Augusta Played (36 page)

They had to get the news around. Norman had told his family. After the separation agreement was signed, Gus called her mother in Chapel Hill to tell her to expect the box of leaves. She didn't know exactly how to say what she wanted to say. Finally, she said, “You remember that you said you and Dad would get us a wedding present when we decided what we needed?” Her mother said yes. “Well,” Gus said, “we won't be needing it.”

76

T
HE
HEADLINE
said
:
MASSACRE
AT
MUNICH
. It sharpened the edge of Norman's anxiety.

Gus had been back in New York for three days. She had telephoned Norman—the phone was still listed in her name—and said she would like to have lunch with him. She said there was a reason. A special reason.

Norman met her in a bar-cum-restaurant on Broadway, planning to walk up to Columbia afterward. It was a warm day, brightly lit by the September sun, and he stood for a moment just inside the doorway, while his eyes adjusted to the darkened room. Then he saw her, already seated.

Her beauty took him by surprise; in nearly four years, he had forgotten what she looked like, but now it came back to him, and he realized that although she had been beautiful then, she was more so now. There was a new elegance in the way she held herself, sophistication in the way she looked at him. The golden light that had always surrounded her had taken on a darker hue; she was still the possessor of cool brilliance, but now it was mixed with a warmer, throbbing tone, a jet of rare mystery, a steadily glowing flame at the center of her aura. She was wearing a khaki midi skirt, pulled tight, as he saw when she twisted in her chair, across the pelvis, a tight pale yellow tee shirt, and some kind of shoes—wedgies, he thought they were called—with straps that wound up her calves like ballet shoes. Her hair was down, but at the front, from the center part, she had braided a thin yellow ribbon through a single long pencil-thin plait.

As Norman considered all this, sitting down across from her at a small square table laid with large red napkins, he noticed her hands. “You've stopped biting that nail,” he said. He also noticed that there was no ring on the finger.

Gus was wondering if Norman had noticed that nobody had supplanted him. “Do you remember the delicatessen we went to the day we bought the engagement ring?” she asked.

“That
son of a bitch. You picked a great country to go to.”

“It was a good place to get started. After what happened here,” Gus said, “it seemed sensible to grab the review and run.”

“So what brings you back?” Norman asked this question with enormous casualness, but suddenly a part of him was hoping for an answer with the status of revelation, one that would turn a key and set free everything he sometimes felt must be locked in his heart, and hers. “Something must bring you back.”

“The same thing that took me to Europe. My work.”

“You've been playing with a modern music group, you said.”

“Tomorrow Music. We tour. Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Tunisia. The State Department sponsors us. I was able to work in a few lessons with Zóller in Berlin,” she added.

“You still haven't told me why you're here.” He meant
here
.

“I have a couple of solo engagements. Richard—do you remember Richard? He's the conductor for one of them.”

“How could I forget Richard,” Norman said. “Is the dodo a forgotten creature?” He waved the waitress over. “What do you want to eat?”

“Cheeseburger.” She smoothed the folded edge of the napkin with her finger. “And a Bloody Mary.”

He ordered two cheeseburgers, French fries, a BloodyMary for her and a root beer for himself. The restaurant was crowded, and the waitress had to do a contortionist's act to slip between tables, but Gus's and Norman's table was next to a partition, giving them a small pool of quiet in the larger swirl of chattering voices and clattering dishes.

As Norman handed the menu back to the waitress, Gus stole a look at him and inwardly named what was bothering her: it was the absence of heat in his eyes. If it was possible for eyes to look silenced, that was how his eyes looked to her. He must be thirty-four now. Was this dying of the eyes inevitable with time, this fatal disconnection from some inner source of creativity inescapable, this power failure universal? His profile, when he turned his head toward the waitress, was still startlingly heavy on his slight body. There was a masculine thickness about the thrust of his head into space, the strong neck, that she still found, she now realized, with a shock like a bolt of electricity being sent to her heart, immensely attractive. But the dead eyes put her off.

“Did you finish your degree?” she asked. “You said you had to go up to Columbia after we eat—”

“Where else would I steal books? But yes, I teach in Philadelphia three days a week.”

“I'm glad you're doing well.”

“I'm surprised you think I am. After all, it's derivative, what I do.”

“Are you still angry about that?”

“I was hurt, Gus. You were too wrapped up in yourself to realize it. Who knows, if you had respected my work more—”

“Don't you even remember the context? I didn't call your work derivative out of a clear blue sky.” She felt an almost painful urgency, an awareness that what didn't get said now might never get said, might lie dormant forever in the dimension of silence, larval words, chrysalid thoughts awaiting the metamorphosis of sound. She leaned forward over the little table. “Don't you
remember
why I called your work de rivative? You explained the ground level significance of my claim all right. You said I was getting back at you because you wouldn't go down on me.”

The waitress set the food in front of them.

Norman glanced furtively around the restaurant. “Lower your voice, Gus. People can hear.”

“Let them. Maybe they have nothing better to do.”

“Then get it right. It's not true that I wouldn't go down on you. I did.”

“Once.”

“It's not my thing,” he said, helplessly. “You could at least allow me my inhibitions.”

“If you'll remember,” she said, bridling, “I did.”

“You've changed.” He hit the bottom of the ketchup bottle with the heel of his palm. Once upon a time, even Gus's vocabulary of euphemisms had been limited. He had also observed that there was now a feathery edging of down above the sexy upper lip, the most feminine of moustaches.

“I'll tell you something,” she said, “if you won't laugh. I used to be frightened of you. When you were angry with me, I used to get scared of what you might do.”

He laughed.

“You hit Mario,” she said.
“And
Richard.
And
you ripped the mole off my back. There were times when I thought you wanted to kill me.”

“That's projection for you. I mean, when you get right down to it, you're not without your violent streak. You remember when you made me drown the mouse?”

“Norman! I didn't make you drown it.”

“Sure you did. You forced me to get rid of it. It made me sick, seeing that mouse swim for its life in the john. Like a fetus, for Christ's sake.”

“Like a what? Just what are you accusing me of? I've never even been pregnant!”

“It's not a question of reality. It's a question of meaning. It made me sick, that's all.”

“I didn't know that.”

“I know,” he said. “I know you didn't know. That was part of the trouble. I guess,” he said, sighing in the way his father used to, as if from a range of comprehension that encompassed all of human history, “we married precipitously.”

“We divorced even more precipitously.”

“I had to get out. If you knew how unhappy I was—”

“Is that an explanation or an accusation?”

“Both,” he said.

“You're making me feel miserable. I didn't come to lunch to be made to feel miserable,” she said.

“You might like to know that it looked to me as though you couldn't have cared less about our marriage. Jesus Christ, Gus, you never even bothered to cook dinner! For two years I was starving!”

“Why didn't you say so?” she asked, stricken. “How was I supposed to know that? You said you wanted a wife with a career of her own! I thought I was just doing what you wanted me to do.”

Norman was trying to find a way of telling Gus, without hurting her, that her always wanting to do what he wanted her to do had been her most egregious error. It wasn't merely that such compliance charged him with the responsibility for all consequences; it went still deeper than that—and that alone was deep enough for trouble. But the ghastliest thing had been that he'd felt guilty for not always knowing even what he wanted. From her, from himself, from anybody. Goddammit, he did not know everything, even about what went on in his own head, and he'd gotten tired, tired, tired of having to act as though he did.

“Gus,” he said, gently, “I thought I wanted something that I didn't really want. All I ever really wanted was”—he held back for a fraction of a second—“a wife who would
pay attention
to me. Isn't that what marriage is,
agreeing to pay attention to each other?”
He had thought about this for four years. “What I really want is a wife who'll care enough about me to make me the center of her life. If Gloria Steinem doesn't like it, she can eat shit. I'm certainly not going to marry her.”

“Who's Gloria Steinem?” Gus asked.

“I forget you've been out of the country for four years,” Norman said. “And boy, what old Dr. Morris would have to say about why you picked Germany!”

“I think you married me to get back at your father and dumped me to revenge yourself on Hitler.”

Norman, chewing on his cheeseburger, choked. Damn, he had missed her sassiness! “It's true I did once take out the daughter of a former SS officer. Phil and I both did. The same girl. Same date, for that matter.”

“Did he ever marry Dinky?”

“Dinky? He traded her in on a new model several light-years ago. The new one is named Dawn.”

“Was I right about why you're gloomy? Is it this morning's news?”

“There's certainly nothing non-gloomy-making in a pogrom.”

“Maybe Israel should give back the land it took in 1967.”

“Took! You mean reclaimed, don't you?”

“There's wrong on both sides. Take Deir Yassin, for example. That was a massacre too.”

“What do you know about Deir Yassin?”

Gus felt her courage unraveling, like a slipknot coming undone. “I read about it once,” she said.

“So what's your solution? Surrender? May I remind you that we have tried that once or twice in the course of some two thousand years?”

Gus put down the rest of her cheeseburger and concentrated on her drink. “If just once somebody would give something back to somebody…” She fixed him with her narrow eyes. “It would be an action even more redolent of grace than redemption. Why does there have to be a price tag on everything? I've spent four years thinking about this.” Norman jumped. “Even Christ's body is a price tag. Suppose God just came down to the world and said, Here, here are your dead. All of them, renewed and living. Take them back—they're all yours. Or suppose Israel said, Here's the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights—we would like to have them but we managed before and we can go on managing without them. Even though they were ours yesterday, they are yours today because we give them to you. Suppose, Norman, just suppose you said to me, Here are all the grievances I have stored up against you. I don't need to hang onto them any longer and I won't make you pay for them. You can take them. Throw them out the window. Dance on them. I don't care, they're no good to me anymore.”

“If they were no good to me anymore, I wouldn't be giving you anything of value. And what kind of gift is that? It's not worth anything unless it's worth something. That should be obvious.”

“I was just talking,” Gus said. “Don't mind me, I'm just a musician.”

“Oh Jesus, don't start sulking.” He had resolutely stuck to the abstraction of argument, because if he had replied to what seemed to him to be the sense of self-congratulation motivating her speech, she would have thought he was attacking her. And he didn't want to attack her, although he felt as though she had deliberately, pyromaniacally, struck a match and set fire to his brain.

“I'm not sulking,” she said. But she realized she was; only it didn't have anything to do with politics. It was because she had caught him thinking, at one point, I was smart to marrythat; and then at another point, he had thought, And I was even smarter to divorce it. She had seen these two thoughts blink into being and settle into the back of his mind, as clearly as if she had been inside his mind.

“Too bad my father never heard you on redemption,” Norman said.

“How is your father?”

“Dead,” Norman said. “He died a couple of years ago. Cancer of the prostate.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You don't have to be.”

“I know I don't
have
to be. I am, though. I'm sorry for Esther.”

“She's okay. She still lives in Brooklyn.”

“Do you realize I never actually met Esther? Did your father re-inherit you?”

“I guess you could say so,” Norman said. “The money went to my mother first. She'll divide it between Rita and me. Talk about irony. It's entirely possible that by then there won't be any money left for her to pass on. My mother tends to give away whatever's available.”

“She was nice,” Gus said. “What about Birdie? I miss Tweetie-Pie.” Birdie had adopted Tweetie when Gus went to Germany.

“Birdie's at City College, majoring in sociology. She says she's going to be a marriage counselor.”