Violin (19 page)

He drew back as if he’d let me pick his pocket.

“Sit down,” I said. “I’ve sat beside many a deathbed, you know I have. That’s why you chose me. Maybe you’re ready to end your little ghostly wandering.”

“I am not dying, lady!” he declared. He pulled back the chair and sat opposite. “I grow stronger by the minute, by the hour, by the year.”

He relaxed in the chair. That put four feet of polished wood between us.

His back was to the blinkering window curtains, but the dull mist of the chandelier revealed his whole face, too young to have ever been an evil king in any play, and too full of hurt suddenly for me to enjoy it.

I wouldn’t glance away, however.

I watched. He revealed it.

“So what’s it about?” I asked.

He seemed to swallow as surely as a human being, and to chew on his lip again, and then he pressed his lips together for discipline.

“It’s a duet,” he said.

“I see.”

“I am to play and you are to listen, and you are to suffer and to lose your mind or do whatever my music drives you to do. Become a fool if you like, become mad like Ophelia in your favorite play. Become as cracked as Hamlet himself. I don’t care.”

“But it’s a duo.”

“Yes, yes, that’s your proper word, a duo, not a duet, for I alone make the music.”

“That’s not so. I feed it and you know. In the Chapel you feasted on me and everyone there, and everyone else there was not enough, and you turned again to me, and mercilessly you made images come that meant absolutely nothing to you, and you tore my heart with the abandon of some common ignorant criminal in your desire to make suffering. Suffering you know nothing about but need. That’s a duet as well as a duo. That’s music by two, such a thing.”

“My God, but you have speech, don’t you, even if you are a musical idiot, and always were, and like to swim in the deep waters of other people’s talent. Wallowing on the floor with your Little Genius, and the Maestro, and that Russian maniac, Tchaikovsky. And how you feed on death, yes, you do, you do, you know you do. You needed them all, all those deaths, you did.”

He was genuinely passionate, glaring at me, letting the deep eyes widen at the perfect moments to emphasize his words. He was or had been far younger than the Olivier as Richard III.

“Don’t be so stupid,” I said calmly. “Stupidity doesn’t become a being that doesn’t have mortality for an excuse. I learned to live with death and smell it and swallow it and clean up after its slow progress, but I never needed it. My life might have been a different thing. I didn’t—”

But hadn’t I hurt her? It seemed entirely true. My Mother had died at my hands. I couldn’t go out there now and stop her from leaving by the side gate that didn’t exist. I couldn’t say, “Look Father, we can’t do this, we must take her to the hospital, we must stay with her, you and Roz go with Trink and I’ll stay with Mother.…”
And for what would I have done that, so she could have gotten out of the hospital as she had once before, talking her way out, playing sane and clever, and charming, and come home to lie again in a stupor, to fall again on the heater and gash her head so that the blood spread in a pool on the floor?

My father spoke, “She’s set the bed on fire twice, we can’t leave her here.…” Was that then? “Katrinka’s sick, she’s going into surgery now, I need you!”

Me?

And what did I want? For her to die, my Mother—for it to end, her sickness, her suffering, her humiliation, her misery. She was crying.

“Look, I won’t!” I said. I shook myself all over. “It’s vile and cheap, what you do, you raid my mind for things you don’t need.”

“They’re always swimming in your ken,” he said. He smiled. He looked so brightly, frankly young, unlined and unworn. Struck down surely in youth.

He glowered. “That’s nonsense,” he said. “I died so long ago there is nothing in me that is young. I passed into this, this ‘thing,’ as you so described me in your own mind earlier this evening, when you couldn’t endure the grace or the elegance that you saw, I became this ‘thing,’ this abomination, this spirit, when your guardian, your magnificent symphonic master, was alive and was my teacher.”

“I don’t believe you. You speak of Beethoven. I hate you.”

“He was my teacher!” he raged. And he meant it.

“That’s what brought you to me, that I love him?”

“No, I don’t need you to love him, or mourn your husband or dig up your daughter. And I’ll drown out the Maestro, I’ll drown him out with my music before we’re
finished, until you can’t hear him, not by machine, not through memory, not through dreams.”

“Oh, how kind. Did you love him as much as you love me?”

“I simply made the point that I am not young. And you will not speak of him to me with any possessive superiority, and what I loved I will tell you not.”

“Bravo,” I said. “When did you cease to learn, when you threw off the flesh? Did your skull thicken even as it became a phantom skull?”

He sat back. He was amazed.

And so was I, a little, but then my own riffs of words often frightened me. That’s why it had been years and years since I drank.

I made such speeches often when I drank. I couldn’t even remember the taste of wine or beer, and craved neither. I craved consciousness, and even my lucid dreams, dreams in which I roamed like the dream of the marble palace, knowing that I dreamt, yet there, and dreaming still, the best of both worlds.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

I looked up. I was seeing other things, other places. I fixed right on his face. He looked as solid as anything in the room, though totally animated, lovable, enviable, fine.

“What do I want you to do?” I asked, mockingly. “And what does the question mean? What do I want?”

“You said you were lonely for me. Well, I am for you. But I
can
let you go. I can move on—”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so,” he said with a little flash of a smile that faded at once. He looked very serious and his eyes grew large as they relaxed. His eyebrows were perfect and heavily black, lifted above the ridge so that they made a beautiful and commanding expression.

“All right, you’ve come to me,” I said. “You come like something I would conjure. A violinist, the very thing I once wanted with all my heart to be, perhaps the only thing I ever tried with all my heart to be. You come. But you’re not my creation. You’re from somewhere else and you are hungry and needy and demanding. You’re furious that you can’t drive me mad, yet drawn to the very complexity that defeats you.”

“I admit it.”

“Well, what do you think is going to happen if you remain? You think I’m going to let you spellbind me and drag me back to every grave on which I’ve strewn flowers? You think I’ll let you fling my lost husband, Lev, in my face, oh, I know you’ve forced my thoughts to him, often in these last hours, as if he were as dead as all the others, my Lev—him and his wife, Chelsea, and their children. You think I will permit this? You must want a terrible struggle. You must prepare for defeat.”

“You could have kept Lev,” he said softly, thoughtfully. “You were too proud. You had to be the one to say, ‘Yes, go marry Chelsea.’ You couldn’t be betrayed. You had to be gracious, sacrificing.”

“Chelsea was carrying his child.”

“Chelsea wanted to kill it.”

“No, she didn’t, and neither did Lev. And our child had already died, and Lev wanted the child and wanted Chelsea and Chelsea wanted him.”

“And so you proudly gave away this man you’d loved since he was a boy, and felt the winner, the controller, the director of the play.”

“So what?” I said. “He’s gone. He’s happy. He has three sons, one very tall and blond and a pair of twins, and they’re in pictures all over this house. Did you see them in the bedroom?”

“I did. I saw them in the hallway, too, along with the old sepia photograph of your sainted Mother, when she was a beautiful girl of thirteen with her graduation flowers and her flat chest.”

“All right, so what do we do? I won’t have you do this to me.”

He turned to the side. He made a little humming sound. He drew up the violin from his lap, and laid it very carefully on its back on the table, and the bow beside it, and held the violin’s neck with his left hand. His eyes moved slowly up to Lev’s painting of the flowers on the wall above the couch, Lev’s gift, my husband, the poet and painter and the father of a tall blue-eyed son.

“No, I will not think about it,” I said.

I stared at the violin. A Stradivarius? Beethoven his teacher?

“Don’t mock me, Triana!” he said. “He was, and so was Mozart when I was very young, a little child, so that I don’t even remember him. But the Maestro was my teacher!”

His cheeks flamed. “You know nothing of me. You know nothing of the world from which I was torn. Your libraries are filled with studies of that world, its composers, its painters, the builders of its palaces, yes, even my father’s name, patron of the arts, generous patron of the Maestro and yes, the Maestro was my teacher.”

He broke off, and turned away.

“Ah, so I am to suffer and remember, but not you,” I said. “I see. You brag as men so often do.”

“No, you don’t see anything,” he said. “I only want you, you of all people, you who worship these names as if they were household saints—Mozart, Beethoven—I want you to know I knew them! And where they are now, I know not! I’m here, with you!”

“Yes, it is so,” I said, “as you’ve said and I’ve said, but what are we to do? You know you can catch me unawares a thousand times, but I won’t sink again into it. And when I dream, of the surf, of the sea, do I dream what you …”

“We won’t speak of that, your dream.”

“Oh, why, because it’s a doorway to your world?”

“I have no world. I’m lost in your world.”

“You had one, you have a history, you have a series of connected events behind you, trailing, don’t you, and that dream comes from you because I’ve never seen those places.”

He tapped his right fingers on the table, and tipped his head down, thinking.

“You remember,” he said maliciously, smiling up at me, though he was much taller, letting his brows do the work of being ominous while his voice was naive and his mouth sweet. “You remember, after your daughter’s death you had a friend named Susan.”

“I had many friends after my daughter’s death, good friends, and as a matter of fact there were four of them named Susan or Suzanne, or Sue. There was Susan Mandel, who had gone to school with me; there was Susie Ryder, who came to give me solace, and then became an ally to me. There was Suzanne Clark …”

“No, not any of those. It’s true, what you say, you’ve often known your women in clusters of names. Remember the Annes of your college years? The three of them, and how they joked about you being Triana, which meant three Annes. But I don’t want to talk about them.”

“Why would you? The memories are only pleasant.”

“Then where are they now, all these friends, especially the fourth … Susan?”

“You’re losing me.”

“No, madam, I have you locked to me.” He smiled broadly. “Just as tightly as when I play.”

“Sensational,” I said. “You know it’s an old word.”

“Of course.”

“And that’s what you are, producing all these hot sensations in me! But come now, why not talk straight, what Susan do you mean, I don’t even …”

“The one from the south, the one with the red hair, the one that knew Lily …”

“Oh, that was Lily’s friend, that Susan, she lived right upstairs, she had a daughter Lily’s age, she—”

“Why don’t you simply talk of it to me? Why should it drive you mad? Why don’t you tell me? She loved Lily, that woman. Lily loved to go up to her apartment and sit with her and draw pictures, and that woman, that woman wrote to you years after Lily’s death, when you were here in New Orleans; and that woman Susan who had so loved your daughter, Susan told you that your daughter had been reborn, reincarnated, you remember this?”

“Vaguely. It’s a pleasure to think of that rather than the time when they were both together, since one’s dead and I thought the letter was absurd. Are people reborn? Are you going to tell me such secrets?”

“Never, and furthermore I don’t know. My existence is one continuous strategy. I only know that I am here and here and here, and it never ends, and those I love, or come to hate, they die, but I remain. That’s what I know. And no soul has ever leapt up bright before me declaring to be the reincarnation of anyone who hurt me, hurt
me
—!”

“Go on, I’m listening.”

“You remember that Susan and what she wrote.”

“Yes, that Lily had been reborn in another country. Ah!” I stopped with shock. “That’s what you make me
see in the dream, a country to which I’ve never been where Lily is, that’s what you would have me believe?”

“No,” he said, “I only want to throw it in your face that you never went to look for her.”

“Oh, pranks again, you have a thousand. Who hurt you? Who fired these guns you heard when you died? Don’t you want to tell me?”

“The way Lev told you about his women, how all during Lily’s illness he had had one after another young girl to comfort him, the father of a dying daughter …”

“You are one filthy devil,” I said. “I won’t match words with you. For myself, I say, he did have his girls briefly and without love, and I drank. I drank. I grew heavy? So be it. But this is pointless, or is it what you want? There is no Judgment Day. I don’t believe in it. And with my faith in that, went any faith I had in Confession or Self-Defense. Go away. I’ll turn the music box back on. What will you do? Break it? I have others. I can sing Beethoven. I can sing the
Violin Concerto
from memory.”

“Don’t dare to do that.”

“Why, is there recorded music waiting for you in Hell?”

“How would I know, Triana?” he asked with sudden softness. “How would I know what they have in Hell? You see for yourself the terms of my perdition.”

“Seems a lot better than eternal fire, if you ask me. But I’ll play my guardian Beethoven anytime I please, and sing what I can remember even if I mangle pitch and key and melody—”

He leant forward and timidly; before I could gather my strength I dropped my gaze. I looked at the table and felt a huge misery in me, a misery rising so that I couldn’t
breathe. The violin. Isaac Stern in the auditorium, my childish certainty that I could attain such greatness—.