Nell (24 page)

Then, as she stood, freshly made up and perfumed in her bra and panties, she faced another problem. She had come in a dress with high heels, and she had brought jeans and shirts and sneakers. Now she had to walk to his house, which was a good thirty-minute walk. She wanted to wear her dress; it was a becoming dress, simple and alluring. But she’d never survive if she tried to walk all those blocks in her high heels. If the cobblestone streets and brick sidewalks didn’t get her, the cracks and bumps in the cement sidewalks would. But she didn’t want to put on her jeans again. She stood for a moment, miffed at the O’Learys, at their thoughtlessness in not leaving her their car. Then she realized how ridiculous that thought was and decided to call a taxi. But she had very little cash in her purse, and she had no idea how much a taxi would cost here—everything seemed to cost twice as much here as in Boston.

Finally she put on her elegant cotton dress and her sneakers. She packed everything else in her canvas suitcase and put her high heels on top. She locked the O’Learys’ cottage and walked to Andy’s. When she was two blocks away from his house she stopped, leaned up against a picket fence, and changed shoes. Then she went on.

She was glad she had worn the dress. Andy had shaved and put on gray flannels and a white cotton shirt. And he had gone to a lot of trouble with the dinner. She was pleased and surprised and also a little horrified at how delicious and exquisitely prepared everything was. They sat in the kitchen again, but the dishes were thin china and the flatware was heavy silver. Andy had chosen a different wine for each course. First he served a homemade vegetable soup. The liquid was clear and the vegetables almost crisp, so that each bite scintillated against her tongue. While Nell watched, he prepared
escalopes de veau à la chasseur
. It didn’t take long, but it was an elaborate undertaking requiring, Nell would have thought, great concentration. But as Andy worked, doing mysterious things with wine and shallots and mushrooms, deftly mixing butter with cornstarch and stirring it in a shining copper-bottomed pan, he continued to chat with ease. Nell was impressed. She would never have tried such a feat in front of another person, especially not for a first dinner. She hated making clever sauces. She always scorched them or used too much thickening or not enough. And she certainly couldn’t have
talked
while fixing such an elaborate and delicate dish.

Andy arranged the meat on a platter in a geometric design with the shallots and mushrooms and poured the sauce over it all. He brought it to the table, set it down, then took hot French bread and a casserole of green beans and almonds from the oven. Nell looked at the platter before her and was almost more astounded than hungry. She thought she would have felt rather silly arranging mushroom caps and shallots just so like that, serving up something that more closely resembled a work of art than a plate of food.

“I don’t know whether to eat this or photograph it,” Nell said, smiling.

“I like to cook,” Andy said. “Food tastes better to me if it’s well prepared and served. We are human beings, after all, not animals, and eating should be a pleasure, not just a necessity.”

Jesus, Nell thought, how can he be so serious about this? She thought eating was
always
a pleasure, even if it was a junk-food hamburger served in a cardboard box. Often nothing was more pleasurable than standing over the stove at the end of a meal, scraping the crisp, oil-soaked crusts of meat from the bottom of the skillet and eating them while the cats and dog stood glaring at her with greed, or scooping hardened homemade fudge from the sides of the pan, or surreptitiously spooning uncooked cookie dough into her mouth when the children weren’t around to see.

“I’ll never be able to have you to dinner,” she said as he served her. “I’m already completely intimidated. Honestly,” she said, smiling.

“Well, don’t be,” Andy said, looking gruff.

They ate for a few minutes in silence.

“This is delicious,” Nell said. “This is unbelievable.” She grinned. “Awesome,” she said. “Totally.” Seeing the expression on his face, she added, “That’s what the kids say when something’s good beyond description.”

Andy was silent for a while, still looking gruff and rather worried. Then he looked at Nell, leaned his elbows on the table, and said, “Well, you see, if you live alone and eat alone, if you aren’t careful, you can eat all your meals in just about five minutes. Then your stomach might be full, but you don’t have that satisfied feeling of having had something. I mean, the times before and after eating are different. Eating is a sort of timeout, and it makes each part of the day different. But if it only takes five minutes to eat, then the whole day just sort of stretches out, all the same. I’m not making very much
sense, am I?”

Nell studied Andy a moment and wondered to herself how she would cook if she lived all alone and didn’t have to work. She doubted very much that she’d start cooking
escalopes de veau à la chasseur
for herself. More probably, she’d lie around all day reading and eating candy bars and chili from cans. But it touched her that Andy did this, and it touched her that he told her about it. It made him seem endearing and a little vulnerable.

“You are a strange man,” she said, smiling. “But a great cook.” They smiled at each other for a long moment, then went back to eating.

After a while Andy said, “Well, how do you cook? What do you cook?”

Nell laughed. “It depends,” she said. “I’ve told you I have children eight and ten and that I work in a boutique—well, somedays I’m too tired to cook at all. Then we order pizza, or eat frozen TV dinners—don’t look so disgusted, some of them are quite good—or just sandwiches. I’m really pretty limited by the children, actually, because they like so few things. Hamburgers. Tacos. Pizza. Chicken. Baloney. Hot dogs. Don’t look so alarmed! You must have liked all that stuff when you were a kid.”

Andy shook his head. “It’s been a long time since I was a kid,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a hot dog, for that matter. I can’t remember when I last had one.”

“Well, now, I know what I’ll serve you when you come to my place,” Nell said. “Nice juicy grilled hot dogs on a bun with mustard and relish and tons of chopped onions.” Nell laughed. “I’m afraid I sort of equate the deliciousness of food with the amount that drips on my hands when I eat it.”

This made him laugh, and Nell was pleased. They talked more about food, and he asked her about her children. He removed her dinner plate and set a green salad in front of her. When they had finished that, he put a board with various cheeses and fruits on the table. He placed grape scissors and a heavy ornate fruit knife next to the board. He served her aromatic coffee in a china cup. Nell watched Andy as he moved around the kitchen, handling all his delicate dishes with an unconscious awkward gentleness. He was beginning to seem to Nell more and more like some exotic and slightly melancholy creature caught in a strange world. He had the elegance and bewilderedness of, say, a
giraffe who had through some sort of spell been constrained to wear the clothes and live the life of a man.

“I can’t stay much longer,” Nell said. “My plane leaves at seven. I hate to eat and run, but …”

“When will you be back?” Andy asked.

“In two weeks,” Nell said. “For the weekend again.”

“Will you have dinner with me in two weeks, then?”

“Of course.” Nell smiled. “And I’ll be able to have you to dinner, too. The O’Learys won’t be here. They have to stay in New York. I’ll have their house then, and for the entire summer.” She smiled at him and he smiled back and they sat like that awhile until Nell felt embarrassed and warm all over. “I’d better call a taxi,” she said, shaking herself a little and looking away.

“No, no, I’ll drive you to the airport,” he said.

Nell rose and walked through the house to the front hall, where she had left her bag. Andy followed, taking the keys from his trouser pockets as he walked.

“Here, let me,” he said, taking the bag from her. There was an awkward moment as he tried to take the bag too quickly from her shoulder while her arm was still caught in it so that their arms were caught together. Nell was too shaken by the touch of his arm against hers to have the sense to smile, and then, thank heavens, he put his other arm around her and drew her to him and kissed her. They stood kissing in the hall with her suitcase hanging from both their arms.

When they finally stopped kissing, Andy drew back a bit and studied Nell’s face. “You’re wonderful,” he said.

“Oh,” Nell said. “Oh my. Well, you are, too.”

“I wish you could stay,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted anything like I want you to stay right now.”

“I wish I could stay, too,” Nell said, and her voice cracked a bit. She was having trouble talking. She was having trouble breathing. She wanted to press herself back up against him and wrap herself around him and get lost in his kiss again, but instead she pulled back. “I really do have to go. I’m sorry.”

They got to the airport on time, and he kissed her again, and she boarded the plane
and it lifted off the ground. This time it didn’t occur to Nell to worry about plane crashes.

Six

On June fourth, at three-thirty in the afternoon, Nell drove her old and very heavily loaded Toyota up a ramp, off the mainland of Massachusetts, and into the bowels of the giant ferry that would take her to her summer in Nantucket. She parked where instructed, just inches away from a station wagon in front of her, and saw a yellow Jeep convertible come looming up behind her. Next to her a golden retriever sat calmly in the driver’s seat of a Volvo, looking as if he himself had just parked the car. All around her car doors were slamming as people left their cars to go to the upper decks for lunch or to watch the ferry take off or simply to sit in a more comfortable spot. But Nell sat rooted in the seat of her car as if glued there. She was having trouble getting her breath. She did not think it had to do with the fumes from other cars and trucks on the ferry. She knew she was close to hyperventilating from fear and joy and anxiety and hope

If her children had been with her, they would have been clamoring at her by now to move. She could almost hear them: “Mo-
om
. Come o-
on
!” they would whine, full of impatience. But they were not here now, forcing her to act normal. It was not normal that they were not here. That was one of the reasons she was hyperventilating.

Hannah and Jeremy were in a car with Charlotte and Marlow, somewhere in the United States, on their way across the continent to Chicago, where Marlow would direct summer theater and Charlotte would reluctantly play stepmother to Nell’s children. The children would not be wearing seat belts on this cross-country trip. Marlow was rabid on the subject of seat belts; he almost equated them with a communist plot to hinder Americans in their expression of personal freedom. No restraints in his car! Nell nearly got sick thinking about it. It was very hard to give the children over to Marlow, to give over the responsibility of their lives and health and welfare to the wildman who was their father. She had done it physically just this morning, when she kissed them goodbye as they got into Marlow’s car. But she was having a hard time doing it symbolically. It was as if by sitting in her car, thinking of them, she could keep them safe, but by going up on deck and beginning the summer, she was somehow consigning them to the careless
whims of fate. Oh God, she missed her children so. She wished she hadn’t let them go. But Marlow had wanted them with him, and they had wanted to go, and legally it was his right, and she would have them back with her on Nantucket for the month of August.… Still. It was almost intolerable for her to be without them for such a long time.

The world seemed a very odd place to her today. It seemed so odd that it wouldn’t have surprised her if the golden retriever in the car next to her had lit up a cigarette and started reading a newspaper. The world seemed topsy-turvy. There her children were, zooming across the earth in a car with Marlow and Charlotte, who had dyed her short spiky hair orange and had taken to wearing silver glitter stars at the outer corner of her eyes even in the day—Nell thought that Charlotte was having this fit of punk because she was going to be thirty this summer—and here Nell was, on her way to three months in Nantucket, where she would live with her ex-stepdaughter, who would be arriving the next day.

Nell wondered if her children would ever have the sort of relationship with Charlotte that Nell had with Clary. Certainly Hannah and Jeremy liked Charlotte well enough. It didn’t bother
them
that she didn’t remind them to brush their teeth or eat their vegetables. Last summer the children had spent a month with Marlow and Charlotte. When they returned to Nell, their hair felt like wire. They had not washed it for the entire month. No one had told them to. On the other hand, Charlotte was not mean to them, and apparently, when she fixed food for Marlow, she fed the children, too, and that was important. Charlotte was undemanding and occasionally amusing. She let them watch television as much as they wanted and wear dirty socks to bed if they wished, and now and then when she was bored, she would play a game of cards or Monopoly with them. She was really more like another child, Marlow’s favorite child, with Hannah and Jeremy, than she was a stepmother. Oh, it was fine, they would be
fine
.

Stellios would be fine, too. Nell had put off seeing him for almost three weeks, afraid that when she told him she was involved with someone else, he would be hurt. But when they were finally seated across a tiny table from each other at a cozy Greek restaurant, he confided that he, too, had met someone else. An American girl of Greek ancestry, a young student. His family thought she was a very fine woman. Nell wished Stellios well, and he wished her well, and they toasted each other’s future luck and love
with red wine over a plate of stuffed grape leaves. And so that part of Nell’s life ended, more pleasantly than she had thought it would.