It was Olivia, just calling to say hello. It was not her usual behavior; she generally liked our brief separations— “little mental-health breaks,” she called them—and she wasn’t fond of the telephone. But we had parted on bad terms—even the very next day, I couldn’t remember why— and she was showing me a kind of mercy by ringing my room.
“I miss you,” she said.
“You do?”
“Please, Sam, don’t milk it. Anyhow, Amanda’s right here.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“She wants to say hello.”
Mandy got on the phone. She sounded shrill and uncertain, as if I were very far away and she had no idea when I might return. Remorse over my night of psychic unfaithfulness barked like temple dogs within me as I pictured Amanda and Olivia in our humble, cheerful country kitchen. I told Amanda I loved her, reminded her to pay attention in school, have fun, et cetera, and then asked if I could speak to Michael—why have but two arrows pierce my scheming heart when there was a third in the quiver? Mandy didn’t answer, just passed the phone back to her mother.
“What’s up?” asked Olivia. My petulance a few moments before had turned her off.
“I was just asking Mandy to put Michael on.”
Silence.
“How long have you been living here, Sam?” she asked, at last. “Michael goes to school at seven-thirty.”
“Oh, right.”
“‘Oh, right.’ That’s it?”
“What do you want? I forgot.”
“You forgot. This is what I do. This is my life. When you forget, or pretend to forget, it’s just a way of saying you think my life is crap.”
“Oh, Christ, Olivia, do we really have to do this? Remember when we used to say our family seal should read, ‘In Each Other’s Arms or at Each Other’s Throats’? Well, it isn’t charming anymore.”
“It was never charming, Sam. You’re the one who can’t bear normal life. You’re the one who is addicted to crisis.”
And so forth. It was just a low-level skirmish, no big deal; marriage is full of them. But as I kept up my end of the match, I realized I was experiencing a certain lifting of my spirits. Olivia was making it easy to justify my night of dreaming of Nadia and whatever was about to happen later this morning. I welcomed this unpleasantness; I could use it like a blade to cut the cord that tethered me to Olivia and home.
When I arrived at III, Aunt Lorraine was waiting for me. One of her employees had found some fascinating Air Force photos of strange airborne objects, recently declassified, and she wanted to give them to me personally.
“I really appreciate your getting into this yourself,” I said. “But I hate to take up any more of your time. Why don’t I work with that woman named Nadia? I think that would be a lot easier.”
Don’t look away, I told myself. Just keep your gaze right in her face.
“Are you sure?” she asked, smiling. She had a faraway look in her small violet eyes, as if she were already thinking of all the long-ignored little tasks she could see to in this sudden space of open time I had granted her.
“If I need your help, I’ll be sure to find you,” I said. I liked the way that sounded: smooth, confident, worldly. This love affair, not even beginning to begin, was already doing me a world of good.
Most of my memories of flirtation and courtship were from my adolescence, when courtship was fraught with anxiety, awkward silences, mistimed lunges in which my lips ended up on the nubby upholstery of a hastily vacated sofa cushion. But I was older now; I was married. It was like playing poker when you don’t mind losing a few hundred bucks—the cards just seem to come to you.
I worked that day with Nadia. I allowed my hand to brush hers as we passed old photographs back and forth. I rolled up my shirtsleeves and let her see my slender, muscular forearms, the very best part of my otherwise fading physique. I talked casually about my wife, took out wallet- sized snaps of Michael and Mandy, though I didn’t show the one of Olivia, because it made her look so pretty and I didn’t want to frighten Nadia off.
After the first morning’s work, I took her to lunch. I made her laugh. I talked about how I had moved out of New York for the kids’ sake (leaving out how I couldn’t afford to live here any longer) and then the shock of finding how much my kids hated living in the country. I knew how to tell this story so it wasn’t so pathetic. I could make it funny; I’d been telling it to city friends for a year, and it had evolved into a satire on the hopelessness of good intentions, a kind of post-yuppie Mr. Blandings. Yet with Nadia I made the move to Leyden what I dared not make of it with older, savvier friends. I tried to turn it into an opportunity. There were stories in that river town, ghosts of old Dutch settlers; there were eccentrics, unsolved murders, natural wonders that made the heart leap. She believed me; she believed I could write about these things. She saw something in me, something of value. And then, even though we had begun to run out of conversation while we waited for our camomile tea, I asked her if she wanted to have a drink after work and she answered with a shrug and said okay, and her gesture was so casual and her “okay” so soft that it made me think she would have said yes to anything.
I did not rush things. My sense of deliberation was not merely tactical. I was mortally afraid of committing adultery. I was afraid of detection. I was afraid of falling in love, of her falling in love with me. I did not want anyone to be hurt; especially right there, in the beginning, the idea of anyone suffering pain because of my errant emotions made me want to slit my wrists.
Yet I did not want the flirtation to end. In a way, I needed to flirt with Nadia much more than I needed to go to bed with her. I craved her attentiveness, that sensitivity to nuance and gesture you get when things are just beginning, when the ear ransacks every word for a hidden meaning.
At the end of the week, I invited Nadia to Leyden. “A country weekend,” I said to her. “It’ll do you a world of good.” (I worried about her, ostensibly; I was older, compassionate.) And then I added, “Olivia and I promise not to quarrel while you’re around.” I faulted myself for saying that: it was so obvious, so coarse—I had been expertly flicking little smooth pebbles into the pool, and that last lob was a brick.
We took the train up together from Penn Station. The tracks ran along the river, and the water was a mirror full of clouds. I sat Nadia near the window; she rested her long, narrow feet on top of her black canvas bag. A sack of woe, I thought, in a moment of prescience. I pointed out sights along the river: a nesting place for swans, a ruined castle once owned by a munitions king, the Vanderbilt house. I was chattering away, trying to transform myself from suitor to tutor. I loved talking to her.
“What is it like to be married for such a long time?” she asked me, as the train neared Leyden.
“Tricky,” I said. “You can so clearly see through each other that you in all decency must stop looking, and then when you stop looking the person changes, and then you’re living with a stranger.”
“My parents were always so happy together,” she said. “My dad ate only fruit and took about fifty vitamins every day, just so he could be vigorous for Mom. They made love all the time. The foil wraps from his condoms were everywhere. Sometimes he’d just put his spoon down in the middle of dinner and look at her. And Mom would make this funny fake scream and say ‘Oh no!’ Now, half the girls I know, they can’t even get their boyfriends to touch them.”
“I’m from the past,” I said. “The deep past. And we men from the deep past would never dream of turning a woman down.”
“Because she might be the last one?” Nadia asked, smiling.
“No, because it might hurt her feelings.”
Olivia met us at the station. Nadia sat in the backseat and Olivia conversed with her, glancing continually at Nadia through the rearview mirror, as we made our way home. I saw in Olivia’s eyes that she was studying Nadia. Olivia had, or knew of, no reason to distrust me, but I hadn’t quite realized how beautiful and profoundly sexual Nadia was, until she
was in the car with Olivia and me. As soon as we arrived at the house, Olivia recruited Nadia to accompany her to an estate auction in an old house along the river, a peeling Victorian that had been the home of a woman called Bonnie Beaumont.
“That sounds like the name of a young, beautiful woman, with her blond hair braided up in a French twist,” I said. “Or she runs a chic little shop at Lexington and Eighty-first.”
Olivia looked at me strangely. Calm down, her eyes said.
“Bonnie Beaumont died at the age of ninety-three,” said Olivia. “Her chic days were behind her, if they ever existed. But she had some good rugs.” She turned to Nadia, who was listening to us, with her back against the kitchen counter, her thin arms folded over her breasts. “I work for a guy who runs a string of antique stores called Past Perfect. I can spend up to five thousand dollars without calling for his okay.”
Olivia and Nadia got home in the late afternoon; I was frantically trying to prepare a brilliant dinner. I wouldn’t let either of them come into the kitchen.
“The Texans were there in their goddamned pickup trucks,” Olivia said, throwing herself heavily into a wing-back chair. “They bid up everything. They don’t have the slightest idea of what anything is worth. They just know what they want. It distorts the market.”
“You got your rugs, though,” I said.
“I paid too much.” Olivia looked queasy, as if realizing everything in her life was a little bit off.
Nadia sat holding a cup of tea with both hands. She looked sleepy, melancholy; she was dressed in a loose- fitting sweater, checked wool pants. In fact, she looked rather dowdy, which managed to excite me—I took it as a disguise behind which she hid the rich, radiant fact of her desire.
“It was so sad, seeing everything she owned being sold,” said Nadia.
“She doesn’t need it any longer,” said Olivia. “And she died without a will, just debts.”
Nadia took to the children. They responded to her youth. She rode bicycles with them; together they discovered an old hemlock in our three acres of woods, a gnarly old tree perfect for Amanda to climb—I had never climbed a tree in my life. They raked leaves, played chess; she braided Amanda’s hair.
“She’s sweet, isn’t she,” said Olivia, as we lay stone still in bed that night.
“Who?” I asked, acutely aware of Nadia’s presence in the guest room down the hall.
“Oh, please, Sam.”
“You mean Nadia? I’m sorry, I was drifting.”
“I’ll bet you were.”
I looked at Olivia through the corner of my eye. She was propped up on one elbow; her satin pajama top hung far from her body; moonlight caressed the breasts that had fed my children. She was jealous, and my heart reached out for her, as if waking from a long hibernation. Could this have been the point of bringing Nadia home? Had what I been seeking been this edge of worry in my wife’s voice?
“She’s okay,” I said. “Her life has accrued more tragedy than her character can bear. She staggers beneath its weight.”
“Why don’t you say things like that about me?”
“Because they’re not true about you. She’s a widow, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yes. And so terribly needy.”
“What’s wrong, Olivia?” That was the trouble with living outside the truth: you had to pretend to such stupidity to maintain your position.
“Why did you bring her here? And why are you having insights about her?”
“Shh. She’ll hear you. Anyhow, I thought you were enjoying her. The kids are.”
“They love her, we all love her. But she’s in love with you. How old is she, Sam? Twenty-two, twenty-four? I’m sorry I can’t be twenty-four, Sam. I’m sorry I can’t pretend to know nothing about men, or life, or you.”
“I think she’s older than that, Olivia. I think she’s quite close to thirty. That’s not so much younger than you.”
A silence. Then Olivia grabbed her pillow and the top blanket and said, “I think you must be so unhappy that it’s driven you insane.”
It was not really inspiration but mere instinct that made me grab for her before she was out of reach. I pulled her back onto the bed. I kissed her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes. She wanted me to. She returned my kisses with hunger, avidity; to be kissed that way by a wife of so many years was like making time run backward. When we made love, she cried out with pleasure in a way she hadn’t allowed herself to do since Michael was old enough to be curious about sex. She might have been summoning it forth because she knew Nadia would hear, but the element of premeditation, that little twist of artifice, only made it sweeter.
That was on Saturday; the next Wednesday, I made love to Nadia. She had sublet an apartment on West Twelfth Street, not far from where Olivia and I used to live and, in fact, in a building where an old friend of ours still lived. Nadia had a studio apartment, just one room, with bare floors, cinder-block-and-pine-plank bookshelves, Hindu and Buddhist art on the walls, a window with a back view of the brownstones across the way.
“I never thought I’d be living like this,” Nadia said, as she handed me a brandy poured into a teacup. We had worked late, seen a movie at a nearby multiplex. “I thought I’d be married, teaching somewhere, have a baby or two.”
“Teaching? Teaching what?”
“I don’t know. Poetry. Meditation. Whatever.”
“I think you’d be a wonderful teacher,” I said.
“You think so?”
“Yes.”
“I think you could learn something from me,” she said.
“What?”
“How to care about yourself, and not ever, ever dislike yourself.”
After a long silence, I finally managed to ask, “How long did you and Leo live together before you married?”
“For a while. Then we had a big fight. He used to speak to me so disrespectfully in front of his friends, like he wanted to make sure they understood that he didn’t take me very seriously. He was a real motherfucker when it came to things like that. He always had these plans. He wanted to design furniture, or do landscape architecture. But he never did anything, not really. And he took it out on me, his frustration.”
“So what happened after the big fight?”
“I was going to go to New Mexico to study with the Hopi Indians. I was putting my name and number on the ride board at the Co-op when he came and got me and talked me out of it.”
“Study what with the Hopi Indians?”
“How to live.”
She abandoned the safety of the rocking chair and sat herself next to me on the sofa. My heart began to race, and I thought: I would not be here if I were a success.
“I came to New York because I didn’t know anyone here,” Nadia said. “I wanted to disappear.”
“I thought you knew people here.”
“And then I met you.”
She took my hand, turned it over as if to read my palm, and then with great ceremony—was this a Hopi thing?— bent her head and planted a solemn kiss on the crisscrossed lines of my fate. The kiss was dry but somehow grew moister, which was a little confusing until I realized she had parted her lips and now pressed the tip of her tongue against my hand. No, I wouldn’t be here if I were writing the book I had meant to write. I would never have even met her if I hadn’t been sent to find pictures for my spaceman book, and I never would have needed her if I had been living the life I wanted. My life had shrunk, it was smaller than Nadia’s apartment, and I wanted to punch a window into the wall, to breathe, to see how other people were conducting their lives.
“If I don’t make love with you tonight, I think I’ll die of unhappiness,” I heard myself say.
I was full of desire to be with her, but, in fact, that first night Nadia was a mild and meandering lover. Sex was a séance in which the object was to bring forth her pleasure from the spirit world. She received me on her side, with her head propped up on one hand, like a Persian on a sofa. She moved away from my thrusts, as if afraid
of pain. She kept her eyes open; I could not tell what she was looking at. Somewhere along the way it struck me that I was having one of the very worst sexual experiences of my entire life.
Nadia was immense inside, oceanic. She touched me lightly on the back of my head. I felt myself wilting. I thought of Moses throwing his staff onto the ground and having it turn into a slithering snake. I began counting my thrusts, timing them to the beat of the Marvelettes singing “Don’t Mess with Bill.” My sharpest experience was the nagging guilt, the sense of irreparable wrongdoing. While I tried to make love to Nadia, I ministered to this guilt by telling myself I was hurting no one. I even dredged up the times in which Olivia had said in anger that I should find another lover—those early-morning encounters really brought out the worst in her. Still, the guilt banged away inside me, like a shutter in an upper room.
And then, suddenly, darkly, mysteriously, the guilt disappeared, the shutter stopped banging, it fell from the house and was lost in the bloomless forsythia, the house was quiet, the universe was hushed, and I became exquisitely aware of this stranger, this struggling soul, this fragrant woman beside me, and it was then, as if she knew that my thoughts had finally fastened upon her, that something caught hold in Nadia, too. She gripped me tightly with her free hand and pushed me onto my back, holding me so I wouldn’t dislodge from her, and now she was astride me, animated, her once-dreamy eyes flecked with madness. A minute later she had an orgasm and roared in my face with such intensity that it was all I could do to keep from laughing.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked, looking at me through the net of damp, dark hair that hung over her face.
“I don’t know. You’re awfully nice. You really are.”
“Did you come yet?”
“No big deal.” It was her house; I wanted to be a polite guest.
Men in Black Page 5