Body & Soul

by Frank Conroy

"Yes, I know. Me too." Claude thought about it for a while. "Maybe ... maybe he wanted to use the bits and pieces the way other people use notes. We all use notes, he used chunks. Maybe that was it."

  "What about irony? Some people think—he was an odd man, they say—irony. Keeping his distance."

  "I don't know," Claude said. "Yeah, maybe, but I don't know. It's really strange."

  Now, in London, after a morning of playing in the practice room, Claude sat in the first row of the auditorium (built like a bowl, really) listening to Mr. Dove working with the orchestra on the lento fourth movement.

  "Violas. That's a full eighth note. Why are you bouncing off it? It's a full eighth note. La dum, dum, dee dum. All right?"

  It became apparent that Mr. Dove enjoyed an intimate and unusually efficient relationship with the orchestra. They rapidly understood what he wanted. In many cases they recognized it when Claude couldn't, played it, and only then did Claude see—oh, that's what he meant. Over the years Claude had attended innumerable rehearsals, mostly with student orchestras, thrown-together ensembles, or regional orchestras around the United States. He was used to a certain amount of horseplay, good-natured (mostly) jibing, stalling, pleading, and argument. American orchestras sometimes seemed determined to show how democratic they were. This one was all business. The players were highly disciplined. Claude knew they were a self-governing organization, but when it came to playing they seemed an extension of Mr. Dove's will. Or perhaps it was the perhaps he was an extension of their collective will. In any case since they would be playing Claude's music, and since their sound was lush, balanced, and smooth, he was happy at what he saw and heard They were very much together.

  Mr. Dove called a fifteen-minute break and surprised Claude by coming over. He perched on the armrest of a nearby seat.

  "It's a gorgeous sound," Claude said. "They're scarily good."

  "What do you think Ives meant by the end?" Mr. Dove asked. "After the bugle call, that shocking last chord?"

  "It's a puzzler," Claude said. "And it wasn't in the original score."

  "He was just about your age."

  "I guess the question is whether it's a synthesis, a kind of prophetic use of dissonance as the only way to put all the themes together and rise above them, or whether he's thumbing his nose at us."

  "Precisely. One doesn't have to know, but it's interesting."

  "I can see both sides. You know, he's so Brahmsy sometimes, so romantic it could be mockery. On the other hand, how could he catch that spirit so well if he didn't love it?" Claude shrugged helplessly. "I've never been able to figure him out."

  "The younger players think it was prophecy," Mr. Dove said, nodding toward the stage. "The older players think he was cocking his snoot."

  Claude laughed. "That figures."

  He sat in the kitchen, at the same small table where yesterday Jennie had worked with her coloring book. Catherine was at the stove waiting for the kettle to boil.

  "I was so lucky," Catherine said, speaking of her mentor. "For some reason we just hit it off right away at the very first meeting. She's tops in the period, by the way, and for a woman to achieve that in this country is not easy."

  "How old is she?"

  "Seventy. Part of it is passing on the torch. She got me in, she got me the scholarship, she did everything. I can never repay her."

  The kettle whistled and she made a pot of tea. She opened the half-sized refrigerator for a pint bottle of milk. Claude could see a stick of butter, a cabbage, a small bottle of jam, and a single potato. Other than that, it was empty. He wondered if there was any connection between the extreme simplicity of her life and the monasteries she read about. Was she doing penance or was she simply poor? If she was poor, why was she poor?

  "You people are rich," he said bluntly, wanting to demystify at least one enigma. "Why do you live this way?"

  "This is the way students live."

  "I know, but..."

  "If you mean my mother and Dewman, I would never ask them. I take a small amount of child support from my ex, which is only fair. And as I said, he pays for the school because he wants a fancy school. Fine." Her eyes glinted with a flash of anger. "He doesn't like the way we live? Too bad. He shouldn't have moved his mistress into the next apartment."

  "He what?" Claude was dumbfounded. To have a woman like this and..."Was he crazy?"

  "No, no." She sighed and seemed to relax. "Silly, that's all. Shallow." She waved a hand to dispense with the subject.

  "So what do you live on?" He regretted the question before it was out of his mouth, but she reacted as if it were of no importance.

  "Three hundred a month from my father's estate."

  "Lady had a five-million-dollar trust fund."

  She smiled faintly. "From another side of the family."

  "Oh, yes. Of course," he said, feeling stupid.

  She poured him some tea, and he looked up to find she was suddenly weeping. She held herself erect, poured her own tea, and carried on as if nothing were happening. Almost immediately the tears stopped. She wiped her cheeks with a paper napkin.

  He leaned forward. "I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have brought up—"

  "No, no," she said. "It's Jennie. It always happens." She stirred sugar into her tea. "A reflex."

  The sight of her tears had both frightened him and prompted a great lurch in his chest, a wave of protectiveness urging him to some kind of action. Now he realized their cause had been hidden from him. She seemed to exist at different levels, all of them running simultaneously, some visible and some not. He wanted to press his head against hers, to put skull to skull and press until the bones melted and their brains flowed together. He wanted to look out from her eyes.

  She had recovered herself completely and they sat in silence. He was aware that she was watching him. She got up abruptly and cleared the tea things. For a moment, the warm water running over her hands, she had one of her whiteouts, her body motionless, her soul out on some astral journey. Then she finished up.

  He knew what was going to happen when she took his hand and led him out of the room. Something snapped inside him and waves of heat cascaded through his body. His vision closed down at the edges, so that her head and shoulders were all he saw. In the hall she put her arms around his neck and kissed him, a long, gentle, full kiss that obliterated all other sensation. When she moved her head back, breaking it off, she gave a long, voluptuous sigh as if she had been in pain, and now, instantly, it was gone. Her dark eyes were fully dilated, almost totally black, and seemed to look right through him.

  In the front room she left the overhead light off, switched on the electric fire, and sank to the prayer rug. He stood for a moment in the gloom, his mind racing in a blur, his senses quickening to an impossible level. The carbon bars turned red. She raised her arm to urge him down and he sank to his knees and embraced her.

  In the pale rose glow she removed his jacket as she slipped her tongue between his lips. She unbuttoned his shirt and pressed her cheek against his breastbone. Dizzy with the taste of her, the scent of her hair, the smooth warmth of her neck, he undressed her as she undressed him. They did it easily, their hands deft, as if they'd done it a thousand times before. Their open nakedness seemed miraculous, a gift from heaven stealing their breath away.

  For three nights and two days they made love. The first time, on the rug, he had followed her lead, moving in the wake of her certitude, amazed at her strength, awed at the depth of her surrender to the forces driving them. He rapidly understood that for her—and very quickly for himself—what was happening was a way to get beyond the body (as, in music, Fredericks had taught him to go over the wall). Passion was a force to be fed, eagerly and gratefully fed like some hungry angel with them in the room possessed of the power to lift them out of themselves. Out of the body, out of the world to some deep blue otherness where their souls would join, in and with the blue. Sailing along together in the blue, the blue insupportable to a soul alone. Which c
annot be known alone.

  The second time, in the big bed in the back room, he was her equal. Deep, deep in his innermost self he felt dormant selves awake and move forward into completeness, as if he were a vessel only now realizing its destiny to be filled. He laughed and cried at the same time and she covered his face with kisses. Afterward, resting, his head beside hers, he suddenly heard the sound of a horse-drawn wagon going by on the street. The sound was receding and he realized he had been temporarily deaf. At that precise moment she said, "Listen, how the world comes back." And Claude was changed forever.

  Late afternoon. They lay spooning under the sheets. The small dim room held them. Stacks of books. A dresser with a cracked mirror. Two stuffed bears of Jennie's.

  "There isn't a line on your face," she said.

  "There will be if you don't marry me."

  She kissed the back of his neck. "I'm too old for you."

  "What do you mean? We're almost the same age."

  "I can see you when you're forty-five. Famous, good looking, confident, you'll have some fabulous girl on your arm. Twenty-five. Thirty, maybe." (This was in fact precisely what would happen.) Her tone was not playful, but neither was it sad. She was simply stating a fact.

  "No, no," he sighed impatiently.

  "Yes, yes," she said. "That's the way it works."

  "Who says?"

  "Christ!" She jumped up. "Tomorrow's Sunday. I have to run to the shop." She got out of bed and picked up her clothes from the floor—slacks and a sweater—her dark-nippled breasts swinging ever so slightly. He reached out and touched her thigh.

  "I'll come with you."

  "I've got you where I want you," she said. "Stay right there. It won't take a sec."

  He drank in the sight of her. When she pulled the sweater over her head he lunged forward, caught her around the waist, and slipped the point of his tongue into her navel. She arched back, the sweater covering one breast now, and with both hands pulled his head in even tighter. "Ah, my hungry boy, my sweet boy," she whispered. "Do it."

  "God in heaven," he said when she pulled away.

  "Stay right there."

  He heard her go out the door and the house was silent. Gradually his body calmed and he fell into a blissful half sleep, his mind drifting, taken up not so much by thought as by pure awareness. It was a new world, and he was overwhelmed by a sense of novelty, of a benevolence in the light, the air, the objects around him. He was alive in a new way, and the sensation was so beautiful he clung to consciousness. But then he slept.

  Her presence woke him. She sat at the foot of the bed. "There's this woman I bump into in the shops. My age, four kids, simple hard-working housewife, something about her I like, although I hardly know her. We were on line at the checkout. 'My goodness,' she says, and she actually patted my hand. 'My goodness, but aren't we looking radiant. Don't we have roses in our cheeks.' " And then a smile of satisfaction appeared on Catherine's face, a sort of inward smile. "She gave me the quickest, most discreet little wink." She laughed and turned to Claude. "Isn't that wonderful?"

  By Sunday night they had lost track of time and all but the most remote awareness of the outside world. Wrapped in a cocoon of love and trust, a trust so deep and yet paradoxically so natural, so elemental, Claude could not believe he had never experienced it before. The boundaries of thought seemed to blur, as had the boundaries of flesh, until they were as much one creature as two. They talked, they touched, they talked and their talk was unhurried. Most often it served no particular purpose except to give voice to their partly parallel, partly shared consciousness. Most often it was simply luxurious, but occasionally they questioned each other, or informed each other, filling in gaps as Jennie had filled her coloring book.

  "I thought you were a terrible snob," he said. "Your disdain was lacerating. You broke my heart."

  "Yes, I know," she said. "I was awful."

  "Did you know I loved you?"

  After a while she said, "I guess I thought you were in love with a picture you had of me. It was sweet."

  "Well, I didn't know you thought it was sweet."

  "It would have hurt you to know that. You would have felt patronized."

  He gave a soft laugh. "I felt patronized anyway."

  Or, together in the cramped bathroom as they took consecutive baths in the half-sized tub. "Do you remember that dance we went to at the River Club?" she asked, leaning against the sink, her arms folded in front of her. "God, it seems so far away. Lifetimes away."

  "Of course I do," he said from the tub.

  "Just before that, I began to think of you differently," she said. "All those silly boys, and you were in another category altogether. You had a certain ... a certain gravitas, I guess is what I mean. You were naive, but somehow..." Her voice fell away. After a while she said, "And there was something about how intent you were to do well with the dancing. I could really feel it. It impressed me."

  "You remember the ride in the limo afterwards?"

  "Yes," she said. "I brushed you off."

  "Why?"

  "I got scared, I guess. I was starting to take you more seriously, and I couldn't let that happen."

  He stood up, got out of the tub, and reached for a towel. She got it first and began drying him off, starting with the back of his neck. He bent his head.

  "You were just a nice boy, you see," she said, rubbing his back. "And you thought I was just a girl."

  "I don't understand."

  She said nothing. She dried his entire body, slowly but not erotically. A loving task, as she might have dried her child, down on her knees on the bathroom floor. They went back to bed, under the quilt, pillows bunched up behind their heads. They lay in comfortable silence for a long time, so long that when she spoke it took him a moment to realize she was responding to his last remark. "I wasn't just a girl." She waited, then said, "I'd been sleeping with Dewman since I was thirteen years old."

  He couldn't quite take it in. "What do you mean?"

  "I'd been having sex with him."

  "With Dewman Fisk?" He was incredulous, at a total loss.

  "Oh, you know," she said quickly, "a powerful man, bringing all those famous people to the house." It was almost offhand.

  As the implications dawned on him he remained motionless, staring at the ceiling. "Holy mackerel."

  "I've never told anyone," she said.

  He thought about it. "Not even your husband?"

  "No."

  He thought some more. "You mean he raped you? Why didn't you tell somebody?"

  "He didn't rape me." Her voice was calm. "It wasn't like that."

  More than anything—despite his confusion, his mind racing almost desperately—more than anything he wanted to avoid saying the wrong thing. They were in a zone of unreality, or so at least it felt to him as he struggled toward comprehension. For the first time since they'd knelt together on the prayer rug—which had been a couple of days ago but felt infinitely longer, outside of time altogether—he felt the presence of danger. What she was talking about was so alien, so utterly weird, that he might inadvertently, in his ignorance, do or say something to hurt her. Or not do something or not say something. He was locked.

  "He started watching me when I was twelve," she said. "And then the next year it was games, and then, well..."

  "But how ... all those people in the house?"

  "Never when my mother was there." She caught herself. "No, a few times when she was sick, I think. It wasn't continuous, you see. Sometimes months went by and I'd think maybe it was over."

  "Did you want it to be over?"

  "Oh, yes. Pretty quickly. But he knew just how to play it." She said this without any apparent bitterness. "By the time I was seventeen I couldn't stand it anymore. So I ran away with the first man who asked me."

  "So people thought you'd just fallen in love and eloped."

  "Except Dewman. He knew, I'm sure."

  "And the son of a bitch got away with it." He shook his head. "Unbeli
evable."

  Now little snatches of memory began playing in his head. Catherine coming down the stairs with Dewman right behind her the night of the dance. Lady's reluctance to talk about Catherine except for an occasional anecdote about school, and the observation that even as a young girl Catherine had been "hot" or "sexy" or "a vamp," and that it was "undignified." He remembered Peter's remark that she was always trying to be so "grown up." He remembered Catherine's no longer mysterious question about Dewman's response when receiving the laurel crown. Now he thought about the servant giving him the cross to ward off evil. "I think the maid knew," he said. "Or suspected, anyway."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "She seemed to be warning me of something. What was her name? Isidra. Could she have known?"

  "I remember her." Catherine thought about it. "Maybe. We were never caught, but maybe. She certainly hated me. It doesn't matter now."

  "Sure it does. She's still there. Only now she's the housekeeper and they call her Miss Sanchez. Your mother's out of it and Isidra runs the place. Lady said her clothes were very expensive, and I can tell you she doesn't look like a servant or act like a servant. Maybe he didn't get away with it altogether."

  "It doesn't matter. I'll never see any of them again. I left it behind a long time ago." She turned on her side and put her hand on his shoulder. "I don't know why I told you."

  A closed book for her. He understood that, and certainly he wasn't going to push. But another memory floated up and he could not stop himself. "The children's section!" he cried.

  "What?"

  "Did you know when he was deputy mayor he wrote the city law that mandates a children's section in every movie theater? You know, matinees and everything, so sex fiends wouldn't bother the children?"

  "Don't be angry, Claude."

  "Why not? He stole your childhood. You were living a double life before you were out of grammar school. You couldn't talk to your own mother, for God's sake. He put you in solitary. It's a fucking outrage!"