Dirty Wings (8 page)

“God has no place for sinners,” the woman says.

“I do,” Cass says, but low, to herself. “I do.” She does.

THEN

Maia won't admit to herself how hard she's looking for Cass, but she walks home from Oscar's every day that week. At the piano, she's as focused as ever. The Ravel is enormously difficult; she barely makes it through, the first time she plays for Oscar. He tsk-tsks at her. “We must begin more quietly,” he says. “It is as the poem: We enter this world that is made without us already, that beckons us in but does not give us answers. We are part of the water, we are bewitched by the water. Do you see? You must make me believe it. She is trying to bring him in, to sink him. Then here”—he taps the page—“further along, he rejects her, and she is furious. But always you, the storyteller, must be in control. She is angry, but also ruined, do you see? She dissolves without him. All of this you must tell us.”

She plays, as always, with a ferocity that belies the tininess of her world, the penned-in dollhouse of her life. When she was in school, there was school, but it's been years since she was in school. She studies in her room, now, and takes tests on a paper she mails to an office somewhere. Her mother is supposed to be guiding her but her mother is always, forever, too busy; something has come up, a meeting must be gone to, a dinner party attended, a luncheon, you'll be fine on your own, won't you. The truth is, Maia has always been fine on her own. When she's not practicing she opens her books at random—trigonometry, European history, biology. Triangles, the roof of the Sistine chapel, a diagram of fruit fly genes. Sometimes she falls asleep with her cheek against the thin pages, wakes with cheap ink smeared on her skin. Equations transferring from the text to her body, marking her with some language that is far less useful to her than the language she lives in, the language of her hands. The notes that move from the page to her eyes to her fingers, quick as sound, quicker.

This week, Oscar is harder on her than he's ever been; maybe he sees in her some seed that Cass has planted. At the piano he is relentless, making her play the Ravel over and over and over for him until she wants to tear the music into pieces and throw them at his head. “You must practice!” he says Friday afternoon, after he's demanded she play a single measure thirty times in a row. “Have you not practiced? Have you got lazy?”

“I practice,” she whispers. He shakes his head, exhales through his moustache.

“You have gone,” he says, waving one hand. “You have gone to somewhere else, I don't know where this is. Listen, I have an idea for you.”

“What,” she says, exhausted.

“You must read when you play.”

“Read the music?”

“No, no.” He makes a disdainful face. “Books. You must read books. This is the trouble, I think. You become bored when you practice. Over and over again, the same notes, this is the curse of the pianist; we must play until our body knows the notes so well it is as if we are born with them written in our fingers. Only then can we play with spirit, with interpretation. Only then can we make good choices, do you see? Because it is not the notes you are thinking about any longer, but the music, what is behind it, what it is trying to say through you. Where your body will be when you play, the color of the sound. This is how we play, when we play well. So you read while you practice.”

“I don't—”

“Always it is
no
with you, Maia. Poetry isn't good, it has got its own rhythm.” He frowns. “Unless it is
modern
poetry, which one cannot help but find quite upsetting. But I don't think poetry is the thing. And great fiction, you know, it's not the thing either. If the language is beautiful it is most distracting.” He looks out the window, tugging thoughtfully at his moustache. “Detective stories,” he says.

“Detective stories.”

“Yes, detective stories. Also I find that the newspaper is good for this; of course it's harder to put at the piano. Not the front page, the front page is always
very
distressing, this is a country full of criminals. Criminals and disaster. You will read detective stories, when you practice at home.”

Maia gives up. “Sure. I'll read detective stories when I practice.”

Oscar beams at her. “Next week, my dear, I promise you, you shall see the most wonderful results!”

“Oscar, I read the poem. The Bertrand. My mom had it.”

“Ah, yes. Your mother.” Oscar hates her mother.

“Ondine, the mermaid? She's sort of horrible.” He raises an eyebrow. “I mean, Oscar, she says she's in love but she doesn't care if she kills her lover. She's selfish. She knows he'll die when she pulls him underwater.”

Oscar nods. “Yes, my dear, of course. This is true. But it is also—well, we are not speaking of human beings here, for the one thing. We are speaking of creatures of myth. These people, they do not have morals the way that we have morals. They are quite a bit older than we are, you know.” Oscar is discussing mermaids as if they're a slightly eccentric family who lives down the street. Maia opens her mouth to say something, but he continues. “They do not share our views of the world. But of course it is more than this. When we fall in love we desire only to live in the shadow of desire. We don't think of the sensible thing. It is no matter if we are a human being or a little fish in the sea. Or this mermaid.”

“But he doesn't say she's in love, not like that. She's trying to tempt him underwater even though she knows it'll kill him. When he tells her he's in love with a human woman, she laughs at him. It's not tragic, it's—”

“Who are you, child, to say what tragedy is? Have you loved?”

Maia falters in the face of his sudden outrage. “No,” she says. “But that's not what he says about her. ‘
Boudeuse et dépitée.
' He's saying she's sulky. Selfish. Not tragic.”

“Love is always selfish,” Oscar snaps. “Always. Love is only interested in taking away all that makes a person what they are, and bringing this person into you. There is no love that does not wish to take and take until there is nothing left of the beloved.”

Maia is quiet. Oscar can't be right, but what does she know? She has never been in love. She doesn't know anything about the world except for her own house and her piano and this room where she plays for Oscar. All the years she's come to his house, and he's never even let her see the upstairs. She can feel her heart buzzing inside her chest like a bee trapped in a jar, battering itself against the glass. There is a whole world of secrets outside the walls that keep her. When she was younger, she saw her cage as keeping other people out. Now she's coming to understand that instead it's made to shut her in.

“I don't know,” she says.

“I am correct,” Oscar says, imperious. But under his pompousness she can sense something massive, an old hurt calcified. He's told her countless times he ruined his own life, and that's why he's stuck here, teaching piano to her and a sea of snot-nosed wealthy children. But he's never told her the story of that ruin, or the shape it came in. What kind of wreckage could leave him like this that's not a broken heart? She may have never been in love, but she's read books. Whatever Oscar says, love is messier and more grand than he's willing to let on. Of that, she's sure.

Oscar doesn't let the silence build. “You will go home now,” he tells her. “You will practice and practice, with the detective stories, as I have told you.” As far as she knows, there's not a single detective story in the entirety of her mother's library. “When you play there must be no Maia. There is only the music, the hands, the muscle of the back. Here, and here.” He pokes her shoulders with one blunt finger. She stifles a yelp. “I have seen you do this before and it is why I am asking you to do it again, because I understand that you are good enough. Even though
you
do not.”

His last
you
is almost an accusation. Maia nods. She won't give Oscar the satisfaction of knowing he's made her cry. She gathers up her music and puts it in her bag, keeping her back to Oscar so that he can't see her hands shaking.

“I'll see you next week,” she says, her voice as even as she can make it. Oscar shows her to the door. She keeps her back straight as she walks away, long after his door closes behind her, long after his house recedes into the distance and she knows there is no one left to see what's left of her pride carry her home.

But Oscar's sternness has shifted something inside her and that night at the piano the music changes. At first the Ravel is as difficult as ever, as heavy and shapeless in her hands as dough. Her arms are stiff, riddled with their old familiar aches: strained tendons, cramping fingers, the ordinary pains of the pianist who wishes to be extraordinary.
What do I know about love,
Maia thinks, staring dully at the keys. What is a piano but wood and string and ivory, felt hammer, metal pedal. No secrets hidden in its body, no clues to how she might make it sing. Frustrated, she runs a set of scales, and then another, and then another, until her mind is empty and her hands are limber, and then she tries the Ravel again.

She can feel the difference in the first chords and wills herself not to overthink it, to let the music come from her like dancing or breathing. She imagines the low murmur of Oscar's voice, gentling her through the piece.
We know the notes, do we not? We have played them many times. They are in our memory now. We have only to let them go, to give them shape.
She almost laughs out loud with the joy of it, the music rising out of her like the blood flowing through her veins, pumped through her by the rhythm of her heart even as the meter of the piece tolls through it like a bell. Here it is at last, this window to the other side, this feeling that she lives for, this rare elation. And then she misses a note.
What do you know about desire,
sneers a little voice in her heart.
What do you know about darkness? What do you know about the kingdoms underneath the belly of the earth?
She stumbles through a chord. The piece is clunky again and she soldiers through the rest of it without joy.

But for a moment it was there, it was hers.

“That was beautiful, Maia,” her mother says behind her. Maia whirls around on the bench. Her mother is leaning in the doorway, her head tilted, her face soft. Maia has no idea how long she's been standing there. She looks down at her hands.

“I haven't nailed it yet,” she says. “The last half wasn't right.”

Her mother shrugs. “You'll get it. And it still sounds wonderful.”

“Thanks,” Maia says, unsettled. Her mother is so stern that she forgets, sometimes, that her mother is also human; that, presumably, her mother has emotions like other human beings; that her mother also loves, looks at paintings and finds them pretty, listens to music and is moved. Once Maia walked in on her mother listening to
The Magic Flute
in her office and crying unabashedly. She looked up as Maia came into the room and smiled. They waited together until the end of the aria and then she lifted the needle off the record and sighed. “Your father and I went to the William Kentridge production,” she said. “It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. The shadow puppets…” She trailed off and looked tearily at the wall. “It's really an Orpheus story, you know,” she said, her voice distant. “Charming beasts with flute music. There's a kind of underworld throughout, and of course for Kentridge the metaphors of colonialism, exploration—but really, at the heart of it, his vision is so magnificent, his scenery so wonderfully realized.”

“You don't need to lecture me,” Maia said. “You can just tell me you like something.” But though she'd intended the words to be gentle, her mother's eyes snapped back into focus, and Maia saw that instead she'd landed a blow. “I didn't mean—” she said, but her mother cut her off.

“Did you want something?”

“I just needed to borrow some paper,” Maia said.

“Oh,” her mother said. “Sure.” She'd handed Maia a few sheets. Maia had taken the paper and fled to the safety of her room.

Sometimes she wishes it were easier to simply hate the woman who bought her, but moments like this one, when the expression on her face is so wistful, so full of longing, make it impossible to loathe her altogether.

“Well,” her mother says. “Keep practicing.”

“Is it okay with you and Dad if I stay up and work on this?” Her parents don't like it when she practices late, but every now and then she asks for the favor, and they let her.

“I suppose that's fine, just for tonight,” her mother says. “I can put in earplugs if I can't fall asleep.”

“Are you going to bed?”

“Soon.”

“Goodnight, then.”

“Goodnight, Maia.” Maia presents her cheek dutifully, and her mother crosses the room in a few long strides and kisses it. The smell of her perfume lingers long after she leaves.

Maia plays through the Ravel again, and again, and again. The moment she had earlier never returns, but with each repetition the notes come more easily and she makes fewer and fewer mistakes. At last, she is getting somewhere. She tamps down the spark of glee that leaps up in her lest she get cocky, plays the piece again. And again. And again. Imagining as the night passes that she is first the mermaid, then the lover, the seductress and the seduced. And if she were the lover, what would her own answer be? To live in the dark below the surface forever, wandering the lightless, frigid depths in the company of her beloved? There are worse fates. The room grows cool and her attention drifts. Under her feet she can feel a smooth path; around her, the undulating lines of a kelp forest rising toward a surface too far away to see.
What would Cass do,
she thinks.
Cass would find out where the path goes.
She takes one step forward, and then another, and then she is walking forward in the dark and the path opens up into a fissure in the earth and there is a man standing in front of her, at the place where the descent begins. He is looking somewhere over her shoulder and because he does not seem to notice her she stares at him openly. He is terribly thin and so pale he glows against the velvety dark, and he is dressed in a long coat that moves in the darkness like a deeper darkness, and Maia thinks,
Are we underwater, we can't be underwater, I can't breathe underwater, I'm not a fish,
and then the man looks at her. His eyes are very black.