In spite of himself, in spite of his hasty proposal, Nicholas did not believe in romantic love. He did not believe in being swept off your feet, or in love at first sight--either of which would have accounted for his near-immediate obsession with Paige. When he had lain awake in bed last night, he wondered if the attraction could be based on pity--the boy who had grown up with everything thinking he could light up the life of the girl who had not--but Nicholas had met women of less pedigreed backgrounds before, and none of them had ever affected him so strongly he forgot how to use his voice, how to breathe involuntarily. Those women, the ones Nicholas could win over with a bottle of house Chianti and a disarming smile, usually graced his bed for a week before he felt like moving on. He could have done that with Paige; he knew he could have if he'd wanted to. But whenever he looked at her, he wanted to stand beside her, to shield her from the world with the simple, strong heat of his body. She was so much more fragile than she let on.
Paige was sprawled in what was now his living room, thanks to her, reading Gray's Anatomy as if it were a murder mystery. "I don't know how you memorize all this stuff, Nicholas," she said. "I couldn't even do the bones." She looked up at him. "I tried, you know. I thought if I remembered them all without peeking, I'd impress you."
"You already impress me," he said. "I don't care about the bones."
Paige shrugged. "I'm not impressive," she said.
Nicholas, lying on the couch, rolled onto his side to look at her.
"Are you kidding?" he said. "You left home and got yourself a job and survived in a city you knew nothing about. Christ, I couldn't have done that at eighteen." He paused. "I don't know if I could do that now."
"You've never had to," Paige said quietly. Nicholas opened his mouth to speak but didn't say anything. He never had to. But he had wanted to.
Both of Nicholas's parents had, in some way, changed their circumstances. Astrid, who could trace her lineage to Plymouth Rock, ad tried to downplay her Boston Brahmin ties. "I don't see all the fuss about the Mayflower," she had said. "For God's sake, the Puritans were outcasts before they got here." She grew up surrounded by wealth that was so old it had always just been there. Her objections were not to a life of privilege, really, only to the restrictions that came with it. She had no intention of becoming the kind of wife who blended into the walls of a house that defined her, and so, on the day she graduated from Vassar, she flew to Rome without telling a soul. She got drunk and danced at midnight in Trevi fountain, and she slept with as many different dark-haired men as she could until her Visa ran out. Months later, when she was introduced to Robert Prescott at a tailgate party, she almost dismissed him as one of those rich, have-it-all boys with whom her parents were forever throwing her together. But when their eyes met over a cup of spiked cider, she realized that Robert wasn't what he appeared to be. He seethed below the surface with that hell-or-high-water pledge to escape that Astrid recognized running through her own blood. Here was her mirror image--someone trying to get in as badly as she was trying to get out.
Robert Prescott had been born without a dime and, apparently, without a father. He had sold magazines door to door to pay his way through Harvard. Now, thirty years later, he had honed his image to a point where he had such financial holdings no one dared remember if it was old money or new. He loved his acquired status; he liked the combination of his own glossy, crystalline tastes butted up against Astrid's cluttered seventh-generation antiques. Robert understood the part well--acting stuffy and bored at dinner parties, cultivating a taste for port, obliterating the facts of his life that could incriminate. Nicholas knew that even if his father couldn't convince himself he'd been to the manner born, he believed he rightfully belonged there, and that was just as good.
There had been a bitter argument once, when his father insisted Nicholas do something he had no inclination to do--the actual circumstances now forgotten: probably escorting someone's sister to a debutante ball or giving up a Saturday game of neighborhood baseball for formal dancing lessons. Nicholas had stood his ground, certain his father would strike him, but in the end Robert had sunk into a wing chair, defeated, pinching the bridge of his nose. "You would play the game, Nicholas," he had said, sighing, "if you knew there was something to lose."
Now that he was older, Nicholas understood. Truth be told, as much as he fantasized about living the simple life of a lobster fisherman in Maine, he enjoyed the perks of his station too much to turn his back and walk away. He liked being on a first-name basis with the governor, having debutantes leave their lace bras on the back seat of his car, getting admitted to college and medical school without even a half second of self-doubt or worry about his chances. Paige might not have grown up the same way, but still, she'd left something behind. She was a study in contrasts: as fragile as she seemed on the outside, she still had the kind of confidence it took to make a clean break. Nicholas realized that he had less courage in his whole body than Paige had in her little finger.
Paige looked up from the anatomy book. "If I quizzed you, would you know every little thing?"
Nicholas laughed. "No. Yes. Well, it depends on what you ask me." He leaned forward. "But don't tell anyone, or I'll never get my degree."
Paige sat up, cross-legged. "Take my medical history," she said. "Isn't that good practice? Wouldn't that help you?"
Nicholas groaned. "I do it about a hundred times a day," he said. "I could do it in my sleep." He rolled onto his back. "Name? Age?
Date of birth? Place of birth? Do you smoke? Exercise? Do you or does anyone in your family have a history of heart disease . . . diabetes . . . breast cancer. Do you or does anyone in your family . . ." He let his words trail off, and then he slid off the couch to sit next to Paige. She was looking into her lap. "I'd have a little problem with a medical history, I guess," she said. "If it's my medical history, why do you focus on everyone else in my family?"
Nicholas reached for her hand. "Tell me about your mother," he said.
Paige jumped to her feet and picked up her purse. "I've got to go," she said, but Nicholas grabbed her wrist before she could move away.
"How come every time I mention your mother you run away?"
"How come every time I'm with you you bring it up?" Paige stared down at him and then tugged her wrist free. Her fingers slipped over Nicholas's until their hands rested tip to tip. "It's no big mystery, Nicholas," she said. "Did it ever occur to you that I have nothing to tell?"
The dim light of Nicholas's green-shaded banker's lamp cast shadows of him and of Paige on the opposite wall, images that were nothing more than black and white and were magnified, ten feet tall. In the shadow, where you couldn't see the faces, it almost looked as if Paige had reached out her hand to help Nicholas up. It almost looked as if she were the one supporting him.
He pulled her down to sit next to him, and she didn't really resist. Then he cupped his hands together and fashioned a shadow alligator, which began to eat its way across the wall. "Nicholas!" Paige whispered, a smile running across her face. "Show me how you do it!" Nicholas folded his hands over hers, twisting her fingers gently and cupping her palms just so until a rabbit was silhouetted across the room. "I've seen it done before," she said, "but no one ever showed me how."
Nicholas made a serpent, a dove, an Indian, a Labrador. With each new image, Paige clapped, begged to be shown the position of the hands. Nicholas couldn't remember the last time someone had got so excited about shadow animals. He couldn't remember the last time he'd made them.
She couldn't get the beak right on the bald eagle. She had the head down pat, and the little open knot for the eye, but Nicholas couldn't mold her fingers just so for the hook in the beak. "I think your hands are too small," he said.
Paige turned his hands over, tracing the life lines of his palms. "I think yours are just right," she said.
Nicholas bent his head to her hands and kissed them, and Paige watched their silhouette, mesmerized by the movement of his head and the sleek ou
tline of his nape and the spot where his shadow melted into hers. Nicholas looked up at her, his eyes dark. "We never finished your medical history," he said, and he slid his palms up her rib cage.
Paige leaned her head into his shoulder and closed her eyes. "That's because I don't have a history," she said.
"We'll skip that part," Nicholas murmured. He pressed his lips against her throat. "Have you ever been hospitalized for major surgery?" he said. "Say, a tonsillectomy?" He kissed her neck, her shoulders, her abdomen. "An appendectomy?"
"No," Paige breathed. "Nothing." She lifted her head as Nicholas grazed her breasts with his knuckles.
Nicholas swallowed, feeling as though he were seventeen all over again. He wasn't going to do something he'd regret. After all, it wasn't as if she'd done this before. "Intact," he whispered. "Perfect." He lowered his hands, still shaking, to Paige's hips and pushed her back several inches. He brushed her hair away from her eyes.
Paige made a sound that started low in her throat. "No," she said, "you don't understand."
Nicholas sat on the couch, curling Paige close beside him. "Yes I do," he said. He stretched out lengthwise, pulling Paige down so that their bodies were pressed together from shoulder to ankle. He could feel her breath, a warm circle on the front of his shirt.
Paige stared over Nicholas's shoulder to the blank wall, haloed in pale light, empty of shadows. She tried to picture their hands, knotted
together, fingers indistinguishable in the far reflection. Nothing she could conjure in her mind was quite right; she knew she'd miscalculated the length of the fingers, the curve of the wrist. She wanted to get that eagle right. She wanted to try it again, and again, and again, until she could commit it, faultless, to memory. "Nicholas,"
she said. "Yes. I'll marry you."
chapter 4
Paige
I should have known better than to begin my marriage with a lie. But it seemed so easy at the time. That someone like Nicholas could want me was still overwhelming. He held me the way a child holds a snowflake, lightly, as if he knew in the back of his mind I might disappear in the blink of an eye. He wore his self-assurance like a soft overcoat. I was not just in love with him; I worshiped him. I had never met anyone like him, and, amazed that it was me he had chosen, I made up my mind: I would be whatever he wanted; I would follow him to the ends of the earth.
He thought I was a virgin, that I'd been saving myself for someone like him. In a way he was right--in eighteen years I'd never met anyone like Nicholas. But what I hadn't told him grated against me every day leading up to our wedding. It was a nagging noise inside my head, and outside too, in the hot hum of traffic. I kept remembering Father Draher speaking of lies of omission. So each morning
I woke up resolving that this would be the day I told Nicholas the truth, but in the end there was one thing more terrifying than telling him I was a liar, and that was facing the chance I'd lose him.
Nicholas came out of the bathroom in the little apartment, a towel wrapped around his waist. The towel was blue and had pictures of primary-colored hot-air balloons. He walked to the window, shameless, and pulled down the shades. "Let's pretend," he said, "that it isn't the middle of the day."
He sat on the edge of the mattress. I was tucked under the covers. Although it was over ninety degrees outside, I had been shivering the whole day. I also wished it were nighttime, but not out of modesty. This had been such a tense, awful day that I wanted it to be tomorrow already. I wanted to wake up and find Nicholas and get on with the rest of my life. Our life.
Nicholas leaned over me, bringing the familiar scent of soap and baby shampoo and fresh-cut grass. I loved the way he smelled, because it wasn't what I had expected. He kissed my forehead, the way you would a sick child. "Are you scared?" he asked.
I wanted to tell him, No; in fact, you'd be surprised to know that when it comes to sex I can hold my own. Instead I felt myself nodding, my chin bobbing up and down. I waited for him to reassure me, to tell me he wasn't going to hurt me, at least not any more than he needed to this first time. But Nicholas stretched out beside me, linked his hands behind his head, and admitted, "So am I."
I didn't tell Nicholas right away that I would marry him. I gave him time to back out. He asked that night in the diner after he'd brought his witch of a girlfriend in for coffee. I was terrified at first, because I thought I'd have to face all the secrets I had been running from. For a day or so, I even fought against the idea, but how could I stand in the way of something that was meant to be?
I knew all along he was the one. I could fall into step walking beside him, even though his legs were much longer. I could sense when he came into the diner by the way the sleigh bells on the door rang. I could think of him and smile in just a heartbeat. Although I would have loved Nicholas if he never had proposed, I surprised myself by thinking of tree-lined residential streets and soccer car pools and Good Housekeeping recipes curled into handmade sanded boxes. I envisioned a normal life, the kind I'd never had, and even if I would be living it as a wife now, I figured it was better late than never.
The dean of students at Harvard gave Nicholas a one-week hiatus from classes and hospital rotations, during which we would move into married student housing and set a date with a justice of the peace. There would be no honeymoon, because there wasn't any money anymore.
Nicholas pulled the sheet away from me. "Where did you get that?" he asked, running his hands over the white satin. He slipped his fingers beneath the thin straps. His breath brushed the hollow of my neck, and I could feel us touching at so many points--our shoulders, our stomachs, our thighs. He moved his head lower and circled my nipple with his tongue. I ran my hands through his hair, watching a shaft of sun bring out the blue base under thick black.
Marvela and Doris, the only two friends I had in Cambridge, took me shopping at a small discount-clothing store in Brighton called The Price of Dreams. They seemed to carry everything there for a woman's wardrobe: underwear, accessories, suits, pants, blouses, sweats. I had one hundred dollars. Twenty-five came from Lionel, a wedding bonus, and the rest was from Nicholas himself. We had moved into married student housing the day before, and when Nicholas realized that I had more art supplies in my knapsack than clothes, and that I had only four pairs of underpants, which I kept washing out, he said I needed to get myself some things. Although we couldn't afford it, he gave me money. "You can't get married in a pink uniform from Mercy," he had said, and I had laughed and answered, "Just watch me."
Doris and Marvela flew around the store like seasoned shoppers, Girl," Marvela called to me, "you lookin' for something formal like, or you gonna go with funky?"
Doris pulled several pairs of panty hose off a rack. "Whaddya mean, funky," she muttered. "You don't do funky at weddings."
Neither Doris nor Marvela was married. Marvela had been, but her husband was killed in a meat-packing incident that she did not like to talk about. Doris, who was somewhere between forty and sixty and guarded her age as if it were the crown of Windsor, said she didn't like men, but I wondered if it was just that men didn't like her.
They made me try on leather-trimmed day dresses and two-piece outfits with polka-dotted lapels and even one slinky sequined cat suit that made me look like a banana. In the end, I got a simple white satin nightgown for the wedding night and a pale-pink cotton suit for the wedding. It had a straight skirt and a peplum on the jacket and, truly, it seemed to have been made for me. When I tried it on, Doris gasped. Marvela said, shaking her head, "And they say redheads ain't supposed to wear pink." I stood in front of the three-way mirror, holding my hands in front of me as if I were carrying a spilling bouquet. I wondered what it might have been like to have a heavy beaded dress hanging from my shoulders, to feel a train tug behind me down a cathedral aisle, to know the shiver of my breath beneath the veil when I heard the march from Lohengrin. But it wasn't going to happen, and anyway it didn't matter. Who cared about the trappings of one stupid day when you had the rest
of your life to make perfect? And just in case I needed reassurance, when I turned again to look at my friends, I could see my future shining in their eyes.
Nicholas's mouth traced its way down my body, leaving behind a hot line that made me think of Lionel's scar. I moved beneath him. He had never touched me like this. In fact, once the decision was made to be married, Nicholas had done little more than kiss me and caress my breasts. I tried to concentrate on what Nicholas must be thinking: if it stuck in his mind that my body--which had a will of its own--was not behaving in the shy, frightened manner of a virgin. But Nicholas said nothing, and maybe he was used to this kind of response.
He had been touching me for so long and so well that when he stopped, it took me a moment to notice, and then it was because of the terrifying rush of cold air that came instead in his absence. I pulled him closer, a hot human blanket. I was willing to do anything to keep myself from shaking all over again. I clung to him as if I were drowning, which I suppose I was.
When his hands skittered over my thighs, I stiffened. I didn't mean for it to happen, and of course Nicholas read it the wrong way, but the last time I'd been touched there, there had been a doctor, and a clinic, and a terrible tightening in my chest that I know now was emptiness. Nicholas murmured something that I did not hear but that I felt against my legs, and then he began to kiss the spaces in between his fingers, and finally his mouth came over me like a whisper.