Classical Music

by Cowley, Joy

  I am attempting the ‘Largo’ for the second time when Bea comes in. ‘That was Chloe,’ she says. ‘Ringing from Sydney.’

  I turn quickly. ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘Yes.’ Bea looks puzzled. ‘Francis was out with a client. Chloe said she was ringing to see if we’d got back all right. She thought I might want to speak to the children. It’s seven o’clock over there. They were just going to bed.’

  ‘Did you speak to them?’

  ‘Yes.’ Bea sits down on the bed, next to my suitcase. ‘I don’t know why she rang.’

  I grin at her. ‘Maybe guilty conscience,’ I say.

  Bea’s face clears. ‘You’re probably right!’

  ‘I was joking! Hey Bea, I didn’t mean that! It was a bad attempt at sarcasm!’

  ‘Many a true word is spoken in jest,’ Bea says.

  ‘Bea! I said I didn’t mean it. She called you. She called you long distance. Doesn’t it occur to you that she might be trying very hard to be nice?’ I stop myself from adding something about Bea’s attitude.

  ‘Her problem,’ says Bea, ‘comes from the fact. She is so possessive of Frank. She won’t let him do a thing without her say-so. I’m not going over there again, Diddy. My grandchildren treat me like a guest. And Frank. You don’t know what it’s like to have a son who talks to you as though you were a charity case.’

  I swing around on the piano stool and pretend to play a violin.

  She stops mid-sentence, gives me a small smile and then goes out, tossing her head.

  Great! I think to myself. Fantastically, flipping great!

  * * *

  I don’t know what I have been dreaming but I wake up, clammy, agitated, with a terrible feeling of desolation. It is not associated with my parents but with my apartment back home, a sense of the thousands of miles between me and it, and no way of crossing them. It takes me some minutes to recollect that I have a plane ticket and that tomorrow I’ll be leaving Auckland non-stop for Los Angeles. What was the dream that cut all my bridges? I don’t know but as I lie in the narrow bed next to the piano, the trivia of my neighbourhood becomes very real and very dear and I count images like gold coins, Niki who sells flowers on the corner, the tail of his pet rat hanging out of his shirt pocket, Arly and Mike who still twirl pizza dough by hand, Rex our doorman whose diets never last more than a day, the woman who takes her labrador for a walk every night at seven, Johnny the panhandler who sometimes sits on our steps, rattling a styrofoam cup for his habit. ‘God bless you, Delia. Praise Jesus for you, Delia.’ I miss the blinking neon sign ‘Kosher Chinese Restaurant’, I miss the entire village of our building. I miss the Greenacre Park opposite where old men sit wrapping the New York Times around their early morning grumpiness. I miss the melted tar in summer, the ice in winter, the black garbage bags, the black umbrellas, the yellow taxi cabs, the sirens, the people noise, the whole steam and stink of it.

  Yesterday in Napier I saw in a bookshop the latest New Yorker. It was two months old. Two goddam months! I felt as though I was falling off the end of the earth.

  I miss Lal.

  He’ll be making lassi for his mother, mixing yoghurt with a little honey, a little salt, the way she likes it, pouring it over ice cubes while snowflakes immolate themselves on the warm stained glass of the living room windows and she, a little older, a little more blind, is trying to stitch yet another rug or pillow cover, pausing every few minutes to ask, ‘When did you say Delia is coming back?’

  The phone rings in the distance and I wait for Bea to answer it.

  It is ridiculous to be so homesick that you want to exchange a New Zealand summer for a New York snowstorm.

  The phone clicks but the voice is not Bea’s. ‘I’d like to leave a message for Delia Munro. This is Lal speaking. Could you tell her that I –’

  I am out of bed and bumping into the piano stool. Wait! Wait! Running to the kitchen.

  ‘– have arranged to meet her at Newark Airport. I’ve got the arrival time. Thank you.’

  Wait! Wait! ‘Hello Lal!’

  ‘Delia! Well, hi sweetheart! I was just about to hang up!’

  ‘It’s great to hear your voice. Are you calling from the apartment?’

  ‘No, the office. It’s five after three. I was sitting here feeding some notes into the computer and I had this sudden urge to hear a funny New Zealand accent.’

  ‘Lal, I don’t know how you do it. You always know! It’s morning here. I was half asleep. I forgot the time difference.’ I look at the kitchen window and see the beach and sea. Bea is out there, talking to a man with a little dog. ‘Lal, in this place they tell me I have an American accent.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it.’ He says. ‘Did you check your e-mail already?’

  ‘Yes! Regus and Holly!’

  ‘Munro, huh? What do you think of that?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Lal. I’m pleased and embarrassed. Have you seen him?’

  ‘Oh sure! We all went over there with the usual cute stuff, polar bear T-shirts and stuffed toys. I took some flowers from you and me, both.’

  ‘What does he look like? The baby?’

  ‘I just saw his head. A bit like a large prune. Are you still flying in Friday? Good. I’ll be there, somehow. The roads are so bad we’ve had to delay the Poughkeepsie job. Icestorms everywhere. I’ll probably get a cab to the airport.’

  ‘Thanks, Lal. Lal? Next time I bitch at you, will you remind me that I’ve missed you like hell?’

  He laughs. ‘Me too, sweetheart.’ Then he says, ‘I guess it hasn’t been easy. Did you get to see the farm?’

  I was about to hang up but now I pull over a chair and tell him all of it, the funeral, the farm, Bea’s house, Bea and of course, the piano.

  ‘Let’s bring her over,’ he says. ‘Let’s bring them both over.’

  I find a towel, have a shower and am dressed before Bea comes in. She is bare-footed, large and beaming in a pink sarong, and her hair is wet.

  ‘Just been for my morning swim,’ she says. ‘I did look in on you but you were fast asleep. Was the bed comfortable?’

  ‘I saw you talking to someone.’

  ‘That’s the new neighbour. He’s such a nice man. He’s got this dear little dog that he takes. He’s fifty-eight, born the same month as you.’

  ‘Does he also have a dear little wife?’

  ‘Oh Diddy, for goodness sake! I’ve only just met him. Did you manage the shower all right? You have to twiddle the thingy. I’m getting it fixed.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were a swimmer, Bea.’

  ‘Didn’t you? A kilometre every morning. In winter though, I go to the heated pool. Heck, I’ve swum for years.’

  ‘I thought you were terrified of water.’

  ‘I was. Half a lifetime ago. It was precisely that. So I took swimming lessons. You see how much we’ve found out in just four days? Imagine a week!’ She sees the red light on the answering machine and presses the playback button. Before I can say anything, Lal’s voice comes into the room. ‘I’d like to leave a message for Delia Munro. This is Lal speaking –’

  ‘I heard it,’ I tell her. ‘I got to it.’

  Bea resets the answering machine. ‘Your last day,’ she says. ‘Your last day already. Well, that’s the way it is. We’d better make the most of it.’

  ‘Have you ever had a white Christmas?’ I ask.

  She looks quickly at me. ‘What?’

  ‘Lal suggested you come over next Christmas. It’s a good idea. We’ll take time off, maybe go up to the Finger Lakes, take you on a sleigh ride. You’d love it.’

  She rubs the back of her neck and stares at the phone.

  I tell her, ‘Most New Zealanders never see past New York City. The state is so big, so beautiful. You know I saw a bear not seventy miles from Broadway? No kidding! It was up a tree raiding a bird feeder.’ I stop. ‘Well, I can’t guarantee you a white Christmas but I can guarantee cold.’

  She rubs her arms with the
towel and says, ‘I’d be scared of getting on your nerves.’

  ‘Bea!’

  ‘I do. I know I do, Diddy. We’ve always been oil and water.’ She goes on rubbing. ‘I’d like to come. Yes. I would really, really like.’

  ‘Good. That’s settled. Come for a month.’

  ‘A month?’

  ‘And don’t change it to four days.’ I give her a push. ‘Oh go on, have your shower. Do you trust me to make the coffee?’

  ‘I’d like to come for a month.’ Her voice is so serious. ‘Where would I stay?’

  ‘We have a couch that folds down. Manorama doesn’t like it. She thinks it’ll swallow her in the middle of the night. But you’ll manage. Oh, one other thing. Lal says yes to the piano.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ll snip the piano. God knows where we’re going to put it even if we do get it into the elevator. I guess the legs unscrew. Anyway, he says it’ll fit and that I should have it because its totemic.’

  Bea clasps her hands. ‘Deo gratis! I get my spare room back! Diddy, I’m so glad. I don’t know what it’ll cost but if they can ship cars they can ship a piano.’ She frowns. ‘What on earth did he mean by totemic?’

  I laugh. ‘Bea, Lal is going to be an entirely new experience for you. I promise.’

  ‘You are quite sure it’s all right to stay for a whole?’

  ‘Yes. You and I will fight but we’ll get over it. And Bea, I’m not completely lost. I do go to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. It’s a habit. Lal says he’s not sure if it’s my Catholic upbringing or my solstice instinct, but anyway, he comes too. You’ll like St Patrick’s Cathedral.’

  But she is not impressed, I can tell, and I guess my tone has been too flippant.

  She says, ‘We could probably find a shipping firm today, I’d better have a shower and get dressed. There are all those boxes to go through. I have to ring the staff. I said I’d be away a week. We can’t just go. Do you mind an early dinner so you can meet? Look around the place before it opens? Good. Yes, yes, you make the coffee.’ And she disappears towards the bathroom, leaving me wondering how she ever runs a business.

  Sorting the contents of the boxes is not as simple as I thought it would be. There is very little that I want, some old school reports, a few photos, but the process of going through the museum of their lives brings up a rawness that is not diminished by Bea’s cheerful questions about New York. There is a packing case full of small, neat shoes, hardly worn. I didn’t know Mum had so many. I didn’t even know that she liked shoes this much. Then there is a cardigan I haven’t seen before which must have belonged to Dad in later years. The elbows are out. The pockets sag. I hold it to my face and inhale the strong weed smell of his tobacco.

  I say, ‘I don’t know about Father O’Donnell’s broken heart theory. His strokes were probably caused by his smoking.’

  ‘Probably,’ she says. ‘Are you quite sure about Christmas?’

  ‘Don’t ask me that again, Bea.’

  ‘But a whole month?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ I drop the cardigan back in the box and pick up a crystal bowl. ‘Has Francis seen his grandparents’ things?’

  ‘No. I said nobody until you. Well, there’s Francis and Erueti and Donna and maybe. I must send a card to Chloe.’ She looks at me. ‘I was tired last night.’

  ‘We have to be careful lest people live up to our expectations of them.’ That is all I dare say on the subject. I put the bowl back. ‘I really don’t need any of this. What they don’t take can go into the St Vincent de Paul shop. But I will ship all her music, if you don’t want it. Lal suggests I have some more tutoring. It’s not such a crazy idea.’

  ‘How did you meet him?’ she asks.

  ‘Who? Lal? I don’t remember. It was in our Greenwich Village days and there were mainly students in the building. I had a certain status among the penurious youth who were all younger than me. I was a graduate with a regular job. That meant something. There was a group of young gay men interested in music and theatre, on the same floor. They provided me with safe and agreeable escorts while I provided tickets. It was a very happy arrangement. At some stage I noticed a quiet man who walked as though he wanted to be invisible. I didn’t know his ethnicity, thought he was probably Arab. There was nothing memorable.’

  It is true. I don’t know when we first spoke, saw the first movie, shared the first meal. Others came and went. His partners came and went. Years had passed before I grew into the realisation that he was the only person in my entire existence with whom I had discussed my deepest feelings. Years more would go by before we both realised that apart from one small section of our bodies, we shared something deep and enduring.

  I tell all this to Bea. She says, ‘How do you feel about his? You know, his partners?’

  ‘What do you mean, how do I feel? He’s not promiscuous and he’s got good judgement. They’ve been fine people. I don’t think there’s been anyone for a couple of years. That’s because of an attraction to a dead guru called Mahatma Gandhi. But that could change.’

  ‘Don’t you get jealous?’ she asks.

  ‘Jealous?’ I start to laugh.

  ‘Possessive,’ she says.

  ‘I was possessive about the Italian robe but that was different. Why should I be? Sure, I hate the idea of my body being invaded but I don’t project that on other people.’

  ‘You really are,’ she says. ‘Technically.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about? Tampons.’

  ‘Nope. Pads and I’m past that.’

  ‘How do you get on for smear tests?’

  ‘Never had one.’

  ‘Oh Diddy!’

  ‘Virgins are low risk,’ I tell her.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ she says, her face so very serious that I can’t contain my laughter.

  ‘Think of it, Bea. We represent the twin stereotypes of Catholic womanhood, virgin and Magdalene. Isn’t that interesting?’

  She decides, after all, to smile. ‘It was nice of you not to say prostitute.’

  ‘You could never be a prostitute,’ I tell her. ‘You could never charge.’

  ‘That’s right. I couldn’t. Oh Diddy, I just couldn’t. You know.’ She sits on the bed beside me. ‘I love men. I do. I just love everything about them and I hate hearing. When women put them down. They’re so vulnerable. They pretend to be tough but. Sometimes I get the feeling I want to gather up all the men in the world and love them and love them. Can you understand that?’

  ‘I don’t relate to it personally, but I see it in you.’ I realise that she’s crying. ‘It’s your strength,’ I say and then stop, confounded by the truth of the statement.

  She picks up the corner of the bedspread to wipe her face. ‘Thank you.’ She smiles. ‘It’s funny, you know. Thinking about love. It’s so huge in the heart. I remember Tony and it’s like the only love there ever was. But then I feel the same about Barrie, about Erueti, Rawson, Pete. The same about them all. The memory of love. That doesn’t change. Only their faces. I’m not talking about desire, Diddy. The feeling’s a fullness, big, big. Sometimes I believe. It sounds stupid. That my heart could. No, not break. That’s different. Burst. Yes, burst wide open.’

  I put my hand on her shoulder. ‘Actually, Bea, there are no words to describe us and our relationships. Do you realise that? Women like us must be as old as humanity. We’ve been around for millions of years. Yet there is no language for the way we love.’

  She nods and sighs. ‘People like life to be tidy,’ she says.

  By mid-afternoon I have gone through all the photos and I have not found what I’m looking for. At one time there were dozens of snapshots, most of them taken with Dad’s old Box Brownie but others too, pictures of them in the Air Force during World War II, with planes and cars, a heap of wedding photos which included the best man. Now I find just a sepia portrait of Mum and Dad as bride and groom, very young, very sober, and on their own. It seems that every image of Jack Holland has b
een destroyed.

  11

  Beatrice

  After a while I have to remind her. I love New Zealand and everything about. I love the clean air, the beaches, friendly people and all this space and there are Americans. Yes, I’ve met them. Who love it too and say they wish they could. I haven’t been to New York but I’ve been to London and to Sydney and I don’t think she should rubbish the country that gave her. I have to say it. And I admit she takes it quite well.

  ‘Really Bea?’ She looks puzzled. ‘I didn’t know I was doing that.’

  ‘You do it,’ I tell her. ‘It happens every visit.’

  ‘I do have some attachment to this country,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t yelling for Uncle Sam when the America’s Cup was on.’

  ‘Maybe. But over here you’re always going on about. We haven’t got this. We haven’t got that. We’re so backward. Diddy, I like what New Zealand is.’

  ‘You big soft thing!’ she says. ‘I just get homesick. I’m sorry, Bea, but I don’t think of this country as home.’

  ‘I know that.’ I glance at her quick, electric grin and suspect that she’s cheerful because in twenty-four hours. I look in the rear-vision mirror and then pull over into the turn-off lane. ‘You are really sure about me coming over for a month?’

  ‘Really, really sure. And please, please, do not ask me that again.’

  ‘I have to know, Diddy, because I thought I’d see the travel agent tomorrow.’

  She looks surprised but says, ‘Great!’

  ‘It’s eleven months but we need time to shop around for discounted fares. So. I need to know you’re positive.’

  ‘Bea!’

  ‘All right, all right. That’s fine.’ I realise I’ve got a touch of indigestion. It could be about New York but I think. Yes, I really am nervous about showing her Kiwiana. I’m afraid she’ll. Well, really, it’s the way she is about everything New Zealand. She was unhappy here. Funny how the little things. When you’re travelling for instance. A bowl of cold soup, a long wait in the Post Office and you hate a country. I think she was lonely. Hell, we were both lonely. I think that’s the ultimate fear. Not death. Loneliness. We are so scared of being on our. But then she got the Rhodes Scholarship. No, not Rhodes Scholarship. What am I thinking? That was Dad’s joke. The scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design and everything changed for her. As Sister Jean Baptiste used to say, nothing is chance, girls. But Diddy developed this. Well, she would call it attitude. Except she doesn’t think she’s got it. It’s over here too, I suppose. Aucklanders and Wellingtonians hitting out at each other in competition. You don’t make yourself taller standing on someone else. Diddy, you were lonely here, I want to tell her. You were dying of loneliness. That’s all it was. It coloured your view of everything. But what’s the use. She always knows better than anyone.