The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (3 page)

“No, not lucky.”

“You know what I mean.”

Down below, a barge slipped past, its lonely horn like the notes of “Old Man River.” Anna watched as the hulk of metal faded into the darkness of the water around it, one shadow sliding into another. After a while, Pierre picked up Anna's hand and gently moved it off his knee. She felt a weary discouragement and anger at herself for having raced down a path that, in the end, was so embarrassing and potentially destructive to their friendship.

She said, “I guess I'm kind of flailing here. I'm sorry.”

For a while they just sat, staring out toward the river and the fringe of woods on the other side. “It's not the end of the world,” Pierre said. There was a forced lightness to his tone, but he didn't sound angry.

Anna knew that she should leave, that Pierre would be relieved to see her go, but she couldn't bring herself to get up from the sofa. The prospect of returning to her house, all emptiness and mess, immobilized her. It was at that moment that Anna's thoughts, like birds disturbed from their nest, somehow settled on Goldie. “My grandmother called this morning and asked me to go up to New York.”

Pierre looked at her. When, years earlier, Goldie had denounced Anna's decision to marry Ford, the couple's friends and family, including Pierre, had rallied around them, calling Goldie everything from “hateful” to “toxic.” Anna had a vague memory of Pierre himself using the word
bitch.
Now, though, he just seemed surprised. “Are you going?” he asked.

“No,” said Anna, but she really wasn't sure. Talking to Goldie on the phone that morning, Anna had found support and comfort in the familiarity of her own home. But now, at night, and considered from a distance, the thought of her little bungalow—with its dusty floor, its neglected garden, its solitary toothbrush tipped against the edge of a University of Memphis mug—only made her feel more lonely.

Pierre turned toward her on the couch, pulling his leg up so that there was a bony knee between them now. “Maybe you should,” he said. She detected in his tone some sense of relief that, after tonight's embarrassing interaction, she might leave Memphis, but his demeanor also retained enough of his old warmth and friendliness that she was curious to hear what he had to say.

“Why?” she asked.

“You need a break. You work too hard.”

“You sound like my sister. And you're ignoring the fact that my grandmother has been horrible to me.”

“It could be bracing.”

Pierre was the only person Anna knew who would use that word, in any context. “You sound like we're talking about a trip to the Arctic.”

But Pierre wasn't moved. “You need a change,” he said.

And there it was. Anna realized, with a clarity that seemed all the more absolute for being so unexpected, that he was right. She needed a change. The thought of seeing Goldie again raised her anxiety in every way, but at the same time she suddenly felt an enormous sense of relief and possibility. She let her head fall back against the couch and, without making any overt signal of acquiescence, moved on to the next logical question. “How am I going to survive such a thing?”

But Pierre could never abide self-pity. He gave a thoughtful tug at his goatee and said, in his most syrupy drawl, “Well, darlin', I expect that woman will eat you for dinner.”

Anna's expression had turned dreamy, but her eyes shot open now. “Stop!” she said, and it was with this sudden sense of laughter and fear that finally she propelled herself off the sofa.

Pierre stood up beside her. “I'm joking,” he told her, taking firm hold of her shoulders. “You're going to be fine.” And when he pulled her into a hug, it did feel awkward, but not as awkward as they might have expected.

 

Four days later, Anna's plane touched down at LaGuardia Airport at three o'clock in the afternoon. By four thirty, she had gotten the key from the doorman downstairs and was pulling her suitcase into her sister Sadie's apartment. By four forty-five, just as she was brewing herself a cup of tea, her cell phone rang.

It was Sadie. “I'm ridiculously late. The color on the
Super Kitten
proofs is all fucked up. Pink looks red. Red looks brown. It's giving me a heart attack.”

“I can imagine,” said Anna, who had officially taken a leave of absence from
Shaina Bright.

Long, tobacco-infused pause. “Listen, are you okay there?” Sadie asked. “I know this is the last thing you need, given everything. I said I'd be there, and now I'm not.”

“What do you mean, ‘given everything'?” Anna asked. “I'm fine. I'm going to drink your pomegranate tea. I'm going to eat all your Carr's crackers.”

“You only just got here. And now I'm not even home to help you get settled.”

The big-sister thing made Sadie slightly crazy sometimes. “Will you get off it?” Anna asked.

Finally, carrying the tea and what was left of the crackers, Anna made her way into the living room, with its clean lines, luxurious rugs, and expansive views, which, because this was a corner apartment, stretched down Eleventh Street and up Fifth Avenue. A sense of optimism had accompanied Anna from the airport, but Sadie's overwrought concern had thrown her off. As she sat down on the sofa, she felt her excitement evaporate like the little puffs of steam rising from her mug of tea. For how much longer would Sadie continue to think of her as the grieving widow? It seemed to Anna that that one word,
widow,
with its sad but somehow spidery connotation, had become tangled with the way that people thought of her these days. In her own mind, though, it wasn't Ford's death that weighed most heavily. It was two other facts that, even after two years had passed, caused the most lingering damage. These were the facts that buzzed around her head in the middle of the night, keeping her from falling asleep.

Fact One: By the time Ford died, he hated her. You could detect it in everything he said to her, in every look and sigh. Sometimes, in a fit of frustration, he would call her a “cunt” or, on days when he felt creative, a “dirty cunt.” He told his parents that she had cheated on him (she had not), told his friends that she stole his money (she did not). Most people ignored such remarks, or gave Anna's hand an extra squeeze when they said their good-byes after a visit. Those who did acknowledge Ford's fury explained it away as an understandable, though unanticipated, result of his illness. He wouldn't be so angry if he were healthy, Anna's mother said, offering, too, the theory that Ford was having a weird reaction to the drugs. Sadie, who had her own explanation, would pull her frantic sister aside and comment, in the manner of a grade school schemer, that Ford was a “dope” who had “lost his marbles.” But Ford's aversion toward Anna became a thick smog, despite others' attempts to brush it away. It floated through their home, making it impossible to breathe when the two of them were together.

During the worst of this period, it helped Anna to recall healthier times, like the weekend they drove to New Orleans on a whim, or the year (it took an entire year) they read
Middlemarch
aloud to each other before going to sleep, or how, on Sunday mornings, Ford brought freshly squeezed orange juice, along with the morning paper, to Anna in bed. But these memories came to be like money in the bank. She returned to them so often that eventually she used them up.

As the end approached, Ford receded deeper into his illness and need. It had been months already since he'd “retired” from his job at the University of Memphis libraries—“retired” being the most delicate way to phrase the fact that a thirty-three-year-old rising star archivist was too sick to work and would not recover. Anna, who worked from home, began taking her drawing materials to cafés just to get some distance. Eventually, though, she and Sadie put
Shaina Bright
on “indefinite hiatus,” which meant that for the rest of Ford's life, she was bound to him without relief. Ford demanded her constant attention, and no matter what she did, she failed him. He wanted the cup on the table. No! On the floor. He craved eggs, but he wouldn't eat the egg salad, deviled eggs, scrambled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, or boiled eggs she brought him. He craved brownies, but he rejected the brownies with nuts, brownies without nuts, cheesecake brownies, blondie brownies, and butterscotch brownies she baked (though not the marijuana brownies, thank God, which eased his nausea, a little). Why was she baking all the time, anyway? Why did everything taste so bad? Why all the smells? Why so much food? Why so little? Too much! Too little! Too much! Too little! And why did she keep asking questions?

“Make your own decision,” he cried once, when she asked him for the second time that day if he wanted noodles or rice in his chicken soup.

“Sometimes you change your mind,” she replied. The house had filled with the aroma of the stock, “built,” as the recipe described it, by simmering over the course of an afternoon three pounds of chicken bones, two heads of garlic, and an entire onion, tossed in whole. Anna worried that the resulting flavor might be more than he could take. “I can't always know.”

“Well, you should by now.” He slumped further into the cushions of the couch, the newspaper spread across his stomach, his face, yellowy and cracked, stained by frustration and despair. Sometimes she could still make out his healthy face in this sick one. The color of his eyes, for example, never changed. (Long ago, in a fit of sentiment, she had described the shade of brown as “the color of melted Kisses.” Ford, in reply, had called it, “Pepsi in a Dixie cup left out on somebody's porch too long.”) It made no difference what color his eyes were. They were glowering at Anna now. “How long have we been married?” he asked. “Bitch!”

She turned away from him, out of anger, yes, and also out of pity, because she did hear the agony in his voice. But mostly she turned away from him because she had come to find him so ugly, so awful. As a girl, she had cried through
Love Story
and
Brian's Song,
and she could remember how at the very end of those films, death became quite lovely. When would Ford's death become lovely, too? As his health deteriorated, Anna experienced no uplifting moments, no wise words.

Here was Fact Two, the most salient truth in her story and the one that she would not confess: By the time her husband died, Anna Rosenthal suspected that she had married the wrong man, that they had never been right for each other and never would have been right had he lived. That knowledge subverted the emotions of loss and grief that logic told her she should experience. She felt very little, actually, except an emptiness and uncertainty about the future. This was the emotion that she had failed, on that difficult evening with Pierre, to adequately explain. Empty, finished,
finissimo,
she had said. What she didn't say, and what she hadn't said to anyone, was that in the last few months of Ford's life, he and Anna had, essentially, split up.

 

The next time the phone rang, it woke Anna. For a moment, she couldn't remember where she was. Then she saw, in a corner of the living room, the boxes of brand-new baby equipment stacked like fancy modern sculpture and thought,
Oh, yes, Sadie
.

And it was Sadie, again, on the phone. “I'm just a catastrophe,” she screeched. “I have to meet you at Nana's. I might even be late.”

This news fully woke Anna. “Are you kidding? You're going to make me see her for the first time by myself?”

“I'm sorry. Open the Malbec on the counter and have a glass of wine before you go. Diane bought it just to torture me.”

Until this very moment, Anna's anxiety about seeing her grandmother had simmered, ignored. Now it boiled over. “So you're not drinking at all these days?” She didn't have to come right out and accuse her sister of smoking cigarettes. A casual but well-placed remark would achieve the same effect.

“Of course not. I'm pregnant.” Sadie sounded hurt, suspicious.

“I didn't think you were the type to eliminate things that give you pleasure.”

This time there was no lag in the response at all. “You think I want to damage my baby?”

Sadie's voice carried so much tortured anguish that it was as if the entire failed effort to quit smoking revealed itself in a single instant—the guilty furtive drags; the cycle of buying packs, then throwing them away, then mooching cigarettes off strangers; the sense of doom over her prospects as a mother—and Anna rushed to comfort her sister. “No! You're going to be a great mom. The best mom ever!”

 

Anna took the elevator up to the seventh floor of the Sherry-Netherland, walked down the hall to the door marked 721, and rang the bell. The front desk must have phoned from downstairs, because she heard Goldie's voice immediately. “Just a minute! I'm coming,” she called, as if, at eighty-five, she understood that a delay in answering the door might lead whoever had rung the bell—the housekeeper, the maintenance man, her son, her granddaughters—to think her ill or worse, simply because she took so long to move across a room. And so, without actually announcing that she was still alive, she had taken to narrating her progress: “I'll be right there. I'm on my way.” She had become like a sportscaster on TV, except that she was athlete and commentator both. “Here I am!”

Goldie opened the door and peered out. Her hair, pulled back into its smooth bun, had thinned at the top and turned from silvery gray to faded ivory. Her body seemed more hunched and fragile, but Anna saw that her grandmother still looked fabulous. Today she had on a midnight blue pin-striped suit, charcoal turtleneck, three heavy strands of thimble-shaped beads in shades of royal blue, and of course the ever-present inch-wide clip-on gold hoop earrings, which Anna could remember trying on at two and seven and thirteen years old, over the course of her entire life, really.