Free Memories of a Marriage by Louis Begley

give him at least a year’s notice. I was going to leave on Friday morning, which gave me a couple of days when I could see Thomas Snow’s widow, Jane, a projectI’d had in mind ever since I’d arrived in the city. Lucy’s rants had somehow imbued it with new interest. Jane had remarried, but I had not met her husband and had in fact forgotten his name as well. All the same, finding her couldn’t be a problem. The weekly show of her interviews with authors, on which I had twice appeared, continued to be aired on public television. I had no doubt that my editor’s assistant had her office telephone number or would know how to get it.
    Lucy’s sneer about Jamie’s visits to his stepmother, however, led me to think that most probably she was still living in Thomas’s Park Avenue apartment, the location of which, south of Seventy-Second Street and on the desirable west side of the avenue, I now realized, must be one more thorn in Lucy’s side. Accordingly, the next morning, before turning to the young man at the publishing house or Google, I dialed Thomas’s old number and asked to speak to Jane Morgan. As I might have expected, given the anemic sales of my two most recent books, my name clearly meant nothing to the secretary who answered and proceeded to grill me at annoying length. In the end I passed the test, and Jane came to the telephone. She sounded enthusiastic about getting together and introducing me to her husband Ned and wondered aloud which would be better: the three of us having dinner, or she and I first having lunch à deux and going over the old times. I expressed a slight preference for the latter solution. My familiar haunts on the Upper East Side had all apparently disappeared or were no longer establishments where someone like Jane would wish to be seen, but she suggested a French restaurant on Lexington Avenue not far from herapartment. We could meet there at one, this being a day when she didn’t have to be at the studio. She said she’d make sure we had a quiet table.
    She was still a knockout and didn’t look a day older than the last time I’d seen her—not surprising in one who had surely always watched her figure and her complexion but somehow very comforting and pleasant. I was discovering that seeing people my own age or, as in Lucy’s case, only four or five years younger gave me little pleasure. It was all very well to recall a shared past, but what I really wanted was a bridge to the present. We devoted the unavoidable ten minutes to the folly of the Iraq adventure and another five minutes to John Kerry and his promising but oddly lethargic candidacy. Ned is working for his campaign, she told me. He’ll be interested in talking to you about how you and other writers can help. In turn I told her that I knew some of the senator’s Forbes cousins, had been thinking along the same lines, and had been frustrated by the difficulty of volunteering to do anything other than send money.
    Ned will open the door, she replied. You’ll have to come to dinner very soon. Even better, spend a weekend with us in Water Mill.
    After a pause, she asked how I had been passing my time now that I was back in New York.
    First of all working, I said. I’m close to completing the first draft of a book.
    A novel? she asked.
    I nodded, whereupon she told me she had, of course, read my latest and how sorry she had been that scheduling problemshad prevented her from attempting to prevail on me to find the time for an interview.
    That sort of hypocrisy being both familiar and odious, I was at the point of erupting but managed to restrain myself. There was no point in spoiling this lunch and perhaps queering the chances of her taking up the new novel. So I smiled and went on with the account of my activities.
    I’ve been putting my apartment in order, I said. Two young relatives, my cousin Josiah Weld’s granddaughters, had been living there for almost three years. My old housekeeper kept an eye on them,