by Anna Monardo
With the pink folder on her lap, Mary forced herself to realize that, together with Lotte, David, and Ross, she had let a fifteen-year-old girl run around New York City at night. They had known—all of them had known—that Natassia was out with a man, and they’d done nothing to stop her. But when Mary read the October 25, 9 p.m. entry, she saw that even though all four of the adults had failed to protect Natassia—failed to a miserable, possibly criminal, degree—there had been something happening in Natassia that could not have been stopped even if they had tried. Natassia, just like her mother, was ultra-alive in her body. And also there was this: art. Somewhere along the line, the kid really had turned into a writer.
CHAPTER 21 :
DECEMBER
1989
One night in early December, as she slept, Nora heard a voice. It was just twenty minutes after she’d turned out her bedside lamp and fallen quickly into her first bout of sleep (blessedly, thoughts of Abe were calming her nights), but then, half awake and shifting her sleep position, she heard a friendly domestic voice calling to her, saying, “No-RA,” a male voice with no hint of harm in it but demanding enough that it seemed to expect an answer, and she almost called out, “Yes?”
Nora knew she was alone in the loft. Christopher hadn’t slept at home in weeks. Slowly, warily, she reached over to turn the lamp on, then, sitting up, she woke enough to realize that if she did call out and got an answer she’d be in real trouble.
The voice didn’t call out again, but No-RA echoed in her ear. A little terrified but also curious, she picked up cuticle scissors, small defense, and ventured out into the open space of the loft, switching on overheads to light up the corners ahead of her. Into the living space, into Christopher’s studio. In the bathroom the many clocks ticked. Nothing out of place. Nora was relieved but also a little bit sad not to find anyone. Was it a dream? That she might have imagined the voice made Nora feel unsure of herself, almost feeble. That she might be wishing so hard for companionship she had begun to hallucinate voices—that was almost scarier than the thought of someone entering while she slept.
WHEN NORA WOKE the next morning, she wasn’t rested. Her dreams had been about trying to get to sleep. She pulled open the heavy damask curtain and looked out the filthy window next to the bed. Slushy rain. Unable to decide whether to rain or snow, the day was as full of doubt as she was. It was December 5, and at the end of the workday she was meeting Christopher “to talk.” Relying completely on the personal-memo feature of their answering machine, never actually talking to each other, they’d made this date over a week ago. It had become embarrassingly clear that they had to make some plans.
Sometimes Nora wondered what Christopher’s secret life was. They hadn’t set eyes on each other in over two weeks. Thanksgiving they had ignored until the very last minute, then he’d left a message saying he had to work on the Nyack job, and Nora had spent the day moving office files into a new file cabinet. No turkey.
She knew that on weekdays, while she was at her office, Christopher went to the loft. He’d take his mail, do laundry. Sometimes he left a check to pay for utilities. It seemed that he slept either in his studio or up at the work site in Nyack. That’s what he told her. But a friend of theirs had seen him doing a carpentry job in the West Village. He’d never told Nora about that job; she never saw evidence of it in their joint accounts. What was really strange, though, was that over a year ago Christopher had sworn off doing construction work. He used to do a lot of setup construction in galleries, interior work in lofts and brownstones, but it started getting to him that everybody he worked with was about ten years younger than he was and hopeful. Or else they were fifteen years older than Christopher and stuck for good. So he’d decided to make a big push to get more freelance illustration work. And he did get the illustration jobs. He was good. Mostly, he did drawings for medical journals, and those checks were still coming in, but now he was taking construction jobs again. And what was he doing with the extra money?
His gallery in Connecticut had sold two paintings; the gallery owner had left a message on the answering machine asking him to call back. Nora had “accidentally” erased the message, then (such a scatterbrain!) forgotten to leave a note about the call. Passive-aggressive? Damn right I’m being passive-aggressive. The check from the gallery was in a pile of mail she had to bring for him tonight, but she would ask no questions. If Nora pressed Christopher for details, she might have to reveal something of her own secret life.
By now Nora was getting together with Abe a couple times a week, and she was scared. Not about losing or damaging her marriage, but about the way she was flirting with an edge she’d never dared push against so hard, not wanting to disrupt her pact with the universe and send Christopher’s—and her—secret spilling. I want more, I want more. More Abe? More sex? Nora had no idea, just a solid feeling in her gut that Abe was essential. First of all, there were the particulars of his looks. Whenever an empty moment was available—riding the subway, walking home from work—Nora loved saying to herself, Here’s what Abe looks like.
He had a smashed-in nose that she eventually wanted to ask him about, but something told her he’d then ask about her white hair, and she didn’t want to tell her usual lie: “Delayed grief, my parents’ deaths.” Abe was balding at the forehead. (The only time she’d see him with his hair untied was that rainy Saturday she’d run into him at the restaurant.) A mustache and goatee now (he said he changed his facial hair every winter), and his lips were lost within the darkness of all that busy hair. Small round wire-framed lenses glinted a purplish bruised light. Nice wide hands. Whenever Nora was late to meet him, she’d find him writing with a fountain pen in a small rawhide notebook he carried in his pocket. His right index finger always had a black ink stain.
Eight weeks had passed since their first Thursday-night dinner at Veselka. That night they’d talked from seven-thirty until ten-thirty, ostensibly waiting for Nora’s husband to show up after his class at Cooper Union. By nine-thirty, Abe began to wonder, “Where’s your husband?”
“God, yeah, he’s late. Sometimes when the students are pushing to finish a project he stays on with them. I’m guessing that’s what happened tonight.”
“He sounds like he’s a good teacher,” Abe said.
A little jealous?
So Abe and Nora continued talking. He had told her all about his novel-in-progress, set in L.A. just before and during the McCarthy era, the story of a young man who comes from a long line of secret Jews and a white woman who discovers that a large portion of her genetic inheritance is African. Blond and pale, she’s as much Negro as she is Caucasian, and he’s a Southern Baptist who’s really a Jew, and both the man and the woman are writers in Hollywood doing studio work and living on the fringes of the Red scare. Abe explained to Nora that, as his characters slowly revealed themselves to each other, their love story would be intermingled with sections of their ancestors’ stories, which would explain how and why, generation by generation, these families had systematically hidden who they were.
Nora was intrigued, of course, when Abe talked about his novel, for lots of reasons. And he was fired up by her interest in his work, she could tell. When he was excited, his Southern accent slipped in, and he looked less tired than usual. Outside, in front of the restaurant, saying goodbye, when she shook his hand, he lifted hers and kissed it.
The next Thursday, he was already at their table when Nora arrived. He was in pursuit now. Nora remembered from far back in her life, before Christopher, that it was time for her to tone down her interest, be quiet, let him draw her out. Sunday evening of that week, Nora and Abe went to see Au Revoir les Enfants. (“My husband hates foreign films; I’m always looking for somebody to go to them with me”), and during the movie, Abe’s elbow found Nora’s on the armrest, his black, worn-thin sweater sleeve next to the olive-green sleeve of Nora’s Benetton cardigan, and stayed there, touching.
During these early meetings with Abe, Nora believed that her
ambition was to move slowly, slowly toward making love with him. Every week, like the girlfriends he’d complained to her about, Nora tried to calculate if progress had been made. And she believed she felt no guilt because she was sure by now that Christopher was betraying her in some way. She could imagine nothing other than that he was having an affair. His secret life? Swindling money, taking drugs, selling drugs, gambling, dressing in women’s clothes, joining a cult? She couldn’t imagine any of it. Most likely he was having an affair. Nora was just glad that Christopher was occupied, not paying attention. These days, she felt her loyalty was with Abe. She wasn’t sure what she and Christopher would have to talk about at dinner tonight.
CHRISTOPHER HAD SUGGESTED that they meet at an Indian place they liked on Sixth Street. “I’m tight on cash,” he’d said. Who’re you spending your money on?
Nora got to the restaurant ten minutes early, probably because she did feel a little guilty. Two nights earlier, Abe had complained about needing a place to live. He’d sublet his Brooklyn apartment so he could ease up on freelance work and have more time to write, but his next apartment-sitting gig wasn’t until early January, so Nora had offered Abe the house in Greenport—without consulting Christopher or Kevin. “No one will be there,” Nora had told Abe. “The place’ll be all yours.” And just now, before leaving work to come downtown to meet Christopher, she’d called Abe’s machine and left a message, taking a liberty she’d never taken before in their relationship, assuming he’d want to get together with her: “I haven’t seen Babette’s Feast yet, have you? Thursday night?”
When she looked up from her menu and saw Christopher walking out of the crowd at the tight doorway, she thought, Oh yeah, him, my husband. Christopher was scanning the room for her, a frightened look on his face that made her feel sorry for him, almost. By the time he saw her, came to the table, bent to kiss her on the cheek, her sympathy had switched to anger. What are you hiding from me?
“Jesus,” he said as he sat down, bunching his down jacket and stuffing it under his chair. Right away he drank from Nora’s glass of water. “What a day.”
“Yeah?” He was in work clothes, dusty with sawdust, but, as always, neat. His jeans were belted over his shirt, his sleeves rolled up, the cuffs even and sharply creased.
“Sorry I’m dirty,” he said. “I wanted to change, but I didn’t want to be late.”
“That’s okay.”
He ordered a Rolling Rock. She ordered a Scotch. She handed him his mail. He leafed through quickly. Just as he saw the envelope from the gallery in Connecticut, she said, “I think there’s something there from your gallery.”
“Yeah,” he said, and opened it up. “Great. A check.”
“Big?”
“Big enough. Bigger than nothing. She never called me about this. There was no message from her, was there?” Nora shook her head as she gulped ice water. Christopher said, “That bitch. I made money for her, and she doesn’t even call me.”
“Which piece did she sell?” Nora asked.
“Actually, she sold two.”
“Two? Wow. Well, congratulations.” His beer bottle and her glass of Scotch met for a distracted toast over the squat candle at the center of the table. The waiter walked up. As Christopher ordered nan and a hot chicken curry, Nora thought, He’s not telling me what the paintings sold for.
“And for you?” the waiter asked.
“I’ll have the same curry, but with vegetables, no meat.” When the waiter was gone, Nora told Christopher, “The elevator at the building’s getting stuck mid-floor again.”
“Yeah, I saw that the other day. You want me to call Tomas?”
“Yeah, and we’ll have to figure out how much to give him for Christmas. Last year we gave him a hundred dollars and a bottle of vodka, but that year he watched the loft a lot while we were away.”
“We can’t give him less this year. Another hundred? I’ll pick up a bottle?”
“Fair.” Each time Nora glanced over at Christopher, she expected him to stop being handsome. But even with sawdust in his hair, he couldn’t stop looking good. He was middle-aged, but his blue eyes held so much light they still sparked. Christopher would never escape the trap of his good looks; he’d never be interesting the way Abe was. Nora put her fork down on the edge of her plate of curry. “These vegetables tonight are dead,” she said.
“Yeah, I can see. We got here late. Here, have this chicken. I can’t eat any more.”
They switched plates. He ordered another beer; she, a glass of Chardonnay.
Their Brazilian friend Tina had recently announced her engagement to her Italian boyfriend, and Nora and Christopher talked about that. A filmmaker was negotiating to shoot a movie in one of the lofts in the building next door to Christopher and Nora’s, so they talked about how much money the loft-owners might end up getting, what a traffic mess the filming would be for everyone else on the street.
Christopher reached across the table and took Nora’s hand, wiggled her wedding rings. “You look nice,” he said in a soft, hurt voice. “I miss you.”
She stroked his hand with her thumb, wanting to be kind but not too reassuring. For a quick, strange moment, she worried, What if Abe were to walk in and see this?
Christopher dared to start: “Things are fucked up, Nor.”
“Yeah.” It was only in the pause afterward that she understood all that she had just acknowledged.
“What do you want to do?”
“What do you want to do?” she repeated, testing. If he said separation, would she say okay? If he said divorce, maybe even okay to that?
“Me?” Christopher laced his fingers through her fingers. “I want us to be normal again. I want us to be married.”
“We are married.”
“You know what I mean.”
There was desire in his hand, something she had to stave off. “It seems like—”
“What?” he asked.
“Like we’re both doing—going in these directions. Different. I mean, you seem to have a lot to do and—”
He jumped way ahead of her. “Do you think this is permanent?” He kept looking bruised, hurt, but Nora also realized he was saying nothing to alleviate her doubts, nothing to explain where he was going off to, what he was doing. All he said was what he’d said before. “I don’t want us to not be married.” He pushed aside plates and pulled Nora’s hand and held it tight to his chest. “I love you. Look at me. I love you. I never stop loving you.” When she said nothing, he asked, “Are you okay? Are you—all right these days?” What he meant was, Are you able to sleep, ride the subway, be alone in the loft?
“Yeah, I’m reasonably okay.”
“Do you miss me?”
“Chris—”
“Just answer the question.” He was squeezing two of her fingers.
“I miss—I don’t know. I miss the good part of our marriage. But we both know we can’t go back to how it was. There are problems, locked-in problems—”
“Is Natassia getting better?” He brought it up himself.
“I think so. She’s still upstate with Mary. Mary never seems to have time to talk these days. Giulia’s talked to her a few times. She says they’re okay.”
“Is she still depressed?”
“I think Mary found a therapist for her, but I don’t know a lot. Mary never calls.”
“Do they know what triggered it? With Natassia? Do they know why—”
He had never before asked so many questions in a row about Natassia. It crossed Nora’s mind that maybe he could sense she was feeling cut off from her friends and he was rubbing it in. “If I knew anything about Natassia,” Nora told Christopher, “I’d tell you.”
“I’m not going to let you go, Nora. I’m not giving up.”
He won’t talk about Natassia anymore. “Things have to happen before—”
“I know, Nora, I know. Don’t start.”
How she hated that tone in his voice. “Can I ask, are you in therapy?”
“I’m taking care of things.” He released her hand. “I’m doing what I have to do, and I’m doing it my way.”
Now she remembered exactly why they were not together. “Well, Frank Sinatra, I guess I’m doing it my way, too.”
“Good. Where’s the waiter?” Christopher motioned him over and took the check from him. Nora tried to hand Christopher twenty dollars to pay for her dinner and drinks, but he shrugged her money away. “I got it,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Listen. I need to stay over tonight. The heat’s out at the studio. I’ll use the couch.”
“Yeah, you’ll have to. The bedroom’s a total mess with all my—”
“All I need is the couch. I just need to sleep. I’ll be gone early.”
“Nyack tomorrow?”
He nodded. “Early.”
The way he answered, she knew that his secret, whatever it was, was in Nyack.
As they walked out of the restaurant, he held his hand on her back. Anyone watching would think they were a functioning couple.
AS NORA AND CHRISTOPHER WALKED HOME, the sidewalks were wet and slick, their footsteps echoey and loud, and within the noise Nora said, “I found someone who wants to rent Greenport for Christmas, and I told him okay.”
Christopher was holding her hand as they walked. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about Christmas.”
“Yeah?” Afraid of hearing him say something sad, something like he wanted to spend it as they always did, together, with tons of people around, she said, “I’d kind of like to make separate plans this year.”
“You do?” he asked, but he seemed more surprised than upset.