Nick and I are curled together on the seat of his Packard Speedster, talking about Christmas.
“Think about it,” he says. “We’ll be less than a mile apart, for three entire weeks. We can see each other every day, go out to dinner, have a little privacy. What would you like for a present?”
“You don’t have to get me anything.”
“Something soft? Something sparkling?” His breath warms the top of my head; his arm sits snugly around my back and shoulders. Beneath my cheek, the lapel of his greatcoat has the butter-soft polish of cashmere.
“Nothing. Just yourself.”
“But you have that already.” He kisses my hair. “It doesn’t matter. I already know what I’m getting you, Lilybird.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll have to wait and see.”
“Mmm.” I close my eyes. I’m growing sleepy from the warmth of Nick’s body and the late hour. He should have left long ago, but still we sit here, unable to disentangle ourselves. He arrived at eleven in the morning, as he does most Sunday mornings, and we took a walk in the frost-laden air before having lunch under Dorothy’s gleaming eyes at the diner. Another walk, and then a visit to the museum, where we snatched a brief kiss during a momentary lull in the flow of visitors. Dinner with Budgie and a friend or two, then the movies, and now this: the daring front seat of Nick’s racy little car, because it’s the only place we can be private without freezing in the December air, and where Nick Greenwald, as always, is behaving like a perfect gentleman. Not one button of my coat has been unfastened, not one inch of my dress has been raised along my silk-stockinged leg.
“Nick, you should go. The roads will be icy. You won’t be back until past midnight.” My breath shows white in the air. The temperature has been dropping all day, and the smell of new snow lies heavy about us.
“I know.” He makes no move.
I turn my face up to his. I love his kisses, tender and thorough, usually on my lips but sometimes slipping down to my jaw, my neck, the hollow of my throat, while his breath comes fast on my skin and his fingers press through the thick layers of my clothing.
But no more than that.
“You are not Budgie Byrne,” he told me, a week ago. “You’re too good for car seats and furtiveness. You’re sacred, Lily.”
“I wouldn’t mind being a little less sacred,” I said.
“When the time comes, Lily. When everything’s just right. Just you wait.”
This week, I don’t want to wait any longer. I wrap my arms around his neck and deepen the kiss. His mouth is sweet and molten from the Hershey bar we shared at the movies. I think of Claudette Colbert and Fredric March embracing on the screen, and the way Nick’s fingers had wrapped around mine in the darkness and the flickering silver light, and the way I felt his touch right to my center, like a decadent ache, like no other sensation in the world.
I rub the soft skin at the back of his neck, the stiff little hairs that grow above. He smells delicious, soapy and warm.
“Lily,” he whispers.
We go on kissing, combusting together in the cold, and all at once I realize that his hand has come around to the front of my coat, that he is unfastening the buttons, one by one, with his long and diligent fingers.
My heart pounds against the wall of my chest, so hard he must feel it under his hand.
“Lily.” He slips his fingers inside my coat to cup my left breast.
My breath catches, my head falls back, and his lips follow me and travel across my throat. Ungloved, his palm ought to be cold, but instead it burns through the silk of my blouse and the brassiere beneath.
He jerks backward, as if from a daydream, throwing himself against the seat. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t stop.” I pull him back. Already my breast feels chilled, exposed, deprived of Nick’s warm hand.
He pulls together the ends of my coat and buttons them clumsily. His chest heaves for air. “I lost my head.”
“It wasn’t you. It was me.”
“Yes, you’re irresistible.” He places his hands along my cheeks, kisses my nose, and rests his forehead against mine. “But it’s my job to resist you. Look how beautiful you are, how innocent.”
“And you aren’t?” I have tried to wrest this information from him, but he is reluctant to give it, as if the details would somehow contaminate the purity of our own gleaming new affair. I think there have been women before. There was certainly some woman last summer, I’ve gathered, from hints and allusions. Some woman he met while he was in Europe with his parents. Some woman with whom he perhaps made love, or perhaps came close. How close? How could I say, when I don’t know the gradations myself, the minute step-by-step of sexual consummation? How far a leap is it, from accepting Nick’s massive hand around my breast to going to bed with him? What territory, vast or small, lies between?
His hands are stroking my hair. “Not innocent in my thoughts, that’s for sure.”
“Neither am I.”
Nick’s stroking hands pause around my ears. He lifts his face away and peers at me. “Is that so? And just what . . . No. Stop, don’t tell me. God.” He exhales. “Lily, Lily. This is . . . This is . . . not easy.”
“I know.”
“Do you know, really? I want it so much, Lily. Don’t think I don’t. I think about it every minute, I torture myself with it. Lying with you, together with you, all the time in the world. Just imagine, Lily.”
“I do imagine it.” I put my hand on the wool covering his heart, and wonder how it will look when the wool is gone, and the jacket, and the shirt, leaving only Nick.
“But not here, for God’s sake. You’re too important to me, too precious, too . . .”
“Sacred?” The word tastes dull and flat on my tongue.
“Yes, sacred. If anything can be called sacred anymore.” He tucks my head into the nook of his neck, until the steady thrust of his pulse pushes against my brow. “Lily,” he says, “how do you feel about meeting my parents?”
I hesitate only an instant. “I’d love to.”
“And may I, over the holidays, have the honor of meeting yours?”
I picture my father’s distracted face, my mother’s stern eyes. Budgie’s words echo in my head: Have a few kicks. . . . Just don’t bring him home to your mother.
“Lily,” says Nick gently, and I realize I haven’t answered him.
“Yes. Of course you can meet them.”
“Have you told them about me?”
“Not yet.”
Nick says nothing.
“Daddy’s a bit fragile, you know, because of the war. And Mother . . .” Mother will forbid me to see you again, when she hears of it. “Mother’s just old-fashioned. I mean, she isn’t bigoted, it’s not that”—God, I sound like Budgie—“but she doesn’t believe a thing can be done until she sees it for herself. Do you know what I mean?”
“Of course.” His voice is cold.
“Don’t. Don’t sound like that. You know how I feel. You know it doesn’t matter to me who your father is. I can’t wait to meet him.”
“If you say so. But it matters to the people you love.”
“Then they can go to hell, Nick.” I sit up and face him. “Do you understand? It will be hard to tell them, because I know how they feel, I am honest about that, Nick, I know their faults. But that’s all. That’s the only reason I haven’t said anything, because I dread the unpleasantness. My mind is made up. It was made up that first morning, when you drove all the way down from Hanover with your broken leg.”
He says nothing. There is very little moon, and we have parked as far away as possible from any streetlamps. Nick’s face is dim, almost invisible; I can see only the tiny gleam of his eye, the outline of his cheekbone. “The thing of it is,” he says, “the irony of it, is that I’m not even Jewish. Not according to law, anyway. It passes through the maternal line.”
I sit there in his lap, thinking, listening to his breath. “Well, what do you think
? I mean, do you feel you’re Jewish? Or Christian?”
“Yes. No. Neither. I don’t know.” He speaks softly. “My father’s parents are observant. I would say strictly so. We usually went to their place for the high holidays, when they were alive, and it was always awkward, because to them I was a gentile, an outsider. They loved me, of course, but . . . well, there was always a line between me and my cousins. The boys all wore their yarmulkes and knew the Hebrew responses, and I didn’t.”
I am vibrating inside. Nick rarely speaks of matters like this, deeply personal matters. I’m afraid of saying anything, afraid of saying the wrong things and closing off the channel forever. I ask hesitantly: “Couldn’t you have converted, or something like that? Didn’t your father want you to be . . . well, like him?”
Nick shrugs. “My father doesn’t really practice. Never even kept kosher, as far as I can remember. Never sent me to school or anything like that. Just laughed it all off, washed his hands of it.”
“And your mother?”
“She’s faithful, I guess. But very quiet about it. Christmas, Easter.”
His words are growing clipped, hardened. He’s told me all he wants, for now: one tiny chip of an entire iceberg of Nick.
I try one more time. “So you were caught between the two, weren’t you? Each side thinks you belong to the other.”
“More or less.”
“And which do you want to be?”
“I don’t know, Lily. I don’t know. Whatever you want me to be. Hell, I’ll be Father Christmas, if you like.”
I turn away. “Don’t be rude.”
“Well, don’t pry like that.”
“I wasn’t prying. I didn’t mean to, anyway. I just want to learn about you.” I try to pull back, but Nick’s arm, which had fallen away, tightens back around me.
“Wait, Lily.” He sighs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. It’s a sore spot, that’s all.”
“I’ll say.”
“You were right. You should pry. You have every right.”
I don’t answer.
He lifts his other hand and lays it against the side of my head with immense delicacy, and with immense delicacy urges me back against his chest. “I’m sorry to put you through all this,” he says at last.
“You haven’t put me through anything. You’ve given me everything. Look, it doesn’t matter to me, Nick. You know it doesn’t. Please say you know that.”
“I know that.” He kisses me. “I know that.”
“It’s just a few practicalities to sort out. And things will get better. People are modernizing. All the old prejudices will fall by the wayside.”
“Darling Lily,” he whispers, “do you have any idea what’s going on in the world at the moment?”
“In Europe. Not here. That sort of extremism would never take hold here.”
He holds me silently.
“And anyway, my parents aren’t extremists, not at all. They deplore all that. They’re very kind people. They’re almost socialists, really. They’ve just . . . things have been a certain way all their lives, and . . .”
“And you plan to upset the apple cart.”
“I do. I will,” I say passionately, before halting in confusion. We’ve progressed into dangerous territory. Nick hasn’t exactly proposed, after all. He hasn’t even said he loves me, at least not outright. He only wants me to meet his parents, wants to meet my parents himself.
“Good,” he says. “We’ll upset the cart together. Let them think what they like.”
“Yes, let them.”
We kiss a little longer, until Nick says, reluctantly, that he should take me home. He bundles me out of his lap and slides behind the steering wheel and drives through the darkened campus lanes until we reach the dormitory.
The cast was removed two weeks ago, but Nick still moves a little stiffly as we walk up the path to stand, as always, under the hundred-year oak. Its branches are now bare, a tall and intricate skeleton of a tree, except for a few tenacious brown leaves clinging on against the odds. The cold has deepened shockingly, and a few snowflakes somersault about us. “I have two exams this week, and then I go down on Friday,” he says. “I have your telephone number. You’re on Park and Seventieth, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. Seven-twenty-five Park. Budgie is driving me down on Saturday.”
“Shall I stop by on Sunday?”
I imagine Nick Greenwald filling the foyer of my parents’ apartment, smiling and handsome, a few dark curls dipping into his forehead, a touch of frosty December still hovering about his coat and hat. “Yes, do,” I say.
He tips back his hat and leans down to kiss me, straightens my hat for me, takes my woolen hand and kisses that, too. “Until Sunday, then, Lilybird.”
I waltz on golden slippers into the warmth of the dormitory, sign myself in, share a quick joke with the unsmiling attendant, and turn to the lounge, where Budgie Byrne sprawls on a sofa next to my Aunt Julie.
I stop short.
“Hello, Aunt Julie.” My body feels stiff and immobile, my lips unnaturally large and blood-filled. The entire history of the past hour, it seems, is scrawled in intimate detail upon the lines of my face.
Aunt Julie rises. “Hello, you.” She sounds as convivial as ever. Her golden hair curls under a neat dove-gray cloche, and she wears a matching coat of dove-gray cashmere and black leather driving gloves. She reaches for my shoulders and gives me a feather-light kiss on each cheek, surrounding me with Chanel. “There you are! I’ve been waiting for hours.”
“I’m so sorry. If I’d known . . .”
“Oh, that’s all right. Dear old Budgie has been keeping me company.” She glances over her shoulder. Dear old Budgie waggles her fingers and smiles wickedly.
“I’ll say,” I mutter.
She hooks her arm through mine and leads me to the sofa. “Anyway, I was just passing through, you know, on my way to New York, and I couldn’t resist stopping off to see my favorite niece.”
Passing through? On her way to New York? From where, Montreal?
“Well, I’m glad you came.” I settle myself on the sofa next to her and pull off my woolen winter gloves, which have become intolerably hot and itchy. “I just wish I’d known, so you didn’t have to wait for me. Are you staying in town?”
She waves her hand. “No, I’ll be on my way. I’m a hopeless old night owl.”
“Mrs. van der Wahl has just been telling me all about her divorce.” Budgie, swings her slippered foot. “She makes it sound like such fun. I’m beginning to think I’d like to get married, just for the fun of a divorce.”
“Poor old Peter,” says Aunt Julie, with a sympathetic sigh. “Such a gentleman. I only wish we suited, but then I don’t think there’s a man in the world who could tolerate me for more than a year or two.”
“Human beings aren’t really designed for monogamy anyway,” says Budgie. “I’m taking the most fascinating class in sexual psychology this term. The professor’s just enthralling. I was telling your aunt about it, Lily, when you danced in at last from your date with Nick.”
“Had a nice time, dear?” Aunt Julie rivets me with her famous green eyes.
“Very nice. Nick is a perfect gentleman.”
“Budgie, my dear,” says Aunt Julie, “why don’t you give us a moment alone?”
Budgie unwinds herself from the sofa and stretches her slender arms to the ceiling. “I’m dead tired anyway,” she says. “Such a weekend. I’ll see you in the morning, darling. Good night, Mrs. van der Wahl. Happy trails. Give Manhattan a big smacking kiss for me, will you?”
She blows us both kisses and prowls up the stairs.
“Well, well,” says Aunt Julie, watching the disappearing profile of Budgie’s cashmere-lined derriere. “Tell me all about this boy of yours.”
“Getting straight to the point, aren’t you?”
“I always do. So tell.”
“I don’t know what to say.” The lounge is warm, stuffy. The radiator hisses con
spicuously in the corner. I unbutton the collar of my coat, and then the next button. “I met him in October, when Budgie and I drove up to Dartmouth for a football game. He plays quarterback, or did, until he broke his leg. He’s brilliant. Kind, funny.”
“He’s a paragon, I’m sure. You know about his father, don’t you?”
“I know a little. I know Mother isn’t going to be happy about his last name, but I’m sure your mind is much more open than that.” I insert a challenging note in my voice.
“His last name.” She lets out an elegant snort. “No, you’re right. Your mother isn’t going to be happy at all. You don’t know the half of it, not the quarter of it.”
My temper begins to flare. “Well, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m in love with him. He’s in love with me.”
“Oh, you’re in love with him, are you? How charming. I was in love once. It’s a very pleasant thing. I’d recommend it to anyone.”
“Don’t joke. We are serious, Aunt Julie.”
“Do you know, I was very serious about Peter, before we married. As much as I can be serious about anything, that is. Do you have a cigarette, by chance? Or are they forbidden at top-drawer women’s colleges?”
Her hands are trembling in her lap. She moves her arm to the side of the sofa and begins to tap the red-lacquered tip of her index finger against the worn upholstery.
I rise to my feet. “Why are you here, Aunt Julie? Did somebody warn you that I was having an affair with someone ineligible? You’ve come here like a Victorian grandmother to forbid me to see him again?”
“Oh, shush. Sit down. For goodness’ sake, I never knew you to have such a dramatic streak. Love. Really, it’s responsible for the most vulgar excesses.”
I stand for a moment longer, fingers clenching, before I drop back down to my seat.
“Now, listen. You can do as you like, of course. Believe me, I know better than anyone that there’s no better way to get some headstrong young lady to do something than to forbid her to do it. I just ask you to listen to me.”
I fold my arms. “All right.”
“Now, you know, of course, that Nick’s father’s firm is on the brink of collapse?”
“Collapse?” My arms fall apart. “What do you mean collapse?”