Dirty Wings

by Sarah Mccarry

  She’s halfway down the hall when she hears a sharp “Wait!” It’s the harpy, clip-clopping toward her. How does she walk in those heels? Maia wonders. She stands there, her heart still racing, until the harpy’s caught up with her.

  “Who taught you to play like that? Not Oscar.”

  “You know Oscar?” Maia asks, startled.

  “Knew. He taught here, a long time ago.”

  “Oscar taught here? He never said anything.”

  “No,” the harpy says. “He wouldn’t.” A flicker of distaste crosses her face.

  “I love Oscar,” Maia says. “Oscar taught me everything I know.”

  “Other people will teach you more.”

  “Like who? You?” The harpy raises an eyebrow but says nothing. “That’s how it works, right? You sink your teeth into whatever young talent you think will carry your name to the stars? You can’t do it yourself anymore so you want me to make your name for you? Does anyone even know who you are? Does anyone fucking care? Because I don’t. I don’t care about any of this. I don’t care about you. I don’t care about coming here. I thought I did. I thought this was what I wanted. I don’t give a shit.” The words are huge and thrilling, coming from somewhere at her core, getting bigger and bigger and faster and faster. The harpy is staring at her in shock. “You and my mother and my father and all your fucking plans for me, you can go fuck yourselves. I don’t want to sit here and listen to some dried-up old bitch tell me how to live my life. You don’t care about the piano. All you care about is making sure your name goes on the goddamn program. I want to fucking make art.” Maia wheels around without waiting for the harpy to answer, imagines Cass a stadium of one giving her a standing ovation as she half-runs down the hall. The euphoria lasts all of a few seconds before it dissipates into a cloud of dread. What the fuck, she thinks, did I just do?

  Outside, she leans on the building, her heart pounding. The speed is betraying her; she’s just jittery now, her fingers twitching, her pulse too fast. There’s a pay phone across the street. She crosses to it, finds a stray handful of quarters in her bag, drops them in, dials Oscar’s number. He answers on the fifth ring. She’s never been so glad to hear his “’Allo?”

  “Oscar.”

  “Maia!” he says, delighted. “Chérie! But why are you calling? Aren’t you in your audition now?”

  “I just finished.”

  “And?”

  “Oscar, I—I’ve never played like that.”

  He’s cautious. “This is good?”

  “Oh my god, Oscar, it was like—it was like someone else was playing me. It was beyond good. It was the best I’ve ever played in my life. I wish you could have seen.”

  “Ah,” he says, with a long sigh. “I wish this also, my dear, but it is the curse of the teacher to have his pupil outgrow him. You will be a wonderful pianist, my dear, and I shall beg you not to forget me when you have got your first contract with Deutsche Grammophon and a nice touring program, hmm?”

  “Oh, Oscar,” she says. “Of course I’m not going to forget you. But Oscar—I said some things—I—” She falters. I called the head of the department a dried-up old bitch. “I’m not sure if coming here is the right thing for me to do.”

  He is quiet for a long time. “This school will make your career. You will meet everyone who is important.”

  “But I don’t think that’s what I want.”

  “You are too young to know what you want.”

  “That’s not true,” she says, stung.

  “Young people have grand ideas, always,” he says. “It is the job of their teacher to corral them, do you see? You will get in, and you must understand that this is a great privilege. You have worked so terribly hard, harder than any pupil I have ever taught, and you are tremendously gifted, Maia—I do not say this unless it is true. You are the most gifted student I have seen in many, many years. Since I was a student myself. You want to throw this all away because you have a strange mood at the audition? Absolutely not, chérie, I won’t allow it. I won’t allow you to be so foolish.”

  “You didn’t like it here. You never even told me you taught here.”

  “Kaplan. That bitch,” he says, without rancor. “I was better than her, you know. She always hated me for it.”

  “Then maybe you can understand why I wouldn’t want to—”

  “No,” he says, cutting her off. “I cannot. Myself, I have made a terrible mistake. I have ruined my life. And for what? For nothing. For an illusion. It doesn’t last. What lasts is a career. A life of art. You have a chance at this and I will not allow you to toss it aside. Do you hear me? I will not.”

  “I thought you of all people would understand.”

  “I of all people? I of all people do not understand. You are being foolish, you are a child who knows nothing of the world. You do not leave your house except to come to my house. I am telling you that if you make this mistake you will never forgive yourself. You will be a ruin. It will be over for you.”

  “Oscar, why didn’t you tell me you taught here?”

  “Because it was another life,” he says. “That Oscar, I do not even know him. He is a stranger to me.”

  “You can’t make the past go away by pretending it didn’t happen.”

  “You are quite young, my dear, to be lecturing me on the uses and nature of the past, and I will thank you to cease at once.”

  “I sort of told them—I told that woman to—I wasn’t polite.”

  “Then you will apologize.”

  “I will not,” she says, horrified.

  “My dear, I know she is not a nice woman. Believe me, I know this quite well. But she is in charge there, god help them, and it is in her hands your fate rests, god help you. When someone has got quite a lot of say over what will happen for you in the future, you must be polite to this person. You mustn’t make enemies, my little one. You are not a man.”

  “Oscar.”

  “Do you think it does not make a difference? It is very American of you, to pretend there is no difference. It will end your career, if people find you difficult. It has ended mine, and I am not a woman. It will end yours even more quickly. You will write her a—how do you say? an absent apology?”

  “Abject.”

  “Yes, thank you. An abject apology. You will grovel. You will offer to lick her shoes clean with your little pink tongue, if it is necessary, is that clear to you? She will like this. It is her greatest passion, to be correct and magnanimous. You will tell her you have seen the error of your ways. When she is satisfied you have got no pride left you will get in, and you will go. Do you understand?”

  “I—” she begins, and then she thinks, I what. Oscar has nothing left, no hope, no future. Oscar has nothing but her, and she is throwing his dreams for her back in his face. All these people, living through her, and now that for the first time she is beginning to live for herself, she is also coming to see that it will not end well for any of them. But she cannot bear to break his heart. “I understand,” she says.

  “I will see you in a few days, my dear, and we will not speak of this tantrum, and when you receive your acceptance letter we shall have a little party, don’t you think? A recital.”

  “Sure,” she says. “Okay. Sorry. I was being silly.”

  “Yes. You are young,” he says. “Young people are always silly. It is why they must trust their betters. Bisous, chérie.”

  “Bisous.”

  She hangs up the phone, stares dully at the receiver. More than anything she wants Cass. I wonder what it would be like, she thinks, for someone to actually see me. To look at me and see what I am. What I want. Who I can be. She puts her hands in the pockets of her coat and thinks about what she is going to tell her father.

  NOW: BARRA DE NAVIDAD

  Cass is fuzzy-drunk on some terrifying cheap liquor Jason dug up, sitting at the edge of the water and smoking the absolute last of the weed. She doesn’t know much about tequila, but she’s pretty sure it’s not suppos
ed to taste like paint thinner. They’ve seen no other white people, the entire time they’ve spent on the beach; it’s the wrong time of year, and other Americans—tourists, they’d all concurred with contempt, the one thing the three of them can manage to agree on—prefer the beach towns to the north and south, replete with luxurious resorts.

  She doesn’t have her candles or her herbs but she has her cards, and she’s laying them out on a scrap of cloth on the sand, over and over. The Chariot. The Empress. The Six of Swords. “I need help,” she says. The Lovers. The Hanged Man. “I can’t keep going. I need help.” The Magician. The Fool. The Lovers. Death.

  The Magician.

  Something changes in the air. She looks up and he’s there, standing a little ways down the beach, looking at her. She didn’t see him come. He is tall, and so thin it is almost painful to look at him, and dressed, despite the fact that they are on the beach in Mexico, in a long black coat and close-cut black trousers and a black shirt that flows loose and soft like silk. White is not the word for him; he is so pale he fluoresces. He has stepped out of the dark and into her waking life, but that’s not possible, so he must be someone else.

  “Hi,” Cass says. “Did you—are you—you’re American?”

  No. His voice is so deep she feels it in her bones rather than hears it. It echoes through her, turns her blood cold. You know what I am, child. She looks down the beach. Maia and Jason are nowhere in sight. Ah, shit, she thinks. The luck of Cass: she’s the kind of girl who will meet a touristing serial killer on beach vacation. Or a ghost. Whatever the fuck he is. He is not the man from her dreams; he cannot be. Nothing Raven told her ever prepared her for anything like this. When the people in your head are standing in front of you, cool as you please, the hot white afternoon sun on your face, the heat haze making you stupid. She could swear he’s smiling, but his death’s-head mask is impassive, the cold black eyes regarding her as though she’s an insect pinned on a corkboard. I had forgotten what it was like, to feel the sun on my back. He holds his pale hands toward the paler sun, palms facing upward, stands there still as a crow on a wire. His black coat does not move in the faint breeze coming off the water. Come with me, Cassandra. I have something to show you. He holds his hand out to her and, not knowing what else to do, she stands and takes it, and the sun winks out.

  They are standing in the apartment from her dreams. Beyond the wall of glass, a dark sea heaves against a darker sky. The candles in the chandeliers burn with an eerie greenish light that does little to dissipate the gloom. The room is deathly cold and Cass shivers in her tattered shorts and T-shirt. “What is this place?”

  You know where you are, Cassandra. You know what I am.

  “No,” she says, looking around her. There’s a wall behind her she hadn’t noticed before, windowless and lined with oil paintings. Cass thinks at first they are landscapes, but when she gets closer she sees they are populated with figures. She walks down the line. In one, a man rolls a boulder up a hill, his face contorted in agony. In another, a woman stands on a parapet, her face grief-stricken, her skin an ashen grey that makes her look as though she is made of stone. There are dozens of paintings, and Cass looks at every one, as the man in the black coat waits behind her.

  When she gets to the last, she pauses. It looks newer than the others, somehow; the style is more modern. It’s a study of a man on a grassy lawn, a big house behind him, all angles and windows. He’s looking at something outside the frame of the painting, his face sad. Behind him, half-obscured, the figure of a woman in a white dress, her features hidden. “This is Jason,” Cass says slowly. “This painting is of Jason.”

  You know what I am, he says again. You know what I want. She chews the edge of her thumb. Does the man who’s haunted her dreams since she was a little girl really want Jason? Whiner and narcissist, inept cook and hapless navigator, a boy who could not take care of himself if he were given ten thousand dollars and a roadmap to the adult world? His music is good, but despite the other night on the beach, it’s nothing special. Cass cocks her head, considering. Maybe there’s some secret side to Jason that she’s too spiteful to see. Maybe Maia’s right about him; maybe he really is worthy of her love. She’s having a hard time believing it, but if this skeleton in a fancy suit is bent on collecting Maia’s boyfriend for his nocturnal freak show, Cass isn’t going to argue. The gods always want boys for their special projects; girls only ever go crazy or die. Or betray.

  “You want me to, like, get him for you?” she asks. “Doesn’t he have to make his own deal with the devil?”

  The man in the black coat shrugs, one shoulder rising to his ear and dropping again, his eyes never leaving her face. In every fairy tale Cass has ever been told the witch is a trickster, the gods turn traitor. Fickle as toddlers and as cruel. If he is from the dark palace that haunts her dreams, if he has crossed that black and undulating river, he is not on her side, whatever story he tells. But she thinks, then, of her life restored, her Maia brought back to her, unhitched from the stringy-haired monster that has insinuated himself into their friendship like a cancer. She knows all those old stories too, musicians selling their souls at the crossroads, signing away on the dotted line. Jason wants to be famous, and the man in her dreams wants Jason, and if he really is what she dreams of, there is nothing he cannot do. She looks down at the floor. “You can have him,” she says. “But he doesn’t like me. You’ll have to talk to him yourself.”

  It is you I have come to, Cassandra. You whom I have followed here. You who led me to what it is I seek. And you are, after all this time, what I expected to find.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean,” she says. His eyes are so dark she cannot tell where the pupil ends and the iris begins, and behind them there is nothingness. A dead white plain, a black palace with a thousand doors.

  You are not a fool, child, he says. He reaches into his black coat and pulls out something round and red and tosses it to her, and she raises her hand instinctively to catch it, her eyes following its rosy arc, and when she looks again he is gone. She blinks, once, twice, and she is on the beach again, the hot sun on her face, shaking her head to clear away the cobwebs of the dreaming world. There is nothing to suggest she was talking to anyone other than herself, save what she holds in her hands: a pomegranate, sweet-scented and heavy, cool against her palms. “No fucking way,” Cass says, and starts to laugh. “No way.” Whatever he is, he has a sense of humor.

  Her bottle is empty and the joint is dust. The sunlight glitters on the water. Cass takes her shirt off and puts it over her head, stretches out on the sand, and falls backward into sleep.

  When she wakes up, the sun has tracked most of the way across the sky and is sinking into a gold-purple blaze at the edge of the world. She has to think about where she is for a while before she gets up. The pomegranate is still real, next to her on the beach. Her belly is tender, the beginning of what will most likely be a nasty burn. She picks up the fruit and it’s cool in her hands, despite having sat out on the beach while she slept.

  Jason and Maia are asleep in their cabana. The lowering sun falls across Jason’s stubbled cheeks in strips. His mouth is slack, his face as innocent as a child’s. One hand is tucked beneath his chin, the other outflung, as though he’s reaching for something far away. Maia’s curled up against him, her head on his bony chest, the tangle of her bleached hair spilling across his faded shirt. Cass stands looking at them, the two of them a locked door she cannot pass through, a barred gate with DO NOT ENTER writ large across its iron bars. She is overcome by the childish impulse to throw a handful of sand at Jason’s head, curls her fingers tighter around the fruit instead. Maia murmurs, her eyelids flickering open. “Hey, you,” she says, her voice raspy with sleep.

  “Hey,” Cass says. “I got us something.” She holds up the fruit and Maia’s eyes widen.

  “Far out,” she says, sitting up. “Where on earth did you find that? I didn’t even know they grew around here.”

  “Go
t it from some guy,” Cass says, and sits next to Maia, stretching out her legs. The cabana is cool and dim and tilting slightly. “I’m sort of drunk,” Cass adds.

  Jason opens his eyes, shading out the sun with one hand. “What is that?” he asks. Maia takes his hand and brings it to her mouth, bites his knuckle gently.

  “Pomegranate,” Cass says.

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “It’s good. Try some.” She takes out her knife, cuts through the thin red skin to reveal the nest of ruby seeds.

  “How do you eat it?”

  “Like this.” She mimes dropping the gemlike fruit into her mouth, pretends to chew. He laps what she’s given him up from his hand. Red juice stains his palm. He swallows and she hears a chord on the wind, faint and far away. She waits for gods, demons, a celestial host. Nothing happens. The waves crash against the beach, the sunlight falls in slats, Jason looks at her with his ice-blue eyes. He’s all yours, she thinks. Take him quick and don’t let him come back.

  “That’s good,” he says.

  “Here,” Maia says, “you have to try this,” and takes a red seed between her fingers. “Open your mouth.” Jason parts his lips. Maia puts her fingers in his mouth and pinches the seed between them and the tangy juice fills his mouth as the seed bursts and he laughs.

  “Do it again.”