Abel turned around. “Lulu’s happy,” he said. “She gets to eat Lucky Charms instead of oatmeal.”
“What about you and Deirdre?”
When he didn’t answer, Nan rushed in with what had come to her. “Listen...” she said. “It’s so late, when I get home I’ll just be going straight to bed. Is there any point in paying for a car? What if I just sleep on the sofa downstairs? That way I could get breakfast for everyone in the morning and ride into the office with you.”
There was a silence. Abel seemed taken aback and Nan wondered if he could tell she was holding her breath.
Finally he said, “That’s very kind of you. Really. But I couldn’t ask you to do something like that.”
“You didn’t ask.”
Deirdre leaned forward. “Oh, honey, bless your heart. But you’ve done so much for us already these two days. How could we let you go to any more trouble?”
“Nothing would be easier.” Nan looked straight into Deirdre’s eyes, saying this. “All I have to do is lie down and fall asleep.”
By the end of the week, a routine was in place. In the morning, Nan made breakfast and ran errands for Deirdre: went to the bank, the cleaners, even the post office if anything had to be certified. She arrived in the office by 10:00
A.M
. or so, and from that point on, she worked a regular day. At six o’clock, she rode home with Abel, cooked dinner, did the dishes, and brought Deirdre whatever she needed. She stopped by her apartment only once, over the weekend, to pick up some clothes and her toothbrush.
For the first few nights, it was hard for Nan to eat at the Nathansons’ table. In the convent, meals were taken in silence, except for a recitation of Grace and a reading of Scripture by one of the nuns. Each sister ate whatever was put in front of her whether or not it was to her liking. Even crumbs were caught in a napkin and consumed—to waste the slightest amount was a sin against poverty.
In Abel’s dining room, there was no form to observe, and therefore no way for Nan to relax. Still, within a few days, she was afraid of how good being there had begun to feel—even during the most difficult moments, like when Lulu looked up from her plate of ravioli and asked, “Is Daddy going to go away?”
A hush fell over the table.
Deirdre, who was sitting beside Abel, put a hand on his knee. She looked stricken. “Why do you ask that, honey?”
“Jack in my class said the police are going to put Daddy in jail.”
“How would Jack know anything about Daddy?”
“He said his daddy read it in the newspaper.”
Deirdre set her fork down. There was a tremor in her hand. “Jack has no way to know anything about what will or won’t happen with Daddy.”
“So the police aren’t going to take Daddy away?” the little girl persisted.
There was a terrible silence and then Abel broke it. His voice was quiet and steady.
“Lulu, there’s one thing I can promise you,” he said. “No matter what happens, nothing in the world can take Daddy away from you. Even if we’re separated for a little while.”
“And Lulu, that’s not likely to happen,” Deirdre said in a rush.
“Did Daddy do something wrong?”
Deirdre shot a helpless glance at Abel, who responded in the same quiet tone. “Yes,” he told her. “Daddy made a mistake.”
“And Lulu, everyone makes mistakes. We’ve talked about that,” Deirdre put in. “But a very smart lady is working to help Daddy stay out of jail. That’s her job and she’s very good at it.”
“Oh,” Lulu said, and went back to her ravioli.
Deirdre looked over at Nan with a mortified smile.
How awkward it must be
, that smile said,
for you, an outsider in the midst of all this.
Deirdre could always be counted upon to draw these lines, lest Nan start to feel like a part of the household.
Each night after dinner, Abel dried the dishes she had just washed and stacked them in the wooden rack. Nan loved standing next to him at the sink, close enough to feel his warmth, her arm occasionally brushing his. At these times, he still wore a work shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, as he waited for her to put each plate into his outstretched hand.
What would she do if she belonged to them for all time? Everything she was doing now, and anything else she could think of. She would buy the linen spray they were selling in the corner boutique and iron the scent of lilacs into their sheets. She would travel any distance to bring them whatever they wanted. She would babysit Lulu when they went out, take down the living room curtains and wash them, polish the silverware and dust the display china and scrub their hardwood floors.
And if Abel hadn’t been a family man, and she belonged to him alone? She would rub him down with massage oil every night, bring him scotch in a shatterproof glass, read him his mail, screen his calls, and stay within easy reach.
* * *
(“Was this the first time you ever lived with a family?”
“Yes. And it was also the first time I ever lived in a house.”
“It must have been so different from what you were used to.”
“Oh, more different than you could ever imagine.”)
* * *
The rich femininity Deirdre brought to Abel’s house fascinated Nan. The convent was so austere, and her own apartment didn’t even look lived in. But in Deirdre’s kitchen, ornamental bottles of cooking oil lined the windowsill. Bright red berries, lemon slices and whole jalapenos floated inside them as if trapped in amber. There was a hen-shaped wire basket for eggs, glass grinders of rock salt and peppercorns, a window box where herbs grew in little clay pots.
And then there were all the bottles and jars lining Deirdre’s bathtub, with labels that read
milk bath, honeysuckle, tea rose, violet, jasmine.
There was the bed she shared with Abel, with its bank of lush pillows stacked against the headboard, its cream-colored down coverlet pulled tight over flannel sheets. There was a water glass and a stack of novels on her night table, loose change and a Braille-faced alarm clock on his.
At Our Lady of Sorrows, none of the sisters owned anything but her sins. They used nothing besides their own homemade yellow soap when they bathed, and there were no mirrors on the wall of the communal washroom. Each sister had a gray-blanketed bed where she laid down her body and offered up her soul, along with a passion so ardent it could survive lifelong abstinence.
But looking at Deirdre’s things, Nan could feel, for the first time, the seduction of luxury. There was a time when Deirdre’s array of worldly goods would have struck Nan as vanity, frivolity, self-indulgence. But if she were married to a blind man like Abel and had the means, admittedly she would stop at nothing to delight all his other senses. Mary Magdalene broke her alabaster box to anoint Christ’s feet, Christ himself turned water to the finest wine, and she thought Deirdre, at least, was doing the right thing.
* * *
(“What did Deirdre think of you?”
“It’s difficult to answer that. She was hard to read. I think she appreciated all my help. But she was bothered by the fact that I learned Braille for Abel.”
“Oh?”
“She wished she’d thought of it herself. But it had never occurred to her.”)
* * *
It was six weeks in, on a Thursday evening, when Nan was alone with Abel in the house for the first time. Deirdre had gone to a class, an art history course she was taking at the local college. Lulu had no school the next day and she was sleeping at the home of a friend. Abel was in the upstairs den with his contracts and leases, and when Nan went up to offer him a cup of tea, she found him asleep in his armchair.
His eyes were closed. She had wondered about that—whether blind people slept with their eyes closed. Standing there in the doorway, she was stunned by the privilege of the moment—the bluish shadows filling the room and the intimacy of watching him sleep.
She stepped over the threshold and did what she’d been longing to do since the morning she first came to his house. She knelt before his chair and as she did, she heard herself whimper. He stirred but did not open his eyes.
“Abel,” she said in a hush.
He inhaled then as if rousing himself, and spoke quietly, but his eyes stayed closed.
“Yes,” he said.
Nan continued to whisper, as if he were still asleep and she didn’t want to wake him. “May I take your shoes off?”
There was a pause and then, “Yes,” he said again, as if she’d asked him whether he wanted her to hold his calls.
She slowly tugged his laces from their knots, loosened his shoes, and pulled them off, revealing his feet in their black dress socks. She was breathing with an effort, her need rising inside her like floodwater.
Moments like these come suddenly and without warning, adrenaline-driven and past all decision, where no resistance is possible, no sense of propriety can prevail.
“Abel,” she whispered once again.
“Mm.”
She shut her own eyes now and pressed a fist to her mouth, cringing in disbelief. “May I...may I please kiss your feet?”
Then came the silence, the agonizing expected silence where she waited for him to open his eyes, struggle upright, make sure he’d heard right before putting as much distance between them as he could manage at the moment. But incredibly, after what seemed a considered pause, and with no particular surprise or alarm, he murmured in assent.
The men who came to the Nutcracker, they moved through the world without ever letting their secret desires break the surface of their daily lives. That’s what Nan had been for: a visitation, a kind of angel, descended for an hour or a day, whatever they were willing to pay for. A commercial transaction, negotiated and contrived, but still better—or so they had decided—than waking up and going to sleep, year in and year out, without a flash of their deepest gratification in between. They were always married, to wives who wanted no part of this nonsense or possibly had no real idea what their husbands craved. Perhaps this was regrettable, or perhaps it was just wisdom. These passions, after all, aren’t really made for this world.
It had been her job for so long to create and inhabit these spaces—just alongside of, but never quite touching, what everyone else called real life—that it shouldn’t have been truly shocking to find herself here, stretched out face down on the floor, belly to the short stiff weave of the carpet, gripping Abel’s ankles. But she was, she was shocked, she was trembling and overcome, terror giving slow way to gratitude as the minutes passed without retraction or retribution. She pressed her lips to the outline of each of his shrouded toes: first the left foot, then the right. After some time, she eased his socks off and lay there with her cheek to the bony plateau of his feet. Tears were leaking silently from her eyes and she let them trickle onto his warm skin.
In all this time, Abel had neither moved nor spoken. Was he some wayward counterpart to her, did this feel entirely right to him? So natural that there was no need to remark upon it? That was possible, and it was also possible that he was still asleep, and all of this was an intersection of his sleeping dream and her waking one.
After a while, she made herself get up and go back downstairs, pausing at the doorway of the room to turn and whisper,
Good night.
He and Deirdre went together to see her doctor the next morning, so for the first time in weeks, Nan walked to work. It had rained during the night and the wet streets held the sky’s reflection. The city was shining, renewed, redeemed, and Nan was as happy as she had ever been.
She would often think of this morning, afterward. She would think of it as her last hours in Eden.
* * *
Around two o’clock that day, Abel summoned her to his office, and she went expecting to read the afternoon mail. Instead he pushed a check across the desk, made out for five thousand dollars in Matt’s careful hand. Abel’s own jagged signature was at the bottom. Nan was suddenly so afraid she could hardly speak.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Deirdre’s sister is coming to town tonight,” he told her. “She’ll be staying with us through the end of next week. So she’ll be able to help us out and Deirdre’s cast is coming off on Monday anyway.
“Deirdre and I have talked it over,” he continued, “and we both want to compensate you for all the extra time you put in at the house. It was an incredible gesture and we’ll never forget it. Money isn’t an adequate response to that kind of generosity, but we want to repay you in whatever way we can. I can only imagine how glad you’ll be to finally go back home. But you’ve been as gracious as anyone could be. From both of us, thank you so very much.”
There was a long silence while Nan tried to steady her breathing.
“Are you there?” Abel asked after a moment. It was a literal question.
“Yes, of course,” Nan managed to say. “I’m sorry.”
“Is something wrong?”
“I’m sorry, Abel.”
“Nan,” he said. “Are you...?”
For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of her weeping.
“What is it?” he asked. “Can you talk about it? Is there anything I can do?”
“Keep me,” she heard herself say, knowing even in that moment that the words weren’t going to stop this, weren’t going to help in any way, and saying them left her hollow, like something crushed and empty by the side of the road. They represented a fatal loss of form, a stain on her record that would never stop spreading—never stop blackening what had been immaculate.
“What was that?” Abel asked after a moment. His tone was quiet and disbelieving. He was trying not to know what she couldn’t keep from telling him. And once she started, she couldn’t stop.
“Please,” she whispered. Craven and begging. “Please let me stay with you.”
There was a very long pause. Then:
“I don’t understand,” he said.
* * *
There are things too unbearable to think about, memories you can never let float into focus. Nan could barely bring herself to consider that day, and the terrible stilted awkwardness of the ones that followed, where she was unable to meet his sightless gaze and she knew things would never be the same. She seldom let herself remember how he decided within a week that he needed an assistant with a working knowledge of real estate. How he arranged for her to interview with the Lighthouse, a midtown non-profit providing services to the blind.