The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (21 page)

But here he was, on the phone. Worse, Goldie was sitting right beside her. “My grandmother is doing really well,” Anna finally stammered. “I'm not letting her push herself too hard.”

“I'm glad to hear it.” Then, after a pause, he asked, “Did you find the book?”

The sound of Naveen's voice gave Anna an almost woozy pleasure, which made talking even more difficult. “Yes, thanks.” Did he hear the quaver in her response? And what did he expect from this exchange? She could hardly launch into a discourse on haiku poetry. Beside her, Goldie had pulled her nail file from her purse. She was working on her left thumb.

“Anna, I don't have your cell number. Could you call me sometime? I miss you.”

At this point, Anna really did find it a challenge to drive. His words filled her with joy, but like a physical pain that shoots through the body unexpectedly, she also felt a sudden jolt of fear. That fear shut her down. If she could have spoken freely at that moment, she would have reminded Naveen that, by definition, their interaction had been limited to a single night. “I don't think it's a good idea,” she told him.

“What's a good idea?” asked Goldie, holding up her thumb to the light.

But Naveen understood. “It's an oversimplification to call that a ‘one-night stand,' ” he said. His voice sounded so reasoned and exasperated that she felt as if she'd just entered a conversation that he'd been engaged in for hours, by himself.

In any case, Goldie's presence meant that Anna couldn't respond in any straightforward way. “I don't want to complicate anything,” she finally told him. “She's doing fine.”

He was silent for a moment, apparently trying to decipher Anna's meaning.

“Complicate what?” asked Goldie.

Anna said, “I really can't drive and talk at the same time.”

“Just call me,” said Naveen. Anna didn't respond, and her silence seemed to have an effect on him because, in an apparent burst of emotion, he added, “Not everyone's going to die on you, Anna!”

She slammed the phone shut in her hand and tossed it into Goldie's lap as if the metal had turned hot and burned her. “Are you out of your mind?” asked Goldie. “You hung up on the doctor? And he asked for my recipe for the maharani's meatballs.”

Anna said, “I didn't hang up on him. We got disconnected.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake.” Goldie held the phone in her hand, waiting for Naveen to call back. When he didn't, she slid it into her purse. “Anyway, calling was the proper thing for him to do. Not all doctors would bother. The Indians are excellent doctors. I would recommend him to friends, but I don't know a living soul in Illinois. I'm no help to him at all.”

“Indiana,” Anna said, blowing her nose again.

“What's the difference?”

After a while, Goldie fell asleep. Anna had heard that the landscape of Iowa was dull enough to make you crazy, but she liked the shaggy carpet of the prairie. Naveen seemed to think that Anna was afraid of death. How simplistic! No, it wasn't only Ford's death that continued to torment her; it was all the ugliness that they'd endured
before
he died as well. Even when he was still healthy, their relationship had troubled them. Weekends, which should have been fun, had devolved into drawn-out disagreements over how best to allocate their precious time. Should they go out and listen to jazz (Ford's inclination) or stay home and eat popcorn while watching DVDs (Anna's)? Whatever they decided led to a clash between one person's guilt and the other's resentment. Even if your marriage didn't receive a catastrophic diagnosis, was that a way to spend your life? And then, if it did, things got worse.

Anna found herself weighing, then, the joys of love against the pain it caused. Naveen had compared his divorce to losing money in a risky venture. Anna was less businesslike in her assessment. She felt the allure of romance as much as ever—and she didn't deny how much she had once loved Ford, either—but she remained focused on the complications that came with it. She didn't like the word
pessimist
because of the implication that
optimist
was just as valid. No, she was a pragmatist, the clarity of her understanding born of her own experience of discord and grief. She did not discount the possibility that she might fall in love again, if only because the romantic in her found the alternative too depressing, but the prospect also made her fearful and uncertain.

The sun, coming out from behind a cloud, seemed to butter the prairie. How would it feel to lie across this beautiful planet, a stem of grass in her mouth, staring at the sky? Anna pulled off the highway a few miles out of Newton, and the change in the sound of the engine made Goldie open her eyes. “We out of gas?” she asked.

“I need some grass,” Anna said.

“Gas?”

“Grass.” She turned down a farm road, which made her feel self-conscious in the Rolls, and let the car come to a stop on the shoulder.

“What the heck are you doing?” Goldie asked.

“I got an urge.”

Goldie's face relaxed. “That's fine. Personally, I can wait and use the facilities, but I couldn't care less what you do.”

Anna walked around the car, opened Goldie's door, and took her grandmother's hand. “Follow me. Just for a minute. I promise that we'll come right back to the car.”

Goldie peered out toward the grassland that surrounded them. Her nose crinkled as if Anna had driven them to a hog farm, though the air smelled fresh. “What?”

“Please.”

Goldie grumbled, but she let Anna help her out of the car, and together they walked hand in hand down the road and up a little farm path, only letting go when Anna took a couple of giant steps out onto the grass of the prairie. “Have you lost your mind?” Goldie asked.

Anna turned around and looked back. The grass wasn't as high here as she'd expected, nor as lush. Instead of a thick carpet, it was patchy on the ground. But she was determined. She lay down, stretching her arms and legs as far as they would go, feeling the scratchy stalks against her skin.

“Are you crazy?” Goldie stood with her hands on her hips, staring down at her.

Anna placed a hand against her forehead to block the sun from her eyes. “Haven't you ever felt the need to do anything inappropriate?” she asked.

“No,” said Goldie, who had spent the first few decades of her life trying to learn the rules and the rest obsessively following them.

Anna put her hand down again and stared up at the clouds scattered across the sky. Her body felt lighter these days, so light that as the earth spun through the universe, she felt that she could fly right off. “Come join me,” she said to Goldie.

“And mess up my linen pants? Not on your life.”

But Goldie was laughing. Anna sat up. She grabbed a stalk of grass and stuck it in her mouth. “It's sweet,” she said. “Try it.”

Goldie looked wary. “I don't care for nature,” she said, but she plucked a stalk and edged it between her lips anyway. Then she closed her eyes and savored it as if she were giving her attention to a new Cabernet.

Shielding her eyes from the sun, Anna watched her grandmother. At that moment a wave of beautiful, mixed-up emotion washed over her: joy over the splendor of the afternoon, happiness that Naveen still thought of her (even if she remained firm in her conviction to do nothing about it), and love—yes, love—for the old woman standing on the prairie in front of her.

Finally, Goldie said, “It's not the best thing I've ever tasted, but it's not the worst, either.” Satisfied, Anna stood up, took her grandmother's hand, and helped her walk across the bumpy earth to where Bridget was waiting.

12

If Only

“
I
'm dead,” Goldie said that night. “I'm not even going to wash my teeth.” They had stopped in Grand Island, Nebraska, and it was just past nine. “Help me get my shoes off, and then you go downstairs and watch some TV.”

Anna knelt down next to the bed and slipped off her grandmother's shoes. They both looked down at Goldie's toes, which she carefully wrapped in moleskin every morning to protect her skin from blisters. “I used to worry that no man would ever marry me, because of these feet,” Goldie said, watching as her granddaughter gently pulled down her knee-high stockings.

“How did you get over that?” Anna asked. She could not remember Goldie ever admitting to an insecurity.

But Goldie's sympathy for herself as a young woman turned out to be no greater than her sympathy for anyone else. “I was just an idiot,” she said. “Life got complicated. Who had time to worry about feet?”

Anna stood up, holding the shoes and stockings in her hands. Goldie looked so tiny perched on the edge of the bed. “What if you need me, Nana? You could get up to go to the bathroom and fall.”

“How can I fall when I'm asleep?” Goldie said. She took off her blouse and slacks, handed Anna her watch and gold hoop earrings, unsnapped her bra, then held up her arms to let Anna slip her nightgown over her shoulders. “I couldn't get up if I wanted to. I'm dead.”

Still, Anna lingered. Goldie lay with her head on her pillow, the sheets pulled up to her chest, watching her granddaughter dig through her wrinkled clothes, moving them from one side of the suitcase to the other. “If you packed properly, you'd be able to find everything,” she said. “In my suitcase, I could find a toothpick with a blindfold on.”

“I'm just looking for the T-shirt I want to sleep in. I don't want to turn on the light when I come back in.”

“You can come in with a marching band. It's not going to bother me.”

Anna took her cell phone, a copy of
People,
and her sketchbook and pencils. Once she got downstairs, she made herself a cup of Earl Grey tea at the hot drinks bar, then sat down at one of the tables in the breakfast area. This Hampton Inn had a banner at the front of the lobby proclaiming that it had won a special national award for “Decorative Charm,” and that charm was made obvious in the breakfast area, where a model train made a circuit through Hampton Inn Holiday Village, which was decked out for winter, although it was June.

She opened her sketchbook and looked at the drawings she had made a few nights before, during those hours when Goldie lay trapped inside the suitcase. Putting aside the guilt she felt for her part in that disaster, Anna tried to focus on the work itself. She had spent many years illustrating comics, but that night had marked her first attempt to sketch from her own life. She was pleased, then, to see that the drawings of the afternoon in Goldie's living room weren't bad. Technically speaking, she liked the textures she'd given to Goldie's fancy chairs, the enormity of the coffee table, the way the light came in sideways, through the slits between the blinds. She wasn't quite so happy with the acuity of her self-portrait, which seemed, in retrospect, imprecise. Her eyes were vague and unfocused, her ponytail too saucy (a bad habit developed from drawing so many saucy ponytails for
Shaina Bright
), and her legs too shapely. She could blame her own vanities and insecurities, not her drawing skills, for all of that. On the positive side, the pictures had achieved that fine balance of simplicity and emotional power that she felt she had lost. Goldie's eyebrows, those two thin scratches on the page, were like a treatise of scorn and recrimination.

But Anna found herself most affected by the images of Ford. Since his death, she had looked at his photographs often, but those pictures lost their power over time, becoming little more than abstract combinations of shape and color. The sketches in front of her now felt completely vivid. They were perfect. Each frame captured him just as he was—the downturn of his eyes; his shock of bangs, which fell across one side of his forehead but never the other; the gentle curve of jaw from his ears to his chin. Looking at the drawings gave Anna the unsettling feeling that she was seeing him alive again, but at a distance that made him unreachable. There, beside the twinkling lights of the Hampton Inn Holiday Village in Grand Island, Nebraska, Anna felt as if she had rediscovered something vital to her well-being and, at the same time, lost it all over again.

“Hey? Are you okay?” The hotel desk clerk, who had taken a seat at a nearby table, was peering out over the top of a book, watching Anna cry.

“Oh, yeah,” Anna said. “Sometimes I just get sort of overcome.” She picked up the little paper napkin she'd carried over with her tea and blew her nose. It seemed to be her fate these days to be always in need of tissues.

The clerk was in her early twenties, with spiky blond hair and sparkly gold earrings that nearly touched her shoulders. “Are you an artist or something?”

“Kind of.” She felt sheepish about the tears, and so, remembering a tourist brochure she'd seen in her room, she asked, “What's with the sandhill cranes?”

“It's not the season,” the clerk said. “You missed it by about a month.”

“But what's the big deal?”

“The Platt River, outside of town, is a stop on their migration route. We get a couple hundred thousand birds coming through every year. It's pretty amazing if you've never seen it before. I've seen it before, so it's not that amazing.”

Out of habit, Anna glanced down to see what the clerk was reading.
Claudine en ménage
by Colette. “You read French?” she asked, immediately regretting the sound of surprise in her voice.

The clerk didn't seem offended. She looked pleased that someone else would take an interest. “I spent my junior year in France last year, in Lyon. I'm a French major.”

“That's cool.”

“Hey, are you the one driving the Rolls-Royce?”

“Yeah. It's my grandmother's. What do you think of that book?”

“It's funny. Have you read it?” The girl must have made some connection between driving a Rolls-Royce and mastering French. She perked up at the idea that Anna could share her interest in Colette. “I've got some other ones if you need something to read while you're here.”

Anna shook her head, mindful, not for the first time, that she had not taken full advantage of her excellent education. Nothing against drawing comic books, but why had she never become fluent in French? This girl had done that. And Ford, pretty much self-taught, had become a full-fledged intellectual. He used to get cranky if he finished one book and didn't have a new one waiting. When was the last time Anna read a novel? “I don't really speak French,” she admitted. “I just studied it in college.”

The clerk may have been disappointed in Anna's lack of language skills, but she didn't seem reluctant to chat. Her shift ran from four to midnight, she said, so she still had a few hours ahead of her. “Why are you guys driving through Nebraska?” she asked.

“My grandmother needs to be out of New York for a while because of her taxes, and she has some art that she wants to return to an old friend in San Francisco. Was it hard to leave France?”

“Terrible. I would have stayed, but I ran out of money. And now I have to take this year off from college to work.”

Anna took a sip of her tea, which was lukewarm now. “Is that a drag?”

“I've got a boyfriend in Lyon,” the clerk said, as if that explained everything. With her angular face and brooding eyes, she wasn't exactly the model of a Nebraska farm beauty. In France, though, she might have been a sensation. “He's actually Algerian,” she continued. The opportunity to talk about love gave her face radiance. “He's studying fashion design, and we're talking about opening a dress shop. It's just kind of a dream, though.”

“It sounds romantic,” Anna said, flipping one of her pencils between her fingers. She was surprised to find that for the first time in ages, the idea of romance did not completely put her off. On the other hand, she felt incapable of offering the young woman much encouragement. After a while, she said, “I'd like to see the sandhill cranes.”

The clerk glanced around the room as if to make sure that no one else was around to listen. “Hey, you know, if you go out that door down the hall, follow the sidewalk to the right, you'll find a little path that goes off into grass at the back of the hotel. We put a deck chair out at the end of the path. That's where we take our breaks.”

Anna must have looked confused, because the young woman added, “Trust me. You'll like it.” She got up, crossed over toward the hallway leading to the office, and disappeared for a moment before returning with a flashlight. “It's a new moon, so you'll need this.”

“You're sure it's okay?” Anna asked, won over by this clerk who kept up with the waxing and waning of the moon.

The young woman said, “I'm supposed to offer travel tips. It's in my job description.” She had also carried over with her a fat catalog:
Hampton Inns Worldwide
. “Stick this in the door so I don't have to come get you when you're locked out.”

Anna went upstairs to leave her things on her bed and check on Goldie, who was sound asleep. Within five minutes, she had found her way to the trail and switched on the flashlight. It felt strange, and unsettling, to be walking down a path completely alone in the dark. Surrounded by flat prairie, though, and with the glaring lights of the Hampton Inn behind her, she could hardly get lost. The dirt path wound along a grassy slope, then followed the banks of a little creek until suddenly she came upon the chair in a patch of dirt. It was a cheap folding lounge chair that had lost a couple of bands but still looked fairly stable. She turned off the flashlight and then carefully lowered herself into the seat, stretching her legs. The chair faced away from the hotel, though she could still hear the intermittent roar of trucks on the interstate. In this direction, the flat black plain of Nebraska stretched as far as she could see. Anna was not, strictly speaking, a city girl.
City
to her meant New York, or Hong Kong, or Paris. But Memphis, too, could block the light of the galaxy. She had never in her life seen so many stars.

Once, in high school, the Honor Society had gone camping at Reelfoot Lake. The AP English teacher, Mrs. Eddington, who devoted an entire month to Wordsworth and Shelley, suggested that the stars were our lost loved ones, gazing down at us. At the time, Anna's teenage cynicism found such a notion both sentimental and superstitious, which explained why she responded to the comment by elbowing her friend Estelle in the ribs. Who didn't want to believe that the dead stay with us? Desire couldn't make it real, though. At sixteen, Anna had only known one person who had died, and that was a Pall Mall–smoking friend of her mother, who had developed lung cancer. Could that be Irene Agnoff, looking down at them? Doubtful.

Now, though, Anna wanted it. She really wanted it. Tonight, she thought, she could see a million stars. And, surely, there were enough beyond her vision to account for all the people who had died in this world. Not just people, either. Beloved dogs and cats, birds, bees, bugs. Every aphid and butterfly, surely, could have a star of its own in this universe.

Maybe it was the kindness of the evening—the silky air, the tuneful breeze, the sweet scent of the prairie grass—that led Anna back to an afternoon some months before Ford died. They had gone outside to sit on the porch. The air had grown chilly, and they wrapped blankets around their legs to keep warm. Ford was very sick already. His illness seemed so terrible then, but it was in fact rather mild compared with what would come later. Earlier that day, Pierre had brought them a bootleg of some old Neil Young songs. Anna pulled the speakers into the doorway so that she and Ford could listen. They sat on the Adirondack chairs, Anna with the newspaper, Ford with his eyes closed, his head resting against a pillow. For a long time, they didn't talk. Then Ford said, “Fuck burning out.” Anna looked up at him. He was staring at her with that worried brow, that lip tucked under, those eyes wide as open windows. It was the look that she had always taken as an expression of his love for her. If Anna had been paying attention then, she would have done something to acknowledge it.

But she wasn't paying attention to how Ford looked just then. Love, romance, or whatever you wanted to call it had gotten buried in the daily trials of illness and debilitation. It was enough, for her, to listen to his words, to try to understand what he was saying. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

As quick as that, his expression shifted. The brow hardened, the lips pursed, the eyes clamped shut. “The song,” he said, his voice a croak of irritation. “ ‘It's better to burn out than to fade away
.
' That's bullshit. And you weren't even listening.”

“I was listening!” Anna had cried. And then she got angry. “Fuck you, Ford,” she had screamed, not even caring that the tragic cancer couple was causing a scene within earshot of the neighbors. “Fuck you, always being the victim. Fuck you.” And then she had stomped into the house, leaving the newspaper to blow wildly across the porch, like so much debris after nuclear destruction.

How had they resolved it? They had not resolved it. That moment had piled onto the other dark moments of those months and years to create the burden that Anna, alone now, had to carry with her. It was enough to make you think of life as one mistake after another.

There was nothing to be done about it, except forgive herself, which seemed completely insufficient. But she also understood now that that was all she had. And so, finally, through concentrated effort, Anna considered Ford's face again after all this time: that brow, that lip, those eyes, that impossible jumble of love and fury and sorrow. And in that momentary vision of her husband, she felt awash in love for him again.