by Amy Lapwing
“Five, four, three, two—” he intoned. The women, one after the other glanced over at Michael, appraised his torso, its satisfying muscle mass, covered with a generous, but not simian, quantity of glistening black curls. “One.” Charles attempted a seductive look for the women’s benefit, but they were on their way to the locker room.
“What?” said Michael, regaining his breath.
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
Michael felt his look. “What?”
“So, how’d the big date go?” Charles tried not to sound too eager for details.
Michael frowned with concentration. “I’m not really sure.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just— I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
“Then tell me what happened and I’ll tell you how it went.”
Michael told Charles about dinner and the play.
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Charles, “you talked and talked and the air was getting warmer and warmer. And?”
Michael sighed. “And we kissed.”
“Ah!” said Charles. “And the heavens opened.”
“I thought so, anyway.”
“The heavens don’t open for just one.”
Michael shrugged and attempted to describe the blunder in the orchard.
“You told her you wanted to see her again because of how she kissed? Jesus!”
“I told her— I told her, no, I told her— I don’t know what I told her. ¡Mierda!”
“All right, so, how’d it end?”
Michael told him of the spirit of companionship as they worked together at the piano, the easy feeling at dinner.
Charles said, “Sounds like you patched it up, anyway.”
Michael looked up at the cloudy squares of glass just below the ceiling. “It’s just— that it was strange. Not the same ...” He made a gesture suggesting the lifting off of a rocket.
Charles shrugged. “That’s not necessarily bad. May just mean she’s realizing something.”
Michael kept his eyes on Charles as his friend eyed the computer services woman stroking the water.
“Maybe, I don’t know, of course, but maybe she feels something happening, and maybe it seems too fast, for her.”
“I only said I liked to kiss her.”
“Sure, that’s all you said.” Charles heaved himself out of the pool, walked with self-conscious dignity to the bench, silently cursing every jiggle, put a terrycloth robe about him, and went into the locker room.
Michael dove back into the pool and did some more laps, feeling his body propelled by muscles that seemed not a part of him. He would slow down, he told himself, make no move unless she clearly wanted him to. She was vacillating, he needed to keep his distance.
On Tuesday, he found her at the library and asked her out for that weekend.
Justina put aside her novel and stood up by the sunny library window, the leaves of a young maple peaking with orange leaves that looked freshly painted.
Michael stood with her. “I promise not to take up all your time,” he said.
She took his hand. “Come here, Music Man.” She led him into the stacks and found a hidden corner. “Do you dance?”
“Yes. Only, not hippity-hop.”
She smiled at his malapropism. “Me neither. I mean fox trot, box step, that stuff. Let’s go dancing this weekend.”
He smiled at her— “Okay—” and shifted his weight closer to her. “Novel Girl, do you want me to kiss you?”
“Mm-hm.”
“If I kiss you, I won’t be able to keep myself from liking it. Is that all right? It doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate your many, many other very fine qualities.” He put his arms around her and pulled her close. “Do you understand? Is that all right?” She lifted her chin and closed her eyes.
Justina could not think what the problem had been on Sunday in the orchard. Everything about his kiss seemed right. It was not demanded in a mean-spirited way, not demeaning, not portending abandonment.
Footsteps passed by their hiding place, a switch clicked and the light slapped their heads. The light clicked off and the steps went away. “Just one thing,” Justina said. “Promise you will.” He did not understand. “Promise you will take up all my time, this weekend.”
They found ways, that week, to be alone on campus. She kissed him in his office, in her office, students obtusely knocking on the closed door; in an alcove outside the fac, unknowingly in plain view of the kitchen help; behind the library, under Diane Updoc’s rare-book-framed gaze; and then Justina would leave him to plot their next encounter. They met for dinner at her place or at his, cooking side by side, feeling married, never daring to say so. The remainder of the evening would be spent in the living room as she tried to grade quizzes and he attempted to help, the stack not noticeably diminishing; or she would listen to him play and sing pieces he was considering for his choruses. He sang softly for her, he did not know if she cared for an operatic sound. She watched his face from her place on the couch, his eyes now squinting at the notes, now glancing at the keys, looking up at her when he had finished, the cloud of concentration breaking into a smile. She would long to feel his hair between her fingers. Leery of amatory escalation, she never kissed him in his apartment.
That he wanted to get her in bed went without saying, his scheme-hatching brain lobbying him constantly on the subject. When he was with her, he saw the hesitation, like an alarm, in her eyes, which he respected. He did not know the cause of her equivocation, but he sensed that she was herself frustrated by it, and that no change in his own behavior would dispel it. In the meantime, the other dimensions of their selves were becoming entwined and he would be on the verge of declaring to himself that the absent sex did not matter. And then she would kiss him and the lobbyists would scream again.
“Okay, how about this one.” Michael rinsed a plate and handed it to Justina. “La Bohème.”
Justina guessed, “French?”
“Italian.” He soaped up a glass. “La Fille du Régiment.”
“Not French, apparently.” She got a fresh towel. “Italian?”
“French. Okay, this is a tricky one. Pique Dame.”
“Not Italian. French?”
“Russian.” He handed her the last glass.
“Obviously I have a lot to learn about opera!” she exclaimed, drying the glass.
“Me, too.” He placed his hands on either side of him on the counter and leaned back against it. It was Friday night, but she had said she did not want to go out. They were going dancing tomorrow night, she did not want to stay out late two nights in a row. He could not believe she would want to grade all night, again, though. He did not know what to suggest.
She hanged the towel on the rack over the sink and leaned back against the counter, as he did. “I bet there’s a newsgroup.”
“What is a newsgroup?”
“On the Internet. You want to see?” She went past him into her bedroom.
He stood in the doorway and watched her sit at her computer. He felt foolish for hesitating and went in and stood beside her between the computer table and her bed. It was a double bed covered with a flowered bedspread in muted shades of cream, mauve and green that reminded him of his grandmother. He imagined the sheets were another floral print. Or perhaps a simple white. He wanted to turn down the cover and see.
She was typing at her computer. He looked at the screen, squeezing his eyes to focus: short lines of text, mostly abbreviations, some comprehensible words: “login,” “password,” “connecting.” The machine whistled two consecutive tones, a C and an F, he guessed, and then white noise.
“Gah!” she spouted, her hands in her lap, one leg bouncing up and down with impatience. “Mainframe’s dragging its butt.” She was typing again. She showed him a listing of articles in the rec.music.opera newsgroup. They read a few. There was a debate going on as to why opera singers were so portly. Michael remarked that the answer was easy, because they could get away with it,
it wasn’t the cinema, nobody cared what they looked like; they used to argue about it all the time at Juilliard. She asked him if he wanted to post an article; he declined. They read a few more articles. An unusually civil group of people were singing the praises of a new soprano on the scene.
“Wellsworth!” exclaimed Michael, looking at the posting’s sent from line. “I know him!” He got down on one knee to more easily read the screen, and put his arm on the back of her chair. “Son of a dog! I know him, I knew him at Juilliard!”
She cast her eyes sideways at him; she had only to turn her head and she could brush his cheek with her lips. She shifted in her chair, away from him. “You could send him email. Want to? Find out what he’s been up to?”
“Maybe so.”
She asked if he had an account. He said he didn’t know, he didn’t think so. She told him he should call Computing Services, he might have one he has never used. She would show him how to get started. “Then you can talk to people all over the country. You’d like that, you love to talk.”
“I do?”
“That’s what you said,” she said, looking in his eyes. She could smell him, a scent of soap, scalp and something else, probably just him.
“I like to talk to you,” he said.
“What else do you like?”
Kissing you. “I like tackling a new piece.” ¡Mierda!
She raised her eyebrows.
“I like to see the chorus try to sight read,” he clarified. “It’s funny. I mean fascinating. Not all of them is very good at it, but after the first twenty measures or so, they start to hear it. It’s as if even the slowest ones can understand a little what the composer is try to do. Simply by hearing how the experienced ones read it, which it is still imperfect. I think it’s a subconscious thing, what they do.”
“They say musical learning is a human faculty. Even children have it.”
“Yes! Children are natural musicians.”
“Natural linguists, too. If only we could recapture that capacity we had as children.”
“You want to be a child again?”
“I just want to be as quick as a child is, you know? Not have to think so consciously, when I’m learning something. Just, sort of, get it by experiencing it.”
“You can learn more when you understand things.”
“Sometimes you don’t understand it until after you’ve learned it,” she countered.
“You mean you must live it first, and then later, you understand what it is?”
“Because some things can’t be learned from books,” she continued, her eyes dropping from his eyes to his mouth.
We’re in her bedroom and she’s talking about love, he thought. His eyes took in every feature of her face, ending with her eyes and he said, “We need to experience it.”
She bowed her head and looked back at her screen.
“Like children,” he continued, steering the conversation back to its innocent origin. “It’s good to begin to learn as a child. Those things stay in your mind forever.”
“What’s your earliest memory?” she said, glancing over his shoulder at the pillows.
“I think it was my uncle. Tio Pedro. He visited us from somewhere, Miami, I think. And he was all the time singing. I think he sings more than he talked. Anyway, I remember he sang a song about a little frog.” He hummed a tune, and dusted off a few of the Spanish lyrics, singing softly, his eyebrows and lips raised in a smile. “I remember one time he was singing it while I was at the toilet. I was just learning, I was very little. He sang and I pissed. It was wonderful! I was so proud. They all said I will be a singer some day.” He was so close to her, it seemed odd to realize they were not touching. “What is your first memory?” he asked her.
“I remember when I was real little, lying in my bed, or I guess it was my crib, and there was this hanging thing, a mobile, over my head, with these clowns on it, all in bright colors and smiling with their eyes closed, these sleeping clowns. Except there was one with wide open eyes. It would bug me, I kept wanting those big round eyes to be closed, like the others’. And I used to hate it when they wound it up and it would play some lullaby or something, all twangy sounding, out of tune, probably, and the clowns would all circle each other, and every time the wide-eyed clown spun around and showed its face I would cry, until they stopped it. Probably why they said I didn’t like music. But it was really just that stupid clown.”
“You don’t like music?” he asked, surprised.
“No, I do. But they thought I didn’t and so they didn’t bother to expose me to much. I pretty much grew up on the top forty. Country rock, disco, that sort of thing.”
“I think I skipped that time.”
“The seventies? You skipped the seventies?”
“I didn’t get out much, then.”
“What a pitiful statement!”
He crossed his arms and sat back on his heels and said with an affected moue, “I’ll have none of your pity!”
Upholstered in his brown corduroy slacks and navy blue corduroy shirt, he seemed like a great big chair. He would be nice to cuddle, she thought, soft on the outside, firm underneath. She said, “What did you do in the seventies?”
“You mean before I came here? I audition, all the time.”
“For what?”
“For opera roles, musical roles.”
“What was your most fun one?”
“There was none. I had very little success. I worked in restaurants and offices.”
“Struggling musician?”
“Very much struggling.”
It was fascinating to think of him as a grown man during a time when she was barely conscious of the world outside her town. “What else? Any girlfriends?”
“You ask me about girlfriends again?”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“I had a girlfriend.”
“Just one?”
“Mm-hm. For two years.” He remembered her chiding him about dating Laura and Pam each for such a short time. “Are you pleased?”
“My God! Such staying power!” Pascale had been right, there was a world to know about him, in his before-Kennemac years. “What was her name?”
“Delaphine. Delaphine from Dothan, Alabama.”
“What happened?”
“She graduated and went away.”
“Were you devastated?”
Why does she care? If I say I was not in love, then won’t two years seem a long time to have been with her? And if I say I was in love, will she break down? He said, “No.”
She wanted to know all about this “affair,” as Pascale would call it. She wanted to imagine how it had been for him, trying to make it on his own in New York, while she was learning what girls use purses for. “Didn’t you love her?”
He sighed. This should be fun, talking about love with her in her bedroom. But he dreaded screwing up again. He heard the wind whistling through the window casement and felt an excitement; this was new, all of it, being with her, feeling this way. He would tell her the truth and see what happened. “I liked her, I felt affection for her, naturally, she was a charming person. Really, it was good not to be alone in that city. But I was not in love with her. I knew she would leave when she finished her schooling.”
Like her and Omar, she thought. She understood him. Probably he had been disappointed to not be in love. She wondered if she was herself “a charming person,” someone to keep him from being “alone.” She had a new fear, to add to her fear of intimacy with him. He was waiting for her response. He did not have the look of a man who could take her or leave her.
She said, “I have a very strange feeling, all of a sudden.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, you just seem suddenly very large. Like a moose or an elk or a Clydesdale.” She looked past his ear at the bed and then around the room. “Too big for the room.”
He got off his knees and sat down on the floor, his back against
the side of the bed. “Is that better?”
“Now you look inert. Deceptively inert.”
His eyes seemed huge as he rolled them up to look at her. “I don’t try to deceive you.”
“I don’t know what it is.” She wanted to keep her brain working on this problem, the transformation of Michael into a giant in her bedroom. His head looked enormous rising above the surface of the bed. “As long as you stay right there. If I move—” she started to stand up, and sat back down— “or if you do, I don’t feel so good.”
He was not sure what she was on about. “I tell you what,” he said, “let’s go to sit in the living room.” He stood up— “Okay—?” and held out his hand.
She looked at his hand and then at him, as though he was asking her to grasp a hot coal.
“Come on,” he said softly.
She would not take his hand.
“Okay, look, I go first.” He went to the doorway and turned to her and made a flourish with his hands over his chest: See? He went out into the living room.
She let out her breath and followed him and stood by him as he sat on the couch. He took her hand and she sat next to him. “Sorry,” she said, “I don’t know what came over me.”
“That’s okay.” He put his arm around her shoulders and rested his head on hers. “We’ve been spending a lot of time together this week. Maybe it’s too much.”
“I like being with you.”
“Me, too.” He would try to let her discover his feelings for her slowly, a day at a time, and avoid making powerful declarations. He hoped he would remember. He hummed a Brazilian tune, singing when he remembered the lyric. “In my heart, it is the morning of Carnival.”
Chapter Ten
Dancing Lesson
Justina wore a Little Black Dress on Saturday night that covered much less than the knit plum number had. Upon Charles’ suggestion, Michael reluctantly wore a dark wine red sport coat in a rich wool weave, sure that he looked like a car salesman. She told him he looked like a Moroccan prince. They drove to Bournemouth and had dinner at a seafood restaurant and he told her his New York stories. He remarked on the sad intensity that the lonely people exuded, and how friendships he had made had not continued once he left there, as though they required the air of the city for their survival. She responded that it was perhaps simply the nature of youthful friendships, that they relied on shared ordeals, and when the common ground crumbles, so does the friendship.
