“Don’t be silly.”
The man on his left began talking to him loudly about the unseasonably hot weather in the south. And then the waiters were circling the table, pouring wine in everyone’s glass. Each held a bottle of white and a bottle of red.
Father Faulk asked for water. Natasha held her glass out and indicated that she wanted the red.
“When do you go back to Memphis?” she asked him.
“Probably tomorrow. I’ve been visiting my aunt Clara. She’s the senator’s mother-in-law.”
“Then maybe you’ll see Iris before I do,” Natasha said.
“Oh, well, in that case, I’ll remember you to her.”
The food was arriving. She felt a pull of nausea at the pit of her stomach. For months she had been miserable; and here, completely unforeseen, was something like light pouring in. And he would be gone tomorrow, and she would never see him again. She drank half her glass of wine, nearly gulping it. He was listening to the man go on about humidity. The man owned a bookshop in Leesburg, and business was slow. Finally he grew quiet; Faulk turned to her and asked how she liked the wine.
She held up the nearly empty glass. “Evidently too much.”
She was not thinking of him in a boy-girl way but simply as a possible friend. And she did not want him to go back to Tennessee. “You should have a glass,” she said.
“I think I will at that.” He signaled one of the servers.
“Is your aunt Clara here?”
“She was supposed to be — she knows this crowd pretty well, of course. But she developed a migraine this afternoon. She doesn’t get them often, but when she does they’re fairly incapacitating.”
The waiters were bringing the food. Two choices: a vegetable medley, with butternut squash and kale, or medallions of beef, with arugula salad, red potatoes soaked in olive oil and sprinkled with candied garlic. She asked for the beef, and he followed suit. Her glass had been refilled. He had a little wine, too, now.
“This is very jammy,” he said, with a slight smile.
She said, “Maybe too much so.”
2
Her parents were lost in the Meteor cruise ship fire near Vancouver in 1971, their remains sepulchered somewhere in the waters off that coast. The recitation of this history never failed to make her wish herself far away, and her grandmother still occasionally mentioned it as a reason that Natasha possessed such an old soul.
Natasha, in her early twenties, took to thinking of her own beginnings ironically. After all, it was just who she was. There seemed something faintly snobbish or even smug reporting the calamity to people like some sort of pedigree. But the accident was the dividing line of Iris’s life, so the fact of it would be mentioned in talk with new acquaintances, and often enough this would lead to Iris using the phrase “old soul,” meaning it in the best way, about her granddaughter. At times she would elaborate a little more, pointing to the watercolors Natasha did — depictions of faces from piles of photographs found in bins at antiques stores, families long gone, staring out in the light of those rainy-looking scenes.
Natasha felt like an old soul, all right, but not in the way Iris meant it. Through the past winter all the shifts of her mind and heart seemed frail and elderly to her, and she endured the purgatorial hours of each day, walking around in a haze of penitential worry about minutia, experiencing an immense lethargy and a recurring fearfulness. Fear of others, the sounds outside her apartment at night, the shadows in the cold streets when she walked home, all the possible harms of the world, and, most terrible, the fear that this darkness might last all her life. Night panics, dread wakefulness, fierce dreams when she could manage any sleep. During the days, nothing had any taste. Everything seemed dismally the same, the same. Her own thoughts oppressed her. The voices of others were demoralizing and dull. Friendships lapsed. The young women she had studied with in France and the group of friends and acquaintances she had made in Washington drifted to their own concerns, stopped calling or writing, acceding one by one to the silence. All but two: Marsha Trunan, a Paris friend with whom she had traveled in Italy and who was also from Memphis, and Constance Waverly, who lived in Maine now and was twenty years older than Natasha and sometimes treated her like a daughter. Marsha continued to call and leave messages, apparently having decided to ignore the difference between Natasha before and Natasha now. Marsha wanted to know what was wrong. Natasha kept insisting that nothing was wrong. She was overwhelmed with work. Just awfully busy. And this was partly true when you added to the daily responsibilities in the senator’s office the necessity of keeping up appearances.
Perhaps the thing that tormented her most was the banality of it alclass="underline" a squalid little cliché of betrayal and being the other woman. Surely regret was supposed to be reserved for mistakes on some grander scale than this — yet regret was what she felt, so deep that it sat under her heart, a physical ache.
She had thought he was the love of her life.
His name was Larry Mackenzie, a photographer she met through her job arranging appointments with journalists and news services for the senator.
She had spent almost a year sneaking in and out of hotels with him, and taking trips to other cities for false reasons, lying to everyone, including herself, holding on to the hope that he would leave his wife for her, end an unhappy marriage, a loveless disaster. He had described the misery in his house: a wife sinking into fanatical pursuit of the supernatural, believing in her ability to read minds and predict the future. Natasha had felt sorrow for his pain, mingled with desire that he stop talking about it and do what he kept saying he would do: find a way to make the civil arrangements. No one had to remain in a marriage he no longer wanted.
The day after Thanksgiving, she got a phone call from the wife.
Mrs. Mackenzie was confident and strong and spoke from a great height of scorn and moral superiority. She had confronted her delinquent husband with what she had known “for some time,” and he’d told her the whole story, had answered all her questions, being courageously forthright, explaining everything to her satisfaction. “I’ve already forgiven him,” she said. “As my faith dictates I should.”
What Mackenzie had done, it turned out, was convince the poor woman that Natasha was the instigator of the affair and was now stalking him.
Ugliness all around.
Natasha confided this to Constance Waverly, and Constance responded in a tone that expressed how sordid she thought it was.
Well, Constance was right — no use denying the fact.
There had followed a series of blurry evenings, of being out by herself in Adams Morgan and Georgetown — boozy hours and instances of dalliance with unknown men. She had stopped painting altogether, and she began to drink alone, in the predawn, in her apartment, often going to sleep drunk, half clothed, on top of the blankets of her bed. This desperation had slowly turned into the interior gloom and ache that had brought her to a doctor and a prescription for bupropion.
She confided in no one else. When she spoke to Iris on the telephone, it was their usual pleasant back and forth. When Iris asked about her plan of saving money to go back to France and spend a year putting together enough work for a show, she pretended that things were still on track. Senator Norland, who kept a proprietary interest in her and saw her nearly every day, was nevertheless too absorbed to notice that anything was wrong, and somehow she continued to keep up with her work. She had in fact gotten better at it, had buried herself in it.
But the days were long, and filled with dejection.