Orfeo (29 page)

She pulled him down into a pew.
What are you doing in England?
The timbre of her voice said: You found me.

Els felt the strangest impulse to lie. To say he’d sought her out, that she was the reason for this, his first ever trip abroad. But he told her of his mother. She cupped her mouth in pain, although Clara and Carrie Els had never been more than wary rivals.

But how did you know about the concert?
she asked, when Els was done.

Pure chance.

Her eyes went wide, as if adulthood had taught her, too, that chance was an order no one could yet see.

They sat in the pew, racing through the last quarter century. Clara had lived three years for each of Els’s one. She’d taken a First at Oxford. A year after their final disastrous phone call, she married a Rhodes Scholar, whom she divorced soon after, when he returned to the States to enter politics. Two years of graduate research at Cambridge; then something happened that she couldn’t talk about, and she took off for the Continent. After a stint in the pit of the Zurich Opera, she bounced around Germany for a decade, playing with various broadcast orchestras. She auditioned for the Baroque ensemble, which had been her family for the last four years. She remarried, a British conductor six years younger than she was, with a growing reputation.

We’re more good friends than . . . man and wife, anymore.

Els thrust his juddering hands into his pockets.
No children?

She smiled.
When was that going to happen? You?

A daughter
, he told her.
Very bright. Angry at me. Studying computer science at Stanford
.

Not chemistry?
Clara fixed her eyes on Els’s shoulders.

No. It’s machines, for her. At least they’re predictable.

He looked away, into the cavernous space emptying of people. Up in the galleries and behind the choir, the wide window lancets were sheets of black. Buzz from the departing audience floated up into the flattened barrel vault and echoed off the clouds, shells, and cupids. Els gazed around the frowsty barn—half meeting house, half wedding cake. And he told her of his life.

Twenty-four years, and almost nothing to say. He’d studied composition, taken on the fierce cravings of the avant-garde. He’d worked a dozen jobs of no significance. He’d married, had a family, and abandoned it for a pile of mostly unplayed creations now almost four feet high.

All your fault,
he said, warmed by a strange joy.
I would have been so much better off playing chamber music with my chemist colleagues on Saturday nights.

Her bow hand found her neck.
I shipwrecked you!

For years, all I wanted was to write music that would twist your gut.

You’re doing pretty good now,
she said
.

But then . . . I got caught. You know: a certain rhythm, a sequence of intervals. And something would spring open, like the tumblers of a lock . . .

It was, he suddenly felt, as good a life as any. Spin the wheel, roll the twelve-sided dice, push them around, hoping to find the future. Even a three-minute piece could run to more permutations than there were atoms in the universe. And you got three-score years and ten, to find one that was sublime.

He heard himself bungling this, the explanation he thought he’d never get a chance to give. But Clara nodded; she’d always had a good ear. She stared off into the bare, paneled aisles. A laugh tore out of her, and she stood. She took him in one arm and her cello in the other, and hustled them from the church through the admiring thank-yous of the thinning crowd.

They wound up in a subterranean restaurant in St. Martin’s Lane. It was dark, noisy, and indifferent, with candles and a tiny Persian carpet on the table. Clara managed to be both measured and giddy. She ordered an expensive Bordeaux and offered a toast:
To unearned forgiveness. I was a monster, Peter. One confused little shit of a girl. Forgive me?

Nothing to forgive,
he said, but clinked her glass anyway.

They tried to talk music, but their worlds were separated by three centuries. They had no more common cause now than cannibals and missionaries. It stunned him; he’d misread her love of music from the start. Not revolutionary: recuperative. He’d gotten the whole game wrong. Still, her eyes were soft over the rim of her glass as he spoke of their old discoveries. Her mouth curled up with happy embarrassment.

What are you thinking?
he demanded.
Where are you?

At my house. Summer before college. Two babies! Listening to those Strauss songs.

He cringed in the dark, but corrected nothing.
I remember.

Tell me about your music. I want to hear everything.

There wasn’t a single score or recording on this island he could show her. At best, he could whistle her bits of tune—like selling your car by scratching off a few flecks of paint to show prospective buyers.

Funny,
he said.
Right before I made this trip? I was just beginning to learn how music really worked.

Clara’s eyes widened. She pressed two fingers against her lips.
You have to come home with me! Oh, not . . . There’s something I need to show you.

She wouldn’t tell him. They settled up and left the restaurant like runaways. Els sat on the wrong side of her Ford, driving with no steering wheel. He leaned back in the tunnel of London lights. Soon enough, she pulled up in front of a row of Georgian terraced houses. The inside felt like one of those London pocket museums. Old engravings covered the walls and the heavy furniture sprouted festoons. Even the foyer was a wonder cabinet. She’d stepped from their shared Levittown childhood into the highborn eighteenth century.

She nudged him into the sitting room and sat him in stuffed leather. Then she addressed a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The thing she sought lay on an upper ledge, in a system of labeled cardboard coffers. She had to climb up a trolley ladder to reach it. The sight of her legs from under her concert black, ascending the rungs, threatened to kill him.

At last she waved something aloft, singing the first few notes of Bach’s
Et Resurrexit.
She descended triumphant, crossed the room, and put the prize in his hands.

The sheets were a letter he’d posted to himself, into a distant future. His adolescent musical penmanship ambushed him. What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere. But
somewhere
was an awfully big place.

He followed the staves of his first apprentice piece, laughing at all the car wrecks and crazy inspirations. Every choice seemed tender green and bumbling. But how much life the music had! How much hunger to give and excite. All his adult sophistication would never get it back.

All he could do was stare and grin. Young Turk, full of groundless optimism. Every single element of his style had changed. Music had been ground up in the mangle of years. And still he studied the notes, and learned.

He looked up, incredulous.
You kept this?

Her head bobbed like a teenage girl’s. Behind her, her shelves sagged under the legacies of a life richer than he could grasp. And yet, she’d saved this student sketch.

Why?

She took the score back and tugged him to the baby grand that dominated the adjacent room. She slipped off her concert heels and sat him on the piano bench.

Come on. Let’s try it.

Clara laughed her way through the upper lines, leaning into the turns with gusto. Their hands collided as they staked out the keys, struggling to catch the boy’s buckshot notes. Their shoulders pressed together, as if this four-hands act were their standard Saturday night ritual. They resumed the little phrase that they’d had to set aside for a moment, a quarter century before. All went onward and outward; nothing at all important had collapsed.

They crossed the finish line together in a rough approximation of what the boy might once have had in mind. Clara, gleeful, shook her head and patted the pages.
Great, isn’t it? For a first go?

Els shrugged. He needed to show her a quarter century of work that could vindicate this first attempt. She had shipwrecked him. But he wanted to prove that shipwreck might still be luckier than anyone could suppose.

Again!
Clara insisted. And the second time through, the thing breathed.

She grabbed his wrist when they finished.
Peter! I’m so happy. I feel . . . retrieved.
She fell into a cloudy silence, head bowed, stroking the keys.
I’m surprised you’d even say boo to me.

She took him into her tiny galley kitchen and opened a Château Margaux. Wine in hand, they toured her collection. Her walls were crowded with Renaissance woodcut processions and copperplate Baroque fêtes. Four small oils depicted saints in a rainbow of surprise. But the photos were what grabbed Els. He couldn’t stop looking: Clara from every missing year. At twenty-five, in a sleeveless black dress, ridiculously confident and free. At thirty-two, in front of the castle in Prague, gemütlich but wary. A woman of thirty-nine, kissing the hand of Arvo Pärt, before anyone knew the man’s name.

She returned to the kitchen and retrieved the bottle.
Come on,
she said, taking him by two fingers.
Something else to show you
. And she led him up the half-width staircase toward another forgotten thing, put on pause awhile, a lifetime back.

She sat him on her four-poster. They lay back, on top of the nineteenth century eiderdown. She kept his fingers. Els felt the wine, the distance of the past, this woman as familiar as breathing. He bought time, entertaining her with accounts of SoHo spectacles, Richard Bonner’s paranoid flamboyance, the Brooke sonnet to safety that would never be heard. When he ran out of material he made things up, almost like a real composer. She laughed and drew his hand up underneath her concert shirtwaist.

They fell silent in the woozy warmth. Sobered, she took his hand away and studied it.
You could stay a bit
, she said. She flinched as she spoke, waiting to be berated.

Els steadied his glass and leaned against her. Alertness coursed through him. She was right: He could. There was nowhere in the world he had to get to. His passport was in his inside jacket pocket. No one waited for him anywhere. Home was a technicality, and the future held no real obligations aside from filing taxes and dying. The one inexplicable wound of his past had spontaneously healed. Nothing left to prove, and no one to impress or punish.

He felt impossibly cold. He heard her say,
You’re shaking.

Yes,
he said. His arms and legs convulsed and wouldn’t stop. Clara bent forward, then lowered herself to him. They clung without thought. She shifted to fit, and he matched her—a minimalist ballet. Both were where they had to get, and they stayed in that place, free from time, until the doorbell rang.

Clara leapt up and smoothed down her silk wrinkles to no effect. It was well after midnight. Her face flushed with apology. She pulled back her hair, pleaded with her eyes, and padded down the narrow stairwell in her stockings.

Els lay alone in the bedroom of a woman he didn’t know from Eve. He looked up: triglyphs and metopes ringed the room, and below them, a light floral frieze. The cultivated serenity resembled something he might have guarded once, in his museum days. This was the room of the fearless girl of sixteen who’d taught him how to prize the new above all things. He rose from the bed and straightened the eiderdown. On the Belle Époque nightstand next to her pillow was a set of silver hairbrushes and an old edition of Jowett’s Plato. Something clicked, and Els saw what he hadn’t, all those years ago. Even as a girl, Clara Reston had hated the real world.

Voices issued from downstairs: two people, speaking low. Els heard only the cadence, but that was enough: a short comic opera of chirrups and murmurs. Warmth turned to confusion, then furtive explanation, then annoyance, wheedling standoff, and a tense good night. The door shut. Feet padded up the stairs, and Clara eased back into the room.

Her eyebrows rose as she crossed to him.
Sorry about that
.
Where were we?

She took his fingers, the same fingers that had once frozen to the faceplate of a public phone, feeding it quarters on an arctic night weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, through the walls of her Georgian terrace house, came elevated doses of radiation from Chernobyl, thirteen hundred miles away.

That was nothing,
she told his hands.

He held still and supposed she was right.

This matters more.

For years, he’d tried to write music that would make this woman say those words. Now he didn’t believe them. They were no better than that boy’s apprentice piece—passionate but clumsy. The Clara he’d imagined for decades would have laughed at them.

Peter. You looked me up. Despite everything. It’s astonishing.

He freed his hands. Hers patted the air between them.

I want you to know that nothing is off the table. Nothing is impossible.

I should go,
he said.

Later, he couldn’t remember getting downstairs. He did retain an image of her standing in the foyer saying,
Peter. This is wrong. Something brought you here. Don’t throw this away.

But he’d thrown away much worse already in his life, and the real cleaning hadn’t even started. He scribbled his New Hampshire address on the back of his ticket stub. She didn’t want to take it. He left it on the Empire guéridon at the foot of the stairs.

Thank you
, he said.
For everything
.

He had a thought bordering on elation: even death was lucky, and no real loss. But nothing short of music could explain that thought to her. She was still shaking her head, unbelieving, when he pulled the door shut behind him.