Music to tear you to pieces.
I tried to breathe slowly, to relax and not clench my hands.
Suddenly something changed. It was total, like when the sun goes behind a cloud. Only this was night and this was the Chapel.
The saints! The old saints were back. The old decor of thirty years ago surrounded me.
The pew was old and dark with a scrolled arm beneath the fingers of my left hand and beyond him stood the traditional and venerable high altar, with the fully carved and fully painted figures of the Last Supper beneath it, set in their glass case.
I hated him. I hated him for this, because I couldn't stop looking at these lost saints, at the painted plaster Infant Jesus of Prague holding his tiny globe, at the old dusty yet vibrant pictures of Christ carrying his cross down one side of the room and up the other between the darkling windows.
You are cruel.
And that is what they were, the windows of evening time, darkling, full of lavender light, and he stood in softened shadows, and the old ornate Communion Rail crossed in front of him, which had been taken away a long time ago with everything else. He stood fixed in this perfect rendering of everything I remembered, but which I couldn't have recalled in detail a moment before!
I was transfixed. I stared at the Icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help that hung behind him, over the altar, over the blazing golden tabernacle. Saints, the smell of wax. I could see the red glass candles. I could see everything. I could smell it, the wax and incense again, and he played on, varying the concerto, dipping his slender body into the music and drawing gasps from the crowd that listened to him, but who were they?
This is evil. It is beautiful, but it is evil, because it is cruel.
I closed and opened my eyes. See what is here now! For an instant I did.
Then the veil came down again. Was he going to bring her back? Mother? Was she coming, to lead me and Rosalind up the aisle, in old-fashioned safety in the shadowy evening Chapel? No, the memory overrode his inventions.
The memory was too hurtful, too awful. The memory of her not here in this sacred place in the happy times before she was poisoned like Hamlet's mother, no, the memory of her drunk and lying on a burnt mattress, her head only inches from the burning hole. That is what I saw, and Rosalind and I running back and forth with the pots of water, and beautiful Katrinka, with her yellow curls and huge blue eyes, only three years old, staring mutely at Mother, as the room filled with smoke.
You will not get away with this.
He was deep into the concerto. I deliberately filled the Chapel with lights, I deliberately envisioned the audience till it was the people, had to be, the very people I now knew. I did this and I stared at him, but he was too strong for me.
I was a child in my mind, approaching the Altar Rail. "But what do they do with our flowers after we leave them?" Rosalind wanted to light a candle.
I stood up.
The crowd was magnetized by him; they were so totally in his thrall that I went unnoticed. I moved out of the pew, and turned my back on him and walked down the marble steps and out and away from his music, which never slackened but grew all the more heated, heated, as if he thought he could burn me up with it, damn him.
Lacomb, cigarette in hand, rose from his gateside slouch and we walked almost side by side, fast down the flags. I could hear the music. I looked deliberately at the flags. If my mind veered, I saw that sea again, that foam. I saw it in sudden crashes of wild color; this time I heard it.
Even as I walked, I heard the sea and saw it and saw the street before me.
"Slow down, boss, you gonna trip and break my neck!" Lacomb said.
Such a clean smell. The sea and the wind together give birth to the cleanest finest scent, and yet everything that lurks below the surface of the sea can give off the stench of death if dragged up to the sandy bank.
I walked faster and faster, looking carefully at the broken bricks and weeds growing among them.
We reached my light, thank God, my garage, but there was no gate open there. Mother's gate was gone, taken away, that old green painted wooden gate fitted into the brick arch through which she had walked right into death.
I stood motionless. I could still hear the music, but it was far away. It was tuned for human ears that were near to him and he seemed bound to that by some rule of his nature that I was very pleased to discover, though I wanted better to understand what it meant.
We walked up to the Avenue, and towards the front gate. Lacomb opened it for me, and held it, this heavy gate that always fell forward, that could slam on you and knock you right down on the pavement. New Orleans abhors a plumb line.
I went up the steps, and into the house. Lacomb must have unlocked the door, but I didn't notice. I told him I would listen to music in the front room. Shut all the doors.
He knew this pattern.
"You don't like your friend over there?" he asked in a deep voice, the words so run together like syrup that it took me a brief second to interpret this.
"I like Beethoven better," I said.
But his music came like a hiss through the walls. It had no eloquence now, no compelling meaning. It was the strum of the bees in the graveyard.
The doors were shut to the dining room. The doors were shut to the hall. I went through the disks which had been put in perfect alphabetical order.
Solti, Beethoven's Ninth, Second Movement.
In an instant I had it in the machine and the kettle drums had put him completely to rout. I turned the volume loud as it would go, and there came the familiar trudging march. Beethoven, my captain, my guardian angel.
I lay down on the floor.
The chandeliers of these parlors were small, not decorated with gold like the Baccarats of the hall and dining room. These chandeliers had only crystal and glass. It was nice to lie on the clean floor and look up at the chandelier which had only dim candle bulbs in it.
The music blotted him out. On and on went the march. I hit the button which told the machine to repeat, but to repeat only this band of the disk. I closed my eyes.
What do you yourself want to remember? Trivia, nonsense, humor.
In my young years I daydreamed incessantly to music; I always saw his brand of images! I saw people and things and drama, and was worked up almost to making fists as I listened.
But not now; now it was just the music, the driving rhythm of the music, and some vague commitment to the idea of climbing the eternal mountain in the eternal forest, but not a vision, and safe within this thundering insistent song I closed my eyes.
He didn't take too long.
Maybe I had lain there an hour.
He came right through the locked doors, materializing instantly, the doors quivering behind him, the grand violin and bow choked in his left hand.
"You walk out on me!" he said.
His voice rose over the sound of Beethoven. Then he walked towards me in loud menacing steps. I climbed up on my elbows, then sat up. My vision was blurred. The light shone on his forehead, on the dark neat brushed brows that made such a distinct line, as he glared down at me, narrowing his eyes, looking perhaps as hostile as any creature I've ever seen.
The music moved on over him and over me.
He kicked the machine with his foot. The music faltered and roared. He tore the plug out of the wall.
"Ah, clever!" I said before the silence came down. I could scarcely keep from smiling in triumph.
He panted, as if he'd run some distance, or maybe it was only the effort of being material, of playing for spectators, of passing invisible through walls and then coming alive in lurid flaming splendor.
"Yes," he said contemptuously and spitefully, looking at me, his hair falling down dark and straight on both sides. The two small braids had come undone and mixed now with the longer locks, loose and shining.
He bore down on me with all his powers to frighten. But it only brought some old actor's beauty to my mind, yes, with his sharp nose and enthralling eyes, he
had the dark beauty of Olivier of years gone by, in a filmed play by Shakespeare, Olivier as the humpback and deformed and evil King Richard III. Irresistible, a lovely trick in paint, to be both ugly and beautiful.
An old film, an old love, old poetry never to be forgotten. I laughed.
"I'm not humpbacked and I'm not deformed!" he said. "And I'm not a player of a part for you! I'm here with you!"
"So it seems!" I answered. I sat up straight, pulling my skirt down over my knees.
"Seems?" He used Hamlet's speech to mock me. " 'Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not "seems." ' "
"You overtax yourself," I said. "Your talent's for music. Don't wax desperate!" I said, using words more or less from the same play.
I grabbed hold of the table and climbed to my feet. He stormed towards me. I almost flinched, but held fast to the table, looking at him.
"Ghost!" I said. "You had a whole living world looking at you! What do you want here when you can have that? All those ears and eyes."
"Don't anger me, Triana!" he said.
"Oh, so you know my name."
"As much as you know it," he turned to the left and then to the right. He walked towards the windows, towards the eternal light dance of the traffic behind the lace birds.
"I won't tell you to go away," I said.
His back to me still, he lifted his head.
"I'm too lonely for you!" I said. "Too fascinated!" I confessed. "When I was young, I might have run screaming from a ghost, run screaming! Believing it with a total superstitious Catholic heart. But now?"
He only listened.
My hands shook badly. I couldn't tolerate this. I pulled out the chair from the table. I sat down and rested against the back. The chandelier was reflected in a blurred circle in the polish of the table, and all around it, the chairs with their Chippendale wings sat at attention.
"Now I'm too eager," I said, "too despairing, too careless." I tried to make my voice firm, yet keep it soft. "I don't know the words. Sit here! Sit down and lay down the violin and tell me what you want. Why do you come to me?"
He didn't answer.
"You know what you are?" I asked.
He turned around, furious, and came near to the table. Yes, he had the very magnetism of Olivier in that old film, all made up of dark contrasts and white skin and a dedicated evil. He had the long mouth, but it was fuller!
"Stop thinking of that other man!" he whispered.
"It's a film, an image."
"I know what it is, you think I'm a fool? Look at me. I'm here! The film is old, the maker dead, the actor gone, dust, but I am with you."
"I know what you are, I told you."
"Tell me what precisely, then, if you will?" He cocked his head to the side, he gnawed his lip a little, and he wrapped both his hands around the bow and the neck of the violin.
He was only a few feet away. I saw the wood more distinctly, how richly lacquered it was. Stradivarius. They had said that word, and there he held it, this sinister and sacred instrument, he just held it, letting the light catch it and race up and down its curves as if the thing were real.
"Yes?" he said. "Do you want to touch it or hear it? You know damned good and well that you can't play it. Even a Strad wouldn't mend your miserable faults! You'd make it shriek or even shatter in outrage if you tried."
"You want me to ..."
"No such thing," he said, "only to remind you that you have no gift for this, only a longing, only a greed."
"A greed, is it? Was it greed you meant to implant in the souls of those who listened in the Chapel? Greed you meant to nourish and feed? You think Beethoven ..."
"Don't speak of him."
"I will and I do. Do you think it was greed that forged--"
He came to the table, consigned the violin to his left hand and laid down his right hand as near to me as he could. I thought his long hair hanging down would touch my face. There seemed no perfume to his clothes, not even the smell of dust.
I swallowed and my vision blurred. Buttons, the violet tie, the flashing violin. It was all a ghost, the clothes, the instrument.
"You're right on that. Now what am I? What was your pious judgment upon me--about to be pronounced--when I interrupted you?"
"You are like the human sick," I said. "You need me in your suffering!"
"You whore!" he said. He backed up.
"Oh, that I've never been," I said. "Never had the courage. But you are diseased and you need me." I continued, "You're like Karl. You're like Lily in the end, though God knows--" I broke off, switched. "You're like my Father when he was dying. You need me. Your torment wants a witness in me. You're jealous and eager for that, aren't you, as eager as any human who is dying, except in the last moments perhaps when the dying forget everything and see things we can't see--"
"What makes you think they do?"
"You did not?" I asked.
"I never died," he said, "properly, I should explain. But you know that. I never saw comforting lights or heard the singing of angels. I heard gunshots and shouts and curses!"
"Did you?" I asked. "Such drama, but then you are very fancy, aren't you?"
He drew back as if he'd let me pick his pocket.
"Sit down," I said. "I've sat beside many a deathbed, you know I have. That's why you chose me. Maybe you're ready to end your little ghostly wandering."
"I am not dying, lady!" he declared. He pulled back the chair and sat opposite. "I grow stronger by the minute, by the hour, by the year."
He relaxed in the chair. That put four feet of polished wood between us.
His back was to the blinkering window curtains, but the dull mist of the chandelier revealed his whole face, too young to have ever been an evil king in any play, and too full of hurt suddenly for me to enjoy it.
I wouldn't glance away, however.
I watched. He revealed it.
"So what's it about?" I asked.
He seemed to swallow as surely as a human being, and to chew on his lip again, and then he pressed his lips together for discipline.
"It's a duet," he said.
"I see."
"I am to play and you are to listen, and you are to suffer and to lose your mind or do whatever my music drives you to do. Become a fool if you like, become mad like Ophelia in your favorite play. Become as cracked as Hamlet himself. I don't care."
"But it's a duo."
"Yes, yes, that's your proper word, a duo, not a duet, for I alone make the music."
"That's not so. I feed it and you know. In the Chapel you feasted on me and everyone there, and everyone else there was not enough, and you turned again to me, and mercilessly you made images come that meant absolutely nothing to you, and you tore my heart with the abandon of some common ignorant criminal in your desire to make suffering. Suffering you know nothing about but need. That's a duet as well as a duo. That's music by two, such a thing."
"My God, but you have speech, don't you, even if you are a musical idiot, and always were, and like to swim in the deep waters of other people's talent. Wallowing on the floor with your Little Genius, and the Maestro, and that Russian maniac, Tchaikovsky. And how you feed on death, yes, you do, you do, you know you do. You needed them all, all those deaths, you did."
He was genuinely passionate, glaring at me, letting the deep eyes widen at the perfect moments to emphasize his words. He was or had been far younger than the Olivier as Richard III.
"Don't be so stupid," I said calmly. "Stupidity doesn't become a being that doesn't have mortality for an excuse. I learned to live with death and smell it and swallow it and clean up after its slow progress, but I never needed it. My life might have been a different thing. I didn't--"
But hadn't I hurt her? It seemed entirely true. My Mother had died at my hands. I couldn't go out there now and stop her from leaving by the side gate that didn't exist. I couldn't say, "Look Father, we can't do this, we must take her to the hospital, we must stay with her, you and Roz go with Trink and I'll stay with M
other...." And for what would I have done that, so she could have gotten out of the hospital as she had once before, talking her way out, playing sane and clever, and charming, and come home to lie again in a stupor, to fall again on the heater and gash her head so that the blood spread in a pool on the floor?
My father spoke, "She's set the bed on fire twice, we can't leave her here...." Was that then? "Katrinka's sick, she's going into surgery now, I need you!"
Me?
And what did I want? For her to die, my Mother--for it to end, her sickness, her suffering, her humiliation, her misery. She was crying.
"Look, I won't!" I said. I shook myself all over. "It's vile and cheap, what you do, you raid my mind for things you don't need."
"They're always swimming in your ken," he said. He smiled. He looked so brightly, frankly young, unlined and unworn. Struck down surely in youth.
He glowered. "That's nonsense," he said. "I died so long ago there is nothing in me that is young. I passed into this, this 'thing,' as you so described me in your own mind earlier this evening, when you couldn't endure the grace or the elegance that you saw, I became this 'thing,' this abomination, this spirit, when your guardian, your magnificent symphonic master, was alive and was my teacher."
"I don't believe you. You speak of Beethoven. I hate you."
"He was my teacher!" he raged. And he meant it.
"That's what brought you to me, that I love him?"
"No, I don't need you to love him, or mourn your husband or dig up your daughter. And I'll drown out the Maestro, I'll drown him out with my music before we're finished, until you can't hear him, not by machine, not through memory, not through dreams."
"Oh, how kind. Did you love him as much as you love me?"
"I simply made the point that I am not young. And you will not speak of him to me with any possessive superiority, and what I loved I will tell you not."
"Bravo," I said. "When did you cease to learn, when you threw off the flesh? Did your skull thicken even as it became a phantom skull?"
He sat back. He was amazed.
And so was I, a little, but then my own riffs of words often frightened me. That's why it had been years and years since I drank.
I made such speeches often when I drank. I couldn't even remember the taste of wine or beer, and craved neither. I craved consciousness, and even my lucid dreams, dreams in which I roamed like the dream of the marble palace, knowing that I dreamt, yet there, and dreaming still, the best of both worlds.