Crazy in Love (2 page)

I heard someone in the background at Nick’s office. A male voice telling him they were ready to leave for the meeting.

“Are you interviewing anyone today?” Nick asked.

“I have a few possibilities, don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried about keeping you busy, Georgie.” He paused. “I love you,” he said, even though someone was standing right there.

I hung up feeling angry; I had started to notice I often felt angry after talking to Nick. That was one secret I kept from him. He knew I was bothered, but he didn’t know how much. I barely knew myself. At the beginning his job had been an adventure, not to mention being the type of work about which every law student dreams. Everything about it felt larger than life: the clients he represented, the amounts of money involved, the way we lived in a house directly on Long Island Sound while many of his law school classmates had small rent-stabilized apartments in the city, the way he flew in and out of Black Hall by seaplane, the exotic places we went on business trips. But gradually the stakes had grown higher. He had been at the firm for nearly seven years, and he was thinking about partnership. That meant longer hours and major pressure. A tiny mistake could cost a client millions and Nick his chance.

Occasionally we considered returning to New York, where the commute would be twenty minutes by subway instead of an hour by seaplane, but I loved living in the country. Our shingled house perched on a rocky point jutting into the Sound. My grandparents, Penitence (Pem) and Damon Bennison, had built houses for Honora, me, and Clare, and prayed we would always love the place. We had flower and vegetable gardens and an entire hillside covered with heather. Migrating birds passed through every March and September. Every winter, seals came down from Maine to swim in the bay. For years I had been working on a profile of the bay, from the rocky bottom to the water column itself, but now I had another job. I operated the Swift Observatory, an institution that observed neither galaxies nor constellations but human nature.

It began with a lie. I lied to Nick. Or, rather, I failed to tell him the whole truth. Six months earlier I had answered a classified ad and started working as a maid. I did not tell Nick. Later I saw this as an act of pure defiance, a private protest against his endless working nights, but at the time I felt nearly out of control, in need of a secret. When Nick would call late in the afternoon, asking where I had been, I would say, “The fish store.” It astonished me, the fact he never suspected. I hid my wages in an envelope in my desk drawer. I imagined whipping it out some day, handing it to Nick, and saying, “Pack your bags, baby, we’re going to the Bahamas.” Sometimes I considered buying him an extravagant birthday present. Mainly I saved the money for our future.

Working as a maid, I experienced the thrill of observation. My first client was Abel Darty, a banker who was never home. The house empty, I could sustain the illusion that it was a museum of his life. Ashtrays, dirty socks, the gallery of family photos standing on the grand piano, the history and science books in the library: all were artifacts.

I took on other clients. Mrs. Burns, whose father was dying; the Corellis, a couple with twin teenaged daughters; Liza Jordan, whose marriage was breaking up against her will. Housekeeping was the precursor of the Swift Observatory. The simple facts of my clients’ lives seemed extraordinary. Their different ways of arranging their kitchens compelled me. I began to make notes about them instead of doing my profile of the bay. How Mrs. Burns spent mornings making delicious, clear, concentrated broths to take to her father in the hospital. The secret things I found hidden in Gabrielle and Cecilia Corelli’s room: a do-it-yourself voodoo kit, three failed biology quizzes under Cecilia’s bureau scarf, a vial of water-soluble green hair dye in Gabrielle’s gym bag. One day Liza had started to talk about the separation, and two hours passed before we even noticed that I hadn’t done the upstairs. Although the daily transformation of my hands from smooth to abraded satisfied me in a way I couldn’t define, the work bored me. I had already decided to quit. But by then my interest in other people’s lives had become so consuming, I had to tell Nick.

At first he was devastated by my secret career as a maid. He could not begin to understand why I hadn’t told him about it. Two nights in a row he came home from work and tried to get to the heart of some terrible truth. His first fear was that I was in love with Abel Darty. When I remember those conversations, they seem warped, spoken by people entirely unlike me and Nick. Wickedly, I enjoyed his jealousy. I took to greeting him at the door wearing lipstick—certain proof of a serious transformation.

Finally we talked until dawn one Thursday. I had expected to tell him about the great interest I had developed in my clients’ lives, but instead we talked about his absence from our house. How he always seemed to be gone. How we both were too tired to have any fun by the time he landed in Black Hall. We accused, denied, disavowed, then finally agreed, for the truth was quite obvious: we missed each other like crazy, and all because of his work. For the moment we would change nothing, but at least we had raised the problem. Like a still-activated undersea mine brought to the surface by scuba divers, danger remained, but at least it was in plain sight.

Stepping close to me, Nick chased away the melodrama. I caught a glimpse of us in the bathroom mirror: Nick, so tall, with softly curling black hair, me with hair as black as Nick’s but eyes pale instead of dark.

“You really like cleaning bathrooms?” he whispered into my hair.

“No, I like looking through medicine cabinets.”

“It’s your cataloguing instinct,” Nick said. “It sounds to me like a human version of your profile of the bay.”

“I want to do profiles of people, Nick. Study the most ordinary people I can find. I learn the most amazing things about high school girls—”

“Your parents named you right, Agassiz.”

My mother, who had had me during her graduate years at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, had let my father call me Georgiana after his mother under the condition my middle name be Agassiz after Louis Agassiz, the great naturalist. His motto had been “Study nature, not books.” Much to Honora’s dismay I had adopted it and not gone to college.

“Honora will love this idea,” Nick said. “Maybe she and I can be your patrons for a while. You can do a newsletter for the family until you think of something broader.”

“I already have. I’ve written up a grant proposal, and I’m submitting it to the Avery Foundation. I want them to fund the Swift Observatory.”

“You have? Maybe this will take your mind off my work,” Nick said.

“Maybe,” I said, but I doubted it and so did Nick.

Kissing goodnight in pajamas and glasses, we reminded me of those couples in black-and-white home movies: stocky, jerky, the wife in a shirtwaist, the husband in a white shirt and tie, bumping glasses and noses during the kiss, smiling at the camera. Safe. Old-fashioned. A real married couple.

IN MARCH I GOT
the money.

I could hardly believe it.

Two thousand dollars paid by the Avery Foundation to the Swift Observatory for the study of human nature, and all they expected in return were quarterly reports on my progress.

THE STUDY OF HUMAN
nature deserved more than a few quarterly reports, so I decided to narrow my focus. By that windy May morning I had started to specialize in families. My first reports covered three sisters who had traveled around the world together, a couple whose Christmas tree farm had just been repossessed, a man whose new bride had drowned in a white-water kayaking accident, and a woman accused of helping her terminally ill husband kill himself.

I let myself in my front door, changed into jeans and a sweater, and walked into my workroom. Battered wicker furniture covered with faded summer fabric filled the small space. The surface of every table was covered by shells, sharks’ teeth, vases of dried heather, tendrils of dried seaweed, framed snapshots of us and our families. On my desk, an eighteenth-century French worktable, piles of notes about families covered old notes and sketches of marine life in the bay. Through two windows I saw the bay, the rocky headlands that protected it from the open Sound, Clare’s house farther out the western headland. My mother’s house, hidden from my sight, nestled in a pine grove. Pem’s house, big and dark and empty now, lorded it over the entire scene, its widow’s walk barely showing over the treeline.

Yesterday’s newspapers covered the seat of my chair. I went through them in search of stories about families. Since giving up my maid’s work, I had to take my ideas from the media. The relationship between Senator Hearne and his troubled son interested me, but of course it interested everyone in the state. The dynamics of life in the Children’s Home, where brothers and sisters were allowed to stay together, seemed brave and poignant, but too public. Social workers studied that place every day. Newsprint had turned my hands black by the time I came to the story about Mona Tuchman.

Mona Tuchman had tried to kill her husband’s mistress. She stabbed the woman with a butter knife. Despite the weapon’s bluntness, Mona Tuchman had cracked one of the woman’s ribs and left her bleeding. This had happened in the woman’s own kitchen. The woman remained in the hospital; Mona Tuchman had been in jail but now was free on bail. She had three children. She was my age. The other woman, whose name was Celeste Stone, was a close friend. A source said Mrs. Tuchman had been so shocked to hear about her husband’s affair that she had gone straight to the friend’s apartment, just four blocks away on Central Park West, and confronted her. One thing led to another, and Mona Tuchman grabbed the nearest weapon. “We’re grateful it wasn’t chicken shears,” the source said. Apparently the other woman was an excellent cook, in the process of boning partridge breasts when Mona Tuchman burst in.

The newspaper reporter found this situation hilarious. Why quote “We’re grateful it wasn’t chicken shears” in a story about real tragedy? I sat there holding the newspaper, listening to waves slap the rocks, thinking about desperate Mona Tuchman. One day she thought she was happily married; that night she was an attempted murderer. Her husband had custody of their children. They had been married six years; he was an eye surgeon, she ran a mail-order patchwork quilt business. I imagined her choosing that line of work because it would allow her to stay home with her children. I imagined her at that moment: alone in the West Side apartment she had, until two days ago, shared with her family. Now they were gone. I conjured up this picture of her: huddled in a chair by the window, knees drawn up to her chin, dark hair greasy because she didn’t have the strength to wash it. A woman named Mona Tuchman would have dark hair, or maybe I was just thinking of the Mona Lisa.

I have always believed that anyone, sufficiently provoked, could be capable of murder. Clare and I once laid the groundwork to murder someone. When we were thirteen and fifteen, our mother came close to marrying a man named Carson Bleyle. We hated him. He made himself too comfortable in our house too soon. At the same time, he owned a house in New Haven and wanted us to move there. He couldn’t keep his hands off Honora, and thinking back on it, Clare and I have agreed he was overly touchy with us as well. “Bring me some tissues, lovey,” he was fond of calling through the bathroom door. Whenever he visited he would take a solitary stroll to the end of Pem’s dock. He would smoke a cigar and stroll back. Clare and I decided he would meet his fate on one of those moonlight strolls. We bought marbles at Malloy’s, poured them into a mesh bag that had once held onions, and tied them underwater to a piling. Within days the bright glass turned murky with algae. Tiny sea plants attached themselves to the smooth surfaces. After a week the marbles looked as though they had been in saltwater for a year. Our plan was this: we would retrieve them, spread them over the dock, and lie in wait for Carson. He would slip on the marbles. When he fell into the water, we would bash him with a rock. Upon investigation, the police would discover the marbles, but Clare would swear she had lost them when she was nine. Although Honora broke up with him before we came close to acting, planning Carson’s demise gave us much pleasure.