Angels Go Naked

by Cornelia Nixon

  “When I’m married, I won’t go anywhere at all,” he said, blue eyes warm. “I’ll have my own fun at home.”

  The last thing every night before he left, in the car or on her porch or in her living room, he’d lean close and kiss her a few times, always stopping before she wanted to. Once he pulled her down onto his parents’ couch, stopped as if switched off, and apologized. On the way home he talked about the beauty of carnaval, how all rules were suspended there (“Don’t you ever go to one,” he said, grinning hard, gripping her hand). But a few nights later in the car he slid one hand up her side, where he could feel a little of her breast—stinging her so unexpectedly with want that tears spilled from the corners of her eyes.

  “I may have to sign up for a nose job soon,” she said one sultry afternoon, twirling on a swing in a park near Rachel’s house. Ann was at the Vineyard with her family, and Rachel moped on the next swing, rolling a joint in her lap. “That is, if things go on this way.”

  Pulling down her heavy black sunglasses, Rachel regarded her with some alarm. “You wouldn’t. Not with Ken?”

  Margy tipped her head back toward the ground, viewing the world upside down. “That’s who it’s done with,” she pointed out. “By virgin straights. The Kens of this world.”

  Rachel pushed her sunglasses back up over her eyes and looked inscrutable.

  “Not necessarily,” she finally said, and gave one fleeting grin, though she would not explain.

  In August Henry’s parents left for their summer place down on Long Island, and Henry lingered on alone. At first they pretended nothing had changed, eating at Margy’s, taking walks. Then one night he made dinner for some friends from Yale, at his parents’ house in Brookline, and invited Margy too. The friends were a couple, tall gazellelike blonds who almost looked alike, both living with their parents for the summer, and happy to be out of their sight.

  They all drank gin and tonic before Henry’s manly fare (steak and potatoes and oversalted salad), and then the gazelles disappeared, into Henry’s bedroom, it turned out, with his war books and his model planes. Margy and Henry climbed up to the widow’s walk on the third floor, where they could watch the city lights reflected on the river in the summer dusk, Margy in a dress that tied behind the neck and almost nothing else, Henry in a seersucker jacket. She was quivering lightly, not from cold, and when he ran his fingers down the bare skin of her back, she turned and started kissing him.

  Startled, he opened his eyes wide and seized her like a tortured man. Moments later they were in his parents’ bed, pressing together through their clothes until she lost all sense of being in a room, or even in a body of her own, apart from his. Then he stopped. Fingers in the tight curls at her scalp, he shook her face from side to side.

  “Negativo, pixote,” he said, and left the room.

  Henry left to join his parents in Wading River, and suddenly her life went blank. She called her friends, but already they seemed remote. She hadn’t seen them often over the summer, and Elizabeth and Ann had had a fight, though neither would say why. (“It’s me,” Rachel explained. “Elizabeth is jealous of the time I spend with Ann.”) Margy saw Ann a few times, but never alone, no matter what they planned: when Ann arrived, Rachel would be with her, grinning and relaxed and full of little jokes. They were both staying home, Ann to go to Radcliffe and Rachel to B.U., and Rachel seemed almost to live at Ann’s place now. Her clothes were hung on chairs in Ann’s room, and once Margy found her lying on the canopy bed, an arm across her eyes.

  “Ann needs support right now,” Rachel explained when Margy asked her what was going on. Since they’d left Huntington, Ann’s mother had started a campaign against Ann, telling her she was spoiled and self-centered, and other cruel, unnecessary remarks.

  “Last year, when your friends found you so charming,” Betsy had lately said in reference to the winter festival. Ann’s eyes were always shining with leashed tears, and Rachel hovered close to her, one hand on her shoulder, staring at anyone who came near.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Margy said one hot night in Cambridge as they were walking toward a party full of Rachel’s friends. “People’s mothers say things like that. It’s just the ordinary coin of mother-daughter economics. You’re lucky that you have a mom at all.”

  Rachel’s mouth fell open as if Margy’d fired a gun. Clutching Ann’s shoulders, she steered her away. Later she cornered Margy at the party, in a throng of loud and happy older women. (“Lay off, she’s straight,” Rachel kept saying as they stopped to stare.)

  “You don’t know,” she said quietly, watching Margy with a light in her black eyes. “You just don’t know. Comprend-tu?”

  Henry wrote to Margy, in a big angular hand on heavy paper, about his father’s need to win at golf, and where they’d sailed that day, and how much he thought of her. Once he said remembering how she’d kissed him on the widow’s walk that night was driving him insane. But he didn’t trust letters, so he’d say no more. Except he hoped that he could see her the moment she got to Yale. In fact he would be waiting in her college yard.

  The night before she left, Ann stopped by with Rachel to give her a blank book with a dove-gray linen cover, for a journal while she was away, and Rachel gave her a God’s Eye she had made. Ann was wearing Rachel’s leather jacket, clutched around her tightly with both hands. She gazed at Margy with beautiful clear eyes.

  “You are coming to a place where two roads diverge, and taking the one less traveled by.” She touched Margy’s hand. “We understand each other, don’t we, Margy? No matter what happens.”

  Margy followed them out to the street and watched them walk away. In the dark, their heads inclined toward each other till their silhouettes converged.

  Her father drove her to New Haven, delivered her to his old college, and took her on a campus tour, pointing out the design of each quadrangle. Then he was gone, and Henry was there, in his seersucker jacket, fingers clenched around her arm.

  “Can we go now?” he said quietly, hardly moving his lips.

  It was Indian summer, hot sun with an autumn drowsiness, and Henry had the top down on the MG. Quickly crossing town, he raced south. The wind was too loud in the car for talk, but Margy knew where they were going now. She had on a simple sheath of rose linen that Ann had helped her pick out, her hair restrained in a ribbon the same shade. But as they crossed the bridge onto Long Island in late sun, the wind teased out the ribbon and her hair burst free, with a ripple of pleasure along the scalp.

  He had her back soon after breakfast, though she’d missed the freshman dinner in her college and had failed to sleep in her bed. Calhoun was full of Southerners, from Georgia and Virginia and the Carolinas, and they were all just trooping off in tennis whites, or to try out for some a cappella group, as she made her way upstairs, trembling slightly and trying to look blasé. At the last second, when the pain was most intense, she had tried to pull away. But Henry went on saying, “Just relax,” into her ear, and soon she lay still listening to him sleep, with a feeling she didn’t recognize, like floating in a warm bath, with an undertow of fear.

  In the morning he had quickly pulled a pillow across the bloodstain on the sheet, as if she shouldn’t see that, when she had already seen it in the bathroom twice, in the middle of the night and again after the second time, when he woke her at first light, his lean, hairless chest quivering before her eyes like a wall she had to climb. Driving back, he didn’t say a word. The law school had already started, and he had to be in class. But he kissed her tenderly by Calhoun gate in the open car, and said he would be there to pick her up on Friday afternoon.

  She took long, meditative showers, spent whole days in the practice rooms, and only joined her fellow frosh in class. On Fridays Henry drove her out to Wading River, where the house was always packed now with his friends, who played tackle on the beach and drank all night, and she was alone with him only in the sandy bed. With a football in his arms he was unexpectedly exuberant, and she watched him from a
beach chair in the autumn sun, trying to write something profound to Rachel and Ann. They’d sent her two postcards, one from a small hotel in Provincetown. (“All quite legitimate, you understand,” Rachel’s part had said. “Searching the beach for pebbles you may have sent. Now is the time to buy a kite.”) But Margy had nothing to say that she could trust to letters now, so she watched Henry steal the ball, and laugh and cheat and leap across his fallen friends with lean, tan legs, and streak across the sand to score.

  The weather changed, dry leaves crackling in the wind at night. The first cold week, she did not hear from Henry, and on Saturday she called his rooms, where his suitemate said he had gone home to Boston. Margy was concerned. Of course she knew that men could change, from the days of Gary Slade. But the last time she had seen Henry, he had been more tender than before, and had held her hand on the long drive back to Yale.

  Monday night, on her way home from the practice rooms, she stopped by the law school dorm, where he was studying. He seemed surprised but glad, and pulled her in protectively.

  “Everything all right?” he said, ushering her quickly into his room, shutting the door. “Nothing wrong?”

  They talked politely, sitting on the bed, his law books lit up on the desk. He did not explain why he’d gone home to Boston, and she didn’t ask. When she rose to go, he said good-bye at the door and watched her leave. He strode behind her down the gleaming brown expanse of hall.

  “Don’t go,” he said, clutching her arm and looking at the floor. “Please stay, all right?”

  She couldn’t sleep in his narrow bed, and she got up late to walk back through the cold, clear night. That weekend she practiced all the daylight hours, avoiding telephones. But when she went back to Calhoun at night, there were no messages for her. She called Henry’s rooms, pretending to have a French accent.

  “Boston,” his suitemate said.

  “Ah, bon,” she said, and did not call again.

  Henry wrote her a careful letter, saying he had made a mistake and wasn’t ready to be serious yet, but asking her to let him know if she ever needed anything from him. Margy wrote four versions of a letter back, outraged, pleading, miserable, abject, and tore them up. Finally she sent a postcard with a view of Wading River (bought to send to Rachel and Ann), saying she was always glad to hear from him but didn’t think she would be needing anything. He sent her a biography of Freud, which she had already read (“From your friend, Henry,” it said inside), and a yard of rose-colored ribbon to replace the one she’d lost while riding in his car. Once she saw him on Elm Street, idling in traffic as the snow fell on the cloth top of his car. Honking and waving, he half emerged. But she saluted with her violin and hurried off against the traffic, so he couldn’t follow her.

  Sleet was rattling on the windows as if hurled from fists on the day she started to throw up. She tried to make it stop, lying on her bed in the hot blasts from the heating ducts, as Rachel’s God’s Eye twirled above. It was ridiculous, it was impossible. Henry had been so cautious, breaking open little hard blue plastic cases, exactly like the ones she’d seen once in her father’s dresser drawer when her mother was alive, and dropping them beneath the bed as he put their contents on. The night she’d visited his room, she had crouched to count the empties in the silvery light, and there had been at least a dozen more than he had used that night. Though it was hard to tell, of course, how old they were.

  She went to class and could not hear a word. She could not play the violin, or remember why she’d ever wanted to. The nausea surrounded her, six inches of rancid blubber through which she had to breathe. She threw up in the daytime, in the evening, in the middle of the night. She told herself to just relax. Morning sickness is all in the woman’s head, Freud said. She ate a crust of hard French bread, and saw it unchanged moments after in the white cup of the toilet bowl.

  She found a doctor down in Bridgeport, where she would not run into anyone from Yale. The man she picked had chosen his profession because the forceps used at his own birth had damaged a nerve in his face, causing his forehead to hang down across his eyes, while his mouth pulled to one side. Yes, he had good news for her, he said. Mrs. Henry Bergstrom, she had called herself, and lied about her age. Alone with him when the nurse had left, she mentioned that they weren’t quite married yet. The doctor may have given her a kindly look, though it was hard to tell.

  “Don’t be upset if something happens to it,” he said, lips flapping loose around the sounds. “It’s not because it’s out of wedlock or anything like that. It’s not your fault.”

  Margy nodded, and started to weep quietly. Moments later she was on the sidewalk in cold sun, with the recommended diet in her purse, and Mrs. Henry Bergstrom’s next appointment card.

  She’d be a famous violinist, live in a garret with the child. It would be a purse-sized child, round and pink, a girl, never growing any bigger or needing anything, and it would ride on Margy’s chest while she played the major concert stages of the world. She would wear flowered dresses, cut severely (bought in France), with black berets and leather jackets. She would smoke fat cigarettes through vermilion lips, drink liqueur from a small glass. And one day, in a café on the Boul’ Mich’, or in Nice, or in her dressing room in Rome, Henry would track her down. He’d send his card backstage, and she would send it back. She’d look the other way in the café.

  “Mais non, monsieur,” she’d say. “We do not know each other. Excusez moi.”

  For Thanksgiving she had to fly to Florida with her father and pretend to eat some of the thirty pounds of turkey her grandmother made, and throw up in the bathroom of the tiny oceanview apartment with the fan on and the water running. Back at Yale, she learned that she had failed midterm exams (equipped with the vast wasteland of all she hadn’t read), and packed to leave for Christmas break.

  Rachel met her train. Sauntering down the platform, thumbs hooked into black jeans, she looked very young in a new black motorcycle jacket with silver chains. But her stare was just the same.

  “They’re engaged,” she said, with a tragic face.

  Margy kissed her on both cheeks, said, what? and who? and even laughed. She felt a little better, having not thrown up almost all day.

  Rachel hung suspended, watching her. Slowly a look of wonder, almost delight, broke on her face. Stepping closer, she took tender hold of Margy’s head.

  “Oh, baby. Don’t you know anything yet?”

  It had started in the summer, Rachel said, when she and Ann first went to bed. They’d been in love since spring—she and Ann, that is—and Rachel was spending all her time at Ann’s by then. Ann never wanted her to leave, but at first they didn’t get near the bed. They’d sit on the floor in her room and talk until they fell asleep, right where they were. Ann couldn’t face it, what it meant, or do more than kiss Rachel on the cheek.

  “She was just a little virgin straight,” Rachel explained. “Like you, only worse. She thought that girls who went to bed with girls would end up riding Harley-Davidsons and stomping around in big dyke boots. It wasn’t possible for the queen of the winter festival.”

  Then suddenly it was, and they’d been lovers now for months, every night in the canopy bed. It was the most intense thing in her life, and in Ann’s. One night they’d been making love for hours when she touched Ann’s back, and it was wet.

  “That does it,” Rachel’d told her then. “No matter what, you can’t go saying you’re a virgin now.”

  Things were good then for a while. They took some little trips. (“You lied to me on that postcard,” Margy pointed out, and Rachel shook her head. “I promised her,” she said.) Ann was jealous of Rachel’s other friends, and accused Rachel of not loving her—while she, Ann, was in love for life. But Rachel reassured her, and then things were all right. Even Betsy laid off Ann.

  “Betsy thinks I’m good for her,” Rachel said, and grinned. “She likes the way Ann shares her toys with me.” Of course Betsy had no idea what was going on, it wasn’t in her le
xicon. But she liked Rachel, they got along. And Rachel learned to head Betsy off when she was going after Ann.

  Then one night in the fall, Ann announced that she was going out, and Henry showed up at the door. He took her out to eat, and to a play, and to the symphony.

  “They went out?” Margy cried, but Rachel only looked at her. Out, and home to meet his parents too. It was a bulldozer through their happy life. He started calling every night from Yale. Ann would take the call in her parents’ room and close the door. She started quoting Henry. He said men should always be gentle to all women, and he was sorry it had not worked out with Margy, but that they had parted friends. This was the time in their lives that counted most, he said, when the steps they took would determine all the rest, and it was important to be circumspect. Ann agreed, and every weekend circumspectly she went out with Henry, and came home to sleep with Rachel.

  “So now she’s wearing this big Texas diamond that used to belong to his grandmother. And all she does is cry. He brings her home, and she gets in bed with me and starts to cry. She cries while we make love, and then cries in her sleep. In the morning she gets up to try on her trousseau, and puts on sunglasses so Betsy won’t see, but they just dam up the tears, until she’s got this pool behind them on her cheeks. She’s just afraid, and she knows it, but that doesn’t mean a thing. They’ve got the guest list all made out. She’s going to marry him in June.”

  Margy took the T to Cambridge, looked for Rachel’s friends. She found the one who’d had the party, a big-breasted woman in a T-shirt with short rough hair, who offered to make tea, or lunch, or roll a joint. Yes, she could tell Margy where to go, and no, she wouldn’t mention it to Rachel if she didn’t want her to. But was she sure?

  “It’s not a nice thing to go through,” she said as she followed Margy out onto the landing, carrying a large gray cat. “Don’t do it by yourself, baby.”