“Are you ready, Emma? We’re all looking forward to hearing you play.”
Emma didn’t say anything. After an awkward moment, Ethan put his hand on her back. “Emma, Mrs. Wheldon asked you a question.”
Emma moved her head up and down.
Ruth Wheldon tried to smile. She turned her wedding ring round and round on her finger. “There’s a lot going on.”
“Yes,” Grace said.
“Well.” Ruth Wheldon took a step backward; she looked ready to flee. “Emma goes ninth, just before my son. I put her near the end so she’d feel less pressure.”
“Thank you,” Grace said.
Suddenly Ruth Wheldon reached out and squeezed her hand. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. And then she walked back to the front of the room, wiping tears from her eyes.
It was a kind of torture for everyone involved—Grace felt quite certain of that. The method was deceptively innocent. The Starkey twins, Megan and Billy, played “Greensleeves” on their recorders. A sweet, redheaded pair. They might just as well have run their fingernails down a blackboard. Marcia Starkey, the mother, cried her eyes out in the eighth row. One hand dabbed at her mascara with a Kleenex while the other carefully monitored the volume on the cassette recorder on her lap.
The song came to an end, the tape clicked off. There was applause and, afterwards, as she got up from her seat in the front row and walked to the stage, the intense rustling of Ruth Wheldon’s dress. She made the introduction, and somebody’s little girl walked up to the stage carrying a guitar.
“Jesus,” Ethan whispered. “This is a nightmare.”
She actually smiled, looking at him over Emma’s head: it was so Ethan—the mordant, ever-suffering cynic. For a moment she felt how much she loved him.
But he wouldn’t stop.
“I told you we shouldn’t have come to this thing,” he whispered bitterly. “This was a mistake.”
She went cold. “My mistake, you mean.”
There was no reply. And then, as if on cue, a new song began. A young voice singing high like a reed by a stream. Grace could make no sense of it. It was as if a cord had been cut, and the time that passed then passed without her, though she was sitting at its center. She sensed only how the notes touched the air as shadows will touch light, how all things return to their source without explanation, without shame. There was only one truth: that she lived now on the periphery of a world she once had owned without a thought. Cowardice and darkness surrounded her; courage too, though she could not find it.
Applause. The girl sat down, a boy stood up. Other people wouldn’t go away. And with each new performance Ruth Wheldon appeared and disappeared from the stage with an earnest, faintly goofy precision, like a beautiful cuckoo clock.
It was the Dixon boy, twelve years old. He played the clarinet and knew he was good. The way he held the black instrument like a wonder stick, something to throw, or dance with, or make magic with. “A-one; a-one, two, three,” he said, like a little Benny Goodman, as if he had a quartet behind him, and then launched into “When the Saints Go Marching In”—New Orleans–style, the rhythm all out there and the audience compelled to clap. She took Emma’s hand in hers. Thinking that the boy couldn’t have known—how could he have known? Daddy’s favorite song. Joyous and southern was how he’d liked his music, and until the day he died he’d played this song on the phonograph in their parlor in Durham, over and over again on Saturdays, and on Sundays after church, after meals, holding his Grace high off the ground by her wrists and dancing her around the room, making her cry with delight, while Mother called out to be careful.
A sound came from the back of the gym: the groan of hinges. Someone arriving late. A few angry people turned to glare, but not Grace. She had nothing left over for strangers.
The boy played on and the people clapped. And she held tight to Emma’s hand, waiting for something to happen.
Dwight
I took a last deep breath and pulled open the metal door at the back of the gym. The hinges groaned, cutting through the music, and in the room’s bright light and hardwood shine faces I recognized turned and frowned at me.
Up on a makeshift stage, in front of about fifty people seated on folding chairs, a boy was playing the clarinet. He couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen and he was playing “When the Saints Go Marching In,” his foot tapping and the black flowerlike instrument moving herky-jerky in his hands as if being blown around by the wind inside of it.
It was fine music, and some parents in the audience were clapping to the beat. Larry Baylis was clapping, and so was Chuck Zorn. They’d be just off the train from Grand Central. A quick pit stop home for a double martini and a change of clothes, a flip from boardroom chic to catalogue country, and then here to see their children shine before the community. We’d all been neighbors once. But I’d been expelled, both privately and publicly, and they didn’t want me here. I was a good-riddance piece of history resurrected from the dead. Their faces showed disgust, anger, maybe even fear. And then they turned back to the music and soon were clapping again.
I slipped into an empty seat in the last row. A few chairs away a pretty, older woman sat alone. She nodded and smiled at me, and I smiled back. She was a divorcée maybe, a widow, somebody’s silver-haired aunt. She was my new best friend. The boy went on with his playing and the saints came marching in. It was New Orleans here, it was Mardi Gras, and the boy moved herky-jerky, and there was a sickening heat in the pit of my stomach and at the back of my throat.
A jazz flourish, a precocious little riff, and the song ended. Applause broke out. The boy walked back into the audience to join his family, the clarinet held easy in one hand as if he’d just smacked one out of the park, and Ruth got up from a seat in the front row and turned to face everyone. Public Speaking 101. She was blushing.
“The next performer will be”—her voice caught and she cleared it—“Emma Learner. Emma will play a prelude by Bach.”
At the sound of the name I half rose out of my chair. The whole room was before me and every person in it. Ruth caught sight of me then and her face turned stony, but it was wasted on me: in the third row a small blond girl had stood up. She had on a white dress and a red ribbon in her hair, and it was Emma Learner, and she turned and put her hands in the lap of the beautiful blond woman sitting next to her. They were mother and daughter, there could be no doubt about that. The woman was Grace Learner, and she whispered something in her daughter’s ear and kissed her on the cheek full of love, and watching it all I felt a confused stab of regret and shame and age-old longing and maybe even of envy. She was too perfect, too much in the center of a life I never had been and never would be a part of, and from my cheap bleacher seat at the margin of things I could hardly see her through the washed-out memories of the sickly, unstrung housewife who had been my mother.
Then these particular thoughts disappeared. The man sitting next to mother and daughter—a tall, handsome man with small round glasses and black curly hair—leaned down, and it was Ethan Learner, and he kissed his little girl on top of her head.
Emma Learner walked to the stage, where Ruth smiled reassuringly at her and adjusted the height of the piano stool. Then Ruth went back to her seat. Next to her I caught a glimpse of the back of Sam’s head, and the gleaming lips of the trumpet held vertical on his lap. There was whispering in the audience before the music started; an ugly adult sound, edgy with gossip. Ethan Learner put his arm around his wife and squeezed her shoulder. And I saw how she gave in to nothing—not the comfort he was offering, not the voices whispering around her—but sat rigid and erect on her chair, looking ahead at her daughter and nowhere else. Pretty soon he stopped squeezing, and then his hand fell off her altogether.
Ethan
She took her place, small before the piano, white to its black, red-shoed feet floating above the pedals. She leaned forward over the keys and stared down at her hands, as if it were all up to them. Then she began to play, and the
gossiping fell to nothing.
Trouble came early—a difficult passage. She got caught and misplayed a note, and then another. Grace and I winced for her. But she just gave a breathy sigh of disappointment and played on. There was no way of knowing her thoughts except that for those few minutes she seemed to have left us all behind; as if, for the duration of her playing, there was no such thing as memory. Just her fingers traveling the keys, pushed to their limit, and the long black box ringing out.
She made no more mistakes, and then she was done.
They were still applauding when she came back to her seat. We kissed her and told her how good she’d been. But she would have none of it. She sat straight on the chair while her eyes filled with tears. Her mother took her in her arms, and Emma pressed herself there, burrowing. Her voice came, faint and mumbled.
“What?” I said. “I couldn’t hear.”
The color had drained from Grace’s face. “She said she’ll never be as good as Josh.”
“Emma . . . ,” I began. But I could think of nothing. I turned away. The applause had died out and Ruth Wheldon was walking up to the stage, her long dress whispering. No one in the crowd would meet my eye.
Ruth Wheldon said, “The last performer of the evening will be Sam Arno, on trumpet. Sam will play ‘America the Beautiful.’ ”
Polite applause as a small, sandy-haired boy stood up in the middle of the front row and climbed the stage. Just his back visible, and the trumpet that he carried in both hands like a trophy, its color the color of white gold, its ends sticking out to either side of his narrow body like some piece of treasure he was hoarding, or chained to. His mother bent down to him, whispered something in his ear, gave him a kiss. Then he turned around.
A murmur ran through the first rows of the audience. The skin around the boy’s right eye was a patchwork of faded blues and yellows. The eye itself was noticeably bloodshot. Some woman whispered, “My goodness!” It sounded like Judy Aronson.
Ruth Wheldon flushed and looked helplessly at her son, who was staring hard at his trumpet, as if he wanted to crawl inside it. The harsh gym lights offered no sanctuary. “Um . . .” she said, and all eyes in the room turned to her. She tried to smile; impossibly, her color deepened. “You’re probably all wondering about Sam’s eye,” she said weakly. “Well, he was out with his father, Dwight, last week and they got in a little accident. Nothing serious. Actually, he’s fine.” Her smile withered on her pretty face. She touched a hand to her son’s head and walked quickly off the stage.
The boy watched her intently. A serious, sad boy, I would have said. Who had been in an accident. Who had a black and bloodied eye: his father’s fault, one way or another. The boy waited until his mother was safely in her seat before raising the trumpet to his lips. “ ‘America the Beautiful,’ ” he said, his voice high and far away, an undiscovered continent.
Suddenly, hinges groaned at the back of the gym: I turned in time to glimpse a man’s broad back disappearing through the open door. Fresh murmurings shot through the crowd. Then the door closed with a bang, and the boy started to play.
We made it home, upstairs; Grace said she’d sit with Emma until Emma fell asleep, so I went into our room alone. The floor littered with dirty clothes, the bed unmade. You could see something had happened here—a terrorist attack, a bloody defeat without a battle. The kind of war for which there is no diplomacy or solution, no thought that could possibly matter. I stepped out of my clothes, leaving them like skins on the floor. Naked, I went into the bathroom and brushed the encroaching coffee stains on my teeth and emptied my bladder and stood for less than a minute under a shower so hot there was nothing left to consider but the red scalding pain. It made me shiver. And afterwards I lay on my back with the white sheet up to my neck, like a corpse waiting to be prepared. Grace’s bedside light was on, shining over her empty place. I was afraid of the words forming in my head; “Josh” was a word. I closed my eyes and began to hum to myself. The notes just appeared at the back of my throat, unchosen, familiar: “America the Beautiful.” I fell asleep.
I dreamed it was dark in the car. Our car. Driving back from somewhere on a moonless night, my beautiful son singing in the backseat, his voice high and soft and sweet in the dark. We all knew the song, the famous stirring words: “America the Beautiful.” But on this night for some reason it was annoying the hell out of me. I hated it. I kept telling Josh to be quiet, but Grace kept saying no, let him. Let him. It was pitch black in our car and I kept saying “Be quiet,” and Josh kept singing. And then, still driving, I turned around to yell at him. Nothing there but blackness. “Where is he?” I demanded angrily, wanting to punish him. “Where he always is,” Grace answered calmly, sounding bored. Then she screamed, and I turned around.
Just ahead, in the washed-out tunnel of headlights, Josh stood fixed in the road, his mouth open. And I chose wrong. My foot hit the wrong pedal and the car sped up. He was still singing when I ran him over.
I woke in my house. Sweating and afraid in my own room. Sick with guilt. The room was dark. I reached out for Grace but she wasn’t there. And for a long horrifying moment that felt like a tumbling through nothingness, I sensed no other human presence in the entire house, neither heartbeat nor breath, nor family, nor love. It felt like the death of everything I had once believed in and hoped for and been a part of.
I rolled over, peered through the darkness: Grace was there, at the far edge of the bed, curled away from me. Asleep. The sheet carved a phantom across her back, a waterline rising and falling with each breath, and there were shadows in the hollow between her neck and shoulder and around the long sweeping curve of her hip beneath the white sheet. I was chilled, damp with sweat. Now, like a burrowing animal, I slid my body across the bed and found the pocket of her warmth. Her skin emanating heat as if she’d swallowed the sun. Her skin smelling of soap and earth and something like wildflowers. I touched her hip and her eyes opened. I pressed up behind her, hard now and curving between soft moons of her flesh, my fingers working down from her hip through the damp triangle of her hair and into her, and her scent rising up, musky and beautiful. She moaned softly. Then she turned, opening her body to me, her pale night limbs unfolding like a butterfly being born. I entered her whispering her name, and felt the horrors of the dream begin to recede.
Then it ended. I saw her eyes change while I was deep inside her. A going away. Her mouth fell slack under the weight of the words she would not utter. And then she was sand draining through my fingers.
I pulled out, rolled away from her.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I know.”
“I can’t.”
“I know.”
“I can’t. I just can’t.”
“I know,” I said.
I got out of bed and went to the window. Looking at nothing, the darkness. There was just a thin new moon in the sky. I heard her go into the bathroom and shut the door. The old leaded windowpane was cool against my forehead. She began to run a bath. I pictured her sitting naked on the edge of the tub, steam rising around her like smoke. In a little while, I thought, she wouldn’t be able to see herself in the mirror, and then she would lower herself into the hot water and scrub me out.
I knelt down and put my face to the open window. I breathed in and out, and there was dew in the air, particled and summer-lush. I missed the winter that had passed without my having paid attention to it, the smells of woodsmoke and juniper, my son’s footprints in the snow. My son would not be growing up.
Grace turned off the water. Through the closed door between us, I heard the liquid circles of her feet stepping into the bath, and then the rest of her. The white faces of her knees above the clear greenish water. She did not cry for very long.
PART THREE
Dwight
Late one night in the middle of August I got in my car and drove over to Wyndham Falls. I found Pine Creek Road, and drove slowly past the mailbox that had their name on it. It was an old house, ha
ndsome, set back from the road, with frowning black shutters. All the lights were out.
I had no plan in particular. It was just a need, no different in some ways from an animal—a bear, say—who comes out of the woods at night to sniff at the edges of the human world, wondering at how close it is after all, and how foreign. What in theory seems like clear boundaries between lives turns out to be something a little more confusing when your face is pressed up against it. I had spent hours sitting in my house trying to imagine this place and the lives inside it. For some reason, in my mind it was always at night. A white house like this one now, on a road called Pine Creek, but with one window glowing bright. And a blond woman standing behind it, looking out at the blackness, where I was.
But dreams are cheap, and most of the time they are wrong. There was no light on at all, there was no woman. I stared through my window at the darkened house, and then I turned the car around and drove back the way I’d come. And promised myself: Never again.
The rest of August went. Like anybody else, I turned out the light at night and lay on the bed till sleep came; or if not sleep, then something like it, some thickening and dulling of the nerve ends. In the mornings I kept getting up and going to work. I had a week’s vacation coming at the end of the month but put it off because I was afraid of any downtime at all, when the days would be as empty as the nights. (When Jack Cutter heard I wasn’t taking my vacation he was incredulous, even concerned. “Are you sick, Dwight? Are you in love?” I just shrugged.) I was a coward. I kept Donna in the dark, never called her at all. I kept the Taurus with the busted right headlight in the garage, and the door there closed. I watched the summer pass.
The only relevant clock for me had become Sam’s bruised eye. It faded to the color of nicotined fingers, the sallowed eye-pouches of old men in bowling alleys. Then it faded all the way back to youth. But this was a different youth, less innocent and sure, even if Sam didn’t yet know it himself. By September he was already on his third life (how many would he get?), and he was only ten.
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