Carla was sitting on their bed, her chin resting on her knees. The sun had gotten him, he knew. And the Percocets. He needed liquid. And he had to lie down.
“Move over,” he told her. He sounded drunk.
He woke to discover himself scalded. Flesh parched as the bricks of Egypt. Sinuses, eyes, dry as a dune. The scent of dime-store peachblossom steamed from the bathroom. His wife had found an old bottle of bubble bath.
She drew her knees up again when she returned to sit on the bed. This time she was wrapped in a thick white towel. Peachblossom hung in the air around her and fell to the pillow where he lay. The tips of her fingers and toes were pale on her tanned skin. Mad streams of bathwater crazed her temples. A little clump of bubbles deliquesced on her shoulder.
“Seltzer,” he said in reply to her question. “With lots of ice and some lime if we have any.”
He propped himself up at the edge of the bed and sipped from the tall glass she’d brought him. Goose prickles rose along his arms. In his eyes and well back into his brain the scratching of fingernails on dry clay pots, insane whispers of desert dying. He plunged his hand into the cold water and drew it across the nape of his neck.
“You look refreshing,” he finally said to her.
“Are you okay, Nathan? You want something more to drink?”
He slouched to the dresser and fumbled about for the Bufferin.
“Nathan, something’s hurting me,” she said. It was the voice of a small child. He wondered when their daughters had sounded so unassuming.
“What is it, Carla?” He was still groggy.
“Something’s not right. It’s burning. Throbbing, more like.”
“What is?”
She kept her chin tucked down as she slowly parted her knees. “I have some vaginal infection or something. Not yeast. I know what that’s like. Maybe it’s just menopause.” She looked up at him, still without raising her chin. Just her eyes, those two aquamarines.
He stood beside the bed now. “Lie down with your knees apart. You know, as if there were stirrups.” His fingers probed only a moment.
“Jesus Christ, Carla, you’ve got herpes! Jesus fucking Christ!” He stood over her, his moist hand poised at a distance from him as if it held a dead rodent.
Her eyes were closed. “Tom never said anything. I wonder if he knows,” she said meekly.
“Of course he knows. A man can see it. What a jerk! This is your thing, Carla. It’s not my business.” He sat once more at the edge of the bed and held the bedlamp close to her crotch, opening her again.
“Herpes,” he said. “The gift that keeps on giving.”
“It’s no big deal,” she said.
“You’re really nuts, Carla, you know that? You should hate him for this.”
“I love him,” she said. She had turned her head and buried it in the pillow. Her shoulders heaved slightly. “I have to forgive him. He’s changed my life, given it back to me.”
“He’s changed your life all right,” Nathan said. “And what he’s given you is a loathsome disease!”
“I forgive him,” she said again.
In the bathroom, he dug his nails into an ancient cake of Lifebouy soap. He brushed his hands, rinsed and washed them again. He expected the soap to sting the cuts on his left palm but it did not. In fact, he felt nothing on that hand. He wanted to puke.
He took a cab to the Provincetown airport. In his briefcase were some papers, a blue oxford shirt, a Dopp kit, and three socks. He got clearance from traffic control and climbed into his Cessna. Still a bit of heat stroke, he thought. But the flight will bring me around.
In two hours, the others would be coming up to Provincetown for the dune rides. Carla would say something about his having an emergency to attend to. He doubted she’d say anything very much to Tom. It was a different thing she felt for Tom, he knew, than he had ever felt for anyone. Than anyone had ever felt for him. It’s because of the way Tom is, he thought. He’s that kind of guy.
He followed the Atlantic coastline to New York. No moon, no stars. Just the familiar lights of I-95 winding along the coast below and then west toward the river. He continued south, passing the Westchester airport.
It’s because of the way Tom is. He wondered if Tom was keeping Carla at the proper distance. They would have to discuss this herpes thing, his wife and Tom would. Pretty soon, they would have to talk about it. It might be hard to keep the proper distance after that.
He would fly under the George Washington Bridge. Just for the hell of it. He could lose his pilot’s license. What the hell, he thought. He cut his transponder, dropped to five hundred feet, and upped the engine to a hundred and eighty. The broad Hudson spread out beneath him, a gleaming grey fishbelly, the wide belly of a drugged woman. A tugboat, stolid and snub-nosed, passed to his left. He pulled up the yoke and rose to eleven hundred feet. Back up between the stanchions of the bridge. A loop. A perfect loop. Now, down on the yoke and once again he was under the bridge, taunting the river. Another loop. He was dazed and dangerous. A vacant consciousness at liberty.
Twenty
“Carla and the girls are still up on the Cape,” he told Muriel the next day. “A little contretemps. I was hoping you’d be up for a concert. Something at Alice Tully Hall?”
Sunday in late August the City is evacuated as if threatened by holocaust. Those destined never to escape stare wantonly from doorways and windows. And I, Nathan mused heading north along Broadway, am the one to discover it was all a mistake: There will be no flood, no war, no devastation. Unwitting adventurer, I find this city drained of its roiling contents, now surprisingly pristine and entirely mine. And there was Muriel, perched at the rim of the Lincoln Center fountain, crisply mint green in polished cotton.
“‘A consummation devoutly to be wish’d,’” he said, offering his hand to help her down. Her skin was cool.
The rhapsodic cello transported him. Muriel, he thought as he gave himself to the music, was more of a good thing than he had acknowledged lately. He knew he offered less than she wanted and far less than she deserved. Her concert tours, filled with salving productivity, protected her from him. The affection of her audiences and colleagues sustained her. These things stabilized and shielded her. For, in the end, he always abandoned her.
He rose to applaud the musicians. He was immensely grateful for the tiny freckled form that rose beside him. He would take her to dinner at Cafe des Artistes.
“I have to tell you something,” she said when they had returned to her apartment. “I’m seeing someone else.”
“Why?” he asked after some moments.
“It’s been six years, Nathan. You won’t leave Carla.”
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Leonid. The composer. You met him years ago. Perhaps you’ve forgotten.”
“Leonid?”
“Yes, Leonid Rosovsky.”
“Why him?”
“He loves me. He wants us to get married. We have the makings of a very sharable life.”
“Do you love him?”
“I want to be married.”
“Yes, I know. Are you going to put up some coffee?”
“You know I love you,” he said when she returned with coffee and cream poured over ice. “And now you’ve won your point. I really am going to leave Carla.”
“I’m not asking you to leave her anymore,” she said. “I’m just saying that it’s over between us.”
The holiday traffic southbound on FDR Drive was more irksome than ever. An accident. A shattered windshield. He would have to move his shoes out of the closets in Peekskill. Carla would take the house, he would keep the apartment. They had spoken of this. He would tell Carla it was because of her infection. It was entirely plausible. And he would not lose Muriel. He could not lose her, he knew that now.
Weekend drivers changing lanes without signalling. It infuriated him. What would he say to his daughters? And his friends, would any remain? Muriel had wonderful friends but he had always
stayed at the periphery. Fifty-seven years old and no friends! He hated Muriel for putting him through this, making him choose. He hated the backup of holiday traffic.
Atrocity bestows its own sainthood. In his monumental suffering, Robin Colby had become a holy man. Nathan had never sought personal advice, but very little humility is required to bare one’s soul to the dying.
“You once said that a woman kept at the proper distance offers the consolation that a wife cannot,” Nathan said to the benign moonface set now atop a heap of bandaged limbs. “I have to ask you, if such women offer salvation, why you’ve stayed married to a woman you despise.”
“I don’t despise Reena. What gave you that idea?”
“All your affairs. The things you said about her. About how you had no sexual feelings for her.”
“Oh c’mon, Nathan. You can’t compare affairs and marriage!”
“You said affairs are what keep us alive, I think. The woman who retains her sheen? Relief from mortal anxiety, wasn’t that it?”
“Yes, yes, Nathan, but it’s an illusion. Religion for the churchless, eh?” Robin’s laugh was shrill.
“Whatever,” Nathan said.
“A mistress is not reality, Nathan. Reena is full of darkness. She confronts me every day with her imperfection, her indefiniteness. It’s disempowering. Of course, by comparison a mistress is consoling.”
“Consoling only because you keep far enough away to maintain the illusion,” Nathan said. “But why stay married if a wife is disempowering, as you put it?”
“Because that’s reality, Nathan. I find ambiguities in Reena that I find in myself.”
“Why confront death everywhere, Robin? Isn’t it enough that we have to deal with our own mortality? Do we need to encounter it in our women as well?”
“Oh, poor Nathan! It’s that old riddle. Which is the true reality? That’s the oldest riddle, isn’t it?”
“So this darkness we encounter in a wife, this foreshadowing of our own mortality, are you saying we should embrace it because it’s the truth? Is that what you want to tell me, Robin?”
“It depends on whether or not you want to hear it.”
“You not only look like a Buddha,” Nathan told him, “you sound like one.” He was growing impatient, anxious. “Are you saying that’s what marriage is? Surrender to death? Who are you kidding, Robin? It’s easy for you to talk of surrender now.” Nathan knew immediately that he had overstepped and was filled with regret.
Robin’s reply was gentle. “You wanted to know why I stayed married. I thought you meant before this happened.”
“Yes, of course,” Nathan said. “I’m sorry.” It was difficult to trust Robin’s new magnanimity.
“What I’m saying,” Robin continued in a hoarse voice, “is that the shining ideal is not a real consolation.”
“And so,” Nathan took up the thread, “we must cleave to the disempowering woman despite the fact that we countenance our own mortality in her.”
“Because of that, Nathan. Not in spite of it.” Robin was weary. “We cleave to her for companionship,” he said.
“Surely, that can’t be all!” Nathan was confounded.
“It’s the best we can hope for,” Robin replied. “Someone to breakfast with, to breathe beside. A companion in the struggle to accept mortality is no small thing.”
“It’s so pedestrian.”
Robin chuckled. “Yes, it’s terrifying,” he said. “Terrifyingly pedestrian!” He managed a histrionic sigh.
Nathan wanted to throttle his friend. Finally, he pushed on, “Are you happy you stayed married?”
“I never considered any other possibility.”
“Didn’t you ever fall in love with one of your other women?” Nathan asked.
“Yes, of course,” Robin replied. “It was wonderful.” His speech was slurred. Nathan could see he was dozing.
“Thank you,” he said to the whiteness. Sheets and gauze. He’s falling apart, Nathan thought. Still, the poor bastard gave me something. Nathan wasn’t sure what it was that Robin had given him. But he said “thank you” again and left.
At 103rd Street, he parked his car and rang the bell in Muriel’s lobby. They would talk, he had decided. He couldn’t decide much beyond that. They would work something out.
“No,” she said. It would not be convenient for him to come up. “No, later would not be good either.”
He slumped back in his chair at the West End Cafe. He would have to avoid the Upper West Side, he thought. Lincoln Center. Carnegie Hall. Eclair. But also the Rockefeller concerts. And Kaufman Concert Hall. And the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He would sense her everywhere. He would become a recluse. He would listen to music at home. But not to Liszt.
He paid the bartender and bid him a moist farewell.
Carla was silent and dense beneath the covers. Safe in her rose-printed gown. Safe on her’ side of the line that divided their bed. The boundary she observed so carefully. Even in her sleep.
He considered his wife. Someone to breathe beside. It would never be enough. But it was, perhaps, something. Something, perhaps, irreplaceable. He studied the plateau of her hip. She, unlike the others, did not form a cello. He placed his hand on the highest point and moved slowly toward her knee where warm skin extended below the hem of her gown. He reversed the motion and moved up along her flank. Her belly protruded under his fingers. There was, after all, a great comfort in this. She rolled away from him.
“Carla,” he said cautiously, “I know it’s been awhile.”
“No,” she said.
“I’m your husband,” he said.
“I can’t,” she said. She did not turn to face him.
“Carla, dear, I think we might reconsider,” he said.
She sat up and swung her feet over her side of the bed.
“I’m importunate, Carla,” he said with a small laugh.
Finally, she turned to him. “I’m not well,” she said. “It’s erupting again. I can’t.”
Dr. Nathan Kline stood on the terrace facing south over Gramercy Park. An old recording spun on his phonograph.
“Mir war auf dieser Welt das Gluck nicht hold!”
Auch mir, Nathan thought. Fortune has not been kind to me either.
“Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde!”
Ah! poor little Gustav Mahler, Nathan thought. You seem so wise and yet, you were so naive. You and I both, little Gustav. We have both been so naive!
Twenty-one
Hilda, he thought upon reflection, might have shown some emotion. Alarm. Sadness. Compassion. But she had been impassive as she gave him the news. The applications to renew his grants had been denied. Both of them. Both projects terminated. The one in its eighteenth year and the more recent project too. It was terminated. No appeal, she had said. Terminated. Heany wanted the labs dismantled by year’s end. Two months, she said. She wanted to discuss her severance. That was something he recalled when he began remembering it. She had wanted to discuss her severance. He had had a sharp pain in his left arm. And he’d taken a fistful of Percocets. And some vodka. It was quite a while before he could begin to remember these things.
But once the remembering began there was no forgetting. Each morning at four he woke to remembering. It bore upon him, a crushing weight, some abomination with no boundaries. It distinguished his waking from his sleep. Dull pain in his jaw, his chest. He lay there helpless before his pain, so engrossed was he in his rememberings. And decades would pass. Awful decades of words he regretted saying. Decades of wounds he had inflicted. I am unforgivable, he thought. And all the wounds he had suffered. Others are unforgivable, he thought. It seemed he had always lived in this darkness and that it could not end. I have become my father, after all, he would conclude. When he finally rose to urinate, he was exhausted. He shoved the toothbrush back toward his molars and retched. That was how he began his days. Decades of rememberings, and then the retching.
His days were small and forgotten. Wi
sps trailing behind the decades of remembering. Even as he peered through his loops, measured the pressure in an eye, offered some cordiality to an old patient, studied Doris Needham’s meticulous notations, the rememberings kept up their incessant thrum.
Tom and Armand faced Carla and him on the tennis court in the pear orchard. He snarled at Armand. He barked at Carla. He smiled small smiles at Tom. It was good to keep moving. The dark weight broke a bit when he moved about the court.
“My shoulder’s no good,” he would announce after a double fault.
“I thought it was the left shoulder,” Armand said.
“It was,” he replied. “Now it’s both shoulders. No feeling in my left hand. Calcium deposits, most likely.”
“You ought to get it checked,” Tom said.
“Yeah,” he said. He was often surprised to hear himself in conversation. To hear his voice through his darkness. To hear others respond as if he had made sense. They were so far away, he could not imagine how they heard him.
He wondered if calcium deposits could really produce that numbness in his left hand. He wondered about the pain in his shoulders. Mostly, he did not think about it.
“I can prescribe Tofranil,” Lily told him, “but you really ought to talk to someone, too.”
“With all due respect to your profession,” he said, “I don’t think there’s anyone I want to talk to. I’ll talk to you, if that’s okay. And I can prescribe my own Tofranil.”
“Of course, we can talk, Nathan, but it’s not the same thing. And you’re not going to prescribe for yourself.” She handed him a prescription.
“You’re still awfully pretty,” he said. “You’re sexy, too, Lily. If I could get it up just now …”
“Thanks for the compliment,” she said.
“Really, Lily, how come you never remarried?” They were leaving her office now, heading to Le Veau d’Or.
“You’ve been out with a lot of men, God knows,” he continued when they were seated. “Didn’t Carla fix you up with Armand? She introduces everyone to Armand. Too bad you didn’t like him. He’s loaded, you know.”
“He wasn’t any more or less defective than the others.”
The Speed of Light Page 11