Tuesday, October 8, 2024

A Singing Tree (Part Three of Six)

 

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.

 HARRIET SMITHSON

     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 Old World bow that Zoltán takes at the end of each session.  Only Faith knows what it is like to see her partner rage and cry and lose his dignity under life’s inevitable strain; Lucy can only imagine.

     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 5:55.  Weight 168.  Call from Lucy last night.  She’s in a weird space.  Something happened that she isn’t telling me about.  Got an even weirder call from her friend Monika, whom I barely know:  “I’m concerned about Lucy.”  (Lucy has a way of getting people concerned about her.)  Told Monika I knew nothing.  I think it’s something to do with Kate, probably pregnant or something.  Teenage hormones run riot.  Lucy isn’t talking.

     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.

 KATE

     I can’t believe it. Mums boffed that guy, that Rafe.  She didn’t have to say a word.  Came up the stairs at 2:07 a.m. the other night looking guilty, walking guilty even, and I  just shot her a glance.  She smiled sheepishly and turned a funny color.  About time, I say.  It’s been a long time since she and Dad split up and I don’t think she’s really had a boy friend in all that time.  Wonder if it was any good?  Sex with Brian isn’t always great, at least not since the “episode”, which really took it out of me.  Once in a while it’s good, but I still have to show him what to do.  Guys aren’t born knowing. 

     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 Calgary, for God’s sake.  I think he’s even seeing someone.  I picked up a vibe.  Mums goes all tight-lipped whenever I mention his name, even though she’s officially “over” him.  I’m sure she still loves him.  She wants to demonstrate to him that she’s a different person from the drunken banshee who used to blow off the roof every Saturday night.  But Dad too suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome (I’ve definitely been reading too many of Mums’s books).  We all do, even Mad Max the Manx who sleeps on top of his litter-box, weird.  Shake the family tree and all the nuts fall down.

 LUCY’S JOURNAL

     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 Budapest.  Even the idea of sex with Zoltán is wrong, like incest.  But the mind often travels into the forbidden zone.)

      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.

      CASSANDRA MARTIN

     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 Budapest about 40 years ago.  For the equivalent of fifty bucks.  I wanted to say to her, “Lucy, don’t you know when you’re being conned?”  Every violinist has a story like that about their ersatz Strad which conveniently happens to have no label inside it to identify it one way or the other.  I’m not particularly musical (though I feel even less so when Lucy starts to expound), but I know a charming con when I see one.  Lucy doesn’t.  Alcoholics are all that way, gullible, dazzled by surface glitter.  “Zoltán has so much unresolved pain inside him,” Lucy maundered, going on and on about images of World War II which flashed into her mind when he touched her.  So how does Faith feel about all this?  Lucy claims to like her, to be making friends with her.  And Faith’s no pushover, from the sound of things, and will keep a close eye on the situation.  My impression is that Zoltán would fall apart without her, in spite of his ramrod-straight comportment, the way he carries himself like a pampered little prince.  (I’ve never seen him, but I do “see” him from Lucy’s ga-ga descriptions.)

     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?

 ANDREW

     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.

 ZOË

     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)