Good Things I Wish You
Read Good Things I Wish You Online
Authors: Manette Ansay
Good Things I Wish You
A Novel
A. Manette Ansay
This book is for W. R.,
to whom I wish all good things.
Contents
Part I:
The Ax Murderer
Part II:
Virtue
Part III:
Frozen
Part IV:
Blue Day
Part V:
Translation
Part VI:
Good Things I Wish You
Other Books by A. Manette Ansay
This is a work of fiction. Everything in it—from historical sequences to contemporary details—serves, first and foremost, the fictional story I’ve set out to tell. Those interested in strict historical accuracy should consult the books my characters discuss, debate, and refer to throughout
Good Things I Wish You
. Additional information about the life of Clara Schumann can be found at www.amanetteansay.com.
I wish I could write you as tenderly as I love you and tell you all the good things that I wish you. You are so infinitely dear to me, dearer than I can say…If things go on much longer as they are at present, I shall have some time to put you under glass or have you set in gold…Your letters are like kisses.
—Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann, 1856
*
I wish I could find longing as sweet as you do. It only gives me pain and fills my heart with unspeakable woe.
—Clara Schumann, in a letter to Brahms, 1858
*
The Ax Murderer
The Wine Cellar, 2006
1.
M
Y FIRST DATE IN
nineteen years was nearly an hour late. The hostess had brought me two messages, each one saying he was only minutes away, but he was coming from Lauderdale, and even without traffic, that’s a long haul to West Palm, where we were meeting in an open-air restaurant. Small tables. Wicker chairs. Below, in a courtyard planted with coconut palms, colorful jets of water rose and fell like expectations. I took another roll from the bread basket, ordered a glass of wine. The dating service, one which demanded lots of money to keep everything off the Internet, had assured me that Hart was “handsome, honest, and caring.” Once a week, twice a week, a young woman named America called with yet another recommendation, and all of her recommendations were men who were “handsome, honest, and caring.”
“He’s an entrepreneur,” America had added this time.
“That can mean anything.”
“He’s forty-seven years old. He has a ten-year-old daughter.”
I could tell she was reading from her screen. In the back
ground, other girls just like her—fresh voiced, eager—encouraged other clients.
“He lives too far away,” I’d said. “And what kind of name is Heart?”
“H-a-r-t. He enjoys classical music and good conversation. I’m looking at his picture, and he’s cute.”
“But we’d never see each other.”
“If you two kids hit it off,” America said brightly, “you’ll figure something out.”
I was, at the time, forty-two years old; I’d signed up for this service several months earlier, but I’d yet to agree to a date. Too busy, I’d kept telling myself, and this wasn’t exactly a lie. There was my job at the university. There was the novel I was supposed to be writing about the nineteenth-century German pianist and composer Clara Schumann and her forty-odd-year relationship with Johannes Brahms. There was my four-year-old daughter, Heidi. There was also the fact that, since my divorce had been finalized, I’d been finding it difficult to make decisions of any kind. Should I put the house on the market? Should I buy green apples or red? Should I find an outside piano teacher for Heidi or keep teaching her myself? The previous week, with the help of my new friend Ellen, I’d finally boxed up the last of Cal’s things, odds and ends he’d been promising to collect for months: a framed map of Massachusetts, a shoe box full of pens, an assortment of holiday gifts—candles, boxed jellies, joking plaques—from various junior high students. A swan-necked lamp that had belonged to his mother. Period boots and belts
and jackets. Faded T-shirts printed with the dates and locations of Revolutionary War reenactments. Ellen pulled a tomahawk from a dark leather pouch; she wore a man’s powdered wig on her head.
“What do you miss about this guy?” she’d said.
“Everything,” I’d said. “And nothing.”
Now, as the waitress arrived with my wine, I considered what to do with the boxes. Should I mail them to Calvin? Leave them at the graffiti-spattered Goodwill trailer next to the I-95 overpass? Wait until he picked up Heidi for the weekend, insist he take everything along? Each of these options seemed fraught with consequences, all of them unpleasant and inevitable. The box would be lost. I’d be carjacked at gunpoint. Calvin would be angry. The rational part of my brain, the part I recognized, reminded me that I was being ridiculous. But the other part—its nervous newborn twin—was persistent, hungry for disaster. One wrong step, one bad choice, and the worst would happen, the earth would swallow me whole, and if that happened,
when
that happened, what would become of Heidi? Each night, I got up to check windows and doors, making certain that everything was locked. I stayed off the phone during storms. I’d stopped taking vitamins, worried about choking, about Heidi finding me dead on the floor.
By the time Hart showed up, I’d finished my wine as well as the contents of the bread basket. My first impression was that he was utterly exhausted: ashen-faced, pale-lipped, a quietly aging man. I was looking tired myself these days, the bags beneath my eyes worse than usual.
Already you have something in common,
said the thin, ironic voice inside my head, and I wished I had left ten minutes earlier, the way I’d wanted to. I should have been at home, tucking Heidi into bed. I should have been reading student manuscripts. I should have been going through the hundreds of pages I’d already written on Clara and Brahms, all of them perfectly fine pages of writing, and not a single one of them right. Not a single one offering fresh insight into the questions others had already asked.
*
What was the true nature of their relationship?
Why did the two never marry, even after Robert Schumann’s death?
“This will never work,” Hart announced, voicing my own thoughts as he sank into a chair. “It is over an hour to get here.”
He spoke with a light German accent. Maybe Czech. Too bad I’d never know which. “I told them the distance was a problem,” I said, reaching for my purse.
He glanced at me without interest. “You are leaving?”
“My sitter goes home at eight.”
“It is seven.”
“The traffic.”
“Ah.”
German, I decided. My parents spoke it as children. Of course they stopped when they started school, and then there was the war. Growing up, I’d begged for German words as if they were pieces of hard candy, delicious but unwholesome somehow, certain to rot my teeth.
“I could eat something quick,” I said, wavering. Perhaps he might be someone who could help me with translations. “Maybe some soup.”
“You like soup?”
“Why not soup?”
He touched the empty bread basket. “You seem to like bread, too.”
The waiter nearly tripped in his eagerness to get to our table, and I took a second look at my date: expensive watch, tailored shirt, full head of curly dark hair. This was a man who would always be led to the table marked
Reserved
. I made up my mind to dislike him. The waiter stood ready with his pen.
“I must have more than just soup,” Hart said. “I am coming straight from work.”
“I also came from work.” It seemed important to establish that I, too, had been put out.
“From your university,” he said. “America is telling me this. But she wouldn’t tell me where. In case I am the ax murderer, I suppose.”
I glanced at him sharply. The waiter bobbed and smiled.
“The
se
-ri-al kill-er.” Hart landed on all the syllables, striking each one like a clear, hard note.
“We have fresh calamari,” the waiter said.
“Of course you do,” Hart said.
He ordered soup for both of us, a plate of calamari for himself. Now we were committed. We sat for a moment in silence.
“I
could
be the serial killer,” he said, still musing.
“
I
am the serial killer,” I said.
For the first time, he looked at me directly. His mouth was small, precise as a comma, even when he smiled.
“That’s right,” he said happily. “You never can tell. This is such a fucked-up country.”
2.
T
HIS SUDDEN RUSH OF
déjà vu: it had happened to me twice before. Isn’t it caused by some chemical glitch, a misfiring deep in the brain? It’s like becoming aware of gravity, just for a moment, and without warning. It’s the same inevitability one feels at the start of a steep, accidental fall.
3.
T
HE FIRST TIME,
I was still in high school. I’d been accepted into the studio of a well-known piano teacher who’d had some success as a concert pianist before rheumatoid arthritis ended his career. This teacher was in his early forties, a soft-spoken man whose handsome face had been damaged by illness and disappointment. Initially, our lessons had been held at his university, but one day he suggested that I come directly to his home. It was closer to where I lived, and besides, he’d have more time for me there.