Falling in Love with Natassia

by Anna Monardo

  Truly exhausted, she could only float. Another good thing about sleeping on the dock was that it always made Nora feel closer to her mom, who had often slept on the deck when the heat was at its worst. Eighteen years dead, her mother—her mother’s voice—still came to her. After the fire, Nora had lost her mother completely, but in her therapy she’d recovered Mommy’s voice, and she didn’t let a day pass without talking to her, listening. Now, floating slowly toward the shore, Nora tried to hear Mommy listing options for her: “Well, dear, you could leave him.” Nora found herself crying into the salt water of Long Island Sound. “Okay,” her mother’s voice said, “so don’t leave him, but give him an ultimatum. Tell him, ‘Never talk to me about having a baby ever again or I’ll leave.’ You could get your tubes tied without telling him. Or, dear, you could decide not to decide now. It’s always an option to just go on as you have been.”

  Terrified, Nora realized that wasn’t really an option for her and Christopher anymore.

  A FEW HOURS LATER, fixing tuna salad in the kitchen, Nora had just got off the phone with Christopher when the phone rang again and it was her brother, Kevin. She could hear the subway behind him.

  “Hi, Nor, it’s me.”

  “Kevin. Where are you, in the subway?”

  “Yeah. Seventy-second Street. Listen, I just ran into Giulia buying peaches at Fairway. They’re on sale. Real nice. She told me you guys were at the beach this weekend. How’s Mary? Still with that guy, that lawyer-for-the-arts guy?”

  “The lawyer? Nothing ever happened with that.” Nora, tugging her kitchen curtains closed in Greenport, heard train exhaust huffing behind Kevin’s voice, and she wished she were back in the city.

  Kevin was saying something about some bowling shirts. He made good money as a computer programmer but he had a sideline selling vintage clothes. “These shirts are nice. Something Mary might like. When will she be in town? I can go by her place with these shirts anytime.”

  “Tell me what colors. I could use something new.”

  “Not good for you. These are little, Mary’s size. I have a robe for you. Quilted silk. Champagne, nice color for you. I’ll drop it off. So—Mary must be seeing somebody new, huh? That’s good. I didn’t like that lawyer.” Nora could hear Kevin’s train coming into the station, and she imagined him standing on the platform, tall and skinny, his shoulders hunkered over, and his balding, freckled, reddish-haired head bent as if he were a boy apologetic for having grown so much taller than the adults around him. Even now, at thirty-three, he rarely dressed like a grown-up; his hand was always jiggling keys and coins and gum in the pocket of baggy old shorts or work pants. Nora’s friends thought he was cute. “Sexy” was what one woman had said. “He’s such a boy, but he has that ‘I’m ready’ look in his eyes, and you just know he’s got a constant hard-on.” In fact, Kevin was never without a girlfriend, but none of them lasted long. Nora had tried to talk with him about his tendency to sexualize all his relationships, avoiding intimacy, a symptom of someone who’d undergone trauma, but Kevin said he’d made his peace with the past—without the benefit of therapy, and without Nora, and with lots of different girlfriends. And somehow he managed never to make anyone hate him. “He’s the biggest sweetheart,” said one girlfriend, even after he’d dumped her.

  “No, Kevin, Mary’s not seeing anybody. But I don’t think she’s looking. Too much going on with Natassia. Listen, come for dinner tomorrow night. I’ll be back in the city, and I have all this frozen pesto I want to get rid of in the freezer.”

  “I can’t tomorrow.” The train was squealing to a stop. “So what’s new with Mary? I haven’t run into her in ages.”

  “Oh, Kevin.” He broke Nora’s heart every time he got into one of these Mary binges, which had begun when he was in the sixth grade. Mary had never shown any interest in Kevin, and never would.

  “Nor, you sound weird or something, like you were crying. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes. Listen to me. Mary, you know—hey, your train—”

  “Yeah, I got to go. Can I have dinner Friday night?”

  “Sure. I’ll be home. Bring that robe, okay?”

  “You sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine. Come around seven.”

  “Bye, Nora.”

  “Love you, brother. Bye.”

  When Nora heard Kevin sounding needy the way he just had, when she felt alone the way she did now, when their conversation ached like the one she was hanging up from, two words appeared to her: We’re orphans.

  CHAPTER 4 :

  AUGUST

  1989

  Trapped on the train for hours on her way home from Nora’s beach house, Mary was not feeling any way she wanted to feel. The B-52s playing on her Walkman matched the buzzed-up, captured beat of her heart. Something like caffeine was fluttering in her pulse. Two stops before her station, Mary was already in the aisle, leaning against the doors under the sign DO NOT LEAN ON DOOR. Her teeth held an unlit cigarette, her AC-chilled fingers spun her Bic lighter. She’d never had patience for travel, that long nothing between one performance city and the next. While others in the company read or played cards, Mary paced the aisles of planes, trains, buses—flexing, stretching, rolling her joints. I left my kid in New York to do this tour. Let’s get there, dance, go. Up at the Hiliard School, Mary had no real dance life, not much of any life, so the commute to and from the school always felt pointless, and this particular dragged-out trip was killing her.

  Three frigging hours on the bus squeezing through traffic on the Long Island Expressway just to get into the city. Then a one-hour wait at Grand Central, then two hours on the train. If she were a good mother, if she had stayed in the city overnight to have dinner with Natassia to try to find out more about this letch she was in love with, Mary would be sitting on her daughter’s bed right now, the two of them watching a video and eating cold sesame noodles. Instead, because she was afraid even to try talking to the kid, Mary was locked up in this train, cold as a meat freezer, making her way up the river.

  I was stupid to move to Hiliard, Mary said to herself just as the doors opened up at Hiliard, and she got off the train. Three steps onto the platform, she lit her cigarette. In front of the station, four cabs were lined up. Mary walked to the closest one. “Hiliard School,” she told the driver. He put her backpack into the backseat for her. She got in, and they drove off.

  THE HILIARD SCHOOL wasn’t paying Mary much, but they gave her rent-free housing in the old remodeled greenhouse. This was good because the greenhouse was as far away as she could get from the students’ dorms and still be on campus. It was bad because the formal flower gardens began right at Mary’s front door and spread out in fastidious formations all across the long slope from the greenhouse up to the main buildings. These gardens were where neighborhood people liked to walk their dogs in the evenings. When Mary pulled up in the taxi that night, two matrons in jogging suits were crouched right by Mary’s front door sniffing at a bush, and their three bichons frisés were sniffing at the dirt.

  Walking toward the greenhouse, Mary turned up her Walkman until it was pulsing bass notes so loud the neighborhood ladies lifted their lapdogs and walked away. Halfway down the pebble path, though, they turned to watch Mary unlock the door. “Beautiful evening,” they said to her.

  “Yep.”

  “Do you live here, dear?”

  “Yep.” Mary slammed the door shut.

  Inside, the plants were finally dead. Mary was glad; now she could throw them out. Slowly, systematically, over the past eight months, Mary had been trying to hide or get rid of all the doodads in the place, the stuff that belonged to the family whose home this was—an anthropology teacher and his wife and kids. They were in Peru for his sabbatical year, and everyone on the faculty was saying he’d probably come back divorced.

  Mary stepped over the phone machine on the floor. The dusty red light was flashing. Four messages. Mary ignored them because she couldn’t deal with Nata
ssia’s silliness right now, and there was no one else Mary wanted to hear from. She turned the stereo on to the lousy local jazz station and pulled off her Walkman, then pushed open windows and got the stereo up loud to make sure the nosy women took their dogs far away. After yanking the curtains shut, Mary peeled off her clothes, which smelled from traveling. She took a shower with water cold as she could get it. Afterward, she dried off, wrapped her head in a towel, walked naked into the living room, and filled up her favorite pipe.

  A parade of Camels had marched her through the weekend and the long trip home, leading her to this moment when, finally, she could lie back naked on her futon and cup her hand around the warm bowl of this pipe, her meerschaum—white and as smooth as bone, definitely her favorite.

  Mary’s collection of pipes was extensive and secret. No one knew she was a pipe-smoker. Not Nora, not Natassia. More than ten pipes were hidden around the cottage. A corncob was stuffed between heavy sweaters on a high shelf. She reached for that pipe mostly in winter. When the dry air sapped her skin and left her fingertips numb, the husk rubbing against the palm of her hand was a sharp relief. Mary’s most expensive pipe was a Savinelli she’d bought on a whim a few years ago, when the dance company was held over in the Milan airport for a few hours. What a beautiful pipe—black octagonal bowl, an ivory-colored band in the handle. She had lit up that pipe only once, while getting dressed up for a dance-company fund-raising gala, a night that called for something classy, but the pipe was a disappointment. It had a recessed mouthpiece, which brought the smoke up behind her teeth. She must have been badly jet-lagged when she bought it. The Savinelli just got wrapped into its plush little pouch. It was around somewhere, in some corner.

  The meerschaum, the pipe she filled up that night when she came out of the shower cooled down and finally soothed, was kept tucked in her underwear drawer so it would always be handy. She liked finding that masculine thing among her underclothes. This was the pipe Mary wanted when she needed comfort, that something she supposed happy couples, people like Nora and Christopher, gave each other.

  Mary’s futon was skinny, like a pancake, and surrounded by dust kittens, but there really was comfort in this pipe. For one thing, it was beautiful. Carvings swirled into the soft white bowl; the tortoise mouthpiece had a nice curve. And it was a good pipe. A nice, cool smoke. In just a short minute, the tobacco had done its trick, changed from the fruity scent on her fingers into the tasty smoke circling in front of her face and inside her mouth. She tongued the pipe’s mouthpiece, the slight slit at the tip. She loved that part of a man’s penis, the tiny line you could finger into a little O, vulnerable as an Oh!, a small gasp.

  It was Barry, she remembered now, the lighting technician, who had got her started smoking a pipe. They were on tour in Scandinavia. Mary couldn’t remember which town they were in, or even which country, just that it was as cold as shit, and dark when they went to bed and dark again when they woke up. They had a couple hours in the morning before time to rehearse. It was too early to try calling Natassia, so Mary and Barry stayed in bed. Once, after he lit up, he offered his pipe to Mary.

  “I never get high before a performance,” she told him.

  “This won’t make you high. It’s just tobacco. Here, taste.”

  The first puff choked her, but then she liked the burn in her mouth. “How do I do this?”

  “Like a cigarette, but hold it in your mouth a while. Give it a chance.”

  Mary and Barry were lovers all through that run and on into Amsterdam. Then something happened—he got a new job, or the crew changed, or he was forced to take a union break. There was no big breakup, just one nice last morning. Before he left, he gave Mary a present, her own pipe, a brand-new briar. She still had it. Somewhere. Hidden. Once or twice, sharing a pipe in bed with a guy, she’d been asked, “Where’d you learn to do this?” “Ah, I just learned.” She’d never tell anyone about Barry and what she and he had done in bed, in the same way she’d never tell any guy about any other guy. Mary was like that, loyal. Never told bed secrets. Ever. All those guys, wherever they were now, gone. In a weird way, though, she felt closer to them than to her best friends or even her own daughter.

  Beyond family and blood and the confidences of girlfriends, there was the privacy of secrets shared between bodies together in bed. Mary knew there were those who thought she was a slut, but the secrets men showed her and told her had meant something to her every time it happened. Either you had those secrets in your life or you didn’t; and to Mary’s mind, if you had them they were a sacred thing. How could she explain this to Natassia? Natassia, who was so full of herself these days she’d actually had the nerve to ask Mary, “Mom, what’s the most orgasms you ever had in one night?” Making Mary squirm.

  All she had been able to answer was “Natassia, how many orgasms is not the point,” and then the next questions had hung between them, unasked and unanswered: What is the point? Why all those other guys after you left Daddy?

  Now Mary watched the curtain over the open window puff and collapse in a relaxed adagio. She let her inhale-exhale follow the same slow rhythm. A breeze came through with some kind of pollen in it that made her sneeze, then sneeze twice more. Where’s my asthma inhaler? I better use it tonight. Where’s Barry now? With each guy there’d been some one thing that happened only with that guy, no one else. Rubbing her itchy eyes, she sort of smiled to herself. Weird. Since she’d begun sitting still for fifty minutes each week to talk to Dr. Cather, Mary was remembering things differently. Before, when she thought back, the guys just blurred. It was good now to be able to see that each one had added something to her life before he left. Some token or habit or ritual or game.

  Allen, who had managed the company for six months a few years back, had taught her how to use all kinds of work-related expenses as deductions on her income taxes. A musician named Tony had convinced her it was necessary to put out some money if you wanted a good haircut, and she still did that every four months. Mary sneezed again, realized the air was cooling, pulled up her shaggy quilt. Her memory was moving; she let the details bring details.

  That guy Yuri, one of their guides in Leningrad, amazing. Something about him, she never figured out what, but she had such orgasms with him that by the end of the week there were black-and-blue marks on his butt from her heels kicking. She remembered a kind of chunky guy in Berlin who said that when she flicked his nipples with her tongue a sadness went all through him, yet he wanted her to do it. So she did, but she rubbed his face real softly at the same time, to comfort him. She forgot names, forgot which of them snored, but she said “Oohh” out loud when she remembered a sweet, skinny, impossibly tall guy whose big feet stuck out through the blankets and hung off the end of the bed. One cold night in a four-star but not great hotel in Paris, she wrapped a towel around his feet to keep him warm. She’d liked him a lot; his gentleness had made her gentle. Larry. His name was Larry. He hurt his back lifting a scaffold and had to go on disability.

  With the round-bowled pipe in her hand, Mary remembered another techie, a kid who worked at the theater in Haifa. He had the plumpest, most rotund testicles she’d ever touched. His face and name were gone, but he’d left her with this one detail: the tender weight of his balls in her hand. Amazed by what she was remembering, Mary sat up, filled her pipe again, lit it, warmed her fingers around the bowl, smiled. She and this Israeli guy had had a game they played in bed. She’d hold one of his balls and ask, “Which do I like best? This one?” Then she’d cup the other and say, “No, wait, I like this one,” then cup the first: “But maybe this one.” Her hand moved with increasing speed from one side of his sack to the other, touching him, softly, more quickly, doing nothing but stroking him and stroking until he was thick and slick and slipped into her and filled her like a big inhale of smoke.

  MARY WAS ASLEEP on the futon for over an hour. When she woke, she’d had a dream she couldn’t remember, but some panic made her look quickly around the room, to remind herself
which objects belonged to her, to make sure she could still pack everything up in one night if she had to get out. The tobacco in her meerschaum had burned down, and the pipe had tilted over onto her abdomen. “Shit.” Someday she was going to burn herself to death. Sitting up, she saw the phone machine flashing at her. “Shit,” she said again, and pressed the dusty PLAY button.

  The first two messages were hang-ups. The third began with a pause, so Mary sensed immediately that there was trouble. And there was.

  “Mary, dear, it’s Lotte. Small problem this weekend here in the city with Natassia. Everyone is safe and healthy—no problem that way. But I’m sure she’ll want to talk to you as soon as you get in. She was caught—” Lotte’s voice was cut off by the machine.

  “Fuck! Fucking damn it.” Mary stopped screaming so she could hear the machine deliver the last message: “Mary, it’s me again. Sorry, long-winded. Here’s what happened. Natassia was shoplifting, they say, though the store’s evidence is pretty spare. In any case, dear, the police officer wants to talk with you. And Natassia—well, call us when you get in. We love you, dear. I hope you got a rest this weekend. You’ve needed that, been working too hard. Call. Bye.”

  It was the sound of people’s voices more than the words they said that got to Mary, like music telling her body how to dance. Lotte’s voice being kind to her always made Mary go soft, give up some hold on her muscles. “Goddamn it,” she moaned slowly, almost weepy, and fell back onto the couch and hugged a pillow to her sweaty naked middle. Natassia. Shoplifting. Now Mary was going to have to go back to the damn city. I need to be in the studio.