Nathan began arriving at Northampton each week after Friday tea to take her to dinner. One late October evening, he drove with her to a spot near the arboretum. He brushed her curls with his fingers and gazed down at her. Oh, gorgeous, radiant Carla, when can I ask you? he thought.
Carla resisted the dry rim of his lips when he leaned forward to kiss her. She sat still, breathing evenly, and let his hands rest on her bosom while she breathed.
“Could we do without the gloves this time?” Nathan asked gently. She had extracted from her purse a spotless pair of white cotton gloves that he knew would smell of Clorox when they got wet. She’d explained that all the girls at Smith wore gloves for hand jobs. He’d explained that all over New York, Europe, everywhere, girls grabbed hold of men’s cocks with their bare hands, and sometimes with their mouths. She had looked so young, so frightened, staring down at her lap, he hadn’t had the heart to press her.
But this time he said, “Carla, let’s try it just this once. Some girls get to like it very much, you know. Even Smith girls. Your friends are surely doing things they don’t tell you about.”
Her knees were pressed tightly together, her gloved hands resting upon them limply. He stamped wet, terse kisses on her neck, trying to distract her as he unbuttoned the periwinkle cashmere cardigan. He released the clasp at her back, eased her brassiere up to the strand of pearls about her throat and leaned back to gaze upon it all. Gourds, he thought. Immense decorative gourds. The kind with demarcations so sharp they appear unnatural. A sharp divide where a summer’s tan ended, another sharp divide at the borders of the large, rosy nipples. More than he could bear. He thrust both hands out to cup them but there was so much more than they could hold. He placed his hands about one of them and buried his face in it.
“Oh, Carla, please!”
She closed her eyes, slipped off her glove, and did it with her bare hand. She left the wet hand in his lap, unable to take it back in that condition.
“Ah, you are so good. Thank you.” Nathan tenderly kissed her neck, then her brow. “Ah yes, your hand.” His left hand groped in his pocket and found nothing. He took her hand in both of his and wiped it on his shirt. He hoped his laughter would make her laugh too, or smile. And there was a tiny smile that never parted her lips but a smile nonetheless and it heartened him.
Five
The Harvest Ball. It would be Nathan this year, not Phil. And a grey-blue peau de soie gown. Philip loved her in that shade of blue. But Philip had ebbed away just as Felix had said he would. And so it would be Nathan this year.
Nathan looked forward to meeting her friends. Ronnie Lebenthal, a roommate who had had her nose fixed. Cora, whose mother sent chocolate-covered ants and who had just had an abortion. Grace Nussbaum, who had embarassed herself attempting to seduce her senior-thesis advisor.
Nathan would wear the tuxedo he had bought in Dusseldorf, he told her. Mohair. So close a weave, it felt like steel. Never creased. It would outlive him.
A week before the Ball, he took her to the dinner-dance for the Pediatric Wing at the Medical Center in New York.
“Well, here I am!” he’d trumpeted, bursting into the Weisenthals’ library. “And here,” he cried, parting the flaps of his topcoat as though they were curtains opening on a puppet show, “is the Dusseldorf tuxedo!”
Sophie helped him off with his coat and Felix circled about, admiring the suit. He stroked the stiff lapels. “You won’t get another one of these,” he laughed. “Wear it in good health! Carla, my darling, come see what your remarkable boyfriend is wearing tonight.”
“Very handsome,” she said, and handed Nathan her wrap.
At home, later, in the Weisenthals’ kitchen, Carla made some coffee.
“Nathan, I hope you won’t wear that tuxedo next weekend. You do understand, don’t you?”
“Actually, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Oh, c’mon Nathan. You’re being obtuse. Please, just wear a regular American tuxedo.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you look like the Kaiser in that outfit, Nathan.”
“Oh really, Carla. Just because it’s German …”
“You look like a German. A stuffy old German. Please, Nathan. Please don’t wear it when you meet my friends.”
Nathan said he would take it under consideration.
He arrived at Northampton early the next Friday. Luce offered a dry Chablis with the frogs’ legs and Carla spoke enthusiastically of a poetry reading at Amherst. Tomorrow night. Intriguing people. Robert Frost and a reception to follow at the English Department. She had managed an invitation from Ronnie Lebenthal’s brother, a junior member of the Department. It would be a very special evening. Far better than the Harvest Ball. And no need to lace up in all those stiff clothes.
And then it was Christmas again. Arpeggios of crystal wine glasses and brandy snifters. The virtuoso harpsichord trill of the Telemann Trio Sonata. Tintinnabulating sopranos against a continuo of altos as well-wishers greeted each other in the Russian Tea Room. The Hallelujah Chorus. A thick frenzy of bodies racing up and down Fifth Avenue. The resplendent cascade of counterthemes as Bach’s Pasacaglia reached its crescendos. Parties, friends. Nathan’s colleagues from Columbia and from the hospital. Carla’s school friends. Hors d’oeuvres, champagne.
Stew Abrams, Nathan’s roommate at Columbia, became engaged to an Englishwoman he had met in Europe during the war. Maxene Paulsen-Quine. Nathan admired her. Virtually everyone from their class was at the engagement party. Nathan passed the evening with the physicists who, in undergraduate days, had formed a little clique on the top floor of Livingston Hall. Their enthusiasms had engendered Nathan’s devotion to Baroque music.
“The physicists are the true geniuses of our class,” Nathan used to tell Stew.
Marvin Lampert was a physics major who commuted to Columbia from the Bronx because he could not afford to live in the dorms. It was Marvin who had unravelled the mysteries of the Bach A-major violin concerto for Nathan, demonstrating how the theme of the second movement wove back into the coda. Baroque music, Marvin had told him, is what physics would be if it were music. Complex. Intricate but orderly.
Lew and Marian Perrin were at the party too. Lew had studied literature at Columbia and gone directly into his father’s jewelry business. It was a pity, Nathan told Carla, because Lew was really a poet, a rare bird with one foot on the Earth and one in paradise. Lew had chosen to live on the Earth. But after they’d had dinner at the Rainbow Room with Lew and Marian, Carla remarked that she couldn’t discern a jot of poetry in Lew. She liked him for being so down-to-earth, and she liked the effervescent Marian even more.
Dr. and Mrs. James Heaney invited Nathan to their Christmas party. “Gorgeous,” Heaney whispered to Nathan when he was introduced to Carla. “Delightful girl,” Mrs. Heaney said and offered a claret for the partridge blanketed in buttery pastry.
Cora’s abortion had resulted from an encounter with a Princeton man, Henry Sedgwick, whose mother hostessed a Christmastime bridal shower for Cora at the Princeton Club one afternoon. Nathan picked Carla up at five. She introduced him to Cora and to Ronnie Lebenthal and Grace Nussbaum.
“Thank you for arranging the invitation to the Robert Frost event,” Nathan said to Ronnie. “A really enjoyable evening.”
As they drove away from the Club, Nathan said that Cora seemed too nice for Henry Sedgwick and that Ronnie’s surgeon had taken off too much of her nose and that he was surprised Grace’s thesis adviser hadn’t had the sense to take her up on it.
“Really, Nathan!”
“Yes, really. She’s not you, of course. Nothing of your aristocratic charm. But she’s very attactive nonetheless.” Grace Nussbaum, Nathan thought, was attractive in a troubled and a troubling sort of way. The sort of way a man does not forget.
On the last afternoon of 1956, they stood in a queue outside the Criterion Theatre under one of those light wet snows that become transparent a foot or so above the pavement. Carla had
wished for a frothy Hollywood movie: Around the World in Eighty Days.
“Carla?” A baritone voice was taking her into its confidence. She caught just a glimpse of the lithe form behind them and made hasty introductions.
“Philip is in medical school at Tufts,” she told Nathan. Nathan asked a few questions about the faculty, enough so the younger man could grasp his seniority.
“Phil played first singles for Yale,” Carla said.
“What sort of racquet do you use?” Nathan inquired and manuevered the conversation back to a comfortable place.
“You were awful to him,” she told Nathan as they were leaving the theater. “I used to go out with him, you know.”
Of course, Nathan knew.
“How did you know that?”
“Your color changed,” he said. “Anyway, I’m glad you threw him over for me.”
“It wasn’t quite like that,” she said.
“Whatever you had to do to make room for me,” Nathan said, “I’m glad you did it. I’m very happy, Carla. I think I might turn out to be one of those rare creatures: a truly happy man.”
She did not answer him, and Nathan took this as sufficient assent. He put his arm around her shoulder. “Yes,” he said, “I think it just might turn out that way.”
That evening, Sophie sat at the foot of her daughter’s bed, stitching down a fastener that had come loose on the black velvet bodice of Carla’s best gown.
“The same thing happens with my evening gowns,” she told her daughter. “We ladies with the big bosoms, we always have these problems. The men don’t understand this. They just go crazy for the big bosoms.”
Carla stroked the dark red taffeta skirt. She knew she had run out of time. The cacophony of winks and nods, knowing smiles, and pinched cheeks was reaching its climax.
“I really can’t marry him, Mother. I can’t.”
“I was very nervous like you when I married your father,” Sophie said, giving her daughter’s knee a sympathetic squeeze.
“I’m not nervous,” Carla protested. “It’s not that. Mother, he’s really too old for me.”
“Twelve years is a good distance between a man and a woman. He has advanced nicely in his career. He will take good care of you, you will see.”
“It’s not the twelve years, Mother. It’s just the way he is. He’s too old for me.”
“Papa almost loves this man.” Sophie looked embarrassed.
“I know. I know Papa loves him. He’s an old-world European just like Papa.” Carla reached across and stroked her mother’s cheek. “I love Papa,” she said, “and I love you too. But I don’t love Nathan, Mother. I can’t.”
Sophie bit off the end of the thread and laid the gown across the foot of the bed. “You will love Nathan someday too. You will see. It takes time, the love that comes in marriage. Take a nap, liebchen. It will be a late night for you tonight. But wonderful. Papa and I will wait up. I, myself, should take a nap.”
Carla stared at the voluptuous rolls of deep red taffeta. The thick black velvet of the bodice. She fingered the little fastener her mother had lovingly sewn in place and she sat back on her bed, drawing the cool pillow against her chest. Papa was a very good, a very wise, man. And he loved her, wanted the very best for her. She could never doubt that.
She pressed her fingers into the deep velvet and ran them down to the slippery taffeta. She realized for the first time the power of delicate barriers. She realized that simple faith could fortify them, making even a bit of taffeta a mighty suit of armor. It would make her unreachable, impregnable.
He would ask her tonight and, unreachable, impregnable, she would say yes. And, yes, unreachable, impregnable, she would marry him. She would wrap herself in a comforting fog. She would marry him in her sleep.
Six
In cream-colored linen Bermuda shorts, purchased expressly for the occasion, he paced impatiently before the hotel window. It was true, he thought, the sand was coral. A color more obscene than beautiful as it reached the blue of the ocean beyond. The raucous clang of their impact had so impressed the hotel’s decorator that the two colors were forced to collide over and over throughout the Honeymoon Suite.
His brand-new wife was bolted in the bathroom.
“Carla, darling, it’s been forty minutes. Are you ill?”
“I’m all right. I’ll be out in a few minutes. Why don’t you find the bar and have some Rum Swizzles? I’ll be right down.”
When he returned an hour later, he found her coiled in a clump of pillows, tears spilling over the apple cheeks onto a blue-and-coral flowered spread. The room was rank with the odor of ripe cheese.
“I’m sorry, Nathan. Something awful’s gotten to my stomach.”
After four days of it they flew home. To Peekskill. Sophie put her daughter to bed. Felix thought it might be distress about the marital act.
“Oh, I’m sure it’s not that,” Nathan said.
Six months earlier, Carla had been fitted with a diaphragm. There had been times in the car, in motels, and in the sprawly house in Peekskill, when he’d kissed and fondled her enormous breasts, searching for the spot, the gesture, the tempo that would arouse her. When he’d been so wild with desire just gazing at her that he’d had to hum a Bach cantata to himself, stroking, caressing, and kneading until she acquiesced. She was sick with fear, this beautiful young wife of his, but it was not so small, so precise, a fear as Felix imagined. She was young, Nathan told himself.
He carried the crates up the narrow stairs, despite their incommodious sizes and their considerable heft, as though he were lifting a ballerina, supporting them past three stories on just the tips of his fingers. He opened the door of their tiny top-floor apartment with a push of his toe and moved with some urgency to set them down upon the table. He’d had to make several trips but his precious Rosenthal china, service for twelve, was home at last. Exercising every privilege at his disposal, he had still had to pay dearly for it in Germany and pull all sorts of strings to have it shipped to America. And after all that, he’d almost had to forfeit it.
“How does a husband come to choose the china?” Carla had demanded to know one afternoon in Peekskill. Nathan had just described the comeliness of the Rosenthal set. His allusions to Attic restraint, “The Horse of Silene,” for example, had set Sophie in a swoon.
“It’s my wedding gift to you,” Nathan had said.
“But you didn’t even know me when you bought it!”
“That’s true. I bought the most elegant dinnerware imaginable,” he’d said, “and set about finding a woman worthy of it.”
“I wouldn’t have chosen plain white.”
“Rosenthal is the very finest,” Sophie had agreed.
And here it was. Ninety-six pieces, plus servers.
“Are you going to have a look?” Nathan asked.
Carla helped uncrate a few pieces and ran her hand across the cool creamy glaze.
“They really are very elegant Nathan. Thank you.”
She stacked the crates on the floor of his closet and, when she had filled that space, stacked the remaining crates beside his dresser. It would remain Nathan’s china.
He studied his wife of three weeks. She moved about their apartment in the same cardigans and pleated skirts she had worn in college, folding yesterday’s newspapers, covering bedsheets with a spread, lining kitchen drawers with flowered paper. Her gestures were indecipherable, obscure. He studied his wife as she went about setting napkins on the table and for the first time he wondered what she was thinking. Suddenly, then, he understood that he would never know that. In her unfathomable otherness she could elude him utterly. She could keep herself in purdah; she could deceive him. It struck him that he had possessed her more perfectly before their marriage, before it ever occurred to him to wonder what she was thinking.
Her face was lustrous as ever, the aquamarine eyes shone as fiercely. But she moved in an hermetic, sequestering fog, a thick November fog. She was in his room, in his bed, and
yet she was in fog. He slid his hand beneath the rose-printed flannel nightgown, over her hip and into the warm place where one of her breasts rested upon the other. But she arose in the morning and carried her breasts to the kitchen where they were a bewildering, fluctuating swell beneath a navy wool robe, something he remembered in another kitchen with the bland aroma of cream of wheat. He was disturbed by the transformation of her breasts. He disliked the kitchen and kept away. The fog confused him. Her varying forms confused him. The kitchen confused him.
A book party for an author she had edited. She had volunteered their apartment with its rooftop garden. “Much too formal,” she said when Nathan suggested the Rosenthal china.
Important people would be there. A brilliant young man from Newark who’d had a story in The New Yorker. She labored over canapés and spread crackers with colored creams, smoked oysters, and red and black caviars; they huddled self-consciously on silver-plated trays.
Nathan tended bar, passing lavish compliments and delectable quips as generously as he poured vodka. A senior editor invited him to play tennis. The brilliant young writer would bring his father for an eye examination. An author whose name he could not remember would send him an autographed copy of something.
His cousin Lily arrived late with her husband, Howard. Two psychiatrists, they each saw patients late into the evening. Lily had been his first, when he was fourteen and she twelve. It was not a fact he recalled about her as he would have recalled something she said. It was the very gist of Lily, her name; it was indigenous to the merest thought of her. Howard was distracted and disarrayed as ever but he managed to congratulate Nathan once again for winning Carla. Lily requested a teaspoon.
Nathan searched the kitchen cabinets and drawers. He felt bumbling, oafish. He pulled out a drawer lined with flowered paper. Knives, forks, tablespoons, three large serving spoons. They apparently had no teaspoons. He proffered a tablespoon which Lily accepted gratefully.
The Speed of Light Page 3
