Peter Robinson - Aftermath

“But I already see that,” Maggie protested. “I mean, I know it was his aggression, not mine.”

“But you don’t feel it.”

Maggie felt disappointed; Dr. Simms was right. “Don’t I?” she said. “I suppose not.”

“Do you know anything about poetry, Margaret?”

“Not much, no. Only what we did at school, and one of my boy-friends at art college used to write me stuff. Terrible drivel, really. He just wanted to get in my pants.”

Dr. Simms laughed. Another surprise, for it came out as a loud, horsey guffaw. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem called ‘Dejection: An Ode.’ It was partly about his inability to feel anything, and one of the quotes that has always stuck in my mind was when he wrote about looking at the clouds, the moon and the stars and ended up saying, ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are.’ I think that applies to you, Margaret. And I think you know it. Intellectual awareness of something, through reason , does not guarantee emotional acceptance. And you are a very intellectual person, despite your obvious creative inclinations. If I were a Jungian, which I am not, I would probably classify you as the introverted, thinking type. Now tell me more about this courtship.”

“There’s not much to tell.” A door opened and closed out in the corridor. Two male voices rose and fell. Then only the birdsongs and the sounds of distant traffic on The Headrow and Park Lane remained. “I suppose he swept me off my feet,” she went on. “It was about seven years ago, and I was just a young art school graduate without a career, still wet behind the ears, hanging out with the artsy crowd in bars and arguing philosophy in Queen Street West pubs and coffeehouses, thinking one day some rich patron would appear and discover my genius. I’d had a few affairs in college, slept with a few boys, nothing satisfactory, then along came this tall, dark, intelligent, handsome man in an Armani suit who wanted to take me to concerts and expensive restaurants. It wasn’t the money. That wasn’t it at all. Not even the restaurants. I wasn’t even eating much then. It was his style, his panache, I suppose. He dazzled me.”

“And did he prove to be the patron of the arts you’d been dreaming of?”

Maggie looked down at the scuffed knees of her jeans. “Not really. Bill was never very much interested in the arts. Oh, we had all the requisite subscriptions: symphony, ballet, opera. But somehow I…”

“Somehow you what?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I’m being unfair. But I think maybe it was just some sort of a business thing. Being seen . Like going to a client’s box at the Skydome. I mean, he’d be excited about going to the opera, for example, take ages getting dressed up in his tux and fuss about what he wanted me to wear, then we’d have drinks in the members’ bar beforehand, rub shoulders with colleagues and clients, all the local bigwigs. But I just got the impression that the music itself bored him.”

“Did any problems manifest themselves early on in your relationship?”

Maggie twisted her sapphire ring around her finger, the “freedom” ring she had bought after she had thrown Bill’s wedding and engagement rings into Lake Ontario. “Well,” she said, “it’s easy to identify things as problems in retrospect, isn’t it? Claim that you saw it coming, or should have, after you’ve found out where things were leading. They might not have seemed strange at the time, might they?”

“Try.”

Maggie continued twisting at her ring. “Well, I suppose the main problem was Bill’s jealousy.”

“About what?”

“Most things, really. He was very possessive, he didn’t like me talking to other men for too long at parties, that sort of thing. But mostly he was jealous of my friends.”

“The artists?”

“Yes. You see, he never had much time for them, he thought them all a bunch of deadbeats, losers, and he felt he’d somehow rescued me from them.” She laughed. “And they, on their part, didn’t want to mix with corporate lawyers in Armani suits.”

“But you continued to see your friends?”

“Oh, yes. Sort of.”

“And how did Bill react to this?”

“He used to make fun of them to me, put them down, criticize them. He called them pseudo-intellectuals, no-brainers and layabouts. If we ever met any of them when we were together, he’d just stand there, looking up at the sky, shifting from foot to foot, glancing at his Rolex, whistling. I can see him now.”

“Did you defend them?”

“Yes. For a while. Then there seemed no point.” Maggie remained silent for a moment, then she went on. “You have to remember that I was head over heels in love with Bill. He took me to movie premieres. We’d go for weekends in New York, stay at the Plaza, take horse-and-buggy rides in Central Park, go to cocktail parties full of stockbrokers and CEOs, you name it. There was a romantic side to it all. Once we even flew down to L.A. for a movie premiere the firm’s entertainment lawyers had been involved with. We went to the party, too, and Sean Connery was there. Can you believe it? I actually met Sean Connery !”

“How did you handle all this high living?”

“I fit in well enough. I was good at mixing with them – businessmen, lawyers, entrepreneurs, the movers and shakers. Believe it or not, many of them are far more cultured than the artsy crowd thinks. A lot of them sponsored corporate art collections. My friends believed that everyone in a suit was dull and conservative, and a philistine to boot. But you can’t always go by appearances. I knew that. I think they were being very immature about it all. I think Bill saw me as a positive enhancement to his career, but he saw my friends as dead weights that would drag me down with them if they could. Maybe him, too, if we weren’t careful. And I didn’t feel anywhere near as uncomfortable in his world as he did in mine. I began to feel I’d only been playing the starving artist role, anyway.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, my dad’s a pretty important architect, and we always moved in elevated circles. Traveled around the continent a fair bit on commissions, too, when I was younger, just after we emigrated from England. Sometimes, if it was school holidays, he’d take me with him. So I didn’t come from a blue collar background, or a bohemian one. Dad appreciates the arts, but he’s very conservative. And we weren’t poor. Anyway, as time went on, I suppose I began to agree with Bill. He wore down my defenses, like he did in a lot of other ways. I mean, all my friends seemed to do was drift from one social security check to the next without making any attempt to do anything because it would compromise their precious art. The greatest sin in our crowd was to sell out.”

“Which you did?”

Maggie stared out of the window for a moment. The blossoms were falling from the trees in slow motion. She suddenly felt cold and hugged herself. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I did. As far as my friends were concerned I was lost to them. I’d been seduced by the almighty dollar. And all because of Bill. At one of his firm’s parties I met a small publisher who was looking for an illustrator for a children’s book. I showed him my work and he loved it. I got the job, then that led to another, and so on.”

“How did Bill react to your success?”

“He was pleased at first. Thrilled. Proud that the publisher liked my work, proud when the book was published. He bought copies for all his nephews and nieces, his clients’ kids. His boss. Dozens of copies. And he was pleased that it was because of him all this had happened. As he never ceased to tell me, it would never have happened if I’d chosen to stay with my deadbeat friends.”