Good Things I Wish You (12 page)

It is not impossible that all three of them might imagine things continuing exactly this way:

Clara’s heart beating faster at the touch of Brahms’s knee;

Brahms choked to shyness as her hand guides his own over secret fingerings;

Robert stroking those fresh, smooth cheeks, leaning forward to offer his kiss. And Brahms receiving that kiss from them both, Clara and Robert, Clara again. Returning it. Receiving it. Offering it again.

Morning walks together and lunchtime with the children. Afternoons spent at the piano, scratching at scores, debating each note with a passion that eclipses the page. Robert and Brahms composing variations on Clara’s original themes, dueling at the piano, taking delight in Clara’s delight as she turns effortlessly, gracefully, score to score. Hours of conversation in which everything and anything is talked about—

Except this thrum of longing that engulfs them. This warm sense of expectancy that sharpens every look, every word, into its own exquisite point. It cannot be identified because it is everywhere. They are breathing it. Like air.

Erotically, these types are torn in two directions…Where they love, they do not desire, and where they desire, they cannot love. The only defense against this dilemma consists in despising the object of one’s sexual hunger while, conversely, adulating to excess the soul mate…

—Sigmund Freud
^*

25.

B
Y SIX IN THE
evening, Miriam and Chuck had closed up shop. No way would Hart be taking me up in the Blanik today. Nor was I going to be home by eight—though, somehow, this didn’t seem to matter any more. Cumulus clouds compressed the horizon; at least the air had cooled enough to make it possible to sit outside. I packed up my computer and returned it to Hart’s car, exchanged it for the short-story anthology, which I took to the edge of the pool. The Japanese students had retired to the dormitory; now and again, voices drifted through the door, which was propped open by a stone. For a moment, dangling my feet in the water, I thought I was hearing the piano.

Out of tune. Rasping. The G gone sour.

Sometimes it was hard to distinguish the world I’d reentered from the one I’d left behind.

I’d planned to look at a new Danticat story, but I found myself rereading, instead, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates for what must have been the fiftieth time, seduced by the quiet foreboding that
intensifies with each appearance of the stranger, Arnold Friend, who ultimately talks young Connie from the safety of her home, from behind her locked screen door, and into the car that will take her away.
The place where you came from ain’t there any more, and where you had in mind to go is canceled out.

Then I heard it again: the opening bars of Schumann’s Arabeske
.
A pause, followed by another few bars.

Midori was practicing.

Puffs of wind rustled my pages; the weather vane shuddered, clocked around. Something was building: a system, a storm. I realized the sunlight was gone. At exactly the moment I started to worry, a hand rested cool against the back of my neck.

“I spent most of my adolescence in a swimming pool,” Hart said. “Lap after lap in that cold, cold water.”

“Do you still like to swim?”

He laughed. “I cannot bear the thought of it. Another lost passion, I suppose. Do you still play the piano?”

“I’m teaching my daughter.”

“Ah.” He settled himself beside me, unlaced his shoes. “But I have read this story,” he said, peering at the page. “Lit-tle Connie meets the devil.”

“You interpret Arnold Friend as the devil?”

“Don’t you?”

“Yes and no.”

He slipped his feet into the water beside mine. “I am thinking you are someone who fears commitment.”

“And I’m thinking you are someone who believes in the devil, which is surprising, considering you don’t believe in God.”

“Arnold Friend is not
the
devil, he’s
her
devil,” Hart answered seamlessly. “Lit-tle Connie doesn’t have a chance.”

“Do you have a devil?”

“Everyone has a devil.”

“Not me.”

“You are certain of this?”

“Some people attract devils. Some don’t.”

“He is out there. Trust me.”

I found myself thinking about the men—boys?—I dated during the years before my marriage. I thought about L—, his sincere and uncomplicated admiration for me. I thought about Cal, but it seemed impossible, now, that we could ever have aroused in each other anything beyond middle-aged weariness.

“No one would make me open that door.”

“Someday, someone will coax you out.”

“Fat chance.”

His foot grazed mine in the water. “Me, perhaps.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

He looked amused. “I thought not.”

Another burst of Arabeske spilled over us both like a shower of gold.

“How many times have you been married?” I asked.

“Is it already time for true confessions?” From somewhere deep in a cloud, there was thunder. “I see that it is.”

“Unless,” I said, “you have something to hide.”

He smiled. “Only my own stupidity. My first and third marriages were with Lauren. She was seventeen when we met. I was thirty-three.” His mouth twisted ruefully. “An excellent age to meet your devil.”

“Thirty-three or seventeen?”

“You are funny.”

“How long were you together?”

“It is off and on. We married other people in between. The second time we divorced, you could say I did not take this so well. Friederike was ten, and I was the one who supervised her practicing, as you supervise your own daughter, yes? So you understand what this means. The time, the discipline. The commitment.”

More thunder, sustained this time, followed by a sturdy gust of wind.

“The court had no such understanding. The child should be with her mother.
Basta.
Only now the child is old enough to have her own say. So, once again, as you have seen, the topic is under discussion.” He tapped his shirt pocket, where he kept his phone, then looked up at the sky. “I’m afraid there will be no flying for you today.”

“Too bad.”

“You are truly disappointed?”

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved. But I’m starting to wonder if there’s a connection between how nervous I am about—well, just about everything—and the way I’ve been stuck on my book.”

“Maybe it would help you to fly, then?”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

He glanced at me, surprised. Pleased. “I have always found it useful to try new things,” he said, and then: “Help me with the glider, do you mind?”

A Chopin Polonaise accompanied us as we walked past the pilots’ quarters. “Can I ask you another question?” I said.

“Sure, sure. The answers are free.”

“Are you really a famous eye surgeon?”

This made him laugh. “Who is saying that?”

“Did you invent some kind of prosthetic eye that senses light?”

“My God, who do I look like? How do you say—the miracle man?”

“The miracle worker?”

“There is no such thing, Jeanette, as a prosthetic eye. Not the way you mean. None of this involves the eye, anyway. It is all about the brain.”

But another gust of wind blew his words away, and by the time we’d rolled the ASW into the hangar, a dark wall of rain was sweeping toward us across the open field. Directly overhead, the sky lit up. The thunder was continuous, a hammering deep in my chest. Hart closed the hangar door, and when he turned to rest his fingers very lightly on my shoulders, I wondered if the regret in his face was a reflection of something he’d seen in my own. Twelve years of marriage. Richer or poorer.

The rough kiss of his chin. The spark of his tongue.

I’d believed we were forever, Cal and me. I’d believed only death could part us.

We kissed until the rain overtook us, until his hand found the small of my back, guiding me toward the trailer, toward the warm yellow light that shone from the propped-open door. The ax murderer. The entrepreneur. There was no need to hurry. We were already wet to the skin. We were already moving toward where this would take us, where this was going to end.

But for now, we’d eat dinner with the Japanese students. We’d listen to Midori perform Arabeske, and I’d play selections from Schumann’s
Kinderszenen
, easy pieces that have lived in my fingers for over twenty years. We’d spend a restless night in the dormitory—the next night, too—Hart on the couch in the main room, me in a twin-size cot beside Midori. And it was on this second morning, the day of my first flight, that the sentence woke me out of my sleep, warm and glowing as the beam of sunshine splashed across my face.

That first flight was nothing like what I’d imaged. A few shuddering seconds on the tow, then the lovely, lifting feeling that means you’re in the air. The sound of the wind pouring in through the vents. The creak of the rudder, like a seagoing ship. Hart released the towline at three thousand feet, and I found I was not afraid. Suspended by physics, surrounded by space, I looked out at the world as if for the first time: bitter-burned fields and gummy-eyed sinkholes, the single gray road that had brought me here. Everything familiar. Everything changed.

“Okay back there?” Hart called.

“Okay.”

“You sure?”

But I was too happy to speak.

I made it home by seven that night, just minutes ahead of Cal. After that, I was busy with Heidi, who ran through the house touching everything—toys, furniture, even my face—as if to reassure herself that nothing had been lost during the time she’d been away. It took several hours before she was finally able to sleep. Before I could hurry down the hall toward my study, pinning back my hair. Eager as a woman going to her lover. That single sentence singing, still, its song inside my head.

What I wrote:
My first date in nineteen years is nearly an hour late.

26.

W
HAT MAKES YOU PASSIONATE
about flying?

Character come before person is born.

What if something happened so you couldn’t fly anymore?

I am careful. Nothing happens. You will see!

What do you think makes some people want to do what you’re doing and other people, like me, afraid to do it?

Do not eat uncook vegetable. Begin each day with hot boiled egg.

Part V

Translation

Düsseldorf, 2006

27.

I
T’S THE FIRST TRIP
they’ve taken together, aside from short jaunts to visit friends. Over five days’ time, they’ll hike over one hundred miles along the Rhine. They’ll climb the Lorelei. They’ll picnic in the shadow of crumbling castles, explore the little villages scattered through the hills. Sweet stone churches. Half-timbered houses. Johannes talking and talking and talking, bubbling on like a fresh, clear stream. Clara listens to his voice the way she listens to music, breathing hard from the climb.

Passing the shared canteen.

Something about the distant clearings of steeply sloped vineyards and gable-chinned roofs, woods and more woods of linden and oak, makes her feel as if anything is possible. It’s been sixteen months since Robert entered the asylum, but she doesn’t think of this. She doesn’t think of the children. She doesn’t consider what people might say. For once, she can taste the dark scent of the Rhine, far below, without weighing the question of whether or not it might have been better had Robert—

Now and again they stumble upon an ancient orchard, an overrun garden, a half-concealed well greenly tangled
with ivy. Once she turns to find he has vanished. But no, he’s scrambled up into a mulberry tree. Laughing, he pelts her with fruit. They walk on. Touch each other swiftly, in places that do not matter. Here he is combing bits of fern from her hair; there she straightens his rucksack, kicks pebbles at his shoes. When they stop to rest, she eats the crushed mulberries he offers, still warm, from his pockets.