I Think I Love You (34 page)

“Well, I did music at the Royal Academy. Cello and a bit of piano.
Then I played professionally, which earned me a fortune. Sometimes as much as twenty-three pounds a night. Now I do music therapy. That’s my job.”

“Music therapy?”

“Yes, you know. Using music as an aid to mental and spiritual health.” She feels as if she is reading from a script.

“For troubled souls, you mean. Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,” Bill says.

“If you like. I see quite a few savage breasts. Damaged kids mostly.” Petra hates talking about her job. People always jump to the wrong conclusion. More cautiously, she tries again. “When they hear about a job like mine people always call it ‘putting something back.’ ”

“And it’s not?”

“I feel I get more out of the kids, and the music, than they … It fills me up …” She trails off.

Bill smiles. “So it’s true then.”

“What is?”

“I knew it.”

“What did you know?”

“You
have
been thinking about David Cassidy all this time.”

Petra looks at him and narrows her eyes. “Never stopped.”

Bill sits back. “Tell me everything,” he says.

Petra saves what she’s done, closes her file and then the laptop. It is dark in the room except for the fuzzy orange glow cast by the lamp in the road outside. Through the bay window, freckled with late-summer dust, she can look into the house opposite, an exact copy of her own solid Victorian semi, and watch the shadow play of another family. Observing how other people’s families work has always fascinated her. She reaches for the switch on the desk lamp, but changes her mind. Hello darkness, my old friend.

When she was making music with Ashley she felt she knew exactly what she was doing, which made a change from the rest of her life, but now she finds she can’t write it up. A case history requires her to impose the technical language of her profession—cognitive deficits, transference reactions—on the living child who came into her room one freezing February afternoon. Ashley refused to speak, yet was simultaneously shouting her distress. Undersized for her age, the girl wore a crop top with a Playboy bunny motif and dirty white terry-cloth shorts; the puppy fat wobbling between the two garments was mottled blue with cold. It was toward the middle of their fourth session together, with Petra guiding the child’s hands over the piano keys, that Ashley took out her chewing gum and sang “Getting to Know You.”

The crystal-clear diction of Deborah Kerr’s governess in
The King and I
had traveled down forty years or more, via Ashley’s nana on a pub piano, to a child-woman who probably had a vocabulary of no more than two thousand words. Petra made a point of not breaking down during sessions. The child’s emotions were always more important than any she might have, but that day with Ashley it was a struggle to compose herself sufficiently to be able to echo and answer the child’s song with the bit about getting to like her, getting to hope that Ashley liked her back.

And then the final verse together, the girl’s and the woman’s voices twined together in a silvery helix of sound.

Music can reach the parts that language can’t, it can perforate the armor that a wounded self builds very early to protect itself; that is why
the therapy works, if it does work, and maybe the fact that the process is mysterious and beyond language is what makes it so hard to write down.

Bill Finn could write it down, Petra is suddenly sure of it. At the makeover, Bill asked about her job, questions that suggested he might even be interested in the answers, which he couldn’t possibly be. Petra knows that metropolitan type. Actually, she doesn’t know those types, not personally. But she’s read about them. Always flitting between the latest book launch and opening night, everything is marvelous or incredible or terribly interesting, if only as a ploy to make yourself interesting to the other person. Maybe that was unfair. Maybe Bill was more than the sum of his glossy magazines. They were sitting in the cafeteria at Nightingale Publishing when Petra found herself telling him about Ashley’s laugh, the most joyful she had ever heard, and thus the most crushing because it came from a place with no previous record of joy. Bill wanted to know exactly how the music therapy got through to a kid like Ashley.

“It’s not an exact science,” she said. “There are a lot of theories about how it works.”

“And what’s yours?”

“They think that early man may have communicated by song, don’t they? Sort of grunts with tunes. So maybe we were like birds and we lost it. Except we didn’t really lose it.”

“Birdsong is pretty strange stuff,” Bill said. “You think it’s all territory and sex. But it turns out they’re doing it because they love it.”

“You mean the birds.”

“This one guy, biologist or something, takes his clarinet to play in a forest. Flocks of thrushes around. At the end of it all, his only conclusion is they’re making thousands more sounds than they actually need to. Just for the joy of it, improvising as they go along. Like Charlie Parker.”

“You mean Bird.”

“Yeah,” Bill said. He paused. “I thought you were a classical girl, not a jazz fiend.”

“Just a general fiend,” she said. “If you get brain damage in your right temporal lobe, which controls higher auditory processing of sound—speech on the left, music on the right—”

“You’re losing me,” he said.

“No, you’re okay. Right temporal lobe, just behind your ear,
here
. I’m guessing yours is pretty well developed. If it’s injured, patients exhibit a complete failure to recognize recently heard songs, although they can still respond emotionally to them. It’s called amusia.”

“Amusia. Great title for a book. I love it.” When Bill smiled he looked like a different person.

“So what if humans sang before they spoke?” she said. “I mean, music may be profoundly instinctive to us, maybe it’s our truest form of communication.”

“You haven’t heard me in the shower at six in the morning.”

“Like I said, early man.”

“Ouch,” Bill said. “Where did you come from?”

As Petra thinks this over, she is returned to her living room by a loud rhythmic pounding coming through the ceiling above. Molly. Still awake and on her keyboard. At 10:25. On a school night, for God’s sake. She pinches the bridge of her nose, the part that’s supposed to take away headaches, or so the magazines say. All their worst fights these days are about bed. Not going to bed early enough, not being able to go to sleep, then not being able to get up the next day. Bedtime, her daughter announced loftily, is babyish. Petra thinks back to Molly in her crib, curled tight as a cashew nut, her tiny fists clenching and unclenching. That had felt like the hard bit; the night feeds, the bedside clock’s beady green digits telling you it was 3:15; back then, it always seemed to be 3:15. Sleep deprivation made you light-headed at the same time as your feet felt like they were shod in lead. During a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Petra had nodded off for a few seconds, which would have been just about okay, except she was one of the performers. Petra always reckoned she could play the cello in her sleep, though only motherhood had given her the opportunity to test that hypothesis.

Then the baby years passed, like an April shower, and the hard bit turned out to be the easy part, only you didn’t find out until it was over. Motherhood was like being in a play and only ever having the lines for the scene you were in at any given moment. By the time you figured out how to play the part, the curtain dropped and it was on to the next act. Some days, she felt so nostalgic for that little baby.

“Being a parent doesn’t get any easier,” Carrie said. “It just gets hard in a different way.”

Petra was the family disciplinarian, a role that Marcus had been quite happy to delegate. No, happy to abandon, she thinks, and then checks herself. She can’t stand being bitter, the taste of it like cheap mouthwash. Walking away from the solicitor’s office after discussing an amicable settlement—Mr. Amos used to be
their
solicitor, but suddenly he was Marcus’s—she retched up the bile that had been accumulating in the back of her throat into a green wheelie bin.

I have become the kind of woman who spits in the street and doesn’t carry a handkerchief, she thinks. If her mother were alive, it would have killed her.

Now that Marcus is gone, Petra must somehow be good cop and bad cop for Molly. Cagney
and
Lacey.

Which was which? She never did get that straight, though the blonde was definitely harder, the brunette rounder and more maternal. You didn’t see enough portraits of women who loved and depended on each other like those two; in real life, it was female friendship that kept most women going, in her experience, especially once the rivalry over men had fallen away.

Every weekday at ten to seven, Petra goes into Molly’s room and stumbles across the carpet. With its scattered heaps of debris, the room is like a beach after the tide has gone out. She switches on the radio—some jackass DJ irritating enough to raise the dead; then, fifteen minutes later, she yells up the stairs, by which time her daughter is usually in the shower. This morning, though, she had literally had to shake her awake. Molly, her features snared in a mess of golden hair, surfaced like a marsupial from some deep burrow. This was not sleep, it was hibernation. Petra had gotten angry. “Lost it,” in Molly’s tearful accusation.

“And if you’re going to wear your hair long, young lady, you’re going to have to learn to brush it every night or we’re cutting it off.”

Young lady?
Where did that come from? How prim and predictable are the words that travel down the maternal line on the reproachful gene. Did Darwin guess that survival of the fittest involves a hairbrush? No, but mothers do. Greta used to grab Petra by the hair and say, “Ach, it’s szo greasy.” So many of her mother’s sentences began with that guttural
ach
of disgust. She thought it was because Greta was disappointed in her daughter’s looks. Now that she has a girl of her own, Petra sees with frightening clarity how the world will judge Molly, and it won’t be for her dry humor or her wonderfully mobile hands, which straddle complex chords like bridges made of flesh and bone.

She loves her daughter passionately, but she is highly critical of her. With a son it might have been different; she always wonders about that. Instead she has a teenage girl, a creature with a whim of iron. Will of iron. No, whim of iron is better. The way Molly juts that heart-shaped chin of hers, determined to have the last word in any argument, most confident when she is most ignorant. And it stings when she accuses Petra of not understanding her. Compared to her own mother, Petra feels like a limbo dancer of flexible compassion and comprehension. Greta could have taught those ayatollahs a thing or two about rigid intolerance. At least Molly has not inherited the relish for gloom and disaster. Petra was brought up to believe that anything invented after 1959 would give you cancer.