Paul Theroux - My Secret History

There was often a slight suggestion of What now? or What next? in her face or voice. She was thirty-four. She had never been married.

Some months after I had met her she became depressed. I asked her what was wrong. At first she said nothing, but her mood did not lift.

“I just wonder where all this is leading,” she said.

I felt oddly ensnared by the sentence, yet wasn’t the answer to that always Nowhere . Most women I had known had needed to look ahead — the future was always on their mind, the sense of time passing was strong in them; if I listened closely to any woman she seemed to tick like a clock, and even the silliest of them made plans. Eden thought about growing old.

In that same mood of depression she said, “What would you say if I told you I’ve been seeing someone?”

I’ve been seeing someone was inevitably an oblique sexual admission. It meant everything.

I couldn’t speak or answer her — my mouth was too dry.

She said, “I was just joking. I wanted to find out whether you cared.”

“I do care.” It came out as a pathetic croak.

She became very serious. She could see that she had shocked me.

“You really do, don’t you?” And she kissed me. “I’m sorry, darling. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m a very bad girl.” Her voice changed and softened to that of a small girl. “You should put me straight to bed. You should punish me.”

That day she was naked underneath her short skirt and green cashmere sweater. She came alive when I touched her, and so did I.

She sometimes wore knee socks when we made love, or a lace collar — nothing else — or a ribbon in her hair. She always wore something — a silk sash, a leather belt, a pair of high-heeled shoes. “I feel more naked that way.” Once she wore a mask. She was never completely dressed, nor completely undressed.

If she was vain about anything it was her stylishness, her flair, the way she presented herself — and this look was reflected in the way she wrapped presents, always so beautifully, with glossy paper and multiple bows. She took a pride in such things, as she did in styling her hair or wearing the right color contact lenses; but as with the gift-wrapping I had the impression she was calling attention to something that she happened to be good at. That was why it was vanity — because it didn’t need emphasis. And also I suspected that she faintly despised the sloppy way I dressed or my casual gift-giving — I seldom wrapped anything. I felt like a buffoon putting a ribbon around anything except her neck when we made love. But we got along: she allowed me to be a brute and I encouraged her in her stylishness.

That awareness of the look of people and things probably came from her job. She was assistant editor of a Boston magazine that specialized in antiques and decoration, and she lived not far from me, in Marstons Mills, in an old house that she had restored. She had the skills of someone who had become self-sufficient by living alone. She had a vegetable garden, a good one full of healthy plants; she preserved fruit and froze vegetables; she made jam, she stewed tomatoes and kept them in mason jars. She had painted her whole house alone, wallpapered it, sanded the floors and varnished the planks. She had hooked her own rugs, sewn her own curtains, made her matching cushion covers. She was a painstaking cook, and like a lot of brilliant cooks was not a great eater — she loved watching other people eat her food, her sculptured vegetables.

Why hadn’t she gotten married? If she had married she probably would not have mastered all these skills, but there was also another answer. She did not like children much. She was frequently childlike herself — a characteristic of some people who don’t have kids. And she told herself — she told me — that she still had time to choose whether or not to have any.

We were on the plane out of Logan, flying east in the darkness, the pilot giving us details of our flight path over Newfoundland.

Eden wasn’t listening. She tore a page of out a magazine.

“Doesn’t that look delicious?”

A good cook looking at a recipe is like a musician looking at a music score — the simplest notation suggests everything they need to know, and just glancing at a line their senses are aroused.

I read Chef Bernard’s Lobster Bisque . It was a three or four hour operation; it contained wine and cream and several items I had never heard of; and it was made in about ten separate stages. Step seven, I noticed, was pulverizing the lobster shells to give it the right pinky color.

Eden rested her head against my shoulder and took my hand in hers. She said, “We’ll make it on the Cape when we get back from India. We’ll bake some bread. We’ll have profiteroles for dessert.”

She was expert at making the lightest puffballs of choux pastry — she knew that, too. It was another part of her vanity, but forgivable because she took such pleasure in cooking for other people and working hard to please them.

But why, I wondered, were antique fanciers and restorers nearly always lovers of gourmet food? Was it part of an ingenious attempt to live well, or was it all conspicuous and self-boosting pretension and the narrowest, most intolerant snobbery?

Yet Eden would have been the first to admit that she was like one of the objects she meticulously restored, or something she went to great trouble to prepare. The difficulty was that she had the gourmet cook’s fastidious pedantry. That could be inconvenient.

As we talked about this great meal we were going to cook when we got back from India we were served a tasteless, overcooked airline meal that had the faint stink of baked plastic, and only surface color — when you scattered the peas they were no longer green. The chicken was wet and fibrous and coated with wallpaper paste, and surrounding it were sodden rice grains, brown-flecked salad, cold bread, and a cube of dry cake.

“Garbage,” Eden said, and ate an apple from her handbag.

The food was terrible, but hunger gave me patience. Nevertheless, I felt so self-conscious eating a meal she had rejected I could not finish it. I resented her severity — the fact that she couldn’t joke about this stuff. She was so certain that she made me doubtful, and I could not understand why.

A moment later she said, “We’ve never been on a plane together — we’ve never really traveled, have we?”

That was it — that was the reason. We had only known each other on the Cape, not in the world.

The movie Trading Places came on after the meal but I fell asleep in the middle of it, and just before dawn we flew low over London. I looked down at the pattern of yellow lamps on the city’s irregular streets. I kept my face at the window, picked out the river, and then the larger parks, and finally as we dropped lower I could spot York Road and check our progress through southwest London, over Wandsworth and Putney and Richmond. We arrived at Heathrow in light brown morning light as rain plinked in puddles on the runway.

“Now that we’re here I can ask you why we came this way,” Eden said. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to go to India via the West Coast?”

“This is more direct,” I said, and when she looked doubtful I added, “Because you don’t cross the International Date Line.”

She seemed to accept this. Well, it was six o’clock in the morning — not an hour that encouraged lucid discussions.

She said, “But isn’t it strange being in London with me?”

“We’re not in London,” I said, evading the real question. “Didn’t you know the airport’s in Middlesex?”

We sat in the Transit Lounge for a while, and then she excused herself. She was away for about twenty minutes, but when she returned she had a newly painted face. She was fragrant and looked refreshed. She had the knack — it was makeup, and clothes, and something about her hairstyle — of being able to renew herself throughout the day.