Harvesting the Heart (22 page)

Paige was in the kitchen, getting together the main course, when Renee Russo and Gloria Walker ducked their heads together and began to whisper. Nicholas was in the middle of a discussion with Alistair about immunosuppressive drugs and their effect on transplanted tissue, but he was listening to the wives with half an ear. After all, this was his home. Whatever transpired at his first dinner party could make or break him in the political ranks of the hospital as much as a brilliant piece of research. “I bet,” Renee said, “she paid a fortune for these.”

Gloria nodded. “I saw almost the same thing in The Gifted Hand.”

Nicholas did not see Paige enter the room behind him, frozen by the gossip. “It's the
in
thing,” Gloria added, “crayon drawings that look like they were done by monkeys, and then someone has the gall to sell them as original art.” Gloria saw Paige standing in the doorway and offered a tight smile. “Why, Paige,” she said, “we were just admiring your dishes.”

And just like that, Paige dropped the roast beef so that it rolled onto the pale beige carpet, steeped in a pool of its own blood.

The year that Nicholas was seven, his parents did
not
split up. In fact, just a week after the Red Sox game, Nicholas's life—and that of his parents—miraculously moved back on track. For three days Nicholas ate by himself at the kitchen table while his father drank Dewar's in the library and his mother hid in the darkroom. He walked through the halls only to hear the echo of his own footsteps. The fourth day, he heard banging and sawing in the basement, and he knew his mother was making a frame. She had done it before when she mounted her originals, like the famous Endangered exhibit, which hung at odd intervals in the hallway and up the staircase. She said she wouldn't trust her prints to some crackpot frame store, and so she bought her own wood, nails, and matting. Nicholas sat at the foot of the main staircase for hours, rolling a basketball over his bare toes, knowing he wasn't allowed to have a basketball in the house and wishing someone were around to tell him that.

When his mother came up from the basement she carried her framed print below her right arm. She brushed past Nicholas as if he weren't there, and she hung the photograph at the head of the stairs, at eye level, a place you couldn't help but notice. Then she turned and went into her bedroom, closing the door behind her.

It was a photo of his father's hands, large and work-rough, with a surgeon's blunt nails and sharp knuckles. Superimposed on them were the hands of his mother: cool, smooth, curved. Both sets of hands were very dark, silhouettes traced in a line of white light. The only detailed things in the picture were the wedding bands, gleaming and sparkling, swimming in the black. The strange thing about the picture was the angle of his mother's hands. You looked at it one way, and his mother's hands were simply caressing his father's hands. But when you blinked, it was clear that her hands were neatly folded in prayer.

When Nicholas's father came home, he pulled himself up the stairs by the banister, ignoring the small form of his own son in the shadows. He stopped at the photo at the top of the stairs and sank to his knees.

Next to the spot where Astrid Prescott had signed her name, she had printed the title: “Don't.”

Nicholas watched his father go into the room where he knew his mother was waiting. That was the night that he stopped hoping he'd grow up with his father's glory and started wishing, instead, that he'd have his mother's strength.

Everyone laughed. Paige ran upstairs to the bedroom and slammed the door shut. Rose van Linden washed the beef in the sink, made some new gravy; and Alistair Fogerty carved, making scalpel jokes. Nicholas mopped up the mess on the carpet and laid a white dish towel over it when the stain would not come out. When he stood up, his guests seemed to have forgotten he was there. “Please excuse my wife,” Nicholas said. “She's very young, and if that isn't enough, she's also pregnant.” At this, the women brightened and began to tell stories of their own labors and deliveries; the men clapped Nicholas on the back.

Nicholas stood apart, watching these people in his chairs, eating at his own table, and wondered when he'd lost control of the situation. Alistair was now sitting in
his
spot at the head of the table. Gloria was pouring wine. The Bordeaux curled into a glass meant for Paige, a crimson wave behind the painted image of a conch shell.

Nicholas walked up the stairs to the bedroom, wondering what he could possibly do. He wouldn't yell, not with everyone in the living room, but he was going to let Paige know she couldn't get away with this. For God's sake, he had an image to present. He needed Paige to attend these things; it was expected. He knew she wasn't brought up this way, but that wasn't a reason to fall apart every time she faced his colleagues and their wives. She wasn't one of them, but Jesus, in many ways he wasn't, either. At least, like him, she could pretend.

For a fleeting moment he remembered the way Paige had softened the edges of his apartment—hell, the edges of his whole
life
—just hours after he'd asked her to marry him. He remembered his wedding day, when he'd stood beside Paige and realized, giddy, that she was going to take him away. He'd never have to sit through another stuffy six-course meal with brittle, false rumors about people who hadn't been invited. He'd promised to love her and honor her, for richer and for poorer, and at the time, he really had believed that as long as he had Paige, either outcome would be fine. What had happened in the past seven years to change his mind? He'd fallen in love with Paige because she was the kind of person he'd always wanted to be: simple and honest, blissfully ignorant of silly customs and obligations and kiss-ass rituals. Yet he was poised at the edge of the doorway, ready to drag her back to his colleagues and their politically correct jokes and their feigned interest in the origins of the draperies.

Nicholas sighed. It wasn't Paige's fault; it was his own. Somewhere along the way he'd been tricked into thinking, again, that the only life worth living was the one waiting for him downstairs. He wondered what Alistair Fogerty would say if he took Paige and crawled out the window and shimmied down the drainpipe and ran out to the Greek pizza place in Brighton. He wondered how he had wound up coming full circle.

When he pushed open the bedroom door, he couldn't find his wife. Then he saw her, blended into the blue bedspread, tucked into the upper right corner. She was lying on her side, with her knees drawn up. “They made fun of me,” she said.

“They didn't know it was you,” Nicholas pointed out. “You know, Paige,” he said, “not everything is about
you.”
He reached for her shoulder, pulling her roughly to face him, and saw the mapped silver lines tears had cut across her cheeks. “About these dinner parties,” he said.

“What about them?” Paige whispered.

Nicholas swallowed. He imagined Paige as she might have looked earlier that day, painstakingly painting the dishes and the glassware. He saw himself at age ten, learning table etiquette and patterned waltzes on Saturday mornings at Miss Lillian's Finishing Sessions. Well, like it or not, he thought, it all was a game. And if you had any intention of winning, you had to at least
play.
“You're going to go to these stupid dinners, whether or not you like them, for a long time. You're going to go out there tonight and apologize and blame it on hormones. And when you say goodbye to those two bitches, you're going to smile and tell them you can't wait to see them again.” He watched Paige's eyes fill with tears. “My life, and your life, doesn't only depend on what I do in an operating suite. If I'm going to get anywhere I have to kiss ass, and it's sure as hell not going to help if I have to spend half the time making excuses for you.”

“I can't do it,” Paige said. “I can't keep going to your stupid parties and fund-raisers and watch everyone pointing at me like I'm the freak at the sideshow.”

“You can,” Nicholas said, “and you will.”

Paige raised her eyes to his, and for a long minute they stared at each other. Nicholas watched new tears well up and spill over, spiking her lashes. Finally, he pulled her into his arms, burying his face in her hair. “Come on, Paige,” he whispered. “I'm only doing this for you.”

Nicholas did not have to look to know that Paige was staring straight ahead, still sobbing. “Are you,” she said quietly.

They sat on the edge of the bed, Nicholas curling his body around Paige's, and they listened to the laughter of their guests and the
ting
of glasses being raised in toasts. Nicholas brushed a tear off Paige's cheek. “Jesus, Paige,” he said quietly. “You think I like making you upset? It's just that this is important.” Nicholas sighed. “My father used to tell me that if you want to win, you have to play by the rules.”

Paige grimaced. “Your father probably
wrote
the rules.”

Against his will, Nicholas felt his shoulders stiffen. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “my father didn't have any family money. He worked to get what he has now, but he was born flat broke.”

Paige pulled away to stare at him. Her jaw dropped open as if she was about to say something, but she only shook her head.

Nicholas caught her chin with his fingers. Maybe he had been wrong about Paige. Maybe money and breeding were as important to her as they were to his old girlfriends. He shivered, wondering what this admission had cost him. “What?” he said. “Tell me.”

“I don't believe it.”

“You don't believe what? That my father had no money?”

“No,” Paige said slowly. “That he
chose
to live the way he does now.”

Nicholas smiled, relieved. “It has its advantages,” he pointed out. “You know where the next mortgage payment is coming from. You know who your friends are. You don't worry nearly as much about what everyone else thinks of you.”

“And that's what you care about?” Paige shifted away from him. “Why didn't you tell me this before?”

Nicholas shrugged. “It never came up.”

In the distance, someone shouted out a punch line. “I'm sorry,” Paige said tightly, balling her hands into fists. “I didn't know you made such a sacrifice to marry me.”

Nicholas pulled her into his arms and stroked her back until he felt her relax. “I
wanted
to marry you,” he said. “And besides,” he added, grinning, “I didn't give it all up. I put it on hold. A few more dinner parties, a few less roasts on the floor, and we'll be in the black.” He helped her stand. “Would it really be so awful? I want our baby to have the things I did when I was growing up, Paige. I want you to live like a queen.”

Nicholas started to lead her into the hall. “What about what I want?” Paige whispered, so soft that even she could not clearly hear herself.