The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (30 page)

And now, two months into their marriage, three successful episodes of intercourse behind them, she was still asking questions about sex.

“How should I know?” he demanded, unable to control the irritation in his voice.

Goldie's face clouded over. Sometimes he seemed to love her so much. Other times he hated her. Her previous experiences with men had been so much less complicated. Alan Stevenson had faked his feelings in order to do what he wished with her body. And Henry? She never knew what emotion would flame up with the memory of Henry Nakamura, and so she was pleased to experience a rush of pleasure now. He had truly loved her. Simple as that. And so, somehow, the memory of Henry's devotion led to a flash of anger in Goldie now. “You know if Mr. Blankenship is queer,” she said, “so tell me.”

The waiter brought their steaks. For his benefit, Goldie looked down at her plate and gave a flustered little “Oh, my.” Then, once the man disappeared again, she raised her gaze to Marvin. “Tell me,” she said.

Goldie hadn't realized it yet, but Marvin was beginning to see that of the two of them, she was stronger. He had not fully attended to this quality in his wife before they married, but it consistently impressed him now. He shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “He's queer.”

He watched Goldie to gauge her reaction, but she merely focused on her steak. The knowledge of Mr. Blankenship's private life didn't change her feelings about him in any way, but it made her feel more confident that she could understand the world, and thus she didn't feel so utterly lost within it. She picked up her fork and knife. “Goodness, if I eat all this, I'll get fat,” she said. Then she cut a bite and put it in her mouth, looking happily at Marvin as she chewed.

For the first year, then, their marriage worked well in its own peculiar fashion. As the spring of 1943 arrived, however, things began to change. Marvin had gauged the pros and cons of taking a wife without factoring in the possibility that he might fall in love. In April, he did just that. The man was a sculptor, a few years older, named Thomas Raymond, and Marvin met him at a gallery opening he attended with his mother. Thomas was engaging and smart, coolly handsome, with long fingers that, when they held a cigarette, looked like art themselves. He had grown up in Sacramento, attended an experimental college in the desert called New River, spent a year studying figure drawing in Rome, then finished his degree at Yale. Now he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and kept a little place on Russian Hill, a fifteen-minute walk from Marvin and Goldie's apartment. Within two weeks of meeting Thomas, Marvin had more or less moved in with him. Some nights he returned to Goldie by twelve or one. More often he would come home in the morning to shower and change, by which time she'd have already walked down the hill toward Feld's. She developed a habit of leaving messages on the counter in the kitchen. “Sorry I missed you!” she wrote. Or “See you tonight!” The notes served as mild communications of the fact that she noticed he was gone, without, she hoped, expressing any kind of dissatisfaction with his behavior. Goldie and Marvin had made a deal when they got married, and she planned to stick with it.

Still, the entrance of Thomas into their lives aggravated Goldie's sense of insecurity, which had not yet completely disappeared. What if Marvin ran off with Thomas? What would she do then? Those thoughts intensified her eagerness to get pregnant, which was something, she reminded herself, that Thomas could never do. Even if Marvin threw her out of the house, the Felds would never abandon a grandchild. Would they?

The more frequent Marvin's absences, the more urgent became Goldie's concern about babies. That concern, combined with boredom, loneliness, curiosity, and her own natural physical desire, meant that she began to think a great deal about sex. She experimented by herself, relying on trial and error, her own creativity, and the still-vivid recollection of her moments with Henry. Eventually she became quite adept at self-satisfaction. Various kinds of touch, she discovered, could elicit all sorts of reactions. She gave a lot of thought, too, to the male anatomy and its potential. A more interested man would have found Goldie's growing skills delightful. But Goldie faced an enormous challenge with Marvin. Ultimately, her talents helped to maintain his erection just long enough to complete the act. Neither of them enjoyed it.

Despite the disappointments, Goldie didn't begrudge Marvin his feelings of love. Thomas was tall and lithe, elegant, beautifully dressed, and could talk about anything. The three often dined together at Bill's Place, and she did notice that when Thomas joined them, she and Marvin had more fun. The man told dramatic stories about his past, describing people and places with such amusing detail that Goldie sometimes felt that she was watching a movie. His opinions often shocked her—of Franklin Roosevelt, he said, “Charming, but doesn't he look like a bit of a pig?” He called champagne, which he found disgusting, “simply a way for the rich to drink beer”—but he was so bold that he seemed to be declaring truths no one else had the courage to utter. Perhaps most appealing to Goldie, Thomas could relate to her past, not because he had grown up with chickens and a cow in his backyard, but because New River students worked as ranch hands in addition to studying.

“The dust. That's what I remember most,” he said, leaning toward her across the table. He had sleepy eyes, like someone waking from a nap, which made his wit all the more surprising. “Do you remember how it felt to take a bath?”

“Do I remember?” An expression of dismay crossed Goldie's face. “Sometimes I still think I'm scrubbing the grime off my skin.”

He lifted his arm and pointed to the inside of his elbow, covered now by his beautifully tailored shirt. “Right here. I'd have dark brown creases. And between my toes.”

“My mother would scrub the back of my neck so hard I'd cry,” Goldie told him.

Marvin had spent his childhood in Pacific Heights. His memories of rural life were limited to the farm scenes glimpsed through the car window as the family drove to their ski lodge in Tahoe. He could not, therefore, participate in this kind of banter. “You're making me feel that I've missed out on something important,” he said, laughing.

“Poor you!” said Goldie, who took Marvin's hand and squeezed it.

“Poor you!” said Thomas, who would have liked to, but didn't.

These were confounding moments for all of them. Goldie and Marvin cared about each other deeply, but despite their rare occasions of sex, they were only pretending to be lovers. Marvin and Thomas really were lovers, but they were pretending that they were not. Still, from the outside, their little table in the corner, with its sparkling silver, glistening candles, and outbursts of laughter and jokes, looked like an island of conviviality: the happy newlyweds dining with their dearest friend.

By early September, dinners at Bill's Place came to an end. When Goldie returned from the store one evening, she found Marvin sitting with his eyes closed, his arm stretched across the back of the sofa, and a glass of Scotch dangling from his hand. Marvin was almost never home at that time of the day. “What is it?” she asked, suddenly concerned. She dropped her handbag on a chair and rushed over to him.

Marvin opened his eyes to look at her but merely gestured with the glass toward an envelope on the coffee table. Goldie picked it up and saw that it contained an official government cable. The merchant marine had ordered him back to duty. He was to serve as a six-month replacement for an injured chief engineer on the SS
John Harvey,
a Liberty ship delivering military supplies between Africa and Italy. In order to meet the ship on time, he would have to sail from New York by the middle of the month.

“The middle of the month?” Goldie couldn't believe it. In less than two weeks, her husband would be transported to a war zone.

Marvin had still not moved. “That means New York by the middle of the month. I'll actually have to take the train next week from San Francisco.” He related this information while staring at the ceiling.

Goldie knew a good deal about Marvin's career in the merchant marine, but she had never imagined that they could call him up again for service. The shock of this news, combined with Marvin's apparent disinterest in her own reaction to it, led her into a sudden spasm of tears. It was the tears, finally, that forced Marvin to take notice of her, and her sorrow genuinely upset him. He set his drink on the table and held her face in his hands, then pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her tears. “We'll muddle through this somehow,” he said, which was pretty much what he'd been saying to Thomas all day.

Marvin had received the cable that morning, at which point, in a fit of almost complete agitation, he had rushed to the Art Institute and pulled Thomas out of class. The two had then spent an agonizing day together, alternating in episodes of tears and lovemaking, which in retrospect might have been exquisite but at that moment were hardly even bearable. If their love affair had lasted for years, they might eventually have settled into some kind of easy routine together. But they had only known each other for a few months. Unlike heterosexual lovers, to whom society provided a kind of emotional grooming for passionate love—the encouragement of teenage crushes, the acceptance of (if not active support for) kissing and petting—Marvin and Thomas had had little preparation for the intensity of their feeling for each other. As a result, though they were both nearly thirty, neither came into the affair with enough experience to adequately manage their emotions. Their interactions almost invariably devolved into fits and tears and recriminations. Who would leave the other? Who didn't
really
care? Who loved more? Who loved less? Their affection was deep and passionate, physical and spiritual, but also unpredictable, impossible to contain, and exhausting.

Marvin had never discussed with Goldie the dynamics of his new relationship. She would have been willing but had no idea how to approach such a subject. Marvin, always polite, considered it both indelicate and potentially hurtful to talk about his lover with his wife. They both might have benefited, however, from sharing their experiences of love. Marvin could have used some friendly advice, and Goldie would have had an outlet for the loss that she had suffered. By October of 1943, a year and a half had passed since Henry's departure. These days, she spent most evenings alone after Marvin went out, and she would pour herself a glass of juice and sit at the dining room table, looking through Henry's portfolio of prints. The landscape scenes were lovely and peaceful: vast mountainsides, lonely roads, limitless ocean. The lady pictures, though, with their vibrancy and drama, touched her most deeply. These scenes of Japan felt foreign to the girl from Memphis, but their mood perfectly addressed the state of her mind during that period. She felt exquisitely attuned to the beauty and possibility around her, but also adrift and completely alone. Had Henry known how she might feel? Is that why he gave her his pictures?

Goldie knew about loss, then, and so, amid the confusion of her own reaction to Marvin's departure, she sensed what he was feeling now. “And what about Thomas?” she exclaimed suddenly.

“He's handling it about like you.”

Normally, Goldie drank very little, but she believed in the usefulness of spirits in times of distress. They sat for a while on the sofa, silent except for the clinking of ice in their glasses. Finally, Goldie said, “I'll go to New York with you.”

Marvin answered without even a pause. “That won't work,” he told her, staring at his knees.

Of course, she realized, Thomas would go. She reminded herself of her own good fortune. She had no right to feel hurt by slights like this one. But she was human, too, and not always capable of muting disappointment. “I see,” she said, expressing more of it than she intended.

And so it was that Goldie and Mr. and Mrs. Feld accompanied Marvin to the station a week later. Like everything else that Marvin owned, his luggage was beautiful, a navy blue canvas set detailed in leather and monogrammed with his initials just above the brass locks. Even though he shunned the government-issue duffels, he did wear his merchant marine uniform, which, combined with his good health and stature, made him look dashing and heroic. “I'll be right back,” he told Goldie, giving her a peck on the cheek. Then he dashed after the porter who was carrying his luggage up and into his private compartment.

Mr. Feld looked at his watch, then stepped closer to the train to squint up into the windows, trying to discern the whereabouts of his son. “Where's he gone off to?” he grumbled. “The train's pulling out in five minutes.”

“He's just gone to supervise his luggage, dear, weren't you listening?” His wife looked at Goldie and rolled her eyes. She had still not warmed to her daughter-in-law, but she did occasionally align herself with Goldie if she felt a need for womanly solidarity.

The conductor, walking the length of the train, passed them on the platform. “All aboard, folks. All aboard.”

Marvin's mother sighed. “This is the second time we've done this, you know? And now he's married. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Goldie shook her head. “No, Mama.” Calling Mrs. Feld “Mama” had been Marvin's idea, though it never felt right to any of them. “There must be thousands of other chief engineers who could go instead of him.” She rested her hand on her stomach. The night before, during the hour or so when Marvin visited her in their apartment, Goldie had confided to him the news. Under other circumstances she might have kept it to herself for a few more weeks, but he was leaving and she believed that he should know. In any case, she was certain. She was pregnant.

Mrs. Feld pulled a handkerchief out of her purse. “I'm going to cry,” she announced. Then she pulled out a second one and handed it to Goldie. “You'll probably cry, too. You've only just gotten married.”