Violin (10 page)

What place is this, what country, what land, where style and color could so audaciously come together? Where convention has been overrun by masters of all crafts. Even the chandeliers are Persian in design, great silver metal sheets with intricate patterns cut out of them.

Dream or real! I turn and strike the column with my fist. Goddamn it, if I’m not here, let me wake! And then comes the assurance. You are here, most definitely. You are here body and soul in this place, in the Babylonian room beneath the marble temple.

“Come, come.” Her hand is on my arm. Is it Mariana or the other lovely one—with the round face and large generous eyes—Lucrece? They commiserate, the two in a singing Latinish tongue.

Our darkest secret.

Things shift. I’m here all right, because this I’d never dream.

I don’t know how to dream it. I live for music, live for light, live for colors, yes, true, but what is this, this rank, soiled white-tiled passage, the water on the black floors, so filthy that they are not even black, and look, the engines, the boilers, the giant cylinders with screwed-on caps and seals, so ominous, covered in peeling paint, amid a din of noise that’s almost silence.

Why, this is like the engine room of an old ship, the kind you wandered aboard when you were a child and New Orleans was still a living harbor. But no, we are not on board a ship. The proportions of this corridor are too massive.

I want to go back. I don’t want to dream this part. But by now, I know it’s no dream. I’ve been brought here somehow! This is some punishment I deserve, some awful reckoning. I want to see the marble again, the pretty rich
fuchsia marble against the side panels of the stairs; I want to memorize the goddesses in the glass.

But we walk in this damp, rank, echoing passage. Why? Foul smells rise everywhere. Old metal lockers stand here, as if left behind by soldiers in some abandoned camp, battered, stuck with cutout magazine girls from years before, and once again we view this vast Hell of machines, churning, grinding, boiling with noise as we walk along the steel railing.

“But where are we going?”

My companions smile. They think it a funny secret, this, this place to which they are taking me.

Gates! Great iron gates lock us out, but lock us out of what? A dungeon?

“A secret passage,” confesses Mariana with undisguised delight. “It goes all the way under the street! A secret underground passage …”

I strain to see through the gates. We can’t go in. The gates are chained shut. But look, back there, where the water shimmers, look.

“But someone’s there, don’t you see? Good God, there’s a man lying there. He’s bleeding. He’s dying. His wrists are slashed and yet his hands are laid together. He’s dying?”

Where are Mariana and Lucrece? Flown up again into the domed ceilings of the marble temple where the Grecian dancers make their easy graceful circles in the murals?

I am unguarded.

The stench is unbearable. The man’s dead! Oh, God! I know he is. No, he moves, he lifts one of his hands, his wrist dripping blood. Good God, help him!

Mariana laughs the softest sweetest laugh and her hands stroke the air as she speaks.

“Don’t you see him dead, good God, he’s lying in filthy water …”

“…   secret passage that used to go from here to the palace and …”

“No, listen to me, ladies, he’s there. He needs us.” I grabbed the gates. “We have to get to that man there!” The gates that bar our way are like everything here—immense. They’re heavy iron, fitted from floor to ceiling, hung with chains and locks.

“Wake up! I will not have it!”

A torrent of music crashed to silence!

I sat up in my own bed.

“How dare you!”

6

I
SAT
up in the bed. He sat beside me, his legs so long that even on this high four-poster, he could sit in manly fashion, and he stared at me. The violin was wet. He was wet, his hair soaked.

“How dare you!” I said again. I reared back, bringing my knees up. I reached for the covers, but his weight held them.

“You come into my house, my room! You come into this room and tell me what I will and will not dream!”

He was too surprised to answer. His chest heaved. The water dripped from his hair. And the violin, for God’s sake, had he no concern at all for the violin?

“Quiet!” he said.

“Quiet!” I spat at him. “I’ll rouse the city! This is my bedroom! And who are you to tell me what to dream! You … what do you want?”

He was too astonished to find words. I could feel his groping, his consternation. He turned his head to the side. I had a chance to look at him close, to see his gaunt
cheeks and smooth skin, the huge knuckles of his hands and the delicate shaping of his long nose. He was by any standards—and even filthy and dripping wet—very handsome to look at. Twenty-five. That was the age I calculated, but no one could tell. A man of forty could look so young, if he took the right pills and ran the right miles and visited the right cosmetic surgeon.

He jerked his head round to glare at me!

“You think of trash like that as I sit here?” His voice was deep and strong, a young man’s voice. If speaking voices have names, then he was a forceful tenor.

“Trash like what?” I said. I looked him up and down. He was a big man, thin or not. I didn’t care.

“Get out of my house,” I said. “Get out of my room and out of my house now, until such time as I invite you here as my guest! Go! It puts me in a perfect fury that you dare come in here without my bidding! Into my very room!”

There came a banging on the door. It was Althea’s panic-stricken voice. “Miss Triana! I can’t open the door! Miss Triana!”

He looked at the door beyond me and then back at me and shook his head and murmured something, and then ran his right hand back through his slimy hair. When he opened his eyes fully they were large, and his mouth, now that was the prettiest part, but none of these details cooled my anger.

“I can’t open this door!” Althea screamed.

I called out to her. It was all right. Leave it be. I needed some time alone. It was the musician friend. It was all right. She should go now. I heard her protests, and Lacomb’s sage grumbles beneath them, but all of this on my insistence finally died away, and I was alone again.

The creaking boards had charted their retreat.

I turned to him. “So did you nail it shut?” I asked. I meant the door of course, which neither Lacomb nor Althea could force.

His face was still, and this stillness perhaps resembled whatever God and his mother might have wanted it to be: young; earnest; without vanity or slyness. His big dark eyes moved searchingly over me, as if he could discover in all the unimportant details of my appearance some crucial secret. He didn’t brood. He seemed an honest, questing being.

“You aren’t afraid of me,” he whispered.

“Of course I’m not. Why should I be?” But this was bravado. I did for one second feel fear; or no, it wasn’t fear. It was this. The adrenaline in my veins had slacked, and I felt an exultation!

I was looking at a ghost! A true ghost. I knew it. I knew it, and nothing would ever take the knowledge away. I knew it! In all my wanderings amongst the dead, I’d talked to memories and relics and fed their answers to them as if they were dolls I held propped in my hand.

But he was a ghost.

Then came a great coursing relief. “I always knew it,” I said. I smiled. There was no defining this conviction. I meant only that I knew at last there was more to life, and something we couldn’t chart, and couldn’t dismiss, and the fantasy of the Big Bang and the Godless Universe were no more substantial now than tales of Resurrection from the Dead or Miracles.

I smiled. “You thought I would be afraid of you? Is that what you wanted? You come to me when my husband is dying upstairs and you play your violin to frighten me? Are you the fool of all ghosts? How could such a thing frighten me? Why? You thrive off fear—”

I paused. It wasn’t only the vulnerable softness of his
face, the seductive quiver of his mouth; and the way his eyebrows met to frown but not to condemn or forbid; it was something else, something analytical and crucial that had occurred to me. This creature did thrive off something, and what was that something?

A rather fatal question, I realized. My heart lost a beat, which always frightens me. I put my hand to my throat as if my heart were there, which it always seems to be, doing these dances in my throat rather than in my breast.

“I’ll come into your room,” he whispered, “when I wish.” His voice gained strength, young and masculine and sure of itself. “There’s no way you can stop me. You think because you spend every waking hour doing the Danse Macabre with all your murdered crew—yes, yes, I know how you think you murdered them all—your Mother, your Father, Lily, Karl, such stupid monstrous egotism, that you were the cause of all these spectacular deaths, and three of them so ghastly and untimely—you think because of that, you can command a ghost? A true ghost, a ghost such as I am?”

“Bring my Father and Mother to me,” I said. “You’re a ghost. Bring them over to me. Bring them back over the divide. Bring me my little Lily. Bring them in ghostly form if you are a ghost and such a ghost! Make them ghosts, give Karl back to me without pain, just for a moment, one single solitary sacred moment. Give me Lily to hold in my arms.”

This wounded him. I was quietly amazed, but adamant.

“Sacred moment,” he said bitterly.

He shook his head, and looked away from me as if disappointed but mainly disrupted by the remark, but then again he seemed thoughtful and looked back. I found myself riveted by his hands, by the delicacy of his fingers and the hollow-cheeked yet flawless youth of his face.

“I can’t give you that,” he said thoughtfully, considerately. “You think God listens to me? You think my prayers count with saints and angels?”

“And you do pray, I’m to believe?” I asked. “What are you doing here! Why are you here? Why have you come! Never mind that you sit here, lazily and defiantly on the side of my bed. Why are you here at all—within my sight, within my hearing?”

“Because I wanted to come!” he said crossly, looking for a second rather painfully young and defiant. “And I go where I would go and do what I would do, as perhaps you noticed. I walked your hospital corridor until a gaggle of mortal idiots made such a riot there was nothing to do but retreat and wait for you! I could have come into your room, into your bed.”

“You want to be in my bed.”

“I am!” he declared. He leaned forward on his right hand. “Oh, don’t even consider it. I’m no incubus! You won’t conceive a monster by me. I want something far more critical to your life than the plaything between your legs. I want you!”

I was speechless.

Furious, yes, still furious, but speechless.

He sat back and looked down before him. His knees looked quite comfortable on the side of the high bed. His feet actually touched the floor. Mine never have. I am a short woman.

He let his greasy black hair fall down around him, in streaks across his white face, and when he looked at me again, it was a quizzical look.

“I thought this would be much easier,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“To drive you mad,” he said. He affected a cruel smile.
It was unconvincing. “I thought you mad already. I thought it would be … a matter of days at most.”

“Why the hell should you want to drive me mad?” I asked.

“I like doing such things,” he said. The sadness flashed over him, knitted his brows before he could brush it away. “I thought you were mad. You’re almost … what some people would call mad.”

“Yet painfully sane,” I said. “That’s the problem.”

I was now utterly enthralled. I couldn’t stop studying all the details of him, his old coat, the wet dust that had made mud on his shoulders, the way his big dreamy eyes sharpened and then mellowed with his thoughts, the way his lips were moistened with his tongue now and then as if he were a human being.

Suddenly a thought came to me. It came crashingly clear.

“The dream! The dream I had of the—”

“Don’t talk of it!” he said. He leaned forward, menacingly, so close now his wet hair fell down on the blanket right by my hands.