Nicholas is right. I don’t understand his life. I don’t know the things that everyone else takes for granted, like how to read a doctor’s mood after surgery, or which side to lean to when Imelda takes the dishes away. I’m killing myself to be part of a world where I’m always two steps behind.
A door opens, and classical music floods the hallway. Robert holds Max, letting him chew on the plastic CD case. I give my best smile, but I am still shivering. My father-in-law steps forward and narrows his eyes. “What’s happened to you?” he asks.
The whole day, this past month, all of it crowds and chokes in my throat. The last person in the world I want to break down in front of is Robert Prescott, but still, I start to cry. “Nicholas,” I sob.
Robert frowns. “Never did learn to pick on someone his own size,” he says. He takes my elbow and guides me into his study, a dark room that makes me think of fox hunts and stiff British lords. “Sit down and unwind,” he says. He settles into a huge leather chair and sets Max on the top of his desk to play with brass paperweights.
I lean back against the burgundy couch and obediently close my eyes, but I feel too conspicuously out of place to unwind. A crystal brandy decanter rests on a mahogany table beneath the frozen smile of a mounted buck. A set of dueling pistols, just for show, are crossed above the arch of the door. This room-dear God, this whole house -is like something straight out of a novel.
Real people do not live like this, surrounded by thousands of volumes of books and ancient paintings of pale women and thick silver varsity mugs. Real people do not take tea as seriously as if it were Communion. Real people do not make five-figure donations to the Republican party-
“Do you like Handel?”
At the sound of Robert’s voice, my eyes fly open and every muscle in my body goes on the alert. I stare at him carefully, wondering if this is a test, a trap set for me so I’ll slip up and show how little I understand. “I don’t know,” I say bitterly. “Should I?” I wait to see his eyes flare, or his mouth tighten, and when it doesn’t, the fight goes out of me. It’s your own fault, Paige, I think. He’s only trying to be nice. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I haven’t had a very good day. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that when I was growing up, the only antique we had was my father’s family Bible, and the music we listened to had words.” I smile hesitantly. “This kind of life takes a little getting used to, although you couldn’t really undey wñ€†rstand that-”
I break off, recalling what Nicholas told me years ago about his father, what I’d forgotten when I’d seen Robert, and all his trappings, again. Something flickers across his eyes-regret, or maybe relief-but just as quickly, it disappears. I stare at him, fascinated. I wonder how he could have come from my kind of background but still know, so easily, the right way to move and to act in a house like this.
“So Nicholas told you,” Robert says, and he doesn’t sound disappointed or furious; it’s simply a statement of fact.
Suddenly I remember what had tugged at the corner of my mind when Nicholas said his father had grown up poor. Robert Prescott was the one who had objected to Nicholas’s marrying me. Not Astrid-which I could understand-but Robert. He had been the one to drive Nicholas away. He had been the one who said Nicholas would be ruining his life.
I tell myself I’m not angry anymore, just curious. But I pick Max up anyway, taking him away from my father-in-law. “How could you?” I whisper.
Robert leans forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “I worked so hard for this. All of this.” He gestures, sweeping his hands in the directions of the four walls. “I could never stand the thought of someone throwing it all away. Not Astrid, and especially not Nicholas.”
Max squirms, and I set him down on the floor. “Nicholas didn’t have to throw it all away,” I point out. “You could have paid for his education.”
Robert shakes his head. “It wouldn’t have been the same. Eventually you’d have held him back. You could never move in these circles, Paige. You wouldn’t be comfortable living like this.”
It isn’t the truth that stings; it is hearing Robert Prescott, once again, decide what is best for me. I curl my hands into fists. “How the hell can you be so sure?”
“Because I’m not,” he says quietly. Shocked, I sink back into the couch. I stare at Robert’s cashmere sweater, his neat white hair, the pride gracing his jaw. But I also notice that his hands are clenched tight together and that a pulse beats fast at the base of his neck. He’s terrified, I think. He’s as scared of me as I’ve been of him.
I think about this for a moment, and about why he is telling me something it obviously hurts him to discuss. I remember something my mother said in North Carolina when I asked her why she had never come back. “You make your own bed,” she told me. “You have to lie in it.”
I smile gently and sweep Max off the floor. I hand him to his grandfather. “I’ll change for dinner,” I say, and I start toward the hall.
Robert’s voice stops me. His words trip over Handel’s sweet violins and reaching flutes. “It’s worth it,” he says quietly. “I would do it all over again.”
I do not turn around. “Why?”
“Why would you?” he says, and his question follows me up the stairs and slips into the cool quiet of my room. It demands an answer, and it knocks me off center.
Nicholas.
Sometimes I sing Max to sleep. It doesn’t seem to matter what I sing-gospel or pop, Dire Straits or the Beatles. I usually skip the lullabies, because I figure Max will hear those from everyone else.
We sit on the rocking chair in his room at the Prescotts’. Astrid lets me hold him whenever I want to now, as long as Nicholas isn’t around and isn’t about to show up. It’s her way of getting me to stay, I think, although I don’t consider leaving a real option anymore.
Max has just had his bath. The easiest way to give it, because he’s so slippery in the bathtub, is just to get naked with him and set him between my legs. He has a Tupperware bowl and a rubber duck that he plays with in the water. He doesn’t mind when I get baby shampoo in his eyes. Afterward I wrap him in the towel with me, pretending we share the same skin, and I think of wallabees and opossums and other animals that always carry around their young.
Max is getting very sleepy, rubbing his eyes with his little fists and yawning often. “Hang on a second,” I say, sitting him up on the floor. I lean down and pop a pacifier into his mouth.
He watches me as I straighten his crib. I smooth the sheet and move the Cookie Monster and the rabbit rattle out of the way. When I turn around fast, he smiles, as if this is a game, and he loses his pacifier in the process. “You can’t suck and smile at the same time,” I tell him. I turn around to plug in the night-light, and when I face Max again he laughs. He holds up his arms to me, asking to be held.
Suddenly I realize that this is what I’ve been waiting for-a man who depends entirely on me. When I met Jake, I spent years trying to make him fall in love with me. When I married Nicholas, I lost him to the mistress of medicine. I dreamed for years of a man who couldn’t live without me, a man who pictured my face when he closed his eyes, who loved me when I was a mess in the morning and when dinner was late and even when I overloaded the washing machine and burned out the motor.