Back Then by Anne Bernays Page A

distantly polite, imperious. It was as if he had been given a fierce purge that had flushed out the young and free spirit, leaving behind a middle-aged reactionary nearly as frosty as the house he lived in. Ian wasn’t fun anymore; Patsy couldn’t understand what I saw in him, refusing to believe me when I assured her that there were two Ians—one American the other British. Constantly hungry, I suggested one day that we get a snack from the kitchen. “We don’t go in there,” Ian said. I needed to know why. “It isn’t done. That’s Cook’s place.” I asked him if he had ever raided the icebox, and he looked as if I had accused him of stealing from the collection plate. He seemed to enjoy telling me that all the married men he knew slept in their so-called dressing rooms. Pressing him for clarity I discovered to my astonishment that men of his class prefer not to sleep next to their wives.
    That was the year I transferred to Barnard. Although I went out with other men, I yearned for Ian. We exchanged letters. He invited me to Strachur again and again I accepted, this time alone—and armed with two thick sweaters and some heavy-duty survival rations. If I had hopes that Ian had somehow dropped the mantle of the laird, the fact that I was wrong—along with the fact that I had gone back—only proved how little room I allowed reality. Ian was the same only more so. He wanted to teach me to sail. For once the day was warm, and so I put on a pair of shorts before we set out on the choppy waters of the loch in a small, swift boat. Within a few minutes, Ian began the lesson, the naming of parts—“sheet,” “boom,” “jib,” and so on. Having neither pencil nor paper, I figured I was supposed to memorize this rapidly issued vocabulary, and also to remember to duck my head whenever we changed directions (“came about”), which seemed to be happening every few minutes. Ian told me to tighten something; I did something else. Without hesitating, he whacked me smartly across my thigh with the end of a rope (“sheet”). “So you’ll get it right next time,” he said. Where the rope landed lay a pink snake of pain.
    We went shooting for small woodland creatures. He handed me a shotgun and showed me how to carry it while walking across the lumpy moor behind the house, which lay below us, starkly splendid in a medieval sort of way. We didn’t talk much as we trudged over gorse and brush. “I think I see a rabbit,” I said, darting ahead of him on the overgrown path. “Get back here, you damned idiot,” he shouted. I froze. “Didn’t I tell you never to get in front of someone carrying a loaded gun?” I tried to apologize but nothing came out. He said “damned idiot” again.
    The ten sexless days (since he had told me many times how adorable I was, why hadn’t he tried to ravish me?) at Ian’s house in Scotland that summer were enough to start the process of breaking up and dispersing the particles that formed my attachment to this man who was so loose when abroad, so taut at home. Along about December an envelope addressed in Ian’s ornamental hand arrived. I tore it open and found inside an announcement of Ian’s upcoming marriage to Miss H. B., daughter of Brigadier and Mrs. So-and-so. There was a note to me from Ian. “She’s a lovely girl—I’m sure you’ll like her.” The dispersal was complete.
    By late fall I still couldn’t say Ian’s name without beginning to tear away the scab that had formed over the wound of his marrying someone else. But neither was I quite ready to take the veil.
    What did my friend Patsy have in mind when she decided I should meet her boyfriend Milton’s chum, Anatole Broyard? However fond of me she was, it didn’t take me more than a minute to realize there might be an element of mischief in her wanting to