Falling in Love with Natassia Read online

  “Two. And four nieces.” His gaze moved from her feet to her face. He was a little older than she was, like the young professors she’d liked, but not as harried. “Hey, I’m a new uncle.” He wanted her, Nora could tell, but it was a different wanting than she’d felt with other guys, because she wanted him, too. He was at once dark and light. Auburn hair. Big eyes kaleidoscoping several shades of blue at the same time. She couldn’t stop watching him. His smile slipped from eyebrows to cheekbones to chin. “You’re American, aren’t you? I’m Christopher Sampietro, who’re you?”

  They didn’t get together that first day, but he began courting her, leaving notes for her with her concierge, leaving sketches on her doorstep. They met for coffee once, but he was so shy on a date it was awkward. Then they just ran into each other in the village. In the market, in cafés and shops, he was never alone. “Go ahead without me,” he’d tell his friends, sometimes in English, sometimes in French; “I’ll catch up with you guys later.” Then he’d step in close to talk to Nora, much more easily than he had when he’d asked her out. They were as tall as one another, eye to eye. She loved the scent of his breath, like oranges and fresh bread. With each conversation, Nora entered another story of his family. She began to know their names, the nieces’ ages. It was a relief to meet someone who didn’t hate his family. Saying goodbye, he’d clasp his big paint-speckled hand around her arm just above her elbow. But he wasn’t asking her out again, and Nora, usually not intimidated by men, was afraid to ask him out. She began wearing bright colors—a sweater that was the color of beets, an apricot-paisleyed skirt—hoping to catch his painter’s eye in the crowds of the village. Then, one day in the market, he said, “I was wondering, have you ever, you know, like, modeled for a painter? No? I’d love to paint you.”

  “Paint me?”

  “I mean, not with clothes not on.” His cool was gone—he became almost inarticulate—and for the first time Nora thought, I have a chance with him. “Really, it’s your head that’s good. You have a great shape to your head, a strong face. Would you try?”

  Those hours when Nora sat in Christopher’s studio were edged with the sweetest quiet. Years earlier, Nora had spent one delicious, long Labor Day weekend out at Greenport alone with her mother, closing up the house for the season. Without Daddy around, Mommy was relaxed, not distracted, and she and Nora ended up spending most of the weekend reading on the couch—“silent as stones,” Mommy had said. Nora was deep into the Narnia books then. Sometimes, without realizing it, she held Mommy’s hand for a whole chapter; sometimes she rested her head on Mommy’s lap. Painting, Christopher never spoke, never stopped. Nora’s modeling sessions with him were long, slow, felt nice. The space surrounding her was too large and echoey, but, with Christopher nearby, Nora could sit still without fear pumping her heart and dilating her pupils.

  “You have good energy,” Christopher told her.

  “Energy? I’m not doing a thing.”

  “Yeah, you’re perfect for this. You’re peaceful,” he said, and so she was.

  Nora modeled for Christopher three times. Then he took her out for an elaborate dinner, to thank her. He ordered grilled seafood. They couldn’t even eat. Nora went home with Christopher that night. She was supposed to meet the married man for lunch the next day, but she didn’t show up. That was that. Nora’s world stopped.

  And then it reorganized itself around Christopher.

  Christopher—the name had run through Nora’s mind probably once a minute, every minute, for the past fifteen years, played over and over until the word wiped out its own sounds. Husband was there but no longer meant anything Nora could understand. Spouse had been coming up lately. She hated the word. Too much like louse, lice, an insidious plague. Nora’s head in the water turned sideways just in time for her to see she was floating through a patch of foamy seaweed. Paddling her feet, she got herself quickly away. What were the things her mother couldn’t live with in her own marriage? It really did seem that Nora and Christopher had reached the end of their passion, and now Nora needed to know what, what, was the dark side of her parents’ marriage, which had always looked good. And not just to Nora. What a special couple, the Conollys.

  The psychotherapist she’d done her training analysis with had warned her—no, had suggested to her—that she had a lot of family-of-origin issues still to be explored. But when Nora terminated that therapy, she was living so much more fully than she’d imagined possible, able to be alone, to ride the subway without panic, even able to concentrate enough to complete her dissertation, “Grief and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” How clever, her father-in-law had said, how efficient, to work through her emotional problems and get an education and a career all at the same time. “A real bang for your buck,” he’d teased. Working so hard to survive her parents’ deaths, Nora hadn’t given herself a chance to consider their lives.

  But now she needed to know. Why, occasionally, out of nowhere, the closed doors as her mother slept in one of the attic rooms for a few angry nights? How rudderless the house felt then, and little Nora could hardly eat until Mommy got “normal” again. It was impossible for Nora to remember exactly what her parents had argued about (they didn’t bicker much, maybe because of the age gap between them), but Nora knew there had been some shadow in the marriage. Some deep trouble that stayed hidden for long stretches of time but then always reappeared. Nora knew there’d been darkness because she could remember feeling afraid of it. But she also knew because, well, she just knew.

  In her work with patients, Nora had got used to hearing about, and witnessing, the pathology within love, the woes people created for one another, and the chaos they lived within. Occasionally she saw the transcendent moments when people rose above themselves. When two people managed it together, a simultaneous transcendence of two bruised spirits lifting up from the quotidian mess of their lives—God, that was what everyone in therapy lived for.

  It hardly ever happened.

  Nora dropped her legs, curled in on herself, somersaulted down into a colder depth of water. She dove, as always, with her eyes open, a superstitious action that was really a wish to catch some hint of her parents—ashes, bones, anything. As she rose back up to the surface, a new word was with her—eternity.

  Lately she’d been working with a patient, a woman who was thirty-nine, almost forty, a few years older than Nora. This woman, a financial adviser, was highly likable, with a cheerful disposition, a fluctuating but basically strong sense of self, and a sad problem. Trying to heal from the breakup of a long-term relationship in which marriage had been planned, she’d joined some friends in renting a summer house in the Hamptons and had a brief affair with the man from whom they’d rented. He was wealthy, narcissistic, married, and careless. Nora’s patient was now pregnant, almost two months, and trying to make her decision. She had always wanted a child and was afraid this might be her last chance. Though she hadn’t planned to get pregnant, she knew that an unconscious wish had been at work when she’d agreed to sleep with the man. Crying, she told Nora, “This was no mistake. Things went just how my unconscious planned.”

  Nora made attempts to open discussion of unresolved feelings about the breakup of the previous relationship, but the patient stayed focused on “this pregnancy.”

  “Have you ever been pregnant before?” Nora asked.

  “Are you kidding? We were so careful in my last relationship. You know, we were each other’s first lover. I’ve never been casual about sex. Part of me did this on purpose.”

  Now the woman’s consciousness was kicking in hard. When the man found out about the pregnancy, he had shown her what he was really about. Unpredictable. Full of rages. He threatened to hurt her if his wife found out he’d been unfaithful. Then, one week after threatening, he came back and said he’d told his wife, who had forgiven him, and he was seeking legal advice so he could gain shared custody of the child. He and his wife had never had children. He wanted this one. He had money, he had power. Nora’s pa
tient was in a panic. What if something happened to her, and her child ended up in the care of this maniac? Was she being fair to the child? Would it be better if this child was not born? Was she just trying to punish herself? She couldn’t opt for adoption, because the father said he’d block it. Besides, she doubted she could live knowing she had a child in the world who was being raised by someone else. The woman was haunted by one thought, and she repeated it at every session: “If I have the baby, we’ll be eternally linked to that man.”

  Eternally had been moving through Nora for weeks, trembling within her as her patient got more panicked every Wednesday at three-fifteen. In Nora’s mind, baby and eternally had linked to form a word-picture. It rose up now before her as she began the long diagonal swim back toward the dock. What she saw was a big pink baby sitting on a rustic, ivy-covered swing, swinging and swinging. This motion, Nora knew, was suggested by her patient’s indecision about whether or not to abort. But Nora had a strong impression that the woman would go on with her pregnancy, so Nora interpreted the swinging to signify the steady way a child moves into the future, bringing with it mother and father and everything else, which is then passed on through time. The makings of eternity.

  It scared Nora, the idea of an endlessly forward-moving energy that gathered and gathered more people, generations of them, accruing mistakes and illnesses, damage on top of damage, as steady and unstoppable as a train wreck.

  And swinging into this inevitable accumulation was baby. In Nora’s mind, the picture of baby never varied. There was only one baby, always the same one: the pink, plump infant Natassia.

  Natassia. Placid, irresistible, six weeks old, the way she had been in July 1974, arriving in the south of France in the sack-and-frame contraption on Ross’s back, while Mary hefted their backpacks. They had hitchhiked all the way from Rome to visit Nora in the south of France. All winter, in her letters, Nora had offered to travel to Rome to visit Mary as soon as the baby was born. Plus, Nora had met Christopher, and she wanted Mary to meet him. “It’d be so easy for us to come to Rome,” Nora wrote. But Mary insisted that she and Ross had planned long ago to travel in Europe when classes were out, and having the baby wasn’t going to change their plans.

  So they arrived. Mary, Ross, and Infant Natassia.

  Mary’s letters just after the birth had described the baby as “buttery.” And she was. Skin soft and a tiny bit damp from the heat. A little melty. She had an itsy-bitsy red mouth puckered like an elbow. Nora had been expecting at least a hint of Mary’s Koreanness in Natassia’s features, but the baby had huge round dark eyes, crisply etched with long lashes. Tiny, tiny nose, with all the curves and contours of a regular nose but in an impossibly small size. Now and then Natassia would smile, and whoever was near her—Mary, Ross, Christopher, Nora—would call out “Look, look!” and the others would come running from all corners just to see. “Oh my God, that smile!”

  At six weeks old, Natassia was a feast of smells and textures and a subtle palette of colors from pink to apricot. Feet as sweet and meaty as slices of a peach. Holding that little baby was like filling your arms with flowers and summer fruits.

  And so maybe that was why Christopher did it, gave in to the temptation to fill every one of his senses.

  At this point in her reverie, Nora had to stop swimming. There was tightness on the side of her left breast, spiking into her heart. Nearby, on the water, too close, a gang of seagulls were squawking over possession of a dead fish. The cyclone of her thoughts had done it again, overpowered her will, centrifuged all sounds and spellings and meanings away from the words until nothing was left but that tiny town in the south of France, fifteen years ago, Nora pretending to study while Christopher painted, the two of them a couple only a few months but already living together in his warehouse loft, where Mary and Ross came to visit, bringing that poor tiny baby with them. The visit had been going so well that after a week Nora convinced Mary and Ross to go off by themselves for a few days while she and Christopher babysat. What an easy baby Natassia was, and how impressive Christopher was in his care of her, so eager to keep the baby fed and cleaned and entertained. He’d cushioned a dresser drawer to make a crib for her, and the first night he and Nora were tucking Natassia in, he said to Nora, “You and me can make a baby ourselves, you know?” In those days he was endlessly, shamelessly wooing Nora.

  It was a Wednesday, late afternoon. Mary and Ross would be back the next day. It was hot, but cooling down a bit, and Nora thought maybe it would be nice to take the baby to the beach; by now she felt confident that she and Christopher could manage a picnic at the beach with the baby. And she was going to ask Christopher what he thought about going to the beach. She stepped into the kitchen, and what she saw—that one moment, that nanosecond powerful enough to obliterate even images of her family’s fire—would stay with her forever: Christopher eternally lifting naked Natassia, tiny plump baby. Christopher’s one big hand spreading the loaves of the baby’s legs. Christopher bringing his mouth to the baby’s vagina. To smell her. To taste her.

  What would have happened if right then Nora hadn’t entered the kitchen? (For years, one of the biggest points in Christopher’s defensive self-explanation had been “Honey, if I’d been premeditating this act, would I have done it in the kitchen? What I did was wrong. It was a mistake. It was bad. But it’s over. It was just that one time. I’m not a sick person. I’m not pathological. You’re not married to a pervert. Please, let’s let go of this. I’ve done my therapy, just like you wanted. I’ve done my dark nights of penance. It was a one-time aberration thing. It’s been so hard for me to forgive myself. Please, why can’t you forgive me?” For years he’d showered her with the jargon he’d picked up in therapy, just to show her he was doing it, since counseling was her one condition for staying in the marriage. Lately he’d been infuriating her by telling her, “Sweetie, there’s something wrong that you can’t let go of this after all these years. Maybe you need to talk to someone about this?”) That July afternoon in France, if the air hadn’t cooled, if Nora hadn’t felt ready to go to the beach with Natassia, if she hadn’t appeared just as Christopher’s tongue trembled there in the air, at the entrance into the baby’s body, if Nora hadn’t been there to grab the baby from him and hold on to her for the next forty-eight hours, until Mary and Ross finally showed up, what would have happened? What might Christopher have done next?

  This was the hell where Nora lived.

  What did happen before Nora walked in? What happened inside the baby’s body? What damage was done to her soul? Any? Maybe nothing. But why did Christopher do it? What was it in him that made him do it?

  This event, this eternal moment in time, had shaped Nora’s life as much as the fire that had consumed her family. It was the reason she and Christopher had stayed in France for five years. It had turned her blond hair white, bone white, in the course of one week. It was why Nora eventually chose the career she chose. It was why she refused to have a child. It was why she and Christopher were probably heading toward divorce. The why of what happened that July day still hadn’t been explained.

  Nora knew—had always known—that if she couldn’t trust Christopher she should leave him. She couldn’t trust, but she didn’t dare leave. What? And float sleepless and crazy and alone through the universe? So she swallowed her rage (he was supposed to save her from disaster, not create more) and made a psychic adjustment, an accommodation: yes, she was protecting a man who had, once, molested a baby; however, Nora was deeply committed to the task of trying to find the answer to why he had done it. This was Nora’s unspoken pact with the universe, a stalling tactic, pathetic, a way to buy time because she didn’t have courage. She would not ask for or expect anything more if she could just, please, be spared a return to the abyss she’d lived in before she met Christopher.

  In exchange, Nora lived a nimbus life around Natassia, assumed the duty of being vigilant over her—it was the least Nora could do, since she couldn’t find the courage to tell
Mary what had happened. Nora’s therapist, who knew the whole story, had pushed, but, really, how could Nora tell Mary? Nora wasn’t sure herself what had happened. A few times, she had brought up with Christopher the idea of telling Mary and Ross, but Christopher said, “What good would it do? Don’t meddle.” Nora left the secret untold, let the telling became a task still to be done. After that disastrous summer of ’74, Nora and Christopher didn’t see Natassia again until she was four years old, when they were back from France. By then Ross and Mary were almost splitting up, and the stories were flying: how friends had found Natassia sitting on the stoop outside their walk-up on Thompson Street because no one was home to let her in, how many evenings Natassia slept on dressing-room floors at dance studios until one or two in the morning with nothing but a coat thrown over her, how the fights between Mary and Ross had become bad and loud and vicious. Mary was already a mess of guilt and resentment and dread. Telling her about that moment in Natassia’s infancy might make things worse for Mary, and for Natassia.

  And for Christopher.

  It was in this, her need to protect her husband above all others, that Nora entered the loneliest corner of her marriage. Lately Christopher had begun to accuse her: “You’re selfish, Nora. Honey. Admit it. The reason you won’t let us have a baby of our own is that you’re selfish.” A baby? He wanted a baby? Couldn’t he understand that Nora was just barely getting by? Was he trying to dismantle her completely?

  And how could she have a baby with him, create a tie into eternity with a man who—who what? Who was he? She was still, after all these years, trying to decide if he was good or bad, worthy or not. I need to leave. I can’t leave.

  By now, the water Nora was swimming in had darkened, the sky around the house was navy blue, more faded than her old bathing suit. She was close to the beach, so she had to tug at the stretched-out straps every few strokes to keep her breasts covered. The tank suit had been her mother’s, her last one, nearly new when she died; now the elastic was worn and the foam cups had fallen out. The suit was so loose that Christopher had recently told Nora it was almost sexier on her than her bikini, “if I was turned on by hillbillies wearing hand-me-downs.” They had become so mean with each other. A few hundred yards from the dock, Nora had to stop to rest. I’ll sleep out on the dock tonight. On the dock she’d be far from the phone.