Ladies and Gentlemen (15 page)

One of them caught my eye, and Nicholas noticed me staring.

“She’s drop-dead, isn’t she?”

It was a photograph of a husband and wife and their two young
children, a boy and a girl, the family on a beach somewhere luxurious, though nothing captured your attention like the woman. She was incredibly beautiful.

Nicholas smiled. “Ever seen two uglier kids?”

Their homeliness was as remarkable as their mother’s beauty. I looked at the card again. It was a pleasure to be able to stare at the woman so unabashedly. She had long, curly brown hair, blue eyes so pale they seemed lit from within.

The girls returned. When Maria noticed which photograph I was looking at she said “Oh” and tucked her chin into her neck. “That’s Lisa.”

“Tell them the story about Lisa,” Nicholas said.

“You tell them.”

“No, you tell it.”

Maria sat down gingerly, adjusting her skirt. Then she looked at her chest and brushed herself off, as if she were covered in crumbs. “I don’t know where to start,” she said.

“Start at the beginning. At school.”

Maria reached over to the table, picked up her wineglass, took a sip, and put it down. Marx and Weber, their two German shepherds, squeezed past the coffee table and curled themselves neatly around her feet, having grown noticeably more protective during her pregnancy. She bent forward to pet them, then leaned back in her chair.

“Lisa,” she said, “was my best friend in college. We became close when we were sophomores in chemistry, and we shared an apartment together our senior year, the year that Nicholas and I met. She was gorgeous, just like you see her now, but I don’t know, she seemed even more so then. Do you agree with that?”

Nicholas shrugged. He ran his palm across his short black hair. When we met them two years ago, he wore it long, down to his shoulders, but now he cut it himself. He was half Russian and a quarter Cherokee, with Asian eyes and the full lips of a Mongol. He’d played football in college, and his body still had some of that absurd mass.

“Go on,” he said.

“She was also brilliant. No, that’s not even right. She was one of the most intelligent and creative people I’ve ever met. She was a big star in the English department and a dual major in biology. She could paint, too, and didn’t she come to school on a dance scholarship?”

Nicholas nodded.

Maria took another sip of wine. “Anyway, when you were around her you couldn’t help but think how nice it must be to have unlimited options in life. And yet you couldn’t hate her or be jealous—at least I couldn’t—because she was so kind. She was good. She was
good
, wasn’t she?” she said to the dogs. They lifted their heads, waited, then put them down and sighed. “She had nothing to be afraid of,” Maria said. “I remember that fall we were all talking about what we were going to do with ourselves next, and Lisa had all sorts of glamorous plans—teach English in Japan, work for Doctors Without Borders, go to Africa for the UN. And I supported anything she suggested without question because somehow I needed her to do something spectacular.” She looked at Carla. “Does that make sense?”

Carla had lit a cigarette. She’d opened the window by her to spare us the smoke. “Absolutely it makes sense,” she said.

Maria paused for a moment. We’re close friends, so the silence
was comfortable. I poured myself more wine and looked around the room, at all of Nicholas’s books, at the bicycle rack and the reading stand he’d made with rollers on its legs and an adjustable desktop so that Maria could work while sitting in their club chair. To make ends meet, she’d been moonlighting regularly at Veterans Hospital, Baptist, and Vanderbilt, seven months pregnant and still picking up killer shifts, twenty-four and sometimes even thirty-six hours on call. And you could look at these things Nicholas had built, these enhancements, as his way of either assisting her or goading her—I wasn’t sure which. According to mutual friends, three years ago, before we knew them, Nicholas had an affair with one of his graduate students, and he and Maria separated for a time. One afternoon, after he ran out of fellowship money, he snuck over to her apartment, stole a credit card application from the mail, and applied for it under her name. He used this card to fund his life for the next several months, running Maria into enormous debt. And still, after all this, they reconciled. This was a mystery to me. Why had she forgiven him? Why had he come back? Could people really forget or get over such things? Had he crippled her self-esteem? Or were they willing to go to these lengths simply because they loved each other? “They’re either the cursed or the blessed,” Carla once said to me, “but I’d have kicked that son of a bitch out long ago”—which at the time I took as a warning. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure it was so cut and dried. There’s a photograph of the two of them in their living room that I always like to look at whenever I’m over. Nicholas and Maria have their backs to the camera, walking hand in hand along the ridge of some valley in Germany—nothing but mountains beyond and below them for
miles. It’s fall, so they’re wearing sweaters and stocking hats, and because they’re on a slope and Nicholas is standing downhill from his wife, they seem the same height, two happy little people, married since forever. And every time I consider this photo, what’s clear to me is that it’s easier to understand what makes two people let go than what keeps them together.

“Where was I?” Maria said.

“Unlimited options,” said Carla.

“Anyway, by the end of that fall I’d already applied to medical schools, and Nicholas was applying to programs in philosophy. But Lisa, I don’t know how to describe it. She just shut down. It wasn’t exactly a nervous breakdown, but something close. She just withdrew—from me, from school, from everything. All her energy left her. Her enthusiasm. Maybe the weight of her options started to overwhelm her or—”

“Oh, come on,” Nicholas said.

“What?”

“You’re telling it completely wrong.”

Maria hunched slightly, and her eyes went blank.

“Weight of her options?” he said.

Maria wouldn’t look at him. “Story police,” she said.

“Don’t make her such a victim.”

Carla and I had never witnessed them quarrel openly, but we’d seen portents, harbingers of fights waiting to happen the minute we left. “
You
tell it,” she said, sitting back in her chair. Maria stared into space while Nicholas smiled at the two of us. His teeth were spaced widely apart. I tried to catch Carla’s eye but she took a long drag on her cigarette and wouldn’t look at me.

“First of all,” Nicholas said, “you have to understand that Lisa wasn’t some picture-perfect genius. She was a bit of a head case. You’d agree with
that
, wouldn’t you?”

Maria didn’t appear to be listening.

Nicholas shook his head. “Lisa could be
way
out there,” he said. “She had this need for extravagance, so everything she did had to be extraordinary. And if it wasn’t she abandoned it—no matter what it was, or who. That fall she was talking about writing a novel, and she even started one at the beginning of the semester. She signed up for a creative-writing class and when she came back after the first session she was so excited she could barely contain herself. She was going to write a novel like no one had ever written before, she told me. She thought it was amazing that a narrative form several hundred years old was still chained to linearity and psychological realism—the same Joycean rant all the smart kids make before they bother to write a word. Then she went to her room, closed the door, and set to work—just like that. I’m pretty sure she was up most of the night. Being manic like that, she’d have made a great surgeon. I was basically living with Maria by that time, so when Lisa left for class the next morning, I went in to have a look at what she’d done because I was dying of curiosity.”

“Jealousy,” Maria said.

“Please. The pages were on her desk—fifteen, maybe twenty, drafted in one sitting. She wrote this very mannered prose, but it had a kind of energy that immediately hooked you. But it wasn’t really a story per se. It began with this long description of an old doorman in the service elevator of an apartment building. He’s collecting tenants’ trash and going through it, spinning tales in his
mind about what he finds while remembering things he’s overheard during his rides with these same people. He’s got a portable radio with him in the elevator that’s tuned to a call-in show, and the narrative shifts from these on-the-air conversations into what’s going on in the guest’s head. He’s a doctor who’s explaining the process of separating conjoined twins, giving all this technical material in layspeak, but then it goes into his memories of the actual operation, passages that only someone with Lisa’s knowledge could pull off. That’s as far as she got, but it was fantastic stuff. It really was. And I wanted to tell her this. But when I stopped by that evening, she was sitting at her desk holding her hair in one fist and striking through line after line with a black marker. She was crossing everything out in utter disgust. So I knocked lightly on her door, and she glared at me wild-eyed and said, ‘I’m
working
,’ then reached out and slammed it in my face. She dropped the class a week later.”

Maria stood up; both dogs, suddenly agitated, rose too. “I need some water,” she said, and went to the kitchen. Carla was looking at Nicholas, slightly amazed, as if she’d never seen him before. She was still ignoring me, and I felt a tightness in my gut, something close to fear. Occasionally, a night with Nicholas and Maria could touch off tensions between the two of us. Carla was twenty-eight and had been practicing law for two years. I was thirty-three, teaching the LSAT, bartending, still struggling to wrap up a novel I’d been working on for a long time. When she got frustrated with me, when we really got into it, she’d say I’d been finishing the book ever since we met—an ungenerous, simplistic accusation, I thought, if not entirely inaccurate. What was inarguably true was that there was a growing list of things we couldn’t talk about—the
hours I’d put in writing that day, if I’d gone for a run, if Nicholas and I went out for coffee. “It must be nice,” Carla might say, “to meet for a leisurely chat in the middle of the afternoon.” I didn’t dare answer. I started editing out all sorts of daily information, minimizing conversations with my family, growing wary of phone calls that tied up our line. “Who were you talking to for so long?” Carla might ask when she got through.
Bitch
was often on the tip of my tongue, and I would’ve said it many times if her questions weren’t apt, her frustrations and fears not justified. Worse, these elisions were changing me: I was a miser with good news, with friends’ pregnancies, promotions, new homes. When Carla called me out regarding this pettiness, we sometimes spiraled into vicious argument. In the past few months, we’d said unforgettable things.

Maria came back. “You didn’t have to wait,” she said.

Nicholas watched her sit, but she wasn’t backing down and I thought they might have it out right then. He wanted some acknowledgment from her, even at our expense. He was so unyielding that in a strange way I admired him. He made
no
apologies. He just took. Yet he never talked to me about Maria, as if their relationship was sacrosanct. Once, over drinks, I’d told him about the problems Carla and I were having; bitter, I offered more details than were necessary, all of which he considered thoughtfully. But finally he replied, “Never underestimate a woman’s loyalty.” I felt so ashamed that I promised myself I’d never discuss my marriage with him again.

“But Maria’s right,” he said, relenting. “Lisa did shut down for a while, but not because she had unlimited options. She just had no follow-through. Everyone around her was making choices on the fly. Plenty of us had no idea what we were getting into, but Lisa
didn’t understand commitment. She couldn’t accept that making a choice eliminates other choices. She wanted to step up and hit the bull’s-eye on the first try. She was so talented, so quick, she had no clue how long it really took to get somewhere.”

At this, Maria and Carla simply looked at each other.

“So she overcompensated. We come back from Christmas vacation after Lisa’s had her little meltdown, and she’s all better. She seems completely restored. We’re having dinner together that first night, and out of the blue she announces she’s getting married.

“And we’re floored. We were like, ‘Married? To who?
When?
’ And she says she just wants to
get
married, she
has
to get married. We think she’s joking. But Lisa’s like, ‘I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life. It’s what I want. It’s what my mother did, and she’s happy. I don’t want to be one of those women who have to compete in the rat race. I don’t want to work insane hours. I want children. I want to be a
homemaker
. Is that such a dishonorable goal?’ And then she lists all the qualities she’d come up with for her ideal mate. She really had a list. He had to be financially secure enough to support her comfortably. She wanted him to be handsome, absolutely. She felt strongly that he should have a solid religious background—Catholic, Jewish, it didn’t matter, as long as he believed and practiced
something
. It got a lot more specific than that. She’d really put her mind to it. It was all so hyperconscious that I honestly thought she’d gone nuts. And when Maria and I told her she was being obsessive, that this was a misguided grasp at certainty, at a direction, she shot us down. She said we were being hypocritical because we were married already, even though it wasn’t official, which was true.

“She went out almost every night that spring, hunting for a
husband. It became her job. Her new major. It was the sole purpose of everything she did. She trekked into Seattle and hit the town. She joined a gym off campus. She started going to openings at galleries, to restaurant openings. She asked about the family backgrounds of classmates. She became a database of who was who and who had what. She dragged Maria and me out with her occasionally. And the nights we came along, it was fascinating to watch her size men up, approach them, talk to them or wait until they approached her. And within an hour or sometimes just minutes she’d come back to where we were sitting and compare the guys against her criteria and describe how they’d passed or failed. And the whole time she seemed completely happy.