Falling in Love with Natassia Read online

  WHEN THE FRENCH YEARS were over, and she and Christopher moved back to New York, Nora’s friends referred to her as She Who Has What She Wants.

  CHAPTER 11 :

  SEPTEMBER

  1989

  Nora, shaking, was lying on a rag rug on the bathroom floor of her loft. It was the day after the night at the ER with Natassia. Early afternoon. There wasn’t much relief in having found out, fifteen minutes earlier, that Mary and Natassia were safe. Lotte had just called with the news that they were upstate, in the cottage. Mary was insisting that for now the two of them needed to be alone.

  “Nora, please,” Lotte had begged over the phone, “you’re trained in this sort of thing. How do we make Mary be sensible?”

  “I don’t know, Lotte. I guess we just let her do what she’s doing.” Nora had had to wrap her arms around herself and hold on tight to the phone.

  Now, lying in the bathroom, Nora turned onto her side, and the dusty rag rug curled up beneath her. She had canceled her morning and early-afternoon appointments, which she’d never done before. She had about four hours to pull herself into some kind of shape for her four-fifteen appointment, a guy losing custody of his Downs-syndrome daughter, a guy whose stability was so precarious right now that Nora couldn’t risk putting him off for a week. But isn’t he going to notice, she wondered, that I’m a bigger mess than he is? She stretched out her arm, rested her head on the inside of her elbow. Her face turned in to her armpit, hip balanced on the floor, leg on leg, trying to make herself thin, a rolled-up wick—light it up and burn away. There was nothing for Nora to do now but disappear.

  The bathroom was the only place in the loft where she could close a door, be alone, and keep Christopher’s cat away from her. Mary walked out of the hospital with her suicidal daughter. Nora was shocked even by the thought of what Mary had done. To play out the possible—probable—disastrous outcomes…Nora needed to hide.

  All night long at the hospital, like everyone else, Nora had stood around panicked in the hallway outside the ER and stroked Natassia’s hair, as if the only thing she cared about was Natassia’s recovery. Like the damn Red Cross. How she envied the others, even Mary, the clarity of their fear and panic, while Nora had had to mask her impatience: Did you have to do this? How far are you going to push, until Christopher and I are completely ruined? Last night Nora had finally admitted to herself that she’d never liked Natassia much. And that she’d always been afraid of her.

  If only Nora could be alone for a few minutes, sit still with the truth, unbraid the strands of anger and hate from the strands of fear knotted inside her, but, alone in her own bathroom, Nora kept seeing pictures, last night’s events broken down moment by moment. Natassia’s thin, parched presence in the hallway of Lotte’s apartment when they’d arrived to visit her, not even saying hello. Nora at first thought Natassia was being rude, diffident, but then she noticed that Natassia’s breathing was so shallow she could say only a few words at a time. I should have said something then. Later, when the Chinese food arrived and the women settled in the living room to eat, Natassia was nothing but a ghost passing through the rooms, making less noise than the old wooden furniture creaking from the radiator heat. There they were, four women assembled because of their shared concern for Natassia; Natassia was the only reason for them to get together last night. And down the cramped hallway, in her bedroom, on the telephone, Natassia was carrying out some drama over a boyfriend that led to her slashing herself with a Cuisinart blade.

  Nora covered her face with her hand. When they’d found Natassia, there was blood in a little puddle in the palm of her hand. She’d been calling, “Help me,” and when they got to her she said that thing that kept rolling and rolling inside Nora: Help me do this. Remembering it made Nora bite the heel of her hand. There’d been red oblongs of blood on Natassia’s nightgown, on the sheets. When they got down to the lobby, the doorman was peeling an apple, and as he ran out to the curb to hail a cab, two cabs, he still had his tiny paring knife in his hand, even as he helped Natassia get into a cab. “Dios,” he was saying under his breath, “Dios.” Nora couldn’t remember who had paid for the cab she was in. Giulia? Had anyone paid?

  And then the four women and Natassia had entered the eternity of the ER.

  At some point in the middle of the night, Nora’s period had started, nine days early. A few hours later, Mary asked Nora, “Do you have a Tampax? I got my fucking period.” Did Natassia have this power, to force them all to bleed along with her? Lotte and David were going crazy with phone calls back and forth and all over the country. Nora had kept calling the loft, but Christopher wasn’t home. She wouldn’t embarrass herself by calling their friends to see if anyone had seen him. His new studio in Chelsea didn’t have a phone. Wherever he was, he was there all night, never went home. The last time Nora called the loft, it was almost six o’clock in the morning. And then Mary and Natassia had disappeared from the hospital. Not a soul had seen them leave.

  Nora didn’t for a second believe that Mary could manage what she was trying to do—even with the most informed care, Natassia’s recovery would be an iffy business—but Mary deserved some credit for trying.

  Also, there was the relief.

  Go ahead, Nora challenged herself, say it. Since Mary took Natassia away, Mary is responsible for her. Christopher and I aren’t.

  Her hand was spread out on the cool tile bathroom floor, and when she lifted it, her handprint appeared in the coating of dust and bath powder on the cracked white and black tile hexagons. Originally, this loft had been built as a sewing factory, and this bathroom had been a ladies’ room with two toilets. There were now bare spots on the floor where the walls of the stalls had been bolted down. A big potted cactus plant covered the bare patch of concrete where the second toilet used to be. Christmas ornaments and a string of dusty chili-pepper lights clung to the cactus needles. Christopher lit the lights when he and Nora took baths together. That hadn’t happened in a long time. Nora sat up to stretch the rug out under her, then curled up again as small as she could.

  Eye-level with the floor, she could see how much the surface bubbled, the little tiles roller-coastering across the bathroom to the claw-footed tub. Hundreds of pounds of bathtub. It had taken five guys to get it off the U-Haul truck, into the elevator, off the elevator, and into the bathroom. Such ridiculous efforts to re-create the past. It embarrassed Nora now, the high cost of the worn-out chic she and Christopher and most of their friends (the lucky ones) lived in. How silly they would look to the women who had worked here in the factory and used this bathroom decades ago.

  Nora imagined those women rushing in for a pee or a cigarette, quick, so they wouldn’t get in trouble with their boss. Nora could see those women, almost feel their presence, as they left their sewing machines and ran into this bathroom to cry. She imagined women relieved to see the blood that assured them there was no baby this month. Praying in Italian, Greek, Polish, Chinese: Thank you. Or women panicked to see the blood that meant a baby was leaving them, lost. Suddenly Nora felt so connected to those women, imagined stifled sobs in the bathroom stalls, heartbreak over boyfriends, husbands, lost refugee family members. Monsoons, tidal waves of tears over money, children, the law. “I’m sorry,” Nora heard herself say aloud, and she did not feel foolish. She felt weak for how little she was able to do for anyone. God, please, let her be all right.

  WHEN CHRISTOPHER came home and found her, Nora was asleep. She woke and heard his “Nor? Nor-a!” In the surprise of finding her curled asleep on the bathroom floor, his voice had turned tender, as she hadn’t heard it in months. “Sweetie, what are you doing in here like this?”

  She looked up at him filling the doorway. “Was I asleep?”

  “What’s with Natassia? I just listened to your messages from the hospital.”

  “She’s gone.” Christopher’s eyes got huge, then closed shut, then he grabbed the doorjamb. “No, no,” Nora told him, “she didn’t die. She and Mary disappeared. A
little before six this morning, Mary just left with her, before they were done treating her.”

  “She just left?” Nora shook her head, wasn’t able to answer. “How much did she hurt herself? What the hell happened?” Nora still couldn’t speak. Christopher came and sat down on the floor, facing her. He took both her hands, turned them over, rubbed her palms with his thumb. How good it felt, the way he knew where to go to rub the tension out. How he knew her. As she relaxed, Nora felt her face give in to tears, and she leaned her head forward, into his chest. He’d worked all night and then slept in his studio. He hadn’t been with some other woman. Nora knew just by the smells on him: turpentine and sleep and paint and coffee. He was still holding her hands. “What, sweetie? Nora, tell me.”

  They hadn’t talked or touched or been close like this in weeks, so many weeks. “It was horrible. So, so bad. We were…” Now she was sobbing. “We were all there, eating dinner in the living room, right down the hallway from Natassia’s bedroom, and we never knew. We were there and couldn’t stop her.” By now Nora had crawled onto Christopher’s lap and they were hugging, hard. He was rocking her. “Christopher, she used the Cuisinart blade. Do you know how bad that is? Do you know?”

  “Ssshhh. Oh, baby, ssshhh.” Nora was holding on tight. How had she supposed she could manage Natassia Natassia Natassia without this hugging, without her husband? “Nora, baby, you poor thing.” Her face was against his neck. “Nora, what can I do?”

  “I need you to be with me, Christopher. We need to go through this together.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. That’s all I want to do. I want to help you.” He’s with me. We’re going to talk now. He finally sees how serious our problem with Natassia is. He’s finally going to take responsibility. “I haven’t been taking good care of you,” he whispered, “I’ve been bad.” His wide hand stroked her back. “All I want to do, Nora, is love you, that’s all. I want this all to pass out of your mind. I want it not to be bothering you.”

  He was still trying to rock her, but Nora stiffened a bit in his arms. Were they talking about the same thing? “We need to talk about Natassia.”

  But he was holding on harder. “Nora, just let me love you.”

  She pulled away, looked at his face. It was his eyes more than anything, that surprise of blue under heavy, long, straight dark lashes. His skin never stopped looking tanned. She ran her palm over his auburn buzz cut, the wide curves of his scalp. Except for the light eyes, his coloring was syrupy and matched the warm sounds of Christopher. Nora tucked her hands under his stubbly chin, rested her fingers against his broad cheekbones. Home. “Christopher, I love you.”

  “I love you, Nora,” he insisted, with a hurt twinge in his eyes.

  She brushed a loose eyelash off the side of his nose. “I know, I know, and we have this problem, honey. Natassia. We’re in this with her. We can’t pretend we’re not.”

  “You said she was doing all right.”

  Nora took her hands off of Christopher’s face, pushed back her hair. All of a sudden, she felt sweaty, hot, too close. Just a minute ago, she had seen in his eyes a new acknowledgment of the seriousness of the situation. She couldn’t believe he was doing it again. “What I said,” she told him, “was that she didn’t succeed in killing herself. She’s still alive, but she’s certainly not all right. There’s nothing right about her situation.”

  With Nora still sitting on his lap, Christopher leaned away from her, took his arms away from her waist, put his hands on the floor behind him, which unbalanced her, and she tipped off of his thighs and onto the tile floor. He sighed a long, tired, irritated sigh. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

  “Doing what?”

  “I’m a fool to try with you even anymore.”

  “What?” she asked again.

  “I’m trying to love you, Nora”—his voice was rising away from anything that sounded like love—“and you keep torturing me.”

  Torture?

  “You think I’m a sicko,” Christopher said. “You really do think I am.”

  “I do not think that.” Nora knew—she felt strongly—that Christopher was not a sexual deviant. His molestation of Natassia, though hideously wrong, had been a one-time act. She believed that. Pretty much. But there was something she did not believe. Something—someone?—she did not believe in. Or have faith in. Or trust. Belief. Faith. Trust. Torture? Nora had no idea, no idea whatsoever, exactly what it was she wanted from Christopher when she insisted that they still had to deal with Natassia. I need to be more direct with him. More direct than ever. “Christopher—”

  “Nora, we have been through the Natassia business so many—”

  “But never satisfactorily. It’s all been brushed under the rug. Can’t you see? Why can’t you see it? What’s happening with Natassia now, and the problems you and I are having, it’s all connected to what happened when she was a—”

  “If you say that this, this suicide try, is connected to some stupid, stupid, stupid thing I did fifteen years ago—we’re talking fifteen years ago. My God, woman, you never let up. You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you? You’re trying to make me go crazy.” With his heels, he scooted himself away from her, backed himself against the tile wall.

  “Christopher—”

  “Shut up. You just shut up. I’m tired of—”

  “Don’t talk to me that way,” Nora said.

  He wasn’t looking at her, just staring hard out the window, where truck horns were blaring. “I’m your husband,” he muttered. “I’ll talk to you any way I want.” He reached up, grabbed a towel off the towel rack, balled it, threw it hard out the window.

  That was a good towel. Nora bit the insides of her lips together.

  “Fucking trucks,” he muttered. And then Christopher and Nora were silent.

  By now, when he got like this, irrational, it had become automatic for Nora to revert to her list of things that needed to be done in order for her to leave him. Pack up her laptop. Get the manila envelope with her important papers, get the checkbook, collect as much clothing as she could stuff into one suitcase. Go straight to the bank and take half their cash and half their savings and go uptown to her office and have the locks changed immediately. Call that lawyer she’d met at the 92nd Street Y gym—Lindsey Lewis, Lucie Lewis? She’d be listed in the phone book under divorce lawyers. Most of last year, this list had existed only in Nora’s mind. Over the summer, though, she had once got angry enough to write it out on a sheet of legal paper. The white page was now folded and tucked into her wallet. Along with her driver’s license and her American Express card, the list was with her wherever she went. Each time Nora was forced to consider it, the list became more specific. Once you’ve given it so much thought, you almost have to do it, don’t you? Was this the occasion when she’d finally begin the process of separating from this long marriage? Nora’s heart was pulsing right now with pure white rage. How many times could she feel this before she’d hear herself saying aloud to Christopher, Bye?

  Now, as usual, he took the righteous position, made a beleaguered noise through his lips, the sound of their old radiator spitting fast, hot steam. Once, in a marriage-counseling session, he’d managed to tell her that when he acted exasperated he was feeling attacked, confused, in over his head. But that counseling had been several years earlier. After four months, the therapist had led them into serious discussion of what had happened that day in France between him and Infant Natassia, and Christopher refused to go to any more sessions. Understanding that he’d lose the marriage if he didn’t do something, he agreed to individual therapy—with a therapist of his own choice. He’d feel less embarrassed, he said, if he was able to talk to someone without Nora in the room. Nora would have been happier if he’d said less ashamed rather than less embarrassed, which was too mild. He’d gone to therapy for six months with some bozo who made him feel good about himself but never challenged him, and that was it. Nora and Christopher had just gone on, until two years ago, when he’d begun
making noises about wanting a child, and Nora had had to tell him flatly, I don’t trust you.

  Christopher’s knees were raised. She looked at the paint specks on his ankles, his strong feet stuffed into his cloth espadrilles planted squarely on the bathroom floor. There was sex in the way the bones of his long toes stretched the canvas of his shoes. Sex in the smooth skin of his ankles before the dark hair of his legs began. If she did leave him, what would she do about her desire for him?

  After a full ten minutes, when he started in for his next attack, she wasn’t surprised. She knew what was coming. He waited until the hour struck—two o’clock—and all twelve of the cuckoo clocks on the bathroom wall went off at the same time. When the clocks were done chiming, he said, “Let me…Can I ask you just one question?” He was launching off in his high-and-mighty voice, a false voice he assumed when he was being defensive, warding her off, a voice in which he always made grammatical and idiomatic mistakes and ended up sounding more befuddled than when he’d begun. “Why is it I’m supposed to submit over and over to your cross-examination about something that happened fifteen years ago and you won’t grant me the dignity of having what I want to talk about discussed? Namely, why won’t you honor my desire to talk about when in the hell you and I are going to fucking get pregnant?”

  “Chri—”

  “Let me finish,” he bellowed, and she asked herself, How can such a fool think he could ever be a father? “All I hear of all the time is about your fears and your needs”—he mocked the words as he said them. “Meanwhile, you’re ruining our life. Don’t you understand, Nora, that I can’t go on with you, loving you, having my life with you, loving getting older with you, and not have kids? Do you see that at all? It doesn’t make sense to me. You and me in twenty years with no kids, I don’t see it. I’m forty years old. I’ve spent over twenty years of day and night doing nothing but painting. I’m used to it that I’ll never be a star. I’ll never have a show at MoMA. I can live with that. I don’t even care about that anymore. I do my work. I show here and there. My work sells sometimes, and sometimes I make money, and sometimes it’s good money. The thing I feel most ambitious about is us. Don’t you see that? I want a family, Nora. I want a family with you.”