Harvesting the Heart

Fogerty would say if he took Paige and crawled out the window and shimmied down the drainpipe and ran out to the Greek pizza place in Brighton. He wondered how he had wound up coming full circle.

When he pushed open the bedroom door, he couldn’t find his wife. Then he saw her, blended into the blue bedspread, tucked into the upper right corner. She was lying on her side, with her knees drawn up. “They made fun of me,” she said.

“They didn’t know it was you,” Nicholas pointed out. “You know, Paige,” he said, “not everything is about you.” He reached for her shoulder, pulling her roughly to face him, and saw the mapped silver lines tears had cut across her cheeks. “About these dinner parties,” he said.

“What about them?” Paige whispered.

Nicholas swallowed. He imagined Paige as she might have looked earlier that day, painstakingly painting the dishes and the glassware. He saw himself at age ten, learning table etiquette and patterned waltzes on Saturday mornings at Miss Lillian’s Finishing Sessions. Well, like it or not, he thought, it all was a game. And if you had any intention of winning, you had to at least play. “You’re going to go to these stupid dinners, whether or not you like them, for a long time. You’re going to go out there tonight and apologize and blame it on hormones. And when you say goodbye to those two bitches, you’re going to smile and tell them you can’t wait to see them again.” He watched Paige’s eyes fill with tears. “My life, and your life, doesn’t only depend on what I do in an operating suite. If I’m going to get anywhere I have to kiss ass, and it’s sure as hell not going to help if I have to spend half the time making excuses for you.”

“I can’t do it,” Paige said. “I can’t keep going to your stupid parties and fund-raisers and watch everyone pointing at me like I’m the freak at the sideshow.”

“You can,” Nicholas said, “and you will.”

Paige raised her eyes to his, and for a long minute they stared at each other. Nicholas watched new tears well up and spill over, spiking her lashes. Finally, he pulled her into his arms, burying his face in her hair. “Come on, Paige,” he whispered. “I’m only doing this for you.”

Nicholas did not have to look to know that Paige was staring straight ahead, still sobbing. “Are you,” she said quietly.

They sat on the edge of the bed, Nicholas curling his body around Paige’s, and they listened to the laughter of their guests and the ting of glasses being raised in toasts. Nicholas brushed a tear off Paige’s cheek. “Jesus, Paige,” he said quietly. “You think I like making you upset? It’s juiv›Aset? It’sst that this is important.” Nicholas sighed. “My father used to tell me that if you want to win, you have to play by the rules.”

Paige grimaced. “Your father probably wrote the rules.”

Against his will, Nicholas felt his shoulders stiffen. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “my father didn’t have any family money. He worked to get what he has now, but he was born flat broke.”

Paige pulled away to stare at him. Her jaw dropped open as if she was about to say something, but she only shook her head.

Nicholas caught her chin with his fingers. Maybe he had been wrong about Paige. Maybe money and breeding were as important to her as they were to his old girlfriends. He shivered, wondering what this admission had cost him. “What?” he said. “Tell me.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t believe what? That my father had no money?”

“No,” Paige said slowly. “That he chose to live the way he does now.”

Nicholas smiled, relieved. “It has its advantages,” he pointed out. “You know where the next mortgage payment is coming from. You know who your friends are. You don’t worry nearly as much about what everyone else thinks of you.”

“And that’s what you care about?” Paige shifted away from him. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

Nicholas shrugged. “It never came up.”

In the distance, someone shouted out a punch line. “I’m sorry,” Paige said tightly, balling her hands into fists. “I didn’t know you made such a sacrifice to marry me.”

Nicholas pulled her into his arms and stroked her back until he felt her relax. “I wanted to marry you,” he said. “And besides,” he added, grinning, “I didn’t give it all up. I put it on hold. A few more dinner parties, a few less roasts on the floor, and we’ll be in the black.” He helped her stand. “Would it really be so awful? I want our baby to have the things I did when I was growing up, Paige. I want you to live like a queen.”

Nicholas started to lead her into the hall. “What about what I want?” Paige whispered, so soft that even she could not clearly hear herself.

When they walked back into the living room, Paige held on to Nicholas’s hand so tightly that when she stepped away, marks from her fingernails were pressed into his palm. He watched her lift her chin. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m not feeling too well these days.” She stood with the grace of a madonna while the women took turns holding their hands up to her stomach, prodding and pressing and guessing the sex of their child. She saw each pair of guests out, and as Nicholas stood on the porch, talking to Alistair about tomorrow’s schedule, she went to clean up the dirty dishes.iv›

Nicholas found her in the living room, throwing the plates and the glasses into the fireplace. He stood very still as she hurled the ceramic and watched her smile when the shards, littered with fragments of clouds and flamingos, fell at her feet. He had never seen her destroy her own work; even the little doodles on the telephone pad were tucked into a folder somewhere for future ideas. But Paige shattered dish after dish, glass after glass, and then she lit a fire underneath the pieces. She stood in front of the hearth, flames dancing in shadow over her face, while the colors and friezes were ashed over in black. And then she turned to face Nicholas, as if she knew he had been standing there all along.

If Nicholas had been frightened by her actions before, he was shocked by what he saw in Paige’s eyes. He had seen it once before, when he was fifteen, the one and only time he had gone hunting with his father. They had walked in the mist of a Vermont morning, stalking deer, and Nicholas had spotted a buck. He had tapped his father’s shoulder, as he’d been taught to do, and watched Robert raise the barrel of his Weatherby. The buck had been a distance away, but Nicholas could clearly see the tremble of its rack, the rigidity of its stance, the way the life had gone out of its gaze.

Nicholas took a step back into the safety of his living room. His wife was framed by fire; her eyes were those of an animal trapped.

chapter 10

Paige

Spread around my kitchen were the travel brochures. I was supposed to be planning my family, painting the nursery and knitting pale-peach sacque sets, but instead I had become obsessed with places where I had never been. The leaflets were spilled like a rainbow across the counter, they covered the length of the window seat in splashes of aqua, magenta, and gold. Progressive Travels. Smuggler’s Notch. Civilized Adventures.

Nicholas was starting to get annoyed. “What the hell are these,” he’d said, sweeping them off the black glass stovetop.

“Oh, you know,” I had hedged. “Junk mail.”

But they weren’t. I had sent away for them, a dollar here and fifty cents there, knowing I would receive in the mail a new destination every day. I read the brochures from cover to cover, rolling the names of the cities in my mouth. Dordogne, Pouilly-sur-Loire. Verona and Helmsley, Sedona and Banff. Bhutan, Manaslu, Ghorapani Pass. They were tours that were impossible for someone who was pregnant; most involved intense hiking or bicycling, preventive inoculations. I think I read them because they were exactly what I couldn’t do. I would lie on my back on the floor of my pristine kitchen, and I’d imagine valleys heavy with the scent of rhododendrons, the lush parks and canyons where guanacos, serows, and pandas made their homes. I imagined sleeping in the Kalahari bush, listening to the distant thunder of antelope, buffalo, elephants, cheetahs. I thought about this baby, weighing me down more