Augusta Played (23 page)

“Maybe you could write a dissertation about that.”

“Too bad he can't disinherit them. Do you know,” Nor man asked, “that Lenin said listening to Beethoven made him want to pat the composer's head but that he couldn't afford such sentiments? He said it was his duty to
crack
the heads of people like Beethoven.”

Gus laughed. “The devil probably thinks it's his
duty
to destroy goodness.”

“The devil? The
devil!
Sometimes I wonder about you, Gus.”

“I can't see Beethoven allowing his head to be either patted or cracked, especially by Lenin.”

“I'm going to tell you something,” Norman said, changing his tone.

“About Beethoven?” Gus asked. But she was alarmed.

“I miss you.”

It was the phrase Gus had heard so often from Richard, but when Norman said it, he didn't give it the same spendthrift sense Richard had given it, a kind of throwaway light-heartedness. When Norman said the words, every one of them seemed hard earned. “That's a funny thing to say,” she said, shyly. Timidly.

“I'm married to you,” he said, “but I miss you. You're never around.”

“I'm around,” Gus said. “You're the one who's always out.” She tried to make a joke. “Getting wounded by the New Left and the Old Right. Or just…out. It seems to me that you work late at the library an awful lot.”

Norman looked away, testing his forehead with his fingers as an excuse not to look at her. He couldn't explain at this point that the weekly late nights were dinners with his father. She might even think he was—what? Betraying her. Collaborating with his father. He knew how the mind could work, turning things around. She might understand that he had been his father's son for longer than she had been his wife and that he was only trying to do the best thing for everybody concerned, and she might not. It was better not to bring everything out into the open; things in the open took on a new, distorting emphasis. “It isn't just me,” he said. “You're busy all the time.”

How had it happened that he was accusing her, instead of the other way around? “I have to practice. Don't touch it, Norman, it'll get infected.”

“How is it going?”

“Dieter's finished his piece. The one I'm going to use for the last number.”

“I've been meaning to speak with you about this, Gus. Isn't it risky to put it last? Suppose it's no good.”

“But it's brilliant. Even Julie Baker agrees. I'll be giving the première of something really special. Between Dieter and me,” she said, forcing herself to smile, “I don't see how we can miss. I'm scared to death.”

“I know,” he said. “I'll bring a claque.”

“I love you,” she said.

“You said that already,” he said, full of himself. “But if it makes you feel better, you can say it again.” He pulled her down with him, and when their mouths met, Norman felt invincible, and Gus felt less inclined to bring up the phone call. It was not as if she hadn't already suspected what Elaine had told her.

45

I
T
WAS
TRUE
that Gus was busy. All her energies were concentrated on one endeavor—the approaching debut. If she had not been involved with that—learning her program, keeping up with her regular lessons, providing her manager with material for brochures, programs, and posters, and so forth—she might have thought more fully and precisely about the turn her marriage had taken, but as it was, she felt she had no solid grounds for complaint. Married men did, after all, sleep with other women; her sexual experience had been limited, but it encompassed at least this much knowledge, since she had been a woman with whom a married man had slept. She worried about the lack of money but did not know of any other young couple who didn't. She regretted the loss of her independent social life, but that was what marriage was all about, wasn't it? She owed allegiance to Norman, and this meant that her role in society was to express that loyalty always, meeting other people, or writing to them, as Norman's wife. She had her programs printed up with
Augusta Gold
and felt a kind of creeping guilt, subtle and pervasive as kudzu in North Carolina, as if she had betrayed her parents' ambitions, but it was as Norman's wife that she was making her debut, and it was as her husband that he was paying for it.

Gus did not consider herself unhappy or even discontent. There was, she admitted to herself, an air of malaise that seemed to hang in the apartment, but perhaps that was because living in one room was growing tedious. Tweetie trilled his brilliant, golden notes, like little balloons filled with helium, and sent them floating over the room, and he swung on his swing until he was dizzy. Sometimes he practiced with Gus—she blew her notes and he blew his. It made Gus laugh. But Tom and Cyril were her only frequent visitors. She had no time to entertain, nor the money nor the room nor the equipment nor the skill with which to do it, and if she was disinclined, Norman was even more so: he was living in his research these days, and she had to respect that, knowing for herself the unbeatable exhilaration hard work of any kind can bring.

So nothing was really wrong, and yet it seemed to her that something was very wrong. When she tried to talk with Norman about it, he became impatient. If she suggested to him that she felt somehow spiritually constricted, he reacted as if she had attacked him critically, whereas she meant—or thought she meant; she had learned from him to doubt her own motives—merely that marriage had removed an element of surprise from the future; the future was correspondingly emptier and the present heavier. There was a feeling of overfullness about her married days, a sense of time as a thick syrup. While playing the flute helped her to lose track of time, when circumstance recalled her to the present she lamented the loss of the myriad possibilities which once had quickened each day unfolding from sunrise. She could hardly blame Norman for this; she believed that Norman must feel the same way, since it seemed to be the price you paid for the benefits of marriage, and it seemed sensible to her to assume also that an open admission and sharing of the problem would itself alleviate it, but every time she broached it, Norman grew irritable. He said she was suffering from personal grandiosity.

As nearly as she could follow him, what he had said was that she was now, with the debut looming before her, for the first time facing the real possibility of failure and on an even darker level the limitations of her ego's ability to feed the id, and not being able to handle this new awareness of power-lessness, an awareness which her parents had conspired to keep from her so that she was reaching it later than other women but which was rooted in her having been born a woman, she mistakenly attributed this novel, acidic taste of powerlessness in her mouth to marriage—and to him for marrying her. He spoke so eloquently, collapsing Flatbush and Freud in a dialect which she found endlessly fascinating, that she began to rely on his explications of her moods for entertainment: they lifted the weight of present time from her shoulders. In fact, she suspected Norman was satisfying precisely that personal grandiosity he accused her of. It was like watching herself on a wide screen. The only trouble was, she was relegated to the role of audience; the Gus in Norman's speeches was only an image, a flat projection thin as light. Sometimes it seemed to her that her entire inner life was being directed by Norman, and while she had all the freedom she needed to conduct her outer life how she wished, she had no
moral
freedom at all: every motive or intent was subject to Norman's evaluation. This
did
make her feel powerless, downright helpless, unsure of herself on even the most insignificant level.

She'd go to the neighborhood housewares store and stand for minutes at a counter, unable to choose between two dish-towels, as if empires might crash if she selected red when she should have taken blue, or blue when she should have chosen red. She ironed her hair, trying to achieve the swinging sixties look, but gave it up when it wasn't successful; her hair still waved and tumbled, wings over temples, with a completely un-cool sunniness. She found herself gazing at Norman with an even more obsessive longing than she had experienced before they were married, mesmerized by his hot, hurt eyes, entranced by his graceful attacking tones, as if he boxed with his voice the way other men box with their hands; she was in love with the way he held his cigarette, dropped his pants to tuck his shirt in his jeans, shaved, combed his Afro with a dog comb, wrote in the margins of his books (mispunctuating), in love with the forward plunge of his walk, the way his boots smelled when she took them off, his Burberry, his dominance. As she became dependent on him for her view of herself, she became increasingly grateful for his presence in her life, and anxious about losing it.

But the more dependent she became on him, the more distance he placed between them.

The dark eyes cooled. Now she saw less anger in them and more mockery, as if, observing her so much more dispassionately than she could observe herself, he saw that her limitations, relative to her personal grandiosity, were contemptible, ludicrous, and this left her no choice but to depend on him even more deeply, recognizing through him that her inadequacies were so unlovably blatant. She could not name any other reason for the hardening of the light in his eye.

Gus's natural cheerfulness colored her life golden, the way for some people gray gloom infects their every perception, slanting it; Gus's basic disposition slanted everything she felt or thought in the direction of optimism, but these daily frictions, downers, were there, intensifying. Still, she thought that to old friends (in any sense) she would appear pretty much the way she had always been, and when Richard Hacking, running into her one May morning at McGinnis and Marx, asked her what was wrong, she didn't know what he meant. “Nothing's wrong,” she said, genuinely surprised.

“You can't fool me, Gussie. It's been almost a year since we saw each other, but I remember you perfectly.”

Richard had been searching for a score by Dallapiccola, when he saw Gussie riffling through Rampal's latest transcriptions. That special, flutelike ambiance of hers was unmistakable even from the back, her hair like an aureole, like the focal point in an Old Master. He had not thought about Gussie since the night Birdie had mentioned her, but as soon as he had seen her here, head bent over the open drawer of sheet music, he felt that he missed her supremely.

“Richard,” she said, pleased and amused, “did anyone ever tell you that you are really dopey?”

“Elaine,” he said.

“Speaking of Elaine—”

“Do we have to?”

“No,” she said, biting her upper lip. “I guess not.”

“There. You bit your upper lip.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing. But you never used to do it when you were my girl. You only bit your nail.”

“Something is wrong,” she said.

“I knew it.” And he did—he could sense it in the hesitancy with which she framed her words. The fact that he had made a correct deduction elated him; he propelled her by the elbow to the side of the store, propping her against a filing cabinet as if she needed support. Women frequently did need support, in Richard's experience, and he thought Gussie looked a little green in the face. “You're not pregnant, are you?”

“No, Richard. Why do you keep asking me that?”

“It happens to women. Look at Elaine.”

“I thought you didn't want to talk about her. How are the kids?”

“Oh well, you know kids. They fight all the time. I try to keep everybody happy, but it's not easy.”

“I know,” Gus said, starting, to her own horror, to cry. She blinked and sniffled, turning her back to the other customers in the store. “Norman's not happy either.”

“Not happy?” Richard asked, wondering what that meant, exactly, in this context. Norman was not one of the people he had tried to make happy.

“It's like you said, Richard. It's not easy. I've tried. At least, I think I have. Norman says I have conflicting desires.”

“Doesn't everybody? Mine conflict all over the place.”

“That's all right for you, but your wife isn't having an affair.”

“No,” he said, “I don't think so. I couldn't be sure, though. She goes shopping all the time.” He thought of something that gave him pleasure: “For Elaine, the three B's are Bendel's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Bloomingdale's.”

“Norman is.”

“What?”

“Norman is having an affair.” There; it was out. “Richard,” she said, starting to cry again, “he hardly waited until we were married!” A man behind the counter looked over at her. She ducked her head. “I was right.”

“That's strange,” Richard said. “Norman thought you were having an affair with me.”

“You mean from before. But he doesn't even know who you are! He knows your name is Richard and that you're a conductor, but that's all.”

“I mean from not very long ago. He thought we were still, you know.”

“He didn't!”

“Don't worry, it's all straightened out now.”

“But you don't know Norman! Who told you this?”

“Birdie Mickle.”

“Birdie?”

“Someone I know.”

“Oh my God,” she said, “you mean Birdie is a name?”

“You think that's questionable, you should hear her stage name.”

“And she told you that Norman thought you and I were having an affair? I know he heard me talking with you on the phone once, but that was before we were married.”

“I told you, he knows better now.”

“Richard, this Birdie—she's the woman he's sleeping with.”

“Birdie?” he said. “Not likely.”

“Yes, she is,” Gus said. “I know because—”