Crazy in Love (9 page)

“That’s a very uplifting tale. Thank you
so
much, Clare,” I said, grinning sarcastically.

“My point is, they’re under a lot of peer pressure,” Clare said. “Sometimes Donald tells me his biggest regret is that he didn’t buck the trend and take me to Japan.”

“Is your biggest regret that you didn’t go?” I asked.

“No—it’s just one regret of many,” Clare said. Clare was motherly and voluptuous, but when she smiled at me that way, I remembered her when we were girls: skinny, taller than I, with an expression that told me she loved me more than anyone in the world. “Nick’s all right,” Clare said. “He probably feels better knowing you’re on Mom’s porch than in a stuffy hotel room.”

“Clare’s right,” Honora said. “Nick’s thinking of you.” Then, because the time had come to change the subject, she clapped her hands. “The coincidence!” she said, pronouncing each syllable with force. “I can’t get over it, the partner at Nick’s firm overseeing your grant. Isn’t it bizarre, Clare? Have you ever heard anything like it?”

“I nearly fainted when I found out,” I said. “There I was, standing on the club terrace, making what I thought was small talk with John Avery. I mean, he is always very polite, very interested in what the associates’ spouses are doing.”

“That is a real talent,” Honora said, “making the other person feel important. That time I was on Dick Cavett, he made me feel that I was the most interesting guest he had ever had. Me, Weather Woman. Hah! Go on.”

“Then I mentioned the Swift Observatory, and at that instant I connected him with Avery and he connected me with Swift and we both about fainted.”

“It’s unreal,” Clare said. “And he said he liked your work?”

“Yes.”

“Great, great,” Honora and Clare said together.

Honora stood. She collected our empty glasses on the tray. We started into the kitchen. I gave Pem a hand, and she slipped her arm through mine. “Take my arm and call me Charlie,” she said.

After dinner both Honora and Clare invited me to spend the night at their houses, but I said no. We all kissed, and Clare and I left at the same time.

“That’s a terrible story about Tokyo,” I said. “I wonder why I never realized it at the time.” Honora’s grass needed mowing; the long grass, wet with the night air, tickled my bare ankles.

“You were single then. You didn’t want to hear about married problems. Remember how upset you were when I first married Donald?”

“I was jealous of him.”

“I know, but you never said that. What you did was tell me how foolish I was to get married instead of working. Of course I saw no reason why I couldn’t paint and sculpt at home. Not to mention keep up with biochem. An architect came to design a studio in the garage, but we never had it built.”

“That portrait of the boys is great,” I said.

“Oh, thanks.”

We had come to the spot where Clare turned right and I turned left, but we stood still, listening to the waves. “You start off thinking you can plan the way your life will be,” Clare said. “But I don’t think you can. Sometimes things just happen. But we’re lucky, Georgie. More good things happen to us than bad.”

“Think of the sisters who don’t live near each other. That’s sad, isn’t it?” I asked, kissing Clare.

“Sleep tight, Georgie,” she said.

The emptiness of my house struck me because I would be alone in it all night. The hook where Nick wouldn’t hang his coat that night, the table where he wouldn’t place the plane’s chart case, the sofa on which he wouldn’t sit beside me. I walked through the rooms aimlessly, accompanied by my own amber reflection in each window. Settling in my workroom, the room where I was always alone and would be least likely to feel Nick’s absence, I glanced through old newspapers. In a way it felt good, to be relieved of worrying about plane crashes for one night. Then I came to a news story about a retired firefighter who was killed by a falling brick on Fifth Avenue. It could happen any time, anywhere. As I sat in my cozy house a meteor could crash through the roof. I thought of what Clare had said: you think you can plan, but you can’t.

The phone rang.

“Nick!” I said into the receiver.

After a long pause, a woman spoke. “Is this Georgie Swift?” she asked.

“Mona?” I asked, recognizing her voice.

“Is this a bother, me calling you?”

“No, I’m glad to hear from you. I’m sorry about your miscarriage.”

“Thank you. This is awkward, but it’s late, I just had a bottle of wine with dinner, and I feel like talking. So I thought of you. We had a nice conversation that day.”

“Yes, I’ve thought of it often. How is everything?”

“Pretty shitty, but not as bad as it could be. My lawyer has managed to arrange for the charges to be dropped if I agree to counseling. So I’m not going to jail.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” I said, feeling genuinely thrilled for her but uneasy about being on the phone when Nick might try to call. I knew what his meetings were like, how difficult it was for him to step away from the conference table. Sometimes he had only one chance an hour.

“They’ve let me see the kids, and Dick is going to be reasonable about it. He keeps saying ‘You’re their mother,’ and I get the feeling he’d let me have them if it weren’t for the severity of the charges. If I’d only hit Celeste instead of stabbing her. He has such unpredictable hours. Everyone thinks an eye surgeon can plan his time, but you wouldn’t believe the calls that would come in at night. Eyes injured in brawls, in car wrecks. Of course he could schedule routine things, like cataract operations, but not the others. So it’s tough for him to take care of the children and keep up his work. He would be better off if we were back together.”

“I know that, Mona. I’ve always felt that way, ever since I met you. I hate to do this, but I have to get off the phone. Could we talk some other time?”

“Oh, sure. I don’t want to bother you.” The change in her tone told me I’d offended her.

“I wish I didn’t have to go. Can I call you tomorrow?”

“Sure, bye.”

The click as she hung up sounded final and mocking, but I didn’t care because the phone rang one minute later and it was Nick.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you,” I said.

We said more, but those were the words that mattered.

THAT SUMMER THE TELEPHONE
was the sorcerer’s apprentice, and I was the sorcerer. The alchemy started with newspapers, full of stories about faceless people, victims of tragedy, winners of lotteries, yesterday’s ordinary people made extraordinary by events in their lives. I used a pair of Pem’s old white kid gloves, to keep my hands clean while I paged through the papers. That was part of the ritual. So was the coffee I sipped while I read, the chair in which I sat, the pile of newspapers that grew until Thursday, when the garbagemen came. I would list stories that captivated me, and eventually I would call the people involved. My bookshelves became clogged with phone books from many municipalities. I would dial, transported by the hollow ringing into another person’s life. I envisioned each person I called. They had definite features, families, political views. The minute I heard their voices, they became entire.

Since our cell reception was limited, the telephone company installed call-waiting and also a second line. I wanted to leave one line absolutely free, in case Nick or someone from the family tried to call. For the first time in my life I was putting people on hold. I instructed my loved ones to call me on our original number, while the second line was the meeting ground for people I had read about but would never see or meet. “Hold, please,” I said to Clare when she called in the midst of a conversation with Alfred Hoberg, winner of the New Jersey Jackpot. “Can I call you back? I’m on the other line,” I said over and over to Nick, once I had established that nothing was wrong and he was just calling to talk.

Nick seemed amused by my obsession with the telephone, and perhaps relieved. He thought it was curing me of my obsession with him. “Obsession is not love,” he had said to me the night after our night apart. “It’s driving me crazy, the way you imagine my motives. It scares me.”

It scared me as well. I had thought that people grew comfortable after many years of marriage. In worst cases they became bored with each other when nothing new was left to discover, but mainly they could rest easy, having learned a common language, developed a pattern of days and nights, put down the terrible fears of early love. The vigor with which I telephoned my people, the diligence with which I transcribed those conversations into reports, the effort I made to forget Mona Tuchman because she reminded me of the violence of love: all of these kept my fear in check.

WHEN I THINK
of it now, that summer, I try to understand the frenzy. What stirred us up? Had I been a distant observer, I might have seen a normal young couple, living happily among the wife’s family, suffering the usual trials of the man’s demanding career. Even to me, in the midst of everything, that is how it appeared on the surface. But it was beneath the surface, where tensions seethed and poisoned, that counted. How could powerful love be a poison? I thought of it as strong and bracing, life-giving, a sweet, delicious, and sinful nectar. Sometimes I thought of the people I loved and the feelings were so strong I would cry. Sometimes I thought I would die of love for them.

6

NICK’S PARENTS INVITED US TO A FOURTH OF
July barbeque at their home in the Berkshires.

“The Fourth is Pem’s favorite holiday,” I said. “But we haven’t seen your parents in a long time. Since Christmas.”

“That’s true, but it’s a long way to go. I can’t take the whole weekend off.”

“But they’re your parents.”

“True,” Nick said.

That exchange typified the debates we would have every holiday. From my cajoling, would you guess that the last thing I wanted to do was leave the Point? In a perfect world, I would choose to spend every holiday with my family, but in the real world, Nick had parents and brothers and sisters. He seemed oddly indifferent about seeing them. Perhaps that was because he felt so close to my family; we talked about it often, but Nick never seemed to care about the answer. It was always I who told him we should visit his parents, spend Christmas with the Symondses instead of the Swifts-Bennisons-Mackens. I did this partly because I felt it was penance for the great majority of time we spent with my family. I made bargains with myself: if we visit the Symondses for this one holiday, we won’t have to go back until December or March or June. I liked his family very much, but they weren’t mine.

We borrowed the seaplane. The day was perfect: bright sun and a deep blue sky. Nick wore a golden suede jacket and aviator sunglasses. Checking the instruments, he frowned with concentration. I sat beside him, holding the chart of the Connecticut River Valley across my lap. I wore blue jeans and a black T-shirt covered by a woven shawl.

“Ready?” Nick said, leaning across me to make sure my door was locked.

“Kiss and fly,” I said, just before he turned the key.

The engine whirred and the propeller began slowly to turn. Our pontoons slapped the bay’s flat surface as we gathered speed. Motorboats and small sloops, thick in the water, gave us right of way. Then came the lift, and we were soaring straight into the sky, leaving Bennison Point beneath us. Nick banked left, then right, giving me a chance to wave goodbye to everyone: Donald and the boys in their Dyer Dinghy, Clare standing on the rocks, Honora in the rose garden. Pem stood by the stone wishing well, shielding her eyes to watch us. As we wheeled north I lost sight of everyone, but the land’s contours gained sharper focus. I saw the rooftops, the groves of pine and oak, the craggy rocks dipping into the sea. I saw the Point in relation to the rest of Black Hall. Then the sea was behind us.

We followed the Connecticut River north. The plane’s engines were loud, making conversation difficult. I loved flying with Nick. I experienced no fear, and I wondered, as I always did when I flew with Nick, about the bald terror I felt every time I watched him take off. Hartford, with its tall buildings and gold domes, came into view. We flew straight past, past the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, and took a left turn over the Massachusetts Turnpike. Nick seemed so confident as a pilot, as he did in all his walks of life: lawyer, pilot, family man. I viewed each occupation as separate. At his office I looked at him and thought “lawyer,” just as in law school I had looked at him and thought “law student.” In a plane he was the pilot. In bed he was a wonderful lover. At the dinner table he was my dear husband. I couldn’t seem to integrate his selves into one person with many aspects. I did that for the people I studied, but not for my husband.

We landed on a black lake ringed by parasol pines in the heart of the Berkshires. Gently rounded mountains, made velvety green by the thickness of trees, surrounded us. We coasted to a buoy, set in place by Nick’s father the year Nick invested in the seaplane. Already Bart, Nick’s father, was rowing toward us. He held out his hand to help me into the boat. It felt pleasantly rough, a measure of how he was enjoying a rural retirement after years as a hospital administrator in Springfield.

“Hey, Nick, Georgie, how about this weather? Terry bought some fireworks on his way back from Florida, you should be able to see them for miles.”

“Great,” I said, even though we planned to leave before dark.

“How are you, Dad? How’s Mom?” Nick asked, sitting beside me on the boat’s aft seat. Bart rowed fervently, as if lives depended on it. His round face gleamed with sweat and sunburn.

“We’re good. We’re just fine. Your sister Eleanor made it home for the party, and so did you and Terry. But Beth couldn’t come. She has a party to go to on the Cape. Did she tell you she’s renting a house with some girls? They’re having a ball.”

“No, I didn’t know that. I should stay in better touch with the others,” Nick said.

“She sent us a postcard,” I said, leaning against him. “It showed fishing shacks in Provincetown, remember?”

Nick shook his head, laughing quietly. His father rowed and rowed, hardly noticing our joke. Nick had a funny habit of reading his family’s letters and immediately forgetting what they said. He said it was because he knew everything that was going to happen: every summer until Eleanor got married, she had rented a house on Cape Cod, and so would Beth until she got married.

Nick’s parents now lived year-round in what had been their summer retreat. It stood two hundred yards away from Lake Temperance, a modern house with a lot of windows, in an enclave of similar houses. Nick’s mother, Sally, was playing badminton with Eleanor and her husband, Paul.

“Oh, hi, get yourselves a drink or find a racquet,” Sally called, a greeting I thought understated considering we hadn’t seen her since Christmas. Further proof of the worthiness of my family: Honora showered us with hugs and kisses even when she saw us every day.

Bart poured us beers, foamy from the keg. It seemed touching to have a keg capable of serving fifty people, with only six of us there. Light came through the trees, dappling the dry grass. Bart, Nick, and I sat on the picnic table’s hard benches.

“How’s retirement, Dad?” Nick asked. “You chasing that white ball around the course?”

“No, I don’t play much golf. I’m taking care of this place morning, noon, and night. Chopping wood for next winter, weeding the garden, you know. Your mother is the golfer. Cut her handicap by two since last year.”

“But you’re enjoying yourself, right?” Nick said. I knew he was remembering his mother’s fear that Bart would wither without an office to go to, that he would be dead of boredom within six months.

“Nick, I love it,” Bart said earnestly, leaning across the table. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to your mother and me. We feel like lunch in Vermont, we just drive up to Grafton. We feel like a show in the city, we just drive to Boston. Last week we took in a doubleheader at Fenway, spent the night with your sister Eleanor.”

“Who’d they play?”

“Yankees. Yankees killed them. You see the Yankees play much in New York?”

“No, we’ve switched to the National League,” I said. “We follow the Mets now. Isn’t that terrible? Two lifelong Red Sox fans rooting for the Mets.”

Bart shook his head. “You’ll come to your senses one of these days.”

Sally came to stand behind Bart. She bounced her racquet lightly on his head. “He’s not telling you all about the hospital, is he? Because if he is, I’ll brain him. I tell him, the hospital is no longer his problem. Hello, you two.”

“Hello,” we said. I climbed off my bench and walked around the table to kiss her. Nick stayed where he was. She went to him, gave him a crushing hug from behind.

“It’s a crime, the way you don’t visit more. I want to hear everything. Get me a drink, Dad. I want to sit right here and listen to everything that’s happened, from start to finish.”

“I’m working too hard and Georgie has a new job,” Nick said.

“You do, dear?” Sally said, and I thought I saw her eyes narrowing. I know she approved heartily of wives who stayed home, taking care of their husbands. For that reason she had always encouraged me to do my profile of the bay. After Nick had explained the Swift Observatory, she frowned. “I’m not sure I like you telephoning strangers out of the blue,” she said. “With so many nut cases out there.”

“Thank God, or there’d be nothing interesting for her to study,” Nick said.

“That’s not true,” I said. “The more ordinary the better. Ordinary people faced with extraordinary strife. That’s becoming my motto.” I punched Nick playfully on the upper arm.

“He always bruised so easily,” Sally said, staring into space.

Leaning against Nick, I felt him stifle a giggle. He reached around me, hooking his thumb through my belt loop.

“The woman is a terror,” he said. “Just look at her.”

Sally looked at me and smiled. “I know she’s a good girl.”

Everyone decided to swim. They changed into bathing suits, but I stayed dressed. I couldn’t swim in lakes. Fresh water lacked the buoyancy of salt. It felt sinister to me, although it tasted pure as drinking water. Perhaps if the lake contained a spring, or was fed by a waterfall, anything to make it move, I would have swum in it. But I hated thinking of its muddy bottom, nurturing plants that bloomed on the surface. A nickel dropped in that lake would rest in the mud until eternity. A nickel dropped in our bay might turn up in the Outer Hebrides. I felt frightened of freshwater fish, which I found tasteless to eat: trout, pike, bass, none of which I could identify. Snapping turtles. Water bugs. Swamp adders and pit vipers. Frogs. Lily pads. Branches rotting beneath the surface. In the sea, branches would be tossed onto a beach and saved or pulverized by the tides, waves, and currents.

I sat in a mesh lawn chair watching the Symondses tread water. They formed a circle of heads; their voices carried to me, but not their words. Then Nick struck out from the group and came toward me. He walked onto shore, his bare chest dusted with silvery particles of mud.

“This is nice,” he said. “I’m glad we came. Thanks for suggesting it.”

“I’m glad we came too,” I said, thinking of the Point and Pem’s traditional Fourth of July cake, but absurdly happy to be given credit for our visit with his family.

“We’d see my family much less if it weren’t for you,” he said.

“They’re your family. It’s very important to stay close to them.” It was a philosophy I believed with all my heart, even when staying close to Nick’s family interfered with a day of seeing mine.

We cooked hot dogs and hamburgers on a gas grill, but after that first beer Nick, the pilot, refused to drink another. His mother tried to convince us that we should spend the night, partly so that Nick could help drink the keg, but we stood fast to our plan. We said goodbye at six o’clock. Everyone acted disappointed that we wouldn’t stay to watch Terry’s fireworks, but Nick had to go to the office early the next day. Flying home, I watched the clock and wished for the plane to fly faster. Reading my mind, Nick glanced at me, smiling. “The throttle’s opened up. We’re going as fast as we can.” Mountains turned to hills, farmland to suburbs, we followed the highway to the river and the river to the sea, and we landed in our bay at Bennison Point in time to watch Pem cut the Fourth of July cake.

THE FOURTH OF JULY
cake was white and gooey with red, blue, yellow, and green squiggles and twirls of icing. Paper flags of all the states flew from toothpick standards, circling Old Glory in the center. Pem had made the cake, or supervised the making of it, every year since I could remember. That night everyone sat on her porch: Clare and Donald, the little boys in their summer pajamas, Honora and Pem, me and Nick.

“We can’t cut the cake until the fireworks start,” Eugene said, sounding injured.

“That’s the rule,” Honora said. “That’s always been the way it is.” The sun had set, but light reflected in the sky, clinging to the water’s surface, to the trees, to the yards and houses, to everything on earth.

“Come on, let’s cut the cake,” Pem said, a telltale smear of white frosting in the corner of her mouth.

“What do you do to your brows?” Nick asked, peering into her eyes. She laughed merrily, distracted from her sweet tooth, and spun into the story.

“So many people ask me that!” I heard her say, but I was remembering other Fourth of July cakes.

Everyone in Pem’s family would drive from Providence to Black Hall for the Fourth and the days surrounding it. Our cottages were full of her sisters Gert, Nettie, Lil, and Kat and the husbands and children of everyone except Lil, who had never married; her brothers Edward and Henry and their wives and children; her father, Achilles (pronounced “Ash-heel” in the French manner), a big man of noble proportions whose profile fittingly resembled the Indian on the Buffalo nickel. He was half American Indian. Present also were Pem and Damon, whom Clare and I called “Granddamon,” Honora and Timothy, me and Clare. The generations were staggered in such a way that there were no children our age. Honora was the oldest of her cousins. Many of those cousins were still unmarried; two were married with little babies. Clare and I received a lot of attention. Everyone brought us presents: little chamois sacks of marbles; sweatshirts that said “Narragansett Pier” across the front; tin rings with plastic rubies; our great-aunts’ cast-off sunglasses, pointy and trimmed with rhinestones. They brought boxes full of doughnuts, rolls, and cheeseless pizza. The moment they arrived a card game would start—canasta, pinochle, or thirty-one—and not finish until they left.