Falling in Love with Natassia

by Anna Monardo

  You can get something done talking to Candice. That Saturday morning of their coffee date, Nora felt calmed enough to go down into the subway. Sitting in an uncrowded car on her way uptown, leafing through Street News to distract herself, Nora realized she’d have to be a little bit organized about this visit. In the past, she’d always had Candice’s full attention, but now there were babies. Two of them. Still, Candice was not the kind of person to let babies get in the way of an important talk.

  WHEN NORA REACHED the entrance to the bakery, she looked up and a huge pram was less than half a block away and being pushed by Candice, who was wearing a leopard-print fake-fur coat. Her hair was now several different shades of red and looked like a babysitter’s—pulled up in a ponytail on the top of her head and flopping over to one side. “Hi, sweetie!” Candice called loudly down the sidewalk.

  Nora never raised her voice in public. She smiled and waited until the pram was in front of her, and Candice was close enough for a hug. Nora wasn’t a big social hugger or kisser, but she found herself relieved to hug Candice, the first person she’d had physical contact with in two weeks. Nora made a move to look inside the pram, but Candice put her finger to her lips and whispered, “Our only chance to talk is if they keep sleeping.”

  And without knowing why she was saying it, Nora lied, “I have a cold anyway. I shouldn’t get too close to them.” And then, because she felt guilty about her lie, she said, “Wow. What a coat!” She didn’t remember Candice dressing like such a teenager before.

  “Isn’t it fun? My sister-in-law wore it over from Paris when she came for Christmas. I made her leave it here when she left. One of her boyfriends designed it.”

  Inside, as they stood waiting to be seated, Candice said, “It’s good to see you, Nor. You look great.”

  “You’re being kind. I’m big as a house.”

  “You. Are. Not—”

  A waiter in a crisp shirt interrupted, spoke French as he led them to a table. Two old-lady customers fussed over the pretty pram and tried to look in, but Candice walked on, leading with her chin. At the table, Candice told the waiter, in French, she wanted to be farther from the window—it was too cold for the babies. Just after they were seated at an interior table, she called the waiter over. “The overhead fan, please, could it be turned off? The babies,” Candice said with a pinched worried face, “the draft.”

  “Oui, oui, madame.”

  The minute her coat was off, Nora covered her own lap with the big cloth napkin, hoping to hide her hips. Candice had always had a skinny little body, stiff and not too appealing, but today she was wearing leggings and, boldly, a short-cropped sweater. Nora used to be able to dress that way. No more. Candice fussed with blankets and bags, finally took her seat, and shook her head, her ponytail spinning to the other side. She put her hand over Nora’s hand on the table. “How are you?”

  “These babies. They’re beautiful, Candice.” In truth, the twins weren’t great-looking. Pimply, scaly. As Nora turned toward the pram, there was a funny smell. Something medicinal. But the clothes were showpieces: tiny hand-knit sweaters with pearl buttons, fleecy tights with ruffled bottoms. It was an odd, European way of dressing babies that Nora would never have thought of. She had a block about remembering the babies’ names, which were French and referred back to Greek goddesses. Lots of vowels. Christopher’s baby was named something like Ronald McDonald, and it was extremely likely, highly possible, that if Nora called Christopher and said, “I need you right now,” he could say, “I can’t come right now. My baby needs me.”

  This visit with Candice was a big mistake. I wish I weren’t here.

  “So how’s Christopher?” Candice asked. “And the loft? And—”

  “Not good. With Christopher, I mean. The loft is fine.”

  “Christopher?” The features of Candice’s face, especially as she listened, were tiny and squished tight, and Christopher had once said it might not be easy for her to hook up with someone again, implying she wasn’t pretty enough.

  Candice was whispering, so Nora did, too. “It’s not Christopher. It’s me.”

  “What?” Candice took a guess: “You met somebody?”

  “Sort of.”

  Candice brushed her bangs away from her tiny eyes.

  “He’s a writer,” Nora said, as if this information were clarifying.

  “Journalist?” Candice asked, hopeful. Then the waiter was at the table, and Candice, in French, ordered a café au lait, insisting on decaf, and a croissant, insisting that it be hot. She told Nora she really should have a hot croissant, too, because they were the best in town, so Nora let Candice order for her, and she promised herself she would not, under any circumstances, say the name Abe.

  “He’s a novelist.”

  “Oh no,” Candice said.

  “What?”

  “Well, just that…Remember Greta in grad school who had that guy? He never did finish his book, and he used up all her money.”

  “But, no, this guy,” Nora said, “it wasn’t serious. It’s not serious.”

  “It’s still going on?”

  “It—The truth is, it never took off. It was an attraction. It went nowhere. He is, he was, a symptom, I guess. He’s not the real issue.”

  “Well, that’s good. You sound really clear….”

  Nora allowed the conversation to go on this way, as if her problems really were about another man, which was easy, and freed Nora up to take in deeply all that she was observing. For example, Candice, good listener as always, maintained solid eye contact, but her hand never left the side of the pram. One baby flinched, woke, but before she even completed her first cry, Candice had the baby up and out, without disturbing the sleeping twin. It was as if Candice were playing a skilled game of jacks or Pick-Up Sticks. Her foot kept the pram in a slow rock while she adjusted the awake baby onto her shoulder. Her kisses on her baby’s head were as unconscious as breath.

  The baby didn’t want the shoulder. “Does this guy, this novelist, know? Do you think he senses your detachment from the situation? Is he pressing for more?” Candice’s moves were deft, getting a cashmere shawl around her shoulders, reaching in to unbutton her sweater, lifting, lowering, and within the time it took to complete a sentence, the baby was nursing and quiet, and Nora watched her skinny pale fist unfurl as she relaxed.

  The one time Nora had been pregnant, for six weeks when she was nineteen years old, her breasts had got enormous and they hurt enormously. She could still remember the particular quality of the bruised ache within her breasts, the way hot pain radiated outward, into her clothes and beyond, so that when her boyfriend even tried to come near her Nora crossed her arms in front of herself, made a shield. He showed up loyally, every night, at her apartment very late (he was studying to take the LSATs). “Nora, let’s get married, I’m not kidding. I love you. We can do it.” The ache in her breasts was so much more powerful than his voice. Now she had to stop a minute to remember his full name—a clear indication that she’d made the right choice all those years ago. She couldn’t even remember exactly how it was when they broke up; what she remembered was sitting in a class one day and realizing that her breasts no longer felt bruised, no longer felt like anything. That’s when she had to go to student services to ask about counseling.

  Nora asked Candice, “Does it hurt?”

  “What? This?” She nodded toward the baby on her chest. “No. Not now. At first they weren’t latching on right and it hurt like hell. But now it’s okay.”

  “What’s it feel like, physically?”

  Candice hesitated. “I don’t know. Like nothing.” Pause. “That’s not true. It’s a nice little tug. Suckling. It feels just like that. What do you call that, onomatopoeia, when the word sounds exactly like what it’s describing? But I do it so many times a day.”

  “How many?”

  “Hundreds. Thousands.” They laughed. The baby fussed, and Candice shifted her onto a shoulder. “I don’t know, but, no, it doesn’t hurt.
What hurts is their crying in the middle of the night.”

  “They cry a lot, huh?”

  “It goes on for hours sometimes. Oops.” The baby spit up on Candice’s shoulder. There was a smell. “First you feed one, then the other.”

  “How do you do it all, Candice?”

  “Well, I’d be lost without my mother. She comes in from New Jersey a lot. My sister comes over a lot. Then Jacques’s sister was here for a while. God, I hated to see her go—she’s just a stitch. And I have a nanny every afternoon for five hours. But even with all that help, I just end up weeping sometimes.”

  Weeping, suckling. Ancient words, Biblical language. Widow.

  That woman in Nyack, Christopher was probably seeing her breasts all the time.

  “When she’s done feeding, do you want to hold her?” Candice asked.

  “No!” Nora said very quickly. “I better not. My cold. Germs.” She had never so intensely wanted something and at the same time not wanted it.

  “Oh, okay,” Candice said, and to the baby she said, “Next time Auntie Nora will hold you, next time. We need to see Auntie Nora more often.”

  Nora had disappointed Candice. Forgive me, Nora wanted to say, but I’m one of those women who come along sometimes in the history of women, an aberration who is just not able to latch on.

  AT THE END of their visit, out on the sidewalk in front of the bakery, Nora and Candice spent ten minutes remembering last things they wanted to tell each other while Candice rocked the pram. “I saw your friend the dancer a few months ago. On Broadway. God, her daughter’s all grown up now.”

  “Natassia.” Nora hadn’t said the name aloud to anyone in weeks. “Yeah.”

  “She’s always fascinated me. Just the level of excellence—”

  “Natassia or Mary?”

  “Mary, with her dance. I remember you telling me how she performs even when she’s sick and injured and all that. I think of her sometimes now, with the babies, when they’ve kept me up all night and I have to wake up and do the next day. She danced jet-lagged, all of it. The contradiction. Her work’s all about body, and she goes about it as if she has no body. Nora, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, just—”

  And then Candice’s voice shifted; she reached a hand and clutched Nora’s coat sleeve. “I’ve missed talking to you. Nora, I really need these talks with you.”

  As always, Candice’s ability to know what she needed, and to ask for it, muted Nora. “I really like our talks, too,” Nora said, but in a way that revealed nothing.

  Then the babies were crying, first one, then the other. “Oh dear, I’ve relied on their patience for too long,” Candice said, “I should go.”

  Nora, panicked, hugged her purse to her chest.

  “We’ll do this again?” Candice said. “Call me?” She was turning the pram around.

  “Wait,” Nora said. “I have to tell you something. I, this week, I made a really bad mistake in a session.” Candice’s face pinched with worry again. “With a patient,” Nora said. “I yelled at her, I completely rejected a decision she’d made. A big decision. A bad one, but still—”

  “Oh, Nora, I’m sorry.” Both babies were crying now.

  “You better go,” Nora said.

  Candice leaned on the handle of the pram. “There are no mistakes in therapy, Nora, there’s just information, remember that?”

  “What I keep remembering,” Nora said, “is Winnicott—if there is a mistake, it’s the therapist’s.”

  Baby cries were all over the sidewalk; passersby were trying to look into the pram. Nora was hugging her purse tightly, afraid to let Candice go, but also embarrassed about the noise. Candice really did need to get going. “You’re being too hard on yourself, Nora. You just need to sit with it, like with any countertransference, and figure out, you know…”

  “What was going on with me.”

  “Right, what was going on inside that moment for you.” Candice had never actually worked at her profession, but somehow she’d managed to turn education into wisdom. “And then, Nora, you’ll talk with the patient, work it out.”

  “If she comes back.” One baby howled, then another baby. “Go, Candice, go.”

  “You know what, call me, later today. I’ll try to make sure we have a minute to talk. We should talk about this more.” Candice offered a goodbye hug, but Nora didn’t move her purse or open her arms, so Candice tossed a kiss into the air. The two women began walking away from each other in opposite directions. “Let’s get together again soon,” Candice called.

  And Nora nodded and waved.

  And then she turned away, letting her friend get lost in the sidewalk crowds, letting Candice become just another wealthy new mother with a nice stroller. It had happened with other friends, and now it would happen with Candice. Spending time with people who had babies left you feeling lonelier than you had before. Nora stopped at a corner and waited for a bus to race through a yellow light. As she stepped out into the street, a bunch of teenagers were approaching her, crossing the street from the other direction. About seven of them, city kids, all different skin tones and hair textures, talking loud. “My mom’s going to kill my ass when she finds out,” a girl said, laughing, and they all laughed, all of them involved in the same big conversation, and a boy from far back in the crowd said, “Your mama. My uncle, man…” When they intersected with Nora, she felt a little panic, the need to lower her sunglasses from the top of her head to cover her eyes. Young Mary had known how to be part of a group like that. Even Kevin. But Nora had always been off somewhere, alone with some exclusive boyfriend, some guy who kept telling her she was pretty, beautiful, great, the best. Seventh grade, eighth grade, high school. Even now, the group had ignored her, passed around Nora like water around a rock.

  A FEW HOURS LATER, when Nora finally got back to the loft after walking all the way from uptown, there was one message on the answering machine. Slipping off her coat and scarf, she hit the red button and heard, “Nora, hi, this is Lotte Stein.” Natassia? “It’s David, Nora.” Lotte was crying. “All of a sudden, after a lunch meeting today, back at his desk. It happened in a second. I’m reeling here, Nora, I’m just…” Lotte was crying hard into the phone. “The doctor said there was nothing anyone could have done. Nora, please, I have to ask you to do something for me. Would you, please, go up to Hiliard to tell Mary and Natassia? I want them to get this news in person. I’ll pay for you to take a car service up there. It’ll take you a couple hours. But, please, go soon. Tonight. Before Ross gets it in his head to call Natassia from an airport. He’s on his way home now. I wouldn’t bother you with this, Nora, but I don’t know what this news will do to Natassia. What’s going to happen to our girl when she hears her poppy died?”

  CHAPTER 36 :

  MARCH

  1990

  Christopher was in Grand Central Station and had just bought his train tickets. The weather still wasn’t good enough to start going up to Nyack on his motorcycle, which would have been so much faster. He was thinking about that, walking away from the ticket window, when his eye caught a woman in a black wool coat who looked like Nora. It wasn’t Nora. But then, five steps farther, just at the base of the big marble staircase, he walked right toward Nora—actually her—in her good camel-hair coat. She was carrying her leather purse and a canvas bag. She was the classiest woman in the crowd.

  “Nora.” She saw him just as he was saying her name. Their quick halt sent people spilling to the left and right of them.

  As soon as they had hugged, he realized that something serious was wrong, or Nora wouldn’t have let him touch her. He began to ask, “Where—”

  “I’ve been up at Hiliard.” Her voice was full of troubles.

  “Is Natassia—”

  “Fine. It’s David, Christopher. He died. David died. I had to go up there last night to tell Mary and Natassia. Lotte didn’t want them to hear it on the phone.”

  “David? David Stein’s dead? No. Wait—”

&
nbsp; “Instant. In his office.”

  “My God. Is Natassia—? Wow, she was close to him.”

  “I can’t even tell you—Christopher, I need to talk to you. Now.”

  He made a quick decision that wasn’t really a decision—of course, if Nora wanted to talk, he’d talk. “Sure, come on. I’ll buy you lunch.”

  “But”—she looked up at the huge schedule board, where the track numbers and departure times and town names were flipping—“your train?”

  “I’ll catch my next one. Come on, let’s get a drink.”

  THEY SAT at a bar where it was dark and the lunch-rush crowd was thinning out. It was after two o’clock. They waited for their beers, though Christopher knew he wouldn’t be able to drink his. He needed to find a pay phone so he could call Denise to tell her he’d be getting a later train. He needed to sit still and take in Nora.

  She looked more afraid of him than angry at him, and her fear of him made him so sad he almost wished to see her angry again. As soon as she unbuttoned her coat, Christopher could see she’d gained more weight, and he tried to imagine her pregnant, but that game didn’t feel good anymore. Baby Don was too real now. Christopher was on his way up to Nyack for one of his twice-weekly trips. He was building a half-bath in the basement of Denise’s house. Her original baby-care plan hadn’t worked. The Haitian woman she’d planned to swap child care with had made too many comments about Denise’s mothering, and Denise had chewed her out. So now Denise had a nanny living in the house, which was working fairly well. Except they really needed another bathroom. The nanny was a young girl, also Haitian, barely twenty, but smart and breezy with Baby Don, just what was needed in that house to even out the unpredictable weather that was Denise. The girl smelled of patchouli. Christopher still couldn’t pronounce her name. She wore skintight clothes over a great little body, and he wished he could ask her to model for him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d painted a whole painting. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had sex. Those weeks in January, that early-spring thaw between him and Nora when he was back in the loft. Until that stupid Sunday he got the stupid idea to work on their stupid taxes. Now he looked at Nora, who was on the verge of crying. Let’s stop this, he wanted to say; he wanted to insist, No more separation. You’re my wife, you’re the person I love, we have to stop this.