Falling in Love with Natassia

by Anna Monardo

  “Yeah,” he whispered back. “Let’s go check that out.” He stood and pulled her up by both hands, and, whispering, led her across the room. “This is pretty,” he said. “This is a Nora Conolly bathrobe, huh? Is that what this is? Let’s take this off.”

  They had never been together on an actual bed before. He put a pillow under her legs and Nora stretched her arms out on the sheets, really stretched, tried to relax, but she was working hard to remember the moment even as it was happening. First his hand was on my breast, now my belly, my leg. Finally, she was here with him. Abe. She’d planted condoms in the drawer of the bedside table. There was no question. They would make love. There was nothing to stop them, no reason to stop. Finally, tonight, he’d be inside her. Then they’d sleep together, and wake together, and that would be only the first night, with so many more ahead of them. Merry Christmas.

  Before she got Abe out of his jeans, he fell asleep. “Abe?” Nothing. And then he actually began to snore. Lightly, but still. It’s okay. He didn’t expect me. Of course the first night would be awkward. She tried curling up against him. She tried turning away. Finally, after almost two hours, she got out of the bed, picked up her robe from the floor, went into the little room, to the single bed covered with all her stuff.

  That night was the closest Nora ever got to spending a night in bed with Abe.

  NORA’S GREENPORT CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY was a disaster. All Abe did was work. Every morning, Nora woke early to call her answering service, dreading the possibility that a patient might want to talk to her. Thank God, nothing. Then she checked the morning TV shows to see what was going on with the opening of the Brandenburg Gate. Then she went back to bed. Her day sleep was her best sleep. At night she was awake trying to think of ways to get Abe into bed with her. But he worked and worked, waking at six to get started. First thing, he went straight into the kitchen. While his coffee brewed, he did a twenty-minute meditation, sitting cross-legged in front of a lit candle, ringing chimes and reciting Hebrew phrases. One morning she got up early, on purpose, and asked if she could join him. “Suit yourself,” he said. She sat and crossed her legs inside her long nightgown, keeping her knee close but not touching his, sitting as still as she had learned to sit when she was a painters’ model. But Abe had no interest in looking at her.

  By seven o’clock, he was on his laptop or dealing with the piles of papers spread from the table to the floor. He had lists Scotch-taped to the living-room wall. He made phone calls (remembering every time to use his phone card) to the New York Public Library to check facts. He had manila folders stuffed with biographical information he’d photocopied from files in the Time library. He had one fat folder on 1950s cars because in one paragraph the main character bought a new car. Abe was obsessed with making sure his story was accurate in every way. But when Nora stuck her head into the living room to try to get Abe to come into the den to watch TV with her, he wasn’t interested. “Abe, you need to see this. This is one of the biggest events of our lifetime.”

  “The fact of it is big. The news coverage is soap opera trying to sell soap suds.”

  A few times, including Christmas Day, Nora tried to make a lunch-brunch thing happen, tried to scramble eggs and have toast ready all at the same time, but Abe wasn’t interested. Around one-thirty every afternoon, he collapsed for a nap, no more than an hour. Waking, he’d come find her and ease her into the big bedroom and they’d mess around on the bed a bit (Nora always ended up shirtless, but he never even got unzipped), no longer than fifteen minutes, then back to work. Saturday, Sunday, Monday passed, and he didn’t stop to shave. His kisses began to scratch. Did it make sense for Nora to be intimate with someone she didn’t know well enough to tell, “You need to shave”? He had not yet asked about her hair, why it was white. Maybe he simply wasn’t interested in her.

  When she wasn’t napping or watching CNN, Nora tried to read the professional journals she’d brought with her, but her focus slipped every few sentences. She began writing out Christmas cards but got no farther than the “F” s in her address book, and she included no newsy notes this year, just a sloppy signature: N & Chr. Wherever Christopher was, Nora was sure he was having a more successful infidelity than she was.

  On Friday, Abe woke from his nap, joined her on the couch in the den, and said, “You’re not having much fun. I’m lousy company. I tried to warn you, Nora Conolly.”

  “Abe Shulevitz,” Nora said, “it’s all right.” Not only was the guy talented and sexy, he was observant and intuitive, too. Nora had let herself become another of his women, smart girls who knew that romance with Abe wasn’t going anywhere but who couldn’t just write him off.

  “Let’s talk,” Abe said. Nora stood, ready to head for the bedroom with the big bed, but he tugged her back down onto the couch. “No,” he said, “let’s talk.” Embarrassing. “First, though, I’m making tea. You want tea, Nora Conolly? A beer?”

  “Tea’s good.”

  As he brought her a hot mug, she tried to pretend that he’d been offering these small attentions all week.

  “I’m thinking,” he said, setting his tea mug on a coaster (Kevin never did that), scrunching up next to her again, “that I’m some way that you didn’t expect. You’re not happy with me.” He lifted her legs up onto his lap, his favorite talking position.

  “Abe, you told me you’d be working. The reason we’re here is so you can work. It’s not your responsibility to keep me entertained.”

  “Being around a writer with a deadline is a lousy way to spend your holiday. Nora Conolly, if you want to head back to the city—”

  “Do you want me to—”

  “I knew that’s what you’d hear. No, I don’t want you to go, but if there are things you could be doing for New Year’s that would be more fun for you…”

  He really did have very beautifully shaped hands. She was staring at them resting on her leg. “I haven’t had time off like this in…I don’t know. I really needed this time to just, you know, relax.”

  “But you don’t seem too relaxed. I don’t think you’re sleeping at night. Missing your husband for Christmas? Your brother?”

  “My brother, yeah. I feel bad about my brother.” God, Abe was even offering her a face-saver. “It’s always hard to come here. Holidays are hard.”

  “Had nice Christmases here when you were a little girl? I bet you did. How’d you all do for Christmas, the Nora Conolly family?”

  “We didn’t do holidays.”

  “What? You Conollys are heathen Jews or something?”

  “If only. When I was a kid, I envied my two Jewish friends. Their families got together on Christmas Day and went to the movies and out for Chinese, and at night the parents played bridge and the kids got to stay up late. But our family didn’t do Christmas, and we didn’t do the alternative thing. We didn’t have relatives, and my parents weren’t going to hang out with other people’s relatives. Mom and Daddy were both estranged from their families.”

  “No aunties and uncles and gramps around? No Conolly cousins? Hell, I pictured you people like the Kennedys, out there all dressed up and tossing the pigskin.”

  “Kevin and Mom and I always tried to see who could sleep in latest on Christmas Day. Daddy always got up early, to check the market in Asia.”

  “No church?”

  “Church? My father was no joiner of anything, especially not something like a church, where some other guy would be in charge and telling him what to do. Never.”

  “Rotten parents. They gave you nothing to reject and rebel against.”

  “Well, I mean, they didn’t totally ignore it. Mom always gave us some books for Christmas, or a new game or something. And, you know, now that you mention it, I remember one year going to Mass with her. I was probably eight or nine, that age when girls are so tied up with their mothers. Maybe she was feeling nostalgic, or maybe she was just bored, but all of a sudden, on Christmas Eve, she says, ‘Who’s going to Midnight Mass with me?’ So I went. Oh, and
I remember I didn’t want to stop reading the new book she’d bought me, so we sat in the little room for people with crying babies. Since it was so late, it was just the two of us in there, along with this young mother from out of town with her baby, and we started talking to her, and she ended up crying to us about her in-law problems, and Mommy spent the whole time giving her advice.”

  “You call your mama Mommy. That’s nice,” Abe said.

  “Kevin does it, too. We can’t seem to call her anything else.” It drove Christopher crazy, but Nora didn’t mention that to Abe.

  “Tell me about her, your mommy. Tall, I bet, huh?”

  “Oh, tall, yes. Very, very. Lots of authority.”

  “Like you,” Abe said.

  “Me? Ha!”

  “No ha! Nora Conolly, you walk in and the place takes notice. You know that, ma’am, you can’t pretend you don’t.”

  “Yeah, we’re tall….” She loved this opportunity Abe was giving her to talk about Mommy in the present tense, and he was giving her all the time in the world.

  “Daddy?” Abe asked.

  “Oh yes. Six-three. Like Kevin.”

  “Mommy, Daddy, Nora, Kevin Conolly,” Abe chanted.

  Abe’s eyes were smiling, covering her not with sex but with affection. A few days earlier, for one crazy moment, Nora had considered telling Abe about Natassia—about France—just as a way to maybe spark something intimate between them, but instead, now, Abe was making it happen, and she heard herself say, “Did I ever tell you my father spent time in jail? For embezzling.”

  Abe’s eyes behind the glinty glasses widened. “I’d have remembered that.”

  “Yeah. Mommy met him right when he got out. I guess that’s why she was always protective of him.”

  “A convicted embezzler and he needed her protection?”

  “Oh, Daddy was harmless, but I think jail made him kind of, I don’t know, a hermit. Maybe even a little crotchety. And Mommy just sort of, well, kept things running. So he could stay private. People thought—Well, he was a snob.”

  “And who was it your daddy stole from?”

  “A company.” After the fire, Nora had never told anyone but a few therapists this story. Of the people who knew Nora now, Mary and Christopher were the only ones who knew about Daddy’s jail time. “Actually, he stole from his family’s company.”

  “From his own people? I can see why he needed protection.” He aimed a finger-gun at his head.

  They both laughed. Nora had never been able to amuse anyone before with stories about her family. She started laughing harder.

  “What?” Abe asked.

  “I just remembered this one Christmas, a new neighbor came over with a tray of cookies. My father answered the door because she kept ringing it—usually he never answered the doorbell, never. And she handed him this big tray of homemade cookies, and he didn’t know what to do with it. He said, ‘Why are you bringing these here?’ And she said, ‘I figured you had the Christmas songs on so loud you didn’t hear the bell, and I didn’t want the squirrels getting these goodies if I left them on the porch.’ For years we laughed about that word, ‘goodies.’ He must have made her so nervous—Daddy was extremely handsome, even when he was older—she kept saying, ‘Enjoy the goodies.’ Daddy just left the tray on the bench in the hallway, and no one moved it. It’s not like we had company over or anything. All during Christmas break, Kevin ate cookies off the tray in the hallway. Kevin. I remember him buying his own Girl Scout cookies from his friend’s sister, because Daddy wouldn’t let anybody answer the door for the neighborhood girls.” Nora kept laughing.

  “Nora Conolly, that story makes me sadder than anything else you’ve told me about your family, including that fire.”

  In a few months’ time, Nora would come to feel the sadness of the apart way her family lived, the shared shame that held them hostage, but that afternoon in Greenport with Abe she laughed. “Abe Shulevitz, if you dare use my family in your fiction…”

  “I’m using it all. ‘The Tales of the Conolly Clan.’ ” Abe tickled her, and Nora wrestled him to the floor, where they rolled and played—just played— for a good long time. Until Abe said, “Time for your commentary on the news. Don’t miss it. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “You don’t want a sandwich or something?”

  That tickle fest was pretty much the high point of Nora’s holiday.

  CHAPTER 31 :

  DECEMBER 1989–JANUARY 1990

  On New Year’s Eve, close to noon, Mary and Natassia were at a crowded coffeehouse on the Upper West Side. They’d managed to nab a sofa way in back, where Mary could smoke, with a coffee table where they could spread out all their papers and their mugs. “Okay, Mom. Once again, what is the most important thing to tell your students when you’re teaching them how to dance? Be clear.”

  “Move. I tell them to move.”

  Natassia was biting into her second éclair, licking cream off of her fingers. Mary was thinking it probably would have been better to hire somebody to write the job papers rather than submit to this drawn-out, humiliating collaboration with Natassia, who, seemingly freed of her BF yearnings, was brattier each day they spent in New York. With sticky fingers, the kid typed into the laptop, My teaching philosophy is based, first of all, on kinetic principles. Mary read over Natassia’s shoulder. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yes, you did. What’s the second-biggest thing you tell them?”

  For the past week, Mary, Natassia, and Kevin had talked continually about beginning the work—after the next meal, after the next coffee, after the next nap. Mary had called Japan, then Thailand, to track down her company, and she’d had some success. Everyone she’d reached was happy to fax a letter. The company, however, had no way of coming up with old reviews. Natassia told Mary, “Lincoln Center’s dance library will have all of it.” So they’d gone to the Upper West Side, where they found the library not open; then they had landed in this coffeehouse with the expensive pastries, which, Mary understood now, had been Natassia’s destination all along. The hot chocolates were almost three bucks each; Natassia was sipping her second.

  “Okay, Mom, what else do you tell your students?”

  “I tell them, Dance big. Fill the space. Make yourself big.”

  Natassia wrote: I introduce, early on, the principle of spatial challenge, so that my students are, from the start, involved in dual problem-solving, movement intersecting with space, a challenge which increases in complexity as their abilities augment.

  “You’re amazing,” Mary said. “You could quit school and get paid to write this kind of stuff.”

  Natassia was not flattered. “Name the exercises.” Mary was digging into the bottom of her backpack. “Mom, it’s really, really bad to chew nicotine gum if you’re smoking.”

  “Not now, Natassia. Don’t even think about starting in with the lectures until this thing is done and written.”

  “The job won’t do you any good if you’re dead from lung cancer.”

  “I’ll need the medical insurance for my chemo. Come on, write.”

  THAT EVENING in the loft, Mary and Natassia continued on the job papers while Kevin was in the kitchen cleaning, stuffing, and trussing six squabs according to the directions in one of Christopher’s cookbooks. “Sorry this is taking a while,” he called out to Mary and Natassia, who had the laptop set up at one end of the dining table; the other end was set with Christopher and Nora’s good linens and heavy Italian ceramic plates.

  “No problem,” Mary called back. Natassia typed while Mary described her usual warm-up. “I start dégagés. Right foot front, and side, and back, and side. Left foot…” Mary glanced up at the kitchen counter, where Kevin was holding a tiny squab, moving its tiny legs, and mouthing, “Front and side and back…”

  Mary burst out laughing.

  Natassia looked up.

  Kevin jumped the squab into the air, calling out, “And changement! And now left! And front and side and…”

/>   THE LITTLE SQUABS tasted okay, but they weren’t anything great. That’s what Mary thought. Of course she told Kevin it was all delicious, but she couldn’t help thinking that if he’d made one big fat regular chicken they’d have leftovers. Collapsed into a dining-room chair, Kevin was still wearing his big wraparound apron slopped up with food. He was overheated and sweating, and he pulled a dish towel out of his back pocket and wiped his moist freckled head. He looked more like a mechanic who’d come out from under a car than someone who’d been cooking tiny birds. Kevin didn’t seem like a kid anymore, but his body was sure in better shape than the bodies of a lot of guys Mary’s age.

  About the squab, Natassia made a fuss—in French: “C’est formidable!”

  “Sampietro would’ve never pulled it off.”

  For dessert, Kevin had made chocolate crème brûlée, which, he and Natassia decided, they would torch at the stroke of midnight. Already it was ten o’clock. Mary stood up from the table and said she’d clean the kitchen. Kevin and Natassia went to the sofa to resume their Scrabble game. They’d been playing back-to-back Scrabble games since Christmas Eve.

  “Hey, we’re starting a new game pretty soon,” Kevin called into the kitchen. “Come play with us. It’s better with three.”

  “I’d rather scrub dirty pots,” Mary said.

  She heard Natassia tell Kevin, in a low voice, “She’s not much of a word person.” And then Kevin must have said something in Mary’s defense, because Mary heard Natassia say, “I’m not dissing my mother, I’m just saying…”

  Kevin just did not let Natassia get away with being a brat. Probably he was the person they should write into their wills to be Natassia’s guardian. The guardian issue had never got resolved. How easy it had seemed to Mary a few months ago, just last summer. Now the thought of Natassia in anyone’s care but Mary’s was—not acceptable, as Cather would say. Not even Ross was acceptable anymore. In an emergency? Especially in an emergency. Maybe Mary should think about asking Kevin to step in if she and Ross croaked. Kevin really did seem to know what he was doing.