Angels Go Naked

by Cornelia Nixon

  Table of Contents

  Also by Cornelia Nixon

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Women Come and Go

  A Solo Performance

  Season of Sensuality

  By the Shining Big Sea Waters

  After the Beep

  When a Miwok Takes a Wife

  Flight

  Last of the Genuine Castrati

  Risk

  Harbor

  Canary in the Mine

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Also by Cornelia Nixon

  Now You See It

  For Dean Young, Tony Hoagland,

  Lisa Ruddick

  The Women Come and Go

  Her name was Margy, hard g, like argh, not soft g, like margarine. One quarter of her waking life had gone to practicing the violin, but when her teacher entered her in a national audition, she was surprised to make to the finals and didn’t stay for the results, so the teacher had to track her down to tell her she had won. Margy knew it was a fluke, but soon she had been asked to play at Tanglewood, at Aspen, with the Boston Symphony, and at her school in the Back Bay, where she’d always had to practice straight through lunch, ignored by everyone, suddenly the most sought-after girls were seeking her. Ann was generally acknowledged the most beautiful girl there, and beautiful in a way that made other girls feel awe: she was perfect in the natural state, like Grace Kelly before she met the prince, only better, since she’d never bleached her hair or worn lipstick. She had a nun-like aura and wore expensive modest clothes, the kind most girls’ mothers picked for them and they refused to wear. Even the Huntington School uniform looked good on her. Calluses did not grow on her toes. Whatever she said was considered wise. She liked to quote Herman Hesse, Kahlil Gibran, and other sources of deathless wisdom.

  “Just sit on your bed and think,” she said. Hushing to listen, girls went home and sat on their beds.

  And with Ann came Elizabeth, her lifelong acolyte. Their mothers were friends, former debutantes who had married the wrong men and now lived in a neighborhood much faded from its former glory instead of in three-story mansions out in Brookline or Lexington. Elizabeth dressed like Ann, even vied with her a little in the neatness of her gestures, the propriety of her shoes. But she didn’t have the face, or the hair or the skin, and no one stopped to listen when she talked, unless it was about Ann.

  “As Ann said to me last night,” she might begin, through a din of girlish voices, and suddenly a hush would fall.

  Then in their junior year they took on Margy, who was related to no debutantes, whose hair was impossible, maggot-white and curled as tight as Velcro in tiny fetal snarls, who was always fidgeting and humming and dancing with her bony legs when she wasn’t playing violin. But she learned fast, and soon the three of them were gliding modestly around the school, discussing Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath, looking benignly (but silently) at the other girls. Ann and Elizabeth would listen to Margy practice during lunch, and after school they all walked home with Ann (who lived only a block away, on “hardly passionate Marlborough”) or out in every weather to the Esplanade, where they would grieve together privately, for the divorce of Elizabeth’s parents, and the death of Margy’s mother when she was only twelve, and the last cruel thing Ann’s had said to her.

  “‘Could it be then that this was life?’” Ann quietly intoned one brilliant winter day beside the Charles, the sky delft blue, the river frozen blistering white. “‘Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into air?’”

  In their senior year, they read Camus in French and took on existential responsibility, marching gravely, all in black, with a hundred thousand others up and down the major avenues to protest the bombing of North Vietnam. Margy started quoting from the things she’d read, but without Ann’s authority: she might just mutter quietly, so no one else could actually hear, “‘Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,’” or “‘Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.’” On her birthday in November, Elizabeth and Ann gave her a locket with their three initials in a triangle, and for Christmas they all gave each other books, disapproved together of their family celebrations, and went to midnight mass at Holy Cross, for the music, and to appall their parents, none of whom were Catholic or in danger of becoming so. Away from Huntington they were more free, and sometimes, standing on street corners, waiting to cross in the winter sun, Ann and Elizabeth might fall in with Margy’s dance, gently snapping fingers, tapping feet. Crazed with success, she once vamped off a curb into the path of a careening cab, but they yanked her back in time.

  Margy was happy to be their friend, though she knew she was not like Ann. She had calluses not only on her toes but on every finger of both hands, and had once had a hickey on her neck. She’d gotten it from a pianist named Gary Slade, on whom she’d had a crush until the night he tried to make her fish the car keys from his underpants. She had walked home that night, and never been alone with any guy since then, but still she went on having similar effects on other boys and men. The chorus master at her music school was a handsome man, but he was past her father’s age, and if she looked at him it was only on obligatory Saturdays, singing husky alto in the second row. But at the last school picnic out at Marblehead, he’d gotten her off by herself, both of them in bathing suits, not fifty yards from where her father stood. Running a pool cue through his toes, he’d said, “You know I want to make love to you,” as if she were accustomed to hearing words like that, when she was just sixteen and had been kissed exactly once, by Gary Slade.

  She’d never mentioned these events to Elizabeth and Ann. In fact, she would have died on the rack before she did. But once she told her father about Gary Slade, in vague theoretical terms, as if it were simply something she had heard, to see whose fault he thought it was. Her father was an architect, and he liked theoretical problems, though preferably the geometrical kind. He was willing to talk about anything, however, after dinner, when he’d had a few martinis just before.

  “Well, now,” he said, running one bony hand across his hair, which sprang up in a solid hedge as his hand passed, curled like Margy’s, only slightly red. “That would depend on how she got into the car, now, wouldn’t it?” If she had kissed the man and led him on, then it was her fault too. He thought in general women were too quick to speak of rape. Leaning one elbow on the table, he held the other hand out in the air and looked at it.

  “When a gal shows up at the precinct and says she’s been raped, they make her hold a hand out, and check to see if it’s trembling. Because if it is, it means she had an orgasm, and it wasn’t rape.”

  He glanced at Margy, looked away, fair cheeks flushing clear red.

  “Of course, sometimes it is.” He grinned, as if he knew he shouldn’t say what he was going to next. He gave her a bold look. “But when it does happen, when it can’t be stopped. Why not just relax, and enjoy?”

  In January of their senior year, Ann was elected queen of the winter festival at a boys’ school across town, by guys she’d mainly never met, and Margy and Elizabeth went with her as her court, flanking her at the hockey match, triple-dating to the ball that night. Ann chose as her escort Gary Slade, who was still the best-looking young man they knew, while Margy (having no one else to ask) went with his little brother, Jason, with whom she’d shared a violin teacher since they were six.

  The night of the ball she rode in Gary’s car as if she’d never seen it before. She didn’t have to talk to him, or even much to Jason. She was really there with Elizabeth and Ann, as they were there with her. Gary had to stand for hours by the throne the boys had made for Ann, while she sat silent and expression
less, in a white ball gown and rhinestone crown, bearing the stares of all those eyes. When the ball was over, they asked to be delivered back to Ann’s, where they dismissed their escorts at the curb (Gary trailing after Ann forlornly, saying, “Can I call you soon?”) and went in to drink hot chocolate while Margy pranced in her long skirt from room to room, too excited to sit down.

  “Gary should be falling on his sword by now,” Elizabeth noted, smiling down into her mug.

  Lifting her lovely head, Ann seemed to consider an object far away. “Gary? Oh, Gary will be fine. He’ll get married and buy a house and have five children and become ‘a sixty-year-old smiling public man.’”

  Margy was fidgeting nearby. Suddenly she felt bold.

  “‘The women come and go,’” she said. “‘Talking of Michelangelo.’” And then, with special glee, “‘I do not think that they will sing to me.’”

  Ann laughed, and kissed her cheek. She put a record on, and they all began to dance, to “Let It Bleed” and “Love in Vain,” and “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime you just might find you get what you need,” until they had calmed down enough to sleep, Elizabeth with Ann in her canopy bed, Margy on a cot down at the foot.

  Margy started reading through her father’s library, leatherbound classics hardly touched by anyone, and after sampling here and there she settled on the Sigmund Freuds, which were small and dense and rewarding even in small bites, and therefore suitable for reading in the moments when she wasn’t practicing. She read Dora, Anna O., Civilization and Its Discontents. She took to peppering her talk with Freudian remarks.

  “I have cathected to those shoes,” she’d say. “The economics of my libido may require a chili dog.” Or, “Time to get obsessional about that test.”

  One week she was excused from classes in the afternoons to rehearse with the Boston Symphony, and as she waited for the T at Arlington, she read that if a woman dreams her daughter is run over by a train, that means she wants to go to bed with the man who once gave her flowers as she got onto a train. She was about to turn the page when she felt a hard stare from a few feet off. Pretending to read on, she tapped out the timing of the Paganini she was going to play against one edge of the book, as if deeply engrossed.

  The staring did not stop. Annoyed, she glanced that way and recognized the new girl in her class at Huntington. Rachel had arrived only that year, a tall, dark, awkward girl with huge black eyes who stared at everyone as if she found them very strange, and slightly amusing. Imitating Ann’s most unrevealing expression, Margy gave her a brief nod and returned to her book, the most effective of the small, polite rejections she and Ann and Elizabeth practiced every day on other girls at school.

  Rachel moved closer, staring like a baby over its mother’s shoulder. She read the spine on Margy’s book. Her voice squeaked in amazement.

  “Are you holding that right side up?”

  Margy finished the sentence and looked at her. Rachel’s uniform was entirely disguised by a black leather jacket and beret, her hair whacked off around the earlobes. But her face was fresh and artless as a two-year-old’s.

  “Insulting people in train stations is a sign of unresolved dilemmas in the inner life.”

  Rachel chuckled, watching her. “And what about the virgin goddess, does she read books too?”

  Margy pretended not to know who she could mean, narrowing her eyes at her. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  Rachel whipped out a pass and twirled it in the air.

  “Legal as milk,” she said, but grinning in a way that made it clear she wasn’t going to the dentist after all. She had a sick friend at B.U., and how could she leave her there alone, pining for a cool hand on her brow?

  “Freud used to operate on people’s noses,” Rachel calmly said. “To clear up their sexual hang-ups. He thought if you put your fingers in your purse you were playing with yourself. He was a little bit hung up on cock, and thought the rest of us were too.”

  Margy rode with her to Copley, slightly stunned. On the platform, changing trains, she glanced back at the one she had just left, and there was Rachel pressed against the glass, eager as a puppy locked inside a car.

  She introduced her to Elizabeth and Ann, and soon Rachel started showing up at lunch, refusing to fade off as other girls had learned to do. She even followed on their private walks, stalking behind them with her long, unhurried gait.

  “What about me?” she would actually cry, throwing her arms out wide, as they tried to walk away.

  She introduced them to new lore, Simone de Beauvoir and The Story of O and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and gradually to other things. Rachel had lived in Paris and L.A. and Israel, but now her parents had moved to Beacon Hill, a few blocks from the house where Margy’d always lived, and she took to turning up on Sunday afternoons, to listen to her play and go for walks and tell her things that would have made Margy’s mother’s hair stand up. Already Rachel had a lot of friends, older women living on their own, who fed her marvelous meals, peyote buds, and grass, and taught her unimaginable acts in bed. She kept her fingernails cut to the quick so that they could not wound. She said she could do anything a man could do, only better, because she was a girl too.

  “There’s nothing nicer than getting ready for bed,” she said, “knowing there’s a girl in there waiting for you.”

  Margy listened, thrilled and shocked. She began to look back with new eyes on certain things she’d done herself. The summer after her mother died, a rash of slumber parties had gone through her neighborhood, with girls she hardly knew at Huntington. But Margy had gone to every one, and when the lights were out they’d played a secret game. Bedded in their sleeping bags on some girl’s living room rug, they’d touched each other’s breasts, circling incipient nipples with light fingertips, until the hostess said to switch, and then the one you had just touched would do the same to you. They did it as a dare, to prove that they were brave, and they would have all dropped dead to learn that it had anything to do with sex—though the boldest girls, who had invented it, played an advanced form of the game, removing pajama pants and circling fingertips on a certain sensitive spot. Torture, they called that.

  “Who were they?” Rachel squeaked, dropping to her knees on the Common, clutching Margy’s coat. It was early spring, the air cold and sweet, and they were loitering after a rally against the bombing of Cambodia. “Please, please, pretty please. Tell me. Are they still at Huntington?”

  Most of them were, but Margy said they had all moved away. Rachel sank her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket, slouching morosely down the path.

  “Why do I never meet girls like that? I just meet little virgin straights. Not that you aren’t cute, of course,” she said, and tousled Margy’s hair.

  Margy assumed that Ann knew nothing of Rachel’s other life, and that it would be best to keep it to herself. Then one Sunday she called Ann’s, and Ann’s mother said that she and Rachel had gone out. Another time she stopped by, on her way home from music school, and found Rachel cooking in the kitchen with Ann’s mother. Ann’s mother was formal and remote and tall, a suntanned woman in yachting clothes who smoked and watched you without smiling while you spoke. Margy was afraid to say a word to her, and she had always called her Mrs. Church. But in the kitchen she was laughing, deep and slow, stabbing a spoon into a pot, while Rachel watched her, hands on hips.

  “Betsy! Not like that!” Rachel cried, and tried to wrestle the spoon away from her, both of them laughing like maniacs.

  Margy stood chuckling in the kitchen doorway. Mrs. Church whirled at the sound, face sobering at once.

  “Oh, hello, Margaret. Annie’s in her room, I think.”

  Margy stood on one foot, smiling, but they did not go on. Dutifully, she went to look for Ann as peals of giggles echoed from the kitchen walls.

  That spring, Margy fell in love. Yale was taking women now, and her father’d asked her to apply, since he had gone there, and to try it for at
least a year instead of Juilliard. To help convince her, he arranged for her to meet the son of a new partner in his firm, who was finishing at Yale and would be entering the law school in the fall. Henry Bergstrom was handsome and sandy-haired like Gary Slade, but soft-spoken and grown-up and kind, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist and one chipped tooth that gave his grin a boyish charm. He was from New York City, had lived in Texas and Brazil, his family having only recently relocated to Boston, and he was a fan of carnaval and soccer as well as football and World War II. His voice thrilled her, deep and faintly drawling, but abrupt and furtive when he was moved.

  “Where have you been?” he would say quickly on the phone, as if in pain, when she’d been practicing too long. But in person he might hold an ice-cream cone out too high, focus his eyes above her head, and gravely search for her. The Brazilians had a dozen words for “shorty” and “little kid,” along with maybe a hundred each for “pester,” “scram,” and anything to do with sex, though he wouldn’t tell her what they were.

  “Hey, pixote, what’s it to you?” he would say when she asked, or call her tico-tico, catatau.

  He took her to the symphony, where he listened with shining eyes, turning at the end to say he’d rather hear her play. She gave a solo recital in June, and he sat up straight and rapt beside her dad.

  “Pretty good for a pixote,” he whispered in her ear, standing by protectively as Ann and Elizabeth and Rachel all surged up to kiss her cheek. He drove a powder-blue MG, and Rachel called him Ken, after the boyfriend of the Barbie doll.

  “Is Ken coming up this weekend again?” she’d say, staring with outraged onyx eyes.

  Margy got into Yale, and agreed to give it a try. Henry came home to Boston for the summer, worked for his dad, and she saw him almost every night. They went to hear the Pops, and to restaurants a few times, then settled into eating with her father or his parents, and after dinner going for a walk. Henry didn’t really like to go out at night.