Inspired, I ran to the counter and began to draw Nicholas. I drew not just the perfect match of his features but also his ease and his flow. Just as Nicholas was digging in his pockets for a tip, I finished and stepped back to view the picture. What I saw was someone beautiful, perhaps someone more beautiful than I had ever seen in my life, someone whom others pointed to and whispered about. Plain as day, in the straight brows, the high forehead, and the strong chin, I could see that this was someone who was meant to lead others.
Lionel and Leroy came into the main area of the diner, carrying leftovers, which they brought home to their kids. “You know what to do,” Lionel said to me, waving as he pushed his way out the door. “See you, Nick,” he called.
Very quietly, under his breath, he said, “Nicholas.”
I stepped up behind him, still holding my portrait. “Did you say something?” I asked.
“Nicholas,” he repeated, clearing his throat. “I don’t like ‘Nick.’ ”
“Oh,” I said. “Did you want anything else?”
Nicholas glanced around him, as if he was just noticing he was the only customer in the diner and that the sun had gone down hours before. “I guess you’re trying to close up,” he said. He stretched out one leg on the banquette and turned the corners of his mouth up in a smile. “Hey,” he said, “how old are you anyway?”
“Old enough,” I snapped, and I moved closer to clear his plate. I leaned forward, still clutching the menu with his picture, and that’s when he grabbed my wrist.
“That’s me,” he said, surprised. “Hey, let me see.”
I tried to pull away. I didn’t really care if he looked at the portrait, but the feeling of his hand against my wrist was paralyzing me. I could feel the pulse of his thumb and the ridges of his fingertips.
I knew by the way he touched me that he had recognized something in what I’d drawn. I peered down at the paper to see what I had done this time. At one edge of the picture I’d sketched centuries of kings, with high jeweled crowns and endless ermine robes. At the other edge I had drawn a gnarled, blossoming in A blossom tree. In its uppermost branches was a thin boy, and in his hand he held the sun.
“You’re good,” he said. Nicholas nodded to the seat across from him. “If you aren’t keeping your other customers waiting,” he said, smiling, “why don’t you join me?”
I found out that he was in his third year of medical school and that he was at the top of his class and in the middle of his rotations. He was planning to be a cardiac surgeon. He slept only four hours a night; the rest of the time he was at the hospital or studying. He thought I didn’t look a day over fifteen.
In turn, I told him the truth. I said I was from Chicago and that I had gone to parochial school and would have gone to RISD if I hadn’t run away from home. That was all I said about that, and he didn’t press me. I told him about the nights I had slept in the T station, waking in the mornings to the roar of the subway. I told him I could balance four coffee cups and saucers on one arm and that I could say I love you in ten languages. Mimi notenka kudenko, I said in Swahili, just to prove it. I told him I did not really know my own mother, something I had never admitted to my closest friends. But I did not tell him about my abortion.
It was well past one in the morning when Nicholas stood up to leave. He took the portrait I’d drawn and tossed it lightly on the Formica counter. “Are you going to hang it up?” he asked, pointing to the others.
“If you’d like,” I said. I took my black marker out and looked at his image. For a moment, a thought came to me: This is what you’ve been waiting for. “Nicholas,” I said softly, writing his name across the top.
“Nicholas,” he echoed, and then he laughed. He put his arm around my shoulders, and we stood like that, touching at the sides, for a moment. Then he stepped away. He was still stroking the side of my neck. “Did you know,” he said, pressing a spot with his thumb, “that if you push hard enough here, you can knock someone unconscious?” And then he bent down and touched his lips to where his thumb had been, kissing the spot so lightly I might have imagined it. He walked out the door before I even noticed him moving, but I heard the sleigh bells tap against the steamed window glass. I stood there, swaying, and I wondered how I could be letting this happen again.
chapter 2
Nicholas Prescott was born a miracle. After ten years of trying to conceive a child, his parents were finally given a son. And if his parents were a little older than the parents of most of the boys he went to school with, well, he never noticed. As if to make up for all the other children they’d never had, Robert and Astrid Prescott indulged Nicholas’s every whim. After a while he didn’t even need to verbalize his wishes; his parents began to guess what it was that a boy of six or twelve or twenty should have, and it was provided. So he had grown up with season tickets to the Celtics, with a purebred chocolate Lab named Scout, with virtually guaranteed admission to Exeter and Harvard. In fact, it wasn’t until Nicholas was a freshman at Harvard that he began to notice that the way he had been brought up was not the norm. Another young man might have taoutung man†ken the opportunity then to see the third world, or to volunteer for the Peace Corps, but that wouldn’t have been Nicholas. It wasn’t that he was disinterested or callous; he was just used to being a certain type of person. Nicholas Prescott had always received the world on a silver platter from his parents, and in return he gave them what was expected: the very model of a son.
Nicholas had been ranked first in his class forever. He had dated a stream of beautiful, blue-blooded Wellesley girls from the time he was sixteen and realized they found him attractive. He knew how to be charming and how to be influential. He had been telling people he was going to be a doctor like his father since he was seven, so medical school was a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. He graduated from Harvard in 1979 and deferred his admission to the medical school. First he traveled around Europe, enjoying liaisons with light-boned Parisian women who smoked cigarettes laced with mint. Then he returned home and, at the urging of his old college crew coach, trained for the Olympic rowing trials with other hopefuls on Princeton’s Lake Carnegie. He rowed seventh seat in the eight-man shell that represented the United States. His parents had a brunch for their friends one Sunday morning, drinking Bloody Marys and watching, on television, their son stroke his way to a silver medal.
It was a combination of things, then, that made Nicholas Prescott, age twenty-eight, wake up repeatedly in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking. He’d disentangle himself from Rachel, his girlfriend-also a medical student and possibly the smartest woman he’d ever known-and walk naked to the window that overlooked a courtyard below his apartment. Glowing in the blue shadow of the full moon, he’d listen to the fading sprint of traffic in Harvard Square and hold his hands suspended in front of him until the trembling stopped. And he knew, even if he didn’t care to admit it, what lay behind his nightmares: Nicholas had spent nearly three decades evading failure, and he realized he was living on borrowed time.
Nicholas did not believe in God-he was too much a man of science-but he did think there was someone or something keeping track of his successes, and he knew that good fortune couldn’t last forever. He found himself thinking more and more of his freshman roommate in college, a thin boy named Raj, who had got a C+ on a literature paper and jumped from the roof of Widener, breaking his neck. What was it Nicholas’s father used to say? Life turns on a dime.