‘It is a fact that I am married,’ she said resolutely, ‘and taking the ring off is not going to change anything. I am in love with you, without doubt, but you have understood my situation from the beginning. If you cannot deal with it any more, then perhaps we should just call it quits.’
Nick was shocked by her response. The thought of being without her terrified him. He apologized and professed his love. He began kissing her passionately and then jumped in the back seat. He told her that he needed her right then, that moment. She somewhat reluctantly joined him and they had intercourse on the back seat of her Cadillac. Monique was quiet and pensive for most of the rest of the day.
On Friday, exactly a week after they had met, Monique took Nick to a tuxedo shop to have him fitted for a black tie dinner with some friends that she was having on Saturday night in her home. So finally he was going to be seen with her. And, Nick thought, she will talk about our future. Nick was supposed to be in Boston on Monday morning and his parents were expecting him on Saturday night in Falls Church, but he assured himself that he could drive all day (and all night if necessary, so pumped up with adrenaline was he in his love for Monique) to get to classes on Monday morning.
Nick was full of hope and dreams when he showed up at the Silver mansion on Saturday night. He looked elegant in his rented summer tuxedo, and the smile with which he greeted Monique at the door could have won a prize. Even with the doorman standing by, he handed her a dozen red roses, gave her a kiss, and told her that he loved her. ‘Of course you do,’ she said lightly, ‘doesn’t everybody?’ She took him inside and introduced him to the four other people who had also come early as the ‘young man who saved our Teresa one day in Lauderdale’. Then Monique excused herself. It was her fashion, Nick later learned, to ask a few select friends to come early to a party, to greet them in casual attire, and then to return an hour or so later, when everyone had arrived, with a grand entrance. As Monique gracefully walked up the stairs of the mansion, Nick’s eyes followed her with an unmistakable look of adoration.
‘Isn’t she magnificent?’ Nick was asked by a relaxed tanned man of about fifty who offered him a martini. His name was Clayton. ‘Once I was with her all weekend on their yacht, while Aaron was in Montreal. I thought she had invited me for a little diversion.’ He laughed. ‘But I was wrong. She just wanted some company and I could talk about France and Europe. Come with me’ (he slipped his arm through Nick’s) ‘and I’ll introduce you to the select group that was invited early today.’
Nick was treated with extreme courtesy by the other favoured guests, but he was wary of their questions about Monique. He was, after all, a Southern boy, and if there was something to say about their relationship, it was her place to say it. So he answered politely but modestly and didn’t elaborate at all.
One of the two women at the bar, who introduced herself as Jane Somebody, said that she was Monica’s oldest friend in Palm Beach. (They all called her Monica. It was impossible for Nick to call her anything but Monique. Nick wondered if they could guess what was going on or if Monique had told them.) Jane was in her late thirties, plump and raucous, a heavy drinker and a chain smoker. She had once been fairly attractive but had lived too hard too soon. She was one of those people who touch everybody during a conversation. She made Nick nervous.
The other guests began to arrive. Jane and Clayton (as in Clayton Poindexter III of Newport and Palm Beach) seemed to be acting as hostess and host in Monique’s absence. They introduced him to everybody. Clayton, when asked by Nick what he did, answered, ‘NVMS’. Nick had absolutely no idea what that meant. Clayton laughed. ‘NVMS—No visible means of support—a term used to cover all bums.’ Nick had three or four martinis and told the Teresa story at least seven times during the first hour that he was in the Silver mansion.
Nick was becoming slightly drunk by this time. He sang to himself as he took another martini off the cocktail tray being proffered by one of the servants. The alcohol had buoyed his spirits and made him feel somehow temporarily suave and debonair. He was on the patio talking to Monique’s ‘riding partner’, a lovely woman in her mid-twenties named Anne, when he heard scattered applause from the living room. ‘It’s Monica,’ Anne said. ‘Let’s go see.’
The grand stairway in the Silvers’ colonial mansion rose to a platform perhaps six feet above the living room floor and then divided, with two different sets of stairs then continuing up to the upper floor. Monique was standing on the platform, acknowledging the applause, dressed in a simple navy blue knit dress that seemed form-fitted to her perfect body. The back was cut right down, almost to the bottom of her spectacular hair (she turned around to please the forty or so guests), and, in the front, two thin pieces of cloth ran from her shoulders to her waist, covering each breast adequately but leaving plenty of cleavage to be admired. Entranced by the vision of his queen, Nick cheered lustily, a little too loudly, ‘Bravo. Bravo.’ Monique seemed not to hear his cheer. She had turned and was looking up the stairs.
It probably took an entire minute for Nick to comprehend the sight he was seeing. A man, a distinguished-looking man in his early fifties, wearing a custom-made tan tuxedo and sporting an amazing sapphire ring on his little finger, came down the staircase and put his arms around Monique’s waist. She reached up and kissed him. He smiled and waved at the crowd as they politely applauded. They walked down the stairs together to the living room.
Who is that? Nick thought to himself and even through the gin and the vermouth and all the incredible feelings the answer came back, That is her husband, Aaron. What is he doing here? Why didn’t she tell me? And then, following very swiftly, How could she do this to me? I love her and she loves me and there is something very very wrong. This cannot be happening.
Nick tried to breathe, but felt as if a large piece of earth-moving machinery were pressed against his chest. Instinctively he turned away from the sight of Monique and Aaron walking down the stairs arm in arm. As he did he spilled part of a martini on Anne’s shoulder. His apology was very clumsy. Now completely confused, he stumbled over to the bar, trying desperately to breathe and to stop the pounding in his chest. No. No. She can’t be doing this. There must be some mistake. His mind could not read the message that his eyes were transmitting. He drank another martini swiftly, barely aware of his surroundings or the jumbled feelings torturing his soul.
‘There he is.’ He heard her voice behind him, the voice that had come to signify everything that was valuable and important in life, the voice of love. But this time he was terrified. Nick turned and Monique and Aaron were standing right in front of him.
‘So finally I get to meet this young man I’ve heard so much about,’ Aaron said. He was pleasant, friendly, without a trace of anything but gratitude in his voice. Aaron Silver was holding out his hand. Monique was smiling. God, she’s so beautiful. Even now, when I should hate her. Nick mechanically shook Aaron’s hand and quietly accepted his thanks for ‘helping Teresa at a difficult time’. Nick said nothing. He turned to look at Monique. She reached up and kissed him on the cheek. Oh, those lips. How I long still for those lips. Why? Why? What happens to us now?
Nick suddenly realized that there were tears in his eyes. Oh my God. I’m going to cry. Embarrassed beyond measure, Nick abruptly excused himself and walked out on to the patio. Now the tears were running down his cheeks. He was afraid he was going to sit down on the grass and start bawling like a baby. Confused, puzzled, he walked around the garden with his head down and tried, without success, to draw a regular breath.
He felt a hand on his elbow. It was Jane, the last person Nick wanted to see at this moment. ‘She’ll be out to see you in a few minutes. First she and Aaron have to make the rounds; you know how it is at parties when you’re the hostess.’ Jane lit a cigarette. Nick was certain he was going to puke. He turned quickly to ask her to put out the cigarette, and lost his equilibrium.
Perhaps it was the drink, perhaps the adrenaline, perhaps it was all too much. Nick’
s head was spinning around and around. He inadvertently leaned against Jane for support. She misunderstood, and then pulled his head to her shoulder. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Don’t take it so hard. You and Monique will still be able to have some time together. Aaron will only be here for a couple of days and then he’ll go back to Montreal to work. Besides,’ she said with gusto, ‘if you’re anywhere near as good as Monica says you are, I’d be delighted to take care of you when she’s with Aaron.’
Nick pushed her away and staggered back. He felt as if he had just been hit in the face with a sledgehammer. The full impact of Jane’s comment sunk in slowly and an uncontrollable mixture of anger and hurt surged to the surface. What? What? She knows. This cloying bitch knows. Maybe they all know. What? Fuck. Fuck this altogether. And then, almost immediately, as his mind began to take the measure of the evening’s events, How do I get out of here? Where is the exit? As he walked around the house to the front (he was not about to go inside again), from deep inside Nick there now came a sound, a sound that welled up to the surface and could not be contained. It was a wail of pain, the unmitigated and ineluctable cry of the animal in total despair. Millennia of acculturation have made it rare to hear such cries from human beings. But this loud and untoward scream, which rose into the Palm Beach night like a siren from a police car, gave Nick his first comfort. While the partygoers were trying to decide what they had heard, Nick climbed into his 1977 Pontiac and drove away.
He drove south toward Fort Lauderdale, his heart still pumping wildly and his body trembling from adrenaline. He didn’t think about anything coherently. The pictures in his mind seemed to come at random, without any clear connection between them. Monique was the focus of all the pictures in the montage. Monique in her Alaskan seal coat, Monique in her red and white bathing suit, Monique in her dress tonight (Nick winced, for just off screen left in his mind’s eye, he could see Aaron coming down the stairs). Had it all been meaningless? Was it just a game? Nick was too young to know about the greys of life. For him it was a simple question of black or white. It was either wonderful or it was terrible. Monique either loved him passionately and wanted to give up her luxurious life to marry him, or she was just using him to satisfy her sexual needs and her ego. So, he concluded, as he arrived at his uncle’s flat in Fort Lauderdale, I was another of her toys. I was like her furs and horses and yachts and clothes. I made her feel good.
Disgusted with himself, depressed beyond belief, a headache from the martinis starting to tear his brain apart, Nick rapidly packed his clothes. He didn’t bathe or eat. He took his two suitcases down to the car, left the tuxedo with the managers of the complex, and drove out toward Interstate 95. A couple of miles before he reached the freeway, Nick pulled the car off on the shoulder and allowed himself a few tears. That was all. The external hardness that would characterize the next ten years of his life began at that moment. Never again, he said to himself. I will never again let some bitch make a fool of me. No way, Jose.
Ten years later, early on a March morning in his flat in Key West, Nick Williams idly played with a metallic golden object sitting on his coffee table and experienced again the terrible pain of seeing Monique with her husband at that party. Wistfully, with some mature chagrin, he remembered also how, when he reached I-95, he turned left and south toward Miami and the Keys instead of right and north toward Boston. He couldn’t have explained why at the time. He might have said that Harvard was trivial after Monique or that he wanted to study life and not books. He didn’t understand that his need to start absolutely fresh came from the fact that he could not face himself.
He had not played the memory of Monique through from start to finish for five years. This morning, for the first time, Nick had been able to distance himself from the recalled emotions, ever so slightly, and to see the entire affair with a tiny bit of perspective. He recognized that his blind youthful passion had set him up for the anguish, but he was still reluctant to find Monique faultless. At least the memory no longer destroyed him. He picked up the trident and walked to the window. Maybe it’s all coming together now, he said to himself. A new treasure. A final moulting of the last adolescent angst. He thought about Carol Dawson. She was vexing, but her intensity fascinated him. Always the dreamer, Nick visualized Carol in his arms and imagined the warmth and softness of her kiss.
3
Carol watched in fascination as the octopus captured its prey with its long tentacles. ‘Imagine what it would be like to have eight arms,’ Oscar Burcham said. ‘Just think of the brain architecture necessary to separate all the inputs, to identify which stimulus was coming from which limb, to coordinate all the tentacles in defence or acquisition of food.’
Carol laughed and turned to her companion. They were standing in front of a large, transparent glass window inside a dimly-lit building. ‘Oh, Oscar,’ she said to the old man with the bright eyes, ‘you never change. Only you could think of all these living creatures as biological systems with architectures. Don’t you ever wonder about their feelings, their dreams while they are sleeping, their concepts of death?’
‘Aye, well I do,’ Oscar replied with a twinkle in his eye. ‘But it’s virtually impossible for human beings, even with a common language and developed communications skills, to truly describe their feelings. How could we even know or appreciate, for example, a dolphin’s sense of loneliness? In our maudlin way we ascribe to them human emotions, which is ridiculous.’ He paused for a moment to think. ‘No,’ he continued, ‘it’s more fruitful to conduct scientific inquiry at levels where we can understand the answers. In the long run, I believe that knowing how these creatures function, in the scientific sense, is more likely to lead us to their emotional quotients than conducting psychological experiments whose outcome cannot be interpreted.’
Carol reached over and kissed him fondly. ‘You take everything I say so seriously, Oscar. Even when I’m kidding, you always pay attention to my comments.’ She stopped and looked away. ‘You’re the only one who does.’
Oscar pulled back dramatically and put both his hands on Carol’s right shoulder. ‘Somewhere here there’s a chip… I know it for a fact… It’s almost always here… Ah, I found it.’ He looked at her knowingly. ‘It’s not becoming, you know. Here you are, a successful, even celebrated reporter, still suffering from what could only be described as terminal insecurity. What’s this about? Did you and the boss have a big fight this morning?’
‘No,’ Carol replied, as they walked across the room to another part of the aquarium. ‘Well, sort of, I guess. You know how he is. He takes over everything. I’m working on this big story down in Key West. Dale comes to the airport to pick me up, takes me out to breakfast, and proceeds to tell me exactly what I should be doing to cover my assignment. His suggestions are almost all good, and I appreciate his help on the technical issues, but it’s the way he talks to me. As if he thinks I’m stupid or something.’
Oscar looked at her intently. ‘Carol, my dear, he talks to everybody that way, including me. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He is absolutely convinced of his own superiority and nothing has ever happened in his life to change his mind. He was a millionaire from his own patents before he graduated from MIT.’
Carol was impatient and frustrated. ‘I know all that, Oscar, believe me, I know. But you’re protecting him again. Dale and I have been lovers for almost a year. He tells everybody how proud of me he is, how much he enjoys being stimulated by my mind. But when we’re together, he treats me like a fool. This morning he even argued with me about what I was having for breakfast. For Christ’s sake, I’ve been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize but the guy who wants to marry me doesn’t think I can order my own breakfast.’
They were standing in front of a large tank with crystal-clear water. About half a dozen small whales were swimming in circles around the tank, occasionally going to the surface for air. ‘You came and asked my opinion in the beginning, my young friend,’ he said quietly. ‘And I told you that I thought y
our souls were not compatible. Do you remember what you said to me?’
‘Yes,’ she answered with a rueful smile. ‘I asked you what the chief scientist of MOI could possibly know about souls. I’m sorry, Oscar. I was sorry at the time. I was so headstrong. Dale looked great on paper and I wanted your approval—’
‘Forget it,’ he interrupted her. ‘You know how I feel about you. But never underestimate a scientist. Some of them,’ he said abstractedly, ‘want to know facts and concepts so that ultimately they can understand the overall nature of every thing. Including the putative soul.
‘Now take these whales,’ Oscar continued, increasing the tempo and adroitly changing the subject. ‘We have been mapping their brains for almost a decade now, isolating various kinds of functions in specific locations, and trying to correlate their brain structure with that of a human being. We have been reasonably successful. The language function that governs their singing has been separated and the location of the physical controls for all parts of the body have been identified. In fact, we have found an area in the whale brain that corresponds to the equivalent function for every major capability in the human brain. But there’s still a problem, a mystery if you will.’
One of the whales stopped in its normal circuit about the tank. It seemed to be watching them. ‘There’s a large section of their brain that we have been unable to allocate to any specific function. A brilliant scientist years ago, after listening to the whales’ songs while they were migrating and correlating those songs with the rest of their behaviour, postulated that this large, unmapped portion of their brain was a multidimensional memory array. His hypothesis was that the whales store entire incidents in that array, including sights, sounds, and even feelings, and that they relive these incidents during migration to alleviate the boredom. Our tests are starting to confirm his theory.’
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