Leo had long taken it for granted that he was no better than a factory hand. He was low man on the totem pole — far above him were the directors and the producers and whatever other resplendent figures hovered above them — but what a gilded pole it was! Here was this big house, and waiting in the circular driveway was his big car; a cook, big in the shoulders and wide in the waist, was in the kitchen. His wives were gone, both the first and the second. They had carried off his daughters, Lucinda with the first, Lenore with the second. Sometimes he remembered to correct the count: the first was actually the second, the second was the third. Commonplace enough in his circle, which had as many offspring from different wives as any Trobriand Islander. The true first was by now nearly a phantom — a buried episode (episode, an industry term), a whim so far in the past that it could hardly have happened. His half-forgotten marriage, and only a reckless fool would have abandoned a perfectly fine grand to a musical imbecile. The brother had made something of himself; at least he’d made money, or else married into it. In either case, a corporate mogul of sorts. The brother who had belittled him a hundred years ago, and then came groveling for a favor.
He was pacing before one of the tall front windows, tall enough to serve a cathedral. In this house everything was oversized, as if swollen by some disease. It had belonged to a deceased actor in silent films. In a locked cabinet (it had to be broken open) Leo found a collection of rubber swords and medieval-looking tunics. There were dog turds in the vestibule. The price of the house had plummeted when Leo bought it: with its ruddy Spanish roof tiles and its gaudy crenelated turrets, it had been on the market for four and a half years — the pool had been filled in after the deceased actor’s German shepherd drowned in it. Carrie, Leo’s first wife (but he meant the second), stuck it out for twenty-two months before decamping. Marie, the second (no, third) wife, lasted longer; but it was a house inhospitable to nuptial harmony. Or else the trouble was Leo; or else it was the custom of the country, that part of it facing the fickle Pacific.
Through the window he watched the little rented Ford maneuvering into the driveway behind his elongated Buick: look, she had learned to drive! — well, so had he, so distant was he from that antediluvian period of trolleys and buses and the pressing elbows of strangers in suffocating subway cars, and from the boy who boarded with his relations in the Bronx and was both confined to and prevented from practicing on his cousin’s hideous out-of-tune old upright. He was distant from that boy, and a bit beat up from the unexpectedness of things since then, but the sounds in his brain were incorruptible, it was only that somehow, somehow . . .
She was approaching the door, his massive front door with its bell that gonged like the chimes of Big Ben (the silent actor, to compensate, had given the house a set of gargantuan vocal cords), and he considered whether he ought to go himself, or have Cora come out of the kitchen to relieve him of the first difficult look: would she be embarrassed, would he? Her voice on the telephone was unfamiliar: he remembered it differently, tentative, compliant. Are human beings made inconsistent by time? Oh, she seemed nervous enough — but deliberate. She wanted something. First the brother, then the sister. As for consistency, he was the same as that distant boy in the one way that mattered most: the incorruptibility, the sublime chorusing, of the sounds in his brain. Though, to tell the truth (he sometimes told it to himself), to the savvy eye what was he? A hack, another film industry hack, no more, no less.
But not to her eye! Over it, he knew, would shimmer the veil he was accustomed to seeing, that brilliantly colored silken membrane spun out by the national, the international, the galactic wizardry of movies. Movie magic: his public name that crept in wraithlike letters across the screens of the seven continents. He had seen it, that worshipful humility, inflaming the brother’s broad powerful face, that flat hard mouth, those large lower teeth glinting with speechifying saliva: yet the man of force turned timid, fearful, ready to importune. Movie magic had him in thrall; it had every living being in thrall across the seven continents. The brother, the man of force, was impressed, daunted — though never by the grandeur of this house; no doubt his own was ten times bigger and better. It was likely that Bea too had left the tenements behind, if not very far behind — good grief, could she still be stuck in that festering school for toughs! — and when Cora led her through the acreage of vestibule and central hall to the blue lawn of carpet where he stood waiting among deep sofas (those were Carrie’s) and marble-topped tables and too many fat-bellied Chinese vases (that was Marie) and framed stills from his films and the Instrument Itself, he believed he had the satisfaction of observing a woman cowed. A woman! How bizarre to have imagined she would look the same, or nearly the same. The girl had dissolved; here was another creature altogether.
He put out his hand to get through their hellos — what else was there to do? She took it almost sleepily: her palm was hot, the fingers lax.
“I hardly recognized you,” he said, and since this was the main thing, why hide it? He didn’t think she would mind; it was simple fact.
But she was searching past him into the lavishness of wainscoting and fluted draperies and, not to be overlooked, his reasonable hospitality — Cora’s seed cakes. No trace here of the silent actor’s vociferous choices: it was Carrie overlaid with Marie.
She was steadily staring. “You’ve got another piano.”
“Another? I’ve had it for years, it’s my prize,” he said.
“It’s a lot bigger than the other one.”
“My cousin’s tinny old box, oh come on, is that what you’re thinking? Poor dim Laura, she must be out of your life by now —”
“She’s filling in for me at school, it’s how I could get away.”
“So you’re still at it,” he said.
“No, not that one, not Laura’s. The other one, the grand, I still have it, and yes, I’m still at it.”
“Teaching,” he said stupidly. He felt a perilous inquisition creeping toward him — he meant to deflect it. He was about to invite her to one of the sofas, but she had already settled into a chair with a rattan back and a tapestry seat. The tapestry was of an arched bridge. It matched the arched bridge on the fattest of the fat Chinese vases standing on the ormolu table at her elbow. He saw her turn to it, and it alarmed him that with some careless movement of her arm she might knock it off — he knew its worth. But her eye was on the other objects on this gilded surface: an ashtray (Marie was the smoker: the sofa cushions still held the latent fog of Camels), a snapshot of two children, crudely pasted onto a makeshift cardboard holder, and the book he had set down there at least half a dozen years ago.
“I see you’re reading Mann,” she said.
“Doctor Faustus, I haven’t looked into it for a while. I just like to keep it in sight. A sort of talisman.”
She picked up the photo and put it down again. “Who are they?”
“My girls. A birthday present, they made the frame themselves —”
Her look traveled all around, scanning corners, he supposed, for symptoms of little girls.
“They live away,” he said.
She seemed indifferent. Her attention was again on the Instrument. What were his girls to her? She had no daughters. It amazed him that Beatrice Nachtigall, or whatever she called herself nowadays, was at this moment sitting across from him in his own house! It had no reality, it was a chimera. It was a visit from a fossil.
“Is this one a Steinway?” she asked. “You always wanted a Steinway.”
“A Blüthner,” he said. He was reluctant, but he went on with it. “Nineteenth-century concert grand, imported from Vienna. I’m told Mahler composed his Symphony Number Six on it, it’s a treasure —”
“And do you compose on this one now? The way you used to on the other?”
So it was beginning: one of those naïve interrogations. Was it possible that she had come as a member of his awed little public, like her brother, blatant, intrusive — but if that was all, he could make do, he wo
uld surrender to it, as long as it wasn’t personal. Yet how could it not be personal? Inconceivable that this unsmiling middle-aged woman could ever have been a wife, anyone’s wife. Certainly not his! Her ankles, those shoes. Even her wrist bones. She was dry all over. Were there breasts under that wool jacket? She was dressed for New York weather.
She had mentioned the grand; it could not have been innocent that she mentioned the grand: that was personal. She had turned up for a purpose. He owed her nothing, it had been stipulated at the time that he owed her nothing — she’d been the one who was employed, he wasn’t. Her leap into his ear the evening before: how his throat went out of control, how a wisp of a yelp escaped him, but she was dispassionate, she told him merely that she’d found herself in his neighborhood, would it be convenient if she dropped in? Better to say dropped out of the sky! A woman grown foreign to his life, erased from his history, obliterated; as if never. He hadn’t given a thought to her for decades. He had no reason to speak her name.
“I remember how you used to do it,” she persisted. “You would get into a sort of sweat.”
“You don’t know anything about it, you never did —”
“Leo, I’ve been listening to you for years. Years and years.”
Ignorance steeped in flattery, was that why she was invading his house, his life?
“Look,” he said, “is this something to do with your brother? Another go-round? You told him I could do something for his kid, now it’s your turn? I can’t do anything for his kid, no matter who asks.”
It was startling to see how she reddened: it was as if he had struck her straight in the face.
“I heard about it,” she said. “That Marvin came.”
“For auld lang syne? Is that why?”
“I don’t know why. I haven’t spoken to him. I haven’t seen him. It was his own idea —”
“If you haven’t spoken to him, how did you know he was here?”
“His wife told me.”
“Your brother, his wife, their kid. The whole blasted family. Find a spot for the kid in the movie business! You can’t just show up asking for favors, Bea. You’ve got no claim on me.”
He saw that he was shaming her; it surprised him that he was ashamed of her shame. She had always defended him against her brother, she had never taken Marvin’s part. He had forgotten how much he had forgotten. It was the first time he had said her name in . . . he hardly knew how long.
“And supposing,” he said, “I did have jobs to hand out, which the devil knows I don’t — what does he imagine his kid could do in the movies? Sell gum in the lobby? Your brother thinks I’m famous, I’ve got influence, I can work miracles —”
“I haven’t come for Marvin, I don’t know what he thinks. I haven’t come for his son. It’s only because . . . because —”
“Because you think I’m famous,” he broke in.
“I heard you in London, I heard you in Paris —”
Across the seven continents!
“Those were movies,” he said. “They weren’t me.”
“Weren’t they.” It ought to have been a question, it was framed as a question; but it was a declaration. Or else she didn’t believe it, and it was ridicule, a putdown. Or worse, she did believe it — this musical imbecile thought movie music equal to opera, to symphonies! She didn’t know the industry, she didn’t know music, she didn’t know Mahler, she didn’t know the truth of the Blüthner, she didn’t know what it was to be blinded by the wilderness of the Sixth, the wound, the pain, the thud to the brain of the hammer . . . Yet she knew and she knew, and in his shame at her shame (he saw how she was ashamed of her brother, and maybe even of his son) he felt what she knew — she was there at its birth, she was its witness: it was his will she knew. His deeps, his passions, his abysses. She was the single mortal on earth who had expected him to write symphonies. Not Carrie, not Marie, and finally not even himself.
Cautiously he said, “London and Paris. You’ve been traveling then?”
“I don’t usually. Only lately. In Paris I went to Whispering Winds twice, and in New York I’ve seen it half a dozen times. I told you, I’ve been listening.”
“To contrivance. To mechanics and tricks. It can’t be the real thing, it’s not possible, they won’t let you.” He wanted to tell her they didn’t let Schönberg, not even Schönberg, they threw out Schönberg! — but if she didn’t know Mahler, how would she know Schönberg?
“No,” she said. “It’s you, Leo, I can tell.”
“You can tell! You couldn’t tell a piccolo from an oboe. That brother of yours —”
“Marvin’s unhappy, he shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“Ambitious and a fool. I take it his kid’s a nothing.”
“He won’t come home, that’s all.”
A silence opened between them. He had put her off her track, and what was her track?
He said, “Are you going to see him now?”
“I’ve seen him. In Paris.”
“Your brother’s in Paris?”
“His son is. I don’t know where Marvin is, he was in Mexico a while ago. I don’t know if I’ll see him, I don’t expect to. His wife is sick, she’s in a rest home not far from here, so I thought of you —” She stopped. The redness had ebbed. She gave him a whitened look, like a blank page. “I think of you a whole lot. More than I ought to.”
“A romantic. After all these years.” Spiteful! Why was he drawn to spite? It wasn’t Bea he was spiting.
“It’s not that. Not that, Leo. It’s that you made me think of you. You made me. Because you left it, you never came back for it.”
“The grand,” he said.
“The grand.”
“You didn’t have to keep it, what use is it to you?”
“It’s in good condition. Nobody touches it. It’s in tune, I have a piano tuner come in, I know that much.”
“You could sell it. You could’ve sold it long ago.”
A return of the reddish smudge, but only between her eyebrows. A Brahmin mark — recently he’d scored a thriller set in Calcutta.
She said, “It would have been selling your soul, wouldn’t it?” And now his spite overflowed. “Oh, I’ve done that myself, many times!”
“That’s why I go to the movies. To listen to you do it.”
He stood up. One leg was starting a cramp. The sofa was too deep, he had never liked it, it put pressure on his thighs.
“I couldn’t have stayed, Bea. That place was a cell, I was afraid if I didn’t jump I’d never get out. You wanted too much, you trusted too much. You didn’t want anything for yourself, only for me.”
“Then why didn’t you come back for it, why did you leave it?”
“I bought myself a better one.”
“Better? Because once upon a time somebody else composed a symphony on it?”
“Somebody else — as if . . . good God, you call Gustav Mahler somebody else!”
“But you didn’t. You haven’t.”
“I haven’t what, what are you talking about?”
“It’s never happened.” Her look was fierce and unfaltering; it was not the look he remembered. “There’s no symphony.”
“You’re disappointed, is that it?”
“Not for me. For you, just as you said.”
“You’re seeing too many movies, Bea. Mine especially, and believe me that’s where it’s all tremolo faking —”
“You said you’d come for it, and you never did.”
The cramp had turned vicious; his leg was hurting wildly, from calf to ankle. He watched her circle the room. His sofas, his Chinese vases, his fluted draperies, the spacious blue lawn of his carpet — he was certain she owned nothing like these. She earned a city teacher’s wage, she lived in a city flat. She was nobody’s wife: what had become of her breasts?
The lid of the Blüthner was shut. She lifted it and looked down at the keys. Did she fathom she was seeing history, seeing truth, seeing the mighty sublime? But she
was too deaf to see. She was splaying the fingers of her left hand, the right she had curled into a knob. The left plunged like a lion’s maw into the bass, the fist crashed down on the treble. The sound was tremendous, the sound was august, it was a thunder, a chorus of tragical gods, it was out of the deeps, it was out of the sky, it was hail, it was flung stones, it was majesty! It was the opening bars of the symphony he was yet to write. He stomped his foot to shake off the pain. The shame was his own.
24
THE AIR WAS thickening with early flower scents and intimations of rising heat. It was seven in the morning; Bea’s flight was at eight. She had parked the Ford directly across from Marvin’s place. His place! He had made a place for himself, and here it was — the size of it! In the Spanish style, more or less, bits of this and bits of that. Misguided geographies and scrambled histories: in some eyes it might be beautiful. She knew it was empty of wife and children — they had fled, all three. Possibly it was empty of Marvin, possibly the housekeeper came and went, and didn’t live in; possibly it was empty altogether. Leo’s mansion (from his uncle’s couch to a mansion!) was no better than a cottage next to Marvin’s — though you could hardly call it next to it. Here “around the corner” meant distance, streets that turned in circles and then turned again, grass down to the lip of the road, a dim click-click of gardeners clipping, half-hidden waver of a tennis net, driveways deep and deserted, garages set far back — miniature castles in themselves. And like a jewel laid down beside every great house, the glint of sun on water: pool after pool after pool. Each estate had nothing in common with the estate beyond it, except for the pool. Water has no past, or else it holds all pasts, and all-ness, say the philosophers of the East, is the same as nothingness. O California!
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