"What do you want me to do?" he asked.
I looked up. I was seeing other things, other places. I fixed right on his face. He looked as solid as anything in the room, though totally animated, lovable, enviable, fine.
"What do I want you to do?" I asked, mockingly. "And what does the question mean? What do I want?"
"You said you were lonely for me. Well, I am for you. But I can let you go. I can move on--"
"No."
"I didn't think so," he said with a little flash of a smile that faded at once. He looked very serious and his eyes grew large as they relaxed. His eyebrows were perfect and heavily black, lifted above the ridge so that they made a beautiful and commanding expression.
"All right, you've come to me," I said. "You come like something I would conjure. A violinist, the very thing I once wanted with all my heart to be, perhaps the only thing I ever tried with all my heart to be. You come. But you're not my creation. You're from somewhere else and you are hungry and needy and demanding. You're furious that you can't drive me mad, yet drawn to the very complexity that defeats you."
"I admit it."
"Well, what do you think is going to happen if you remain? You think I'm going to let you spellbind me and drag me back to every grave on which I've strewn flowers? You think I'll let you fling my lost husband, Lev, in my face, oh, I know you've forced my thoughts to him, often in these last hours, as if he were as dead as all the others, my Lev--him and his wife, Chelsea, and their children. You think I will permit this? You must want a terrible struggle. You must prepare for defeat."
"You could have kept Lev," he said softly, thoughtfully. "You were too proud. You had to be the one to say, 'Yes, go marry Chelsea.' You couldn't be betrayed. You had to be gracious, sacrificing."
"Chelsea was carrying his child."
"Chelsea wanted to kill it."
"No, she didn't, and neither did Lev. And our child had already died, and Lev wanted the child and wanted Chelsea and Chelsea wanted him."
"And so you proudly gave away this man you'd loved since he was a boy, and felt the winner, the controller, the director of the play."
"So what?" I said. "He's gone. He's happy. He has three sons, one very tall and blond and a pair of twins, and they're in pictures all over this house. Did you see them in the bedroom?"
"I did. I saw them in the hallway, too, along with the old sepia photograph of your sainted Mother, when she was a beautiful girl of thirteen with her graduation flowers and her flat chest."
"All right, so what do we do? I won't have you do this to me."
He turned to the side. He made a little humming sound. He drew up the violin from his lap, and laid it very carefully on its back on the table, and the bow beside it, and held the violin's neck with his left hand. His eyes moved slowly up to Lev's painting of the flowers on the wall above the couch, Lev's gift, my husband, the poet and painter and the father of a tall blue-eyed son.
"No, I will not think about it," I said.
I stared at the violin. A Stradivarius? Beethoven his teacher?
"Don't mock me, Triana!" he said. "He was, and so was Mozart when I was very young, a little child, so that I don't even remember him. But the Maestro was my teacher!"
His cheeks flamed. "You know nothing of me. You know nothing of the world from which I was torn. Your libraries are filled with studies of that world, its composers, its painters, the builders of its palaces, yes, even my father's name, patron of the arts, generous patron of the Maestro and yes, the Maestro was my teacher."
He broke off, and turned away.
"Ah, so I am to suffer and remember, but not you," I said. "I see. You brag as men so often do."
"No, you don't see anything," he said. "I only want you, you of all people, you who worship these names as if they were household saints--Mozart, Beethoven--I want you to know I knew them! And where they are now, I know not! I'm here, with you!"
"Yes, it is so," I said, "as you've said and I've said, but what are we to do? You know you can catch me unawares a thousand times, but I won't sink again into it. And when I dream, of the surf, of the sea, do I dream what you ..."
"We won't speak of that, your dream."
"Oh, why, because it's a doorway to your world?"
"I have no world. I'm lost in your world."
"You had one, you have a history, you have a series of connected events behind you, trailing, don't you, and that dream comes from you because I've never seen those places."
He tapped his right fingers on the table, and tipped his head down, thinking.
"You remember," he said maliciously, smiling up at me, though he was much taller, letting his brows do the work of being ominous while his voice was naive and his mouth sweet. "You remember, after your daughter's death you had a friend named Susan."
"I had many friends after my daughter's death, good friends, and as a matter of fact there were four of them named Susan or Suzanne, or Sue. There was Susan Mandel, who had gone to school with me; there was Susie Ryder, who came to give me solace, and then became an ally to me. There was Suzanne Clark ..."
"No, not any of those. It's true, what you say, you've often known your women in clusters of names. Remember the Annes of your college years? The three of them, and how they joked about you being Triana, which meant three Annes. But I don't want to talk about them."
"Why would you? The memories are only pleasant."
"Then where are they now, all these friends, especially the fourth ... Susan?"
"You're losing me."
"No, madam, I have you locked to me." He smiled broadly. "Just as tightly as when I play."
"Sensational," I said. "You know it's an old word."
"Of course."
"And that's what you are, producing all these hot sensations in me! But come now, why not talk straight, what Susan do you mean, I don't even ..."
"The one from the south, the one with the red hair, the one that knew Lily ..."
"Oh, that was Lily's friend, that Susan, she lived right upstairs, she had a daughter Lily's age, she--"
"Why don't you simply talk of it to me? Why should it drive you mad? Why don't you tell me? She loved Lily, that woman. Lily loved to go up to her apartment and sit with her and draw pictures, and that woman, that woman wrote to you years after Lily's death, when you were here in New Orleans; and that woman Susan who had so loved your daughter, Susan told you that your daughter had been reborn, reincarnated, you remember this?"
"Vaguely. It's a pleasure to think of that rather than the time when they were both together, since one's dead and I thought the letter was absurd. Are people reborn? Are you going to tell me such secrets?"
"Never, and furthermore I don't know. My existence is one continuous strategy. I only know that I am here and here and here, and it never ends, and those I love, or come to hate, they die, but I remain. That's what I know. And no soul has ever leapt up bright before me declaring to be the reincarnation of anyone who hurt me, hurt me--!"
"Go on, I'm listening."
"You remember that Susan and what she wrote."
"Yes, that Lily had been reborn in another country. Ah!" I stopped with shock. "That's what you make me see in the dream, a country to which I've never been where Lily is, that's what you would have me believe?"
"No," he said, "I only want to throw it in your face that you never went to look for her."
"Oh, pranks again, you have a thousand. Who hurt you? Who fired these guns you heard when you died? Don't you want to tell me?"
"The way Lev told you about his women, how all during Lily's illness he had had one after another young girl to comfort him, the father of a dying daughter ..."
"You are one filthy devil," I said. "I won't match words with you. For myself, I say, he did have his girls briefly and without love, and I drank. I drank. I grew heavy? So be it. But this is pointless, or is it what you want? There is no Judgment Day. I don't believe in it. And with my faith in that, went any faith I had in Confession or Sel
f-Defense. Go away. I'll turn the music box back on. What will you do? Break it? I have others. I can sing Beethoven. I can sing the Violin Concerto from memory."
"Don't dare to do that."
"Why, is there recorded music waiting for you in Hell?"
"How would I know, Triana?" he asked with sudden softness. "How would I know what they have in Hell? You see for yourself the terms of my perdition."
"Seems a lot better than eternal fire, if you ask me. But I'll play my guardian Beethoven anytime I please, and sing what I can remember even if I mangle pitch and key and melody--"
He leant forward and timidly; before I could gather my strength I dropped my gaze. I looked at the table and felt a huge misery in me, a misery rising so that I couldn't breathe. The violin. Isaac Stern in the auditorium, my childish certainty that I could attain such greatness--.
No. Don't.
I looked at the violin. I reached out. He didn't move. I couldn't cover the four feet of table. I got up and came round to the chair next to him.
He watched me the whole time, keeping his pose deliberately, as if he thought I meant to do some trick to him. Perhaps I did. Only I didn't have any tricks yet, nothing really worth trying, did I?
I touched the violin.
He looked superior and smoothly beautiful.
I sat right in front of it now, and he moved back his right hand, out of the way, so that I could touch the violin. Indeed, he moved the violin a little towards me, still gripping its neck and bow.
"Stradivarius," I said.
"Yes. One of many I once played, just one of many, and it's a ghost with me now, as surely as I am a ghost, it's a specter as I am a specter. But it's strong. It is itself as I am myself. It is a Stradivarius in this realm as truly as it was in life."
He looked down on it lovingly.
"You might say after a fashion I died for it." He glanced at me. "After Susan's letter," he asked, "why didn't you go looking for your daughter's reborn soul?"
"I didn't believe the letter. I threw it away. I thought it was foolish. I felt sorry for Susan but I couldn't answer."
He let his eyes brighten. His smile was cunning. "I think you lie. You were jealous."
"Of what on earth would I be jealous, that an old friend had lost her mind? I hadn't seen Susan in years; I don't know where she is now ..."
"But you were jealous, consumed with rage, more jealous of her than ever of Lev and all his young girls."
"You're going to have to explain this to me."
"With pleasure. You were in an agony of envy, because your reincarnated daughter revealed herself to Susan and not to you! That was your thought. It couldn't be true, because how could the link between Lily and Susan have been stronger! That's what you felt, outrage. Pride, the same pride that let you give away Lev when he didn't know his left hand from his right, when he was sick with grief, when--"
I didn't answer him.
He was absolutely right.
I had been tormented by the very idea that anyone would claim such intimacy with my lost daughter, that Susan in her seemingly addled brain would imagine that Lily, reincarnated, had confided in her instead of me.
He was right. How perfectly stupid. And how Lily had loved Susan. Oh, the bond between those two!
"So, you play another card. So what?" I reached for the violin. He didn't loosen his grip. Indeed, he tightened it.
I fondled the violin but he wouldn't allow me to move it. He watched me. It felt real; it was magnificent; it was lustrous and material and gorgeous in its own right, without a note of music coming forth from it. Ah, to touch it. To touch such a fine and old violin.
"It's a privilege, I take it?" I asked bitterly. Don't think about Susan and her story of Lily being reborn.
"Yes, it is a privilege ... but you deserve as much."
"And why is that?"
"Because you love the sound of it perhaps more than any other mortal for whom I've ever played it."
"Even Beethoven?"
"He was deaf, Triana," he said in a whisper.
I laughed out loud. Of course. Beethoven had been deaf! The whole world knew that, as well as they knew that Rembrandt was Dutch, or that Leonardo da Vinci had been a genius. I laughed freely, kind of softly.
"That is very funny, that I should forget."
He was not amused.
"Let me hold it."
"I will not."
"But you just said--"
"So what of what I said? The privilege does not extend that far. You can't hold it. You can touch it, but that's all. You think I'd let a creature like you ever so much as pluck the string? Don't try it!"
"You must have died in a rage."
"I did."
"And you, the pupil, what did you think of Beethoven, though he couldn't hear you play, what was your estimation of him?"
"I adored him," he whispered. "I adored him as you do in your mind without ever having known him, only I did, and I was a ghost before he died. I saw his grave. I thought when I came into that old cemetery that I would die again of grief, of horror, that he was dead, that a marker stood there for him ... but I couldn't."
He totally lost the look of spite.
"And it came so quick. That's how it is in this realm. Things are quick. Or lingering and seemingly eternal. Years had passed for me in some haze. Later, so much later, I heard of his great funeral, from the chatter of the living, of how they had carried Beethoven's coffin through the streets. Ah, Vienna loves grand funerals, loves them, and now he has his proper monument, my Maestro." His voice fell almost to silence. "How I wept at that old grave." He looked off, wondering, but his hand never relaxed on the violin.
"Remember when your daughter died, you wanted the whole world to know?"
"Yes, or to stop or to take one second to reflect or ... something."
"And all your California friends didn't know how to sit through a simple Mass for the Dead, and half of them lost the trail of the hearse on the freeway."
"So what?"
"Well, the Maestro you so love had the funeral you so desired."
"Yes, and he is Beethoven, and you knew him and I know him. But what is Lily? Lily is what? Bones? Dust?"
He looked tender and regretful.
My voice wasn't strident or angry.
"Bones, dust, a face, I can recall perfectly--round, with a high forehead like my mother's, not like mine, oh, my mother's face," I said. "I like to think of her. I like to remember how beautiful she was ..."
"And when Lily's hair fell out and she cried?"
"Beautiful still. You know that. Were you beautiful when you died?"
"No."
The violin felt silky and perfect.
"Sixteen ninety was the year in which it was made," he said. "Before I was born, long before. My father bought it from a man in Moscow, where I've never been, not even since, nor would I go on any account."
I looked lovingly at it. I really didn't care much about anything in the world then but it, ghost or fake or real.
"Real and spectral." He corrected me. "My father had twenty instruments made by Antonio Stradivari, all of them fine, but none as fine as this, the long violin."
"Twenty? I don't believe you!" I said suddenly. But I didn't know why I said it. Rage.
"Jealousy, that you have no talent," he said.
I studied him; he had no clear direction. He didn't know whether or not he hated me or loved me, only that he desperately needed me.
"Not you," he countered, "just someone."
"Someone who loves this?" I asked. "This violin and knows it's 'the long Strad' that the elder Stradivari made near the end of his life?" I asked. "When he had broken away from the influence of Amati?"
His smile was soft and sad, no--worse than that, deeper than that, full of hurt, or was it thanks?
"Perfect F holes," I said softly, reverently, running my fingers over them on the belly of the violin. Don't touch the string.
"No, don't," he said. "But you can .
.. you can keep touching it."
"You are the one weeping now? Real tears?"
I meant it to be mean but it lost its power. I just looked at the violin and I thought how exquisite, how unexplainable. Try to tell someone who hasn't heard a violin what the sound is like, this voice of this instrument, and think--how many generations lived and died without ever hearing anything quite like it.
His tears were becoming to his long deep-set eyes. He didn't fight them. For all I knew, he made them, made them like he made the whole image of himself.
"If only it were that simple," he confided.
"A dark varnish," I said looking at the violin. "That tells the date, doesn't it, and that the back is jointed--two pieces, I've seen that, and the wood is from Italy."
"No," he said. "Though many of the others were." He had to clear his throat, or the semblance of it, in order to speak.
"It's the long violin, yes, you are right on that; they call it stretto lungo."
He spoke sincerely and almost kindly. "All that knowledge in your head, all those details you know of Beethoven and Mozart, and your weeping as you listen to them, clutching your pillow--"
"I follow you," I said. "Don't forget the Russian madman as you so unkindly call him. My Tchaikovsky. You played him well enough."
"Yes, but what good did any of it do you? Your knowledge, your desperate reading of Beethoven's or Mozart's letters and the endless study of the sordid detail of Tchaikovsky's life? Look, here you are, what are you?"
"The knowledge keeps me company," I said, slowly and calmly, letting my words speak to him as much as to me, "rather like you keep me company." I leant forward, and came as close to the violin as I could. The light from the chandelier was poor. But I could see through the F hole the label, and only the round circle and the letters AS and the year, perfectly written as he had said: 1690.
I didn't kiss this thing, that seemed a wanton vulgar thing even to think of. I just wanted to hold it, put it in place on my shoulder, that much I knew how to do, to wrap my left fingers around it.
"Never."
"All right," I said with a sigh.
"Paganini had two by Antonio Stradivari when I met him, and neither was as fine as this--"
"You knew him as well?"
"Oh, yes, you might say he unwittingly played a heavy role in my downfall. He never knew what became of me. But I watched him through the dark veil, I watched him once or twice, that was all I could bear, and time had no natural measure anymore. But he never had an instrument as fine as this ..."