Harvesting the Heart (22 page)

"That's
only true through the first trimester," Nicholas had said.
"You're almost five months along."

And
Paige had turned on him. "I know that," she said. "I'm
not
stupid."

"I
didn't say you were stupid," Nicholas said gently. "I said
you were
pregnant."

He
drove home quickly, hoping Paige had remembered this dinner
party even if he hadn't. She'd have to, after the way they'd fought
over it. Paige insisted the house was too small, that she couldn't
cook anything worthy of a dinner party, that they didn't have fine
china and crystal. "Who cares?" Nicholas had said. "Maybe
they'll feel bad and give me more money."

He
opened the back door and found his wife sitting on the kitchen floor.
She wore an old shirt of his and a pair of his pants rolled to the
knee. She held a bottle of Drano in one hand and a glass in the
other, ringed brown. "Don't do it," Nicholas said,
grinning. "Or if you do, wouldn't sleeping pills be more
pleasant?"

Paige
sighed and put the glass down on the floor. "Very funny,"
she said. "Do you know what this means?"

Nicholas
pulled open his tie. "That you don't want to have a dinner
party?"

Paige
held up her hand and let Nicholas pull her to her feet. "That
it's a boy."

Nicholas
shrugged. The ultrasound had said the same thing; the waitresses at
Mercy said she was carrying out in front, the way you carry a boy.
Even the old wives' tale had confirmed it—the wedding ring
dangling from a string had moved back and forth. "Drano
probably isn't the definitive test," he said.

Paige
went to the refrigerator and began pulling out trays of food covered
by aluminum foil. "You pee into a cup, and then you add two
tablespoons of Drano," she said. "It's like ninety percent
foolproof. The Drano people have even written to
ob/gyns
,
asking them to tell their patients this is not a recommended use for
their product." She closed the door and leaned against it, her
hands pressed against her forehead. "I'm having a boy," she
said.

Nicholas
knew that Paige did not want a boy. Well, she wouldn't admit it, at
least not to him, but it was as if she just assumed that being the
kind of person she was, it was impossible for her to be carrying
anything other than a tiny replica of herself. "Now, really,"
Nicholas said, putting his hands on her shoulders, "would a boy
really be so awful?"

"Can
I still name him after my mother?"

"It
would be hard," Nicholas said, "to be the only boy in first
grade named May."

Paige
gave him a smug look and picked up two of her platters.

She
stuffed one into the oven and took the other into the living room,
which had been turned into a dining room for the night. The tiny
kitchen table was bolstered on both sides by card tables, and every
chair in the house had been dragged into service. Instead of their
usual dishes and glassware, there were ten places set with bright
dinner plates, each one different and each with a matching
glass. Painted on the surfaces were simple, fluid line drawings of
diving porpoises, glacial mountains, turbaned elephants, Eskimo
women. Curled in
the
glasses
were paper napkins, each fanned in a different shade of
the
rainbow.
The table spilled with color: vermilion and mango, bright yellow and
violet. Paige looked uneasily at Nicholas. "It's not quite
Limoges, is it," she said. "I figured that since we only
have service for eight, this would be better than two place settings
that looked entirely wrong. I went to the secondhand stores in
Allston and picked up the plates and glasses, and I painted them
myself." Paige reached for a napkin and straightened its edge.
"Maybe instead of saying we're poor, they'll say we're funky."

Nicholas
thought of the dinner tables he'd grown up with: the cool white china
from his mother's family rimmed in gold and blue; the crystal
Baccarat goblets with their twisted stems. He thought of his
colleagues. "Maybe," he said.

The
Fogertys were the first to arrive. "Joan," Nicholas said,
taking both of Alistair's wife's hands, "you look lovely."
Actually, Joan looked as though she'd had a run-in at Quincy Market:
her tailored suit was a silk print of larger-than-life cherries and
bananas and kiwis; her shoes and her earrings sported clusters of
purple clay grapes. "Alistair," Nicholas said,
nodding. He looked over his shoulder, waiting for Paige to arrive and
take over the role of hostess.

She
stepped into the room then, his wife: a little pale, even swaying,
but still beautiful. Her hair had become thick during pregnancy and
covered her shoulders like a shining, dark shawl. Her blue silk
blouse curved over her back and her breasts and then billowed, so
that only Nicholas would know that beneath it, her black trousers
were secured with a safety pin. Joan Fogerty flew to Paige's side and
pressed her hand against her belly. "Why, you're not even
showing!" Joan exclaimed, and Paige looked up at Nicholas,
furious.

Nicholas
smiled at her and shrugged:
What
could I do?
He
waited until Paige lowered her gaze, and then he led Alistair into
the living room, apologizing for the lack of space.

Paige
served dinner to the Fogertys, the Russos, the van Lindens, and the
Walkers. She had prepared Lionel's secret recipes: split-pea soup,
roast beef, new potatoes, and glazed carrots. Nicholas watched her
move from guest to guest, talking softly as she replenished the
plates with spinach salad. Nicholas knew his wife well. She hoped
that if she kept the plates full, no one would remember that they
weren't a matched set.

Paige
was in the kitchen, getting together the main course, when Renee
Russo and Gloria Walker ducked their heads together and began to
whisper. Nicholas was in the middle of a discussion with Alistair
about immunosuppressive drugs and their effect on transplanted
tissue, but he was listening to the wives with half an ear. After
all, this was his home. Whatever transpired at his first dinner party
could make or break him in the political ranks of the hospital as
much as a brilliant piece of research. "I bet," Renee said,
"she paid a fortune for these."

Gloria
nodded. "I saw almost the same thing in The Gifted Hand."

Nicholas
did not see Paige enter the room behind him, frozen by the gossip.
"It's the
in
thing,"
Gloria added, "crayon drawings that look like they were done by
monkeys, and then someone has the gall to sell them as original art."
Gloria saw Paige standing in the doorway and offered a tight smile.
"Why, Paige," she said, "we were just admiring
your dishes."

And
just like that, Paige dropped the roast beef so that it rolled onto
the pale beige carpet, steeped in a pool of its own blood.

The
year that Nicholas was seven, his parents did
not
split
up. In fact, just a week after the Red Sox game, Nicholas's life—and
that of his parents—miraculously moved back on track. For three
days Nicholas ate by himself at the kitchen table while his father
drank Dewar's in the library and his mother hid in the darkroom. He
walked through the halls only to hear the echo of his own footsteps.
The fourth day, he heard banging and sawing in the basement, and he
knew his mother was making a frame. She had done it before when she
mounted her originals, like the famous Endangered exhibit, which hung
at odd intervals in the hallway and up the staircase. She said she
wouldn't trust her prints to some crackpot frame store, and so she
bought her own wood, nails, and matting. Nicholas sat at the foot of
the main staircase for hours, rolling a basketball over his bare
toes, knowing he wasn't allowed to have a basketball in the house and
wishing someone were around to tell him that.

When
his mother came up from the basement she carried her framed print
below her right arm. She brushed past Nicholas as if he weren't
there, and she hung the photograph at the head of the stairs, at eye
level, a place you couldn't help but notice. Then she turned and went
into her bedroom, closing the door behind her.

It
was a photo of his father's hands, large and work-rough, with a
surgeon's blunt nails and sharp knuckles. Superimposed on them were
the hands of his mother: cool, smooth, curved. Both sets of hands
were very dark, silhouettes traced in a line of white light. The only
detailed things in the picture were the wedding bands, gleaming and
sparkling, swimming in the black. The strange thing about the
picture was the angle of his mother's hands. You looked at it
one way, and his mother's hands were simply caressing his father's
hands. But when you blinked, it was clear that her hands were neatly
folded in prayer.

When
Nicholas's father came home, he pulled himself up the stairs by the
banister, ignoring the small form of his own son in the shadows. He
stopped at the photo at the top of the stairs and sank to his knees.

Next
to the spot where Astrid Prescott had signed her name, she had
printed the title: "Don't."

Nicholas
watched his father go into the room where he knew his mother was
waiting. That was the night that he stopped hoping he'd grow up with
his father's glory and started wishing, instead, that he'd have his
mother's strength.

Everyone
laughed. Paige ran upstairs to the bedroom and slammed the door shut.
Rose van Linden washed the beef in the sink, made some new gravy; and
Alistair Fogerty carved, making scalpel jokes. Nicholas mopped up the
mess on the carpet and laid a white dish towel over it when the stain
would not come out. When he stood up, his guests seemed to have
forgotten he was there. "Please excuse my wife," Nicholas
said. "She's very young, and if that isn't enough, she's also
pregnant." At this, the women brightened and began to tell
stories of their own labors and deliveries; the men clapped Nicholas
on the back.

Nicholas
stood apart, watching these people in his chairs, eating at his own
table, and wondered when he'd lost control of the situation. Alistair
was now sitting in
bis
spot
at the head of the table. Gloria was pouring wine. The Bordeaux
curled into a glass meant for Paige, a crimson wave behind the
painted image of a conch shell.

Nicholas
walked up the stairs to the bedroom, wondering what he could possibly
do. He wouldn't yell, not with everyone in the living room, but he
was going to let Paige know she couldn't get away with this. For
God's sake, he had an image to present. He needed Paige to attend
these things; it was expected. He knew she wasn't brought up this
way, but that wasn't a reason to fall apart every time she faced his
colleagues and their wives. She wasn't one of them, but Jesus, in
many ways he wasn't, either. At least, like him, she could pretend.

For
a fleeting moment he remembered the way Paige had softened the edges
of his apartment—hell, the edges of his whole
life
—just
hours after he'd asked her to marry him. He remembered his wedding
day, when he'd stood beside Paige and realized, giddy, that she was
going to take him away. He'd never have to sit through another stuffy
six-course meal with brittle, false rumors about people who hadn't
been invited. He'd promised to love her and honor her, for richer and
for poorer, and at the time, he really had believed that as long as
he had Paige, either outcome would be fine. What had happened in the
past seven years to change his mind? He'd fallen in love with Paige
because she was the kind of person he'd always wanted to be: simple
and honest, blissfully ignorant of silly customs and obligations and
kiss-ass rituals. Yet he was poised at the edge of the doorway, ready
to drag her back to his colleagues and their politically correct
jokes and their feigned interest in the origins of the draperies.