The Daughters: A Novel (6 page)

“I just have to be careful. If I inhale too much, I’ll sound awful tomorrow.” I rubbed my fingers down the crest of my neck, where an Adam’s apple would have been on a man. “I can already feel it building up.”

“Of course,” the wife said. She took a sip of whiskey-laced tea from a delicate teacup. All around us people sat on logs, balancing china plates on their knees while the fire illuminated their faces erratically.

Just as I decided that I ought to sneak away, someone brought out a few guitars, and to my surprise the group converged around them. I thought my presence was just a whim of Finn’s—an embellishment, like the china and the beef bourguignon. My concern over tomorrow’s performance was half a put-on: it was true that I didn’t want to inhale too much smoke, but the show I was worried about would take place in New York a week hence. This was the desert. These were desert people, at a party for their wealthy friend.

As the instruments were strummed and tuned, the crowd reshuffled themselves and began to sing. Country songs, old James Taylor, Johnny Cash. Then they veered towards folk songs, or so I assumed anyway, being unfamiliar with absolutely all of them. The songs seemed tied to the singers’ bodies, borrowing rhythm from hands slapping or feet landing against the dirt while couples danced. I settled myself on a stone bench some distance from the fire and watched them. Listened. While two women wove a harmony so sleek I could feel their voices rolling through one another like strips of silk being tied into a knot. While the guitars bantered, and skipped, and ran. While Finn played and sang, a smile opening his face so wide it became another face entirely.

Easy to read. Empty of expectations, save one.

I don’t know how long the music went on, but by the time it stopped the cold from the sky had settled down over our shoulders, dampening the fire. I shivered, sitting lonely on my stone bench, and the shudder in my body startled me properly awake. Standing up, I stretched my arms to the stars and shook out my hair, taking one last look towards the bonfire. Finn was sitting with a guitar flat across his lap, the fingers of one hand stroking the strings, the fingers of the other hand muting them. He stared at me and I stared at him until finally the night was so fully quiet that I walked back to my room just to hear the sound of my footsteps falling.

And, when Finn followed behind me, his.

I
n Chicago, after ending my call, I’d made a show of powering my phone all the way down and tucking it into my purse. John seemed pleased, growing more gregarious as we ate. When our waitress brought over the dessert menu, he
asked her for a split of champagne to accompany our almond praline macarons.

“To what do I owe this sudden joie de vivre?” I accepted a glass from the waitress but didn’t take my eyes off John. He took his own glass, tasted it. Smiled.

“To impulsivity?” he suggested. “Impetuousness? Impishness?”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Infatuation?” I offered. “The attitude of an infantile, indulgent impresario?”

John toasted me. “Indeed. At your service.”

“All right,” I said. “All right.” We sat quietly for a time, listening to a Bach fugue playing over the stereo and sipping our champagne. I let my gaze travel out the window, around the room, but my eyes kept drifting back to John. His hair was thinning away from his temples, something I’d never noticed. It looked good on him. A slight tightening. But I felt a little hollow pocket in my chest, knowing this was something I should have seen before.

When you’re young and your love is new, you map the geography of a person’s body inch by inch. You want to know them so well you could make another version of them, one wrought out of gold and filled with light. And so when you touch your lover, you’re also molding and reshaping their avatar. This rib slightly lower down. The birthmark higher, above the hip. Later, you don’t look so hard. After so much careful scrutiny, you come to believe that you know all the secrets of your beloved’s skin and bones. You run your hands over the golden version in your head, thinking it is the real flesh. Thinking you can do everything by memory. We were only four years married, that night. And yet his hair seemed like a revelation.

“I’m going to tell you something,” John said.

I raised my eyebrows. “What?”

“Oh, I think the story of the man who’ll take you away.” He ran a nail down the stem of his glass. “What do you think this time? Zeus the swan, or Zeus the bull?”

A little sigh of relief escaped me, though I couldn’t have said why. I suppose I thought he was going to reveal something terrible, something that I could never unhear. After all, there had been times lately when I caught John assessing me carefully, slantwise. Like I was a creature invading his home, which he was afraid to startle.

My touring frequency had risen to an alarming pitch—I flew to a different performance every few weeks, sometimes jumping from one to the next and staying away for a month at a time. More. When I came home, John seemed surprised to find me there, doing what I always do. Lounging in bed, reading a score in a state of undress. Picking a plum out of the refrigerator and eating it.

But the stories of my kidnapping were old standards. John used to tell them often, to make me laugh. When he wanted to say that I was beautiful. A god sees a maiden on earth and can’t stand to live without her. Steals her while wearing the skin of a beast and takes her essence for himself.

“Well,” I said, “I’m going to Arizona, right? Some rich so-and-so with a ranch.”

“Okay.” John tilted his head, waiting.

“So the bull, I’d think? Southwestern?” I could see that something about my answer didn’t sit right with John. A little frown crossed his face, then disappeared. “Or maybe Greece doesn’t translate well to contemporary American landscapes?”

“Not an inspired choice,” he agreed. “Maybe it would be better to pick something new. Go down an uncharted road.”

He sat back in his chair, tilting it onto two legs in a way that always makes me nervous. One false move and
crash
, we can’t
come back to this restaurant, ever again. On the stereo, Bach changed to Vivaldi.

“Someplace,” John continued, “remarkable.”

“All right,” I said. But I felt, again, that little shiver.

The wonderful thing about Bach is that his music always says what it means—his exploration, his sense of exercise, is plain in each line of notes as they ascend and then descend in turn. And in Bach’s case, clarity is not at odds with transcendence. They are one and the same: a pure thought, a wordless feeling. Vivaldi is more of a piece with the backways and canals of Venice. His tone is light and seems to follow—as his titles promise—the seasons. But under the sunlight of it, under the whiff of clean snow, I’ve always felt something lurking. People laugh at me when I tell them this, but I maintain that Vivaldi is untrustworthy.

“Well.” I spoke carefully. “Like what?”

“We have to decide on the rules of the world,” John said. “First of all, you’ll be gone there for a long time. Maybe it’s even somewhere you’ve been before?” His eye caught mine in a flash, then flicked away. Sounding me out. If I hadn’t noticed what he looked like, what else might I have missed? Submerged signals. Signs of displeasure when I talked about a conductor in Berlin, the broad chest of a basso profundo in Carnegie Hall.

“I go where I’m asked.”

“Yes.” John let his chair descend with a thump and I looked around, embarrassed, but no one was paying attention. “But who’s asking? A, shall we say, rich so-and-so. Debonair type, who keeps a whole storeroom full of jewels to drape around the shoulders of the women he lures in.”

“John,” I said. But he put up a hand, one finger aloft.
Let me continue.

“What you see when you look at him isn’t the whole truth.
But at first that won’t be what’s important, because he’ll want to look at you. He’ll give you a necklace to wear when you sing, one that clasps at the top and bottom of your throat. And there will be jewels—rubies, probably.” John raised an eyebrow at me, daring me to critique him.

I shook my head. If we were going to really go for it: “Garnets.”

“Ah, ha,” he agreed. “Even better. Garnets then. To mark each gulp.” John traced a vertical line down his neck, running over the Adam’s apple. “A row of jewels up and down, a collar of jewels at top and bottom. That will be your welcome gift.”

“Not a very good gift, if he wants me to sing.”

“Why not?” He looked wounded, and by way of explanation, I made a choking motion, hands a V on my collarbone.

“Too restrictive.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is
.
” I could feel my blood pressure rising—a dial twisting, turning by centimeters. I wanted John to stop, to look at me and say he was sorry for letting himself get carried away. But he didn’t.

“Well, that’s just the point,” he said instead. Then he smiled. Wide. And with that smile, I felt him pull something out of my hands. The rope that tied us to shore. The mooring. “He’ll have had it designed just for you. So it doesn’t obstruct your throat, it moves with it. You see? He’s a man who likes to watch.” He took a drink of water. “Watch you sing, that is.”

I stared down at the plate of macarons, which our waiter had slipped on the table unobtrusively. They were arranged beautifully, and I picked one up but couldn’t quite bring myself to eat it. My stomach had gone off. Too much rich food with dinner. Too much wine.

“I thought the man wasn’t what he seemed,” I said. “That was your premise.”

“No, you’re misremembering.” John reached over and took the cookie from me, ate it clean in two sharp bites. “I said that what you saw of him wasn’t the whole truth. That doesn’t mean that what you saw was a lie. Just that”—he glanced towards the ceiling, considering—“I don’t know, he has lizard skin underneath. Or feathers. A reverse swan, if you will. Zeus on the outside.”

“I don’t know,” I said. Drummed my nails on the table.

“Oh?” John licked his teeth.

“You make him sound so wretched, but really, what is he? A rich man who loves music? I’ve heard of worse.”

“Well yes, but—” John mimed my earlier choking motion. “You know. His perversions.”

I shrugged. John put his hand over mine. I flattened it against the table, and he flattened his own, to keep the contact. “We’re just playing. Don’t get upset.”

“You don’t listen to yourself,” I said. “Do you?”

We looked into each other’s eyes.

“Well, I’m going to go pay the bill.” John stood up and caught the attention of our server. His voice had gone tense, his jaw set. “You come when you’re ready.”

“You don’t listen to anything,” I said to his back. “It’s no surprise you don’t get invited to tour anymore.”

He didn’t turn. Small wonder.

Outside a group of people walked by, laughing. It was spring, the city beginning to thaw. I sat still and finished the last of my champagne. Considered drinking John’s too, but thought better of it. At the front of the restaurant, John laughed with the waitress as he handed her a credit card and signed the slip. To look at him, you’d never know he was angry—would never know he’d ever been angry in his life.

T
he day of Finn’s party I woke up early, the sun softer and warmer in the dawn than it had been the afternoon before. I was alone but hadn’t been for long—the pillow beside me was depressed in the telltale shape of Finn’s head, and still smelled like him, dust and musk. There was a shape lodged in my throat, making it hard for me to draw normal breath. A heart, beating. A small animal, curled in a ball. I rolled into the hollow Finn had left in the sheets, masking his scent with my own.

The fire, the smoke. I’d known it would cause problems. Sinking into the mattress, I pulled the duvet up over my ears, hoping that a little more rest would clean me out. Wash away all remnants of the previous evening.

On its surface, the ranch was rustic—it told the story of a Mexican hacienda, with small orange and pink casitas dotting the land around the main estate. When I first rode into the courtyard, my gameness for adventure had stuttered, as I imagined scratchy woven blankets and hard wooden chairs. But the antique touches were just for show. One layer down, everything here had been built for comfort.

Still, I couldn’t find sleep—still, despite my bed and its deep well of feathers, despite the crisp sheets. No matter how I arranged myself, I was too aware of my body. Tiny hairs crackling on the back of my neck. Ribs abutting stomach and spleen. The memory of a finger tracing a line down my back. I felt too alive, too touched to drift off.

And then there was the issue of my throat, that shadow shape.

Get out,
I thought. But it sat firm, small bean. Silent passenger.

With a sigh, I sat up, holding the blanket around my shoulders.
A window beside me allowed in streams of light where a triangle of curtain had been folded back—when? Finn had wanted to show me constellations. Finn had crept out in the morning, perhaps before the sun bled into the sky.

Outside nothing tempered the landscape. Cactus and rock, bone and tree, jutted from the earth where and how they wished. Contradictions refused explanation: the sky through my window was clear, but the sand was speckled with rainwater, the scent of which lay over the morning like a shawl.
What are you doing here?
The question came to me from the air. And I remembered.

The stage. A real reason, a good reason, to have come all this way. To have pushed and pulled John into a fight, and then tumbled down after him, much further than I expected to go.

I pulled on jeans and a long cotton shirt, hasty dress against the wind. My plan was simple, if vague: find the right path and reach my destination. If there was a path, that is. Knowing what I did about Finn, it was entirely possible that the stage was hidden and we’d need to be led there by some sort of native guide. He liked a show. Though at least he had no trouble admitting that. No hesitation about telling you what was a performance and what was real as breathing.

As luck would have it, I slipped outside without meeting anyone else in the hacienda. An hour later and the other guests would all have been out to waylay me. Polite hellos. Curiosity. I’d have had to look at their bodies and try to map the sensations in mine to possibilities in theirs. Like coded words being translated back to ordinary meaning.