Perfect Pitch

by Amy Lapwing

  “He would say things,” she tried to explain. “Hurtful things, for no reason, just to hurt my feelings.”

  Michael shook his head with misgiving. How could she have been with someone like that? “How long you were with him?”

  “A year.”

  “Did you love him?”

  She hesitated. “I thought I did. I didn’t know what else it could be.”

  “Were you afraid of him?”

  She remembered the constant panic of imminent abandon. “In a way. He never hit me or anything, but there was this feeling, like, he didn’t care, really, that he was just playing with me, to see how loyal I could be, like he was getting off on having this girl do whatever he said. But he could leave just any time.” She looked out the window; the flakes had coalesced into flocks as the night’s deep cold had eased. “I still don’t know why I stayed with him so long.”

  “It scares you, to think it could happen again?”

  She realized he thought she was comparing him to Rourke. “I know you’re nothing like him, Michael.”

  “But you’re afraid of the blindness that comes with love.”

  Was that it? Was she afraid she’d wake up one day and feel nothing at all for him? Would she have loved in vain, neglecting her work for no reason, after all? “I dread losing control again.”

  Losing control! He welcomed it without reservation, that aching pleasure that will not be put off. But he was far, very far, from his bad love. He did not know what he could do to give her a different perspective, his perspective. He could not wait for her to put twenty years between herself and Rourke. He squeezed her hand and asked, “Why do you think it’ll be better in May?”

  “There’ll be less at stake, in my work.”

  “Because it’s the end of the year?” he asked. “Whatever effect my love will have on you, it will be less because of the summer?”

  He thinks I hold it against him for loving me, she thought. How did we get there? How could I let him think that?

  “Justina, I have loved you since I first saw you. Don’t you know that?”

  Love at first sight! She had been too wary to admit it.

  “It happens, Justina, there’s nothing to think about. I’ve loved you these last four months. I know we haven’t been together, but I have loved you.”

  She remembered the clipped articles and newspaper cartoons that he had sent her in the brown campus mail envelopes, always marked “Calderón” in the corner.

  “You want some more tea?” he asked softly, standing and holding his plate. She shook her head no, he took their plates to the sink and began to wash them.

  She doesn’t understand. She wants to control her feelings, she wants love but only on certain terms. Is she just too young? A dread stole over him as he imagined their love a crystal paperweight knocked off the table and cracked, forever after fragile and in danger of shattering. He wanted to chase the image from his mind, replace it with a living, growing thing, something messy perhaps, but robust. He glanced over his shoulder at her.

  She sat with her back to him and stared out the window. She had not noticed before how much the holes in the lace trim on the curtains resembled snowflakes. If she stared, she could not tell where the curtains left off and the real snowflakes began.

  Her silence kept him mired in misery. He kept down the weeping feeling. He rinsed the dishes. “And what happens next fall, when your work begins again? Do you put me back in my cage?”

  She turned to see if he was angry; he kept his back to her as he worked at the sink.

  Say something, he thought. He set the dishes to dry and turned to her, nervously squeezing the dishrag.

  “I don’t think you’re an animal,” she said quietly.

  “Then why are you so afraid of me?”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” she lied.

  “You won’t let me come near you, only when you think it’s safe, when I won’t harm any of your precious work.” He angrily threw the dishrag into the sink.

  “My work is important to me!”

  “But I’m not?” She did not answer. “What am I to you? What am I? Am I only an admirer? Someone who flatters you?”

  His tone was making her angry, she looked away from him.

  “I don’t know, Justina, I really don’t know what I am to you. Tell me.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “It’s not what I want you to say, I simply want to know if I’m a part of your life. Because I don’t feel like a part of your life.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Then why I have to keep away?”

  She got up and went to the window. The heavy snow had buried everything, filling the parking lot with fat pillows. “You’re pushing me!” she shouted. “I can’t stand it!”

  He followed her into the living room. “I have to know. I’ve been patient, Justina. But I’m an old guy, I don’t have a lot of time. If this isn’t going to work, if you’re not willing to try, I need to know now.”

  She looked out the window, trying to distinguish the snow-covered cars in the parking lot. She found his car; it looked stuck in place, difficult to extract. “I don’t know if it’s going to work out—”

  “But will you try?”

  “Why’s it have to be right now?” She turned to him, his expression was hard, his eyes dulled by anger. She knew he was not going to just let this go. She turned back to the window.

  “Why not?” he persisted. “What’s wrong with now? Now. Right now. We’re here, together, now. What’s wrong with it?”

  She rubbed her finger on the windowsill, pushing the dust off the edge. He wants me to be his woman. He wants to own me. I’m not his, I’m not anybody’s. If he doesn’t like it—

  “There was nothing wrong with last night, evidently,” he continued, unable to keep the sarcasm from his voice.

  What was he calling her? Was he calling her a slut? “You go to—” She brushed past him, retreating. “Jesus!”

  He gripped her arm. “Why did you go to bed with me? Just to see what it’s like? To see if I’m any good?”

  “Let go of me!”

  “Or you were throwing me a bone?”

  “I can’t believe you!”

  “You didn’t have to. We could have continued like we were. But it’s different now. You know it’s different now.”

  “Leave me alone! I hate this!” She broke free and went into her bedroom and slammed the door. The arguing, the sarcasm, the running away and slamming doors, it all brought back to her the feeling of imminent abandon. The cockroach had found his way in, after all; he had come back to make her feel miserable and disgusted with herself again. She sat balled up on her bed, trying to push away the memory of so many arguments with Rourke, when she would retreat like this and wait for the storm to blow over, a dinghy unmoored and adrift. I hated him! I still hate him! She stared at objects, her old response to conflict. The feeling of déjà vu was abruptly dispelled when her gaze fell upon Michael’s shoes, lying on their sides where they had fallen when he kicked them off last night. She set them neatly side by side, big spots of tears falling in them.

  He stood outside her door, unstrung by her reticence, cursing to himself. “Please, Justina, just tell me what’s going on in your head. I promise I won’t say anything. Just talk to me.” He listened. The silence was stretching his nerves taut.

  The door flew open. She glared at him, long tear runnels on her cheeks. “I know it’s different now. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.” She went back into her room and sat at her computer and brought up a word processor with an exam for her French One.

  He did not know what to make of the tears and now the calm. “What does that mean?” he said, following her in.

  “You want devotion, Michael.” She typed, making a change in the file. “I can’t give you devotion.”

  “What’s that mean? You don’t love me anymore?”

  “Not like you want me to.”

  She doesn�
��t love me, he thought, trying out the idea. How could it be? She does love me, I know it, I can feel it. “But you love me?”

  “Yes. I do. But loving you isn’t the most important thing to me, right now.” She typed another change into the file.

  He sank down to sit on the bed near her. How can she talk about measures of love, so coldly? “But Justina, these things evolve. Even love at first sight doesn’t start out as lifelong devotion.”

  “Lifelong” drew her glance to him. He was searching her eyes for some sign of understanding, some relenting from this hardness she had affected. “You’re more evolved than I am,” she said. “I wish it weren’t so, but—” She knew this was hurting him, but she just had to tell him. “Love, your kind of love, is down the road, for me.”

  He had tried to hurt her feelings, she was responding by opening her heart to him. How he loved her! “Then, I guess it’s down the road for me, too.”

  She turned back to her computer. “You shouldn’t wait for me, Michael.” She commanded the printer to produce a hard copy. “Just because our paths have crossed once doesn’t mean they will again.”

  “Doesn’t mean they won’t.” He watched her stand and take up the sheets the printer squeezed out, and looked for some sign that she did not mean to let him go. An unstoppable fear settled over him, cold, light, blinding.

  She put the print-out aside. “I’ll never forget you.”

  His thighs tensed and he bowed his head and squeezed his eyes hard. It was no use. He put his hand over his face. She sat next to him and embraced his tense shoulders.

  He choked out his plea between sobs. “I would never stand in your way! You’d never let me, anyway. I don’t want anyone else. Please, Justina. You don’t have to love me as I love you. Just love me as you have. That’s enough. It’s everything.”

  It's impossible, we're mismatched. His passion surprised her in its foreignness. She could not understand him. She did not want to be the caretaker of such a deep feeling, she would not know how. She would continually hurt him by omission. He would suffer from her neglect, and she might not always know it. But knowing it would be the worst, to fall short in loving him made her want to flee. Give up, she told herself. It's not going to work.

  “It’s not everything,” she said, feeling big for trying to comfort him. “You don’t believe me now, but when you find that woman, the one who’ll love you like you love her, there’ll be no comparison.”

  “How can you say that?” He turned his frightened eyes on her, the wet lashes clumped together. “How can you sit there and tell me how I’ll feel in the future?”

  “You’ll get over me—”

  “I will never get over this! I’m incapable of loving nobody else ever again!” His forcefulness alarmed her. “I won’t be rejected again. I can’t take it!” He stood up and looked for his shoes. When he saw how she had straightened them, he turned to her, hoping to find a softness he had somehow missed. She was staring at the flower pattern on the bedspread, her eyes slightly crossed. He pushed his feet into his shoes and went out.

  She followed him and watched him pull out his coat from underneath the honey afghan. “I blame you, Justina. I know I shouldn’t, but I do. I know you love me. Now, right now. But just because everything isn’t perfect, you reject me, because you think later, in some magical future, everything will be just right and paf! You’ll fall in love with someone else and your life will be all set.” He put his tuxedo jacket over his arm. “It doesn’t work like that. You have to take it when it happens. It’s not a carousel that goes around and around and you always get a chance at the prize. Some people never get a shot. Never! You know people like that, think about it. Other people get two or three shots. And some people get one shot and they lose it. I lost my first shot. I was lucky and I got another one. I can’t count on a third. I don’t want to.” He went to the door and glanced back at the gold afghan still on the couch.

  “I don’t know what to say. Michael, can’t we be friends?”

  “Listen to you! No, Justina, we are lovers or nothing at all. We don’t have to be equal lovers, none of your egalitarian crap, please! Just because you think I love you more than you love me, why do you think it would stay that way? A few years from now it might turn around, we might switch places, by our own fault or by nobody’s fault, who knows? But you have to try. You always have to try. You have to try to make it perfect, even though you know it always falls short. But it doesn’t matter. It’s wrong only if you don’t try.” He opened the door. “You’re wrong not to try.” He put the afghan over his tuxedo and went out and pulled the door to. She held it fast.

  “Don’t go, you can’t go anywhere.”

  “I can’t stay here.”

  “The roads aren’t plowed. You’ll go into a tree.”

  “Goodbye.” He walked away and down the steps. She ran to the living room window and looked out. He was putting his tuxedo and the blanket inside the car. Then he stood in the foot of snow, scraping off his windows, the sky covering them again almost as thickly in an instant. His shoes must be soaked, his hair was turning white and she knew his bare hands must be freezing. This was not how he was supposed to leave. He was supposed to be sad, all right, but not distraught; he was supposed to say yes to being friends, then wait till it was safe to go, keeping her company while she worked. He was always being more than she expected: more alluring, more attentive, more unpredictable, more uncontrollable, more passionate, more puzzling. And now he was more hurt. She thought she was right to let him go, though; he was too much for her. He backed his car out of its space and proceeded slowly out of the lot and away.

  For the first time it occurred to her that perhaps what she wanted was not reasonable. She had thought she could control him. But he was unpredictable, and it scared her, but it also thrilled her. He loved her so much, he could not take her in small doses. What could she do about that? She had been keeping her sights on May, she knew it would arrive someday, and then she would throw herself with abandon, she told herself, into what they had started back in September. That promise had allowed her to restrain herself in his regard in the meantime. But something different had been going on with him. She did not understand him. It did not fit, her picture of him as the suffering lover, and herself, the energized, happy-at-work career woman. He put her in mind of the wide-eyed clown on her baby mobile. He should have his eyes closed, like the rest of them. Like her. Why couldn’t he follow her example and be happy?

  She went back into her room and sat at the computer and brought the French Two exam into the editor. She did not like anything about it. She decided it would do, even if it was a little short, and printed it. James Benn’s questions made up the entire survey exam, though some were really too easy. She decided to assign an essay and make up some oral questions on the spot for Advanced Conversation. She gathered her tests in a folder and put them in her briefcase.

  The four o’clock night had fallen. She did not want dinner. She put on her nightshirt and lay on her bed and tried to sleep. She thought of how Rourke used to argue with her, and how she would feel afterwards, giddy and hopeful, thinking everything would be all right now. But it never was. It had always been wrong. Just like now, like the wrongness she felt now. She was a poor lover, she thought, she lacked compassion, she was too self-seeking. With a wail, she wept into the pillow. Michael’s disappointment made her feel more wretched since she had caused it. He was better off without her. She fell asleep at seven o’clock and lay in bed next morning as late as possible before going to give her first exam.

  Chapter Twenty

  Liaison Optional

  In the hueless hibernal days Justina’s interior life took the place of the carnival of her first months at Kennemac. The outdoors was either dirty or freshly white. There were no new people in her life. Any novelty she could find was in books or in her mind. Her readings fascinated her in this environment of impoverished stimulus. Ideas tumbled over each other beseeching her for elaboration. S
ome days the mental hurdy-gurdy cheered her and she felt brilliant and invincible. A string of such days was sooner or later followed by a balancing self-doubt. She could think only of all her shortcomings: her impulsiveness, her tendency to think the easier research topics superior to the harder ones; her self-absorption and the resulting neglect of family and friends. She had impulsively fallen in love with a man; when he had become demanding she had taken the easier course and turned away from him; she was thinking more of her own disappointment than of his. She was a base person. Might it not be better to drive into a tree one of these days? But then one morning she would wake up and get down a book and do her best work for the next few weeks. She would congratulate herself, and continue working, if she was lucky; if she were not, she would giddily sing her own praises and the dreaded cycle would restart.

  The pellets of salt crackled beneath her boots as she walked along the lonely flagstone path. It was three fifteen, everyone was inside somewhere. There was not even the odd cross-country skier, though the mid-March day was pretty and not too cold. She entered the old white clapboard music building and went around the corner and heard the chorus warming up. The substitute glanced at her as she entered. He continued the warm-up for another two minutes or so, his back straight and his arms working overly hard for just warm-up exercises. He told them to get out the Hindemith, and came over to Justina.

  “Perry Nordstrom,” he said, offering his hand and tossing back a wayward lock of yellow hair. She shook his hand and reminded him of her name. Disgusted with the chorus’ pronunciations of the difficult songs, Minnie had pestered Mr. Nordstrom to ask Justina to come coach them. He had resented the student’s suggestion, but when she told him Mr. Calderón had asked her once before and been real pleased with how well they pronounced afterwards, he felt he had no choice but to ask her. “They’re not too bad,” Nordstrom said to Justina, “but the tempos are really pretty fast, so they trip all over themselves.”

  Justina asked to see a score. She looked it over carefully, noting the places where liaison would be made. Liaison facultative, optional liaison, becomes obligatoire in poetry, she reminded herself. She took off her coat and stepped forward toward the chorus.