“Afterward,” says Isolde, “after we finish our drinks, we’re walking down the street toward her car and I’m a bit light-headed.
I’m laughing too much. And then Julia says, Most of the girls at school are afraid of me, a bit. It’s nice that you’re not
scared.”
Isolde stops. She’s in a yellow pool of streetlight now, wide eyed and short of breath, with her fingers clasping convulsively
at the cuffs of her jersey. The music slips into a new accelerated phase, becoming more insistent and discordant. Isolde stiffens.
“I looked at her and I said, I am a bit. I am a bit scared. But it wouldn’t be worth it if I wasn’t.”
Isolde gives a little cry, a strangled involuntary half-sob that afterward will be the only thing the saxophone teacher can
remember.
“And Julia looks at me,” she says, “and then grabs the sleeves of my coat, real fistfuls, grabs the fabric and pulls me toward
her really hard. And I think I remember there’s one tiny moment before we come together, it’s like we stalled for a moment
just at the last instant, and I could feel her breath on my upper lip, sweet and hot and quickly panting. I could smell the
black spice of the wine in the small pocket of space between us, and then she kissed me.”
Isolde isn’t looking at the saxophone teacher; she’s looking out, out over the mossy rooftops and the clustered antennae and
the pigeons wheeling and wheeling against the sky.
“Only it wasn’t a kiss how I thought it would be,” she says. “She took my bottom lip between hers, and she bit me. She bit
my bottom lip, but not so it hurt, more like she was tearing at it very gently, pulling at it with her teeth. And I guess
I kind of pulled my head back and gave this gasp and opened my mouth a bit and she still had my bottom lip in her teeth, not
so it hurt, really tenderly, like she’d captured it and she couldn’t bear to let it go.
“And then we were up against the wall,” she says, “and I remember my eyes were closed and my hands were clenched in fists
on the wall above my head and Julia presses up against me and her hands are pushing and pushing to find the skin underneath
the bottom of my jumper, and then she slides her cold hands up my back and she whispers all salty and hot into my ear, I can’t
believe this is happening. I can’t believe it. I can’t tell if this is my fantasy or yours.”
The lights ease back up again, just as the track on the disc comes to a chordal close. Isolde moves over to the stereo and
ejects the disc before the next track has time to begin. The sax teacher wipes her face, pulling her hand down over her chin
so the soft skin of her cheeks is drawn downward for a brief moment, like a sad clown.
“I understand that this is something you couldn’t possibly have prepared yourself for,” the saxophone teacher says to Bridget’s
mother. “I’m shocked myself. I feel partly it’s because Bridget was so dull. I always imagine that the ones who die are the
interesting ones, the wronged ones, the tragic ones, the ones for whom death would come as a terrible, terrible waste. I always
imagine it as a tragedy. Bridget’s death doesn’t quite seem to fit.”
Bridget’s mother fiddles with the button on the cushion. She looks gray. There is a jeweled stack of gold on the penultimate
finger of her puffy left hand, trapped between two swollen knuckles and sunk into her finger like a tattoo or a brand. She
pushes the cushion impatiently off her lap and shakes her head in a despairing way.
“If she’d been more original,” Bridget’s mother says, “it might have been easier. If she’d been more original, you see, then
we might have worried that she might commit suicide one day. Then at least we would have thought about her death. We would
have prepared ourselves for the possibility just by imagining. But someone as unoriginal as Bridget would never think of suicide.
She just wouldn’t be clever enough to consider it an option.”
“Yes,” says the saxophone teacher. “I saw that too. Despair is not something that Bridget would have been clever enough to
feel.”
They sit quietly for a while. Down in the courtyard the pigeons are fighting.
“And how do you prepare yourself for an accident?” Bridget’s mother says limply, mostly to herself. “How do you prepare yourself
for a car speeding in the dark?”
After a while the saxophone teacher says, “Do you have other children?”
“Oh, a boy,” says Bridget’s mother. “Older. He doesn’t live at home anymore.”
“I suppose you called him on the telephone.”
“Yes,” says Bridget’s mother.
“I suppose he’s coming up for the funeral.”
“Oh, the funeral,” Bridget’s mother says. She lapses into silence again and then she says, “I just didn’t think this was going
to happen. I wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready. It’s not fair.”
“Do you know,” Patsy says in a dreamy voice, swaying at the table with her chin upon her fist, “the moments when I’m the most
dishonest with Brian are usually the ones when he believes I’m at my most intimate.”
“What do you mean?” says the saxophone teacher. She is sitting stiffly, with her saxophone held upright on her knees. It is
a long time ago. She is still holding the instrument with a careful reverence, gingerly even, with both hands, as if it is
a new wife and not yet fingerprinted or commonplace.
“I’ll be sitting there and thinking how much he is irritating me,” Patsy says, “maybe if he’s sniffing when he reads, sniffing
and sniffing, every half page. And then he’ll look up and smile at me and I’ll feel compelled to say something, in case what
I was thinking was in some way visible to him. So I’ll panic and in my guilt I’ll say, It’s so lovely that we can sit here
in silence and read like this. It’s so peaceful. I love doing this with you. Which is virtually the opposite of what I really
mean. It happens
so much. I’ll be thinking how he really is getting rather fat, and then I’ll feel guilty for thinking such
an ungenerous thought, so I’ll panic and blurt out, I love you. I’m always motivated by the oddest things.”
“But you do love Brian,” the saxophone teacher says, mostly because she feels it ought to be said. She has only met Brian
once so far, at a recital in the old university chapel. He shook her hand and praised her performance and spoke in a booming
voice about the renovations to the tapestry and paneling, twinkling down at her from his great height as if enjoying her lack
of interest very much. Patsy flitted in and out and slapped at him and said, again and again, “Come on, Bear, she doesn’t
want to hear about that.”
“Oh, God yes, I
love
him,” Patsy says now. “Nearly all the time. A good percentage, anyway. My best percentage yet.”
She laughs and shrugs her shoulders lightly, inviting the saxophone teacher to join in and laugh as well at her foolishness,
and the foolishness of all duplicitous women who say the reverse of what they mean. The saxophone teacher gives her a tight-lipped
smile and watches Patsy’s laughter dwindle to a head-shake and a sigh. She wants to kiss her mouth. She wants to feel the
other woman pull back minutely in surprise, to almost recoil at how strange and forbidden it feels, but then, all in an instant,
to respond—even against her will. Especially against her will.
If there was no Brian—the saxophone teacher’s thoughts often begin in this way. If there was no Brian, what then? Is Brian
just one man, just one circumstantial, incidental man, or does Brian stand for all men? Is he a symbol for a general preference,
a general tendency, and if there was no Brian would there be another, maybe a Mickey or a Hamish or a Bob? She sometimes fears
that Brian’s solidity and physical presence has transformed Patsy’s very shape over the years, bowed her and crooked her until
she is simply a negative space that parcels the man up, each defining the other. She fears that Patsy will always
exist in
this way now, Brian or no Brian, curved to define herself around a man, always a man: a yin that reaches out for its counterpointed
yang with one arm always curled and one arm always arched, forever.
Patsy shakes her head again, as if she can’t believe her own folly, and reaches the heels of her hands up to her temples to
smooth the hair away from her aging face. Her wrists are delicate. The saxophone teacher follows the movement with her eyes.
“I heard she’s on Prozac,” everyone is saying by the second week, or, “I heard they had to put her on Ritalin after she was
found out, she was that out of control.” Victoria is now marked, doomed to accept one of the polar fates that diverge before
her. “Either she’ll end up being totally promiscuous for the rest of her life, and her body will become this weapon she depends
on but she’s not really sure how to wield,” the girls whisper, “or she’ll end up this emotional shell, hollowed out and listless
and blank. It’s one or the other. You’ll see. She’s screwed up now. It’s one or the other.” They watch her greedily to see
which road she will take, craning forward when she comes into a room, and deflating with disappointment and relief when she
leaves again.
Victoria shows no signs of taking either path. She is downcast and polite with all her teachers, and in the schoolyard she
tries with limited success to patch up the friendships that have been so damaged by her betrayal. The girls look askance at
her, especially the ones who were once Victoria’s closest, with whom she should have shared her secret but did not. She asks
polite things about the months she has missed, and the girls respond truthfully, but all the while looking at Victoria as
if from a long way away, caught between pity and disgust.
“Did your parents ever meet Mr. Saladin?” one of the girls asks one lunchtime. “I mean after you left school. Was there like
a meeting or something?”
“Yeah,” Victoria says. “All four of us together.”
There is a sudden fascinated hush. All the girls pause and look at her.
“He’s still way younger than my dad,” Victoria says, “so it was still kind of us against them.” She doesn’t say anything more.
She finishes her apple and wanders off across the quad to drop the core in the rubbish bin. When she comes back the bell has
rung and the girls are dispersing, looking longingly up at her as they fish for their bags and stow their lunch wrappers away.
“You realize the only way you can make up for this betrayal,” the girls want to say, “is by telling us everything, sparing
no detail.”
“You would be a celebrity among us,” the girls want to say, “if you only gave us everything, told us everything, let us in.”
The girls want to say, “It’s unfair that you should have this advantage over us. You are selfish to keep such valuable and
dangerous knowledge for yourself.”
The weeks go by.
“I enjoyed your performance last week,” the saxophone teacher says when Julia arrives. “Your performance of the ride home
after the concert, both of you in the car together. What you were feeling. What you saw. I enjoyed it.”
“Thanks,” Julia says.
“Did you practice?” the saxophone teacher says eagerly. “Like I asked?”
“Some,” Julia says.
“What have you been focusing on?”
“I guess big-picture,” Julia says. “How one girl comes to seduce another.”
“Let’s start big-picture then,” the saxophone teacher says, and gestures with her palm for Julia to begin.
“I’ve been looking at all the ordinary staples of flirting,” Julia says, “like biting your lip and looking away just a second
too late, and laughing a lot and finding every excuse to touch, light fingertips on a forearm or a thigh that emphasize and
punctuate the laughter. I’ve been thinking about what a comfort these things are, these textbook methods, precisely because
they need no decoding, no translation. Once, a long time ago, you could probably bite your lip and it would mean, I am almost
overcome with desiring you. Now you bite your lip and it means, I want you to
see
that I am almost overcome with desiring you, so I am using the plainest and most universally accepted signal I can think
of to make you see. Now it means, Both of us know the implications of my biting my lip and what I am trying to say. We are
speaking a language, you and I together, a language that we did not invent, a language that is not unique to our uttering.
We are speaking someone else’s lines. It’s a comfort.”
Julia’s saxophone is lying sideways across the lap of the cream armchair, the mouthpiece resting lightly on the arm, and the
curve of the bell tucked in against the seam where the seat-cushion meets the steep upholstered curve of the flank. The posture
of the instrument makes the saxophone teacher think of a girl curled up with her knees to her chest and her head upon the
arm, watching television alone in the dark.
“I don’t know how to seduce her,” Julia says. Her eyes are on the saxophone too, traveling up and down its length. “Sometimes
I think that it would be like trying to bewitch her with a spell of her own invention if I tried to smile at her and bite
my lip and cast my eyes down, if I tried to look vulnerable and coy. Would it even
work
? Even the thought makes me feel disarmed and sweaty and undone. But what’s the alternative? Should I
behave like a boy, play
the part of a boy, do things she might want a boy to do?
“Is that how it works?” Julia says, rhetorical and musing now. She is still looking at the saxophone, lying on its side upon
the chair. “Like a big game of let’s-pretend? Like a play-act? It feels like there’s this duologue about a girl and a boy
who fall in love with each other. And maybe the actors are both girls but there’s only these two parts in this play, only
two, so one of them has to dress up: one of them has to be mustached and breast-strapped and wide-legged and broad to play
the boy.
“If you’re just looking at the costumes and the script and the curtains and the lights, all the machinery of it, then you’ll
just see a boy and a girl having a love affair. But if you look at the actors underneath, if you choose not to be deceived
by the spectacle of the thing, then you’ll see that it’s actually two girls. Maybe that’s what it has to be like whenever
two girls get together: one of the girls always plays the part of the boy, but it’s both of them that are pretending.”