I apologize most meekly.
But this was precisely my point.
We wrapped her in the black cloth that was shaped to cover the piano.
In the wings of the stage.
It seemed fitting.
No, we did not.
In that moment? I was not trying to recall the music in that moment. I was committed to my duty.
I swear to you that it does not. You could chop us open from head to foot, you could pull our hearts from our chests, and you would not find the notes.
I trust to your wisdom, kind sirs. I beg you fervently. I . I pray.
CROSS
There was garbage on the lawn, or maybe a construction sign, or (now that she was close enough to notice the flowers and ribbons) discarded decorations from a prom. But it was late August, not spring. And no, it wasn’t prom garbage, but a small cross.
Celine had formed a cocoon of the summer’s clothes around her cello case in the back of the little red Saab, and driven no faster than forty-five from Vermont to Albany and the rest of the way home. She was crawling so slowly on these cracked and narrow streets that she didn’t need to brake to see the display. A white wooden cross, already weathered and tilting into more of an X than anything perpendicular. A sash across it: “Our Angel.” Red artificial flowers, crumbling brown organic ones. Stuffed animals around the base. A red velvet ribbon, the kind intended for oversize Christmas gifts, tied around the top and already frayed and faded from weeks of rain and sun.
She coasted the ten feet to her driveway, then slowly pressed the gas as the car rumbled over the gravel: under the drooping trees, past the raised beds that had once been vegetable gardens, out of sight of the memorial.
Her first reactions were horror and empathy—cut with that strange exhilaration she’d learned not to feel guilty about when passing car wrecks on the highway. Later that fall, when she became fairly sure she was a terrible person, she would at least have this to hang on to: She did feel sorry. For those first few moments, she knew she was sorry.
After she turned on all the lights, after she stomped her hiking boots to scare away any mice, and let the taps run till the water turned clear, she turned on her computer and googled her street and “car accident,” but there was nothing. She found a can of tomato soup in the cupboard, and while it heated on the stove she called the sheriff. “I’m wondering about an accident on Grove Road this summer,” she said. “There was a fatality.”
“Oh, right.” The man might or might not have been the sheriff himself. “Yeah, teenage girl on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. Tried to avoid a truck, and they hit a tree pretty bad. Boyfriend’s okay, woke up from a coma back in July. You know what, it was out in front of that oriental musician’s house. That famous lady musician. She your neighbor?”
Celine hadn’t even noticed the tree, but when she went back outside she saw the old white oak had some bark missing and a decent gouge three feet up. The tree was fine, though. It had, after all, won this particular battle.
She straightened the horizontal bar of the cross and nudged one of the small teddy bears with her boot. It was rain soaked, polyester stuffing erupting from the back. Birds and chipmunks, she presumed, had been hauling off the fluff to line their homes.
It started to rain again as she carried her bags into the house, and she dug the umbrella out from under the passenger seat to hold over the cello case. She sat in the living room and played the Kodály she’d been working on for Philadelphia, his Capriccio, then rested there, silent, and enjoyed the stillness of her house and the creak of the walls—such a change from the constant noise of Marlboro, where the young, excited stars and the seasoned virtuosos had made glorious rackets for seven long, hot weeks.
By the time the smoke alarm went off, the tomato soup had already burned to a solid mess.
Twelve days later, she still hadn’t unpacked. That first day she’d considered herself too tired, too thrown by imagining the calamitous summer of emergency vehicles and witness statements she had so serendipitously avoided. And then classes started at the college, and rehearsals started in the city, and she was hardly ever home when it was light. Over the next week the clothes spread outward from the open suitcase, the hair dryer found its way back to the bathroom, and the sheet music migrated to the coffee table. She could find everything she needed, and she might never have unpacked at all were it not for Gregory and the two Mikes coming to stay.
She pushed the couch back for more rehearsal space and brought in extra chairs, and finally filed the old music away. She scraped the moldy gray cucumber out of the crisper drawer, checked the guest rooms, which only needed a sweeping and a change of pillowcases, and then at last sat cross-legged on her own bedroom floor to excavate the shirts and sandals and performance dresses of what seemed at least a year ago.
The smell of stale sweat grew stronger with each layer she lifted, but also the smell of Vermont, of grass, of the cigarettes she hadn’t touched since she’d been home. There was the black dress, the one that wasn’t long enough to work with a cello between her legs, but which she’d worn, with various disguising accessories, to everyone else’s concerts. The back was dirty, she saw now, from leaning against buildings to smoke, and she wondered if it had been like that all summer. She hadn’t found much time to do laundry up there. No one had, really. It was almost unthinkable now, back in the real world, that she’d worn this dress at least six times since it last saw detergent. And yet she didn’t remember smelling funny, even in the last week when she’d worn it with a long pink scarf to the Mozart piano trios. That night, Gregory had found her during an intermission behind the auditorium and told her he felt old. “There’s too much youth here,” he said.
“They’re good kids,” Celine said. “They’re not that much younger.”
He said, “No, I misspoke. I meant my own youth.” He’d been there, like Celine had, as a young star just out of the New England Conservatory. They’d missed each other by five years, so whatever heartbreak and triumph and sublimity and romance had filled his summers she couldn’t know, but she assumed they must have run pretty much parallel to hers. Celine herself had fallen in love that first summer with Lev Moskowitz, the forty-year-old composer in residence, and they had spent the next thirteen years miserably married. She’d been worried, when she was asked to return to Marlboro to guide and collaborate with the younger musicians, that she’d spend the summer awash in self-pity. But instead she’d felt just the opposite: young again, and silly, and almost beautiful.
That Gregory had then kissed her—that she’d kissed him back and let his dense, abandoned stubble scrape her chin—seemed almost inevitable, just a by-product of all that youth and music and summer. They’d been rehearsing Bartók together that week, and it seemed to follow naturally that the interweaving of melodies should lead so directly to the interweaving of limbs. As it so often had, in the history of Marlboro. In the history of music, for that matter.
He had wedged his thigh between her legs, and she felt her feet leave the earth, felt the damp of the building soak through her dress. Gravity rearranged itself so that leaning back against the theater’s slippery verticality was enough to keep from floating off into the night.
The next morning, she could still trace the red patches on her skin where Gregory’s mouth and chin had scraped and bitten: down her neck, along her collarbones, down her sternum. And it was only then, the next morning, standing in her towel in front of the narrow closet mirror in the Marlboro dorm room, that she could process what had been so unusual, what left her so shaken and oxygen deprived. Every man who had kissed her good night in the past year of formal and tepid dating had done so with a tactical purpose: obtaining a second date, getting invited upstairs, letting her down easy. But Gregory and his fervid mouth had only demonstrated the simplest and most emphatic things: clavicle, they said, and shoulder, and teeth and thirst.
And then he had lowered her, slow a
nd weightless, to the ground—where his hand against her cheek and then his heading to the theater, staring back over his shoulder, had not seemed in the least like a breaking off. Nor did it particularly seem like a story that was to be continued.
At lunch the next day there was no awkward avoidance, only a sly grin, which made it all right to rehearse peacefully with Mike and Mike that afternoon, to glide through the rest of the summer’s rehearsals and meals and concerts with neither longing nor regret, just shaky wonder.
Outside, she heard a car drive up and stop. Gregory and the Mikes weren’t due until the next morning, and she had a moment of dread imagining that Gregory might have decided to show up a day early. But the car wasn’t in the driveway. It was out on the road near the oak tree, and when the doors opened two women worked their way out. A few leaves had already fallen from the trees, affording her a clearer view of the cross than she’d had before, and as the women began circling it, she could see their bodies and their pale hair. One was extremely thin, almost ill-looking, so that the other, though not obese, was nearly twice her weight. They wore jeans and unzipped fleeces, and the larger one seemed younger—mother and daughter, perhaps, and perhaps the mother and sister of the dead girl. Celine had pictured something very different before. She’d imagined the dead girl as petite, with dark skin and long, straight black hair. Exactly like her teenage self, she realized now, and wondered why she’d formed such a narcissistic picture. But no one like that could feasibly be related to these two women who were now walking partway up the driveway to peer at Celine’s car, to stare suspiciously at the house. Celine ducked out of the window frame and only looked again a few minutes later when she heard music blasting from the little blue car. They had turned on the radio and opened all the doors, so that now they had a soundtrack of anemic rock for the redecorations they were attempting around the cross.
They didn’t seem to be taking anything away, just adding. Celine grabbed her father’s old birding binoculars out of her desk and watched the women jab individual plastic flowers into the ground around the cross’s base. She inferred from the cardboard box still full of blue and white and pink that they intended to plant an entire plastic garden.
Over the next hour, as Celine went back and forth between unpacking and cleaning and staring out the window, the women, too, alternated their plastic horticulture with sitting on the hood of the blue car, smoking, laughing loud enough for Celine to hear.
At several points she considered pulling on her coat and walking out there, bringing the women mugs of hot cider, asking if there was anything she could do to help. But she never knew what to say in these situations, and she worried that her distaste for the new lawn decorations would show on her face. The way they kept looking at her car, kept pointing at her house and talking, she felt strangely judged. They already guessed her to feel superior, and they were right.
When the Mikes showed up the next morning—Mike Langley, the gay blond one, and Mike Cho, the young straight one who, in a fit of bravery, had slapped his arm around Celine that summer and called her his “half-breed half-Asian half sister”—she was in a frenzy of breakfast preparations. She had covered the kitchen table with pitchers of orange juice and milk and plates of fruit and toast, and over at the stove she was working on “eggs with stuff,” which she was sure had a fancier name somewhere in the world. It occurred to her, as she hugged them both and showed them their rooms and ran back down to stir the browning vegetables and sausage, that filling the air with the smell of onions and peppers and mushrooms and meat might have been, in some way, an attempt at compensation for the hollow welcome of an empty and under-decorated house.
The Mikes sat at the table fidgeting and ate huge plates of eggs. Mike Langley was in his twenties, and this had been his third summer at Marlboro, but Mike Cho was only eighteen. She had suddenly wondered, in the midst of all the arrangements for this week, if she should perhaps be calling his parents. Langley had picked him up from Juilliard this morning and driven him west in his little Honda. Despite their enormous talent, both had been noticeably intimidated that summer by both Celine and Gregory, and she hoped this week would put them at ease.
She was displeased with how frequently she found herself checking the clock, how busy her hands wanted to be. “There’s a used bookstore in town,” she said, “and a coffee shop, if you want to drive in. I thought we could all go out to dinner tonight, or we can order pizza. And tomorrow’s the day Julie comes, from Deutsche Grammophon.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Langley said. “Don’t tell me.”
“You can pretend she’s my sister, and she’s visiting from Canada. My blond sister, ha! But she’s going to love you.”
Julie was thrilled by the prospect of the quartet, especially since it involved Gregory, who was already on the label. But Celine hoped, from a sort of motherly perspective, that Julie would fall so in love with Mike and Mike that she’d develop independent relationships with them.
Gregory had, apparently, just let himself right in the front door, because there he stood, duffel bag in one hand, violin case in the other, his thinning hair still bleached from the summer, his face unshaven. He put his things on the floor and hugged everyone. Celine held her wooden spoon out awkwardly behind her back so she wouldn’t get grease on his coat.
“Quite a display you have out front there.”
“We were wondering!” Mike Cho said. But then he straightened his face, clearly worried he’d made a mistake. “Was it your dog?”
“A girl on a motorcycle.” Celine went back to the stove and started cracking eggs into the new batch of vegetables and sausage. Too many eggs, probably, but she couldn’t stop herself from cracking one more, and then one more. She told them the story, as she knew it, and about the recent additions. “I haven’t been out yet this morning. How bad is it?”
Gregory considered while he poured a mug of coffee. “I’d say it’s sprawling.”
She turned from the stove, relieved to have found a topic of limitless conversation. “Okay, here’s the issue, then. Pretend you’re advice columnists, and I’m depending on you for a moral answer: What do I do? I can’t take it down. I can’t live with it forever. I can’t move. I can’t ask them to make it more tasteful. It’s selfish, I know, but I’m not okay with a shrine on my lawn. Not forever.”
“Could you plant a shrub in front of it?” Mike Langley asked.
“That’s good! But maybe—no, it’s too close to the street. There’s only a couple feet of room. And in winter you’d be able to see right through anyway.”
“You should complain to village hall,” Gregory said. “They probably own the land by the road for putting in phone poles, right? They wouldn’t want that on town property. Separation of church and state.”
“This is a town that erects a life-sized Last Supper on the green for Easter.”
“I want to see it again,” Mike Cho said. “We’re creative people. We should be able to come up with something.”
When he stood, Mike Langley followed him, leaving Celine with a pan of eggs she was about to serve Gregory, and Gregory with an empty plate. She scraped the eggs onto the plate—a mountain, really—and handed him a fork. “You can carry this, right?”
“I thought I’d stay here and chat with you and enjoy my coffee.” He looked straight at her and didn’t blink, and she saw that it was a challenge, or at least an offer.
“It’s so nice out!” she said. “And we’ll be sitting all day. Let’s get some exercise.”
And so he followed them all out the door, eating his eggs.
It was worse than she’d imagined. The flowers were spread over at least twenty-five square feet, all the way out to the street and all the way back to the oak, but three times as long as that—a carpet of white and blue and pink. They had jammed the plastic stems so far into the earth that it was botanically bizarre—roses and tulips and carnations that blossomed only three i
nches above the ground. The stuffed menagerie had expanded, as well. A plush moose and what looked like an off-brand Cabbage Patch doll were now slumped near the base of the cross, like winos at a bus stop.
Mike Langley clasped his hands behind his neck. “I’m offended, aesthetically,” he said. “This is possibly the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Celine shook her head. “So tell me, then: Am I a bad person? I do feel sorry for them. But that doesn’t mean they can have my lawn.”
“You’re a good person,” Gregory said. He was circling the scene with his eggs. “They can’t make a shrine on your property.”
Mike Cho suddenly grew excited. “Could you mow the lawn and just chop them all down? And then it would just look like your lawn people did it.”
“I don’t think these are the kind of folks who would assume anyone had lawn people. Which I don’t, except when I’m out of town. And it would ruin my mower.”
They all found themselves straightening things, just as Celine had the day she’d first found it. “Are you even religious?” Mike Cho asked. “Are you, like, Christian, or . . . ?”
“Not since I was fifteen. I love sacred music, though. I love masses, and I love requiems. The Verdi Requiem might be my favorite thing in the world, even though I don’t believe a word of the text. Is that weird?”
Mike Langley poked a fake tulip with the toe of his shoe and said, “I think weird has just been redefined.”
Back in the house, Celine toasted more bread and refilled everyone’s coffee and started another batch of eggs. “Look at you,” Gregory said. “You’re Snow White, feeding all the little men.”
The Bartók went beautifully, as if a day hadn’t passed since Marlboro. Of all the groupings that summer—cello with piano, cello with flute and harp, cello with clarinet and alto—this string quartet had been the one that instantly justified itself, that proved revelatory. Rehearsals had left her sweaty and exhausted and jubilant. It had been a long time since she’d felt that way about any collaboration, and it had been at least a year since she’d felt she was making any progress, musically. She knew the Mikes must still be wondering what on earth these two experienced, successful musicians could want with two young kids. They didn’t understand yet what they were bringing to the equation themselves: fire, energy. And marketability, to be quite honest. It was an interesting concept, one that Julie from Deutsche Grammophon thought would sell nicely. “The music press will love it,” she’d said. “Because it’s about teaching, and it’s about a meeting of the generations, and it’s about Marlboro.”
Music for Wartime Page 15
