LUCY’S JOURNAL
I will kill anyone who harms my
child. That much I know. I could have done murder in the past few
weeks, several times over, with the rank insensitivity Kate has had to endure
from the medical establishment.
Supposedly it’s “all over” now, we can relax and go on with our
lives. “It’s all for the best,” said the
doctor, so callow he looked to be barely out of his teens, and I could have
ripped his throat out.. As if we were
let off some kind of hook.
Kate knows about being on the hook. This has forced her to grow up in a way she
never would have asked for. First, there
was the resistance she met when she made her decision known. She didn’t need the sales talk about the
nobility of keeping her baby, or – even more noble- giving it up for
adoption. As if this were some sort of
easy solution, not a decision that would tear her heart out by the roots. But that’s what she got, even from the time
she had the pregnancy confirmed at the clinic.
This made her feisty and defensive, and feistiness does not go down well
with Dr. Jaharwahl who thinks girls should be obedient, like good dogs. But to express any feelings about this at all
is to be labelled a racist.
Kate was incredibly calm when she went in
to see Dr. Danforth to make the preliminary arrangements. I don’t know where she gets this calm and it
unsettles me. It lasted until Thursday
night, when I was just about to go out the door for choir practice. Then I heard something in the bedroom
upstairs that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle.
I bolted in a blur up to Kate’s room. She was rolled in a ball on the bed, rocking
back and forth, her face deathly blanched.
Not even crying out, but moaning in a low, shuddering, too-mature
voice. “I’m bleeding, Mums,” she said so
softly that it made me shudder. “It’s
bad. Please do something.”
Panic whited out all resonse in me for
what seemed like a disgracefully long time.
But probably it only took me about one minute to get to the phone and
call an ambulance. She was bleeding pretty heavily, and visions of her
haemorrhaging to death in the car kept me from even thinking of driving her to
the hospital. I sat next to her on the
bed with my arm tight around her, feeling the rhythmic waves of pain squeeze
through her. “I think you’re having a
miscarriage, honey,” I said. “It’s sort
of like having labor pains.” “It’s not
supposed to feel like this,” Kate moaned.
“I can’t believe having a baby hurts so much. What if I die from this?”
Time stretched grotesquely, as it always
does in a crisis, until a siren sounded from blocks away. “There must be a fire,” Kate said. “No, honey, it’s for you,” I told her.
The heavy thud of feet pounding up the
stairs was a sickening reminder of all my past distress-calls, the times I
overdosed and woke up stuck to the rug in my own vomit. I forced the memories from my mind. The devil was on my back, devising an even
worse torture this time, a way to get to me through my child.
Two young male paramedics came striding
into the bedroom, and the one who seemed to be in charge immediately asked Kate
to take some deep breaths and make a conscious effort to calm down. She instantly responded, relaxing a bit into
the hands of competent authority (which made me feel even more useless, but
never mind.) A tinge of color returned
to her face. I filled them in on all the
medical details. “She’s in no
danger,” they told me in a well-meant
attempt at reassurance. No danger. Seventeen, pregnant against her wishes,
bloodily losing the baby on a Thursday night, a night she might remember with
horror for the rest of her days. I tried
to put a clamp on the dark haemorrhaging of my thoughts.
The ambulance ride was less traumatic than
that interminable ten minutes of hell in the bedroom, because at least we were
going somewhere, to a place of help. She
was able to walk into Emergency with a little help, and I sat with her for
about twenty minutes, joking feebly while we waited for the doctor on call.
An absurdly youthful-looking blonde
surfer-boy type burst into the waiting room and beamed at us both: “I’m Dr. Anderson.” Then with a brilliant grin he offered Kate
his arm like he was her date for the night, and took her away.
There is nothing like the atmosphere of a
waiting room in Emergency, the spilled smell of accidents, the sound of
magazines slowly growing older, the sudden awareness of pulse, the blood
beating in the ears. The muddy murmurs
of nurses’ voices, and a removed, clinical clanking from other rooms, other
catastrophes. Behind the door my
daughter was being examined. Flashes of
memory intruded: my little legs spread
wide, the doctor bending solemnly over a torn-open vagina. “She must have been masturbating,” he told my
mother, who believed him.
Time elongates at these moments like a
pulled-out slinky, or a grotesque parody of a marijuana high when a single
musical note can stretch out forever.
Then it snapped like a released spring as Dr. Sunshine burst out the
door and strode towards me, beaming.
“All over,” he chirped. “She passed the baby. Just fascinating! It was pretty easy.”
This was one of those times when I had to
physically restrain myself from doing terrible violence. “Easy”.
Yes, for him, his feelings hermetically sealed in a compartment far, far
away.
“Just let me see her,” I muttered. “Oh, you can take her home now,” he grinned,
as if he were talking about a dog at the vet’s.
I literally ran to my Kate, who was already dressed and looking about a
thousand times better than before.
“That bastard,” she said.
“I know.
He said it was ‘pretty easy’.”
“I told him to fuck off, Mums.”
“Good.
Let’s get out of here. We’ve had
enough of Dr. Mengele for one day.”
I sat up with her for several hours at
home. She was experiencing
post-traumatic calm, the strange bliss that follows great shock. Endorphins bathed her blood. I was glad for it. The body keeps the mind in one
piece,any-old-how, at least for now. But
a steady accumulation of trauma leads to cracks in the foundation. How many blows had my dear one already
absorbed over my years of alcoholic chaos?
Was this the coup de grace,
the final insult, the thing that would crack her glorious soul forever?
I couldn’t bring myself to see Elsie
again. Been there, done that, and
there’s no going back. I did go to talk
to Rev. Marian. “Women don’t talk about
these things,” she said. “It’s one of
the last taboos. But it happens. It
happens a lot. Along with depression and
marital infidelity, it’s one of the things I hear about the most. People come to me and almost seem to expect
me to judge them. And I don’t. I’m not sure what they’re looking for –
punishment? Absolution? None of that is up to me. So I listen, and I give them a hug and I
reassure them once again that God loves them no matter what. The fundamentalists would be horrified, but
that’s what I do.”
Marian is the only one I’ve told, and
there’s a reason. Monika went through an
abortion, a very messy and dangerous one, when she was only 15. She has never talked about it in any detail,
never discussed more than the bare bones of it, because twenty-five years later
it still hurts too much. Time doesn’t
heal all wounds, obviously. So it has
been a lonely time. I can’t yet really
confide in Rafe yet, either. We’re
becoming friends of a sort, in an AA way, but at the same time we’re slowly
moving towards becoming lovers. I
suppose I should be horrified even to be thinking about any of this with my
daugher in such distress. But the thing
about life is, everything always happens at once, pleasure and pain all tangled
up together like blood vessels in the same body. Our bodies talk, hesitantly, a subtext
beneath the banter of our words. I draw
back at the crucial moment, sensing the voracious nature of his sexuality, the
rawness, like a spouting waterfall.
Once we cross a certain line,
there will be no going back.
Why am I with this man? Sex, mainly.
The heavenly smell of him, sweetly male.
He makes my mouth water. It has
taken me a while to admit this about Rafe, the raw physicality of the
connection. He has the most exquisite
hands – not construction-foreman hands at all, but the fine hands of a surgeon
or a violinist. The long, tapering
fingers with the small hammerlike tips
seem designed for my instrument.
I think of Zoltán’s chunky earth-hands with the plump fingers and huge
Mount of Venus, and wonder what God could have been thinking of. Rafe can’t even carry a tune, and thinks my
violin studies are ultra-refined, a little too ladylike, like crewel
embroidery, though he never comes out and says so. Does he think I wear crinolines and a corset
to my lessons? Does he think Zoltán
catches me swooning in his arms?
Some day I’ll tell David about Kate’s
ordeal, but not now. David’s good in
small doses, but too bitter as a steady diet.
He’d purse his lips (I can see it now) and mutter something about
“actions have consequences”, as if there have never been any messes in his own
personal life. But I saw his red-rimmed
eyes around the time that Cassie and Zöe were playing all those elaborate
psychological games with him. He was a
wreck. I don’t know if he loves either
one of them, but he is a man, and he
does have a sex drive, and it does build up over time, what with his monkish
devotion to his instrument.
I must play. I go back and back again to Harriet, who
forgives me my rawness, my acid-green tone (I think). I nearly had a fit at the last lesson, hearing
every sharp squeak and obscene ping as my fingers clumsily stretched across the
strings. Then Zoltán solemnly took my
violin away from me and handed me his.
“Now play.” The difference in
tone was remarkable. It was a deep dive
into a world of pure amber, dark honey, old musical gold. Even my trembly bowing smoothed out, as if by
magic. Zoltán’s violin resembles a
bald-skinned, eyeless old teddy bear or a much-loved, much-read book, its
frayed cover hanging by a thread. My
left side was picking up minute Zoltán-signals almost frantically (and
sometimes I wish I didn’t have this preternatural bodily sensitivity). I felt an unutterable peace in playing, as if
I were being physically rocked. But
there was the zest and brilliance too, the mind that never stops. It was not lost on me that playing his violin
was like holding his life in my hands. I
felt a springy, voluptuous appetite for living and at the same time a heartsunk
sadness, a lostness, and a sweetness too, as if the boy had never entirely left
the man. I handed the beautiful old
relic back to him feeling as if I had touched the pulse of his soul.
What did he feel when he briefly held my
instrument, got his fingerprints all over its shiny, too-new surface? Green.
Green like the wood of a sapling. Maybe
he, too, picked up on sorrow, the stress of Kate’s recent ordeal and the
general grief of my life. My sorrow has
not yet found a way out through this instrument. Surely that comes, with time. Surely that’s why I’m pursuing this whole
exercise. To express something, to make
sense of the outrageous accident of my being, to release my voice. Zoltán stands patiently by, knowing.
Lucy has graduated. Of course she doesn’t realize it yet. I can feel the early hints of her graduation
like an iridescent thread or a whisper of air across my strings. Something has deepened; something has
broadened. It’s too bad that she can’t
yet hear it; Zoltán, who has hearing like a dog, can detect just the subtle
beginnings of it. He started this
change, pulled her through the portal into a new phase a few lessons ago by
prescribing a large dose of Vivaldi.
“No,” Lucy said on seeing the spiky,
forbidding, closely-notated music of the Concerto in A Minor, Opus 3 No. 6 – a
piece such as a real violinist might play.
“I can’t do this. Can’t reach
those notes. I’m not ready.”
Zoltán grinned like a sprite. “Now you start,” he said, thrusting the tip
of his bow at the first note on the page, an innocuous-looking open E.
“But it goes up to C. C! I’ll run out of fingers,” Lucy twittered, her
whole being resisting the next phase.
“What do you know about third position?”
Zoltán asked in his intimate murmuring tone, his shiny dark eyes piercing right
through to the back of her head.
“I don’t have a clue. . . except that it’s
higher.”
“Exactly!
And sound is better.”
“Better?
Won’t I sound like a sick cat way up there?”
“You will surprise yourself.”
And thus Lucy’s hand shot up the neck of
her instrument into unknown territory, the mystery of third position, her first
foray into real playing. To her
amazement, and mine, the high C sounded sounded purer, clearer, almost lucent
in tone; she was able to sustain it for about half a second, then realized she
couldn’t do it and reverted to her awful ham-fisted sawing. Lucy’s shoulders are tense as piano wire and
will have to relax substantially if she’s ever to sustain that sweet lucence. Which she will. Zoltán knows it, has heard a faint murmur of
it in her playing, even with bowing which threatens to cut me in half.
Zoltán has plans for this woman. He has designs on her musical mind. Beethoven waits in the wings, and Schubert,
and at some point even Lucy’s favorite, the Heartbreak Kid, Johannes
Brahms. Zoltán will pitch this powerful
music at her and see if the bat connects, even clumsily. His motives are pure. Lucy’s love of music is a compelling,
transforming force, the only thing strong enough to break the ice-jam in her
shoulders. Right now she stands like a
statue, her body as rigid as it was in high school at those dances where she
stood miserably in a corner wearing a sign that said, “Don’t dance with me”. Zoltán wants to make her backbone slip, and
the only thing that will unlock her is the power of the music itself.
You should hear Lucy’s mind during these
intense sessions with Z.: “What’s he
doing? I need more bowing exercises. Why isn’t he giving me more bowing
exercises? I’m not sure I trust his
teaching method. Maybe David was
right. Maybe I need a more linear
approach. This is too much! Third position? I can barely handle first. Does he know what he’s doing? Of course he does, just listen to him, making
the thing sound warm as a viola. But
he’s been playing for fifty years. Half
a century! Why does he think I can do
this? Isn’t it obvious that it’s too
late and I can’t cut it?” . . . and on and on and on. Zoltán hears the clatter and rattle of these
anxious thoughts and is slightly amused by it all, knowing that a deeper wheel
turns somewhere in her psyche, a profound and silent wheel of understanding,
heavy as a millstone and equally unstoppable.
Lucy stayed the course during Kate’s
ordeal, and thus crossed another threshhold.
To keep practicing daily even when her mind screamed with anxiety was a
test of discipline, and she passed it. At one point while she bravely assayed
the Vivaldi with all its eelishly baroque twists and turns, Zoltán saw the
crack in her heart like a suspended bolt of brilliant white lightning, and knew
she had suffered a terrible grief. Lucy
barely noticed how often he touched her during this session, his fingers
closing around hers as she clumsily rosined the bow ("Hint. You do this way,” he demonstrated, his method
sleek and quick.) Zoltán would never do
anything inappropriate or threatening with a woman of Lucy’s history, but he
realizes she needs healing and knows he can convey it. He touches her shoulder like a punctuation
mark at the end of his sentences, concentrating on the right shoulder, the
locked one; he is trying to determine just how bad the rigidity problem really
is, and if he can help melt it through the right kind of touching. He can.
Lucy stands slightly more openly in front of him now, no longer holding
the bow across her chest defensively, as if to have it ready to whack him if
necessary. She can finally drop her
right right arm while he talks (and a good half of the session, surprisingly, involves
talking). Zoltán continually runs his
scanners over her teeming mind and tense body, though not at a conscious
level. After more than 25 years of
teaching it is automatic. This is why I
put the two of them together; both have unusual ways of coping in the world,
involving senses that are in most people dormant. They just belong together as teacher and
student, and both of them knew it from the moment Zoltán beetled out of the
utility room to meet her.
Lucy doesn’t consciously know that Zoltán
helped her through Kate’s bloody rite of passage. She was only grateful for the normalcy of it,
reporting for her lesson as if nothing was wrong. Zoltán went along with the ruse, knowing she
needed him not to ask. They know each
other, but not that well. A certain
refined formality will always permeate their association, exemplified by the
courtly little
But something buzzes in him to a similar
frequency, the resonance of a great hurt.
This colors his playing, which Lucy has already noticed resembles
polished amber, the ancient gem-hard bleedings of a tree.
He plays out of need. In Lucy he has divined the presence of another seeker. She is hungry as few of his other students are hungry. So he feeds her Vivaldi, note by note, phrase by phrase. And she plays, always resisting, always persisting, gamely struggling forward into a new and frighteningly revealing light.
DAVID’S JOURNAL
Rose at
Bad
calls all week. Zoë phoned, sounded
almost stoned. Demanded to know why I
got together with Cassie the other night.
It was innocent. We shared a
bottle of wine, talked music, went over old times, better times. The kiss at the end didn’t count (though I
noticed she still wears White Shoulders at the base of her throat). She’s sweet, but I’ve definitely
moved on. Then Zoë swoops down like a
chickenhawk. I don’t know what Cass sees
in her. Don’t think she’s even gay, so
what is she doing living this bizarre woman?
Zoë still can’t let go of the fact that we spent that one night together
– and it was her idea, believe me, because I’ve never been attracted to that
sort, with the black hair-spikes and the pierced eyebrow. Zoë was all over me like a swarm of locusts
and I could hardly help myself, I hadn’t had sex in seven months. In fact I could probably live without it if
women stopped throwing themselves at me.
Then halfway through this weird phone call
from Zoë, she goes all sweet and gooey on me and wants to get together
again. Says she has something to discuss
with me which is too private for the phone.
What does she think, that Cass taps her wire or something? She might.
She’s sly as a snake. Never mind
that she looks so sweet, sort of like a red-headed Judy Collins at 25. I’ve never met anyone so devious.
I’ve always liked what Jean-Paul Sartre
said: “Hell is other people”. I think I could do very nicely without people
in my life, period. Music is the only
thing that really makes sense. “Are you
married to your oboe?” Lucy asks. She
has a fat nerve, has Lucy, in spite of that deerish exterior, the wide
greeny-blue eyes behind her big Gucci frames. “No, it’s just my lover,” I tell
her. Lucy and I agree on one thing; our
instruments are “she”, female. How could
the voice of an oboe possibly be male?
It’s a soprano, to the English horn’s alto (and the bassoon and
contrabassoon sing tenor and bass). So
why do I need Zoë? I don’t. I only agreed to see her on Friday to get her
off my back. Plus she sort of fascinates
me, I’ll admit it, all those piercings,
most of them out of sight so they’re kind of a private fetish. She smells a bit like cayenne pepper under
the heavy scent of sandalwood. Hope
she’s straight (I mean not stoned; she’s never straight.) Does she want me
to set up a menage á trois with her
and Cass? I shouldn’t allow myself these
musings. It drains vital energy away
from my playing.
Wearing on towards December. Lucy goes flaky at Christmas and will
probably need me as a stabilizing influence.
The problem is that too many women need me. Hope Kate is okay.
I can’t believe it. Mums boffed that guy,
that Rafe. She didn’t have to say a
word. Came up the stairs at
This Rafe came over for dinner one night
and, yes, I guess I can see how Mums might be attracted to him. He looks a bit like a big burly husky-dog
with pale eyes that are sort of appealing (not like the lizard-eyes of that
weird friend of hers, that David, whom I secretly call Poindexter). Rafe has this aura of sex about him, almost
like a scent. Mums and I talk about this
all the time, how you can tell how much someone enjoys the act by their physical
presence in the world. It kind of comes
out of their skin.
I was worried for a while that Mums was in
love with her violin teacher, but it’s worse than that; I think she believes
he’s some kind of soul mate. Mums thinks
of herself as really healthy these days, and of course she is, compared to
those horrible old times. But she’s
still really codependent – I read all about it in one of her 579 self-help books. (If each one has “the answer”, why is there a
new one out every month? It’s worse than
diet books. She has 578 of those.) Mums is like an amoeba, engulfing people with
all her intensity and concern. I don’t
mean she’s a vampire like some people, because it seems to me she gives more
than she takes. But I feel a little
sorry for the recipients of her “concern”.
And oh, yeah. Dad called.
Mums must’ve told him about my little genetic indiscretion. He sounded worried and wanted to get together
with me sometime and I sort of put him off – Christ, he’s in
David has a new phrase to describe my
life: “Sex and violins.” Suddenly the world is alive with eroticism,
and it’s as if I never knew it before (though God knows I’ve always had a
tremendous amount of desire). Men hang
everywhere on the branches, waiting to be plucked. Even Zoltán has a smell of dark chocolates
about him, and his eyes are like those Black Magic coated cherries we have at
Christmastime. Men, men, men –
some small, some gracile and tall; some hairy, some smooth – I want to put them
all in a giant petting zoo and charge admission for women like me to fondle
their naked bodies. (Time to feed the
bulls!). I have heard that men of
different nationalities actually taste different. Rafe has Ukrainian blood on his mother’s
side. (But what a subversive thought,
given that my music teacher is from
This episode with Rafe has broken me open
sexually, and now my hunger seems insatiable.
All it took was one embrace in which he pulled my waist to him in a
great arching scoop, and our bodies kissed like mating cobras, twining electric
eels. Then there was just no
stopping. Oh God, he knew exactly what
to do. We slipped and slid, and I became
his instrument, his salty sauce-box. It
was the perfect dance.
Zoltán’s black-cherry eyes turned to
exclamation points when I played the Blue Danube Waltz at my last lesson –
ineptly, of course, the way I still play everything, but with a new swish and
dip, a visceral dance-rhythm that broke some of the freezing in my right arm.
“Those little Viennese hesitations! Very
fine work.,” he exclaimed. I can’t help
but notice the way he inhabits his small intense body, fills it out with all
the natural glee of a three-year-old boy.
Yet there is a gravity to his physical presence, unlikely in one so
naturally sprightly. Zoltán sometimes
reminds me of large farm animals blowing steam and lowing, crunching cud with
the hollow resonant booming of gunfire.
He is like the sweet saddly smell of a horse, sharply beery, almost
winey. Cured leather. Old fabric, roughly hand-loomed. Van Gogh’s painting of battered boots. The Potato Eaters. “On a wagon bound for market, there’s a calf
with a mournful eye.” Theodore Bikel
crammed down in a vise to fit the tiny manic body of Joel Grey.
What I feel for Zoltán is better than
love. What I feel for my husky-dog Rafe
is pure unadulterated lust. My mind goes
white when he touches me, rubs me slowly with those exquisite
violinist-hands. The rest of me goes
pink, then scarlet. The playing of the
violin has unlocked my hips. For the
first time I really enjoy deep tongue-kissing and wonder how it ever repulsed
me before. I could suck Rafe’s beatific
bearded wolfen face forever. I want to
feel his tongue squirm hard inside me, wetly writhing like a stiffened
snake. And lower down. He likes me down there. And how.
My clitoris is a pearl of great price, the organic diamond of an irritated
shellfish, a tiny pink princess-pea of pleasure, created by God for the strict
and single-minded purpose of orgasm. I
marvel at such a structure, a tiny stately pleasure-dome beeping with minute
signals of love.
But God help me, I’m a Christian woman. I sit in the front row of the church choir
ever Sunday and sing to the glory of Jesus.
But isn’t there another kind of glory in a perfect orgasm? Is God not redolent in the superb smell of a
man? My friends in the church know I am
“different”, and they can never truly accept me for what I am, as do my sweet
close comrades in AA. It’s because their
asses are too tight. I’m sorry, but
that’s what the problem is. They could
never understand this sluicing, this great unleashing, the dark tide of singing
blood. I have waited nearly forty-three
years for this! (And Zoltán claims that
I have no patience!)
It’s a drug, this warm bath of hormones,
this flooding bloodwash, and it almost drives out my grief over Michael and
what we lost, what we maybe never had except when we were kids. After I talked to him on the phone the other
day he apparently called Kate, which was really the least he could do. But the loss of the marriage is still like a
stone in my chest. Kate’s ordeal tore at
my own long-dormant wounds. Elsie used
to say I had no boundaries, not enough layers of skin. Does this make for a sexual ecstasy that
others can only dream about? Yes, and
for pain. Lots of pain.
Speaking of. There’s a crease in David’s pale high forehead
with Zoë embroidered on it. (With all
her piercing and branding, next she’ll take to cross-stitching her own
skin.) I’m too drunk on endorphins to
properly dive down into his lovely misery, as he’d obviously like me to. But it’s plain that Zöe is trying to ensnare
him again, and there’s something he’s not telling me about that encounter he
had with her on Friday. I don’t even
think it’s sex, but something worse than that.
I mean, more compelling. Probably
wants to have his baby. There should be a
cleaner, plainer way to reproduce, in a tank or something, like the alien
hybrids on the X Files. To carry a fetus
in your own gut is just too personal. My
life’s problems are all entwined with veins, a raw coursing of blood. I can’t cut them away for fear of starting a
haemorrhage.
How is it that now that I’m sexually
satisfied at long last, I can’t stop masturbating? Is there something wrong with me? “Too much alive,” Zoltán once said about
me. He said it as a warning. His own skin is see-through, like those
intrawomb shots of a developing baby.
But he survives. He
survives. God knows what he has
survived. Faith began to talk about his
times during the war, then stopped herself.
He was a small boy then. What
happened? I feel his scar. Monika saw a vision in which he discovered
someone dead on the floor and threw himself across the body. What’s it about? I mentioned his sense of humor once and he
gravely and unexpectedly said, “It is only way to keep my sanity.” Sanity is precious to those who have felt it
slip out of their hands.
Ask me.
I asked Zoë if we should buy a turkey
baster, and she burst out laughing and didn’t stop for about 20 minutes. Christmas is coming, after all. The goose is getting fat. But the apparatus is intended for a somewhat
different purpose.
I think Zoë went about it all wrong,
approaching David so directly. Now he’s
going around looking as if he’s been hit with a board or something. Dazed and confused. But there’s a certain light in his glacial
blue eyes, almost a hope. Perhaps he’s
considering it. I think he knows by now
that he’ll never get married, and it’s unlikely he’ll even live with anyone,
given his naturally monastic temperament.
But he’s like a monk who can’t keep it in his pants. Zoë and I both know.
When I came out to David, he seemed to be
taking it well, but I think it really ate him up inside. Would this be a kind of reconciliation with
both of us? And his child would have two
mothers – lots of good care. He wouldn’t
have to pay support or anything, and as for his emotional connection with the
child, that would be left entirely up to him.
It sounds unconventional, but I grew up in the most conventional setting
possible and look how fucked up I turned out to be.
Not that I think it would hamper my mothering skills. I feel that there’s a great accumulated
storehouse of love in me which is just waiting to be unleashed on the right
person. David used to hate statements
like that. He cringes at emotionalism,
even though he changes color under stress like an octopus or something, so
sensitive I don’t know how he stands it.
There was no doubt that Zoë would be the
one. My menstrual cycle is so irregular
that it’s out of the question for me.
Plus I have to stay on my medication, which would probably harm the
fetus – and how can I function without my Nefazodone? It was a Godsend when they invented that
stuff. Works like a charm, and you can
still have an orgasm. Can’t say the same
for Prozac, Paxil and the like- they’re chemical chastity belts. If only David would take something. It might bring him out of his lifelong
depression. There is something in his
background he’s not facing; Zoë saw a crack in his aura back when she was
experimenting with psyllocybin a few years ago.
She’ll have to cut all that out completely now, kick the Southern
Comfort and the Pall Malls, but she has already made a good start and has
stopped smoking twice in the last three months.
At least it’s a sign of commitment.
And she’s willing to put her career on hold for a while – Lord knows I
can’t afford to stop playing, and I’d probably go immediately and irreversibly
insane if I did. Zoë never sold many
paintings anyway, and most of them went on restaurant walls, which really
bothered her. Hip restaurants, of
course.
It will all work out if we don’t push too
hard. David has a fragile psyche
underneath all that cynicism and he can’t be pushed or he’ll really dig in and
resist. He wants to be a father; I can
see it. Probably he’s thinking in terms
of a son, a musical prodigy. So he might
prefer my genes, but Zoë has an artist’s genes and isn’t that just as good?
Plus having a prodigy on our hands would be miserable. I was pushed from age eight and it’s amazing
there’s any joy left in it for me at all.
But what does joy have to do with it? David actually said that to me once, without
cracking a smile.
HARRIET SMITHSON
One day she began to hold me differently. It began with a newspaper clipping: an article about the violin prodigy
Vanessa-Mae Nicholson who reminisced about her experiences as a child:
“I had a real connection with my violin
because, from a young age, what really drew me to the violin was the fact that
it was a very compact, physical instrument.
It was very affectionate to tuck it under your chin. It was like a pet or a doll at that age.”
A pet or a doll. That’s hardly how dear Lucy has been treating
me. More like a Dresden china figurine
of a fine lady holding a parasol, locked away in a glass display case, so
delicate you dare not even dust it except with shivering ostrich-feathers. Lucy got that intent furrow between her
eyebrows after reading the article.
Wheels were turning. When wheels
turn in Lucy’s mind, they not only make a sound, they make a breeze.
Then she picked me up by the neck as always - almost like picking up an infant by the
neck, though it’s surprising how many violinists do it. And she held me close to her body for the
first time, wrapping her arms around me with a little shuddering sigh, and I
snugged up against her chest as sensuously as a cat, as naturally as a
baby. Lucy hadn’t felt that way since
Kate was born and the nurse brought her to Lucy and plopped her down in her
lap. She gathered Kate to her breast and
felt a quiet ecstasy, a loving ache, a completeness. How few people realize how natural and
bodylike is our carven shape! I have
wanted to say to Lucy: hold me. Don’t be afraid of me. Come closer!
Yes, get fingermarks all over me; I don’t mind, as my surface is far too
shiny. Look at Zoltán’s battered old
instrument, three hundred years old, all the gloss of it loved right off. And it makes a sound like bathing in honey, a
pure liquid orgasm of tone. Zoltán
treats it rightly like an extension of his own body, an elaboration on his
considerable physicality.
Lucy needs her wrist thawed. Zoltán sees, and swims his own amphibious
wrist before her: “Look, look how I
bend!” – then Lucy tries it and chops and saws and rolls her eyes in
chagrin. Zoltán has her stand in a door
frame, right elbow firmly planted against solid wood, then says, “Play.” This is to force her to develop the tender
flexible nuances of wrist and hand which mark the real violinist. Swim, Lucy, swim! Playing is fluid, never static, never harsh
or choppy. And you should see the music
which Zoltán is throwing at her to call forth those latent skills: the first movement of Mozart’s 40th,
Kuiawiak by Wieniawski, and even Kreisler’s Schon Rosmarin, which Lucy chopped
her way through in typical bumpety stiff-armed fashion until Z. began to knead
the muscles in her frozen right shoulder like warm plasticene. Lucy felt something. She felt the same tingly buzz of healing
energy which her dear friend Monika conveys so easily and lovingly; it was
familiar, only coming through a different kind of channel. Lucy saw some things, too, disturbing things,
something like a newsreel from the 1940s, only this was real and fleshly. A taste of what her teacher and friend had
lived through. Just a flash, and the
touch was brief, carefully done. And her
bowing immediately lightened and loosened, at least for a few bars until the
old fear returned.
But this week – ah, this week! – Mr. Z.
pulled out a masterwork. Lucy hummed the
first few bars on sight, then blurted her usual reaction: “no, no, no, I’m not ready for this.”
Lucy is at the eight-month mark in her instruction, and Zoltán has
seldom ever prescribed this level of music for someone so junior, so
green. It was the 2nd violin
part of the Concerto for Two Violins by J. S. Bach.
But Lucy is ready, ready at least to try.
There is an underlying maturity and depth in her approach to music which
speeds her progress. Her biggest
obstacles are just muscle mechanics, tied back to her early trauma to be sure –
but Zoltán sneezes at early trauma. His
view seems to be: Surely you’re not
still held prisoner by that. Yes, he sees – sees with sickening
clarity the raw brutality of Lucy’s deformed childhood. And he feels no sympathy, because it is clear
she jumped over that obstacle long ago.
It was when Lucy mentioned yet again her
five years in Gestalt treatment that Zoltán referred to therapy as “digging
down through all the layers of self-pity”.
The reaction in Lucy was instantaneous.
She felt an urge to put her hands around his skinny little Hungarian
neck and throttle him to death. It upset
her so much that she did the unheard-of and cancelled two lessons in a row over
Christmas and New Year’s, claiming she needed “a break”. Zoltán isn’t sweet. In fact Lucy is finding out the hard way that
he’s much more hard-nosed than he originally seemed. Personally,
I like it. Lucy downright wallows
sometimes, indulges in orgies of pain, and there is no excuse for this behavior
because today she really is well.
And just when prideful Lucy was about to
switch teachers for good, Zoltán touched her stiffened shoulder and asked with
real concern, “Your daughter. She is all
right now?” Lucy never even mentioned
what Kate went through, but she didn’t have to.
Two embryonic tears slipped like silver minnows into her blue-green eyes
as she answered, “Better than before.”
(Zoltán was barely aware that Lucy even had a daughter, or so she
thought.)
To analyse Lucy is to see mirror images of
mirror images endlessly duplicated, so that the original subject-matter is
obscured. Zoltán knows he has a live one
here. Their relationship won’t be all
cream. Sometimes it will be white
lightning. But both will be changed in
subtle ways, healed in the soul where repairs take longer than a lifetime. Take a deep breath, Lucy. Here begins the story of your real
redemption. Remember what the article
about Vanessa-Mae Nicholson said:
“Somehow the instrument had insinuated itself into her psyche.” This also applies to you, my reluctant
sister. Our lovely scoop-waisted shape
can grab at the vital organs and seize hold like a fishhook. You have no choice
but to obey.
MONIKA
Sometimes I worry about Lucy, this violin
thing which just seems to have insinuated itself into her psyche. She still refuses to play for me even though
we’re best friends, and this in spite of the fact that her guru Zoltán told her
he had only had one other student in 25 years of teaching who progressed faster
than her. Lucy lets these little details
“slip”, always prefacing them with statements like, “I don’t mean to sound like
I’m bragging, but. . . “ Of course she’s
bragging. Lucy has the ego of a
cat. Deep down she knows how much talent
she has. And maybe she should.
We’ll be sitting in the Mean Bean over a
mocha java and she’ll start waggling her left hand out in mid-air, murmuring
“Pulse. . . pulse. . . “ – her first attempt at vibrato. She’ll ramble on for half an hour about
something she calls “throat”, a certain human tonal quality which the finest
violinists have and Lucy covets. Speaking of throat, sometimes I’d like to
wrap my hands around her self-important little neck and squeeze.
She doesn’t seem to notice that my own
life has fallen into a sort of doldrums lately, that I have no sexual prospects
(how naked that sounds, but Lucy can’t resist throwing in self-satisfied
comments about how great Rafe is in bed.
From the sound of things, it’s his only real talent.) My psychic ability is at kind of a low ebb
now, and when I “connect” with my shiatsu clients I’m not really connecting. I’m getting weary of the whole thing anyway,
the buried (unresolveable) trauma in so many people with chronic pain. All that piled-up emotional shit! They need a
good dump, that’s what they need, but they never seem to have one. I wonder at my own pain, my smoking, my
overweight, my loneliness. All Lucy can
talk about is “sex and violins” and her oddball musician friend David who seems
to be enmeshed in some sort of bizarre love triangle.
Maybe I
need to take up an instrument. (Perhaps
the bagpipes?) Do I need a Zoltán? What is he to her, anyway? He’s always touching her, for purely
therapeutic reasons, of course. Meow,
meow. I know I shouldn’t be such a bitch
here. But I know that personal
boundaries have to be closely kept, particularly between men and women. In the throes of her sexual bliss with Rafe,
Lucy murmured dreamily that “if the social rules were completely different,
Zoltán and I would have become lovers long ago,” and I wanted to slap her
face. That’s the trouble – we are like sisters, which means we are
sometimes insufferable with each other.
I know my smoking annoys her and she secretly thinks, “If you’re such a
healer, why are you still fat and nervous?”
I want to ask her just what “recovery” means when she’s sleeping with a
hunky dough-head and going out on dangerous limbs with a weird quasi-psychic violin
teacher. She went on and on last time we
had coffee about how Z. got his fabled 300-year-old violin from a gypsy on the
streets of
What do I need to do here? Have an affair with someone? Take up the euphonium? Dear God, am I jealous of my buzzy-brained,
intense little friend? She has a way of
turning her life’s most mundane incidents into Cecil B. DeMille epic adventures
with a cast of thousands. I suppose Lucy
will always be one of those histrionic personalities. I feel dulled-out by comparison. Lucy wears people out and she knows it. But does she have to enjoy it so much?
For a dead guy, I sure get around. The thing people don’t realize about guardian
spirits is that they don’t just hang around when the going gets tough. We’re here all the time, insinuating
ourselves into the recipient’s psyche in ways that are subtle as mist.
I can see the big picture in ways that
Lucy can’t. She doesn’t understand that
the relative peace she and Kate are experiencing is only the honeymoon calm
that follows a crisis. They’re both
grateful for the feeling of return to relative normalcy. But a phantom babe continues to grow in
Kate’s womb, and may always have a life in her mind and heart.
When the physical body is cast off,
perception becomes much clearer, and it’s possible to see forward, to perceive
train-wrecks on tracks still miles ahead of the engine. Lucy’s friend David is heading for such a
pile-up, a smoking disaster which might bring some of the participants close to
death. When I died in the fire,
something broke in Lucy, and another something grew much tougher. It was as if she could now bear anything, and
in so doing could carry her weaker-souled friends through the smoke and
flames. But she had no idea how often
she would be called upon to do just that.
Don’t ever develop a strength in yourself, or life will suck on that
strength without mercy. This is why
weakness is in some ways preferable. But
unlike me, Lucy is damned to a life of strength. I got off relatively easy, gifted with so
much dysfunction that the organism eventually collapsed. Lucy’s dysfunction has always been
borderlinish; at times during her quasi-craziness she even wondered, “Why can’t
I just go irreparably mad like Andrew?
Why can’t I sit on a park bench all day talking to myself? Why do I keep pulling out of it?” God plays with her. The Spirit of the Universe was compassionate
enough to see that I just couldn’t make it and took me out of the game. Lucy was almost as damaged, but was indelibly
stamped “Survivor: do not kill.” Cursed?
In a way. With that ornery spiked
personality she’ll never exactly be Rebecca of Sunnybrooke Farm. But there’s a blob of God in her. Spirit finds a nest in the most horribly
fractured places. In my case, my death
meant almost more than my life; it simply had to be, just as Lucy’s long messy
life has to be, a fact which she accepts only grudgingly.
The only thing I’m really worried about is
that we didn’t go about it in the way that Cassie and I planned. We had even talked about going to a clinic
and having it all done in a sterile environment, all that jazz. Then we decided a turkey baster would
probably work if we were willing to keep at it for several months, really
pouring it on (so to speak) during my fertile periods. I knew David would be able to keep up because
the guy is a bloody sex maniac at heart.
But it was kind of sweet of him to have me
over to his place in Kits, treating me like a real lady (God, I can’t believe
I’m saying this – a “lady” is someone in white gloves who can’t get her knees
apart. It nearly makes me sick!). Plying me with wine and music and spinning
that web of charm all around me, the old spider. What does he take me for? He didn’t quite have the guts to come right
out and say that we should stop beating around the bush (so to speak) and do
this the old-fashioned way. God knows
David’s equipment is a little more interesting than a big plastic tube with a
bulb at the end, though vaguely the same size and shape. Anyway, after all that red wine and swampy
talk and intimate clasping-across-the-table stuff (toes running up the
trouser-leg, etc.), I just sort of came over and sat in his lap in my black
bodysuit and he started peeling me like a tangerine.
Cassie doesn’t have to know about
this. Jesus, if she finds out we’re
doomed. She’d kill us and immediately
excommunicate the devilish David. But hell,
it was fun. I even removed my eyebrow
ring and tongue stud out of respect for David’s delicate aesthetic sense, but
left in the ones in my nipples and labia which I think secretly turned him on,
because this high-flown intellectual suddenly got converted into a ravenous
wild animal. It’s no wonder really,
because the idiot goes for literally months without sex.
So anyway, there we were on his
living-room floor with Vivaldi blaring away in the background, and it was as if
the place suddenly became a gymnasium or something. His spine is in way better shape than I
thought and it made me wonder if he secretly does yoga or something. (Didn’t Yehudi Menuhin used to do yoga? No wonder his wife was always smiling.)
Musicians really, really know what to do with their fingers too and he was
playing all the right keys, if you know what I mean.
I’ve never been so happy to throw up in my
entire life! Cass heard me barfing and
retching and came right into the bathroom and held my head while the tears poured
down my face. Then we started jumping
around the room with our arms around each other. I felt like I was about eight years old and
had just won a contest or something. “It
worked so fast!” Cass kept saying, and she was right, considering we’d only
gone at the baster method maybe a couple of times. Typical of David though that it only took one
good fuck. The man rang the bell first
try. He must be eating his Wheaties or
something.
So now Cass is going all mother-hennish on
me and telling me to eat this and don’t smoke that, and I am really trying,
cutting down to only half a pack a day which is really a pretty big concession
to this teeny blob of genetic material in my gut. I’ve been trying to do a mental
computer-morph on David and I to see what this kid’s face will look like, but
it’s almost impossible, like crossing a boxer with a chihuahua. Cass hopes it’s a girl but popping out a
being with a little pink wee-wee also appeals to me mightily. There’s more than one way to have a prick inside
you. God, nature is relentless. Along with morning barfs there’s zits and
moodiness and running to piss and even (already) boredom. I feel really uncreative, as if all my energy
is flowing into the formation of this superbaby. I don’t even feel like hanging around the
clubs any more. Can’t drink anyway, I’d throw it all up in a minute, so it’d be
a bit of a waste.
So do I now have to go out and buy a bunch
of navy blue clothes with little puffs on the sleeves? I hope my bodysuits just stretch. I want people to see my belly anyway. I have nothing to hide.
LINK TO PART FOUR: A Singing Tree (Part Four of Six)
