Paul Theroux - My Secret History

I loved her for that.

Very soon she was with me in the room. She said, “You’re amazing. What are you doing here?”

“It’s a secret,” I said, and when I looked up again she had her clothes off. Now what Mrs. Mamalujian had said did not seem so silly. We were in the next room and this was better than anything. She had been right — this was living. Lucy arched her back beneath me as we made love, and she gasped at how deep I had gone, as though she had just then lost her virginity.

That was the oddest day I had ever spent — the afternoon in the hotel; lunch with Mrs. Mamalujian; her shower and my Moby Dick; and then a long night with Lucy. We checked out at five in the morning, and with the thirty dollars left over I took a taxi home. If I had blundered in at midnight my mother would have asked me where I had been. But because I arrived just before breakfast and didn’t wake them they assumed I had been in bed all night and had just got up early. I was in the yard, ankle-deep in dew, marveling at my luck.

There was more. The rest of July was like a new life to me: I had a girlfriend, I had money, I had a job, and I had Mrs. Mamalujian. I suspended my reading of Baudelaire.

Mrs. Mamalujian was lonely. She told me that she had met her husband, the construction man, when she was eighteen. Her children were my age, but she was vague about how many she had and didn’t like talking about them. She preferred to talk about herself as a girl and said, “I was spoiled rotten,” and smiled. She had never gone to college. Because of that she had never stopped reading, and she read everything, Norman Mailer, Freud, Somerset Maugham, Kahlil Gibran, Frances Parkinson Keyes, A Night to Remember , Tennyson, Salinger, I Jumped Over the Wall , Jacques Barzun, and sex books. I was the same, only I varied it a bit more by reading Ovid, and books about camping, gun catalogues and Isis Unveiled by Madame Blavatsky.

She did not treat me like a son. She made me understand that I was her friend and that she was grateful for my company. We had lunch and talked about books. Now and then she would be talking about a sexual episode — the man in the Norman Mailer story sodomizing his girlfriend, for example — and she would call it “spicey.” The word would remind me that she was thirty years older than me, and I thought God! We didn’t go to a hotel again. It was always restaurants.

“Is there anything you want?” she usually said after lunch.

She didn’t mean food. She meant anything else. She urged me to want something.

“How about one of those blazers we were looking at on the way here?”

Passing Brooks Brothers in Harvard Square I had said I liked the striped blazer in the window. Mrs. Mamalujian had a very good memory for wishes and desires.

“Let me buy it for you.”

I had never bought things I wanted. I had been made to believe that they were beyond me and that I did not deserve them. Work was the proof that I could have them, but being a lifeguard was not work — not real work. I saved the money I earned and cheated myself with what my mother called pin money. I bought secondhand military clothes in the Army and Navy Store. I still wore a khaki shirt and fatigue pants, combat boots, and sunglasses.

I let Mrs. Mamalujian take me to the shops — Brooks Brothers, J. Press, the Ivy League Shop, or the Coop, and I would try things on. What surprised me was that they fit me so well. But I was shocked by how expensive they were, and if you added the price of lunch it was fifty dollars or more.

The salesmen were always sly, and they would pressure Mrs. Mamalujian because they could see she was paying and she was eager to please me.

“It’s excellent quality,” they said. “That cloth wears like iron.”

“What do you think, Andy?” she would say to me.

The salesmen never listened to me.

“Everyone’s wearing that style,” they said.

That did it. As soon as I heard that I didn’t want the thing.

So when Mrs. Mamalujian said, “Is there anything you want?” I thought: Yes, what no one else has, what no one else wants or can even imagine . People with money bought things to be like everyone else. If I had money, I thought, I would try to be as different as possible.

But the idea of wealth was so remote that I could not imagine having any money myself. And I could not think of anything I could do to become wealthy. It would never happen.

That made me value Mrs. Mamalujian and it made me hate the rich even more than I already did. The sight of Kennedy’s face — his lovely teeth showing behind his smile — made me want him to lose the election. It was an unfortunate irritation because wherever I looked he was smiling — gloating — at me. I realized that I could never have lasted at the Maldwyn Country Club. I despised those people too much. And I was proud of the fact that I had been fired. I reasoned: If you couldn’t succeed with the rich you had to be their enemy.

Yet I needed money badly — for tuition fees, for my rent at college, for books, to take Lucy out. I had about four hundred dollars in the bank; if I didn’t have a thousand by September I would have to find a job in the second semester. I kept thinking of Vinny Muzzaroll saying You can sell your body . How did people get money? How did a banker become a banker? How did a man become a landlord? These people who drove Cadillacs — how did they get them? There were boys my age at the Maldwyn Country Club who had Thunderbirds and Bulova watches and some had their own golf clubs. They got them from their parents. I had the idea that people who had things — money, cars, tennis rackets, beautiful shoes — had been given them. I could not imagine that they earned them. What on earth could a person do to earn a Caddy? My father worked hard and drove a jalopy.

There was a secret that I suspected, did not know, that I would never know. That suspicion made me secretive — if I don’t know theirs why should I tell them mine? — and it made me grateful to Mrs. Mamalujian. If I wanted something she would give it to me. That was a helpful thought, but it was only a thought. I did not want anything conventional.

When I politely refused these gifts — a suit, a jacket, a pretty tie — she said, “You shouldn’t be so modest—”

She didn’t know that it was arrogance. Something special, that no one else had — that’s what I wanted.

But she had a talent for gift-giving. It is a rare talent, fitting a gift to a person, since most gifts are an obscure burden or obligation. No one had ever tried to please me with a present. Did she know that I disliked having lunch in expensive restaurants? It wasn’t a favor. I felt these places confining. I hated sitting in the dark watching her drink. Perhaps she knew that, which was why she was likewise grateful to me. There was no sex, so it had to be a profound friendship.

She gave me a wallet with my initials on it; a jackknife with six blades; an electric razor; a belt with a fancy brass buckle; a leather keyring; a Japanese camera; a Timex watch; a pair of ivory chopsticks, a leatherbound Tom Jones; Italian sunglasses; a cigarette holder — just handed them over, “That’s for you.” When I protested, she said, “You’ve got to have it,” as if this trinket was one of life’s necessities, like shoes. I accepted them because they weren’t expensive, and because I could have bought them myself.

She gave me earrings and scarves. “That’s for your mother.” I passed them on to Lucy, and it amazed me that Lucy liked them. Why hadn’t I been able to think of such gifts? But it made Lucy wonder why I could afford earrings and not two tickets to The Seventh Sea at the Exeter Theater, or Smiles of a Summer Night , which was famous for having a nude scene.