He settled himself on the terrace with a bottle of Stolichnaya and a bucket of ice. His daughter’s rendition of Purcell consoled him. A sudden August squall had cooled the air but it was warming again and there were no stars. Fear? Rage? Grief? What was it that made his wife hold onto things so? What had happened to her in Prague or in England? How could he have known her, lived with her, all these years and not know the answers to these questions?
He laughed a short, cold laugh. All these years. She had belonged to Phil Neuman all these years. In his kitchen, in his bed, beside him in his Cessna, it was Phil she had been thinking of. What puzzled him was that the news he’d brought her had not wrecked it. She was saddened, but not by a sense of loss so much as by the knowledge of Phil’s agony. It astounded him that Phil Neuman’s incipient transformation into a woman had not in any way affected her love for him. “He’s the same person,” she had explained, “and now I understand him.”
Nathan could not understand.
“Am I a stodgy old man?” he asked Alexandra.
“You’re a mandarin and an M.C.P. but I wouldn’t call you stodgy,” she told him.
“You know that ‘Male-Chauvinist-Pig’ thing is silly, Alex. Feminism is a dangerous fad, my sweet. If you ever try to defy your biologic imperatives, you’ll find out.” He wrapped his arm under her chin in a wrestler’s hold and bent to kiss her frizzy head. “But I’ll adore you anyway,” he said. She glanced up at him mischievously and broke into the Maple Leaf Rag.
He returned to the terrace and the Stolichnaya. A mandarin and a male chauvinist pig, he thought. Perhaps he had married too late, had children too late. Perhaps he had become his father after all. His jaw tightened.
He had passed his midpoint. He was in his … his … Manneristic period. It was true, he thought. Not a very nice characterization, but an accurate one.
“Veritas,” he said, sinking another ice cube in his tumbler. He had become who he was some time ago, some time that had gone unmarked and unnoticed. And now he was an overelaboration of himself: studied, hyper-refined, excessively mannered.
“I’m an overstatement of myself,” he announced to the lilliputian figures on the pavement below the terrace. He wished the stars were visible. Visible, and available for conversation.
Fourteen
“As Titian was mixing rose madder,
His model posed nude on a ladder.
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition
So he swarmed up the ladder and had ‘er.
“I love that ‘swarmed,’ don’t you?” Nathan was grinning and shoveling a mound of goat cheese onto a wheat thin. Marvin Lampert had brought a stunning wife to dinner and Nathan had managed to get Stew and Maxene Abrams and the Perrins as well.
“A Columbia College reunion,” Carla said, cheerily welcoming Marian Perrin with a kiss. “Nathan is reading from his collection of limericks. I’m compiling a book and Nathan insists I use his favorites. You know how he manages to take over.”
“A good limerick is a good limerick,” Nathan said. “How can you omit one that scans in four languages?”
He held an old notebook at arm’s length:
“There was a young plumber of Leigh
Who was plumbing a girl by the sea
She said, ‘Stop your plumbing,
There’s somebody coming!’
Said the plumber, still plumbing, ‘It’s me!’
“Pretty ordinary, but entendez:
“Il y avait un plombier, Francois
Qui plombait sa femme dans le Bois
Dit-elle, ‘Arretez!
J’entends quelqu’un venait.’
Dit le plombier, en plombant, ‘C’est moi!’
“And in Latin,” Nathan continued.
“Prope mare erat tubulator
Qui virginem ingrediebatur.
Dessine ingressus
Addivi progressus:
Est mihi inquit tubulator.”
“What about German?” Marvin Lampert wanted to know. “It would have to work in German, too.”
“Well, of course,” Nathan agreed. “I did say four languages:
“Es giebt ein Arbeiter von Tinz,
Er schlaft mit ein madel von Linz.
Sie sagt, ‘Halt sein’ plummen,
Ich hore Mann kommen.’
‘Jacht, jacht,’ sagt der Plummer, ‘Ich binz.’”
Never before had Nathan addressed a domiciliary concern with the attentiveness and energy he summoned for clearing the dining room at Gramercy Park. Now, the long table was drenched in creamy white Rosenthal china. It was what he had so long imagined and hoped for. Perhaps, he thought, he should long ago have applied himself to household matters. He shuddered. The piano at the far end of the dining room seemed a bit spindly, cobwebbish, with the space beneath it freed of clutter.
October wines. Cornish game hens. Slippery slivers of zucchini. Crusty rolls from Veniero’s. Carla did this sort of thing very well, he reflected.
“Splendid dinner, Carla,” he told her as she paused beside him, lifting his bread and butter dish onto his dinner plate to clear them away.
“Yes, Carla, splendid,” they all agreed.
“You could do this professionally,” Stew Abrams said.
“Carla doesn’t do anything professionally,” Nathan said.
“That’s not fair,” Marian put in. “She sculpts and she’s edited several books. This limerick book sounds terrific.”
“She’s only compiling it,” Nathan said. “Part-time. She does everything part-time with no real commitment to anything.” He looked up from his plate. Hadn’t there been a tiny sparrow of a woman standing at the piano?
Carla returned to the table with a tray of cups and saucers and the coffee service, regal as the Horse of Silene. She kept her head bent to the table, attending excessively to serving.
“Such magnificent china!” Maxene Abrams exclaimed.
“Nathan brought it back from Germany, from the navy,” Carla said. “It was my wedding present.”
“Ninety-six pieces plus servers,” Nathan said. “Carried it up to our first apartment one crate at a time. Remember that little walk-up we had?”
“It’s the most sumptuous china I’ve ever seen,” Maxene said. “What a marvelous present.”
“Nathan didn’t even know me when he bought it,” Carla said.
“I picked Carla to match the china,” Nathan said.
“You must have felt flattered,” Maxene said to Carla.
“She didn’t feel at all flattered,” Nathan put in. “She felt cheated.”
“I would have felt flattered,” Maxene said.
“Perhaps I should have married you,” Nathan said.
“Nathan!” Maxene said, turning away from him. But the toe of her shoe remained pressed against his.
“I think Carla is just grand,” Marian Perrin said, raising her wineglass. “To our hostess, whose talents extend to editing and sculpting and raising two lovely daughters. A truly well-rounded woman! Thank you for this exceptional dinner!”
“I’ll drink to that,” Marvin Lampert said.
There were tiny babas swimming in thick syrup laced with peach brandy. Carla set them aflame.
“Perhaps you should do catering,” Nathan said as she set a plate of babas and vanilla ice cream before him.
“I’m just fine as I am,” she said, and moved on to Maxene.
“But you have no serious endeavor,” Nathan said. “No burning passion.”
“Why does she need a burning passion?” Lew Perrin said. “Running a household and raising children is pretty serious stuff. Not everyone needs to rage and burn. Women do things differently, I think.”
“A woman helps run your business,” Marian reminded him sweetly.
“Actually she created my business,” Lew said, closing his hand over Marian’s. “If not for her flare for Tibetan primitives, I’d still be in the jewelry business,” he told them.
“But is it pas
sion that drives her?” Nathan demanded to know.
“Hey,” Lew said, “she’s my partner. We work together and neither one of us burns with passion. It’s not art, after all. It’s business. What’s all this about passion, anyway?”
There was a tiny woman at the piano. Standing at the piano. And Nathan could see that she wore polka dots.
“But Carla really is talented,” he said. “She could run a catering business. She could do much more in publishing. She could sculpt more seriously. With passion. She had a show last month, you know. Everyone wanted to buy her things but she refused to sell them. Can’t let go of them. She won’t let herself really be a sculptress.”
“It’s okay to call a woman a sculptor,” Carla said.
“A sculptor is serious about his work,” Nathan said.
“I do it for the fun of it,” she said. “The studio at the Y is a supportive, social place. It’s not as if I needed the money.”
“You don’t take yourself seriously. And you can’t ever let go of anything! I’m not sure of the connection, but those two things are related somehow.” Nathan looked hard into his coffee cup, struggling to ignore the freckled back of the lady at the piano.
“I would love to see the view from the terrace,” Marian Perrin said brightly. She stood up and led her husband from the table. Stew Abrams and the Lamperts followed. Maxene remained to help clear the dishes.
“Nathan must have had too much wine,” she said to Carla. Her English accent had not faded at all in the years she’d been married to Stew. “Don’t let him get to you with all that. You’re a wonderful hostess and an even better mother. You’re also very good with clay, I think.” She stacked the cream-colored plates on the kitchen counter. “This china is undoubtedly the most marvelous ever,” she said.
It seemed Maxene’s accent had become suddenly grating. “Maxene,” Carla said, “please join the others. I’d really rather do this myself.”
Carla was a fetal lump beneath the covers. The rose-printed nightgown enclosed her and kept her safe. She would fall to her sleep safely, amid roses.
“I’m sorry, Carla. I don’t know what got into me.”
She pulled her sturdy Slavic calves in tight against her thighs and tugged at the thin cotton gown. The efficacy of delicate barriers.
“I shouldn’t have said those things in front of everyone,” he said. “Really, sweetheart, I’m truly very sorry.”
The umber curls were buried deep in the blue blanket.
“I just know that if you’d put some passion into it, you could be really terrific at something. You could do something important. Give birth to a dancing star, as Zarathustra said.”
“I gave birth to your daughters, Nathan,” she murmured. “And I’ve worked ever since to raise them. It’s my biological destiny, remember?” The blanket rose and fell with her breath and she pulled it tightly across her shoulders. “I just don’t understand what you want from me,” she said.
Nathan stared at the ceiling. Lighted building tops to the south of the Park threw muted angular shapes across it. It’s still quite light outside, he thought. The City is very much awake. In the Russian Tea Room, they are drinking vodka in their coffee and in the cavernous apartments of the Upper West Side, musicians are playing their music for each other.
He rose from their bed and walked to the kitchen. A telephone hung on the wall.
“Yes,” Muriel said. There was a place on Broadway between Eighty-second and Eighty-third. A little coffee shop on the west side of the street. In a half hour. Yes, she said. She would be there. She would love to. She would.
Fifteen
November again. Pungent oak and wild cherry leaching into the Peekskill soil. Geraniums unpotted and upended in the cellar. A time for taking in the last of things.
Sophie and Felix put off migrating south until after Thanksgiving and, it seemed, the meandrous, sleeping hound of a house chilled early this year. Felix piled on three warm sweaters and still he could button his old corduroy jacket over them all. He had become smaller.
Gustav Mahler, the Coon cat, no longer slept atop the piano, but contented himself with a more accessible spot under Hassah’s bed. Gustav Klimt, the Siamese, had long ago run off and been replaced by a pair of common grey cats. Felix unhesitatingly named them Kokoschka and Gropius, although he would not explain how those names were suggested by their very ordinary shapes. He only left the house for short walks. To the edge of the lake where his eyes became lost in the softly lapping water.
Sophie and Carla drew springy strokes with their leaf rakes, forming mounds of wet brown leaves in the pear orchard. Their efforts made them perspire, even in the cold air, and they could not spare their breath for conversation. They dragged a tarpaulin loaded with the last leaves to the road’s edge just as the sky turned that November shade of lavender splashed with vermillion.
“I’m losing the girls,” Carla told her mother when they were seated in the kitchen, warming their hands around mugs of hot coffee. “Alexandra has always been Nathan’s. She’s never wanted much to do with me.”
“She’s very much Nathan’s child,” Sophie agreed, “but she will soon become a woman and then she will come to you, you’ll see.”
“You and I have always been so close, Mother. I expected the same with my girls, but it isn’t happening.”
“You were special, liebchen. You were our only child and we were fleeing the war. It was an extraordinary time. Don’t envy me that time. You have two daughters, twice the love.”
“No,” Carla said, “it’s not working out that way. Lisle has always gone her own way. I find small bits of myself and a lot of Nathan in Alexandra, but we learn about the world outside from Lisle. It’s as if she came from some other family.”
“She’s a wonderful artist,” Sophie said. “She gets that from you.”
“Her art is nothing like mine,” Carla said. “We never talk about it, but I think she looks down on my sculpture. And she never shares her work with me.”
“Well, a second child is always more independent. Give it time, Carla. Lisle, too, will be a woman and then she will come to you.” She rose and walked around the table to kiss her daughter.
“You’re so beautiful. Don’t think it’s easy for those girls to have such a beautiful mother. But you know, I should put the squash in the oven now.”
Carla carried her mug to the sink. It was filled to the brim with cold coffee. “I’ll make a salad,” she said.
“Will Nathan be here for supper?” Hassah asked, as she laid out the silverware.
“He never comes to the country on Friday,” Carla heard her mother say. “He’s very busy, Hassah. A very important doctor. He does cancer research, you know.”
The worn, chintz-covered chairs were pressed close by the hearth so the grown-ups could suck in its warmth through toes extended almost to the embers. Alexandra, working through a difficult passage of Schumann’s Carnival, was oblivous to the icy draft blowing off the lake into cracks in the old window frames. Lisle remained at the table, scrawling in her diary. Felix dozed. The women chatted. They’d have departed for their separate rooms by now if not for the hearth.
Carla had always imagined the months of the year laid out in a circle, as on the face of a clock. Perhaps she had seen an illustration in a child’s almanac. Perhaps in Prague. November, she imagined at about four or five o’clock. A precarious position, a point in motion toward a resting place at the circle’s bottom. November was, she felt, a vagrant time: transitory, fluctuate. There must have been a drawing in a book. In England or in Prague. It was an ancient image, a familiar sensation. The queasy fear that she might slip off the circle at a tangent, out of reach of that centripetal force that held things together. Their smug little huddle about the hearth, for example, could so easily come asunder. She could sense a rumble in the Earth, preparation for a tectonic shift.
A simple telephone call. Nathan would arrive later than usual the next day. But in time for dinner, he s
aid.
Another call short on its heels. Tom. He’d reserved an indoor court for tomorrow afternoon. Armand was free. Could they play doubles? She had to say no. Nathan would not arrive in time. Perhaps he should try the Perrins. Tom was sorry. He would miss her, he said.
And moments later, the telephone again. Tom again. Marian Perrin had had chemotherapy. Leukemia. Just a routine checkup. It must have been a day or so after their dinner party at Gramercy Park. Leukemia. Sweet, ebullient Marian.
Lew made very little sense when Carla called to offer … She wasn’t sure what she was calling to offer. Perhaps she hadn’t made much sense either. The whole thing, she told Sophie, made no sense. She had been right to feel uneasy. It could all come apart so quickly.
Her daughters and her parents went to bed. The embers died in the hearth and the November chill streamed through the old, irregular windows in icy ribbons. She sat hunched at the kitchen table, one hand on the receiver of the telephone. Finally, she dialed the Szabos. It made no sense, she told Tom.
“I’m sorry I upset you,” he said.
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
“I should have told you in person. I know how much you love her,” he said. “It was thoughtless of me to tell you on the phone like that. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I was upset before that. About lots of things, not just Marian.”
“I know,” he said.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. I can tell.”
“It’s not you,” she insisted. “I’m not upset at you.”
“How would you like a nightcap? Or a hug? Or one of each?”
It is sometimes astonishing to discover how destabilized a system can be and yet endure and function. But when it strays so far from its nature as to reach the grotesque, it can blow itself to bits and, in so doing, right itself. Carla had been an obedient daughter all her life and a dutiful wife for almost twenty years. Imperceptibly, over the years, she had strayed from her nature and gone very much awry. So imperceptibly, and so awry that she could not know until his strong bear-arms were tight about her, just how urgent it was that she see Tom that evening.
The Speed of Light Page 8
