Extension School and signed up for two night courses. I picked architecture for me and intro to lit for Nicholas. I figured that if I knew Hemingway from Chaucer and Byron, I’d be able to follow the subtle artsy references that Nicholas’s friends batted across dinner conversations like Ping-Pong balls. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stay on my feet all day at Mercy and have dinner ready for Nicholas and still have time to read about rococo ceilings and J. Alfred Prufrock. I was scared of my professors, who spoke so quickly they might as well have been lecturing in Swedish.
Mosob,?size='3'›t of my classmates dabbled in schooling; nearly all had already graduated from somewhere. They didn’t have a future at stake, like me. I realized that at the rate I could afford to take courses, it would take nine years for me to get a college degree. I never told Nicholas, but I got an F on the only paper I ever wrote for one of those courses. I can’t remember if it was architecture or lit, but I will never forget the professor’s comments:
I had made some excuse to Nicholas and dropped out. To punish myself for being a failure, I took on a second job, as if working twice as hard could make me forget just how different my life had turned out from what I had imagined as a child.
But I had Nicholas. And that meant more than all the college degrees, all the RISD courses in the world. I hadn’t changed much in seven years-and I had no one to blame for that but myself-but Nicholas was very different. For a minute, I looked up at my husband and tried to picture what he’d been like back then. His hair had been thicker, and there wasn’t the gray that was coming in now, and the lines around his mouth weren’t as deep. But the biggest changes were in his eyes. There were shadows there. Once Nicholas had told me that when he watched a patient die, a little piece of him went as well, and that he’d have to work on that, or one day when he was close to retirement he’d have nothing left at all.
Mass General had been having a Halloween ball at the Copley Plaza for ages, although about ten years earlier, costumes had been traded for formal wear. I was sorry about that. I would have given anything for a disguise. Once, when Nicholas was a general surgical resident, we had gone to a costume party at the medical school. I had wanted to be Antony and Cleopatra, or Cinderella and Prince Charming. “No tights,” Nicholas had said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead.” In the end we had gone as a clothesline. Each of us wore a brown shirt and pants, and stretched between our necks was a long white cord, pinned with boxer shorts, stockings, bras. I loved that costume. We were literally tied together. Everywhere Nicholas went, I had followed.
On the drive into Boston, Nicholas quizzed me. “David Goldman’s wife,” he’d say, and I’d answer,
We pulled off the Mass Pike and stopped at the corner of Dart-mouth. Copley Square danced around us, lit with the glitter and whirl of Halloween. Beside the car stood Charlie Chaplin, a gypsy, and Raggedy Andy. They held out their hands as we slowed, but Nicholas shook his head. I wondered what they had expected and what others had given. A sharp rap on my window surprised me. Standing inches away was a tall man dressed in britches and a waistcoat, whose neck ended in a bloody stump. He cradled the blushing oval of a face under his right arm. “Pardon me,” he said, and I think the face smiled, “I seem to have lost my head.” I was still staring at him, at his plumed green cape, as Nicholas sped away.
Although there were more than three hundred people in the Grand Ballroom of the Copley Plaza Hotel, Nicholas stood out. He was among the youngest='1?the young, and he attracted attention for having come so far so fast. People knew he was being groomed; that he was the only resident Fogerty thought was good enough to do transplants. As we moved through the double doors, at least seven people came forward to talk to Nicholas. I gripped his arm until my fingers turned white. “Don’t leave me,” I said, knowing well that Nicholas would not make promises he couldn’t keep.
I heard words in a familiar foreign language: infectious endocarditis, myocardial infarction, angioplasty. I watched Nicholas in his element, and my fingers itched to draw him: tall, half in shadow, steeped in his own confidence. But I had packed away my art supplies when we moved, and I still did not know where they were. I had not sketched in a year; I had been too busy working at Mercy in the morning, at Dr. Thayer’s office in the afternoon. I had tried to get other jobs, in sales and management, but in Cambridge I was easily beat out by people with a college education. I had nothing to my name except Nicholas. I was riding on his coattails, which, ironically, I had paid for.
“Paige!” I turned to hear the very high voice of Arlene Goldman, a house cardiologist’s wife. After my last experience with Arlene, I had told Nicholas that I physically could not sit through a dinner party at their house, and so we’d declined invitations. But suddenly I was glad to see her. She was someone to cling to, someone who knew me and could justify my presence there. “So good to see you,” Arlene lied, kissing the air on both sides of my cheeks. “And there’s Nicholas,” she said, nodding in his general direction.
Arlene Goldman was so thin she seemed transparent, with wide gray eyes and sunny gold hair that came out of a bottle. She owned a personal shopping service, and her biggest claim to fame was being sent by Senator Edward Kennedy to choose his fiancee’s engagement ring at Shreve, Crump and Low. She wore a long peach-colored sheath that made her look naked. “How are you, Arlene,” I said quietly, shifting from foot to foot.
“Ducky,” she said, and she waved over some of the other wives I knew. I smiled around at them and stepped back, listening to conversations about Wellesley reunions and six-figure book deals and the merits of low-E glass for houses on the ocean.
The wives of surgeons did it all. They were mothers and Nantucket real estate agents and caterers and authors all at once. Of course they had nannies and chefs and live-in maids, but they did not acknowledge these people. They spent galas dropping names of celebrities they’d worked with, places where they’d been, spectacles they’d happened to see. They chained themselves in diamonds and wore blush that threw off sparkles in the subtle light of the chandeliers. They had nothing in common with me.
Nicholas dipped his head into the circle of faces and asked if I was all right; he was going to ask Fogerty about a patient. The other women crowded around me. “Oh, Nick,” they said, “it’s been too long.” They put their cold arms around me. “We’ll take care of her, Nick,” they said, leaving me to wonder when my husband had decided it was all right to be called something other than Nicholas.
We danced to a swing orchestra, and then the doors were opened for the banquet. As always, dinner was a learning experience. There were so many things I still did not know. I didn’t realize that there was something calt='?omething led a fish knife. I didn’t realize that you could eat snails. I blew on my leek soup before I figured out it was being served cold. I watched Nicholas move with the practiced ease of a professional, and I wondered how I had ever stumbled into this kind of life.
One of the other doctors at the table turned to me during dinner. “I’ve forgotten,” he said. “What is it you do, again?”
I stared down at my plate and waited for Nicholas to come to my rescue, but he was speaking to someone else. We had discussed it, and I wasn’t supposed to let people know where I worked. It wasn’t that he was embarrassed, he’d assured me, but in the political scheme of things, he had to present a certain image. Surgeons’ wives were supposed to present Rotary plaques, not blue-plate specials. I put on the brightest smile that I could and affected the flip voice of the other women. “Oh,” I said, “I go around town breaking hearts so my husband has something to do at work.”
It seemed like years before anyone said a word, and I could feel my hands shaking under the fine linen tablecloth, sweat breaking out in the hollow of my back. Then I heard laughter, like shattering crystal. “Wherever did you find her, Prescott?”
Nicholas turned from the conversation he’d been having. A lazy grin slipped across his face to hide the line of his eyes. “Waiting tables,” he said.
I didn’t move. Everyone at the table laughed and assumed Nich olas was making a joke. But he’d done exactly what we weren’t supposed to do. I stared at him, but he was laughing too. I pictured the other doctors’ wives, driving home with their husbands, saying,
There were several people inside, but nobody I recognized. I slipped into a stall and sat on the edge of the toilet. I balled up some tissue in my palm, expecting tears, but they didn’t come. I wondered what the hell had convinced me to live at the end of someone else’s life rather than live my own, and then I realized I was going to
