Harvesting the Heart (16 page)

Minutes
before Nicholas left the hospital for the night, Fogerty called him
to his office. He was sitting behind the mahogany desk, his face
shadowed by the slatted vertical blinds. He did not motion for
Nicholas to enter, did not even lift his head from the paper he was
writing upon. "You couldn't have done a thing," he said.

Nicholas
pulled on his jacket and wandered toward his car in the parking
garage, wondering if he'd ever be given a bypass to do again. He
searched his memory to find something he'd overlooked, a torn
capillary or an additional blockage, something Fogerty smugly hadn't
mentioned after the operation that day, something that might have
saved the guy. He pictured the still amber eyes of Serena LeBeauf's
youngest son, mirrors of what her own used to be like. He thought
about the Navajo Hand Trembler and wondered what potions and
blessings and magic decrees might fall between the cracks of common
knowledge.

When
he turned the key in the apartment door, Paige was sitting on the
floor of the living room, stringing cranberries on black thread. The
television had been moved to make room for an enormous blue spruce,
thick at the middle, which swelled across half of the little room.
"We don't really have any ornaments," she said, and then
she looked up and saw him.

Nicholas
had not gone straight home. He'd headed into Cambridge, to a
seedy bar, where he'd had six straight shots of Jack Daniel's and two
Heinekens. He'd bought a bottle of J & B from the bartender and
driven home with it by his side, swilling at the stoplights,
almost hoping he'd get caught.

"Oh,
Nicholas," Paige said. She came to stand in front of him, and
she put her arms around him. Her hands were sticky with tar, and he
wondered how she'd managed to get that enormous thing into the wobbly
tree stand all by herself. Nicholas stared down at her white face,
the thin brass hoops dangling from her earlobes. He hadn't even known
it was near Christmas.

He
seemed to fall forward at the same moment Paige put her arms around
him. Staggering under his weight, she helped him sit on the floor,
knocking over the bowl of cranberries. Nicholas crushed some as he
sat, grinding them into the cheap yellow throw rug, a stain that
looked suspiciously like blood. Paige knelt beside him, moving her
fingers through his hair, telling him softly it was all right. "You
can't save them all," she whispered.

Nicholas
gazed up at her. He saw, swimming, the planes of an angel's face, the
spirit of a lion. He wanted to make it all go away, everything else,
to just cling to Paige until the days ran into each other. He dropped
the bottle of J & B and watched it roll with a shudder under the
fragrant skirt of Paige's naked Christmas tree. He pulled his wife
toward him. "No," he said. He breathed in the quiet clean
of her as though it were oxygen. "I can't."

^chapter
7

Paige

hospital
last night, and he'd had a triple bypass and an emergency surgery
during the day, so he hadn't had time to phone. I hadn't been sure
he'd remember the fund-raising dinner. I'd dressed and gone
downstairs, watching the clock move closer to six, and as usual I
waited in silence, impatient for Nicholas to get home.

I
hated our house. It was a little place with a nice yard in a very
prestigious pocket of Cambridge—one with an awful lot of
lawyers and doctors. When we first saw the neighborhood, I had
laughed and said the streets must be paved with old money, which
Nicholas did not find very funny. Despite everything, I knew that in
his heart Nicholas still
felt
rich.
He'd been wealthy too long to change now. And according to Nicholas,
if you were rich—or if you
wanted
to
be—you lived a certain way.

Which
meant that we'd taken out a large mortgage in spite of the fact that
we had tremendous loans from medical school to repay. Nicholas's
parents had never come back groveling, as I knew he'd hoped they
would. Once, they had sent a polite Christmas card, but Nicholas
never filled me in on the details and I didn't know if he was
protecting my feelings or his own. But in spite of the Prescotts, we
were working our way back into the black. With Nicholas's salary—a
finally respectable $38,000—we had started to make a dent in
the interest we owed. I wanted to save a little just in case, but
Nicholas insisted that we were going to have more than we needed. All
I had wanted was a little apartment, but Nicholas kept talking about
building equity. And so we bought a house beyond our means, one that
Nicholas believed would be his ticket toward becoming chief of
cardiothoracic surgery.

Nicholas
was never at the house, and he probably knew when we bought the place
that he wouldn't be, but he insisted on having it decorated a certain
way. We had almost no furniture, because we couldn't afford it, but
Nicholas said it just made the place look Scandinavian. The
entire house was the color of skin. Not beige and not pink, but that
strange pale in-between. The wall-to-wall carpeting matched the
wallpaper, which matched the shelving and the track of recessed
lighting. The only exception was the kitchen, which was painted a
color called Barely White. I don't know who the decorator thought she
was kidding; it most certainly
was
white—white
tiles, white Corian counters, white marble floor, white pickled wood.
"White is in," Nicholas had told me. He'd seen white
leather couches and white carpets like spilled foam all over the
mansions of doctors he worked with. I gave in. After all, Nicholas
knew about this kind of life; I didn't. I didn't mention how dirty I
felt sitting in my own living room; or how I stuck out like a sore
thumb. I didn't tell him how I thought the kitchen was just crying
out to be colored in, and how sometimes, while chopping carrots and
celery in that seamless room, I wished for an accident—some
splash of blood or stripe of grime that would let me know I'd left my
mark.

I
was wearing red to the hospital benefit, and both Nicholas and I
seemed starkly drawn against the fading beige lines of the bedroom.
"You should wear red more often," he said, running his hand
over the bare curve of my shoulder.

"The
nuns used to tell us never to wear red," I said absentmind-edly.
"Red attracts boys."

Nicholas
laughed. "Let's go," he said, pulling my hand. "Fogerty's
going to be counting every minute I'm late."

I
didn't care about Alistair Fogerty, Nicholas's attending physician
and, according to Nicholas, the son of God himself. I didn't care
about missing the sumptuous shrimp fountain at the cocktail hour. If
the choice had been mine, I wouldn't have gone. I didn't like
mingling with the surgeons and their wives. I had nothing to
contribute, so I didn't see why I had to be there at all.
"Paige," Nicholas said, "come
on.
You
look
fine."
When
I married Nicholas, I truly believed—like a fool—that I
had him and he had me and it was plenty. Maybe it would have been if
Nicholas didn't move in the circles he did. The better Nicholas
became at his job, the more I was confronted with people and
situations I didn't understand: jacket-and-tie dinners at
someone's home; drunk divorcees leaving hotel keys in Nicholas's
tuxedo pockets; prying questions about the background I'd worked so
hard to forget. I was not nearly as smart as these people, not nearly
as savvy; I never got their jokes. I went, I mingled, because of
Nicholas, but he knew as well as I did that we had been kidding
ourselves, that I would never fit in.

When
we had been married for a couple of years, I tried to do something
about it. I applied to Harvard's Extension School and signed up for
two night courses. I picked architecture for me and intro to lit for
Nicholas. I figured that if I knew Hemingway from Chaucer and Byron,
I'd be able to follow the subtle artsy references that Nicholas's
friends batted across dinner conversations like Ping-Pong balls. But
I couldn't do it. I couldn't stay on my feet all day at Mercy and
have dinner ready for Nicholas and still have time to read about
rococo ceilings and J. Alfred Prufrock. I was scared of my
professors, who spoke so quickly they might as well have been
lecturing in Swedish.

Most
of my classmates dabbled in schooling; nearly all had already
graduated from somewhere. They didn't have a future at stake, like
me. I realized that at the rate I could afford to take courses, it
would take nine years for me to get a college degree. I never told
Nicholas, but I got an F on the only paper I ever wrote for one of
those courses. I can't remember if it was architecture or lit, but I
will never forget the professor's comments:
Buried
somewhere in this muck,
he
had written,
you
do have some qualified ideas. Find your voice, Ms. Prescott.
Find
your voice.

I
had made some excuse to Nicholas and dropped out. To punish myself
for being a failure, I took on a second job, as if working twice as
hard could make me forget just how different my life had turned out
from what I had imagined as a child.

But
I had Nicholas. And that meant more than all the college degrees, all
the RISD courses in the world. I hadn't changed much in seven
years—and I had no one to blame for that but myself—but
Nicholas was very different. For a minute, I looked up at my husband
and tried to picture what he'd been like back then. His hair had been
thicker, and there wasn't the gray that was coming in now, and the
lines around his mouth weren't as deep. But the biggest changes were
in his eyes. There were shadows there. Once Nicholas had told me that
when he watched a patient die, a little piece of him went as well,
and that he'd have to work on that, or one day when he was close to
retirement he'd have nothing left at all.

Mass
General had been having a Halloween ball at the Copley Plaza for
ages, although about ten years earlier, costumes had been traded for
formal wear. I was sorry about that. I would have given anything for
a disguise. Once, when Nicholas was a general surgical resident, we
had gone to a costume party at the medical school. I had wanted to be
Antony and Cleopatra, or Cinderella and Prince Charming. "No
tights," Nicholas had said. "I wouldn't be caught dead."
In the end we had gone as a clothesline. Each of us wore a brown
shirt and pants, and stretched between our necks was a long white
cord, pinned with boxer shorts, stockings, bras. I loved that
costume. We were literally tied together. Everywhere Nicholas went, I
had followed.

On
the drive into Boston, Nicholas quizzed me. "David Goldman's
wife," he'd say, and I'd answer,
Arlene.
"Fritz
van der Hoff?"
Bridget.
"Alan
Masterson," Nicholas said, and I told him that was a trick
question, since Alan had been divorced the previous year.