Angels Go Naked. Cornelia Nixon

to weep quietly. Moments later she was on the sidewalk in cold sun, with the recommended diet in her purse, and Mrs. Henry Bergstrom’s next appointment card.

      She’d be a famous violinist, live in a garret with the child. It would be a purse-sized child, round and pink, a girl, never growing any bigger or needing anything, and it would ride on Margy’s chest while she played the major concert stages of the world. She would wear flowered dresses, cut severely (bought in France), with black berets and leather jackets. She would smoke fat cigarettes through vermilion lips, drink liqueur from a small glass. And one day, in a café on the Boul’ Mich’, or in Nice, or in her dressing room in Rome, Henry would track her down. He’d send his card backstage, and she would send it back. She’d look the other way in the café.

      “Mais non, monsieur,” she’d say. “We do not know each other. Excusez moi.”

      For Thanksgiving she had to fly to Florida with her father and pretend to eat some of the thirty pounds of turkey her grandmother made, and throw up in the bathroom of the tiny oceanview apartment with the fan on and the water running. Back at Yale, she learned that she had failed midterm exams (equipped with the vast wasteland of all she hadn’t read), and packed to leave for Christmas break.

      Rachel met her train. Sauntering down the platform, thumbs hooked into black jeans, she looked very young in a new black motorcycle jacket with silver chains. But her stare was just the same.

      “They’re engaged,” she said, with a tragic face.

      Margy kissed her on both cheeks, said, what? and who? and even laughed. She felt a little better, having not thrown up almost all day.

      Rachel hung suspended, watching her. Slowly a look of wonder, almost delight, broke on her face. Stepping closer, she took tender hold of Margy’s head.

      “Oh, baby. Don’t you know anything yet?”

      It had started in the summer, Rachel said, when she and Ann first went to bed. They’d been in love since spring—she and Ann, that is—and Rachel was spending all her time at Ann’s by then. Ann never wanted her to leave, but at first they didn’t get near the bed. They’d sit on the floor in her room and talk until they fell asleep, right where they were. Ann couldn’t face it, what it meant, or do more than kiss Rachel on the cheek.

      “She was just a little virgin straight,” Rachel explained. “Like you, only worse. She thought that girls who went to bed with girls would end up riding Harley-Davidsons and stomping around in big dyke boots. It wasn’t possible for the queen of the winter festival.”

      Then suddenly it was, and they’d been lovers now for months, every night in the canopy bed. It was the most intense thing in her life, and in Ann’s. One night they’d been making love for hours when she touched Ann’s back, and it was wet.

      “That does it,” Rachel’d told her then. “No matter what, you can’t go saying you’re a virgin now.”

      Things were good then for a while. They took some little trips. (“You lied to me on that postcard,” Margy pointed out, and Rachel shook her head. “I promised her,” she said.) Ann was jealous of Rachel’s other friends, and accused Rachel of not loving her—while she, Ann, was in love for life. But Rachel reassured her, and then things were all right. Even Betsy laid off Ann.

      “Betsy thinks I’m good for her,” Rachel said, and grinned. “She likes the way Ann shares her toys with me.” Of course Betsy had no idea what was going on, it wasn’t in her lexicon. But she liked Rachel, they got along. And Rachel learned to head Betsy off when she was going after Ann.

      Then one night in the fall, Ann announced that she was going out, and Henry showed up at the door. He took her out to eat, and to a play, and to the symphony.

      “They went out?” Margy cried, but Rachel only looked at her. Out, and home to meet his parents too. It was a bulldozer through their happy life. He started calling every night from Yale. Ann would take the call in her parents’ room and close the door. She started quoting Henry. He said men should always be gentle to all women, and he was sorry it had not worked out with Margy, but that they had parted friends. This was the time in their lives that counted most, he said, when the steps they took would determine all the rest, and it was important to be circumspect. Ann agreed, and every weekend circumspectly she went out with Henry, and came home to sleep with Rachel.

      “So now she’s wearing this big Texas diamond that used to belong to his grandmother. And all she does is cry. He brings her home, and she gets in bed with me and starts to cry. She cries while we make love, and then cries in her sleep. In the morning she gets up to try on her trousseau, and puts on sunglasses so Betsy won’t see, but they just dam up the tears, until she’s got this pool behind them on her cheeks. She’s just afraid, and she knows it, but that doesn’t mean a thing. They’ve got the guest list all made out. She’s going to marry him in June.”

      Margy took the T to Cambridge, looked for Rachel’s friends. She found the one who’d had the party, a big-breasted woman in a T-shirt with short rough hair, who offered to make tea, or lunch, or roll a joint. Yes, she could tell Margy where to go, and no, she wouldn’t mention it to Rachel if she didn’t want her to. But was she sure?

      “It’s not a nice thing to go through,” she said as she followed Margy out onto the landing, carrying a large gray cat. “Don’t do it by yourself, baby.”

      Margy thanked her, put the number in her purse, but did not make the call. First, she needed to understand. She needed to see Ann one more time, from a distance, preferably. Maybe that would be safe. Maybe then the thing that happened when you looked at her would not, and she would understand, why all their lives arranged themselves Ann’s way, as if they were the notes and she was the melody.

      Christmas Eve, Margy played chess with her father, which he had taught her as a child, but she was too sick to concentrate, and he won both games. Humming happily, he went off to bed, and she sat waiting in the ornate living room, still decorated in her mother’s taste, Persian rugs and heavy velvet drapes and lamps held up by enslaved caryatids (“early sadomasochist,” as Rachel’d labeled it). When she could hear nothing but the antique clocks, ticking out of sync, she eased her coat out of the closet, and the bolt out of the door.

      Flagging a cab was easier than she’d supposed, with the neighbors all returning home, and she was early for the service at Holy Cross. The cathedral was already nearly full, rows churning with genuflection, kneeling, crossing, touching lips, and she took up a position to one side, beneath a statue of the Virgin, plaster fingers open downward as if beckoning the crowd to climb up into her arms. In an organ loft somewhere above, someone was playing Bach’s most schmaltzy fugue, hamming it up with big vibrato on the bass, while in the aisles people streamed both ways, like refugees from war, out toward the doors and in for midnight mass. Their coats were black and brown and muddy green, with sober scarves and hats, and when Ann’s head emerged from beneath the outer arch, hair glowing like ripe wheat and freshly cut to brush the shoulders of her camel-hair coat, she seemed to light the air around for several feet.

      Margy pressed back closer to the wall. She hadn’t forgotten how beautiful Ann was, but memory could never quite live up to her. Henry’s shoulders framed her head, wide and straight in a navy overcoat, with Rachel tall as he was next to him, looking strangely wrong in a lace collar, wool coat, and heels. None of them had time to glance across the nave. Rachel was clowning for Henry, rolling her eyes and gesturing with her hands, and he gave a grim smile, looking handsome but harassed, as he stepped up to take Ann’s hand. Rachel moved to her other side, and together they maneuvered to a spot behind the final row of pews.

      Now all three stood, Rachel and Henry crowded close on either side of Ann, bantering above her head, while she looked docile as a child, and lost. Henry had a firm grip on her hand, and he kept it well displayed, curled against his chest or resting on the pew in front or in his other