Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (7 page)

I felt very peculiar going there, Friday night. It was late April and one of the first warm nights, warm and windy, all the flowers out in the gardens, and clouds blowing across the stars. Walking to the church I felt dizzy. You know that feeling where you seem to have done something before? Well, this was just the opposite. It was as if I'd never seen any of the streets before, though I walked them twice a day, five days a week. Everything was different. I felt like a stranger in the late evening in a strange city. It was frightening, but I liked it too, in a way. I thought, what if none of the people in the houses I passed and the cars passing me were speaking English, what if they were all speaking some language I didn't know, and this was really a foreign city I had never seen before, and I only thought I'd lived here all my life because I was going crazy.

I looked at things, the trees, the houses, the way a tourist would, and it really seemed to be true, I'd never seen them before. The wind kept blowing in my face.

When I got to the church and other people were going in, I felt very nervous and irritable. I sort of crept in. I would have gone on all fours if I could have, so as to be less visible. It was a big old church, mostly wood, hollow and dark and high inside. Since I'd never been in it, it was easy to keep up the feeling of being a total stranger, a foreigner. There were quite a lot of people there and more coming in, but I didn't know any of them. I didn't know where Natalie would sit, probably down in front; so I took a seat at the end of a pew in the last row, clear across the church from where the people came in, behind a pillar, as inconspicuous a place as I could find. I didn't want to see or be seen. I wanted to be alone. The only people I saw that I knew even by sight were two girls from school, maybe friends of Natalie's. The church got quite full, but being in a church nobody talked loud, and the sound of them talking was like water on the beach, a big soft noise, not English, not anything. I sat there reading the mimeographed program and feeling dizzy and unearthly—detached, completely detached.

The songs were the next to last thing on the program. The orchestra was pretty good, I guess; I didn't listen hard, I kept floating; but I sort of vaguely enjoyed the music, because it let me float. There was an intermission, but I stayed in my seat. Then finally the singer stood up, down in front. The accompaniment was a string quartet, and Natalie was playing the viola part. I hadn't expected that. I saw her sitting there next to a big middle-aged man cellist; he hid most of her, I could just see her hair looking sleek and jet black in the lights. Then I ducked down again. The conductor, who was the chatty type, went on for a while about Music in Our City and about this promising young musician and composer of eighteen, and finally shut up and the music began.

The singer was good. She was just somebody who sang at the church, I guess, but she had a strong voice, and she understood the words and the music. The first song was "Love and Friendship," a simple poem about how love is like the wild rose but friendship is the holly tree. It had a good tune, and you could tell the audience thought it was very pretty. They applauded hard at the end Natalie sat there and scowled and didn't look up. They weren't supposed to applaud until all three songs were sung. The singer looked embarrassed and half bowed, and the audience finally got the idea and shut up. Then she sang the second one. Emily Brontë wrote the words when she was twenty-two.

Riches I kid in light esteem
And Love I laugh to scorn
And lust of Fame was hut a dream
That vanished with the morn—

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is— "Leave the heart that now I bear
And give me liberty
"

Yes, as my swift days near their goal
'Tis all that I implore—
Through life and death, a chainless soul
With courage to endure!

The violins and the cello played long notes softly in a kind of shivering drone, and there was a double tune, the singer and the viola, singing with and against each other. A hard, reaching, grieving tune. And it broke through, on those last four words and stopped.

The audience didn't applaud. Maybe they didn't know it was over, maybe they didn't like it, maybe it scared them. The whole place was perfectly silent. Then they did the third song, "Mild the mist upon the hill," very softly. I began crying, and I couldn't stop when it was over and they were clapping and Natalie had to stand up and take bows. I got up and blundered around the back of the pews, by feel mostly because I couldn't see for crying, and got out of the church into the night.

I started to walk up towards the park. The street lamps were big blobs of light with rainbow haloes, and the wind was cold on the tears on my face. My head was hot and light and ringing with the singer's voice. I didn't feel the pavement under my feet, and if I passed anyone I didn't see them. And I didn't care if they saw me walking on the street crying.

There was a glory in it. It was too much for me to take, everything coming together at once, but there was a glory in it. And that was partly love. I mean real love. In the song I had seen Natalie whole, the way she really was, and I loved her. It was not an emotion or a desire, it was a confirmation, it was a glory, like seeing the stars. To know that she could do that, that she could make a song that made people be still and listen, and made me cry, to know that that was Natalie, it really was, it was her, herself, the truth.

But there was so much pain in it, and I couldn't handle it.

After a couple of blocks my tears dried up, I walked on, but by the time I got to the edge of the park I was so tired I turned around and headed for home. It was about fifteen blocks, and as I walked I wasn't thinking or feeling anything that I can remember. I just walked in the night, and I could have been doing it forever and gone on doing it forever. Only the sense of strangeness was gone. Everything was familiar, the whole world, the stars even, I was at home. Now and then there was the smell of fresh earth or flowers from a dark garden. I remember that.

I came to our street and turned down it. Just as I came towards the Fields' house, their car pulled up in front of it, and Mr. and Mrs. Field and Natalie and another young woman got out. They were all talking. I stopped short and just stood. I was between streetlights, and it's very strange that Natalie could see me off there in the dark. But she came straight towards me. I stood there.

"Owen?"

I said, "Yeah, hi."

"I saw you at the concert."

"Yeah. I heard you," I said, and gave a sort of laugh.

She was carrying her viola case. She had on a long dress, her hair still looked very black and smooth, and her face was bright. Playing her music, and then I suppose a reception afterwards with people congratulating her, had got her keyed-up, tense; her eyes looked big.

"You left after my songs."

"Yeah. Is that when you saw me?"

"I saw you earlier. At the back. I was looking for you."

"You thought I'd be there?"

"I hoped you would. No. I thought you would."

Her father called her from the front steps; "Natalie!"

"Is he proud of you?" I asked.

She nodded.

"I have to go in," she said "My sister came for the concert. Do you want to come in?"

"I can't,"

I meant I couldn't, not that anybody was preventing me.

"Will you come tomorrow night?" she said in a sudden voice, fiercely.

I said, "All right."

"I want to see you," she said in the same way. Then she turned around and went to the house and went in, and I walked on past and came home.

My father was watching TV, and my mother was sitting with him doing crewelwork. She said, "Short movie?" and I said it was, and she said, "Did you enjoy it? What was it?" and I said, "Oh, I don't know," and went upstairs, because I'd walked right out of the night wind back into the fog. And I couldn't talk in the fog, I couldn't say anything true.

It was not my parents' fault. If this seems to be one of those books about how everything is the older generation's fault, and even some psychologists have written books like that by the way, then I haven't said it right. It wasn't their fault. All right, so they lived partly in the fog all the time, and accepted a lot of lies without trying to get at the truth—so what? Who doesn't? It doesn't mean they liked it any better than I did. It doesn't mean they were strong. It means just the opposite.

I
WENT OVER
to Natalie's the next night. It was like the first time: Mrs. Field let me in, and Natalie was practicing. I waited in the dark hall, and the music stopped, and she came down the stairs. She said, "Let's go for a walk."

"Its raining some."

"I don't care," she said. "I want to get out."

She put on her coat and we started up the street towards the park.

She still had that tense, high-flying look. It was going to take her a while to come back down.

"What's been happening with you?" she said after we'd gone half a block.

"Nothing much."

"Have you heard from any of the colleges?"

"Yeah, one."

"Which one?"

"MIT."

"What did they say?"

"Oh, they'll let me in."

"No money?"

"Yeah, tuition."

"Full tuition?"

"Yeah, right."

"Wow. That's great! So what did you decide?"

"Nothing."

"You waiting to hear from the others?"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, I'm going to State, I guess."

"State? What for?"

"To get a college degree."

"But why there? You wanted to work with that fellow at MIT"

"Freshmen don't go and 'work with' Nobel Prize winners."

"They don't stay freshmen either, do they?"

"Yeah, well, I decided not to."

"I thought you said you didn't decide anything."

"There isn't anything to decide."

She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and hunched her head over and strode along clumping her heels. She looked mad. But after about a block she said, "Owen."

"Yeah."

"I am really confused."

"What about?"

I don't know how she could go on, I was answering her in such a cold, dumb, uninterested tone. But she went on.

"About Jade Beach and all that."

"Oh, yeah. Well, that's all right."

I didn't want to talk about it. It loomed up out of the fog much too big and solid and hard. I wanted to turn away and not look at it.

"I've been thinking about it a lot," she said. "See, I thought I had all that figured out. At least for a while. For the next couple of years anyhow. The way I figured, I didn't want to get really involved with anybody. Falling in love or love affairs or marrying or anything like that. I'm pretty young, and there's all these things I have to do. That sounds stupid, but it's the truth. If I could take sex lightly the way a lot of people do, that would be fine, but I don't think I can. I can't take anything lightly. Well, see, what was so beautiful was that we got to be friends. There's the kind of love that's lovers, and the kind of love that's friends. And I really thought it was that way. I thought we'd really made it, and everybody's wrong when they say men and women can't be friends. But I guess they're right. I was ... too theoretical...."

"I don't know," I said. I didn't want to say anything more, but it got dragged up out of me. "I think you were right, actually. I was pushing the sex stuff in where it didn't belong."

"Yeah, but it does belong," she said in this defeated, morose voice. And then in the fierce voice, "You can't just tell sex to go away and come back in two years because I'm busy just now!"

We went on another block. The rain was fine and misty so that you hardly felt it on your face, but it was beginning to drip down the back of my neck.

"The first fellow I went out with," she said, "I was sixteen and he was eighteen; he was an oboeist, oboeists are all crazy. He had a car and he kept parking it in places with a nice view and then, you know, sort of launching himself onto me. And he started saying, 'This is bigger than either of us, Natalie!' And it made me mad, and I finally said, 'Well it may be bigger than you, but it isn't bigger than me!'That sort of finished that. He was a jerk anyhow. So was I. But anyhow. Now I know what he meant."

After a while she went on, "But all the same..."

"What?"

"It doesn't belong. Does it?"

"What?"

"With you and me. It just doesn't work Does it?"

"No," I said.

She got mad then. She stopped walking and looked at me with that scowl. "You say yes, you say no, you say there isn't anything to decide—Well, there is! And did I decide right or didn't I?
I
don't know! Why do I have to make the decision? If we're friends—and that's the whole point of it, can we be friends?—then we make the decisions together—don't we?"

"OK. We did."

"Then why are you mad at me?"

We were standing there under a big horse chestnut tree in a parking lot. It was dark under the branches, and they kept most of the rain off. Some of the flowers shone like candles in the streetlight, above us. Natalie's coat and hair were all like shadows, all I could see of her was her face and eyes.

"I'm not," I said. It was like the ground was shifting under me, the world reorganizing itself, an earthquake, nothing to hold onto. "I'm really mixed-up. It's just that. I can't make sense out of anything. I can't handle it."

"Why not, Owen? What's wrong?"

"I don't know," I said, and I put my hands on her shoulders, and she came up close and held me around the ribs.

"I get scared," I said.

She said, "What of?" into my coat.

"Being alive."

She held onto me, and I held onto her.

"I don't know what to do," I said. "See, I'm supposed to go on living all these years and I don't know how."

"You mean you don't know why?"

"I guess so."

"But, for this," she said, holding on. "For this. For you, for the stuff you have to do, for time to think; for time to hear the music. You know how, Owen. Only you listen to the people who don't!"