NONFICTION - Feb. 12, 1995

ADVICE TO A YOUNG WIFE FROM AN OLD MISTRESS by Michael Drury (Random House: $15; 110 pp.) Gear up, brace up, chin up. This is really a book about how to accept life’s disappointments with dignity, how to avoid the pitfalls of “wifedom” and yes, keep your man. Willing suspension of disbelief: The reader must either pretend she is in the early 1800s or pretend she is a young girl asking the advice of a fabulous woman who has lived most of her life alone. You must arrange yourself on the cushions in front of the fire in her intimate and unique Upper-Westside apartment and turn your face upward, bravely and hopefully. Receive these painful facts: “A successful mistress knows how to be loved; it seldom occurs to a wife that it is necessary to learn.” Learn what? Mainly restraint. “If you would stay loved, stay strange a little.” “A mistress, because she has few stated rights, learns restraint; a wife, having almost too many, is tempted to usurp.” A mistress is never “nosy,” she knows her “boundaries,” “she forestalls his saying things he will regret . . . she surprises herself by preferring the restraint.” “The crudest injury inflicted on love is administration.” “A mistress has limited time, limited room, limited prerogatives, but she learns that limits are not a disadvantage.” It’s not that mistresses are glamorous, it’s just that they know how to clean up and arrange everything perfectly without speaking of it (“such daily ministry is muted”). “Matthew and I,” Drury’s subject says of her lover of 30 years, “were outside the law and social custom,” and in fact, it is the element of free will that is most extolled here. But something is betrayed, something we have been working for, men and women, and the thing restrained rises up and bites.