Violin Read online

  Music. I could try it again. Just one more evening alone listening to my disks, all to myself, before they came, screaming. Before his mother sobbed on the phone from London, "Thank God the baby is born! He waited, he waited until his sister's baby was born!"

  I knew that's exactly what she would say, and it was true, I guess; he had waited for his sister's baby, but not waited long enough for her to come home, that's the part that would keep her screaming longer than I had the patience to listen. Kind old woman. To whose bedside do you go, that of your daughter in London, giving birth, or that of your dying son?

  The house was littered with the trash.

  Ah, what license I'd taken. The nurses didn't really want to come during the last days anyway. There are saints around, saints who stay with the dying until the very last, but in this case, I was there, and no saints were needed.

  Every day my old-timers, Althea and Lacomb, had come to knock, but I hadn't changed the note on the door: All Is Well. Leave a Message.

  And so the place was full of trash, of cookie crumbs and empty cans, and dust and even leaves, as if a window must be open somewhere, probably in the master bedroom which we never used, and the wind had brought the leaves in on the orange carpet.

  I went into the front room. I lay down. I wanted to reach out to touch the button and start the Second Movement again, just Beethoven with me, the captain of this pain. But I couldn't do it.

  It even seemed all right for the Little Genius, Mozart perhaps, the bright safe glow of angels chattering and laughing and doing back flips in celestial light. I wanted to ... But I just didn't move ... for hours. I heard Mozart in my head; I heard his racing violin; always with me it was the violin, the violin above all, that I loved.

  I heard Beethoven now and then; the stronger happiness of his one and only Violin Concerto which I had long ago memorized, the easy solo melodies, I mean. But nothing played in the house where I lay with the dead man upstairs. The floor was cold. It was spring and the weather wavered in these days from very hot to winter chill. And I thought to myself, Well, it's getting cold, and that will keep the body better, won't it?

  Someone knocked. They went away. The traffic reached its peak. There came a quiet. The phone machine told lie after lie after lie. Click and click and click click.

  Then I slept, perhaps for the first time.

  And the most beautiful dream came to me.

  2

  I DREAMED of the sea by the full light of the sun, but such a sea I'd never known. The land was a great cradle in which this sea moved, as the sea at Waikiki or along the coast south of San Francisco. That is, I could see distant arms of land to left and right, reaching out desperately to contain this water.

  But what a fierce and glistening sea it was, and under such a huge and pure sun, though the sun itself I couldn't see, only the light of it. The great waves came rolling in, curling, full of green light for one instant before they broke and then each wave did a dance--a dance--I'd never witnessed.

  A great frothy foam came from each dying wave, but this foam broke into great random peaks, as many as six to eight for one wave, and these peaks looked like nothing so much as people--people made of the glistening bubbles of the foam--reaching out for the real land, for the beach, for the sun above perhaps.

  Over and over, I watched the sea in my dream. I knew I was watching from a window. And I marveled and tried to count the dancing figures before they would inevitably die away, astonished at how well formed of foam they became, with nodding heads and desperate arms, before they lapsed back as if dealt a mortal blow by the air, to wash away and come again in the curling green wave with a whole new display of graceful imploring movements.

  People of foam, ghosts out of the sea--that's what they looked like to me, and all along the beach for as far as I could see from my safe window, the waves all did the same; they curled, green and brilliant, and then they broke and became the pleading figures, some nodding to each other, and others away, and then turning back again into a great violent ocean.

  Seas I've seen, but never a sea where the waves made dancers. And even as the evening sun went down, an artificial light flooded the combed sand, the dancers came still, with heads high and long spines and arms flung beseechingly landward.

  Oh, these foamy beings looked so like ghosts to me--like spirits too weak to make a form in the concrete world, yet strong enough to invest for a moment in the wild disintegrating froth and force it into human shape before nature took it back.

  How I loved it. All night long I watched it, or so my dream told me, the way dreams will do. And then I saw myself in the dream and it was daytime. The world was alive and busy. But the sea was just as vast and so blue I almost cried to look at it.

  I saw myself in the window! In my dreams, such a perspective almost never comes, never! But there I was, I knew myself, my own thin square face, my own black hair with bangs cut blunt and all the rest long and straight. I stood in a square window in a white facade of what seemed a grand building. I saw my own features, small, nondescript with a smile, not interesting, only ordinary and totally without danger or challenge, my face with bangs long almost to my eyelashes, and my lips so easily smiling. I have a face that lives in its smiles. And even in the dream I thought, Ah Triana, you must be very happy! But it never took much to make me smile, really. I know misery and happiness intimately!

  I thought all this in the dream. I thought of both the misery and the happiness. And I was happy. I saw in the dream that I stood in the window holding in my left arm a big bouquet of red roses, and that with my right arm I waved to people below me.

  But where could this be, I thought, coming closer and closer to the edge of wakefulness. I never sleep for long. I never sleep deep. The dreadful suspicion had already made itself known. This is a dream, Triana! You aren't there. You're not in a warm bright place with a vast sea. You have no roses.

  But the dream would not break, or fade, or show the slightest tear or flaw.

  I saw myself high in the window, waving still, smiling, holding the big floppy bouquet, and then I saw that I waved to young men and women who stood on the sidewalk below--tall children, no more than that--kids of twenty-five years or less--just kids, and I knew that it was they who had sent me the roses. I loved them. I waved and waved and so did they, and in their exuberance they jumped up and down, and then I threw them kisses.

  Kiss after kiss I threw with the fingers of my right hand to these admirers, while behind them the great blue sea blazed and evening came, sharp and sudden, and beyond these youthful dancers on the patterned black and white pavements, there danced the sea once more, flocks of figures rising from the foamy waves, and this seemed a world so real I couldn't pronounce it just a dream.

  "This is happening to you, Triana. You're there."

  I tried to be clever. I knew these hypnagogic tricks that dreams could do, I knew the demons who come face to face with you on the very margin of sleep. I knew and I turned and tried to see the room in which I stood. "Where is this? How could I imagine it?"

  But I saw only the sea. The night was black with stars. The delirium of the foamy ghosts ran for as far as I could see.

  Oh, Soul, Oh, Lost Souls, I sang aloud, Oh, are you happy, are you happier than in life which has such hard edges to it and such agony? They gave no answer, these ghosts; they extended their arms, only to be dragged back into dazzling sliding water.

  I woke. So sharp.

  Karl said in my ear: "Not that way! You don't understand. Stop it!"

  I sat up. That was a shocking thing, to have so recollected his voice, to have imagined it so close to me. But not a terribly unwelcome thing. There was no fear in me.

  I was alone in the big dirty front room. The headlights threw the lace all over the ceiling. In the painted St. Sebastian above the mantel the gilded halo gleamed. The house creaked and the traffic crawled by, a lower rumbling.

  "You're here. And it was, it was, it was a vivid dream, and Karl was right her
e beside me!"

  For the first time I caught a scent in the air. Sitting on the floor, my legs crossed, still all filled up with the dream and the strictness of Karl's voice--"Not that way! You don't understand. Stop it!"--all filled up with this, I caught the scent in the house that meant his body had begun to rot.

  I knew that scent. We all know it. Even if we have not been to morgues or battlefields we know it. We know it when the rat dies in the wall, and no one can find it.

  I knew it now ... faint, but filling all of this whole house, all its big ornamented rooms, filling even this parlor, where St. Sebastian glared out from the golden frame, and the music box lay within inches. And the telephone was once more making that click, time for the lie, click. A message perhaps.

  But the point is, Triana, you dreamed it. And this smell could not be borne. No, not this, because this wasn't Karl, this awful smell. This was not my Karl. This was just a dead body.

  I thought I should move. Then something fixed me. It was music, but it wasn't coming from my disks strewn on the floor, and it wasn't a music I knew, but I knew the instrument.

  Only a violin can sing like that, only a violin can plead and cry in the night like that. Oh, how in childhood I had longed to be able to make that sound on a violin.

  Someone out there was playing a violin. I heard it. I heard it rise tenderly above the mingled Avenue sounds. I heard it desperate and poignant as if guided by Tchaikovsky; I heard a masterly riff of notes so fast and dexterous they seemed magical.

  I climbed to my feet and I went to the corner window.

  He was there. The tall one with the shiny black rock musician hair and the dusty coat. The one I'd seen before. He stood on my side of the corner now, on the broken brick sidewalk beside my iron fence and he played the violin as I looked down on him. I pushed the curtain back. The music made me want to sob.

  I thought, I will die of this. I will die of death and the stench in this house and the sheer beauty of this music.

  Why had he come? Why to me? Why, and to play of all things the violin, which I so loved, and once in childhood had struggled with so hard, but who does not love the violin? Why had he come to play it near my window?

  Ah, honey babe, you are dreaming! It's just the thickest yet, the worst most hypnagogic trap. You're still dreaming. You haven't waked at all. Go back, find yourself, find yourself where you know you are ... lying on the floor. Find yourself.

  "Triana!"

  I spun round.

  Karl stood in the door. His head was wrapped in the white cloth but his face was stone white and his body almost a skeleton in the black silk pajamas I had put on him.

  "No, don't!" he said.

  The voice of the violin rose. The bow came crashing down on the lower strings, the D, the G, making that soulful agonizing throb that is almost dissonance and became in this moment the sheer expression of my desperation.

  "Ah, Karl!" I called out. I must have.

  But Karl was gone. There was no Karl. The violin sang on; it sang and sang, and when I turned and looked I saw him again, with his shiny black hair, and his wide shoulders, and the violin, silken and brown in the street light, and he did bring the bow down with such violence now that I felt the chills run up the back of my neck and down my arms.

  "Don't stop, don't stop!" I cried out.

  He swayed like a wild man, alone on the corner, in the red glow of the florist shop lights, in the dull beam of the curved street lamp, in the shadow of the magnolia branches tangled over the bricks. He played. He played of love and pain and loss and played and played of all the things I most in this world wanted to believe. I began to cry.

  I could smell the stench again.

  I was awake. I had to be. I hit the glass, but not hard enough to break it. I looked at him.

  He turned towards me, the bow poised, and then looking right up at me over the fence, he played a softer song, taking it down so low that the passing cars almost drowned it.

  A loud noise jarred me. Someone banging on the back door. Someone banging hard enough to break the glass.

  I stood there, not wanting to leave, but knowing that when people knock like that, they are bound to come in, and someone had caught on that Karl was dead, for sure, and I had to go and talk sane. There was no time for music.

  No time for this? He brought the notes down low, moaning, loud and raucous again and then high and piercing from the strings.

  I backed away from the window.

  There was a figure in the room; but it wasn't Karl. It was a woman. She came from the hallway, and I knew her. She was my neighbor. Her name was Hardy. Miss Nanny Hardy.

  "Triana, honey, is that man bothering you?" she asked. She went to the window.

  She was so outside his song. I knew her with another part of my mind, because all of the rest of me was moving with him, and quite suddenly I realized he was real.

  She had just proved it.

  "Triana, honey, for two days, you haven't answered the door. I just gave the door a hard push. I was worried about you, Triana. You and Karl. Triana, tell me if you want me to make that horrible man go away. Who does he think he is? Look at him. He's been outside the house, and now listen to him, playing the violin at this time of night. Doesn't he know that a man is sick in this house--"

  But these were teeny tiny sounds, these words, like little pebbles dropping out of somebody's hand. The music went on, sweet, and demure, and winding to a compassionate finale. I know your pain. I know. But madness isn't for you. It never was. You're the one who never goes mad.

  I stared at him and then again at Miss Hardy. Miss Hardy wore a dressing gown. She'd come in slippers. Quite a thing for such a proper lady. She looked at me. She looked around the room, circumspect and gently, as well bred people do, but surely she saw the scattered music disks and empty soda cans, the crumpled wrapper from the bread, the unopened mail.

  It wasn't this, however, that made her face change as she looked back at me. Something caught her off guard; something assaulted her. Something unpleasant suddenly touched her.

  She'd smelled the smell. Karl's body.

  The music stopped. I turned. "Don't let him go!" I said.

  But the tall lanky man with the silky black hair had already begun to walk away, carrying in his hands his violin and his bow, and he looked back at me as he crossed Third Street and stood before the florist shop, and he waved at me, waved, and carefully placing his bow in his left hand with the neck of the violin, he raised his right hand and blew a kiss to me, deliberate and sweet.

  He blew me a kiss like those young kids had done in the dream, the kids who'd brought me roses.

  Roses, roses, roses ... I almost heard someone saying those words, and it was in a foreign tongue, which almost made me laugh to think a rose by any other tongue is still a rose.

  "Triana," Miss Hardy said so gently, her hand out to touch my shoulder. "Let me call someone." It was not a question, really.

  "Yes, Miss Hardy, I should make the call." I pushed my bangs out of my eyes. I blinked, trying to gather up more light from the street and see her better in her flowered dressing gown, very neat.

  "It's the smell, isn't it? You can smell it."

  She nodded very slowly. "Why in God's name did his mother leave you here alone!"

  "A baby, Miss Hardy, born in London, a few days ago. You can hear all about it from the machine. The message is there. I insisted that his mother go. She didn't want to leave Karl. And there it was, you see, no one can tell you exactly when a dying man will die, or a baby will be born, and this was Karl's sister's first, and Karl told her to go, and I insisted she go, and then ... then I just got tired of all the others coming."

  I couldn't read her face. I couldn't even imagine her thoughts. Perhaps she didn't know them herself in such a moment. I thought she was pretty in her dressing gown; it was white with pale flowers and pleated at the waist, and she had satin slippers too, such as a Garden District lady might, and she was very rich, they always said. H
er gray hair was neatly trimmed in small curls around her face.

  I looked back out at the Avenue. The tall lanky man was gone from view. I heard those words again. You're the one who never goes mad! I couldn't remember the expression on his face. Had he smiled? Had he moved his lips? And the music, just thinking of it made the tears flow.

  It was the most shamefully emotional music, so like Tchaikovsky just saying, Hell with the world, and letting the sweetest, saddest pain gush, in a way that my Mozart and my Beethoven never did.

  I looked at the empty block, the far houses. A streetcar came slowly rocking towards the corner. By God, he was there! The violinist. He had crossed to the median and he stood on the car stop, but he didn't get on the car. He was too far away for me to see his expression or know even that he could still see me, and now he turned and drifted off.

  The night was the same. The stench was the same.

  Miss Hardy stood in frightening motionlessness.

  She looked so sad. She thought I was crazy. Or she just hated it, perhaps, to be the one to find me this way, the one to have to do something perhaps. I don't know.

  She went away, to find the phone, I thought. She didn't have more words for me. She thought I was out of my mind and not worth another word of sense, and who could blame her?

  At least it was true about the baby born in London. But I would have let his body lie there even if they'd all been home and here. It just would have been harder.

  I turned around and hurried out of the parlor, and across the dining room. I went through the small breakfast room and ran up the steps. They are small, these steps--not a grand staircase as in a two-story antebellum house, but small delicate curved steps to go to the attic of a Greek Revival cottage.

  I slammed his door and turned the brass key. He was always one for every door having its proper key, and for the first time ever I was glad of it.