Falling in Love with Natassia Read online

  And yet people always tried to figure out who, exactly, Mary was. All kinds of men were always telling her, I’m falling in love with you, simply because they couldn’t figure out what to do with the curiosity she aroused in them.

  Nora remembered a grad student who liked partying with them, a Ph.D. in international studies, cool guy (Nora had actually been the one to notice him, had her eye on him); he kept following Mary around one night, asking if it bothered her, as a Korean, to be portrayed on TV as Japanese.

  “Hell, no,” Mary had said.

  The guy kept pushing. “Even though the Japanese have been Korea’s enemy for most of history?”

  “Not my history,” Mary said, then, “Hey, somebody’s lighting up a bong over there. Let’s check it out.”

  Mary had always played hard against people’s assumptions of what to expect from a petite, pretty Korean-faced girl: that she would be polite, respectful, obedient, with a large dose of filial duty, book-smart, with good grades and diligent study habits. So, when Mary answered questions with the same slurry slang all the other kids used, when she belched into a can of soda, when she sat in a classroom with her ankle up on her knee, when she swore on the school bus, when she said, “Go ahead, call my parents, see if I care,” when she was caught with boys or cigarettes or beer, the teachers or the bus drivers or the guidance counselors or the friends’ parents or even sometimes the other kids were—what?—taken aback?—thrown off?—turned off? Whatever, their hands were tied. What were they going to do, say aloud what they were thinking? A girl like you shouldn’t be bad, you should be grateful you’re here. You poor orphan, yanked out of a war zone, no wonder you’re wild. You knew people were thinking it, but no one was going to say it.

  And so Mary kept making her point over and over again: I’m not what you think I am when you look at me. Talking back. Sassing. Bold, bad-girl behavior Nora never would have risked (“You’re only as good as the things gossips tell each other about you,” Nora’s mother used to say). Maybe it was Mary the American girl attacking the Korean girl within herself. The funky clothes, the sloppiness. It had always annoyed Nora’s father that when they took Mary to a nice restaurant she’d tug off her shoes and tuck her legs up onto her chair. “Coarseness,” he told his children, “is not the way you want to bring attention to yourself. Of course, you should try never to bring attention to yourself. Just the opposite.” Now that she was well into her thirties, Mary was starting to look ridiculous. Needlessly casual. Why did she still have to go around broadcasting to the whole world that she didn’t give a damn?

  Swimming back up, breaking the surface, shaking her head—Why am I so focused right now on Mary?—Nora couldn’t help wishing that she’d never invited Mary out for the weekend. Thank God, Giulia was here to run interference. Really, I should have come out here by myself.

  All Nora wanted these days was to be alone.

  Tired in her arms and legs and shoulders, Nora turned onto her back to float. When her body reached this point, whipped into fatigue from the inside out, she felt as if the cyclone had spun its way through her. Now the words were outside of her, nipping at her, like a school of hungry fish.

  Limp as her limbs were, Nora tried to keep up the listless paddling of her feet. Her hands pushed small patches of water at her sides. Finally, she just had to stop, lie there in a dead man’s float, let what was going to wash over her wash over. Inside, too, she felt so weak she couldn’t define the difference between herself and the water, except the water had color and she did not. Her love and her fear had burned each other out. She was ashes, white. Maybe if she floated long enough she’d decompose and sink and meet up with her mother and dad. These were the waters where, eighteen years earlier, Nora and her brother, Kevin, had come with Mary and two carloads of family friends—there was no extended family—to empty out the urns. It was a June afternoon, one month to the day after the middle-of-the-night house fire that had taken their parents. Nora and Mary were seniors in high school; Kevin was two years younger. Family life, as they had known it, was ended.

  Nora still remembered the nothingness she’d felt standing on the dock with her fists full of ashes, which were actually bits of bone that felt like large grains of sand. Right hand, Mommy; left hand, Daddy. With all that water in front of her, Nora saw only fire. Six years, and much therapy, would pass before she could return to that dock and look at the water without seeing flames, without seeing over and over what had happened that night: She and Kevin, just home from late-night dates, had been sitting in the den watching a TV movie (neither of them was ever able to remember what the movie had been). The spring weekend was warm enough for opened windows. Then she glanced behind her through the screen because she’d heard whoosh and sirens. Nora saw flames vining up the side of her house, and the neighbors’ garage in the alley lit up, too. She gasped. Kevin, quick, unplugged the TV. They both ran upstairs to wake their sleeping parents. Caught in the stairwell, they watched a room-sized section of the second floor collapse right past them onto the living room. And then a firefighter was pulling them away. “They’re up there! Our parents are up there!” Nora remembered the onyx air of the kitchen, remembered crawling, then nothing much more.

  The whole family was in the same hospital. Daddy died that night, Mommy three days later. The neighbors were unhurt, though it was an ember from their blown-over grill that had started the fire. That summer, Kevin moved in with his best friend’s family, and Nora lived in neighbors’ houses, since there was no way she could live at Mary’s house; Mary could hardly live there. Nora’s parents had left some money, lots of insurance, but no will, no designated guardians. For four months, Nora slept on different pillows every few nights, used different showers, ate in different kitchens; everywhere, the smell of smoke. Wherever Nora was staying, Mary visited every evening, slept over if there was room. They cried. And cried. And then it was September.

  Nora showed up at the University of Pennsylvania, her dream school, but after two weeks she left. Unlike in high school, where Nora had excelled academically, at Penn she couldn’t focus, couldn’t sit through class, couldn’t talk to strangers or sleep at night. If she was alone, she literally could not put her head down on a pillow and fully recline; she’d get shaky, she felt suffocated, her heart beat ferociously. She transferred to SUNY Purchase, where Mary had a dance scholarship.

  Mary’s schedule was full, but at least Nora could check in with her daily. Even before the fire, Nora had depended on Mary for a link to the wider world of their high-school universe. “High-achieving,” one teacher had written in Nora’s college-reference letters, “self-sufficient, mature, confident; somewhat of a loner, by choice.”

  “Snob” was what some girls in high school had called her, mostly those who had trouble getting boyfriends. Nora had always had a boyfriend, and Mary as her best friend, and her family, and her schoolwork, and she felt she didn’t have much to complain about, not the miseries the other girls were hashing over all the time. Sure, there were times Nora’s boyfriends weren’t acting the way she wanted, weren’t saying the things she wanted to hear. And there was Peter Ashley, whom she’d been crazy about since eighth grade, who took her out now and then and treated her badly (she lost her virginity to him in eleventh grade, then he avoided her for months), but why would she talk to anyone other than her mother and Mary about that? (Both had consoled Nora with one word: Bastard!) “What’s to gain,” Mommy always said, “by wearing our underwear on top of our clothes? Especially if it’s underwear that’s not so flattering.”

  At SUNY Purchase, with no family and unable to study, Nora did what she knew how to do: immediately she got a boyfriend, someone to spend the night with, to eat meals with. When that first guy got too serious, she found another boyfriend. Then another. One guy she dropped when he asked her to transfer to University of Michigan because he’d been accepted there for law school, another when he wanted her to go on a Christmas vacation with his family, another when he asked her to move
into an apartment with him. They expected ridiculous things from her. Tonight how will I get to sleep? How will I get through this afternoon? Looking into the future, the way some of her boyfriends wanted her to, was not possible, so she moved from one guy to the next with an efficiency much admired by the six other women in the off-campus house she and Mary lived in. Nora’s skill with men, together with having survived a recent family tragedy (she and Mary disclosed nothing but “fire” and “both parents dead”), made Nora a favorite in the house.

  “Nora Conolly is so gorgeous.”

  “But nice, too. No wonder guys are so crazy about her.”

  One thing Nora knew about having a boyfriend was that she couldn’t be with him all the time, so she put in her hours at the house, where, to avoid being alone, she went to whichever room the girls were gathered in. She listened. Mostly it was the same litany of complaints she’d heard in high school—about parents, classes, boyfriends, birth control, part-time jobs—but with nowhere else to go, Nora took more of it in, and over the weeks, she noticed that the girls’ problems with their boyfriends were often similar to the problems with their advisers, or with their parents, or between their parents. God, Nora, you’re so smart. But it was obvious. Everything was there to see; the girls violated every rule of privacy that had been sacred in Nora’s family. They’d tell anything.

  “My dad is ten thousand dollars in debt.” “I never once had an orgasm with my high-school boyfriend—yeah, the guy who visited me last weekend. Cute, I know, but his penis is sort of just not quite right somehow.” “My mother’s lost a bunch of weight. She started looking great this summer since she’s sleeping with the lawyer who’s doing her divorce from my dad.” “Dad started noticing that Mom smelled sort of funky, but it was a couple months until we found out about her cancer.” It wasn’t the information that shocked Nora but the girls’ insistence—almost a sense of entitlement—that they could and should reveal themselves and their families!

  Nora was appalled, as she knew her mother and father would have been. And yet, anthropologically, it was interesting enough that when her name was yelled up from the kitchen because some guy was on the phone for her, Nora didn’t run like the other girls did, dropping a conversation in mid-sentence. “Tell him to call me back later. I’m busy.”

  “Nora’s such a good friend.”

  “She’s really a good listener. I’d tell her anything.”

  And they did, even though Nora never served up confidences of her own. In those college rooms, dim with lit candles and cigarettes and an occasional joint, Nora’s blue-green eyes grabbed all the light, gave nothing back, and no one seemed to mind. The friends just told her more.

  In college, Nora came to understand something that as a child she had intuited—that people were drawn to her, as they had been to her whole family, willing to overlook lots, because the Conollys were attractive people (tall, lean, limber, light-haired, turquoise- or jade-eyed, aristocratic bone structure in the face), with a vague air of street smarts and lots of old-money good taste (even though there was no old money, or much of any money). Nora’s parents, Ed and Finny, had driven a series of secondhand Saabs. Their house, though mildly dilapidated, had sat on the top of a hill and had been one of the largest in their medium-income part of town, a sprawling Victorian with two landmark features: a master-bedroom fireplace with Italian marble inlay, and a sunken rose garden that Finny pampered. Lots of people were intrigued by the Conollys, and others had no use for them, but everyone knew who the Conollys were and which house was theirs. You knew it whether you liked them or not.

  It was generally concluded that the Conollys had “a story,” but the truth was known only to Ed and Finny’s inner circle, which consisted of Finny’s bosses, Dr. Jack and Dr. Rita, a husband-wife team of plastic surgeons who entrusted Finny with every detail of their professional and financial lives; and Dr. Jack’s brother and his wife, two lawyers. The three couples had drinks at home and dinner out every Saturday night for twelve years, and over the years, when the mood was right, Ed and Finny, in the offhand manner of a two-part comedy act, revealed their secrets. Eavesdropping during their cocktails, Nora learned most of what she would ever learn about her parents.

  Before they met and married, Ed had done time in a Missouri prison for embezzling money from his family’s manufacturing business. Finny (née Nora Finn, nicknamed Finny Finn) had been a pregnant California teenager whose mother had sent her to Albany to live in a home for unwed mothers while telling everyone in Sacramento that Finny had gone east to nursing school. After Finny gave birth, after her newborn son was adopted, she stayed in Albany, became a nurse, and never returned to California. After his prison term, after refusing to have anything more to do with his family, ever, Ed randomly chose a city—Albany—left the Midwest for good, and drove to New York State in a used Cadillac. “They didn’t like Caddies in the Midwest. Too posh.”

  The Conollys’ intimates knew the following series of facts: (1) At some point during his drive east, Ed changed his last name to Conolly; (2) in December 1952, he had a flu so bad he went to the hospital emergency room because he couldn’t afford a visit to a doctor. The ER attending physician treated him and recommended that in a week’s time he go to a nearby clinic for a follow-up, which Ed did, and there he meet Finny, a graduating nursing student, twenty-two years old. Ed was forty-three. They dated daily for six weeks; then Ed proposed marriage, and Finny accepted, and Conolly became her name, too; (3) within ten months, their first child, Nora, was born, and, two years later, Kevin; (4) the family’s income, from Finny’s job as a nurse, was often compromised by Ed’s playing around with stocks.

  “When the debt gets out of hand,” Ed would tease, “Jack and Rita can fix me up with a new visage, and I’m good to go.” He was balding, almost always in a tie, refined, so it was surprising, and sexy, when he winked at his wife. “Don’t worry, ma’am. Not without you.”

  She answered looking right into his eyes. “You’re not going anywhere without me, mister.”

  Not even their children learned which Midwestern town or even which state Ed was from, what his last name had been, if his real first name was Edward, Edwin, or what. He wouldn’t say what product his family manufactured. And no one knew how much family—if any—Finny had left in California; she’d stopped communicating with her mother soon after she married Ed. “First she sent me off because I wasn’t married,” Finny said, with that humor, like Ed’s, that made her seem immune from the sadnesses of her own life. Rolling her eyes, she set up her punch line: “Then, because of Ed’s jail time, she disapproved when I did marry, so to hell with her.” The friends, and even Nora and Kevin, knew about the adopted baby, but no one, not even Finny, knew where he was, and she wouldn’t tell his birthdate. The only biographical information Ed and Finny carried forward was (1) her nickname, and (2) the length of Ed’s prison time: 1,473 days and nights.

  Those were the facts as known by the inner circle.

  The general public kept a distance. Nora knew, from hearing things and watching, that lots of people disapproved of the Conollys. Ed was above work, never left his home to go to a job, and he never—not ever—stopped for small talk with anyone, not even the next-door neighbors. The family belonged to no community club, no country club, no church. Mr. and Mrs. didn’t seem to care what anyone thought. When you saw them in public, they were always with their hands on each other, so affectionate you’d think they weren’t married—as if it wasn’t bad enough already that he was so much older than her.

  Nora was around ten when her parents told her and Kevin about their father’s jail time, saying it was information to be kept in the family but nothing to be ashamed of; the only shameful secret, to be kept among the four of them, was how thoroughly Ed’s family had screwed him over when they let him go to jail. Even as a little girl, Nora had understood that loyalty in the face of shame was part of the passion between her parents, an erotic charge she noticed in the way they looked at each other. L
ittle Nora shivered to be in the presence of such powerful adult love, and when she was older, she looked for that passion with so many guys—not with the boyfriends who wanted her, but with other guys she couldn’t get. Peter Ashley (Bastard!). A grad-student TA too dependent on student evaluations to let his guard down with Nora; a biology professor up for tenure, too nervous to focus when she showed up for all his office hours; her Psychology Department adviser, who never took her seriously when she invited him out to dinner. And then, in late spring of her sophomore year, with the guy headed for law school, Nora got pregnant and after the abortion was so depressed she went to a campus counselor, who kept asking about Nora’s family, saying, “I have the sense, Nora, there’s much there that needs to be explored.”

  By then Mary had met Ross. They wanted Nora to go to Rome with them junior year, but instead she went to the Riviera, to a truly bogus study-abroad program (all through college, she never did regain her ability to concentrate), her first radical attempt to rid herself of her phobia of being alone.

  In France, within a few days, she hooked up with a married Brit who worked in a tourist office while his wife in London worked on some advanced degree. Mary, in her letters, scolded Nora for messing with a married man (“If his wife doesn’t want to be with him, why would you?”), but the Brit let Nora barnacle herself to him, every night, every meal, and he ignored the fact that she clearly had her eye on the manager of a local wine shop. It was while she lingered in the tiny aisles of that shop one day that another customer, stooping down for a bottle on a low shelf, stood up and said, “Those are nice sandals. My sisters would love those.”

  Nora’s feet were large, bony, her least attractive feature, and the man was staring at them. “How many sisters?” she asked.