Nell

by Nancy Thayer

  During the five years after her divorce, she fell in love, too, once or twice, for a week or two or a month or two, or thought she did. She was hurt, she was left, she tried not to think about those times. The only consolation was in their brevity.

  She would have gotten bitter after a while if she had not had so many other friends who were going through the same sort of thing: falling in love with the wrong man, trying to trust and being forsaken, over and over again. One drunken night she and a friend who had recently been left by men decided that their lives were really nothing more than a cosmic comedy act for bored gods. The Boob Sisters Fall in Love … And Fall in Love … And Fall in Love … And Fall in Love … Laughter saved them, friendship saved them, and Nell was at the point in her life when she believed in little else save laughter and the friendship of women. She began to regard people like John and Katy Anderson, people with happy marriages, as mortals who had been blessed with miracles, part of the miracle being that they didn’t know how miraculous their lives were.

  For the past three and a half months, Nell had been dating Stellios Xouris, the man who had provided for Nell the experience she had been secretly expecting all her life.

  It had been early January, a Saturday—Nell’s day off and her one chance to do a week’s worth of errands. It had snowed and melted and frozen over already; the air was cold and gray and the streets a sheet of treacherous, slush-covered ice. Nell had a cold. She was wearing jeans, boots, a grungy old sweatshirt under a grungy old sweater, her parka, and a wool cap. There was no man in her life. One of the cats had thrown up odiously on the hall rug, which was wool and too heavy for her washing machine. Nell begrudged the expense of having the rug cleaned; she hated having to lug it to the cleaners and she wanted someone else to take care of this particularly repellent task. She was wearing no makeup, but her slight fever had made her eyes bright and her cheeks rosy, and as she passed the hall mirror on the way to the car, she regretted the absence of some man to notice and admire the flare and glow of her hair and face, her hot prettiness on this cold, drab day. She yelled to her children that they must keep cleaning their rooms, that she’d be right back, and set off in her car for the dry cleaners on Mass. Ave.

  Something had broken: a gas line, or a water line, or something. Half a block on each side of the dry cleaners was torn up, and three men were cursing and mucking about at the edge of the sidewalk, throwing broken cement around. The entrance to the dry cleaners was an obstacle course of slick ice and jagged chunks of pavement. Nell had parked her car two blocks away, grabbing the first available spot she saw. She had lugged the heavy rug this far—now, suddenly, the impossibility of negotiating it over the broken curbing hit her like a tragedy. She thought she would die right then and there—a stupid, mediocre death brought on by one too many inconveniences in her life.

  As she stood at the edge of the work area, trying to decide whether to try to negotiate her way through the cement, shovels, pipes, and picks or to just drop the rug and leave it there forever, one of the workmen looked at her. He stood up and walked over to where she was standing.

  “You want to go to the cleaners?” he asked, his speech heavily accented.

  Nell looked at him. Automatically but unemotionally, she noted that the worker was tall, slim, dark, and handsome.

  “Yes,” she replied, glaring. She felt anger flare up inside her because he was young and strong and good-looking, the type who’d throw cement around, build up his muscles, then impress some pretty young woman at a bar tonight and have only pity or disdain for a poor exhausted working mother like Nell.

  “Wait!” he exclaimed. “You must wait!”

  While she stood, startled (was he an inmate loose from an asylum, out on a work permit, perhaps?), the man began to build a path for her, a bridge of cement blocks over the slush and dirt.

  “Here.” He gestured at last. “For you. You must not trip and fall. And I will carry your package for you.”

  “Oh no,” Nell said, more alarmed than anything else. What about his foreman, she wondered, wouldn’t he be angry that his worker left the job?

  “Please,” the young man said, extending his hand. “I must. You are a princess.”

  Well, Nell thought, at last. Someone’s finally noticed. She smiled at the man, surprised, pleased, delighted—and not for one minute doubting his seriousness.

  During her childhood she had had a favorite fantasy: somehow it would be discovered that her kind, ordinary schoolteacher parents had adopted her and that she was actually the child of the grand monarch of some lovely foreign country. When she rode in the backseat of her parents’ Ford station wagon, she had pressed her face against the window, hoping that someone on the street or in another car would see her and cry out, “Stop! That’s my daughter!” She would be rescued and restored to her proper parents and rightful place as a princess. It was a purely irrational fantasy, filled with detailed images of the glittering, beribboned gowns and bejeweled tiaras she would wear as princess—but lacking the explanations of why she had been taken from her parents in the first place, how she had come to live in the unprincesslike locale of Des Moines, Iowa, or exactly where her new realm was located on the map—all that was vague, a blur of circumstances that didn’t interest her much.

  As she grew older, though, the fantasy changed, became more rational, more focused. She was not born a princess—that was a stupid dream. No. She would become a princess. She would meet and marry a prince. Grace Kelly had done it, after all. It truly happened in the real world.

  But it didn’t happen to Nell. Realism finally prevailed, and by her late teens she had traded the princess fantasy for the actress dream. Still, those old yearnings never really went away. Nell knew there weren’t many women alive who, nurtured on Cinderella stories in the crib, didn’t secretly envy and identify with Lady Di, even in their wise maturity.

  Stellios’s words were magic, the ultimate seduction. He could see past the jeans and smelly rug to the truth: Nell was a princess.

  “Thank you so much,” she had said, letting him take the rug from her. “It is heavy,” she added, flashing a dazzling smile, “although it probably won’t seem so to you.”

  He followed her into the cleaners. The owner took a blessedly long time to appear after the bell on the shop door announced their arrival, so Nell and Stellios became friends and exchanged telephone numbers.

  Stellios courted Nell with diligence and flourish. He brought her blossoming flowers in the dead of winter, bottles of sweet wine, records recorded by men with smoldering dark eyes singing sentimental ballads. He continued to treat Nell with courtesy even after he realized she was not, in spite of her education and large house, wealthy. And Nell continued to see him even after he confessed to her that his dream was to marry a wealthy American woman. She had no doubt that he’d succeed. He was handsome, gentle, quick-witted. She wished him well.

  Stellios had been born in Greece and had grown up there, yet in many ways he reminded Nell of Steve, the young and very American man Nell had dated just after her divorce. Like Steve, Stellios was a manual laborer, a young, hard, strong, sexy, uneducated, rather simple man. Nell was beginning to think that perhaps this was the sort of man she was destined to meet for the rest of her life. She met so many of these types, young muscular jocks who coached Jeremy’s baseball team or painted her friends’ houses. She wasn’t sure what to do about this—wasn’t sure she wanted to do anything about this. This sort of man provided for Nell the temporary pleasure of companionship without that dreadful specter of Serious Intention lurking in the background. She never had to think whether she would give up some part of her freedom in order to make the relationship last—she knew it wouldn’t last from the start. So she was relieved rather than threatened to know that there could be nothing permanent between her and Stellios.

  Back in Greece, Stellios had been engaged to a young woman who suddenly ran off with another man; rather than commit suicide or murder—for Stellios was passionate
and sincere in his actions and emotions—he had fled to America. Now he lived with one of his mother’s aunts, surrounded by loving and watchful relatives. Nell had been to dinner at the Xourises several times and the assemblage of cousins and Greek friends had been pleasant to her, easily affectionate. But they had made it quite clear that Nell was not the right woman for Stellios—she was several years older than he, and divorced, with children—! She was, in their eyes, a kind of tramp, whose body would provide for Stellios a smooth and pleasurable final passage from his native country to the new one. The men at the Xouris house touched Nell. They hugged her when she arrived or left, patted her bottom or arm, and complimented her effusively. They told her she carried herself like a queen. The women stood in the background, judging Nell with their eyes.

  So Nell had thought she was safe enough with Stellios. They provided pleasant company for each other, with no chance of involvement, no chance of pain. They really were good for each other, for a while. Nell helped Stellios improve his language and his manners without embarrassing him; she taught him useful things like how to light and use a charcoal grill and how to dance without clapping his arms above his head or waving them in the air. In turn, Stellios was a charming escort who complimented Nell intelligently, noticing the things she wanted a man to notice—a new dress, a new way of wearing her hair, her slender ankles. He was sensitive to her moods and rubbed her back when she was on her period. She had been perfectly content to enjoy his company and was prepared to watch him move on, when the time came, with no regrets at all. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that every day while he worked for the city road crew, digging here and there on the streets of Cambridge, he said to each promising woman he saw: “Please. Let me carry that for you. You are a princess.” It was only a matter of time, Nell knew, until a man as handsome as Stellios met another woman who knew in her heart that she was a princess and would let Stellios become her prince.

  But recently Stellios had been acting strangely—serious. He was acting as if he were in love with Nell. He was beginning to bring her roses, ice cream sundaes, dreadful (he didn’t know they were dreadful; he liked the TV ads) perfumes. He was playing up to the children more and more, playing ball with them, even going up to kiss them good night at bedtime. And he was looking at Nell with a different expression on his face. He had even mentioned living in the house: “If I lived here, I’d tear out the fireplace and put in a wood stove. They’re more efficient.” Nell knew what he was up to; he was trying to believe he was in love with her. And she did not want him to be in love with her. They had so little in common except goodwill toward each other. He loved sports, was baffled by drama and music; he loved to go to amusement parks and ride the roller coaster—oh, they really had nothing in common, except, perhaps, loneliness. She knew Stellios better than he knew himself. She knew he wanted to believe he loved Nell so that the pain of his fiancée leaving him would be lessened. She had thought they would help each other, that she would, simply by being his lover and friend, help him in his desolation. But now she saw that it would be no help and perhaps even more harm if she continued the affair with him.

  But she didn’t want to end the affair, either; he was the only man she was seeing these days, the only man on the horizon. In the past five years she had learned very well to do most things alone: She could manage the house, hold down a job, keep two children healthy and happy, take sustenance from her friends, and live a pretty pleasant life. But in spite of all her intelligence, in spite of all her love of books and drama and movies and friends, she still took the most pleasure from an intimate association with a man. It was not just the sex, although that was of course a great part of it. It was all the other things: she liked the sound of men’s voices, the male presence they exuded, like a scent of sage or bayberry, around her house. She liked the way they always surprised her with the way they thought; so different from the way she and her friends thought. She thought of women as having fiction minds and men as having nonfiction minds, and she liked having men around in the same sort of way that she liked looking at Time magazine or the evening news. She might not agree with everything that was said, but it opened up her world to know such viewpoints were there.

  It would be the kindest thing to do to break things off with Stellios before he got more involved, more liable to hurt. But the summer was coming, the lovely season when laziness and sensuality spread through her limbs like a lazy stream through a meadow. The evenings would be long; she did not want to sit on her porch and sip strawberry daiquiris alone every night. The summer was coming, when men took off their flannel shirts and sweaters and went around in cutoff jeans and T-shirts, when she could see the hair, the sweat, the muscles of their arms and legs and backs.… The summer was the worst time to be alone. She knew that. She had spent summers alone, lying in bed at night, drinking iced tea and reading a mystery and trying to ignore the soft summer breeze that blew gently in her window and played across her skin. She did not want to hurt Stellios, and she did not want to be alone in the summer. It seemed to her that as the years had passed she had compromised greatly with life, she had learned to ask for less and less and less. Now she did not even ask for love or the security of marriage, now she only asked for—for what? For a little more pleasure in her life.

  She did not know what to do. She did not understand why nothing in her life would be uncomplicated. She worked so hard; why could nothing come or stay easy? She lay in her bath a long time, waiting for the heat to soothe her, waiting for some answer to come. She lay there until all the bubbles evaporated into the air and the water cooled to lukewarm and she was left looking down through transparent water at her foolish fleshy body, which never could seem to learn not to ask for more.

  Four

  Sunday night Stellios insisted on taking Nell to a restaurant she knew he couldn’t really afford. When she tried to convince him she would prefer pizza or Italian food, he was offended, and she saw that it would hurt his ego more than his pocketbook for her to refuse to let him give her this treat. At the restaurant he gazed at her with great affection and constantly held her hand, so that it was difficult to eat. She silently vowed to have a discussion with him, to tell him that they should stop seeing each other, that they were getting too serious for their own good. She intended to do this. She wanted to wait until they left the restaurant—she didn’t think it would be fair to dump something like that on him in the middle of a wonderful meal.

  But the ride in the car to the apartment in his aunt’s house was too brief for them to have an emotionally involving discussion. So she went into the apartment with him and turned to face him, her face stern. “Stellios,” she began, and he took her in his arms and kissed her. Her good resolutions faded. She went to bed with him. He had a beautiful body. And she knew she was making him happy—it seemed the right thing to do.

  After they had finished making love, Nell lay in his arms, feeling all flushed and drowsy, completely relaxed, her good intentions forgotten, until she heard Stellios whisper in her ear, “You mean so much to me.” Then she felt a chill pass straight through her and she went all tense and miserable. She did not want to mean so much to him. And now she knew that each time she was with him she would be encouraging him to let her mean more. But she could not bring herself to speak of breaking off—not then, when they were lying so close together. She only hugged him and made a noncommittal “umm” sound into his chest.

  Finally, he drove her home. She did not sleep well. She got up in the middle of the night and took a shower, as if cleansing or baptising herself, as if she would be a new, calmer, better person after the ritual. She still did not sleep well.

  She was plagued by old superstitions, old patterns of guilt and fear. She had certain mental habits that were as ingrained as her ways of walking and holding a fork, and one of these was left over from her childhood: She believed that any bad news that befell her was somehow the result of some previous bad deed she had done, and so guilt was always with her, foresha
dowing even the beginning of any selfish act. She could not go out to dinner with a friend or to bed with a man or even read an enjoyable novel if her children were on a car trip with Marlow until she knew they had all arrived at their destination safely. Now, even with children as old as eight and ten, she could not leave the house for an evening at a concert, no matter how expensive the tickets, if the children were sick. She knew her superstitions were irrational, illogical, and often inconsistent, but she couldn’t shake them any more than she could change the color of her eyes. There resided within her some primitive belief that even the tiniest of sins on her part would bring about certain and disproportionate disaster.

  So it did not surprise her on Monday, when after making marvelous love with Stellios on Sunday, that all sorts of strange things fell from the sky in the nature of changes and sorrows. Monday morning Jeremy awoke feverish and vomiting.

  She knew a flu was going around. After the first round of vomiting, Jeremy’s stomach seemed to settle down and he was able to keep down some ginger ale. She got Hannah dressed and off to school and settled Jeremy in front of the TV. He still wore his pajamas, and she brought down his pillow and favorite blanket. She pushed a low table near the sofa and put on it a glass of ginger ale and a large bowl, in case he had to throw up again. By the time she had to leave to open the boutique, his fever had dropped. She brought the phone in and plugged it into the jack in the TV room wall; he could easily call her if he felt sick again. She had left him before, and he had been fine. He would spend the day sleeping, watching TV, feeling sick, waiting for her to come home, slightly pleased at missing school. She would spend the day worrying about him, trying to be pleasant to customers, phoning him, and wishing she could stay home and tend him the way her mother had tended her when she was ill.