Love Begins in Winter (2 page)

The long eighteenth-century manor waits in darkness for its part-time occupants, who are spread across Paris for most of the year like different parts of a machine. They are a lovely family. Though one side is a little solemn, while the other is a little zealous. The house is long and white with many windows. In the attic there is a box of Napoleonic uniforms. In one of the bedrooms, three dozen Agatha Christie Penguin paperbacks. In another, engravings of birds.

Tomorrow I will return to New York, my home for almost a decade now. More concerts at the end of the week. One at the Lotos Club, another at a fund-raiser for Central Park, then Los Angeles—a concert at the Hollywood Bowl—then San Francisco, then Phoenix.

I love New York but miss the silence of rural Europe. Americans are literal. I think my brother would find a wife here in five minutes.

Bach's Suites for Solo Cello were written as pieces intended to teach but contain a mystery musicians unravel without knowing why; a map that shows the position of other maps. They are as popular as the stock pieces I play by Mozart and Haydn. Bach's Suites for Solo Cello are actually my biggest sellers. Bach and my brother helped buy my small apartment in Brooklyn. My brother doesn't know I know, but he bought thousands of copies of my CD and put them in his employees' Christmas bags. My brother's employees love him passionately. If there were a war on, they'd become his private army. It's amazing how he's done so well in business. He's crushed all competition. He's been on the cover of business magazines worldwide. For reasons known only to my brother and me, he has almost single-handedly made Renault the most popular brand of small car in Europe. I even have one here in New York. Everybody wants to know what it is. They always pronounce the “T”. I have a mechanic in Queens. He's from Senegal and also grew up with Renault automobiles. In fact, I park it at his house and he uses it to drive his six kids around. I haven't seen it in almost two years. My brother doesn't know but would approve of the whole situation. My brother and I have the same brown Renault 16s, both from 1978. Perhaps we hold on to our childhoods because we can't hold on to each other. His girlfriends are always surprised when their millionaire boyfriend picks them up in a 1978 Renault 16.

An hour after my performance in Quebec City I walked right past my hotel into the maze of old streets. The rain was too beautiful to miss. Then I found Le Saint Amour, a little French restaurant. The food reminded me of home. I explained how I don't drink because I'm allergic, but the waiter brought little glasses of wine for me to sniff as I sank my fork into foie gras, filet mignon, truffled lentils. I'm not really allergic to alcohol; the opposite actually—my body loves the stuff.

The restaurant was packed with couples. A teenage girl sat quietly with her father. She was angry or disappointed with him. He knew it but pretended not to be bothered. I think all children are disappointed with their parents if they're lucky enough to get so close.

I left an enormous tip. I shall never forget my waiter. He kept trying to speak Italian, even though he knew I was French. He kept mentioning his daughters. He wore glasses that made him look too old. He loved being a waiter. He said that each meal was a memory. He said that he was a part of something good that had not started with him and would not end with him. As I left the restaurant, I felt a stabbing sadness. I would never see him again.

I passed several cold shops. Everything was closed. Puppets in a shop window stared out into the street, pretending not to see me. I walked carefully across the icy cobbles. It was snowing now, but only lightly. The buildings were silent, their occupants asleep inside. It was after one and so quiet I could hear the buzzing of streetlights as I walked under them.

The city looked different. I stood in the middle of the square before Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, a small gray, crooked church. They once filmed a sad film there. It was about a boy whose father was a failure. Going back somewhere at night is almost like haunting the world after death.

I kept walking, making eyes at the statues, naming each one like a sentimental drunkard after lovers and friends.

And then I stopped walking. My eye was drawn by movement. I couldn't quite see what it was—most likely a human figure passing before a dark window like a fish barely visible beneath the surface of a pond.

Each window held its very own candle. But they weren't real candles, just electric lights shaped like candles. The long house was tucked into an alley that glowed with snow. The streetlights at the far end of the house cast a great shadow on the side of the crooked church. The house was almost a smaller version of the one in which I had grown up—the bourgeois manor my father had spent his life maintaining like a mute first-born child. There were other windows too, ones without candles, ones so dark it was almost as if there were no glass at all. An inscription above the door read, “Par le Coeur de Mon Fils,” and then a stone relief of a hand entering what appeared to be a human heart. Also, a large crucifix carved into the heavy wooden door. The order and cleanliness of the corridor that was visible through the only brightly lit window, on the ground floor, made me think this was a convent.

Then I saw the figure pass by the window again. It stopped. Whoever it was had seen me standing outside in the freezing air. It was past three in the morning. We were the only two inhabitants of an entire city; footprints on each other's island.

The figure swiftly moved to another window, one with a candle, and I saw who it was.

I could distinguish her profile, but details remained a mystery. She stood with the poise of someone young. Her hand pressed up against the pane. Then, in the mist which had laid itself thinly upon the early morning glass—as if solely for the purpose of what was about to happen next—this woman whom I knew but would never know, this lost, sleepless figure who found herself wandering the corridors of an icy dawn, wrote something very slowly with her finger upon the pane. Then she lifted the candle against the letters she had drawn with her finger:

 

 

I took my hands out of my pockets. It began to rain and she disappeared. I turned and walked slowly away.

I said the word over and over again as I paced the city. And I felt suddenly warm, full of strength, full of life, and ready to give life. I suppose I need people to tell me what I already know.

My father and mother would be awake by now.

The kitchen sink full of vegetables freshly pulled from the earth.

My brother in Paris reading beside the window—his new girlfriend still asleep.

And Sandy, my agent—with her daughter in their hot bed, nestled in one another's arms. Their breathing is soft and private; mouths open against hillsides of pillow.

I must have returned to my hotel room around breakfast time the next day. I was out all night in the cold and soaked through. I left a small pool in the elevator. The couple staying on my floor with the miniature poodle will probably be blamed. The staff here is very gracious, and the grand Chateau Frontenac hotel is like something from the mind of Chekhov.

I am now soaking in a hot bath.

My chest protrudes from the bubbles like an island upon which the carved head of some great deity has come to life. I must remember to write in my diary that I spent the early hours of the morning making eyes at all the statues in the city and then soaked in a tub.

My shoes were so wet they had ceased to make a sound on the cobbles. I have put them in the sink. The leather is impossibly tender now; I don't think it will ever go back to normal. I think of the word. I can feel her finger moving across my back in the shape of letters.

 

 

When I get back to New York, I'm going to start getting up early. I'm going to invite my brother to come and see me. We will sit together in the park in heavy coats. We will watch the clouds pass. Sometimes I imagine that each cloud holds the weight of what will happen.

The water in my bath is cooling. I can see a version of myself in it. My eyes ascend to the window, then through it. They find the river and follow it. Quebec City was taken from its ancient people by the French when William Shakespeare was about my age. My hotel room overlooks the St. Lawrence River. Chunks of ice slip by with the current. Quebec women once set out hard rods of corn on planks of wood on the river's bank. I can see their cotton-white breath and their gray teeth as glimmering fish are spread across barrels. Their aprons are wet. Frost has dusted white the rich brown earth. The ground is hard as stone. Cold has cracked their hands. They laugh and wave to children on small boats drifting. Clouds churn in the eyes of the fish.

I like my room here at the Chateau. It overlooks part of the river but is directly over a park. In the park there are trees stripped by winter and blackened by rain. I can't stop thinking of the early settlers of the 1600s. The smell of wet leather. Stupid horses not doing what they're told. Babies crying. Wet wood. Ice on everything, ice cutting through the body. The earth too frozen to bury the dead. And nothing will grow. A few frozen berries dot the woods like eyes. New foods are tried but result in sickness.

I must have fallen asleep in the tub. I awake to a light tapping on my door. I don't answer and hope the person will go away. Tapping again. Perhaps my cello is ready to come up from the hotel vault they assured me exists. I find a towel, open the door, and thank the bellboy with some money. He asks if I want breakfast, then says it was an honor to carry my instrument. He walks away whistling. I think the staff like me. Two chambermaids think they heard me practicing in my room before my concert yesterday, but it wasn't me. It was Pablo Casals. I was playing one of his old recordings, a Toccata in C Major by J. S. Bach. They were shuffling outside the door. I made it louder. When it finished, they clapped. I should write to Bose and tell them their speakers are a success.

Most people never get to hear this music. Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us. Bach wrote the Cello Suites for his young wife as an exercise to help her learn the cello. But inside each note is the love we are unable to express with words. I can feel her frustration and joy as my bow carves out the notes of the mild-mannered organist who saw composing as one of his daily chores. When Bach died, some of his children sold his scores to the butcher; they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany, a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.

I open my cello case and smell my grandfather. I pick up the instrument and run my fingers tenderly up and down the strings. In each note of music lives every tragedy of the world and every moment of its salvation. The cellist Pablo Casals knew this. Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained. Music and love are the same.

I am staring at the fireplace in my room, holding my cello. I think of my parents again. My father doesn't listen to the music I record, but he sometimes comes to my performances when I'm in Tours or Saumur.

In my cello case is a mitten that belonged to the baker's daughter. I keep it in my pocket when I play. We sat next to each other in class. Her name was Anna. She had freckles and held her pencil with three fingers and a thumb.

Winter strips the village of my youth, but in spring the parks fill up again with children learning how to ride bicycles and not doing what they're told.

T
O SEE HIM IS
a miracle. He stands at the fountain and gently raises a hand. Then birds swoop down from trees and perch on his shoulders. Some hover, then drop into his hands like soft stones. Children cry with joy. Parents want to know who he is. They call him the birdman of Beverly Hills and talk about him over dinners with friends who wonder what his story is. Some say his wife and child were killed. Others say he was in a war. Many people believe he's an eccentric billionaire.

He wears a dusty dinner jacket, and his pants are short enough to clearly see white socks. His hair is overgrown, with streaks of silver. Worn chestnut loafers tell of a different life.

Sometimes the birdman will raise a hand to his mouth and whisper something to the plump bird cupped there. Moments later, the bird will fly out and land on someone in the crowd: a boy's shoulder or the outstretched hand of a girl.

One Friday morning, not one but three birds landed on an old man's knee. He was sad because no one had asked him out to lunch that day, nor had he received any letters. When the birds landed on him, his mouth trembled and the clouds in his eyes parted.

When the birds flew away, he said, “What a nice birthday present!” The birdman nodded. The old man immediately went home, put away the length of rope, and went downstairs to ask his young Mexican neighbor to be his guest for dinner. They talked about many things. And over dessert the old man made a promise that he would teach his neighbor to read. They were both drunk. Every idea felt original. The next day, the neighbor took the old man a present and a piñada purchased in an East L.A. bakery next to the old Cat & Dog Hospital.

By the time the Mexican boy could read, the two of them had found that they fit the way jigsaw pieces do. They celebrated holidays together. They created for each other a world within a world and cast each other as stars.

Hope is the greatest of all gifts.

Once, a black-haired woman and her child asked the birdman his name. He sighed slowly. He didn't like questions. But the birds around him fluttered their wings. The tired woman and her young child peered up at the birdman.

“Please,” the child implored. “Won't you tell us your name?”

The woman and child were holding hands. The afternoon sunshine warmed the tops of their heads. The woman tilted her left foot to the side as though pouring something out.

“Jonathan,” the birdman said. Then he turned and walked away.

The birds flew with Jonathan, as though pulling his slight frame to the edge of the park with thin ropes. The park returned to normal. A homeless woman fell asleep to the sound of passing cars. Squirrels chased each other around tree trunks with acorns in their mouths.