New Heaven

Photo by Carlos Sotelo

I was twenty-seven years old and working a dead-end job in the city when I discovered that my grandmother, who’d died young in 1955, had been a nymphomaniac too.

My great-aunt Nancy told me when I was home in New Haven for Christmas. I’d volunteered to pick her up from the train station after lunch. When I arrived, she was standing at the curbside, ankle-deep in the mud-spattered snow, smoking the same fruity, gold-paper cigarettes that had set our guest bed on fire twenty years ago. She was hard to miss: four foot ten, frail and whippet-faced, wearing striped galoshes and an oversized ski jacket with a fluorescent lift tag still on the zipper. From the smell of her, she’d been drinking double martinis since breakfast.

She slammed the car door and knocked ice on the floor mat. The holly sprig in her hair had wilted on the train. She unzipped her jacket and smiled a bright, boozy smile. “Patricia, darling, you’re red!”

“What? No, I’m not.”

“Why are you out of breath?”

“Because I hurried. Sorry I kept you waiting.”

I ran my fingers through my hair and started the engine; I eased the old Pontiac out onto the road. Nancy rolled down the window and lit another cigarette, then said, almost under her breath, “Just like your grandmother!” which alarmed me because my grandmother had been very glamorous and cosmopolitan, and I was sitting there in jeans, no makeup and a camouflage hoodie I’d bought at the army surplus store downtown. Also, the real reason I was late was because I’d made a quick detour to an old friend’s house—Andy Starling, from my twelfth grade English class. All day long I’d had this insatiable craving for New England–style sex, in Andy’s big oak bed with the quilts piled on top of us and his black Lab sleeping on a braided rug by the fire. I’d been thinking about it the whole ride up from the city: knocking on the red door of his house, being greeted by the homey smells of pine needles and pumpkin pie, his little nieces running underfoot in their velvet and plaid and Andy leading me upstairs in his cable-knit sweater, where he would present me with a tumbler of spiced eggnog and a condom that tasted like candy canes. But when I got there, he was still in his sweatpants and grubby college T-shirt, drinking his first cup of coffee and flipping through an L. L. Bean catalog on the kitchen counter. The house was overrun with family, all of whom seemed to be suffering from a cold, and as it turned out, he was sleeping on the couch so his aunt and uncle could take the bed, so we ended up doing it in the garage, up against the old station wagon, where the air stank of gasoline and paint thinner and smears of peanut butter on the rattraps. Afterward I asked about law school and how his fractured arm had healed after the rugby tournament, and by then I was late. I pulled on my jeans and said, as I did every time, to look me up if he was ever in the city, and he said yes, of course, but I knew I wouldn’t see him until Easter. He was practically engaged to some girl at Brown.

“What do you mean, my grandmother?” I asked Nancy.

Nancy flicked the ash from her cigarette. “You know Alice,” she said with a bored wave of her hand, as if my grandmother were a friend of ours from finishing school and had made a foolish decision about a dinner menu. “Alice had needs. I can’t keep count. First it was the boy at the pool, when we were girls. Right up until the last one, that actor. The girl was addicted.” She pinched her eyes. “It was a tonic for her.”

“Atomic? What, like...