The Weight of Gravity (7 page)

             
She remembered that her toes began to tingle even before their lips met.  It wasn't their first kiss, but one of the most memorable.

She passed on the stair-stepper, finished her workout in aerobics and spent longer than usual sitting in the Jacuzzi.  She closed her eyes and a familiar voice came to mind.

Play for me, Reeki.

Chapter 7 - Max

Clay told Max that Erika volunteered at
Borderland Books, Barista & Bagels,
where she played mini concerts on the piano for groups of preschoolers and their moms.

“She still plays.”
Again, it was a statement, not a question. 
She plays the piano ... still.
  And why not, it made sense.  The first thing they shared was their passion for art and music.  He wanted to be a writer, he’d told her, and she dreamed of being a concert pianist, she’d said.  “Art transcends all things,” he’d said to her.  “Art can change the world,” she’d said to him.  “And, most importantly,” he’d said, taking her hand for the first time, “great art lasts forever.”

Damn, that was good stuff, he thought -- the creativity they shared, the inspiration to write, the passion to play the piano. 
Suddenly he had his answer to the question that had plagued him on his long drive out from the coast.  It was no wonder he’d come back to Cottonwood.  It wasn’t simply that he’d stopped writing and eating and sleeping because he’d become cynical, or disillusioned with life, and stopped believing in his craft.  He’d lost his passion to write.  His art was forged in this provincial world, nurtured and inspired by a young woman who loved music. 

Okay, let’s add this up.  Happy and creative back then -- miserable and unproductive now.  Makes sense.  Could explain the trip into hell, anyway.

Undeniably, the bond between them many years ago was forged on their respective talents.  His greatest gift to her had been words.  She inspired him, and he wrote volumes of love notes and poems.  Erika’s gift to him was her music.  He always thought her art greater than his own.  She could never satiate Max’s appetite, no matter how much she played the piano.  Max was old enough now to understand that these gifts between lovers came at a time when they were struggling to make sense of the world and their place in it – and their feelings for each other.

As Clay and Cindy engaged in a discussion about plans for the evening – she’d arranged earlier to gather with friends at the
Fox and Hound
without consulting the “man of the house” -- Max walked out onto the back porch.  Heat waves rising off the desert floor blurred the landscape for as far as he could see.  Standing in the shadow of the porch overhang was probably ten degrees cooler than the direct sunlight, so he pulled a chair into the shade.  But the metal was too hot for him to sit on it comfortably, so he sat on the lid of a large, rusty ice chest near the screened door.

He was back, he thought
, resigned to the idea that there was reason to be here.  For two decades he would not have believed this could ever happen again, but here he was.  All of it, the landscape, the heat, the people, the smells, the way the dry air filled his lungs and prickled his skin, was, in some ways, frighteningly familiar.  What troubled him most was that this place, Cottonwood, was obviously a part of who he was, who he’d always been.  It was like being held under water.  He was immersed, engulfed in something he’d always believed would kill him, if he embraced it.  Years ago he felt suffocated by this world, but now he sensed that survival, instead, might be here for him.  He took a deep breath.  Could he bottle it and take it back to New York?

The shouting in the kitchen came to an end.  Cin and Clay had resolved their dispute.  They were going to meet friends that evening
at the
Fox and Hound
, just as she had said they would.  Max was certain that Clay would eventually give in to Cin’s plans.  It was just that his friend needed to reestablish his male dominance in a household where everyone knew at the get-go that the pretty young wife could have whatever she wished.

At sixteen, Max recalled, he was openly bitter and defiant.  He was angry about many things; his parents’ constant bickering, his father’s infidelity.  But the dark feelings went deeper.  He built an emotional wall that shut most everything and everyone out.  His heart was cold, and he’d taught himself to have compassion only for the characters in his stories.  Watching the
intense sunlight pull the last drops of evening moisture from the desert, Max recalled that no one in this small-town universe understood him or his consuming desire to write.  As a teenager, he delighted in becoming an outcast among peers and a disappointment to his father. 

It took a single, monumental event, twenty-four years ago, to throw open the gates of his i
ron will.  Max never forgot the moment he first heard Erika play the piano.  To say she played the piano, that she was a pianist, was absurdly simplistic, he thought.  There he was, wearing his usual mantle of pride and arrogance, posturing himself in attitude superior to his classmates and few friends, and wishing to be anyplace else that evening but the school auditorium.  He watched, disinterested, as Erika walked on stage, sat and adjusted the bench so slightly he didn’t see it move –
what was that about?
-- and then place her right foot on the pedal.  After several motionless seconds, --
okay, play already
-- she raised her head and gently rested her fingertips on the keys.  It was a moment longer before the music exploded into the air and the journey began.  Max learned later that Erika’s first note was in D flat major, the most romantic of all keys.

“In her hands,” he wrote that night in his journal, “the inanimate collection of wood and wire took wing.”  Max saw Erika lean into her lover, caressing and urging him to respond, to follow her touch.  He was suddenly embarrassed, watching a beautiful woman delight in pleasuring her lover, and sharing the experience with him.  It was the most intimate scene he had ever witnessed, or imagined in his writing.  Max saw other voyeurs around him lean forward in their seats, some with mouths open.  As she played -- the notes striking everything and everyone in the room -- Max knew he was watching Erika in a moment of perfect union.  He saw the joy in her face, and in the subtle movement of her lips and eyes as she played.

"She's good!" Danny whispered to Max.  "Best in the class.”  Max had come to cheer on his friend, a cellist who was waiting to perform.  “Everyone wants to play like Erika."

Max heard Danny, but his eyes never left Erika.  When the last note was played, Max was changed.  He knew it then, and remembered it vividly now, nearly a quarter of a century later.  His life at sixteen was dramatically altered between E flat and F sharp.  Max had no control over what happened to him that warm evening in May.  Erika had unknowingly given Max – the disinterested classmate in the back row -- a gift that brought him joy where there was little before, and he wrote in his journal after they had come together, “Like the piano, the whole of my person sang every time she touched me.” 

The end of her performance came too soon, though his senses were exhausted.  Max noticed the long pause when Erika finished her recital.  It was as if the air in the hall had stopped moving and everyone needed to breathe.  She sat motionless; her hands still on the keys, her incredibly curly hair nearly touching the keyboard, then Erika sat back and turned to acknowledge the applause.  He followed Danny to the orchestra room after the recital, hoping for a chance to speak to her.  It would be the start of their relationship.

How, he wondered now, could he have ever left her side?  Max could not remember the last time, if ever, he felt like crying.  The realization of all of the moments lost with Erika and her music suddenly made him incredibly sad.

Chapter 8
– Erika

             
Lilacs.

Erika stopped the grocery cart in front of the flower display.  She was feeling high-spirited after her workout at the club
.  Salad is on the menu tonight, regardless of what else I fix.
  She saw the flowers on the far side of the produce section. 
I love lavender lilacs.

So many dinners were spent alone, now.  Jay had his friends, and with Garner gone

on business so often the house was quiet for hours.  Tonight she planned to do major damage to an expensive bottle of merlot, and the salad was a continuation of her daylong commitment to a healthier lifestyle. 
Time I started taking better care of myself.  And, it'd be nice to have fresh flowers on the table tonight. 

As she gathered the stem
s in her cart, Erika remembered the moment when the sight and smell of lilacs first touched her heart.  She’d casually opened her school locker one day and the flowers spilled out.  There were so many that they puddled around her ankles and tumbled to the middle of the hallway.  Max had somehow filled the locker with lavender lilacs the night following the first time they made love.  Beneath the cascading flowers was a card with a picture of a vase of lilacs resting on an ebony piano.  Inside, Max had written

Search the world over, along
garden paths for hours

Rarely ever seen, is a waterfall of flowers.

When I see you tonight, will you play for me, Reeki?

              Erika then recalled loaning a history text to Max.  She'd taken the same course the previous semester.  Before giving him the book, she wrote tiny notes in the margins of dozens of the pages.  As he progressed through the semester, Max would turn a page and read, in her beautiful handwriting, 

Hope your day is special!
  Page 14, or

             
             
Can't wait to see you tonight.
Page 54, or

             
             
Smile.  Someone loves you very much!
Page 147

She didn't write on every page, so each note was a surprise.  She made him promise not to read ahead, but he cheated, she recalled.

              The phone was ringing when she walked from the garage into the kitchen, her arms full of groceries and flowers.  It was Kathy Prager with an invitation for Erika to join friends at the country club after dinner to share dessert before going bar hopping.  She looked at the clock over the stove.  There was plenty of time to have her special meal and still socialize with friends.

             
"Sure," she said into the phone, "see you guys about seven."  Erika placed the lilacs in water in the center of the table before putting the groceries away and starting an early dinner.

              It was time.  It disappointed him that he always avoided moments like this, where life can be unalterably changed by a single decision.  Too much change, too quickly was never a good thing, he thought.  He didn’t know what to expect when he spoke to Erika.   Maybe she didn’t hold any hidden keys to his personal dilemma.  All he knew for certain was that he needed to recapture a time when the world made sense, when his life had purpose, and when he was most passionate about his writing.  He was only assuming that seeing Erika again would be the answer.

Max promised Clay and Cindy that he would touch base with them again before he left town.  They reminded him that the bookstore was at the far end of Elder Avenue, even though most of the businesses along the street had moved out and into the
new mall on the highway on the north side of town.

“You’ll see a lot of empty buildings, but keep going,” Cindy told him.  “The st
ore still looks pretty good for being the last one on the street.  And it’s got a whole new clientele ever since people figured out what ‘barista’ meant,” she said.  “
Bobbi’s Cup & Saucer
used to be the only place in town to get a good mug of java, but not no more.”  Max thought about taking notes on the local idioms for his next novel. 
Not no more
was a new one.

He
took the access road back into Cottonwood.  Halfway there, he pulled over at the intersection of County Road 82.  A dozen miles to the right was the highway in and out of Cottonwood.  To the left was nineteen miles of winding road, up to Pine Meadow and the ski resort on Mescalero Mountain.  His father’s cabin in Pine Meadow was a favorite retreat in high school, when his dark moods threatened to steal his sanity.  If time permitted, he would take a nostalgic trip to his old haunts among the Ponderosa pine, spruce and aspen.