“Lily, Lily. You’re being much too harsh,” he said.
“Have you any idea what the available sampling of men is like?” She was laughing. “You know before you get to dessert why their wives left them.”
“There must be some widowers,” Nathan offered.
Lily leaned forward and traced a finger round the rim of her wineglass. “Have you ever passed some old piece of upholstered furniture left on the street in a fancy neighborhood? Ever consider that someone, maybe a whole family, had that greasy, ragged mess in their living room until yesterday? Every time I see one of those things, I go home and examine my own furniture. Maybe I’m not noticing the wear and tear as the years pass. People with plenty of money keep this awful stuff in their homes. You don’t realize it until they throw it out.”
“Widowers?” Nathan couldn’t keep from laughing.
Lily drained the wine from her glass. “You think all the really terrific men are married. Then one turns up widowed. He takes you out to dinner and you wonder, ‘How did anyone put up with such rude manners, with such boring conversation, with such hypochondria for thirty or forty years?’ It’s amazing what people live with!”
“You of all people, Lily, how could you be surprised?”
“These aren’t my patients, Nathan. They’re the mild-mannered husbands of the women I envy. The ones whose husbands stayed alive and faithful for years of marriage. And then one of these men is across the table, treating me to his monotonous life and I just want to get home.”
“People are pedestrian,” he said.
“They’re vagrant,” she said.
“You’re really cheering me up, Lily.”
“Not you, Nathan. You’re still somebody’s husband.”
February. March. Sundays. Mondays. They all began at four. Tofranil. Percocet. Vodka. Patients who smiled. Patients who complained. Coffee. Vodka. Just a sip. Passover with the Szabos and Tilly Szabo still not understanding it at all. Sweet wine and another Percocet. His daughters sat silently at the Seder table, staring at their plates.
“Poor Daddy,” Alexandra said when they had a moment alone. “You’re sadder than I’ve ever seen you.”
“I miss the lab, sweetheart. It’s a big step down. And, of course, now I’ll never be made chief.”
“Do you ever think of getting a divorce?” she asked.
“Alex, how could you ask me that?” He was reeling.
“You and Mom are miserable. And it’s getting worse.”
“It’s not true,” he said. “And even if it were, it’s none of your business.”
“Of course it’s my business,” she said. “And it’s true, Daddy. Anyone can see. A divorce wouldn’t be a bad thing, you know.”
“It’s too late,” he said. “I can’t live alone like Armand. I don’t envy him his women. Not at our age. Besides, who would want me? I’m like a greasy old sofa with its stuffing hanging out. The kind people leave on the sidewalk as trash.”
“You’d be more attractive if you were happy,” she said.
“Your mother and I have a history. Two terrific daughters.” He kissed her tight curls. “We have two homes we’ve shared for years and scores of friends who see us as a couple.”
“They’re mistaken,” she said ruefully.
“Don’t be angry with me, sweetheart,” he said. “We have something. Something more than Armand has. Trust me.”
“I love you, Daddy,” she said, “but I hate your being so miserable. I don’t want you staying married for my sake.”
Alexandra would never be the same for him after this. She would remain his friend, but he would approach her cautiously. He had lost his position with her, his place in her eyes. He would never be entirely comfortable with her again.
A woman pressed her back against the slats of an Adirondack chair. They were at the edge of the lake, just a few yards from the Peekskill house. She had silky red hair and skin as white as talc. There was something steamy about her. Not tropical, of course. Not with that complexion. But steamy in the way of indoor swimming pools in roadside motels.
He was aware that his wife had stayed in touch with her college friends, but he hadn’t actually seen Grace Nussbaum since that afternoon long ago at the Princeton Club. He remembered her, though. She’d been a very attractive girl.
And now, she looked decent enough although her two divorces came as no surprise. One of those well-meaning women doomed to carry through life an utterly fatal defect in her approach to men. Doomed, too, never to understand her defect. And men could never say just what it was they found so unbearable.
When she’d left for a swim with Carla, Nathan had dozed in his chair. Now, he walked to the little cabana by the lake to change into his trunks.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, pulling back from the doorway. Grace had tucked a pink towel hastily about her.
“Not at all,” she smiled. In one astonishing moment she pulled him into the aromatic cedar box, shut and locked the door behind him, and let go the towel that had barely contained her.
“Grace,” he began.
“Carla told me to.” It was the gentle reassuring voice of a school nurse following protocol.
“Carla?”
“She said you’ve been so depressed lately. She said your girlfriend left you and you lost the grants for your research and that she can’t …”
“My girlfriend!” He was succumbing to the cedar scent.
Grace had stooped to pick up her towel but ended by kneeling on it. She turned her damp white face toward him.
“Carla feels terrible that she can’t do for you.” She tugged at the zipper on his shorts. “She said you found me attractive.”
She was, not surprisingly, very skillful at her work. The horror of what was happening to him added a certain piquancy. She made a display of swallowing hard.
“Thank you,” Nathan said. His hands rested on her red hair. He could think of nothing else to say. Then, “I don’t think we should leave together. Would you mind going out first?”
“Of course not,” Grace said. “I understand completely.”
Nathan locked the door behind her and fell back against the cedar panels. He had never in his life been able to weep and he could not do so now. He stared at the sink, unable to regard himself in the mirror. It was as close as he could come to weeping.
PART THREE
Twenty-two
A star begins as dust. A swirl of particles drawn by gravity, drawn so powerfully the temperature within is driven to numbers requiring logarithmic expression. Hydrogen and helium create and destroy each other. Carbon circles round upon itself. A star is a Mesopotamian bazaar where primordial elements are exchanged one for the other, a frenzied cycle of attractions and repulsions, the oscillations of love gone mad. But it pulsates rhythmically as the chest of a peaceful dreamer. Taken as a whole, viewed from a distance, this is a stable state of affairs. It can continue for billions of years, at a constant temperature, producing an unvarying hue.
But as it comes to the end of its time, a star’s internal struggles become more ferocious, more apparent, even from afar. The glowing bits of dust fall upon one another with greater force. It grows dense and small until its particles reignite and burst out again into glowing clouds. Stars continue like this, growing larger and then smaller, each pulsation more exaggerated than its predecessor. Finally, some implode. They are sucked into themselves and become cold dense rocks hurtling through the universe. Others spill, out of control, into bloated swells of cooling specks.
Red dwarfs. White dwarfs. Red giants. A dying star is unbalanced, desperate, deranged. In its death throes, violent or melancholy, it is always grotesque. It is a thing abandoning its own identity. In its ultimate phase, it bears little resemblance to what it has been for uncounted millenia. A dying star is no longer itself.
Nathan could mingle affably, smile politely, and nod as if he were listening. He could peruse The New York Review of Books and recite the gist of some recent
article to whomever was not-quite-facing him at cocktails. It was important on these occasions to move from one guest to another with alacrity, not to linger. There were scores of dinner parties, some of them their own. He found it difficult to differentiate them. It was his sixtieth year.
Tilly Szabo was carrying a tray laden with those pink-and-white-smeared crackers his wife used to serve. He hated people smearing his crackers for him, making them soggy. Tilly had a big heart but no sense at all when it came to entertaining. Of course, the food would be fine and plentiful. Money, Nathan decided, has certain uneclipsable virtues.
Armand had yet another woman. It was an awkward business for everyone, Armand’s women. Faces, names, slender details of lives lived elsewhere. They carried plates to Armand’s dining table as if they owned them. They bathed him in endearments filled with anticipation, and then they vanished. Nathan wanted to tell these women that they were doomed, to urge them to flee the darkly handsome man with his melancholic eyes, his art collection, and his Jacuzzi. To flee before they embarrassed themselves. But Carla defended Armand.
“He’s terribly lonely,” she would tell Nathan as they drove home after dinner at Armand’s. “He says he wants to settle down, but he won’t just settle.”
“Very neat,” Nathan would say. “He’ll never settle down with any of those we’ve met. He should have stayed with Zoe.”
“He’s afraid he’ll make another mistake,” she’d say.
“He’s not taking it seriously,” Nathan would say. And then they would be home and undress and go to bed.
The Szabos had invited the usual people. At Carla’s instigation, Lily was there to meet Lew Perrin, now a wealthy widower and, Carla said, the best man on the market. Reena Colby arrived late. Her hair was matted, her face vacant. She wishes Robin would die, Nathan thought.
Reena had her son, Marco, in tow. Marco had shot a deer on their front porch. He’d had the venison dressed and roasted for the Szabos. It would be served for dinner but there was also game hen for those who preferred.
And, of course, there was a couple no one had met before. A short, dry man with protruding eyes and a noisy wife. She talked incessantly of his hobby. His sculpture filled his office, crowded their home. “He’s a born sculptor,” she said.
“What kind of sculpture?” Nathan asked politely.
“People, of course,” the man replied. “Only people. The human form is all that interests me. Children. Men. Women. In every imaginable activity. I want to render every human activity in clay.”
“Then you build up, you don’t chip away. No marble or wood,” Nathan said.
“No chipping away,” the man said. He was a surgeon. Larry Rosbacher. He introduced Nathan to his wife, Elaine.
“Larry loves to work with his hands,” Elaine said.
At the table, Tilly placed Larry next to Carla so they could talk about sculpture. Nathan sat opposite. Armand’s date was at Larry’s right.
“And which is your husband?” Larry asked the woman.
“No one,” she said. “I’m Vera.” She had a rich, easy smile and her gleaming dark hair was swept back from her face, woven into a thick braid that lay heavy on her back. “I’m here with him,” she said, indicating Armand at the far end of the table.
“I came with her,” Rosbacher said, nudging his chin toward his wife. “We’re a pair.”
“So you always come together,” Vera said, her smile broadening as she skewered a bit of venison. Larry hesitated, unsure about her joke.
“When you speak of sculpting, you sound like the Lord on the sixth day,” she continued. She was toying with him. Nathan saw deep intelligence in her, and irony and mischief as well. Her grey eyes twinkled.
“I am, in fact, very much like God,” Rosbacher replied.
“But far more modest,” Vera said. The buzz of conversation around the table had subsided.
“I mean my work,” Rosbacher said. “In my work, I’m required to be God. Each day I make profound, excruciating decisions.” He said this with compelling gravity.
“What decisions?” Vera asked. “What exactly do you do?”
“I’m a neonatal urologist,” he said.
“I thought urologists had elderly patients,” Vera said. “What do you do with newborns?”
“My patients are born with indeterminate sex organs or none at all,” Rosbacher said. Now the attention of the group was riveted on him. He had used the woman for this moment, Nathan thought, had made her his unwitting shill.
“They’re hermaphrodites,” Rosbacher continued. “I have forty-eight hours to decide their sexes and give them definitive organs. So, you see, I am always a sculptor, always creating people.”
There was a murmur at the table. He’s given this speech before, Nathan decided. In just this way. Waits for silence and then … his denoument.
“Aren’t there genetic indications? Natural codings, so to speak? You don’t make these decisions in a vacuum, do you?” Vera was impressed but also horrified.
“In true hermaphrodites there is no clear genetic information. No clear structural indication. Everywhere you look, you find equivocal signals. That’s what’s so fascinating.”
It’s revolting, Nathan thought. He found he could not swallow a half-chewed morsel of venison; he spit it into his dinner napkin.
“Do you consult with the parents?” Vera asked.
“Not to ascertain their preferences, if that’s what you mean. They have no better rights than other parents.” Rosbacher was emphatic. He was a man whose business required unwavering principles and policies without exceptions.
“How do you finally decide?” Vera wanted to know.
“Sometimes it’s pure intuition. I sculpt all night and in the morning I go to the O.R. and I make a boy or a girl, as it comes to me.”
“They must require years of counseling,” she said.
“I am opposed to psychotherapy,” Rosbacher said. “What I do leaves no emotional scars.”
“But in puberty,” Vera was agitated, “are the hormones there? Do they develop proper secondary characteristics?”
“My boys and girls become perfectly normal men and women,” Larry Rosbacher said with a reassuring nod.
“I can see why you feel like God,” Vera said quietly. She was not admiring, only subdued.
“And you, my dear,” Rosbacher said. “Do you work at something?” He leaned closer to her, lifting his brows to display the full effect of his bulging eyeballs.
“At something,” she replied. She had recovered her ironic demeanor and was regarding him aggressively.
“And what sort of something is that?”
She looked away from Larry and moved her eyes slowly around the table, letting them come to rest on Armand. She stared, unblinking, into his face.
“Well, dear, we’re all waiting to hear,” Rosbacher cooed.
“And I,” Vera said, “am waiting for you to take your hand off my knee.” The ironic gaze remained levelled at Armand.
Larry Rosbacher turned crimson but it hardly mattered. A flood of hilarity had broken over the table.
Nathan patted Armand’s shoulder as they said goodnight.
“She’s marvelous,” Nathan told him.
“Marvelous,” Carla echoed. “Good for you, Armand.”
Twenty-three
Robin Colby’s death was a technicality. Authorized persons made notations in ink and the bandages and bones were re-classified.
Nathan paced about the old couch where his father-in-law sat in the cavernous study. The old man’s brow was smooth and tan: a speckled egg. The backs of his hands were speckled, too, and crossed by mountains of teal veins. His fingers were buried in thick black fur. Walter, a new cat.
Lisle, now a Semiotics major, was the only one who truly understood her grandfather’s theories about correspondences between the shapes of words and the shapes of things. But she was confused about the cats and thought she should be consulted about naming this new one.
“You will have to take it on faith, then,” Felix said. “This cat is Walter. Bruno Walter, in fact.”
“You’ve changed the rules for naming them,” Lisle protested.
“You are astute as usual,” her grandfather beamed. “I think maybe your sister will help you figure it out.”
Nathan had figured it out. Felix’s mind flashed and crackled, fierce as ever, Nathan thought. Testimony to the triumph of spirit over matter.
“What can I say to eulogize Robin Colby?” he asked the old man. “He was a pig. Everyone knew that. I knew another side of him, but I can’t talk about it at his funeral. What a terrible task I’ve taken on. I don’t know why I offered.”
“You always offer,” Felix said, smiling down at the sleek black coil in his lap.
“That’s true,” Nathan said. “It’s an odd thing I do, eulogizing everyone.”
“Not so odd,” Felix said without lifting his eyes from Walter. “It separates you from the others, removes you from the death. Empowering is what it is.”
“A mistress is empowering,” Nathan murmured wistfully.
“What’s that?” The old man heard less and less.
“Nothing,” Nathan said. “I’ll speak about his research, his children. About Reena. This is a terrible eulogy, somehow. Far more difficult than the others.”
“Well, of course,” Felix said.
“What does that mean, ‘of course?’”
“You jousted with him all these years. He was your most formidable competitor. Now, he’s vanquished. You have your wish.”
“Go to hell, Felix,” Nathan told him. “And take psychoanalysis with you!”
Felix remained in the study, stroking Bruno Walter. He was thinking about his daughter. About the match she’d made. A match I made, he thought. I wanted the best for her, he told himself. He considered that, in spite of several earnest attacks upon them, stacks of magazines still remained in the cellar. She was blither, firmer in her step, that was clear. Yet, Felix thought, she has never come to full flower. Her sculpture could be so much more powerful. Her voice, her gestures, could be so much more …
The Speed of Light Page 12
