“Steppenwolf?”
“Not the Hesse,” I explain. “Theâ”
Now Wun Gon Jew pulls away from me, not to run but to execute delicate little dance steps next to me in his horrid sneakers, and as he dances, he sings: “Why don't you come with me, little girl, on a magic carpet ride.”
“That's it!” I shout.
He stops dancing. He stops singing. He does laugh now.
“She
loves
that song.”
“Maybe she is real,” he says.
“Maybe she is,” I agree.
“Do you have a photo of her?”
“No.”
“You don't have a photo of your own wife?”
I am getting irritated. “I told you no. I don't believe in photography.”
I have never owned a photograph in my life. I don't like what they do to people. You see too much in them, the past, the future, a dozen faces frozen into one. This is stasis that shuts off life like a stopcock. Among my mother's effects were photographs of me. I looked into my pretty, pudgy baby face and saw a bit of her and some of him and gagged, literally. I threw them all away.
“It's not music,” he agrees.
“No, it's not.”
“So what does she look like, this wife of yours?”
I try to see her, but, as always, I fail. I can feel her in me, but I can't picture her.
“I don't know,” I confess.
“Does she look like that?”
This startles me. I look toward the door, thinking she's come quietly home and he's seen her. But the door stands closed, bleak against the night.
I look back at him and see him pointing, not toward the door but toward the eastern part of the northern wall, where some Madonnas hang.
He walks toward them. I follow him. We stand beneath these holy mothers and look at them together. His eyes are up, and yet his head is bowed. His glasses touch his upper lip.
He's found her image. Not in one but shared among several: the condescending serenity of Raphael's Virgin of the Fish; the comforting intelligence of Botticelli's Madonna who closes her eyes so that the urchinlike John the Baptist can engage ours; and most of all van Hemmessen's sensual, pouting, permed seducer, whose lids are heavy with expended bliss, whose brows are so delicate a snake might have licked them into place, who rests her splendid face upon the caressing fingers of her beloved son.
“I see her,” I say, in a way that I hope adequately expresses my gratitude.
“Who did that one?” He points.
“Botticelli.”
“Look at that boy.”
“John the Baptist.”
“Rough trade.” He reaches up and runs his fingers over the pronounced angles of the boy's suffering face. He does look like a child who has been, or will be, beaten. “I wonder if anyone has ever changed religions because of the art.”
“I can't think of a better reason.” In fact, I can't think of any other reason to change one or even have one. Art and fucking, those most private of divertissements, seem the only transcendences. Everything else just keeps you glued to the procrustean loam.
“So where is she?” he asks.
“There. There. There.” I point to one painting after another.
He turns from the wall. “I mean where has she gone, this wife of yours? You said she's gone. But she hasn't left you. She isn't dead. And she's not with another man. Where is she?”
He is aggressive in his questioning. He refuses to believe she exists.
“Come.”
I go to the bed. He follows me, though I still cannot feel him through the floor.
I sit. He stands before me. I notice for the first time that his shiny, shapeless pants are held up by a piece of rope. I remain so forlorn at Clara's absence that I think again of the hangman.
“Sit, please.” I even pat the quilt.
He does sit. Not near me, but at least I finally feel his weight, like some discrete quop of rain on the vast inland sea of my being.
He is the first person, Elspeth aside, who has touched our bed. He is no fantasy, this one, but a real if insubstantial man who's all I have left. I look at him and want him to be Clara, but I know he's not. I want to take him in my arms and bury myself within him, my entire being, but I shall not. He is afraid of me, he seems almost to cower. This is so unlike Clara, my malapert, who beckons me with every glance and gesture, knowing, as she does, that I cannot get enough of her and would wither and die if ever I did.
I reach behind me for Clara's Week-at-a-Glance.
“Come closer.”
He inches toward me, and to mask his fear he says, “This is the biggest bed I've ever seen.”
I picture his own bed, as narrow as he, chaste in his purity, but it's Clara I see in it, naked, knees apart, floating away toward the horizon, watching me disappear.
“What size is it?” he continues.
“Do you know what piece of music first had the cadenza written out?”
He understands, but he seems to find it fatuous. “This is your empire?”
“I live in this bed. I listen to music. I read. I think. I wait for Clara.”
“How long?”
“Nine feet.”
I think he's going to ask me where we get sheets for it and is it actually square, but he says, each word distinct, as if I were trying his patience, “How long have you been waiting for her?”
I look at the clock beside the bed. “Almost four hours.”
He shakes his head. “That's all? I thought you were going to say all your life.”
“Almost four hours,” I repeat.
“That's nothing.”
“It's not the time.” For it isn't.
“Then what is it?”
I open Clara's Week-at-a-Glance and point to the empty space that's now, this minute we are sitting here together on the bed.
“What the hell is that?” He puts his finger down into the thicket of her words.
I feel him touching her. His eyes follow his fingers over the tortured scordatura of her writing.
“Her appointments.”
“Can you read this?”
“Yes.”
He looks at me with the same perplexed expression with which he's been trying to read her writing. “So what does it say? Where is she?”
“It's what it doesn't say.” I point again to the empty space.
I can see his narrow eyes working to avoid being caught within the net of her language. They struggle to escape but cannot. I wonder what he sees. Etymologically cognate here are Oriental and orientation. Mankind looked to the East, as it were, to find out where he stood, to locate the truth.
“There's nothing there,” he says.
I nod. “âThe depths lie on the surface.'”
He looks up at me, surprised. “Buddha?”
“Nietzsche.”
“There's nothing there,” he repeats, as if to tell me that he
finally understands.
I feel like sobbing. Had I expected him to supply her there, to bring her back to life, manifest within lines pressed from her pencil? Instead he merely corroborates the truth. It's as if she's stepped off the edge of the earth. I can feel her gone. I am filled with the absence of her.
How can I make him understand what this emptiness means?
“The Lamas,” he says, “have what are called their elegant sayings. One of them's about the astronomer who can calculate the movements of the moon and the stars, but he doesn't know that in his own house the women are misbehaving.”
Why do I take such delight in this? It is so distracting an image: the sky is so vast, it must be the only thing in nature that we may speak of as full and empty at the same time, plenum and vacuum, unless it is the heart of one whose love has gone; the misbehaving woman is so tight before the eyes. I can almost see her.
“Maybe she doesn't want you to know where she is,” he says. “Or maybe you don't even have a wife.”
He is frustrated, so he strikes out at me. He persists in thinking I'm some vecordious husband with no wife to his name sitting here alone at the top of the city in the midst of music and the smell of Chinese food that's colliquating in the sink.
“Maybe I don't,” I say. “But I did.”
He looks again at the empty space in her datebook. He touches it now and looks up at me.
“Yes,” he says, as if he finally comprehends. “Sometimes people just go away. They disappear. Most people you see you see for the last time in your life. Like me, for instance.”
With that, he rises from the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“You were my final delivery. I've got to take my bike back.”
More quickly than I have ever movedâfor I am a man who is nothing if not deliberate in what I do and say, as it is wise to be in contention with a culture in which speed is valued over depth, and action over thoughtâI am on my feet and have pushed him back toward the bed. As he falls from my hands with so little resistance to the air he seems no more than air himself, I am given an image of him flying back up with his body like a deadly letter
E
, a martial artist fulfilling the stereotype of his race. But as he hits the bed, he curls up so tightly I think he is going to fit completely into one of the wedding rings on the quilt.
“Don't.” His voice remains surprisingly manly, given his embryonic attitude.
“Don't what?”
“Hurt me.”
“I won't.” I see him try to look at me, but his glasses are askew with the side of his face pressed into the quilt.
“Where are you going?” Apparently he can see me. There is desperation in his voice, as if now it is he who does not want to be abandoned.
I walk away.
“Why did you throw me down?” he calls after me.
I say nothing until I return. He remains voluted on the bed, encased like a snail in his virtue. “Here.”
His eyes are closed. “Where?” He doesn't know what I'm talking about. He shifts his body uncertainly.
“No,
here
.”
He opens his eyes now and squints at the violin case I'm holding toward him. As if he can't believe what he sees, he
pushes himself up with one arm and with his other hand adjusts his glasses on his tiny nose. “You can't be serious.”
“You promised,” I say, putting the burden on him to play and removing from me the much simpler one of bequeathing him this violin in what he perceives to be, to judge from his last words, the zaniest of xenial gestures.
He stands up. He straightens his shapeless pants, tucks his colorless shirt beneath his rope, and in so doing seems to regain his dignity. “No I didn't.”
He's right. “Nonetheless,” I say, “we have a deal.”
“No we don't.”
“Yes, we do. You have to play it for me.”
“And then what?” He is still uncertain.
“And then it's yours. If you want it, of course. Go ahead. Open it up. Take a look at it. Here. I'll take out the bow.”
I put the grip of the violin case into his hand. I can see he thinks of laying it down upon the bed, but instead he carries it over to one of the flame-bark worktables.
I follow him and walk around to the other side of the table so I can watch.
When he sees the violin, he closes his eyes and brings his palms together at his breast.
“It's so beautiful,” he whispers.
“Here's the bow,” I find myself whispering in turn.
He opens his eyes and parts his hands and holds them out to receive the bow.
“Where did this come from?” He is whispering no longer.
“From me to you.”
He smiles slyly, as if he's caught me out. “I mean its provenance.”
“German,” I answer. “From the 1650's. The violin is Italian, of course, and youngerâ1773, a mere 220 years
old. The bow had a fixed frog originally, but after a hundred years that was replaced with this Cramer nut. Otherwise it's no different from how it was three and a half centuries ago. It's older than Bach.”
“What a stick.” He holds it straight out in his right hand. “It's heavy.”
“Snake wood.”
“Not Pernambuco?”
I shake my head. “Snake wood.”
“It must be stiff.”
I see my anguine cock slithering up the inside of Clara's thigh. I'm tempted to make a play on those words but remain musical: “Polyphony was all the rage.”
“Perfect.” His narrow eyes shine.
Just like a violinist to pay more heed to the bow than the box. Just like a man as well, now that I think of it.
He puts down the bow and carefully takes the violin from its case. He holds it to his ear and plucks a string. Then he looks at the strings and plucks them all. “Gut E and A,” he pronounces. “Wound D and G.”
“Yes.” As if I didn't know.
“How long have these strings been on?”
“Forever.” Like everybody else, I reduce eternity to my own span. “Since I last played.”
He picks up the bow and resins it and draws it across the strings. “Can I adjust the tuning to
a
'=415?”
“Be my guest.”
As he tunes the instrument, I wonder what he's going to play. I wonder also if he will be worthy of this gift, the sight of which has awakened in me memories of jubilation and longing and embarrassment and failure. I remember screaming for my mother to come rescue me. I realize for the first time that when I stopped playing the violin, I
stopped doing, acting, and began being. It was the beginning of my downfall and my salvation. I shut the door into the world and opened the door into myself. And no one has walked through that door but Clara. And now this boy.
He surprises me by putting the violin back in its case and the bow on the table. I prepare to throw my arms around him to keep him here when he says, “Is there some place I can wash my hands? They get all greasy from my job.”
I can't let him wash his hands in the kitchen, for the bag of food he delivered is still sitting there in one of the sinks, and I don't want him to have to suffer the humiliation of confronting what he's forced to do to support his music. So I point toward the closed door of my bathroom.