And the Dark Sacred Night

by Julia Glass

  “Lie down,” she whispered.

  “No,” he whispered back. He held her, not roughly but with an authority, a knowingness, she wouldn’t have guessed. When she started to grasp at the elastic of his shorts, he stopped her. He took her left hand and pressed it, instead, against the right side of his chest. His nipple rose against the center of her palm.

  He kept her pulled tight against him, so that it felt as if they were dancing, the tempo slow yet fraught. She broke away from his mouth and breathed into his ear, “I want you.” Inside me, she wanted to say.

  He had barely gasped, “You have me” before he uttered a fierce, indecipherable word and pushed against her harder, over and over. Gradually, without releasing each other, they became motionless. She knew they were equally stunned, afraid to look at each other’s faces. Her bent arm was hot and numb, pinned between their bodies; she didn’t dare pull it free.

  He was the one who stepped back. Without meeting her eyes, he turned toward the water, still wearing his boxers, and dove in.

  “Wait,” she said. All she could do was follow.

  He swam straight out, not swiftly but with a clear determination for distance.

  “Where are you going?” she called out.

  He stopped, but still he faced the opposite shore.

  “China,” he said. “Or maybe just upstate New York.”

  She caught up and reached clumsily for his shoulder. “Are you running away from me?”

  “I’m always running away. From too many things.” He gave her a sidelong glance, half smile, half grimace.

  What was she to say? Would he never return her honest feelings? And yet what had she fallen for? If she had wanted earnest or gushing or even possessive, there were other boys with those qualities.

  He swam close to her, kissed her on the mouth, and said, “Time to go. Tomorrow is our big day.” He swam back to shore. By the time she caught up with him, he was dressed, his shirt soaked through, his sneakers dangling from the fingers of a hand.

  ——

  Friday night—their Friday night—arrived, and here they were: the boys in their dark suits, many of them bought for this purpose alone (too late, Daphne noticed the price tag dangling from the armpit of Oboe David’s jacket) and the girls in demure funereal dresses, their prescribed modesty a trial in the heat. Natalya’s gown was also black—but strapless. With her glossy hair surging from her face like a mane, she formed a fierce silhouette against the glare of the klieg lights above and, below, the mosaic of the spectators’ faces: a full house and, despite the rumor of a storm, the meadow crowded, too.

  Near the front of the stage, the two pianists faced each other across the lacquered expanse of their twin instruments, the arabesque of one tucked neatly into the other. In the brief silence after Natalya switched on the lectern light and before she raised her hands, Daphne glanced furtively backward: there he was (of course he was), aligning his fingers with the polished keys, flexing his lips against the aperture.

  But once Daphne raised her bow, his presence was immaterial. She swam in the music much the way she had swum in the lake the night before: diving, surfacing, finding a rhythm to suit the currents, at times treading water. Natalya had promised they would play perfectly, and they did (or sensed they did). No one, however, could have anticipated the rumblings of thunder, the recurrent fissures of lightning, faraway yet bright. The wind blew skirts and unfastened tresses of bobby-pinned hair. Their music was clamped to their stands, which in turn were held in place by miniature sandbags.

  Only when they finished playing, as they stood and bowed to the applause (and the shameless cheers of their parents), did Daphne wonder if anyone had ever been struck by lightning here—up on the stage or out in the wide exposed meadow. Antony Carpenter-Rhodes had assured them he would suspend the concert if the storm showed signs of heading directly their way. For now, it lingered over an adjacent valley, pinned there by unseen pressures.

  Single file, they receded from the stage and took their seats in the audience. Daphne glanced across to the parents’ section; her mother and father, who had seen her only briefly before the concert, beamed and waved. Her mother, wiping her eyes, blew Daphne a kiss.

  The rain, when it arrived, was sudden and punishingly loud. It arrived in the middle of a guitar piece, a flamenco-tinted duet that seemed like a brazen taunt to the hovering storm. Except for the technicians—captains of the foundering ship—everyone fled: as the rain intensified, they scattered fast, some for the nearest practice studios—screen doors slamming again and again—others running for the pillared gate and their cars in the lot beyond.

  Daphne lost sight of Malachy, whose seat had been two rows behind hers. And then, in the dim, wet pandemonium of bodies hellbent on seeking shelter, she found herself pulled into her mother’s embrace. Her mother was soaked to the skin and smelled of her special-occasion Chanel. Daphne’s father kissed her tenderly on the cheek.

  “You were a star!” he said, shouting to compete with the rain.

  “No, you were the star,” said her mother. “Oh, honey, that solo.”

  Daphne wanted to feel touched by their praise, by their presence after more than a month’s separation. But all she could feel was that they didn’t belong here; she was ashamed of herself, but it was true. This place was hers. “You’d better go,” she said. “The roads.” Unlike parents who had taken trains or even planes to be there, hers would drive the few hours it took to return home. They were not the type to splurge on one of the nearby country inns.

  She saw them to the gate; she hugged them again as quickly as she dared. She promised to call the next day.

  And then she ran, through the undiminishing rain, to the main house, where she knew they would all be gathered, her new friends, celebrating. She paused, as briefly as she could, to pull off her shoes and lift her sodden skirt. The grass was deliciously silken against her stockinged feet.

  She woke from a dream in which Natalya was announcing that Daphne’s brother, Andrew, had been killed. And this time Malachy was there with the others to hear the news. He leaned against the pool table, aloof, without expression, while everyone else embraced her, keening in sympathy. (But none of them know Andrew! Daphne was thinking as she struggled toward consciousness, breathing hard.)

  Chilled to the bone by her waterlogged dress and nylons, Daphne had gone to bed that night wearing a thick, baggy sweater of Andrew’s (a favorite of his, gleefully pilfered), retreating deep beneath her covers, desperate for the sheets to warm. Now—soaked in perspiration, chilled all over again—she willed herself fully awake, pushing back the urgent fear of the dream.

  The rain continued to fall, less torrentially but with an alert steadiness. She could hear the wind, still bullying tree limbs against the walls of the house. Her roommates slept, their steady breathing audible, too.

  There had been no celebration after the performance that night. As Daphne had expected, most of the campers were gathered in the games lounge at HQ. Natalya stood before the grand fireplace with its still life of perfectly stacked, never-ignited birch logs. Slipping in among her fellow musicians, Daphne was hungry to hear what would surely be praise for all their hard work.

  “Listen, my friends. Listen,” said Natalya. She did not have to raise her voice to be heard; she called them many things but never her friends. “There was sad news for Carl tonight. His brother who is a soldier has been killed.” Kilt, she said; maybe she meant something other than actually killed. “Probably Carl will not return to us.”

  No one had spoken for several seconds. Carl’s brother was a soldier? But where? Vietnam would be the obvious answer. Daphne hadn’t known this; had anybody known? Impossible to tell when she scanned the room. The crying was instinctual, neither heartfelt nor phony, like singing along to an irresistible melody. And Malachy, where was he? Why hadn’t he joined the others? Daphne had felt more dismay at this trivial discovery than at the news. That’s how selfish she was. She hadn’t even been able to su
mmon tears.

  So what now, now that she was wide awake? She got up and went down the hall to pee. She did not turn on the bathroom light, and before returning to her room, she stared out the rain-spattered window into the swaying trees. She stood there until the toilet tank filled again, sighed into silence. Back in her room, she looked at the glowing face of her alarm clock. Three-thirty, the no-man’s-land of neither night nor morning. She felt a surge of mournful desire. In three weeks they would all leave this place. How could she imagine returning to her high school, much less to that excuse for an orchestra? How could she return to the company of boys like the ones she used to date (only halfheartedly, she knew now), their insistent bodies, their presumptuous hands and tongues?

  She went downstairs and stood on the stoop outside the door to the girls’ house, beneath the small protective awning. Water rushed from the downspout, carving a furrow in the fragrant pine needles hemming the path. Along one side of the house, she noticed a flourishing colony of ferns. Even in the dark, their green was incandescent. She leaned down and picked the tallest one, using both hands to sever its tough stalk.

  “Just go,” she whispered.

  She followed the path, half running, pine needles clinging to her feet. She clutched the fern in one hand, holding her brother’s sweater close to her body with the other. At the Shed, she stopped. She stared at the latch to the barn door. Like most doors at this privileged place, it was unlocked, implying welcome—or daring her to violate its trust.

  Crazy. But everything that night was crazy; why not this? Why not her?

  She lifted the latch. She pulled the door open by millimeters. Perhaps because of all the rain, nothing creaked or clicked. The sound of water falling on a dozen different surfaces masked any noise she might have made. She felt invisible, canceled by the elements.

  The girls slept in a dorm that had once been a dairyman’s house; its rooms were small, the amenities few—but it was luxurious compared with the boys’ quarters. The Shed was a barely converted barn: rows of narrow curtained stalls partitioned in plywood. Each occupant slept in his own tiny room—little more than a cubicle—but together they shared a single bathroom in the adjoining pump house, the place where the milk had been stored. (“Someone needs to tell them about these people called architects,” Malachy had said the one time he showed Daphne around.)

  His stall, she remembered, was the first one in on the right. She walked through the opening—he hadn’t bothered to close the curtain—and knelt on the rug beside the cot.

  He slept on his side, his back to the flimsy wall that separated his space from the one where Trombone David slept. Malachy’s mouth was closed, his long hands joined, fingers to palm, at the edge of his pillow. The sheet covered him up to his chest, secured by an elbow.

  He slept soundly. She could just stay there and stare at him for as long as she liked, then leave, no one the wiser. Carefully, hindered by the wet nightgown clinging to her knees, she settled into a cross-legged position. Her face was level with his shoulder.

  She held the fern to her nose as she waited for her eyes to adjust to the dusty dark of the barn interior. The fern smelled like good, fertile dirt, like her mother’s flower beds in the spring.

  His eyes opened. He remained silent, but he looked frightened.

  “It’s me,” she whispered.

  “Daphne?”

  She reached out and touched his mouth.

  She rose to her knees and tucked the fern beneath the pillow.

  He said nothing, and he didn’t move. She stood, as quickly as she could, and wrenched off her brother’s sweater, her cold encumbering nightgown. She climbed under the sheet beside him, pushing him back to make space for herself.

  His elbow struck the wall, a brief knock, and he started to speak, but she kissed him. She felt, simultaneously, that he was trying to pull away from her and also that he was completely naked, and shaking, under the sheet.

  “Oh,” he said, speaking into her lips as she pressed her hand flat against his penis, which had been hard from the moment it touched her legs.

  How did this work? She began to shake, too. But Malachy’s arms folded her close. He pulled his face away from hers and whispered, “This isn’t safe.”

  “Yes, it is,” she whispered. “I promise.”

  “But you” was all he could say before she pressed one leg over his and somehow rolled herself beneath his body.

  For ages and ages, this had been happening; everybody knew that. Without diagrams or books or the gym teacher’s drawings on the blackboard in the stuffy coaching office behind the locker room. Daphne’s period had come the week before. Ten days: that was the margin, she’d read.

  It was, and wasn’t, what she had imagined. At first it was difficult, the fitting together: clumsy, but not painful. Almost by accident, she found herself turning him, against the wall, forcing him beneath her. He came quickly, the way he had by the lake, and again he kept her against him. This time he went back to kissing her, determined and unceasing as the rain, which clattered so loudly on the roof that Daphne was certain no one could hear them. He pushed a hand between her legs, searching. She almost wanted him to stop, but then she realized that he was hardening all over again, and this part—this was what surprised her completely.

  They said nothing, even when their faces were parted, and now it did hurt, though she did not protest. He stayed on top of her, taking his turn as the one who moved constantly, pinning her down with a weight that seemed far greater than his own. It felt as if he were telling her something essential with every part of him except his words (the part of him that had won her over to begin with). This, she thought, was the opposite of poetry.

  When they were done, both of them finally still, Daphne felt a twist of anxiety. But their shared warmth was reassuring, and Malachy’s sinuous arm, lightly balanced in the niche of her waist, gave a logic to the way she was shaped. His eyes were closed, though she knew this only by feel, her fingers appraising his face. There was no telling what time it was.

  “I have to go,” she whispered.

  Her palm against his cheek, she felt him nod.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  She waited. He answered, “Daphne, you’re too perfect for me.”

  She wondered why her shoulder felt so scratchy—until she pushed herself up from the cot and felt, beneath her hand, the flattened fern. She left it there for him to find in the light. As if he might forget.

  She did not see Malachy until Monday morning, at breakfast; by then, she was desperate with angry confusion. She had been incapable of asking anyone where he was before then. Furtively, she had searched the other boys’ faces for mocking recognition of her trespass. She saw nothing—but still, she could not have uttered his name without emotion.

  After chamber rehearsal—now they dove full force into Debussy’s “Faun,” Saint-Saëns a thing of the past, a book closed, a journey all but forgotten—Malachy sat at another table for lunch. During the afternoon break, he was nowhere to be found; at dinner, he was absent. But as if nothing were different, she ate a large piece of Boston cream pie and walked with Michael to the studio where Viktor Vassily, a visiting member of some Bach society, was tutoring Malachy on the flute sonata. All the campers worked in smaller ensembles as well as in the two chamber groups; Daphne couldn’t believe her luck when she was assigned to this trio.

  Malachy’s instrument was the melodic backbone of the sonata; he would be the star. Michael’s harpsichord and Daphne’s cello were mere courtiers, sycophants to the flute, though their roles were challenging, too. Under Viktor Vassily’s nearly disdainful guidance, they practiced together that night without any humorous asides, with an almost dull-witted focus on the mechanics that could make Bach’s music merely workmanlike if the performers were too unsure of themselves (or too unmoved by the music itself).

  At nine, when Vassily dismissed them, Daphne was tempted to pack up hastily and bolt to her room. But after thanking their tutor
and saying good night to Michael, she stood on the spongy lawn, under the showy stars of a storm-washed sky, and she waited for Malachy, who had lingered in the studio to clean his flute.

  “There you are,” he said when he emerged, as if he weren’t the one who had vanished for the past two days.

  She willed herself to say nothing, to let him stay or go, as he wished. She would not appear to have trapped him.

  He started along the path that led toward the Silo, but then he turned back, obviously expecting her to follow. When she didn’t, he said, “Daphne, we should talk.”

  “Don’t say it was a mistake.” Damn her voice for trembling. “Don’t you dare tell me that.” But she gave in and joined him.

  He resumed walking. He held his flute case in one hand, his music folder in the other. “You need to understand something, Daphne. I’m selfish. I guess I was so selfish that I didn’t—”

  “So we’re all selfish!” she said. She stopped, resting her case on the bricks. She hated how unfairly burdensome her cello was, compared with Malachy’s flute in its trim, complacent little box. You could flee with a flute. “I’m selfish and, so what, I still love you!” She realized how angry she sounded. “I love you partly because I am selfish.”

  He was forced to turn around and face her. He was clearly uncertain—no, unhappy—clearly thinking hard about how to answer, and suddenly she was furious that he had to think about an answer.

  “How about a limerick?” she said. “Can you maybe just give me a goddamn limerick?”

  His eyes narrowed. “You know, I could, Daphne. I actually could. But what I can’t give you is what you really want from me. If you don’t believe me, I understand. Or if you hate me. You should hate me.”

  She wanted to hate him. She wanted to accuse him of using her, but how absurd would that be? “What’s it meant to you, Malachy? All this time we—all this—the nights and the … how can you deny that we …” Are meant for each other, she longed to say, but she wasn’t so stupid. They weren’t actors in a movie. They were a pair of spoiled brats at a hothouse for talented students of music, most of whom would never be famous or successful at what they believed set them apart, made them special. She could not persuade Malachy Burns to love her any more than she could persuade Antony Carpenter-Rhodes to give her a solo with the London Philharmonic.