Free Necessity by Brian Garfield

performances and his lectures worked, didn’t they. Growing up you had values. You paid attention in all those schools you went to, trailing around to Dad’s stationings in Germany and South Korea and Alaska. You could figure out the square root of a four-figure number; you could dissect a frog; you could recognize a Rembrandt—or an O’Keeffe—and you could hum Bach melodies on key; and there was a time when you could recite Shelley from memory: “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
    Of course you had to rebel against all that. Why must we all behave with such hackneyed predictability? You came to New York determined to put that staid middle-American goody-two-shoes personality as far behind you as you could leave it: you came determined to kick up your heels like some rustic rube farm girl coming to the big city in the flapper era and discovering speakeasies for the first time. You came in search of excitement and you found it; you came in search of a glamorous career and you found one.
    It turned out to be not all that glamorous, really. But don’t they all.
    After all, you didn’t abandon your upbringing entirely. You weren’t enough of a rebel; not then. A year or two of mindless diversions—then you found yourself on a date in the Whitney and soon you were going to the ballet at Lincoln Center, listening to good music, reading books again—no longer because it was what you were supposed to do but now because it was what gave you pleasure.
    You made friends easily enough. Both men and women. Most of the men were attached or gay. The eligibles were hard to find; some of them were frightened off by your beauty—others by your wit. Mostly they just seemed terribly immature and dull.
    There was Sylvan, of course—forty-six and distinguished, a cultivated marvelous man—it was Sylvan who took you to the Whitney—but he was married and not inclined to get a divorce and you couldn’t bring yourself to rationalize being a kept woman.
    There was Richard and then there was Chris. Several years apart. The memories now are jumbled: moving in, mingling the furniture—later the break-ups, the bleak sad search for another lonely apartment. And the quest beginning over again: for passion or affection or just (settle for it) companionship.
    All too suddenly you were pushing thirty and in the morning you’d look fearfully in the mirror expecting to find a new crease in the beautiful skin.
    It began to occur to you that you couldn’t go on living this aimless life. You didn’t want to think about that but now and then you’d have a premonition: a vision of yourself at thirty-seven trying to get work posing for lingerie ads in cheap mail-order catalogs and accepting some tedious schlemiel’s marriage proposal out of desperation, knowing it would be good—at best—for four or five years of domestic boredom and financial security and another few years of alimony: you even saw yourself thereafter, midfortyish and fifteen pounds overweight, working as office manager for a chiropractor and making reservations for ten days at a Club Med: over the hill and desperate.
    In that context Bert looked like more than a good bargain. He looked like a heaven-sent dream.
    Remembering marrying him—remembering why she married him—she feels soiled.
    Then of course the other question: Why did Bert marry me?
    He professed nothing cornball; you couldn’t expect Bert to deliver himself of pronouncements of loving devotion. The nearest he ever came was that remark about wanting you to be the mother of his children. There probably was quite a bit of truth in that. He had his head full of pop theories about genes and heredity. More than once he brought out her album of family photographs (she remembers, with a pang, leaving it behind) and showed it to their friends and boasted, as if they were his own ancestors, about her handsome grandparents