Читать книгу Riverside Drive - Laura Wormer Van - Страница 11

Tea at Amanda Miller’s

“Darling heart,” Mrs. Goldblum said, “all women go a bit mad in their thirties. That’s why it’s so terribly important to marry well.”

The younger woman blinked.

“You see, dear,” Mrs. Goldblum continued, “in her twenties, every girl believes she knows what she wants out of life, and she settles into the life she is convinced will bring it to her. And no one can tell her differently.” She smiled into her teacup and took a discreet sip. “And then the thirties arrive and she suddenly realizes the world can say no to her, and she becomes convinced she has made all the wrong choices…and,” Mrs. Goldblum sighed, “she realizes that, instead of knowing everything, she knows very little.” Mrs. Goldblum smiled. “It is not an easy time.”

The younger woman nodded, thinking.

Mrs. Goldblum took a delicate bite from the small pepper jelly and cream cheese sandwich on her plate. The women were sitting across from each other at a round table in front of the largest of the living-room windows. The four corners of a white linen tablecloth hung nearly to the floor; the silver tea service sparkled in the afternoon sunlight; across the room a fire was burning in the fireplace, the brass fender set gleaming in the contrast of lights.

Both women wore black, but it was not in melancholy. Instead, it was fitting. The room in which they sat had furniture from an earlier century—dark, massive, gleaming products of English workmanship, settees and chairs covered in deep burgundy velvet. There was an enormous oriental rug, and the fringed edges highlighted the dark wood floors that were exposed around it. Old paintings of every size adorned the walls; the high ceiling was an intricate work of white panels and carved plaster. And there was clutter in the room. On every surface—table tops, shelves, even along the enormous mahogany mantel—there were bits and pieces of brass and hand-colored glass, and there were antique frames with pressed flowers and porcelain vases with dried flowers, and little leather Shakespeares and ivory elephants and all kinds of other small distractions.

The older woman sat perfectly erect. The black dress—whose era was anyone’s guess—though faded slightly, still draped from her shoulders in flattering folds. A small gold brooch rested on the left of her chest; a gold charm bracelet on one wrist occasionally made small tinkling sounds. Her breath was gentle and slow; her hands moved gracefully, unobtrusively, often finding rest in each other’s company on her lap. Her hair was pure white, the complexion beneath pale and sweet, and her face conveyed enduring strength of some seventy-seven years.

Her glasses were the only thing out of place. The lenses being thick, they distorted the woman’s languid brown eyes into something almost comical. But they weren’t comical. They were searching the face of her companion, looking for clues as to the younger woman’s thoughts.

“I never liked him, you know,” Mrs. Goldblum said.

The younger woman laughed. “You certainly deceived me there.”

“Of course I had to be polite. You seemed so keen on the young man, I vowed I would come to like him in time. I never did, however.”

The younger woman shook her head, looking down to her lap. Mrs. Goldblum reached across the table to cover her hand with her own. “Drink your tea, dear. You’ll feel better.”

The young lady raised her head. Her eyes, usually bright, were rather tired. A smile was pressed into use and her face changed considerably. It was a fascinating, striking face. But it was not beautiful. Every feature, though brilliantly conceived on an independent basis, was in contrast to the next. The large, hazel eyes competed with the strong, perfectly chiseled nose (that decidedly linked her to the portraits on the walls). The high cheekbones did not know the wide, full mouth, and the olive of her complexion was at odds with the light brown of her hair. And her hair, long and straight, parted in the middle and spilling down over her shoulders, certainly did not know what to make of the black dress and pearls. And the contrasts did not end there. Her ample breasts made no sense of her thinness; her hands, whose fingers were long but large, hinted at a line of heritage that once knew the fields—or service under the people from whom her nose had come.

Mrs. Goldblum watched Amanda Miller take her suggestion regarding the tea. She smiled, nodding slightly. “Better now?”

“Yes, thank you,” Amanda said. She cleared her throat. “I must apologize—I’m not quite myself today.”

On that note, Rosanne came in, wafting her arms in the air as though she were a loon in descent toward water. She came to a rest at Mrs. Goldblum’s side—with Mrs. Goldblum none the wiser as to how she had traveled there—and pulled down on the crisp black uniform dress she was wearing. Every Tuesday, Rosanne cleaned Amanda Miller’s apartment until early afternoon and then changed for the ritual of serving high tea at three. (“You gotta be kiddin’,” Rosanne had said when Amanda first suggested it. “Well, maybe,” she had reconsidered, once a generous offer of financial compensation for such an ordeal was discreetly tendered. “Ah, geez!” she had cried during her first “tea etiquette” lesson. “You make me do that [a curtsy] and I’m gonna go down like a house of cards.”) All in all, the arrangement had worked out fairly well. As for Rosanne’s etiquette, once she had latched onto Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz as a model for her demeanor, she had gained a rather peculiar but nonetheless pleasant form of grace.

“Would you care for some more sandwiches, Lady Goldblum?” Rosanne said.

“Lady,” Mrs. Goldblum chuckled, looking over at Amanda. “Oh, my, my.” She turned back to Rosanne, softly touching her wrist. “No, thank you, dear.”

“Very good,” Rosanne said, curtsying. She raised herself onto her tiptoes and teetered over to Amanda, waving her imaginary wand once in her face. “And you, Empress?” she asked.

“No, thank you, Rosanne,” Amanda said, laughing, covering her mouth with her napkin.

“Very good, ladies,” Rosanne said, curtsying. Once she was safely behind Mrs. Goldblum, she raised her wings and glided back into the kitchen.

Mrs. Goldblum turned to make sure that Rosanne had left the room, looked back to Amanda and said, softly, “There is a lesson to be learned, Amanda dear. She married the man she thought she wanted—and she will waste her life waiting for him to be the man she wants him to be.”

Something crashed in the kitchen.

“I realize it is difficult to understand, Mrs. Goldblum,” Amanda said, “but I never wanted him—” Her eyes settled on a silver napkin ring. “I was not, am not, in love with him.”

Mrs. Goldblum apparently did not hear the crash or Amanda. “To love and be loved in return is the greatest gift life has to offer. To love those who don’t love themselves is—” Mrs. Goldblum refolded her napkin in her lap and then smoothed it with the palm of her hand, over and over. “I was very fortunate,” she finally said. “Mr. Goldblum and I had a wonderful marriage.”

“Why?”

Mrs. Goldblum looked surprised. “Why, compromise. Every good marriage is one of compromise. Of acceptance. The pleasure and satisfaction of knowing that you both are willing to give up certain things in exchange for receiving much more than you could have alone.”

Amanda touched at her pearls. “What kind of compromises did you make?”

“Oh, gracious,” Mrs. Goldblum said, looking past Amanda to the window. Her voice grew faint. “It’s been so many years, I can hardly remember what I cared about before Mr. Goldblum. Dances, friends, pretty ribbons, I suppose. Isn’t it odd,” she said, bringing her eyes back to Amanda, “I can’t seem to remember anything of importance before I was married.”

Or afterward, Amanda thought.

“And once the children arrived”—she chuckled to herself, shaking her head— “there was no time to miss anything.”

Mrs. Goldblum’s attention seemed to have drifted to her charm bracelet. Amanda patiently waited for her to continue.

“And, of course, there was Mr. Goldblum to look after. He worked so very hard.” She looked up, smiling. “I used to bathe the children at five. With the children’s nanny, Muerta—a Swiss girl. We had help in those days. And when Mr. Goldblum came home, the children and I would be lined up at the door, as neat as tacks, waiting to welcome him home.”

“And after the children grew up?”

“Oh, gracious,” Mrs. Goldblum laughed, “I missed them terribly. So did Mr. Goldblum. We always believed Sarah would be with us for a few years longer, but then, Ben was such a catch!” A long pause. “Can it be twelve years?” she wondered aloud. “It must be. She died in 1974.”

After a moment, Amanda said, “When the children left home…”

Mrs. Goldblum smiled again. She drew out a white hankie that was discreetly tucked in the underside of one sleeve, patted her nose with it and replaced it. “Mr. Goldblum and I didn’t know quite what to do with each other.” She laughed quietly. “Sometimes,” she said, leaning forward, “I would look at him across the dinner table and think, Who is this man? It was as if I had never seen him before. The man I married had black hair. The man sitting across from me had gray hair.” She eased back in her chair. “But then,” she sighed, “there were still those moments when I felt as though he and I shared the same body, the same life, the very same thoughts. And in those moments I was the happiest woman on earth.”

The clock on the mantel struck the half hour.

“Dear me, I’ve overstayed my welcome,” Mrs. Goldblum said.

“Nonsense,” Amanda said, rising from the table. “I would be deeply offended if you left so soon.” She lifted the teapot. “We will have some freshly made tea, perhaps by the fire.”

“No, I’m fine, thank you, right where I am,” Mrs. Goldblum said. She looked at the teapot. “I do so love a cup of good hot tea.”

“And good and hot it shall be,” Amanda said. “Excuse me.” She carried the teapot out to the kitchen. Rosanne was banging candlesticks in the sink, apparently in some effort meant to clean them. “Rosanne,” Amanda began.

“It’s not fair,” Rosanne said, throwing down the sponge.

“What’s not fair?”

Rosanne rested the back of one rubber glove against her forehead for a moment and then whipped around to face Amanda. “She shouldn’t talk about Frank behind my back,” she said, clearly upset.

“Oh, Rosanne,” Amanda said softly, putting the teapot down on the counter. “Rosanne, no, no. It was not meant as a criticism—”

“I heard what she said.” Rosanne’s eyes fell, and she swallowed. “She just shouldn’t talk about him, that’s all.”

Amanda considered this, absently toying with her pearls. “No,” she finally said, “you’re right. But you know, Rosanne, Mrs. Goldblum is getting on in years…She would never intentionally say or do anything to hurt you. She was only trying to comfort me.”

Rosanne sighed, pulling off the rubber gloves. “Yeah, I know,” she muttered, reaching for the teapot. “You want another?”

“I’ll make it,” Amanda offered.

Rosanne looked at her. “Ah, geez, don’t start playin’ Mother of Mercy on me. Go back and play the-good-ol’-days with Mrs. G.”

“All right,” Amanda said, walking to the door. She turned around then, hand resting on the doorway. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Rosanne said, moving to the stove.

When Amanda returned to the living room, Mrs. Goldblum asked if she had told her that Daniel called.

“Oh?” Amanda walked over to take a small log out of the woodbox and place it on the fire.

“Yes. He said he’ll be coming for a visit soon.”

“That’s nice.” Poke, poke, sparks fly.

Pause. “He has suffered a minor reversal in business recently,” Mrs. Goldblum said slowly.

Amanda remained silent. Her frank opinion of Mrs. Goldblum’s only living child was less than complimentary; she thought he was a self-centered, worthless rogue. For the life of her, Amanda could not understand how Daniel could shut his mother out of his life—that is, when Daniel did not require money. Mrs. Goldblum was a fine, amazing lady. How could he ignore her? She was loving, warm, cheerful…and very, very lonely.

The first time Amanda ever laid eyes on Mrs. Goldblum was in line at the Food Emporium in 1983. Amanda had sailed up behind her with a shopping cart of liquid staples: a case of seltzer, coffee, milk, tea, Tab, and cranberry, apple, orange, grape and grapefruit juice. After loading them on the counter, Amanda had reached ahead for the delivery pad. Mrs. Goldblum had smiled at her; Amanda had smiled back; and then Amanda noticed Mrs. Goldblum’s purchases: two potatoes in a plastic bag, one orange, a can of tuna fish, a pint of milk, a box of butter biscuits and six cans of cat food. For some reason the nice old lady’s purchases hurt Amanda. (For some reason, all nice old ladies’ purchases hurt Amanda.)

After filling out the delivery slip, Amanda had yanked a copy of the Enquirer out of the rack to look at it. Over the top of the page—over a picture of Hepburn caught walking on the streets of New York—Amanda watched Mrs. Goldblum’s change purse come out. Inwardly, Amanda had drawn a sigh of relief at the sight of two twenties in it. Good, she had thought at the time, I don’t have to worry about her.

The older women on the West Side of New York always unnerved Amanda. There they were—when the sun came out—strolling, sometimes inching their way, on the sidewalk, sometimes arm in arm, sometimes on a walker, almost always with a fiercely determined expression that said to the world, “Nope! I’m not dead yet!” It made Amanda want to scream, “Please! Why can’t we give them whatever they want?”

When Amanda left the store, she had found Mrs. Goldblum sitting on the fire hydrant that came out of the side of the building. Her pocketbook and precious purchases were lying on the ground at her feet. She was a little dizzy, she said. It would pass in a minute. Wasn’t Amanda kind to pick up her belongings?

Amanda had ended up walking Mrs. Goldblum back to her apartment on Riverside Drive at the south corner of 91st Street. Mrs. Goldblum described to her how all the doormen up and down the Drive, in the old days, had polished the brass buttons on their uniforms and had taken pride in the white gloves they had worn.

Mrs. Goldblum’s apartment was enormous but vacuous. And rather dusty. Amanda had stayed for tea and a tour of the apartment, receiving a history of the remaining furniture and a description of all the pieces that had since been shipped to her son in Chicago. Amanda learned that Mrs. Goldblum had been a widow for sixteen years, that her daughter had died of leukemia. That Mrs. Goldblum used the one bedroom, that the other two were empty. That she didn’t live alone—she had her cat, Missy, whom she had recently adopted from the ASPCA. And that, before Missy, her cat’s name had been Abigail.

Amanda had learned that Mrs. Goldblum was one wonderful older lady whose friendship meant the world to her. While Amanda fought the urge to shower money on her—an urge that, if Mrs. Goldblum ever suspected, would undoubtedly raise her wrath—she did manage to hatch two plots that did much to cheer her older friend’s life: a cleaning woman (Rosanne) who would come once a week for twenty-five dollars (supplemented in secret by a twenty-five-dollar increase on Amanda’s tab); and a formal tea served at Amanda’s every Tuesday afternoon.

“Don’t drop it, Rosanne,” Mrs. Goldblum was saying, “place it on the table.”

Rosanne was looking dangerous. She yanked on the hem of her uniform but said nothing.

“I’m sure the tea is lovely,” Mrs. Goldblum added. “You always make it perfectly.”

Rosanne’s mouth twitched. “Thanks,” she finally said.

Amanda walked back to the table from the fireplace. “I quite agree with Mrs. Goldblum,” she said, smiling. “You know, Rosanne, we are very, very fortunate to have you.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Mrs. Goldblum said, taking Rosanne’s hand. “You know, dear,” she said, “I often wish you could have been with us when the children were small.”

Rosanne squinted at this declaration.

Mrs. Goldblum looked at Amanda. “I’m quite sure Mr. Goldblum would have been every bit as fond of her as I am. And,” she said, eyes turning up toward Rosanne, “we had all of our lovely things then, things I would have liked very much for you to see.”

“What, like the bone china?” Rosanne asked her.

A small, wistful sigh. “Yes,” she said, eyes moving down to her bracelet, “my lovely china.”

“Well, you still got that plate,” Rosanne said. To Amanda: “You should see it. It’s really nice. Sort of pink, with flowers.”

“Painted by hand,” Mrs. Goldblum said.

Rosanne gave Mrs. Goldblum’s hand a little shake. “I can just see how it looked at Sunday dinner, Mrs. G. All I have to do is look at that plate and I can see the whole thing.”

Mrs. Goldblum smiled.

The doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it,” Rosanne said, gently disengaging her hand from Mrs. Goldblum’s and heading for the double doors that opened on to the hall.

“Thank you, Rosanne,” Amanda said. “I can’t imagine who that might be,” she added, frowning slightly.

“Perhaps it is a neighbor,” Mrs. Goldblum suggested.

But Amanda didn’t have any neighbors on this floor of the building. That is, unless Mrs. Goldblum was taking into consideration the ghost who was said to be living in the south tower.

“No!” they heard from the foyer. “You wait right there. Don’t move an inch until I find out what Ms. Miller has to say—if she’s at home.” Silence. “Hey! I told you not to move and I mean, don’t move.”

Amanda and Mrs. Goldblum looked at each other.

Rosanne came in and closed the double doors behind her. “Oh, boy,” she sighed, slumping against the doors, “it’s Mr. Computer Head and he’s got flowers.”

Amanda’s back went ramrod straight.

“Yeah,” Rosanne confirmed, “and I don’t think they’re for your word processor.”

“Is it your young man?” Mrs. Goldblum asked Amanda.

“Yeah,” Rosanne said, “the guy we just finished trashin’.” Amanda seemed disoriented. Mrs. Goldblum didn’t say a word; she merely looked down at her napkin.

“I—” Amanda started, and then stopped.

Mrs. Goldblum placed her napkin on the table. “Of course you must see him, dear,” Mrs. Goldblum said. “It’s time for me to leave on any account.”

“Take him into the writing room and tell him I’ll be with him momentarily,” Amanda told Rosanne.

Rosanne sighed and did as she was told, closing the doors behind her. “Ms. Miller has guests,” they heard her say, “but she’ll see ya for a minute. Follow me.”

Amanda saw Mrs. Goldblum to the front door, where she assisted her with the pinning of her hat in place, with her coat and with her walking stick. “It was lovely, darling Amanda, and I so enjoyed myself,” Mrs. Goldblum said. She turned her face to allow Amanda to kiss her cheek, adding, “Just remember, dear, if you feel pain, it’s because you’ve left the road for a thicket.”

Amanda smiled and kissed her again. Closing the door, she paused there a moment. Straighten UP; shoulders

BACK; WALK.

Roger was sifting through a pile of discs by her word processor when she walked in. He looked up and smiled. “Hi,” he said.

“Hello,” Amanda said, standing there.

Rosanne pushed past Amanda in the doorway to plunk down a vase of white roses on the table. On her way out, she said loudly, “I’ll offer Mr. Smith some more tea.”

“The flowers are lovely, thank you,” Amanda said, closing the door.

Roger sighed and ran his hand through his hair. He was a good-looking man in his early forties. Well, Amanda reconsidered, pleasant-looking, but it was never for his looks that she had got involved with him.

He gestured to the word processor. “I see you’ve been working on Catherine.” He laughed to himself, hitting one of the keys. “If nothing else, at least you can run this baby by yourself now.”

“Yes,” Amanda said.

That was how Amanda had met Roger. He had sold her the machine and delivered it himself. And then he had tried to teach her how to work it. And then he had tried to teach her how to work him. Amanda had been eminently more successful at her first attempt at one than the other.

Grinning at her, he plunged his hand in his pants pocket and furiously jingled the change in it.

“Roger,” Amanda said, moving to sit in the easy chair, “what do you want?”

He cocked his head. “I’m not sure, exactly.” His eyes trailed down, to there. To Amanda’s breasts.

She must be flat-chested, Amanda thought, crossing her legs.

He moved closer to her, coins still jingling. “Maybe I thought I was making a mistake,” he said. Amanda didn’t say anything. “Maybe I thought I had to be sure.”

Amanda sighed, looking down at the armrest. “I don’t think so,” she said finally, looking up. “There was never any pretense between us. That there was any more to it than…”

“Yeah,” he said, eyes narrowing. Jingle. Jingle. Jingle.

“Good grief,” Amanda said, shaking her head. She was surprised—was she really?—at the erection apparent in his pants. It was coming closer into view. Jingle. Jingle. Jingle. Amanda lunged out of the chair. “Roger—” she said again, whirling around, “what on earth do you think you’re doing?” She walked to the window, held onto the cross pane, and looked out at the river. “What about your girl? The one who adores you?”

“Cooking dinner, probably,” came the answer.

Amanda turned around and leaned back against the sill. “But she’s not enough for you, I presume.”

Jingle, jingle, jingle. He was on the move again.

“I was under the impression that you were going to marry this girl.”

“I might,” he said, smiling, moving toward her.

“This is a marvelous start for a marriage,” Amanda observed, folding her arms across her chest.

“Hmmm,” he said, placing his hands on her shoulders. Amanda dropped her head. He kissed the top of it. “What do you care?” he murmured. “You never pretended to care for me.” He lifted the hair away and pressed his lips against her neck.

Amanda’s mind raced. It was undeniable, what she felt. What she felt like doing. What she always felt like doing with Roger, and it wasn’t conversing. This unbearable, insufferable computer salesman also possessed an unbearable, insufferable member that was, at this moment, pressing against her. Only the words weren’t really “unbearable” and “insufferable”; they were “unbelievable” and “insatiable.” Like the compatible parts of her own body.

He had his hand on her breast and in a few moments Amanda was reaching down to feel the length and breadth of his excitement. He moaned into her neck, dropping his hand to press between her legs. “I am aching to get inside you,” he whispered in her ear.

The phone started ringing. Both of them froze. It rang and rang and rang. “Rosanne will get it,” Amanda whispered, their palms still pressed against each other.

But she didn’t. On the eighth ring, Amanda sighed, pulled away from Roger and smoothed her hair. “Hello?”

“I just wanted to remind you that Mr. Smith’s out here,” Rosanne’s voice said.

Amanda closed her eyes.

“You know, like he’s out here if you need him,” Rosanne was saying. Amanda also heard the sound of a zipper. She opened her eyes to see Roger lifting himself out of his pants. “I can knock on the door—” Roger moved in close and pulled Amanda’s hand down to hold him. She did. “Or maybe Mr. Smith could even yell for ya, ya never know. Or maybe he could break somethin’ in the kitchen ’cause he’s jealous or somethin’.” Roger slid Amanda’s dress up to her waist and managed to work her panty hose down. And her underwear. “Too bad there’s no gun around. A couple shots would do the trick.” Roger parted her legs with one hand, eased himself out of Amanda’s hand, and moved behind her. “How ’bout a light bulb? Sounds just like a gun sometimes.” He pushed her forward over the desk. “Amanda,” she finally said, “if you need some help you’re gonna have to say somethin’.” Roger felt for, and found, the right place and brought himself up into position.

And then Amanda cried, “No!” and tried to twist away.

And then Rosanne started pounding on the door.

She had been divorced for six years. Six years. Could it be? Six years since she had been Mrs. Christopher Gain? It was hard to believe.

If it had been six years since her marriage, then Catherine the Great had been living in her head for ten years, and existing on paper for—let’s see…five years. Could that be right?

That was right.

Amanda Miller was thirty-two years old. Thirty-two? That would make her mother—fifty-eight, her father…seventy?

Yes.

Yes, that was right.

In 1946 a WASP-y rich girl from Baltimore entered Syracuse University as a freshman. Tinker Fowles was her name. Tinker Fowles fell head over heels with her dreamy-eyed English teacher, and scandal ensued. Not only was this Associate Professor Reuben Miller twelve years older, but he was Jewish as well. (“His mother does not even speak English!” Nana Fowles had shrieked in Baltimore, pulling her hair out.) The Fowleses filed an official protest with the university, but to no avail. Tinker went ahead and married Reuben and, to her parents’ fury, Tinker transferred the million-dollar trust fund left to her from her grandmother to a Syracuse bank.

The year 1950 brought Tinker a degree in English; 1952 brought a master’s degree; 1954 brought baby Amanda; 1955 brought a doctorate in English literature; and 1957 found Professor and Associate Professor Miller both working in the English department. They were, as everyone on campus noted, the most ridiculously romantic couple ever seen in this century. The Professors Miller left poetry in each other’s office mailboxes; La Professora (as Reuben often called his wife) received flowers often; My Darling Own (as Tinker often called her husband) found silk ties and handkerchiefs hidden in his office; and every evening at six the two could be seen strolling out of the Hall of Languages, crossing the lawn, listening to the music students play the bells of Crouse Tower. They would stand there, hand in hand, smiling at each other. My Darling Own would, as he would describe, “dare to slip his hand around his dearest’s waist.”

Amanda, everyone agreed, was adorable, but certainly the oddest child around. To begin with, she was forever floating about in costume. One afternoon it would be as a princess, the next as a prince. Fridays usually found her streaking around the campus, laughing to herself, trailing multicolored layers of capes and scarves. She was reading by four and, by special arrangement, received her education at the hands of the students in the School of Education.

The Millers lived in a hundred-year-old Victorian house in Jamesville. Amanda had the entire third floor as her own. She spent hours up there by herself, reading and writing, playing music on her record player, and acting out plays that had no beginnings and no endings. She sang too (though terribly off key), and had a passion for what she considered dramatic dance (anything between ballet and the twist, or combinations thereof).

Adults were fascinated (and ultimately won over) by Amanda; children were decidedly leery of her. Upon introduction, Amanda was prone to break into merry song of her own composition and do a little dance—taking little leaps this way and that—to the usual response of her new acquaintances skedaddling but quick. But Amanda did not seem to mind; it was the attention of adults that made her happiest.

By age fifteen Amanda—strange as ever—took her SATs. And there was a bit of a problem. She scored a perfect 800 on the English part and 200 in the math (the 200 one receives for merely signing one’s name). Nana Fowles (now the widow dowager of Baltimore) pleaded with Tinker to give Amanda to her for a year—to get Amanda “stabilized,” to get this math problem straightened away and to prepare Amanda for something other than reciting poetry at the top of her lungs in the stairwells of the Hall of Languages.

Amanda begged to go. By this time Nana had made her year-round residence the Fowles Farm, a source of wonder and enchantment to Amanda all of her young life. And so Amanda traveled to Baltimore in Nana’s limousine to get stabilized.

While Nana was otherwise rather forbidding in nature, she was helpless against the charms of her granddaughter. For the next fourteen months Amanda could be seen daily riding across the expanse of Fowles Farm, scarves trailing in the wind behind her. It had not been Nana’s intention to put Amanda’s fantasy world on four legs, but the girl was growing so quickly, so alarmingly, that even Nana had to admit that adulthood and labors of the heart would be arriving soon enough.

However, every afternoon at four, Monday through Friday, poor old Mr. Hammer would arrive, shouldering the burden of trying to teach Amanda mathematics. Amanda was cheerful, amiable, and even stopped touching Mr. Hammer’s ears when he asked her to (“They are ever so remarkably red,” Amanda would say), but she seemed to go into some kind of autistic trance when his lesson began. She watched as hard as she could but heard nothing. It was a language that her brain did not understand.

“Amanda,” Mr. Hammer would say, marking a big red X by every question on the test sheet, “you have outdone yourself. Now, not only can you not do algebra, but you appear to have lost the ability to add.”

Amanda would slide down in her chair and examine her hair at close range. “Nana will be most grievously vexed,” she would sigh.

Poor Nana was also suffering grievous vexation over the bodily changes that had descended on her granddaughter. The slight girl who had arrived was blossoming in ways that Fowles women did not. “You must do something,” Nana would direct the seamstress, “about that—about her—” The movement of her hand would indicate that the seamstress was to do something about concealing Amanda’s ever expanding chest.

Amanda, Nana noted, was the only one oblivious to her new body. The gardener had taken to trailing around after her; the groom smiled in a most inappropriate way when he insisted on giving Amanda a leg up on her horse; even Randolph, the butler—who was at least as old as Nana—could be seen gazing elsewhere than at the gravy he was supposed to be serving.

If Amanda gained any permanent knowledge from her “stabilization” at Fowles Farm, it was Nana’s opinion of the saving graces and potential downfalls of her heritage. Amanda loved Fowles Farm because, Nana said, her Fowles blood responded to it. Amanda’s thinness, her five-eight height, her light brown hair (and its straightness), her nose, her straight white teeth, her strong jaw line and her long arms and legs were all Fowles. As for the shape of her eyes, their strange shade of hazel, those long lashes, that mouth, and the “overendowment” (referring to her chest), they all—sigh—clearly came from the Millers (said with the same emphasis as murderers).

Mr. Hammer pounded enough mathematics into Amanda’s head—right up to the door of the examination room in Baltimore—for her to score a 560 on the SAT. As for the English part, if the examiners had taken her essay on “What George Orwell Would Think of the Design of This Test” into consideration, surely Amanda would have scored higher than her 800.

Amanda went to Amherst on the strength of her desire to attend school with Emily Dickinson’s ghost. She enjoyed school very much and felt at home around the English department. She also made great friends with the curator of the Dickinson house. As for her contemporaries, everyone liked her—and some even admired her—but always from a distance. She was, in their words, “just sooo weird.”

In her senior year Nana died. It became campus news that Amanda had inherited some four million dollars. And it was right around then that Christopher Gain appeared on her doorstep—literally. She was dressed in billowing white, just departing from her cottage to visit the curator. Christopher was dressed like Zorro. He bowed, deeply, his hat in hand, swept his cape to the side and offered her his hand. The girls roared from the windows above, but after Amanda smiled pleasantly at them, she turned to Christopher and took his hand.

Christopher had graduated some years before from Dartmouth. Since that time he had been hanging out at Amherst, discussing his future as a brilliant writer with various gorgeous coeds. He himself had gorgeous blond looks, tremendous charm and appeal, and a three-hundred-year-old pedigree.

Amanda found Christopher slightly magical. Sitting on the grass outside Emily’s house, in the dark of the night, he cited poem after poem that the great lady had written. While Amanda noticed that he kept bending the emphasis to imply that Emily had been writing to some lover hiding beneath her bed, rather than to her universal lover in the heavens above, she enjoyed the performance immensely. And then, offering his hand to her again, he had led her behind some trees. He spread his cloak, gently helped her down, and then gracefully, gently, laid himself down on top of her.

Amanda marveled aloud at the way Christopher touched her. What he was doing, what it felt like—what she did not know it felt like. But it felt wonderful, she said, over and over. Amanda said a lot of things. In fact, she rendered a verbal narrative description of everything Christopher was doing to her—as he did it to her—as if it would help her to remember it all.

Amanda had never been touched that way before. Amanda had never been so much as kissed on the mouth before. Amanda was introduced to earthly delights beyond her comprehension. It wasn’t like Mr. Hammer’s mathematics—but it was very much like reading, she thought. It was taking her somewhere quite far away, somewhere quite different from the places she had been—inside of her? outside of her? where?—and she had the feeling that, yes, like reading, she would not fully understand it until she reached the end of what Christopher had to share with her.

They married three weeks after her graduation and moved to Florence. For two years Amanda and Christopher read and played and talked and dressed and drifted and reveled in Italy. They also spent hours making love.

At night, Christopher would go off alone to the cafés to think about his novel. Amanda preferred to stay home, reading and writing, playing records on the stereo, and acting out plays that had no beginnings and no endings….

Amanda’s first brush with reality struck when Christopher said he couldn’t have sex with her because he had herpes. Had what? Christopher took her to the doctor with him, where it was carefully explained to her that she was lucky not to have caught it. But what was it? How did one catch such a dreadful thing? Did it have something to do with the water here?

The doctor explained.

Christopher said it happened one night, late, when he was so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing. It would never happen again. And soon he would be well, he was sure, and then— “oh, darling, do you know what I’m going to do to you?”

On Christopher’s inspiration, the couple moved to New York City in 1978, renting an apartment on 73rd Street between Fifth and Madison avenues. Two weeks after they arrived, Amanda came home from registration at Columbia University to find a young man named Marco wandering around in her kitchen with a towel around his waist.

It took almost six months for it to penetrate, but Reality Part II visited Amanda. Christopher, by his own admission, was bisexual. For Amanda, this information did seem like Mr. Hammer’s mathematics. Not until Christopher persistently pounded it into her head was she able to glean what it was he was talking about. (“But I don’t understand, how can this be?” “It just is, Amanda.” “Is what?” “Like it is between you and me.” “But he’s not like me—how could it be like us?”)

Amanda took her furrowed brow to Columbia to concentrate on an MFA in their creative writing program. It didn’t work. With each passing day she and Christopher were splitting apart. Their sex life broke down completely and Amanda, for the first time in her life, felt terribly lonely. She stopped writing, she could scarcely read, she could not act out plays of any kind. After a while, not even the huge mirror of the wardrobe could evoke a line from her. Her costumes hung in the closets; her attire died into jeans, the denim growing looser, her blouses growing baggier. She dropped out of graduate school.

In 1979, Tinker and Reuben surprised the Gainses by arriving in New York to see them. (It was the first time they had actually made it.) The Millers were frightened by the change in their daughter. They were also stunned by Christopher, who, last time they had seen him, had not being sailing in and out of the house in silk pajamas. And there was something else—something Tinker had to talk about in private with Amanda.

Tinker didn’t mean to pry, but Nana’s lawyer, Mr. Osborne—did Amanda remember Mr. Osborne at the reading of the will? Amanda did—told her that the Gainses had spent some four hundred thousand dollars in the last eight months. Mr. Osborne—who only had Amanda’s best interests at heart—said three hundred and forty thousand of that money had flowed through Christopher. Did Amanda know that? Was, perhaps, Christopher starting a business?

When Amanda sank down in her chair and started playing with her hair, Tinker had called her husband in. Together, standing before her, holding hands, the Millers gently suggested to their daughter that she might want to see a doctor…perhaps she and Christopher together.

Christopher, no…but yes, Amanda would see the doctor.

Amanda had been in therapy for five months when she flew up to Syracuse for a visit. Her parents were encouraged by the change in her. (Though, they sighed in secret, she was not their Amanda anymore, was she?) There were papers to be signed with Mr. Osborne, money matters to be rearranged. Amanda wasn’t sure what all the papers meant (a Mr. Osborne was not of much value without a Mr. Hammer), but she agreed that it would be a good idea to curtail Christopher’s access to her money.

When Amanda came home—on that fateful Saturday evening—she found her home in a full-swing party, the majority of the guests being what are sometimes described as “screaming queens.” Her husband, Christopher, was the loudest. Wearing a little fig leaf. And in the dining room, among the bottles of booze and piles of joints, Amanda saw an array of pills and powders and needles and razors and a mirror, and a burner was scorching the finish off of Nana’s table and—

Amanda moved into the Plaza Hotel—where, she remembered, her earliest literary heroine, Eloise, lived—and asked Mr. Osborne to handle her divorce.

Amanda settled fifty thousand dollars on Christopher, though Mr. Osborne told her she certainly didn’t owe him a thing. Amanda thought she did though.

She bought the apartment on Riverside Drive at once. From the ground looking up, she thought her building looked like a castle. And her apartment, on the top floor, came complete with a tower room. She flew down to Baltimore, tagged furniture that was in storage from Fowles Farm, and had it shipped to her new home. In time, Amanda started riding in Central Park, and then her reading resumed, and her writing resumed, and then her talking to herself resumed. But the plays never came back, nor did her costumes ever leave the closet.

The idea of writing a novel from the perspective of Catherine the Great had originated in Florence. After having read and digested some three hundred tomes of Russian and European history over the years, in the fall of 1981 Amanda finally sat down and wrote the first line of the book. “I, Catherine, Imperial Empress of Russia, answer to no man.”

“He’s gone,” Rosanne said, coming back into the writing room. She stared at Amanda for a moment and then abruptly turned away. “Uh, ya better…”

Amanda was confused. But then she looked down at herself and saw the state of her dress, of her undress, of her half undress. She pulled the dress down over her thighs and smoothed it. She brushed back her hair with her hands and felt the absence of an earring. Amanda rubbed her face, dropped her hands and sat back against the window. She sighed. “I am utterly at a loss as to what to say to you—except, thank you.”

Exhibiting caution, Rosanne slowly brought her eyes back around. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. She swung her weight onto one leg and brought up her hand to the opposite hip. “Look, Amanda,” she said, looking down at the floor, “it’s none of my business—and it’s not none of Mrs. G’s either—” She looked up.

Amanda covered her mouth and coughed.

“Don’t get mad—”

Amanda crossed her arms over her chest, sighing.

“I think you’re great,” Rosanne said.

Amanda was looking confused again.

“And Mrs. G thinks so too, and we just kinda worry about ya. I mean, it’s not like we think anything’s wrong with that guy or nothin’,” she rushed on, “it’s just we wish you were a little happier.”

Amanda nodded slightly, lowering her eyes. “Thank you for your concern, Rosanne,” she murmured.

“You’re not mad or nothin’—vexed, are ya?”

Amanda raised her eyes, shaking her head. “Of course not,” she said.

“Okay then. Well, I better be goin’,” Rosanne said, moving toward the door. “Oh, man, I almost forgot to tell ya.” She spun around. “Amanda, I think Howie wants to read your book.”

Amanda blinked.

“Howie—you know, Mondays, Howard Stewart. The editor.” Rosanne waved her arm in the air to make sure Amanda was paying attention. “Listen, okay?”

“I’m listening,” Amanda said.

“Now don’t go gettin’ freaky, but he was really interested in your book. I told him it wasn’t finished or nothin’, and I told him it was kinda long—”

“Long,” Amanda repeated, looking at the shelves that were Catherine.

“So is it okay if he calls you or somethin’?”

Amanda looked at her, hesitating.

“He’s really the greatest guy,” Rosanne said. “Just talk to him, will ya? You know, like he’s an editor. And he won’t push ya about it, he isn’t pushy at all.” She nodded her head vigorously. “Just say yes, Amanda.”

Amanda lowered her arms to her sides, sighed and said, “Yes.”

“Great!” Rosanne said, leaving the room. “See ya next week!”

Amanda covered her face with her hands. I nearly had sex in front of the cleaning woman, she imagined herself saying to Dr. Vanderkeaton.

It had started with the apartment on Riverside Drive. This sex thing had. One man on Mondays and never one that she could even remotely like. For the last eight months it had been Roger, and Rosanne and Mrs. Goldblum had known about him only because Roger had forever been stopping in to try his luck. (“Mondays,” Amanda would hiss at the door, with Rosanne lurking dangerously close by, “I have told you repeatedly. Every other Monday at one o’clock.”

“Yesterday was Monday,” Roger would hiss back, trying to grab hold of her, “and I came back to finish up.” “Mrs. G told me to tell ya,” Rosanne would say, coming out into the foyer, “that she hopes you’ll invite your visitor to join you guys for tea.” And the confounded dolt had said, “Love to!” no less than six times.)

In the beginning, five years ago, it had worked. Sex had pushed something back into place for Amanda. After one of those Monday afternoons something would temporarily subside inside of her—that awful, gnawing sensation that her moorings were fraying to the snapping point. But, over time, it had stopped working that way, leaving Amanda only to agonize over what seemed like some sort of curse on her body. On her.

She still ran into Christopher on occasion. Once at F.A.O. Schwarz, once at Lincoln Center, twice on the terrace outside the Stanhope and, most recently, in the Whitney Museum. She had been alone; Christopher was never alone.

Each time she saw him—and most strongly this last time—Amanda felt weak at the sight of how unattractive he had become. His hair was thinning almost too fast to be normal; he had lost far too much weight; his muscle tone was gone; and his teeth showed nicotine stains when he smiled at her. His eyes, too, had lost their luster. And Christopher was losing his—his maleness, too.

Looking at him made Amanda feel queasy and disoriented. This was the man who had commanded such love and desire from her? This was her Christopher?

Amanda lowered her hands from her face and looked at the shelves of Catherine that made up one wall of the writing room. There was her work, yes. There was that. And maybe…maybe it was time to do something about it. What had Rosanne said? Something about an editor wanting to read it?

The thought made her feel cold and scared and so she banished it.

She walked over to the desk, sat down, and pulled the telephone toward her. She looked at it a moment, lifted the receiver, and pushed the button marked “in house.”

“Yes, Peter, is that you? It is Amanda Miller calling…. Fine, thank you, and you?…I’m very glad to hear it. Peter, the reason why I am calling is to say that under no circumstances is Mr. Slats to be granted entry into this building…. That is correct—don’t let him in…. Exactly. Not now, not ever.”