Falling in Love with Natassia Read online

  There was the music and the slow leg and then this thing Ross noticed as it moved across her face. A sadness so stern and forbidding it opened Mary’s eyes wider than usual and slackened her mouth, as if she herself were surprised by it. His weight slumped against the wall, his head hit the base of a brass light sconce. Watching Mary dance, Ross was haunted by a premonition: There’s danger for me in this.

  Before she was pregnant, Mary’s dances had been fast, and her hair flew, and only once in a while could you find her face. Before, she could hide. But tonight here she was, dressed in winter white, just like Dean Greco, and, with her hair pulled back and her face exposed, Mary looked as sad as Greco. This, this was what got Ross. Mary’s face while she danced onstage showed him pain she never told him about, not in talk or in lovemaking. Pain that was the eggplant color of her hair, slippery-surfaced, too hard to puncture, a sadness with depths and depths. Watching her perform, he knew it was beyond him. She would leave him. He knew he was too young to be feeling already the limits of his power to love her, but there it was.

  When the pivot of her leg was almost unbearable in its slowness, Mary broke the spell, swung the leg behind her, turned her back to the audience to begin a series of spins. Ross hated that everyone saw the marking on her back—her Mongolian spot, an oblong birthmark floating between her shoulder blades, that small, shallow valley he could fill up with just one of his hands.

  IN HER SEVENTH MONTH, she did her last pregnant performance to the happy section of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert. With her body feeling as huge as a continent, her weight stunningly awkward, Mary decided her choreography needed to include Ross. He couldn’t believe she’d actually talked him into doing it. She made him dress in black and get onstage, and she held on to his shoulders, arms, and knees while she did arabesques. The music was quick, and her movement was slow. He balanced her while she did extensions. Mary had told him, No matter what happens we keep going to the end of the music. Her stomach was hugely distended but she got her leg right up there, rested it on Ross’s chest, held it four counts, turned.

  LATE REHEARSAL is always the best, Mary thought. The dance is perfect by then. You’re dancing for yourself and the other dancers, no audience yet. Onstage, you had to make so many adjustments—for the space, the sound, costumes, the lights. The makeup made the performance even smell different from rehearsal. Mary never expected much from performances.

  That early-June night at the hospital when the baby was born, Mary knew for sure she loved Ross. Just like at the meeting with Dean Greco, his performance was first-rate.

  It was past midnight when she went into labor. No taxis. They paid a night guard at the school to drive them to the hospital. The male nurses at the admitting station were sleepy. Mary felt the pains curving upward. She was starting to get scared. At the double doors of the labor room, two nurses tried to make Ross wait outside. Ross blocked the door and wouldn’t let them wheel Mary in. By now she was growling. The nurses kept yelling in Italian that Mary had to go in alone, without Ross.

  “Impossibile!” Ross yelled back. His accent was very good. He wouldn’t budge from the doorway until the doctor finally arrived, waving his arms, complaining about the noise. Ross grabbed the doctor’s hand. “Grazie, dottore.” Ross’s Italian was sharp enough that he could, quickly, make the doctor understand that Ross must be allowed to stay with Mary throughout the entire delivery. Ross’s parents had sent bound galleys of a book on natural childbirth and had told him that he should not, under any circumstances, leave Mary alone in an Italian hospital.

  Mary sat in a wheelchair hugging her stomach, her feet raised onto the chipped tile wall to anchor herself against the galloping pains. “Fuck,” she howled, “fucking fuck!” while Ross explained to the doctor, “In all the hospitals in Manhattan, this is how it is done, with the father in the delivery room.” Picking up on the doctor’s hip sideburns and bell-bottoms, Ross had understood how much it would mean to the doctor to do things as they were done in New York.

  So, because Ross was very smart, Mary had him next to her for the entire delivery. Neither Mary nor Ross took any drugs. There she was on the table, there they were under the lights. A perfect performance.

  THAT NIGHT, Mary came so close to something she hadn’t known she wanted—her wish for a partner. Mary had never relied on anyone. Her stepmother had been useless, her half-brothers Mary had just ignored, and her father had had that weak streak that embarrassed her. The only useful lesson had come from the stranger who was her birth mother: Shed burdens, travel light, move ahead alone.

  Mary had assumed early on that the journey of her life was hers, and the burdens were hers. Even as a child, she’d understood without anyone’s spelling it out for her that dance was her best chance for survival. When she imagined a successful dance career, she never imagined grandeur, just the means to keep body and soul together, a different version of her father going to his warehouse job or her stepmother showing up at the restaurant she managed. So Mary did what she had to do and never talked to anyone about how terrified she was onstage. Nothing was lonelier than performing. Even in an ensemble, she could depend only so much on the other dancers. Her own body and the music were all she had when she performed. No matter how slowly she stepped out of the wings, she felt she was being chased, savage animals coming after her. She wished she could scramble up a steep tree, escape. Music was the firm branch, the counts were tree limbs, and if she could swing herself from count to count, she could save herself.

  But the night she was giving birth to Natassia, the pain jagged up all the way into her ears, and she couldn’t hear a thing, even though she and Ross had practiced and practiced the breathing. This was it, she was finally going to fuck up. The damn baby was going to turn Mary inside out, show the secret of what was inside her: nothing but panic where other people had heart and lungs and blood. Ross was the calm one; he kept the beat and stayed close-close to her ear, counting, breathing loudly so she could hear him over the racket of her own grunting screams.

  THE WEEKEND the baby was born, Ross was supposed to be writing a paper on War and Peace, so they chose the name Natassia, the Italian version of “Natasha.”

  Natassia was huge, two armfuls of buttery flesh, and wanted to eat all the time. After the birth, Mary wrote to Nora, her best and only real friend: “This breastfeeding thing is cool, but it goes really slow. It reminds me of slow-dancing in tenth grade to ‘Hey Jude.’ Remember that foreign-exchange student from Scotland, how I always ended up dancing with him because he was short? Remember how we could never understand a word he said, even when he was talking English?”

  Mary had forgotten the name of the boy from Glasgow, but she could still hear him trying to talk to her about what it was like back where he was from, as if she cared. The way he strangled his words, it sounded like he was sending up messages from the pit of a well. In a few months, her class would start doing drugs, but that fall they were all still pretty straight, dancing in somebody’s candlelit rec room. Mary hated the incense, burning for no reason, smothering them with some stink that was supposed to be cool. She just wanted the music to end so they’d be released from the stupor of “Hey Jude.”

  But also, for as long as the song lasted, she couldn’t lift her head off the Scottish guy’s shoulder, she couldn’t let go of the scent of him. Warm, woody, something like outside but like inside, too, not like food but like wafts off of a wood-burning fire. (It was the homespun wool of his sweater, she found out later; all the other boys she knew back then wore 100-percent acrylic or army surplus.) So she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, bunched his sweater in her fists. His hands rubbed down to her waist but no farther. Once he realized he didn’t have to talk to her, he seemed content to rock in the slow dark. And Mary just wanted to hang on, sluggish and mesmerized, to his unknowable scent.

  From the first days the baby was out of her body, Mary treated Natassia like a foreign-exchange student, someone who was purportedly interesting but who
, in truth, was merely skirting the edges of the real business of Mary’s life. Now that the baby was out, Mary was panicked about losing weight and getting back to dancing seriously again, which was the only way Mary knew how to make a living, which she had better get busy doing now if she was going to keep this baby alive. While pregnant, Mary had lost almost two months of performances. Since the birth, she’d missed five days of classes. Breastfeeding, she felt pulled down, held in a place where she couldn’t afford to linger. The hours of sitting with her peasant shirt untied. The baby’s sweaty head resting in this elbow or that one. The baby got fussy if Mary stood and did leg lifts or foot flexes while she breastfed. Even if Mary sat somewhere, at attention, the baby didn’t want her doing head rolls or rolling her shoulder joints.

  “I hate this,” Mary said, but the baby wouldn’t take a bottle.

  “Come on, Mar, it’s only for a couple months. It’s a couple hours a day.”

  “I hate you,” Mary told Ross, and she left their dorm room and carried Natassia up to the roof terrace. Summer now, no breeze anywhere in Rome. Clay-pipe roofs, plastic-enclosed balconies, pigeons on TV antennas, pigeon shit on the carved stone railing. The palazzo rose taller than almost all the surrounding buildings, and the neighborhood kitchens were sending up an overheated olive-oil smell that closed the evening in all around Mary. How stupid to think that Ross could help her carry this off, idiotic to think they could make something like a family.

  After a few minutes, he showed up, pushed open the creaking terrace gate. “Want me to write up a proposal so you get extra credit for breastfeeding?”

  She wouldn’t look at him. “I don’t hate the baby.”

  “I know you don’t.” He sat behind her on the garden table, wrapped his legs and arms around her and Natassia.

  “It’s too hot, Ross.”

  “I don’t care. I want to hug you two.”

  Pulled down by the baby’s mouth, pressed down by Ross’s chest leaning on her back, sluggish and miserable as she was, Mary felt inebriated right then with the baby’s scent. Damn baby, didn’t she understand how badly things could fall apart if Mary didn’t keep dancing? But Natassia kept pulling, and Mary dipped her face into Natassia’s neck, couldn’t get enough, couldn’t understand it, that combination of milk, infant sweat, skin.

  “Smell her,” she told Ross, “just smell her neck and her head and her skin.”

  “I know. It’s some sweet-smelling part of the inside of you she brought with her when she danced out from between your legs.”

  “She didn’t dance out. She was like a herd of buffalo.”

  What bothered Ross was his suspicion that the hardest thing for Mary to accept was the possibility that there was something sweet and intoxicating inside herself.

  For a long time, quietly, they studied the baby. After a while, Mary said, “She has finger-toes. Did you see that, how long her toes are?”

  “My mother’s toes are like that.”

  “She’s going to be tall, like five-eleven or something.”

  “Want to hear a true fact?” Ross asked. “Natassia’s eyeballs are the same size right now as they’ll be when she’s a grown-up woman. Her nose and ears’ll keep growing, but not the eyes. Man, can you see her grown-up, what a knockout our girl’s going to be?”

  “That’s good,” Mary said, “about the eyeballs.” Natassia’s eyes were predominantly round, but Mary had been examining them for any slanting tendency that might develop. So far, it wasn’t there, nothing Korean in the baby’s face, and Mary was relieved.

  When the feeding was finally over, Mary leaned back onto Ross and they watched the baby perform. “She’s not a buffalo,” Ross said. Mary had to admit that there wasn’t a false movement in the baby’s hands and feet. Infant Natassia moved with a perfect rolling gracefulness. It was beautiful, un-self-conscious movement, Mary could see that, but the fat on Natassia’s arms flowed over her wrists. “She looks like a sumo wrestler.”

  “No! Look at her smile. Look at her lips. She has that same mouth-pout you have. Let me look. I love your gorgeous lips.”

  “Ross, not now. I’m too tired.”

  “Sweetie, come on, look at her. Look how she gives that smile away out of the corner of her mouth, just like you. She’s just like you.”

  “She is not like me,” Mary insisted. Then they just looked at each other. Even Mary could hear that this didn’t sound right, but all she could do was quietly add, “She really isn’t like me. She’s a completely different body type.”

  FIFTEEN YEARS LATER, Natassia was five-foot-seven, six inches taller than her mother. For the most part, she’d been raised by Ross’s parents, Lotte and David Stein, and she still lived with them. Ross and Mary had split up for good when Natassia was five. Ross went to the Northwest to do his residency in family medicine. Mary took off with Tim Dillon Dancers, which at that time was booked in every large city in the world. Natassia’s grandparents enrolled Natassia in a Montessori program on the Upper West Side, and she went to live with them in their crammed-with-books apartment on West End Avenue.

  Lotte and David were in their mid-fifties then, well established in their careers and in their habits, but they changed their lives for Natassia. And Natassia was an exceptional child, smart and flexible, able to find her place, even as a little girl, in her grandparents’ world, which was mostly literary, full of publishing people and writers. By age four, Natassia was reading her own bedtime stories. Though reading was her first passion, she, like her father, had an aptitude for science. By age eight, she could name all the major constellations, even though she lived in Manhattan, where she rarely saw a star. The summer before seventh grade, she memorized much of the Periodic Table, and she and her father, by long-distance telephone, quizzed each other on the abbreviations of the chemical elements and their various properties.

  At fifteen, Natassia played the violin well enough to be invited to join her grandfather’s Tuesday-night string quartet. She was an honors student who could name most of the major works by the major writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and had read many of them. Natassia’s face was not pretty but full of a placid, unostentatious loveliness. Her natural expression was a no-nonsense gaze that made adults think twice about ever talking down to her. She had long legs, excellent coordination, and no desire to dance. At least in this, Mary found some consolation. She never wished on her daughter a dancer’s life, or really very much of anything that Mary herself had lived. It seemed that, every time Mary returned from a tour, Natassia was exceptional in some new way. When she considered Natassia’s varied talents and accomplishments, Mary knew she could take no credit. Lotte and David were the ones who had shaped Natassia. Mary knew she had no right to feel pride. What she felt for her daughter was awe.

  CHAPTER 2 :

  AUGUST

  1989

  Mary and Nora were at Nora’s beach shack in Greenport for the weekend. Sunday night, out on the deck. Even this far from the city, way out on the tip of the North Fork of Long Island, even this close to the water, the night was thick. The bugs were bad. Nora was in her cotton nightgown, Mary in her underwear and a T-shirt, both of them lying back in wooden deck chairs, held in the navy-blue canvas slings. Two bottles of Chardonnay—one empty, one three-quarters gone—stood at the foot of the chairs. It was late enough that one of them could have said, I’m going to bed now. But neither one did. And then Mary dropped her cigarette butt into the empty wine bottle and said, “If you promise to keep your mouth shut, I’ll tell you something you’re not supposed to know.”

  “Tell,” Nora said.

  “You can’t breathe a microsyllable of this to anyone, not even Giulia.” Their friend Giulia Di Cuore was at the beach with them, but she’d already gone upstairs to bed. “I swear, tell nobody, or you’re dead meat.”

  Nora stretched out her body’s long length, showed the pale undersides of her sunburnt arms, wound her white hair into a rope, and twisted it into a chignon; her gestures, as
always, were full of unconscious elegance. “Come on,” she said, yawning. “What?”

  “It’s about Natassia.” Mary used the tip of a fresh cigarette to go after a mosquito.

  “Your sweet baby girl?” Nora asked, yawning again.

  “Baby girl, my ass. Out of nowhere, I find out she’s got this guy, this boyfriend.”

  “Natassia’s fifteen. Think what we were doing when we were—”

  “Let me finish, please. This boyfriend—this schmuck—he’s, like, in his twenties. Maybe even thirties. And he’s shtupping her. Regularly.”

  Nora’s hands stopped twisting her hair. She turned her full attention to Mary.

  “I found condoms in her backpack,” Mary said. “A huge box, half empty—”

  “But what…” Nora interrupted. In addition to being very tall, Nora was, in her work life, Nora Conolly, Ph.D., a therapist, so people always paid attention to her questions. Right now Mary was extra-alert to hear what Nora was going to say next. “What did you say to her?” Nora asked.

  “I said, ‘What are these for?’ ”

  “And she said?”

  “I’m her mother. She told me the bullshit you tell your mother. ‘I met this totally great guy, I’m in love.’ ” Mary had the cigarette up close in her face and was biting down hard on the cuticles around her gnawed thumbnail.

  “What do you know about this boy?”

  “He’s no boy, Nora. He’s a man.”

  Nora’s hands let her coiled hair fall. “Who is he?”

  “That’s where Baby Girl Natassia is being a sneaky little fink, just like me. She won’t tell me anything about him, not even his name. She calls him the Boyfriend. Or the BF, for short. All she’ll tell me is he’s the stars and the moon and so in love with her—”