Saturday morning, the Earth was once more dense and firm beneath her and Carla felt its equilibrium had been restored. The steady hum of the planet, moving in its predictable orbit, hypnotized like the drone of a raga, like the rhythmic gallops of wooden horses on a carousel. Perhaps she was astride such a horse. On a carousel turning so smoothly it seemed to float. Or perhaps it was the horse itself that floated. Through the raucous jubilee of Coney Island, perhaps. Where she’d joined in the laughter, joined in at last, invited by the son of a Hungarian tailor. By a laughing dancing bear of a man from Brooklyn.
Light, composed, she slid through the day shielded from its vicissitudes. She prepared a casserole for the Perrins.
“It can be heated whenever you want it,” she told Lew. She rushed forward to hug Marian hard but the sombre frailty of her friend’s response subdued her impulse. It was, instead, an ethereal embrace and Marian’s smile faded quickly.
“In a few weeks, you’ll have forgotten this ever happened,” she told Marian, and she returned home.
Hassah crouched on the floor of her room, rocking to and fro as Mediterranean women do in mourning. Her hands were buried deep in the mottled fur of Gustav Mahler. It was some sort of artificial respiration, but the Maine Coon cat could not be roused. Carla wrapped two strong arms about the old housekeeper to still her hands and to catch the torrential outpour of grief.
Mahler was too large, too unwieldy, to lift. Sophie turned up the edges of the Sarouk mat on which he was lying to make it stiffer, more portable. Then Carla and Felix carried it to the pear orchard. Alexandra and Lisle dug deep into the chilled ground. They recited the Twenty-third Psalm and sang “Rock of Ages” and a bit of “Amazing Grace” and Alexandra said the Sh’ma.
Had she been attending to it, Carla would have been surprised to discover that she was not at all enervated by the events of the day. She withstood them with the bland serenity of a pot of warm milk. Had he been attending to it, Nathan would have been surprised to discover his wife, rosy and buoyant, inexplicably blithe when he arrived home at the dinner hour.
On Sunday, they made up a doubles game at last: Tom, Armand, Nathan, and Carla. And, without anyone’s attending to it, it was quite clear to everyone. The double faults, the reckless lobs. Carla finally excused herself and left. She asked Armand to drive Nathan home. But Armand’s knee had given out.
“I’ll leave you two to battle it out,” he said to Tom and Nathan.
Tom was staring at the grey-green surface and bouncing a tennis ball.
“Were we playing Penn sevens?” he asked.
“Yeah. C’mon, Tom. Winner takes all.”
“Nathan, I have to talk to you.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Nathan said.
“Look, Nathan, something’s happened.”
“I’m glad it did,” Nathan said.
“No, really, Nathan. I’m sorry. I want to talk about it. I have to tell you that I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sorry. I’m glad. She deserves something nice. I gave up trying a long time ago. This is a good thing, Tom. Good for you, good for Carla. Good for all of us.”
“Nathan, do you know what you’re saying? What are you made of, for chrissake?”
“Rough or smooth?” Nathan asked. “I call rough.” He twirled the handle of his racquet and let it drop to the court. “Your serve,” he said. “C’mon, Tom. It’s your serve.”
“Nathan, you’re a really sensational guy!” Tom said.
“Serve the ball,” Nathan told him.
Sixteen
Five o’clock in the evening is the finest hour for certain small restaurants. They stand at the ready, laundered and fragrant, bud vases gleaming. They appear empty and still, yet they quiver and tremble like virgin brides. Anticipation is what fills them.
He had left the laboratory early to allow for a leisurely dinner before the concert at Carnegie Hall. Muriel’s colleague, Leonid Rosovsky, was the composer whose work would open the program. They would finish the evening at a party in his honor. Nathan congratulated himself for having arranged so early and secluded a dinner.
Her shoulders hunched against the weather as she approached. She was resolute, condensed. She tilted her head back for a kiss. He offered his cheek.
“I suppose I’m a bit nervous in public,” he said.
She turned away.
“You want me to kiss you anyway,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I can’t.”
They whispered across the spotless tablecloth. Furtive, self-conscious. A busier place, he realized, might have afforded more privacy. But she drew her surroundings in about her like a woman gathering up her evening gown before descending the stairs. Ultimately, he was grateful to be included in the perfect universe that formed about her. Later, at Leonid’s party, it would include others: composers, musicians, poets. He would make brief bows and shake their hands.
“Dr. Kline. Very pleased to meet you.”
She was a cynosure, a vortex. He feared his envy would betray him. He wanted to announce his connection to her, to vanquish all the others. But he considered that one of them might know a patient of his, one might know someone in Peekskill. You never know. He stayed at the periphery and swooned in his jealousy as if it were lust.
No one could mistake the sickly viridescence in the canvas bubble for sunshine, but it was January, after all, and they drank saccharined beverages and slumped in the Hudson Tennis Club’s battered Naugahyde chairs.
“If a Nauga were a real animal, what do you suppose it would look like?” Robin Colby wondered aloud.
“Like you,” Tom Szabo responded. “When you’re gone, Robin, we’ll cover a chair with you.”
“No, not with me, you won’t.” Robin’s mouth tightened against his teeth. He adjusted himself in his chair and brought his right hand to rest on a square of white gauze taped to his left arm. He turned to Nathan, who would understand. “Exfoliative dermatitis,” he said grimly. “Periarteritis nodosa. So, how’s that for a happy ending?”
“Are you absolutely certain?” Years of a physician’s stoicism flattened Nathan’s words.
“Something in my research,” Robin said. He was trying to say as little as possible. “I’m on a hefty dose of steroid.”
Robin Colby was the victim of perhaps a single drop of protein which had entered his skin and to which he was allergic. The result was that his skin was, quite simply, falling away. In clumps. The bandage covered an area where the deadly antigen reaction had repelled his skin, leaving him to bleed. Steroids, Nathan knew, could retard the reaction or repress it entirely for a time but, once mobilized, immunological templates would persist in forming allergens. Robin would die hideously. His system was determined to reject the research project to which he was devoting his life. Nathan’s training sustained him.
“Well, Robin, we must talk further sometime soon,” he said blandly. “You played especially well today,” he said to Armand.
“Surprisingly well, considering,” Armand agreed. The melancholic eyes searched the little circle of friends and came to rest on a garish can of sugarless soda. “I’m leaving Zoe,” he finally said. “We’re getting divorced.”
“That’s no surprise,” Robin said. His own acute suffering had exhausted his compassion. Tom put an arm around Armand’s shoulders and Armand wept. Nathan thought the greenish glow in the bubble had become suddenly nauseating. He was trapped, panicky. He wanted to be alone with Colby, discussing steroid treatment of exfoliative dermatitis, a thing he knew something about. There had never been a divorce. So much, Nathan thought, is falling apart.
He concentrated on the pragmatics of it. How, for example, to announce a divorce to one’s children. How to preserve one’s dignity through the obscene mechanics of moving one’s summer suits and one’s winter suits, one’s overcoat and one’s shoes out the front door. Does one rummage for old tennis racquets and favorite old cardigans, for boxes of letters and cherished books and then car
ry them out ceremoniously? Or is it done clandestinely? Or is it all left behind?
He stared at the Formica tabletop. This has nothing to do with me, he concluded. Armand’s situation is very different from mine. It was some time before he could rejoin the conversation.
“What will you do now?” he found himself asking Armand.
“Move out, of course. What do you mean, what’ll I do?”
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Nathan asked.
“That’s hardly the issue,” Armand said brusquely.
“There’s no one now?” Nathan suddenly realized that Armand might be the only faithful husband among them. Perhaps,” he went on, “you should have an affair. It works quite nicely, you know. Divorce is awfully messy.”
“Nathan,” Armand said wearily, “I think sometimes you should just shut up.”
“But you ought to have an affair,” Robin agreed, “whether or not you leave Zoe.” Colby welcomed this subject, warmed to it immediately. “A woman who is empowering,” he said, “and at the proper distance, that’s the key thing. You have to keep from knowing her too well. You can’t let her shatter your ideal. If you can manage that, it’s terrific.”
Tom could not enter this conversation. And he could not leave it either. For its duration, he was doomed to shift about in his chair and worry a small hangnail.
“What do you mean, you have to keep from knowing her too well?” Nathan was astonished by the naivete in his own voice.
“There’s something awful and frightening about knowing anyone really well,” Robin said. “Self knowledge, I suppose, is the most terrifying of all. Look inside yourself and what do you find? Ambiguity, continuous metamorphosis. Death is what you find.”
“Robin, I know you’re very upset just now,” Nathan said. But Robin was far too interested in his subject to be stilled.
“Nathan, why are you resisting this? That shadowy stuff, the inconstancy. The absence of anything substantial. Live with yourself long enough and it’s all you know. Change, insubstantiality. Death. It’s terrifying to be alone with yourself, isn’t it?”
“A lot of us like to be alone,” Armand said.
“What do you do when you’re alone, Armand? Read a book? Plan another business meeting? Pay your bills? That’s not looking at yourself, Armand. That’s looking away.” It seemed Colby would leave each one of them wounded in some way.
“What do you do when you’re alone?” Armand came back at him.
“I’m the same as you. I can’t confront myself either. It scares me sick. But you see, a wife doesn’t subdue that fear, Armand. You know her the way you know yourself. You know she has the same defect as you. You need an idée fixe. A woman with no ambiguities. Simple. Glossy.”
“In other words, you want a bimbo,” Tom finally said.
“No, no,” Robin said. “I’m talking about not coming near enough to see the ambiguities. A woman close enough to touch, but far enough away to remain exactly as you first conceived her, as you want to conceive her. She is comprehendible, unambiguous. She doesn’t deviate from your initial solid sense of her. Fucking her gives you a whiff of permanence. Immortality.” He stroked the gauze bandage on his arm and tried scratching lightly through it. “Nathan’s right, Armand, an affair would do you good.”
Nathan looked away. Colby was right about that porosity, that elusiveness, the lack of substantiality. From the day he married her, his wife had confused him. “Tom,” he wanted to ask, “does my wife make you feel omnipotent? Does fucking Carla make you forget you’re mortal? Does it make you feel like God?”
Tom, he reflected as he headed home on the road along the reservoir, didn’t care much for Colby’s view of affairs. But of course, Tom had a thoroughbred. Nathan could appreciate Tom’s point of view. He knows a good thing when he’s got it, Nathan thought.
He paused at the doorstep to the house that swarmed with his in-laws and his children. And Muriel, he thought, Muriel is something solid, concentrated. A substantial idée fixe. A laser. Would Muriel come apart somehow if he were married to her? Would her intensity dissipate over time?
Would it be different if he knew she would be with him until he died?
Until he died.
Yes, he thought. She would lose everything then.
Seventeen
He approached mirrors more cautiously now, taking deep breams, as if he were about to open a hefty, complicated tome. Something that required pondering. He thought he must have his face pinned up. He had difficulty peering into the microscope. His eyelids should be repaired. Perhaps his chin as well. Tennis, skiing, naps on the terrace: Too much sunshine had exhausted his skin. And there was Colby’s skin just dropping away. Armand’s marriage and Colby’s skin. Dropping away. We should be like reptiles, he thought. A new skin every few years. We could remain in the sun forever.
“Very handsome, Daddy,” he heard Alexandra say.
He wondered how long she’d been standing there watching him. She had his pale red hair, his aquiline nose. She was almost the age her mother had been when Nathan first met her. He wished Alexandra looked more like her mother.
“Thank you sweetheart, you’re very kind,” he said.
“It’s true,” she said. “You’re a good-looking guy.”
“And an old one,” he said.
“You look your age,” she said. “That’s not old.”
“My eyelids are drooping.”
“You’re sad,” she said.
“No, Alex, that’s age, sweetheart.”
“You’d look fine if you were happy,” she said.
“It all comes together, darling. Age and unhappiness.” She turned away. She was struggling with something. He did not press her but turned back to studying the mirror.
I’ll always be thin, he thought. Thank God for that. It was a matter of considerable pride to him that nothing bulged. Not his stomach, not his midriff. He ran on coffee and ate only one meal a day. I’ll never have a paunch, he thought.
He liked his hair being grey. It was thick and silky and much straighter than it had been when it was red. Grey hair showed off his tan to advantage, made his eyes bluer. An improvement, he thought wryly. The barber advised him not to shampoo it every day. To save the oils. It made him uncomfortable to arrive in the office with unwashed hair. But he’d been told he’d have his hair a good long time yet. What things to be thinking about!
One of those wished-for summer rains. The sort that get women baking pies. Or, on this surprising day, clearing closets and attics. And cellars.
He had ceased complaining about the New Yorkers piled high in the Peekskill cellar, a collection representing twenty-seven years’ hoarding. And now, in the tiny downstairs bathroom, his wife stood atop a shaky ladder, papering the ceiling and walls with New Yorker covers, slathering the glossy undersides with rubber cement and brushing each onto its place on the sagging walls with a broad wallpaper brush. The aromatic glue had drawn him; his amazement held him there. Scores of magazine covers lay heaped on the floor, arranged by year, theme, color.
“Will you be throwing out what’s left?” he asked.
“Well,” she said, “there are some articles I haven’t read yet.” Her laughter tinkled. “Yes,” she said finally, “it really is time to clear out the cellar. I’ll throw out the ones I don’t use on the walls.”
He wondered how she had come around to sorting through those magazines. She’d had to slay dragons, he knew, to be able to throw them away. He’d never understood about those dragons.
Her dark hair shone like the sprightly magazine covers. She was strong and purposeful. Her voice, her laughter were exhilarated, blithe, unhesitating. Her hands moved deftly among the piles she had sorted out. Kneeling there on the tiled floor, the narrow bathroom tapering over her, she was crouched at the foot of a shaft. He had been there once before. An elevator shaft. An elevator in the wrong building. A gladsome young woman whose voice filled the little space like church bells pealing in a small town. Church
bells pealing all at once.
“It’s such a charming effect,” he told her. “Where did you get the idea?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for years,” she said, not lifting her head from her work.
He imagined her bolted in that bathroom, scanning the walls, planning this little delight. Is that what occupied her in the hours she spent locked in bathrooms? Locked in lavatories around the world, planning an arrangement such as this?
It was about as close in the cluttered bathroom as it had been in that elevator. She was still luscious and vital, he thought. Still a round bowl of ripe fruit. Was she still, or had she become so once again?
Why now? he wondered. She had broken free somehow. It seemed all of a piece. This bold release of the tightly bundled magazines. The lightness of her laughter. The sureness of her gesture. She’s in love, he decided.
It was hard to know when Felix’s presence in the cavernous second-floor study had yielded to Nathan’s. The old man spent shorter and shorter summers in Peekskill, bought no new books, wrote little. His peppery meerschaums grew stale in their rack. Nathan brought boxes of data sheets back from the lab. He bought an audio-cassette player and recklessly accumulated cassette recordings of Bach, Telemann, Vivaldi, and, more recently, Chopin, Lizst, and Mahler. These he intermingled with cassette lectures on recent ophthalmologic research. By degrees, the study became his.
Now he stood at the picture window gazing out at the pear trees, green-caped gnomes, slope-shouldered and rainwet. There were still abundant reminders of his father-in-law: an oversized phonograph and the heavy black discs that spun on it at seventy-eight rotations per minute. Stacks of psychoanalytic journals in German and Czech. The only other person in the world who actually uses the word “importunate.” Veneration had become deference and then a cool but even comradeship. Felix was his comrade. Never the closeness he’d once yearned for: Felix offering him his daughter, Felix cheering him on while he … well, that was so long ago. He couldn’t have known. Felix couldn’t have known. But at the time, it seemed a splendid victory.
The Speed of Light Page 9