Harvesting the Heart

I should have known better than to begin my marriage with a lie. But it seemed so easy at the time. That someone like Nicholas could want me was still overwhelming. He held me the way a child holds a snowflake, lightly, as if he knew in the back of his mind I might disappear in the blink of an eye. He wore his self-assurance like a soft overcoat. I was not just in love with him; I worshiped him. I had never met anyone like him, and, amazed that it was me he had chosen, I made up my mind: I would be whatever he wanted; I would follow him to the ends of the earth.

He thought I was a virgin, that I’d been saving myself for someone like him. In a way he was right-in eighteen years I’d never met anyone like Nicholas. But what I hadn’t told him grated against me every day leading up to our wedding. It was a nagging noise inside my head, and outside too, in the hot hum of traffic. I kept remembering Father Draher speaking of lies of omission. So each morning I woke up resolving that this would be the day I told Nicholas the truth, but in the end there was one thing more terrifying than telling him I was a liar, and that was facing the chance I’d lose him.

Nicholas came out of the bathroom in the little apartment, a towel wrapped around his waist. The towel was blue and had pictures of primary-colored hot-air balloons. He walked to the window, shameless, and pulled dourn the shades. “Let’s pretend,” he said, ”that it isn’t the middle of the day.”

He sat on the edge of the mattress. I was tucked under the covers. Although it was over ninety degrees outside, I had been shivering the whole day. I also wished it were nighttime, but not out of modesty. This had been such a tense, awful day that I wanted it to be tomorrow already. I wanted to wake up and find Nicholas and get on with the rest of my life. Our life.

Nicholas leaned over me, bringing the familiar scent of soap and baby shampoo and fresh-cut grass. I loved the way he smelled, because it wasn’t what I had expected. He kissed my forehead, the way you would a sick child. “Are you scared?” he asked.

I wanted to tell him, No; in fact, you’d be surprised to know that when it comes to sex I can hold my own. Instead I felt myself nodding, my chin bobbing up and down. I waited for him to reassure me, to tell me he wasn’t going to hurt me, at least not any more than he needed to this first time. But Nicholas stretched out beside me, linked his hands behind his head, and admitted, “So am I. ”

I didn’t tell Nicholas right away that I would marry him. I gave him time to back out. He asked that night in the diner after he’d brought his witch of a girlfriend in for coffee. I was terrified at first, because I thought I’d have to face all the secrets I had been running from. For a day or so, I even fought against the idea, but how could I stand in the way of something that was meant to be?

I knew all along he was the one. I could fall into step walking beside him, even though his legs were much longer. I could sense when he came into the diner by the way the sleigh bells on the door rang. I could think of him and smile in just a heartbeat. Although I would have loved Nicholas if he never had proposed, I surprised myself by thinking of tree-lined residential streets and soccer car pools and Good Housekeeping recipes curled into handmade sanded boxes. I envisioned a normal life, the kind I’d never had, and even if I would be living it as a wife now, I figured it was better late than never.

The dean of students at Harvard gave Nicholas a one-week hiatus from classes and hospital rotations, during which we would move into married student housing and set a date with a justice of the peace. There would be no honeymoon, because ask qn, becauthere wasn’t any money anymore.

Nicholas pulled the sheet away from me. “Where did you get that?” he asked, running his hands over the white satin. He slipped his fingers beneath the thin straps. His breath brushed the hollow of my neck, and I could feel us touching at so many points-our shoulders, our stomachs, our thighs. He moved his head lower and circled my nipple with his tongue. I ran my hands through his hair, watching a shaft of sun bring out the blue base under thick black.

Marvela and Doris, the only two friends I had in Cambridge, took me shopping at a small discount-clothing store in Brighton called The Price of Dreams. They seemed to carry everything there for a woman’s wardrobe: underwear, accessories, suits, pants, blouses, sweats. I had one hundred dollars. Twenty-five came from Lionel, a wedding bonus, and the rest was from Nicholas himself. We had moved into married student housing the day before, and when Nich olas realized that I had more art supplies in my knapsack than clothes, and that I had only four pairs of underpants, which I kept washing out, he said I needed to get myself some things. Although we couldn’t afford it, he gave me money. “You can’t get married in a pink uniform from Mercy,” he had said, and I had laughed and answered, “Just watch me.”

Doris and Marvela flew around the store like seasoned shoppers. “Girl,” Marvela called to me, “you lookin’ for something formal like, or you gonna go with funky?”

Doris pulled several pairs of panty hose off a rack. “Whaddya mean, funky,” she muttered. “You don’t do funky at weddings.”

Neither Doris nor Marvela was married. Marvela had been, but her husband was killed in a meat-packing incident that she did not like to talk about. Doris, who was somewhere between forty and sixty and guarded her age as if it were the crown of Windsor, said she didn’t like men, but I wondered if it was just that men didn’t like her.

They made me try on leather-trimmed day dresses and two-piece outfits with polka-dotted lapels and even one slinky sequined cat suit that made me look like a banana. In the end, I got a simple white satin nightgown for the wedding night and a pale-pink cotton suit for the wedding. It had a straight skirt and a peplum on the jacket and, truly, it seemed to have been made for me. When I tried it on, Doris gasped. Marvela said, shaking her head, “And they say redheads ain’t supposed to wear pink.” I stood in front of the three-way mirror, holding my hands in front of me as if I were carrying a spilling bouquet. I wondered what it might have been like to have a heavy beaded dress hanging from my shoulders, to feel a train tug behind me down a cathedral aisle, to know the shiver of my breath beneath the veil when I heard the march from Lohengrin. But it wasn’t going to happen, and anyway it didn’t matter. Who cared about the trappings of one stupid day when you had the rest of your life to make perfect? And just in case I needed reassurance, when I turned again to look at my friends, I could see my future shining in their eyes.

Nicholas’s mouth traced its way down my b-tr qy down mody, leaving behind a hot line that made me think of Lionel’s scar. I moved beneath him. He had never touched me like this. In fact, once the decision was made to be married, Nicholas had done little more than kiss me and caress my breasts. I tried to concentrate on what Nicholas must be thinking: if it stuck in his mind that my body-which had a will of its own-was not behaving in the shy, frightened manner of a virgin. But Nicholar said nothing, and maybe he was used to this kind of response.

He had been touching me for so long and so well that when he stopped, it took me a moment to notice, and then it was because of the terrifying rush of cold air that came instead in his absence. I pulled him closer, a hot human blanket. I was willing to do anything to keep myself from shaking all over again. I clung to him as if I were drowning, which I suppose I was.

When his hands skittered over my thighs, I stiffened. I didn’t mean for it to happen, and of course Nicholas read it the wrong way, but the last time I’d been touched there, there had been a doctor, and a clinic, and a terrible tightening in my chest that I know now was emptiness. Nicholas murmured something that I did not hear but that I felt against my legs, and then he began to kiss the spaces in between his fingers, and finally his mouth came over me like a whisper.

“They said congratulations,” Nicholas told me when he’d hung up the phone after telling his parents about us. “They want us to come out tomorrow night.”

It was clear to me after our first visit that Astrid Prescott liked me about as much as she’d like a Hessian army overrunning her darkroom. “They did not say that,” I answered. “Tell me the truth.”

“That is the truth,” Nicholas admitted, “and that’s what bothers me.”

We drove to Brookline in near silence, and when we rang the doorbell Astrid and Robert Prescott answered