Appassionata (30 page)

As she stands at a street crossing, she hears a car horn honking, and her name being called out imperiously. She turns in the wrong direction first, then spots a woman waving energetically through an open window of a red convertible Saab. It’s Jane, her tanned face half covered by a cascade of black curls and glamorous sunglasses, gesturing Isabel impatiently toward the car, and pointing at the lights, which are about to change. “Get in!” she shouts, in a way which brooks no contradiction, and Isabel does. Jane steps on the accelerator as Isabel shuts the door, and bowls on, amid urgent honking from the momentarily stalled cars.

“Well, old girl,” Jane addresses her, once they are on a main thoroughfare, “fancy meeting you here! Who knew you were in LA of all places? You’ve been quite the sensation, you know. In your absence.”

“I’m staying near here,” Isabel says. “Do you want to come in? I’ll give you a cup of coffee. I’m afraid I can’t offer much more.”

“Sure,” Jane says, and Isabel guides her into the enormous parking lot with its reek of gasoline, and then to the elevator which takes them up to the thirtieth floor.

Jane’s three-dimensional energy makes the apartment seem even more Warholian by contrast. She inspects it with mildly disapproving bemusement. “I see you’ve taken Wolfe’s advice to
heart after all these years,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“You know how he always said that to be a real artist, you have to be a monk. Or a nun. I mean, this is a convent cell, girl.”

“It suits me,” Isabel declares. “It suits me just fine.”

“So are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Jane asks, curving herself down into the sofa. “I only know a few things from Anders. He’s been tearing his hair out. It’s almost a satisfaction.”

“That’s not what I’m doing it for, believe me,” Isabel says and stops.

“Of course not,” Jane agrees merrily. “But then what on earth … I mean, you’ve never been a drama queen.”

“Haven’t you ever had the cello go dead on you?” Isabel asks.

Jane emits a brief, are-you-kidding sort of snort. “Sure, it happens sometimes. Happens to all of us. I mean, is that all?” She curls the phrase in elaborate incredulity.

“That’s one way to put it,” Isabel says. “I just can’t … make the music come alive.”

“Well then, play on automatic for a while,” Jane retorts cheerfully. “Sometimes you’ve got to do that, it’s what being a professional is about. Being able to do it on automatic.”

“I suppose,” Isabel says drily.

Jane lowers her voice to a parodied confidentiality. “And sometimes, frankly, if I may share a bit of wisdom with you, there’s nothing like a little fuck. Before a concert. Or after. Or almost at any time. To stir things up. To get the juices going.”

Isabel ignores the effort to cajole her into a better humor. “This is worse than usual,” she says flatly. “Or rather, it’s different.”

“Oh honestly,” Jane says impatiently. “Why, just because some guy you got involved with turned out to be a nasty?”

“I suppose that’s one way to put it.”

“Well, just forget it then, OK? I mean, he’s gone, isn’t he? Or is he still giving you trouble?”

“No,” Isabel says. “Not really.”

“Well then, relax a little, you know? I mean, what’s the point of taking everything so seriously?”

Then she gives a kind of what-the-hell shrug and looks at Isabel more directly. “Not that I’m not serious, in my own way. My very own way. I’m dead serious, actually, if the truth be known. I play for real, that’s my seriousness. I say fuck it all, and this is a matter of life and death. It amounts more or less to the same thing. You know?”

“I do,” Isabel says. She has seen it, Jane’s all-out fearlessness; playing as though she had nothing left to lose.

“That’s what Wolfe couldn’t understand.” Jane sounds almost wistful. “He just didn’t get it about me. Though he took me seriously too, in a way. Don’t you think?” Her voice betrays a need to be reassured; apparently, not even her self-confidence is impermeable.

“Oh yes,” Isabel says. “You were his challenge. His problem. His all-American problem.”

Jane laughs. “Mad old Wolfe,” she says. “Was it worth it, what he did to himself? Driving himself crazy over a composition. A big ghastly sound, as far as I can make out.” She looks at Isabel with concern. “And now you’re driving yourself crazy over some mad Chechen.”

“Don’t you think there was something heroic about what Wolfe tried to do?” Isabel asks, partly to keep Jane’s perceptive attentions off herself.

“Oh, spare me such heroics,” Jane says, energetically. “It was just masochism. He was kind of anorexic, don’t you know that? I mean, didn’t you see how thin he was?”

“I’m not sure that kind of word applies—”

“I mean, he had a sort of … spiritual anorexia. He couldn’t stand all that … life around him.”

Isabel looks at Jane, sitting in comfortable amplitude on the sofa, her eyes alive and impish. She’s sparkling with affirmation, with good spirits, good health. “But the thing is,” Jane continues, “that you mattered to him. Really mattered. To tell you the truth, I was almost envious when I was reading … those parts.”

Isabel smiles. “Oh well, maybe we both meant something to him. He did take us on, in his way. You must give him that.”

“Well, here’s to him,” Jane says, raising her coffee cup. “The great sourpuss. The Last Great Artist.”

“What are you doing in LA, anyway?” Isabel asks. She suddenly realizes she doesn’t even know where Jane lives nowadays, where her base is when she’s not on the road.

“Having Fun,” Jane pronounces sententiously, as if reminding Isabel of an important principle. Then she shrugs merrily and explains that she’s been hired as a consultant for a film about a cellist. “It’s going to be a certified piece of shit,” she says. “But hey, they pay more than you’d believe. And you should see some of the guys around the set. They work out at the gym a lot. And they don’t take anything too seriously, I can tell you that.”

She looks at Isabel with her girlish complicity, even as she considers her carefully. “I’ll see you soon,” she says. “I’m going to come and get you
out
of here, show you round LA. We’re going to have ourselves some fun.”

September 9, 1982

… what Arthur Schnabel called “the second simplicity.” This is what I want to achieve. It is what every true artist wants to achieve. But perhaps I have not been simple enough. I confess that I am forced to think about that girl, Jane, who has provoked me all summer. Is it possible that this Jane from Iowa has achieved the simplicity I strive for?

But no, she only has the first simplicity: innocent, ignorant, unscrupulous. She just wants to get whatever she wants, with no conflict and no price. I want the resolution which comes after strife and darkness. I am still battling my way through the complications of my composition, and all my dread. But I know it is only after this struggle that I can hope to attain the true second simplicity.

She knows Peter will call now, and he does. “I guess I’m getting easier to find,” she says, and is surprised by the lightness of her tone.

“Surely you didn’t think Jane would be discreet,” he returns. “She’s worried about you.”

“I can’t imagine Jane worried.”

“I don’t mean she’s tearing her hair out,” he says wryly, and then sighs. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why you’re in LA.”

“No,” she confirms. She doesn’t really know the answer herself.

“Right,” he says briskly. “In that case, why don’t you tell me how you spend your days?”

And so she tells him about the Elysian supermarket, her walks on the beach, the angry traffic.

“Ah yes, road rage,” he says. “There was quite an example of it today at the Fairway.”

“The Fairway?” she repeats. The idea of any kind of rage in her familiar old neighborhood supermarket seems very incongruous.

“Or rather, lane rage,” Peter distinguishes. “A special sub-category. We’ll probably have to make new laws for supermarket
traffic, if this incident is any example.”

“What happened?”

“Well, you know how crowded the place gets, especially in the late afternoon. So this guy, sort of self-important and obnoxious-looking, pushes his cart right into a little old lady who’s taking too much time getting her stuff off the shelf. In the organic vegetable section. You know, the floor is quite slippery over there. He shoved her pretty hard, I think it was deliberate. Or semi-deliberate. It’s not the kind of distinction the law is good at. Anyway, she sort of slid on the slippage, and then just fell. Straight on the floor. There was a thud.”

“You saw it?”

“I was right there. I tried to help her up, but all of a sudden there was complete pandemonium. Scattered vegetables, someone screaming to call the police.”

“Gosh.”

“Wait, there’s more. Because in the middle of all this, some runty kid snatches the guy’s briefcase. I mean, the guy who pushed the old lady. The perp.”

“All this in the Fairway?”

“Yup.”

“OK, so then what?”

“So then the guy, I mean the perp, goes absolutely berserk. He’s shouting, ‘Get him! It’s government documents! Classified!’ And you know what? The runty kid hears this, and actually turns around and throws the briefcase back, while everyone watches with their mouths open.”

“Just because it was government documents?”

“I guess some people are still awed … Or the kid just got scared. I mean, who knows what ‘government documents’ means these days. You know, all those movies where someone gets to know something, and the next thing you know he’s dead.”

“Yeah,” she says. “All those movies.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest—” he begins.

“I can’t stand it,” she says.

“What? Can’t stand what?”

“What we’re getting used to. The meanness. The routine … aggression.” Fury has flared up and is working its way through her chest.

“Hey, kiddo,” Peter says briskly, as if speaking to a child, “this was a … non-significant incident. A shaggy-dog story. I was just trying to amuse you, for God’s sake.”

“Just,” she says. “It’s always just.” She knows whom she’s echoing.

“Well, what would you want to do about it, anyway? Declare a protest against the Fairway? Or its clientele? Or the current state of the world, as it actually manifests itself?” He sounds energized by exasperation.

She hears herself breathing in agitation, reins herself in. When will her rage subside, now that it has been awakened …

“I’m sure you’re right,” she finally says, and her voice is now small and discouraged. She can hear him listening to her, registering her tone; her mood.

They remain silent for a while. “Why don’t you come home?” he then says, his voice dropping to another key, a reminder of their intimacy. The voice brushes against her like a touch, and she doesn’t recoil.

She gauges her own reactions, and sees that something is changing. “I suppose I will, one of these days,” she says. “I just don’t know when.”

“I don’t mean come back to me, if that’s not what you—”

“Oh, Peter,” she interjects, the words emerging spontaneously out of her gratitude, and something else as well. “I love you, you know.”

She hopes he won’t misunderstand, and he doesn’t.

“Well, I suppose we’ll talk soon,” he says, trying to sound
casual. But she knows all the gradations of his seemingly flat voice, and she knows he is moved.

“Yes,” she says. “Soon.”

The phone rings again in the evening, and she looks at it with some caution before deciding to pick up.

“You may not remember me,” a woman’s voice says, but she instantly recognizes the prolonged, lilting syllables. It’s Katrina, the Russian poetess.

“How on earth did you find out where I am?” Isabel asks. She suspects Anders, Rougement.

“From McElvoy, actually,” Katrina says. “If you remember him.”

“I don’t understand,” Isabel says, though she now remembers that Anzor said something about McElvoy. What was it? How well do they all know each other?

“Well, you know, he’s been concerned about you. We have both been. We’ve been … tracking your movements to some extent, ever since that embassy party in Sofia, where you got acquainted with our Anzorichka. Actually, ever since Margarita recommended him to you. That was stupid of her.”

Isabel tries to think back to the reception in Paris. It seems to have taken place ages ago, and she remembers it as a placid event. “So you mean, you and McElvoy are colleagues.”

“Oh, you know, we’ve worked together from time to time … nothing very big. I am sometimes able to offer some information. You know, we’re all on the same side now.”

Isabel now rewinds to the reception in Brussels, and Katrina’s ubiquitous presence. Only connect, she thinks, though this is hardly what the moralists had in mind, these shadowy linkages, undertaken in the service of breaking up linkages which are more shadowy still. Shadowy and simple, if only she had been willing to see. To look at the obvious, rather than trying to discern something beyond, below, within.

“But this is outrageous,” she says. She wonders how closely she’s been watched, whether there are photographs somewhere.

“What is outrageous, darling?” Katrina asks calmly. “That we were concerned? That we were watching out for you?”

Isabel considers, and feels herself making another readjustment, to a more comic bemusement. She thought she’d fallen for the romantic sublime; instead, she’d been caught in some low international farce. The joke is definitely on her. “How much did you know?” she finally asks.

Katrina sighs again. “Not much, believe me, not as much as we would like to know. Anyway, it was one of those … borderline situations.”

“Then why didn’t you at least warn me.”

“I tried, remember? As much as I felt I could. Given that the situation was … not yet clarified.”

Isabel remembers some oblique signal, at the reception in Brussels. They all get these ideas in their heads, Katrina purred, in her sly suggestive tone. Not much of a warning, not enough for her to understand. At least not if she didn’t want to.