The Speed of Light Read online

  The Speed of Light

  Susan Pashman

  New York

  To Mark R. Nathanson

  for his widsom, his compassion and for the inestimable

  gift of Time.

  And remember that the companionship of Time is but of short duration. It flies more quickly than the shades of evening. We are like a child that grasps in his hand a sunbeam. He opens his hand soon again but, to his amazement, finds it empty and the brightness gone.

  Meditation, by Y. Pennini

  from the Siddur for the

  High Holy Days, Isaac

  Gluckstein, trans.

  PART ONE

  One

  He had fallen asleep reading, in a familiar posture. Head back, mouth agape, one of those sculpted fish standing on its tail, its mouth a fountain. Gravity weighed on his uvula and pulled his tongue backward, closing his throat, and he stopped breathing. But in a moment, his head fell forward and his jaw slammed shut. The bite of air restored him and his head lolled back again. And so it went.

  Behind him, French doors opened to the terrace overlooking Gramercy Park and the first silky strands of coolness to wend their way through the stolid remains of a swampy September day. There was still enough moisture below to throw gelatinous halos around the streetlamps. Nineteenth-century streetlamps, full of charm, that his wife’s committee had installed around the park.

  A night of soft-edged lights. A dampness that turned the white squares of windows on tall buildings to the south into swimmy splotches. A dampness that made the illuminated baroquery on the bank building a huge damaged wedding cake, its icing smeared about, its finely stenciled details indistinct. Narrow ribbons of coolness wove past the chipping paint on the French doors and teased the back of his neck. He gulped at it. His head lolled onto his shoulder. The book in his lap shut itself and slipped between his knees onto the living room carpet.

  Carla was a round-assed fetal lump beneath the covers. Sturdy Slavic calves, large suntanned knees pulled up to her bosom, and all of it wrapped in white cotton printed with baby pink roses. A handsome Tartar face, wide-boned and bronzed, burrowed deep into the pillow. A limp old pillow that needed rearranging several times throughout the night. His pillow lay lifeless beside her. She slept carefully, even in his absence honoring the unspoken covenant never to allow so much as a toe across the imaginary line down the middle of their bed. But even in her careful sleep she was grateful for the flat empty space beside her and for the silence of it. Her shoulder pressed into the lumpy mattress, savoring his absence from their bed. The absence of his gasps, his glottal rumblings, his lurchings.

  The baby pink roses on her thin wrapping sweetened her sleep. She believed in the power of delicate barriers. She knew that simple faith fortified them, making even a cotton nightgown into armor. She swam among the roses as she fell to her sleep, unreachable, impregnable. Even if he had wanted to touch her, he could not. Such was the efficacy of her faith in delicate barriers.

  He could no more touch his wife than he could swallow a bolus of squills. Those mornings when he woke beside her in the dark, he sometimes considered the mountain of buttock and imagined slipping a hand between her thighs. The shiny umber curls on her pillow, the taut sunburnt cheek still appealed to him. But his hand died on its way to her, bested by the rose-printed nightgown.

  He could not even wish she slept nude. The plump mound of ass he had once, briefly, adored had lost its shine and its scent. She was a density bereft of definitive line, an irksome contemptibility. Until dawn, when he hurried to close his eyes and make his mind blank for awhile before arising, he recounted endlessly the reasons his hand could not traverse the distance to his wife’s thighs.

  If he woke beside her and found his bedlamp still lit, he could study her as she slept. Her face, her face! It might almost make up for the rest. It was still a rosy, sweet freshly-plucked apple, ripe as afternoon sun. Full lips, full lids, opaque blue eyes beneath a dark, serene brow. A large round bowl brimming with fruit. Peaches. Plums. Blackberries. Her face held the memory of the first time he had seen it.

  The coral impatiens on the terrace straightened on their stems. The air through the French doors was cooler now, dryer. He stopped breathing again, gagged, and resumed a raspy snore. In his dream, something small and hard had hit him in the chest. Larger than a bullet, smaller than a fist. A tennis ball moving relentlessly into his chest. His chest was very thick. The ball could not pass through. His chest was molten rubber. The tennis ball lodged there. He should not have played tennis that day. Not on Yom Kippur.

  He wondered if God had witnessed his insolence as, after services, he shed his navy blazer and tie and slipped into his tennis whites. Every gesture, he knew, had been too abrupt, too furtive. And now there was a tennis ball in his chest, a thick menacing knot. “You fool, Dr. Kline,” the voice of God was saying, “nothing escapes my eye.”

  He lifted his heavy lids, leaned forward in the chair, and stared at the book on the carpet. Magazines scattered on the floor. Stacks of magazines Carla still could not throw away. Despite her recent resolve. Boxes of magazines lining the dining room beyond. Things she simply would not throw away. The tennis ball could not pass through his chest. He closed his eyes and made it a dream again. A tennis ball pressing inside him.

  Nathan knew his game was in irreversible decline. Even Carla could beat him at singles now. A woman. A woman twelve years his junior, but a woman. Open-heart surgery two years ago could not restore his game. The feeling in his hands and right arm returned but his stamina never did. Carla was a damn good player. Always damn good. Not so terrible these days to lose a match to Carla. Worse to lose to Tom, that no-class entrepreneur. Tom, who bought designer graphite racquets before he could play tennis and a silver lamé ski suit before he learned to ski. It was enough losing Carla to Tom. Losing to Tom on the courts was unbearable.

  He shouldn’t have played tennis today. Not on Yom Kippur. Not in that heat. Fasting and playing tennis. But he beat him, that bastard. He beat Tom at singles. And now the tennis ball couldn’t get through. Tom had a killer serve. The man who had made love to Carla for so many years, the man Carla said she really loved, had served a tennis ball right into him.

  He rose and walked onto the terrace. It was a touch of angina. It would pass. The clock on the bank to the south said five past eleven. Years ago—how long was it now?—Carla had asked him to look at a sore. An ugly sore. Tom, good old Tom, Nathan thought, was a great guy. A guy with a warm, happy handshake. Street-smart, direct. Nathan had envied the fearlessness that could let a man be so direct. And modest. Almost apologetic for the serendipity that had made him unspeakably rich. Tom gave Carla herpes. He never told her he had it; he just gave it to her.

  Carla loved him anyway and that was what she told Nathan even as she begged him tearfully to examine the oozing sore. She told Nathan she loved Tom anyway even as Nathan was running his finger around that dark wet cave of hers, positioning the bedlamp the better to see the runny pustule. He didn’t care just then that his wife loved Tom. He was nauseated by the sore. He set the bedlamp down on the bed and walked silently to the bathroom to scrub his finger. There were faint ripples like chills in his jaw.

  He was sure it was Tom’s serve that had landed the tennis ball in his chest.

  It was just angina. Maybe a bit strong because he’d worked so hard to return that serve on a hot, sticky day. It would pass.

  The air conditioner in their bedroom had a chronic moan. Carla had her chin tucked down. The blue blanket pulled up over her face was pilling from too many washings and the satin hem was shredded. She still hated replacing things, still hated spending money, never threw things away. Her shiny brown hair floated above the shredding satin blank
et hem. The sleep of the safe.

  She was safe with Nathan. He kept a safe distance. Their fights were fought obliquely. She had married him to be safe. Her father, her mother too, had pressed her to do the safe thing and when it was done, she let the safety engulf her as a November fog. She slept, chin tucked down, a safe, foggy sleep. Nathan remarked to himself for the thousandth time upon the soundlessness, the motionlessness, the perfection of his wife’s sleep. He imagined she would sleep the same way if she knew what was happening to his heart.

  It would pass. He went back to his book.

  The letters grew large and then small on the page. He wanted to throw up. He returned to the terrace and studied the white splotches on the buildings south of Gramercy Park. Carla, he concluded, would be fine. She still had that face. She would marry again in no time. Probably another doctor. Doctor father, doctor husband. Second doctor husband. Doctor husband the second.

  Nathan wondered who it would be. The face that was a bowl of fresh ripe fruit. The elegant carriage, the European breeding. She would be safe again in a year or two. A man would sigh and long for that face. A man who had not had her would be lured by those huge, unresponsive breasts as he had been. A man might imagine he could arouse her even now, even thirty-four years later.

  You know a good tennis player after one or two strokes. And a skier, moments into a run. You know a thoroughbred at a glance. A moment’s conversation. A conversation overheard. Carla would be fine.

  It was twenty past midnight on the clock south of the terrace. The tennis ball had become his whole chest. His chest, his arm, were wound tight into one huge pounding ball. Hard and pounding as Tom’s killer serve. It would be embarrassing showing up at the emergency room, a doctor, so far advanced into a massive coronary. They would ask why he’d waited so long.

  He would wake his wife. She would drive.

  Two

  You know a thoroughbred at a glance. A moment’s conversation. A conversation overheard.

  The elevator door closed before he realized that this building he was in had no twelfth floor. And so, in 1955, Nathan Kline, recently returned from the navy, rode to the ninth floor, entranced by a radiant fresh-apple countenance, dark curls, and a waist made tinier by the full bosom and hips that bloomed around it. She was abundance, he thought, glossy, fragrant, vital. She saw only the elevator operator and addressed only him. All Nathan’s senses yielded to her. She filled the elevator car, she overflowed it and filled the shaft, the building, the wrong building!

  Nathan had meant to be in the building next door but now he was lost in a sound, a perfume, a presence that stunned him into alertness even as it clogged his consciousness. By the time the elevator reached the ninth floor, the reverberations of her tutored English, the mannered modulation of her voice and the undeniable lilt of it were the noontime bells in a tiny town of churches, all pealing at once and making him delirious.

  Her composure, her self-assured gaiety. She was loved, indulged. She spoke of her holiday from college. She would be returning to Smith on Sunday. She nodded pertly to the elevator operator and looked straight ahead as she left the tiny car.

  As they descended to the lobby, Nathan managed to pay the elevator operator five dollars for her name. Carla. A name as round as an embrace, round as a bowl. A bowl brimming with peaches, a bosom bursting with nectar. Not English, but tutored in England, Nathan concluded. A thoroughbred. Weisenthal. German or Middle European. An old-world thoroughbred.

  Next day, he rode the subway to Columbia and flashed his alumni card at the guard in Low Library. The Smith College Yearbook. Weisenthal, Carla Wei-sen-thal. Junior Class Secretary. Daughter of Dr. Felix and Sophie Weisenthal. Born, Prague, 1937. No siblings. Brearley. Art History major. His cheeks burned. His head bent closer to the page as he strode past the bookshelves with the automatic movement of a panther on the scent.

  Her father was a doctor. They would talk about medicine; they would talk about Europe. They would be colleagues. Nathan imagined Felix Weisenthal a lean, slight man not unlike himself, a man of great wit and the sort of encyclopedic learning one expects of educated Europeans. He would appreciate Nathan’s refinement and erudition in a way Nathan’s own father could not.

  Nathan saw Felix Weisenthal delivering his luscious daughter to Nathan and watching with amused approval as Nathan ravished her expertly: Nathan plowed and strove as Dr. Weisenthal cheered him on, admiring his skill and endurance and emitting a small giggle when his daughter finally moaned. Nathan held his briefcase in front of him to hide what he supposed was a hugely apparent erection and hastened to the men’s room.

  He returned to the Broadway local, shuttled crosstown to Grand Central, and walked to the hospital. His office was dim, spartan, but in the right part of the basement. He was immensely pleased to have an office so near to the research labs. He had had superb training here in New York and then in Switzerland at the war’s end. The navy had let him stay on under Kopfer, caring for refugees. Ophthalmological surgical techniques yet unheard of in New York. He had credentials, contacts, he could let anti-Semitic remarks pass. They had assigned him an office in the research area. His star was on the rise.

  The dark blue spine on the Directory of Physicians and Surgeons was new, stiff. It crackled in his palm. Felix Weisenthal. Born: Prague, 1899. Certificate in Psychiatry, Vienna, 1928. He would have known Freud. Freud would have known him. Nathan was already deeply connected to him by a powerful lust for his daughter. Nathan’s lust for Felix Weisenthal’s daughter was no mere yearning, but a tidal swell that washed over the three of them, binding them irrevocably. It defined a project, an undertaking so immense in its reach and significance that Nathan would have been thoroughly overwhelmed had he not been so certain of its outcome.

  Some thirty publications in German. Prestigious journals. Nathan was pleased that he could recognize the names of the finest German-language medical journals. Two books in English. A thoroughbred. He had known it instantly. But, of course, that’s what a thoroughbred is.

  He snapped the Directory shut and stood slightly bent, hips thrust forward, running his right hand through the fine reddish blond hair he’d inherited from his father. It was a habit he wished he could break. The gesture brought his father too close, reminded him that his flesh, his bones came from that man.

  Bone, Nathan thought, is what his father was. Dry, dusty bone. Not a moist drop of joy in him, he bent grimly to his daily labor, never pausing to enjoy its fruits. A successful enough accountant for all it mattered. Nathan’s brother, Irv, was an accountant too. Two dour, mirthless, fiercely competitive men. And Nathan, the frivolous younger son, or so they said. Indulged by his soft-hearted mother, they said. She spoiled him, made him a sissy. Not just Irv and his father, everyone in the family said that. But his mother stood up for him, defended his taste for European culture, his love of fine music, his fondness for tennis and skiing. Irv lifted weights which, the senior Mr. Kline was quick to point out, was an efficient, cost-effective way to stay fit. Whenever he ran his hand through his fine red hair, Nathan worried that there was more of his father in him than he realized, worried that he might not have escaped after all.

  He was staring at the floor now, envisioning a plum, a plum dangling from the very top of a tree. He was, in his own way, as competitive as Irv and now he was on fire. He was, at that moment, Nathan of unstinting determination who had bested all the gentiles at Columbia’s School of Physicians and Surgeons. He was Nathan Kline whose skis could carve perfect edges into the sheer ice on Tuckerman’s Ravine.

  He set the blue Directory on his desk and drew a sheet of bond from the top drawer. He sat down deliberately as a man who must come to terms with some stunning, momentous news. He fumbled in the top right drawer for the fountain pen he had received from Dr. Heaney upon completing his internship. He leaned forward as he did when surveying a particularly difficult ski slope, grasped his pen firmly and fixed his gaze upon the whiteness on his desk, readying himself for the torturesome
twists of Tuckerman’s Ravine.

  “Dear Miss Weisenthal,” he wrote.

  “I confess it is with some embarrassment that I address this note to you. A young lady of your obvious fine breeding might certainly be shocked to learn that I obtained your name from the elevator operator at 40 East Sixty-second Street shortly after having had the splendid good fortune to travel all-too-briefly in that elevator with you last Saturday. No doubt you have forgotten me if, in fact, you ever noticed.…”

  He crumpled the paper, lit a cigarette and began again.

  “Dear Carla,

  “Who can say what draws a man to a woman? A man of considerable experience, I have had the good fortune to have traveled extensively in Europe while in the navy. I hope you can forgive my immodesty when I congratulate myself on my excellent intuition for, you see, I glimpsed you only briefly in an elevator the other day and yet I knew immediately that.…”

  And again:

  “Dear Felix.…”

  For godsake! Perhaps he’d been at it too long. He rose and walked around his desk, letting his eyes come to rest on the blue Directory. Perhaps it was a better approach after all. She was his only daughter, his only child. Hadn’t he fled Europe with her in his arms? He would want an appropriate husband for her. Someone learned and impressive. And Nathan did, he had to confess, have a yearning for Felix. As much as he wanted Carla Weisenthal, he longed to be embraced by her father.

  Or, on the other hand, he might write to her mother. A mother might be won by an older, protective man, someone cultivated, well-placed. Women had, after all, always cozened to him. He settled himself in his chair again. “Dear Mrs. Weisenthal,” he began. “Chance is sometimes the kindest of friends.…”

  He returned to “Dear Miss Weisenthal” and stuck with it through a pack and a half of cigarettes and several excursions to the men’s room and the faculty cafeteria.