“I have indeed come to make an inventory,” said Giuseppino, “to round off your stock and collect it into a unity—as you say, a cellar. I am going to turn it into a story. That is what a second meeting does. It is the story’s touchstone, the last curve of the parenthesis, which joins up with the first curve and makes a unity of its contents.”
ISAK DINESEN, “Second Meeting,” Carnival
“WELL, WELL, LOOK WHO’S here. What’s the matter, you got tired of eating garbage?” The fruit man’s eyes were troubled. He knew.
“Hi. Can I have a casaba melon, please, ripe?”
“Best melons in the world, right here.” He waved two under my nose. “You heard the latest?”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, you’re so fancy you don’t read the papers any more? They raided another kibbutz. Four children.” His index finger slid across his throat. “Like that. Two pregnant women.”
“Yes, I did read about it.”
“I suppose to you it’s just a little nothing?”
“On the contrary. ... I’ll take half a dozen of those big navel oranges, too.” I was passing by on my way to rehearse the “Trout.” I had delayed as long as I could, but it was late September, and Rosalie and Jasper were getting edgy, tired of my excuses.
The fruit man flicked open a paper bag. “Here, help yourself. Animals. That’s why they call them gorillas.”
Guerrillas, I opened my mouth to say. Guerrillas is a totally different ... But I thought of Vivian. Her advice: Smile sweetly and keep your thoughts to yourself. If I could manage to live alone, then surely I could manage Mr. Zeitlowitz.
“You don’t got much to say for yourself today.”
“No. I just came for some fruit.”
“So tell me already, don’t leave me in suspense, how come you came back?”
To put off the “Trout.” Spur of the moment, thought I’d give you a treat! “Do I need an excuse? Maybe you’d rather I went elsewhere?”
“Ah! You see? I knew it. You’re still one of us. Only a Jew answers a question with a question.” With his back to me he muttered, “I was sorry to hear your misfortune. Terrible thing.”
“Mm.”
“I haven’t seen your husband around lately. So how is he getting along? Nice fellow.”
“Fine.”
“You want a bunch of grapes? For you, only a dollar nineteen a pound.” I shook my head, no. Suddenly his voice became a furtive whisper. “Now maybe you understand a little how it feels, huh?”
My hand tightened around a bunch of spinach—I could have shoved it in his face—and for an instant I wished this man had perished in a gas chamber or at least in the forests of Poland. But decent childhoods, alas, enslave us to decency and I repented, grudgingly. “It’s not the same thing. I have no one to be angry at. Where are the McIntosh apples?” Phil was home, suntanned and taller, slightly less morose. Once more I was shopping in bulk.
“Hah!” He waved me to the apples. “If you worked here you’d have plenty! You wouldn’t believe what I have to listen all day from them”—jerking his head towards the checkout counter—“about Jews. Jews, Jews. If it was up to them, back to the ovens. Poof.”
“I think you must be exaggerating. They’re always friendly to me and the other Jewish customers.”
“And why not? They want your money, dummy.”
“Don’t call me names, will you, Mr. Zeitlowitz?” I handed him the apples to be weighed.
“Come on. What’s the matter, you’re so sensitive? Between lands-kit it matters?”
“Yes, it matters.” Wrong, Vivie, you were wrong. Sorry, my darling. “Esteban doesn’t call me names and neither do the Koreans.”
“Behind your back they call you. Worse.”
“Well, then you can call me behind my back too. A bunch of bananas, please. No, not those. They’re too green.”
“Names you talk about—you heard the things they’re saying about us in the UN? Starting all over. It was never finished.”
“Uh-huh.” I picked up the full basket.
“So have a happy New Year.” He shouldn’t have tried to smile; on his face it didn’t work.
“The same to you.”
“You can carry all that or maybe you want they should deliver?”
“I can carry it.”
“So I’ll be seeing you again?”
“If you’re lucky.”
When I arrived it was after six o’clock. The others were nearing the end of a Brahms quartet. I sat down to listen next to Howard Schor, the bass player, a man of prodigious memory and patience. Like his instrument Howard was built on a grand scale, with a firm comfortable body and a sanguine face. The absentminded haze in his eyes was misleading: he never failed to come in on time, and unobtrusively kept everyone on an even keel. Howard was always wiping his thick glasses on a handkerchief, tender, pensive daubs. He wiped them now, as he whispered hello and peered with interest into my bag of fruit.
“Do you want an apple?”
“That’s too loud. I’ll take a banana, if you don’t mind.”
His voice was like his instrument too, and he used it gently, as if hesitant to release its full breadth. His playing was not at all hesitant. Dense and witty. Last month we had toasted his seventieth birthday with champagne.
“How is this new violinist?” I whispered. “This is the first time I’ve seen him.”
“Frank? Good. Young but very good. Listen.”
Frank was plump and looked about twenty-two and he was good. Jasper had found him at Aspen during the summer and lured him back to New York. Jasper himself had gained weight as well as acquired a suntan in healthy Colorado. There was a new ease in the way he held his head; his brow was unfurrowed as he played, the tendons in his neck not quite so taut. Their violist was Carla Roby, a friend of Rosalie’s I had played with at the Baroque Marathon in June. Carla was young also, wan and slender, with a wide-boned, expectant face. When the four of them finished, Rosalie pinned her streaming black hair back into its knot. They huddled together to talk; with every passionate toss of her head and wave of the errant bow, strands escaped again.
“Okay, we might as well get right to it and take a break later,” Jasper said. “You ready, Howard? Lydia?” I guess.
Rosalie and Jasper and I took turns with the opening, slipping the temperate melody from hand to hand. A certain restraint in the strings gave it an exploratory sound—a snaking path. Rosalie’s notes were rich as ever but slightly tense; Jasper was radiant. Soon he and I took up a dialogue, tossing the theme back and forth, chasing each other like shadows. Our timing and repartee worked perfectly. Except that beyond the accuracy, his notes were calling out to mine, eliciting, rousing them. It was not for nothing that Victor had imagined Jasper liked me: Jasper’s sounds virtually yearned toward the piano like a creature with a mating call, or a great ship listing to slice the waiting surface of the sea. It had nothing to do with the flesh, though. It was another sort of yearning, selfless. I wished I could answer him in kind as I had in the past. But I couldn’t afford to yearn towards anything with such abandon. Suddenly, just before she was due to pick up the theme, Rosalie stopped.
“I’m sorry, but something is wrong with the piano. Lydia, are you there?”
“Of course I’m here. What do you mean?”
“You sound awfully, I don’t know, retiring. I think you need to be more forthright. It’s a piano quintet, after all. Why include a piano if we’re not going to hear it?”
Jasper passed a hand over his face as if to hide. “We’re just running through to get it set, really. But as long as we’ve stopped ... It’s also a trifle fast, I think.”
“I know,” I said. “I started fast on purpose. When it’s slow it starts to sicken and die.”
“No, he’s right, Lydia. I’ve heard it done at this tempo. Pretty soon it gets all tinkly and bright. It sounds like nothing.”
At the slower tempo my solo, a simple unassuming bit, sounded moribund. As Jasper was about to take it up, Rosalie stopped us again. Howard emitted a few more turgid notes—perhaps he was hoping to charm us back. “I’m sorry, really. But, Lydia, this is the first time you really appear. So appear.”
“Look, Rosalie, this is how I rehearse. I know exactly what’s needed and I’ll do it for real when the time comes. You keep stopping like this and we’ll never get anywhere.”
“This is not how you rehearse. You always go all out.”
“Is this group therapy or are we playing music?” Carla Roby asked in her soft high voice.
“Quite right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“From letter D,” Jasper murmured. There was a clumsy silence till I realized letter D was my part alone. While I played, Rosalie sulked for her nine-measure pause.
“Maybe we’d better take five minutes off,” Jasper said at the end of the first movement. He went out to the coffee machine with Carla. Howard closed his eyes, practicing his bulbous notes. Rosalie removed the cello from between her legs and came to sit on the piano bench.
“This is not personal, Lydia. But a little feeling, you know, might help? Passion? Real, I mean, not Liberace. It gets us all down. What’s the matter, are you sick or something?”
“I’m not sick. What’s with you? We never get this way at rehearsals.”
“I’m nervous. It’s a big concert, we have a lot at stake. The ensemble has to mesh right. Otherwise it is trite. It might as well be a wine commercial. You know that.”
“I’m tired. I worked on Stravinsky all morning at that church in the Village. It’s a benefit for their draft-counseling program. Two years of festivals for poor Stravinsky—by the end no one will ever want to hear another note. But okay, passion. Feeling. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Jasper is weak. He should be taking over more.”
“Jasper sounds fantastic. He has never played this well.”
“Yes. I meant he should be getting the group in order more. I shouldn’t have to do this.”
“So don’t,” I said curtly. “Jasper has faith. He was never one to spell things out. He waits for them to happen.”
The Andante was lyrical and wistful; I was spiteful. Feeling? I gave it to her with a vengeance. I let the notes drip from my fingers till they bordered on parody. Howard raised his formidable gray eyebrows. But no one stopped. I had gotten myself in a nasty bind—either they made demands or they made allowances. And in private, It’s gotten to Lydia’s playing, they would say.
The Scherzo was easier: short and glittery, all speed and color, controlled force and grace. Pianists can flaunt a kind of superficial verve that impresses an audience. Musicians are not impressed. I was overpowering the others, smothering their delicacy, without which the speed and color became crude fireworks. Jasper could have competed, fought fire with fire, but he was too good for that. He frowned, played with his eyes lowered.
The “Trout,” for all its apparent ingenuousness, is a secretive work. When I first played it in college I was too ingenuous myself to confront all of its secrets—I played it as the lyrical, life-affirming piece it is reputed to be—and now I didn’t choose to. One of the secrets is a strain of sadness—nostalgia, mourning—emitted covertly, like a leafy scent you have to bend close to catch. A great and magnanimous composer, but a composer of ambiguity, is asked to write a simple rosy evening’s entertainment and tries to comply; despite his efforts the scent of ambiguity pervades the rosy entertainment. Another secret is the strikingly democratic meshing of the instruments, even the uncustomary bass. In all chamber music each voice speaks according to its abilities, but here each makes an equal contribution on its own terms, like the working of a perfectly ordered community. A Utopia. No one stands alone for long; nothing individual is accomplished without the deferential support of the rest. Not that the five play much in unison. More often they play in contrast, sometimes in heated melees, with contradictions and digressions, one voice after another seizing the airwaves for a thrilling moment. But never tyrannically; it is a community of equals. The piano part is not technically difficult. The task is in the phrasing and the pauses, the pressure on each note that yields the precise quality of sound the group needs to stay buoyant, no more and no less. And then that harmony, that clasping of hands like Matisse’s dancers in a ring, gives the quintet its irresistible vigor as well as its sweetness: love made audible. That was what Rosalie was seeking; without it our separate talents were barren.
It was the fourth movement I had been dreading all along, the theme and variations using Schubert’s song about the trout. Jasper introduced the melody. His sound was pure and lucid, a narrow band of light. I almost didn’t come in on time, he so captivated me. I had the first variation and it couldn’t have been simpler—single treble notes, an isolated melodic line. All any pianist needed to do was allow it to emerge without impediment. Some Chinese sage, I think, told a writer who aspired to write a perfect book: First make yourself perfect, then write naturally. I played but my mind was helplessly elsewhere: on that guileless trout darting in the glistening brook, unaware of the angler on shore who waited to trap him and finally, impatient for the prey, muddied the water so the trout could not see his right path. And on how I had longed to be chosen to play this in college and George said you don’t die if you don’t get what you long for, but I did get it in the end. And then Victor came in during the rehearsal and we went to that bar near the unfinished cathedral. “You might get to like me. It’s been known to happen.” I was not subtle, but the way I played the “Trout” was, he said. “I loved the way you played it. I loved what you kept back as much as what you put in.” His hands shook but he pressed on. “Do you think it’s easy to talk to you like this?” I played what I dreaded and it was far from perfect, or subtle. It had a querulous sound.
“Now, Lydia,” Jasper began, as we stopped by tacit consent. “This is all yours. This is an opportunity.”
“I’m not looking for opportunities.”
“You have to!” Rosalie said. “We’re not playing games here.”
“I will when I have to. Just lay off.”
“Wait a minute. Is there something going on here we two should know about?” Carla asked. “Or is this how you three always—”
“No. There’s nothing.” Jasper locked eyes with Rosalie. His nod was barely visible and they began as one. I had to give what they wanted this time. It was mere stubborn pride rising, a cold professional pride—what could Carla and Howard be thinking? I forced the naive, poignant melody inside, breathed it in like acrid air and breathed it out fresh and resplendent as it was meant to be, though it burned my chest like hell. The others took their turns with it, balanced and equitable as in a Utopia. And for the rest of the movement we lovingly badgered that little melody, sent it up in the air and caught it, twirled it, twisted it and wrung it, squeezed every ounce of juice from it. Rosalie was elated. She wanted to do it all again so I could have my opening solo, but I refused. I didn’t want to be out there alone. It was hard enough being in the group, being part of that audible love and putting mine in.
The last movement took the little Utopia on Hungarian holiday; it was laced with dashing exuberance and my part was showy. I didn’t mind brash romanticism—that didn’t touch any of my untouchable places. I even enjoyed sweeping through a stretch of furious trills; during the brief lyrical calm that followed, I heard the click of the door behind me. Too early for any custodian to be rushing us. It was Victor again, I knew it. Uncanny how he could figure out where to find me. Come to replay history, correct the paths of atoms? Take me to a bar? Offer me a beer? I clenched my teeth and kept hold, finished my triplets with Jasper in a fine flourish. And then I made a mistake. I wasn’t even sure what I had done but I was sure enough in the wrong key.
“Oh Lydia!” Rosalie practically flung the bow at me. “We repeated that already!”
“Shit. I’m sorry. That was dumb.”
She wiped her forehead on her wrist. “And we were going along great.”
“I said I was sorry. Those repeats are so confusing.” I turned around. It wasn’t Victor but Rosalie’s ex-husband, Karl.
“Hi there, hon,” she called. “Have a seat. Just a few minutes, okay?” Karl made a gesture of all right with both hands, like patting down a billowy cloud.
“Twelve measures from the break,” Jasper said mildly, raising the violin to his chin. “And then straight on. No repeat, Lydia. Carla, you could be a trifle louder with those thirds.” He looked at me appraisingly and ten measures later whispered, “No repeat here.” Sixteen after that, “Repeat here.” My protector.
“Well, praise the Lord,” exclaimed Rosalie at the final chord. “We only have a week and a half more. The whole thing is balance. We must get that right.”
Karl shook hands all around. He was dressed in a suit and tie; he must have been coming from his office. Karl, it struck me anew, bore a remarkable resemblance to Sigmund Freud, his spiritual ancestor, with the trim, graying beard, the kindly yet somewhat dismayed set of his features. He had a kindly stance too, leaning a bit forward as he greeted us.
“Nice to see you again, Lydia, and looking so well.” The last time I had seen him was February—he came with Rosalie to pay a condolence call. They brought marrons glacis, which Victor and I finished in bed, watching some late movie. I noticed even then that they consorted a good deal for a couple who had ostensibly separated.
“Thank you. It’s good to see you too, Karl.” Unfortunately, thanks to Rosalie, I could not see Karl without an accompanying image of greasy pots and socks left on the floor, and yet he still appealed to me. He seemed right for Rosalie, ballast without which she might whirl off somewhere, hanging on to her bow.
“How’s the ‘Trout’ going?”
“Oh, you’d better ask Rosalie that. She’s afraid I’m going to ruin everything, even though I assure her I’ll come through.”
Rosalie approached, swirling a Mexican poncho over her head. We stepped out of range. “It’s just that I don’t get how you can withhold it or ration it out. Give and you’ll have more. Loaves and fishes.”
Besides the facial resemblance to Freud, Karl is also a Viennese Jew, one who managed to get to this country during the war as a teen-ager, all alone. It is possible that he too clawed his way through the forests of Poland, or rather Austria, leaving behind him a broken, doomed family, but he never speaks of it, at least not within my hearing. That journey is inside him, however, and may be why he once found the vagaries of Rosalie so alarming, as well as why he can now resolve to endure them.
“Are you ready, dear?” He is positively courtly. I can’t believe it, about the raised bread knife.
“Lydia, want a lift?”
“I’m going with Jasper.” I give a frosty glance. She shakes her head and mutters under her breath as we part.
Jasper and I drive in comfortable silence. He is probably hearing Schubert and hardly aware of my presence. Through the glasses his myopic eyes squint at the twilight streets. His profile is angular, the cheek concave like a medieval stone saint’s.
“Want a cup of coffee?” I ask as he pulls up at my building. This is a formality. He never does.
“Thanks, but I’d better not. Frank is waiting for me. He cooks fancy dishes. Can’t let them spoil.” He grins boyishly. Jasper, lately, has begun to reveal details of his private life. Perhaps he didn’t have one before.
“I thought you’d gained some weight. You look terrific.”
“Thank you. How are the kids doing?”
“Fine. Althea’s having a great time at school so far. Phil is coming to the concert. You’ll see him. Are you worried too?”
“Lord no.” He turns to face me. His mouth is stern, but I’m used to that by now. “How long have we been playing together, Lydia? Nine years? Ten? I’m not worried. Carla is very good, and Howard of course. It’s a matter of trust, isn’t it?” The stern lips relax into a wry smile. “I trust that if you need to collapse you’ll have the good grace to do it afterwards.”
“Jasper.” I can actually feel my heart speed up in response. “Thanks.” I lean over and kiss him on the mouth, close-lipped but sweet. God knows why I felt compelled to do that. We move apart and stare. He kisses me in return, the same brief way, and we start to laugh.
“Is Rosalie back with her husband?” he asks.
“Looks like it.”
“You women. You certainly do flit around. It’s beyond me.”
“You’re becoming a wonderful type, you know? You’re going to be the most straitlaced middle-aged deviate anyone could imagine.”
He makes a face of mock offense. “I beg your pardon, I’m only thirty-six.”
“Oh God, a wit besides. What are we coming to?”
“So are you going to do the ‘Spring’ Sonata with me up in Massachusetts? We’ve been talking about it for two years. It’s so gorgeous. And you know it’s perfect for us.”
“Why?”
“We’re both such romantics underneath. What could be more romantic? All that ripply, sinuous stuff. What a chance to indulge.”
“Oh, I don’t know if I am any more. I played it with Greg Parnis years ago. We were not bad—I still have the tape. Well, maybe we should, why not? It’d be fun to work on.”
Jasper whistles the opening theme of the last movement, a jaunty bit where the violin and piano echo each other half a slippery beat behind. I whistle my part too and for a few seconds we manage to keep the thing aloft, but it’s awfully tricky, whistling to that funny, disjointed beat; our whistles start tripping and stumbling over each other and we end up dissolved in laughter.
“We’ll do better than that, I trust.”
“Thanks for the ride, my dear. Till tomorrow.”
“Do you need any help with that?” He points to my bag of fruit.
“No, I can carry it fine. See you.”
Before I even reach my door I hear it: not the usual early evening stillness I can’t get used to, but a flurry of young voices. Jabbers and giggles. I hang my jacket in the hall and stand listening.
“Oh, but the way she said it. I thought I’d die!” A girl’s bubbly voice.
“I honestly don’t know how she can keep a straight face.” Phil, loud and exhilarated.
“I don’t think she can move the muscles of her face. I think she has paralysis of the face, if there is such a thing.”
“Masturbation. No. ‘Mas-tur-ba-tion.’” The girl’s voice goes deep and nasal and takes on a pseudo-cultivated accent. “‘This afternoon we will discuss mas-tur-ba-tion. I’m sure we all know what that is.’”
Howls, screeches, groans.
To deposit the fruit and get to the bottle of Scotch in the kitchen I have to walk through the living room. I don’t want to spoil Phil’s party. I’ll glide through invisibly, wave if necessary. I make it to the doorway.
“Oh hi, Mom.” Surrounded by allies, he’s not at all abashed that I should come upon this secret face of his, the genial face kept in reserve. I have to control my own face, smile back as if he gives me this greeting every day with eyes wide open and frank. It’s I who feel bashful meeting them. “This is my mother,” he declares without irony, in a voice that has shed its choked constraint. “And this is—let’s see, starting at the bookcase—Nick, June, Toni. Ilana you already know.”
“Hi, Ilana.”
“Hi, Lydia.” A pert, chorus-girl flick of a flat hand, palm front. I like Ilana the informal, the gray-eyed, freckled, and red-haired, bosomy in her salmon-colored T-shirt.
“David and Jose,” he winds up.
“We have this sex education course,” Ilana tells me. “We’re not sure we’ll make it through, though. We might die laughing first.”
I sneak a glance at Phil, who doesn’t even blink, but dips his hand along with the rest into an immense bowl of gorp on the floor in the center of their circle. The living room is strewn with sweatshirts and knapsacks and sneakers. It is wondrous. The kids themselves are a World Federalist’s dream, a medley of the races of the earth, drinking egg creams. George brought over two bottles of seltzer the other day, but Phil must have gone out and bought the extra milk himself. That too is wondrous.
“Don’t mind the mess, Mrs. Rowe,” Toni, the Oriental girl, says. “We’ll clean it all up before we go.”
“I don’t mind. I like it. Just ... carry on.” I leave them to make my drink. I was afraid I’d inhibit them but my fears prove groundless. From the kitchen I can see the black girl, June, continue her impersonation.
“‘I’m sure you’ve all heard various myths concerning masturbation.’” She switches on a leering, mechanical smile. “‘Now, what are some of the myths you’ve heard?’”
“Blindness? Rings under the eyes?” They inspect each other’s eyes.
“My dick-o will fall off?” the boy called Jose whines. “Oh my God!” he gasps in falsetto, clutching himself.
A jumble of cries: “Oops! Catch it, quick! Over there! Microsurgery can do wonders.”
Convulsions of laughter. Rolling on the floor. How long since Althea’s friends sat there performing such antics? Long; Althea’s friends have been long past that. The gradations in those years are subtle, the stages brief. I have forgotten how much I liked this barely-sixteen phase. I like the irreverence, the anarchy, the absence of control. Then it vanishes. They become proper, law-abiding citizens. They become us.
“That’s nothing compared to menstruation. You missed it yesterday,” Ilana says to Phil, beaming a sassy smile. “You cut, you delinquent youth. ‘What myths have you ladies and gentlemen heard about mens-tru-a-tion?’”
“If I wash my hair it’ll fall out?”
A boy reaches over to grab a clump of hair. “Look at this! Comes off right in my hand.” Paroxysms.
I take my drink and slip quietly through the room, making an effort not to limp. I can walk right if I concentrate. The limp teeters on that line between voluntary and involuntary. Sometimes I worry that it will cross over to the wrong side and become a species of tic like the woman on the bus had. Or like Mr. Zeitlowitz.
“You’ll poison any food you touch!”
“Help!” One boy grips at his stomach and pretends to retch, another tosses a fistful of gorp back into the bowl.
I shut the door of my bedroom. Happiness has come to Phil and I am glad. A fine thing, too, to be educated and to relish one’s education so. Brava, courageous teacher of the nasal voice and the straight face. And bravi, boisterous outspoken children who can laugh away their discomforts. When I was a girl there were indeed whispers going round that it might be dangerous to wash our hair during menstruation. But could Phil even dream that his great-grandmothers in Eastern Europe probably visited a ritual bath after each period and had to show a bloodless white cloth to the guardian at the door before their husbands could screw them once again? Does June imagine that her ancestors in Africa shut women up in isolated huts every month for the duration? Does David understand that they bound his grandmother’s feet so she would not run away from her biological fate, and as a result here he is, cozy in these United States?
They have a Beatles record playing now, Vivian’s favorite—the White Album, whose theme she insisted was animals. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night”—so loud I can hear every word clearly—“Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise. You were only waiting ...”
I was only waiting for this moment to lie down, after the rotten rehearsal. I undressed and stretched out. Way across the bed, on Victor’s nighttable, was the book he had been reading just before he left. Bronislaw Malinowski’s Magic, Science and Religion, opened and turned face down. Myths in abundance. I had never touched it all these months but I did now, slithered over the wide stretch of Victor’s side and reached for the book. Let’s see, at last, what myths were on his mind. What put him to sleep nights, after we lay silent or had our desultory talks or made our grim love? Victor, it appeared, had been reading about the ghosts of the deceased in the Trobriand Islands. The ghosts go to an island called Tuma, where they enter the earth through a hole especially made for that purpose, a passage Malinowski coyly calls “a sort of reversed proceeding to the original emergence.”
Oh Victor! Is this what fed your dreams? While I slept, or stole into Alan’s room (not Vivian’s, not to startle Althea, be a mother at all costs) and stood in the dark fingering the furniture, testing the bed to see what it had felt like to be Alan and lie there safe, knowing parents lay right across the hall strong and ready for any sort of rescue? While I lay there breathing in pain you were dreaming about the souls of the dead crawling back into the earth, a reverse proceeding? God, I wish you had told me. No, you were right not to. I might have shrugged and said something dismissive, told you to go to sleep. You were right to leave, a reverse proceeding. Better than staying with me in a snowy pit in the earth.
“Even more important,” says Malinowski, “even more important is the fact that after a span of spiritual existence in Tuma, the nether world, an individual grows old, gray, and wrinkled; and that then he has to rejuvenate by sloughing his skin.” Me. You sloughed me like an old skin. “Even so did human beings in the old primeval times, when they lived underground. When they first came to the surface they had not yet lost this ability; men and women could live eternally young.”
They must have done something, committed some bodily sin, masturbated or washed their hair during menstruation, to suffer so huge a loss. For all the myths show self-indulgence punished by a stripping away. Just look at them go! those treasured indispensables—penis, hair, eyesight, clear skin. Tough. Let the body have its way and you lose, you lose. Careless and pleasure-loving and greedy, having babies beyond your fair share ... With all my schooling I should be above such superstition, but it seems I’m not. Reason has flowed in and out of me light as air, leaving no trace except an image of the flying hair of Professor Boles. So okay, tell us, Bronislaw, what did we do to lose eternal life? Since surely we all did it, in the person of the original offender.
They lost the faculty, however, by an apparently trivial, yet important and fateful event. Once upon a time there lived in the village of Bwadela an old woman who dwelt with her daughter and granddaughter; three generations of genuine matrilineal descent. The grandmother and granddaughter went out one day to bathe in the tidal creek. The girl remained on the shore, while the old woman went away some distance out of sight. She took off her skin, which, carried by the tidal current, floated along the creek till it stuck on a bush. Transformed into a young girl, she came back to her granddaughter. The latter did not recognize her; she was afraid of her and bade her begone. The old woman, mortified and angry, went back to her bathing place, searched for her old skin, put it on again, and returned to her granddaughter. This time she was recognized and thus greeted: “A young girl came here; I was afraid; I chased her away.” Said the grandmother: “No, you didn’t want to recognize me. Well, you will become old—I shall die.” They went home to where the daughter was preparing the meal. The old woman spoke to her daughter: “I went to bathe; the tide carried my skin away; your daughter did not recognize me; she chased me away. I shall not slough my skin. We shall all become old. We shall all die.”
After that men lost the power of changing their skin and of remaining youthful.
Foolish, negating creature. She refused to recognize the persevering life beneath the ravages of time. She didn’t want the miracle; she turned away, intimidated by a vision of regeneration, dazed and cringing before an eternity of opportunities, when to recognize that simple gift was to be immortal. She was punished for her failure of nerve, and we shall all die.
The room had grown dark. I sank lower into the pillows on my side. It suddenly seemed very easy to die. Maybe the philosophy professor on the bus was right. Not as bad as we think. Not to be so dreaded. Fear had left me—it seemed the easiest thing in the world. All you had to do was give in. Yield and be taken. I was schooled for the opposite: to persist and to take. The world, they taught us, was ours for the taking. For the thinking. But I see now how to do it. You lie in a dark room and forget (I have made my bed in the darkness, Job said). You lie ready, you close your eyes, chase away will and desire like naked strangers. Easiest thing in the world. Like sleep. Like travel.
I woke in a pitch-black place, cut loose. What’s the shape of the room, where are the windows and doors, what place is this? There’s only me—not a body with a past but rather a sense of me, intrinsic and impalpable. Me, ageless, and a familiar ageless panic at the dark. For I cannot even tell how far the space extends, the darkness is so thick. I have to get hold. I am in a bed somewhere. My bed feels small, set in a corner perhaps, perhaps against a smooth, paneled wall? Just above it a window, overlooking a dark comforter of trees? And maybe, yes, twelve feet off diagonally, an open door. To my left, another small bed? My right hand fumbles along the wall behind my head for the cord. There was always a light there to scatter my fears, but no more. I thrash around in the void and knock something over. Reaching down—but the floor is wrong, a rug; it should be tiled—I find a switch on a fallen lamp and turn it on.
Ah, this. This big new bed. His side and my side. Cut loose by sleep I was almost elsewhere, in the room I shared with Evelyn in the brown house that idyllic summer, with a high window over the bed and a lamp above my head, and across from me my sister, and I was nine. If only I had not switched on the lamp. If only I could have tunneled through a hole in time to that room, that house, my parents, my sister, myself. Three broad harmonious stripes of sky, sea, and sand, and when we were lost all we needed to do was look for the yellow and white umbrella with the blue slipper hung on the broken spoke.
On the nighttable is my sister’s latest letter, sent from Switzerland in its flimsy airmail envelope bearing her calligraphic writing in green ink. I pick it up but there is no need to reread it; I know it. She talks about her summer in the mountains, the radiant light. How she always loved heights. Yes, on the beach she claimed the enormous dunes as her own and now she is much higher, gazing down at the lands below, if she even cares to gaze down. She mentions that summer when we debated the merits of bay side and ocean side, and she was the Princess of the Beach while I struggled in the waves. She was afraid of the waves, she confesses, and she envied my rushing towards them on such intrepid feet. She thought then that unlike herself I could bear any turbulent tossing, and she thinks so still. She recalls the children, whom she saw only at wide intervals, with unbearable accuracy. She asks to be remembered to Victor and says we must make up at once. That is the term she uses, like a child, make up. Her husband Rene is well, traveling a lot. Anytime I want to come to Switzerland she will be there to receive me. Love, Evelyn. I did love Evelyn. She was my little sister. For a long time I felt deserted by her. Then when she came in February and slept in Vivian’s bed and sat by my side for five days growing paler and quieter by the day I finally understood that she simply needed to breathe thinner air than the rest of us, and I let her go home.
I switch off the lamp, and after a while the room is not so dark any more. Not that dawn has come—dawn is still far off—but my eyes have grown used to the dark. If I close them I can feel myself in that old room with Evelyn sleeping nearby. Rich and strange, to have awakened in that room and that summer of a perfection so powerful that it endured in me and abided, dormant, ready to spring to life in the dark. For all at once the whole summer crowds around me, seeping into every sense—the briny smell of the air and the feel of the hot sand and our mother breaking off green beans from the vine for our breakfast and our father explaining that nature goes in cycles—even though I know this is the bedroom of now, which has sheltered the joys of love and its miseries, and I lie in it and weep. Not for my children and not over Victor, but in gratitude for the memory given me, a simple gift. It is incredible that in all our nights of whispering I never told him about the summer in the brown house—really told him, I mean, beyond the facts. I’ll have to tell him now. Call him up. Not speaking is so silly, I told Phil. Didn’t we love each other twenty years and he say he could look at my face forever and not tire of it? A quarter to one—I must have slept for hours—yet not so wildly late to call; I hear the soft pounding of Fleetwood Mac from Phil’s room; none of us sleeps much these days. I’m crying and smiling together, feeling utterly silly and overcome. I don’t even know what I’ll say. I’ll tell him I’m myself now, he should come back and be himself too; turning and turning we come round right. I’ll tell him about Vivian singing that Shaker melody from Appalachian Spring in the shower in her pure steady voice; about sleeping in the brown house with Evelyn and how like Vivian she was then, born so full of grace; how she was not terribly articulate either but could hold long converse with flowers, and how I used to see Evelyn every time I watched Vivie running down a beach kicking up puffs of sand, clouds of glory trailing at her feet. That he should come home right away, I see it all now. I understand everything the way you do sometimes waking abruptly in the middle of the night, but then you lose it in the sharp light of day so I had to call now, right away. Tell him about simple gifts, turning turning, the valley of love and delight. And that Phil needs him.
I dial his studio but there’s no answer so I hurriedly dig out the slip of paper with that other number, the one in case I needed him for anything, the one I almost tore up in fury but buried in the nighttable drawer instead. It rings three times before a voice answers, “Hello? ... Hello?” The voice of a middle-aged woman, sleepy, heavy, capable, and good-natured. The voice of a woman getting on in years but very much alive, very game. Breasts like melons? Her inner thighs still sticky, maybe, from him? “Hello?” She sounds concerned and maternal, and rather nice. The breath I have been holding so long escapes into the receiver. Oh Christ, I didn’t mean that, I would have spoken to her, but prudently she hangs up fast.
Ah, well. A pretty silly idea in the first place. Wipe your foolish face. Blow your nose. One of those middle-of-the-night ideas that turn out to be ludicrous in the morning. I lie back and try to breathe evenly. It’s quite all right, nothing to be surprised at. Not as if you didn’t know. Breathe. Remember to breathe. Everything will be all right. And I do take some comfort. Because I still possess the brown house and all that went with it. That isn’t lost; the memory is mine, and the vision, the myth, however mocked and contradicted by facts. I am still the person who lived it and made the mistake of trusting it. Anyway—and I light a cigarette to wait with—he’ll call back. I give him five minutes. One minute to ask her about the call, four minutes to pour a drink, brood, and make up his mind.
All that went with it: I remember the one thing about the brown house that was anomalous, menacing. The one not idyllic thing. The toad in the garden. Down in the clearing bordering the stand of trees that became a comforter at night was the plank of wood about twenty feet long and raised off the ground like a seesaw, only it wasn’t a seesaw. It didn’t go up and down; it spun in a horizontal plane, describing a circle. And anyone in its path, anyone inside the circle, could get knocked over, or, as my father liked to warn, sawed in half. Our parents never let us go down there alone: we couldn’t judge the extent of the circle. We would give the plank a push, then stand around nonchalantly, targets in a field, but they yanked us out of range in time. Riding it, either alone or with Evelyn, was the greatest of thrills. The world whipped around us and we kicked at its pebbly surface to make it whip faster. Our hair flew, we squealed, while our parents hung back near the surrounding trees. They were right—a dangerous toy, and it is curious that Mr. Wilson, the benevolent proprietor, should have set it in that hidden clearing in the idyll.
The telephone rings. The desire is gone but I can’t not answer; he would soon come pounding at the door.
“Lydia? I’m really sorry to call at this crazy hour but I had to talk to you. Are you up?”
“I’m up, Rosalie. What is it?”
“I feel bad about tonight. I didn’t mean to hound you, but—”
“That’s okay. Everything you said was true.”
“Ah!” She laughs with relief. “It’s not that I want to take any of it back. I just hate to have bad feelings between us. We’ve been together so long. But this is so important.”
“I don’t have bad feelings. For a little while, maybe, but not any more. I know exactly how important it is, believe me.”
“Well, good. I’ve been lying here thinking—the ‘Trout’ is ... oh, such a sort of communal work. You know what I mean. If we mess up that aspect we’re betraying something more important than the music, even.”
“God, Rosalie, only you could find a way to make a quintet into something political.”
“Say what you like, Lyd, but you know I’m right.”
She is always right. That’s the trouble. “I suppose so. By the way, since we’ve gotten so critical with each other suddenly, there is something ...”
“What?”
“Could you not sing along? You sound like an extra instrument sometimes.”
“Oh my! Was I that loud? All right, I’ll try not to. Definitely not at the performance. Would it bother you if I wore the green gypsy dress again? I know it’s a bit much but I kind of—”
“Why should that bother me? You look terrific in everything. It’s only the singing.”
“Okay, got you. I’m hanging up now. Karl is here. Right beside me, as a matter of fact. Sleeping.”
“I figured as much. Well, have a good night. And listen—thanks for calling.”
The moment I hang up it rings again.
“Lydia, are you all right? The line was just busy.”
“I’m fine. It was Rosalie.”
“Was that you who called a few minutes ago?” I say nothing. “It was, I know. What’s wrong? Phil?”
“No, we’re both fine, really. He had a gang of kids over tonight. It was nice.”
“You must have called about something. Do you need anything?”
I can’t stand that ragged edge in his voice, any more than I can answer that question. I’ll try the plain truth, as Gabrielle suggested. “All it was, was ... I was remembering a summer vacation up at the Cape when I was a kid, and I had an idiotic urge to tell you about it.” There. He’ll think I’ve gone off the deep end. The plain truth stinks, Gaby. Sucks, as Alan used to say. Decimals suck. Percents suck. Fractions.
“You’re sure you’re okay, Lyd?” God, am I tired of hearing that. And trimmed with guilt, not a pretty sound. “I’ll come over if—”
“No, I’m quite sure.”
“So what about your summer? Tell me.”
“Oh, it’s passed now. It was one of those moments. Nothing really. I guess I woke you, didn’t I?”
“I’m sorry it happened this way.”
“She has a right to answer her own phone. I should have thought first.”
We say good night. The distance between us is awkward, weighty like a humid gray dawn, burdened with mutual remorse. Is this how separated couples talk long after, who’ve remained “friends”? Will he hold her close in bed now, or sit staring into the dark? Well, what difference can it make either way? I, for my part, am going to have something to eat. Either way, I’m starved. Either way, I will provide. Passing through the living room I notice that Phil and his friends have cleaned up, as promised. On the couch someone has left a copy of Endless Love. I fling open the door of the refrigerator and, I must say, I am dazzled. It is full of good things to eat, and they come from my very own providential hands: half a chicken steeped in soy sauce and wine, a lentil and sausage salad with fresh parsley and black olives, a casaba melon, six thick-skinned oranges, and more. I give it all a sly, intimate middle-of-the-night snicker, and like Gaby challenging her flesh in the dormitory mirror, like Rastignac to Paris, having buried his last naive tear, murmur, “A nous deux, maintenant.”