“Nicholas,” his sister said, her voice sterner now, “you never did look up that therapist I recommended, did you?”
“Christ, Glenda, can’t you for once . . .” But his voice caught in his throat. The posters, the phone calls. It really was too much.
Glenda waited patiently, a trained listener. When enough time had passed, she asked, in that insufferable way of hers, “That’s not really what this call is about, is it?”
A know-it-all, that’s what they had called Glenda back in school. Nicholas let his shoulders slump. Bloody hell. It didn’t matter that Glenda didn’t even know what she was talking about—she was always so bloody incisive.
To Nicholas’s stubborn silence, she simply said, “Now, what’s really going on?”
Nicholas waited before answering, wanting to put off as long as possible what he only now understood he was about to say.
Chapter 7
MORE COFFEE, GARY?” HAZEL BENT TO REFILL HIS CUP, TAKING care not to leave it too full; she hadn’t forgotten about last time. Even though she knew that everyone made mistakes and that, in the scheme of things, spilled wine on your Persian carpet was relatively minor, she still found it somehow unforgivable.
“From you, sure!” Gary winked at her and then grinned at Nicholas, as if to prove how friendly he was. Hazel pretended not to notice. She couldn’t help being annoyed at him for stopping by like this, completely unannounced and certainly not invited. For one thing, Nicholas was exhausted, had just returned from Italy late the night before. They had barely even had time to talk to each other, since today was the mother-daughter trip to the beach with the Junior League, and she and Jessie had only gotten back this evening.
“I see you’ve been holding down the fort,” Gary said now. “Did you at least manage to have some fun while your husband was gone?” Hazel knew he didn’t mean it in a lecherous way, but she also knew that he wanted her to think that he did.
Nicholas said, “She’s already got a full plate. Plus she’s been taking a course at Harvard Extension.” He was wearing that paisley button-down shirt Hazel secretly wished he would get rid of, the one whose pattern, in light brown and pale red, looked more like a rash than a design.
“Just auditing,” she corrected. She’d had to miss some of the sessions when she went down to help her mother.
Gary asked what subject, and Hazel felt like a college girl again. “Notorious Identity in Shakespeare’s Plays.”
Gary asked which ones, and she listed them off. Five in total. The truth was, even though she liked the course, she felt a certain disconnect in the classroom. While the instructor provided all sorts of interesting information, the connections Hazel would have liked to discuss never seemed to come up. The professor might spend a half hour on his theory of how Richard III was really a commentary on something he called “speech act violation,” but the scenes Hazel had lingered over, the sections she had memorized, the lines she had questioned, were never noted.
It was as if she were concentrating on all the wrong things. For instance, three of the plays they had read included a female character who at some point emerged with “her hair about her ears”—always when these women were agitated, deranged, upset. Hazel thought this might be worth mentioning. But she didn’t quite know what else to say about it, so she didn’t say anything.
“I played Hamlet back in school,” Nicholas said. “I was dire. I can still hear the director—he was our physics teacher—saying, ‘You’re the prince of Denmark, for Chrissakes. You’ve bigger worries than what tonight’s pudding will be.’”
“Talk about miscasting,” Gary said, while Hazel felt relief at Nicholas’s chitchat. All evening he had been his fun, joking self. Not like last night, when he arrived home so tired. Not like this morning, when he waved good-bye in a distracted way as she and Jessie hurried to caravan to Ipswich with the other mothers. How did this sort of disjunction happen, between two people who loved each other? Even the time they’d had together before Nicholas left for Italy had been off. To Hazel it felt like water slipping through her fingers.
“Do you ever act out scenes in your class?” Gary asked. “I bet you’re a good actress.”
“No. It’s mostly the professor talking.” And Hazel jotting down ideas she hoped might be discussed. In Troilus and Cressida, when Troilus’s sister Cassandra appeared with “her hair about her ears” everyone said she was crazy, but really she was prophetic. If Hazel had dared raise her hand, she could have framed her comment that way, in terms of public opinion and prophecy, and not even mentioned the part about the hair.
Nicholas asked if she would have to write any essays.
“Not me. Since I’m just auditing.” But she wouldn’t have minded writing about poor raving Cassandra, whose madness was in fact foresight. Hazel found the discrepancy, between delusion and prescience, significant.
The fact was, Hazel herself had been feeling just the slightest bit crazy. No, she hadn’t seen the woman, the doppel, again. Yet it seemed she was still perhaps . . . seeing things.
“Why is sex like a Shakespeare play?” Gary asked.
Hazel sighed, but he continued. “Because three inches is Much Ado About Nothing, six inches is As You Like It, and nine inches is A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Gary took another bite of cake, and Nicholas chuckled a bit, and Hazel gave a little “tsk” because she knew it was what they expected.
Delusion versus prescience, that was it, or at least part of it—caught somewhere between madness and insight. This was what made her want to cry out, to scream with frustration.
Still, she wasn’t like those women in the plays, not really. Her hair was pulled up from either side of her face and fastened neatly at the back. A few strands had fallen in light curves at her temples, but even when she felt she might explode, the big plastic clip remained firmly at the back of her head.
“Et tu, cutie?” Gary gave her a little nudge, and Nicholas said, “We’re boring her.”
“No more than usual,” she teased. She was used to making the best of any situation. Since finally settling in, though, the days had been falling into clumps: good days and bad days. On the good days things seemed to be coming together. On the bad days . . . she noticed things.
There had been a good day, before Nicholas left for Italy. They had taken Jessie swimming at Walden Pond, early on a hot, humid morning before the park became too crowded. Jessie wore little inflated doughnuts over her arms and was thrilled at the very fact of swimming. Hazel and Nicholas passed her between each other, swinging her through the water as she squealed gleefully.
“You should’ve seen the look on Duncan’s face.” Gary was describing a college production of Macbeth full of romantic intrigue and wayward props. “And even then the play seemed to go on forever. That was when I vowed to never see live theater ever again.”
“That’s a depressing vow,” Hazel said.
“Not at all. Makes it easy to decline all sorts of invitations.”
“You’ve truly not seen a single play since then?” Nicholas asked.
“Only when forced.”
Hazel prevented herself from rolling her eyes. People like Gary, what were they trying to prove? She could tell that he purposely cultivated his lowbrow demeanor, while simultaneously hinting at expertise and connections, as if to suggest that life lessons were what allowed him to talk confidently about any topic at all. Hazel told him, “Some of what we’ve read in class I’ve found quite moving.”
There was a day last week when they were doing a close reading of a section of Richard III and she had suddenly wanted to cry. Queen Elizabeth came onstage upset, and her lines took Hazel by surprise, even though she had read them herself the night before: “Oh, who shall hinder me to wail and weep, / To chide my fortune, and torment myself?” How Hazel would have loved to wail and weep: for her father getting worse and then better and then worse again, and the running back and forth with a three-year-old to tend to, and—there was so much inside her that she h
adn’t addressed. She had never allowed herself to rave, to scream, to throw a fit. Enter Hazel, her hair about her ears. The line didn’t suit her at all. It simply wasn’t the sort of thing she did. People who acted that way were selfish.
“Oh, here, please, have some more cake,” she said, since Gary was reaching for the porcelain server and she didn’t quite trust him with it. She slid another slice onto his plate.
He asked, “Any luck with the house hunting?”
“I’ve looked at a few places,” she told him. “Just to get some ideas. Seeing what our options are.”
Only for those few days before Nicholas left for Italy had they looked at anything together, but Nicholas hadn’t shown the enthusiasm Hazel would have liked. He was so distracted. Even at home—his sleeping pattern was different. Usually he fell asleep immediately and slept soundly, but lately he was restless. Water slipping through her fingers . . .
There had been a moment when she walked into the living room and he didn’t know she was there. His eyes began to close as though he were in pain—but then he noticed her and said, “How lovely you look!” as if everything were absolutely normal.
“If you don’t mind some sketchy sections, the South End is up and coming,” Gary was saying. “Give it a few years and it’ll be prime real estate.”
Hazel shook her head. Even parts of this neighborhood felt rough. “Nicholas wouldn’t mind staying here in town, but I prefer something quieter. We saw some very nice houses in Brookline.”
“It’s pricey, though,” Nicholas said. He had scolded her for allowing the realty agent to think they could afford some of the more spacious homes, while Hazel saw no harm in having a peek. Now Nicholas said, “We really don’t need much space,” and Hazel again felt chided. She looked down, and her gaze landed on the Persian carpet. How beautiful it was, always there for her. Although now it had that splotch in the corner.
“I want to stay up, too.”
“Oh, sweetie, now when did you wake up?” Here was Jessie in her cotton nightie, standing at the entrance to the living room, rubbing her eyes.
“I want to stay up.” Already she was yawning.
“But it’s bedtime,” Nicholas said, and went to her. He lifted her in his arms and kissed her on the cheek—and then the look came over him, desperate, as if he might not see her in the morning. “Come on, darling.” To Gary and Hazel he said, “This is what happens when you trade the crib in for a bed,” and carried Jessie back.
Gary said, “Her eyes are amazing. So green.”
Proudly Hazel said, “She gets them from my father.”
“Terrifyingly green,” Gary added, as if fiddling with phrasing for some profile he was writing. Oh, shut up, Hazel wanted to say. Pretentious hack.
He said, “It’s funny to see Nicholas so smitten.”
Hazel turned to look at Gary. For a split second she wondered if he, too, had seen it. The elastic band. A hair elastic, the thick kind, not the little ones she used for Jessie’s pigtails. She had seen it there on the floor beside the bed, before Nicholas left for Italy, when she was tidying up with the new vacuum from Sears; Nicholas of course hadn’t cleaned at all. And there it was, lying on the rug innocently enough. Hazel paused, though the vacuum was still running loudly, and could have sworn she saw, caught in the little metal part of the elastic, a long, thick, brown, curling hair.
She had just bent down to examine it when Nicholas appeared at the bedroom door to say, “Phone for you.”
Hazel sprang up and turned off the vacuum, not daring to look back at the elastic. She might have had a heart attack right then and there, but it was her mother calling with an update on her father’s condition, so she couldn’t.
The miraculous thing, though—the truly extraordinary thing—was that when she went back to the bedroom to finish vacuuming, the thick elastic band with the long curling hair was gone.
She had to wonder if her eyes were playing tricks on her. After all, there had been other confusing moments these past few weeks, ones that had nothing to do with Nicholas. Driving on the turnpike one afternoon, she saw the sign for her exit and immediately moved into the right-hand lane, but when she took the exit, she ended up on the wrong road entirely. She had to do an illegal U-turn and get back onto the highway, where it turned out that her exit was the following one. Yet even now she knew she had read the original sign correctly. So how had she ended up on the wrong road?
“Everything okay, Hazel?”
She looked at Gary with surprise. “Oh, I didn’t mean to . . . I’m sorry if I— I think I’m just tired.”
“Well, you don’t look it. Nicholas’s a lucky man to have you around.”
Ah, flattery. There was also that sweet comment he made about Jessie’s drawing on the refrigerator. But now he was looking at her with real concern, as if he honestly cared about how she felt. How surprising. People were like that, weren’t they, as layered as artichokes.
She said, “I never realized how hard it could be to reunite with someone. I mean, after so many months of spending time apart.” She hadn’t meant to say it; it just came out.
Gary said, “Long-distance relationships—I stay the hell away from them.”
Hazel said, “Sometimes you don’t have a choice.” To herself she said, He can’t help that he’s a buffoon.
“If you ever need anything, Hazel.”
Now, why would he say that? She frowned.
He said, “I mean, if you want the advice of a native Bostonian. If you need any pointers from a local.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” She didn’t mean to sound brisk. Really she was filled with relief: if Gary could show this gentlemanly side, then it proved she wasn’t always right about things, that the craziness, the glimpses, could be wrong, too.
“‘To sleep, perchance to dream . . .’” Nicholas was back. “She was out even before I put her back on the bed.”
Hazel found herself smiling at him, at the tenderness he showed their daughter. While they were swimming together in Walden Pond, she had been conscious of not knowing at all what he was thinking, yet she felt his energy all around her, in every splash of water. With Jessie they had held hands and done a sort of dance, ring around the rosey there in the shallow part. It was one of those perfect moments, like that vision she used to have, approaching the front steps of the beautiful house with Nicholas and their two children, the boy and girl, just ahead of them.
Swimming, Nicholas had sprung back in his happy backstroke, released, free, and after that let Jessie hang on to his shoulders, and Hazel had watched with pure joy before doing her own breaststroke after them. She had swallowed water just when she was about to reach them. One second she was smiling at how perfect everything was, and then she was gulping water, coughing, spitting it out. Moments like that always amazed her, how something could be so good and then so bad a mere second later. All it took was a split second. Once when she was a teenager she had laughed so hard that she threw back her head and hit the wall behind her with such force, she gave herself a mild concussion. Ever since then she had noted with awe the mere seconds that might separate pleasure from pain. There were so many degrees of this. A glass suddenly shattering, or a car hopping the median. A joke too honest. Wine on your Persian carpet.
Gary said, “I should get going. The cockroaches will be wondering what’s happened to me.”
Nicholas frowned, as if he didn’t want Gary to go.
Stretching his arms, Gary stood, cracked his knuckles, and sighed loudly. “Thank you for the delicious cake and the magnificent company.”
They walked him to the door. “Thanks for stopping by,” Nicholas said, draping his arm around Hazel. She let herself relax.
“Good night,” Gary said, stepping out into the hall.
“Good night, Gary.”
Nicholas closed the door slowly, and Hazel went to clear the coffee table. She would have to stop questioning everything, analyzing everything. It wasn’t healthy.
Nicho
las said, “Thanks for the cake.”
“You’re most welcome.” After all, it had been a perfectly nice evening. She carried their muddied coffee cups—the pattern she had picked out for their wedding—into the kitchen. That she had successfully trusted Gary with her best china felt like an accomplishment itself. Nicholas followed her into the kitchen, carrying the coffeepot and the trivet. He put them on the counter and, when she turned around, had a serious look on his face.
“What is it?”
He opened his eyes wide, as if suddenly caught. “Nothing.” But it didn’t sound that way.
Hazel waited a moment, sure that he would say something more. She knew better than to press him.
When he began to rinse out the coffeepot, she went back to fetch the cake plates and saucers. Nothing. There it was again, the feeling: her mind unraveling. Her world unraveling.
“Hazel.” His voice came from the kitchen and sounded almost panicked. Now he was at the door, facing the living room. He cleared his throat and said, “I need to talk to you.”
Her heart lunged, and she saw that her hands, holding the china plates, had begun to shake. But she walked carefully back to the kitchen and made sure none of the plates fell.
Part Two
Clairvoyance
Chapter 1
HAZEL GRIPPED HER LASHES IN THE FRIEZE OF A METAL CURLER and counted to three. On the bathroom counter were small tubes of corrective cream, two types of tweezers, a jumble of lipsticks, and brushes and sponges of various shapes and sizes. At times the sight of so many tools oppressed her, but mostly she was grateful. She always made an effort; no one could take that away from her.
She released the curler, placed it back in the tray. Now she coaxed mascara onto her lashes with a tiny brush—though deep down she suspected all this effort was for naught. She almost shook her head at the thought, except that she had to be careful with the mascara. There. She blinked at her reflection and turned to the full-length mirror on the door. How odd that this reverse version of her face, of her body, should be the sole way she saw herself. Front view only, curvy waist, broad hips, bust propped cheerfully in an underwire bra. Yes, her makeup was fine. It took expertise to look natural and still hide the white patches.
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