The Speed of Light

by Susan Pashman

“I’m not so sure,” Nathan said. “He told me it’s my way of escaping death, my way of conquering it.”

  “That’s silly,” Sophie said.

  “Perhaps he was right,” Nathan told her. “Perhaps it’s a little game I play with myself.”

  But he knew the game was over. Felix had ruined eulogies and left him with a huge, cold battleship hauled up close against his cheek. He wondered how Lew, how Lily, even Hassah with that splendid old cat, had ever endured it: being so close to it, holding it in their hands. The inutterable fact of terminus.

  “My father-in-law was a doctor who did not imagine himself a scientist,” he told the throng at Riverside Chapel. “He did not view the human soul as a proper subject for scientific inquiry. He told me, when my first child was born, that I was foolish not to realize what to him was obvious: that no amount of empirically verifiable speculation, however sophisticated, could ever account for the processes of the human soul. I dismissed this as old-fashioned poppycock. I still don’t know if it is anything more.

  “I do know, however, that Felix Weisenthal’s view is the logical requirement of a belief that something of the human spirit survives those processes which we know with scientific certainty occur in death. In the case of Felix’s spirit, I certainly hope he was right.”

  He discoursed for awhile on Felix’s accomplishments, his publications and contributions to psychoanalytic theory. Then he read the little meditation he had copied from the Siddur two days earlier.

  “… We are like a child that grasps in his hand a sunbeam. He opens his hand soon again but, to his amazement, finds it empty and the brightness gone.

  “Felix Weisenthal thoroughly enjoyed the companionship of Time,” he told the mourners. “He was a sunbeam that we were each honored to grasp for some short time. I do not believe his brightness will soon be gone.”

  “Thank you, Nathan,” Carla said. “It was your best eulogy ever.”

  “Great speech,” Armand told him. “You’re really good at this sort of thing.”

  “It was my last one,” Nathan said. His fingertips and the inside of his mouth felt icy. “Where’s Vera?” he asked Armand.

  “It’s over,” Armand said very softly. Nathan thought his friend was about to cry.

  “I’m awfully sorry to hear that,” he said. “Now the brightness really is gone.”

  Twenty-five

  “Grey,” the nurse had said. She said he looked grey, that he should lie down for awhile. He’d said it was just a touch of vertigo. The events of the last three days, he’d said, had worn him out. A death in the family, the girls leaving for school, his wife going south to settle her mother. He hadn’t been eating. “And the holidays,” he said. “You know how it gets during the holidays.”

  He’d wanted to resume the stress test immediately. He felt okay, he’d said. He would finish the treadmill in no time at all. He needed to renew his pilot’s license before it expired. He’d forgotten the deadline, what with the holidays. She’d said he still looked grey. “Stay on your back and breathe slowly,” she’d said. As though he weren’t a doctor. As though she didn’t know who he was.

  “And the heat was a factor,” he’d explained. “Indian summer and Rosh Hashonah always come together.”

  She’d begun sticking the little rubber cups to his chest with petroleum jelly. “This is silly,” he’d said. “I know you want to be especially careful. I am on the faculty, of course. But this is really too much.”

  The needle began its scratchings. The glossy paper unspooled. He had heard it.

  “You really don’t need to draw blood,” he’d told her. “A bit of vertigo, that’s all.”

  “The cardiologist’s orders,” she’d said.

  “I don’t have a cardiologist,” he’d insisted. “And I really must get on with the stress test.”

  “We’re going to have to finish that another time,” she’d said sweetly.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, Dr. Kline, I do. Dr. Taylor will be in to see you shortly.”

  How many times, he wondered, had he operated on an eye, cut through a man’s eye? They would shudder in horror as he told them they needed surgery. “I cannot let you do that,” they would say. They would plead for alternatives. “Better you should take the knife to my testicles,” they would say. “It would be easier if you operated on my heart,” they would say. “A knife in the eye! I cannot think of such a thing!”

  He would tell them they would feel nothing. They would be asleep.

  “I cannot sleep,” they would say. “How can I sleep imagining a knife in my eye?”

  He would be seamless reassurance, seamless optimism. He’d taken years acquiring such impassiveness.

  And now, Dr. Taylor was telling him, him, Nathan Kline, that they would cut into his heart with a knife. His heart. They would open his chest and set his heart in ice. A finely trained team of surgeons. They would cut into it with a knife. Taylor’s seamlessness left no doubt. It would be done.

  He found his way home. The apartment, its furnishings, were retracted and noncommital. He poured a Stolichnaya and sat at the harpsichord, gazing out across Gramercy Park.

  He had never really understood their fears. “Better my testicles than my eyes,” they had said. Phil Neuman gave up his testicles and more. “My God,” he wondered aloud, “however did he do that?” He, himself, cut into eyes every week. It can’t be easier to give up a testicle, he thought.

  And a heart, what of a heart? Better a testicle than an eye. Better an eye than a heart. Where, he wondered, where does a man really live?

  There would be weeks to endure. Tests. Measurements. It wasn’t an emergency, Taylor had said. He would have a second opinion. He would go to New Jersey where his father’s cardiologist still practiced. If they were going to open his chest and take out his heart, it would be close to where he’d been born. People would be upset, he knew. It would be difficult to visit him in a hospital in New Jersey. Carla will say I’m being difficult. I’m always being difficult. Too bad, he thought, I can be difficult if they’re taking out my heart. Cutting it up with a knife. That’s difficult.

  Across Gramercy Park, people spilled from the little synagogue like dark ink. Kol Nidre, he realized. The eve of the Day of Atonement. Of Yom Kippur. They had begun their fast and said their prayers and were returning home to sleep.

  On Rosh Hashonah our fate is written. Who shall live and who shall die. On Yom Kippur, our fate is sealed. He could not imagine how he remembered these fragments of liturgy. Ancient fragments, buried in some melodic ritual. Buried in the chants of swaying, white-robed priests. In New Jersey, beside his father. These fragments had slipped into his memory then and stayed there, buried until now. He would go to New Jersey, to his father’s man.

  On Yom Kippur our fates are sealed. Who shall live and who shall die. He would go too, he knew, to the service at the little synagogue tomorrow. Three times during the morning he would read aloud an extensive list of transgressions and, as he called out the name of each one in turn, he would beat his fist against his chest. For the sin of being stiff-necked. Beat. For the sin of coveting. Beat. He would go alone and beat his chest.

  He stepped out onto the terrace. It had grown cool. He wanted to tell someone. Not his daughters. Not his wife. A friend is what was wanted. I might have told Colby, he thought. Or Felix. Doctors who would understand. As it was, it seemed there was no one.

  “What is man?” he read in a little rhyme inserted between the prayers. “Man is frail … like an aimless child … who stumbling, falls and resumes his struggle … seeking more and more of wealth and power … Til at last death comes to overtake him.”

  “Piyyut,” it was called. There were many Piyyutim, some quite elaborate. Whose thoughts are these, he wondered once again.

  “But of man—ah! the tale is another

  His counsels are evil and vain

  He dwells with deceit as a brother

  And the worm is the close of his
reign.

  Into earth he is carted and shovelled

  And who shall recount or who heeds

  When above earth he strutted or grovelled

  His marvellous deeds?

  NOT SO GOD! Earth on nothing He founded

  And on emptiness stretched out the sky.…

  I’m sufficiently humbled, Nathan concluded, and he shut the Siddur and left the synagogue.

  The tests went on for weeks. Weeks of hospital forms, of syringes and questionnaires. Was he allergic to anything? Weeks of telephone calls. To his daughters. They must not worry and surely not return home. To his lawyers to review his will. To his insurance broker. To Heaney, and Mrs. Needham. “Three weeks,” he told her. “Tell my patients I’ll be away for three weeks.”

  He called Armand and then he could not recall why.

  “Would you like to have dinner?” Armand asked him. He was terribly lonely, Nathan knew. They dined at the Oyster Bar where, as usual, the smelts were excellent and the white tile floor was surgically scrubbed. Weeks passed. It was already November.

  There is a shade of lavender rent with orange that is November dusk. A lavender sky stretched out unnoticed behind towers at the rim of Central Park. Surrounding the towers, plastering them, with numinousness. A demure young woman whose cheeks were frosted apples, whose eyes were watery with cold, pressed forward to meet him, her hands buried in a fur muff. A fur muff that suited her so perfectly, Nathan could have leapt to embrace her. But he kept his reserve and chatted about the chill in the air and took no note of that particular shade of lavender, blue enough to herald December, rosy enough to console the brown leaves.

  Impersonal conversation. He supposed she was coy. She supposed she was seeing him for her father’s sake, this exceptional young man. This importunate young man. The lavender sky was, then, what the violinist was, leaning ferociously into his instrument to shield his fingers from the chill air and sending his music out to get lost in it. It was like the pungent musk of burnt chestnuts. It was the air through which they moved, their backdrop, their ambience. Nothing more.

  And now, it was everything.

  Blue. Rose. They held so much import he could scarcely keep track of his thoughts. He sat on a petrified bench by the Park’s boathouse and watched the dusk press down upon those screeching vermillion ribbons. He watched the struggle as the gleaming bands of excitement yielded slowly at first and then capitulated. He gripped the slats of his seat. There was a hole in his glove and the tip of his right index finger was numb. I will yield with exceeding slowness, he decided. I will gleam and screech a shameless orange before it all shuts down.

  He got up and crammed his hand into his pocket. It was becoming dark and he felt very cold.

  The apartment, too, was very dark and very cold. His wife was once again in Florida tending to her mother, resolving things. Papers and insurance. There was no end to these matters. He was hungry and chilled. He cleared his throat as he dialed.

  “Vera,” he said. “It’s Nathan Kline. This is Nathan, Vera. How are you? We’ve missed you.”

  “Vera,” he began again when she had answered his other questions, “I know it’s quite late but I wondered … I mean if you’re free, of course … I wondered if you would have dinner with me tonight. I really would like to talk with you.”

  Twenty-six

  A low, tin ceiling caused the clink and clatter of the crowd to reverberate. Like bells in a small town of churches, pealing all at once. He never could remember that restaurant although he did try to many times thereafter.

  He did not remember either—except that she once or twice reminded him—that he had driven her from the restaurant to the Plaza Hotel where, he suggested, they might dance the night away. She was not suitably attired, she had told him. Whereupon he turned east and then south to the Waldorf-Astoria where, he suggested, the Empire Room had a wonderful dance floor. She had wondered if he was drunk. He had said “No,” and continued south to the World Trade Center where they’d ordered brandies over New York Harbor.

  She was, she later confided, confused and a little alarmed by this behavior. But then, when he toldlier why he had needed to see her, she had understood.

  “When is it going to happen?” she asked. She rested her chin in her left palm. Her fingers climbed her face like vines. She had extraordinary fingers, he decided.

  “In a few weeks. Early in the new year, I imagine.”

  “It must be awful having to wait like this.”

  Nathan’s mouth opened wide but the laugh he emitted was a narrow one. “I’m not worried,” he told her. “I’ve known the surgeon for years. Top man.”

  “How could you not be worried?”

  “I know what’s involved,” he said. “Fear is pointless.”

  “But real,” she insisted. The soft grey eyes, the husky voice. Nathan had often found he had to listen for awhile to get used to it coming from her.

  “Why are you dwelling on this?” He ordered another Remy Martin. A double.

  “I’m just trying to understand why you wanted to see me. Why you called me tonight.” Her voice was low, complicitous.

  “I called you because I wanted to talk with you. To see you before …”

  “Yes?”

  “Because I’ve always wanted to see you. To invite you to dinner. But there was Armand.”

  “And Carla,” she said. “Where is Carla, anyway?”

  “Down in Florida with her mother. Felix died, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. How terrible. This really is a nasty time for you.”

  “Actually, it’s a wonderful time,” he said. “An absolutely splendid time. Because I am here at the top of the City talking with you and your fingers are the longest, most graceful fingers I think I have ever seen. And I want you to come dancing with me. I haven’t danced in years. I’m an excellent dancer, you know. Disciplined. Smooth. You’re a good dancer, too. I can tell.”

  It was four in the morning and he drove her home. She said she would go dancing with him. Before the surgery. “I promise,” she said.

  And she did.

  He wore the Dusseldorf tuxedo because he found it in his closet among Carla’s college blazers and it still fit.

  “Carla refused to be seen with me in this,” he told Vera. “She gave up the Harvest Ball rather than let me wear it.”

  “It’s very you,” she told him. The deep, rich laughter engulfed him.

  “I know it’s very scary,” she said quietly as he fox-trotted her about a crowded floor. “It’s scary but you’re going to come out just fine. I know you will.”

  “I need a friend,” he said.

  “I’m your friend,” she said. “I’ll keep right on being your friend.”

  “It’s nice having my hand around your waist,” he said, “but do I place it under or over the pigtail?”

  There was a spaciousness now, and a path through his days. Each chore was but some small diversion from the time he spent with her.

  He showed her the architect’s plans for renovating his office.

  “A perfect new start,” she said. “The timing is just right.”

  He visited her at the preschool and watched her flock swarm about her, grasping at the sparks that cascaded like petals of chrysanthemum fireworks, spilling from her as she skipped from one eager face to the next. The powerful energy of her own face, eyes dancing beneath the raised brows, every feature in motion. Captivating the little ones, entrancing them. The deep voice, its gentle humor. The agile, animated hands. Hands of a magician, Nathan decided.

  He met her two fierce sons. Do not harm her, they seemed to say with their cool reserve. She is a treasure and she is ours, they were telling him.

  She showed him the drawings the autistic children made. “They really are poets,” she said.

  They talked about Armand. He asked about her divorce. She asked why he had remained married.

  “So you noticed,” he said, looking down at his hands.

  Vera n
odded.

  “We have children,” he said.

  “So do I,” she said. “Your daughters would endure a divorce.”

  “Alex actually urged me to do it.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “Our finances are complicated, you know. And socially, well, you really do have to be a couple.”

  “That’s absolutely medieval,” she said. “In some respects, I think, it’s better to be single.”

  “Armand is single,” Nathan said. “He’s very unhappy.”

  “But Armand has the possibility of finding someone he loves. You don’t have that possibility.”

  They spoke of politics. And of art. Of the art of politics and the politics of art.

  “Your views are so original,” he said. “Like so much else about you. Utterly refreshing. What do you read?”

  She laughed that laugh he had come to think of as the sound of her and hunched her shoulders up quizzically as she so often did when she laughed. “I read my children’s homework assignments,” she said. “No time for much else. Mostly, I just think about things. I’m always thinking about things.”

  Christmas. He took her to Saks for leather gloves that ran to her elbows. To a tuba concert at Rockefeller Center. To the Russian Tea Room with its incandescent samovars.

  One Saturday morning he fetched her and drove to Washington. Matisse’s paintings from the Midi. “I want to see these with you,” he told her, “because you are an odalisque.”

  “I’m an art therapist,” she said.

  “I watched you massage Armand’s neck and his back and I realized then that you were an odalisque.”

  She stood staring at Pineapples and Anemones painted in 1939. He moved about the gallery and returned to her.

  “Is this really such an interesting painting?” he asked.

  “The anemones,” she said. “He could never have guessed when he painted them that ten years later he would be bedridden and unable to paint. That he would be forced to begin his cutouts. That these anemones would return years later as his signature in the cutouts. He could not have had the slightest inkling when he made this painting.”