“I don’t want the Peekskill people, Mother. I don’t want to live out my days catering parties.”
Sophie poured them each more coffee. Her hair had been pinned hastily into a bun atop her head and wiry white strands stretched out crazily all around it. “Have you thought about money?” Her tone was grave. “You’ve had a comfortable life, my darling. The best clothes, the best schools. The house in Peekskill is yours, of course, but the apartment …”
Carla set her cup down noisily. “You’ve had a terrible night, I can see. I’m sorry to upset you so, but I’m going to be fine, Mother.” She took her coffee to the terrace and slid the screen shut behind her.
When Sophie reemerged, she was bathed and dressed in a cool green cotton shift. Her still-wet hair was meticulously rolled into a twist and carefully pinned. The toenails protruding from her white summer shoes, Carla noticed, had been painted with mauve enamel. She had never seen her mother with painted toenails.
Sophie beckoned her daughter to the far end of the terrace. “See down there, around the pool,” she said. “Women, only women. They swim a little, they play cards. The men—what’s left of them—hardly ever come out. You think this is a nice life?” Carla remained silent. “This is not a nice life,” her mother continued, “living out your years alone, playing cards with the ladies! Not nice at all.”
“Mother, if you’d like to come back to New York, to live with me …” Carla began.
“Not me!” Sophie fairly shrieked. “I’m an old woman. But you. You think fifty-year-old men grow on trees? You think they’re so wonderful, the ones that are left? You’re a beautiful woman, you’ll have no trouble. But you think they’re any better than what you have?”
“I don’t need a man, Mother.”
“Those new friends of yours have made you very foolish.” Sophie shook her head. All sadness and dismay.
Carla leaned toward her, intent on keeping a soothing voice. “I have my work, Mother. I love my work. And I make money from it. My sculpture is selling very well now. You should be proud.”
Sophie’s shoulders hung low, her chin rested on her chest. She was struggling to accept the new shape her world had suddenly assumed.
“Do you think it’s easy to live without someone to love you? Since your father died, it’s terrible. I read, I keep everything neat. I have new friends down here, all very nice, very cultured. Many Europeans. But I miss your father!” Heavy tears rolled over the creases of her face.
“I know,” Carla said softly, “I miss him too.”
“You need someone, liebchen. Besides your work, you need someone to love you. Someone to have coffee with in the morning, someone to sleep with you at night, to make you comfortable. You have so many years ahead of you. You think that Szabo man …” Sophie stopped abruptly and turned away.
“Tom?” Carla said. “What about Tom?”
“Nothing. Just your father thought …”
“I said good-bye to Tom years ago, Mother.”
“So it was true, then.”
“It’s over.”
“Then you do need someone.”
Carla remained quiet, staring out across the Gulf. Then she took her mother’s hand in both of hers. “I promise I’ll have someone to love me,” she said.
So it was done, then, she thought as she settled back in the plane seat. She had explained that it would all take time. She would see a lawyer. She would speak with her daughters. She would only tell Nathan when it was all in place. Tell him sweetly, firmly. He could call her if he became ill again. But she wanted everything settled before she told him.
“Poor Nathan,” her mother had said.
This trip to Florida, Carla thought as she watched the orange streaks outside the plane’s window turn to deep purple, this trip was the most difficult thing she’d ever undertaken. Causing her mother such pain! But apart from that portion of her that belonged to her mother, Carla felt light as a cloud. As the plane banked over New York Bay and the skyline of lower New York came blazing into view, she decided this was not the most difficult thing. The most difficult part of her life, she was certain, was the part that was about to end.
Thirty-six
Leon Sinrich’s damp red face had become unbearable. Perhaps it was the contrast with the celadon green of the new enamel cabinets. Nathan suggested lunch at The Oyster Bar.
“I’ve done the numbers,” Sinrich said. He was trickling yellow beer into a tall pilsener glass. “Surgery is your money tree, no doubt about it. If you don’t do surgery, you can’t make a living. The office practice is just barely breaking even. You remember, of course, I told you you’d have to make some changes.”
“Sharing the office didn’t work out,” Nathan said. “I can’t work with a partner. I’m not cut out for business arrangements.”
“Why do you want to give up surgery anyway?”
“It’s giving me up,” Nathan said. “I get the laser positioned and I realize I’m working on the one seeing eye this patient has. One false move and I blind him. Then I get chest pains. And that increases the chances I’ll mess up.”
“Too much exposure here,” Sinrich declared. “You’ll have to shut down the whole practice.” He said it like a man deciding to move money from one bank into another. He had, after all, done the numbers.
“I could sell the practice,” Nathan said.
“That’s true,” Sinrich agreed. His pinky jutted out as he held the glass to his lips.
“How much?” Nathan asked.
“Whatever the market offers.”
They were, Nathan understood, playing at dominoes. Your turn, my turn. It came to nothing. It was a conversation in which words were merely little blocks of wood.
A speck, a tiny flicker at the periphery as he drove up the Szabos’ driveway. An image that so countermanded logic, all his cognitive powers rose up to persuade him he had not seen it.
Nathan had been certain he would never see Vera again. He had fixed her as an idea, the conjunction of certain images. It had its own texture, its particular comfort, its particular bitterness. He conjured it at times as refuge and, at times, as self-flagellation. She had become an idea he could summon at will.
But it was actually Vera, now, sweatshirt and sweatpants, tearing across the Szabos’ backcourt on this chill March Sunday. Running to return Armand’s backhand. Nathan could make out the broad smile as her racquet smartly addressed the ball. It was Vera. The long, dark braid gone, her hair cropped close, tinged with grey. Still the wiry little body, charged with energy. He could see this through the naked vines that clung to the Szabos’ fence, awaiting spring.
“Is that Vera?” Carla asked. “Armand never mentioned it.”
Carla opened her arms to Vera and planted a kiss on her cheek. “Welcome back!”
She’s a real thoroughbred, my wife, Nathan thought. “Good to see you again,” he managed to say.
After lunch, Nathan suggested they play doubles. “I’m out today,” he told Tom, “but you and Tilly can play Carla and Armand.”
Vera settled herself in the chaise longue beside him. Still mischief in her face. And the huge grey eyes, still sparkly.
“How have you been?”
“Just fine,” he said. “Better than ever, in fact. Your tennis strokes looked pretty good.”
“I had a good teacher.” She winked at him. And then her brow furrowed as he had seen it do so many times. “But you’re not playing,” she said. “Are you well?”
“Yes, yes. I told you. Better than ever.”
He had never had to consider it, yet it was instantly clear. So much had happened since last they spoke. Things she would not ever need to know. He would never tell her all those things. Knowing them now, what did it matter? He could tell her what he wanted her to know. Which was very little, and that would do. They would speak of her. She would be their subject that afternoon.
“My research ended,” she said when he asked. “The grant just ran out.”
“Ah,
Vera. I know how you feel,” he said. He pulled the zipper on his parka up close to his chin.
“Actually, I think you’d be quite surprised,” she said. “I’m still at Columbia, but I’m a student now. I’m studying to be a rabbi, Nathan.”
Was it her density, her mass that suddenly altered? Nathan knew it was something fundamental. Her shape? And the light falling across her, was that also transformed? Perhaps he had been right to believe he would never see Vera again. He fastened on the steady pinging of the ball on the court beside them.
“You must be the only woman at the seminary,” he heard himself say.
“Not at all,” she laughed. “They’re entrusting quite a few of us with the eternal flame these days.”
“I’m not sure they should do that,” he said. “Eternal matters are better entrusted to men.”
Vera turned that ironic smile on him. “Are men more trustworthy?”
“We’re dealing with immortality here,” he said. He was remembering Colby on the ski lift. “Men, you know, are frantic on that subject.”
She was still smiling. “I’m sure that explains their perpetual insecurity and considerable aggression, but I doubt it contributes much to their holiness.”
“Nevertheless, we do worry about it,” he said, “and now women are being ordained when they don’t really understand.”
“I’m just hoping to preserve what’s preservable,” she said.
“Which is what?”
She thought for a moment. “A sense of spirituality,” she said. “I think I can be entrusted with that.”
“You’ll do well at that, but it’s not what I want to have preserved.”
“I know.”
Tom and Armand were engaged in a disagreement about a serve. Their voices were audible but not their words. In the time he had purchased to become accustomed to her again, it became clear to Nathan that Vera was still vibrant and supple as ever. More supple than he had imagined, in fact. And there was something powerful in her now, something that had not been there before.
He decided to tell her about the Bergs.
“A couple in the office building offered to buy me out,” he said. “A hundred thousand dollars. Can you imagine? My whole life for a hundred thousand. I’d rather send it all up in smoke. Forty years building a practice for a lousy hundred thousand?” He paused, out of breath. “So I told them to go fuck themselves,” he said.
“Nathan, you didn’t design cathedrals or compose music. You didn’t choose to build something durable. You healed and comforted hundreds of people.”
“And then they died anyway,” he said. “I should have been an architect. Should have put my efforts into something that would last.” He pulled his hood up over his head.
The sun had begun to sink and the temperature was taking a sharp turn. Vera suggested waiting inside for the others to finish their game.
“You keep wanting to stop the river from flowing,” she said when they were settled in the Szabos’ study.
“That’s understandable, isn’t it?”
“If you had become an architect, do you think that would have stopped the river? Years from now, people would pass your building. They’d think to themselves, that’s a great building. Then they’d think about something else. Or they’d think about your name and then they’d think about something else. The building, your name, would be floating past them in the stream of experience.” Her long fingers rippled through the air. “Floating, flowing. There’s no way to stop the river, Nathan.”
“This isn’t very comforting news.” He had set two brandy glasses and a bottle of Remy Martin on the little table between them and poured them each a brandy.
She reached across and took his hand. “I’m sorry, Nathan. It is very hard. Of course you shouldn’t sell your practice for a lousy hundred thousand.”
“What should I do, rabbi?” he asked.
Vera thought for a bit and then hunched her shoulders up in that familiar shrug and laughed. “Give it away,” she said, “and then move on.”
“Too late,” he said. “Nowhere to move.”
He poured himself a second brandy and told her of his nights among Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Duras. He really was feeling fine, he said. The surgery had been a huge success, and his tennis game, he assured her, was strong as ever. “Except that sometimes I lose to Carla.”
“How is Carla?” she said. “I mean Carla and you …”
“I have no life with Carla,” he said flatly. “It’s one thing that has never been right.”
“You’ve never wanted to change it, though. All these years, and with all your options. Something’s kept you there.”
He looked down at the snifter in his lap. “I had to stay,” he said. “I’m a coward. I had no choice.” He thought he might tell her of his trip to Gerald’s office, of the color of Gerald’s face. But telling her now, what was the point? It was one of those things she did not need to know.
She sat back in her chair and studied him thoughtfully. That same intent gaze he’d seen at the Matisse exhibit, pondering anemones. Then, as though she’d reached a decision, she leaned toward him.
“Nathan,” she said. “I’ve thought about this quite a lot and I’ve never understood it. All you ever seem to feel for Carla is contempt. I think you’ve spent your entire life with someone who has only your contempt.”
Nathan rested his face in his hand. His cheek was damp, his eyes hot. “It’s true,” he said at last. “Contempt is exactly what it is.”
“I don’t understand it,” Vera said.
Nathan pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face, studied the glass in his hand. “It’s easy, Vera. Contempt, I mean. It’s just so easy.” A long swallow of brandy. “I don’t try to figure her out. I don’t worry about what she wants from me. So long as I show up when I’m expected, I can pretty much ignore the rest. The singular virtue of contempt, I suppose, is that it’s so very easy.”
He threw his head back, drained the snifter and looked at her. “Funny,” he said. “I never thought about it that way before.”
He had been astonished, once, that Vera’s eyes could be clear as crystal and soft as velvet all at once. Her husky voice was wistful now, hesitant. “You don’t engage yourself. Not deeply. Is that what you mean?”
“It’s lonely, of course,” he said, “but perfectly undemanding. A coward’s bargain.” He looked up, determined to look at her as he spoke. “You … could never be so easy,” he told her. “You … require a response. Engagement, as you put it. And so for me, Vera, you will always be …”
“What?”
“Impossible.”
Vera said nothing. Nathan fumbled with the bottle and poured a snifterful.
“That’s a lot of brandy,” she said.
“You know,” Nathan resumed, gesturing broadly with his glass, spilling liquor on the Szabos’ kilim rug, “I’ve spent most of my life avoiding real emotion.”
Vera frowned and remained silent.
“Well, I’m not without feelings, of course, he continued. “Envy, ambition. Man-stuff, you know. Strive, compete, achieve.” His vowels were long, his consonants slurred.
“I’ve been an idiot,” he said. “Been wanting the wrong thing the whole time. The wrong thing. What I really should have been wanting … what I really want …” He paused, his glass wavering in midair.
He rearranged himself, straightened in his chair. “I want to be like you,” he blurted. “Spontaneous, like Vera. Alive, like Vera.” His voice dropped. “Never really felt alive, you know.”
He rose to his feet and began pacing. “Goddammit, Vera,” he sputtered, “helluva thing to know this now!”
He paused in front of her, his voice almost a whisper. “That river of yours, Vera. It flows by mighty quickly.”
He noticed her glance across to the doorway. Armand and Carla and the Szabos tumbling noisily into the room, chilled, perspiring. Tilly would set out some of those smeared-over canapés. N
athan tossed the remaining brandy down his throat and blinked.
Thirty-seven
Along the Henry Hudson Parkway, yellow-green knobs rose on the cherry branches, but charred lodes of ice flanked the roadway. Winter was no longer bearable. Spring had yet to appear. Nathan had seen this season too often before. He was heading into New England, his skis bound to the roof of his car.
The Holyoke Range was freshly white. He stopped in Northampton for gas. Luce’s chalet restaurant had long ago disappeared. He slammed the car door hard against the cold. The “Kyrie” of Mozart’s Requiem was on his tape deck. For the angels. He drove north into Vermont.
White as bedlinen. As thirsty towels. Whiteness glistening. Bath foam on his wife’s shoulder in Truro. White foam slithering over Vera’s ankle in a room that smelled of fruit. Ahh, they had said. Ahh! The white, the glistening. Enduring snow. Stoical as the sea.
Boys on snowboards whooshing past. Truculent, immortal boys. Could they imagine peril? He would have done just that at their age. When I am again that age, he thought. Impossible.
But days such as this: days of light. Unceasing reverberations of whiteness, maddening almost as church bells in a tiny town pealing all at once. The cloying sunlight of July. The delirium of whitenesses of days such as this.
The squeak of ratchets as the little chairlift came round the bend. Then it tucked under his thighs and scooped him up over the hemlocks. Colby hadn’t needed to be chief. His research had been enough. Colby wrapped in gauze, flaking away under snow white gauze. I should have been chief, Nathan thought. Impossible, now. Even with Heaney retiring. They’ll take a younger man. Someone who advertises. A speech for Heaney on his retirement. Not quite a eulogy. A fountain pen when he’d finished his internship. Crackling new spine on the blue Directory of Physicians and Surgeons. And Felix: Katte, who may have survived.
The pulley halted and the slatted bench swayed over a gorge. She had seemed a child, covering her eyes, the warm pressure of her face buried in his shoulder. Supple woman, gypsy woman. Velvet eyes, velvet dress. And peonies they were, carmine and rose. Heady June peonies splayed among feather beds. An odalisque. It was not possible to be her. Not possible to have wanted that.
The Speed of Light Page 19
