Nell (6 page)

Charlotte was Nell’s best friend, had been her best friend for the four years they had lived in Arlington. Nell sat down on the bed with a plop that caused her drink to spill over the side of the snifter and onto her lace nightgown.

“You’re kidding,” she said. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding,” Marlow said.

Nell, hurt, struck back. She laughed, shaking her head as she did. “You and your
ego, Marlow, really. Ever since I’ve known you you’ve been so concerned about being
unique
, and here you are having an affair with my best friend. God, you’ve just waltzed us right into a perfect
cliché
. My best friend. God. What’s happened, are you getting too old to attract the little students?”

Marlow slapped Nell across the mouth. He had never come close to striking her before. It had been years, since she was a child, that she had been struck, and Nell felt an explosion of anger within her at the blow.

“Go on to Charlotte,” she said. “I don’t want you. I’ve
never
wanted you.” She glared at Marlow, defiant, hurt, mad, not caring that he might hit her again, not caring that she did not know if her words were true.

Marlow sat down on the bed next to her then, sat there quietly in a sort of slump. Then he said, “You know, I’ve always suspected that. And if it’s true, Nell, then you and I have led a pretty sad life.”

Was it true? Nell didn’t know, didn’t think she would ever know. Oh, what a thing to say to the man she had been married to for eight years! And if he was right, if that were true, then how sad their life
had
been. In the dark depths of that New Year’s morning, they just sat there on their bed side by side for a while, unable to go on from that moment of truth. Their house spread all around them, full of sleeping children, the world spread all around them, and they sat there together, silent in a pool of light from the bedroom ceiling.

Nell looked at Marlow. How could she not love him? He was her husband, the father of her children, a man with a sense of humor, a talented man, a man as good as any, she supposed. She did care for him. She had long ago stopped worshiping him and learned to care for him. But the best she could summon up for him now was the kind of love that made her hope he would be truly happy with Charlotte. Yet she did not say this to him, for she knew it would be an even greater proof of her failure to love him as a wife.

They sat there side by side on the bed, which was spread with a quilt hand-sewn by Marlow’s mother, and drank their brandy and sodas and had nothing else to say to each other. Finally they crawled into bed together and lay there, side by side, husband and wife, not touching, never to touch again—they lay there until they fell asleep.

Marlow fell asleep first. Within fifteen minutes he was snoring deeply, his body and mind safely sunk in the depths of sleep. He was not aware of Nell, who lay very still but felt her thoughts scrambling frantically at the heights of her consciousness.
Marlow wanted a divorce
. What did that mean? She could pretty much guess what it would mean in practical terms: the mess and bother of legalities; the anguish of breaking the news to the children and the work of protecting them; boxes packed; change everywhere. Maybe they would have to sell the house. Where would she live? She
could
live anywhere now, in any city, state, country. She was free to go. But she found this sudden freedom confusing. Even if she had not been happy with Marlow, still he had brought order to her life, anchoring her firmly to the ground, giving her something to center her life on. Now she was going to drift free, and she was scared. She hadn’t yet figured out what it meant that they had married, and now she would have to figure out what it meant that they were divorcing.

Five years later, here she was wandering around her house at night and she still hadn’t figured it all out. She still hadn’t decided a thing.

But she had survived. She had managed. She had kept her children safe, healthy, and happy. She had found a job and kept it. She had gotten them this far.

Nell drifted down the stairs of the dark house and carefully opened the front door so that the Indian wedding bells hanging from the nail below the knocker wouldn’t chime and wake the children. She slid outside into the night, and as her bare feet touched the cold wood of the porch, she felt a shiver ascend inside her. She walked to the edge of the porch and sat down on the steps. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the lack of light and she could make out the figures of trees and bushes, street and streetlights. The April air was chill and the porch wood was damp; her gown clung, moist and cool, to her bottom and legs. She would probably catch a cold. But she liked these cold, definite, unambiguous physical sensations. She needed them.

Once, when she was a senior in high school, Nell had driven from Des Moines to Chicago to spend a weekend seeing theater. Laura Morrison, her best friend, another aspiring actress, had gone with her. They had sped along the highway in Nell’s red Thunderbird, with the white top down and the wind blowing their hair. They had felt young and lovely and glamorous and adventurous, singing with the radio, passing a
cigarette or Coke back and forth between them, waving at other cars. There had not been such severe speed limits in those days, and Nell had driven very fast, proud of her driving. As they approached Chicago, Laura had unfolded a gigantic map.

“Do we want 94 or 294?” she yelled.

“What’s the difference?” Nell yelled back.

“I don’t know,” Laura said, her words carried away on the wind.

The map rattled and whipped in her hands. It was big and awkward and flapped like a great colored sail, seemed to fight like a live bird.

“Hell!” Laura said, and began ripping away at the map. She tossed complete sections of the map over her shoulder so that the paper flipped away behind their car. “We don’t need this part, or this,” she said. “We’ve already been there.” Finally, she had nothing in her hands but a small square of paper covered in a complicated checkerboard of the vicinity immediately around Chicago. “Now,” she said, “I’ll be able to make sense of this.”

But she had thrown so much of the map away that they couldn’t figure out where they were, not even when Nell finally pulled the car to the side of the road and studied the jagged remnant seriously. They didn’t know anything, couldn’t tell anything. They didn’t know if 294 was different from 94 or the same road. They stared at the flat corn land around them and realized they didn’t even know which towns they had just passed. In the end they had had to get off the highway eight times in order to find service stations and ask directions, and that had added two hours to their trip.

Still, Nell liked that memory. She and Laura had found the whole trip hilariously funny. And even now Nell liked knowing that once she had been brave and carefree enough to speed down a highway while her friend threw pieces of map to the wind.

Then, getting lost had been an adventure.

Now Nell worried that she’d never get on a good clear road to anywhere, because she wasn’t sure where she’d been or where she was. She was just lost. And it seemed that when she tried to remember parts of her past, she found that they had been carried away, out of sight, beyond memory, and she could only remember scenes of her life, scenes sailing past too quickly to catch.

She was thirty-eight, and she had lost so many people.

She had lost Laura very early. Laura had gotten pregnant shortly after that trip and had married her boyfriend. They lived in a tiny apartment, and talented Laura spent her time there taking care of twins, while her young husband worked at a factory in the day and went out drinking with the boys at night. Laura had been every bit as attractive and talented as Nell, both girls knew that. But their situations had changed. Nell was envious of Laura for about fifteen minutes, during Laura’s wedding shower, when her friends had given her three sexy beribboned peignoirs and Laura had shown off her diamond engagement ring. But Nell had never been envious of Laura after that, especially not the time she saw her coming out of Sears with two babies squalling in a basket.

When Nell went off to college in Iowa City, she wrote to Laura regularly, but Laura never replied. During Christmas vacation her freshman year, Nell had gone to Laura’s house with presents. But Laura had been cold. She had looked so much older, so beaten down, that Nell wanted to cry. Still, Nell had cooed and oohed over the babies and acted as if the minutiae of Laura’s life—the blue spotted ashtray on the Salvation Army table, the curtains Laura had sewn for the bathroom window—were marvels. Laura had not been taken in by Nell’s effusiveness.

“Nell,” she had said when Nell was leaving, “please don’t come here again. I know you want to remain friends, but honestly, I just can’t bear to see you. I can’t stand reading your letters. I can’t stand knowing about your life. I need to have friends who are doing what I do, raising babies, making tuna and potato chip casseroles. When I think of what
you
’re doing—well, it sends me into a depression so serious that I sometimes think of killing myself.”

“God, you don’t mean that, Laura!” Nell had cried.

“I do mean that,” Laura had said. She managed a wry smile because at that moment the babies awoke and began to wail. “Oh, don’t worry, I won’t commit suicide. I won’t find the time or the energy to commit suicide. But please, do me a favor and don’t write me again. Don’t come to see me again. I don’t want to know you or anything about you. It’s too hard for me to bear.”

Nell had complied with her friend’s request. She had not seen Laura again.

One time, in their junior year of high school, they had worked on a play about Anastasia, the woman who claimed to be the long-lost surviving daughter of the
murdered Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra. They had taken turns being the pleading young amnesiac Anastasia and the skeptical old noblewoman grandmother to whom she appeals. They had played one particular scene over and over again with each other, wishing they were on the Broadway stage so they could thrill the world as much as they thrilled themselves with their passionate acting. At the end of the scene, the grandmother had come to believe that Anastasia was her own, and the two women had embraced, weeping with joy at having found each other. Then, in high school, in their teens, Nell and Laura had believed all that—that life was a process of people discovering each other, that life would be a series of joyful embraces, breathtaking revelations, passionate reunions. They had thought that only through death would people be taken from them.

How little they had known. Nell had written Laura when she was divorced from Marlow.
Now
she won’t envy me, Nell had thought. But Laura had never replied. She was really gone from Nell’s life.

Laura had been Nell’s best childhood friend. Charlotte had been Nell’s best grown-up friend. During the first few years of Nell’s marriage to Marlow, she had had no real friends, only brief and spotty and often competitive relationships with the actors and actresses who passed through the repertory company. It had been her own fault that she had no friends; she knew that. Friendship had not been important to her then. She had been too busy creating and defending the image of her marriage to Marlow; they were so clever and so much in love, the two of them, that they needed no one else. When Marlow began to have professional difficulties, Nell really cut people off, afraid she might slip and reveal just how hard times were for them. She did not want to betray Marlow to anyone. Even when Jeremy and Hannah were born, when Marlow was sleeping around, when things were rotten between them, still Nell pretended. It had been her only defense.

When they settled in Arlington, Nell at last found a friend. Charlotte was an actress on stage and off. She was a student of Marlow’s, a beautiful tall girl of twenty-three. Her image was that of a lovely fool, a brilliant, bony, talented nitwit with chopped-off hair who could not be called upon to get the tea kettle from the stove to the cup without a mistake. She took to hanging around Nell every day, openly admiring Nell’s maternal competence, marveling at Nell’s nurturing abilities, and Nell needed that. She was a mother; she became a mother figure; warm, generous, benign, patient. Dressed in a
loose-fitting navy blue corduroy jumper that hid her pregnancy-acquired fat, her hair clumped up in a bun for efficiency, Nell graciously moved through her house and life, doling out homemade cookies to her little children and anyone else who passed through the house. Marlow always did fill the house with actors and actresses and students and general hangers-on, but Charlotte was the guest who transcended all the others. She would sit in the kitchen, idly stirring a cup of herb tea, leaning her cheek in her hand, and watch Nell with admiration and longing all over her face. Nell would be kneading bread or spooning mush into a baby’s mouth or chopping vegetables, her hair falling out of the bun and around her face in tendrils as she worked.

“Oh, I’ll never have
all this
,” Charlotte would sigh, gesturing with her hands, and Nell would see her grimy kitchen with the handprints on the cupboard doors and the cat and dog hair blowing like tumbleweeds in the corners and the trashbasket overflowing with used Pampers transformed into a warm room wealthy with life. Charlotte looked so skinny and lonely. Nell felt opulent by contrast. She bloomed under Charlotte’s admiration. She often dressed for the day thinking of Charlotte, how she would look to Charlotte; Charlotte became more than her best friend—she was Nell’s perfect audience.

Charlotte was always being pursued by passionate lovers who were going to commit either murder or suicide because Charlotte had broken off with them. Sometimes Charlotte came to spend the night at Nell’s for protection or simply just to get some rest.

“Why is that woman always here?” Marlow would grumble.

Nell would reply, indignant, “She’s
your
student, Marlow. And she’s my friend. Besides, she’s having problems. Mark just won’t leave her alone. She needs to get away from him for a while, poor thing.”