Читать книгу Angels Go Naked - Cornelia Nixon - Страница 6

The Women Come and Go

Her name was Margy, hard g, like argh, not soft g, like margarine. One quarter of her waking life had gone to practicing the violin, but when her teacher entered her in a national audition, she was surprised to make to the finals and didn’t stay for the results, so the teacher had to track her down to tell her she had won. Margy knew it was a fluke, but soon she had been asked to play at Tanglewood, at Aspen, with the Boston Symphony, and at her school in the Back Bay, where she’d always had to practice straight through lunch, ignored by everyone, suddenly the most sought-after girls were seeking her. Ann was generally acknowledged the most beautiful girl there, and beautiful in a way that made other girls feel awe: she was perfect in the natural state, like Grace Kelly before she met the prince, only better, since she’d never bleached her hair or worn lipstick. She had a nun-like aura and wore expensive modest clothes, the kind most girls’ mothers picked for them and they refused to wear. Even the Huntington School uniform looked good on her. Calluses did not grow on her toes. Whatever she said was considered wise. She liked to quote Herman Hesse, Kahlil Gibran, and other sources of deathless wisdom.

“Just sit on your bed and think,” she said. Hushing to listen, girls went home and sat on their beds.

And with Ann came Elizabeth, her lifelong acolyte. Their mothers were friends, former debutantes who had married the wrong men and now lived in a neighborhood much faded from its former glory instead of in three-story mansions out in Brookline or Lexington. Elizabeth dressed like Ann, even vied with her a little in the neatness of her gestures, the propriety of her shoes. But she didn’t have the face, or the hair or the skin, and no one stopped to listen when she talked, unless it was about Ann.

“As Ann said to me last night,” she might begin, through a din of girlish voices, and suddenly a hush would fall.

Then in their junior year they took on Margy, who was related to no debutantes, whose hair was impossible, maggot-white and curled as tight as Velcro in tiny fetal snarls, who was always fidgeting and humming and dancing with her bony legs when she wasn’t playing violin. But she learned fast, and soon the three of them were gliding modestly around the school, discussing Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath, looking benignly (but silently) at the other girls. Ann and Elizabeth would listen to Margy practice during lunch, and after school they all walked home with Ann (who lived only a block away, on “hardly passionate Marlborough”) or out in every weather to the Esplanade, where they would grieve together privately, for the divorce of Elizabeth’s parents, and the death of Margy’s mother when she was only twelve, and the last cruel thing Ann’s had said to her.

“‘Could it be then that this was life?’” Ann quietly intoned one brilliant winter day beside the Charles, the sky delft blue, the river frozen blistering white. “‘Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into air?’”

In their senior year, they read Camus in French and took on existential responsibility, marching gravely, all in black, with a hundred thousand others up and down the major avenues to protest the bombing of North Vietnam. Margy started quoting from the things she’d read, but without Ann’s authority: she might just mutter quietly, so no one else could actually hear, “‘Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,’” or “‘Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.’” On her birthday in November, Elizabeth and Ann gave her a locket with their three initials in a triangle, and for Christmas they all gave each other books, disapproved together of their family celebrations, and went to midnight mass at Holy Cross, for the music, and to appall their parents, none of whom were Catholic or in danger of becoming so. Away from Huntington they were more free, and sometimes, standing on street corners, waiting to cross in the winter sun, Ann and Elizabeth might fall in with Margy’s dance, gently snapping fingers, tapping feet. Crazed with success, she once vamped off a curb into the path of a careening cab, but they yanked her back in time.

Margy was happy to be their friend, though she knew she was not like Ann. She had calluses not only on her toes but on every finger of both hands, and had once had a hickey on her neck. She’d gotten it from a pianist named Gary Slade, on whom she’d had a crush until the night he tried to make her fish the car keys from his underpants. She had walked home that night, and never been alone with any guy since then, but still she went on having similar effects on other boys and men. The chorus master at her music school was a handsome man, but he was past her father’s age, and if she looked at him it was only on obligatory Saturdays, singing husky alto in the second row. But at the last school picnic out at Marblehead, he’d gotten her off by herself, both of them in bathing suits, not fifty yards from where her father stood. Running a pool cue through his toes, he’d said, “You know I want to make love to you,” as if she were accustomed to hearing words like that, when she was just sixteen and had been kissed exactly once, by Gary Slade.

She’d never mentioned these events to Elizabeth and Ann. In fact, she would have died on the rack before she did. But once she told her father about Gary Slade, in vague theoretical terms, as if it were simply something she had heard, to see whose fault he thought it was. Her father was an architect, and he liked theoretical problems, though preferably the geometrical kind. He was willing to talk about anything, however, after dinner, when he’d had a few martinis just before.

“Well, now,” he said, running one bony hand across his hair, which sprang up in a solid hedge as his hand passed, curled like Margy’s, only slightly red. “That would depend on how she got into the car, now, wouldn’t it?” If she had kissed the man and led him on, then it was her fault too. He thought in general women were too quick to speak of rape. Leaning one elbow on the table, he held the other hand out in the air and looked at it.

“When a gal shows up at the precinct and says she’s been raped, they make her hold a hand out, and check to see if it’s trembling. Because if it is, it means she had an orgasm, and it wasn’t rape.”

He glanced at Margy, looked away, fair cheeks flushing clear red.

“Of course, sometimes it is.” He grinned, as if he knew he shouldn’t say what he was going to next. He gave her a bold look. “But when it does happen, when it can’t be stopped. Why not just relax, and enjoy?”

In January of their senior year, Ann was elected queen of the winter festival at a boys’ school across town, by guys she’d mainly never met, and Margy and Elizabeth went with her as her court, flanking her at the hockey match, triple-dating to the ball that night. Ann chose as her escort Gary Slade, who was still the best-looking young man they knew, while Margy (having no one else to ask) went with his little brother, Jason, with whom she’d shared a violin teacher since they were six.

The night of the ball she rode in Gary’s car as if she’d never seen it before. She didn’t have to talk to him, or even much to Jason. She was really there with Elizabeth and Ann, as they were there with her. Gary had to stand for hours by the throne the boys had made for Ann, while she sat silent and expressionless, in a white ball gown and rhinestone crown, bearing the stares of all those eyes. When the ball was over, they asked to be delivered back to Ann’s, where they dismissed their escorts at the curb (Gary trailing after Ann forlornly, saying, “Can I call you soon?”) and went in to drink hot chocolate while Margy pranced in her long skirt from room to room, too excited to sit down.

“Gary should be falling on his sword by now,” Elizabeth noted, smiling down into her mug.

Lifting her lovely head, Ann seemed to consider an object far away. “Gary? Oh, Gary will be fine. He’ll get married and buy a house and have five children and become ‘a sixty-year-old smiling public man.’”

Margy was fidgeting nearby. Suddenly she felt bold.

“‘The women come and go,’” she said. “‘Talking of Michelangelo.’” And then, with special glee, “‘I do not think that they will sing to me.’”

Ann laughed, and kissed her cheek. She put a record on, and they all began to dance, to “Let It Bleed” and “Love in Vain,” and “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime you just might find you get what you need,” until they had calmed down enough to sleep, Elizabeth with Ann in her canopy bed, Margy on a cot down at the foot.

Margy started reading through her father’s library, leatherbound classics hardly touched by anyone, and after sampling here and there she settled on the Sigmund Freuds, which were small and dense and rewarding even in small bites, and therefore suitable for reading in the moments when she wasn’t practicing. She read Dora, Anna O., Civilization and Its Discontents. She took to peppering her talk with Freudian remarks.

“I have cathected to those shoes,” she’d say. “The economics of my libido may require a chili dog.” Or, “Time to get obsessional about that test.”

One week she was excused from classes in the afternoons to rehearse with the Boston Symphony, and as she waited for the T at Arlington, she read that if a woman dreams her daughter is run over by a train, that means she wants to go to bed with the man who once gave her flowers as she got onto a train. She was about to turn the page when she felt a hard stare from a few feet off. Pretending to read on, she tapped out the timing of the Paganini she was going to play against one edge of the book, as if deeply engrossed.

The staring did not stop. Annoyed, she glanced that way and recognized the new girl in her class at Huntington. Rachel had arrived only that year, a tall, dark, awkward girl with huge black eyes who stared at everyone as if she found them very strange, and slightly amusing. Imitating Ann’s most unrevealing expression, Margy gave her a brief nod and returned to her book, the most effective of the small, polite rejections she and Ann and Elizabeth practiced every day on other girls at school.

Rachel moved closer, staring like a baby over its mother’s shoulder. She read the spine on Margy’s book. Her voice squeaked in amazement.

“Are you holding that right side up?”

Margy finished the sentence and looked at her. Rachel’s uniform was entirely disguised by a black leather jacket and beret, her hair whacked off around the earlobes. But her face was fresh and artless as a two-year-old’s.

“Insulting people in train stations is a sign of unresolved dilemmas in the inner life.”

Rachel chuckled, watching her. “And what about the virgin goddess, does she read books too?”

Margy pretended not to know who she could mean, narrowing her eyes at her. “Why aren’t you in school?”

Rachel whipped out a pass and twirled it in the air.

“Legal as milk,” she said, but grinning in a way that made it clear she wasn’t going to the dentist after all. She had a sick friend at B.U., and how could she leave her there alone, pining for a cool hand on her brow?

“Freud used to operate on people’s noses,” Rachel calmly said. “To clear up their sexual hang-ups. He thought if you put your fingers in your purse you were playing with yourself. He was a little bit hung up on cock, and thought the rest of us were too.”

Margy rode with her to Copley, slightly stunned. On the platform, changing trains, she glanced back at the one she had just left, and there was Rachel pressed against the glass, eager as a puppy locked inside a car.

She introduced her to Elizabeth and Ann, and soon Rachel started showing up at lunch, refusing to fade off as other girls had learned to do. She even followed on their private walks, stalking behind them with her long, unhurried gait.

“What about me?” she would actually cry, throwing her arms out wide, as they tried to walk away.

She introduced them to new lore, Simone de Beauvoir and The Story of O and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and gradually to other things. Rachel had lived in Paris and L.A. and Israel, but now her parents had moved to Beacon Hill, a few blocks from the house where Margy’d always lived, and she took to turning up on Sunday afternoons, to listen to her play and go for walks and tell her things that would have made Margy’s mother’s hair stand up. Already Rachel had a lot of friends, older women living on their own, who fed her marvelous meals, peyote buds, and grass, and taught her unimaginable acts in bed. She kept her fingernails cut to the quick so that they could not wound. She said she could do anything a man could do, only better, because she was a girl too.

“There’s nothing nicer than getting ready for bed,” she said, “knowing there’s a girl in there waiting for you.”

Margy listened, thrilled and shocked. She began to look back with new eyes on certain things she’d done herself. The summer after her mother died, a rash of slumber parties had gone through her neighborhood, with girls she hardly knew at Huntington. But Margy had gone to every one, and when the lights were out they’d played a secret game. Bedded in their sleeping bags on some girl’s living room rug, they’d touched each other’s breasts, circling incipient nipples with light fingertips, until the hostess said to switch, and then the one you had just touched would do the same to you. They did it as a dare, to prove that they were brave, and they would have all dropped dead to learn that it had anything to do with sex—though the boldest girls, who had invented it, played an advanced form of the game, removing pajama pants and circling fingertips on a certain sensitive spot. Torture, they called that.

“Who were they?” Rachel squeaked, dropping to her knees on the Common, clutching Margy’s coat. It was early spring, the air cold and sweet, and they were loitering after a rally against the bombing of Cambodia. “Please, please, pretty please. Tell me. Are they still at Huntington?”

Most of them were, but Margy said they had all moved away. Rachel sank her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket, slouching morosely down the path.

“Why do I never meet girls like that? I just meet little virgin straights. Not that you aren’t cute, of course,” she said, and tousled Margy’s hair.

Margy assumed that Ann knew nothing of Rachel’s other life, and that it would be best to keep it to herself. Then one Sunday she called Ann’s, and Ann’s mother said that she and Rachel had gone out. Another time she stopped by, on her way home from music school, and found Rachel cooking in the kitchen with Ann’s mother. Ann’s mother was formal and remote and tall, a suntanned woman in yachting clothes who smoked and watched you without smiling while you spoke. Margy was afraid to say a word to her, and she had always called her Mrs. Church. But in the kitchen she was laughing, deep and slow, stabbing a spoon into a pot, while Rachel watched her, hands on hips.

“Betsy! Not like that!” Rachel cried, and tried to wrestle the spoon away from her, both of them laughing like maniacs.

Margy stood chuckling in the kitchen doorway. Mrs. Church whirled at the sound, face sobering at once.

“Oh, hello, Margaret. Annie’s in her room, I think.”

Margy stood on one foot, smiling, but they did not go on. Dutifully, she went to look for Ann as peals of giggles echoed from the kitchen walls.

That spring, Margy fell in love. Yale was taking women now, and her father’d asked her to apply, since he had gone there, and to try it for at least a year instead of Juilliard. To help convince her, he arranged for her to meet the son of a new partner in his firm, who was finishing at Yale and would be entering the law school in the fall. Henry Bergstrom was handsome and sandy-haired like Gary Slade, but soft-spoken and grown-up and kind, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist and one chipped tooth that gave his grin a boyish charm. He was from New York City, had lived in Texas and Brazil, his family having only recently relocated to Boston, and he was a fan of carnaval and soccer as well as football and World War II. His voice thrilled her, deep and faintly drawling, but abrupt and furtive when he was moved.

“Where have you been?” he would say quickly on the phone, as if in pain, when she’d been practicing too long. But in person he might hold an ice-cream cone out too high, focus his eyes above her head, and gravely search for her. The Brazilians had a dozen words for “shorty” and “little kid,” along with maybe a hundred each for “pester,” “scram,” and anything to do with sex, though he wouldn’t tell her what they were.

“Hey, pixote, what’s it to you?” he would say when she asked, or call her tico-tico, catatau.

He took her to the symphony, where he listened with shining eyes, turning at the end to say he’d rather hear her play. She gave a solo recital in June, and he sat up straight and rapt beside her dad.

“Pretty good for a pixote,” he whispered in her ear, standing by protectively as Ann and Elizabeth and Rachel all surged up to kiss her cheek. He drove a powder-blue MG, and Rachel called him Ken, after the boyfriend of the Barbie doll.

“Is Ken coming up this weekend again?” she’d say, staring with outraged onyx eyes.

Margy got into Yale, and agreed to give it a try. Henry came home to Boston for the summer, worked for his dad, and she saw him almost every night. They went to hear the Pops, and to restaurants a few times, then settled into eating with her father or his parents, and after dinner going for a walk. Henry didn’t really like to go out at night.

“When I’m married, I won’t go anywhere at all,” he said, blue eyes warm. “I’ll have my own fun at home.”

The last thing every night before he left, in the car or on her porch or in her living room, he’d lean close and kiss her a few times, always stopping before she wanted to. Once he pulled her down onto his parents’ couch, stopped as if switched off, and apologized. On the way home he talked about the beauty of carnaval, how all rules were suspended there (“Don’t you ever go to one,” he said, grinning hard, gripping her hand). But a few nights later in the car he slid one hand up her side, where he could feel a little of her breast—stinging her so unexpectedly with want that tears spilled from the corners of her eyes.

“I may have to sign up for a nose job soon,” she said one sultry afternoon, twirling on a swing in a park near Rachel’s house. Ann was at the Vineyard with her family, and Rachel moped on the next swing, rolling a joint in her lap. “That is, if things go on this way.”

Pulling down her heavy black sunglasses, Rachel regarded her with some alarm. “You wouldn’t. Not with Ken?”

Margy tipped her head back toward the ground, viewing the world upside down. “That’s who it’s done with,” she pointed out. “By virgin straights. The Kens of this world.”

Rachel pushed her sunglasses back up over her eyes and looked inscrutable.

“Not necessarily,” she finally said, and gave one fleeting grin, though she would not explain.

In August Henry’s parents left for their summer place down on Long Island, and Henry lingered on alone. At first they pretended nothing had changed, eating at Margy’s, taking walks. Then one night he made dinner for some friends from Yale, at his parents’ house in Brookline, and invited Margy too. The friends were a couple, tall gazellelike blonds who almost looked alike, both living with their parents for the summer, and happy to be out of their sight.

They all drank gin and tonic before Henry’s manly fare (steak and potatoes and oversalted salad), and then the gazelles disappeared, into Henry’s bedroom, it turned out, with his war books and his model planes. Margy and Henry climbed up to the widow’s walk on the third floor, where they could watch the city lights reflected on the river in the summer dusk, Margy in a dress that tied behind the neck and almost nothing else, Henry in a seersucker jacket. She was quivering lightly, not from cold, and when he ran his fingers down the bare skin of her back, she turned and started kissing him.

Startled, he opened his eyes wide and seized her like a tortured man. Moments later they were in his parents’ bed, pressing together through their clothes until she lost all sense of being in a room, or even in a body of her own, apart from his. Then he stopped. Fingers in the tight curls at her scalp, he shook her face from side to side.

“Negativo, pixote,” he said, and left the room.

Henry left to join his parents in Wading River, and suddenly her life went blank. She called her friends, but already they seemed remote. She hadn’t seen them often over the summer, and Elizabeth and Ann had had a fight, though neither would say why. (“It’s me,” Rachel explained. “Elizabeth is jealous of the time I spend with Ann.”) Margy saw Ann a few times, but never alone, no matter what they planned: when Ann arrived, Rachel would be with her, grinning and relaxed and full of little jokes. They were both staying home, Ann to go to Radcliffe and Rachel to B.U., and Rachel seemed almost to live at Ann’s place now. Her clothes were hung on chairs in Ann’s room, and once Margy found her lying on the canopy bed, an arm across her eyes.

“Ann needs support right now,” Rachel explained when Margy asked her what was going on. Since they’d left Huntington, Ann’s mother had started a campaign against Ann, telling her she was spoiled and self-centered, and other cruel, unnecessary remarks.

“Last year, when your friends found you so charming,” Betsy had lately said in reference to the winter festival. Ann’s eyes were always shining with leashed tears, and Rachel hovered close to her, one hand on her shoulder, staring at anyone who came near.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Margy said one hot night in Cambridge as they were walking toward a party full of Rachel’s friends. “People’s mothers say things like that. It’s just the ordinary coin of mother-daughter economics. You’re lucky that you have a mom at all.”

Rachel’s mouth fell open as if Margy’d fired a gun. Clutching Ann’s shoulders, she steered her away. Later she cornered Margy at the party, in a throng of loud and happy older women. (“Lay off, she’s straight,” Rachel kept saying as they stopped to stare.)

“You don’t know,” she said quietly, watching Margy with a light in her black eyes. “You just don’t know. Comprend-tu?”

Henry wrote to Margy, in a big angular hand on heavy paper, about his father’s need to win at golf, and where they’d sailed that day, and how much he thought of her. Once he said remembering how she’d kissed him on the widow’s walk that night was driving him insane. But he didn’t trust letters, so he’d say no more. Except he hoped that he could see her the moment she got to Yale. In fact he would be waiting in her college yard.

The night before she left, Ann stopped by with Rachel to give her a blank book with a dove-gray linen cover, for a journal while she was away, and Rachel gave her a God’s Eye she had made. Ann was wearing Rachel’s leather jacket, clutched around her tightly with both hands. She gazed at Margy with beautiful clear eyes.

“You are coming to a place where two roads diverge, and taking the one less traveled by.” She touched Margy’s hand. “We understand each other, don’t we, Margy? No matter what happens.”

Margy followed them out to the street and watched them walk away. In the dark, their heads inclined toward each other till their silhouettes converged.

Her father drove her to New Haven, delivered her to his old college, and took her on a campus tour, pointing out the design of each quadrangle. Then he was gone, and Henry was there, in his seersucker jacket, fingers clenched around her arm.

“Can we go now?” he said quietly, hardly moving his lips.

It was Indian summer, hot sun with an autumn drowsiness, and Henry had the top down on the MG. Quickly crossing town, he raced south. The wind was too loud in the car for talk, but Margy knew where they were going now. She had on a simple sheath of rose linen that Ann had helped her pick out, her hair restrained in a ribbon the same shade. But as they crossed the bridge onto Long Island in late sun, the wind teased out the ribbon and her hair burst free, with a ripple of pleasure along the scalp.

He had her back soon after breakfast, though she’d missed the freshman dinner in her college and had failed to sleep in her bed. Calhoun was full of Southerners, from Georgia and Virginia and the Carolinas, and they were all just trooping off in tennis whites, or to try out for some a cappella group, as she made her way upstairs, trembling slightly and trying to look blasé. At the last second, when the pain was most intense, she had tried to pull away. But Henry went on saying, “Just relax,” into her ear, and soon she lay still listening to him sleep, with a feeling she didn’t recognize, like floating in a warm bath, with an undertow of fear.

In the morning he had quickly pulled a pillow across the bloodstain on the sheet, as if she shouldn’t see that, when she had already seen it in the bathroom twice, in the middle of the night and again after the second time, when he woke her at first light, his lean, hairless chest quivering before her eyes like a wall she had to climb. Driving back, he didn’t say a word. The law school had already started, and he had to be in class. But he kissed her tenderly by Calhoun gate in the open car, and said he would be there to pick her up on Friday afternoon.

She took long, meditative showers, spent whole days in the practice rooms, and only joined her fellow frosh in class. On Fridays Henry drove her out to Wading River, where the house was always packed now with his friends, who played tackle on the beach and drank all night, and she was alone with him only in the sandy bed. With a football in his arms he was unexpectedly exuberant, and she watched him from a beach chair in the autumn sun, trying to write something profound to Rachel and Ann. They’d sent her two postcards, one from a small hotel in Provincetown. (“All quite legitimate, you understand,” Rachel’s part had said. “Searching the beach for pebbles you may have sent. Now is the time to buy a kite.”) But Margy had nothing to say that she could trust to letters now, so she watched Henry steal the ball, and laugh and cheat and leap across his fallen friends with lean, tan legs, and streak across the sand to score.

The weather changed, dry leaves crackling in the wind at night. The first cold week, she did not hear from Henry, and on Saturday she called his rooms, where his suitemate said he had gone home to Boston. Margy was concerned. Of course she knew that men could change, from the days of Gary Slade. But the last time she had seen Henry, he had been more tender than before, and had held her hand on the long drive back to Yale.

Monday night, on her way home from the practice rooms, she stopped by the law school dorm, where he was studying. He seemed surprised but glad, and pulled her in protectively.

“Everything all right?” he said, ushering her quickly into his room, shutting the door. “Nothing wrong?”

They talked politely, sitting on the bed, his law books lit up on the desk. He did not explain why he’d gone home to Boston, and she didn’t ask. When she rose to go, he said good-bye at the door and watched her leave. He strode behind her down the gleaming brown expanse of hall.

“Don’t go,” he said, clutching her arm and looking at the floor. “Please stay, all right?”

She couldn’t sleep in his narrow bed, and she got up late to walk back through the cold, clear night. That weekend she practiced all the daylight hours, avoiding telephones. But when she went back to Calhoun at night, there were no messages for her. She called Henry’s rooms, pretending to have a French accent.

“Boston,” his suitemate said.

“Ah, bon,” she said, and did not call again.

Henry wrote her a careful letter, saying he had made a mistake and wasn’t ready to be serious yet, but asking her to let him know if she ever needed anything from him. Margy wrote four versions of a letter back, outraged, pleading, miserable, abject, and tore them up. Finally she sent a postcard with a view of Wading River (bought to send to Rachel and Ann), saying she was always glad to hear from him but didn’t think she would be needing anything. He sent her a biography of Freud, which she had already read (“From your friend, Henry,” it said inside), and a yard of rose-colored ribbon to replace the one she’d lost while riding in his car. Once she saw him on Elm Street, idling in traffic as the snow fell on the cloth top of his car. Honking and waving, he half emerged. But she saluted with her violin and hurried off against the traffic, so he couldn’t follow her.

Sleet was rattling on the windows as if hurled from fists on the day she started to throw up. She tried to make it stop, lying on her bed in the hot blasts from the heating ducts, as Rachel’s God’s Eye twirled above. It was ridiculous, it was impossible. Henry had been so cautious, breaking open little hard blue plastic cases, exactly like the ones she’d seen once in her father’s dresser drawer when her mother was alive, and dropping them beneath the bed as he put their contents on. The night she’d visited his room, she had crouched to count the empties in the silvery light, and there had been at least a dozen more than he had used that night. Though it was hard to tell, of course, how old they were.

She went to class and could not hear a word. She could not play the violin, or remember why she’d ever wanted to. The nausea surrounded her, six inches of rancid blubber through which she had to breathe. She threw up in the daytime, in the evening, in the middle of the night. She told herself to just relax. Morning sickness is all in the woman’s head, Freud said. She ate a crust of hard French bread, and saw it unchanged moments after in the white cup of the toilet bowl.

She found a doctor down in Bridgeport, where she would not run into anyone from Yale. The man she picked had chosen his profession because the forceps used at his own birth had damaged a nerve in his face, causing his forehead to hang down across his eyes, while his mouth pulled to one side. Yes, he had good news for her, he said. Mrs. Henry Bergstrom, she had called herself, and lied about her age. Alone with him when the nurse had left, she mentioned that they weren’t quite married yet. The doctor may have given her a kindly look, though it was hard to tell.

“Don’t be upset if something happens to it,” he said, lips flapping loose around the sounds. “It’s not because it’s out of wedlock or anything like that. It’s not your fault.”

Margy nodded, and started to weep quietly. Moments later she was on the sidewalk in cold sun, with the recommended diet in her purse, and Mrs. Henry Bergstrom’s next appointment card.

She’d be a famous violinist, live in a garret with the child. It would be a purse-sized child, round and pink, a girl, never growing any bigger or needing anything, and it would ride on Margy’s chest while she played the major concert stages of the world. She would wear flowered dresses, cut severely (bought in France), with black berets and leather jackets. She would smoke fat cigarettes through vermilion lips, drink liqueur from a small glass. And one day, in a café on the Boul’ Mich’, or in Nice, or in her dressing room in Rome, Henry would track her down. He’d send his card backstage, and she would send it back. She’d look the other way in the café.

“Mais non, monsieur,” she’d say. “We do not know each other. Excusez moi.”

For Thanksgiving she had to fly to Florida with her father and pretend to eat some of the thirty pounds of turkey her grandmother made, and throw up in the bathroom of the tiny oceanview apartment with the fan on and the water running. Back at Yale, she learned that she had failed midterm exams (equipped with the vast wasteland of all she hadn’t read), and packed to leave for Christmas break.

Rachel met her train. Sauntering down the platform, thumbs hooked into black jeans, she looked very young in a new black motorcycle jacket with silver chains. But her stare was just the same.

“They’re engaged,” she said, with a tragic face.

Margy kissed her on both cheeks, said, what? and who? and even laughed. She felt a little better, having not thrown up almost all day.

Rachel hung suspended, watching her. Slowly a look of wonder, almost delight, broke on her face. Stepping closer, she took tender hold of Margy’s head.

“Oh, baby. Don’t you know anything yet?”

It had started in the summer, Rachel said, when she and Ann first went to bed. They’d been in love since spring—she and Ann, that is—and Rachel was spending all her time at Ann’s by then. Ann never wanted her to leave, but at first they didn’t get near the bed. They’d sit on the floor in her room and talk until they fell asleep, right where they were. Ann couldn’t face it, what it meant, or do more than kiss Rachel on the cheek.

“She was just a little virgin straight,” Rachel explained. “Like you, only worse. She thought that girls who went to bed with girls would end up riding Harley-Davidsons and stomping around in big dyke boots. It wasn’t possible for the queen of the winter festival.”

Then suddenly it was, and they’d been lovers now for months, every night in the canopy bed. It was the most intense thing in her life, and in Ann’s. One night they’d been making love for hours when she touched Ann’s back, and it was wet.

“That does it,” Rachel’d told her then. “No matter what, you can’t go saying you’re a virgin now.”

Things were good then for a while. They took some little trips. (“You lied to me on that postcard,” Margy pointed out, and Rachel shook her head. “I promised her,” she said.) Ann was jealous of Rachel’s other friends, and accused Rachel of not loving her—while she, Ann, was in love for life. But Rachel reassured her, and then things were all right. Even Betsy laid off Ann.

“Betsy thinks I’m good for her,” Rachel said, and grinned. “She likes the way Ann shares her toys with me.” Of course Betsy had no idea what was going on, it wasn’t in her lexicon. But she liked Rachel, they got along. And Rachel learned to head Betsy off when she was going after Ann.

Then one night in the fall, Ann announced that she was going out, and Henry showed up at the door. He took her out to eat, and to a play, and to the symphony.

“They went out?” Margy cried, but Rachel only looked at her. Out, and home to meet his parents too. It was a bulldozer through their happy life. He started calling every night from Yale. Ann would take the call in her parents’ room and close the door. She started quoting Henry. He said men should always be gentle to all women, and he was sorry it had not worked out with Margy, but that they had parted friends. This was the time in their lives that counted most, he said, when the steps they took would determine all the rest, and it was important to be circumspect. Ann agreed, and every weekend circumspectly she went out with Henry, and came home to sleep with Rachel.

“So now she’s wearing this big Texas diamond that used to belong to his grandmother. And all she does is cry. He brings her home, and she gets in bed with me and starts to cry. She cries while we make love, and then cries in her sleep. In the morning she gets up to try on her trousseau, and puts on sunglasses so Betsy won’t see, but they just dam up the tears, until she’s got this pool behind them on her cheeks. She’s just afraid, and she knows it, but that doesn’t mean a thing. They’ve got the guest list all made out. She’s going to marry him in June.”

Margy took the T to Cambridge, looked for Rachel’s friends. She found the one who’d had the party, a big-breasted woman in a T-shirt with short rough hair, who offered to make tea, or lunch, or roll a joint. Yes, she could tell Margy where to go, and no, she wouldn’t mention it to Rachel if she didn’t want her to. But was she sure?

“It’s not a nice thing to go through,” she said as she followed Margy out onto the landing, carrying a large gray cat. “Don’t do it by yourself, baby.”

Margy thanked her, put the number in her purse, but did not make the call. First, she needed to understand. She needed to see Ann one more time, from a distance, preferably. Maybe that would be safe. Maybe then the thing that happened when you looked at her would not, and she would understand, why all their lives arranged themselves Ann’s way, as if they were the notes and she was the melody.

Christmas Eve, Margy played chess with her father, which he had taught her as a child, but she was too sick to concentrate, and he won both games. Humming happily, he went off to bed, and she sat waiting in the ornate living room, still decorated in her mother’s taste, Persian rugs and heavy velvet drapes and lamps held up by enslaved caryatids (“early sadomasochist,” as Rachel’d labeled it). When she could hear nothing but the antique clocks, ticking out of sync, she eased her coat out of the closet, and the bolt out of the door.

Flagging a cab was easier than she’d supposed, with the neighbors all returning home, and she was early for the service at Holy Cross. The cathedral was already nearly full, rows churning with genuflection, kneeling, crossing, touching lips, and she took up a position to one side, beneath a statue of the Virgin, plaster fingers open downward as if beckoning the crowd to climb up into her arms. In an organ loft somewhere above, someone was playing Bach’s most schmaltzy fugue, hamming it up with big vibrato on the bass, while in the aisles people streamed both ways, like refugees from war, out toward the doors and in for midnight mass. Their coats were black and brown and muddy green, with sober scarves and hats, and when Ann’s head emerged from beneath the outer arch, hair glowing like ripe wheat and freshly cut to brush the shoulders of her camel-hair coat, she seemed to light the air around for several feet.

Margy pressed back closer to the wall. She hadn’t forgotten how beautiful Ann was, but memory could never quite live up to her. Henry’s shoulders framed her head, wide and straight in a navy overcoat, with Rachel tall as he was next to him, looking strangely wrong in a lace collar, wool coat, and heels. None of them had time to glance across the nave. Rachel was clowning for Henry, rolling her eyes and gesturing with her hands, and he gave a grim smile, looking handsome but harassed, as he stepped up to take Ann’s hand. Rachel moved to her other side, and together they maneuvered to a spot behind the final row of pews.

Now all three stood, Rachel and Henry crowded close on either side of Ann, bantering above her head, while she looked docile as a child, and lost. Henry had a firm grip on her hand, and he kept it well displayed, curled against his chest or resting on the pew in front or in his other fist. Ann’s other hand was out of sight, but Rachel’s arm pressed close to hers, and both their hands plunged down behind the pew, as still as if they’d turned to stone.

Ann leaned back her head, looking high up toward the ceiling, a parted sea of water shining in her eyes. She said something to distract the other two, and all three of them looked up, as if they could see something descending from above. In a moment, other people near them looked up too.

The Bach swelled to an end, and the crowd pressed in, packing all the spaces on the floor. Forging a path back through stiff overcoats, miasmas of perfume, Margy stepped out into the cold, pure night. She’d seen enough, and as she hurried up the avenue, alive with pinpoint lights, Salvation Army bells, and taxis rushing through the slush, the city opened up around her, smaller than before, while she felt strangely huge, as if she were parading through the air like the Macy’s Mickey Mouse balloon. A thousand windows lit up small and bright, no bigger than the hollows in a honeycomb, and for a moment she could almost see inside, into the thousand tiny rooms, where figures crossed, and smiled, hiding their hurts, and wanting the wrong things, and spending long nights in their beds alone.