Babylon and Other Stories Part 10

"What did she say?"

"She said, 'I know, Nicholas' "-here he s.h.i.+fts into a disturbingly accurate falsetto imitation of Leda's sweetest tone of voice-" 'but it would mean a lot to me.' "

"So you're going to do it."

"Of course I am," he says. "She'd kill me if I didn't."

The next few days are an avalanche of last-minute activity, Leda calling Nathalie every twenty minutes at work, Nick calling every ten to complain about Leda. He and his mother bicker constantly, being so much alike, each of them obsessed with detail, having infinite attention spans for logistics. Whenever Leda comes over, Nick parades her through the house, talking about joists and finishes, and his mother not only nods but asks questions that make it clear she's processing the information. This is when Nathalie retreats to the kitchen-as yet untouched, thank G.o.d-and listens to Martin tell jokes about ho's.

When Nick and Nathalie got married, he and Leda took charge of everything: the flower arrangements, the invitations, the seating arrangements, the music. At first none of this bothered Nathalie; work was hectic, she wasn't a party organizer by nature, and she was relieved to have met a man so unconcerned with gender stereotypes that he could throw himself into wedding planning with abandon. The one thing she cared about was her dress, and she and her mother found the one whose simple straight lines and elegant drape suited her perfectly. She thought walking into the church in it-into the ceremony her husband had lovingly designed for her, for them-would feel like crossing a threshold into their life together, a border crossing to a new world. Instead, as she walked down the aisle, she felt separate and alone: the only self-contained element of the entire event.

Leda will have no such problems. She's arranging all the details and drawing everybody else in with her. She summons Nathalie on her lunch hour to help her choose a dress from the off-the-rack options at a store called Better Bridal Bargains. She sweeps out of the fitting room, all sixty years of her, in organza concoctions with full skirts, in beaded bodices and empire waistlines. She looks like a princess who's fallen victim to an evil aging spell.

"Honestly, I've always wanted to be married in a tiara," she says. "Haven't you?"

"I guess," Nathalie says, stealing a look at her watch. She has to be back at the office by one.

"You probably haven't," Leda says pityingly. "You're so practical, so lawyerly. I was almost expecting you to walk down the aisle in a navy blue power suit."

That is what Nathalie is wearing right now. She doesn't use clothes to draw attention to herself. Her outfit, like a doctor's coat or a mortician's black, enables a client to look past her, the individual woman, to the expertise she represents. Leda has never worked, having married Nick's father when she was still in college, so it would be unreasonable to expect her to understand. Nathalie looks Leda up and down. The bodice of the current dress is tight, clenching her torso into several horizontal rolls of fat.

"I'd have to vote against this one," she says. "It's not the most flattering."

"But it's the most romantic," Leda says. "It's like Martin's proposal. He said we should just do it, life is too short, we shouldn't wait. 'Let's get married this week,' he said, and you know what I said, dear?"

Nathalie waits.

"I said 'Martin Horst, when you're right, you're right.' This dress is like a fairy tale. I'm going to take it." She spreads the skirt out on either side, folds of fabric frothing like egg whites in her arms, and grins at herself in the mirror. Her short white hair matches the gown. She looks like she feels adored.

At home that night, Nathalie finds her husband sanding the chair again. It's a rocking chair that belonged to her grandparents, and over many years it has been painted successive layers of white, red, and green-most of which have been removed and now lie scattered in particles around the garage floor. It's less like he's sanding the chair than pulverizing it. In fact it looks noticeably smaller, the runners spindly and weak. She worries that by the time he gets through with it, there won't be any chair left.

"Hey, look," he says. "I'm finally down to the real color." He points to a spot, a nondescript light brown, on the arm.

"Okay," Nathalie says. She used to be more enthusiastic about these things before the house smelled permanently of paint stripper. "Have you taken care of the flowers?"

"Done."

"Called everybody on the list?"

"Done."

"Ordered the catering?"

"Done."

"Figured out what you're going to do for Martin's bachelor party?"

This makes him look up from the light brown spot. "You're joking, right?"

"Leda was hinting that he'd enjoy having one. She said maybe you and Michael Thomas could take him out."

Nick lowers his eyes to the light brown spot, squints at it, then bangs his head against it several times in succession. Michael Thomas is Rupert Thorne's son. He still insists on referring to himself as Leda's stepson, even though she divorced his father two years ago. (Rupert Thorne was having an affair with another patient, and apparently was always having affairs with patients.) A thin, jittery, forty-year computer programmer, Michael Thomas lives alone in an enormous house he bought early on in the tech boom. He adores Leda and took her side, one hundred percent, when his father told him about the divorce. Leda generously continues to invite him to family functions, which he always attends bearing tasteful but extravagant gifts: fine wines, tropical flower arrangements, fruit baskets. Like most very enthusiastic people, he seems a little unbalanced.

Without answering her question, Nick goes back to sanding. He's been doing this more and more the past few months: checking out of conversations and turning instead to the project at hand. What's disturbing to Nathalie is that she doesn't even necessarily mind. After all, she already knows where the conversation would go. In the first months after the layoff she kept trying to get Nick to talk, kept trying to boost his spirits, kept trying everything she could think of.

All it accomplished was to make him mad; he said he felt like a child, like her own project to fix. It reinforced his sense that she had her life together and he didn't. "The best thing you can do," he said, "is to leave me alone."

Nathalie is good at leaving things alone; she doesn't like to intervene. Her work involves labor disputes, and in conference rooms she often faces clients staring at her beseechingly, begging to be told what to do next with disgruntled former employees or tough-negotiating union representatives. She always lays out options and consequences rather than recommending any one course of action. She explains their liability, the strong and weak points of the case, and that is as far as she will go. The lighter the touch, she believes, the better. But at home these days she thinks maybe she isn't just leaving things alone; maybe she's on the way to leaving.

Martin and Leda are as giddy as kids. They show up at the rehearsal dinner, at Nathalie and Nick's house, holding hands and blus.h.i.+ng. They keep turning around and smooching and pinching each other's sagging cheeks. There is a lot of eyerolling going on in Nick's corner of the room. Michael Thomas, who arrived staggering beneath a present the size of an oven, keeps crossing and uncrossing his arms and saying loudly, "Aw." He says it every time they kiss, which means at least five times so far.

"She and my dad were never like this," he says to Nathalie in the kitchen. "He was a cold b.a.s.t.a.r.d with her like he was with everybody else. Once he got them into bed it was all over. Conquest was the name of his game. Frankly, I never understood what she saw in him."

Nathalie nods. After that divorce she and Nick had Leda over for dinner, and she got tipsy and confided that she'd married Rupert Thorne "for the s.e.x."

Nick said, "I'd really rather not know this about you, Mom."

Leda shrugged, her cheeks a flourish of color. "It's not enough to base a relations.h.i.+p on," she said, "not one that will last forever."

"Thanks for the tip," Nick told her.

Now he's in a corner with Martin and Leda, listening to them talk. All week long he worked on wedding arrangements during the day and on his various projects in the garage at night. He looks exhausted, dark shadows beneath his dark eyes. Leda, on the other hand, looks radiant, wearing a pink suit with a corsage-what Nathalie thinks of as a mother-of-the-bride outfit-and a flower in her hair. She's staring at Martin with a wide-eyed, loving stare. Martin's elaborating a joke that involves an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Belgian; Nathalie misses the setup, but the punch line is the single word potatoes.

Leda's laugh rises and flits across the room, a string of notes like pearls.

At dinner Martin rises and makes a toast. He is sixty-six; his ex-wife has moved to Florida, and his children live in Europe. His suit bags and pouches, and it looks like he's carrying rocks in his pockets. His eyes are watery; his nose hairs need clipping.

He raises a gla.s.s in Leda's direction. "To my darling bride," he says, "I let you go once before, and I will never be so foolish again."

Leda blows him a kiss.

Michael Thomas says, "Aw."

After dinner, while Nathalie and Leda clean up, Nick and Michael Thomas take the groom out for his bachelor party. Since Martin likes to go to bed early, this is at seven-thirty. Nathalie drives Leda home, and when she gets back, at nine, the light in the garage is on. Nick is standing over the chair, looking down to where it rests on its side at a weird angle. His eyes are bloodshot and he smells like booze.

"How was it?"

He grimaces. "Michael Thomas bought Martin a lap dance."

Nathalie pictures a nineteen-year-old stripper hovering over Martin's hairy nose, shaking her pasties in his face. She laughs. "Did he enjoy it?"

"He did until he tried to get up and give her some money, and he pinched his sciatic nerve or something and we had to take him home."

"Is he okay?"

"He says he will be. Let's go in, okay?"

Nick never wants to come in from the garage. His tools and handiwork are in here, all his gear and paraphernalia. She looks down at the chair and realizes it's not really lying at a weird angle. What it really is is broken. He has sanded it so hard that he snapped part of it off. He sees her see this and says, "I can fix it. You'll never even know."

"It's my grandparents' chair, Nick."

"It'll be even better once I fix it. It was structurally weak."

She sighs, heavily and on purpose. The garage is a blur of dark shadows, of Nick's head, of wood pieces scattered like detritus on the ground. "I don't know why you had to start messing with it," she says.

"This is what it's supposed to look like. Once I fix it, you'll see how much better it is."

"If you say so," she says. In the flick of his head she sees how annoyed he is that she won't get mad at him, won't lose her temper and yell. But what would be the point, anyway? She turns on her heel and goes to bed.

The wedding day is cool and bl.u.s.tery. It's November and all the leaves are golden and half gone from the trees. The small church smells overwhelmingly of potpourri, which Nathalie realizes comes from air freshener, the same spray Leda uses at home. Nick's aunts and uncles and cousins-all that could make it at the last minute-filter in, greeted by Martin, who's loitering by the door in a moth-eaten tuxedo that predates the Vietnam War. He shakes all the relatives' hands and cracks jokes.

"I guess you heard it's a shotgun wedding-but don't make any comments about Leda showing. She's kind of sensitive about it." Nathalie, who is handing out programs, smiles at this, and he winks. To the next aunt he says, "We had to have another wedding because the presents were so disappointing last time. I hope you acquitted yourself well." In a lull between guests he wanders over to her, his silver c.u.mmerbund rising halfway to his neck, and confides that he is nervous.

"You'll be great, Martin," she says. "It's going to be great."

"Where did your fine husband get off to?"

She shrugs. "Probably refinis.h.i.+ng all the pews at the last second."

Martin looks at her, his rheumy eyes gleaming kindly behind his thick gla.s.ses. "Now, sweetheart. Be grateful his hobbies are harmless."

Harmless, Nathalie thinks later, as the organ plays the wedding march and Nick, his face a study in beleaguered patience, escorts his mother slowly down the aisle. She thinks, It's not enough. The minister, a solid twenty-five years younger than the two he is about to wed, greets the bride with a smile. She wonders if Leda knew, each time, that her marriage wouldn't endure- wonders when and how this knowledge dawned on her. And each time it happened, was she surprised? Behind her, one row back, Michael Thomas sighs with audible sentiment. Nathalie shoots him a look over her shoulder, and he leans forward and whispers in her ear, "Grouch."

Nick kisses his mother on the cheek and takes his seat beside Nathalie without looking at her. Leda's wearing the floor-length gown she chose in the store, its wide skirt buoyant around her, her exposed chest and shoulders wrinkled, age-spotted, as soft as cus.h.i.+ons. She's also wearing elbow-length gloves, a veil, and- Nathalie can just make it out, its gems nestled and sparkling against Leda's white hair-a tiara. She smiles at Martin, her thin lips parted slightly. She looks like a travesty and a fantasy, both.

She and Martin promise to love each other, to honor and obey. Martin lifts up her veil and looks into Leda's eyes; she looks back, then they share a gentle, dignified kiss. One princess-gloved hand reaches up and squeezes Martin's arm in its ancient tuxedo. What she's seeing, Nathalie can tell, is love-the real thing, stripped down and authentic-and as they walk back up the aisle together, she looks down at her hands.

At the reception, which is held back at the house, Martin tells her a joke involving a mailman, a fireman, a policeman, and a farmer's daughter. Leda and Nick are dancing in the living room, swaying more than moving their feet, their shoes scuffling against the bare floor. Leda's gloves lie where they've been flung, in postures of abandonment and repose, over the back of the couch. Nick smiles down at his mother. They've made up, as they always do.

He sees Nathalie watching them and glances away, a gesture that is half anger, half apology, and wholly familiar. Michael Thomas comes over and asks her to dance. He's been leaning against a wall since the party began, tapping his feet to the music and looking longingly at the people on the floor. Pa.s.sing by him earlier, handing out hors d'oeuvres, she even heard him humming along loudly to "The Way You Look Tonight." Now he stands before her, wide-eyed and eager. She shakes her head. Michael Thomas seems like the kind of person who's had dance lessons and isn't afraid to use them.

"Please?" he says. "Just one dance? I love to dance at weddings."

"I'm not really much of a dancer."

Beside her, Martin gives her a nudge-actually, less a nudge than a poke in the ribs, sharper and more forceful than she would've expected.

"Go ahead, dear," he says. "Who knows how long it'll be until Leda and I get married again?" He pushes her in the direction of Michael Thomas's skinny arms. She relents. Michael Thomas takes her hand and bows an exaggerated introduction. The two of them step and swirl, paired and clasped. She was right about him: he has technique. People head to the edges of the room, making room for them. He spins and dips her, and by the time the song finishes, she's breathless and grateful not to have been injured.

When Michael Thomas bows and retreats, Nick comes over and hands her a drink. "Impressive moves," he says.

"It was all Michael Thomas," she tells him.

Together they watch him scouring the room for other partners. Leda and Martin are dancing together now, cheek to cheek, eyes closed in rapture, swaying only the slightest bit. Nathalie sips her champagne and observes the happy couple. Next to her, Nick smells of cologne and sweat and shrimp canapes and wine; the rhythm of his breath as familiar as her own. She knows the two of them won't dance tonight. They'll stand side by side, as if on guard, waiting until the others are through.

Land of the Midnight Sun.

Maxine was the good child; her little brother was the problem. When he kept getting in trouble at school, their parents conferred and took drastic steps. The doorbell rang one Sat.u.r.day afternoon when Maxine was home alone, doing her trig homework. Her mother was working at the hospital and her brother was wherever he went when he left the house. n.o.body knew what he did with his time. Maxine opened the door, and there was a boy standing on the porch; she'd never seen him before. On the street behind him, a horn honked and a car drove away.

"Can I help you?" she said.

"I am Yuri," said the boy, and just stood there. He was thin and dark-haired, pale-skinned, with high, prominent cheekbones. Despite the warm October weather he was wearing a wool sweater. Dark circles under his eyes made it hard to guess his age.

"Is your parents at home?"

"No."

Maxine noticed a black suitcase on the ground, bound by a leather strap. Yuri looked to the left and the right, as if checking the truth of her story. Finally he looked back at her. "I am exchange student," he said. "I live in your house one year."

"What?" she said.

"Then, if you like, you may come to Soviet Union and live in my house one year. But only if you like," he continued. "It is no obligation." His accent was halting and twisted, like nothing she had ever heard.

"I know nothing about this," Maxine said.

"It is glasnost program."

"It's like n.o.body tells me anything," she said.

"You have a brother," Yuri stated flatly, and fished a piece of paper out of his jeans. "His name is Brian. He is for me the exchange host."

"n.o.body calls him Brian," Maxine told him. "We call him Bat."

Yuri gazed at her with his exhausted eyes. He reached into his jeans pocket again and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, then sat down on the porch and lit one, throwing his match onto the rock lawn.

"Because his room is like a cave," Maxine said.

Yuri nodded. "You are talking of the mouse with wings."

"Yes, exactly." She left the house and sat down next to him and waited until he was done smoking. Then she picked up his suitcase and led him to Bat's room. It was pitch black in there and smelled like an armpit. She usually avoided it.

"Well, here's your new home," she said. "You can watch TV if you want."

Maxine's mother made enchiladas that night and they all ate dinner together, in the dining room. This was such an unusual occurrence that Maxine and Bat stood in the kitchen beforehand, momentarily baffled, until their mother gestured to the chairs around the table. In their house people tended to be preoccupied by individual activities-work, school, juvenile delinquency, as the case may be. They rarely ate meals together, were rarely even home at the same time. Maxine enjoyed this setup as a rule, especially when it freed her own days from scrutiny, but she liked it less when Russians started showing up on the doorstep unannounced. She sat down across from Yuri, who had taken a nap that afternoon but still looked tired.

"Yuri, these are enchiladas," her mother said. "A local specialty. It's Mexican. We are very close to Mexico, I guess you know that."

"Ah, yes," he murmured, looking out the back window as if he might see Mexico right there. Maxine followed his gaze: there was nothing to look at, just some faded rosebushes blooming into the alley, then the square backs of other houses, all the same-looking houses in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

"I didn't make them too spicy, because I thought you might not be used to it. But if you do like hot food, you can put the salsa on it. Salsa comes from the chile pepper. Do you have chile peppers in Russia?"

"Chiles are a New World crop, Mom," Maxine put in.