Falling in Love with Natassia

by Anna Monardo

  Christopher and I haven’t had a Saturday like that in—what?—months maybe.

  But in the length of time it took to fry up a cutlet, things had fallen apart between Abe and the woman. She was moving her knees away from his; he reached under the table but wasn’t able to keep her near him. She turned and sat sideways, literally giving him the cold shoulder. He spoke with affection, as if he really meant everything he was saying, but she was gathering her canvas bags and her leather backpack. The look on her face said she’d probably been through this with him before. Clutching her coat and all her various bags, she moved to the edge of her chair, looked straight at him, and said some goodbye something. He said something apologetic. She stood and walked out of the restaurant without her coat on. Outside, she passed quickly by the front window, still not wearing her coat, and she never looked back. Gone. One more unhappy woman wandering through a weekend alone.

  Abe’s long ebony hair was loose today, a little damp from the shower. He wasn’t wearing eyeglasses, just the earring and watch. Clothes—pretty much the same as when Nora had met him. She gave it ten full minutes, allowed for the possibility that the woman might come back. Abe did, too. He sat there, pushed back his plate. When the waitress came by, he ordered something and she wrote it down. He leaned elbows on the table and rubbed his hands over his eyes and face. The waitress returned with a pot of tea, cup, and saucer, put the bill upside down on the table, and took his plate of food. His lunch was practically untouched. Nora, willfully, forgot the hurt and intelligence she’d noticed in the woman’s face, and the possibility that Abe might deserve to be left with a ruined lunch. Poor guy.

  Nora had finished her soup and ordered an apricot Danish and coffee so she’d have an excuse to stay at her table. It was a rainy Saturday with a lengthening line of people waiting at the door. Within a few minutes, Nora had her Danish, coffee, and bill, and she pulled money out of her pocket, pulled on her coat. If she waited too long he might leave. But then Nora saw the waitress heading for Abe’s table with his plate of cutlet, holding it with a towel—she’d zapped it for him; he had never intended to leave his lunch. And he looked up with a flirty smile, any sadness about his girlfriend wiped away. The waitress was a pretty Russian woman. He said something to her, kept her there a few extra minutes. When she left him, the waitress was smiling. Abe dug into his food.

  He’s a jerk. Nora stood and, with her pastry and coffee, walked to his table. “Can I sit down?”

  “Hey. Hi.” He was in mid-bite. Swallowing, he ran his napkin over his smiling mouth. “What are you doing here?”

  Thinking fast, she said, “Oh, I have a sort of date with myself here every Saturday afternoon.” She surprised herself. After fifteen years of monogamy, she still had a knack for quick play with a new man. “My husband paints on Saturday afternoons. He’s a painter.” She offered this information to help Abe feel safe as she joined him at the table. “He’s working on a big project,” she said, stirring Sweet ’N Low into her coffee. “I tell him he can have all Saturday to himself, if we have a date for sushi on Sunday night.”

  Abe put down his fork. “That is a very reasonable marriage. You give him that? That’s great.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t make him feel the guilt. Jeez—I just had a mess here—”

  “I know,” Nora said, “I saw.”

  “You saw that?” He forked a big piece of cutlet and dipped it into his mashed potatoes. “I guess I erred. She says I did, but I have no idea, truly, what I did wrong. I need my time to write, that’s all.”

  “What happened?”

  “She’s a good woman. An editor at a public-policy journal. Very smart person. Man, she has read all the literature there is to read in a couple different languages.” Ah, so that’s what he likes; I’ll need to read more novels, maybe poetry. “She lived in Leningrad and speaks Russian fluently.”

  Nora looked down into her coffee, stirred it a bit more. He likes her. This bothered Nora. She started to put a bit of sugar into her coffee, to hide the aftertaste of the Sweet ’N Low, but Abe said, “Too late to add sugar. Sugar only mixes in when the coffee’s hot.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what our friend Giulia says. Her Italian expertise. Anyway, Ava and I—”

  Ava, huh?

  “—were here having a nice breakfast.” Blamelessly, his hands gestured toward the table. “I was telling her just that I needed tonight to write. She wanted me over at her place. I guess she was getting some kind of dinner together with these friends of hers. She says she told me about it last week. I don’t know. I mean, we’ve been together all morning, all afternoon.”

  “I guess,” Nora said, “she was disappointed.”

  “Yeah, but it’s more than that. She seems to have a need—almost a compulsion, I’d call it—to talk about our relationship.” Leaning toward Nora a bit over the table, he said, confidentially, “I think she wants to talk about living together. She wants to know if I’m seeing anyone else.”

  “Are you?” Nora looked up from her coffee, and Abe looked at her, and they both laughed.

  “You women. You’re all alike.”

  “I’m kidding you, Abe. But I can understand why she might want to know the answer to that question. She may need to know that information. For herself.”

  He looked at her and shook his head, his beautiful bony scalp and the black straight hair falling away from it. “You’re a shrink, right? Women come to your office all week long to talk about what happened over the weekend with jerks like me, don’t they?”

  They both laughed again. Nora felt something spin so low in her stomach it was near her groin. This she had not felt in years.

  “These girls with big careers, man…” Nora noted he was talking about girls instead of women, and her conscious mind was offended. But he was looking at her, and she felt what she had felt the first time she met him, in Giulia’s office. That skin of sadness she’d been carrying for so long, it shed away when Abe looked at her, as he was now, saying, “They excite me, these girls, with all their busyness…”

  Up close, she saw that his tired eyes were hazel. “…these brilliant, exceedingly beautiful girls, with their unimpeachable professionalism, that unassailable competence. Oh, how it excites me. And they make all that nice money and are so meticulous about saving it up and investing it. And then, invariably”—his language, he’s creative with his adjectives and adverbs, Nora thought; Christopher wouldn’t know an adjective if it bit him on the shin—“invariably, they slip into that retrograde mentality of charting the progress of a relationship, and each weekend I’m thinking we’re just having a nice, enjoyable time, but for them each weekend is a watershed. They want to know, ‘Has progress been made? Are we on task?’ What am I supposed to do with that?” He was finishing his meal, pushing back his plate so he could lean his arm on the table in front of him. “Noreen—”

  “Nora.”

  “Nora. Sorry. I knew it was something sexy and Irish. And it’s Conolly, right? Nora Conolly, you’re a woman, you’re smart, you talk to these women all the time. You tell me, what do they want?”

  Nora told him, “I’ve never lived the way you’re describing, having an agenda for my relations with an intimate. I’ve never conducted my relationships that way.”

  He leaned across the table, staring right into her green eyes with his round, tortoisey, big eyes, and with the sternest look on his face. “You’re lying,” he said, and then dipped his fork into Nora’s apricot Danish.

  LATER THAT EVENING, sitting by herself in a crowded movie theater waiting for Mystery Train to begin, Nora thought about how far along she and Abe had come that day. The miracle of running into him had eliminated the need to figure out a way to track him down. In just one week, she’d met him, and then, among all the people in New York City, she’d found him again. Best of all, she’d found him downtown, in her world. She’d been smart enough to mention her marriage a few times, but not too much, j
ust enough to make Abe feel unthreatened. But she’d managed to make him curious, too, and a little envious. “Why can’t I meet a woman like you? That’s great you give your husband all that freedom,” he’d said. For almost two hours that afternoon, Nora and Abe had sat in the restaurant and talked. He told her stories about this girlfriend or that one. Yes, he was using Nora as a sounding board, but she could cut that off quickly if it went too far.

  When they’d ordered a second Danish, he said, “I love this place, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. My husband”—she never once said Christopher—“on Thursday nights he teaches late at Cooper Union, so I come here for soup and sit and catch up on my reading for a couple hours, until he’s done with his class.”

  “Every Thursday?”

  “Pretty much,” Nora said. Christopher didn’t teach at Cooper Union anymore, hadn’t in a couple of years.

  “Great,” Abe said, “I’ll see you here, this Thursday night. Would that be all right with you, Nora Conolly? What time?”

  The theater lights were dimming now, the audience full of couples, but Nora didn’t care. With her hand in a carton of buttered popcorn, she snuggled down into the plush seat. Thinking over all that had happened that day, she was proud of herself, tickled.

  Within herself, Nora felt herself lifted away from Na-ta-sha, saved from the biting torture by Aaaaabbbbe.

  CHAPTER 18 :

  OCTOBER

  1989

  Mary had never in her life given a flying fuck about school or the rules of school. It had always been such a joke to her, like in Rome, when she and Ross managed to hustle the dean into letting them drop most of their classes. Now so much of Mary’s well-being, and her daughter’s sanity, depended on Mary’s ability to please and please the administrators of a private school she would never have been admitted to or been able to afford to attend. The irony wasn’t lost on Mary. About the Hiliard School job, she was a nervous wreck all the time, so afraid she wasn’t doing it right. It had never been like this with dance jobs.

  Her boss, Franklin Fields, the headmaster, wasn’t a total idiot, but Mary didn’t feel she knew enough about academic life to understand the full extent of his power—or the lack of it. A dance-company director she could figure out immediately, but this headmaster guy, was she supposed to talk to him, ignore him, stay out of his way, or what?

  One day, Franklin walked up to Mary in the faculty parking lot as she was taking groceries out of Claudia’s car. Franklin, pink-cheeked, mildly lubricated from lunch, had just parked his blue Volvo. “Here, let me help you with those bags,” he offered.

  Mary calculated quickly. It was embarrassing to have this rich guy carry her groceries, but she couldn’t say no to her boss. Could she? “Thanks,” Mary said, and handed him the lightest bag (as soon as she handed it to him, she realized that toilet-paper rolls were sticking out of the top of the bag—embarrassing). She put on her sunglasses and marched up the path at a clip, so he could see she wasn’t wasting time. Franklin kept up close behind her as they cut through the backyards of the dorms. Even though it was cold, some kids’ windows were open, spilling out funky Jackson Browne. Ross had explained to her that one way to manage the people who have control over you is to establish a rapport with the people who are above the people who are just above you.

  “Hardly see you these days,” Franklin said, pausing a moment behind her to catch his breath. “Heard your daughter’s with you for a visit.”

  Who had power over the headmaster? The parents? But the parents weren’t around. The kids hardly ever saw them. How could Mary establish a rapport with the Hiliard School parents? She stopped in the path, looked back at Franklin, and just came out with it: “My daughter’s having a nervous breakdown, so I need to take care of her.”

  “Sorry, Mary,” he said, “really sorry.” She watched his face pinch with the bad news. Faker. “I’m sure you’re doing a fine job with her. The kids love what you’re doing in dance class.” Mary and Franklin had reached the path leading to her cottage. She reached over to take her bag of toilet paper from him.

  “Let me know,” he said, “if I can help in any way with your daughter.”

  Mary lifted her sunglasses. “So you don’t care that she’s staying with me? It’s not against the rules?”

  “You’re taking care of your child. If she’s having a hard time, I don’t know what else you could do. Half the kids in this school are on the edge, several on medication. After a certain point, you don’t have a lot of options. Someday I’ll tell you about the mess we had in the dorm a couple years ago. If I were you, I wouldn’t go out of my way to let the board of trustees know your daughter’s in class with you. And, of course, don’t advertise it to the parents. They’ll say their kids aren’t getting attention.”

  The board members of the dance company had always been in love with Mary. But the Hiliard board of trustees? Who are they? What do they do? She’d have to remember to ask Ross.

  “Funny. Natassia tells me I give the students too much attention.”

  Franklin smiled at her—it was sort of a guy’s smile, not much of a boss’s smile. “Can’t win, huh?” Franklin said. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Want to have dinner with me Friday night?”

  Mary shifted her bags of groceries. “Are you asking me out or something?”

  “Yeah. Something.”

  “I can’t. I’m with Natassia all the time.”

  “You’re a good mother.” He walked away, tugging at his leather gloves, heading over to his office, but looking back at Mary. “A lousy date, but a good mother.”

  A GOOD MOTHER. The headmaster of Hiliard School had said it himself. If I need witnesses in court, maybe I can get Franklin. Some part of Mary’s mind was always preparing to be brought to court by David Stein. He still was giving her a hard time on the phone, really lording it over her that his detective-writer helped get the police to back off of the suicide-attempt follow-up, even though Dr. Jonson’s call had been the important one. “You can’t just take Natassia like that,” David yelled, “out of the hospital, like some kind of hostage.”

  Lotte got on the extension. “Yes, she can, David. Natassia’s her daughter. Mary can do what she wants.”

  “What about Ross?” David yelled at Lotte. “Natassia’s got a father, you know.”

  “Don’t you start on Ross.” The arguing continued between David and Lotte, who were in different rooms in the same apartment but yelling at each other via a long-distance phone call. “The way you talk to him,” Lotte told David, “how can he bring himself here?”

  After listening to a few rounds, not getting a word in, Mary quietly hung up.

  Two days later, Lotte and David drove up to Hiliard, without calling ahead, and David asked Natassia what she wanted to do: go back to New York with them, go to stay with her father in Washington State, go to a hospital, or stay where she was?

  “I guess I want to stay here,” Natassia said. Even Mary was shocked. Of all the adults reaching out to help Natassia, Mary felt her offerings were the most meager. “I mean, since I’m here,” Natassia said, “I may as well just stay. For a while.”

  Lotte and David were standing in the center of the cottage, filling it up with their tallness, their largeness, her expensive flowing purple-and-black clothes, his wrinkled wool overcoat, their bulging leather bags, and a heap of “supplies” for Natassia. Lotte had a suitcase with Natassia’s clothes. David had Natassia’s violin, which she didn’t want. They brought her a MoMA bag full of bound galleys so Natassia would have reading material, and a Zabar’s shopping bag full of weird cheeses and pâtés and other stuff Natassia was used to eating, foods that Mary couldn’t quite figure out. Lotte made a big deal over a pomegranate. “Cut into this soon, girls, I’m telling you, it’s perfect. Now.”

  And then David handed over to Natassia a Zabar’s bag with something he said was extra-special. “Here, love, your grandmother almost forgot this, but I know how much you like it. This is
from me,” he insisted, “and I want you to enjoy it. Every bite. You don’t need to give any of this to your mother. She wouldn’t appreciate it.”

  “Da-vid.” Lotte sighed. “Jesus Christ, do you have to insult someone, always?”

  “It’s okay,” Mary said. “Honey, what did David bring you?”

  Natassia looked into the bag and smiled. “Poppy, great.” Mary could hear the effort in her voice. “A David Glass chocolate-mousse cake.”

  “Mary, here’s a pint of delicious chicken soup with good matzoh balls. Heat that up for her tonight,” Lotte said. “And that cake, in the freezer it will last till doomsday.”

  Lotte and David hugged Natassia and Mary goodbye. David was the only one who had tears in his eyes. Mary wanted to slap him. But she didn’t.

  “We want you back home with us, sweetie,” David said to Natassia when he was finally seat-belted into his car. “We want everything back to normal,” he warned, “soon.”

  NATASSIA’S GRANDPARENTS continued calling every night to check in. Lotte sent Mary a one-hundred-dollar check with a note: For food, whatever. Love to you both. Ross called every few days. Then, once, he called in the middle of the night, his voice a sort of whimper, and he asked Mary, “Listen, if I moved back to New York, is there any chance you and I could get married? I mean, shit, Mary, it’s the only thing we can do here. We have a kid. She’s in trouble.”

  “Ross. Honey, are you drunk?”

  “Yes.”