Appassionata (13 page)

At 2 a.m., she turns on the bedside light, and dials Peter’s number in New York. She has to turn somewhere, talk to someone.

“Did you watch the news tonight?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says. “Sort of. I was cooking dinner.”

“Did they say anything about what happened in Rotterdam?”

“Ah yes,” he affirms after a pause. “There was something. I’m afraid I didn’t really catch it.”

“Well, I was there. Or here. I’m in Rotterdam. It happened right near me.”

“But
what
happened, exactly?” he asks, his voice instantly on the alert. “And how near were you?”

“No, I don’t mean I was in any danger,” she says, realizing that, somehow, she is making more of the incident than she has the right to. That she might be accused of histrionics. “I just saw it … after.”

He listens to her description of what she saw in silence. “Well, that certainly sounds horrible,” he says, clearing his throat. “I’m sorry you had to see it.”

She’s suddenly furious at him. He is not taking this seriously enough. His tone does not match the bloody awfulness of what she witnessed. But then, she tells him, a note of entirely unjustifiable accusation entering her voice, he wasn’t
there
. He didn’t see it. He was probably making himself something nice to eat, she adds in her mind, meanly. Peter likes his food well prepared, even if he’s cooking just for himself.

“You’re right, I wasn’t,” he responds curtly. “That’s why I’m not offering any commentary. I have no idea what happened there.”

She stops herself. “I suppose neither do I, really,” she says, feeling a sudden deflation, a drop of moral pressure. What does she actually
feel
about the incident, what sort of emotion is she striving for, except some assurance that she’s not callous, that her compassion is adequate, that she’s a good person?

“It’s just so … intolerable,” she says.

“What’s intolerable?” he asks. “What happened, or the fact that you saw it? Because awful things happen all the time.”

Anger jolts her again, like electricity. “You just don’t care,” she says coldly. “Do you?”

“What am I supposed to care about?” he asks, in his most logical tone. “I wasn’t there, as you point out. I don’t know who was involved. Or who was hurt. OK, I care notionally. I am appalled. Notionally appalled.”

“Honestly, you and your legalistic distinctions,” she brings out, just avoiding contempt. “This is not some case you’re trying.”

“Oh, don’t give me that,” he shoots back. “You sound upset. You called me. I want to know what it is that has upset you. But I am not upset myself.” Some sort of steel has entered his voice, and she’s almost glad of it.

“Do you mean I shouldn’t have called you?” she asks, her voice dipping into a different, more private register. An aside, from the stage of their conversation, to the more intimate listener.

“No,” he says, after a pause. “That’s not what I mean. I’m … glad you called.” She can hear him hesitate, before he says the next thing. “You know, I wonder if this has anything to do with Kolya …”

She’s tigerish in her response. “It has nothing to do with him. Nothing.”

“OK,” he says soothingly. “I just wondered … though what you’ve seen is horrible enough. I’ve seen accidents. I know these things can … get to you.”

“But this wasn’t an accident,” she says, with a sort of resignation. The moral measure, he’s not giving this the right moral measure.

There’s a pause in which she hears him take a sip of coffee. “It was an accident that you were there,” he then says.

“Maybe that’s what’s bothering me about it,” she picks up. She’s trying to make sense of it and failing. “The randomness of it. Of my being there. The way that woman … whoever it was
under the plastic … just happened to be there …”

He leaps in energetically. “It’s the way we live now, kiddo.” He knows she’s catching the reference to Trollope, and the fact that it was one of the few books they both loved. One of the few novelists for adults, Peter had said approvingly.

“Well, if that’s the way we live now, then Trollope is no guide,” she retorts.

“There aren’t any guides,” he comes back tersely. “Don’t you know that?”

She pauses. “I don’t know why this got to me so much,” she begins again, with a more vulnerable urgency. “Maybe because I had to get through the concert right afterward … I just don’t know what to make of it.”

“I don’t see why you have to make anything of it,” he says. “You can’t be implicated in every goddamn thing that happens to happen in every place on your itinerary.”

“So you mean, just forget it,” she says. “Forget the whole thing.”

“Just stop being so … permeable,” he says, more intimately. There are layers of allusion behind that word too. Her porousness, her St. Teresa tendencies. “Where’re you going to be tomorrow, anyway?”

“Amsterdam,” she says. “For two whole days.”

“Bound to be an improvement over Rotterdam,” he says. “Given everything. Got any plans while you’re there?”

“No,” she says, suddenly feeling a flush coming up her chest to her neck. “Not really.” Now she knows the nagging sensation at the back of the conversation: embarrassment, small hot embarrassment for her petty deception, her failure to mention Anzor.

“Ah well, then maybe you’ll even get to be bored.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” she says, her voice fading into smallness.

“Take care of yourself.”

“Yes,” she says. “Thanks. I mean … for the concern.”

“I know what you mean,” he says drily.

There’s a silence, not completely comfortable.

“Bloody hell,” he then says, “I just realized what time it is in goddamn Rotterdam. Go and get some sleep, will you?”

“Yes,” she says. “I will.”

He clears his throat, hesitating. “And call me again if you need to,” he says. “Remember I don’t have your schedule … this time.”

“Thanks,” she says, feeling a sweaty flush come up to her face again. “I hope everything is all right in New York?”

“Yeah, fine.”

“Goodnight, then.”

“Goodnight.”

She paces round the room after they hang up. She mustn’t call him again, not as long as she can’t tell him … isn’t willing to tell him … She hasn’t done anything to violate their current contract; no. He’d be free too … and yet … she mustn’t call him. She thinks of him sitting down to his evening reading, wonders if he suspects. But no, he doesn’t. For someone who studies law, Peter is oddly unsuspicious. Or rather, she thinks, the world of deception doesn’t interest him. That’s what she has admired about him, his particular kind of rationality, which is a form of decency. And this is what she found irritating, she thinks, sotto voce. Peter has no patience for hidden drama, for wiliness, for excess sentiment. It is what is stated, written down, signed and sealed that, for him, counts. What people intend, or are willing to say they intend. He thinks there’s no point in bothering about anything else. If people want to lie, or have hidden motives … that’s their own business. It’s not interesting. His respect for the law is profound. His love of law, really. Outside of that is darkness, the meaningless darkness of the lawless chaotic world.

*

But she thinks about Kolya before she falls asleep, or rather, he returns to her, from some place where he is always present, just below the surface, within her inner cells. Now it is his childish, still perfect face she sees, as their mother shooed them out of the house, pushed them out against Kolya’s pleading eyes. A whitewashed farmhouse in Provence. It must have been Provence, that was where Lena brought them, to stay with a group of Argentinians, ebulliently cheerful even in their exile. That was in Lena’s peripatetic stage, when she ferried her children to and fro, between a baffling succession of other people’s houses. And everywhere, she turned away from her small son with a casual, careless cruelty … Isabel can still feel Kolya’s tiny, listless hand in hers, holding on as they walked along a narrow whitish path, between fields of enormous sunflowers. The glaring sun. The flowers’ big yellow heads turning toward it on their long thick stalks. They walk slowly, in the stretchy, toffee time of childhood. They’re not all that pretty, she remembers thinking about the sunflowers, and she didn’t like the absence of clouds, the acuteness of light which made her sense a shadow somewhere at the back of her, coming from the house, from Lena’s sensuous, deprived body and her aggrieved, indifferent face. The shadow of the object falls upon the ego: Freud. But of course then there was no ego. Not yet. There was only silky childish skin and a defenseless porousness of soul. She was permeable, everything entered in, Kolya’s sad little face and helpless blue eyes, the transparency of the light, and the sunflowers’ heated menace. She might as well have been drinking in Kolya’s hurt, his sense that Lena threw him out even though he tried so hard to be good, to make her smile. He walks along silently, his eyes fixed on the ground. The gratuitous suffering of children, Isabel now thinks, the memory of his hurt piercing her again … Kolya had not been flogged, or thrown into an orphanage, or even spanked; but his eyes in her memory have the look of a suffering small animal, a
creature that can’t make out the rights and wrongs of the situation, but only knows it has been wounded. Is that the shadow? She stoops and embraces little Kolya on the white path, and strokes his head and back. Nothing is said, but when they start walking again, he’s almost cheerful. “Oh look!” he cries, pointing to a sunflower which for some reason seems more beautiful to him than the others. “Look at this!” Now she almost gasps from the recollection of the sudden shift in his childish face, how easy it was to make him happy, and how easily the childish happiness was shattered.

In her bed, Isabel tosses and turns restlessly, as if to escape the memory, which now comes with the knowledge of its consequences, the knowledge that what was shattered could never be fixed again. Now it is a young man’s pale face she sees, in some unearthly distance. It has the haunting presence of a revenant; someone who is no longer of the reachable world, and yet not completely vanished. He looks at her with a sort of reproach, but also in consolation, as if trying to convey a complex message. I have been so abandoned, his expression seems to say; but I am no longer suffering. As she falls asleep, she feels a line of purest longing stretching from her to Kolya, to his spectral presence. If only she could console him, tell him he had been loved … A swell of still living anger at her mother comes at the heels of her grief, at the injustice of what she did to her small son, so unthinkingly, unseeingly. At the gratuitous withholding, the dearth of love. The Incident comes back to her, with its larger consequences. By comparison, this is such a … private matter. She married Peter shortly after Kolya’s death. Was that also part of the story, some hidden, half-known narrative unfolding in that other lawless realm, the realm of the heart?

*

In Between

July 21, 1982

The cellist again. She burst in with her bouncing body, seemingly without inhibition, giving me her white-toothed smile. “I’m going to surprise you today!” she announced, and proceeded to play Bach’s Second Suite, with her breasts bouncing beneath her T-shirt. The incongruity was so great that it struck me as shameless … But undoubtedly, this Jane would not recognize the concept of shame. She would think it a quaint inconvenience interfering with her right to pleasure. I wonder what would happen if the human kind lost its sense of shame. What would emerge from bodies allowed to speak themselves, without brakes or scruples? But no, I cannot imagine such a condition, do not want to imagine it. It is impossible to imagine Bach without a sense of sin. Without recognition of our wrongness, which drives us to imagine something more perfect than ourselves. Without knowledge of our mortality, which impels us to produce timeless symmetries. No matter how hurtful to discipline our spirit, to make it rise out of the flesh and our earthbound selves.

This is what this Jane doesn’t understand. She has virtuosity, it must be admitted. But she has no faculties with which to grasp the profound, the necessary conflicts impelling Bach or Beethoven.

July 22, 1982

Isabel Merton. I wait for her lessons … impatiently. This has to be admitted. I am not yet so lost to myself as not to notice. She played Schubert’s B flat, beautifully. The autumnal beginning, the melodic lines not so much haunted as finding their way to epiphany … I thought of that Warsaw room, the utter stillness, our hands moving over each other’s bodies … I put my hand on Isabel’s shoulder when she finished playing, to indicate my approval. Her eyes widened with feeling, and she lowered her head to conceal how much she was moved.

In her enclosed capsule, her resistless meta-space, Isabel is moved again; by all that Wolfe discerned; by the braided conversation, with all its accumulating meanings; accumulating weight.

Amsterdam

In Amsterdam, she waits for Anzor to collect her at the hotel. Oddly, she’s feeling more skittish, more shy, than before. They’re meeting by prearrangement this time; she cannot pretend to an irresistible or errant impulse. She’s doing this with her eyes open, and is proceeding despite what she felt the night before.

She sees him before he sees her as he comes into the lobby of the hotel, with a quick long step, looking for her impatiently. Then he does notice her, and his eyebrows gather into a funny V, as though he’s been taken by surprise at a tender sight. He embraces her as if they’d been parted too long.

They walk out into the autumn day with no particular plans, but with some unspoken agreement to avoid excessive eagerness about falling into each other’s bodies. The narrow streets are packed tight with tourists, consulting their guides and going about their task with the determined, dyspeptic looks of tourists everywhere. Youths of both sexes, laden with enormous backpacks,
move with the resigned patience of slow beasts of burden. Middle-aged couples click their cameras in front of Anne Frank’s house. The great nomadic republic. But in the historic city, the light falls with an almost fleshly warmth on the dark brick of the tall narrow houses, a light filtered through the miraculous paintings she’s seen of just such brick and such tall narrow houses. Pleasure doubled by the doubling of perception.