Harvesting the Heart (49 page)

She was wearing a simple black sleeveless sheath. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a loose knot; her eyes were wide and luminescent. Her shoes were fake alligatorskin, with spike heels—the kind of shoes his college friends had called fuck-me pumps—although with someone like Paige wearing them, that term would never have come to mind.

At the end of their other three dates, Nicholas had gone no further than gently cupping her breasts, and from her quiet trembling he knew that was enough. In spite of the fact that she'd run away from home, that she was not college educated, and that she was a waitress in a diner, to Nicholas, Paige O'Toole was as chaste as they came. When he pictured her, he thought of the image of Psyche from the White Rock ginger ale label, a girl-woman kneeling on a boulder, staring at her reflection as if she was surprised to see it in the water below. The way Paige was shy to smile, the instinctive habit she had of covering her body when Nicholas touched her—it all added up. They had never spoken of it; Nicholas wasn't like that. But he believed in the strength of coincidence, and surely there was a reason he had been in Mercy when she had begun to work there: Paige did not know it, but she had been waiting for him all her life.

“You look wonderful,” Nicholas said, kissing the spot below her left ear. They were waiting for the elevator.

Paige smoothed her hands over the dress, tugging as if it didn't fit her like a second skin. “This is Doris's,” she admitted. “I didn't have any couture, so we went through her closet. Would you believe this is from 1959? We spent the whole afternoon taking in the seams.”

“And the shoes?” The bell rang, and Nicholas took Paige's elbow to lead her into the elevator.

Paige looked straight at him, challenging. “I bought them. I figured I deserved something new.”

Nicholas was sometimes surprised by the fury she held in check. When she believed she was right, she would fight to the end to make you see her side, continuing emphatically even after she had proof that she was wrong.

When the elevator touched ground level, Nicholas waited for Paige to step out first, as he'd been taught in eighth grade. But when she didn't, he turned to face her, and he saw again the expression she often had when looking at Nicholas. It was as if he filled up her entire world; as if there was nothing he could do wrong. “What is it?” Nicholas said, taking her hand.

Paige shook her head. “It's just you.” She took two steps and then looked back at him, smiling. “If you had lived in Chicago, you would have passed me on the street.”

“No I wouldn't,” Nicholas said.

Paige laughed. “You're absolutely right. You wouldn't have been caught
dead
on Taylor Street.”

Nicholas couldn't convince Paige that it didn't matter to him where she had come from, where she was working, whether she had a diploma. The one important thing was where she was going, and Nicholas was planning to make sure that she would go there with him. It was one of the reasons he'd told her to dress to the nines and had booked a reservation at the Empress in the Hyatt Regency on the river. They'd head up to the Spinnaker afterward, the revolving bar, and then he'd take her home and they'd sit beneath the street lights of Porter Square, kissing until their lips were swollen and bruised. Then Nicholas would drive back to his own apartment in Cambridge, and he would lie naked beneath the ceiling fan in the bedroom, lazily tracing circles on the sheets and imagining the silk of Paige's skin underneath his fingers.

“Where are we going?” Paige asked as she slipped into the car.

Nicholas grinned at her. “A surprise,” he said.

Paige fastened her seat belt and smoothed the wrinkles out of the black skirt stretched over her lap. “Probably not McDonald's,” she said. “They've relaxed the dress code.”

The tuxedoed maître d' at the restaurant bowed to Nicholas and led the way to a tiny corner table that abutted a wall of glass. The basin of the Charles River was bathed in the fuchsia and orange of sunset. Playing across the surface like skittering butterflies were the distant billowed sails of the MIT sailing club. Paige drew in her breath and pressed her palms to the glass for a second, leaving a neat steamed print when she took them away. “Oh, Nicholas,” she said, “this is great.”

Nicholas picked up the black matchbook in the crystal ashtray, embossed with Paige's initials in gold lettering. It was one of the reasons he'd chosen the Empress instead of Café Budapest or the Ritz-Carlton ; this was one of their touches. Nicholas handed the matches to Paige. “You might want to hang on to these,” he said.

Paige smiled. “You know I don't smoke,” she said. “Doris doesn't even have a fireplace.” She tossed them back into the ashtray, and then she noticed the letters, PMO. Nicholas sat back, watching Paige's eyes darken and grow wide. Then, like a little kid, she glanced around and sneaked to an empty table next to them. She lifted the matchbook out of the ashtray and her face fell, but only for a second. “It's just this one,” she said, breathless. “But how do they
know?”

As the meal progressed, Nicholas began to question his motive for an elegant dinner. Paige had urged him to order, since she hadn't had any of the dishes before, and he'd done that. The appetizer—a bird's nest filled with chicken and vegetables—had been delicious, but Paige had no more than touched a straw mushroom to her mouth when her lip began to swell like a balloon. She had held ice to it with her napkin, and it subsided a little, but she must have been allergic. Then when the waiter had brought the complimentary palate-cleansing sorbet, frothed in dry ice that spilled over onto your lap like the mist of a Scottish moor, Paige had argued with the man, insisting that since they hadn't ordered it, they shouldn't have to pay. She had watched Nicholas eating throughout the entire meal, refusing to pick up one of the three forks or spoons until he did. More than once Nicholas caught her with her guard down, staring at her dish as if it were another wall to scale in an obstacle course.

When the check came, the waiter brought Paige a long-stemmed rose, and she smiled across the table at Nicholas. She looked exhausted. Nicholas couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it from this angle: to Paige, this had all been work, almost a kind of test. After Nicholas's credit card had been returned, Paige bolted from her chair before he could even pull it out for her. She walked quickly through the path of least resistance toward the door, head down, not looking at the other diners she passed.

When she was in the hallway by the elevator, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. Nicholas stood beside her, his hands jammed into his trousers pockets. “I guess a drink upstairs is out of the question,” he murmured.

Paige opened her eyes, momentarily confused, as if Nicholas were the last person she'd expected to find beside her. A smile fixed itself on her face. “It was delicious, Nicholas,” she said, and Nicholas couldn't help it, he kept staring at the puffy outline of her still-swollen lower lip, which made her look like a 1930s screen siren. She covered her mouth with her hand.

Nicholas grabbed her fingers and pulled them down to her side. “Don't do that,” he said. “Don't ever do that.” He slipped his suit jacket over her shoulders.

“Do what?”

Nicholas paused for a fraction of a second and then picked up again. “Lie to me.”

He expected her to deny it; but Paige turned to him. “It was awful,” she admitted. “I know you didn't mean it, Nicholas, but that isn't really my speed.”

Nicholas didn't believe it was really
his
speed, either, but he'd been doing it for so long he had never really considered anything else. He rode down the fourteen stories in the elevator in silence, holding Paige's hand, thinking about what Taylor Street in Chicago might look like and whether, in fact, he
wouldn't
be caught dead on it.

It wasn't that he doubted Paige; in spite of his parents' reaction, he knew that they were going to get married. But he wondered how very different two worlds had to be before they kept people apart. His parents had come from opposite sides of the proverbial tracks, but that didn't count, since they'd wanted to swap places anyway. In Nicholas's mind, that sort of equalized them. His mother had married his father to thumb her nose at society, and his father had married his mother to gain entry into a tight circle of wealth that all the new money in the world couldn't buy. He really didn't know how—or
if—
love ever figured into it, and that was the biggest difference between his parents' relationship and the feelings he had for Paige. He loved Paige because she was simple and sweet, because her hair was the color of an Indian summer, and because she could do an impression of Elmer Fudd that was nearly flawless. He loved her because she had made it to Cambridge on less than a hundred dollars, because she knew how to say the Lord's Prayer backward without stopping, because she could draw exactly what he could never quite put into words. With an overwhelming fervor that surprised Nicholas himself, he believed in her ability to land on her feet; in fact, Paige was the closest thing to a religion he'd had in years. He didn't give a damn whether or not she could tell a fish knife from a salad fork, if she'd be able to pick a waltz from a polka. That wasn't what marriage was about.

But on the other hand, Nicholas couldn't help but remember that marriage was a man-made thing, a statute created by society itself. Two souls that were meant to be together—and Nicholas wasn't saying that was the case with him; he was too scientific to be so romantic—well, two people like that could just mate for life with no need for a paper certificate. Marriage didn't really seem to be about love; it was about the ability to
live
together for a long period of time, and that was something completely different. That was something he just wasn't sure about when it came to him and Paige.

He stared at her profile when he pulled up at a red light. Tiny nose, shining eyes, classic lips. Suddenly she turned to him, smiling. There had to be a happy medium. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“I was thinking,” Nicholas said, “that I wish you could show me what Taylor Street is like.”

chapter
29

M
y mother had seven geldings, and with the exception of Donegal, they were named for men she had turned down. “I don't date,” she had told me. “Very few men think that the perfect end to an evening of seduction is a ten o'clock check through the stable.” Eddy and Andy were chestnuts, Thoroughbreds. Tony was a mixed-breed pony she had saved from starvation. Burt was a quarter horse that was older than dirt, and Jean-Claude and Elmo were three-year-olds that had come from the racetrack and were in the process of being broken.

While she took Jean-Claude or Elmo down to the ring to work on a lunge line, Josh and I mucked the stalls and spread sweet bedding and scrubbed the water buckets. It was hard work, which knotted my back and my calf muscles, but I found that I could rake through an entire stable sometimes without thinking about Nicholas or Max. In fact, almost anything I did in association with the horses took my mind off the family I had left behind, and I began to see what held my mother's fascination.

I was filling the black beveled buckets in Aurora's stall, and as usual she was trying to bite my back every time I turned away. She was the eighth horse my mother owned, the white fairy-tale mare. She had said that she bought her on impulse, because she'd been hoping Prince Charming would come with the deal, but she'd regretted the purchase ever since. Aurora was bitchy and foul-tempered and stubborn to train. “I've done Aurora's water,” I called to Josh, who was mucking farther down in the same barn. I liked him—he was a little weird, but he made me smile. He did not eat meat because “somewhere, cows are sacred.” He had let me know the second day I was here that he was already halfway down the eightfold path to nirvana.

I picked up the wheelbarrow Josh had filled with manure and went to the dump pile that composted under the hot Carolina sun. I lifted my face and felt the grime collecting on the back of my neck although it was only eight-thirty.

“Paige!” Josh yelled, “Get here quick! And bring a halter!”

I threw the wheelbarrow aside and raced back, grabbing the halter hanging beside Andy's stall. From the far end of the barn I heard Josh's soothing words. “Come closer,” he whispered to me, “and walk slow.”

When I peeked out the far door, he had Aurora by the mane. “It's customary to lock the stall when you finish,” he said, grinning.

“I did!” I insisted, and I worked the little clip, just to prove it. But one of the chain-link spokes had broken, and I realized I had probably fastened the clip over that one, and the door had sprung free. “Sorry,” I said, and I took Aurora by the halter. “Maybe you should have just let her go,” I said.

“I don't know,” Josh said. “I don't owe Lily any favors this month.”

We took a break and went to watch my mother lunging Jean-Claude. She stood in the center of the ring, letting the horse buck and gallop in circles around her. This time, he had a saddle on his back, simply to get used to the feeling. “Look at his conformation,” she'd said. “He's a born jumper—nice sloping shoulders, short back.”

“And,” Josh had said, “an ass like a truck.”

My mother had patted him on the cheek with the same tenderness she showed her horses. “Just as long as you don't say that about me,” she said.

We watched the muscles in my mother's arms cord and bunch as she tugged on the line that Jean-Claude was valiantly trying to shake free. “How long has she been doing this?” I asked.