He knew she was referring to the case and not the music inside. The case, decorated with a Bavarian woodlands scene on a lovely cherry wood, was nothing special. The music itself was a recording by Jacqueline du Pres.
She saw the look on his face. “Well, I can’t help but wonder, Eli—why not Bach?”
Why not Bach indeed?
***
Minuet
Five times in six—no, perhaps, nine times in ten—Nan practiced the Bach suite. Eli seldom entered the house without hearing it cascading down the stairs, spilling into the dining room, tumbling into the kitchen. If she wasn’t playing it herself, she was listening to her many recordings.
“Cellists spend their whole life deciding on the correct reading of this piece,” his mother explained to him in a hushed phone call. “Attaining a correct balance between the romantic and the scholarly interpretation—and what exactly that interpretation is—is the constant debate. Some say Bach wrote his suites much like one would publish mathematical theorems.” She paused. “Is she playing it now?” He held the phone up. “I think she’s leaning toward the more aesthetic approach. Interesting but predictable. No one can say she suffers a lack of restraint.”
“We’ve been married for three years,” he said. “In all that time, she has never once played outside this house, Mother. If she only plays for herself, is it anything more than self-gratification?”
He could feel his mother freeze. “I don’t think we can consider Nan’s music in those terms,” she finally said. “You don’t understand, Eli. Not being a musician. And although you’re a talented photographer, I don’t think you share our obsession.” This was clearly meant as a slight, but he was long inured to such observations from his mother. “Maybe Nanette is your obsession.”
He shrugged this off. “I do understand what complete self-absorption is. When I picture her, it’s always with that instrument in front of her.” He thought again of Nan as a centaur—of an illustration of cracked spacings. If he found a way to separate Nan from her cello, would she lose the thing that defined her? Would she be irreparably incomplete, broken?
“Maybe it’s you who has the problem,” his mother repeated. “Be glad she cares about something more than shopping trips, decorating, or making obscene amounts of money.” She sighed. “And I think you need to examine this: how is Nan different now from the girl you were attracted to eight years ago? Didn’t you, in a sense, create her? Are you incomplete without her? Is she the product of submerging your own ambition to someone else’s?”
She babbled on about how they shouldn’t have taken away his violin, shouldn’t have sent him to Oberlin, should have introduced him instead to a nice fourth grade teacher
“I think you should look for a job,” Eli told Nan later. “You could teach, work for a non-profit even. You need to get out of the house. Live more in the real world.” Having children was beyond her capacity for nurturing. He understood that.
“I didn’t realize we needed a second salary,” she said, putting down her cup of Oolong. “I thought we had an understanding…”
“That understanding was based on the idea you’d perform. I had no idea—”
“And I will perform,” she snapped at him. “As soon as I’m ready. Madame Giroux thinks next spring. I have the brochure for the local spring music season at the arts center. They’re inviting guest performances.” She opened a drawer and withdrew it, slapping it down on the table.
He took the brochure and looked at the section she’d circled in red. A quick scan made it clear it was meant for high school, or, at best, college-aged musicians. Not a cellist who’d now studied her instrument for more than fifteen years.
“You underestimate yourself,” he said tiredly.
That night when he passed her music room, he was sure he saw her face intersected by the strings. Near the peg box, they seemed to bite into her. Cruelly even. Should a string snap, she could be seriously injured. Her cello, one he himself had purchased from an excellent luthier, was taking on the size of a bass fiddle in his head.
***
Gigue
The Bach Suite was playing when Eli came back from Chicago. He could hear it on the street now that the windows were open. Several neighbors seemed to be listening from their stoops. He wished he could make Nan understand the pleasure they took in her music, the look of joy on their faces as they listened. Maybe then she’d find the courage to play on stage.
But, strangely, when he came inside, he found her in bed, the CD player turned off. She looked dead. “Men only kill the thing they love,” went through his head. The poem Wilde had written in jail.
“Nan,” he said softly. And then he said it a bit louder. “NAN.”
She sat up suddenly—like a puppet whose strings had been yanked. And it was all right then. He lay down beside her and together they absorbed the silence, entwined their fingers, tangled the sheets, and slept. She seemed to sense they needed a rest from it—from whatever it was lurking in the music room. For a week or two, she left the house with him for various events. A concert, a play, a dinner with some business associates. She seemed normal if tired; their life was ordinary for once. But normal for most people wasn’t normal for Nan when you thought about it.
And however he defined normalcy, this period was short-lived. He came home to silence again but knew his wife was in the house because her coat was on the coat rack, her keys on the hall table. At first, he thought the music room was empty. It took several seconds before he saw her face, looking plaintively out at him from behind the bridge of the cello. Her skin seemed to be part of the wood, layered onto it in some ineffable way. Marquetry perhaps. The cracked spacings had merged.
“How did you get in there?”
The strings, which cut across her face earlier, now seemed to imprison her. Her cries for help seemed to spring out of the blasted f-holes—cello-like in sound. The entire instrument was a prison. Why hadn’t he seen it before? When had the cello taken control? When had she submitted to it? Why had he allowed it?
“Don’t worry, my darling. It won’t take more than a minute to free you.”
He looked around wildly for a suitable implement to destroy the thing that jailed her, thinking suddenly how difficult, how painful, how necessary such a separation was. Surely she would understand if she could speak, imprisoned, as she was, that he was doing it for her
A Lamb of God
The first time Kyle Murmer’s mother tried to kill him, he was nine. But he couldn’t remember a day before or after that when he didn’t worry about it. At night, he asked God to smite her, but he had no hope this would happen. And it did not.
“Let me see your teeth.” Her voice cut through the sound of running water in the shower as she shoved the plastic curtain aside.
Her left hand held his chin like a vise as the right one forced his mouth open. Her personal supply of dental tools twinkled fiercely from the transparent case that hung from her neck.
“People not much older than you have lost all their teeth.”
The desire to bite down on her fingers was nearly overpowering as she pulled him out of the bathtub and onto the floor.
On days like this, when she got up early enough for a frenzied completion of household chores, she hadn’t taken her medication. On good mornings, the ones when the perphenazine made her sleep late, his father fixed them a bowl of cereal and they tiptoed out of the house, sharing an embarrassed smile.
She was waiting for him when he came home from school in the October of fourth grade. Hair curled, makeup applied perfectly, neatly dressed in a khaki skirt and white blouse, she wrapped pantyhose around his neck. It happened with such speed and precision, he wondered if she’d practiced on the back of a kitchen chair.
“Where have you been?”
Her nails were inches from his face, and beads of spit, scented with dental wash, shot
into his eyes. He wasn’t surprised. His life seemed exactly like a place where such things might happen. A place where mothers might practice lassoing kids in their off-hours.
“At school.”
“Liar,” she said, dragging him around the kitchen by his neck. “The Devil has you in his grip.”
“I was at school,” he repeated, trying to wait out this bad stretch. Survive it.
That’s what his father always called it—a bad stretch. Bad stretches happened regularly at the Murmer house. Kyle and his father were always waiting for the other shoe to fall—another phrase his father used a lot.
“They called and said you weren’t there. Said your desk was empty, no coat on your hook.”
“That was on Monday.” His throat was so dry that his voice scratched it.
Her eyes looked like the dead blooms on an African violet and a sort of eggy smell began to exude from her mouth.
“You forgot to call the attendance line and they called here. That was on Monday,” he repeated.
Her grip on the pantyhose loosened. Then she was sitting at the table, collapsed and sobbing. “Don’t tell your father. I wanted to lift you up to God.” She raised her arms and he tried hard not to flinch. Her arms dropped on the table with an awful thud.
But he did tell his father; how could he not?
“Let me see your neck.” His father ran a light finger over the bruises. “Your mother means well, but she gets confused. Must’ve been a hormonal thing. Maybe the thought of having another kid just broke her. Probably flushed her meds.”
Another kid? No one had told Kyle. In fact, he understood none of what his father had said, but knew he’d have to be even more careful.
His father also told Kyle he’d also found signs she’d tried to kill the baby. “Concoctions she must have mixed at her office.”
At the Church of the Living God, birth control devices were forbidden—an impediment to the holy duty of women to bear as many children as possible. Children were the lambs of God. Abortion would mean expulsion from the Church. With just one child, the Murmers were frowned on. Encouraged to do more for the Lord.
When Kyle was sixteen, his mother attacked him while he slept. Her fists were hammers on his head. She wielded a small knife and tried to carve Aramaic words into his forehead.
“The devil will flee once you’re marked.” She’d flattened a crumpled piece of paper with the proper marks to copy on his bedside table. A flashlight shone on it.
His mother was jailed for several weeks, and he went to school with two strange marks on his forehead. Nobody asked about them. Such things were not unheard of at his school.
“This can’t happen again,” his father said.
Kyle wasn’t sure if his father meant the scarring or his mother’s imprisonment.
Kyle began college in Ann Arbor and never came home if he could help it.
“I have to work at the library over the break,” he told them. “I need to study for finals. I’m helping out at my church.” The last was a lie. He’d given God a chance and wouldn’t again.
“Kyle.” It was his sister, Jolene, whispering on the phone. “Mom thinks I’m having sex. I don’t—I don’t even know what having sex means.”
Lambs of God didn’t need such information. Information led to experimentation, ruin.
“I’m locked in my room. She’s looking for a way in.”
He borrowed a car and drove home, feeling more and more nauseated as he neared the house. His mother was in the garage, looking through his father’s tools.
“Kyle,” she said. “Can you help me find something to jimmy a lock? I hate to use a blowtorch. The wood’s a fine oak. Maybe we can remove it with a screwdriver.”
Her eyes were fixed and dull, dead moths again. The torch was in her hands. “Jolene doesn’t understand I’m trying to lift her up to God.” She looked at him closely. “Like I did with you.” She smiled beatifically.
He put out his hand, and she gave him the blowtorch. He used it without hesitation, watching her cheap acrylic blouse go up in a flash, her face melt away. Her screams seemed inconsequential coming from a black hole as they did.
She was cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.
He didn’t try to deny it when the police arrived, didn’t try to run or to hide. He’d heard about Judgment Day often enough to recognize it when it came.
The Higher the Heels
The Night Owl was a blue-collar bar, and although Cara Willis had discarded both that look and the social status, she often stopped in after work. She’d paid less than three hundred dollars for the navy suit she wore tonight, but it looked damned good, as did the one-hundred-dollar haircut, and the gym-trim body. The higher the heels, the higher your sales numbers, someone had told her ten years earlier when she first got her license.
The guy directly across from her at the horseshoe bar was exceptionally cute. She noticed this gradually since the lighting wasn’t great. He was the type she was a sucker for, skinny build, wavy dark hair swept back, tight jeans, one discreet tattoo curling out of his tee shirt. He was drinking a beer. Perfect. Solitary whiskey drinkers were likely to be alkies. She made eye contact, and a few minutes later, the bartender delivered her a second G & T. She smiled encouragement as the guy began his slow slide around the bar. His approach was like a mating dance, and she felt pins and needles in her feet as she got ready to tango.
More than once over the course of her pathetic dating history, a quick trip to her place or his had resulted in disease, a missing purse, a cab ride home paid for by her, a black eye. And on one dismal night, she spent a half hour sticking an eyedropper filled with medicine inside a cat’s mouth while the doofus she was with pried it open. She’d come away with some minor wounds, but her itch never got scratched.
New Guy arrived at the empty stool to her right.
“Joey Rinaldi,” he said, not offering a hand. So he wasn’t just dressed the part of a blue-collar guy. White-collars always went for the handshake. Sometimes they even moved in for a hug, a definite no-no.
“Cara Willis.” She patted the stool beside her, and he took it, lazily sliding his ass back and forth. “Gonna sit down on that seat or polish it?”
For a minute, she thought he wasn’t going to get it. Damn. Another double-digit IQ had slipped into her life. But then he smiled, showing white teeth. Relieved, she took a long sip. She had a penchant for choosing men of limited intelligence. So many good-looking guys were either gay or dumb. Did good looks accompany a low IQ?
“Hey, I remember you,” he said suddenly, pointing a finger at her and shaking it. “Realtor, right? You were showing a property I thought about buying a year or two ago. Over on Washington Lane? Around eight hundred square feet? Needed a lot of electrical work? Remember? Come on—you remember—the wires were dangling?”
She did remember: a small storefront perfect for selling ice cream, which is how it ended up.
“The people that bought it sell TCBY.”
“I repair jewelry,” he said. “Make some from time to time too. I was thinking of starting my own business back then. That was before things went bust, of course. Now I just work for the man.”
“The man?” She stirred the ice with her finger and licked it.
He shrugged. “Anyone other than me.”
“And you don’t like that, right?”
“Right.” He twisted the ring on his finger. It had a blue stone and looked expensive.
“Did you make that?” She nodded toward his hand.
“Nah. It was a gift. I like to make more delicate things.”
She never finished the second drink. It was inevitable since she was a sucker for scrawny guys with witty banter, and his came close enough.
Her place turned out to be the closer one. She was leery of
following strange men home anyway. Their filthy apartments were a turnoff. Unnervingly clean ones were worse. One guy stripped the bed before she left the bedroom. Earlier, she’d thought their shower together was foreplay, not a prerequisite.
Joey was good in the sack. So good, in fact, it made her worry. She was a six plus at best. He was like a nine, she thought, looking him over in the lamplight. And half a dozen years younger than her. It was childish that she still assigned a number to men she dated, and that the rating was based solely on looks—at least at first. At some point, that first evening, she lost the upper hand.
Nine got up from the bed and roamed around, picking things up. “This you in high school?” He put the photo down. “So what’s your story?”
She shrugged. “Nothing much to it. I sell properties—as you know. I belong to a book club and vote Democratic, but don’t tell my boss. I like pistachio ice cream, summer carnivals with phony midway games and dangerous rides, and the Pixies.”
“Like fairies?”
“They’re a musical group. Or were.”
No sign of interest. Or was he too young?
“Realtors must know more about what goes on behind closed doors than most people.”
“That would be home sales,” she said. “I rarely get involved in those. They’re a pain in the ass because everyone thinks their home is worth more than it is if they’re selling, and less than it is if they’re buying. Businessmen are more realistic.”
“I bet you made a pretty penny on the one I missed out on.”
Cara shrugged. She couldn’t remember what her commission was but certainly nothing special.
“So they put an ice cream parlor in that place?” He shook his head. “Ice cream that profitable?”
Why the hell was he so interested?
Reading her mind, he said, “It would’ve been perfect for me. A great space for a nice little pawnshop.” He stroked the hair on his chest, and she shivered.
“Thought you said jewelry?” she said, pulling herself together.
I Bring Sorrow_And Other Stories of Transgression Page 14
