Free Indiscretion by Charles Dubow Page B

I always put first-time guests. The ones whom I like, at any rate. I still sleep in the same room I occupied as a child, over the kitchen in what had been the nursery wing.
    Finally, there is the playroom on the third floor. The biggest in the house, it contains an old pool table, bookshelves crammed with popular novels of my parents’ youth—Kipling and Buchan, Ouida, Tom Swift and Robert Louis Stevenson—and chests of drawers filled with exotic costumes brought back over the years by relatives and friends that we used to wear for fancy-dress parties. Along the wall is my great-uncle’s oar from Henley and window seats where I would curl up with a book on rainy days.
    “We should do a costume ball,” says Claire. She is rummaging through the drawers. She pulls out a Pierrot costume I had worn as a child. It would just fit her. Then a burnoose my father used to wear that made him look like Rudolph Valentino. I had always admired it most because it had a real dagger. “That would be such fun.” It has been a long time since our last costume party.
    For a second I almost make another pass at her but think better of it. Maybe she would have said yes this time. Expensive real estate can be a powerful aphrodisiac.
    We go back downstairs, and I lead her to her room. It is large, with windows facing over the pond. I imagine it is probably bigger than her entire apartment. The bed is just to the right as you enter, the French linen part of my great-grandmother’s trousseau. Matching bureaus, a dressing table with my great-grandmother’s silver-backed Tiffany hairbrushes still on it, a fireplace, an escritoire, a pair of Louis XV armchairs. Silvered family photographs. My grandfather in his uniform. My grandmother’s three brothers. Heavy, pale damask curtains. A wide stretch of carpet, a chaise longue, and a table with an old-fashioned upright telephone and an equally ancient radio, neither of which has worked in years but which remain in place because that’s where they’ve always been.
    “What a wonderful room.”
    “It was my great-grandmother’s. It’s something, isn’t it? You know, back then husbands and wives rarely shared a room. My great-grandfather slept next door.” The room as spare as a Trappist’s cell.
    “And where do you sleep?”
    “On the other side of the house. In the nursery. Now don’t look at me like that. It’s not like it has Donald Duck posters on the wall. I’ve updated it somewhat over the years. It’s just where I feel most comfortable.”
    “But you could sleep in any room in the house.”
    “Exactly. And I could eat in the dining room every night and throw costume parties. But I don’t. I come here to relax and sleep and work.”
    “Don’t you get lonely?”
    “Never. And besides, Madeleine and Harry are right next door.”
    We say our good-nights, and I pad off down the familiar carpet past my parents’ former bedroom and the “good” guest room to my old lair. As I lie in bed that night, I fantasize that Claire comes into my room. Once or twice I even venture to the hallway, thinking I may have heard the sound of her feet, but when I finally fall asleep around dawn, I am still alone.

7
    A fter graduation Harry was commissioned in the Marine Corps. As a college graduate he was automatically entitled to become an officer, and he entered flight training school. Madeleine followed him. They had been married the day after graduation. It was a small ceremony held in Battell Chapel, followed by lunch at the Yale Club. Ned was best man. Madeleine’s father and brother, Johnny, came, as well as her stepmother at that time. Mister and Mrs. Winslow. I had never met them before. His father was a prep school English teacher. Tweedy, articulate, wry, the same broad shoulders. Harry had grown up a faculty brat in Connecticut, living on borrowed privilege. A pet of the upperclassmen as a child, and a guest on classmates’ ski trips and holidays while a student. Unlike most of