Appassionata (3 page)

There are a few more people who’ve been waiting to speak to her, and whom Rougement discreetly hurries along. Then he brings her coat, and helps her put it on quite gently. “Wonderful,” he says. “Believe me, you were very good. And I hear a lot of concerts.” She feels a warm candle lick of satisfaction. A task accomplished, a labor in beauty. “You’re sure you don’t want to come to dinner with us?” Rougement asks.

“Perhaps next time,” she says, feeling apologetic again. She’s not ready for the comedown into dinnertime conversation. The engines have been going full blast, it’s hard to brake so abruptly.

She changes into slacks and sneakers after the others leave, and on the way back, tells the driver to stop a few blocks short of the hotel. She walks along the Seine at a brisk pace, hardly looking at the glittering night vistas on the other bank. She is still
wrought up, currents racing through her head and body. She circles back, through the narrow streets around the Madeleine. People at café tables look up at her with some surprise as she walks by, drawn perhaps by her agitation, the tension of the condensed time frame in which she is enclosed. It’s like being on a hallucinatory drug, or drunk among sober people. She thinks she’ll sit down and have a coffee, then changes her mind. She’s beginning to feel a familiar desolation coming on, the arid ghost of the performance. She has been in plenitude, and has been rapidly ejected and she feels she’s walking through deoxygenated air. Her breath, emerging from its depths, is short and narrow. She’ll call Peter, even though it isn’t completely fair. She no longer has the right to assume he’ll be there, or will want to talk to her, or help her through her descent from intoxication. But she also knows he won’t mind; doesn’t mind. At least, she’s pretty sure.

In the hotel, she changes into a terry-cloth robe, and dials Peter’s number.

“Ah, it’s you,” he says his voice terse, slightly hoarse, familiar in every quarter-tone shift. “I take it this is post-concert?”

“Yes,” she says somewhat sheepishly, because he knows so well why she’s called. Because this used to be their routine. Then she stops, because she’s suddenly unsure what she wants herself.

“Well?” he asks. There may be a shade of annoyance in the question.

“How was your day?” she asks.

“Oh, you know, the usual. Robertson is being headhunted by Yale, so he is strutting around like a goddamn peacock.” She hears him take a sip of coffee, mentally supplies the little round table placed next to his easy chair at just the right height, the legal periodicals strewn about on the floor. “One of my students asked whether I thought the principle of contracts is universal,” he tells her. “I think that was the high point of my day.”

“Well, is it?” she asks.

“Is it what?”

“Universal.”

He sighs, humorously. “In principle, yes. If you really want to know.”

“I do,” she says, stretching on the bed more comfortably. She wants to be distracted from the susurrus of the music, to step into his crisp, logical world.

He sighs again, heaving himself into a mock-pedagogic explanation. This used to be part of the comedy of their relationship; her almost childish enjoyment, after the exertions of a performance, of the nicely contained, orderly progression of an argument. He is willing, it seems, to humor her still.

“What I told the student,” he says, “was that the idea of contracts enters human relations as soon as we differentiate ourselves from the primal horde. As soon as we notice that others don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart. That they can grab something away from us. Unless we make a compact. I was improvising, of course.”

He pauses, waits a beat. “How are you?” he asks, dropping into a different register.

“Oh, you know. I’m post-concert.”

“Is anything wrong.”

“No …” She pauses, tries to figure out how to put it. “It’s the … comedown, I suppose. The contrast. Or maybe just the tension. And then the decompression.”

“Just don’t forget that you actually added something to the general scheme of things this evening,” he says quickly. “You don’t feel like this for nothing. What’s been taken out has been added. First law of thermodynamics, I believe.”

“Do you really think so?” she says.

“I do,” he says.

“Yes, maybe,” she agrees. “Though I wonder … Do you know how many concerts there are in any given week? In Paris?
Or in Cleveland?”

“But how did it go?” he asks. “Were you good?”

“I think I was, you know,” she says.

“How did the audience take it?”

“Oh, the audience took it lying down,” she says, and giggles. He’s cheering her up, after all. “But you know how audiences are. So eager to be … pleased. To … forget themselves.” Her voice recedes again. “Or else they just like to have some soothing sounds washing over them in the evening. It probably doesn’t mean anything more than that.”

“Look,” he says more firmly, more seriously. “Don’t elevate a mood into some … philosophical problem. This is post-concert, you know that. Or maybe post-partum.”

“I suppose so,” she says, and there’s another pause. “There was a man on the plane,” she then resumes, inconsequentially. She’s feeling pleasantly tired.

“Yeah?” Peter asks. He doesn’t sound exactly pleased.

“Yes,” she says, and sleepily tells him about the conversation, and the man’s reappearance after the concert.

“There you are then,” Peter says, tersely. “He was apparently satisfied.”

“I suppose so,” she repeats, dozily. She’s coming back to herself. If that is what it is. She’s never sure. Up there on the stage, as she leaves herself, she feels she is never more—herself; or at least, filled with being.

“Well then, stop brooding,” he says. “Go get some sleep. Oh, and by the way,” he adds, his voice turning more terse, “you know I don’t have your schedule this time. So if you want to talk …”

“Right,” she says, also more tersely, because she is both grateful and oddly, unjustly, irritated. Her old irritation, at how good he is, how calm, how unfailingly, almost immovably tolerant. “Thanks.”

“Goodnight then,” he says, and she detects a fraction of sadness in his voice.

“Goodnight.”

In Between

The melancholy of travel. On the TGV to Lyons, she stares at the golden landscape moving past in blurred, reiterative motion. Yellow stubble of wheat; azure sky. Nature has the best color combinations. Through the reverie of the fallow fields and hypnotic haystacks, she returns to last night’s conversation with Peter, and the mood space of the large, comfortable Upper West Side apartment where they spent their few years together, and which she still can’t help but think of as home. They were lucky to get it, through Peter’s teaching job at Columbia. The white-painted high-ceilinged rooms, into which the sun entered in the afternoon, the motes of dust on the elongated shafts of light, the quietness permeated with the pulse, the urban surf of the street … The apartment was never entirely protected from the pugilistic honking of cars during the day, or the monotonous beat of disco music at night, or the loud metallic rattling of garbage trucks at dawn. She’d wake up for their passage, and suffer it like some social duty, then go back to sleep, duty done. In the morning, the moment of small passage, into the piano room, which was sound-insulated and just big enough to contain the Steinway and some shelves. A dip into a different space, different state: she can still feel the pleasure of it, stepping away from the street’s perpetual agitation, and into her musical cave and subsiding into a denser, more viscous element.

At the end of the afternoon, the distance between the rooms was sometimes hard to cross. There was the time, early on, when
she emerged from her cave just as Peter was opening the front door. He stopped mid-movement, as if disturbed by something in her appearance. “Why are you blinking?” he asked. She had just been practicing some unearthly Schoenberg pieces, and was standing in the hallway in a state of half-absence. On the threshold. “You look as if you weren’t expecting me,” he added.

“I am, I am,” she said vaguely, trying to snap out of it, feeling slightly dazed. He moved toward her and kissed her on the forehead, as if to see if she had a temperature, or was slightly ill. Peter … He never seemed to suffer such transitions; he was equally himself whatever he was doing, moving at an even pace, somehow evenly distributed in his packed, solid body. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that he should speed up or slow down, or otherwise modify himself for anyone, or anything.

Her blinking became a running joke between them for a while; then he started ignoring it altogether. If he found her in her border state on coming in, he simply went over to the liquor cabinet to pour them both a drink. He never attempted to pull her out of her dazes forcibly, or draw her toward him. From within the well-defined boundaries of his person, he did not attempt to cross hers. Or anyone’s. She sees him, taking off his jacket and lowering his tall, well-built frame into a large leather chair and placing the whisky and soda on the small glass table—that’s where he sat last night, as they talked—and taking a few sips before glancing at her again to see if she was back, if she was with him. Then he’d ask her about her day. Or tell her about his. He had already started his rise through the professorial ranks at the Columbia Law School, at a rather precocious age. She’d watched him, progressing steadily from one advance to another without ever losing his footing, or his composure. Others told tales of all-night marathons, with amphetamines to get them through before exams. Peter never lost a night’s sleep … Then there were those papers on the links between law and justice she
could never quite read, but which soon added up to a hefty tome that came to be referred to as “definitive.” But then, he was doing exactly what he wanted; what he was meant to do. He had that calm … that particular kind of pleasant confidence which in her mind went with the pleasant setting of his childhood home, the unpretentious, tree-surrounded house in Illinois, where nothing ever seemed to go very wrong. Peter didn’t have to strain or reach beyond his grasp to get where he wanted. He’d simply come into his own. The phrase seemed made for him; it fitted him like a glove. Anyway, the idea of excessive ambition would have seemed slightly histrionic to him; slightly vulgar.

It was safety that permeated Peter’s body so evenly, like a good-smelling substance. Was she happy then, without noticing? Did she simply not notice, did she not know what contentment looked like, its weight or shape … Her own early career, Peter had joked, progressed through some form of punctuated equilibrium, rather than a more gradualist version of the evolutionary process. There were lengthy periods during which nothing happened, except for punishing invitations to multiple-use halls in mid-sized Midwestern towns. Then the programming director of a prestigious festival happened to hear her in Wisconsin, and offered her a prime spot in his recital series. That was when she seemed to leap to another level, like those organisms in the prehistoric eras which, without warning or seeming transition, all of a sudden developed new organs or assumed another morphological form. All of a sudden, she was visible; desirable; a rising star.

… the sun-shafts in the Manhattan apartment, the close warmth of the piano room. When did it change … She isn’t sure when she began to feel Peter’s presence in his study not as an anchor to which her mind turned for quick reassurance, but as a sort of chafing. He listened to a lot of baroque music as he read, and even that began to irritate her, out of all reason. All those endless
tonal permutations, as background. At some point, his very calm made her restless. Not fair, she knows, not fair. When did she stop wanting an antidote to the restlessness, and start wanting to pursue the restlessness itself? She sits back in her train seat and remembers the concert at Alice Tully Hall. It was one of those evenings when the adrenaline coursing through her veins worked to stoke all her deeper energies, rather than inhibit them. There was an atmosphere of excitement in the auditorium. Afterward, she was almost painfully excited herself; she might as well have been on cocaine. When Peter came into the Green Room, she expected—well, what? A matching excitement, she now supposes, a glow, a heightened alacrity. But of course, it was not he who had just given a concert, not he who felt the effects of extra electricity in his body. He came up to her and held her against the satisfyingly large expanse of his chest, looking at her from under his already somewhat craggy eyebrows with equable approval. “Well, kiddo,” he said, “you were just excellent. Your best yet.” And then he moved away to make room for the rest of the well-wishers who were lining up behind him. He left before the end of the celebratory dinner, because he had an early class to teach.

There were other moments … With a twinge of embarrassment, she remembers the party in SoHo. It went on till all hours, coming after the music, out of their making music together, so that they danced afterward and held each other close as if it was a natural culmination, a cadenza, a coda. By the time she entered the apartment in the gray dawn, she felt diminished with exhaustion and obscure shame, and not a little alarmed. Peter was sitting up in his bathrobe and pajamas.

“What happened?” he asked, observing her carefully.

She shivered a little. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I want to go to sleep.”

“Then you can tell me about it tomorrow,” he said. “If you want to.”

She never did tell him anything, and he didn’t ask again. Peter was quite an expert on contracts, and this was his understanding of the agreement between them: that they were both autonomous agents and that, however they wished to treat each other, they would do so of their own free will; and that, if their intentions toward the other, or their feelings, changed, the other was obliged to accept that. It was as clean, as pure as that. He is a man of principle, Peter. Or perhaps, she now ruefully thinks, perhaps he knew something she didn’t; that when it came to the basics, you couldn’t change anyone. Not unless you wanted to exert power over them. And he didn’t. That was what he had decided to give up, when their implicit contract was drawn. And yet he had a kind of power over her, of course; she feels it still, the power he exercises precisely through not exercising it, as if there was no need to make a point of it; as if he had enough to spare. It is complicated, she thinks, even this simple story is complicated … Through the window of the train, she can feel the warmth of the ripening afternoon and of the zenith sun. She opens Wolfe’s
Journal
.