“Carla, darling, where do you keep the teaspoons?” he asked when the guests were gone and they were toting bags of refuse to the incinerator.
“In the drawer near the stove.”
“Which drawer, sweetheart? Left or right?”
“Left.”
He opened the drawer. A plastic tray with four compartments. Butter knives, salad forks, teaspoons, canapé forks.
“Carla, why aren’t the teaspoons and the tablespoons in the same drawer?”
“I keep the big things in one drawer and the little things in the other. It’s easy to remember that way.”
Nathan knew he would never search for silverware again. He would improvise somehow if he were ever alone in the kitchen. He considered that he would live the rest of his life with a woman who kept teaspoons and tablespoons in separate drawers. Would he have married her had he known that about her? He wondered, too, if he’d have married her knowing that for several hours every third day or so she would be bolted behind the bathroom door. The chase was concluded, the quarry secure, and Nathan was left with the irreducible otherness of his wife. At that moment he was utterly alone. And terrified.
Within a few months, heaps of papers lined their bedroom. She saved every issue of the New York Times, five weekly magazines, medical journals that he had finished reading. The crates of Rosenthal china became buried under piles of The New Yorker. On her lamp table were the manuscripts she read each evening, plowing through them for something promising. Suddenly, it seemed, she could not decide what to say about them. She read aloud to him. His responses were judiciously ambiguous. She grew furious with him: He was erudite and impressive, but she would not be able to defend or even to explain his remarks. He was no help at all! She reconstituted herself and began scribbling and jotting. Her confidence in her own judgment was diminished. She was yielding more of herself to him than she realized.
He had proposed a ski trip to celebrate their first anniversary. She had demurred. She had never skied. They could try Bermuda again, she had suggested. Now, he leaned backward, his elbows jutting out crazily as he made his way up the narrow staircase, a mountain of bags and boxes artfully counterpoised against various parts of his body. He sashayed deftly to the table and and let them tumble from his arms.
“Presents, sweetheart. Anniversary presents, if you will.” All in all, Nathan was pleased with himself.
The familiar glossy red paper and the gold insignia of B. Altman. Bags and boxes. Her eyes roved the tabletop, seeking out the smallest parcel. A slim bag. Lingerie, perhaps. She unfolded the contents. Long, white flannel something. Long underwear. A larger bag. Three cotton pullovers, grey and brown and cerulean blue. The largest box with its loops of gold ribbon. A hooded jacket, brown and pale blue.
“Bogner,” he beamed at her. “The best in Europe. In the world. Try the leggings, sweetheart. It’s all coordinated. You’re going to be a terrific skier so you have to look terrific. Oh Carla! You’re going to look gorgeous in this! You really are a thoroughbred. I knew it at a glance.”
Carla resigned herself. “I’ll try it,” she told him. Then she tucked the leggings and pullovers into her dresser and hung the jacket away. She folded the red paper and the gold elastic cord into the boxes and stacked them on top of the pile of New Yorkers.
They had been married one year. He had, he told himself, tried very hard. To know her, to anticipate her needs, to please her. But the Rosenthal china, the handsome ski costume, his fingers gingerly probing her clitoris—they were all, he decided, a lot like the teaspoons in the kitchen: Everything seemed to end up in the wrong place.
Nathan wondered if other marriages were like his. He considered their pretty apartment with its rooftop garden, the friends they were beginning to share, the dinner parties and cocktail parties they had arranged, the vacation they would take. To others, he concluded, this surely must seem a perfectly happy marriage. He decided that things were, most likely, just as they were supposed to be.
Seven
Alexandra Devorah Kline (born November 16, 1963, weight: 7 lbs. 2 oz., height: 19 inches), was conceived in Kitzbuhl on a ski holiday. Carla had become a passably good skier. Plucky, but never dancerly, Nathan said. He would accompany her, instructing, coaxing, encouraging, along two or three runs and then deposit her at the hearth where she chatted while he tested himself against the harshest slopes. It had been Carla’s fervent hope that motherhood would bestow a final dispensation from skiing.
“Oh, Katte! She looks exactly like Nathan!” Sophie cried, pressing her face to the nursery window. And there was no mistaking it: The ruddy, mottled knot of wrinkles would eventually resolve into a not-very-pretty little strawberry blonde.
“God should have let her favor her mother,” Felix murmured to his wife.
Nathan watched as the nervous little jaw chomped erratically on his wife’s nipples. He watched as Sophie cradled her granddaughter in her arms and sang fragments of a German lullabye. He felt proud, and then guilty in his pride. He’d had, he knew, almost nothing to do with it. This noisy, squirming bit of protoplasm that had entered his home, warming it like some rich infusion, came from a woman. And its glow belonged, he decided, mostly to the women. When he considered it further, Nathan finally concluded that the birth of his daughter, instead of revitalizing him, had moved him along in the chain of being and thereby taken some of his life from him. He felt measurably older, denser. He was the older generation, now. Responsible, grave. Once more, he worried that he might turn out like his own father. He vowed to himself that he would not.
Still, the sun had crossed its apogee. Nathan wanted to reach up his arms and push it back to that place in the sky just before noon, to the spot it had occupied before Alexandra arrived. He wanted to stretch out his fingers and keep the sun from starting its inevitable descent.
“It’s a miracle,” Felix said, his eyes riveted to the tiny pink face. “There is no other way to account for it. A miracle is what that is.” It was not what Nathan would have expected from his father-in-law.
“Actually,” Nathan chided the older man, “there’s a perfectly scientific explanation for it and if you’ll leave the women and come to the kitchen for a drink, I’ll explain exactly how she got here.”
Felix followed Nathan to the kitchen. “Maybe I’ll have a cup of coffee,” Felix said.
Nathan had never attempted to use the percolator, to assemble its half-dozen parts; it required too much time in the kitchen. “For coffee,” he said, “you’ll have to wait for Carla. Why don’t we have some vodka?” He set two glasses on the table.
“It is a miracle, you know,” Felix resumed.
“Well, it’s very nice,” Nathan offered.
“No,” Felix insisted. “It’s important to have miracles. Very important to see mysteries for what they are and to say to yourself, ‘There is another mystery, another miracle. Right here in my own life!’ That’s how I kept going in Europe before we got to England.”
“Really, Felix, I never imagined you were religious. Do you still feel that way?”
“Not religious, Nathan. Humbled.”
“But you are a man of science.”
“But that is precisely it, Nathan. The miracle is what is given, it’s the premise from which we ‘men of science’ proceed. First there is consciousness. Then, we begin. You with your physics and chemistry, I with my analysis.”
“You amaze me, Felix. Have another vodka. What is it you are calling a miracle?”
“All of it! All of it! I am perhaps too emotional. Still, you have to agree that consciousness, anyway, is inexplicable. Alexandra’s funny little face that looks like you, you can explain that scientifically. And her bony head and what will be, I am sure, a prodigious brain. There will be satisfying mechanical explanations for those things. But of consciousness and its contents, we will never know more than we do right now.”
“You have so little faith in science, Felix. Why so pessimistic?”
“But it is the
very opposite, Nathan. It is the sublimest optimism. That consciousness is beyond the reach of scientific explanation is surely cause for celebration!” He drained the vodka from his glass. “A cause for optimism, at the very least.”
“Felix, you amaze me and, I must confess, you disappoint me a little too,” Nathan said. “We’re not very far along in the history of predictive science. Time will yield far more in the way of explanation than we have now. Science is getting there, Felix.”
“But it will never reveal the origins of consciousness or its contents.” His plump hand reached for the vodka and he dribbled a few more drops into his glass. “Your probes and lasers may someday count the molecules in Alexandra’s brain, and measure their electrical properties, but you will never know her thoughts except by the account she gives. The brain’s chemistry, yes. But consciousness itself will never be the subject matter for chemists.” He drew the clear liquid into his mouth, held it a few moments, and continued. “Dreams and languages, illusions and allusions, yearnings and terrors, these are beyond the reach of chemistry, Nathan. They will always remain miraculous. The existence of life itself is miraculous. In fact, the existence of anything, rather than nothing …”
“Now, Felix, this really is going too far.”
“Think about it,” the older man said. “You will laugh out loud. Miracles will make you very happy, Nathan. That’s my secret.”
“I’ll give it a try,” Nathan said quietly. He studied his empty glass. He ran a finger around its rim. He was bewildered by what he had discovered in Felix.
“And now, I would like to have some coffee, Nathan. Get my beautiful daughter, would you? And thank you, Nathan. Thank you for my miraculous grandchild.”
As the dark fragrance of coffee settled over them, Nathan regarded his father-in-law happily chatting in the kitchen and he knew he would never believe in miracles, much less be cheered by the thought of such things. A searing grief pierced him as he reflected on this. Pain that was part envy, part isolation. He would have to forgo the embrace he’d so hoped for from Felix.
A cold, bright November morning. The sunlight in precise parallelograms on the carpet of his consultation room. He was more than halfway through his allotted three score and ten, on the cusp of forty. He had a thriving Park Avenue practice, a baby daughter, and friends and acquaintances whose names meant something. He had a famous father-in-law and an enviable wife. His father had been wrong: He could indulge in the pleasures of a refined and cultivated life and be successful in his work as well.
Doris Needham, a widow, kept his files meticulously, ushered patients smoothly through three examining rooms, sent out bills, kept the books, remembered Carla’s birthday and their wedding anniversary and the birthdays and anniversaries of all his relatives. She suggested, and even bought, appropriate gifts. Nathan moved from one examining room to the next, reading the cards she set out, making pleasant banter, endearing himself to those afflicted with glaucoma or cataracts. He listened intently to their complaints and replied with heartening quotes from Virgil or Marcus Aurelius. They adored him. He paused every hour or so for a sip of tomato juice or of Stolichnaya. It was not at all a bad life he had.
But as the days passed and he returned each evening to his wife and their baby daughter, the sense grew within him that he was not living as fully as he could, that he was not doing all he was capable of doing. His practice was humming now without his putting forth much effort. The excitement of Alexandra’s arrival had subsided and whatever it was the women of the family did with her now did not include him. He could not allow himself to die this way, he thought.
He should climb through the ranks at the hospital. Chief of Ophthalmology. He doubted they would let a Jew become chief. Columbia College had let him be valedictorian. But then, he’d made it impossible for them not to. There were, he knew, more subtle considerations in getting to chief. Certainly, he was charming, affable. Too charming and affable, perhaps. Patients came to him for second opinions and stayed. Patients he saw at clinical rounds showed up at his office. His practice expanded at the expense of his senior colleagues. At the expense of Heaney himself. And Heaney had let him know he was aware of it. Over claret and pheasant in buttery pastry. The way gentiles let you know things. There was a shriek. And commotion in the waiting room.
Doris Needham kept her starchy dignity as she knocked on his door. “The President’s dead,” she said. “He was shot in the head. In Dallas. Mrs. Horowitz just came in and told us. The patients are very upset. Would you like to speak to them?”
“We are all sorrowed by this news,” Nathan said, addressing the distraught little group in his waiting room. “If you would prefer to reschedule your appointments, Mrs. Needham will accommodate you.”
Lily’s office was beige. The walls, the carpet, the velvet upholstery, the lamps. There was a soft, whirring sound in the waiting room and that, too, was beige. On that particular evening, when Lily buzzed him in, she sat deep in a huge beige chair, her platinum pageboy all Lana Turner, backlit by a very fashionable lamp, and Lily was beige that evening too. Her lipstick was all chewed off. She had been crying. He took her to dinner and back to the office and they undressed and vanished into the beige.
“It’s a shock, you know,” she said afterward. “I may be too traumatized to see my patients tomorrow.”
“It’s been a terrible day,” he said. “I sent all my patients home. Mrs. Needham rescheduled everyone. She really is so efficient.”
“He was so young. She’s so young. That makes it so much more tragic. And the children! My God!”
“Past forty is not young. It’s pretty far along. I’m past forty and I’ve never been president of anything.”
Lily lit a cigarette and stared at the ceiling. She was depleted.
“I was thinking of talking to you when the news came. What do you think of my moving up at the hospital?”
“Moving up?” Lily was drifting.
“To chief.”
“How?”
“There are several ways. What do you think?”
“You’re Jewish, so you’d have to be Einstein. You’d have to find a cure for cancer. Or have a project that brought millions in research money to the department. Why do you want this? You have a Park Avenue practice, a new family. For godsake, Nathan! You have an enviable life, and it’s just beginning.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Is it boring?”
“It’s too small.”
“Too small?”
“Too small to be my whole life.”
In the elevator down from Lily’s office, he thought of Carla. It seemed he had not thought of her for quite some time. He leafed back through his day. Chief of Ophthalmology. Heaney. The assassination. Lily. He had come to Lily to talk about his plan. He had been unfaithful to his wife, but it hadn’t seemed that way. It was Lily, after all, not some new adventure. Lily had been there since … well, since childhood, for chrissake. It was not, he concluded, an act of adultery. It was Lily.
He was not suited to hospital diplomacy, that was true enough. He would find a research project. Millions in grant money coming into the hospital and him as head of the project!
Lily was a genius. It certainly wasn’t adultery.
Eight
The kitchen windowpanes fogged with aromatic steam. Steam bearing scents of garlic and onions and a roast’s juices spattered about the oven. The tawny fragrance of pecan pie, the blossomy perfume of apfelkuchen, and, sunk down in the bass notes, the peasant-footed smells of turnips braising and potatoes roasting. The floors of the old Peekskill kitchen sloped toward the center of the house so a shelled pea dropped on the floor rolled nearly to the dining room. The room itself, so often rearranged by its various owners, had an indeterminate number of corners. Corners that folded protectively about the women bent to their work.
Sophie and Felix lived in the house year-round now, and Nathan and Carla came up on weekends with Alexandra. Sophie’s longtime housekeeper was
Hadassah Kimmel. “Hassah,” Carla had called her as a child and the name had stuck. Hassah kept a timeless Maine coon cat named Gustav. The women chatted through the kitchen steam—Sophie, Carla, Hassah, and Alexandra, who squatted on the low end of the floor, feeding Gustav the peas that occasionally rolled off Sophie’s lap.
“He wants to be department chief, Mother.”
“I told you he would be very successful,” Sophie said.
“He’s a brilliant man,” Hassah said. “And so nice with this little girl of his. Surprising in a man like that, don’t you think?” She prodded Carla’s arm. “We wished the best for you and you got it. The best husband!”
“Thank you,” Carla said. It had been foolish to try to discuss Nathan’s ambitions with them, her fears that the small thing that remained as their marriage might vanish entirely.
Felix rushed in brandishing a sheaf of crayola drawings. The artist had labored prodigiously over her signature, sending it around corners where necessary to fit in all the letters. A-l-e-x-a-n-d-r-a. There were large, fat circles in torpid repose atop massive rectangles. Some circles had whiskers. Some rectangles had tails.
“You see how she has distilled the very essence of Gustav,” Felix exclaimed. “Picasso worked a lifetime to achieve such purity of form.” He brushed the peas away from Sophie to make space for the drawings.
“What is Gustav? He is smug. And smugness is a fat, round circle, of course. And what is his hulking presence but a monolithic rectangle! The quintessential Gustav! I love a child’s vision. So pure. So absolutely right!” He danced into the dining room, stooping to sweep Alexandra up in his arms.
“Picasso? Bah!” he said, planting a kiss on her nose.
The guests arrived. New friends, old friends. Shaking off the January snow. Harrumphing to expel the cold, inhaling to savor the warm. Embracing their hosts, shedding parkas and handing up bottles of wine. They all arrived at once, twenty minutes past the stated hour, so that the narrow vestibule forced a stream of them into the living room, some still clutching hats or gloves.
The Speed of Light Page 4