Alex found him asleep in his favorite chair when she returned home. “It sounds pretty awful,” she said when Nathan told her about the cupid.
“Alex,” he said suddenly, “you know Vera Lenz. Armand’s friend?”
“Yes.”
“She’s my friend, too.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
“I’d like you to meet her. With me, I mean. It’s Friday and Vera will be lighting candles. There’ll be challah and kosher wine. I love being at Vera’s on Friday nights. Please come along with me tonight.”
After Vera was gone, he would find there was one image he could not erase: Vera, her face glowing like wheat as she lit and blessed the candles. Her long fingers across the flames, a conjurer, beckoning the fragrant tallow smoke, summoning ancient spirits of comfort and peace. Vera, potent in her wisdom of ages, her two sons who knew all this, respectful and loving. They felt blessed by her as he did.
He had often been drawn by those flames, phoning to ask her to dinner, knowing she would say it was shabbos and that he was welcome at her table. How he loved to spend a Friday evening sipping the sweet wine, savoring the golden bread dunked in rich broth. Yet, even at her table, he was an orphan peering through a window at some bountiful family feast, wishing he could truly partake. Something kept him apart, however. That same invisible bar that had kept him from the warmth of Felix’s embrace. The mysterious blessings she chanted in Hebrew connected Vera to the miraculous, transported her sons with her to somewhere Nathan could not go. This vision of Vera, wrapped as it was in so powerful a longing, he would never dispel that.
“You’re so happy when you’re with her,” Alex told him as they drove home. “You should marry her, Daddy. You deserve to be happy.”
“Ah, sweetheart,” he said, scrubbing her tight, red curls. “It’s not so simple as you imagine.”
“How was the party?” he asked his wife when she returned home.
“I enjoyed it,” she said, “but it wasn’t your sort of thing.”
She was a thoroughbred, his wife. A woman of great restraint. But Nathan could see that the character bred into her was eroding, ebbing out of her and muddying those aquamarine eyes.
The evening at Marvin Lampert’s was the last of those things along the way. It had not been noted on his calendar. Not on the one Doris Needham kept.
“You should have told Doris,” he had said to Carla. “It’s the only calendar I attend to.”
“It’s here on the big calendar in the kitchen,” she said. “Circled in red. You can’t miss it.”
“I never look in the kitchen,” he said. “For anything.”
He’d reserved a table by the dance floor that evening at the Rainbow Room. He loved dancing with Vera. He was planning to wear the Dusseldorf tuxedo once again. A celebration of sorts. One year since their evening at Don Giovanni.
“But these are brilliant, interesting people,” Carla said. “A gala at the Rockefeller University mansion. Can you really think of not going?” Her voice was brittle, weary.
“These are the best people we know,” he told Vera sheepishly. “Tomorrow night, darling, the dance floor will still be there.”
“It was you who taught me to love Bach,” he told Marvin Lampert. “You and the physicists in Livingston Hall.” He was mouthing the words, the click of the telephone receiver at Vera’s end still echoing in his head.
“We were children then,” Lampert said. He dabbed his heavy lips with a linen napkin. “Now that the universe is so beyond comprehension, Bach seems naive, doesn’t he?”
“Not at all,” Nathan said. “He’s so complex! Music addressed to God. The intricate, orderly universe.” He had to labor over words that he expected would slide from his tongue. He was not thinking about music. He was thinking that he would leave his wife. That he would run to Vera and tell her he had thought it over. He would tell her he had decided.
“We were naive,” Lampert was saying. “God, or Nature, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t merely complex. It’s utterly unresolved. Sometimes I think continuity is nothing more than a scientist’s dream. The world I contend with is one disjuncture after another.”
“More like Mahler,” Stew Abrams suggested.
“Worse,” Lampert said. “More like John Cage.”
“I never imagined you ’d come to that,” Nathan said. It seemed Lampert had betrayed him. Or perhaps the betrayer was Bach. It no longer mattered. He would be done with this arrangement of things. He would begin now bravely disarranging them. There was still a chance, a life that sparkled. Disarranged. Deranged. Yes, he thought, definitely more like John Cage.
“I still love Bach,” Maxene Abrams whispered as they said good night. It had been her toe along his leg at dinner.
He hurried to phone Vera. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and counted ten rings. He hung up and called the floral delivery. “Anemones,” he said. “Enough anemones to fill a room.” He never did discover what became of those anemones.
Telegrams and more calls. Letters that received no reply. The custodian at the preschool refused him access. Now, he could think of nothing else.
He paid a visit to Lily’s brother, Gerald. I want a divorce, is what he planned to say. I am a free man, is what he imagined writing to Vera. Long corridors of cherry wood panels hung with large paintings. Originals, Nathan noted. Gerald had done well for himself.
But Gerald’s face was the color of rotting fruit, and he growled belligerently into a speaker on his telephone. Nathan counted three other voices in the conversation.
“How many lawyers are involved in one divorce?” he asked when Gerald hung up.
His cousin shook his head and drew a vial of pills from his drawer. “Complicated mess, this one,” he said. He swallowed a few tablets. “They’re all messy, of course. Mine is messy. My partner is handling it for me and I’m still going to lose my shirt. Divorce stinks. Always stinks.”
“Yes,” Nathan agreed.
Nathan asked about Gerald’s sons and about his tennis.
“Don’t play much,” Gerald said. “Heart,” he said. “How’s yours?”
Nathan said his tennis was okay and that he was hoping one of Gerald’s partners might look over the pension plan he’d set up for Mrs. Needham. Gerald said he’d put someone right on it. Nathan wished him good luck with his divorce and said good bye.
And then his darkness returned. Deserts of no identifiable color. Shrill keenings of animals too famished to eat. Interminable ululations of nocturnal creatures inhabiting his skull, his jaws. Until morning, he let them cry their hungry cries.
This tenebrous vat became his domicile. He no longer expected connections with things; he expected isolating fog as one expects a certain odor upon returning home. Two fifty-three, two fifty-four, red numerals on his clock blinking like rats’ eyes in the night. Crumpled bedlinen, morning nausea were as familiar to him as the backs of clenched teeth to an unslept tongue.
In time, it was no longer Vera so much as her legacy. She had unveiled his abyss and he loathed himself. Were she to return, it could not heal him, could not complete him. It was not that he wanted to have her back so much as that he wanted, somehow, to become her. TO BE HER.
To be her? A woman? Was it possible? Was it possible, as she sometimes seemed to demonstrate, that anything was possible? Could he really want to be her? Was it possible to want that and, if that were possible, was it, in fact, possible to be her? Or was he wanting the impossible? It seemed possible sometimes. In the darknesses of winter and the shorter bitter nights of April. In the dark light of July and the steaming darks of August.
“We are like a child,” he read in September, “who holds in his hand a sunbeam.”
It had really been too hot, too sticky to play tennis and the persistent little tightnesses in his chest had begged for his attention but he had slipped furtively out of his navy blazer and into his tennis whites. He had had, he remembered later that evening, some misgivings
about playing on Yom Kippur. But he had wanted a chance to play singles with Tom. A chance to beat him as he had in the old days. To beat him in spite of the little tightnesses. In spite of that killer serve.
And now there was a tennis ball lodged in his chest. A hard round knot in his chest. Tom’s serve was making its way through. And in the blue bedroom his wife, wrapped in her rose-printed gown, kept entirely to her side of the imaginary line down the center of their bed.
He woke from his troubled sleep. The book he had been reading lay on the floor. The coral impatiens on the terrace straightened on their stems. The air coming through the French doors now was cooler and dryer than it had been all day. He let his head fall backward and resumed his dream. Something larger than a bullet, smaller than a fist, was stuck in his chest. The man who had made love to Carla all these years, the man who had sent Leon Sinrich to sit on his shoulder, had sent a tennis ball right into him.
It was merely angina. It would pass. He bent over and picked up his book. The letters grew large and then small on the page. He wanted to throw up. He stepped out onto the terrace and studied the buildings south of Gramercy Park. The windows were white splotches in the dampness. It would be embarrassing showing up at the hospital. They would ask why he’d waited so long. He would wake his wife. She would drive.
Thirty-two
The Doctors Berg had an office in the same building as Nathan. He’d seen their names on the directory in the lobby. Husband and wife ophthalmologists, like the Colbys. And now they were in his office inquiring about his health.
“Left anterior descending, I would imagine,” Mordecai Berg was saying. Brenda Berg shifted her eyes from her husband to Nathan and regarded him with immense sympathy.
“Yes, that was it,” Nathan said briskly, “but I’m fine now. Very nice of you to drop by. Really very nice.”
“Vultures,” he told Doris Needham when they were gone. “Perched up there on the fourteenth floor, waiting to devour my practice. Can’t even let the carrion cool. That’s how vultures are, you know. Did you see them salivating over the new equipment?”
Mordecai Berg had left Nathan a dark blue folder containing what he called “a little suggestion.”
“Whenever you have a moment to look it over,” Brenda Berg had said, “we’ll be delighted to talk.”
“They want to share my practice for three years and then take it over entirely,” he told Doris. “This is my retirement plan, this little blue folder. Courtesy of Mordecai and Brenda Berg. Such kindness!”
He slammed the folder onto Doris’ desk and made for the little closet in the powder room. The vodka restored moisture to his mouth.
Now Stew Abrams, Nathan thought as he returned to his consultation room, was never burdened to consider retirement. Stew hit a smashing serve one crisp autumn morning and ran in for the volley. Before he reached the ball, he fell dead on the court. That, Nathan had decided, was the way a heart ought to fail. He had said as much to Maxene. “It’s the best way to go,” he had said. Then he had remembered the sensation of Maxene’s toe against his leg. “Well,” he ventured, “the second best way.”
There are seasons that burst suddenly upon us: a first snowfall, a first daffodil. But autumn seems a more gradual thing. Berries darken, leaves drop, coats on small animals thicken. Yet there are those autumn storms that can tear every leaf from the trees in a single night. Then branches appear startled as new lovers who, riding on passion, shed their clothes all at once and discover themselves too soon naked.
Nathan sometimes thought it was Vera’s departure that brought on the storm. As if that could account for his accelerated autumn. But the heart, of course, and its ventricles and plaques and its garland of arteries all have reasons of their own. And once an infarction occurs, it is more than a possibility that it will occur again. The possibility that it might occur on the tennis court. Atop a mountain, possibly. And it was, for the Federal Aviation Agency, a disturbing possibility that it might occur in the cockpit of his Cessna. “The harm that could come to those on the ground,” the examiner had said.
Nathan struggled for the appropriate analogy. Losing his pilot’s license, selling the plane. It was not like losing a limb or like contracting a crippling disease. It was not like a dishonorable military discharge, although he considered for awhile that it was, in fact, somewhat like that. A public humiliation, he thought. An impeachment is what it most resembled. The examiners had voted “no confidence” and stripped him of his wings. Of his power to flee his wearying fretfulness.
And it did not end there. Armand and Tom, cautioned by the fate of Stew Abrams, declined invitations for tennis. Tom was always busy. Armand’s knee was worse than ever. No one, it seemed, would serve the ball that might cause that frangible artery to fail.
It was not so much that he had planned to ski again in Aspen as that it was now forbidden. Entire portions of the globe were forbidden. Only after his visit to Dr. Taylor did he realize how much of the world was so far above sea level. Too much of a risk, Taylor told him. Forbidden.
So was a second cup of coffee. A lamb chop. A runny Brie. “And in bed,” Taylor said, “well, I’m sure you know about that.”
“Never mind,” Nathan told him. “It’s the best way to go.”
“That’s not what I meant,” the cardiologist said. “You’re taking a beta-blocker. You may experience some difficulty.”
Nathan slid down in his chair. “I’m impotent,” he murmured. It was an incantation he hoped would work an instant antidote.
“What I’m saying,” Taylor continued, “is that you may experience some difficulty. We can talk further if you find that you do. We can tinker with the dosage or switch to a different drug.”
An accelerated autumn. He was a stark, gnarled branch. All his colored leaves had been ripped away too soon.
January break. It was the warm wedge of winter when his daughters returned from their studies. The obligatory chaos of the holidays was behind them, Carla refurbished the refrigerator daily, he could bask in their company.
Their colleagues came and went, heaping long scarves and secondhand coats in the foyer. A straw-haired Greek who had followed Alexandra home from Italy. Lisle’s beau, a voluble architect eleven years her senior. A fine-boned, olive-complected woman with a dancer’s calves and opulent spectacles. She inhabited Lisle’s room, consuming sprouted peas and scores of novels. There were early morning whispers and the lento sonorities of philosophical speculation late into the night. The pale, attenuated Martin, still Alex’s closest friend, sat beside her for harpsichord duets. Wittgenstein and Derrida and Paul DeMan. Marguerite Duras and Habermas. They crunched endive and macadamias and drank Cointreau with quinine.
Nathan could not return home early enough, could not live vastly enough. He asked Martin for a good introduction to Deconstructionism and devoured it. Lacan. Lyotard. He wanted to understand, to be included, to face out with them to their wide winter sky.
“I guess I’m retrograde. I must seem bourgeois,” he would say when they invited him to join in.
Their voices were fine and light. He wanted to rub against them. He wanted to bury his face in all their shiny hair, in their clavicles, their navels, and inhale.
Thirty-three
Lily could disappoint him deeply these days if she were not available on Wednesday evenings.
“I wouldn’t dismiss Berg’s offer out of hand,” she told him. She was looking extremely pretty, Nathan thought. Burnished, enhanced by time. Still meticulously groomed, still those neutral shades that blended with her fair complexion to produce the sense of a small furry animal. Still the trim legs, pertly crossed. He realized as he studied her face that he had not expected her to age so well. “It’s a perfectly reasonable offer,” she continued, “and it’s done all the time by healthier physicians than you. You really should consider it.”
“For godsake, Lily. My practice is all I have left!”
“Oh, c’mon Nathan. This is the start of a whole new
phase, time for the things you’ve always wanted to do.”
“I can’t fly anymore. Can’t get a tennis game. Can’t ski most places. There’s nothing else I can do, Lily.”
“That’s not the point,” she said. “Now’s the time to play the harpsichord, take up photography. Try yoga. Time to do things just for enjoyment, Nathan. Just for fun.”
“I know what I enjoy,” he said, “and I can’t do any of those things. I don’t want to learn new things. I wouldn’t enjoy that at all!”
Lily recrossed her legs, sucked in her lips and studied him. “I suppose that’s true, Nathan,” she said at last. “You probably wouldn’t enjoy that. Perhaps you’d better not think about the Bergs anymore.”
Nathan stretched out on the beige sofa and loosened his tie. He looked across at his cousin. When he was fourteen and she was twelve … We have a little sister and she has no breasts. He had always thought of Lily when he read that.
“You’re letting your hair go grey,” he said.
“Silver,” she said. “Acknowledging my age.”
“It’s very attractive. I could be aging more gracefully,” he sighed, “but it all went at once, Lily. There’s nothing left.”
“There’s plenty left,” she said. “You’re just refusing to see it. Your family …”
“Lily, please!”
“Well, the girls, Nathan. And grandchildren someday.”
“Alex and her friends are gorgeous,” he agreed. “The best thing I have. But they come and go. And Lisle’s always busy at her studio. The girls are wonderful, but they’re not my life.”
Lily rose from the curvy beige chair and walked to the window where she stood staring down at the street. “We keep avoiding the issue, don’t we,” she said quietly, not turning to face him. “We never talk about what you really want, about what’s been missing all this time.”
“Which is?”
She turned and looked directly at him. “A real woman, Nathan. Someone to be close to, to give time to. Someone to give yourself to. That would be enough, wouldn’t it?”
The Speed of Light Page 17
