Nathan turned to the painting and then back to Vera. She was studying it with sadness, almost pity.
“It’s disturbing to see this painting,” she went on earnestly, “knowing how those anemones will return and knowing that, at the time he painted them, the painter could not have known.”
“Vera,” he said, “you do think an awful lot.”
They drove back to New York very late and, once more, looked out over the Harbor. He told her stories he had not told in years. He remembered things he had not remembered. He talked about a summer he had spent in Maine and about his adventures in the navy. About Marvin Lampert, a physics student from the Bronx, who had taught him to love music.
“At Columbia,” he said, “the top floor of Livingston Hall was filled with physicists and they all loved music.”
“That’s understandable,” she said.
He recounted how his cousin Lily’s husband Howard hanged himself and wondered while he was telling her why he was telling her that.
There were all those things he could not, dared not, say about how much he wished he’d known her sooner. Known her when there was more time. How he wanted to know how she was then, and at all times other than then. What he could never now know no matter how much she told him. For words could never bring her to him as she was at all those other times and could not ever be again.
How much he wanted to tell her about himself and he did try and always failed because his words, but not just his words, his efforts to fathom or to remember who or what he was then or at any other time always fell short and he found it was impossible to give himself to her as he so very much wanted to do.
And so in the end there was just the present moment and who they were just then and he was, he thought, so miserably inadequate.
It was dawn when he let himself into the apartment. Under the yellow bedlamp light, the crown of his wife’s head was a polished chestnut.
“You’re still up.”
“You might have called.”
“I didn’t know you were back in New York.”
“I said I’d return Saturday morning. It’s Saturday. Or, rather, yesterday was.”
“I forgot. Sorry.”
“Your surgery is on Monday. That’s tomorrow, you know.”
“I know. I was with Vera. We were talking.”
“Vera? Armand’s Vera?”
“It’s over with Armand.”
“I know.”
“Go to sleep, Carla.”
He needed to find his boxes. Papers, notebooks. Journals and diaries from college, from the navy, from his trip to Normandy. Descriptions of cathedrals in the manner of Henry James. Letters from the German woman. He’d almost married her. He read each one.
Another box. Poems and essays he’d written in his twenties. He sat in the living room reading them aloud. A worn first edition of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. A woman had given him that. Elizabeth. When he was an intern.
“Evening strains to be time’s vast,
Womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.”
He rose and walked through the room where his wife lay sleeping. In their bathroom, his leather Dopp kit sat open in the linen closet. He would need a fresh supply of razors. Mouthwash. There were ample Percocets in the orange vial. He yanked a canvas zippered bag from the top shelf.
His navy cotton robe, freshly laundered pajamas … Underwear, socks, slippers … Sweatpants, a Lacoste shirt, a cardigan … The collected poems, first edition.
Twenty-seven
After a week, Carla brought him back to the apartment overlooking the park. One hand gripped the canvas straps of his zippered bag while the other clutched his wool scarf close about his throat. January-thin rays of light glinted off the snow, making it whiter, colder. He had lived.
He paused in the foyer, taking in what he knew had been his home for almost thirty years. Shelves crammed with books, small round tables, ovals and rectangles, sofas, little objects accumulated in travels. They might have been relics in the vitrines of some anthropological museum. Shimmering with intimations of roles they had played, ways they had served in lives now past, lives one could only guess at. A moire evening gown in Les Invalides is recognizable as the gown of the Empress Josephine. One knows how it was fastened, and on what sorts of occasions it was worn. But one does not know enough. The details one wants are not provided. He had been irrevocably severed from his former knowledge of things.
He let his wife take his topcoat from him and set his bag down at the harpsichord, staring across to the window and on to the park beyond. The window, the park itself were so much smaller than he remembered. And faded, somehow greyed. In Cardiac Intensive Care, perhaps, one sees larger things, more vivid things. Perhaps that was it.
In the mirror before him, an obscene wine-colored scab wended its way through the stubble that had been his chest hair. He could recall halving a game hen with a heavy knife through the soft rib bones. Or steadying a lobster on his plate for the same deft stroke. He backed away slightly and lowered his eyes to take in the fuller view. On his right leg, another long, jagged line. The same burgundy color, but a thinner, less certain line. His pubic hair was gone. Like a young boy, he thought. And then he reconsidered. A humiliating baldness. The baldness of French girls found sleeping with Nazis.
“You look very well,” Vera said when she came to meet him in the lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel. “I should have had my taxi pick you up. That was thoughtless of me. You really shouldn’t be out yet, breathing such cold air.”
“I’ve only come around the corner,” he told her. “I can walk, you know.” She was bundled in a grey mohair coat the color of her eyes. He had never before seen such glow in that particular color.
“It’s too cold out. I really should have come for you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s wonderful to see you,” he said. A phrase that trips from the tongue so readily, that is heard so habitually, its truth value is never in issue. But, Nathan reflected, it was true. It was wonderful to see her. And to be seen by her. Held fast in that unequivocal, wholly scrutable gaze. It really was absolutely wonderful.
“Come again on Wednesday,” he pleaded as she rose to leave. “We’ll walk around the park. My first outing.”
“You did it!” she cried and hugged him at the end of their walk.
“You did it,” he told her. He felt suddenly giddy and sobered himself. “I’m not letting anyone help me, you know. They all want to mix in and I just don’t want it. But I could not have walked in this cold without you.”
“You must let people help, Nathan,” she said.
“Well,” he said, “it’s not like me to depend on others. But I can lean on you, Vera. I don’t know why. Strange, really. I hardly know you. I hope you’ll come back and walk around the park with me again.”
“Day after tomorrow,” she said.
As they walked through the Museum of Modern Art, he took her arm and spoke to her of Manet’s uses of the color red.
“It saves him from sentimentality,” she agreed.
They found themselves in the photography wing.
“I’ve never much cared for photography,” he said. “Never liked the portraits. I don’t like snapshots, either. Never could tell why.”
“I don’t like them either,” she said. “They’re dead.”
“How do you mean, ‘dead?’”
“A photograph freezes its subjects, don’t you think? No matter how naturalistic, photographs are always unnatural, dead. Frozen in time, frozen in space. They give me the willies.”
“But here is a child going by on a bicycle,” he said. “You can see it moving. It’s very much alive.”
“But it’s a moment that has passed,” she said. “The photograph attempts to hold that moment in place. Motion never really looks like that.”
“I suppose that’s true,” he said. “Still, death is not the subject matter.”
“What I meant,” she continued, “is
that regardless of subject matter, a photograph’s resemblance to experience calls attention to the poignant differences. For the subject of the photograph, the moment is gone. The photographer imprisons that moment when it really wants to flee. He just can’t let it pass. Even family snapshots are overlaid by melancholy, nostalgia for the moment that has passed. I always feel a tinge of sadness on everything a camera captures.”
They returned to the main exhibition rooms.
“Painted portraits,” he said, “of people who have died. Shouldn’t you include them in your necrology as well?”
“That’s not it at all,” she said. She was annoyed with him. “A painting is always fresh and new. From its inception, it is something other than its subject.”
“I’m not sure it’s such a simple distinction,” Nathan said. He had stopped studying the pictures and was watching her instead. Rapt, pondering, her eyebrows knit deeply. There was a difference, he decided. Something fresh, newborn in a painting.
Vera, he decided, was undoubtedly a painting. And I, he concluded, I … am a photograph.
Colby, he recalled, had startled him once. The way he seemed to envy women. But I do envy her, Nathan thought. I could, if she stayed around perhaps, become more like her, more … like a painting. For one flickering moment, Nathan considered that he might begin it all again. It is undoubtedly my last opportunity, he thought.
A heart mending, and his patients grateful for his return. Wanting him to know it caused them concern. Pleased to hear his anecdotes again. They reassured each other. “Take good care of yourself, now,” they said. “We missed you, you know.”
“I’m going to be good as new,” he said. “You take care of yourself.”
The congenial little squeaks of Doris Needham’s crepe-soled shoes along the office corridors. Department meetings, Heaney’s endless droning, endearing for its familiarity. Rounds with residents, their eagerness to see what he saw when he peered through his loops, wanting his vision of things. Peekskill and its immutable lake. Carla: subdued, obliging, and still radiant, somehow. His daughters and their friends. He loved their friends visiting. A raw rush in his veins when they stayed to dinner.
And Vera. Luminous, complicated, miraculous as a snowflake.
Twenty-eight
The present nastiness, Nathan later recalled, had started with Tom Szabo. With Tom, expansive as ever, extending a warm, dry palm to draw him into an embrace. Tom’s other hand grasped the shoulder of a short, damp, ruddy-faced man. “This is Leon Sinrich,” Tom had said. “Leon’s a terrific guy. You have to get to know him. He’s an accountant. Specializes in doctors. Nathan,” he’d told the red face, “is an ophthalmologist. Also one helluva guy. Nathan,” he had said, “is my best friend.”
It had struck Nathan as very odd to hear he was Tom’s best friend. He had, for the first time in perhaps several years, wondered if Tom was still at it with Carla. He had long ago let all that pass.
Tom had thought Nathan should meet with Sinrich to find out what the new federal regulations would mean for his business. Nathan no longer got annoyed at Tom referring to his practice as a business, something Nathan knew it definitely was not. He’d gotten past all that, too. But it had struck him as very odd to hear that he was Tom’s best friend.
It was Tom who had set Leon Sinrich on him. And Leon would linger in his newly-renovated office, smiling back at him from the celadon enamel coating on all that expensive new equipment. It was Leon’s face that would surface on the bills Doris Needham so meticulously prepared and presented for review. Leon said the new regulations placed a ceiling on what he could charge, a ceiling so low he might not be able to breathe in the air remaining beneath. It could not be gotten around, Leon said. Medicare patients would be forbidden from offering more in payment. “Of course you,” the disagreeable face continued, “will be profoundly affected since, as I estimate it, eighty percent of your practice is Medicare. Cataracts, degenerative disorders. Am I correct?”
Nathan’s lids hung low over his eyes and his chin rested on his chest. He wanted Sinrich to leave. He wanted to take a nap. He could not appreciate Tom’s kindness just then.
“What it really cuts into,” Sinrich continued, “is your surgery billings. I imagine they support the rest of your operation. I figure your malpractice premium alone at around nineteen, twenty grand.”
He certainly knew what he was talking about. Tom always found good people, Nathan recalled.
“So,” Sinrich went on, “you have to clear over two hundred just to meet expenses. I don’t see that happening.”
Celadon, Nathan realized, could be a sickening shade of green.
“You’ll have to triple your load, turn them over six an hour. Join a group, an HMO. Or, hire a P.R. firm and.…”
Nathan held up his hand. “Enough,” he said. “The practice of medicine isn’t something you hawk on the street. It’s an art. It’s not like accounting.”
“I’m trying to be realistic with you,” Sinrich said.
“I know,” Nathan replied. “I’m sorry.”
Sinrich laughed. “You medical men are all unrealistic,” he said. “That’s how I make a living.”
It wasn’t Sinrich’s fault, Nathan knew. But his professional life was being overlaid with a thick coat of anxiety, a coat he knew he would not be able to shake even after Sinrich was gone. And he could not forget it had been Tom who had so generously arranged this meeting. Once again, he found himself wondering if Tom and Carla were still at it.
She had never spoken of Tom after that day in Truro, but he could not ignore the changes in his wife over the last few years. How clarified, how resolute, how self-possessed she had become. A zealousness about her work, it was impossible not to notice. And she was now, well, a phenom of sorts at some downtown gallery. Perhaps her ardor was fueled by what she shared with Tom. Or perhaps she was flourishing because Tom had vanished. It might be either way; Nathan had no way of knowing which it was.
It was, in fact, Time more than anything else. It was, in some measure, Felix’s apology, which she had not understood at the time. It was also, in great measure, Lisle. Lisle grew angrier as she matured but, to Carla’s dismay, refused to leave home. She wanted something from her mother before she could leave, and she persisted, taunting, prodding, demanding something Carla could not provide. Her peachy cheeks inflamed with wrath, her blonde hair damp on her forehead, her eyes would burn. “I hate you,” Lisle would cry out. “You’re such a … a nothing!”
And then, one autumn, it seemed it was time. Time to tell Tom that his thoughtlessness pained her, that the futility of their arrangement pained her, that she was tired of the pain. It was time to forsake the parties that brought her so much admiration, that caused people to say what a superb caterer she might be.
One autumn evening, Carla tore apart the clay figure she was dawdling over in the studio at the Lexington Avenue Y and began feverishly, unfalteringly, to remake it. Tools she had obediently used for their specified purposes were set out in their usual places at her bench. But she took them into her hands with reverence and awe, as if she were receiving a just-born infant. She dug and clawed at the figure on its wire armature, elongated its hands, its neck, thickened its feet, hollowed its cheeks.
George, the janitor, told her he had to close, he had to get on home. “I’ll lock up,” she said. She pleaded with him. “I have to keep at this,” she said. It was time.
Nathan had no inkling of the processes by which his wife had become a sculptor. He had no idea how things stood with Tom. He knew only that it was Tom who had sent Leon Sinrich into his office and he knew that Leon would, henceforth, sit on his shoulder like some warty toad.
He remembered something his father was fond of saying: Every day every man must swallow a toad. Leon would be his daily bitter draught.
So much more was he grateful for Vera.
Twenty-nine
As Nathan’s heart healed and his body felt more itself, he found new and various way
s in which Vera could make him stronger.
In early March, he asked if she would help him revive his tennis game, return the balls, slowly, gently. She obliged, and soon he was teaching her to gauge the distance to a backhand, to step into her forehand, to bring her full weight down on her serve.
“You’re doing so well with your tennis,” he told her then, “I’d love to teach you to ski as well. I can’t keep up with Alex and Lisle anymore. You’d be a good skier. I’m sure of it.”
“I really don’t think I can learn at my age,” she said.
“Nonsense,” he said. “You’re not your age, Vera. The rules don’t apply to you.”
He took her to a fine, glowing shop on Madison Avenue. “Bogner,” he told her, “is the very finest.”
She attended carefully to his instructions and cut a sure, graceful path down the beginners’ slope. Nathan beamed with pride as he watched her, the shiny dark braid flying out behind her.
“I told you the rules don’t apply to you,” he said.
He led her to the chair lift at the foot of the smallest mountain. She shrank back against him.
“I can’t,” she said.
Nathan put his arm about her. Within the puffy jacket, her small, uncertain frame. “C’mon,” he said, “hold onto me.”
The pulley stopped and the little chair swung on its wire. Vera gripped the handrail tightly and bit her lip. “We’re almost at the top,” Nathan said. “Just slide off the seat with your skis on the ground.”
He edged her off the chair and helped her to her feet.
“I can’t ski down,” she said. “It’s much too steep.”
“This is the only way down,” he said gently. “Just follow me and do as I say.”
At the foot of the mountain, Vera unbuckled her boots.
“You must go up again,” Nathan said. “Right now. And again after that until you get used to it. You’re doing very well.”
On the lift, she closed her eyes and buried her head in his shoulder. A small bird trembling against him.
On the trail that led back to the pro shop, she paused to watch the rosy children shussing and tumbling on the beginner slope. “I wish I’d learned when I was a child,” she said wistfully.
The Speed of Light Page 15