Bellweather Rhapsody (25 page)

From the waist up, arms casually resting on the table, Natalie is silent. Grave, even. Her still eyes never leave Viola’s face. Her foot might be attached to another person’s body, controlled remotely by someone else’s brain. Fisher snort-laughs when Natalie, having managed to de-shoe him, tickles the bottom of his foot with her big toe.

The food is every bit as wretched as the other meals Fisher’s eaten in the hotel, and he takes hold of Natalie’s elbow as the table adjourns en masse. “I’m starving,” he says. “Meet me in the lobby at nine-thirty. Think we can beat this storm they’re all talking about and get a bite elsewhere.” He looks down at her skirt, her sensible, professional heels. “I’ve got a bike. Dress for it.”

She isn’t just a bike, and when Natalie reappears at nine-thirty, he can tell from the spark in her eyes that Natalie understands this without having to be told. A year before Fisher met Viola Fabian, the year he turned twenty, he realized his inheritance by hocking three of his Auntie’s golden teeth for a vintage motorcycle. The machine belonged to a man in Rockaway named Al Monte, who all but sobbed when Fisher climbed on it in his driveway.

His wife had persuaded him to sell her, Al told Fisher. “She just takes up space in the garage, and I never ride her anymore. But I still remember when we first met, when I first
saw
—I couldn’t take my eyes off her.”

Fisher knew the feeling, having only recently locked eyes on her himself. The ad tacked to the board in the student union—
Vintage Motorcycle For Sale, A Thing of Beauty
—had caught his eye, but nothing could have prepared him for the effect she would have in person. She was more delicate, smaller than he’d expected, designed for aerodynamic economy but perfect in every sense of the word. She was a
bike
—two wheels with spokes, two handlebar grips, the seat cushioned with springs like silver tornadoes. He would feel the road
through
her, feel the road in his knees and legs and hips. All her gleaming guts were on display, coiled, waiting to be released, purring with the naked promise of speed and flight, of becoming something greater when they yielded to each other. She could give him her power, and he could give her his will. Useless, magnificent, and beautiful, the motorcycle fulfilled his Auntie’s dying wish—which, Fisher now understood, had been a wish that he know the freedom that comes from loving something for its own sake. She was a Triumph, a Bonneville, the same bike beloved by the likes of Steve McQueen. He named her Bonnie.

It took several years for Fisher to shake the feeling that he had stolen another man’s true love, that he and Bonnie were carrying on a torrid motorcyclic affair, which may have explained why he’d slept with no fewer than twelve married and otherwise Unavailable women. He’d enjoyed the women, but he knew he’d never be faithful to anyone but her. Sometimes he wondered whether he might have led a different life, if he hadn’t had the parents he had, or hadn’t sat at the piano just to show off—an impulsive stunt that had remade his life in its own image. The thought terrified him, that he could be anyone other than who he was, because who he was allowed him to love, fiercely and freely, the only things in the world that mattered: his motorcycle and his music.

His life had only recently begun to trouble him.

He could trace his unease to an early-morning phone call that woke him two weeks ago. On the other end was the ASM secretary, Helen Stoller, calling on behalf of Doug Kirk, a man Fisher knew well, from having conducted at several local ASM festivals, and liked well, because Doug always traveled with good booze. Apparently, Kirk—who had slurred such Scotch-enabled true confessions to Fisher as “Hanging around all these teenagers makes me hornier than a toad,” and “Don’t you ever want to smack ’em in the face?”—was in a coma.

Helen was beside herself. She was calling to inform him of the situation, she said, and to ask if he had any suggestions about who might serve as an interim head, even though Helen and Fisher both knew the responsibility would naturally fall to Kirk’s second in command. Viola. Which was the real reason Helen woke him, voice pinched and high—because she hated Viola Fabian, didn’t trust Viola Fabian, and there was a small, insistent whisper inside her that said Viola was to blame for Kirk’s heart attack.

“It doesn’t make sense, Dr. Brodie,” she said. “I know he was taking his pills. I picked up his refills, for Pete’s sake. And that
woman.
This is just what she wanted, you know. She wanted to be in charge. Am I crazy? I honestly don’t know which would make me feel worse, being crazy or being right.”

It was common knowledge that Helen Stoller was in love with Doug Kirk, had been for decades, and now her devotion had blossomed into a kind of tender paranoia. Fisher, half awake and oddly touched by her hysteria, assured her she was neither crazy nor right.
These things happen,
he said, wishing he hadn’t smoked so many fags the night before, wishing his voice sounded as gentle and genuine as he meant it to be. He asked that Helen deliver his good wishes to the Kirk family. Then he hung up and rolled under the covers, intent on falling back to sleep. He was an adjunct at the Westing School of Music in Rochester, and his first class of the day wasn’t until the afternoon.

Teetering on the edge of a dream, he wondered if he’d ever loved or been loved by anyone so deeply as to inspire delusions of conspiracy.

Then he had a vision. He saw his body laid out before him, his bare, thin chest in the foreground, his long legs and feet receding to the horizon, and his heart burst out of his flesh like a bladder full of black paint, splashing warmth across his face. He lay supine and watched his body for days, his blood congealing as the sun rose and fell in the world outside. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he saw his toes pressed against the cold steel of a morgue drawer, and when he blinked, cold silver gave way to the hot brick walls of a crematorium. He burned. He felt hot and cold but he could not move and could not cry out. He dreamed of no others, no witnesses, no mourners, no morticians or undertakers. No one touched his body. It propelled itself through the stages of death as it had through life, of its own accord, alone.

He got out of bed and took Bonnie for a ride.

In retrospect, he wishes he hadn’t done that. If he hadn’t gone immediately from that horrible dream to the comforting thrum of Bonnie, he wouldn’t have subconsciously created a bridge between them—ever since that dream, every time Fisher Brodie climbs on his motorcycle, he remembers how he died.

His redheaded pianist, his Natalie, is the cure for this memory. She is dressed entirely in black—black coat, black turtleneck visible beneath her collar, which makes her skin look white as bone and her hair bright as fire. A perfume of anger and desperate sadness follows in her wake as she crosses in front of Fisher to appraise his bike from all angles. He couldn’t fix her if he wanted to. He only wants to know what made her the way she is, what he can do to help her forget. He suspects it has everything to do with music, like everything else in his life. In her life. Their lives.

“This is yours?” she says. Her words float out on a cloud of breath. “She’s beautiful.”

He nods. “She is indeed.” He hands her his helmet but she shakes her head.

“Clearly,” she says with a half smile, “you don’t pay much attention to the weather.”

“
Clearly,
” he says, “it’s never as bad as they say it’s going to be.”

“Don’t come crying to me when you can’t get home on Sunday,” she says.

They are the last words spoken between them for an hour. He climbs on and helps her up behind. She locks her arms around his waist, leans her body fully into his. Turns her head to the side and presses her cheek to the back of his shoulder. Fisher smiles. They ride through the dark of Clinton’s Kill, past a convenience mart, a gas station, a bar, and old, old houses in various states of restoration and dilapidation. Bonnie purrs rhythmically, comfortingly. As soon as they arrive in town, they’re out of it again, out on the black roads, the black and empty roads that are theirs and theirs alone. Fisher opens the throttle. The air rushing over them is freezing, but every part of Fisher is warm. He unzips the top of his jacket. The sky, when he rolls his head back to look, is shocking, open, scattered with stars like shining grains of salt. His lungs fill with bright air that tells of distant fires and coming snow. Natalie moves against him, resettles, squeezes him tighter. She slips one cold hand inside his jacket and holds it over his heart.

The roads cut through open fields, through woods. An occasional lone house peers from a hill in the distance. Fisher and Natalie fly. He thinks of his Auntie. He knows this is exactly what she would have wanted for him. To fly. To be free. Free but not alone.

In the middle of nowhere—they’ve driven through several nowheres, and this is definitely the very middle—Fisher pulls Bonnie into a gas station. The pumps are empty. A single car, a greenish-blue Neon, is parked beside the station mart.

“Why are we stopping?” Natalie’s voice is ragged. She hasn’t let him go.

“Didn’t I promise you a bite?” he says, turning around and pointing at the mart. “I’d kill for a Ho Ho.”

After the dark of the roads, the fluorescent lights inside make his eyes water. He wipes them with his thumbs. Natalie has already found the rack of Hostess products, single-serve, cellophane-wrapped fruit pies and custard-injected pastries that Fisher, who had never had such gloriously terrible foodstuffs before coming to the States, frequently craved. Not that there was a dearth of gloriously terrible foodstuffs in Scotland; his parents just didn’t believe in having them in the house. And since most of his life in Scotland had been spent under his parents’ roof, his parents’ management and control, he had had to go to New York, to university, before being exposed to the delights of Hostess and Little Debbie. She tasted like liberty.

“Ho Hos for you.” Natalie tossed him a packet. “Cupcakes for me. Twinkies for . . . because. Anything else?”

“Think that covers it.” Fisher cannot look away from her. Her pale face has gone lavender in the cold and wind.

“What? What are you staring at?” she says, smiling, turning a deeper purple.

“You should get out more,” he says.

“So should you.”

The boy behind the counter—and it is a boy, he can’t be older than twenty—sets aside a paperback novel with a woman in a lion skin wielding a comically giant sword on its cover.
Back to the Moons of Venus,
Fisher reads, upside down, squinting.

Between beeps from the cash register Fisher hears it. A tiny click over his shoulder.

“Whoa,” says the boy. He backs into a wall of cigarettes, hands up, palms out.

“Get the cupcakes,” says Natalie. “Now.”

“What—” says Fisher, and turns. Natalie is standing behind him holding a gun, pointing it at the poor nerd behind the counter, the nerd squeezing his eyes shut so hard his face looks folded.

“Nat—”

“Shut up and get the cupcakes,” she says. Her eyes are even brighter than they were. They are dancing, they are singing in her face. “Get the Ho Hos. Come on. Come
on.
”

Fisher doesn’t think. He grabs all three snacks and Natalie laughs at him and it’s automatic, he laughs back and he hears the bell above the door chime as they tear out of the store. Everything is instinct. He shoves the snacks in the inside pocket of his jacket and climbs on the bike. Natalie climbs on behind him and grips his middle. He guns it and they’re gone, back on the black, anonymous roads, and Fisher’s heart is beating, beating. He wants to shout. He wants to laugh. He wants to crash his bike into the closest ditch and dig a hole and die there. He wants to take Natalie back to his room,
now,
and kiss her, touch her, make love until they both turn inside out. Natalie is shaking. Fisher is shaking. No matter who started it, they’re both shaking, they’re both laughing, they’re both thrilled to bits.

They ride in silence. Fisher doesn’t know what to do other than head back to the Bellweather. The hotel’s great middle tower is dotted with lit windows and the lobby glows, but everything else is dark. Fisher pulls his bike partway up the main drive, just hidden in the shadows, and cuts the engine. They sit there together, breathing hard. Natalie squeezes him tighter with each exhalation.

“There weren’t cameras,” she whispers. “I checked. Of course I checked.”

“It is real? The gun.”

She swallows. “Yes.” Then she laughs. “Yes, it’s real.” She lets go and Fisher feels his ribs open up.

“Can I have my cupcakes now?” she says. She strolls around to the front of the bike, facing him across the handlebars.

He has never seen anyone look more beautiful. More alive. And God, all the saints and his Auntie McDunnock preserve him, Fisher has never felt more alive than he does tonight with Natalie. The stars and the air and the wind burn, and Fisher burns with them.

He climbs off, dropping Bonnie’s kickstand. He reaches into his jacket and shows Natalie her cupcakes, smashed flat in their cellophane pouch. Cream oozes white through cracked chocolate.

“Is that my fault?” she asks, grinning.

She reaches for the cupcakes. Fisher pulls her close, his hand around her waist for a change, and kisses her.

He can tell she’s surprised, though she shouldn’t be. Her lips are dry from the wind, but her mouth is hot, and shut. She pushes Fisher away and frowns, on the verge of words. He can hear them already:
I’m married. I’m sorry. I can’t do this.
The Unavailables have been different in every respect save for their words, and he has always known, before tonight, the most convincing rebuttal in each circumstance. Humorous:
You’re married? Well, that makes one of us
. Inductive:
There’s nothing to be sorry about. I’m the one who ought to be sorry, I’m the one who brought us here—though I didn’t get here alone.
Logical:
Can’t and won’t are two entirely different things.

Then Fisher remembers whom he kissed, and who, without another word, is kissing him back.