During my late teens, infatuated with a world of limitless possibilities, I met a bigamist. She was not a stranger to my parents or to the small Southern town where we vacationed every summer. Moreover, she was the wife of the town’s most prominent businessman, a rather reclusive fellow with a good heart, an Ivy League degree and a small family fortune.
I’ll call my friend Bess, though that was not her name. She was 20 years older than I was and a great deal younger than my mother. She played a mean game of tennis, enjoyed parties and was surpassingly gorgeous. She was also restless, and the town chatterers soon took it in stride when Bess began to cheat on her husband. They even took it in stride when she cheated outside of the city limits.
Then, after some time, it was rumored that she had found a boyfriend in upstate New York. For six months a year she was a good Southern wife. And for the other six, she lived up North, where she managed a charade in which she played her consort’s wife. His mother never knew otherwise, it was said.
Though Bess — technically — was not a bigamist, her unusual circumstances got her as close as one could be without a license. Each man knew of the other and seemed not to mind. And for many years, she remained a constant source of surprisingly sympathetic gossip. When her husband died, she grieved in earnest and then she moved from the South to the North, leaving us all to wonder what became of her and her tireless (dangerous?) sense of adventure.
It was therefore with no small amount of enthusiasm that I jumped at the chance to review Kate Lehrer’s fourth novel “Confessions of a Bigamist.” I believed that I could bring some empathy to my reading and that she, in turn, would be able to supply the insight, depth and succor good fiction affords. In many ways, with this book, Mrs. Lehrer, wife of PBS anchor Jim Lehrer, has done just that.
Readers meet Michelle Banyon, the heroine and risk-taker of this very modern tale, in a state of semi-consciousness. Awakened by a phone call, she drowsily makes out the voice of a man who tells her he misses her, but for a split second she is confounded by just who that man might be.
In this first-person account of her unusual tangle she relates that “I willed myself into consciousness. Someone was missing? No, missing me. But whose voice? A husband’s, that’s whose.” And so the reader is invited into Michelle Banyon’s world, a place where marital ties are fungible boundaries that stretch and break and realign as the altogether appealing Michelle makes her way in the chaotic universe of her life, all the while reminding herself that she has a husband.
The attractive middle?aged woman, it turns out, is a bigamist who, within the last eight months, fell in love with a man not her husband and shortly thereafter married him. This book, purportedly her “confession,” is in fact is a parable of what can happen to a couple that seems to “have it all” when the fiercely independent and successful female half of the union is overwhelmed by the competing demands of her life.
The pickle Michelle finds herself in comes about in a way that is so natural one wonders why it doesn’t happen more often in the lives of many ordinary people. Michelle, married first to a high-powered international lawyer who travels a lot, is away on her own business trip in Fort Worth, Texas when she meets Wilson Collins, a ruggedly handsome, art-loving naturalist. He lives for his birds and the love of a good woman — who, he decides in short order, is none other than Michelle.
He woos and wins her quickly and before very long she is settling in to his Victorian farmhouse, even as she periodically checks in with her business — she’s an efficiency consultant — and her pristine Manhattan apartment.
The narrative is propelled and supported by her efforts to keep her world simple as she moves through bouts of self-doubt, guilt, exhilaration, gratitude, humility, more guilt (“the nemesis of simplification”) and finally some version of peace.
The writing here is generally graceful and sharp though some of the sex scenes seem slightly off. Am I alone in thinking that a strange man suddenly licking my wrist is more goofy than sensual? That aside, the people who inhabit these pages have good taste and appreciate fine art (Caravaggio paintings, Giacometti sculpture), fine libation (calvados) and nice clothes (Armani when appropriate).
Michelle’s tailspin is depicted in the ways she must navigate her various identities. In business she is Daisy Strait, efficiency consultant extraordinaire; in marriage (the first) she is elegant Michelle; and in the passionate tryst that leads to her bigamy she is Mickey. Keeping her personae straight between two sets of friends, the professional audiences she addresses and the nearly equally appealing men she beds is no small task but for the most part she manages. And though life has dealt her wounds (a child died in utero early in her first marriage) her high flying does not seem to come at much cost. She endures and she finesses it all.
In a lesser writer’s hands this might seem little more than a steamy beach-read romp, but in the end Michelle-Daisy-Mickey is an attractive character. She is introspective and she is self-deprecating, and very often she is witty. It is hard to envy the choices she makes but it is equally hard to condemn her for them.
If I were to note the one thing that seems to be missing from this highly entertaining book it is complexity. For a structure that seems to be erected to represent the plight of modern women in a world that stresses them to the point of breaking, so much happens that seems effortless, light and — despite what Michelle says to the contrary — wholly innocent. Anyone seeking to pierce the conundrum of infidelity may have to look elsewhere.
More to the point, the book confirms the apt quotes of its epigraphs: “The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet” (Gustave Flaubert) and “What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? I wish I knew … Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can” (Tennessee Williams). Bigamy, in these pages, simply is what it is.
CONFESSIONS OF A BIGAMIST
By Kate Lehrer
Shaye Areheart/Crown, $24, 279 pages
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