Before, During, After Page 5

  She pressed herself against him, looked up, touched his cheek, and kissed him. It was a long, exquisite kiss. Then she gazed into his eyes and murmured, “ ‘What seest thou …?’ ”

  “I want to marry you and have a family and raise a bunch of kids,” he said.

  “Yes. The answer’s yes.”

  “But I’m a little worried.”

  “People will find things to say anyway.”

  “Then it doesn’t bother you,” he said. “Sixteen years.”

  She kissed him. “Does that answer your question?”

  “It answers everything in my life. When do you want to?”

  “In Memphis—in September. After I get back from Jamaica. Something small. Very few people. I don’t want a big deal.”

  “Can I say the words?”

  She smiled.

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes.”

  They stood close, gazing at the country below and around them, and then others came rushing up the hill out of the cut path, children with older boys and girls, teenagers showing off for one another. Natasha looked at them with that sense of pity a lover feels for the less fortunate of her kind.

  4

  In mid-August, she gave notice that she would leave her job with Senator Norland and return to Memphis. Iris had suffered a fall and hurt her knee and had required surgery. She was healing slowly. Natasha was needed at home. This was the truth but, of course, not the whole truth.

  She and Faulk had not announced their plans to marry yet; she was keeping to her determination not to divulge anything at work about her personal life. Since the first days of the affair with Mackenzie, she had maintained a strict rule about it.

  She had kept the present news even from Iris until the second week of May.

  Faulk came to Washington every other weekend through the summer months, and they traveled to the Maryland and Virginia beaches or visited with Aunt Clara and Uncle Jack and sometimes Marsha Trunan, too. It was a splendid summer, full of laughter and wide-ranging talk and long walks on the shady streets of the city. They went sailing off Annapolis and picnicking at Great Falls, and they visited the galleries and saw concerts and went to restaurants, and it was as though she were recovering something lost, that adventurous young someone she remembered.

  On the muggy, oven-hot afternoon of her last day at work, Senator Norland tried to talk her into remaining in Washington. She could consider this a long vacation. She listened politely to him, sure now that Faulk had done as she asked and kept it to himself: the senator would not be talking to her about staying if he knew why she had resigned. She was going home and taking her private life with her.

  Anyhow, that was how it felt.

  The air conditioner whirred in one window, and the other was foggy with inside moisture. She experienced a moment of disorientation, pretending to consider his words. He emphasized that she could come back anytime. He stood over her with arms folded. On his desk were photographs of him with Greta, and Clara and Jack, too, and his own parents—two very jolly-looking people standing on a porch. The wall was festooned with framed photographs of him with presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton, and there was a letter wishing him well on his reelection signed by the current president. But no picture of the senator with him. Tom Norland had fought hard to keep George W. from being given the office by the Supreme Court, and he had been outspoken in his criticism of the whole affair. Natasha had typed some of the letters and had contributed wording for them, too.

  But she had never wanted to be the person people saw her as being, in that office. The work interested her, but she had no enthusiasm for wearing the smart little business outfits and the jewelry; never wanted to be the type—with no strand of hair out of place, the senator’s administrative person, the one everyone depended on for practical matters, and about whom they all made easy assumptions, without any inkling of the nights she had spent in other parts of the city. Even before the affair, their picture of her was far from who she really was, sitting in that fluorescent light behind the desk while her thoughts turned on places she had wandered before she was twenty-five years old: Paris and the Loire Valley; Nice and Florence and Rome; Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, and Africa. From her earliest conscious life she had experienced the sense of being held back by her own skin and bones, confined in space. This feeling had carried her across the world.

  Now, with Michael Faulk, she was full of the old thrilling sense of freshness, on the verge of a new life, and in this last week of work the days crawled, reminding her of the tremendous unhappiness she had endured here. She and her new husband would spend next spring in the south of France. It would indeed be like getting her twenties back.

  When she lived in Provence, she went on day trips, biking the roads lined with plane trees and walking the paths above the sea at Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Her thoughts about it were delectable. She could be in those places again, and with the time to take it all in, and to paint. She was beginning to believe she might manage to do something consequential, something people might remember. The idea delighted her, though she recognized that just now, since she had not painted anything in many months, it was a form of daydreaming. But she would work to realize it. She felt the resolve like a rush of adrenaline. Life was gorgeous; she would make it so.

  Working for the senator, with the daily requirements and the little satisfactions of being on the inside, all that was over now, and she felt detached from it and from the thin, stooped, gaunt man who stood before her, talking. His face was blue veined from the years of alcoholism. He wore a lapel pin with the word HOPE on it. He was a humorous, decent, quiet man whose voice, when he was serious, had a way of making her feel drowsy. “None of this is getting through to you, is it.” He grinned. It was not a question.

  “I’m flattered that you’ve taken the time,” she said. “I really am—and I’m grateful. It’s been a wonderful adventure, Washington.” Though in some important ways this was true, she still felt as if she had said something deceitful.

  “Well, I couldn’t let you go without at least expressing what I hope you’ll take as my friendly concern.”

  “I do. I have.”

  “And you’re sure I can’t give you some money to tide you over until you find something out there.”

  “No, really. I’m fine. I’ve actually saved some. You’ve already done more than you should.”

  “Ah. It doesn’t amount to much.” He had made the arrangements with the storage company and the movers, thinking they were for Natasha alone. All her belongings, which as of that morning were in a storage bin on Georgia Avenue, would, the week of September 10, be headed by truck back to Tennessee.

  She rose from her chair and offered a handshake. “Thank you so much for everything. And thank Greta for always being so kind.” They embraced, and that was that.

  She would spend the time with Constance Waverly in Jamaica, then join Faulk in Memphis on the twelfth (they had joked about how it would be their own Twelfth Night).

  Jamaica was the vacation Constance had offered her in the unhappiness of last winter. People were so kind. She walked along Pennsylvania Avenue in the bright sun and looked at the faces, everyone showing consideration, negotiating the traffic without stopping to realize what a fine thing it was, this organized hurry and bustle of a summer afternoon.

  Back at her empty apartment, the phone had not been cut off yet, and she called Faulk to tell him about her conversation with Norland.

  “Did you tell him the news?”

  “Yes. I just said.”

  “About us, sweetheart.”

  “Oh, well, he was so kind about storage and the movers, I—I just couldn’t do it. I mean, he wanted me to know I could consider this a long break.”

  “Well, of course marriage is such a deeply embarrassing thing to have to go through.”

  “Stop it, Michael. I can’t help how I feel about it. I didn’t want my private life bandied about in the halls of that place. You knew that. Aunt Clar
a will say something to him anyway.”

  “No, she won’t. It’s our business.”

  “Well, exactly,” Natasha said.

  He sighed, and she sighed back at him.

  “Are we having a fight?” she said.

  “I hope you have fun in Jamaica,” he told her.

  “Do you want me not to go? Because I’m going.”

  “Go.”

  “Bye,” she said, and hung up.

  Out the window, sun blazed on the façades across the street and the people strolling by, the cars gliding past. She turned and looked at the empty rooms and then walked through them one more time, pausing in the bedroom, that small space where they had first made love. It looked barren now with its faded places on the walls where the pictures had hung.

  5

  She had met Constance in Nice while working as an au pair for the liquor wholesaler and his wife and their two overindulged children, a girl and boy only eighteen months apart. The six-year-old, the girl, was verbally quite advanced and already showing signs of a fundamental dishonesty, and she had been giving Natasha a hard time. Her name was Elga. The couple was from Utrecht, but they spoke perfect French and English, and Constance, back when she lived in England, had purchased art from the wife, who was a ceramist. Natasha was introduced—the lady of the house took some pleasure speaking of her young American servant, or so it seemed to Natasha—and in the polite talk that followed, Constance said she had spent time in Tennessee and still had a small house in East Memphis, which she was trying to sell. Memphis remained the subject of their conversation, in English, while Natasha tried to keep Elga from taunting the boy. A moment later, when the Dutch couple had gone to prepare snacks, Constance murmured that the pretty children were decidedly not pretty when considered from the inside. “Selfish, spoiled little buggers, if you ask me,” she said, and the mild obscenity made Natasha laugh. It became a jag. Constance got lost in it, too, both of them unable to speak to the Dutch couple, who waited impatiently for them to subside.

  The increasing awkwardness fed the laughter, of course, and it also made them friends.

  They saw each other several times that week and kept the connection, though Constance was perpetually moving back and forth from one city to another. Through the six years Natasha was living in D.C., the older woman spent periods of a week or two at a time in the city, really only to see Natasha.

  The bond was complex. At times Constance exhibited a form of intolerance for Natasha’s other friends, little asides in conversations, a certain tone when speaking about them, often preceding the name with the word that.

  She would say “That George” or “That Marsha” or “That Kelly,” like a schoolteacher discussing unmanageable students, and she could be critical regarding Natasha’s history—seeing herself as a kind of arbiter, especially concerning the younger woman’s relations with men. Her disapproval about the affair with the photographer had been both unsurprising and at the same time intensely dispiriting.

  Indeed, they didn’t speak for several weeks after Natasha told her about it. Constance sent vaguely petulant notes wondering who was in Natasha’s life now. It was almost as if she wanted Natasha only for herself. She had a grown daughter with whom she didn’t get along very well, and on occasion Natasha wondered if the other saw her as a kind of surrogate.

  So she worried some about the Jamaica trip.

  Constance’s money was from her father’s side of the family. The old man had bought a four-mile strip of shoreline that nobody wanted near Pensacola, and in his last years he often talked about this one lucky chance of his: buying a piece of swampy lowland property that he ended up selling, acre by acre, to the hotel chains. Constance herself was in possession of a large house in Malibu, where her daughter lived alone, and a condominium in Manhattan overlooking Central Park. She was renting that to a city official. She now lived temporarily in an apartment near Old Orchard Beach, on Maine’s southern coast, where she was having a house custom-built for herself. Jamaica was a yearly trip for her.

  That afternoon on the last day of August, Natasha left her apartment for good and headed for National Airport. While waiting for her flight, she called Faulk to apologize for her sharpness earlier.

  “I’m happy about us,” he said. “And I want people to know it.”

  “But it really wouldn’t have been the right time to say anything, Michael. I think it would’ve made the poor man feel silly after all his talk about my career in politics.”

  “He’s going to feel silly anyway, when he knows.”

  “Well, just tell him I didn’t have the courage or something like that. In a way I didn’t have the courage.”

  Faulk’s sigh this time was not pronounced, nor intended to be anything but itself. “You have fun, darling,” he said. There was so much he did not know about her, and just now it made her anxious.

  “I’ll call you each day,” she said.

  “You don’t have to do that. Just be careful.”

  “I will. You, too.” He would fly to Washington at the end of next week and then take a train to New York on Monday for the wedding of a family friend. How strange, he had said, to know that he would not be the one conducting the ceremony.

  “I’ll only be in town the one night,” he said. “But the wedding’s in the afternoon, and since it’s down where the World Trade Center is, I just might go in the morning and have a look at the city from one of the towers. Be fun to get breakfast a hundred floors up.”

  “I have to call Iris now.”

  “I’ll look in on her before I go. And I guess I’ll have to try like hell not to see Tom Norland when I get to D.C.”

  “Michael.”

  “I’m taking an Amtrak express up to New York Monday, to make the rehearsal dinner. Dad and Trixie will arrive around two in the afternoon. The wedding’s midday Tuesday, so I’ll be back in Washington late that night.”

  “I’ll call you from paradise,” Natasha said.

  “Be careful in those waves. Promise?”

  She promised. Then: “And you don’t go dancing in the clubs down in the Village.”

  “Not much of that on Monday night, with two elderly people in tow. Anyway, there’s no riptides down there. I’m going to be with Dad, Trixie, and the wonderful Ruhms of Brooklyn, New York, very generous but devoutly conservative Christians. We’ll be downtown. Rehearsal dinner Monday evening, wedding and reception the following noon, with the real possibility that all of it will have to be endured in the absence of anything but fruit punch to drink because the groom’s elderly old aunt Linda gets upset at the sight of anything stronger. Probably won’t be any dancing, either. Maybe just a couple pictures of the city from high up.”

  “I’ll miss you,” she said. “Even being in paradise.”

  After they hung up, she sat in a small airport café, drinking coffee, feeling strangely bereft. It would be good to see Constance, in spite of the older woman’s occasional tendency to be magisterial.

  Poor Constance was like that with her grown child as well, and it was the reason the daughter wasn’t coming to Jamaica and Natasha was. The daughter, against her mother’s wishes, had purchased an antiques store in Malibu, using money given her upon graduation, last June, from law school at Yale.

  The two were scarcely speaking.

  Natasha thought about being with Constance in the middle of this complication.

  Out the window to her left, beyond the line of planes at their gates, she saw the Washington Monument, small in the distance, with two stripes of shadow on it, the shadows moving up and dissolving in sunlight. She reflected that she would not miss this city as much as she had thought she might when she first started thinking of leaving it. Well, she was about to enter a whole new life, a different way of being in the world. The wife of an ex-priest. She sighed, thinking of it. “Help,” she said, low, under her breath. It was as close as she ever got to prayer. She started to order another coffee but then thought better of it and asked for hot wate
r instead. She sipped that, warming herself from the inside. And she called Marsha Trunan. There was only Marsha’s voice: “You know what to do after the beep.”

  “I’m at the airport. Getting ready to fly down and see Constance. Be back in Memphis in a couple of weeks. I’ll call you from there. I’m sorry I’ve been so stupid about spending time. I’ll do better.” She broke the connection and felt suddenly so sad that she had to fight back tears. She went to the bar and ordered a whiskey and tossed it back, standing there.

  The bartender was a tall round-faced man with arching bushy eyebrows and dark red lips. He stared.

  “Flight nerves,” she told him, picking up her bag.

  The plane was boarding.

  In Jamaica—happily absorbed by the fresh charms of the place, the lovely aqua-colored waters of the Caribbean out her window, and the soft tropical evenings spent in surprisingly relaxed chatter, drinking cool rum cocktails and eating wonderful spicy meals of jerk chicken and ackee with salt fish—she realized again how pervasive her unhappiness had been, and she remembered reading somewhere that the most terrifying thing about despair was that it was unaware of itself as being despair.

  The resort was near Kingston, a complex of bungalows ranged around a single hotel-sized building that stood like a sandy-colored fortress above the beach. It was all owned by an elderly German woman named Maria Ratzibungen and her two sons, each from a different father—the older from an industrialist named Dieter Ratzibungen, and the younger from a lover of Maria’s as her marriage was ending. This man had tried suicide when he couldn’t have her and had ended by deranging himself with years of drinking, living on the island within sight of her and his growing son. He was still a figure in their lives, surfacing now and then, looking like someone who had come to the island from a shipwreck. His name was Lawton. Constance had pressed Mrs. Ratzibungen to tell the story on the night she and Natasha arrived. Mrs. Ratzibungen and Constance were friends from Constance’s earlier visits. Neither of the German woman’s sons seemed to have any other family. They were both in their forties and looked like twins, though they were separated by four years. Their mother’s speech was pleasantly accented, but they spoke impeccable English, having been raised among relatives of their grandparents in London—German Jews on their mother’s side who’d had cousins in Manchester and had fled to England in 1934. The older one was forty-eight and went by the nickname Ratzi. Neither Constance nor Natasha saw Ratzi’s brother after their first day on the island.