Clark Kent shouted into the empty phone. Agitated, he asked the man who’d been sitting next to him, “Could you hand me my water?”
“I remember old stuff,” Angie said, slow as a warped record.
Luke took her hand, lacing his fingers with hers. She was trembling slightly. They didn’t look at each other but at the television screen, where Clark Kent slipped the water glass into his jacket pocket. Later, Luke knew, he’d check for fingerprints and find the man didn’t have any.
Twenty-eight
At the river at 6 A.M., after two hours of cello practice, the sky was a still, flat black. In winter, dawn didn’t come until after seven. Pieter opened the car door and sat sideways on the seat to lace his skates, legs protruding from the car. He slid guards over the blades and made his awkward way down to the river. Above him, the sky prickled with stars.
Holding on to the back of a bench for support, he slipped the guards off his skates and into his pocket. He had to take a few wobbly steps from the bench to the river. As soon as his skate hit the ice, he felt his posture change.
On land his body often felt awkward to him, but on the ice his long limbs and sharp angles seemed to unlock and straighten. After the first mile he was warm enough to unfold his arms, then unbutton his coat. The Morrill ran twenty miles, starting in Cort, running south past Applefield, then through five miles of open country. Many days, he turned around at the covered bridge, but today he skated beneath it, ducking unnecessarily, and continued on.
He wished he thought about Jordana less—especially now, with Angie struggling. He saw Angie almost every evening, sad visits where his daughter slumped in a chair, listless but irritable, easily provoked to tears. He’d bought her a small portable stereo, and he brought CDs with him, Bach and Mozart. Sometimes they just sat together, listening to the music, and he held her hand.
But even on good nights when his daughter had seemed happy to see him, and even on bad nights when she sank into misery so deep she barely seemed to know he was there, on the car ride home he would find that—like a stylus dropping into the worn groove of a record—he’d moved back into thinking of his wife. If her love for him at first had been less overwhelming, he thought, marriage might ultimately have disappointed her less. But if her love for him had been less overwhelming, they would never have married.
Near Syria, the river became so shallow that boulders interrupted the ice’s surface. He skated between them for another half mile, until the number of rocks, and the softness of ice surrounding them, forced him to turn around.
He’d met Em, the woman he’d lived with before Jordana, at Juilliard. This was the late sixties and modern dance was still relatively new, Greenwich Village still relatively cheap. They had an apartment there, two small rooms plus a tiny closet that held only a toilet; the bathtub was in the kitchen. It was fashionable to reject the institution of marriage, the drive to make money. Pieter had taken secret pride in the knowledge that he and Em had rejected those things not out of rebellion or fashion but out of genuine disinterest. For both of them, art eclipsed everything else. Their relationship had been one of friendship, of good sex. They had even looked something alike: pale, lanky. At moments, he was stirred by her, as when Em woke in the morning and stretched. Casually, she’d touch her forehead to her shin, cupping her long feet—veined and knotty as a hundred-year old woman’s—with her hands.
When Pieter told her he was falling in love with the daughter of Jordan Cohen, he’d trusted Em to do what she did: stare at him out of those green-gray eyes, then cut him off mid-sentence with, “Okay.”
In the middle of the night, though, he woke to find her shaking next to him. “Em?” He reached to touch her shoulder and she jerked away.
Then suddenly she turned and kissed him. If she’d been crying it had been without tears: her face was dry. She kissed him, groping for his penis, a knee on his hip. He was relieved.
When he was inside her, she asked him to hit her.
“Emily. Jesus.”
In the Grace Kelly voice, she said, “I think you owe it to me to do what I want.”
“You want me to hit you?”
“I want you to hurt me.” She pushed back his hips so that he slid out of her, then turned onto her stomach. He moved back into her, trying to thrust as hard as he could, hoping that would be enough. “Hurt me,” Em said, and he did the only thing he could imagine, taking hold of her hair, wrapping it around his hand, pulling her head back sharply so that her throat was bared. He didn’t want to do it, and he didn’t want it to excite him but it did, driving into Em without gentleness, jerking back her head. She was crying out, and then he realized she was crying, and he let go of her hair and tried to cover her body with his own, trying to push his face down into the space between her neck and shoulder, trying to kiss her, saying, “Em, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, God, I’m so sorry.”
“Get off me.” She rolled from under him, stood, and crossed the room. The two rooms weren’t separated by a door, only by the curtain they’d hung across the doorframe. It came to him that he wasn’t sure he could afford to live here alone. There was the click of her lowering the toilet seat. He could hear her peeing, a noise that had delighted him when they first moved here.
Now he skated beneath the Park Street Bridge. Turning, he did the last quarter mile backward, neck twisted so he could look over his left shoulder. He skated as fast as he could, slowing after he passed the car. Coasting, he bent to catch his breath, gloved hands on knees.
At the riverbank he stumbled. Finding the rubber guards in his pocket, he slid them back onto the blades. Cumbrous again, he clumped to the car.
“Don’t grip so hard,” he told his newest student, a bank teller. He adjusted her hand on the frog of the bow so that she held it in just her fingertips.
She complained, “It feels all floppy.”
“You need to bow with the wrist, not with the fingers.” Together, they sawed again through the first eight bars of Anna Magdalena Bach. “Your D is flat,” he said, moving her pinkie forward on the A string. “Now play the note. Hear the difference?”
Lena nodded tentatively. She was a nice young woman who had told him that her dream was to learn to play the cello. He wasn’t being patient enough with her; next week or the next she would call to quit, sounding determined and (this part would be painful for him) embarrassed. Students had been quitting for the first time in his teaching; in the past he’d often worried, in fact, that he was too supportive and understanding, to the detriment of the music. He needed students, but suddenly he couldn’t find it in himself to be nicer.
Grasping Lena’s pinkie, he moved it to D-sharp and said, “Play.” Then he moved her finger to a correct D, then a D sharp, with his hand pressing her finger hard against the string. “Now you try. Hear? Wait, stop. You’re holding the bow too hard again.” Exasperated, he took the bow away and handed her a pencil. “See how you hold this? The bow needs to be held the same way. If you try to choke it, the notes will come out choked as well.” He took the pencil away, thrust the bow at her. “Try again.”
He usually loved teaching adults; their ambitions were small, they practiced dutifully, and they didn’t expect unrealistic progress. They would frown as they played a difficult passage, one they’d struggled with for weeks maybe, then beam at his praise. In contrast, the younger students—he taught four high-schoolers who came to him from all over the state, and one fifth grader—each believed they would one day be famous, and this meant they took Pieter’s corrections with faint skepticism. Two of the high-schoolers practiced fiendishly, but the other two got by mostly on talent. The most gifted, a chunky girl who wore thick glasses and reeked of cigarettes, often came to lessons and sight-read pieces she should have been practicing for a week. Her boyfriend lurked out at the curb, waiting for her to finish
Pieter said to Lena, “Try one more time.”
“I can’t play it anymore.”
He just looked at her. She ducked her head, brea
thed in, and played the first four bars. He interrupted her: “Your D is still flat. Don’t you hear that? Never mind.” He sank back into his chair. “Enough for today.”
Lena packed her rented cello—orange-stained wood, fingerboard dyed black to look like ebony—into its canvas case. She wrote a check, not looking at Pieter, and held it out without meeting his eyes. Outside, the afternoon folded in upon itself, light fading.
Pieter said, “I know that I’m pushing you very hard. But it’s because—” Because his soul rattled in his body, dry and trapped? Because she filled one more hour that would otherwise have been spent knocking blindly around his house? “You have talent,” he lied.
She looked at him. “Really? I thought … I always sound so bad.”
If he said, no, no, you truly have talent, he’d inspire her for weeks. He wasn’t able, though, to give her more than, “These cheap rented instruments.” He pulled his lips back: a smile. “Next week?”
Twenty-nine
Nine at night. They ate dinner in the kitchen, a pizza Luke’s parents had picked up on the way home from the hospital. Out the wide back window the moon hung low and heavy in the sky.
His mother had spent the afternoon on the phone with the insurance company. “Plus they say she should be an outpatient, but they won’t say they’d pay for treatment even if she was.”
“Have you explained to them—” his father started.
“Of course I’ve explained to them! I’ve spent the last two weeks fighting with them while you’ve fussed with Mahler.”
Shoving away from the table, his father crossed the kitchen and pushed through the door so that it swung noisily in his wake.
Luke’s mother put her hand over her eyes and said, “Shit.” She rubbed her temples. “Now he’s going to play Dvorák.”
“The last time I was home it was Elgar.”
“Now it’s Dvorák. There.”
The first notes rose from the living room. His mother ate a couple of bites, then put the pizza down. “I can’t eat to this music. It’s just too sad.” Jumping up, she pushed open the kitchen door, leaving Luke alone.
She would stand in the hall outside the living room now. She got the most reluctant expression on her face when she watched his father play the cello, like he was talking her into something.
Luke had bought cigarettes the other day on the way back from the hospital and he lit one now, ashing onto his greasy plate. He felt homesick for Madison. Even for being at the hospital with Angie. He wished Wendy were with him, and at the same time he felt strangely pissed at her, going on with her life when he’d had to put his on hold.
Loneliness won out. He crossed the kitchen and dialed her number.
“I feel awful,” Wendy whispered. “I feel awful all the time.”
He’d never heard her cry before. He closed his eyes, pressing the phone so tightly to his ear it hurt. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” There were other things he should say, but they felt remote and muffled, as though he had a head cold. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing, I just—I’m … I’m … It’s nothing.”
“Are you seeing someone?”
Silence. Then, in a rush: “You don’t know when you’re coming back.
You won’t even say you are coming back—”
“I’m coming back.” Anger swam through his chest, something heavy and slick.
“You disappeared. You didn’t even say—”
“My sister almost died.”
“I shouldn’t have told you.”
His anger finally caught and held. “It hasn’t even been two months. I can’t believe you.”
“I can’t talk about this anymore,” she said. The line went dead.
He threw the handset of the phone across the room; it hit the fridge, bounced on the floor, and skittered, spinning, underneath the table. He stomped across the dark kitchen. He tried sitting down again but jumped up at once. Fuck! He kicked a cabinet door, then kicked it again.
“Luke?” His mother stood in the kitchen doorway, dark hair frizzed around her face.
It seemed her fault, somehow, that his girlfriend was cheating. “Leave me alone.”
“Was the call about Angie?”
“No.” He turned and kicked the cabinet again, hard enough for the wood to crack.
“Stop it!” His mother had her hands over her ears, and he turned and kicked again as hard as he could.
At the Y, he turned on lights briefly as they passed rooms—the weight machines flickered into view, dimmed, then flared into clear trued lines as the fluorescent tubes came on. The next room had a wall of mirrors, and for a moment they reflected Luke, Cole, Khamisa, and Warren, looking small, framed by the doorway.
Luke’s status at the Y was made hazy by the fact that he’d worked two summers ago as Assistant Pool Manager; he stepped in automatically now when there was a problem, and he had privileges—a desk, keys—that most instructors wouldn’t have. He flicked off the light in the weight room and continued down the hall. “I’ll show you my office.” He unlocked the office, flipped on the lights.
“This is nice, Voorster.”
“The Y palace.” His desk, one of four in the room, was the gray metal kind high school teachers had. Working there during the day, if he stood up suddenly and cracked his knee on the underside, the desk reverberated, an echoing rumble. On the walls hung faded pictures of Matt Biondi and Jenny Thompson holding up Olympic medals, some posters advertising swimsuits and goggles, and other posters with vague success slogans. There was even a grim black-on-white no pain, no gain.
Every time he thought of Wendy, it felt like taking a step and pitching down a staircase. He couldn’t believe she’d cheated on him.
He and Cole sat on the desk, Khamisa and Warren on the floor. They passed a joint around. Even though the other three were all at UNH, they didn’t hang out together, except when Luke came home.
Warren had stopped swimming and joined a frat; he’d gotten jowly. He asked Cole, “Where’d you get this stuff?”
“Remember that guy, Hideo Fugimoro?”
“The Chinese guy?”
“Japanese,” Luke said. “Hideo Fugimoro.”
“We didn’t all go away to UW,” Warren said.
“Yeah, but it doesn’t even sound Chinese.”
Khamisa lay back on the floor, looking at the pimply ceiling tiles. She said, “He should use a nickname. I mean, every time you hear it, you think hideous. Not because he’s hideous.”
“Well, it’s his name,” Luke said. Taking the joint from Cole he inhaled, feeling the rasp of smoke in his throat. He sucked saliva from the inside of his cheeks and swallowed; for some reason that helped him hold the smoke down. He exhaled. “Water?”
“It’s here.” Khamisa handed him the cup she’d filled at the water fountain. Their breakup had been drawn out without being bitter. During his first year of college, they used to hook up over vacations, and there was still a pleasant tension when they were together.
Cole rolled another joint on the desk between his thighs, licking the edge delicately to seal it. “You looked just like a cat doing that,” Luke said.
“Thanks, hippie boy.” Cole reached over and flicked Luke’s ponytail.
He began to feel the pot in his cheeks and elbows, which hollowed out, becoming light and buzzy. Cole grinned at him and tilted his head, bringing the joint’s tip down to the flame of his lighter. He still sometimes dressed like he lived in the fifties, but no longer like a greaser: he had heavy black-framed glasses and rayon shirts that he buttoned all the way up to his Adam’s apple.
Luke announced, “I knew a girl in Madison whose name was Dung.” He took a hit. Holding the smoke down in his lungs meant his voice came out a squawk. “Vietnamese.”
Khamisa held the joint out to Warren, but Warren was laughing. “Dung,” he said, waving the joint away. “You go halfway across the country to meet girls named Dung.”
Luke hadn’t actually known her; she was
in two of Wendy’s classes. Wendy. She was too much in control of herself to be the type of person to hang up. For that matter, he hadn’t imagined she could cheat on him.
He jumped up and went into the pool room, turning on the underwater lights. The room was cavernous and smelled sharply of chlorine. Water cast squirming shadows on the ceiling. It smelled of all the winter mornings he’d come here with his sister. Before Angie got her license his mother drove them here in the morning, and by the end of high school Angie had had Abe’s Galaxie. But it was those first months of Ange driving—borrowing his mom’s car, the months before her first hospitalization—that he remembered most.
Driving, Angie had worn her letter jacket, red and black. She used to pull the bench seat forward as far as it would go, and she drove about ten miles below the speed limit. When he complained, she jammed the accelerator all the way down. The car jerked forward and she swerved into the other lane, then back into their own.
“Jesus, what are you doing?”
“I’m a drunk driver,” she said. She jerked the wheel left again, so that they slid into the path of an oncoming Buick, then past, onto the shoulder. Gravel spit against the undercarriage of the car and she laughed, twisting the wheel back to the right. She stayed in the wrong lane this time, accelerating. A van had honked and swerved and Angie had screamed, “Pussy!” yanking the car right. She’d been manic, of course. But at the time: God, he’d hated and admired her.
Stripping to his boxers, Luke dove into the water, going down and down. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he didn’t know which direction was up. The underwater lamps lit the pool yellow and green, his friends’ bodies gliding black around him, sleek as sharks. With his hands he pushed himself around in a circle until he began to laugh in the turbulence of water and then choked. Choking, he rose up and broke the surface of the water with a sound like cracking glass.
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