Harvesting the Heart (11 page)

Nicholas's
mouth traced its way down my body, leaving behind a hot line that
made me think of Lionel's scar. I moved beneath him. He had never
touched me like this. In fact, once the decision was made to be
married, Nicholas had done little more than kiss me and caress my
breasts. I tried to concentrate on what Nicholas must be thinking: if
it stuck in his mind that my body—which had a will of its
own—was not behaving in the shy, frightened manner of a virgin.
But Nicholas said nothing, and maybe he was used to this kind of
response.

He
had been touching me for so long and so well that when he stopped, it
took me a moment to notice, and then it was because of the terrifying
rush of cold air that came instead in his absence. I pulled him
closer, a hot human blanket. I was willing to do anything to keep
myself from shaking all over again. I clung to him as if I were
drowning, which I suppose I was.

When
his hands skittered over my thighs, I stiffened. I didn't mean for it
to happen, and of course Nicholas read it the wrong way, but the last
time I'd been touched there, there had been a doctor, and a clinic,
and a terrible tightening in my chest that I know now was emptiness.
Nicholas murmured something that I did not hear but that I felt
against my legs, and then he began to kiss the spaces in between his
fingers, and finally his mouth came over me like a whisper.

"They
said congratulations," Nicholas told me when he'd hung up the
phone after telling his parents about us. "They want us to come
out tomorrow night."

It
was clear to me after our first visit that Astrid Prescott liked me
about as much as she'd like a Hessian army overrunning her darkroom.
"They did not say that," I answered. "Tell me the
truth."

"That
is
the
truth," Nicholas admitted, "and that's what bothers
me."

We
drove to Brookline in near silence, and when we rang the doorbell
Astrid and Robert Prescott answered together. They were dressed
fashionably in shades of gray, and they had dimmed the lights in the
house. If I had not known better, I would have assumed I'd arrived at
a wake.

During
dinner, I kept waiting for something to happen. When Nicholas dropped
his fork, I jumped out of my seat. But there was no screaming, no
earth-shattering announcement. A maid served roast duck and
fiddleheads; Nicholas and his father talked about bluefishing off the
Cape. Astrid toasted our future, and we all lifted our glasses so
that the sun, still coming through the windows, splintered through
the twisted stems and littered the walls with rainbows. I spent the
main course being choked by the fear of the unknown, which lurked in
the corners of the dining room with the stale breath and slitted eyes
of a wolf. I spent dessert staring at the massive crystal chandelier
balanced above the lily centerpiece. It was suspended by a thin gold
chain, light as the hair of a fairy-tale princess, and I wondered
just what it could take before it broke.

Robert
led us into the parlor for coffee and brandy. Astrid made sure we all
had a glass. Nicholas sat beside me on a love seat and put his arm
over my shoulders. He leaned over and whispered to me that dinner had
gone so well he wouldn't be surprised if his parents now offered us a
huge, extravagant wedding. I knotted my hands in my lap, noticing the
small framed photos tucked in every spare inch of space in the
parlor—in the bookshelves, on the piano, even beneath the
chairs. All were photos of Nicholas, at different ages: Nicholas on a
tricycle, Nicholas's face turned up to the sky, Nicholas sitting on
the front steps with a ratty black puppy. I was trying so hard to see
these pieces of his life, the things I had missed, that I almost did
not hear Robert Prescott's question. "Just how old," he
said, "are you
really."

I
was caught off guard. I had been examining the ice-blue satin paper
on the walls, the overstuffed white wing chairs, and the Queen Anne
side tables, tastefully highlighted with antique vases and painted
copper boxes. Nicholas had told me that the portrait over the
fireplace, a Sargent which had held my interest, was not anyone he
knew. It wasn't the subject that had led his father to purchase it,
he said; it was the investment. I wondered how Astrid Prescott had
found the time to create a name for herself and a house that could
put a museum to shame. I wondered how a boy could possibly grow up in
a home where sliding down the banister or walking the dog on a yoyo
could unintentionally destroy hundreds of years of history.

"I'm
eighteen," I said evenly, thinking that in my house—
our
house—furniture
would be soft, with curved edges, colored bright to remind you you
were alive, and everything,
everything,
would
be replaceable.

"You
know, Paige," Astrid said, "eighteen is
such
an
age. Why, I didn't know what I really wanted to do with my life until
I was at least thirty-two."

Robert
stood and paced in front of the fireplace. He stopped directly
in the middle, blocking the face of the Sargent so that from where I
sat it seemed he was the painting's center, hideously larger than
life. "What my wife is trying to say is that of course you two
have the right to decide what you'd like—"

"We
already have," Nicholas pointed out.

"If
you please," Robert said, "just hear me out. You certainly
have the right to decide what you'd like out of life. But I wonder if
perhaps your thoughts have been clouded by faulty judgment. Now,
Paige, you've barely even lived. And Nicholas, you're still in
school. You can't support yourself yet, much less a family, and
that's to say nothing of the hours you'll spend doing your
residency." He came to stand in front of me and placed his hand,
cold, on my shoulder. "Surely Paige would prefer more than the
shadow of a husband."

"Paige
needs time to discover herself," Astrid said, as if I were not
in the room. "I know, believe me, that it's virtually impossible
to sustain a marriage when—"

"Mother,"
Nicholas interrupted. His lips were pressed together in a thin white
gash. "Cut to the chase," he said.

"Your
mother and I think you ought to wait," Robert Prescott said. "If
you still feel the same way in a few years, well, of course you'll
have our blessing."

Nicholas
stood up. He was two inches taller than his father, and when I saw
him like that my breath caught in my throat. "We're getting
married now," he said.

Astrid
cleared her throat and hit her diamond wedding band against the rim
of her glass. "This is so difficult to bring up," she said.
She looked away from us, this woman who had journeyed into the
Australian bush, who, armed only with a camera, had faced Bengal
tigers, who had slept in the desert beneath saguaros, searching out
the perfect sunrise. She looked away, and all of a sudden she changed
from the mythic photographer to the shadow of an aging debutante.

She
looked away, and that was when I knew what she was going to say.

Nicholas
stared past his mother. "Paige is not pregnant," he said,
and when Astrid sighed and sank back in the chair, Nicholas flinched
as if he had fielded a blow.

Robert
turned his back on his son and put his brandy snifter on the mantel
of the fireplace. "If you marry Paige," he said quietly, "I
will withdraw financial support for your education."

Nicholas
took a step backward, and I did the only thing I could: I stood up
beside him and gave him my weight to lean on. Across the room, Astrid
was looking blindly out the window into the night, as though she
would do anything in her power to avoid watching this scene. Robert
Prescott turned around. His eyes were tired, and in the corners were
the beginnings of tears. "I'm trying to keep you from ruining
your life," he said.

"Don't
do me any favors," Nicholas said, and he pulled me across the
room. He led me out of the house, leaving the door wide open behind
us.

When
we were outside, Nicholas started to run. He ran around the side of
the house into the backyard, past the white marble bird-bath, past
the trellised grape arbor, deep into the cool woods that edged his
parents' property. I found him sitting on a bed of dying pine
needles. His knees were drawn up, and his head was bent, as if the
air around him was too heavy to keep it upright. "Listen,"
I said. "Maybe you need to think this through."

It
killed me to say those words, to think that Nicholas Prescott might
disappear into his parents' million-dollar house and wave goodbye
and leave my life what it used to be. I had come to the point where I
truly did not think I could exist without Nicholas. When he was not
around, I spent my time imagining him with me. I depended on him to
tell me the dates of upcoming holidays, to make sure I got home from
work safely, to fill my free time till I felt I would burst. It
seemed so easy to blend into his life that at times I wondered if I
had been anyone at all before I met him.

"I
don't need to think this through," Nicholas said. "We're
getting married."

"And
I suppose Harvard is going to keep you on because you're God's gift
to medicine?"

I
realized after I said it that it was not phrased the way it should
have been. Nicholas looked up as if I had slapped him. "I could
drop out," he said, turning the words over like he was speaking
a foreign language.

But
I would not spend the rest of my life married to a man who, at least
a little, hated me because he never got to be what he had wanted. I
didn't love Nicholas because he was going to be a doctor, but I did
love him because he was, unquestionably, the best. And Nicholas
wouldn't have been Nicholas if he had to compromise. "Maybe
there's a dean you can talk to," I said softly. "Not
everyone at Harvard is made of money. They've got to have
scholarships and student aid. And next year, between your salary as a
resident and mine at Mercy, we could make ends meet. I could get a
second job. We could take out a loan based on your future income."

Nicholas
pulled me down beside him on the pine needles and held me. In the
distance I heard a blue jay trill. Nicholas had taught me, a city
girl, these things: the differences between the songs of blue jays
and starlings, the way to start a fire with birch bark, the humming
sound of a faraway flock of geese. I felt Nicholas's chest shake with
every breath. I made a mental list of the people we would have to
contact tomorrow to figure out our finances, but I felt confident. I
could put off my own future for a while; after all, art school would
always be there, and you could very well be an artist without ever
having attended one. Besides, some part of me believed that I was
getting something just as good. Nicholas loved me; Nicholas had
chosen to stay with me. "I will work for you," I whispered
to him, and even as I said it I had the dark thought of the Old
Testament, of Jacob, who labored seven years for Rachel and still did
not get what he wanted.

I
was going to lose control. Nicholas's hands and heat and voice were
everywhere. My fingers traveled up his arms, across his back, willing
him to come to me. He moved my legs apart and set himself in the
middle of them, and I remembered how I was supposed to act. Nicholas
kissed me, and then he was moving inside me, and my eyes flew open.
He was all that I could see, Nicholas spread across this space and
filling, completely, my sky.

"I'd
like to make a collect call," I told the operator. I was
whispering although Nicholas was nowhere nearby. We were
supposed to meet at the office of the justice of the peace in twenty
minutes, but I told him I had to run an errand for Lionel. I was
trying not to touch the grimy glass of the booth with my good pink
suit. I tapped the edge of the pay phone with my finger. "Say
it's Paige."