by Luanne Rice
The air outside was fresh, and I crossed to the sunny side of the street. I heard sparrows cheeping; I looked up to see a pair nesting in a hollow section of the traffic light. This seemed normal, a standard rite of springtime. I decided to walk through the park, anything to get my mind off Mona Tuchman. In a shady bog not three yards from Central Park West I saw a jack-in-the-pulpit. Then pigeons in a mating dance. Then a young girl standing on her toes to kiss her boyfriend. The girl was wearing a pink dress. I heard birds singing, horns honking, children playing, when all of a sudden I knew I had to talk to Nick.
I’d done this before, when the specter of infidelity reared its unwelcome head. I needed to know that Nick wasn’t doing it, would never do it, to me. Cheating on me. Kissing someone else. Honora was in there, pitching her message: keep track of your man. I began to look for a cab.
At the Gregory I waited for the elevator with painful nonchalance, then hurried to the phone in my room. A strange pattern had just been set in motion: I was going to call Nick, seek reassurance that he loved me and would always be faithful, then hang up feeling like a fool. I could view it objectively, the way a lab technician views a speciman, but I was going to do it anyway.
Denise told me he was in a meeting.
“Did he say he wasn’t to be disturbed?” I asked. “Because this is pretty important, Denise.” I rarely disturbed Nick when he was in a meeting, but suddenly I felt that unless I spoke to him, I wouldn’t be able to breathe.
“The thing is, Georgie, he isn’t here. The meeting is uptown, at the client’s place.”
“That’s okay,” I said, hanging up.
Every once in a while, when Denise was vague about where Nick had gone, I started thinking about the women on Wall Street. They were sleek, beautiful, accomplished. They dressed well. Some of them spent more late nights with Nick than I did. I hated imagining them huddled over documents, their heads nearly touching. I called Clare.
“Where are you?” she asked. “Eugene and Casey just swam over for a visit, but they said you weren’t home.”
“In New York. I’m at the Gregory.”
“Georgie, you’re nuts. So Nick has to work late one night. What’s the big deal about sleeping alone?”
“You read my mind. I’ve got affair paranoia again.”
“You want me to run through the usual things?” Clare asked.
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
“All right. You and Nick love each other. It’s obvious to anyone who looks at you. You’ve been honest with each other. You have to trust him more. He would be so hurt if he knew you had these doubts.”
I laughed at her tone of voice, which was deadpan. “Thanks. I feel better. This started because I just met Mona Tuchman. I feel so sorry for her, Clare.”
“I know. Her situation sounds dreadful. Has she seen her kids?”
“No.”
“God, I’d die if I ever lost the boys. Have you ever noticed you call me more from New York than you do from home?”
“I have. It’s weird.”
“It’s because when you’re at Black Hall you know I’m there. If you look out your window you see my house. When you go away you think maybe I’ve disappeared. You’re a really insecure traveler. Honora is the same way—whenever she leaves the Point she calls constantly. You two must have some phone bills.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“Quit mooning over Nick, will you? It’s really undignified. Not to mention unnecessary. When you have something worth worrying about, you’ll know it.”
“What you say makes perfect sense.”
“But it doesn’t sink in, eh?”
“Not completely. But I’ll get to work on my report and try not to think about it.”
“I marvel at the fact that my sister’s husband can’t spend one night without her, she rushes to his side at the drop of a hat, and then she spends her time looking for lipstick on his collar.”
“That’s a little parable about me?”
“You’re the only sister I’ve got, honey.”
We said goodbye, and the second we hung up the phone, Clare disappeared. She was absolutely right: if I didn’t have the person with me, anything might be happening to him. The minute Nick flew out of sight every morning, he could crash-land, be pounced upon by brazen hussies, forget me. Honora had trained my imagination well. I reached for my notebooks and arranged them on the desktop. I held my pen very tight. I concentrated on every word. I reported all my recent cases, winding up with Mona Tuchman. Hours passed. I barely noticed. By eleven that night, when it was time to meet Nick for dinner, everyone who had disappeared was coming back. They were all there, in place but invisible, at the edge of my consciousness. Nick, Clare, Honora, Pem. Reunions brought them back.
“Do you think we should have a baby?” I asked Nick across the table at Vinnie’s in the Village. Candles burned in wrought-iron sconces, casting romantic light on his face. The restaurant was lively, considering the hour. I had to speak in a louder voice than I would have liked. Nick stopped twirling his tagliatelle. He grinned.
“That’s a nice question,” he said.
“Well?”
“You know I’d like to, but I’m afraid of how my hours would affect raising a child. You’d have to do a lot more than your fair share.”
“What’s a fair share when it comes to a child?” I asked, scoffing. I sipped some Barolo. “We’d each do everything we possibly could.”
“Consider whether you would have come into the city today if we had a baby. I’m not sure it would be possible. In fact,” he said, with deliberation, “I’ve been thinking about it—the way you come in whenever I work late.”
“Are you saying you don’t want me to?” I asked, more sharply than I had intended.
“Georgie, we’re just having a conversation. I want a nice dinner—” His lips tightened, then relaxed into a smile. He took my hand. “We’re not setting anything in stone. I just think you shouldn’t come to New York every time I work late. Other lawyers manage it. Jean and her husband spend two days a week apart, and they seem happy,” Nick said. Jean was one of those Wall Street females I most hated to imagine huddled with Nick at the conference table.
“I guess tonight is not the time to talk about having a baby,” I said, because he would know how furious I was if I kept talking.
“Georgie.” Deep sigh. “Shit. Forget it. Do you want me to quit my job?”
Guilt found fertile ground. “I don’t want to be responsible for you quitting Hubbard, Starr.”
“Give me some credit, okay? Don’t you think I question the way we live? It’s crazy, me flying in and out of Black Hall, bringing home work every weekend, spending so much time away from you. You coming to New York just so we can have a quick dinner together. It would be much easier if we lived in the city, but we both love the Point so much.”
“I know,” I said. It was typical of Nick to not take unfair advantage in an argument. He could have said “but you love the Point so much.” He knew how much I loved my family. Another man might have resented that, blamed our difficulties on my unwillingness to leave them, but he loved them too.
“It will be easier on us both if you stop checking into the Gregory every time—if we don’t always count on having dinner together,” Nick said. “I’m so tired right now I can’t taste what I’m eating. And I have to be at the office by seven tomorrow morning.”
“Have you been dying to bring this up?” I asked. “Just waiting?”
“It’s been on my mind,” he said.
Can you pinpoint the moment when a marriage begins to change? It can be an instant or longer, a period that marks the end of the relationship as you’ve known it and the start of something new, something that could turn out to be sweet or dangerous. To observers, even to people who knew us well, that night at Vinnie’s in the Village might have seemed ordinary. But it was not. Sitting across that cozy bistro table from Nick I felt anger but also a sort of grief. I was lo
sing something I loved.
Dining together, no matter how difficult the logistics, had always been important to us. It disciplined us. Where other busy couples would lapse into one dinner a week apart, then two, then three, we had an unspoken commitment to share the evening meal.
Nick paid the check and we left Vinnie’s in silence. I felt unhinged with sadness and worry. I wanted to ask him what he had meant, suggesting we not plan dinner together every night: Exactly what had he meant? I knew the answer he would give me: he was just being sensible. The time had come for us, for Nicholas Symonds and Georgiana Swift, to give in to what other couples, probably no less loving than we, had accepted much earlier. Sometimes the demands of life kept people apart. It was that simple.
But not to me. In the taxi I imagined motives: dark, heavy as sex, and furtive. I thought of Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, who had imagined his wife Faith to be pure, then discovered she had joined the witches’ sabbat along with the rest of the neighborhood sinners. Had we been special, Nick and I? We didn’t speak, but we sat close to each other and rode uptown with our shoulders touching.
“I know I’ve hurt you,” Nick said when we were alone in our hotel room.
Then, because he was sounding like the Nick I wanted, I started to cry. “Explain it to me,” I said, which was really stupid because I knew just what he would say, and I knew that it would make good sense.
He said nothing. He turned off the bedside light and walked to me. He held me for a long while. When he began to stroke my arms in a slow, gentle way, I began to feel mad with desire or maybe violence. Energy pulsed along my veins; I could have chaneled it into wild sex or a fistfight.
“Nick,” I said, pulling back because I felt afraid. I kept my head down.
He was unbuttoning my dress. I felt his big fingers undoing the delicate buttons easily. His other hand cupped my shoulder, then pulled the dress away. I saw it fall to the floor, a puddle of blue and white cotton around my feet, and I stepped out of it. I wasn’t wearing a bra. I brought my arms across my breasts, but Nick held my hands and pulled them away.
“Have I made you want to hide?” he whispered.
“No. I don’t know,” I said, standing stiff and hearing my sullen tone. What would happen if I hit him? I wondered. After that thought I felt more like making love. I kissed him. I was standing naked against him, and he was fully dressed. I felt his erection through his trousers. He lowered his head and kissed my nipples. Sometimes with Nick I thought of nothing and felt joined, truly joined with him in spirit, but not that night. That night he undressed me and then himself, and every place he touched me seared, and I paid attention as if I were committing every sensation to memory.
“I have always loved you,” he said later, just before he fell asleep.
Watching him as he slept, I thought about dinners past and dinners yet to come. Smoked turkey and appenzeller sandwiches at the Library of Congress. During Nick’s third year of law school we lived on Capitol Hill. Studying late, or preparing a journal article, he would say he was too busy to take a dinner break. I would take him sandwiches. As I walked past the Senate office buildings, the Supreme Court, and the Capitol, all floodlit, white, and stark, my mission seemed greater than the mere delivery of dinner. The Library of Congress guard would admit me with barely a glance through my bookbag. I would cross the rotunda to the law library, where I would find Nick at his favorite carrel beside the mezzanine’s wrought-iron balustrade. Then we would go into the stacks to feast and talk.
Cold lemon chicken during the New York Bar Examination Review course. By this time Nick was working until midnight at the firm, with four hours off for a nightly Bar Review course. Circles deepened under his eyes, he lay awake every night, utterly exhausted, worrying over the Rules of Evidence while at the same time worrying what it meant that the head of the Tender Offer Squad had invited Jean Snizort to lunch at the Broad Street Club but not Nick. We were living in New York then, downtown from the theater where the Bar Review was held. I loved that time. Nick would take the subway up from Wall Street. I would walk to Times Square. I would bring dinner with me, things that could be eaten tepid or cold, and sit through the class. With Nick taking fast notes while gobbling his dinner, I would turn off the lecture and think about our life. Even with Nick’s busy pace we were managing to have dinner together every night. All it took was a certain amount of creativity and flexibility. How smug I had been! I had sat there, wondering how many wives could plan such portable meals, so delicious that their husbands wouldn’t even notice the entire dinner had fit into two small plastic containers.
I conjure the business trips I’ve gone on with Nick by remembering sirloin steak at Morton’s in Chicago (a leverage buyout of Frankenthaler, Weiss); the tandoori chicken at London’s Bombay Brasserie (negotiations with a prospective White Knight for the ailing Rosco Corporation); turbot grillé at Hôtel des Indes in The Hague (meetings on the purchase-and-sale agreement of a four-billion-dollar transaction involving sixteen countries); Lobster Savannah at Locke-Ober’s (a hostile tender offer for shares of Boston Chemical); ravioli de ris de veau at Jamin in Paris (meeting to quell the general panic that hit the firm’s clients after the Socialists came into power).
I can remember vacations, periods when we had unlimited time together, without thinking of a single meal. When I think of our free time, I think of the clarity of that day’s light, the species of birds we counted, the Rembrandts we gazed at, the hills we scrambled. But for a running account of our marriage, I think of the dinners.
I lay in bed beside Nick, listening to a movie playing in the next room. I could hear the voices perfectly. The story was about a farming family in Nebraska in the thirties. The father had just been shot by bandits. I lay awake, crying for the mother and children. Then I realized: I feel as though Nick’s abandoned me. He’s left me to keep our little vigil on my own. Our good-marriage vigil.
3
IN THE FOLLOWING WEEKS, NO STORY absorbed me the way Mona Tuchman’s had. I thought of her often. I related to her: as a woman in love who had sabotaged her own marriage. It was a matter of degree. Mona had alienated Dick and her children by an act of attempted murder. Surely they must feel they no longer knew her. But Nick: he knew me. When had I wanted anything but sheer closeness? If I was willing to make the trip into New York to have dinner with him, why should he mind? I felt as though I were pushing too hard, and that that delicious, almost unbearable closeness I had had with Nick, that I had lived by since our marriage, seemed in deep jeopardy.
One morning I stood in my yard, waving goodbye to him as he flew away. Although the weather was clear and fair, I walked next door to visit my mother. I felt sad; I wanted distraction. Honora stood in her driveway, cutting yellow daylilies with garden shears. She wore lightweight white trousers, a navy blue blouse, and, although the sun hadn’t risen enough to evaporate dew from the flowers’ leaves and petals, a straw sunhat.
“Good morning, sweetie,” she said, kissing me. “The boys have a nice day to fly. Winds will be light, out of the northwest, and the visibility should be about fifteen miles.”
“Oh, good,” I said.
“Your grandmother is still asleep.”
“You’re kidding!” I said, feeling alarmed. I had never known Pem to sleep past dawn. “Are you sure she’s still . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say “alive.”
“I checked, and she was fine half an hour ago. She’s been sleeping late recently.” She preceded me into the house and began arranging the lilies in a tall glass vase. “I have to admit it’s good to have some time without her.”
“It must be,” I said. The year before, Clare and I had tentatively suggested that maybe Pem should go to a rest home, and we had been relieved when Honora had said absolutely not. Knowing it was not a possibility, I felt fearless raising the subject. “Do you think it would be better if she were in a home?”
“No, of course not. But she’s a day’s work, Georgie. I’m not that old. If I we
ren’t taking care of Pem, maybe I could travel or teach or something.”
“Mom, you know Clare and I would help out.”
“No, she’s my mother. It’s my responsibility.”
“She’s my grandmother.”
Honora regarded me with blank eyes. “She wets her bed.”
This came as an enormous shock. “You’re kidding.”
“No. She’s done it twice this week. She can’t take baths by herself, so I have to bathe her. We’ve got mice because she makes herself a little sandwich, then hides it when she hears me coming—it seems that old people feel guilty about eating. Then she forgets where she hid it. I find these dried crusts all over the house.”
“I know about the sandwiches—I find them in my house every time she visits.”
We heard Pem’s bedsprings creaking. Then her feet shuffling into slippers, then the window being opened.
“How’s your report coming?” Honora asked. “It must be due soon.”
“I still have a week. I’m typing it over now.”
“I can’t wait to read it. Did you read that Dr. Tuchman was granted custody of the children?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of how Mona must feel. If he wanted custody, that meant he was leaving her. I remembered that day in her foyer, the small hope she had felt because her husband didn’t love his mistress. But that didn’t mean he loved Mona, either. I watched my mother getting Pem’s breakfast ready. “What do you think of her story? Can you understand how she could have stabbed Celeste Stone?”
“Mmmm, I suppose,” she said, pouring orange juice.
“I mean, how did you feel when you found out Dad was having an affair?” My heart went faster as I asked the question I’d been waiting to ask.
“Well, I didn’t want to kill her, if that’s what you mean,” Honora said, laughing a little. “She was very unimportant to me. She could have been anyone. It was your father. He shouldn’t have done that to us. It was humiliating.”