скачать книгу бесплатно
“Cooking dinner, probably,” came the answer.
Amanda turned around and leaned back against the sill. “But she’s not enough for you, I presume.”
Jingle, jingle, jingle. He was on the move again.
“I was under the impression that you were going to marry this girl.”
“I might,” he said, smiling, moving toward her.
“This is a marvelous start for a marriage,” Amanda observed, folding her arms across her chest.
“Hmmm,” he said, placing his hands on her shoulders. Amanda dropped her head. He kissed the top of it. “What do you care?” he murmured. “You never pretended to care for me.” He lifted the hair away and pressed his lips against her neck.
Amanda’s mind raced. It was undeniable, what she felt. What she felt like doing. What she always felt like doing with Roger, and it wasn’t conversing. This unbearable, insufferable computer salesman also possessed an unbearable, insufferable member that was, at this moment, pressing against her. Only the words weren’t really “unbearable” and “insufferable”; they were “unbelievable” and “insatiable.” Like the compatible parts of her own body.
He had his hand on her breast and in a few moments Amanda was reaching down to feel the length and breadth of his excitement. He moaned into her neck, dropping his hand to press between her legs. “I am aching to get inside you,” he whispered in her ear.
The phone started ringing. Both of them froze. It rang and rang and rang. “Rosanne will get it,” Amanda whispered, their palms still pressed against each other.
But she didn’t. On the eighth ring, Amanda sighed, pulled away from Roger and smoothed her hair. “Hello?”
“I just wanted to remind you that Mr. Smith’s out here,” Rosanne’s voice said.
Amanda closed her eyes.
“You know, like he’s out here if you need him,” Rosanne was saying. Amanda also heard the sound of a zipper. She opened her eyes to see Roger lifting himself out of his pants. “I can knock on the door—” Roger moved in close and pulled Amanda’s hand down to hold him. She did. “Or maybe Mr. Smith could even yell for ya, ya never know. Or maybe he could break somethin’ in the kitchen ’cause he’s jealous or somethin’.” Roger slid Amanda’s dress up to her waist and managed to work her panty hose down. And her underwear. “Too bad there’s no gun around. A couple shots would do the trick.” Roger parted her legs with one hand, eased himself out of Amanda’s hand, and moved behind her. “How ’bout a light bulb? Sounds just like a gun sometimes.” He pushed her forward over the desk. “Amanda,” she finally said, “if you need some help you’re gonna have to say somethin’.” Roger felt for, and found, the right place and brought himself up into position.
And then Amanda cried, “No!” and tried to twist away.
And then Rosanne started pounding on the door.
She had been divorced for six years. Six years. Could it be? Six years since she had been Mrs. Christopher Gain? It was hard to believe.
If it had been six years since her marriage, then Catherine the Great had been living in her head for ten years, and existing on paper for—let’s see…five years. Could that be right?
That was right.
Amanda Miller was thirty-two years old. Thirty-two? That would make her mother—fifty-eight, her father…seventy?
Yes.
Yes, that was right.
In 1946 a WASP-y rich girl from Baltimore entered Syracuse University as a freshman. Tinker Fowles was her name. Tinker Fowles fell head over heels with her dreamy-eyed English teacher, and scandal ensued. Not only was this Associate Professor Reuben Miller twelve years older, but he was Jewish as well. (“His mother does not even speak English!” Nana Fowles had shrieked in Baltimore, pulling her hair out.) The Fowleses filed an official protest with the university, but to no avail. Tinker went ahead and married Reuben and, to her parents’ fury, Tinker transferred the million-dollar trust fund left to her from her grandmother to a Syracuse bank.
The year 1950 brought Tinker a degree in English; 1952 brought a master’s degree; 1954 brought baby Amanda; 1955 brought a doctorate in English literature; and 1957 found Professor and Associate Professor Miller both working in the English department. They were, as everyone on campus noted, the most ridiculously romantic couple ever seen in this century. The Professors Miller left poetry in each other’s office mailboxes; La Professora (as Reuben often called his wife) received flowers often; My Darling Own (as Tinker often called her husband) found silk ties and handkerchiefs hidden in his office; and every evening at six the two could be seen strolling out of the Hall of Languages, crossing the lawn, listening to the music students play the bells of Crouse Tower. They would stand there, hand in hand, smiling at each other. My Darling Own would, as he would describe, “dare to slip his hand around his dearest’s waist.”
Amanda, everyone agreed, was adorable, but certainly the oddest child around. To begin with, she was forever floating about in costume. One afternoon it would be as a princess, the next as a prince. Fridays usually found her streaking around the campus, laughing to herself, trailing multicolored layers of capes and scarves. She was reading by four and, by special arrangement, received her education at the hands of the students in the School of Education.
The Millers lived in a hundred-year-old Victorian house in Jamesville. Amanda had the entire third floor as her own. She spent hours up there by herself, reading and writing, playing music on her record player, and acting out plays that had no beginnings and no endings. She sang too (though terribly off key), and had a passion for what she considered dramatic dance (anything between ballet and the twist, or combinations thereof).
Adults were fascinated (and ultimately won over) by Amanda; children were decidedly leery of her. Upon introduction, Amanda was prone to break into merry song of her own composition and do a little dance—taking little leaps this way and that—to the usual response of her new acquaintances skedaddling but quick. But Amanda did not seem to mind; it was the attention of adults that made her happiest.
By age fifteen Amanda—strange as ever—took her SATs. And there was a bit of a problem. She scored a perfect 800 on the English part and 200 in the math (the 200 one receives for merely signing one’s name). Nana Fowles (now the widow dowager of Baltimore) pleaded with Tinker to give Amanda to her for a year—to get Amanda “stabilized,” to get this math problem straightened away and to prepare Amanda for something other than reciting poetry at the top of her lungs in the stairwells of the Hall of Languages.
Amanda begged to go. By this time Nana had made her year-round residence the Fowles Farm, a source of wonder and enchantment to Amanda all of her young life. And so Amanda traveled to Baltimore in Nana’s limousine to get stabilized.
While Nana was otherwise rather forbidding in nature, she was helpless against the charms of her granddaughter. For the next fourteen months Amanda could be seen daily riding across the expanse of Fowles Farm, scarves trailing in the wind behind her. It had not been Nana’s intention to put Amanda’s fantasy world on four legs, but the girl was growing so quickly, so alarmingly, that even Nana had to admit that adulthood and labors of the heart would be arriving soon enough.
However, every afternoon at four, Monday through Friday, poor old Mr. Hammer would arrive, shouldering the burden of trying to teach Amanda mathematics. Amanda was cheerful, amiable, and even stopped touching Mr. Hammer’s ears when he asked her to (“They are ever so remarkably red,” Amanda would say), but she seemed to go into some kind of autistic trance when his lesson began. She watched as hard as she could but heard nothing. It was a language that her brain did not understand.
“Amanda,” Mr. Hammer would say, marking a big red X by every question on the test sheet, “you have outdone yourself. Now, not only can you not do algebra, but you appear to have lost the ability to add.”
Amanda would slide down in her chair and examine her hair at close range. “Nana will be most grievously vexed,” she would sigh.
Poor Nana was also suffering grievous vexation over the bodily changes that had descended on her granddaughter. The slight girl who had arrived was blossoming in ways that Fowles women did not. “You must do something,” Nana would direct the seamstress, “about that—about her—” The movement of her hand would indicate that the seamstress was to do something about concealing Amanda’s ever expanding chest.
Amanda, Nana noted, was the only one oblivious to her new body. The gardener had taken to trailing around after her; the groom smiled in a most inappropriate way when he insisted on giving Amanda a leg up on her horse; even Randolph, the butler—who was at least as old as Nana—could be seen gazing elsewhere than at the gravy he was supposed to be serving.
If Amanda gained any permanent knowledge from her “stabilization” at Fowles Farm, it was Nana’s opinion of the saving graces and potential downfalls of her heritage. Amanda loved Fowles Farm because, Nana said, her Fowles blood responded to it. Amanda’s thinness, her five-eight height, her light brown hair (and its straightness), her nose, her straight white teeth, her strong jaw line and her long arms and legs were all Fowles. As for the shape of her eyes, their strange shade of hazel, those long lashes, that mouth, and the “overendowment” (referring to her chest), they all—sigh—clearly came from the Millers (said with the same emphasis as murderers).
Mr. Hammer pounded enough mathematics into Amanda’s head—right up to the door of the examination room in Baltimore—for her to score a 560 on the SAT. As for the English part, if the examiners had taken her essay on “What George Orwell Would Think of the Design of This Test” into consideration, surely Amanda would have scored higher than her 800.
Amanda went to Amherst on the strength of her desire to attend school with Emily Dickinson’s ghost. She enjoyed school very much and felt at home around the English department. She also made great friends with the curator of the Dickinson house. As for her contemporaries, everyone liked her—and some even admired her—but always from a distance. She was, in their words, “just sooo weird.”
In her senior year Nana died. It became campus news that Amanda had inherited some four million dollars. And it was right around then that Christopher Gain appeared on her doorstep—literally. She was dressed in billowing white, just departing from her cottage to visit the curator. Christopher was dressed like Zorro. He bowed, deeply, his hat in hand, swept his cape to the side and offered her his hand. The girls roared from the windows above, but after Amanda smiled pleasantly at them, she turned to Christopher and took his hand.
Christopher had graduated some years before from Dartmouth. Since that time he had been hanging out at Amherst, discussing his future as a brilliant writer with various gorgeous coeds. He himself had gorgeous blond looks, tremendous charm and appeal, and a three-hundred-year-old pedigree.
Amanda found Christopher slightly magical. Sitting on the grass outside Emily’s house, in the dark of the night, he cited poem after poem that the great lady had written. While Amanda noticed that he kept bending the emphasis to imply that Emily had been writing to some lover hiding beneath her bed, rather than to her universal lover in the heavens above, she enjoyed the performance immensely. And then, offering his hand to her again, he had led her behind some trees. He spread his cloak, gently helped her down, and then gracefully, gently, laid himself down on top of her.
Amanda marveled aloud at the way Christopher touched her. What he was doing, what it felt like—what she did not know it felt like. But it felt wonderful, she said, over and over. Amanda said a lot of things. In fact, she rendered a verbal narrative description of everything Christopher was doing to her—as he did it to her—as if it would help her to remember it all.
Amanda had never been touched that way before. Amanda had never been so much as kissed on the mouth before. Amanda was introduced to earthly delights beyond her comprehension. It wasn’t like Mr. Hammer’s mathematics—but it was very much like reading, she thought. It was taking her somewhere quite far away, somewhere quite different from the places she had been—inside of her? outside of her? where?—and she had the feeling that, yes, like reading, she would not fully understand it until she reached the end of what Christopher had to share with her.
They married three weeks after her graduation and moved to Florence. For two years Amanda and Christopher read and played and talked and dressed and drifted and reveled in Italy. They also spent hours making love.
At night, Christopher would go off alone to the cafés to think about his novel. Amanda preferred to stay home, reading and writing, playing records on the stereo, and acting out plays that had no beginnings and no endings….
Amanda’s first brush with reality struck when Christopher said he couldn’t have sex with her because he had herpes. Had what? Christopher took her to the doctor with him, where it was carefully explained to her that she was lucky not to have caught it. But what was it? How did one catch such a dreadful thing? Did it have something to do with the water here?
The doctor explained.
Christopher said it happened one night, late, when he was so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing. It would never happen again. And soon he would be well, he was sure, and then— “oh, darling, do you know what I’m going to do to you?”
On Christopher’s inspiration, the couple moved to New York City in 1978, renting an apartment on 73rd Street between Fifth and Madison avenues. Two weeks after they arrived, Amanda came home from registration at Columbia University to find a young man named Marco wandering around in her kitchen with a towel around his waist.
It took almost six months for it to penetrate, but Reality Part II visited Amanda. Christopher, by his own admission, was bisexual. For Amanda, this information did seem like Mr. Hammer’s mathematics. Not until Christopher persistently pounded it into her head was she able to glean what it was he was talking about. (“But I don’t understand, how can this be?” “It just is, Amanda.” “Is what?” “Like it is between you and me.” “But he’s not like me—how could it be like us?”)
Amanda took her furrowed brow to Columbia to concentrate on an MFA in their creative writing program. It didn’t work. With each passing day she and Christopher were splitting apart. Their sex life broke down completely and Amanda, for the first time in her life, felt terribly lonely. She stopped writing, she could scarcely read, she could not act out plays of any kind. After a while, not even the huge mirror of the wardrobe could evoke a line from her. Her costumes hung in the closets; her attire died into jeans, the denim growing looser, her blouses growing baggier. She dropped out of graduate school.
In 1979, Tinker and Reuben surprised the Gainses by arriving in New York to see them. (It was the first time they had actually made it.) The Millers were frightened by the change in their daughter. They were also stunned by Christopher, who, last time they had seen him, had not being sailing in and out of the house in silk pajamas. And there was something else—something Tinker had to talk about in private with Amanda.
Tinker didn’t mean to pry, but Nana’s lawyer, Mr. Osborne—did Amanda remember Mr. Osborne at the reading of the will? Amanda did—told her that the Gainses had spent some four hundred thousand dollars in the last eight months. Mr. Osborne—who only had Amanda’s best interests at heart—said three hundred and forty thousand of that money had flowed through Christopher. Did Amanda know that? Was, perhaps, Christopher starting a business?
When Amanda sank down in her chair and started playing with her hair, Tinker had called her husband in. Together, standing before her, holding hands, the Millers gently suggested to their daughter that she might want to see a doctor…perhaps she and Christopher together.
Christopher, no…but yes, Amanda would see the doctor.
Amanda had been in therapy for five months when she flew up to Syracuse for a visit. Her parents were encouraged by the change in her. (Though, they sighed in secret, she was not their Amanda anymore, was she?) There were papers to be signed with Mr. Osborne, money matters to be rearranged. Amanda wasn’t sure what all the papers meant (a Mr. Osborne was not of much value without a Mr. Hammer), but she agreed that it would be a good idea to curtail Christopher’s access to her money.
When Amanda came home—on that fateful Saturday evening—she found her home in a full-swing party, the majority of the guests being what are sometimes described as “screaming queens.” Her husband, Christopher, was the loudest. Wearing a little fig leaf. And in the dining room, among the bottles of booze and piles of joints, Amanda saw an array of pills and powders and needles and razors and a mirror, and a burner was scorching the finish off of Nana’s table and—
Amanda moved into the Plaza Hotel—where, she remembered, her earliest literary heroine, Eloise, lived—and asked Mr. Osborne to handle her divorce.
Amanda settled fifty thousand dollars on Christopher, though Mr. Osborne told her she certainly didn’t owe him a thing. Amanda thought she did though.
She bought the apartment on Riverside Drive at once. From the ground looking up, she thought her building looked like a castle. And her apartment, on the top floor, came complete with a tower room. She flew down to Baltimore, tagged furniture that was in storage from Fowles Farm, and had it shipped to her new home. In time, Amanda started riding in Central Park, and then her reading resumed, and her writing resumed, and then her talking to herself resumed. But the plays never came back, nor did her costumes ever leave the closet.
The idea of writing a novel from the perspective of Catherine the Great had originated in Florence. After having read and digested some three hundred tomes of Russian and European history over the years, in the fall of 1981 Amanda finally sat down and wrote the first line of the book. “I, Catherine, Imperial Empress of Russia, answer to no man.”
“He’s gone,” Rosanne said, coming back into the writing room. She stared at Amanda for a moment and then abruptly turned away. “Uh, ya better…”
Amanda was confused. But then she looked down at herself and saw the state of her dress, of her undress, of her half undress. She pulled the dress down over her thighs and smoothed it. She brushed back her hair with her hands and felt the absence of an earring. Amanda rubbed her face, dropped her hands and sat back against the window. She sighed. “I am utterly at a loss as to what to say to you—except, thank you.”
Exhibiting caution, Rosanne slowly brought her eyes back around. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. She swung her weight onto one leg and brought up her hand to the opposite hip. “Look, Amanda,” she said, looking down at the floor, “it’s none of my business—and it’s not none of Mrs. G’s either—” She looked up.
Amanda covered her mouth and coughed.
“Don’t get mad—”
Amanda crossed her arms over her chest, sighing.
“I think you’re great,” Rosanne said.
Amanda was looking confused again.
“And Mrs. G thinks so too, and we just kinda worry about ya. I mean, it’s not like we think anything’s wrong with that guy or nothin’,” she rushed on, “it’s just we wish you were a little happier.”
Amanda nodded slightly, lowering her eyes. “Thank you for your concern, Rosanne,” she murmured.
“You’re not mad or nothin’—vexed, are ya?”
Amanda raised her eyes, shaking her head. “Of course not,” she said.
“Okay then. Well, I better be goin’,” Rosanne said, moving toward the door. “Oh, man, I almost forgot to tell ya.” She spun around. “Amanda, I think Howie wants to read your book.”
Amanda blinked.
“Howie—you know, Mondays, Howard Stewart. The editor.” Rosanne waved her arm in the air to make sure Amanda was paying attention. “Listen, okay?”
“I’m listening,” Amanda said.
“Now don’t go gettin’ freaky, but he was really interested in your book. I told him it wasn’t finished or nothin’, and I told him it was kinda long—”
“Long,” Amanda repeated, looking at the shelves that were Catherine.
“So is it okay if he calls you or somethin’?”
Amanda looked at her, hesitating.
“He’s really the greatest guy,” Rosanne said. “Just talk to him, will ya? You know, like he’s an editor. And he won’t push ya about it, he isn’t pushy at all.” She nodded her head vigorously. “Just say yes, Amanda.”
Amanda lowered her arms to her sides, sighed and said, “Yes.”
“Great!” Rosanne said, leaving the room. “See ya next week!”
Amanda covered her face with her hands. I nearly had sex in front of the cleaning woman, she imagined herself saying to Dr. Vanderkeaton.
It had started with the apartment on Riverside Drive. This sex thing had. One man on Mondays and never one that she could even remotely like. For the last eight months it had been Roger, and Rosanne and Mrs. Goldblum had known about him only because Roger had forever been stopping in to try his luck. (“Mondays,” Amanda would hiss at the door, with Rosanne lurking dangerously close by, “I have told you repeatedly. Every other Monday at one o’clock.”
“Yesterday was Monday,” Roger would hiss back, trying to grab hold of her, “and I came back to finish up.” “Mrs. G told me to tell ya,” Rosanne would say, coming out into the foyer, “that she hopes you’ll invite your visitor to join you guys for tea.” And the confounded dolt had said, “Love to!” no less than six times.)
In the beginning, five years ago, it had worked. Sex had pushed something back into place for Amanda. After one of those Monday afternoons something would temporarily subside inside of her—that awful, gnawing sensation that her moorings were fraying to the snapping point. But, over time, it had stopped working that way, leaving Amanda only to agonize over what seemed like some sort of curse on her body. On her.
She still ran into Christopher on occasion. Once at F.A.O. Schwarz, once at Lincoln Center, twice on the terrace outside the Stanhope and, most recently, in the Whitney Museum. She had been alone; Christopher was never alone.
Each time she saw him—and most strongly this last time—Amanda felt weak at the sight of how unattractive he had become. His hair was thinning almost too fast to be normal; he had lost far too much weight; his muscle tone was gone; and his teeth showed nicotine stains when he smiled at her. His eyes, too, had lost their luster. And Christopher was losing his—his maleness, too.
Looking at him made Amanda feel queasy and disoriented. This was the man who had commanded such love and desire from her? This was her Christopher?
Amanda lowered her hands from her face and looked at the shelves of Catherine that made up one wall of the writing room. There was her work, yes. There was that. And maybe…maybe it was time to do something about it. What had Rosanne said? Something about an editor wanting to read it?
The thought made her feel cold and scared and so she banished it.
She walked over to the desk, sat down, and pulled the telephone toward her. She looked at it a moment, lifted the receiver, and pushed the button marked “in house.”
“Yes, Peter, is that you? It is Amanda Miller calling…. Fine, thank you, and you?…I’m very glad to hear it. Peter, the reason why I am calling is to say that under no circumstances is Mr. Slats to be granted entry into this building…. That is correct—don’t let him in…. Exactly. Not now, not ever.”
4
The Wyatts
“You are different, Althea, and I’ll tell you how,” Sam Wyatt said to his daughter, voice rising. “You’ve got a nice home, a family that loves you and the best damn education money can buy. The question is, are you going to do anything with it?”
“Mom,” Althea said, looking to her mother.
Sam slammed the Times down on the breakfast table.
