Foreign Bodies (31 page)

What did he want from her, when he was certain she had nothing to give? Symphony in Bea minor: one of his acrid little witticisms, like the
diabolus in musica
that was her crooked toe.

She had sold off the grand and uprooted its shadow. She was rid of him! And here was the grand restored (what might have come out of it anyhow), its stain on her thrown-out carpet returned in these inky tattoos, her devil’s exorcism reversed. And yet it was a gift — a kind of gift. Leo’s mind! It was the thing she had hoped for, long ago. She went on picking up one sheet after another, gazing, gazing — she was no better than a dog with its muzzle sniffing at an open book.

But there was excitement in it, a glorious wilderness under the breastbone, a metronome charging in her temples — those droplets from the ice-mermaid’s tail. Leo burning. Her heart in its cage a foreign body — it had no business stirring up this frenzy, this delirium of knowing and unknowing.

She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life.

And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.

As flies to wanton boys.

The next morning, against all the odds — her antic young men would soon be sobered into soldiers — she took up
King Lear.
And instantly the buzzing began all around, punctuated by a single high-pitched yell:
Flies, boys! Flies in the wonton soup!

In the teachers’ lounge afterward, she told Laura, “Would you believe it, I’ve heard from your cousin, and he’s actually written a whole symphony —”

“What, for the
movies?
” Laura squealed. “How does that make sense?”

“For the ages,” Bea did not say. It would have been a comment too like a thorn; and Laura would only laugh.

Even so, in the long, long war with Leo, wasn’t it Bea who’d won?