Augusta Played (7 page)

“Who were you talking to?” he asked.

“Nobody you know.”

“That was obvious.”

“He's an old friend,” she said.

“No kidding. How old?”

“This is ridiculous.” Then she remembered. “Did you see your father today?”

It took some of the tension out of his back and shoulders. Gus watched it go, thinking, Good riddance; Norman felt it go, sliding from his body like soap under a shower. He flung himself into a chair, sighed à la Sidney, and said, “Yes, I saw him.” He had stepped on a wad of chewing gum, and he leaned over to pick it off with his thumbnail.

“Ugh,” Gus said. “Here, use this.” She handed him a sheet of newspaper from the pile she kept for lining Tweetie's cage.

“I don't think it's so goddamn ridiculous,” he said, scraping, “when I walk into a room and overhear you telling someone you love him more than anyone else. You have to admit, under the circumstances, that that is not exactly a trivial statement.”

“Oh, brother. You really beat all, Norman. I didn't say I loved him more than I love anyone else; I said I loved him more than anyone else does. If you had eavesdropped on the
entire
conversation, you would realize that.”

“I think you're splitting hairs.”

“I don't.”

“Then just how much do you love me?”

“I love you,” she said, laughing. “Why else would I be about to marry you? For your money?”

“That's what my father thinks,” he snapped.

“Then your father's screwy. But I'm not surprised. Look at his son.”

Norman was looking at Augusta. He adored her like this, high-spirited, quick. There was a lilt to her chin and nose in profile, like the Minuet in G. Her self-confidence ravished him. “It's just as well,” he said, “that you don't care about the money. He disowned me.”

“He what?”

“I warned you he's a prick.”

“I didn't know anybody ever actually did that kind of thing anymore. It's rather feudal, isn't it?”

Norman shrugged. “Does it bother you?”

Gus found herself sitting down on the couch-bed. She hadn't said to herself, Now I will sit down; it was as if Norman's news had knocked her down. “It's not the money,” she said, slowly. “It's what it means. If he's disowned you for marrying me, I guess I can assume that your family isn't going to welcome me with open arms.”

“My mother will be different.”

“It's a rotten way to start.” She was suddenly shy. “It makes me feel funny,” she said. “Ashamed, somehow. As if I'm not good enough.”

“Don't do a number on yourself, Gus. It's just my old man. He's a rabid anti-Gentile.”

“I hope you haven't inherited his prejudices.”

“Would I marry you if I had?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said; “I don't know why you want to marry me.”

“Because I need you to love me.”

“But I do—”

“More than anyone else, and more than anyone else does—”

“I do!”

“More than your old friend—”

“Old friend?”

“—with the phone.”

“His name is Richard.”

Norman was running his thumbnail along the inside of her arm, where the veiny network that lay just under the skin, like the tracery of seaweed near a pond's surface, branched out into sudden complication, busy as a cloverleaf highway. He pressed his thumb into the tender crook of elbow.

“Hey, that hurts,” Gus said. Norman pressed down harder, then released her.

“More than Richard,” he said.

“More than Richard.”

He had gripped her by both wrists and forced her under him. Her eyes smarted. “More than anyone else?”

“More than anyone else—”

He couldn't think of names; he needed names, but there were none to be had. It was as if he were watching himself from far off, from the back of a theater; he was on stage, acting a role that had been written for him by someone else—and he had forgotten his lines! Wildly, he asked, “More than your parents?”

Gus twisted her head away from his; his voice bored into her brain through her ear like a pneumatic drill. It made her feel about as responsive as a slab of concrete.

“Answer me,” Norman said.

He had to say it again: “Answer me.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Then he rolled off her like a wave off a rock. He didn't know what to do now, and simply lay there, looking at the ceiling. He was sorrowful—but also amazed. He couldn't quite believe he was behaving like such a bastard.

Gus started to get up, but he pulled her back down.

“Now what,” she said. She was wondering if she shouldn't just get out of this for good, right now. But Norman was looking at her with those lost-kid eyes, and she supposed she could understand why he had had to get her to say that. His father had kicked him out of the family because of her. She owed him something. Richard said she owed him, but she owed Norman.

“What are you thinking?” He kissed her bitten nail, touched his fingers to the scruff of her neck. “I'm sorry.” And he was; he didn't mean to scare her. “I couldn't stop myself.”

The light from the lamp was falling on her dark-honey hair, and he moved his hand up to touch it. She was sitting beside him, but he was still lying down, on his back. She was wearing a white blouse with a square collar, like a sailor's middy, and the light and the angle of his perspective made shadows under her breasts, so that the tops of them, through the cloth, seemed very white and full. He moved his hand to the top button. When he slipped his hand inside, her skin was hot. The classy coolness would melt in his mouth like an M&M.

“I don't know,” Gus said. “I don't think—”

“Don't think,” Norman said. “I thought, and look where it got me.”

“Where's that?”

“Columbia,” he said. She laughed, and he seized the chance to work her blouse out of her waistband. She sank onto his chest, her hair and blouse billowing over him like silk veils, white and gold in the bright night light.

13

G
US
HAD
a practice schedule and she kept to it rigorously. She practiced every morning from seven until eleven, except on the days when she had a lesson with Julie Baker; on lesson days, she knocked off at nine-thirty. Six afternoons a week she practiced again from two to four; once a week she swam in a friend's condominium pool or at the YWCA. Swimming was good for the lungs.

If she skipped a session, she felt disoriented. Playing the flute was the way she aligned herself spiritually, centering her soul in its happiest relation to the rest of the world.

Nevertheless, she knew that practice alone would not win for her the transcendently focal place she would like to occupy publicly. About this, Norman's hoary joke was wrong.

A concert career took money.

When she telephoned her parents in Chapel Hill to tell them she had become engaged, this was the first thing they reminded her of. “You've explained it to me often enough,” her mother, a keypunch operator, said. “You said you have to have money, or else you have to marry into the business. A conductor or an entrepreneur. Weren't you dating a conductor?”

“Not exactly,” Gus said.

“You must have known how we would feel.”

“But you knew it was a long shot. It was you and Dad who wanted me to have the degree to fall back on. Now I'm falling back on it.”

“No, you're not. You're just getting married. You haven't even
tried
yet, Augusta. All your life, you'll wonder—”

“I'm not giving up the flute, for heaven's sake!”

“Who will pay for the concert halls? Tell me that. Critics don't come to hear housewives. Who will pay for your first record?”

“Look, Mom. The odds were against me anyway. It's not just the money, it's the instrument. How many Rampais does the world need when there's only one Boulez Sonatina? The repertoire is limited, to say the least.”

“But you knew that—” The disappointment in her mother's voice was rending Gus's heart; for a heart, she had an old sheet, and it was being ripped into rags. This was supposed to have been a
merry
telephone call.

“But I'm in love!” she said.

“Weren't we all? That doesn't mean you have to get married.”

“Mother!”

“I'm sorry to shock you, but I don't see giving up your work and future for what? Children.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You know what I mean. And that brings up another point,” her mother added, crossly. “Are you pregnant?”

“No!” Gus said. “People keep asking me that,” she said, sulkily. “You'd think two people never got married without one of them being pregnant.”

“It's just that nobody expected you to get married. Not yet, Augusta. Do you know what your father and I paid to send you to Siena? What about Juilliard? Does this—this
Norman
—does he have any money?”

“No. Well, he did, but now his father won't give it to him.”

“Did he do something to disgrace himself?”

“Apparently. He got engaged to me.”

There was a prolonged wait, during which Gus could hear an ambulance screaming in the distance, a truck backfiring on West End Avenue, somebody calling to somebody else from the opposite side of the street, gears grinding at the stoplight, Tweetie splashing in his bath, her own breathing…but not a sound from her mother. Finally, in the Southern accent that always surprised Gus long-distance because in between telephone calls she forgot how it sounded, her mother said, “I guess you aren't planning on a big wedding.”

“No.”

“What would you like for a wedding present?”

“We'll let you know.”

Another stretch, a silent space like a study hall. Gus said, “Will you tell Dad?”

Her father would be at work. This could mean in the field, in the lab, at the biology department at UNC-Chapel Hill, or in his studio at home. All her life, her parents had made a joke about how her father had a pencil attached to his hand permanently, like a sixth finger. Gus, hanging on, on the telephone, scanned the leaf sketches on the wall: holly, hawthorn, and mountain ash; laburnum, locust, Lombardy poplar, and willow; maple, sycamore, chestnut, elm, and oak; and the beautiful lime, with its leaf like a heart, its branches shady with waving valentines in the chlorophyll color of creation. There wasn't a trace of talent for music in Gus's family background, but her parents liked to say she got her manual dexterity from them.

“I'll tell him, but he's not going to be happy about this.”

“So far, nobody is, except Norman and me.”

There was a third interval then, while Gus waited for her mother to make up her mind how she felt. Gus's mother always thought to herself. She also laughed to herself, cried to herself, and in general kept herself to herself. From an early age, Gus had appreciated the fact that this made her mother easier to deal with than other mothers; by the time
her
mother came out with a statement or took a stand, it was a considered statement or stand, and a daughter knew exactly what the opposition, if there was opposition, was. There was none of the hysterical shifting around, none of the sniping from hastily grabbed positions, that her friends got involved in. On the other hand, it also meant that she had spent much of her life waiting while her mother reached a conclusion. Now her mother, in that softly resolute and faintly nasal drawl, a voice like a family heirloom from antebellum days, said, “You know we're always here for you to fall back on?” Like the degree.

And Gus said, “I know,” because she did; she could base her answer of security on a lifetime of knowing that when her mother ultimately decided what she wanted to say, it was indeed what she wanted to say.

But after Gus had hung up, she couldn't bring herself to pick up the flute, she felt so emotionally tangled. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, and the weather had changed. It had been a summer so hot the city seemed to melt, things going liquid at their edges: the street at the far end of the block appeared to undulate like a black river, the skyscrapers looked molten, the sun looked as sticky as a lemon drop left on a dashboard, the sky bled into the gaps between buildings like an illustration into the margins of a page. Then the change had come. There had been a week of finely tuned rain, seven days of silky drizzle, and now the sky was blue again, but cold. The pigeons fluffed up their feathers to keep warm.

That night, Gus didn't see anyone. She sat at her table, next to a window which had been raised by a crack to let in the sharp, fresh air. The night sky was assertive, brilliant. Vega, that blue note Orpheus was wont to strum on his starry lyre, graced the northwest. The pearl on her finger danced in the light from the favorite lamp. Could she never look back, once married, on the future as it might have been?

Gus knew she had “something special” (she was afraid that to be more specific would be tempting the muse). Her tone was extraordinary. In 1961, when she was seventeen, she had had one summer in Maine at Kincaid's camp. It was the old master's last good summer; she had been the last of his protégés. When she had auditioned, he'd said simply, “I like what I hear, I like what I hear,” in the steel-wool voice of someone who knew his preferences were all the aesthetic criteria anybody should need—and knew too that his listening time as well as his playing time was almost up. He had already had one stroke. When he died a few years later, he willed his platinum flute to his famous former student, the great Elaine Shaffer, but Gus had been the very last of his students, a seventeen-year-old with a tone straight out of heaven, a piquant upper Up, and an admirable ability to put away pounds of potatoes at the camp suppers without gaining a single ounce.

Then there were the summers in Siena with Gazzelloni. He was a different kind of teacher—arrogant, competitive, high-strung, but the world's leading flutist when it came to contemporary music. She learned Várese with him, Mes-siaen. (The latter he taught reluctantly; it wasn't new enough to interest him.) She learned Petrassi, Boulez, Berio, Nono. For a while, key-slapping—making a percussive noise by slapping the keys of the flute forcefully—was all the rage. She learned how to sight-read contemporary notation, how to improvise. In 1965, she graduated from college, having sneaked in a few lessons with Murray Panitz, the one whose sound seemed to her supreme—and having begun her first affair, with Richard. Now she was starting her second year at Juilliard, with Julie Baker, and should she do what she was doing, give it all up without a backward glance (because a backward glance would surely, like Orpheus's, be death)?