Cradle (20 page)

Nick was treated with extreme courtesy by the other favoured guests, but he was wary
of their questions about Monique. He was, after all, a Southern boy, and if there
was something to say about their relationship, it was her place to say it. So he answered
politely but modestly and didn’t elaborate at all.

One of the two women at the bar, who introduced herself as Jane Somebody, said that
she was Monica’s oldest friend in Palm Beach. (They all called her Monica. It was
impossible for Nick to call her anything but Monique. Nick wondered if they could
guess what was going on or if Monique had told them.) Jane was in her late thirties,
plump and raucous, a heavy drinker and a chain smoker. She had once been fairly attractive
but had lived too hard too soon. She was one of those people who touch everybody during
a conversation. She made Nick nervous.

The other guests began to arrive. Jane and Clayton (as in Clayton Poindexter III of
Newport and Palm Beach) seemed to be acting as hostess and host in Monique’s absence.
They introduced him to everybody. Clayton, when asked by Nick what he did, answered,
‘NVMS’. Nick had absolutely no idea what that meant. Clayton laughed. ‘NVMS—No visible
means of support—a term used to cover all bums.’ Nick had three or four martinis and
told the Teresa story at least seven times during the first hour that he was in the
Silver mansion.

Nick was becoming slightly drunk by this time. He sang to himself as he took another
martini off the cocktail tray being proffered by one of the servants. The alcohol
had buoyed his spirits and made him feel somehow temporarily suave and debonair. He
was on the patio talking to Monique’s ‘riding partner’, a lovely woman in her mid-twenties
named Anne, when he heard scattered applause from the living room. ‘It’s Monica,’
Anne said. ‘Let’s go see.’

The grand stairway in the Silvers’ colonial mansion rose to a platform perhaps six
feet above the living room floor and then divided, with two different sets of stairs
then continuing up to the upper floor. Monique was standing on the platform, acknowledging
the applause, dressed in a simple navy blue knit dress that seemed form-fitted to
her perfect body. The back was cut right down, almost to the bottom of her spectacular
hair (she turned around to please the forty or so guests), and, in the front, two
thin pieces of cloth ran from her shoulders to her waist, covering each breast adequately
but leaving plenty of cleavage to be admired. Entranced by the vision of his queen,
Nick cheered lustily, a little too loudly, ‘Bravo. Bravo.’ Monique seemed not to hear
his cheer. She had turned and was looking up the stairs.

It probably took an entire minute for Nick to comprehend the sight he was seeing.
A man, a distinguished-looking man in his early fifties, wearing a custom-made tan
tuxedo and sporting an amazing sapphire ring on his little finger, came down the staircase
and put his arms around Monique’s waist. She reached up and kissed him. He smiled
and waved at the crowd as they politely applauded. They walked down the stairs together
to the living room.

Who is that?
Nick thought to himself and even through the gin and the vermouth and all the incredible
feelings the answer came back,
That is her husband, Aaron. What is he doing here? Why didn’t she tell me?
And then, following very swiftly,
How could she do this to me? I love her and she loves me and there is something very
very wrong. This cannot be happening
.

Nick tried to breathe, but felt as if a large piece of earth-moving machinery were
pressed against his chest. Instinctively he turned away from the sight of Monique
and Aaron walking down the stairs arm in arm. As he did he spilled part of a martini
on Anne’s shoulder. His apology was very clumsy. Now completely confused, he stumbled
over to the bar, trying desperately to breathe and to stop the pounding in his chest.
No. No. She can’t be doing this. There must be some mistake
. His mind could not read the message that his eyes were transmitting. He drank another
martini swiftly, barely aware of his surroundings or the jumbled feelings torturing
his soul.

‘There he is.’ He heard her voice behind him, the voice that had come to signify everything
that was valuable and important in life, the voice of love. But this time he was terrified.
Nick turned and Monique and Aaron were standing right in front of him.

‘So finally I get to meet this young man I’ve heard so much about,’ Aaron said. He
was pleasant, friendly, without a trace of anything but gratitude in his voice. Aaron
Silver was holding out his hand. Monique was smiling.
God, she’s so beautiful. Even now, when I should hate her
. Nick mechanically shook Aaron’s hand and quietly accepted his thanks for ‘helping
Teresa at a difficult time’. Nick said nothing. He turned to look at Monique. She
reached up and kissed him on the cheek.
Oh, those lips. How I long still for those lips. Why? Why? What happens to us now?

Nick suddenly realized that there were tears in his eyes.
Oh my God. I’m going to cry
. Embarrassed beyond measure, Nick abruptly excused himself and walked out on to the
patio. Now the tears were running down his cheeks. He was afraid he was going to sit
down on the grass and start bawling like a baby. Confused, puzzled, he walked around
the garden with his head down and tried, without success, to draw a regular breath.

He felt a hand on his elbow. It was Jane, the last person Nick wanted to see at this
moment. ‘She’ll be out to see you in a few minutes. First she and Aaron have to make
the rounds; you know how it is at parties when you’re the hostess.’ Jane lit a cigarette.
Nick was certain he was going to puke. He turned quickly to ask her to put out the
cigarette, and lost his equilibrium.

Perhaps it was the drink, perhaps the adrenaline, perhaps it was all too much. Nick’s
head was spinning around and around. He inadvertently leaned against Jane for support.
She misunderstood, and then pulled his head to her shoulder. ‘There, there,’ she said.
‘Don’t take it so hard. You and Monique will still be able to have some time together.
Aaron will only be here for a couple of days and then he’ll go back to Montreal to
work. Besides,’ she said with gusto, ‘if you’re anywhere near as good as Monica says
you are, I’d be delighted to take care of you when she’s with Aaron.’

Nick pushed her away and staggered back. He felt as if he had just been hit in the
face with a sledgehammer. The full impact of Jane’s comment sunk in slowly and an
uncontrollable mixture of anger and hurt surged to the surface.
What? What? She knows. This cloying bitch knows. Maybe they all know. What? Fuck.
Fuck this altogether
. And then, almost immediately, as his mind began to take the measure of the evening’s
events,
How do I get out of here? Where is the exit?
As he walked around the house to the front (he was not about to go inside again),
from deep inside Nick there now came a sound, a sound that welled up to the surface
and could not be contained. It was a wail of pain, the unmitigated and ineluctable
cry of the animal in total despair. Millennia of acculturation have made it rare to
hear such cries from human beings. But this loud and untoward scream, which rose into
the Palm Beach night like a siren from a police car, gave Nick his first comfort.
While the partygoers were trying to decide what they had heard, Nick climbed into
his 1977 Pontiac and drove away.

He drove south toward Fort Lauderdale, his heart still pumping wildly and his body
trembling from adrenaline. He didn’t think about anything coherently. The pictures
in his mind seemed to come at random, without any clear connection between them. Monique
was the focus of all the pictures in the montage. Monique in her Alaskan seal coat,
Monique in her red and white bathing suit, Monique in her dress tonight (Nick winced,
for just off screen left in his mind’s eye, he could see Aaron coming down the stairs).
Had it all been meaningless? Was it just a game? Nick was too young to know about
the greys of life. For him it was a simple question of black or white. It was either
wonderful or it was terrible. Monique either loved him passionately and wanted to
give up her luxurious life to marry him, or she was just using him to satisfy her
sexual needs and her ego.
So
, he concluded, as he arrived at his uncle’s flat in Fort Lauderdale,
I was another of her toys. I was like her furs and horses and yachts and clothes.
I made her feel good
.

Disgusted with himself, depressed beyond belief, a headache from the martinis starting
to tear his brain apart, Nick rapidly packed his clothes. He didn’t bathe or eat.
He took his two suitcases down to the car, left the tuxedo with the managers of the
complex, and drove out toward Interstate 95. A couple of miles before he reached the
freeway, Nick pulled the car off on the shoulder and allowed himself a few tears.
That was all. The external hardness that would characterize the next ten years of
his life began at that moment.
Never again
, he said to himself.
I will never again let some bitch make a fool of me. No way, Jose
.

Ten years later, early on a March morning in his flat in Key West, Nick Williams idly
played with a metallic golden object sitting on his coffee table and experienced again
the terrible pain of seeing Monique with her husband at that party. Wistfully, with
some mature chagrin, he remembered also how, when he reached I-95, he turned left
and south toward Miami and the Keys instead of right and north toward Boston. He couldn’t
have explained why at the time. He might have said that Harvard was trivial after
Monique or that he wanted to study life and not books. He didn’t understand that his
need to start
absolutely
fresh came from the fact that he could not face himself.

He had not played the memory of Monique through from start to finish for five years.
This morning, for the first time, Nick had been able to distance himself from the
recalled emotions, ever so slightly, and to see the entire affair with a tiny bit
of perspective. He recognized that his blind youthful passion had set him up for the
anguish, but he was still reluctant to find Monique faultless. At least the memory
no longer destroyed him. He picked up the trident and walked to the window.
Maybe it’s all coming together now
, he said to himself.
A new treasure. A final moulting of the last adolescent angst
. He thought about Carol Dawson. She was vexing, but her intensity fascinated him.
Always the dreamer, Nick visualized Carol in his arms and imagined the warmth and
softness of her kiss.

Carol watched in fascination as the octopus captured its prey with its long tentacles.
‘Imagine what it would be like to have eight arms,’ Oscar Burcham said. ‘Just think
of the brain architecture necessary to separate all the inputs, to identify which
stimulus was coming from which limb, to coordinate all the tentacles in defence or
acquisition of food.’

Carol laughed and turned to her companion. They were standing in front of a large,
transparent glass window inside a dimly-lit building. ‘Oh, Oscar,’ she said to the
old man with the bright eyes, ‘you never change. Only you could think of all these
living creatures as biological systems with architectures. Don’t you ever wonder about
their feelings, their dreams while they are sleeping, their concepts of death?’

‘Aye, well I do,’ Oscar replied with a twinkle in his eye. ‘But it’s virtually impossible
for human beings, even with a common language and developed communications skills,
to truly describe their feelings. How could we even know or appreciate, for example,
a dolphin’s sense of loneliness? In our maudlin way we ascribe to them human emotions,
which is ridiculous.’ He paused for a moment to think. ‘No,’ he continued, ‘it’s more
fruitful to conduct scientific inquiry at levels where we can understand the answers.
In the long run, I believe that knowing how these creatures function, in the scientific
sense, is more likely to lead us to their emotional quotients than conducting psychological
experiments whose outcome cannot be interpreted.’

Carol reached over and kissed him fondly. ‘You take everything I say so seriously,
Oscar. Even when I’m kidding, you always pay attention to my comments.’ She stopped
and looked away. ‘You’re the only one who does.’

Oscar pulled back dramatically and put both his hands on Carol’s right shoulder. ‘Somewhere
here there’s a chip… I know it for a fact… It’s almost always here… Ah, I found it.’
He looked at her knowingly. ‘It’s not becoming, you know. Here you are, a successful,
even celebrated reporter, still suffering from what could only be described as terminal
insecurity. What’s this about? Did you and the boss have a big fight this morning?’

‘No,’ Carol replied, as they walked across the room to another part of the aquarium.
‘Well, sort of, I guess. You know how he is. He takes over everything. I’m working
on this big story down in Key West. Dale comes to the airport to pick me up, takes
me out to breakfast, and proceeds to tell me exactly what I should be doing to cover
my assignment. His suggestions are almost all good, and I appreciate his help on the
technical issues, but it’s the
way
he talks to me. As if he thinks I’m stupid or something.’

Oscar looked at her intently. ‘Carol, my dear, he talks to everybody that way, including
me. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He is absolutely convinced of his own superiority
and nothing has ever happened in his life to change his mind. He was a millionaire
from his own patents before he graduated from MIT.’

Carol was impatient and frustrated. ‘I know all that, Oscar, believe me, I know. But
you’re protecting him again. Dale and I have been lovers for almost a year. He tells
everybody how proud of me he is, how much he enjoys being stimulated by my mind. But
when we’re together, he treats me like a fool. This morning he even argued with me
about what I was having for breakfast. For Christ’s sake, I’ve been nominated for
a Pulitzer Prize but the guy who wants to marry me doesn’t think I can order my own
breakfast.’