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 Nich olas 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 b-tr qy down mody, 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 Nicholar 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.
“They said congratulations,” Nicholas told me when he’d hung up the phone after telling his parents about us. “They want us to come out tomorrow night.”
It was clear to me after our first visit that Astrid Prescott liked me about as much as she’d like a Hessian army overrunning her darkroom. “They did not say that,” I answered. “Tell me the truth.”
“That is the truth,” Nicholas admitted, “and that’s what bothers me.”
We drove to Brookline in near silence, and when we rang the doorbell Astrid and Robert Prescott answered together. They were dressed fashionably in shades of gray, and they had dimmed the lights in the house. If I had not known better, I would have assumed I’d arrived at a wake.
During dinner, I kept waiting for something to happen. When Nicholas dropped his fork, I jumped out of my seat. But there was no screaming, no earth-shattering announcement. A maid served roast duck and fiddleheads; Nicholas and his father talked about bluefishing off the Cape. Astrid toasted our future, and we all lifted our glasses so that the sun, still coming through the windows, splintered through the twisted stems and littered the walls with rainbows. I spent the main course being choked by the fear of the unknown, which lurked in the corners of the dining room with the stale breath and slitted eyes of a wolf. I spent dessert staring at the massive crystal chandelier balanced above the lily centerpiece. It was suspended by a thin gold chain, light as the hair of a fairy-tale princess, and I wondered just what it could take before it broke.
Robert led us into the parlor for coffee and brandy. Astrid made sure we all had a glass. Nicholas sat beside me on a love seat and put his arm over my shoulders. He leaned over and whispered to me that dinner had gone so well he wouldn’t be surprised if his parents now offered us a huge, extr at q huge, eavagant wedding. I knotted my hands in my lap, noticing the small framed photos tucked in every spare inch of space in the parlor-in the bookshelves, on the piano, even beneath the chairs. All were photos of Nicholas, at different ages: Nicholas on a tricycle, Nicholas’s face turned up to the sky, Nicholas sitting on the front steps with a ratty black puppy. I was trying so hard to see these pieces of his life, the things I had missed, that I almost did not hear Robert Prescott’s question. “Just how old,” he said, “are you really.”
I was caught off guard. I had been examining the ice-blue satin paper on the walls, the overstuffed white wing chairs, and the Queen Anne side tables, tastefully highlighted with antique vases and painted copper boxes. Nicholas had told me that the portrait over the fireplace, a Sargent which had held my interest, was not anyone he knew. It wasn’t the subject that had led his father to purchase it, he said; it was the investment. I wondered how Astrid Prescott had found the time to create a name for herself and a house that could put a museum to shame. I wondered how a boy could possibly grow up in a home where sliding down the banister or walking the dog on a yo- yo could unintentionally destroy hundreds of years of history.
“I’m eighteen,” I said evenly, thinking that in my house-our house-furniture would be soft, with curved edges, colored bright to remind you you were alive, and everything, everything, would be replaceable.