THE PEOPLE IN MY building are afraid to look me in the face. They murmur hello, uncertain whether to smile any more; their diffident half-smiles wobble on and off like failing light bulbs. Should they talk as usual about the mailman’s erratic hours, the recent rash of burglaries on our block, the state of the plumbing? Is someone in my position still concerned with such things? They needn’t be afraid. There is no danger that my face will crumple. I wear make-up, the expensive kind that looks like young skin; my face is masked as in a Greek play, and I do the usual—say hello in the lobby, hold the elevator door open for my elders and for mothers with strollers. I am “taking it”; to the point that Victor’s frustration has spilled over the dam of his endurance.
Not all of them. An ancient Greek woman lives on the floor below mine, her face a brown web of wrinkles pierced by sparkly blue eyes. She speaks only Greek but manages to keep up with local events nonetheless. When we meet in the elevator she mutters strange syllables, shaking her head from side to side, the bright eyes moist. Can she be muttering wisdom from her ancestors, the great philosophers—“Bear and forbear”? Once she caught my hand and squeezed it for the eight-floor descent. My hand, greedy. Was she trying to recall to me Epictetus’ story about greedy hands? “See children thrusting their hands into a narrow-necked jar, and striving to pull out the nuts and figs it contains: if they fill the hand, they cannot pull it out again, and then they fall to tears.—‘Let go a few of them, and then you can draw out the rest!’—You, too, let your desire go! covet not many things, and you will obtain.” At last she released the hand; I held the door open for her, and outside, walked in the opposite direction.
And three floors down lives a large and splendid minister who became famous opposing the Vietnam war and now runs a disarmament program at his large and splendid church. Victor used to stop and talk to him on the street, and we attended his rallies. I am afraid, when I meet this imposing man whose energy radiates to fill the elevator so that I want to cower in a corner—I am afraid he may say something infinitely wise from Ecclesiastes or Job, and I stand aloof. But he has never said a consoling or a wise word. He alone greets me as before; looks me in the face; mentions the weather, the noisy punk rock party that kept us all up half the night; holds the elevator door not with pity but with old-fashioned chivalry.
Thursday morning, mid-May, going out after practicing for three hours, I find my neighbor from across the hall at the elevator. “Patricia! I haven’t seen you in ages. Where’ve you been?”
“Hi, Lydia.” She looks past me, embarrassment compounded by her baby carriage. She wishes she could tuck it in a pocket, make it disappear. Oh Lord, she is thinking, it’s so damn obvious—the enormous shiny black kind with high wheels and a canvas hood, from which a row of colored plastic rings hangs to amuse the baby, Bobby, whose head lolls on a blue satin pillow with an eyelet ruffle. Patricia’s disapproving parents bought the carriage. They also help pay for the apartment she lives in with Sam, her husband, a lifeguard at a midtown health club. The sweet-natured Patricia is twenty years old and five feet tall, with long smooth light brown hair and placid eyes, a capable girl whose stance toward life is sanguine and accepting. She wears drab old army pants, a green army jacket, old sneakers. She met Sam in high school and at sixteen was pregnant. The baby was Samantha, now in the nursery school Vivian and Alan went to. Patricia helps out there two mornings a week, as I once did. She never got to finish high school and before long was pregnant again—not handy with birth control, she mumbled to me, and residually Catholic besides. I used to feel sorry for her, but soon realized she likes having the children, she is happy with Sam, happy to have her own apartment and no longer live cramped in her parents’ furnished basement in Port Washington. When she first moved in two years ago she called me Mrs. Rowe, but I told her I was not as old as all that, she could call me Lydia. Sam could never stop calling me Mrs. Rowe. Occasionally Althea would babysit, but since the accident Patricia has not asked. The new baby is about five months old.
“How’s he doing?”
She arranges the blankets as if to conceal him. “He’s fine,” in a thin voice. She fusses in her canvas bag, finds a tissue, wipes Bobby’s nose.
We enter the elevator together. “Come on, Patricia, you can’t avoid me forever.”
“It’s only—I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Just talk like before.”
She sniffs and blows her nose with the same tissue she used on Bobby. “How are Althea and Phil?”
“All right.”
“And Mr. Rowe?”
Victor. I haven’t seen Victor in several days.
“Fine. Listen, you can still drop him off if you need to. Really. He was never any trouble.”
During our freezing, snowy winter, Patricia now and then parked the infant with me while she “dashed out” to pick up Samantha or run errands. He could sleep while music played: while the repatriated Henrietta Frye and I worked on a four-handed Debussy suite; through the Beethoven G major trio with my old woodwind friends, a flute and a penetrating bassoon; with Rosalie and Jasper and me stopping and starting our way through the “Archduke.” Such a remarkable sleeper—I worried that he might be deaf or brain-damaged. “Nonsense,” said Rosalie. “He’s just a placid baby.” While Jasper tuned we would stare into the carriage nostalgically, Rosalie and I, wishing we could pick him up just for the feel of it. But we knew from experience you never wake a sleeping baby.
“I didn’t think I should leave him,” says Patricia, maneuvering the carriage out of the elevator. “It didn’t seem right. But if you really mean it.”
“Sure, I know what it’s like.” The doorman bows his head in awe as I approach, and hands me the mail with a sorry, balletic extension of the arm. “Thanks, Carlos. I’ll see you around, Patricia. I’ve got to rush to a lesson.”
The first of two students, a brand-new one of about twenty, talented but sloppily trained, wants to talk at length about the Chopin Ballade I have him working on: the emotions—melancholy, passionate, nostalgic, etc. I interrupt and tell him to forget all that until he has gotten every detail of the timing and phrasing and dynamics with perfect accuracy. Then he can talk to me about emotion, if it is still necessary. He stares as though I am something monstrous, but he will come round in time, when he hears the results. The other is a prodigy of twelve who plays her Beethoven Rondo with astonishing technical skill. She sounds like a music box. She has to be reminded that music is more than timing and phrasing and dynamics executed with perfect accuracy. When I mention a sense of narrative, the unfolding of a passage from here to there like a journey, she blinks in bewilderment. She too will come round, but it will take longer.
On my way out I hear mistimed snatches of a Schubert sonata mingled with shouting, and as I move closer the voice is unmistakable: Irving Bloch again, martinet of the strings, in the East European accent which grows thicker when he loses his temper. Passing the room, I cannot resist peering in the back door.
“Ah, Lydia!” he shouts. “You appear like a miracle! Mrs. Rowe will show you how to do this together,” he says to the quaking pianist and violinist. “Together! Come, come, Lydia, come here to me.”
I smile at the two students and frown at Irving, but he insists—“Come!”—points to the place in the music, and raises the violin to his grizzly chin. The girl hurriedly gets up from the bench. Irving and I play the sixteen bars, allegro vivace. My hands seem yards away, my arms long ribbons from a wooden spool. But it sounds fine, not merely correct but rich with vivacity. The vivacity comes from the hands alone; they were well-educated, and they continue to transmit life and feeling, just as hair and fingernails grow for a while on a corpse. I imagine my hands could be lopped off and continue this way indefinitely, like the Red Shoes.
“There!” he shouts triumphantly to the pianist. “You see it can be done together! And hear the exuberance, the joie de vivre! That is how it should sound.”
While he rants on I show the girl the sixteenth notes she is playing as eighth notes and the two rests she is misreading. “And don’t mind Dr. Bloch. He’s that way with everyone except the strings. Count. Don’t be afraid to move your lips.”
“Thank you,” she whispers.
“Irving.” I take his arm and drag him to the door. Outside he is transformed, warm and paternal.
“So how is it going, my sweetheart? Everything all right?”
“Fine. Look, Irving, I know I shouldn’t interfere, but you can’t keep on doing this. It’s no way to teach. You don’t help them, you paralyze them.”
No one scolds Irving to his face. He has been here twenty-three years to my eight and has an unchallengeable manner. Moreover, his temper has been shorter since his wife died last year—but how long must we indulge him? He squints in surprise and ponders for a moment. “Yes, patience, patience. I do try, believe me, but the ear hurts, you know? I feel it like a pain—I cry out. You look a little pale, mein kind. You’re sure you’re all right?”
Again I shake my head at him. “Joie de vivre! At this stage, Irving? Really!”
“Ach, I’m sorry for that.”
“Not me! It’s them you should be apologizing to. Give them a little time. As it is, when I get them it’ll be days before their hands stop shaking.”
Chastised and shocked, he kisses me good-bye on the forehead.
“Oh, I’m still planning on that evening chamber group, starting next month. Are you going to do it with me?”
“A diplomat you’re not. First you yell at me, then you ask a favor? I said I’d do it, didn’t I? But maybe you want someone sweeter?” He grins flirtatiously. He knows he is the best.
“I want you. Let’s talk about it tomorrow, okay?” I am a little shocked too. Protocol no longer seems to matter; restraint doesn’t matter today.
Under massing clouds I limp down Broadway to the supermarket, where I consult my list like an ordinary woman. I used to shop at eccentric hours and save this precious solitary time for work. But I’ve decided on a day of self-indulgence. Anyhow, I have all the solitude I need. I buy butter and rice and saffron powder and a four-pound chicken, a chicken possibly not as good as the one I could get at the butcher’s, but I have been avoiding my butcher. We have a long and intimate relationship. Anybody privy to one’s choice of dinners for nine years becomes an intimate of sorts. Together we have been through the death of his father-in-law, his son’s acceptance at medical school, his daughter’s marriage, miscarriage, and more adherent pregnancy—she should be due any day now. When Althea became a vegetarian two years ago I told the butcher. He did not take it personally. “Well, children, what’re you going to do?” He shrugged. That is his sentence for all regrettable turns of events. It’s I who cannot look him in the face. The last time I did, nine weeks ago, he said how grieved he had been to hear the news. His white apron was spattered with blood and his hands looked raw. He is a slender, balding man with a long nose, a curving mobile mouth, and thick glasses. He told me feelingly that he remembered how many long years I had been a customer of his, how I used to come in holding them by the hand and they would play with the striped cat amidst the sawdust on the floor, and how he would give them each a slice of bologna. “You too, sometimes. You would take a slice, I remember. Maybe you’d like a slice now?”
“Thank you. Very good.”
“You were always a nice family. Well, what’re you going to do? Things happen. So, what can I give you today?”
I asked for three pounds of chuck for stew. At the time I was wondering also, well, what am I going to do? But I’ll go back someday soon. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. I don’t want him to think I’ve deserted him after so long for no good reason, or that I no longer appreciate his excellent meats. And I want to find out what kind of baby his daughter had.
In the Koreans’ fruit and vegetable store I buy garlic, mushrooms, lemons, the fixings for a salad including some very cheap and very bitter lettuce I have recently discovered and taken a fancy to, whose name I do not know and the Koreans cannot tell me since they speak hardly any English (they are learning Spanish first), as well as three huge, thick-skinned, costly oranges, the kind I have been eating since I was a child, whose tart rinds I munched slowly in the college dormitory to the benign indifference of Melanie, who piled up banana peels. Picking out my oranges, I notice, and not for the first time either, the son of the Korean couple who run the market. He is arranging lettuce. When he sees me looking he nods and lowers his intelligent eyes. Not from fear—the family is new here and doesn’t yet follow neighborhood gossip—but from shyness. A tall, lean, muscular boy of about nineteen, he wears tight jeans and a black turtle-neck jersey through which I can watch his back and shoulder muscles straining to lift the crates of lettuce. He moves lightly, almost stealthily, in his silent Adidas sneakers, the kind Alan craved. He has large boyish hands and fine wrists. He has wonderful coarse black hair, perfect for the flowing styles of today; it hangs, clean and thick, over his forehead. I wonder if he blows it dry, if he is vain. His cheekbones are high and set wide apart, his eyes dark and magnificently soft, his lips large and soft too, his teeth perfect. What a beautiful boy. I tuck him away in the back of my mind.
I’m in the Koreans’ place rather than the Cubans’ grocery not merely because the fruits and vegetables here are better and cheaper, but also because I resolved a while ago no longer to subject myself to the political views of the Cuban store’s Jewish fruit man. The fruit man lost his entire family in a concentration camp in Poland. He barely escaped, clawing his way through the forests of Poland with the Germans at his heels. From his descriptions I envision Poland as a heavily wooded country. As he dropped McIntosh apples into a paper bag, he would tell me of his journey with a numbed but unyielding wrath, in a flat sneering voice that was a personal accusation and a threat. His face would go as gray as his smock. Imagine, forty years later—and here his voice would shrink to a whisper—he has to listen all day long to the anti-Semitic remarks of his Hispanic and black co-workers. They hate him but he pretends not to hear, what does he care? If I chatted with the black and Spanish clerks his eyes would brood over me, mocking and resentful. “So, what do you think about what happened to us now?” was a frequent greeting. “Us” means Israel. A raid on a kibbutz, children killed. Terrible, I groan. “Animals,” he sneers. “Why do you think they call them gorillas?” Yes, terrible. But that would not suffice. No other nation in the world has any moral probity. “We are the best people in the world.” “We” never hurt anyone, just mind our business, unlike local muggers. He waits for me to agree. My response is judged halfhearted; he says I understand nothing, nothing. Ever since the Republicans were turned out of office in 1976, he informs me, the Jews have had nothing but trouble. Is that true? Hastily I would try to recall recent history, but before I can get anywhere: Do I know—he shakes a finger while he weighs my bananas—who would be the best President for Israel? No, who? Nixon. Nixon? Oh, come on, Mr. Zeitlowitz. Sure! What would be so terrible? Doesn’t everyone cheat a little? Ah, they made such a fuss over that business. But when he was President things were good for Israel. But ... but—I try not to splutter—but what about us? How about what would be good for us? (How about not even arguing with him?) If anything happens to that little country out there, he threatens, shaking the ringer in my face, where would those poor people go? I retreat from the finger. “I don’t want anything to happen to them. Did I say that? I wish them all the best.” “You just don’t have the feeling I do,” he accuses with a weak smile. I can’t deny that. Guilty! I did not claw my way through the forests of Poland. “So!” He spreads out his arms, a paper bag of fruit dangling from each hand. “We disagree! That’s that!” He gives me a sardonic, condescending smile: how stupid she is. Actually I should be flattered: it is the kind of smile reserved for intimates, landsman, whose loyalty can be taken for granted. He thinks he sees through me, and perhaps he does. “Okay, then, that’s that.” I too smile familiarly, and reach for the bags of fruit. “But if anything happens to Israel,” he snarls, shoving the bags at me with contempt, “it will be here just like in Nazi Germany.” He nods his head up and down ominously, twice. “You’ll see!”
I would slink away reminding myself that above all I must remember and respect his sufferings and not hold him to account, and therefore when the Koreans’ store opened with its beautifully superior fruits and vegetables and the fruit man’s customers deserted him, I remained. I suppose I wanted to demonstrate something to him, more out of pride, I see now, than humility: did I imagine my loyalty could nullify the Second World War? But the tirades became unbearable. Loudly, he cursed his defecting customers. “They’ll see! They’ll see! It’s garbage they’re buying over there. Horse manure! What do they know from fruit! You think I care? Listen, I been through worse. I been through plenty troubles.” And lowering his voice, he would recount once again clawing his way through the forests of Poland with the Russians at his heels. “The Russians?” “Sure, you think the Russians were any better than the Germans? Ah, a baby—what do you know? They’re all the same, every one of them.”
I raised the dilemma one night at dinner. I told the children about the fruit man’s sad past, the loss of his family, and about the better fruit in the Korean market. The economics of laissez-faire was heartless; how far must I compensate? Where should we shop? Althea’s opinion was prompt as usual. “You say the fruit in the Koreans’ place is better and cheaper?” “Yes.” “And besides that, you don’t like him?” “Yes. I mean, no. It’s hard to say, really.” She gave a disdainful shrug. “It seems to me there’s nothing to discuss.” Phil didn’t care where we got our fruit. He wanted to be excused; he had to call someone about the trigonometry homework. As he left he took an apple from the refrigerator. Alan and Vivian agreed that I should keep going to Mr. Zeitlowitz. “His fruit was good enough before, wasn’t it?” said Alan. “So make believe the other place never opened. Then you won’t have a problem.” “And whatever he says,” Vivian added, “you can just smile sweetly and keep your thoughts to yourself.” Ah yes, I knew that strategy from growing up with Evelyn, but I doubted if I could carry it off.
Althea said, “You people amaze me. I mean, we didn’t persecute him. From what I gather, he persecutes you.”
“Yes, I serve a purpose for him. I think in a way he needs me.”
Althea laughed, and then we all laughed.
Victor suggested that we buy some fruit from Mr. Zeitlowitz and some in the Korean store, which surprised me—I had expected him to react as Althea did. But that was impractical and time-consuming, I replied, besides which it was embarrassing to walk into one fruit store carrying a bag from another. That might inflame Mr. Zeitlowitz further. By this time Althea was laughing uncontrollably.
“You don’t need to be a human sacrifice, Lydie,” said Victor. “You go to the Koreans and I’ll go to him, for your conscience. He never bothers me.”
“Yes, and why not? That’s an interesting point. Have you ever thought about that? No, it wouldn’t be the same if you went.”
I took an apple from the refrigerator. It had a large soft brown spot. I examined another. Every apple in the refrigerator had at least one large and spreading soft brown spot. This is truly absurd, I thought. Althea is right.
So I started going to the Korean fruit market, where the air is hushed and smells of crisp wet greens. The proprietors do not burden me with their psychopolitical woes but nod with consummate reticence. Today as always I nod in return at mother, father, and son, and arms laden, limp on towards Woolworth’s. The sober mien of people hunting down the essential trivia is pleasantly contagious, and I too grow intent as I choose: Scotch tape, a note pad, shampoo, a measuring cup. Rounding a bend, I pass a rack of coloring books. It was both for charity and for spite that he bought me one when I was disintegrating in the walk-up flat on East Twenty-first Street, panicked that I had no identity. Now, with my identity so fixed and compulsory, that state seems enviable. On display are Star Wars coloring books, Superman coloring books, Sesame Street, Flintstones. None of those would suit me. Half hidden behind The Partridge Family is a Medieval Times coloring book: knights on horseback jousting in tournaments; monks and prioresses; cathedrals (the possibilities for stained glass!); lusty peasants gathering at the town well; ladies-in-waiting in luscious low-bosomed gowns. It reminds me of Chaucer. Griselda in all her pomp, before she was stripped down to her smok. I buy it. I buy a box of sixty-four Crayolas and head home, clawing my way through the forests of Broadway, only no one is at my heels. No one will even look at me. They avoid me the way I avoid the fruit man. I may yet come to resemble the fruit man.
Back home I listen to the recording of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet with Hephzibah Menuhin playing the piano part. Rosalie wants to do the “Trout” at an important concert at Lincoln Center this fall and I have promised to think it over. Rosalie is excited at the prospect: she has a violist and a bass player lined up, and waits on my decision. I should be playing it rather than listening, but not today. Today I indulge. Let her wait. Hephzibah’s suave playing begins like a controlled ripple. She launches with vigor into her first solo, and I curl up in the soft wing chair and leaf through the pages of my Medieval Times coloring book. The ladies-in-waiting, perhaps? When the doorbell rings I hide the book and the unopened box of Crayolas under the cushion. Patricia with the baby carriage. “I wonder, Lydia. ... It’s starting to sort of rain and I’ve got to—”
“Of course, bring him on in.”
“Fifteen minutes is all.”
She races to the elevator to show her good intentions. Bobby sleeps serene on his blue satin pillow; his cheeks are puffed out from sucking; his long brown lashes flutter a jot with each deep breath. Hephzibah eases into a lyrical passage with wit and finesse. She is dead, died some five months ago, early January, at age sixty, and The New York Times headed her obituary, “Hephzibah Menuhin, Sister of Violinist.” Once more in my chair, I cannot choose from an embarrassment of riches—the potentially gorgeous dresses of the ladies, or the cathedral at Amiens, which I could do like Monet. Derivative. I hesitate; to color anything would be crossing to a place from which it might be hard to return. And yet it is so seductive, staying in the lines. This time the phone rings.
“Hello. Is this Mrs. Rowe? This is Miss Fosdick, from New York Telephone.” What a musical, ingratiating voice. In those few words she has tripped through almost an octave. She announces that our telephone number is going to be changed. We will be given our new number within the month.
“Hold on a minute, will you?” I turn down the “Trout” at a crescendo in the second movement. “Now, what’s this all about?”
Certain of the numbers in this neighborhood must be changed for technical reasons. Miss Fosdick is extremely sorry for the inconvenience this may cause, and will be glad to supply me and my family with fifty postcards for notifying our friends and associates. From the voice I can see Miss Fosdick, ruddy-cheeked, hailing from someplace wholesome like Nebraska, with pert, pointy breasts and short athletic legs; she was lately graduated from the state university with honors and came to the big city to pursue a career. She was picked for Customer Relations because of her faultless diction and the cordial, ingenuous smile in her voice. I, on the other hand, seem all at once to be shouting.
“You can’t do that! That number is mine! You can’t just ... take it away like that! Who do you think you are? You big corporations think you can push people around however you like. Well, I’ve been paying for that number for nine years and I intend to keep it. You can take your new number and you know what you can do with it.”
“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Rowe,” says Miss Fosdick ever so gently. “We’re aware that it will be a disruption, especially for people who’ve had their number for a long time and have paid the bills promptly as you’ve always done. Unfortunately, technical problems require that we—”
“Technical problems! What are technical problems anyway?”
They turn out to be much too boring to listen to. They also sound inexorable. “Fifty postcards!” I interrupt. “How far do you think I can get with fifty postcards!” I don’t really believe this hysterical sound is my own. Some harpy is lodged in my throat. “We would need at least two hundred! I work out of my home. I have students, colleagues. And my husband ...We have a very large family, they all have friends!”
“In that case we’ll be glad to let you have a hundred postcards, Mrs. Rowe. No problem.”
I sink to the floor, exhausted, and say weakly, “But we’re all very attached to that number. After so long it becomes a part ...”
“I understand,” Miss Fosdick says very softly. Like a psychiatric nurse, trained for any eventuality or maniac. “But you’ll get attached to your new one too, I’m sure. You’ll be surprised at how quickly it happens.” We are like adversaries in a Greek tragedy, Miss Fosdick and I, where the hero learns to yield to Necessity—in this case corporate necessity—represented by some mean-spirited goddess.
When I hang up it is perfectly quiet. The record has stopped and Bobby is asleep. Sitting on the floor, still for the first time today, I feel the fact that Victor has gone like an intermittent thorny migraine; it intrudes whenever it can; it may be assuaged, blunted, or ignored, but not expunged. He left Monday morning with a suitcase. He would be staying at his studio for a while, he said, till ... “Till I don’t know, Lyd, till things work themselves out. This is no good for either of us. It makes it more painful. It isn’t livable.” I think he went to the Montessori teacher rather than the studio, though it hardly matters which. I pictured him not on the subway headed for West Houston Street but on the Broadway bus, requesting a transfer for the eastbound crosstown at Sixty-fifth. Or maybe he walked across the park—it was a balmy May day and the suitcase was small. If she gave him a key perhaps he stretched out on the white shag rug in all his glory and waited for her to return from school.
It was not a question of loving or not loving, he said, as if he had passed beyond such banalities. No; to be quite fair to him, he meant his love was not in question. It was irreversible (Heraclitus, I thought: the way up and the way down, reversible, ceaseless). He loved me, except he couldn’t live with me this way. This was late Sunday night, sitting at the kitchen table with only the dim light over the oven lit. It was labor enough to get himself moving every morning; he couldn’t face the way I was taking it besides. Anything else—if I screamed or went wild or didn’t speak at all. But my “sleekness,” he said. We were drinking tea and eating gorp and his mouth was full: Althea’s gorp, heavy on the figs. “Was that slick or sleek?” I asked. “Sleek,” he said carefully. “I can’t even approach.”
We appear unapproachable but we could approach each other easily, he said more than twenty years ago in the bar near the unfinished cathedral. “Don’t you remember?”
“Of course I remember. It’s my life too, you know. It was true then. It isn’t any more. When you’re young you think those truths are going to last forever.” He really meant it. His voice was even, his eyes steady. Still strong but older: he had lost his look of temperate eagerness.
“You don’t know me at all, then. I’ll never forgive this.”
“Forgive? How does forgiveness come in? You want to be alone with it. It’s clear. You’ve done everything to get that except show me to the door. Forgive, Lyd?”
“You don’t want to coexist?”
“No. I want you. Or not at all.”
We had the bowl of gorp between us. He was picking out two or three pieces at a time and meditatively bringing them to his mouth, while I dug out handfuls, bent my head back and tossed them in. Me, sleek? “Do you love her too? Your friend?”
“Oh, at moments. Not really.” He sighed. “But I don’t pretend to.”
This was not Victor. These were two other people, strangers to us both. We were decent, I always thought. Not the sort who would split in a crisis, but the sort who would abide. The stranger I had become found this impossible to say. “Do you realize what a brute you sound like, Victor?”
“I would say you’re the one being brutal. But let’s not turn it into a competition. You remember Highet. He was so right.”
Together at Columbia we had attended the famous lectures on classical tragedy. Gilbert Highet in natty gray flannels and lustrous black shoes was thrillingly debonair, a triumph of civilized Western manhood, striding back and forth across the platform, fluent on the brutalities of Hecuba. In the world of Euripides, he said, the victims become as bad as or worse than their persecutors. Earnest yet forever debonair, he reminded us time and again that suffering is not ennobling but brutalizing.
I wrote a term paper about Euripides’ Suppliant Women—Victor read it. Mothers of the seven heroes who died attacking Thebes, they supplicate for the return of their sons’ bodies so they can render the proper burial rites. They lament so incessantly that they lose all personal identity but that of grievers. Emblems of grief, they grieve therefore they are. Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of. “What need had I of children?” is their bitter cry. “Would that in death I might forget these griefs!” Well, of course. But what would Victor say if I went about the house swathed in black, intoning, “Alas, alas! Where is the labor spent on my children? Where the reward of childbirth ...? Nothing. He would take it, and be relieved, and hold me in his arms. That is precisely what he wants.
So why not give him what he wants? Our neighborhood shelters many ex-mental patients who walk the streets raving to invisible companions. In the park they perform strange and solitary antics. Last week a woman sitting on a bench slowly unwound an entire roll of paper towels, tearing off two sheets at a time. When she was done she made a fat pillow of them, put her face in it, and cried. Is it any wonder I’m afraid? The sound I would make is beyond imagining. The Greeks had their formal modes, their Necessity, their Destiny, their ritual responses. I have no speeches, no suit to plead, only this shapeless blob the size of the universe and choking as mud; it is all I can do to slog through it, coated in it; it does not wash off; it muddies the eyes; I cannot see Victor through it; I cannot make great poetry of it; I cannot make art of it as the Hopi Indians made of their toothache. It is formless and useless. “What need had I of children?” I used to think that when Althea and Phil were babies and wore me down to the bare nerves, in ignorant bitterness when I couldn’t tell griefs from simple gifts.
“Well, what about the kids? When are you planning to tell them?”
“I’ll call tomorrow night. Or the next night. As soon as I feel up to it. And I’ll be back on the weekend to see them. I’m twenty-five minutes away, Lydia. It’s not as if I’m deserting my children.”
As soon as he feels up to it! Why not as soon as he feels ready to “deal with” it? And he dared to be contemptuous at Esther’s wedding six years ago! He dared to say the fray reminded him of a Bosch painting. He whose patience stopped short at the fatuous, the trendy, the emotionally shoddy. Purist, who once wept tears of rage when a critic said his work was derivative. Listen to him now!
“I’m going to bed.” I got up to put the garbage out the back door.
“I’ll do that.”
“Oh, don’t be gallant, please, Victor. It’s my turn.”
“Have it your way.”
Out in the hall I bumped into his sister Lily’s TV as usual, and cursed. It never did work, even after he had it repaired last year for forty dollars. The fault of the twin towers, he said. Any other neighborhood. We tried to give it away, but everyone seeing the parallel lines and the snow said no, thanks. So there it has sat for over a year now, jammed in with the garbage cans and bikes and sleds, and whoever puts out the garbage bumps into it and curses. Vivian liked to say it tripped us because it resented its fate, back there with the garbage. I returned and said, “Maybe you’d like to take that damned TV with you?”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. You don’t have one in the studio. It would be nice to get rid of it.”
“No, someone will want it someday. Leave it.”
The next night after dinner, I told the children he had gone. Initially I had lied—“Working late”—and then over coffee I changed my mind. Didn’t they deserve better than to be lied to? I watched Althea pour coffee and thought of how we had done for them, how we should do for them. Maybe it was a mistake even to let them drink coffee so young. But then we had often permitted things other parents didn’t: staying up very late, painting their rooms in outlandish ways, reading dirty books. ... Someday we’ll go too far, I used to worry; something will happen. ... The formative years are over, Victor said last summer when Althea blew her babysitting savings on a Berlitz course in Swedish, having seen five Ingmar Bergman movies; we must let them live their own way. Very well, and one of us must tell them the truth. Promptly.
“It may be just for a little while, maybe longer, I don’t know. It was too hard here. He has to pull himself together on his own. Don’t blame him, it’s as much my fault. He’ll call you later to tell you, and you’ll see him whenever you want to.”
Althea had a million questions. Like a Socratic dialogue, ever bifurcating and ramifying the issue. What do you mean, maybe a little while? Either he’s left or he hasn’t left. If he’s left, it’s either permanent or temporary. If it’s permanent ... She could not have known she was employing an ancient method called a tree of Porphyry—Professor Boles once diagrammed it for us. Phil grunted and got up to leave the table.
“Wait.” I grabbed his arm. “I know you’re shocked. But please, will you please not just grunt and leave, okay? It gets me very upset.”
“I have a lot of homework. I have a chemistry test tomorrow.” He turned away, tilting his jaw like Victor. In the adamant profile was a retraction of all the evenings they had spent talking together behind his closed door, one voice aggrieved, the other tempered with limitless, loving patience.
“Phil!”
“I could get a job or something after school. Can you manage by yourself?”
“It’s not like that! He’s not deserting you. Just sit down awhile, all right? Finish your coffee.”
“I’m finished.” He left the room.
“I always thought you two had a fairly good relationship,” Althea said. “I realize there’s been a lot of stress. But still, it would seem to me that at this point he’d want to keep the stable elements in his life.” She lit a cigarette, bending her head over the flame on the stove. Your hair! Watch the hair that easily ignites!
“I wish you wouldn’t smoke, Althea. This is the third night this week I’ve seen you smoking. Do you want to ruin your lungs?”
“I don’t have an addictive personality. I can smoke when I choose and not smoke when I choose. Don’t you do the same? Anyhow, this seems to me very illogical on his part. It’s probably related to a mid-life crisis, in addition to everything else—he’s at that age. But I would think that being so committed to his work, he wouldn’t feel the same lack of ...”
On and on, like a TV documentary. The unexamined life is not worth living, Victor believed, and yet he needn’t have toiled. Teen-aged children are only too glad to examine it for you. Finally I said, “I might as well tell you, since you say I should talk to you like a woman, you smoke and everything. ... He has a ... a lady friend.”
She started coughing, not a very proficient smoker. “You mean like a younger woman?”
“As a matter of fact, no. An older woman. Slightly older.”
A long pause. “A mother figure,” Althea said.
“Oh, come on. She’s not old enough to be his mother. I don’t know if he’ll mention that, but ... well, you’re not a baby any more.”
The hands of the self-possessed Althea began to shake. She prowled around the kitchen, puffing. “I don’t ... uh ... maybe I shouldn’t go away to college. I don’t want to leave you all alone.” For two years she had dreamed of going to Middlebury to study languages, an excellent choice—she has a verbal soul.
“Oh no! You’re going no matter what. Besides, he’s not exactly out of my life, you know. It doesn’t happen like that. And Phil is here.”
“Phil! What use is he? He hardly even speaks. Living with him you might just as well be alone.”
“He is not here for my use, and I don’t like hearing you talk that way about him. It’s not right.”
“It’s true, though.”
“It seems true on the surface. It’s not really true. But even if it were, does the truth, what you think is the truth, need to be blurted out all the time?”
“Yes.” We have discussed this before. She believes that any truth justifies its own utterance. Moreover, she claims it is her nature to speak the truth, like Cassandra. Woe to any who heed not. If I urge diplomacy in the exercise of her powers I am trying to stifle or change her personality, which is a crime. She will never change, she says proudly. She will be this way for life.
“You of all people should understand. You’re close to his age. You know the kinds of things he’s going through. Besides—” My eyes measured the large empty kitchen.
“It’s precisely because I do know. Why does he have to repress it all? He should learn to express his needs—then he might get some of them satisfied.” She grinned but quickly composed her face. “He also might be a little more sensitive to the needs of those around him.”
“Oh, stop sounding like a social worker. What he needs is a little patience from those around him.”
“He’s just acting out, Mother.”
“Acting out?” I smiled. “Who isn’t? Look at your father.”
“I am not.” She stubbed out the cigarette righteously. “I’m a reasonable person. I try to be governed by reason. I don’t see why other people can’t do the same.”
“I wish you luck. Now would you help me clear the table?”
“Sure.” Always willing and able. An oldest daughter, she sees responsibilities everywhere. And a true communal spirit, too—not one shirking cell in Althea. So when she speaks so ungenerously, I remind myself she is the most generous nature of them all, though she might not wish that particular distinction. Someday she may even allow herself some tolerance for human frailty, and then what an excellent person she will be.
“Will you look at that!” The sharp voice, the cutting consonants. “He left his plate, his glass, his dirty napkin, everything. Does he think we’re servants, to clean up after him? If I were you I would call him back and make him clean that up.”
“Oh, Althea, one plate more, what’s the difference? I’ll do it.”
“It’s the principle. No, get away from the sink. I’ll do the dishes.”
“Don’t you have homework?”
“It’s all right,” she said with impatience. “I’ll do them. You’ve done them the past two nights. Go on, go on, out. Practice. Read. Do something,” she ordered, so I obediently turned to go.
“Mom? Will he still come to my graduation?”
Should I go and put my arms around her or leave her dignity be? Leave her. “Of course he’ll come. What are you thinking of? We’ll come together.” I did go over after all. “Althea ...”
She shook her head, scrubbed the dish hard, and shuddered me off. “It’s all right. Go.”
Victor phoned every evening except that first, but Phil would not go to the phone. In two days, Saturday, when Victor comes over to see them, Phil is planning to be out, as I am. If he ever marries this Montessori teacher I shall appear at the wedding like the bad fairy, like Clyde’s ex-wife Floral, and when they ask if anyone knows any reason why this pair should not be joined in holy matrimony I will stand up and shout, Yes, yes, because he walked out on his two remaining children, grieving children, and waited thirty-six hours to explain. Never mind me—I would have left me too, believe me I wish I could have, I was intolerable—but those children, whose eyes have never been the same ... The formative years, I shall tell the assembled well-wishers, are never over.
I get up from the floor and replace the telephone (which I still imagine to contain the voice of Miss Fosdick, like those toy phones that speak when you lift the receiver), turn over the “Trout” recording, and curl back in my chair with the coloring book and Crayolas. I think I’ll do the knights gathering for their tournament. I can give the six horses all the glossy horsey colors I recall from my race-track days with Nina. As I hold Burnished Gold poised above the page, the delectable fourth movement of the “Trout” begins, the theme and variations using the melody from that silly song about the fish: the ascending fourth, then third; the descending third, then fourth—the way up and the way down, syncopated and then even, making audible the idea of the teasingly indecisive, the reversible, the ambiguous. The crooked and the straight in dialogue, and finally in truce. The late Hephzibah, here immortalized, enters with supreme self-possession, with a controlled sweetness that never droops into sentimentality but instead has lightness and subtlety. One instrument after the other plays in turn with this delicious theme. What was first stated so simply they twist and invert, embellish, tickle, unravel and ravel again; they virtually torture that single sweet and faintly melancholy theme. They are so dazzling that I am drawn in, lifted away, and unraveled myself; unknotted, allowing the variations to be played in me and through me. It is almost like before. I almost forget. Something demonic still wants me to color the horses. Become a dribbling idiot, let’s see how far into idiocy you can go. But I won’t. I strain to hang on to the theme. For the truth is, I’m not so young any more, I can’t afford to play games with coloring books. And I’m not ready to go yet, to forget these griefs in death; this organism insists on dying in its own time and in its own way, not when some chance angler throws down a trap. Which is to say, it insists on living. In any old way.
For the first time in my apartment, Bobby starts to cry. Those small half-whimpers to begin with, then bigger gasps, rattling breaths, till he has worked up to the standard infant howl. I can’t see him from my chair but can well imagine the red face and round open toothless mouth, the fists battering air. Alone with a howling infant, to the brash, assertive last movement of the “Trout,” I grow cold. So cold I shiver. Outside, the raining sky is the color of dusty pewter. Across the room the carriage shakes eerily. I go over. He rolls his head back and forth, catches sight of me and pauses for half a second, then resumes howling. I get very hot. I don’t feel sorry for him, a mere red blot on the pillow, but I need that terrible noise, that noise as much a part of me as my own name, to stop! How? My past has been scraped off me with a knife; I can’t summon up how. I jiggle the plastic toy dangling from the hood of the carriage. Not the way. His howls keep filling my empty house like clouds of smoke. I reach down and touch his cheek with a finger. Spit slides out the corners of his mouth. I open my hand and slowly lower it like a wrecking ball, till it rests lightly on his face, then spread the hand wide so the sound comes through the lattice of fingers. The hand is large, veined and articulated, the fingers stretched beyond their natural potential, a hand with a use. The fingers rest on his forehead and temples, the heel of the hand at his chin, and I imagine pressing down, hard. For an instant it seems I will do it. Then I race back to my chair to huddle deep, hugging my knees to my chest, squeezing and punishing the murderous wet right hand.
A key in the door. Hide the coloring book and crayons under the cushion and huddle up again.
“Hi.” Phil tosses his book bag onto the floor. “What’s wrong with him?”
I frown.
“Shouldn’t you pick him up or something?” Pushing six feet, he stands slumped, yet his boy’s body is tight under the corduroy pants and baggy sweatshirt. His hair is damp. His hands seem tense and chapped. “Are you okay?” he asks.
“Mm-hm.” What with the final jubilant bars of the “Trout” and the howls, my silence and Phil’s tangled presence, the room is oppressive, crammed to bursting. Phil casts me an odd, reproachful look, takes off his sweatshirt, and reaches into the carriage with his long gangly arms. He holds Bobby on his shoulder in the correct position, and as he paces, gently patting the baby’s back, the howls diminish. Phil pauses to stare out the wide front windows at the park and the river. In a moment the record stops, all is quiet. He looks at the baby with a kind, amused gaze I haven’t seen on his face in months. He touches Bobby’s chin and cheeks, pinches his plump feet, and makes shy cooing noises at him. Then Phil looks at me and grins. He actually smiles! When the doorbell rings I jump up. “I’ll get it.”
“I’m sorry it took longer than I thought,” Patricia says. “There was such a crowd at the butcher’s. I should have asked you if you wanted any meat. Did you?”
“No, I shopped before.”
Phil brings the baby out into the hall. Bobby is happy to see his mother—he smiles and vaults his body into her arms. I guess he is not brain-damaged after all.
“How was school?” I ask when they’ve gone. His smile is gone too.
“Okay.”
I follow him, limping, to the kitchen, where he opens the refrigerator and regards its contents with the obscurely dissatisfied air he has perfected.
“We have some good apples. Also banana bread. Or would you like some hot chocolate? It’s raining so hard—you must be chilly.”
“I’m not hungry.” He lets the door swing shut and takes a glass of water. He is once more armored, and the scene painted on his armor is resentment of the world. For the moment I represent the world. It is quite some time since I have heard his natural tone of voice, which was rich and combative. He is withholding his voice, himself, all but his body, from this house. As I watch him drink the water, with head back and eyes half-shut, I grow angry. I feel exactly as Althea does: living with him I might as well be alone. “Phil,” I say sharply. “I think you might speak to me when you come home. Just a few civil words would do. We’re still a family. And to Althea when you see her. And—” I stop to soften my tone. “I’d like you to speak to your father when he calls.”
“But if I have nothing to say to him ...”
“Yes you do. You can tell him you’re furious with him.”
“He must have figured that out for himself.”
“Come on now. Not speaking is so silly.”
“Can I go to Boston in two weeks with Henry for the weekend? There’s a Bruce Springsteen concert. His father got tickets and is driving us there and back and we’ll sleep in his uncle’s basement.”
I see the future—Cassandra! More and more time away, and soon he won’t feel he needs to ask. Two weeks: that will leave Althea and me. “I guess so.” I must arrange something to fill the space, though. The best one for this job is Esther. Tomorrow I will call her in Washington and request my semiannual visit, long overdue.
Phil retires to his bedroom and I to mine, with one of the thick-skinned expensive oranges I bought at the Korean store earlier, plucking as I go a paper napkin from the blue napkin holder made two years ago by, I think, Alan. It is five-thirty. I change into old clothes, and for a most indulgent treat, turn on the TV to The Electric Company, but not too loud, so Phil won’t hear. I’ve missed it. They had all outgrown it except Vivian, who happily shared certain of my regressive tastes. This last December, her last December, she was shut in with a cold and bored. I came home to find her stretched out on our old bed, her fine hair in braids and decorated with a tiara of Woolworth’s pearls. Wearing my blue velours robe with high-heeled shoes, as well as lipstick, iridescent eye shadow, and several ropes of beads, she raptly watched Jennifer of the Jungle swing from tree to tree in a leopard-skin costume while below an entourage sang, “Who looks so fine hanging on any vine? Jennifer of the Jungle. Who brings a smile to every Nile crocodile ... I stretched out beside her, tucking her under my arm like a baby. She smelled sweet and chocolaty and was warm with fever. When Jennifer was over I tapped her lightly on the chin and teased, “I think you may be getting too old for this.” “So are you,” she replied.
Well, just for old times’ sake—I wonder, do they still do Jennifer of the Jungle? Fargo North, Decoder? Your Rich Uncle Died and Left You All His ... ? Starts with an M. Marshmallows? Yes indeed they do. And here comes Vivian’s and my favorite: “Punctuation.” Rita Moreno sings in a heavy Spanish accent, “Now a period is just a little dot, But it occupies a very special spot,” and Victor Borge intersperses popping and slurping mouth noises to illustrate the period, the question mark, the comma, and his piece de resistance, the exclamation point. How on earth does he do that, she used to marvel.
When I’m done eating the quartered orange I start on the rinds, a slow process with small bites, since the rinds are so acidic. To Althea this habit verges on the disgusting; to Althea many innocuous things verge on the disgusting—they need only be things she has no inclination to do. “That’s no great accomplishment,” she once said in irritation. “Watch this.” She cut a lemon in quarters and sucked one quarter dry without wincing, though tears rolled down her cheeks. “Very good, Althea. That is an accomplishment. But I happen to like the orange peels. I was eating them long before you were born. I’m not trying to prove anything.” Vivian would stick up for me. Like Voltaire, she did not share my taste for orange peels but would defend to the death my right to eat them, and did.
After “Punctuation,” the Electric Company kids sing “Hard, Hard, Hard,” to demonstrate the “ar” sound, as I start on another stinging peel. “Oh yes, it’s hard, hard, hard, Nothing’s easy in this life, you see.” The song has barely begun when the telephone at my bedside rings. Rosalie, her hello as exuberant and breathy as if she has won a race. Who would ever suspect she is at her best in the plangent, exalted Andantes of Beethoven and Brahms?
“So, have you made up your mind?”
“Not yet. I listened to Hephzibah Menuhin do it this afternoon.”
“And?”
“Well, it’s a big job.”
“Yes, that’s what we need. Enough of this futzing around.”
“Mozart is futzing around?”
“You know what I mean. We need something with a broader line. For this concert anyway—we need to show some range. Maybe one of the Brahms. Faure. We have to work it out with Jasper very soon.”
“I’d rather do something by Telemann.”
“Playing it safe, aren’t you? Listen, I understand about the Romantics, but really, Lydia—”
“All right, all right.” She knows me too well. That music demands something different. Not simply emotion, as my floundering student would call it, but a consciousness of its infinite span. A certain expectant, welcoming embrace extended to emotion, in all its possible variations and modulations. To perform them with willing hands.
“Anyhow, you’ve done the ‘Trout’ before, you told me. Haven’t you?”
“Years ago.”
“Well, then it should be easy. What is that awful noise?”
(“Oh yes, it’s hard, hard, hard, If it’s good then you can bet it isn’t free”—they sound like a hard rock group, something Rosalie loathes.)
“Nothing. The TV. Hold on, I’ll turn it down Rosalie, did you know they’re using the fourth movement of the ‘Trout’ in wine commercials? I heard it on WNCN yesterday.”
“So what?”
“Maybe it’s becoming trite.”
“What do we care about wine commercials? You know very well it’s not trite. For a pianist you can’t do much better. It has everything.”
“I know, but ... I had this strange time listening to it. I could hear all the separate parts but they wouldn’t come together in my ear. I couldn’t get the mix right.”
“Don’t listen to it. Just do it.”
“Did you see Hephzibah’s obituary in the Times this winter?”
“Yes! I certainly did!” Indignation. I can see her smacking her knee, tossing her black hair. “‘Sister of Violinist’! But what can you expect from the Times? Look, Lydia, I have another idea. I’ve told Jasper and he likes it. I want to try some ragtime. Joplin.”
“I think that revival is about over. In one ear and out the other.”
“That’s exactly why. Now it can be done seriously. It’s a tremendous sound, and they have some arranged for string quartets. I could get Carla and someone else. I have this new friend, a kid at WBAI. He’s always looking for something slightly bizarre. You’ll play the original and we’ll do the arrangements. Then he’ll interview us, we’ll talk about its great classical qualities, the problems of adapting for a quartet, et cetera, et cetera. And they record.”
“I don’t think I’m in the mood for ragtime.”
“Oh, mood, schmood. We’ll even do something from Treemonisha.”
“Where are you going to dig up an arrangement of that?”
“I’ll do the arrangements.”
“Rosalie, that’s so much work.”
“So? I have time. I have no babies pulling at my skirts. Oh, by the way, I saw Karl again last night.” The husband she had her fill of a year and a half ago and has been unable to stop talking about since. “We had another—you should pardon the expression—date.”
“No kidding? What did you do on your date?”
“We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, then we went back to his apartment.”
“Ah! A very thorough date this time, sounds like. So, do you think he’s someone you’ll want to see again?”
“He seems to have recovered from that spell of premature ejaculation, for one thing.”
“Jeepers. To what do you attribute this miracle?”
“Other women. I suppose he figured out if he could do it for strangers he could do it for me. He says it’s because his hostility has decreased, but of course he has to say something like that. Frankly, Lydia, the whole evening was ... not bad. Not bad at all. I always did like the guy, you know.”
Rosalie! After your hours of recrimination! He called your mode of living acting out! The neurotic artistic temperament! And then his insane working hours. Psychiatry his mistress. Preoccupied: you didn’t know whether you felt more alone with him or without him. Controlling: opened your mail. Occasionally forgot his children’s names. Once a raised kitchen knife. Lesser-grade evils: Cigars in bed. Couldn’t cut the nails on his right hand. Congenitally incapable of refilling an ice-cube tray. I know this man so well I could have been married to him myself. The brief times I met him he seemed pleasant enough.
“I know exactly what you’re thinking. But after all, twenty-seven years. You become attached. Three children.”
“They’re all off on their own. Remember?”
“Well, we’ll see. I’m not rushing into anything. It was nice to be with someone who didn’t ask questions about what I like, for a change. I hate this new business of utilitarian discussions in bed, having to verbalize every little whim. How is Victor, speaking of ... ?”
“Oh, all right, I guess.”
“And the kids?”
“Phil’s okay. Althea’s away in Princeton till tomorrow. There’s some conference about Romance languages. She got special permission to go because of Middlebury.”
“She’s impressive, your little Althea.”
“Expressive, anyway. She does get around.”
“That reminds me. We are going north sometime in November, you and Jasper and I, maybe a few others, I’m not sure. New Haven, Boston, some of the college towns around there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’ve been asked by some arts council. For two weeks. I’ll tell you the details tomorrow when we rehearse—they’re in my briefcase. Lyd, are you still there?”
“I can go, I guess.”
“Yes.” The dynamo stops for a moment. “Yes,” she says quietly, “you can easily go.”
“It is strange, isn’t it, how things turn out?” I can feel her listening. She does everything so intensely. “All I do is pack up and go. The kids can manage now. I can’t think of a single excuse.”
“Well, good. You’ll travel a lot, then. It’s what you always needed anyway. It’s why you didn’t—”
“Oh, it’s too late for rich and famous, Rosalie. I don’t need that.”
“You never know. Look, before I go there’s one more little thing.”
“You’re so full of little things today. I gather this is supposed to be a therapeutic conversation?” She’s quiet again, and wounded. “I’m sorry, really. Don’t mind me. What is it?”
“Actually it’s something I need from you. A favor. You know this all-day Bach thing I’m putting on at the Calliope Center? Well, Sandy Schuster had to leave town for a sick mother. So we are sort of without a harpsichordist. We have someone to do her thing in the evening, but there’s a three o’clock bit ...”
“Rosalie, I’m not a—”
“Wait a second before you say no. It’s a Handel violin sonata, you don’t have a lot to do there, and a Brandenburg. The sixth.”
“I’m not a harpsichordist.”
“I’ve heard you plenty of times. At the school, at that church in the Village. You were fine.”
“That wasn’t serious. Look, there must be a dozen decent harpsichordists around. Even one of the students.”
“I’ve been looking, Lydia. The good ones are all busy or out of town or want more money, and the others ... well. I need someone who can at least stay together.”
“I won’t be able to do much more than that.”
“I’ll bring the music tomorrow. You have a week.”
“A week. Oh, terrific. I’ll have to practice there. I’m not taking any chances with the instrument.”
“Fine. I’ll arrange everything. If you want to go at night I’ll even get you a key. And thanks. So listen, make up your mind about the ‘Trout,’ bring it along tomorrow, and also the Brahms and the Mendelssohn, and I’ll see you at two.”
“I’m worn out just talking to you.”
“Get a good night’s sleep, then. Say hello to Victor.” She whirls off; her voice hangs in the air another moment like the last descending dust of a tornado.
The Electric Company is over. I carry the remaining bits of peel into the kitchen and pour Scotch over ice, then turn on the “Trout” again, to accompany my cooking. For my shopping spree is about to achieve Aristotelian entelechy—its potential becoming actualized. I no longer feel the obscure yet keen longing that in the morning made me plan this elaborate dinner ... but I might as well. As I set out my purchases, the kitchen table takes on the cheery demeanor of a photo from Woman’s Day—fresh ripe this, plump succulent that. Where to begin? The Raw and the Cooked was a book Victor read and admired a few years ago, but I couldn’t get past the introduction. Surely this is not the way real cooks begin, a dozen colorful items waiting, mute and attentive, on the kitchen table? How did I ever manage to cook for six? Using sense memory, a redemptive faculty that lets me play pieces I haven’t done in years but whose patterns are stored in my fingers as in a data bank, I prepare the chicken and arrange it in a Pyrex pan. Cloves of garlic, pats of butter, wedges of lemon, sprigs of parsley. Vivian once recited to me the wealth of terms for animals in groups: flock of sheep, gaggle of geese, pack of wolves, pride of lions ... She loved peculiar usages, also puns, anagrams, palindromes. (Onion. Onion? Why not onion? And how do you weigh air, anyhow?) Into the oven it goes; one sure thing on this changeable earth is that an hour and a quarter from now, at seven thirty-eight on a Thursday evening in mid-May, Lydia, eleven and a half weeks from the demise of her younger children, will have baked a lemon-butter chicken, Amen. Well done, Lydia. Turn the record over and have another drink.
While I make saffron rice and a salad with the cheap bitter lettuce, I pay close attention to the “Trout.” Yes, I could do that again. Not perhaps with the seemingly effortless buoyancy of Hephzibah Menuhin, but respectably. If I work at it, and shun the temptations of coloring books and educational TV. If Victor keeps his telephone voice out of my life. Tomorrow. Meanwhile, drink up. Tomorrow I’ll tell Rosalie that yes, I’ll do ragtime on WBAI, the gig in New England, even the harpsichord, though the last is definitely an error in professional judgment. Rosalie is trying too hard, but what the hell? Life is not all bad. Everyone’s got troubles. And Scotch is a fantastic thing—what it can do for you, that is. I set the table for two.
At seven-fifteen, shortly before the feast is ready, Phil appears, wearing the same old corduroys but a spiffy plaid shirt. “I’m going to Burger King. I forgot to tell you. I’m meeting this girl—liana? The one who calls about the trig.” Like the neighbors, he avoids my eyes.
Fortunately for him I am well into my third Scotch. “Uh, that’s very nice. You might have said something, though. I cooked this whole meal.”
“Well, I wasn’t really sure. I mean, I just called. ... I’ll eat it tomorrow, okay? I’ve got to go.”
He is not here for my use, I so nobly told Althea. Very well. “Have a good time. Take your keys, I might be sleeping.”
“I’ve got them. ’Bye.”
Going out with a girl! The first time, as far as I know. Well, that is a fine thing for solitary Phil—I’m not too mad to be pleased. Only what shall I do with this dinner? Were I a reader of Cosmopolitan I would know how to invite a friend to drop over for an unexpected treat. Any angle! But I don’t have those kinds of friends, alas. I could call George or Nina, Rosalie, even Irving Bloch, thinner since his wife died. The splendid minister, to minister? Patricia and Sam, who don’t get out much—but no doubt they’ve eaten; they keep baby hours. How about Victor and the Montessori teacher? We could try being ultra-civilized.
In truth there’s not a living soul I’d care to see right now except maybe Evelyn, but she is in Switzerland; most impractical. She was so fluid and calm and captivating, my sister, so like Vivian, the sort of person whose presence, for no evident reason, is a treasure like grace. I might entice her as I did when I was thirteen and she was ten and our parents went to the movies, leaving me money for an excursion to the corner store. “Evelyn.” I’d knock on her closed door. “I’ve got chocolate chip mint ice cream. I’ve got Yankee Doodles.” And she would come out and listen wide-eyed and serene to my chronicles of junior-high life. How we loved to eat and to laugh! I could call long distance, all the way to the Alps: “Evelyn. I’ve got lemon chicken. Saffron rice. Bitter herbs.” I can see her seated at my table, smiling and quietly vibrant, listening absorbed and radiant. It would be like having Vivie back.
I eat it myself, listening, with the score spread out on the living room floor. And then I take the score to bed. I can hear it better without the music; the ensemble does not splinter apart quite so badly that way. Yet it’s hard to concentrate, all alone in the house at night. I’m not used to it. A skill you develop with practice, Nina once said of being alone. He bought this huge bed to make love with a sense of space. Ravish me at any angle. Far across the space, over on his nighttable, is the book he left half-read, open, face down: Malinowski’s Magic, Science and Religion, the book of myths. Why was he rereading that? He knew it—he studied anthropology in college. And why didn’t he take it with him—did he expect his evenings would be too sizzling for serious reading?
All alone and still; something in the back of my mind stirs, shoves its way forward, and bursts out full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus, a fantasy: the Korean boy stands beside the bed with that shock of coarse black hair, those lowered dark eyes, wide cheekbones, perfect teeth. The big bony hands used to hauling crates of fruit, their fingers stretched from piling pyramids of honeydews, hang idly by his sides. He wears the coveted Adidas sneakers. He stands gawky and puzzled though he must be nineteen at least. Can he be so innocent? I beckon.
He doesn’t seem to know even where to begin. Is he frightened, bashful, repelled?—I’m an older woman, old enough to be his mother. Will he cooperate? Ah, clay under my hands: I will shape him into a slavish lover. Do this. Do that. Do whatever pleases me. See how I move in mysterious ways. Let me ravish you at any angle. The boy awakens, begins to seek after his own desire. I am his Frankenstein and his landscape both. I found what made him work and he found his desire. No speech, only brute grunts. His face has become brutish too—the heavy lips hanging open and wet, the luminous eyes dulled, the hair in disarray. That fine intelligence has fled from his face, leaving a generic male. I have created a brute. So it was done to me; I pass it along. Our arms and legs coil and entwine. We paw and scrape at each other’s want like dogs at the site of a buried bone, and when we find it we gnaw till the marrow is all sucked out. And then he sleeps, flat on his back on Victor’s side, and his human identity returns: the lips soft and sensitive once more, smiling faintly. The fine intelligence too. Beneath his lids is rapid eye movement: he dreams, not of me. No urgency in his body now, no trace of it except for the slick wetness. Pleasure has made him weak as a worm, and as shiny too. Now he is at my mercy. But the myth of the castrating female is all wrong—an asinine projection. That’s not the place that’s done me harm. Let him keep his useful worm. Esther was so naive when she made Griselda do that to Walter. I would make the slice and draw the blood across the throat, and watch the face that can change so swiftly from human to brute to deceiver change its last, and bloody Victor’s pillow.
He shrinks and vanishes unharmed, once more a small furrow in the back of my mind. What puny revenge. I get up and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, in Phil’s gray corduroy pants and Althea’s green T-shirt. Even through this nondescript outfit the body shows itself trim and youngish—miracle, after all those pregnancies. But from the neck up, oh dear. Not at all sleek. Tomorrow will be different—such indulgence as today’s is killing. I put away the leftover dinner and take the garbage out to the back hall, where Lily’s TV trips me, resenting its fate, and I curse it as usual. In the shower I study my body clinically as Victor might have done—an object with bumps and planes and hollows. Clay, like the woman Evelyn and Mother and I shaped on the beach, where the waves rushed at her. The gentler ones merely eroded her, the most violent one tore off chunks, till at last I kicked at her remains with exultation, for she was only clay and had no feelings, and anyway, what use was half a woman?
The next morning as I practiced the “Trout” in my small studio off the bedroom, a substantial shadow passed over the corner of my right eye. For two bars I ignored it, and then I went to look. A boy stood in the center of the bedroom. No product of my imagination, this one, but a real, short boy with a slight frame and a wan, wary face in which the eyes bulged unhealthily. We stared at each other for I don’t know how long. My knees didn’t turn to water. Concrete: a game of statues. His dark hair was greased back, and he wore a well-ironed red cotton shirt tucked neatly into his jeans and open halfway down an unimpressive chest; the short sleeves were rolled up, showing puerile biceps. The fire escape window was locked, but the other one, three feet away, was wide open. Stretching over from the ledge of the fire escape, he could have fallen into the rear alley. He fell instead into my life, and seemed even more stunned there than I. I breathed first. “What do you want?”
I was bigger than he was, possibly stronger. He made no move to speak, but with rabbit twitches glanced to right and left: there was only the stillness of an empty apartment.
“You really think it’s worth it, risking your life to steal something? Nine floors!” And how your mother would have grieved! Look how beautifully she ironed your shirt! Unless he didn’t have a mother, like George, or had one who didn’t give a damn.
At last he ventured to look straight at me—crazy lady!—for an instant. His bulgy eyes grew larger with confusion. He was a year or two older than Phil, seventeen, maybe, and like Phil had a volatile, uncommitted sulkiness around the mouth: I will not let you find me out. He took a breath and finally moved; reached in his back pocket and brought out a knife. The blade shot forth like a snake’s tongue.
I folded my arms across my chest. “Oh for Chrissake, will you put that thing away? What could I do to you? And you don’t even look like you could use it.” He switched the blade back in but kept the knife in his fist.
“Anyone else climb in with you?” He shook his head. “You can’t be all alone. This is not your line. They’re waiting down in back, right? Sent you up to see if you could get anything?”
He nodded once, stiff as a doll. His face was gleaming with sweat and his red shirt was darkening under the arms.
“Your first time, I bet. What’d you do, take gymnastics at school or something?”
His shoulders jerked as he took a quick step back. Yes, kid, there’s not much I don’t know about you kids, I made a career of it. He was in a nightmare; I was his tormentor. Nothing anyone had taught him had prepared him for this. I knew precisely how he felt. He glanced over his shoulder at the open window, and when he turned to me again his eyes were filmed with panic.
“No, you better not try getting out that way. Don’t push your luck. You’ll walk out the door. Listen, I have just the thing for you. Come along. I mean it. I’ll give you something your hot-shot friends will like.” I had him precede me through the hall to the kitchen and out to the rear landing where the garbage cans, bikes, sleds, and TV were piled. “Take this.” He stared, then his eyes darted as if I had some trick up my sleeve. “I’m not kidding. You’d be doing me a favor.”
He put his knife away and lifted the TV tentatively. “No shit?” he asked.
“I said take it. Yes, that’s right.” I led him back through the kitchen and to the front door. “Take the elevator to the basement, make a left, go past the boiler room to a blue door, and make sure to slam it shut behind you. If you meet anyone you can say the lady on the ninth floor gave it to you.”
He coughed and rested the TV against the doorframe. He was breathing hard. Victor had carried it with no trouble. Maybe this kid had a rheumatic heart, or a slight murmur like Vivian’s but not innocent. I pointed to the elevator and he pressed the button and waited, his forehead dripping, his shirt not quite so fresh. Only the greased-down hair still lay unperturbed. He tried to avoid my gaze but I wasn’t ready to release him yet. I noticed his blue Adidas sneakers. Good Lord, every kid around had them! Why did I have to tell him to wait till the snow melted?
“What do you do with it now, take it to a fence?” Safe in the hall, he sneered at the crazy lady. “Tell him it’ll work fine anywhere but in this neighborhood. Around here it needs to be hooked up to the cable.” With his face screwed up and his body curved under the weight of the TV, he was a squirrel hugging an enormous nut. “Get away fast and don’t come back, because the next burglary on this block, I’ll go straight to the police and tell them exactly what you look like, sneakers and all. You get it? Tell your friends too. And try some other line of work!” I called as he struggled to open the elevator door. “You don’t want to get yourself killed!”
For Phil and Althea I would have to invent something: a new student who was glad to take it off our hands. For Victor? It would be a long time before he noticed, if ever. Elsewhere, what a story this could make! How I could regale cocktail parties! But unfortunately it is a story that cannot be told, at least by me. I am so tired of curious oblique looks, solicitude, sorrowful head-shaking, friends being “supportive.” It embarrasses me. They make me feel that by losing my children I have done something shameful, profoundly antisocial, but never mind, I will be magnanimously forgiven. Meanwhile I am on probation; my behavior is watched closely for deviance.
Come to think of it, there is someone I might safely tell: my coiffured sister-in-law Lily in Westchester, who has always judged me slightly wacky anyway, who lives and thinks like the Russian landed aristocracy in a Chekhov play. Linked together by cozy mutual disapproval, we have always gotten along rather well. Our dialogue might go something like this:
Oh Lily, remember that old TV you gave us for Vivian and Alan to use? You’ll never guess what happened to it.
I hope it didn’t break down or anything. It was a good little set, if you’re not too spoiled for black-and-white.
It never worked in our apartment. We get terrible reception because we’re due north of the twin towers. We need the cable to get anything halfway decent. A boy broke in one morning so I gave it to him. Ha ha ha.
Lily turns ashen beneath her make-up, and slams down her vodka martini, which nearly sloshes over the rim of the glass. What do you mean, gave it to him? Broke in when? What are you talking about?
It’s nothing personal, Lily. It’s just that frankly, it was a lousy set to begin with, and with almost everyone gone—you know Althea will be away at college soon too—there was really no point. ... I mean, to each according to his needs (I throw this in to irritate her), and Phil and I are not big watchers. So I figured, here is this desperate kid, here is this TV taking up space—they’re made for each other.
You’re not serious!
I’m perfectly serious. Why would I lie to you?
But are you okay? Did he do anything to you?
Not a thing. Didn’t even say thank you.
This city is more like a jungle every day! She shakes her head and makes clicking noises with her tongue. And you! To each according to his needs! You’re too much. It’s a miracle you’re still alive.
Yes, that’s what I’m thinking too. Not about the boy, though. I mean that when the things you thought you possessed, what you thought were necessities, the things that made you who you were, even your goddamn phone number, start to go and yet you remain—it’s kind of a riddle, Lily. Don’t you see? There you stand stripped, the same person, more or less. But what are you now? What is left? Something does abide but it’s only a certain feeling of continuity ... I don’t know what.
Lily sighs. Everyone knows all that, Lydia. (Do they really?) She lights a cigarette with some discomfort at my speaking the unspeakably banal. Listen, sweetie—her hoarse, smoky voice sincerely attempting to be kind—it’s natural to be confused. But remember, people have lost a lot more—she pauses for a sense of the sweep of history, of which my losses are clearly not a part—and they all go on. And on.
Oh Lily, don’t tell me about the ones who clawed their way through the forests of Poland, our distant relations. I know about them. It’s a miracle they’re still alive. Please believe that I’m not trying to compete, only to clear a path also.
And to be satisfied to possess simply this voice in my head which speaks and remembers back to when, the same voice that spoke then and dreamed ahead to now. And the child who dashed in the waves on the beach, whom they cannot take until they take me with her. She is the only child I will ever keep.