Extreme Magic (9 page)

The door-cluttered box in which they stood predicated a three-piece “suite” and no more. In the center of its mustard woodwork and a wallpaper like cold cereal, two contorted pedestals supported less the ceiling than the status of the room. Wedged in without hope of rearrangement, her own furniture had an air of outrage, like social workers who had come to rescue a hovel and had been confronted, instead, with the proud glare of mediocrity.

She returned the room’s stare with an enmity of her own. Soon I will get to know you the way a woman gets to know a house—where the baseboards are roughest, and in which corners the dust drifts—the way a person knows the blemishes of his own skin. But just now I am still free of you—still a visitor.

“Best I could do.” The heavy shoes clumped, shifting.

“It’ll be all right,” she said. “You wait and see.” She put her palms on his shoulders. “It just looked queer for a minute, with windows only on one side.” She heard her own failing voice with dislike, quirked it up for him. “Half chick. That’s what it is. Half-chick house!”

“Crazy!” But some of the strain left his face.

“Uh-huh,
Das Ewig Weibliche,
that’s me!” She half pirouetted. “Dan!” she said. “Dan, where’s the piano?”

“Back of you. We had to put it in the dinette. I thought we could eat in the living room anyway.”

She opened the door. There it was, filling the box room, one corner jutting into the entry to the kitchenette. Tinny light, whitening down from a meager casement, was recorded feebly on its lustrous flanks. Morning and evening she would edge past it
,
with the gummy dishes and the clean. Immobile, in its cage, it faced her, a great dark harp lying on its side.

“Play something, for luck.” Dan came up behind her, the baby bobbing on his shoulder.

She shook her head.

“Ah, come on.” His free arm cinched the three of them in a circle, so that the baby participated in their kiss. The baby began to cry.

“See,” she said. “We better feed her.”

“I’ll warm the bottle. Have to brush up on being a father.” He nudged his way through the opening. She heard him rummaging in a carton, then the clinking of a pot.

She opened the lid of the piano and struck the A, waiting until the tone had died away inside her, then struck a few more notes. The middle register had flattened first, as it always did. Sitting down on the stool, she looked into her lap as if it belonged to someone else. What was the piano doing here, this opulent shape of sound, five hundred miles from where it was the day before yesterday; what was she doing here, sitting in the lopped-off house, in the dress that had been her wedding dress, listening to the tinkle of a bottle against a pan? What was the mystery of distance—that it was not only geographical but clove through the map, into the heart?

She began to play, barely flexing her fingers, hearing the nails she had let grow slip and click on the keys. Then, thinking of the entities on the other side of the wall, she began to play softly, placating, as if she would woo them, the town, providence. She played a Beethoven andante with variations, then an adagio, seeing the Von Bülow footnotes before her: “…the ascending diminished fifth may be phrased, as it were, like a question, to which the succeeding bass figure may be regarded as the answer.”

The movement finished but she did not go on to the scherzo. Closing the lid, she put her head down on her crossed arms. Often, on the fringes of concerts, there were little haunting crones of women who ran up afterward to horn in on the congratulatory shoptalk of the players. She could see one of them now, batting her stiff claws together among her fluttering draperies, nodding eagerly for notice: “I studied…I played too, you know…years ago…with De Pachmann!”

So many variants of the same theme, she thought, so many of them—the shriveled, talented women. Distance has nothing to do with it; be honest—they are everywhere. Fifty-seventh Street is full of them. The women who were once “at the League,” who cannot keep themselves from hanging the paintings, the promising
juvenilia,
on their walls, but who flinch, deprecating, when one notices. The quondam writers, chary of ridicule, who sometimes, over wine, let themselves be persuaded into bringing out a faded typescript, and to whom there is never anything to say, because it is so surprisingly good, so fragmentary, and was written—how long ago? She could still hear the light insistent note of the A, thrumming unresolved, for herself, and for all the other girls. A man, she thought jealously, can be reasonably certain it was his talent which failed him, but the women, for whom there are still so many excuses, can never be so sure.

“You’re tired.” Dan returned, stood behind her.

She shook her head, staring into the shining case of the piano, wishing that she could retreat into it somehow and stay there huddled over its strings, like those recalcitrant nymphs whom legend immured in their native wood or water, but saved.

“I have to be back at the plant at eleven.” He was smiling uncertainly, balancing the baby and the bottle.

She put a finger against his cheek, traced the hollows under his eyes. “I’ll soon fatten you up,” she murmured, and held out her arms to receive the baby and the long, coping day.

“Won’t you crush your dress? I can wait till you change.”

“No.” She heard her own voice, sugared viciously with wistfulness. “Once I change I’ll be settled. As long as I keep it on…I’m still a visitor.”

Silenced, he passed her the baby and the bottle.

This will have to stop, she thought. Or will the denied half of me persist, venomously arranging for the ruin of the other? She wanted to warn him standing there, trusting, in the devious shadow of her resentment.

The baby began to pedal its feet and cry, a long nagging ululation. She sprinkled a few warm drops of milk from the bottle on the back of her own hand. It was just right, the milk, but she sat on, holding the baby in her lap, while the drops cooled. Flexing the hand, she suddenly held it out gracefully, airily, regarding it.

“This one is still ‘the rabbi’s daughter,’” she said. Dan looked down at her, puzzled. She shook her head, smiling back at him, quizzical and false, and bending, pushed the nipple in the baby’s mouth. At once it began to suck greedily, gazing back at her with the intent, agate eyes of satisfaction.

A
T NIGHT, FLORENCE HAS
no tourists. All along the tables dotted in front of this particularly famous café, people sat close together in the half-light, musing, chatting—though it was midnight—in little infernos of talk that celebrated the hour. On the pavement before the tables an unending line of strollers repeated its themes; how many times, for instance, had there not seemed to pass the same pair of high-stepping, black-crepe-and-honey women—or were they girls?—the pout of their calves and pompadours drawn by the same dusky brush, between shoulder and chin always the same long, half-agonized line of throat? Both sitters and promenaders were alike in that each line thought itself audience to the other; for each, its side was the land of the living, the other side the stage.

“I must have been about your age, about nineteen”—the woman speaking, hidden in the shadows beyond the high-backed chair of her invisible vis-à-vis, either thought them both concealed, or did not care who saw or heard—“maybe nineteen and a half, for we were still counting our years in halves then. That gorgeous spring I spent whirling through first love with a boy named Ben. And planning to murder a professor named Tyng. You ever notice, incidentally, that ‘gorgeous’ has quite dropped out of the language? Must have gone during the depression; we all came out of those years so very stripped and staccato, cleansed of everything from fake Renaissance furniture to the acting style of Sir Henry Irving. And slang had to be just like the plays—short words, full of compassion.

“Anyway…it was the spring of my junior or senior year. I’m not good about dates and time, and that goes for geography too; facts of when or where don’t interest me. A person like me’s memory is likely to be long, but schoolbook accuracy is seldom its forte. Right in the middle of a conversation, an experience, it goes on selecting, exaggerating, and what we’re doomed to remember—believe me,
doomed
—is…Oh, well, not so much the facts as the
feeling…

“But that’s just the sort of thing you have to keep in mind about people like us, about me…in what I seem to be going to tell you. Yes, I know you’re interested, or you wouldn’t have looked me up. Just remember, though, that even when we’re at our quietest—and we can be quiet—words are our reflex. We spend our lives putting things into words.”

Contrarily, before the voice began again—not with a sigh, for there seemed no sighs in this clear-thinking reed—there was a silence. And then the voice again.

“For instance, I’m willing to bet when you go back home you’ll have a far better idea of where this terrace was in Florence, and of what we saw today at the galleries, than I—and I’ve been here before. How I’ll remember, dunno—not till I sit down someday to write about it. And then maybe it’ll turn into a dialogue between two women of different ages, sitting here watching the other unaccompanied women go by, and wondering which of the well-dressed ones are—see that ladylike one; she’s a very well-known one—and pinning us all down in our separate terms.”

The occupant of the chair opposite the speaker must have leaned forward, uncurling feet that had been tucked under, for there was now visible one pale slipper of uncertain color, of the kind known as “ballerinas”—a tentative, young shoe.

“Or,” said the voice, “I might use
you
discovering Italy, turning you round and round, seeing you with Italy at your edges, or Italy vice versa—though I won’t necessarily use what you told me happened between you and the boy in Stamford…Hmm? No, of course I won’t. If I’m lucky, you’ll be true to life, that’s all. Not necessarily true to yours. And I shan’t apologize; the odds are I’ll be in there too somewhere, on just as sharp a pin.

“Notice I’m not the least interested in what you’ll remember. My way of talking’s a habit I can’t shake. Keep that in mind, won’t you, that I warned you? For I’ve reached an age, you see, where I notice people try to undazzle the young…

“Thank you, you’re very sweet, but I’m almost forty-one. There are women who falsify their age and women who ask you to guess; I’m too old to be the first sort and not old enough to be the other. And if you think
that
remark has been made before—well, it has! Oh well, thanks. The hair’s a tint of course, but at least I started out a real blonde. And we small-boned types wear better than average; I’ll live till ninety and die of a broken hip. And of course nobody who
is
anybody fattens anymore. A social comment, that—maybe you’ll use it someday when you use
me.

“Anyway, there are at least a half dozen of us who might be me. All of us have done enough to be looked up, the way you looked me up, all about forty, forty-five. All with at least two husbands too, although mine were better than most. A painter so handsome you wouldn’t believe his work could deserve such success—until you saw it—and a banker of such charm that nobody minded his money. Too good to have let go, both of them. And of course
I
didn’t, though they let me think so, right up to the end. Absolute opposites, those two men were, never even met; yet when they left, it was with the same parting words…

“Don’t flinch. You said you wanted to be one of us, didn’t you? From the pieces you showed me, maybe you will be. That’s why I’m telling you this. Get it straight, though—I loved them, and they me. My first used to say he’d
never
seen a woman as pretty and sexy as I was who was so tough to paint. Maybe you’re thinking that’s because one can’t paint a verbal shimmer. But I don’t talk very much with men actually, and I never talked at all in bed; I knew enough not to do that, even before I’d read about it. And I suppose it’s not surprising they both made the same remark when they left—after all, they were both expressing the same thought. Of course, it wasn’t my intelligence that bothered my husbands, though I’m grateful people think so. When asked, I take the line that the painter wouldn’t cope—engage—with it, and I couldn’t stand that. And that the banker wanted to promote it—and of course I couldn’t stand
that
either. That’s the line I take.”

In the chair opposite, the one pale slipper, twisting, was joined in its movement by the other; then both were set flat, suggesting that the chair’s occupant was nervously in thrall.

“So,” said the voice quickly, “at last, back to that spring. Couldn’t do without the preamble, though; you’ll see why, if you haven’t begun to already. In fact, because you’re so smart—so much smarter than I was at your age—I’ll even give you the key to it all, though I expect it’ll sound like kitchen-maid stuff to your collegiate ear.
That spring was the last spring she really lived.
Sorry, this is one of those. What I call ‘little did I know’ stories. Anyway—in case I made you uneasy back there—I still haven’t
quite
murdered Professor Tyng.

“William Tenney Tyng. He was a tall, monk-skulled Anglophile, who opened his Daily Theme course every year by reciting ‘The policeman’s lot is not a happy one.’ In private life he was known to be writing an epic poem. He hated to see the student eye in a fine frenzy rolling, and his highest accolade—I never got it—was to put ‘Neat but not gaudy’ on modest little themes about cats. I suppose his real trouble was he wanted to be teaching young Oxonians, not second-generation American girls who were floundering in a tumescent passion for the language and spoke it mostly in the accents of the Midwest or the Bronx. And I suppose I should feel sorry for him, now that I know he directed his irony at us only because he didn’t dare direct it at the sublime. But I can’t. Oh, I’ve used him, now and then, as people like me will use, over and over, those who have humiliated them, and I once said he didn’t ‘teach the young idea how to shoot,’ as the quote says; he
shot
it, wherever, green and trembling, it arose. Let that stand.