My Mistress
My wife is precise, elegant, and well-dressed, but the sloppiness of my mistress knows few bounds. Apparently I am not the sort of man who acquires a stylish mistress—the mistresses in French movies who rendezvous at the cafés in expensive hotels and take their cigarette cases out of alligator handbags, or meet their lovers on bridges wearing dashing capes. My mistress greets me in a pair of worn corduroy trousers, once green and now no color at all, a gray sweater, an old shirt of her younger brother’s which has a frayed collar, and a pair of very old, broken shoes with tassels, the backs of which are held together with electrical tape. The first time I saw these shoes I found them remarkable.
“What are those?” I said. “Why do you wear them?”
My mistress is a serious, often glum person, who likes to put as little inflection into a sentence as she can.
“They used to be quite nice,” she said. “I wore them out. Now I use them for slippers. They are my house shoes.”
This person’s name is Josephine Delielle, nicknamed Billy. I am Francis Clemens, and no one but my mistress calls me Frank. The first time we went to bed, my mistress fixed me with an indifferent stare and said: “Isn’t this nice. In bed with Frank and Billy.”
My constant image of Billy is of her pushing her hair off her forehead with an expression of exasperation on her face. She frowns easily, often looks puzzled, and is frequently irritated. In movies men have mistresses who soothe and pet them, who are consoling, passionate, and ornamental. But I have a mistress who is mostly grumpy. Traditional things mean nothing to her. She does not flirt, cajole, or wear fancy underwear. She has taken to referring to me as her “little bit of fluff,” or she calls me her mistress, as in the sentence: “Before you became my mistress I led a blameless life.”
But in spite of this I am secure in her affections. I know she loves me—not that she would ever come right out and tell me. She prefers the oblique line of approach. She may say something like: “Being in love with you is making me a nervous wreck.”
Here is a typical encounter. It is between two and three o’clock in the afternoon. I arrive and ring the doorbell. The Delielles, who seem to have a lot of money, live in a duplex apartment in an old town house. Billy opens the door. There I am, an older man in my tweed coat. My hands are cold. I’d like to get them underneath her ratty sweater. She looks me up and down. She gives me her edition of a smile—a repressed smile that is half smirk, half grin.
Sometimes she gets her coat and we go for a bracing walk. Sometimes we go upstairs to her study. Billy is an economic historian who teaches two classes at the business school. She writes for a couple of highbrow journals. Her husband, Grey, is the resident economics genius at a think tank. They are one of those dashing couples, or at least they sound like one. I am no slouch either. For years I was an investment banker, and now I consult from my own home. I too write for a couple of highbrow journals. We have much in common, my mistress and I, or so it looks.
Billy’s study is untidy. She likes to spread her papers out. Since her surroundings mean nothing to her, her work place is bare of ornament, a cheerless, dreary little space.
“What have you been doing all day?” she says.
I tell her. Breakfast with my wife, Vera; newspaper reading after Vera has gone to work; an hour or so on the telephone with clients; a walk to my local bookstore; more telephoning; a quick sandwich; her.
“You and I ought to go out to lunch some day,” she says. “One should always take one’s mistress out for lunch. We could go dutch, thereby taking both mistresses at once.”
“I try to take you for lunch,” I say. “But you don’t like to be taken out for lunch.”
“Huh,” utters Billy. She stares at her bookcase as if looking for a misplaced volume and then she may give me a look that might translate into something tender such as: “If I gave you a couple of dollars, would you take your clothes off?”
Instead, I take her into my arms. Her words are my signal that Grey is out of town. Often he is not, and then I merely get to kiss my mistress which makes us both dizzy. To kiss her and know that we can go forward to what Billy tonelessly refers to as “the rapturous consummation” reminds me that in relief is joy.
After kissing for a few minutes, Billy closes the study door and we practically throw ourselves at one another. After the rapturous consummation has been achieved, during which I can look upon a mistress recognizable as such to me, my mistress will turn to me and in a voice full of the attempt to stifle emotion say something like: “Sometimes I don’t understand how I got so fond of a beat-up old person such as you.”
These are the joys adulterous love brings to me.
Billy is indifferent to a great many things: clothes, food, home decor. She wears neither perfume nor cologne. She uses what is used on infants: baby powder and Ivory soap. She hates to cook and will never present me with an interesting postcoital snack. Her snacking habits are those, I have often remarked, of a dyspeptic nineteenth-century English clubman. Billy will get up and present me with a mug of cold tea, a plate of hard wheat biscuits, or a squirt of tepid soda from the siphon on her desk. As she sits under her quilt nibbling those resistant biscuits, she reminds me of a creature from another universe—the solar system that contains the alien features of her real life: her past, her marriage, why I am in her life, what she thinks of me.
I drink my soda, put on my clothes, and, unless Vera is out of town, I go home to dinner. If Vera and Grey are out of town at the same time, which happens every now and again, Billy and I go out to dinner, during the course of which she either falls asleep or looks as if she is about to. Then I take her home, go home myself, and have a large steadying drink.
I was not entirely a stranger to adulterous love when I met Billy. I have explained this to her. In all long marriages, I expound, there are certain lapses. The look on Billy’s face as I lecture is one of either amusement or contempt or both. The dinner party you are invited to as an extra man when your wife is away, I tell her. You are asked to take the extra woman, whose husband is also away, home in a taxi. The divorced family friend who invites you in for a drink one night, and so on. These fallings into bed are the friendliest thing in the world, I add. I look at my mistress.
“I see,” she says. “Just like patting a dog.”
My affair with Billy, as she well knows, is nothing of the sort. I call her every morning. I see her almost every weekday afternoon. On the days she teaches, she calls me. We are as faithful as the Canada goose, more or less. She is an absolute fact of my life. When not at work, and when not with her, my thoughts rest upon the subject of her as easily as you might lay a hand on a child’s head. I conduct a mental life with her when we are apart. Thinking about her is like entering a secret room to which only I have access.
I, too, am part of a dashing couple. My wife is an interior designer who has dozens of commissions and consults to practically everyone. Our two sons are grown up. One is a securities analyst and one is a journalist. What a lively table we must be, all of us together. So I tell my mistress. She gives me a baleful look.
“We can get plenty of swell types in for meals,” she says.
I know this is true and I know that Billy, unlike my gregarious and party-giving wife, thinks that there is no hell more hellish than the hell of social life. She has made up a tuneless little chant, like a football cheer, to describe it. It goes:
They invited us
We invited them
They invited us
We invited them
They invited us
We invited them
Billy and I met at a reception to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of one of the journals to which we are both contributors. We fell into a spirited conversation during which Billy asked me if this reception wasn’t the most boring thing I had ever been to. I said it wasn’t, by a long shot. Billy said: “I can’t stand these things where you have to stand up and be civilized. People either yawn, itch, or drool when they get bored. Which do you do?”
I said I yawned.
“Huh,” said Billy. “You don’t look much like a drooler. Let’s get out of here.”
This particular interchange is always brought up when intentionality is discussed: Did she mean to pick me up? Did I look available? And so on. Out on the street we revealed that we were married and that both of our spouses were out of town. Having made this clear, we went out to dinner and talked shop.
After dinner Billy said why didn’t I come have a drink or a cup of tea. I did not know what to make of this invitation. I remembered that the young are more casual about these things, and that a cup of tea probably meant a cup of tea. My reactions to this offer are also discussed when cause is under discussion: Did I want her to seduce me? Did I mean to seduce her? Did we know what would happen right from the start?
Of her house Billy said: “We don’t have good taste or bad taste. We have no taste.” Her living room had no style whatsoever, but it was comfortable enough. There was a portrait of what looked like an ancestor over the fireplace. Otherwise it was not a room that revealed a thing about its occupants except solidity, and a lack of decorative inspiration. Billy made us each a cup of tea. We continued our conversation, and when Billy began to look sleepy, I left.
After that, we made a pass at social life. We invited them for dinner, along with some financial types, a painter, and our sons and their lady friends. At this gathering Billy was mute, and Grey, a very clever fellow, chatted interestingly. Billy did not seem at all comfortable, but the rest of us had a fairly good time. Then they invited us, along with some financial types they knew and a music critic and his book designer wife. At this dinner, Billy looked tired. It was clear that cooking bothered her. She told me later that she was the sort who, when forced to entertain, did every little thing, like making and straining the veal stock. From the moment she entered the kitchen she looked longingly forward to the time when all the dishes would be clean and put away and the guests would all have gone home.
Then we invited them, but Grey had a bad cold and they had to cancel. After that, Billy and I ran into one another one day when we were both dropping off articles at the same journal and we had lunch. She said she was looking for an article of mine—we had been sending each other articles right from the start. Two days later, after rummaging around in my files, I found it. Since I was going to be in her neighborhood, I dropped it off. She wrote me a note about this article and I called her to discuss it further. This necessitated a lunch meeting. Then she said she was sending me a book I had said I wanted to read, and then I sent her a book, and so it went.
One evening I stopped by to have a chat with Billy and Grey. I had just taken Vera, who was off to California, to the airport. I decided to ring their bell unannounced, but when I got there it turned out that Grey was out of town, too. Had I secretly been hoping that this would be the case? Billy had been working in her study, and without thinking about it, she led me up the stairs. I followed her and at the door of her study, I kissed her. She kissed me right back and looked awful about it.
“Nothing but a kiss!” I said, rather frantically. My mistress was silent. “A friendly kiss,” I said.
My mistress gave me the sort of look that is supposed to make your blood freeze, and said: “Is this the way you habitually kiss your friends?”
“It won’t happen again,” I said. “It was all a mistake.”
Billy gave me a stare so bleak and hard that I had no choice but to kiss her again and again.
After all this time it is still impossible for me to figure out what was and is going on in Billy’s life that has let me in it. She once remarked that in her opinion there is frequently too little kissing in marriage, through which frail pinprick a microscopic dot of light was thrown on the subject of her marriage—or was it? She is like a Red Indian and says nothing at all, nor does she ever slip.
I, however, do slip, and I am made aware of this by the grim, sidelong glance I am given. I once told Billy that, until I met her, I had never given kissing much thought—she is an insatiable kisser for an unsentimental person—and I was rewarded for this utterance by a well-raised eyebrow and a rather frightening look of registration.
From time to time I feel it is wise to tell Billy how well Vera and I get along.
“Swell,” says Billy. “I’m thrilled for you.”
“Well, it’s true,” I say.
“I’m sure it’s true,” says Billy. “I’m sure there’s no reason in the world why you come and see me all the time. It’s probably just an involuntary action, like sneezing.”
“But you don’t understand,” I say. “Vera has men friends. I have women friends. The first principle of a good marriage is freedom.”
“Oh, I see,” says Billy. “You sleep with your other women friends in the morning and come over here in the afternoon. What a lot of stamina you have, for an older person.”
One day this conversation had unexpected results. I said how well Vera and I got along, and Billy looked unadornedly hurt.
“God hates a mingy lover,” she said. “Why don’t you just say that you’re in love with me and that it frightens you and have done with it?”
A lump rose in my throat.
“Of course, maybe you’re not in love with me,” said Billy in her flattest voice.
I said: “I am in love with you.”
“Well, there you are,” said Billy.
Copyright © 2021 by Laurie Colwin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
