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Authors: Louis Auchincloss
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on top of the world.
Did I ever think I had been wrong? Of course not. Alas, I had only apprehensively to wait.
***
Letty discovered an early infidelity of her husbandâs through a domestic incident overused in the trite chronicles of marital betrayal. Her shock and indignation were tempered with disgust at the banality of her experience. Checking the pockets of a jacket that Eliot had left on his bed for the cleaners, to be sure that no keys or other possessions had been carelessly forgotten, she had come across a scented epistle with an amatory greeting as crude as the letterhead was elegant. She did not hesitate to read it. It might almost have been placed there in order that she should do so. She had suspected such dalliances before, but had had no grounds for a spoken reproof. What should she do with such evidence? After much powerful cogitation, she decided to do nothing.
The first thing that struck her as she analyzed her reaction, with all the care and clarity of one who had devoted a quiet lifetime to the goals of objectivity and detachment, was that jealousy played the smallest part. She didnât give a damn about the woman who had written the letterâwhom she easily identified as a researcher on the family foundation. She was quite able to recognize that her love for Eliotâif it really was love, and if not, what else was it?âwas compatible with his taking an occasional roll in the hay. Suppose, for example, she had come into his bedroom and caught him masturbating? Ugh! But wasnât it basically the same thing? Didnât she share all that was best in Eliot: his brain, his ambition, his daughters, his everyday life? Or did she? Why should she feel that this letter in a jacket pocket was a long delayed challenge to the position she had so proudly taken as his partner? His
equal
partner. Ah, was that it?
So she did nothing, but she watched him much more closely than she had before. And in only a few weeksâ time, she was startled to find that she was beginning to observe slight changes in his appearance of which she had to have been previously aware but which she had presumably brushed aside as irrelevant to herself and to her welfare. His waistline was filling out, and his hair was faintly but noticeably receding. He was still a fine-looking man, but he was not the apollo she had once deemed him. All that, of course, was nothing, but mightnât it somehow correlate with the increasingly autocratic tone he was now taking at editorial meetings of the magazine and the sharper note of his reproval at any defective service by their household staff?
She became even more acutely conscious of this at a meeting of the foundation to discuss a grant to a small and struggling new art museum. Letty had wanted to make the gift conditional on the widening of the extremely limited hours of public admission that the donee, too intent, in her opinion, on access to scholars, was proposing.
âWhat is art if itâs not
seen?
â she asked of her board. âThis business of restricting it to scholars obsessed with the concept of âinfluenceâ can be overdone. Weâre always reading about the influence of X on Y, of Monet on Manet, or money on Monet, as if no great artist could ever think for himself! And if itâs not that, theyâre fixed on reattribution. I donât really give a damn if some kid in Rembrandtâs studio painted the
Polish Rider.
Itâs still a great picture. And all I want is to look at it!â
âLetty, youâre showing yourself a perfect philistine,â Eliot retorted testily. âHow can you compare all those bleary-eyed tourists who drag protesting children past masterpieces because theyâre told itâs the thing to do with students willing to give their very lives to the cause of art? What does the public learn by shuffling past great paintings? Can they tell the difference between a sentimental daub by Bouguereau and a
Did I ever think I had been wrong? Of course not. Alas, I had only apprehensively to wait.
***
Letty discovered an early infidelity of her husbandâs through a domestic incident overused in the trite chronicles of marital betrayal. Her shock and indignation were tempered with disgust at the banality of her experience. Checking the pockets of a jacket that Eliot had left on his bed for the cleaners, to be sure that no keys or other possessions had been carelessly forgotten, she had come across a scented epistle with an amatory greeting as crude as the letterhead was elegant. She did not hesitate to read it. It might almost have been placed there in order that she should do so. She had suspected such dalliances before, but had had no grounds for a spoken reproof. What should she do with such evidence? After much powerful cogitation, she decided to do nothing.
The first thing that struck her as she analyzed her reaction, with all the care and clarity of one who had devoted a quiet lifetime to the goals of objectivity and detachment, was that jealousy played the smallest part. She didnât give a damn about the woman who had written the letterâwhom she easily identified as a researcher on the family foundation. She was quite able to recognize that her love for Eliotâif it really was love, and if not, what else was it?âwas compatible with his taking an occasional roll in the hay. Suppose, for example, she had come into his bedroom and caught him masturbating? Ugh! But wasnât it basically the same thing? Didnât she share all that was best in Eliot: his brain, his ambition, his daughters, his everyday life? Or did she? Why should she feel that this letter in a jacket pocket was a long delayed challenge to the position she had so proudly taken as his partner? His
equal
partner. Ah, was that it?
So she did nothing, but she watched him much more closely than she had before. And in only a few weeksâ time, she was startled to find that she was beginning to observe slight changes in his appearance of which she had to have been previously aware but which she had presumably brushed aside as irrelevant to herself and to her welfare. His waistline was filling out, and his hair was faintly but noticeably receding. He was still a fine-looking man, but he was not the apollo she had once deemed him. All that, of course, was nothing, but mightnât it somehow correlate with the increasingly autocratic tone he was now taking at editorial meetings of the magazine and the sharper note of his reproval at any defective service by their household staff?
She became even more acutely conscious of this at a meeting of the foundation to discuss a grant to a small and struggling new art museum. Letty had wanted to make the gift conditional on the widening of the extremely limited hours of public admission that the donee, too intent, in her opinion, on access to scholars, was proposing.
âWhat is art if itâs not
seen?
â she asked of her board. âThis business of restricting it to scholars obsessed with the concept of âinfluenceâ can be overdone. Weâre always reading about the influence of X on Y, of Monet on Manet, or money on Monet, as if no great artist could ever think for himself! And if itâs not that, theyâre fixed on reattribution. I donât really give a damn if some kid in Rembrandtâs studio painted the
Polish Rider.
Itâs still a great picture. And all I want is to look at it!â
âLetty, youâre showing yourself a perfect philistine,â Eliot retorted testily. âHow can you compare all those bleary-eyed tourists who drag protesting children past masterpieces because theyâre told itâs the thing to do with students willing to give their very lives to the cause of art? What does the public learn by shuffling past great paintings? Can they tell the difference between a sentimental daub by Bouguereau and a
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