The wife had not been unfaithful to the husband. Not with any man—any individual.
In her heart. In the mysterious and uncharitable way of the heart.
But I love him. That will never change.
* * *
“Listen! A dog.”
Not often but from time to time, when the neighbors-through-the-trees appeared to be in their backyard, or on their deck, adults and a child, or children, there came the sound of a dog barking—not protracted, not disturbing, just two or three short barks, then silence.
A dignified dog, the wife thought. A German shepherd, or a border collie. One of those elegant long-haired dogs she’d always fantasized owning—an Afghan.
“I think we should get a dog, darling. Everyone says…”
“Dogs are too needy, and demanding. Dogs have to be walked twice a day.”
“Once a day, I think.”
“Twice.”
“It might depend upon the breed.”
“Twice. And I don’t have time.”
You are retired. You have all the time in the world.
“A dog would be lovely company for us both. And a watch-dog.”
The husband laughed, the way the wife said watch-dog.
“Oh, what’s so funny?”
The wife wanted to laugh with him but the husband had turned his gaze to somewhere beyond the trees and had not seemed to hear her.
* * *
“Listen! Is it—Satie?”
This time there was no mistaking, they were hearing music through the trees: piano music.
Acutely they listened, on the terrace.
“Definitely, piano music. It seems remarkably near.”
“An actual piano, being played. But not by a child—this would be an adult. Someone who has played for years.”
The wife-through-the-trees, the wife thought. She herself had had ten years of piano lessons, as a girl, but had not seriously played for more than twenty years.
Delightful music! Just audible, at dusk.
Mixed with the sounds of waterfowl at the lake, frogs and nocturnal insects in the grass.
The poetic stately notes of Erik Satie. The wife was deeply moved—this was her music, she’d played with such eager pleasure for her piano teacher at college.
She’d had talent, her teacher had said. Beyond his words the subtle admonition she must not acknowledge, for fear of embarrassing them both—Only not just enough talent.
She knew, she’d understood and she’d accepted. You have gone as far as you can go, very likely. You must not delude yourself, you will only be disappointed.
Her life since that time had been a systematic avoidance of delusion. She had thought this was maturity, clear-mindedness. She had married her husband knowing that he could not love her as much as she loved him, for it was not in the man’s nature to love generously and without qualification, as it was in hers. In matters of emotion, he had gone as far as he could go.
Yet, she would love him, and she would certainly marry him. For she was eager to be married. She did not want to be not-married. She did not want to be conspicuously alone. And whatever followed from that decision, she vowed she would not regret.
Three children, whom she loved (unevenly). For no mother can help loving one child above others, as no child can help loving one parent more than the other.
Before she’d married her husband, at the age of twenty-three, she’d had her single great emotional adventure, that would last her lifetime. This memory had crystallized inside her as a secret, insoluble as mineral. Her self had seemed to form around it, encasing it. And never would she reveal it.
The music of Satie reminded her. Tears shimmered in her eyes, the husband would not notice.
Gnossiennes. Gymnopédies.
The composer’s annotations in the compositions were original, curious—du bout de la pensée, sur la langue, postulez en vous-même, sans orgueil, ouvrez la tête, très perdu.
How strange that had seemed to her, a girl: très perdu.
“‘Quite lost!’”
She’d spoken aloud. The husband glanced at her, in mild curiosity.
When the husband was not critical of her, the husband was bemused by her. Their marriage had not been a marriage of equals.
Through the trees, the piano music ceased; then, after a moment, began again, what seemed to be a new composition by Satie, that differed from its predecessor only subtly.
Composed in the 1880s the piano music of Erik Satie sounded contemporary. It was eerily simple, beautiful. It was unhurried as time relentlessly passing second by second and it was seemingly without emotion even as it evoked, in the listener, the most intense sorts of emotion—melancholy, sorrow, loss.
A rebuff to Romantic music perhaps, with its many cascading notes and emotional excess, or to Baroque music, the fierce precision of clockwork.
“Isn’t that something you used to play?”—the husband seemed only now to recall.
She said, laughing, “Yes. But not so well—I’d never played the music so well.”
In fact she’d played Satie quite well. Her teacher and others had praised her, and they had not exaggerated.
The wife and the husband had not had an easy week, this week: there had been doctors’ appointments, scheduling for “tests” and more appointments, stretching into the summer.
The husband’s tenderness with the wife was just unusual enough to leave her shaken and uncertain. She knew it was his apprehension of the future—their future.
He is afraid. But I must not be.
The neighbors-through-the-trees lived in a house that mirrored their own, the wife presumed. Possibly, it was an identical house: artificially weathered shingleboard with dark red shutters, a steep roof, several stone chimneys. A three-car garage. Not a new house, for Crescent Lake Farms was not a new subdivision, but an attractive house, you might say a beautiful house. And expensive.
The wife had not driven by the house at 88 West Crescent Drive but she’d studied the Crescent Lake Farms map and saw how precisely the lots were positioned, three- and four-acre properties on each side of the man-made lake and each with its replica like halves of the human brain.
The property at 88 West Crescent Drive was three acres, like their own. It was equidistant from the man-made lake less than a mile to the east.
The wife had been fascinated, as an undergraduate, by human anatomy as well as by music. She’d thought—perhaps—she might apply to medical school—but requirements like organic chemistry and molecular biology had dampened her enthusiasm.
Yet, she remained (secretly) fascinated by illustrations of the human body, its labyrinthine yet symmetrical interior. The brain was the most complex of all organs.
Cortex, cerebellum, spinal cord.
Frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, temporal lobe.
She was fascinated with the possibility of “dissection”—the human body opened up, its secrets labeled. Yet, she could not bear to look upon an actual human corpse. She certainly could not bear to see a human corpse dissected.
The mere sight of blood caused her to feel weak, faint. Even the thought of blood. It was an involuntary reflex like gagging.
“Hello? What are you thinking about?”
The husband was staring at her, smiling.
“I—wasn’t thinking. I was listening to the music.”
She’d forgotten where she was, for the moment. The pristine piano notes of Erik Satie had faded and in their place were the raucous cries of Canada geese, flapping their wings and squabbling on the lake.
* * *
“‘Seul, pendant un instant’—‘alone, for a moment.’”
At the piano she’d neglected for most of her adult life she was playing—attempting to play—Satie. Inside the piano bench she’d found the yellowing photocopied pages she had annotated many years ago, precise instructions from her music teacher.
She did not want to think Mr. Krauss must be dead. A long time now, dead.
Her fingers had absorbed his interest. The sounds that leapt from her fingers. Of her, he’d had but a vague awareness, and very little interest.
He’d been at least thirty years her senior. And married.
He’d hummed with her piano playing, when she was playing well. Half-consciously he’d hummed, like Glenn Gould. But when she struck a wrong note, or faltered, the humming ceased abruptly.
She’d begun now with the simplest Gnossienne. Her fingering was awkward, she struck wrong notes. The very clarity of the music was a rebuke to her clumsiness but she continued, she returned to the beginning of the piece and continued through to the end; and, at the end, she returned again to the beginning and continued through to the end, with fewer mistakes. She did this several times before moving on to the second Gnossienne. She began to feel a small hesitant satisfaction—rising, almost, to elation—joy! I haven’t forgotten. The music is in my fingers.
For ninety minutes she remained at the piano, playing the music of Erik Satie. Her shoulders ached. Her fingers ached. She was having difficulty reading the notes that seemed to her smaller than she recalled. But she persevered. She was quite happy, even with her fumbling fingers. Someone came to stand in the doorway, to listen. Her heart reacted, she was startled. Though knowing it could only be the husband.
She waited for him to speak. He might say Hey—that’s pretty good.
Or—Hey, is that the music we were hearing through-the-trees?
Or—The piano needs tuning, eh?
But when she turned, there was no one in the doorway.
She closed up the keyboard. She was strangely excited, and apprehensive. She foresaw returning to all her piano music, the many old and yellowed books and photocopied sheets, like an excavation of the past it would be, digging back into time.
The music is in my fingers. Any time I want to retrieve it.
* * *
“Listen!”
It was just past 6 P.M. The midsummer sun was far from the treeline. The husband was on the deck at the rear of the house, for something had attracted him there.
He’d brought a drink with him. Earlier each evening he was leaving his home office until, this evening, he’d left to come out onto the porch before 6 P.M.
The wife came to join the husband, distracted. She’d heard him calling to her and hadn’t realized at first where he was. There had been a telephone call from her oncologist—she’d had to call back, and to wait several long minutes.
It will be a simple procedure. A biopsy with a local anesthetic, a needle.
The husband had left the terrace and was standing in the fresh-mowed grass. He stood approximately fifty feet from the fence at the property line.
He was listening to—what?—the wife heard what seemed to her familiar voices, through the trees. A ripple of laughter.
But there were unfamiliar voices as well. The wife was sure she’d never heard these voices before.
These were dissonant sounds, somewhat jarring. The laughter loud and sharp and a dog’s barking commingled with the laughter, distorted through the trees.
A party? A picnic?
There were children’s voices as well, and shouts. And the dog barking excitedly as they’d never heard it bark before.
“They sound happy.”
“They sound drunk.”
The wife wanted to protest, this was unfair. She understood that the husband felt envious. It had been a long time since they’d hosted a party at their house …
An odor of barbecue, wafting through the woods. Fatty ground meat on a grill. Salsa, raw onion. Beer.
They had friends—of course. Numerous friends, and yet more friendly acquaintances. But their friends were like themselves—their political prejudices, children and grandchildren, homeowners’ complaints, experiences in travel, physical ailments. Like mirror-reflections these friends were, and not flattering.
And their older friends were fading, irrevocably. Some of them had retired to the southwest, or to Florida. Some were mysteriously ill. A few had died—it was always a small shock, to realize But she isn’t alive any longer. There is no way I can reach her.
The wife had accompanied the husband to his fortieth reunion at Harvard the previous year. The husband had arranged to meet old classmates, a former roommate, “friends” he’d maintained, to a degree, over the course of decades, though the men had rarely seen one another in the interim. The wife had liked these men—to a degree—and she’d liked their wives, who were making a special effort to be friendly with one another, under the strain of the college reunion which was tightly scheduled, boisterous, and exhausting. And on the drive home, when the wife said how good it was to see the husband with such old friends, one or two of the men “like brothers,” clearly enjoying himself, the husband had listened in silence and not until they were home, preparing for bed, the husband brooding, slump-shouldered, and the flaccid flesh at his waist and belly pale as unbaked bread dough, did he say, in a flat cold voice, without meeting the wife’s startled gaze, “Frankly, I don’t care if I ever see any of them again.”
Yet, hearing the festive sounds of the party through-the-trees, clearly the husband felt envy, as well as disapproval; he had to be thinking, the wife surmised, that since retiring from Investcorp, he saw relatively few people, from day to day and from week to week. (Was it possible, the husband’s Investcorp colleagues/friends were forgetting him? Those frequent email invitations sent to a set group of individuals had ceased to show up in the husband’s inbox, he’d only just begun to realize. And his emails to his former colleagues/friends were not being returned.)
The husband had only recently wielded such power—in his division at Investcorp. And now …
The husband said, “That sounds like—what?—furniture being dragged on the terrace?”
They listened. Through the trees came a sound very like furniture—heavy, wrought-iron terrace furniture—being dragged along a terrace.
More voices, laughter. Raucous laughter, and braying laughter. The wife was shocked, their neighbors-through-the-trees had not seemed like such—well, gregarious people. Until now they had seemed like an ideal family, well-bred, private.
The husband said, “Maybe it’s a political fund-raiser. It sounds large.”
The husband detested noisy “fund-raisers” in the neighborhood. The husband had grown so contemptuous of politicians, even “conservative” politicians for whom he felt obliged to vote, in the effort of maintaining his accumulated investments and savings, the wife avoided bringing the subject up to him.
“I don’t think it’s that large. I think it’s just—another family or two. An outdoor barbecue, in summer. I think they’re just having fun.”
Not just one dog was barking, but at least two. And now came amplified music, some sort of rock, or—was it “rap”?
The husband turned away in disgust, and stomped back into the house. The wife remained for a few minutes, indecisive, listening.
How loud they are. But how happy-sounding.
* * *
“The Jesters.”
The husband must have been thinking aloud. For he hadn’t addressed the wife, who was standing a few feet away, gardening implements in her gloved hands.
“What do you mean—‘the Jesters’?”
“That’s their name: ‘Jester.’”
“I don’t understand. Whose name?”
“Our neighbors through the trees.”
The husband gestured in disgust, in the direction of the woods. Already, on this weekday morning, though it wasn’t yet noon, there was a barrage of noise coming through the trees: lawn mower, leaf blower, chain saw.
The wife said, faltering, “But—everyone in Crescent Lake has lawn work done. We have our lawn mowed and serviced. How is this different?”
“It is different. It is God-damned louder.”
The wife re
coiled, the husband was being irrational. Surely the decibel level of the chain saw through the trees was no higher than that of the chain saws the husband had hired to trim away dead limbs from their own trees? (Of course, when the lawn crew was working on their large, sloping lawn, the husband and the wife made certain that they weren’t at home.)
In any case it was too noisy, the wife had to concede, for she was trying to avoid a migraine headache, and nausea from medication, for her to work outside in the rose garden, which had suffered an onslaught of Japanese beetles and badly needed her care. She had wanted, too, to remove those tough little tendril-weeds from the terrace that poked up between the flagstones, giving it a shabby look.
Too noisy for the sensitive husband to remain on the terrace where he’d brought some of his home office work—his laptop, investment accounts, sheets of yellow paper on which he penciled notes.
(When the wife asked the husband about their finances, the husband tended to reply curtly. She understood that they had “lost some money” in stocks, but then—who in Crescent Farms had not? The wife did not dare to ask more of the husband who would interpret such questions as a critique of his ability to handle their finances, thus of his manhood.)
The husband who’d been restless in his home office now returned to the house. The wife shut all the windows, and turned on the air conditioning. And a ceiling fan in the husband’s office that made a gentle whirring sound.
“The lawn crew won’t be there much longer, I’m sure. Then I’ll help you move outside again.”
The husband waved her away with a look of commingled disgust and dismay that pierced the wife to the heart.
* * *
“Those damned Jesters! What did I tell you!”
This day, mid-morning, a lovely day in late June, there came what sounded like raw adolescent voices, boys’ voices, through the trees. And barking. (Two dogs: one with a deep-throated growling bark, the other a petulant miniature, a high-pitched excruciating yipping.)
And there came too as the husband and the wife listened in fascinated horror, a harsh sound of slapping against pavement. Slap-slap-slap.
“A basketball? They have one of those damned portable baskets in their driveway so their sons can practice basketball.”
The Uncanny Reader Page 25
