Women and Children First (17 page)

But all Phoebe says is, “That takes courage.” This isn’t dazzlingly original, either. Lots of people tell Gilda that, but so far none of them have been women who’ve spent the last ten years careening from war zone to war zone. Gilda almost wants to make Phoebe repeat it for Nathan’s benefit since he doesn’t seem to be listening, but then Nathan says, “Courage? Stupidity’s more like it.”

Though Nathan clearly means it as a joke, Gilda’s stunned by his betrayal. She knows he doesn’t feel that way about her or himself or the kids. She’s so shocked she hears herself babbling things she can’t believe she’s saying.

“It really wasn’t courage,” she says. “What happened was, I became a kind of junkie. I got hooked on being pregnant and having babies and nursing, and once I got started I couldn’t quit. I’d miss the way newborns smell—their breath and the tops of their heads have this sweet smell, like candy—and the next thing I knew I was pregnant again.”

Gilda looks over at Nathan, who’s smiling slightly and nodding. He knows what she means, and she feels that this shared knowledge shames him a little for what he’s just said. When Gilda was pregnant, he couldn’t get enough of her—of touching her, of taking her picture. The sad thing is that now, when she looks at his book, she skips over those photos too. Nathan also knows that what Gilda’s said is only three-quarters true. Danny was really an accident. By then they’d decided to stop having kids, not because they wanted to, but because they’d gotten superstitious. They’d been so lucky with the first three; they were frightened of pushing their luck. In fact, Danny turned out okay, but Gilda’s afraid he inherited all the terrors of that pregnancy; although he’s begun to outgrow it, he’s been, at one time or another, scared of nearly everything. Once, late at night in bed, Nathan referred to Danny as the runt of the litter and Gilda was horrified at first, then laughed, because his speaking her own worst fear out loud made her feel very close to him; it’s something only the other parent can get away with.

Nathan says, “Gilda was the most beautiful pregnant woman you could imagine,” and it occurs to Gilda that Phoebe—that anyone who knows Nathan’s work—knows
exactly
how she looked pregnant. Though Gilda’s aware that they’re very consciously not talking shop here, she’s hoping that Phoebe will mention those pictures. But what Phoebe says is, “If you can’t cook the children mushroom soup, what
can
you cook them?”

“Pizza,” says Nathan. “Endless pizza.”

“What’s
your
favorite meal?” Phoebe asks Gilda, who’s so surprised that Phoebe would be interested that the only answer she can come up with is, “Linguine and steamed mussels with hot pepper flakes and garlic and parsley.” It’s true, she realizes, but if she’d thought a moment longer, she wouldn’t have been able to decide.

“That sounds wonderful,” says Phoebe. “Maybe you can make it for me sometime.”

“And yours?” Gilda says. “Your favorite?”

Phoebe thinks for a while. “Airplane food,” she says at last, and her voice goes so vague and drifty again, it’s as if she’s flying away from them even as they sit there. Gilda’s afraid they’ve bored her with all this talk of children, and knows the time has come to ask about
Phoebe’s
courage—her career, her work. But what’s stopping her is this: if people repeat themselves so on the subject of Gilda’s name and four children, how much more repetitious must be the questions Phoebe hears all the time. Gilda longs to frame
her
question in a way no one’s happened on yet, but so much dead air’s flowing by that eventually she panics and says, “Have you ever been hit?”

Phoebe looks at her strangely. “Only by my lovers,” she says. Gilda wonders if this is all Phoebe intends to say on the subject, and has the odd sensation that Phoebe’s saving her war stories for a larger and more satisfying audience. But then Phoebe says, “I’ll tell you a funny thing. Sometimes out in the field I get this feeling I’m invisible. That no one sees me, that I don’t exist. A bullet, a rocket—a bomb couldn’t find me. And in a way, I guess, I’ve learned to make myself invisible. It’s like I’m not there—it’s how I get all my best shots.”

“What a great trick to know,” says Gilda. “How do you do it?”

“It’s hard to explain,” Phoebe says. “But I know when I started feeling that way: as a kid growing up in New York. I used to have to walk home from school along the Bowery, and the bums would all say these dirty things to me. I was
terrified
. So I’d practice making myself disappear so the bums wouldn’t see me—and that’s how I learned how to do it.”

Gilda loves this story, this tale of childhood terror mined for power in later life. She hopes—and is embarrassed for reducing everything to this level again, but there it is—that something similar may work for Danny. She glances over at Nathan, who’s got the strangest look on his face. It’s hardly enchantment—that much seems clear. But that’s all Gilda knows. All those years of practice reading Nathan’s mind, and she hasn’t a clue to what’s on it.

Just then the doorbell rings. “That’ll be the students,” says Nathan.

“We’ll have dessert later,” Gilda says, and jumps up from the table.

With each passing year Gilda finds herself avoiding Nathan’s students more determinedly. Mostly she’s disturbed that they stay the same age while she keeps getting older, but there’s also their dogged insistence on calling her Mrs. Wilson no matter how often she asks them to call her Gilda. It makes her feel like Dennis the Menace’s neighbor, or like the headmaster’s wife in some British public-school novel. One thing she knows is that she doesn’t want them calling her Mrs. Wilson in front of Phoebe, so she busies herself cleaning dishes while Nathan introduces Phoebe to the students—six of them, Gilda counts, three boys, three girls, though their nearly identical short punky haircuts and designer paratrooper clothes make this difficult to say for sure. It strikes Gilda as ironic that they are the ones dressed like Green Berets while Phoebe, who’s probably actually jumped out of airplanes, is wearing silk and those tiny high heels. Making extra trips so as to have something involving to do, Gilda imagines that she’s the downstairs maid, and might as well be for all the attention anyone pays her until she shoos them into the living room, urging them to talk and relax while she makes coffee and whips the cream for dessert.

The noise of the electric beater is wonderfully soothing. It blots out everything else as Gilda concentrates on the small miracle of white liquid turning into white solid. She watches the coffee brew, drip by drip, and when she turns away from the counter, she’s touched to find Nathan leaning against the doorway between the kitchen and living room, as if he’s reluctant to leave her alone in there, working. Hearing Phoebe’s clear voice ringing from the other room, Gilda goes and stands beside Nathan to look at what he’s watching: Phoebe on the sofa with all the students seated in a circle on the floor, literally at her feet.

Phoebe’s in the middle of a story, and it takes Gilda a while to get the gist of it, to realize that Phoebe’s volunteering all this, or else the students have been less circumspect than Gilda and Nathan in grilling her for the details of her paramilitary career.

“I had a lover,” Phoebe’s saying, “a Palestinian commando, trained as a fighter pilot. He’d take me on missions with him so I could take aerial shots of all the bases. Most of them I sold to
Newsweek
. When things calmed down we’d make love everywhere, even standing up in the airplane bathroom.”

“Bathrooms on fighter planes?” Gilda whispers to Nathan, but Nathan puts a finger to her lips and says, “Shhh.”

“Then one day,” says Phoebe, “we took some Israeli fire. We got hit, we went down. My lover was killed. The next thing I knew, I was in an Israeli medivac unit with sixty-two pieces of shrapnel in my back, one in this really strategic place near the base of my spine.”

The students make various appreciative, prayerful noises. Wow. Jesus. God. Holy Christ.

“They told me,” Phoebe continues, “that I’d been in a coma for thirty-six hours. But here’s what I remember: when I opened my eyes, there was this beautiful Israeli nurse. A redhead. She looked just like Rita Hayworth. She had on this great perfume—it smelled like a newborn baby, like candy. And she was bringing me food—homemade mushroom soup, made with real mushrooms from scratch. I’d never had it before, and oh, it was just what I needed. I got to be a kind of junkie for it; once I got started I couldn’t stop. And when I began to feel better, she brought me—without my even asking for it—my favorite food: linguine with steamed mussels, hot pepper flakes, garlic, and parsley.”

Gilda and Nathan linger a moment to see if Phoebe realizes they’re watching her from the doorway. But she’s focused on the middle distance, completely intent on her story; she doesn’t know they’re there.

Gilda grabs Nathan’s hand and pulls him into the kitchen and lets the door swing shut behind them. Gilda’s got chills running down her spine, but before she says anything, she wants to be accurate, to know precisely what kind of chills they are. At first she thinks this is how she might feel if she’d come home to find Phoebe trying on all her clothes. But what’s happened, she realizes, is less frightening, eerier and more distant—more like the startled, upset way she felt last summer when she found a bird’s nest into which had been woven, unmistakably, swatches of that red plaid shirt of Danny’s that had mysteriously disappeared from the line. Mostly what concerns Gilda now is that Phoebe be gone before the children get back. How different from her earlier fantasy: that they’d come home early enough for her to show them off. Now Gilda’s afraid that if Phoebe meets them, she’ll steal something from them too.

Nathan says, “Do me a favor. Don’t offer those kids out there any of that mushroom soup. Then they’ll really know something’s weird.”

Gilda nods, then says, “Did you know about this?”

“She said a couple of strange things on the drive back from the airport,” Nathan answers. “But I wasn’t sure till she started in on that stuff about making herself invisible so the bums wouldn’t see her. That’s a famous Dorothea Lange story. The other thing is, Phoebe didn’t grow up in New York, she grew up in some Nebraska hick town where if a bum ever walked down Main Street, the sheriff would have escorted him onto the first boxcar out of there.”

“Is this just starting?” Gilda says. “Has she always been this way? Could she have done all those things she’s done—taken all those great pictures—and have always been this way?”

“I don’t know.” Nathan shrugs. “What difference does it make?”

Gilda wants to tell him that it does make a difference, that, disturbing as the whole thing is, there’s reason for relief and possibly even rejoicing here. For the fact is, Phoebe Morrow isn’t anyone to be envied; by no means is her life a model life. In no way is her approach to the world any better than Nathan’s. The fact is, there’s something wrong with her. Some essential component of self is so desperately missing she keeps trying to patch it with borrowed scraps from other people’s lives.

Nathan sighs and says, “It’s going to be quite a year.” And all at once Gilda realizes how childish she’s being. Nathan’s right; what difference does any of it make? They’re too old for easy and false consolations, for the small, mean pleasures of learning that someone whose achievements you’ve always admired and envied is homely or cursed with an unhappy private life. If Nathan’s afraid he’s wasted his life, who cares what Phoebe Morrow’s done with hers?

Nathan goes to the window and, turning his back to her, looks out. Gilda can’t see what he’s seeing, but knows, without having to look, there’s a rusted swing set and a tangle of bicycles on the lawn. When Danny gets home, he’ll cry for Nathan to pull his bicycle out from the bottom, where it always is, its pedal caught in someone else’s spoke, and Nathan will study it awhile, then find a way to unhook it.

And now Gilda wants to tell Nathan something else. Quick, before she forgets. She opens her mouth to speak and her hands move as if she’s already speaking. She wants to tell him: there is a kind of heroism in everyday life, in facing the daily messes which Gilda would often gladly have turned away from.

She’s thinking of how, near the end, her grandfather kept falling. How the trim little body he’d always tended so carefully turned first to fat, then useless weight, and fell and fell, so that for a while she feared her house would always seem like a museum of places Pop went down: the guest room, the bathroom, the tight spot between sink and stove she thought they’d never get him out of. She remembers how gently Nathan would lift Pop and walk with him till he stopped feeling embarrassed and shaken, and of how, watching, seeking some way to comfort herself, she’d think of how children learn to walk, how they fell, too—especially Danny, who was so scared. She’d think of herself and Nathan facing each other and calling, Come to Mama, Come to Papa, to the baby tottering back and forth as its parents move farther and farther and farther apart until one or another of them suddenly steps aside and the child, tricked into it, just keeps going.

S
ARKISIAN REACHES FOR A BOOK
and drops it, then jumps back as if the book is a bottle shattering at his feet. He edges away from the new fiction section, turns, faces into the library, then does another slow, shuffling turn, reminding Alvar of how once, at the Franklin Park Zoo, he peeked behind a fence and saw a large caribou, sick or maybe crazy, trembling, painfully stepping forward and back.

Sarkisian, in a worn-out black coat, is small and stocky, still handsome, with the glossy, swept-back white hair of a fifties French movie peasant patriarch. Alvar and June, the librarian, look at each other, alarmed. Were it anyone else, Alvar would offer help. But Alvar has lived near Sarkisian for eight years without daring to say one word. Sarkisian is a painter’s painter, a man who has outlived his friends—Arshile Gorky, Matta, Duchamp—without achieving their fame. But other painters—Alvar is one—know his work. For thirty years Sarkisian has lived near this small Vermont town, essentially a hermit except for occasional visits from his New York dealer.