AS BOTH PHILIP and Mme. Kabalevsky had predicted, a number of small gigs resulted from the contest Suzanne won. A few came from people she’d met at Cynthia’s party, and others were arranged by Philip, who had become, tacitly, her manager, even before they decided to marry. She had never sought a manager, didn’t need one yet, she thought, despite Elena’s urgings. Elena, who had been taken on by her stepfather’s manager, was busy touring in the Midwest, but she prodded Suzanne regularly by phone.
The gigs were in local halls in Westchester and Rockland Counties or Long Island, small towns in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Never mind small, it was a start, Phil said. It got her name around. Richard agreed: Play wherever they’re willing to have you. That’s what a professional does. It would be good for her, Richard said, to get used to the traveling, the unfamiliar instruments and settings, to learn all she could. Suzanne played better in these places than she expected, or rather, her nagging stage fright was more manageable. Along with her talent, she had a streak of condescension born less of snobbery than of naiveté. Such places were too reminiscent of her own origins to be more than mildly threatening. They were not the kinds of places that figured in her dreams; still, out of pride, she always tried to give her best.
She got excellent reviews in local papers, her name got around, and after a few months, through his growing connections, Philip arranged a recital at a good hall downtown, part of New York University, where he had friends in the music department. With that one “under her belt,” as he put it, there would be many more, he assured her.
On Philip’s advice, she rehearsed in the hall twice, so that the place would feel familiar. It was larger than most of the others she’d played in. By the time the Thursday evening arrived, she knew its high ceilings, the severe cream-colored walls with Doric columns in low relief, the rows of maroon plush seats, slightly canted, the balcony. She arrived early and sat in a small dressing room with Philip, suffering the agonies of anticipation. So it was a relief at last to be called by the stage manager.
Despite her visits, she’d never seen the hall lit for a performance. As she entered from the wings, the lights assaulting her eyes were so bright that for an instant she saw nothing but bursts of color like fireworks, low to the ground. She paused, blinked, then moved toward the large dark object in the center of the flaring colors: the piano. The floorboards beneath her feet, waxed to a high sheen, shimmered faintly as if in a mirage, their parallel lines appearing to bend. Lining the rim of the stage were more balloons of color; it took her an instant to grasp that they were flowers in large pots. Hydrangeas, like the ones leading up to the row houses on her childhood block.
Her instinct was to turn and run, but she did what she knew she must—this was what she had worked for all these years. At center stage, slightly in front of the piano, she bowed. Philip and Cynthia had told her she must also smile, but she couldn’t force it. How could you smile out into darkness, at people you couldn’t even see? The only way she knew they were there was the clatter of applause. As her eyes adjusted to the light, blobs of heads appeared, patches of bright clothing here and there, but no clear faces.
She couldn’t see them, but they were all watching her. Why couldn’t she be happily in the audience, too, looking forward to someone’s playing music? Why must she be the chosen one, the sacrifice? As they watched her, her dress, a long navy blue evening sheath, simple, sleeveless, with a V-neck, suddenly seemed all wrong, both too fancy and too austere. Her shoes, high heels with a T-strap, were wrong, too. She might trip and fall. But what nonsense was she thinking? Surely Rudolf Serkin didn’t think about the fit of his suit or the color of his tie when he went onstage. Or, who knows, maybe he did. Never mind. She must focus on the music. You must know the music so well, Mme. Kabalevsky said, that you don’t need to think about it. And yet you must think of nothing else. But those pieces of advice were contradictory, weren’t they?
As the coughing and fussing of the audience ceased and Suzanne turned to sit down, she was startled by footsteps behind her. It was the page-turner, a student dressed in black, modest and unobtrusive. The girl glided to her seat to the left of the piano bench. Suzanne had met her before, had seen her backstage a moment ago, and yet her presence onstage felt like a burden. As a student, she herself had been a page-turner on occasion: She remembered well the pleasure of sitting onstage, so close to the music, but knowing the audience was not thinking of her, barely noticed her. Had her presence disturbed the pianists? That had never occurred to her. It had been a combination of full exposure and extreme solitude, hiding in plain sight, which suited her. Perhaps she should have remained a page-turner.
She must stop these idiotic thoughts and begin. Nothing but the music. She flexed her fingers and placed her hands over the keys. Don’t rush, Cynthia said. Take your time. They’ll wait. But not indefinitely. Not as long as Suzanne would have liked to wait. She played the opening notes of the Mozart Sonata no. 13. She had learned it as a child with Mr. Cartelli, and for a few moments a cheerful nostalgia infused her playing with warmth. The first few bars went fine, but as she moved into a ritardando, which contained a faint hint of the slow movement to come, she couldn’t recall any of the notes ahead. The score was up on the rack, there was no real danger, but it would be distracting to have to read from the music. Never mind, the notes will come as their time comes. And so they did. They were in her fingers.
As she was nearing the end of the first movement, something felt wrong in her body. A shudder went through her, then a clutch at her chest and stomach muscles, as if a clamp were gripping them. Panic, her faithful companion. It would spread, she knew from experience. Already her hands were losing warmth. She couldn’t remember what was ahead from one measure to the next, but her hands managed to keep going—good hands, they even understood the phrasing and tonalities. But now she was in the second movement, andante cantabile; could the hands alone convey the singing tone that was needed? Because her mind, which dictated the tone, seemed to have floated upward like a balloon, propelled by puffs of panic. All she could do was let her hands continue as best they could, while she hovered above the keyboard. If only she could stop and flee. Disappear. But there was no stopping now. She had to go on.
She tried to use the old trick that had helped her through bad moments in high school and earlier, when her father had forced her to play for guests. This isn’t really happening, she would say. It’s not even a dream, just something you must wait out, do mindlessly, and soon it will drift away like smoke. It’s not happening, while her fingers continued to play the notes and the lights blazed overhead and the scent of the flowers wafted from the footlights, and every so often the page-turner reached out to flip the page, each flip bringing her closer to the end of what was not happening.
There was no fooling herself—of course it was happening. She was sweating. The wet was seeping under her arms. She could smell her own fear. She was in panic’s grip and would remain there for the entire concert, more than an hour and a half. No, she’d never last that long. She was starting on the final movement now, which had a frisky opening: allegro grazioso, but grazioso felt quite beyond her. She’d make a bargain with her panic: If it would let her get through the Mozart, then the Bach Italian Concerto and a selection of Bartók bagatelles, up to the intermission, she’d say she was sick and couldn’t do the second half. Panic would win this round. A pity, because she and Cynthia had chosen the program so carefully, for contrast—the second half was the Chopin barcarole and Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin—as well as to show Suzanne’s range, which was unusual for so young a pianist. All that would be lost now. No matter. Please, let me last just until the intermission.
She barely registered the polite but mild applause after the Mozart, and promptly launched into the Bach, an exuberant piece and, mercifully, fairly brief. She could hardly tell anymore how the music sounded—her ears felt stuffed and distant, like the onset of dizziness. The notes and dynamics were correct, but it might sound as if it were being played by an automaton.
She waited during the applause and tried, not too conspicuously, to take deep calming breaths. As before, the applause was not thundering but well meaning and courteous. Of course: She knew so many people in the audience. In the front rows, though she couldn’t see them, were her family and friends. Probably some of her mother’s friends, too, primed for her first big success. Could they tell how badly she was playing, or was it enough for them that she sat on the brilliantly lit stage and produced the notes? Richard must be out there somewhere. Cynthia. Maybe some of her teachers from Juilliard. Mme. Kabalevsky had said she’d try to come. They would know exactly what was happening. They would know her shame.
And the rest of the audience, the strangers? Who were they and why had they come? Music lovers? People excited by the debut of a new performer? Or subscribers, lonely people who filled their calendars with places to go of an evening, better than numbing television? Maybe tired husbands, fighting off drowsiness, dragged by wives who wanted to swallow “culture” in a few easy gulps, like some of the neighbors she remembered from childhood, who boasted at the canasta table of the wonderful concerts and plays they had attended, never describing them, only listing, as if adding them to a resumé. Or students such as she had been not long ago, students with buoyant hopes, imagining themselves in her place a few years from now. But they would do better, they must be thinking. How had she managed to get here anyway, or was she just having a bad day?
After the Bartók, when she went backstage, she would say she felt faint. She was coming down with something. The concert would have to be stopped. With this idea to bolster her, she struggled through the bagatelles. The mood shifts and irregularities of the Bartók usually exhilarated her, but now she felt like she was picking her way through a field of nettles. She imagined herself attacking the music the way some of the male students in the master classes at school had done, and while that bellicose approach lacked delicacy, it did have a mesmerizing power. She was giving a shape to the music’s contrariety, and it fortified her. A pulse of excitement kept her going. I’m doing it for him, she thought. He tries so hard, I can’t let him down. Never mind me and my idiot fears. Do it for him.
But this worked for only a short time. The ice crept up her spine and her forehead grew damp. Her fingers, those dutiful slaves, trained robots, were the only part that kept their facility, and she let them go as they would. It was like setting free a cluster of clever gadgets, and while they did not betray her—they were obedient and mindless—they played with a mechanical neutrality.
When the intermission finally arrived, Suzanne managed to stand up and bow, then walk slowly offstage, careful not to slip on the gleaming floorboards.
Phil was waiting in the wings. “Great!” he cried. “You’re doing great!” There was a crowd of faces, stagehands, people darting about on errands. “Oh, please don’t. It was a disaster. I’m not going back out there.”
“What are you talking about? You can’t stop in the middle.” He took her arm and led her back to the dressing room, where she collapsed on the ancient divan. The springs moaned beneath her. On the walls were dusty photos of the famous pianists who’d played here early in their career. She knew her photograph would never be among them.
“Look, I’m feeling sick. Tell them I’m sick and can’t continue.”
“It’s ordinary stage fright, Suzanne. I’ll give you a Valium.”
“No. No drugs. They could mess up my mind, and then I’d do even worse.” She sat up and bent her head over her knees.
“Valium is nothing. But okay, here, take some aspirin, then.” He held them out in his palm.
She swallowed them with a glass of water. “But you’ll have to tell them something. I can’t go through with it. I’ll pass out.”
“That could ruin your chances after all this work. It’ll give you a bad name. It’ll be harder to get the next gig. Dozens of people were dying for this opportunity, and you won it. I’m not going to help you throw it away. You can get this under control. You know the techniques they showed you at school. You didn’t panic when you auditioned at the contest, did you?”
“That was different. It was only a few people judging and I was one of a long line. It wasn’t so focused on me.” I pretended it wasn’t happening, she remembered. That wouldn’t work in a hall with so many people. Too much reality pressing in on her.
“Have some more water. You’re going to be fine. The worst is over, now that you know what it’s like out there. Pretend you’re in a small room with a few people you know. Richard and his friends—they always made you feel confident, you told me. Or pretend there’s no one out there at all and you’re playing for yourself. You’ll see. This half will go much better.”
“I need to lie down. Leave me alone for a while, Phil.”
“No, that’s not a good idea. Sit up. Or go in there”—he waved at the small bathroom—“and splash some water on your face. It’s almost time.”
He wouldn’t let her stop. He was going to make her stumble out into the hot lights and feel it again, just when it had begun to ease: the ice in her spine, her fingers cold and rubbery, her whole body melting down. Her leg muscles felt like sand, but they would have to carry her out there. Philip said she must. This was what he had promised, and he wouldn’t go back on it. Once, right after they were married, when Elena’s name came up, he took her in his arms and whispered, “I’ll never hurt or betray you again. I promise.” This was why she’d married him, was it not? The thought was so troubling that she wished she could wipe it away. Had she married the way some people marry for money or connections or security? This was what she’d wanted, and he had convinced her that he was the one to get it for her.
She splashed her face and fixed her hair and came back out.
“In five minutes you’ll be playing the barcarole—you know that suits you, and it’ll sound fantastic. You look better now. Here, let me straighten your dress.” He tugged at the fabric around her waist and hips. “Just keep yourself under control, and it’ll sound as good as last night at home. I wish I’d recorded it. Then you could hear how good you are. Maybe one of these days we’ll make some tapes.”
She was his prisoner. She let him lead her back into the wings, where he gave a gentle shove at her back and she was onstage again, in the shattering light. She didn’t look at the audience, simply began to play as if that were her prison sentence. And at first the music did go better. She managed to keep a grip on her panic. It was a small squirmy beast she held tight inside, restraining it with her stomach muscles.
The barcarole demanded a limpidity that she tried for but knew she didn’t attain, although the fingers worked for her again. But will alone wasn’t enough to keep the creature from wriggling out of her grasp and scuttling through the pathways of her body. Surely the audience could tell. Almost anyone could tell, as she began the Ravel, that the rhythms were getting shaky, the transitions hesitant. She had the notes all right but couldn’t control the inner narrative of the elusive music; it sounded weighty and deliberate, not at all as Ravel should sound.
“Remember, you’re not just a transmitter,” Cynthia used to say when Suzanne first began studying with her. “You’re so skilled that you tend to rely on that. But you’re also an interpreter. You need an interpretation. Think of those language people at the UN. People are hearing sounds they can’t understand, and the interpreter gives them a meaning, makes them intelligible. You need to do that.” That was especially true of Ravel. But she wasn’t making it intelligible at all. The music might as well have been a foreign language, or a familiar language poorly spoken. She played the slow passages too fast. She was restless, unable to linger in the moment or the sound—all she wanted was to cut and run. She played the fast parts so fast that the intricacies of the harmonies were smeared by speed. Even the page-turner seemed confused, as she leaned over to turn at shorter intervals than she had planned for.
She rallied her strength—it would all soon come to an end. Tolerable, Cynthia would say if she’d played this way at a lesson. Tolerable, Suzanne, but it needs to be more than that.
She didn’t stand up the moment it was over. She would have liked to sink into the stool until they all stopped their clapping and went home, emptied out the hall. The page-turner gave her a slight nudge, and Suzanne rose and bowed to the darkness. She was politely called back for one curtain call, and then it was truly over. In the little room where she lay on the couch, Phil told her there were people outside asking to see her—her family, Richard, Elena—but she would see no one.
“You’re behaving like a prima donna,” he said. “You haven’t earned that right yet. They care about you. And it’s not the end of the world, you know.”
“Leave me alone. You go out and entertain them. Tell them I’m too exhausted and I’ll be in touch.” She disliked being rude; she would have loved her mother’s consoling arms around her, but she knew the moment she saw anyone she loved she’d burst into tears of shame. How fortunate her father was not alive to see this. Not that he would have known the difference between a good recital and a botched one.
Phil shook his head in exasperation, but he did as she asked. Later, in the taxi going home, she wept while he sat silently beside her. Even he could think of no more to say.
The next day the phone kept ringing—her mother, her brothers, Richard, Elena, Simon and Tanya from Juilliard. Everyone congratulated her, and Suzanne did her best to accept their words with grace. Only with Elena and Richard did she speak the truth.
“It was pretty bad, wasn’t it?” she asked Elena. “I could hear it. I was frozen.”
“No, no, I wouldn’t say pretty bad. You could probably play those pieces in your sleep. You have that stunning technique that never lets you down. And that came through. Look, I’ve heard you sound better, but it wasn’t as bad as you think. There were parts that were very impressive—the Mozart. And the Bartók especially.”
That was Elena being diplomatic. Suzanne could take no comfort.
With Richard she was even more frank. “Tell me the truth. It was dreadful, wasn’t it? I was out of my head with fear. Everything I’ve practiced all these years just washed away.”
“I’m sorry you had such an awful time. I could tell what was happening. But it had its good points. You started each piece very well, and kept on, until the panic set in. Well, next time you’ll do all the anti-panic routines and do better. But it wasn’t a bad start. The technique was obvious.”
The reviews—in the Times and Newsday, and later on in a couple of the music magazines—were not as damning as she expected. “In her first New York appearance Ms. Stellman displayed a keen sensitivity to the challenging rhythms and dissonances of the Bartók bagatelles” and, “She played the Bach Italian Concerto with admirable precision, if a bit apathetically as she proceeded.” “Her interpretations of both the Mozart sonata and the Chopin barcarole began with promise, and though they remained technically accurate, they all but ignored the subtler textures and undertones.” The worst, as well as the most just, in her view: “Ms. Stellman is obviously a pianist with extraordinary technical gifts, but she somehow made all the selections sound alike. The shimmering hues of Ravel have little in common with the more abrasive Bartók tonalities, and yet Ms. Stellman did not make much effort to distinguish them. In short, a proficient but mechanical, even somnambulistic, performance.”
“Oh, blah, blah, blah,” said Phil. They were sitting on the living-room couch with the papers spread around them. “A lot of pretentious words. Don’t even read them. It’s not worth it.”
How could she not read them? She read them over and over, practically memorized them. She never said they were unfair. It was Philip who complained. “Okay, so you weren’t in top form, but why dwell on the negative? They love to do that. Couldn’t they hear the intelligence, the facility, the background you bring to the pieces? They should understand about stage fright in a newcomer. They could cut you a little more slack.”
“Why? There are plenty of people just as good who don’t go numb. Audiences pay money. They shouldn’t have to listen to something mediocre, whatever the reason.”
After all her years of work, to come to this. It was over, she said.
“That’s nonsense. It’s just beginning.”
“Okay, whatever you say. You’re the boss, right?”
He turned away. She showed him her bitterness, but not the perverse pleasure she took in the reviews. Tepid as they were, they existed. They confirmed her existence. They put her name in print in what her father used to refer to as the newspaper of record: proof that she had been judged worthy to perform on that stage, however disappointingly. Years from now, someone going through old files might see her name. Long after she was dead, someone would know that she had existed. But this secret pleasure was too shameful to admit to anyone, even Philip.
He was patient while she brooded about the house, a week of watching television and reading mystery novels. Like a good nurse, he was all solicitude. Before he left in the morning he would bring her coffee and a fresh roll from the Italian bakery across the street, arranged neatly on a tray as if she were an invalid: coffee cup in the center, roll to the left, jam and butter just northeast of the coffee. Meanwhile, she canceled her students for the week and called in sick at the ballet classes she accompanied. In the evenings Phil brought home pizza or Chinese food, then insisted she get dressed and walk through the Village with him at sunset. It was early spring; the streets were crowded. He pointed out the first blossoms, the forsythia, flower of their home borough, he reminded her, embarking on its brief season. And they both laughed because they were alike in this: They had no use for nostalgia. They missed nothing of what they had left behind.
Philip was full of plans. His vigor drained what little energy she had. If only he would stop talking and simply walk beside her. They sat down at an outdoor table and ordered coffee, while they gazed at the sun sinking over the river, the endless traffic, the cyclists, and the handful of indefatigable runners in the midst of traffic. Suzanne marveled at their will. What made them feel that anything mattered so much? They walked and ran and drove so briskly, day after day. They were simply carrying on their lives, Phil said, as she’d done up till now and as she would do again. She was young, she’d have other chances. As soon as she was feeling better in a few days—he’d make sure of it. Already he was hatching plans, so she shouldn’t let up on her practicing.
His words troubled her, his plans. He would make sure of it. With his contacts, his persuasiveness, his perpetual motion, he would find gigs for her, if not in New York then back in the smaller venues, where the audiences were not quite so demanding or couldn’t afford New York prices. For all she knew he’d have her flying to obscure hamlets all over the country, sending her off into the chilly embrace of panic.
The following week she tried to get moving. She had to keep her job at the ballet studio and see her students. The trays of coffee and rolls stopped arriving every morning. Obviously Phil thought she had mourned enough. She practiced, but halfheartedly. The worst way to practice, as she well knew. If you can’t put yourself into it, don’t do it at all, Richard used to say. Wait for another day. Do something else, study scores, listen to recordings. Don’t play using half of yourself. Cynthia, on the contrary, believed in putting in several hours no matter how you felt. Don’t let your fingers start forgetting. They’re your most loyal allies. The rest will come back when it’s ready. As in school, there were too many opinions to choose from. She had to decide for herself, and while she leaned toward Cynthia’s view, she couldn’t always carry it out.
In the afternoons she lay on the couch, going through new scores, looking over the piano works of John Field, the Irish composer famous in his time who created the nocturne form that influenced Chopin. But soon the pages would fall to her lap and she would question every decision she had ever made. Invariably, the interrogation arrived at the decision to marry Philip. It went back all the way to that first coffee with him after the Serkin concert at Carnegie Hall, and oh, the glamour of the place. Who could have imagined what that meeting on the stairs would lead to? Maybe the man she lived with, ate with, slept with, was all wrong for her. Had Elena been right, that day at the Juilliard auditions, when she said he was superficial? Was there really nothing more to him than the self-assurance, the glib words, the easy competence? If she hadn’t been so hasty she might not be lying here on this couch, waiting for him to come home, dependent on his words, his plans....
But who else would try to help her as he did? No one else could or would get her what she dreamed of, and that she seemed unable to get for herself. She didn’t have the temperament, she’d once overheard her father saying to Gerda. “She looks fine and she can get by on charm for a while, but for the long run she’s not tough enough.” Maybe he had known her better than she imagined.
Philip had the temperament, she thought as they made love late at night. Here as in everything else he was energetic, managerial, effective, as if he were directing a performance and must make sure all went off splendidly. And Suzanne would think, Why complain of this? He does it so well. He makes me feel so good. He is my husband, after all. It’s not hard to love him as I’m supposed to. Still, the voice she dreaded would intrude in a murmur, even during her pleasure. It spoke not in words at those moments, but in insinuations, images. Maybe she could be someone other than this cosseted creature, object of these lavish attentions. What else or how else she might be, she didn’t know; she hadn’t enough experience. She wondered about other possible lovers, no one she knew, imaginary men who might make bizarre demands, who could elicit something in her that she sensed obscurely but that had never had the chance to assert itself.
When it was over she retreated back into remoteness, even while folded in his arms or holding him as he lay with his head on her chest. She quickly felt separate. Philip remained present, connected, talking, wanting to maintain the intimacy. Maybe he had no private self to retreat to. The longer they were together, the better she understood that his staying connected was his mode of being in the world: Movement, intrusion, management were his way of affirming his reality, just as long ago, playing the piano and being recognized were hers, and showing her off had been her father’s. She was the instrument of Phil’s becoming real. Her success would make him super-real; then she would truly be his creature, at the piano no less than in bed.
Two weeks after the recital Suzanne privately labeled a nightmare, when her last student of the day had left, she lay on the couch watching a late-afternoon talk show, something she would have scorned before as wasting precious time. For years, she had regarded every moment as time to be consecrated to her work, her aspirations. There was no spare time to squander. Now, time was plentiful; it stretched out farther than she could see. She could barely manage to practice an hour or two at a stretch, and did so only out of habit and a sense of obligation.
On the TV screen, a fat, curly-haired, thirty-ish man—his size made him look older, but he had a baby face—with puffy cheeks and sloping shoulders was telling the unctuous host about the miracle of Overeaters Anonymous. It was those rounded chipmunk cheeks that first stirred a sense of familiarity, and then the voice, soft and husky for a man, as if pulverized by the rolls of flesh it had to pass through before emerging. She had heard that voice before. After a few moments, it hit her: Arnie Perchusky from her old block in Brooklyn, whom she had not seen or thought of for almost fifteen years.
An odd figure to serve as her personal madeleine. The images returned not in a rainbow of revivified sensation, but in waves of distaste and humiliation: Arnie Perchusky, the Cyclone, the sickening plunge, the sea below, the surf curling up like bits of abandoned confetti. The years she could not wait to be done with, years of waiting for her life to start. Waiting for now. And here it was, now, and what was she waiting for?
That summer evening she was sitting on the stoop of Eva’s house with Alison and Alison’s older brother. Before long, a group gathered. Eva was preening and tossing her head to show off her new feather cut with blond streaks. Her older sister, in an identical hairdo, had just gotten her driver’s license, which she displayed proudly. Alison’s current boyfriend turned up (they changed every few weeks, but there was always someone—it was those phenomenal breasts, the girls agreed), a freshman at Brooklyn College, along with two of his friends. Paula brought a cousin visiting from Philadelphia. The Schneider brothers from around the corner were there, the older one home from his first year at an upstate university, the younger a high school sophomore but reported by Paula to be a great kisser and to keep a stash of marijuana in his underwear drawer. And Arnie Perchusky, the enormously fat boy who lived down the block with his fat brother and sisters. Arnie wore a gray gabardine windbreaker over Bermuda shorts, despite the heavy, humid evening. To hide his fat, Suzanne thought.
Alison’s boyfriend suggested they all pile into cars and drive to Coney Island to celebrate the end of the term. There were enough of them with driver’s licenses, enough parents willing to hand over the keys. Suzanne drifted along in a mood of lassitude. She rarely joined in group sprees, but she loved the sea and couldn’t pass up a chance to be there. The sea at night, the stars—yes. She could wander off from the others and dip her feet in the surf. In the car, driven shakily by Eva’s sister, Elvis crooned “Love Me Tender” on the radio and they sang along. As always when she heard music, Suzanne couldn’t help playing the notes silently with her fingers, against her palms. A hot breeze blew in the open windows, tinged by salt as they neared the ocean.
They walked on the boardwalk in twos and threes. Across the wide beach the surf was loud, the waves high and swift, roughing up the few twilight swimmers, who surfaced, shook themselves off, and dived into the next one. Suzanne was heading down the steps to the sand, when the boys insisted they must all go on the roller coaster. The Cyclone, guaranteed to make the girls scream, their stomachs flip. Suzanne refused. The Cyclone terrified her, but the girls urged her on. “You’ve got to try it. Just once in your life,” Eva said. It was Eva’s idea to pair her with Arnie. “He’ll protect you,” she whispered. “You’ll be wedged in so tight, there won’t be any room to fall out.” That was loud enough to be heard, and Suzanne felt sorry for Arnie, who must have noticed the giggles and smirks.
To silence them, and because the hot night and salt air cast a spell of passivity, Suzanne agreed. It wouldn’t last long. She’d hardly ever spoken to Arnie alone; he was simply a fixture of the street, occasionally latching on to their group. Now they were wedged tightly into the seat of the car, the metal bar as it clicked into place making a furrow in Arnie’s soft, thick middle. He smiled wanly, no more eager than she, it appeared, to be on the Cyclone. The flesh of his hip and thigh pressed hotly against her. In the car ahead of them were Alison and her boyfriend, arms wrapped tightly around each other.
As the car began to move, Suzanne and Arnie exchanged a look of mortified resignation. Suzanne shrugged and tried to smile. At least she didn’t care what he thought of her; had he been a boy she wanted to impress, she would have to pretend to be enjoying herself. With Arnie, nothing mattered. Ten minutes from now it would be over, she would have done it, no one could tease her for being scared.
The car ascended slowly at a forty-five-degree angle with deceptive calm, but she knew the descending angle would be sharper and rapid. As it paused, quivering at the crest of the highest curve, she looked down at the people strolling about far below, and at others on the Parachute, the Whip, the Ferris wheel. The carousel music was a mere tinkle in the distance, like wind chimes, and way out at the edge of the ocean, the surf was squiggly lines drawn in white chalk. When the inevitable plunge came, they were almost vertical, and her insides fell into her throat. She screamed louder than she thought she could, a monster-movie scream. From then on there was no relief: It was either the plunge or the anticipation. At each plunge, she screamed and thought she would die, yet knew she would not; the contradiction and the captivity enraged her and left her throat tight. In between the plunges she told herself it would not last forever, but the few minutes stretched out surrealistically.
Arnie did not scream, boys couldn’t allow themselves to scream, although once or twice she heard something like a squeaking yelp. He held his breath and clutched the bar. They didn’t exchange a word. She didn’t even feel an impulse to grasp his hand. Despite his enormous presence, his soft sweating flesh against her, she felt utterly alone.
The ride didn’t last forever, but the view from above and the sick dizziness did last, a sensation she could call up from memory at will—and often did. The ride came to evoke her entire childhood in Brooklyn: looking down, helpless, at the whirling, chaotic, beautiful world—crowds, motion, music, roiling sea, glimmering first stars in a royal-blue sky—but fearful she would never return to it, trapped by Arnie’s mound of soft inert flesh and, at her middle, by the cold metal bar.
When they got off, shaking, they edged away from each other, embarrassed—strangers who’d shown each other their fear. All the rest of the evening she could call up the damp warmth of his flesh pressing against her. On the ride home she made sure they weren’t in the same car.
At some point since that night some dozen years ago, Arnie had apparently discovered Overeaters Anonymous. On the TV show, he did look less fat than in adolescence, but clearly he was not yet finished with the twelve-step program, which he credited with changing his life. He spoke at length, more than Suzanne had ever heard him speak before. “I learned that if you persist, with trust in yourself and faith, you can accomplish anything you set out to do.”
She switched off the set and sank lower into the pillows. It was more than the Cyclone that Arnie on the screen brought back: It was the entire block where she had grown up, embedded in her, an enclosing frame for everything that had happened since. She had left it as soon as she could, moving uptown to Mrs. Campbell’s apartment near Juilliard. Her parents had fretted, but Richard helped convince them that the long subway ride twice a day sapped her energy. Since then she had returned only to visit, as seldom as she could, but the people in each of the small row houses remained as vivid as they had been back then, a tableau she could not expunge: the Schiffs, who owned the funeral parlor half a mile away and kept a somber black Cadillac in the driveway; the podiatrist and his placid wife, who sat on the porch all weekend and from that high perch smiled beatifically at everyone who passed; the girls she played with, whose idea of the exotic was Eva’s father’s dentist books with pictures of blighted mouths; the kindly Grubers next door to Richard, who in vain set an example of friendliness and said he was a good neighbor. And especially their daughter, Francine, who worked at a publishing company in the city and in the evenings sat on the porch chatting as she waited for her date to arrive: the law student. At some point, Francine had vanished for a year and returned polished and brightened, a blank gloss over her face and words. She had a breakdown, Gary told Suzanne, because her fiancé—remember that fellow who used to come round for her?—ditched her and she fell apart. That girl had no inner resources, Gerda murmured, standing at the sink. After her return, Francine vanished into her bedroom for a while. But soon she was up and working in the city again, not bothering with the suits or high heels any longer. She grew frumpy and sat on the porch in a cotton shift on the summer evenings, smoking cigarettes and staring into space.
It was the sight of fat Arnie and the memories he called up that roused Suzanne from her stupor. It wasn’t over yet. She’d managed her escape from that cocoon, and she must not go back. She was not Francine; she had inner resources. She’d let Philip make plans and would do what he proposed. If that was why she’d married him, so be it. He promised, and he would keep his promise. It was his way of propitiating the gods who had ruined his childhood. If he did well enough, they would not ruin his adulthood as well. Or was it his way of ensuring his reality, just as her father had had to show her off? She would help him, as she had helped her parents when she was a child.
She told him she was ready to try again, and he hugged her. “That’s my girl,” and a shudder snaked through her.
