Read Online I Come as a Theif by Louis Auchincloss - Free Book Online Page A

peculiarity to like people's faults. But now it struck him that even if Lee would not have loved the Tony behind the mask, it did not have to matter so long as the mask remained. Two Tony Lowders could exist simultaneously and with equal reality: the Tony Lowder who was conventionally honest and whom Lee Lowder loved, and the Tony Lowder who was a crook and whom Lee Lowder might not have loved. He even began to feel the possibilities of continued exhilaration in the manipulation of these two Tonys.
    When he brought Lee her drink, she told him the big news of the day. "Governor Horton called. He said he'd tried your office, but you were out. He wanted you to know that he hadn't forgotten you. He said if he couldn't wangle the SEC, he might be able to get you an assistant secretaryship at the Treasury. Oh, Tony, would we move to Washington?"
    He felt a throb of pity as he made out the urgency in her eyes. Lee had filled out a bit with the years, and there was a hint, just a hint, of middle-aged dumpiness in her hips and shoulders, but her snubby, turned-up nose, her large brown watery eyes, her curly black hair, her desperate intensity, all contributed to preserve the sentimental image of the little girl that held his imagination in so tight a vise.
    "I didn't know you loved Washington."
    "Oh, darling, we need a change. We've been marking time ever since the election. We haven't gone back to the old life, and we haven't really started a new one. I want you to get on with your political career. I want you to get on with the job of becoming a great man."
    "Since when did you become so ambitious?"
    "I'm not in the least ambitious—you know that. It's just that I've finally seen what you must become. And that we've all got to help you become it."
    "Or else?"
    "Or else?" She shrugged as if this were a matter of no conceivable importance. "Or else we miss the boat. I don't know how much that matters, but, generally speaking, boats should not be missed."
    "And when did you decide all this?"
    She looked at him keenly for a moment, as if she were about to say something for which she might be punished. "That night you went to Joan's for dinner and didn't come home."
    "You never mentioned that."
    "No, but I imagine my silence was thunderous."
    "Would you like to hear what happened? Joan's desperately ill, you know."
    "I
do
know. And I don't in the least want to hear what happened. If you tell me you only sat and held her hand all night, I'll be disgusted. And if you tell me something else, I'll be equally disgusted. Let us leave it that a gentleman has to do what a dying lady asks."
    He tried to make out what she was feeling from the fixed half-smile in her eyes. He knew that smile, and he knew that it could mean different things. "Very well," he agreed. "But what does that have to do with me and politics?"
    "I did a great deal of thinking that night. I began to see that I had made a mistake—the commonest mistake that women make—in trying to get hold of you. In trying to be part of you or own part of you. It's so banal, so vulgar, that eternal clutching after a man, to avoid the bathos of loneliness. To avoid the basic human job of learning to live with oneself. Soul fleeing—that's what we're always doing. Running away from our own souls." She seemed to be working herself up to an actual fit of temper with herself. "I realized at last that being jealous of Joan was batting my head against a wall. That if it wasn't Joan, it would be somebody else. Or something else. For what I began to see was that Joan wasn't all sex. That she's not unlike politics to you."
    "Well, of course, she's been a great contributor."
    "Oh, I don't mean that. I mean that she's part of a crowd. The crowd that plays such a large role in your consciousness. The crowd that logically, sensibly, may one day become your constituents. The crowd of which I, like Joan, can be a part. The only way one can become a part of somebody else is by becoming a part