Falling in Love with Natassia

by Anna Monardo

  “If you chose me to be the donor, you wouldn’t let me near the baby, would you?” Christopher asked, and she turned and leaned against the stove and faced him.

  “How close you are to the baby depends on how well you get your stuff together.”

  “So you’re telling me, like Nora, that I have to go to therapy.”

  “I’m not saying therapy. I’m not saying anything. All I know is, you’re a person who really would like to set things right with himself,” Denise said, folding up a dish towel, all of it so much like at Nonna’s, “about Nora and her friend and that baby, and that guy—Ross? And, God, your father. You have a lot to deal with about your old man.”

  Nothing to do now but leave. Christopher put on his jacket, zipped up. “Yeah.”

  “But in the meantime,” Denise said, “I’m still tempted to think you might be the best donor candidate.”

  “I’m not off your list?”

  “If you did it, Christopher, donated, what would the repercussions be for you, if you do this and don’t tell Nora? Or if you do tell Nora?”

  Christopher stood with his hands on the top of a creaking dining-room chair, holding it, not wanting to let go of everything that had happened that afternoon and evening. “I guess we need to go or I’ll miss that train.”

  They went out the kitchen door. Walking through the backyard to the detached garage, they walked across a brick patio with a brick barbecue. “Nice,” Christopher said.

  “Don could build anything.”

  As Denise unlocked the passenger-side door for him, Christopher looked up at the sky. Stars, nothing like Manhattan. “I like it here,” he told Denise. “It reminds me of the old neighborhood in Kansas City.”

  “Yeah? Nyack always reminded us of Erie. That’s why Don and I moved here. And also because all we could afford in the city was a basement studio on Tenth Avenue.”

  In the car, they were silent until they got onto the Tappan Zee. The river was under them, and Denise said, “Whatever happens, Christopher, whether we do this together or not, what happened tonight, all you told me, it’s really important.”

  “Yeah. Really important.”

  Denise drove a 1983 Honda Civic hatchback, very fast. She pulled up to the Tarrytown station just as the train was pulling in on the farthest track. Christopher ran, calling, “Thanks for everything, Denise,” up the steps two at a time, across the passageway and down more steps, jumping off the last four, slipping into the sliding door of the Metro-North train car. As the train pulled out, he stood at the door, breathing hard, while other passengers, nodding off in their seats, looked up at him, then looked away.

  Christopher had just spent all afternoon and a long evening in Nyack, New York, with a woman who was not his wife. This was the closest he’d ever come to having an affair, but he’d never felt so blameless, so light.

  And for three days afterward, Christopher could not stop feeling happy. He woke up early and made buttermilk pancakes for Nora one day. The next day, he made her fresh blueberry muffins. The third day, he saw a red leather purse in a shopwindow and bought it for her, and before he gave it to her, he filled it with chocolates. Nora seemed happy with his gift—not thrilled, but nothing could get in the way of the good feeling Christopher had going on inside.

  And then it was the day he was supposed to call Denise to hear her decision. No phone calls from home. He didn’t want Denise’s decision sitting in the middle of his living room. Not from the street, either. He wanted to be private. He wanted to be sitting down.

  Saks Fifth Avenue has good phones. Nora had once told him about a patient who went to Saks to use the phones whenever she needed to talk to Nora between sessions. Nora would never tell him what the patient’s problem was, or why she couldn’t call from home. Nora never told anything about her patients. But she had, for some reason, let that one detail slip. So, taking a page from Piper’s book, Christopher dressed up, wore a black cashmere turtleneck with his jeans. A tweed coat. He was early, so he got a haircut, too, but then he still had half an hour to wait, and he had hairs caught in his collar, itching him, while he walked the first-floor aisles of Saks pretending to shop.

  Finally, four o’clock, he could call. The booth was perfect: a stool to sit on, and a noisy fan to cover up the conversation. He dialed. She answered. “I’m rushing,” Denise said, “but my sponsor and I talked a long time the other night, and again this morning.”

  “You talked—”

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t tell her details. But we talked, and I woke up today, and I knew it was the right thing to do. She thinks so, too. Last night, I dreamed about Don. It’s always so good to see him. Anyway, since you and I talked, I’ve had this feeling that, yeah, it’s the right thing. And I haven’t wavered for four days, so—”

  “You’re going to let me do it?” Christopher stood up in the tight booth, hit his head. “You trust me? Denise, do you really mean—”

  “Yes, if you still want to, yes, but we’re on long-distance. You’re spending your money. Do you have a piece of paper? I told you to have paper.”

  “I have paper. I have a pen. I am ready.”

  “Call this number.” And she went on with her instructions. He needed to get in touch with the lab. They’d test him, at his convenience, but he should do it quickly. She told him where to call to set up his physical exam. Then the psychological evaluation. “Just give them your name. The billing is set up. Then, if all the medical stuff checks out—”

  “It will check out, Denise, I promise you, so then we freeze my sample”—was he really saying these words?—“for six months, then retest.”

  “Right. Hey, Christopher?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Here we go,” she said, and he could tell she was smiling like crazy. “I’m glad we’re doing this together.”

  “Yeah, Denise. I’m really happy, too.”

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, Denise and Christopher met at the lab to sign paperwork. He called her once around Christmas just to say hello. Through all his days, there was some abstraction, some interesting good feeling that he thought of as Denise, but he felt no urgency to see her or talk to her. Instead, Christopher and Nora slipped into a blessed time. Since he no longer pressed her about having a baby, she no longer steered clear of him. They were like before. Only better. By Christmas, they were having sex all the time.

  In March, things at the loft were going so well Christopher was shocked to get a letter from his Denise life, mailed to his studio, telling him it was time to retest his sample. Of course, the retest was fine. He called Denise a few days after the insemination and she told him it had all gone well, took only a couple of minutes, and now it was just a waiting game. If he wanted, she’d let him know the results of her pregnancy test.

  “Of course, you better let me know!” In April, May, he heard nothing from Denise. He figured it hadn’t worked and she’d try again in a month or so. He was busy making art, happy with Nora, he let it go.

  But then, in June, a letter from Denise arrived at his studio. She wanted him to know that she was pregnant, had been since March. Miraculously—the doctors were thrilled—the first insemination had worked. She hadn’t written earlier because she was superstitious. She wanted to let some time pass, but just that morning, she’d seen the sonogram, seen so much of the baby, she was beginning to believe it was true. She was going to have a baby. And, Christopher, she wrote, it’s going to be a son. It’s a boy!

  SO THE GRAND NEWS of June had turned into the shopping lists of September, and Christopher had just two more months to help Denise get ready, to help her get her house in shape. He simply had not been able to resist having some hand in preparing for this baby. A son. One August Sunday, while Nora was in Greenport with her friends, Christopher had gone up to Nyack on his bike. He saw how much work Denise’s house needed, how overwhelmed she was trying to finish writing her book before her December due date. He offered to clean out her gutters, which were so bad, small trees were growi
ng in them. Then he offered to help clear junk out of her basement. By now, late September, Christopher was up there weekly. Things with Nora had started to lag during the summer. He’d slipped and mentioned he still wanted Nora to want to have a baby with him. And she’d started again with the Natassia business. Now, to top it all off, Natassia had actually tried last night to kill herself, and Nora had the gall to try tagging it on Christopher. He was tangled and twisted inside, had no idea what it was Nora was wanting from him.

  Out on the street now, hanging up the pay phone, coming away from the baby-furniture store where he’d just spent money he didn’t have, to buy a stroller for a baby he might never see, he prayed. God, please, let Denise let me near this baby. God, please, let Natassia stop trying to kill herself. Please, let Nora stop hating me so much.

  CHAPTER 15 :

  SEPTEMBER

  1989

  After the night at the hospital, Nora was in hell for three days, waiting to hear something, anything, from Mary. Finally, on Friday afternoon, just as Nora was walking into the loft, the phone rang.

  “Nor.” Mary was whispering. “Nor, it’s me.”

  As soon as she heard Mary’s voice, the locked-stiff muscles in Nora’s neck loosened. Slowly pacing up and down the kitchen floor as far as the leash of the black telephone cord allowed her, placing each stocking-footed step safely within a black or a white floor tile, careful not to step on any cracks, Nora asked, in a whisper, five or six times, “Are you okay? Is she all right?”

  “She’s doing okay,” Mary whispered back. “She’s going to be all right.” Mary said she could stay on the phone only a minute, because Natassia was napping and might wake up at any moment.

  “But you’ve got to keep us informed, Mary. You just took off. Lotte and David were insane with worry. We all were. The police—we didn’t know what to tell them.”

  “I found a doctor, he’s going to talk to them.”

  “But, Mary, you left us hanging. Call me. At least call me.”

  “Don’t be mad, Nora. That place was a nuthouse.”

  “I’m not mad, but, really, Mary…”

  “Bye, Nor. I gotta go.”

  After they hung up, Nora stood in the kitchen. She’s going to be all right. What did that mean, exactly?

  Terror. Nora turned on the faucet to wash the couple dirty dishes she’d left there the night before, but there were sharp knives among the plates. Her hands were trembling. She turned the water off. Help me do this. Nora was just beginning to understand how much Natassia terrified her, had always terrified her. No wonder Christopher refused to talk about Natassia. He said I torture him. They had not spoken more than five words to each other since that fight in the bathroom on Wednesday afternoon.

  But Natassia was doing okay. Nora took a damp, clean wineglass out of the dishwasher. As she reached for the dish towel hanging on the refrigerator-door handle, her eyes fell over the potpourri of photos and postcards magnet-held to the fridge door (the one place in the loft where her instincts to hoard had won over Christopher’s instinct to clear out) and, within the mess, her eye picked out a photo of Natassia, six years old, smiling wide with no front teeth, rolling with all her might a pumpkin twice as big as her head. She was wearing a red sweater and was surrounded by scads of dead leaves. It was a weekend when Mary was in town (for a change), and Kevin had driven everybody in one of his broken-down vintage cars out to Greenport for the day, one of Nora’s first trips back in years. Natassia had run wild through the pumpkin patches, arranging pumpkins into little groups she called “families.” In another fridge-door photo, Nora found an older Natassia, Christmas Eve when she was around twelve, already taller than her mother, standing in a smiley hug with Mary and Ross. From this photo, if you didn’t know them, you’d never suspect what the three of them had been through, together and apart.

  As Nora stared into the pictures at Natassia’s intelligent, happy face, Nora’s eyes watered and her throat got tight. She had to admit she didn’t always like Natassia. But she did love her. There was no way around that. Almost as deep as guilt and fear, there was love, and for the first time since Natassia’s crisis had begun, Nora realized that she didn’t know what she would do if anything worse happened to Natassia.

  Please, God. She’d been saying it under her breath for days. “Please,” she said aloud as she pulled open the fridge and reached for the bottle of Pinot Grigio. Then, as she poured herself a glass of wine, two words floated up from far away: cabana time.

  That’s what they had called their Happy Hour in France: Fridays, early evening, the start of the weekend. Christopher and his friends would leave their studios or their jobs and bring a couple bottles of wine down to the beach cabanas. Christopher, always concerned with feeding people, brought the cheese and baguette. Before the Baby Natassia event, Nora had enjoyed herself when she joined the guys at the beach. Afterward, she went just once in a while, to observe Christopher among his friends.

  After she witnessed Christopher molesting the baby, Nora’s dilettantish reading in psychology had become an obsession. She returned to the pages of Erik Erikson, Jung, and Freud every morning, early; and in the afternoons, while she modeled for painters, she thought over what she’d read, tried to eke out some promise of an explanation for the pain she had felt and was feeling in her life.

  Now she was thirty-five years old, educated, trained, and professionally licensed. Still wearing her expensive work clothes, Nora walked across her living room to yank the venetian blinds up on this lonely Friday evening that was her life, so far from any cabanas, and she felt sorry for how naïvely she had believed in psychological miracles back then. “Poor you,” she muttered as she curled up in the corner of the sofa to look out the big windows. They faced south. It was almost six o’clock now, moving toward dark. Nora was rarely home at this time. Her last appointment for the day had canceled, giving her this chance to see how lucky she and Christopher were: their view was still unimpeded by new buildings. She could see the light saddening into burnt colors all across a long stretch of sky over lower Manhattan. Amber and coral swatches folding out slowly. She watched.

  She sipped from her wineglass. “Poor deluded you.” Nora pulled up her long skirt and pulled down her gray pantyhose, tossed them across the carpet. Christopher’s cat came out from under the couch, purred, and looked at Nora. “Take them,” she said, “they have a run in them, they’re useless to me.” The cat grabbed the stockings in its mouth and trotted them off somewhere. Without the control top, Nora’s stomach bulged. What hubris, to think she could help anyone with anything when she herself was nothing but a slob. A fraud, really. I’m a therapist, and I know of an incident of sexual abuse to an infant, and I continue to keep that secret from the victim and her parents. Nora pulled the silky turtleneck up over her mouth. But I’m working on it.

  Through the years, whenever she reached a new level in her education and training, she had used the tools she’d learned as a means for further analyzing her husband. She remembered one July when she and Christopher were out at the house in Greenport, the summer after her second year of grad school. Nora, in possession of her natural work habits again, sat at the dining table for two or three hours every morning and again at night and filled two legal pads. In cases of sexual abuse, she’d learned during the past semester, it was important to evaluate the harm done to the child.

  What degree of harm? Was it a case of blurred boundaries on the part of the adult? Was it abuse, exploitation of power, or simply inappropriate behavior, a lapse of judgment? Was physical force used? Was pain suffered by the victim? What degree of pain? If harm was done, how could it be avoided in the future? Never let the offender be with the victim again? Could the harm be reduced by less extreme measures? Was there remedy? Approach the offender with empathy. Was the event of abuse situational? Opportunistic? Chronic, an enduring deviant interest on the part of the offender? Was it a fixated offense, meaning he’d do it again, with premeditation. Had Christopher’s ac
t been premeditated? (He insisted no.) Was the child a substitute for an adult sexual partner, or was the child the primary desired object? Or was it a regression during a time of stress? “Yes,” Christopher had said in marriage counseling once. “It was stress.”

  What the hell kind of stress did Christopher have at the age of twenty-five, living cheaply in a huge painting loft in the south of France, not needing to make much money, having endless time to paint, endless space, and a girlfriend living with him who was so crazy about him that just looking at him practically made her come? Stress, my foot.

  Inevitably, Nora’s efforts to understand Christopher collided with her anger at him. No wonder it was unethical for a psychologist to treat a family member.

  Natassia’s all right. Nora pulled the silver hairpin out of her chignon, and some of the pain in her head abated, but the assault was still there. Natassia Natassia Natassia. When she said the name aloud, the Na bit her tongue, ta blocked her sinuses, sshhaaa rolled around behind her face. Since Wednesday, Nora had been taking aspirin every four hours. Yesterday, three different patients had asked, Are you all right?

  Natassia Natassia Natassia.

  Nora got up and poured herself another half-glass and was putting the wine bottle back into the fridge, but she caught the door before it closed, pulled out the bottle again, and poured herself a little bit more wine, reminding herself what Friday used to be, when she and Christopher were together, a real couple who kept Friday nights for themselves.

  Tonight he wouldn’t be home for hours, maybe not at all. He was working up in Nyack a lot these days. Some friend of his had a restoration job, and they had to rush to finish it. Big money, supposedly. Some nights Christopher and the guys worked late and slept in sleeping bags at the job site and got up in the morning and kept working. A few months ago, when he told her about the job, Christopher had said he was doing it to help his friend but also because he needed the money for supplies for a new project. God only knew what he was doing with the money. The joint checking and savings accounts weren’t any bigger. He kept a separate account for his painting expenses, but in his studio it didn’t look as if much was happening. She’d begun, secretly, going over there once in a while to check. Nora wondered if he had developed some kind of habit, some addiction, something.