Paul Theroux - My Secret History

I ate at the pool. I kept spare clothes in the lifeguard room. I took my showers in the changing room. I did most of my reading at the pool — all these fucken women writers, Muzzaroll said, seeing Evelyn Waugh, Caryl Chessman and Rainer Maria Rilke. Muzzaroll was proud that he had never read a book by a woman. “Joyce Cary!” he screamed one day. Another fucken woman.

I also got my messages at the pool.

Mrs. Mamalujian called me the day after I returned from New York.

“How about dinner tonight?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not very hungry.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it.”

The trouble with being rich was in thinking that food had nothing to do with hunger. Lunch is a figure of speech she had said not long ago.

“I’ve got a nice place in mind,” she said. “Whale steaks!”

I was determined not to go. I had a clear memory of two of them.

I said, “I’m pretty busy”—to remind her that she was not busy at all — and, “I’ve got some things on my mind”—to remind her that her head was empty. But she just laughed and hung up.

One of the things on my mind was Lucy. I had not called her, because I was afraid to tell her that I had failed. And why should I see Mrs. Mamalujian if I hadn’t seen Lucy?

She left me a note one lunchtime saying I must see you. Love, L . and I had the thought that the problem was solved and that she was eager to tell me so. Sometimes, these supposed pregnancies were just a scare — that was what people said. It was nerves. You worried about being pregnant because you missed your period and you went on missing it because you went on worrying. You weren’t pregnant. You were just worried.

I met her after work. She was glad to see me but she was still very pale.

I said, “How are you?”

“I feel okay,” she said.

I thought that meant she wasn’t pregnant anymore.

“Is everything all right?”

“No,” she said, and my heart collapsed: we were still stuck.

She said, “What about New York — what happened?”

“Not much,” I said, and she knew it meant nothing .

She nibbled her lip and I knew she was fretting.

The jukebox in the Harvard Gardens was playing “Get a Job” and almost drowning out what Lucy was trying to say.

“I’m afraid,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Just help me.” She put her hand on mine. “Want to go back to my room?”

I had no sexual urge at all. I didn’t want it, I didn’t dare, I had lost interest. It seemed to me that after all these years I was beginning to understand what a sin was.

I said, “It’s money, you know. If you’re rich you can have anything.” I thought of my failure in New York — it had all been rejection. “If you don’t have money in America you’re out of luck.”

“You talk as though it’s better in other countries,” Lucy said.

“You could get an abortion in another country. In Russia, for example, where they don’t believe in God. You’d just go to the hospital and that would be it.”

Lucy had started to cry.

“My mother keeps calling me and asking me to go home for a visit. But I don’t want to. I’m afraid she’ll ask me questions — or she might guess.”

“I’ll go with you,” I said, before I could restrain myself. I was sorry the moment I said it. Then I had to go to the toilet. I gave her my wallet and said, “Take some money out and pay for the beer, will you? I’ll be right back.”

She was sobbing at the table when I sat down again.

“Oh my God. Oh, my God.”

“Please, Lucy. People are looking at you.”

But she wasn’t sad — she was angry. She said fiercely through her tears, “You’ve been lying to me. You’re nineteen. You’re just a stupid kid.” And she flung my driver’s license down.

And I could tell that her mother felt the same way. Mrs. Cutler — that was Lucy’s name — was a very nervous woman, about fifty. It interested me how she could be the same age as Mrs. Mamalujian and yet be totally different — as different from Mrs. Mamalujian as a man is from a woman. She wasn’t angry that her daughter had brought a young kid in an army jacket down to dinner; she was crestfallen. There was a look of collapse in her eyes; she was nervous and wore an apron. None of this Mrs. Mamalujian chatter and assurance — no makeup, no big hats. Mrs. Mamalujian had an irritating laugh and an original face. She defied you to think about her age, and then you couldn’t imagine it. Mrs. Cutler was apologetic and shapeless, and she looked like an old woman.

She said, “Was it a good trip down?”

We had taken the bus to Plymouth and then caught a local bus to Manomet, and walked the rest of the way, to the house above the cove. We had sat in gloomy silence the whole way. I read Camus’ The Stranger . Now and then I glanced at Lucy and thought: This is what marriage must be like. It was like being unhealthy. You just sat there with the other person and you had to be very careful.

“It was nice,” I said. “I like the South Shore. The North Shore is all snobs.”

Mrs. Cutler said, “We used to have ever such a lovely house on the cliff when Lucy’s father was alive. But we had to sell it. I couldn’t keep it up.”

Lucy didn’t say anything — but it was a disapproving silence.

“You must be famished. I’ll bet you could tear a herring.”

“I’d like to show Andy the beach before we eat,” Lucy said.

We walked down the road, which was warm crumbling tar on this late-August day. Tall grass, weeds with blue flowers, and small thorn bushes lined the road and had a lovely dusty smell. A car rattled past and the man at the wheel waved.

“You know him?”

“I know everybody here,” Lucy said glumly.

She took a sudden step into the grass, and I saw she was on a path. I followed her down the cliff to the beach.

“It’s pretty.”

“It’s awful. It’s dull,” she said. “Can you imagine what it’s like to grow up in a little town like this?”

Waves smashed noisily against the rocks. The rocks were rounded and black and looked like tumbled cannonballs.

“That was Mr. Philpotts,” she said, pointing up at the road. “Now he’s going to tell the whole town that he saw me and you going down to the beach.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“He’ll describe you,” she said.

“I don’t care.”

“That’s the trouble with you,” she said, and walked away from the rocks to where the beach was smoother with sand and pebbles.

“We found a whale here once. A little one. At first we thought it was a mattress, or one of those tractor tires that wash up out of nowhere. It was so strange. It was right here”—she kicked a groove into the beach with her brown loafer—“and its mouth gaped open. It was lying on its side like a big fat flounder. When we jumped on its side the eye bulged.”

“How did you know it was a whale?”

“Because it wasn’t a shark.”

I was thinking: People always complained about them, but their little towns seemed wonderful to me.

“What are we going to do?” Lucy said, without any warning.

Just that question caused my sick feeling to return. It was like a hole in my stomach.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll think of something.”

“My mother doesn’t suspect anything.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“It makes me feel horrible.”

I wanted to start walking fast and keep walking down the beach alone, to Plymouth, to Duxbury, back to Boston and beyond.

“I’m so afraid,” she said.

She touched me and I felt a panic, but I didn’t want her to know how frightened I was, or that I didn’t want to touch her. So I took her hand and I kissed her and I made myself even more panicky than before.