Play for me. I missed you.
He drew closer to the glass, all shoulders for a moment it seemed, so tall and narrow, and with such torrential and tempting hair--I wanted so to feel it and groom it--and he peered down at me through the higher windowpanes, no angry glaring fictional Peter Quint searching for a secret beyond me. But looking right at what he sought. At me.
The floorboards creaked. Someone trod the path right to the door.
Althea came again. As easily as if it were any common moment.
I didn't turn over to look at her. She merely slipped into the room as she always did.
I heard her behind me. I heard her set down a cup. I could smell hot chocolate.
But I never took my eyes off him with his high shoulders and dusty tailored wool sleeves, and he never took his deep brilliant eyes off me as he stared without interruption through the window.
"Oh, Lord God, you there again," Althea said.
He didn't move. Neither did I.
I heard her words in a soft near unintelligible rush. Forgive this translation. "You here right at Miss Triana's window. Some nerve you got. Why, you like to scare me to death. Miss Triana, he be waiting all this time, night and day, saying he would play for you, saying he couldn't get near to you, that you loved his playing, that you can't do without him, he say. Well, what's you gonna play now that she come home, you think you can play something pretty for her now, the way she is, look at her, you think you gonna make her feel all right?"
She came strolling around the foot of the bed, portly, arms folded, chin stuck out.
"Come on now, play something for her," she said. "You hear me through that glass. She home now, she so sad, and you, look at you, you think I'm going to clean that coat for you, you got another think coming."
I must have smiled. I must have sunk a little deeper into the pillow.
She saw him!
His eyes never moved from me. He paid her no respect. His hand was on the glass like a great white spider. But there at his side in the other hand was the violin, with the bow. I saw the dark elegant curves of wood.
I smiled at her without moving my head, because now she stood between us, boldly, facing me, blotting him out. Again, I translate what is not a dialect so much as a song:
"He talk and talk about how he can play and he play for you. How you love it. You know him. I ain't seen him come up here on the porch. Lacomb should have seen him come. I ain't scared of him. Lacomb can run him off right now. Just say so. He don't bother me none. He played some music here one night, I tell you, you never heard such music, I thought, Lord the police will be here and nobody here but Lacomb and me. I told him, You hush now, and he was so upset, you never saw such eyes, he looked at me, he say, You don't like what I play, I say, I like it, I just don't want to hear it. He say all kind of crazy things like he know all about me and what I got to bear, he talk like a crazy man, he just jabbering on and on, and Lacomb say, If you're looking for a handout we gonna feed you Althea's red beans and rice and you gonna die of poison! Now, Miss Triana, you know!"
I laughed out loud but it didn't make very much noise. He was still there; I could see only a little of the big lanky darkness of him behind her. I hadn't moved. The afternoon was deepening.
"I love your red beans and rice, Althea," I said.
She marched about, straightened the old Battenburg lace on the night table, glared at him, apparently, and then smiled down at me, one satin hand touching my cheek for a moment. So sweet, my God, how can I live without you?
"No, it's perfectly fine," I said. "You go on now, Althea. I do know him. Maybe he will play, who knows? Don't bother about him. I'll look out for him."
"Look like a tramp to me," she muttered under her breath, arms folded tight again most eloquently as she started out of the room. She went on talking, making her own song. I wish I could better render for posterity in some form her rapid speech, with so many syllables dropped, and above all her boundless enthusiasm and wisdom.
I nestled into my pillow; I crooked my arm under the pillow and snuggled against it, staring right up at him, his figure in the window, peering over the top of the sash through the double panes of glass.
Songs are everywhere you look, in the rain, in the wind, in the moan of the suffering, songs.
She shut the door. Double click, which means, with a New Orleans door, invariably warped, that she really closed it.
The quiet came back over the room as if it had never been mussed in the slightest. The Avenue gave forth a sudden crescendo of its continued rumble.
Beyond him--my friend peering at me with his black eyes and showing me only a smileless mouth--the birds sang in a late-afternoon spurt that comes each day by their clock and always surprises me. The traffic made its cheerful dirge.
He moved his tall unkempt form into the full window. Shirt white and soiled and unbuttoned; dark hair on his chest like a shadow or fleece. An opened vest of black wool because its buttons were all gone.
This is what I think I saw, at least.
He leaned very close against the twelve-paned frame. How thin he was, sick perhaps? Like Karl? I smiled to think it might all unfold once more. But no, that seemed very far away now, and he so vivid as he looked down at me, so very remote from the real weakness of death.
There came a chiding look from him, as if to say, You know better. And then he did smile, and his eyes gave a brighter ever more secretive gleam, as he gazed at me possessively.
His forehead was pale and bony above his lids, but it gave the eyes their lovely sly shadowy depth, and his black hair grew so thick from his beautiful hairline with its widow's peak and well-proportioned temples that it lent him a hefty beauty even in his thinness. He did have hands like spiders! He stroked the upper panes with his right hand. He made prints that I saw in the dust, as the light made tiny inevitable shifts, as the garden beyond him with its dense cherry laurels and magnolias moved and breathed with breeze and traffic.
The thick white cuff of his shirt was soiled, and his coat gray with dust.
A slow change came over his expression. The smile was gone, but there was no animosity there and I realized now that there had never been. An air of superiority, of secretive superiority, had marked him before, but this expression was unguarded and spontaneous.
A baffled tender feeling passed over his face, held it and then released it to what seemed anger. Then he became sad, not publicly or artificially sad, but deeply, privately sad, as if he might lose his grip on this little spectacle of spookdom on the porch. He stepped back. I heard the boards. My house proclaims any movement.
And then he slipped away.
Just like that. Gone from the window. Gone from the porch. I couldn't hear him beyond the shutters at the far corner end. I knew he wasn't there. I knew he had gone away, and I had the most pure conviction that he had in fact vanished.
My heart thudded too loudly.
"If only it wasn't a violin," I thought. "I mean, thank God it's a violin, because there isn't any other sound on earth like that, there's ..."
My words died away.
Faint music, his music.
He hadn't gone very far. He'd just chosen some dark distant part of the garden way out in the back, near to the rear of the old Chapel Mansion on Prytania Street. My property meets the Chapel property. The block belongs to us, to the Chapel and to me, from Prytania to St. Charles along Third Street. Of course there is another side to the block, where other buildings stand, but this great half of the square is ours, and he had only retreated perhaps as far as the old oaks behind the Chapel.
I thought I would cry.
For one moment, the pain of his music and my own feeling were so perfectly wedded that I thought, I cannot be expected to endure this. Only a fool would not reach for a gun, put a gun in the mouth and pull the trigger--an image that had haunted me often when I was, in younger years, a hopeless drunk, and then again almost continuously until Karl came.
This was a Gaelic song, in
the Minor Key, deep and throbbing and full of patient despair and ambitionless longing--he had the Irish fiddle sound in it, the hoarse dark harmony of the lower strings played together in a plea that sounded more purely human than any sound made by child, man or woman.
It struck me--a great formless thought, unable to take shape in this atmosphere of slow lovely embracing music--that that was the power of the violin, that it sounded human in a way that we humans could not! It spoke for us in a way that we ourselves couldn't. Ah, yes, and that's what all the pondering and poetry has always been about.
It made my tears flow, his song, the Gaelic musical phrases old and new, and the sweet climb of notes that tumbled inevitably into an endless testimony of acceptance. Such tender concern. Such perfect sympathy.
I rolled over into the pillow. His music was wondrously clear. Surely all the block heard it, the passersby, and Lacomb and Althea at it at the kitchen table with their playing cards or epithets; surely the birds themselves were lulled.
The violin, the violin.
I saw a day in summer some thirty-five years ago. I had my own violin in my case, between me and Gee, who rode his motorcycle, as I clung to him from the back, keeping the violin safe. I sold the violin to the man on Rampart Street for five dollars.
"But you sold it to me for twenty-five dollars," I said, "and that was just two years ago."
Away it went in its black case, my violin; musicians must be the mainstay of pawnshops. Everywhere there hung instruments for sale; or maybe music attracts many bitter dreamers such as me with grandiose designs and no talent.
I had only touched a violin two times since--was that thirty-five years? Almost. Save for one blazing drunken time and its hangover aftermath, I never even picked up another violin, never never wanted to touch the wood, the strings, the resin, the bow, no, not ever.
But why did I bother to think of this? This was an old adolescent disappointment. I'd seen the great Isaac Stern play Beethoven's Violin Concerto in our Municipal Auditorium. I'd wanted to make those glorious sounds! I'd wanted to be that figure, swaying on the stage. I wanted to bewitch! To make sounds like these now, penetrating the walls of this room....
Beethoven's Violin Concerto--the first classical piece of music I came to know intimately later from library records.
I would become an Isaac Stern. I had to!
Why think of it? Forty years ago, I knew I had no gift, no ear, could not distinguish quarter tones, hadn't the dexterity or the discipline; the best teachers told me as kindly as they could.
And then there was the chorus of the family, "Triana's making horrible noises on her violin!" And the dour advice of my father that the lessons cost too much, especially for one so undisciplined, lazy and generally erratic by nature.
That ought to be easy to forget.
Hasn't enough common tragedy thundered down the road since then, mother, child, first husband long lost, Karl dead, the toll of time, the deepening understanding--?
Yet look how vivid the long ago day, the pawnbroker's face, and my last kiss to the violin--my violin--before it slid across the dirty glass countertop. Five dollars.
All nonsense. Cry for not being tall, not being slender and graceful, not being beautiful, not having a voice either with which to sing, or even enough determination to master the piano sufficiently for Christmas carols.
I had taken the five dollars and added fifty to it with Rosalind's help and gone to California. School was out. My mother was dead. My father had found a new lady friend, a Protestant with whom to have an "occasional lunch," who cooked huge meals for my neglected little sisters.
"You never took care of them!"
Stop it, I won't think on those times, I won't, or of little Faye and Katrinka on that afternoon when I went away, Katrinka scarcely interested, but Faye smiling so brightly and throwing her kisses ... no, don't. Can't. Won't.
Play your violin for me, all right, but I will now politely forget my own.
Just listen to him.
It's as if he were arguing with me! The bastard! On and on went the song, conceived in sorrow and meant to be played in sorrow and meant to make sorrow sweet or legendary or both.
The world of now receded. I was fourteen. Isaac Stern played on the stage. The great concerto of Beethoven rose and fell beneath the chandeliers of the auditorium. How many other children sat there rapt? Oh, God, to be this! To be able to do this! ...
It seemed remote that I had ever grown up and lived a life, that I'd ever fallen in love with my first husband, Lev, known Karl, that he'd ever lived or died, or that Lev and I had ever lost a little girl named Lily, that I had held someone that small in my arms as she suffered, her head bald, her eyes closed--ah, no, there is a point surely where memory becomes dream.
There must be some medical legislation against it.
Nothing so terrible could have happened as that golden-haired child dying as a waif, or Karl crying out, Karl who never complained, or Mother on the path, begging not to be taken away that last day, and I, her self-centered fourteen-year-old daughter utterly unaware that I would never feel her warm arms again, could never kiss her, never say, Mother, whatever happened, I love you. I love you. I love you.
My father had sat straight up in the bed, rising against the morphine and saying, aghast: "Triana, I'm dying!"
Look how small Lily's white coffin in the California grave. Look at it. Way out there where we smoked our grass, and drank our beer and read our poetry aloud, beats, hippies, changers of the world, parents of a child so touched with grace that strangers stopped--even when the cancer had her--to say how beautiful was her small round white face. I watched again over time and space, and those men put the little white coffin inside a redwood box down in the hole, but they didn't nail shut the boards.
Lev's father, a hearty gentle Texan, had picked up a handful of earth and dropped it into the grave. Lev's mother had cried and cried. Then others had done the same, a custom I'd never known, and my own father solemn, looking on. What had he thought: Punishment for your sins, that you left your sisters, that you married out of your church, that you let your mother die unloved!
Or did he think more trivial things? Lily was not a grandchild he had cherished. Two thousand miles had separated them, and seldom had he seen her before the cancer took her long golden streams of hair and made her little cheeks soft and puffy, but there was no potion known to man that could ever dull her gaze or her courage.
He doesn't matter now, your father, whom he loved and did not love!
I turned over in the bed, grinding the pillow under me, marveling that even with my left ear buried in the down, I could still hear his violin.
Home, home, you are home, and they will all someday come home. What does that mean? It doesn't have to mean. You just have to whisper it ... or sing, sing a wordless song with his violin.
And so the rain came.
My humble thanks.
The rain came.
Just as I might have wished it, and it falls on the old boards of the porch and on the rotting tin roof above this bedroom; it splashes on the wide windowsills and trickles through the cracks.
Yet on and on he played, he with his satin hair and his satin violin, playing as if uncoiling into the atmosphere a ribbon of gold so fine that it will thin to mist once it's been heard and known and loved, and bless the entire world with some tiny fraction of glimmering glory.
"How can you be so content," I asked myself, "to lie right between these worlds? Life and death? Madness and sanity?"
His music spoke; the notes flowed low and deep and hungering before they soared. I closed my eyes.
He went into a ripping dance now, with zest and dissonance and utter seriousness. He played so full and fierce, I thought surely someone would come. It's what people call the Devil's kind of music.
But the rain fell and fell and no one stopped him. No one would.
Like a shock it came to me! I was home and safe and the rain surrounded this long octagonal r
oom like a veil, but I wasn't alone:
I have you, now.
I whispered aloud to him, though of course he wasn't in the room.
I could have sworn that far away and near at hand, he laughed. He let me hear it. The music didn't laugh. The music was bound to follow its hoarse, perfectly pitched, driving course as if to drive a band of meadow dancers weary mad. But he laughed.
I began to fall into sleep, not the deep black beginning-less sleep of hospital drugs, but true, deep, sweet sleep, and the music rose and tightened and then gave forth a monumental flood as if he had forgiven me.
It seemed the rain and this music would kill me. I would die quiet without a protest. But I only dreamed, sliding down down into a full-blown illusion as if it had been waiting for me.
5
IT WAS that sea again, that ocean clear and blue and frothing wild into the flopping prancing ghosts with every wave that hit the beach. It had the spell of the lucid dream. It said, Yes, you couldn't be dreaming, you are not, you're here! That's what the lucid dream always says. You turn around and around it and you can't wake up. It says, You cannot have imagined this.
But we had to leave now from the soothing breeze off the sea. The window was closed. The time has come.
I saw roses strewn across a gray carpet, roses with long stems and each tipped with a sealed vial of water to keep it fresh, roses with petals darkened and soft, and voices spoke in a foreign tongue, a tongue I ought to know but didn't know, a language made up, it seemed, just for this dream. For surely I was dreaming. I had to be. But I was here, imprisoned in this, as if transported body and soul into it, and something in me sang, Don't let it be a dream.
"That's right!" said the beautiful dark-skinned Mariana. She had short hair, and a white blouse that didn't cover her shoulders, a swan's neck, a purring voice.
She opened the doors of a vast place. I could not believe my eyes. I could not believe that solid things could be as lovely as the sea and sky, and this--this was a temple of polychrome marble.
It's not a dream, I thought. You couldn't dream this! You haven't the visions in you to make such a dream. You're here, Triana!
Look at the walls inlaid with a creamy deep-veined Carrara marble, panels framed in gold and the skirting of darker brown stone, no less polished, no less variegated, no less wondrous. Look at the square pilasters with their golden scrolled capitals.