“Well, it seems to have worked out.”
“In New York, you could supervise Friederike’s practicing. You could be there to care for her when I must be away. You could advise her as only a woman can.”
I pushed back my glass, dismayed. “Are you asking me there as your lover or as the household manager you’re reluctant to hire?”
“Neither. Both.” He looked at me earnestly. “I am asking you there as my wife.”
“Are you absolutely crazy?”
“A reaction I’ve not yet experienced,” he said drily.
“We’ve known each other three months!”
“How long did you know Cal before you married him?”
“Three years.”
“I knew Lauren two years the first time, ten the second. For all the damn good it did us. Come, we both have attorneys. We will write a solid prenup. I get along with you, I suppose, as well as I’ve gotten along with any woman.”
I flushed. “How romantic of you to say so.”
“Don’t be that way, Jeanette,” he said, and I saw he was hurt, too. “Would you rather I tell you a lie? What can romance mean at our age? I am thinking we understand each other.”
The town of Gersau appeared on the horizon: an onion-headed steeple, surrounded by houses set into the mountainside. At a restaurant across the street from the station, we asked for directions to the town’s only inn. By now the light was fading fast, and together we walked up the steeply sloped path as he talked of music and sunlight and trees. Of stones, of sour cherries. Of history and God, diseases of the nerves, augmented chords, a restaurant in Dresden where, once, he had sampled a particular kind of cheese. But I couldn’t keep up with all that he said. I couldn’t keep up with my own flooding heart. This was not the sort of man with whom one builds a future. And yet I could not step away.
“Why were you hospitalized?” I asked.
“We are back to that.”
“We are back to that.”
Around us, the darkening land. The fading light of dreams.
“Long before reading poor Schumann’s story, I had the misfortune to jump off a bridge.”
“Stupid,” I said. It just came out.
“Yes, my dear, strong Jeanie,” he said. “Stupid indeed. Particularly when you consider how very well I swim.”
Gersau, 2006
39.
“IT IS SOMETHING OUT of my childhood,” Hart said, staring at the narrow bed, the washbasin, the window shutters thrown open in the hope of attracting the slightest breeze. Cooking smells thickened the air. The bath was down the hall. The overhead light didn’t work, but there was an electric candle on the nightstand and—another touch of whimsy—a small golden cherub mounted above the bed. “Is this the inn where they stayed?”
“Possibly. The house was here, but I don’t know which years it served as an inn.”
We took turns washing up for the night, then lay naked on top of the sheets. Too hot to touch. Too hot to sleep.
“I wish,” Hart said, “I had something to read.”
“I’ve got a book, if you want it,” I said, reaching for the short-story anthology I still hadn’t managed to finish.
“You do have a book, yes.” Hart took the anthology, placed it like a brick between us. “But I’m thinking of the one on your laptop. When do I get to read what you are writing?”
Our bodies looked strange in the false candlelight, each of us neither old nor young. “I should tell you something first,” I said. “Something I should have told you before.”
Hart touched the anthology with one finger. “I’ve never enjoyed any conversation which begins this way.”
“I’ve been writing about you,” I said.
For once, he had nothing to say.
“Not you, of course,” I added. “Everything changes when it hits the page. But there are things you’re going to recognize. Not because they’re true, but because they’re not. The same way that anyone who knows Clara’s life will recognize—”
“Clara’s life, yes. A woman born in 1819. I thought you were writing a historical novel.”
“I thought so too.”
“What happened?”
What I thought: I was a dead woman. I was a stone.
What I said: “There are things between men and women that do not change.”
They will spend this day as they’ve spent all the others: hiking during the relative coolness of the morning, bathing away the afternoon heat, then a few hours at the piano, taking advantage of the lingering light, taking advantage of a language in which everything between them is always understood. Sound floating over the lake like mist, climbing the steep, crooked paths between houses where conversations still to listen, where overtired children release themselves to sleep. Somewhere a nightingale repeats its circuitous lullaby. Higher up, in rough-cut pastures, drowsy-eyed cattle add the tinkling of bells.
How quiet the evenings in the absence of carriages.
How silent the nights with their showerings of stars.
Inside, as always, the air is motionless, stifling. Clara removes her dress and stockings, splashes her face with lake water. She hears Elise across the hall, still talking as the maid turns down their beds. Ferdinand and Ludwig are already sleeping in the room they share with Johannes, who makes his own soft music as he washes, moving about, humming.
It’s been a good day for them all. At last Elise is silent.
A window shutter creaks.
There comes the good smell of Johannes’s cigar, and she leans out her window, too. No need for candles; the moon is full, fierce.
They smile at each other in the clarity of its light.
Usually, they walk onto the balcony, settle themselves in rocking chairs that face the water and, beyond the water, the foothills of the Alps. Johannes carries his candle for them both, a single, flickering heart, and at some point, they find themselves holding hands. For the rest of her life, she will think of that hand, small and smooth and remarkably delicate. A woman’s hand, if she did not know better, dwarfed by her own massive palm. She will think of the smell of Johannes’s cigar, the high, boyish murmur of his voice. The faint lapping sounds of other voices, other balconies, other lovers waiting for the heat to ease, returning to their beds, turning to each other, houses so close that this music, too, becomes part of the night, part of all of the nights in which Clara has lain sleepless, aching, a single thin wall the only thing that divides her from what she wants.
Tonight, she is tired of waiting. Tired of longing. This terrible restlessness that won’t let her sleep. The thoughts that torment her, unspeakable, consuming. Perhaps she is tasting what poor Robert tasted. Perhaps she too is going mad. Certainly it is madness that prompts her to take Johannes by the hand and lead him not to the balcony chairs, but down the wooden steps into the landscaped courtyard, through the gate and onto the stony path they’ve climbed so many times with the children in the freshness of morning, in the brightness of day, gathering flowers, admiring the scattered outcroppings of rock embedded in the Rigi’s green face. Perhaps it is the wide, curious eye of the moon that propels her to walk faster, even as she feels him start to resist, as the silence between them grows shadowed and thick, uncomfortable as the humidity, oppressive as the heat.
Even now, this heat does not break.
Another gate. Cows like pale boulders.
A fence. The first stand of trees.
More trees, and now woods, moon dappled, fragrant, where she guides him toward a platform she and the boys found yesterday, placing their feet in the ax-hewn steps, hauling themselves up into the cooling leaves. For a moment it seems they can both believe this discovery is why she has led them here. Johannes is delighted. He shimmies up the tree trunk to the platform, then continues to climb, working his way from branch to branch, his dressing gown sending showers of snagged twigs and leaves upon Clara’s head. Even after stopping to knot her gown, she must struggle to climb each step. She is a woman. She is no longer
young. When she reaches the platform, she sprawls on her back.
“Johannes?” she calls, but he does not come down.
Hart was reading, the way he did read: silently, rapidly, utterly absorbed. I held the anthology open on my stomach. I watched the cherub, who watched me back.
“Johannes?”
She holds her breath, listening. Though she can’t hear him, can’t see him, she knows he is just above, listening too. Suddenly, wildly, he drops onto the platform; she gasps as the boards shake beneath them, and then he is laughing, she is scolding, they are both themselves again. So much themselves that it seems, at first, that their hands on each other, their mouths on each other, are just a continuation of another conversation, more of the music they make together so easily, so effortlessly, only now everything between them turns strange, his breath like a curse, a hiss, a howl, and it’s nothing like what she remembers of tenderness, over almost before it’s begun.
His gaze on her is a stranger’s gaze: terrible and cold.
“What is it? What is the matter?” she says.
He thrusts her away with such force that she nearly tumbles from the platform’s edge.
She leaves him there, stumbling down through the trees, across the pasture and along the rocky path toward the garden gate, which she passes, and the church, which she passes, and the little road fronting the water, which she crosses, and then she is standing at the edge of the lake. Up to her ankles. Up to her knees. The moon lighting up her shimmering reflection. Angular body. Strong-featured face. She thinks, as she’s often thought before, that if only she’d been prettier, more feminine, everything would have been different. If only she’d been less gifted, less determined, less strong. What happened just now serves only to confirm this.
What happened to Robert was her fault.
“Was there really a tree house and a platform?” Hart asked. The clock in the corner of my laptop screen said 2 A.M. “Did she really walk out into the water that way?”
“I made up everything in that scene.”
“The way you made things up about us.”
“But it isn’t us. That’s what I’m trying to say.”
“Isn’t it?” He rubbed his eyes, and when he looked at me again, I saw the white-coated scientist in his lab, the man I’d first met at the Wine Cellar. “The scene is effective,” he said, “because it plays a trick on the reader. We are not expecting she’ll be thinking of her husband. I myself had not thought about this before. But I believe you are right about how she felt.”
That heat: pressing down like a smothering hand.
“It is the same way, I suppose,” Hart said, still watching me closely, “you feel about your Cal.”
Hard to get breath. Hard to speak. I was about to say it was the last thing I’d been thinking of when I realized it had been the only thing.
All along.
Even now.
“So you see,” Hart said, “you did not make everything up after all.”
Slowly she climbs the path to the inn, her wet gown chafing, sticking to her legs. He is waiting for her on the balcony: smooth faced, slim shouldered. He, too, has been crying. She sits beside him; he extends his hand. She takes it—what else can she do? At last they understand each other. Or perhaps she has understood him all along. He cannot love her, love anyone, completely.
This time, she is protected. Safe.
The first, cool fingers of breeze stir the air. The horizon goes gray, then pink. Clara feels something loosen around her heart, the first flaking pieces of a grief even older than Robert’s illness lifting away. Come September, she’ll be back on the road. She will travel to England, to Russia again. She will, she believes, see America this time.
She will, she believes, feel whole and well again.
When Hart turned out the electric candle, the whole world vanished in darkness. The sort of absolute darkness in which anything might be said. “You don’t love me,” I said. “You have tried, I know. But you can’t.”
“There are better things, more important things, than the kind of love you are meaning.” He turned in the bed to face me; his breath was strangely sweet. “Here is the truth, which I’ve tried to tell you ever since the second time we met. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone the way I loved Lauren. I’m not sure now I would want to. One loses too much to a love like that.”
I thought of how Clara’s music suffered during the happiest years of her marriage. How Robert protected his art from Clara’s love behind the closed door of his studio, behind the closed mind of his madness. The long years of sadness between Cal and me, during which time I published five books in six years.
Yes, Hart understood me. I understood him, too.
Art is about desire, is it not?
I’d chosen him, exactly, for this.
Date: Sunday, July 23 2:52 PM
To: [email protected]
Hi, Jeanie—
There’s this couple in their sixties and they’ve just gotten married and they decide that they want to have children. So they go to a fertility doctor, and he’s doubtful, but hey—cash is cash—so he hands them a container and says, Let’s get a sperm sample first. One hour later, the doctor comes back into the room, only to find the container is still empty.
“What seems to be the problem?” he says.
“Well,” the man says, “first I tried with my right hand, and then I tried with my left hand, and then my wife tried with both hands…but we just couldn’t get the cover off the container.”
In the end, I suppose, it all comes down to this.
Much love to you always, wherever life takes us.
L—
40.
BREAKFAST AT THE INN was coffee and bread, fruit and cold meat, cheese. Hart was already on his way to St. Gallen. I’d walked him down to the ferry dock, where we’d kissed each other good-bye. But I hadn’t wanted to spend the day flying with him, and he, in turn, hadn’t pressed. Something between us was already different. Some necessary tension had eased. At the end of the week, we’d meet in Zurich, in time for Friederike’s recital. Back in the States, we’d talk on the phone. I’d see him until he moved to New York. Perhaps, now and then, after that. And yet, as I’d walked back from the ferry dock, I felt as if I’d just been to a funeral. I saw him as if he were still beside me. I could hear his voice in my head. The room smelled, lightly, of his cologne. The shape of our bodies still hugged the bed.
After breakfast, I reserved the room for a second night, and then I wandered along the few waterfront shops until I found a bench overlooking a strip of rocky beach. My eyes blinked, burned against the fresh morning light. Déjà vu. At last I understood what the feeling meant, what it was I had recognized. It hadn’t been Hart after all. It had been what he’d made me feel. Alive to the world around me. Alive, once again, to myself.
My cell phone buzzed. Heidi, at last. I cleared my throat, answered. But no—it was just Cal.
“I didn’t want you to worry,” he said. “She just doesn’t want to call you this time. I’ll try to put her on, though, if you like.”
“No, it’s okay. Is she happy?”
“Very happy. Settled.”
“If she’s happy, I’m happy.”
“You don’t sound happy. You sound kind of awful.”
How I wanted, at that moment, to tell him everything, to let him comfort me, console me, the way he’d done countless times during our married life together. All that I’d lost truly hit me then. I was alone in the world, I was truly alone. And yet, I must raise Heidi. I must go to work and come home. I must shop and cook and clean the house, balance the checkbook, take the car in for oil changes, repair the gutters, pay taxes. A privileged life, a blessed life, in a world filled with hunger and terror and want. It was shameful to admit, even to myself, that it all seemed impossible somehow.
“I’ve picked up a summer cold,” I said.
“That’s too bad.”
“It’ll pass,” I said. “Thanks for
calling.”
“Listen,” Cal said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry. For the way I acted the last time I saw you. It isn’t even true, what I said.”
“What you said?” I was trying to remember.
“Of course my girlfriend reminds me of you, in some ways. I mean, you and I had so many good things between us. Good years. We still do, don’t you think? I mean, after we get through this part.”
“After we stop being mad at each other,” I said.
“I want to stop.”
“I want to stop, too.”
“God, you really sound terrible.”
“I better hang up, I’m losing my voice. Give Heidi a kiss for me?”
It seemed as if I’d never look forward to anything again. Upstairs at the inn, I pulled the sheets over the bed, closed the thin curtains against the heat that was already spreading over the walls, thickening the moist, still air. I wanted so much to lie down in that bed, close my eyes and bury myself, disappear for the day. Instead I sat down in front of my laptop and turned to the work at hand, to the writing that has always sustained me, kept me whole, even when everything else around me falls apart.
“My true old friend, the piano, must help me,” Clara wrote in 1854, shortly after Robert was institutionalized. “I always believed I knew what a splendid thing it is to be an artist, but only now, for the first time, do I really understand how all my pain…can be relieved only by divine music so that I often feel quite well again.”*
Perhaps, in the end, it was this belief that formed the cornerstone of their friendship. Clara Schumann could not have been the pianist she was, nor Johannes Brahms the composer he would become, had they not shared the same need to remedy longing.
To medicate loneliness.
Good Things I Wish You: A Novel Page 13
