“Years ago, with the Boston Symphony,” he went on, low and calm. “I don’t remember what it was, but I remember how you played.”
She forced herself to look at him. His eyes swam with light, like the fabulous jeweled orbs of a dragon in a cave. They examined every millimeter of her face and hair.
“I grew up in their youth orchestra,” she explained. “They were just being nice to me.”
His face relaxed in soft lines like a child’s. “I don’t think that was it. There was a certain quality to how you played, very unusual in a young girl, or an American of any age. Something . . . mysterious. Americans usually want everything explained, everything simple, a simple story about good and evil. But Boston was right, if they heard something else in you.”
She changed the subject, asked him where he lived in France. He told her it was a medieval village in the mountains of Languedoc with no electricity or running water. His children had been born there, and he had delivered them himself, assisted by a local midwife all in black. He made no mention of a wife, just said “we” once or twice. Since rehearsal that morning, his hair had been mowed short, but it still tried to curl, in bent blades like trampled grass. A few whorls of hair seemed to grow from his earlobes, floating toward his shoulders like prayer curls, and Margy furtively examined them. But even they looked beautiful to her.
“I need someone to talk to,” he said, looking into her eyes. “Someone like you, who answers back. We must see each other often. We will be allies.”
Margy went home stunned and couldn’t sleep. Next day, everyone talked about him. Desperate dad, they said. His wife had lately left him and moved to Chicago, taking his small sons. That was why he had agreed to play with them. His wife was from an old Chicago family, beautiful, the rumor said, taller than Michael, and a snob, named Carter Arlington. He was coming to Chicago now as often as he could, camping in a studio across the street from his wife’s place in Lincoln Park and sharing custody.
Two days after the benefit, Margy passed him on a street near her apartment, with his little boys, holding their hands. They were maybe three and five, tender, serious, alert, and when they saw their father watching Margy cross the street, they stretched up on their toes to look at her, necks as delicate as flower stems.
“A nice man,” she said to Calvin when he asked, despite the shrewd look he was giving her. She did not see Michael again that spring, though she often went for walks in the park near his block. A few months later, he sent her two postcards, one from Languedoc and one from Paris, where he’d played a benefit (“Rachmaninoff again. I thought of you”).
And in the fall he came back to play with them, five concerts of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, and Borodin, all in his dazzling way. In rehearsal, everyone she talked to seemed a little bit in love with him. She was only one of them, another starstruck junior violinist, nothing more.
After his first concert, she loitered as she changed out of her slinky blacks, hoping not to see him in the hall, until the locker room was empty and lights were starting to go out. But when she finally emerged, he was still there, talking to the concert master near the stairs, and he stepped into her path with unexpected speed.
“Are you in a hurry? Can you talk? Have coffee, maybe, or a beer?”
She drove him up to Lincoln Park in the aged Volkswagen convertible she’d lately bought, with a windshield that iced up from the inside in wintertime, and stopped off at a former speakeasy, where Renaissance paintings were grainily projected onto screens and the tape deck played a scratchy loop of the late Romantic repertoire. Michael ordered pints of ale and scrutinized her face.
“Tell me everything about your life,” he said, smiling. “Are there men who hate you because you broke their hearts? Are there men you haven’t seen for years but still think of ? What are you afraid of most? What do you love?”
Margy vibrated as she watched him, strong hands that had mesmerized a thousand people earlier that night resting on the table, cuffs pushed up exposing hairy wrists. She tried to think of things she loved. Italian shoes and Japanese jazz. Caillebotte and Chagall, Camus. Puccini, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff. Venice, Florence, parts of France.
“I love Languedoc,” she cried, a sudden rush of feeling overcoming her, though all she could remember of the place was a wash of sun in a café, a beach with white-rock mountains rising cool behind. Half delirious, she cast about for something more to praise, and landed on a city two hundred miles away. “I love the Gaudis in Barcelona. I love Picasso. I love cassoulet!”
Michael watched her, eyes alight. He plucked a strand of fuzzy hair out of her face, precisely, not touching the skin.
She was too shy to ask him much, except about his music and his children, neutral things. A few facts he volunteered. As a kid he had been bored with school, rode the subway to Manhattan and picked pockets on Fifth Avenue, masquerading once when caught as a war orphan from Germany, parents killed in concentration camps. When he got tired of that, he learned to put the wallets back into the pockets where he found them, or chase the victim down and hand it back, refusing a reward.
“Wallets are too easy,” he said. “I decided to go after bigger things. Some of them are actually too easy too.”
“Like what?”
He pressed his lips together, as if satisfied. “Another time. I’m afraid I must be off now, home. I’ll walk from here.”
“I’ll take you,” she said, startled, unwilling to let him go.
He looked at her gently. “All right.”
She knew exactly where he lived, having looked him up in the phone book. But he directed her to the block before his own.
“This is my corner,” he said intensely. “Is it? Yes!”
She stopped the car, but he made no move to leave, and they talked another hour in the dark.
She made no plans with Calvin after the rest of Michael’s concerts. But after the next three, he disappeared before she came out of the locker room. On the day of his last one, an early snow began to fall, and by evening it had turned into a blizzard. The concert was not canceled, and they played to a diminished crowd, the hall smelling of wet wool and cold snow. Even sealed inside, they could feel the silence past the walls, piling on the roof, and they played more subtly, every note a trespass in a quiet deep as sleep.
When it was over, and she was suited up in jeans and boots, Michael was in the hall. Without a word he touched her arm, and she quickly turned, walked close beside him past assorted members of the orchestra, up the stairs, and out the door.
Streets and buildings had been smothered under snow. Not a vehicle was moving on the avenue, quiet as a country field, mounds of white gleaming over a hundred cars abandoned in midstreet. Snow was still coming down, straight and fast and silent, and streetlights lit it from above in high white domes, like ghostly Arcs de Triomphe in the windless air.
“It could be Paris!” Margy cried, bounding through the drifts, dangerously happy to be out with him. “That’s where we are, in Paris, from this minute on!”
It was no use trying to drive. Instead they tracked across fresh fields of six-lane thoroughfares, snow leaking in their boots and clumping in their eyelashes. Bearlike in his army jacket, Michael humped along in meditative, bobbing strides, as if he thought the act of walking were a touch ridiculous. Here and there a taxi skidded by, and one began to spin, graceful, in slow motion, like ballet for cars.
“It’s like Fasching,” Margy said. “Or Mardi Gras or carnaval, all the rules suspended for a night. Why don’t we do that in this country, ever? Except when there’s a flood, or the Cubs win the Series?”
Dancing ahead, she spun around, dropped to her knees in the snow, and flung glittering handfuls into the air, letting them sift coldly down on her.
“Don’t you hate rules? Brush your teeth! Love your neighbor! Three-four time!”
Michael ploddingly caught up with her. “Rules are good. Without them, we would never feel like this.”
Margy loo
ked up, laughed breathlessly. We, he said. We feel like this. She stayed on her knees, hands full of snow.
“You mean it feels so good when they stop? Thanks very much. I’ll take the feeling, hold the masochism.”
“No, you won’t, because you’re a musician, and you know.”
Pulling off his gloves, he started brushing snow out of her hair, gently, with a musing face, as if not noticing what he was doing.
“The end result may sound like bursting into song, but you know you spent a year on the fingering. Where would the passion be without the three-four time?”
Shivering at the feel of his hands, she stayed on her knees until he stopped. Slowly she stood up in front of him, champagne explosions in her body sharpening to sting. He looked down at her coat, and seemed to study it.
“Look at you. You’re a mess.”
Smiling slightly, as if amused at himself, he began to brush the snow off, lightly touching through the heavy wool with his bare fingertips all down the front of her, as if she were his wife, or his child.
He hailed a cab that night and put her in it by herself. He disappeared, and did not write to her. She tried to practice, tried to sleep. The season had only just begun, and she had to be on top of at least three pieces every week, some of them world premieres, tough contemporary works commissioned for the CSO and new to everyone. For one she had to learn to land on sixteen double-stops in nine measures, while playing out of sync with the row in front of her. For another she had to meet with just the strings to practice flipping down their bows to rap them on the music stands, then up to stroke on the next beat, over and over like a squadron of baton twirlers. She had rehearsal almost every day, concerts half the nights, and practice the remainder of the time.
One Sunday morning in December, she opened the New York Times, and Michael was on the cover of the magazine. On a bench by a grand piano, in his usual old cardigan, he had flashed the camera a blazing look, and there it was. Feverishly she read the article. World-Class Pianist, Ultra-Private Life, Devoted Family Man. Pictures of him with his kids. Quotes from things he’d said. Yes, he liked Rachmaninoff, but in general he preferred the older repertoire.
“Imposing formal restrictions on a piece is like monogamy,” he’d told the interviewer. “All of us have lots of erotic opportunities. But I restrict myself to only one, for the sake of order, and for certain emotional benefits. In music, the point of departure is always the maximum degree of passion. But the control has to be there too, to make it sing. You only hear the sweetest songs when you’re listening through barbed wire.”
Agitated, Margy paced the apartment, read the quotes again. Did he feel he had to say this to her, in a public newspaper? Was he back together with his wife? She searched the article, but did not find a single word about his marriage.
It could not hurt, she decided, to write him a note, let him know she understood. Getting out paper and pen, she didn’t have to think about what to say. She wrote fast, as if in a trance, crossing nothing out.
“Of course you’re right,” she wrote. “The point of departure is always a maximum degree of passion, and we think we accept the restrictions with regret. But in fact they may enhance the passion, and a person who devotes her life to music may be in love with exactly that. It’s thrilling to know how well you see this, though it makes me feel a little naked.”
Even the wildest break with form still made up its own rules, she noted blandly at the end, and mentioned her favorite Japanese jazz musician. Did Michael know his work? Sealing the letter in an envelope, she addressed it to his place in Chicago, walked it to the corner mailbox, dropped it in.
Hours later, as she was practicing, a thought passed over her. What was that she had written to him? “Naked,” “thrilling,” “in love.” Had she said that? She held her breath, and saw an image of her body leaping from the window.
She shook the image off. Michael had said they would be allies. He would understand.
Months went by without a reply, through winter into spring. On a warm May afternoon, she stepped onto a busy street near her apartment, and realized that Michael was walking toward her in the crosswalk, with a young blond woman she had never seen.
“The answer is no,” he called as soon as he saw her. “What was the question?”
Margy felt her body blush down to the toes.
“Never mind,” she said, and walked past them fast, the blond girl watching her. She was about eighteen, leggy in a short black dress and long blond ponytail.
“No, no!” his voice behind her called out urgently. “What was it? Please! I just can’t remember.”
Reaching the curb, Margy looked back. Rooted in the middle of the street, he stood holding out his arms. Above his head the orange signal flashed, WAIT, WAIT. Quickly she yelled back the stupid question she had asked, about the Japanese jazz musician.
“Ah,” he called, nodding. “That’s right.” Waving pleasantly above his head, he turned and walked away with the blond.
A baby-sitter, she decided late that night, tossing in her bed. Why hadn’t she thought of that? He had talked about how hard it was to find them, and how he looked with avaricious eyes at every young person he met, wondering how they’d be with his kids. She got up, read his interview again. He was a good man, serious and fatherly. She believed in him.
A few weeks later, on a hot June afternoon, she was staring at a pile of kumquats in the fruiterer’s, too depressed to imagine eating anything, when she felt a sudden tingling down her skin. There he was an inch away, examining her as if she were a rare and beautiful object. In a panic, she tried to turn away. (Thrilling. Naked. The answer is no.) But his fingers closed on her bare arm as furtively he checked the store.
“Come with me. I know a spot.”
He led her to a tall grove in the park, where they sat on the grass with their shoes off, both of them in shorts, bare legs an inch apart. They talked for three hours, about music and musicians, who they knew.
“So who are your lovers anyway?” he demanded. “Any pianists I know? I bet some of them are conductors.”
“No, nobody,” she said and blushed. “No lovers at all.”
He glanced at her skeptically, but then relaxed, seemed reassured. He looked thinner, in a polo shirt with a hole in one sleeve, his limbs as graceful as a boy’s. His eyes crept over her. When a leaf soared from a tree and landed in her hair, he extracted it and smoothed the place where it had been, fingers lingering.
“Piano envy,” Calvin said. Margy had once wanted to be a pianist herself, take up the whole stage instead of droning in the background with the other violins, like bees in an orchard on a summer afternoon. But her hands had always been too small.
“Any famous pianists in here?” he said archly, coming into her apartment, and cast his eyes around. They were going to a used-clothing store to pursue his lifelong search for a propeller beanie and an intact pair of spats. Margy had on a dress with a short skirt, and he eyed her skeptically.
“Your thighs are the most Venusian part of you,” he said. “But best to keep them covered up. For the mystery, you know.” Taking hold of her skirt, he tugged it firmly down.
She started seeing his therapist, but he only wanted to talk about her father, and the next one she tried sat in frozen
Viennese silence for three months. Finally she found a woman whom she liked, and they went over all the possibilities. Masochism, poor self-image, guilt. Freud was just no help. He always accused some young woman of being in love with an older man. That was the reason why she’d lost the use of her right arm, or fallen mute, and if she’d just admit it, she’d be fine. But Margy knew she was in love with Michael Sein.
“I’m in love with Michael Sein,” she said, over and over, lying on the couch. It didn’t seem to help.
In February, he came back to play with them again, and he was suddenly less popular with the symphony. Rumor had it that he’d tried to change the program he would play.
“A certain man
ipulative bastard,” was how the concert master now referred to him, and everyone knew who he meant.
Michael waited for her after each rehearsal and concert, and they went out for lunch or dinner or a beer. He also asked to see her now on other nights, took her to an opera or a play. Sitting next to him in a dark hall, the space between their shoulders charged like electrons inside a bomb, she hardly noticed what was happening on stage. But every evening ended the same way. They parked a whole block from his home and talked another hour in the dark.
“Maybe he’s gay,” Calvin said, eyebrows wiggling up and down. “Maybe I should give him a call?”
He still had never said a word about his wife, though he often spoke with delight about his children. Margy didn’t ask, sure that he would talk about his marriage when he wanted to.
Once when he said “we,” she blanked out for a moment, and asked, “Who?”
“Carter,” he said slowly, a look of wonder on his face.
“Oh,” said Margy, trying not to feel dumb.
A few nights later, as she arrived at Orchestra Hall, he was being dropped off in a new Lincoln. The driver was only a dark shape inside, but even yards away Margy could hear her yell at him in a high and furious voice.
“You don’t have to tell me that. You think you can just—”
The shouting swelled as Michael stepped out of the car, dimmed as he slammed the door. Meditatively he bobbed away, not looking back. A moment later he noticed Margy, and his face lit with delight.
“See you afterward?” he said, tipping back his head to beam into her eyes.
She dreamed that she was trying on his wife’s wedding ring, and Michael saw her and did not mind. She dreamed they ran away in a Volkswagen van, pursued by guerrillas, escaped across an open sewer on rusty pipes. When they made it to the other side, Michael leaned his face down close to hers.
Angels Go Naked Page 5
