Obsession (9780061887079) by Gloria Vanderbilt

 
 
    I F EVER TWO WERE ONE , it could be said of Priscilla and Talbot Bingham. How charmed Priscilla would be to hear the couple described in this Victorian manner, conjuring up old-fashioned valentines with quaint phrases entwined by ribbons and hearts, bordered by paper lace. For to her, image was all: childless by choice, proud to devote her life “constructing,” as her architect husband might say, “brick by brick,” the castle—high topped by a banner proclaiming to the world the success of their partnership.
    Guests would agree—if ever two were one, it was the Binghams—as they toasted the couple at the country club on the eastern shore of Maryland—and watched Priscilla disintegrate after Talbot died of a heart attack in the middle of their tenth wedding anniversary celebration. It was terrible to see—the stretcher carrying Talbot’s body away—Priscilla on a stretcher in the ambulance as though she too had died.
    But she hadn’t. All she did was live with her grief and after a time found herself walking and talking once again like a normal person. Nobody would have suspected that when she looked in a mirror, the eyes of a dead person stared back. Gone, lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry Clementine, she would sing to herself and cry as if tears came from a well high in the mountains. The cold, coldmountains where nothing grew, no creature lived, nothing except intermittent snow falling and winds releasing avalanches that fell upon her heart, suffocating.
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    I HAD MET T ALBOT at a dance over Christmas vacation when I was a senior at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. He had already graduated from Harvard and was on his way to being America’s most controversial architect. Although not handsome, he had the grace and movement of an athlete. There was something indefinable about him, brilliant and complex bursting with supercharged yet strangely childlike energy combined with an inherent dilemma which belongs to the coexistence of twotrends, often a defect of artists of all kinds—the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found. All part of the fascination and mystery about him, a puzzle; women flirted with the notion that only they might find the missing piece. But not a chance. His devotion to me was beyond question and those who attempted soon gave up, stepping back into mutual friendship with “the Talbots.” I adored everything about him, from his half-curling rough black hair, accentuating black olive eyes capable of expressing every emotion of his animated mind, inherited from his Roman mother, to his contradictory withdrawn silences and eccentricities, a maze of paradoxes I decided early on to leave unresolved. Obsessively secretive in his relationships, even with me, he remained an enigma to the world and tohis closest friends. Of course, he was a genius. But that particular magic I loved most about him was that from our first meeting he had been passionate in his possession of my skinny body, which in my mind lacked a femininity I thought essential and admired in other women. After ten years, he still, when he returned home after a trip, greeted me at the door and always demanded to make love, instantly, before even taking off his coat. This intensity never failed to be a jolt of lightning that transformed my insecurities into an image of myself I was proud of, pushing away the knowledge that I was an impostor who in truth found sex of little interest. But no matter—it triggered passion in the man I admired and loved, and without being aware of it I slipped into a lie of pretense, acting, performing as if I too feltpassion as he did. But that was all right. It could be managed. Put in its place. Eventually I even forgot the consultation, early in my marriage, with a doctor. I asked the doctor if I was frigid. He asked me what my relationship was to my father, and I told him that my