Nathan could scarcely draw breath, his throat had tightened so. Holding her in the lift chair, he had thought of another rosy child, of Lisle when she was young. Of Lisle when he was young. At that moment when the pulley stopped, he was a man whose heart had never lain in a box of ice. He was a man who was strong and young and it was, at that moment, such a long time ago.
Woman, girl, the transmutations of gypsy magic. She coaxed him to a discotheque, the sort of place he’d never conceived. Once more, the raised eyebrows widening her eyes, the mischievous shrug of her shoulders, the throaty giggle as she urged him onto the crowded floor. Her wavy dark hair, set free at last, cascaded over her shoulders, undulating with the movements of her body. Sure, sensual pulsings, captivating him, embarrassing him. Her arms were raised above her head, her torso swaying, her feet barely touching the floor as her weight shifted rapidly from one to the other. She beckoned with long fingers he was certain could reach inside him and, when he pursued her, awkward and hesitant, she chucked him under the chin and swirled about him again. Soon he’d reworked some old dance steps to the disco beat and improvised a lighthearted movement for his arms. He was drawn by the game, the pounding music, the flashing lights. He looked across at her. Tiny beads of perspiration on her upper lip, strands of dark hair across her forehead. They might have been alone on the dance floor.
He was growing weary, his breath coming in short, insufficient gasps. He was afraid to tell her.
She looked into his face, her own damp and beaming. She stopped her dance and threw her arms about him, kissing him on the cheek. “Thanks for the dance,” she said. “I think we’ve done enough, don’t you?”
She would always know him, Nathan thought, always anticipate him.
It had been like making love. He confessed to himself it was not the first time he had thought of her that way. He wondered if he might approach her. She was, after all, free. And for all her bounty, she was a woman alone with two sons, a woman in need of sheltering, the woman who had wanted to marry Armand. He wondered what he might say to turn things that way.
But he was, he reflected, a convalescent. It had been an evening’s adventure, he told himself at last. A marvelous adventure, an exploration of the limits of what was possible. That’s what this friendship with Vera is, he concluded: A journey to the limits of what is possible.
It was almost April, the much-awaited month that never keeps its appointment. March will never conclude, Nathan thought. He despised his topcoat. “Wearying,” he called it.
Vera followed him up the ruby-carpeted steps to the mezzanine of the Metropolitan Opera. He glanced back as he spoke, gesturing and calling out above the din of the milling audience. He wanted her to appreciate Don Giovanni, to understand why it was surely Mozart’s greatest opera.
When they reached their seats, she shed her coat and stood wedged between the rows, smiling down at him. A smile he had never seen on her before. Beneath the smile, a round collar of thick French lace. Old-fashioned puffed sleeves were bordered by the same lace. And the rest was black velvet, gathered thickly at a dropped waist and flowing, Nathan surmised, to some point just above her ankles. It was all held shut by a vertical row of sparkling jet beads that scattered light maddeningly and that ran the length of the dress from the lace at her throat fully down to the hem. It was a little girl’s dress except for those jet buttons. Those buttons, Nathan decided, made all the difference.
He could not have said how it happened that he reached for her hand, how she closed hers over his and somehow drew it into her lap. But the last act was half over and the great statue, bathed in crimson light, would soon appear from below the stage and his right hand was in her lap and the buttons, somehow, were undone so that his hand slipped across the velvet and fell below to thighs as smooth as bone.
“My God, Vera! You’ve nothing on!”
She shrugged and turned partly toward him, a glint in her eye.
He withdrew his hand brusquely but as he did so his fingertips grazed some lushly tufted shrub. He buried the fugitive hand in his other and straightened in his seat. The damp on his fingers warmed, then vaporized.
Peonies, they were. Carmine and rose, their centers all bronzy gold. Multifoliate ranunculae, musky full blossoms blown toward him. He did not see the red-lit statue emerge onto the stage. He saw Vera, splayed among feather beds, heady as a peony in June. And he wanted to rub his face in her, to breathe her. He wanted, quite simply, to smell her.
They were silent as they left and very still as they waited for his car to be brought around.
“Vera,” he said when they were inside it, “I’m scarred and shaven. Bristly and shorn. You’ll find me very ugly.”
She took his hand and again she smiled. An utterly new smile, one he’d only just seen for the first time that evening.
It’s true, Nathan concluded. She does anticipate my every thought.
Thirty
An eager, somewhat unctuous, young man named Jordan Avery answered Nathan’s notice in the hospital bulletin. He was just starting out and a single examining room plus a shared receptionist seemed exactly right.
“Everyone,” he told Nathan, “holds you in such high esteem. I’d be honored to share an office with a senior member of the faculty.”
Nathan had merely hoped for help meeting expenses. He had viewed Avery as a refuge from the insistent croakings of Sinrich’s warty toad. But now, here was an avid admirer, a cornucopia of compliments.
Jordan Avery set out on his desk a colored snapshot of his baby son in a lavish brass frame. He strode through the office with a quick smart step and suggested to Doris Needham that she really ought to put the files on computer disks. He bought her a fax machine as a present. Nathan told him as politely as he could manage that his patients were accustomed to bills typed on his letterhead by Mrs. Needham in digits they could feel with their fingertips, not that they needed to do so. He said Mrs. Needham knew where all the files were and that there was plenty of room for them now that the celadon enameled cabinets were in place. And, he told Avery, Mrs. Needham had no real use for a fax machine.
“The office you saw is the office you rented,” he told Avery. He put a fatherly arm about the young man and took him to dine at The Oyster Bar.
“Medicine is an art,” he said, picking clean one delicate smelt after another. “You don’t want your patients seeing you as yet another machine. You don’t want them thinking this is yet another greedy business.” The younger man nodded gravely. “We’re men of medicine,” Nathan continued. “A science, yes. But also an art. A humane art with a hallowed tradition, an ancient prestige. You want a very human setting here. Human in the classic sense, if you know what I mean.”
Some months later, Jordan Avery took Nathan to dinner. Art-deco sconces, peach-colored walls. On each dish, little curls of vegetables Nathan could not identify. The patrons carried slim briefcases and their laughter was like new wine. Not one of them, it seemed, was a day older than Nathan’s daughter.
Avery produced a manila envelope and spilled its contents onto the table. Bates Associates, it said. Consultants to the Medical Profession. Nathan flicked some shredded radish to the side of his plate. The woman at the table just ahead, he noticed, had pale bobbed hair that moved like liquid.
“They make a videotape of us talking about glaucoma,” Avery was saying. “We play it on a monitor in the waiting room. A loop that plays continuously. Seeing us on television reinforces confidence. Our patients see us as celebrities.”
The morsel of blackened snapper Nathan had speared on his fork dropped into the little dish of red sauce on his plate. “A monitor,” he said. “And a loop.”
“And they do a quarterly mailing. Newsletter thing. Eye Services Update or whatever. Photos of us and stories about our new techniques and the superb results we’re achieving. They send it to all our patients and, for a few dollars more, they can track the zip codes that show up most often on our list and saturate those areas. All computerized.�
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“Saturate,” Nathan said. “That’s really something.” He ordered some more wine. Avery, he suddenly realized, wore French cuffs. He hated French cuffs. And big vulgar cufflinks. Like the brass on that picture frame.
Carla traveled to Florida often now to tend to her mother. Several days each month. At first, this new routine left Nathan unanchored, abandoned. But his resentment soon faded as he came to comprehend the possibilities this arrangement afforded.
“There’ll be a fireplace in our room and a view of the slopes,” Nathan told Vera one early December day. “And we’ll stay for two nights, Friday and Saturday. The whole weekend.”
“Ah,” they said when the porter let them into their room. An ample, spice-scented armoire. The fruity perfume of bath foam. Nathan stretched himself out on the bed and ran through the numbers on the television control. Blades of grass rendered viscous by a photographer’s long lens.
“The mantis’s brain,” a satiny voice told him, “secretes a hormone during intercourse that prevents ejaculation. To have her eggs fertilized, the female must first bite off the head of her mate, stemming the flow of the hormone, thus permitting ejaculation to occur.”
“He dies in both senses of the word,” Nathan said.
“Some folks just have to lose their heads a bit before they can come,” Vera said. Opalescent florets of foam slid down her legs and vanished into the carpet.
“Besides everything else, Vera, you’re very funny,” he said. “You make up jokes like that right on the spot. I can only tell jokes I’ve read or heard from someone else.”
“Your remark about dying was very clever,” she said.
“Oh, a dry little pun. You, on the other hand, are always surprising.”
“But you remember jokes and you tell them so well,” she said. “And all those limericks. They’re very funny.” She had wrapped a thick white towel into a turban around her head and another served as a sarong. She sat, yoga-style, at the foot of the bed. “How about a massage?” she said.
“No thanks,” he said. “I have to admit, they make me uncomfortable.” He muted the volume on the television. “Where do your jokes come from?” He was sombre now. He yearned for something, some thing of hers he could not name.
Vera sensed his mood and thought carefully. “I think a joke disorders the world in some way,” she said. “Reveals the incongruous or the irrational in the world. It’s irreverence, I think. A certain disrespect for order.”
“Women don’t usually make jokes the way you do,” he said.
“I suppose it’s not ladylike to be so disrespectful.”
“Is that why I can’t make up jokes? Am I too respectful of the order in things?”
“You’re very reluctant to disturb the status quo, Nathan.”
“You mean I’m a coward.”
“I mean you seem to want to make things stand still and behave. Pitting yourself against the processes of time, against disruptions and the quotidian derangements of things. Spontaneous eruptions are what I love. But they really unnerve you, I think.”
“It’s true what you say. I don’t like disruption. But I want to learn, Vera. Can you teach me to make up jokes? I want to bravely disarrange things.”
“It’s not bravery,” she said. “The world is already deranged. The thing is to observe it without rushing in to straighten it all out. Just accept it and laugh.”
“Acceptance,” he said. “I’m not very good at that either.”
He sat up and leaned toward her, reached for her hand and uncoiled her across the bed. He uncoiled the white towels, the sarong, the turban. They lay thick and thirsty across the newly-laundered bedsheets. Soft, gauzy linens. White linens. White towels. Vera uncoiled. He pushed his fingers through her hair and full, clear drops of water fell upon the linen. Thirst. Thirst. Whiteness. And thirst.
It was when Vera slept, her wiry legs entwined in his, their feet nesting one in the other, her black hair unbraided, spilling over pillows and the blanket’s border, over his arm wrapped about her, when he saw how soundly she slept held close this way, how naturally it came to her, how easily she meshed her limbs with his, that he knew his life had entirely missed its point. For he could never doze, could never close an eye with anyone, even Vera, so close by. And so he held her through the night, thinking how lucky he was. How rich she was, a deep and endless well; but also a bright, darting light, inventing itself at every moment. In her need for him, she invigorated him in the most powerful way. These thoughts filled him with amazement and gratitude as he clung to her, waiting for morning.
Immortality, Robin Colby had said, is what all men crave. It is, Colby seemed certain, what a man finds in a woman if she is kept at the proper distance. Nathan wondered as he wrapped himself about Vera, pressing against her as she slept, if she was, in fact, at the proper distance. He knew he had never come so close to death as when, almost a year ago, his chest had been cut open, Taylor and his team peering mercilessly into it. And there was no doubt, Nathan thought, that he had never come so close to life as on these early mornings, holding in his own bare arms this supple woman who was, at any moment, as much a girl as a woman.
Would she, he wondered, lose her miraculous powers if she were promised to him until he died? If he married her, if she were to be there at his deathbed? He wondered if that would alter her.
No, Nathan thought that night in the fruit-scented room at the foot of the ski slope, best to keep things as they are. What Colby would call an idée fixe.
In the morning, he boarded the gondola to Alpenhaus, a gathering spot near the top of the most challenging trail. He ordered a double vodka martini, very dry. Gaily-colored tassled hats, plump mittens. Robust, cold-pricked faces. Congenial talk.
On the crusty white crest, Nathan planted his poles and pushed off. The narrow slope soon levelled onto a plateau. His breath was short and the cold sheared his lungs and his throat. A newsletter! A newsletter? Did he really imagine I would advertise? Jordan Avery will be out on his ear, he decided. He will be out in the street with his fax machine and his tasteless brass picture frame and his cufflinks. Out by the first of the year. “I can not accept such disarrangements,” he said to a passing clump of hemlocks. “I’m just not a very accepting sort of man.”
“I’m hungry,” Vera announced when they were finally in the car heading south on Sunday afternoon.
“It’s almost four,” he said. “Let’s wait until we get to Peekskill.”
“Peekskill? We can’t go there. Carla will be home by now.”
Nathan lowered his head and slurred his words. “Carla’s having some people over tonight and we’re very late getting back. I really can’t take you into the City and return to Peekskill in time. I thought I would drop you in Peekskill. At the station. You could take the train to New York.”
He slouched down into his collar but Vera’s eyes were everywhere. They tore at his face. “Nathan, we need to talk,” she said.
“Vera, darling, don’t spoil a nice weekend. It really is quite late. And it has been a lovely time.”
Still she filled the car.
“Sunday dinner, Vera. You know I have to be there for occasions like that. You’re the one I care about. Really, Vera, you know it’s true.” He’d become a pedlar, niggardly and feral.
When Vera finally spoke again, her words were clipped, her husky voice strangely icy. “This is not acceptable,” she said. “I really can’t continue this way. Think it over, Nathan. Think it over carefully and let me know.”
Carla used those very words when he called her from a diner along the highway. “Be reasonable, Carla,” he said. “I came up to the Berkshires this morning for a bit of skiing and now the road’s all frozen over. I need to stay here until it’s plowed.”
“This is not the arrangement,” she said. “How do I face the guests alone? What do I tell them?”
“Tell them the truth,” he said. “Tell them the road is frozen over.”
“I can’t continue
this way, Nathan,” she told him. “I think you’d better consider what you’re doing.”
It was close to midnight when he returned to the drafty house. His wife’s right hand zigzagged over the Sunday puzzle, making little marks with a thin blue pen. The fingers of her left hand absently tested the temperature in her coffee cup. Nathan could see the remains of a baked ham and a crystal bowl half full of limp salad on the counter behind her.
“I’m terribly sorry about dinner,” he began.
Carla did not look up. “Tom and Tilly took their kids skiing this morning,” she said. “In the Berkshires. They got home in time. This is not the arrangement, Nathan. I’m not going to continue this way.”
There was no fat, no sinew, no flesh at all on Nathan’s bones. They were windbeaten and desiccated. Even his tongue was a stone in his mouth and his mouth was a dry, stale nut.
Thirty-one
There were small things that happened before he lost Vera. Small things along the way. These things might have happened differently, but losing Vera was, he finally knew, something that would inevitably have happened. They had explored the far reaches of conceivable configurations and throughout she’d given him proof that it was all entirely possible. The impossibility, he finally understood, was an impossibility in him. And so he understood his loss as something of his own making, something that flowed from his own nature, and his grief would not abate.
The evening of Nina Phillips’s fiftieth birthday was one of those things along the way. It was Valentine’s Day. Carla had sculpted a fat ceramic cupid as a gift.
“It’s absolutely wonderful,” Lisle told Nathan. “Its penis came off in the firing and Mom reattached it with a tiny screw. Now you can have it on or off, depending on who’s coming for dinner. Perfect for Nina, isn’t it?”
“It’s atrocious,” Nathan told them both. “Give Nina my best because this is one birthday party I won’t be attending.”
The Speed of Light Page 16
