Almost Paradise

by Susan Isaacs

  “What does Daddy say?” Nicholas asked.

  “I can’t ask him. You ask him. Please, Nicky. We’ve all been waiting for you to come home.”

  Nicholas had, just as they were taking their seats in the box. It was his first time alone with his father that year. James had offered Charlie his ticket, but Charlie had declined for a party given by a girl who had been pursuing him with letters and phone calls since they’d met at a mixer two years earlier. Nicholas finally had simply blurted out, “What’s wrong with Mummy?”

  “Nothing. I told you, she hasn’t gotten over your grandfather’s death.”

  “But she wasn’t right before that, and Olivia says—”

  “Nick, your sister dramatizes things. You know that.”

  “But I can see Mummy isn’t right. Is she sick? Does she have a—any kind of disease?”

  “No.”

  “She doesn’t eat and she—”

  “She’ll snap out of it. It just takes time. Now sit back. This is a very special performance.”

  But it hadn’t seemed special, and yet when Rodolfo realized Mimi was dead, Nicholas glanced at his father and tears were streaming down James’s cheeks. He had never seen his father cry, and it frightened him, because he thought it must be horrible for him seeing a woman lying there so pale and motionless, in a terrible way just like his wife. The curtain fell and the ovation began. Nicholas reached out for James and touched his sleeve. James turned. His face was so filled with emotion Nicholas could barely recognize him. He waited for James to find his voice. When it came, it wasn’t what Nicholas expected. “Isn’t she magnificent!” James exclaimed.

  “Who?”

  “Who? The soprano.”

  Nicholas almost asked which soprano, for he couldn’t see that either of them was all that great but instead he nodded, for he sensed his father would not like his question. “Magnificent,” he echoed.

  James rose as the tiny soprano, the one who sang Mimi, came out. He clapped wildly and called “Brava! Brava!” Nicholas stared at him. His mother had always been the opera lover; his father had attended infrequently and unwillingly. “Brava!” She bowed, clutching the brown shawl that was part of her costume, then stood as she was pelted with roses hurled from the audience. “Bravissima!” James shouted. He turned to Nicholas a moment later. “Wasn’t she something?” he demanded.

  “Yes, Dad.” Nicholas thought his father was about to say more, but then he lowered his head. “What is it?” Nicholas asked.

  His father looked up, hesitated, then inquired softly, “Would you like to meet her?”

  They waited backstage until her regular visitors, her fans and friends, had left the dressing room. Then James knocked and was summoned. “C’mon in.” Before Nicholas even noticed her, he spotted her maid in the far corner of the dressing room, brushing out the thick dark curls of her wig. It was only then that he looked and saw her sitting on a stool before a huge lighted mirror. “Two secs,” she said, and continued pulling off her false eyelashes with a tweezer.

  She seemed even smaller than she had onstage. Her costume, a beige dress with brown trim, was thrown over a chair and she was wearing a pink satin robe trimmed with feathers, a prima donna robe if ever there was one, but Nicholas thought she looked as if she should be playing roles like—whatever—Peter Pan or Huck Finn instead of Mimi. She didn’t look like an opera singer.

  Lucy Bogard looked like what she was, the daughter of migrant laborers. She was short and scrawny. Her own hair was thin and sand-colored and her right eye, without the frame of the lashes, was a bland, watery hazel. Her nose was so pug it looked like a pair of nostrils on display. “Just another little minute and I’ll be with y’.” She removed the final row of lashes, then dipped her hand into a jar of cream, slapped it around her face, then wiped it away. Her bright complexion came off on the tissue. “All right now,” she said, and spun around on her stool. “What have we got here, Jimmy?”

  “We’ve got my son Nicholas,” James said.

  “Have we now?” she said, and stood. With one hand on Nicholas’s arm and the other on his chest, she guided him to her stool and pushed him down. “Let me look at you. My, you are one fine-lookin’ boy, aren’t you. A little like your daddy, but not too much. Now tell me, did your daddy tell you he knew me? I didn’t think so. He just dragged you down here, and I bet you think your daddy’s some crazy old fan, just trying to get my autograph on his program. But you know, I do know your daddy real well. You know how?”

  “No, I—” She was standing right next to him, fluffing his hair, and he could see inside her robe. He didn’t know where to look. If he looked down he could see the very top of her leg and if he looked straight ahead from his stool he could see her breast where the pink satin gaped open. It was a little breast, but she was still a grown woman.

  “Come on, Lucy. Stop it.” James spoke harshly but a little nervously, as if he knew she was in control of what was going on in the room.

  “You come on, Jimmy. You brought him here.” Her voice thawed as she turned her attention back to Nicholas. “Where were we? Oh, yes. I was telling you how I know your daddy. Well, here I was at this awful, silly charity thing—” She took Nicholas’s face between her hands, forcing him to look into her face. “Well, an old friend came over to me and said, ‘I have someone you simply must meet. The answer to your prayers.’ And there was your daddy. And was he ever!” She paused, and it was as if every person in the entire Metropolitan Opera were holding his breath. Then, at the perfect dramatic second, she added, “The best lawyer in all of New York City.” He couldn’t see anyone else, but he could feel the relief that swept through the room, across his father and Lucy Bogard’s maid. “You know that, don’t you, Nick? Your father is a real legal genius.”

  “Lucy—” James began.

  She cut him off. Her hands were still on Nicholas’s face, her thumbs tracing the outline of his jaw. “He just came and took over and solved every single last one of my problems. Now isn’t that somethin’?”

  That same night, Charlie Harrison fell for a girl he had met at a party, a Hollins freshman, and the next morning he sprawled on his stomach on the thick brown rug in Nicholas’s bedroom, searching through a Lovejoy catalog for a college in Virginia equal to Harvard, so he could convince his parents it would not destroy his life if he followed his new beloved and became a southern, rather than a New England, gentleman. “William and Mary!” he announced. “Jesus, Nick, you look like hell. You hung over?”

  “No.” Nicholas lay on the lower level of his bunk bed, his right arm and leg hanging listlessly over the edge of the mattress. He was pale except for his neck and wrists, which were red from his overstarched shirt of the previous night. “You know your parents won’t let you go to Virginia. Your mother will faint dead away if you don’t go to Harvard, and your father would beat you to a pulp for getting her upset. Anyhow, it’s stupid because you’ll be over her before we have to go back to school. I guarantee it. You’re just intrigued because she’s an older woman.”

  “No. I swear, I’ve never met anyone like her. She’s flawless, Nick. Perfect. A titian-tressed Scarlett O’Hara.”

  “Come on, Charlie. I went to St. Stephen’s with her brother. I’ve met her. She’s lived on Sixty-fifth Street all her life. Don’t fall for that southern belle bullshit.”

  “What’s wrong with you? She’s not pretending to be a southern belle. I just mean she has that, you know, that tiny waist and that soft way about her. But she’s really got it upstairs too. Do you know what she does before she goes to bed every night?”

  “She stands in front of the mirror and feels herself up.”

  “You know, there’s a time to be serious, Nick. It so happens she reads a poem by John Donne every single night. She says it’s the crowning glory of her day. Not the light stuff. The deep, religious ones. ‘O Saviour, as Thou hang’st upon the tree.’ She quoted the entire thing by heart.”

  “I can’t believe you’re falling
for that crap. She probably spent six years memorizing one poem so she can catch divinity students, because no one except a creep—”

  “Hey, what the hell is wrong with you, Nick?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Is something bothering you?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe with your mother not feeling so great.”

  “My father says she’s fine. She’ll snap out of it, okay?”

  “Was your father leaning on you last night?”

  “No. He was fine. He says just because he went to Brown doesn’t mean I have to, but if I want to he’d be happy, but whatever I decide to do is fine with him and he doesn’t care that I didn’t have the grades for Yale.”

  “How was the opera?”

  “Okay. Nice.”

  “It’s my favorite. I mean, I know it’s not cool and I should be more sophisticated and love Götterdämmerung, but there’s something so perfect about Bohème.”

  “Then how come you didn’t take the ticket?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you’d want to be alone with your father, and anyway, I really was hot to trot for a big night.”

  “Charlie, I’m sorry it’s been lousy here for you.”

  “Are you nuts? It hasn’t been lousy. I’m having a great time. And I met Libby, so I’ll thank you for the rest of my life. Do you know what? You’d be a hundred percent better off if you just loosened up a little. Don’t worry so much about your brothers and sisters. They’ll be okay. Your mother isn’t going to stay like this. She’ll be fine. Maybe she’ll go someplace and relax.”

  “I guess so.”

  Winifred made few forays from her bedroom. Nicholas had tried to visit her, but she lay in gloom. The brocade drapes were no longer pulled back but hung over the window, filtering out all light except for a dull amber fog. She seemed to sleep most of the time, and when she was awake she could barely answer his questions. She’d murmur she was fine, but her voice was tired, as though she hadn’t been sleeping at all but spending her days in exhausting labor. She didn’t even have the energy to try to appear cheerful. She didn’t seem to care whether Nicholas was frightened or worried or even that he was in the room with her. She had no other real diversion. The maid tiptoed in once a day, but James now slept in his study. Winifred stayed on her side of the bed, leaving James’s half tightly made, his two pillows plump against the headboard.

  “Come on. You shouldn’t be so—I don’t know—so glum. You’re only young once, and that’s when you have to have a good time. Now listen to me. I know I promised not to criticize Heather and I won’t, but can’t you cut loose a little here in New York? It’s Christmas vacation, Nick. Have a little fun with some nice girl.”

  “I bet you’d rather be with some cute little thing your own age,” Lucy said.

  “No,” Nicholas lied. “Not at all.”

  She had called before noon, just as he and Charlie were leaving the apartment, and asked if it would be too much trouble to help her out of an awful fix; she’d forgotten to send her nephew his Christmas present and he was just Nick’s size and would Nick come up to her apartment and the chauffeur could drive them over to Brooks Brothers and Nick could try on jackets. It wouldn’t take more than—well, a half hour or so. He’d said yes only because he couldn’t think of a way to say no. And Charlie agreed it was the right thing to do because she was his father’s client and because how could you say no to a world-famous diva? Charlie had heard her sing Violetta the year before and seemed awed and thrilled with Nicholas’s good luck. He instructed Nicholas to call her Madame Bogard and, if she offered her fingertips, to brush his lips across them, not really kiss them.

  But she hadn’t offered her fingertips. Instead, she had answered the door of her penthouse apartment wearing skintight shiny black slacks and a black sweater with a deep vee and had greeted him by kissing him on the lips. It was a light kiss, the sort of kiss a prima donna might give to anyone, but it surprised him so much he licked his lips right afterward and she had laughed. She led him into a living room filled with ultramodern furniture—long low couches and tables and high-arching lamps—of the sort he’d only seen in magazines. She offered him a drink and he’d asked for a beer, because he couldn’t think of anything else he could drink before lunch, and then she’d sat right beside him on the couch, sipping something with a cherry from a pink frosted martini glass. Her legs were crossed and her shoe, a very high-heeled shoe, rubbed against his pants leg. She seemed to know all about his family, about Abigail’s chicken pox and Thomas’s good grades and about his mother’s not feeling well, although she probed him on this until he changed the subject by asking for another beer.

  “Are you havin’ a high ol’ time with your friend visiting?” Lucy asked him.

  “Yes. Very nice.” Her toenails were polished bright red, and they were long and oval-shaped, like large fingernails. She wore a gold chain hardly thicker than a hair around her ankle. He tried to make conversation, even though his tongue felt thick from the beer. “Are you going to be here in New York for the rest of the winter? Singing, I mean.”

  “Oh, a little singin’, a little dancin’, a little whatever.”

  “How old is your nephew? The one who’s my size.”

  “Nick,” she said, and set her glass down on top of the kidney-shaped coffee table before them. “You know you didn’t believe a word of that old Brooks Brothers story.” His heart lurched. He tried to stand, but the low couch seemed to slant back so he found himself sliding even farther back. As if to ensure his imprisonment, Lucy put her hands against his chest and kissed him hard. “My God, what a gorgeous, delicious mouth. Do you know that? You have a beautiful, sensuous mouth, lambie. Let Lucy have some more of it. Come on.”

  He found himself kissing her back, opening his mouth to let her tongue capture his even though she tasted unpleasantly of whiskey. He found himself reaching into the vee of her sweater, even though he didn’t really want to touch her bony chest. Her breasts had a strange texture, as if there were goosebumps under the skin, but soon he didn’t want to stop playing with them, even though he was afraid at any moment she’d jerk back and give him an outraged, grown-up crack across the face.

  He had thought her scrawny, homely, a little piggy-looking with her awful pug nose, but he discovered he desired her so much that even though his hands were trembling with fright, he kept trying to pull her slacks down over her narrow hips.

  She did it for him, undressing in the narrow space between the couch and coffee table in the bright light of early afternoon, her fleshless body turning red and green as her Christmas tree lights blinked on and off. She was a woman—even though she had the body of a starved child—and he had never seen a woman completely naked before. He’d never even seen Heather. Whenever Heather pulled off her bra she kept on her skirt, and whenever she allowed him to touch her below the waist her blouse remained closed to the collar.

  But here was this naked woman pulling him up from the couch, rubbing herself against him. “We’re goin’ to the bedroom now,” she said. She held his arm and pulled him along. “Come on, honey. Follow Lucy.”

  In the bedroom, her talk became adult. Her explicitness was so startling—“I’m gonna take your balls in my mouth, Nick, and first I’m gonna suck on them”—that when she shoved him onto the bed he was ready to do precisely what she told him. She took over completely. “Turn over on your stomach now,” she ordered, or “Stick your tongue all the way in, as far as it can go. Come on. More. More.”

  He stayed in the bedroom for three hours and did everything she told him to do. At the end he felt she had taken everything from him and he had nothing left.

  When she went in to shower he began to sob, clutching the sweaty pillow to his face. She came out with a towel draped decorously around her. “Come on, sweetie. Stop carryin’ on. It’s what you wanted, so stop cryin’. Come on. You were a real man. Don’t mess it up.” She sat on the bed and pulled the pillow from him. “Don’t hide from Lucy. D
o you want some more, honey? I bet that’s it. I bet one little suck and I could get it goin’ again. Oh, look at it, startin’ to stand up. There you are, still cryin’ and actin’ like a baby, but it knows what it wants. It sure does. I knew it would be this way, I just knew it. What do they say, honey? Like father, like son.”

  BOOK THREE

  JANE & NICHOLAS

  11

  CHILDREN FOLLOW STAR TO LONDON

  from PETER HEPWHITE in New York

  The teenage daughters of cinema star Nicholas Cobleigh were rushed past journalists at John F. Kennedy Airport and escorted onto a British Airways Concorde by an official of the airline. The girls, Victoria, 18, and Elizabeth, 16, on their way to their mother’s hospital bedside, lowered their heads to avoid the photographers who were…

  —Daily Mail

  Jane Heissenhuber and Nicholas Cobleigh first noticed each other in their sophomore year of college when they sat one row and three seats away from each other in Social and Intellectual History of the United States. For the few seconds he focused on her, he thought she behaved like a typical Pembroke girl: intellectually aggressive and too intense. She did not look like a typical Pembroke girl, however. She was very tall and exotic, with dark skin and a thick black braid hanging to her waist, a figure out of Gauguin incongruously dressed in a pleated skirt and sweater. She did not interest him at all.