She really did look like “Kate” – a sleek, slim face, big, very talkative mouth, foxy eyes and auburn hair.
“More than that. He’s wonderful! Say, speaking of Katharine Hepburn, Woman of the Year is playing. I want to see it. How’s next week?”
“I’d love to. I’ll check my calendar.”
“I called two days ago and left a message about getting together,” she said. She hesitated, then dropped her voice a little. “How are things, Katie? Tell me what’s going on.”
Things was code.
“Things are stable,” I said. And then I added, emphatically and untruthfully, “And anyway, it’s the holidays now, so things are basically calm and, as you see, fairly festive.” And then, because I was on a roll, I finished with Lie No. 3: “And yes, I still have the number of that therapist you recommended and I am calling her tomorrow, so you needn’t be concerned.”
Gillian regarded me closely, as if I were a specimen of something she’d just cut out of a patient. She nodded. “That’s a good first step. Hey – let me spend the night. Cooper won’t mind.”
“Don’t be silly. I told you not to worry. Can’t you see everything is fine?” I gestured toward the general gaeity. “Claude’s in a great mood, and we’re all having fun. Can’t you just get into the Christmas spirit and off this subject?”
“I’m Jewish.” She grinned.
“Okay – but you know what I mean.” I could hear the peevishness in my voice. I looked for a waiter.
“I wish I did,” she said, “but I don’t, and to be honest I’m seeing how much you don’t want to deal with it. You’re doing that splitting thing Cooper told you about in order to cope, which is completely understandable, but—”
“Gillian, come on, you’re not being fair. I’ve got this under control, okay? I have plans. I just can’t give you all the details at the moment.”
Mainly because you don’t know what they are.
“Okay, but when I call, answer the phone. Don’t forget, you have an open invitation to move in with me.”
“What? You’re impossible. I promise, okay?”
We gave each other a tight hug.
*
At eleven p.m., my parents were the last to leave. At the door my father was talking about a patient he’d recently referred to Claude. He was loud and imperious.
“High-profile case,” he said. “Wants a facelift. Very neurotic, needs much, much, much attention. Give her the kid-glove treatment, Claude, you’re so good at that, and charge her up the ass. She can afford it. Her husband owns banks or something. I don’t want to be bothered. After all, it’s only wrinkles. But you are the master. You’ll get it done.”
My mother bent down and kissed Rose. “Sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
“You’re so funny, Grandmamma! I’m coming over to your house tomorrow.”
“Yes, you are, darling, and we’re going to do whatever you want, and maybe you’ll help me make some sugar cookies.”
Rose nodded, and then hugged Claude. “Good night, Daddy, Merry Christmas,” she said, and she took my hand. Leaving Claude to see my parents out, we climbed the stairs and ambled down the hall into Rose’s room. I tucked her in, and she asked me to read The Night Before Christmas – again.
“Please, Mommy, just one more time,” she said, and I dutifully began to read. As I read the singsong lines – practically reciting from memory – her eyelids began to drift down, and by the time St Nick announced, “And to all a good night,” she was asleep. I was about to slip out of the room when I heard Claude coming down the hall. I looked up and saw him standing in the doorway, his large hands balled into fists. He had that look on his face: unfocused, blurred, as if the features had been smeared by a malevolent hand. He was breathing heavily.
I’d read him wrong again.
“Did I not tell you to put her to bed two hours ago?” he said.
Rose’s eyes opened, and I felt her grow rigid under my hand.
“It’s all right, Rose,” I said tightly. “Daddy’s in a little bad mood, that’s all. It’ll be all right.”
“A bad mood?” Claude shouted, coming into the room and standing over the bed. “A bad MOOD?”
Rose began to cry and I instinctively leaned over, covering her. Claude’s words hissed through clenched teeth an inch from my ear. “You will learn to put her to bed when I tell you to,” he said. He took a handful of my hair and twisted my head around. “Are you listening to me?”
“Please, Claude, please, not in front of Rose, not here,” I pleaded.
My husband pulled me to my feet by my hair.
“Mommy! Daddy!”
Claude drew his arm back and then punched me in the face. I staggered back, floated for a moment, and then hit the floor.
I looked up to see him standing over me, his features compressed into a dark, misshapen blur, his eyes like slits. As he raged, his spit rained down on me in a mist.
“I’ll have to teach you to be a good mother too. You’re too stupid to learn anything on your own! I have to do everything around here!”
He pulled me to my feet. Rose screamed, “Don’t hurt Mommy!” as Claude turned me toward the wall, got a better grip, and ran me into it. I had just enough time to raise my arms before I hit, saving my brains from splattering all over one of Rose’s dinosaur drawings.
“That should teach you,” he said, and stomped out of the room.
I struggled to my feet, made it halfway, and sank down again. I was vaguely aware that Rose was still crying; she’d hit a higher gear and was hysterical, her cries less loud but breathless, as if she were being strangled. I crawled toward the bed and Rose jumped down and ran to me, crying, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” Her tears wet my face as I pulled her to me tightly, hugging her as hard as I could, wanting to shut out the pain and the fear and knowing that hugs and words and assurances were not going to make a bit of difference, not after what she’d seen.
2
Beacon Hill
Three years earlier – Late Spring 1994
I met Claude Giraud at dinner at my parents’ house on a summer night just before my twenty-second birthday. I had just graduated from Colby College up in Maine and had moved back home. I hoped to find a job in a Boston art gallery. I wasn’t an artist, and I wouldn’t have said “gallerist” was on my list of life objectives, but I liked the feeling of being in a gallery: the cool rooms, the murmur of patrons as they wandered through, and all the complicated business (I guessed) that took place in the back which no one but the gallerists ever got a chance to see. I liked the atmosphere of art as much as I liked art – maybe more. But I didn’t know whether I really wanted to spend my life in such a place; I decided to try it out, and then figure out if I had the aptitude or the inclination to go further.
Recalling other dinners at my parents’, I assumed there would be the usual medical talk, and that I would be expected to just sit back and look interested and pretty, if I could do either, only once in a while chiming in to agree – always to agree, it was easier that way. Both my parents were outgoing, but in different ways: my father believed he was an authority on all topics and liked to be seen as such, and my mother peppered her prey with glamour, style, chat, smiles and charm and then ate them up. People were drawn to both of them and to their world, and I’d always had the sense that I was a disappointment, a misfit – that perhaps the hospital had made a mistake and given them the wrong child.
Maybe they gave you the wrong parents.
My mother had told me four things about our dinner guest: he was Parisian, trained at the Sorbonne, a brilliant young surgeon and single. He had dined frequently with my parents, consulting with my father on patients and asking his advice about the direction of his career. “Reminds me of myself and is just right for you,” my father had decreed.
Claude arrived promptly at six forty-five, and when I opened the door he handed me a bouquet of pink roses. “These are for you, Mademoiselle Katie. I’m so happy to fin
ally meet you.” His cerulean blue eyes, blue as Monet’s skies, slid across mine, drawing me into him as he took my hand. I felt his warm breath on the back of my hand as he kissed it, and when he lifted his face to mine, his open smile shot through me. His face was slightly rounded, his ash-blond hair against the skin of his temples, and his eyes—
“Please come in,” I burbled, my face suddenly hot. Jesus!
At the dinner table, I caught him glancing at my bare legs as he pulled out my chair, and I thought, “What a gentleman, and thanks for looking!” I felt both panicked and thrilled – I thought I might burst out laughing. I pulled the hem down to mid-thigh and at the same moment was seized by an insane impulse to hike my skirt up and get it all out there.
Dinner was off to a good start.
Flanked by my parents, we glanced at each other through the stems of Claude’s roses – a forest of pinks that matched his tie. My mother had hastily arranged them and placed the vase amid the silverware, crystal and fine bone china. We ate grilled Delmonico steak and roasted potatoes with green beans and my father cross-questioned Claude in a friendly way.
“How did you like the symposium? There was a lot of my material on facial nerve dissection and reconstruction – find it interesting?” My mother’s selection of Viennese waltzes played softly in the background.
“Outstanding – and you know, Jack, you stole the show with your paper on melanoma.”
My father swelled. “This is my twentieth award – not bad for a working man. Although I must say, my favorite is the honorary doctorate from the Sorbonne…” He launched into his well-worn common-working-man routine, how he’d taught his father to read and worked his way through medical school selling his blood, playing pick-up saxophone in jazz bands, and escorting lonely women for a fee. I knew it by heart, but mercifully wasn’t privy to the details of his pay-date days.
What was Claude saying? I didn’t care; I just wished he’d look at me again.
“Mon Dieu, that trip was divine!” my mother said. “The Sorbonne, Paris – and that fabulous hotel – not to mention the wines.”
Claude chewed in small neat bites. Was he counting?
“This steak is so delicious – but then, you always set an elegant table with superb food – you would have had your own salon in Paris.”
“Jack has always let me run the house my way and entertain. It’s my milieu.” She sipped her bordeaux.
“Women’s work,” my father said with a dismissive shrug. “I can’t say I’m any good at it – don’t even want to try.” He let his fork and knife drop onto his plate and proceeded to pick his crooked teeth with a goose quill. Everything with a crash and a bang – I’m here, see me? And then took a sip of his rum daiquiri.
“Jack, you must be doing three hundred cases a year,” Claude said.
“Two hundred and fifty – and no immediate plans to slow down, why should I?”
“And on top of that, he’s written seven textbooks, thirteen chapters, and over two hundred thirty-six articles, and that doesn’t include—”
“Claude knows all that. For Christ’s sake, Amelia, dial it down.”
“Well, you have. Everyone ready for la salade?”
During the salad course, there was a thousand-year-long discussion about medical politics and plans for Father’s department. I spent the time getting my eyes full of Claude, memorizing him. Then in the middle of dessert, he turned to me, his eyes sparking into mine, and said, “So, your father mentioned that you want to work in a gallery. What got you interested in art?”
My father pushed right in.
“Art is not really a profession, is it? I mean, for heaven’s sake, there’s no money in it. The galleries are nothing but busywork for faculty wives and trust fund kids, but it’s not exactly the most academic of fields, so it suits Katie,” he said. “Nevertheless, painting is one of my hobbies, when I have time for such. This is my bullfighting series,” he said, pointing to a group of color-saturated canvases over the sideboard. “I call it my Phallic Period for obvious reasons – inspired by the bullfights I saw with the King of Spain in Madrid.”
“I see what you mean,” Claude responded, scanning the works. “And all that you say about art may be true, but I love it, too, and if you must know, I wish I’d majored in it.”
My father snorted. “You can’t be serious. Then you wouldn’t have gone to medical school, and we wouldn’t have met.”
“That, of course, is an intolerable idea,” Claude said, smiling – and for the moment, the chat was suspended uncertainly in mid-air.
“Because after all,” Claude continued, “I think of you as my medical ‘father’ – but I am sure the world could have made do with one less surgeon.”
He turned to me again and said, “So. Tell me.”
Wow.
“Well, let’s see. Mother always took me to museums and galleries and that’s when it started – I loved drawing – then freshman year I took a class in modernism. And then junior year I spent a semester in Paris.”
It all sounded so pat, so fille riche sans idées, so dumb.
“Ah, so you know my city – how did you enjoy it?” He leaned toward me across the table.
“I loved it! I saw a ton of art there, of course. I mean I basically gorged on art and escargot.”
“So, you’re an aesthete; how terrific.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said, my voice trailing off. What exactly was an aesthete, if not a more or less useless person from another time? My parents sat quietly, forking down cake, quiescent for the moment but all attention.
“At first, looking at all the Picassos and the Braques,” I said, “even though I’d done the courses, I felt confused – why would anyone paint like that? The paintings weren’t beautiful! And I didn’t understand the style, the way their subjects’ heads looked… I don’t know, deformed? The whole modern art thing was beyond me.”
“Yes, those people in the paintings could’ve used our services!” my father said, giving me an approving nod, as if I had supplied him with material for his asinine punchline. I felt my face redden.
My mother laughed, a high-pitched lamentation. “Claude, indeed, the world would have been far worse off if you had gone into art instead of surgery. You are needed in the operating theater, n’est-ce pas?”
“Merci, chère Amelia. I’ll agree with any woman who wears my mother’s favorite perfume.”
“How wonderful! Joy is the only one I wear!”
“Oh, who cares that Claude didn’t become an artist,” I said – horrified to hear my voice speaking yet unable to make it stop.
This time the silence was total and Arctic cold. My father looked at me as if he’d never seen me before and was sorry the present occasion had arisen. My mother got up from the table, babbling about coffee, and went into the kitchen.
Claude looked at me and smiled. “I’d have made a lousy artist, Katie,” he said. “Playing with knives is much more fun.”
I looked into his eyes and remembered to breathe. Thank you.
“Speaking of surgery, Claude,” my father said too loudly, “I’ve been trying to get Katie to come and view one of my operations, but she’s been hanging back. Maybe she’d come with you? I’ll pick a good case…”
At the front door, alone with him, Claude stood close to me, and I let myself imagine his strong, naked, virile body pressed against mine. He said softly, “I realize the subject of art sort of fell by the wayside – or off a cliff?” We both giggled. “I’d love to hear what you have to say about it. May I call you?”
“Y-yes, of course,” I stammered, grabbing the brass knob and yanking the door open to a cool summer breeze and twilight sky and hating that this was good night.
*
Claude phoned in the morning to ask if I’d like to go gallery-hopping on Newbury Street the following Saturday. I said yes, and the week dragged on, pulling me down with intrusive, repetitive thoughts: Maybe he isn’t really attracted to me. Maybe I’m n
ot really attracted to him. Will he like me once he gets to know me? Surely I’m too young, too boring for him – too ordinary. Maybe this is incipient psychosis, and I will wake up confined and sedated.
At Colby I’d briefly had a boyfriend: Todd Skilling, a rower and drama major who relieved me of my virginity on his twin-sized dormitory bed but seemed almost as inexperienced as I was when he asked, after a Pizza Hut special, a six-pack of Coors Light, and two fumbles, “You’re not a virgin, are you?”
As Saturday loomed, my ruminations intensified. Hitting the bottom, I continued digging into the sea floor. What should I wear? I laid out my sleeveless silk cargo and white pants on the bed and picked up my florescent pink slap bracelet. Slap, it went around my wrist – and why can’t I forget his kissing my hand, and his eyes, his voice? Slap – and what if he wants to kiss me? What if he doesn’t want to kiss me? And what will Claude and I talk about? Oh, I could rattle off a few insights about Monet or Manet, but he won’t be interested for more than two even three minutes and then we’ll still have the rest of the date to get through, and I can’t even believe he asked me out maybe he just feels sorry for me and blah blah blah blah blah blah!
Saturday afternoon, Claude picked me up in his sky-blue MG convertible, looking more casual and relaxed in his jeans and polo shirt than he had the previous week. “It’s such a beautiful day, I put the top down. I hope you don’t mind,” he said, opening the passenger door for me. “I can put it back up.”
“I love the wind,” I answered, as I slid into the black-leather bucket seat and pulled my hair into a clip to avoid too much of a windblown look – and relaxed.
“Do you have enough legroom over there?” he asked. “I put the seat all the way back. Give me your purse, and I’ll put it in the back, out of your way. Oh, this is unusual looking,” he said, running his hand over the basket-weave surface of the purse.
“It’s a bucket basket, and the sailboat scene on top is scrimshaw. My mother gave it to me for my birthday.”
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