My Education (20 page)

“What makes you say that?”

“She would have told me. And she didn't.”

“Maybe she wasn't yet ready.”

“I don't think so. It doesn't have to do with me,” I said wretchedly, quoting her, but he thought I was trying to dodge his suspicions.

“It doesn't have to do with you?” he exclaimed. “You should know that I have a reliable source. It's you who've shown me how reliable she is. I've done Lucia a great disservice. Until I found you at the wheel of Martha's Saab I assumed she was mistaken, or lying. Lucia has always played a game with us I didn't enjoy. She's always tried to tattle on Martha, to me. Martha doesn't nurse often enough, she doesn't sing Joachim songs, she doesn't dress him in warm-enough clothes. It's annoyed me. If Lucia hadn't otherwise done her job so impeccably I might have tried to dismiss her a long time ago. But this felt like the limit, this gleeful new slander. Regardless that it wasn't even true—in fact, to me it was much worse for being clearly untrue. Martha sneaking out of her own house at night like a teenage delinquent? Martha returning at dawn with a young female lover, and moans and groans heard through the walls? You can see how even someone without my vested interest would find such a story far-fetched. Yet it seems I've done wrong by Lucia. Or have I? Is Lucia a liar? Perhaps the victim of her own imagination?” He had spoken a long time, and beautifully; he'd suffused his tan even more deeply with blood so his flush climbed up into his hairline, and descended his collar; he'd drained his glass, and averted his gaze from my face so that now I could dare to return it.

“Lucia's not lying,” I said, and my flush rivaled his. Between the two of us we might have outperformed a furnace in that very large, very cold room. All my physical points of connection set up an unbearable hum as if a cyclone had punctured the room and was trying to suck me apart—my knuckles were white on the soft leather arms of the chair and I was grinding my molars. The sun-bleached crest of Nicholas's hair seemed to stand slightly farther away from his scalp.

“Regina, are you in love with Martha?” he asked quietly.

“Yes,” I said, and I was so sorry, and so relieved, to tell him that to my shame and relief I erupted in tears, and once started, could only gain strength, so that, clapping my hands on my face, I sobbed with gusto and drenched my shirtfront in my effort to spare his armchair being stained.

He let me cry for what felt like a very long time. When I had reclaimed some small part of composure he also looked more composed, as if my outpouring had washed away grime and restored his calm, handsome outlines. He disappeared from the room for a moment, and returning refilled our two glasses, and set a toilet-paper roll on the arm of the chair. I pulled off a streamer and mopped at my face while he resettled himself with his drink on the floor. “Having ascertained the facts, I suppose I ought to throw you out,” he said thoughtfully.

“I'm so sorry, Nicholas,” I said into my wad of stained tissue. By this I truly meant, without arrogance, I was sorry she no longer loved him.

“I'm sorry also. I'm not sure how to say this without seeming to belittle your feelings, which I don't mean to do. My and Martha's history—comprises many chapters and in fact many people. I'm very sorry you're now one of them. I wish you weren't.”

“I understand,” I said, to make clear to him the past held nothing to surprise or frighten me.

At that moment, I think we each genuinely believed ourselves to be the protagonist, and the other a naïve and pardonable walk-on whose role might even have a tragic end. Still, it was good to trade compassion in that large and chilly room, regardless if one of us, or perhaps both of us, would turn out to be mistaken.

“Thank you for defending Lucia's veracity,” he said after a while. “I'm glad to know I hadn't trusted my child with someone prone to malicious falsehoods. But she had to go. It isn't what she said—the truth or falsehood of it. It's the way that she said it. The pleasure she took in disparaging Martha. But none of that means I enjoyed firing her.”

This was the “disservice” of which he had spoken. I must have looked as amazed as I felt. Lucia gone? She seemed as permanent a part of their lives as the baby himself, and for an unreasoning moment I imagined the baby was gone, banished alongside his loyal factotum, the two of them perched on a box of his arty wood toys and her garish bedspreads by the side of the road. But no, they had been separated.

“I couldn't let her spend another hour with my son. A child shouldn't grow up in the care of a person who is constantly calling his mother vile names.”

“Such as what?”

“Careful, Regina,” he warned, “my concern is for
him
. It's
his
dignity and self-love I am talking about. There was something of that bile he understood. I'm not defending Martha's honor, or yours.” Standing abruptly, he tossed his spent ice cubes into the ficus. “I must get back to Joachim.”

“Where is—Joachim?” It was the first time I'd spoken his name. Until now I had called him “the baby.”

“At the moment, with Laurence and Sahba. Laurence did me the favor of picking him up, using Bebi's car seat, because I didn't have our one for Joachim. I had to take Lucia to the Greyhound bus station. Then I was going to Mighty Buy to get something for Joachim's dinner when I happened to notice the car I'd been looking for all over town. Martha told Lucia she would be in her office, but that wasn't the case. You never did tell me where Martha is.” He came to take my empty glass and stood a moment regarding the top of my head as I stared at my lap, the two glassfuls of barely iced gin eating holes in the pit of my stomach. Nicholas's regard correspondingly drilled on my scalp. I couldn't return it. It wasn't because I had wronged him, but because the idea that I'd wronged him now seemed so inadequate, self-regarding even.

Back outside I stood out of his way as he struggled to remove the Swedish child restraint from its complex installation in the rear of the Saab, but Martha's papers impeded him, and I finally ventured to open the other rear door and go to work fitting them into an empty seltzer box. For some moments we hunched together in wordless labor like spouses whose entire involvement has worn down to the sharing of such dowdy tasks. Martha had complained to me that Nicholas was never proactive in household affairs. She claimed he contributed nothing, took the initiative in nothing, and yet seemed unsurprised that they should have, for example, a large house which she had shopped for and purchased—Nicholas passively contributing his share of their funds—and furnished and, with increasing distaste and resentment, maintained. She charged him with being unsurprised that they should have a spectacular garden which she had laid out and planted, not with distaste and resentment this time—imprisoned inland since they'd moved to this town, now her garden served much the same purpose her sailboat once had—yet still with the desire, which could not be so strange, that he take notice of the scope of her efforts every once in a while. She would say it was the same with their admittedly infrequent entertainments; with the contents of their refrigerator and liquor cabinet and wine cellar; with their subscriptions and their museum memberships and the expensive, unique, tasteful gifts they bestowed upon friends when occasions arose, and the same with their glasses and flatware and linens and with their house cleaner, lawn boy, and nanny—he didn't know whence any of it arose nor what was required to keep and pay for it. He was like a child, she said, accustomed to having his whole world outfitted for him.

Yet today he had fired Lucia. Either Martha underestimated him, or he had made an extraordinary departure. One might think the latter, if judging by his rapport with the child restraint. Finally, in exasperation, he yielded to my offer to give it a try. I knelt on the floor of the car and peered into the crack where the backrest and seat came together, meanwhile following straps where they descended and crisscrossed each other. I remembered the suction-cup bowl, and Lucia's reflexive insolence, that Martha had not been aware that it stuck to the tray. Certainly Lucia had been a maestro when it came to the child restraint. If you can do it I can, you old bitch, I encouraged myself. My hand squeezed a cold metal bar and all the plastic and padding and straps came away in one piece.

Nicholas seemed almost blind to the cumbersome thing as he took it from me. He pushed it in the back of his Jetta and slammed the door shut. Laurence would have to install it, but of course Laurence would, the right way. Equally senseless as my vision of Joachim and Lucia hitchhiking, the idea flashed through me that Joachim would be staying a long time with Laurence and Sahba, as if he'd been orphaned. I pictured Lucia at the Greyhound bus station, throttling the pay phone receiver and stuffing the slot with coins raked from the depths of her purse while cataracts of mascara asphalted her face and she poured out her tale of woe to her outraged and voluble clan banging skulls to get close to the earpiece in a crowded little house in São Paulo. Perhaps I should have raced to the station myself, just in time to grab Lucia as her wide, stubby feet in their puffy white sneakers clumped disconsolately up the rubberized stairs of her city-bound bus. Perhaps I was starting to realize she'd been my ally—she'd enabled my lover to lavish attention on me. Nicholas climbed in his Jetta and started the engine, then glanced at me out his window. “Regina,” he said, and I stepped close to hear him. “Martha will be very angry Lucia is gone. Just because you and I spoke about it, it isn't your job to defend what I've done.”

“I understand,” I said, just as I'd said it before. But I already knew I'd defend him.

Something crossed his face, a pure motion like wind over water—I couldn't have guessed what emotion it was. “I'll miss you,” he said. “Your friendship.”

“Is it gone?” I wondered, but with luck he hadn't heard my foolish question as, gesturing me to step back, he drove off.

•   •   •

Lucia's disappearance struck the house as might a natural disaster, an earthquake or flood. Electric power still emerged from the outlets and potable water from all of the taps, but you would hardly have known it for the chaos entailed by an oatmeal breakfast. Martha's inherent capability, which allowed her to build outdoor ovens of rocks, or patch sails, or cultivate asparagus with such unprecedented ease for an amateur that a professor of the Agricultural College had produced a monograph on her methods, seemed not to drop off in certain arenas so much as simply to vanish in a massive perforation, a scissor-hole in her brain around “bathing a child” and “spoon-feeding a child” and “soothing to sleep an overtired, distressed child” where some continuity, some carryover from other realms of exceptional competence, might have been expected. One potentially soluble problem she could not seem to solve was that she did not know where anything was that pertained to her child. She could not find the child-size towels, the specially short-handled bright plastic spoons, the wipe cloths or replacement crib sheets or, worst of all, favorite toys for which Joachim wailed in a repetitive, surely translatable argot to which Martha did not have the key. To her credit the uncomfortable parallel, between Nicholas's uselessness as deplored by Martha, and Martha's own that had now been revealed, was not lost on her. Here was the difference she saw: Nicholas did not prize Martha for all Martha did, while Martha
had
prized Lucia, as they say, above rubies. “I knew what she was worth!” Martha said, almost weeping. “I don't
care
if she called me a dyke or if she thought I was going to hell. She did a great job. She did everything and she asked me for nothing and now just to spite me she's gone.”

“Who wanted to spite you? Not her.”

“Of course not. Nicholas! Don't believe that bullshit about safeguarding Joachim's dignity. Joachim adored her. Look at him. How must this feel, having her disappear? A lot worse than hearing his mama called Satan's handmaid. As if he can grasp what that means. He can grasp that she's gone.”

Just as Nicholas had predicted and tried to forestall, I did find myself taking his side. “You might think that she did a great job, but Nicholas thinks that respect for you is part of her job. And frankly, he's right. The way she talked about you—how could you tolerate that?”

“Easily! Who cares if she didn't respect me? She respected my child. She
loved
him. Nicholas had no right to send her away. And don't you understand why he did this? To get back at me. Shorten my leash. Leave us less time together. Who replaces Lucia? I do. You of all people ought to complain!”

But in fact both of them replaced her. Nicholas relieved Martha on alternate days, and when he did, when Martha had a full day to herself, during which she might do anything that she chose—during which she might research her book, or perfect her pool game, or perhaps even sprawl in the bath while her devoted young lover test-drove on her body the ingenious sex toys that, in happier days, had been jointly selected and ordered by mail—her mood, and our relations, grew worse. Lucia's departure posed such a crisis, so thoroughly gripped Martha's mind and reduced to inconsequence other concerns, that days passed before she acknowledged, much less discussed, those connected developments that, to my mind, were of equal interest: that Nicholas had moved out of the house, and that Nicholas knew I'd become Martha's lover. “It has to be an au pair,” Martha ranted as she hurled items into the dishwasher. “Someone who'll live in and knows how to drive. That's Lucia's one failing: she would not learn to drive. Though it wouldn't have mattered if Nicholas hadn't rented a place on the far side of campus. Fricking Walter Debrango and his Home for Scorned Husbands. They don't just share a building, they share the same jokes.”