Elizabeth is remembering a death and a brush with death.
The death was a long time ago. Though when it is importunate, as now, asserting itself, it seems to have happened yesterday. Somewhere it nourishes vines more lunatic than honeysuckle. She has seen pictures: stems thicker than an arm, leaves vast as flags, a punctuation of blood-red flowers. Somewhere a jungle heard her name — Liz, Liz — and grew over the sound.
A winter falls into Elizabeth, the cold gets to her, she falters, she senses the drifts closing over. Through the cracks of unguarded moments, ice fingers her.
She plunges her hands into earth, she claws at warmth, she stops up draughty places. Another peony, dizzy with abrupt transplant, is pitched into juvenescence. And another. And another. A fever of fruitfulness.
Nothing is gained, Elizabeth tells herself, by acknowledging the inexorable nature of the opposition. No prizes for being overwhelmed.
Scoop, transplant, tamp the soil. Expand the ranks of the flourishing. She bends low, intent, lifts one more handful of mud, and another earthworm confronts her moistly. The abiding question. Never look Circe in the eye, she tells it, and buries it in the peony’s cradle.
Anything calling for action, for transposition into beauty, this is her credo. Stay busy with birth and mending. The mere brush with death she could cope with. There was plenty to be done that time, after the concert in New York, when Edward’s heart threw a tantrum. Enough, enough, it screamed, threatening to shut down until further notice. A jungle of tubing flowered over it.
Elizabeth felt the coldness, she came close to losing hope, but she held her breath and kept watch. She has a gift for life. Her hands massaged, caressed, coaxed him back. Not yet, she had willed. Not like this. Not before this family has achieved wholeness.
Mending.
There was more to be done.
They were centring now, coming in from the corners of the earth. She was reining them in, from London, from Sydney, from New York.
She pulled Adam and Emily from air. Dave waited, expectant; she was playing him into the piece. Catalysis, catalysis. Into her thoughts fell Jason. The peonies sang. Tory, fragrant with homecoming, flowered between her fingers.
In the garden Elizabeth dreams of, everything flourishes. The young are in one another’s arms.
XV Converging
(i)
“Newfoundland is on our starboard side now, but too far to see. The steward told me.” Adam collected mentors the way other boys did scraped knees. “Unless there’s a storm. Then we might have to enter Canadian air space.”
“That’s where you began.”
He was politely uninterested, being loyal to Dave, but felt obliged to ask: “Am I Canadian too?”
He felt a kinship with mongrel dogs — the fluffy lovable kind — nationalities adhering to him like chunks of various breeding lines.
It struck his mother as a singularly amusing question.
“No. That’s something they haven’t managed to catalogue. As yet. You’re thoroughly documented for the US and Australia. And there are our visas for the UK. But they have no way of monitoring conception.” She winked at him, sharing a sophisticated joke. “There’s no record whatsoever of your passage through Canada, You got away with it.”
If Dave had been there, he would have said: “No flies on you, mate.”
He wished he could turn to her and say: “For my next birthday, I want Dave back.”
But it was something, like death, that could not be mentioned. Once when he had done so a tic had absorbed the entire right side of her face, like a frightened bird beating its wings against the inner wall of her cheek.
More often she did what he thought of as “walking away from herself”. He would know from her eyes that she had gone from behind them. When he was ready to revert to sensible things, she seemed to intimate, they would resume conversation.
He watched her absorption in the cloud ballet beyond her window. She was thinking, perhaps, of Canada and of the man in Montreal who was technically his father. This information, for him, existed on the same level as his awareness that he was technically a citizen of the United States though he had yet to set foot on American soil.
He heard her catch her breath in instinctive appreciation of the graceful somersaults of cirrus puffs. He watched the gentleman across the aisle watching her. He thought of Dave and of the rare turquoise butterfly that was never still. He watched the gentleman’s wife watching the gentleman watching his mother. In his dreams, sometimes, he and Dave made butterfly nets.
Emily contemplated the inside of clouds, reassured by their disorderly secrets. Movement soothed her. She would have delighted in a storm for what it would offer in dramatic gesture as well as for any delay or detour it might promise in reaching New York. Only in transit did she feel at ease. If she had not had the good fortune to be a concert musician she would, she supposed, have had to sell pharmaceuticals or office equipment— a company car, a wide territory, a life on the road.
Silkily the plane cleaved through a grey-white turbulence that had once drifted along the St Lawrence; that had perhaps, two or three days ago, brought rain to Montreal. On Place Jacques Cartier the chairs and tables would have been pulled back into the shelter of awnings, the flower sellers would have tucked buckets of roses and ferns under trestle counters, rivulets would have coursed in the grooves between cobblestones, and quite possibly Sergei would have presented one sweetheart rose to a young woman with rain-wet hair and a future. A little later he might have begotten another child while the weather fogged the young womans apartment windows.
For this she reproached him not at all, and herself, for the mistakes of youth, only a little. How could she regret Adam? She thought of Sergei, now that he was safely sealed into the past, as an interlude, yes, an educational interlude, a buffer zone, in her life. Also, he had taught her jealousy and for that too she was grateful — grateful in the way of a mother who has repeatedly warned a child about playing by the hot stove; the child burns one hand in a fleeting brush with the element; a lesson is learned, a greater danger forestalled.
After New York and Juilliard, where she had tried men much as she had tried artichokes, pot, anti-war demonstrations, and subscriptions to Gourmet and Ramparts, Montreal had seemed, in 1970, like a voyage to the Old World.
Yet in fact the city had been a ferment of hysteria and martial law. At the time all that had seemed like so much background noise.
In the pages of newspapers, monitoring the rise of her own star, she had sought music reviews before news bulletins. If she had thought much about the words scrawled in spray paint across walls — Vive le Québec libre — it had been to assent inwardly to the blissful freedom of a world remote from family and father, a Quebec where she could spend illicit midnights with Sergei and be deluged with his flowers backstage — a publicly private affair.
She had believed that the passion would last for ever — such was the gift, the illusory magic of Sergei, purveyor of love as art form. She had crossed a border. In New York in the sixties, love was a politically unacceptable anachronism.
In New York her succession of couplings had been so arid that she had begun to fear she was sexually or emotionally impaired. Not that there were technical problems. Rather she discovered that orgasm itself could be almost joyless — like laughter in a television sitcom machine. Or perhaps, as Rob put it, she was politically and sexually infantile, hankering after affection and the forms of romance. For Rob, sex was a balance sheet that must come out even on each side, each time, even when she assured him she would have been quite happy to run a slight debit.
For more spiritual intercourse she had turned to Jim who read to her in bed — Norman O. Brown before and Marcuse after. This was uplifting but failed to spark an abiding passion.
There had been various other men whose energies had seemed to promise much. They had declaimed on campuses and co-opted her for poster making and berated her for such an irrelevancy as the violin when the wor
ld was crumbling. They made love as though it were a military act and they taught her lingering guilt. She made more and more frequent contributions to Save the Children to atone for the price of concert tickets.
These men were also, incongruously, addicted to permanence.
“You know you want me back,” Rob would storm into the phone. “You know this is infantile. You’ve made your point now. My shrink told me it’s your way of throwing a tantrum. Look, Rob, no hands!”
And Jim would drop by with a new book.
“This independence thing,” he would say “Don’t you think you’re carrying it too far? We should discuss it. Why don’t I stay over and we can work through this book?”
Baby, the various angry young militants said, quoting Stokely Carmichael (or was it Rap Brown?), the only position for women in this movement is prone. Violins are elitist. Lay it aside and lie back, or leave.
I’ll leave, she would offer politely.
Outraged, they accused: castrating bitch!
Hey, wait a minute! they pleaded, confused. Can’t we reconsider?
By 1970 New York was mined with lovers who felt discarded. Between the tall buildings they stalked her. Each day the city seemed to shrink, to resemble the small town in western Massachusetts from which she had fled, to smell stale with use. When the Montreal offer came, it was like the gift of a respirator to a victim of asthma.
“Metals I do not consider urgent,” Sergei said. “Real estate, yes, because of inflation and for safety. But music is my best investment.” He had made his money in shoes but now owned whole blocks of Montreal and one of its newspapers and was one of the orchestra’s most generous benefactors. “For my grandfather,” he said, “who never saw this land of promise but who played the violin to me in the evenings when I was a child. That was before our world fell apart.”
Emily, drinking his champagne at a festive opening of the season, smiled politely. She considered how well age suited some men, imagining him at a long table in some baroque room presided over by Metternich or Tolstoy or a patriarch of the Académie Française. His only slightly greying hair would be falling across his forehead in just this way while cultured women in salons all over Europe were pining for him.
“You must come and play for us at our little chamber concerts,” he said. “Must she not, Anna?”
His wife, who might once have been a dancer or a countess, a gaunt handsome woman in black and pearls, said dryly: “We must certainly keep an eye on her.”
And her lively dark eyes had conveyed to Emily the most extraordinary semaphore: pride, amused disdain, indulgence. An air even of collusion: this is the way he is; we must make shift with it.
And of pity: poor child.
A little later a young man of about her own age, beautiful in the style of a Viennese aesthete or a friend of Oscar Wilde, offered Emily canapés.
“Ah well,” he said. “It has been duly noted. You’re next. We must resign ourselves, I suppose.”
“Pardon?”
“I’m Sasha.”
“Emily Carpenter. How do you do?”
“His son.”
She smiled, bewildered.
“I hope,” he said, “when you’ve finished being blinded by him, that you’ll stay long enough to get to know me. Could I take you out for drinks after this charade, or am I already too late?”
“Actually,” she said, feeling crowded, the ghosts of New York lovers jostling her, “I need to unpack. I just got an apartment yesterday. I’ve been camping with a friend in graduate residence at McGill up till now.”
The next morning there were two deliveries of flowers. From Sergei and from Sasha. Arms full of blossoms and fragrance, she debated whether to answer the phone or the door first.
“Could you hold for one minute?” she said into the receiver. “I have to answer the doorbell.”
“You look enchanting by morning light.” Sergei indicated his car in the street. “We have reservations for lunch, but I thought a drive up Mount Royal first?”
“I’m unpacking crates,” she said, breathless. “I’m … you see …” Gesturing at her jeans and sweatshirt.
“I’ll wait while you change.”
In the hallway he said: “Your phone.”
“Oh, I forgot. Excuse me.”
She picked up the receiver.
“Emily? This is Sasha. May I come over and help you unpack?”
“Uh … actually, I’m just going out. Maybe later. It’s awfully sweet of you.”
“Don’t come crying,” Sasha said, “when its all over. I don’t touch his rejects.”
“Thats quite … uncalled for, I think. The flowers…”
“I can tell from your breathing.”
“The flowers are gorgeous. May I thank you?”
“It’s nothing. You could change your mind.”
“Would this afternoon …?”
“Forget it.”
She heard the plastic click of renunciation.
“It’s just a stage,” Sergei said. “He’ll get over it. Do you have something blue?”
He took her face between his hands and ran his index finger gently across her eyelids. As a bishop might have anointed the eyes of a young acolyte. “With such eyes it should be blue. And for such a body, soft as thistledown.”
She strove to see it as elabourate playacting, as almost comically out of date, yet felt absurd tidal movements in the blood. When she walked to the bedroom to find something blue and soft in her suitcases, it was as though a sac of flesh had ballooned suddenly between her thighs. She could scarcely stand for the sweet aching and the shift of gravity. I am dissolving, she thought. This is it. I am finally experiencing passion.
What was tantalising about Sergei was that he let her seep and ferment with desire for weeks before he did more than kiss her fingertips or stroke her hair.
On Mount Royal they climbed the last slope beyond the parking lot to the gigantic cross. Below them in the crisp air the city stirred like a languid woman in October gold.
“You will never forget Montréal.” He pronounced it in the French way. “I will see to it.”
He took both her hands and kissed her lightly on the forehead and led her back to the car. On the car radio, an announcer was saying that James Richard Cross, British Trade Commissioner to the Province of Quebec, had been kidnapped from his home early that morning. Ransom demands of the Front de Libération du Québec had just been found in a letter.
“Messy business,” Sergei said. “I hope to God Sasha has enough sense …”
“Sasha is a sympathiser?”
“It’s his university crowd. Fashionable stuff at the moment and hes fluently bilingual. Also fancies the role of victim.”
The FLQ, said the announcer, gave the authorities forty-eight hours to meet their demands.
Sergei turned off the radio and took her to L’Epicure.
Each day Sergei would sit in the gloam of the empty auditorium and Emily would note the suppressed smiles, the telegraphy of eyes. She would not have minded had she not feared that the members of the orchestra smirked because they detected her ravenous unconsummated hunger. Striving to look tranquil and satiated, she was aware that her hands sometimes trembled, that her eyes and skin had the luminous look of starvation.
Every day Sasha called her, vicious and pleading. I dream about you, he would say. Don’t expect me to care what you do. She promised to have lunch with him. Some time soon. She yearned to ask: What are your father’s intentions?
Daily, after rehearsal, Sergei would take her somewhere for drinks and any bartender would have thought: two lovers. They would drive to her apartment, he would open her door, give a courtly bow, kiss her hand, and leave. After ten days of thinking Surely tonight, of shifting from wry regret to disbelief to frenzy, she ventured:
“Will you come in for dinner? I have a cold chicken and I make a wonderful spinach salad. Everyone says so.”
“Ma petite Emily,” he sighed. “How delightful that
would be.”
But dinner, he explained, was a grand occasion chez Anna. The whole family, the silverware, the best china, candlelight. As in the Old World. He could never disappoint.
“Besides,” he chided, “you must practice. You are disappointing me, relying too much on natural ability. How many hours a day are you doing, aside from orchestra rehearsal?”
“Three. All morning.”
His eyes reproached. “This is not enough. If you are going to be famous, and I have decided that you will be, you must be perfect. You must start earlier in the morning. And three hours more tonight. You will promise?”
In New York a month ago, someone (Liam? Jeff?) had said: “Three hours a day! What monumental self-indulgence! Meanwhile villages are being bombed and children are dying.”
“Three more hours,” she promised meekly.
He kissed her hand in farewell. “Tomorrow I will notice a difference in the playing.” And he kissed her forehead.
Perhaps this is what he does, she thought sadly, watching the receding car from her window. Perhaps when Sasha said “duly noted” he meant that I had been singled out for hard labour and celibacy, for twelve hours of practice a day and a tilt at the golden ring.
Music is my best investment.
He was, after all, simply an impresario, avuncular and intransigent. Practise, practise, practise. I have decided you will be famous.
Abandoned, she was tempted to curl up in bed and weep. Never before, as she resigned her bow, had she thought of her violin as a rival, more desirable than she.
She practiced with an intensity designed to numb her want — and to please him, to dazzle him, to have him say “much improved”, to seduce him with music. Just to have him touch her eyelids, kiss her forehead again. When she dragged herself to bed she went to sleep with a pillow hugged between her legs and dreamed Sergei was undressing her.
For breakfast she had coffee and a Bartok score. He wanted her to work on it “for one of our little chamber concerts”. Under the sardonic eye of the empress Anna she would have to perform gymnastics with fingers and bow. Like a court jester. And will they all know? Is it always like this — a family joke?
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Page 13
