At Mark’s house, she lay on the futon looking up at the kitchen cabinets all around her. Mark lit candles with a plastic lighter, then rolled toward her. The apartment Mark lived in had been made out of two smaller ones, and this bedroom had once been the kitchen of the second apartment. The stove and refrigerator were gone, but a countertop ran along one wall with fake-wood cabinets above and below. One open cabinet showed Mark’s folded T-shirts; the former sink held stacked issues of Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone and the Victoria’s Secret catalog. He was short and pale, cheeks bluish with five o’clock shadow. It exhausted her to think of Mark in the dank bathroom every morning, his small face canted anxiously toward his own reflection, that delicate, wary look men got when they lifted their chins, the careful scrape of razor around their Adam’s apples, the vulnerability of their flat hips wrapped in a worn blue towel. Had Luke noticed yet that she’d left the party?
“You have the most beautiful hair,” Mark said.
“Why do all men love long hair?”
“I don’t know. Because we don’t have it?”
“Luke’s hair is long.” She thought of Luke’s hair in her fingers, its silkiness when it was just washed, the way that summer lightened it. Talking to boring, stupid Mark only made her feel the wrongness of being here. She wanted to leave. Instead, she lunged forward and kissed him.
And then there were all the motions. He kissed her throat, took her nipple gently in his teeth, flicking it with his tongue, until she felt herself growing wet and heavy and arched her back up toward him. Part of her mind was marveling at this, at how the body could express passion when she felt none, while at the same time she was slipping away, into an old fantasy. Lean over the desk, a man was saying, his hand pressing hard against her breasts. Mark moved his hand, slipping beneath the waistband of her jeans. She lifted her hips to him. Open your legs now. The man was lifting her skirt from behind. Mark pressed his hand against her, twisting to work his fingers beneath her underwear. Pretty, the man said, and she began to come, shallowly.
“Christ,” Mark said.
Through her closed lids, she saw a flash in the corner of her vision; she bucked toward Mark’s hand. He stopped moving and she put her own hand over his, pressing down through her clothes.
There was a flat, metallic smell, and Mark said, “Oh, shit,” and hit her, a glancing, indirect blow that just skimmed her cheek.
“What are you doing?” she screamed.
“Shit! Shit!” He was tugging beneath her head, pulling out the pillow and whumping it down against her face. For a moment it covered her mouth; she smelled cotton and detergent and smoke; she couldn’t breathe and tried to roll away. The pillow lifted, and as he started to bring it down again he gasped, “The candle—” and she realized her hair was on fire.
She walked through the dark streets—she’d left Mark over his dim protests about girls walking alone. Reaching up, she felt her hair, which crackled and broke off in her fingers. The charred hair was black and dry like cornsilk. She felt eerily calm. Here at last was something concrete, something to cope with.
At home, Luke was sitting on her bed. He squinted up at her, uncertain and unhappy. “Where did you go? You just disappeared.”
Wendy turned her head.
“What happened?” He jumped up and put his arms around her. “Wendy, God. Why didn’t you come find me?”
He thought that her hair had gotten burnt at the party. For a moment, she was tempted to lie, to put her head on his shoulder. I was embarrassed, she could say.
She stepped back, raising her eyebrows. “I was with someone else.” She wanted it to come out grand and contemptuous. Instead it sounded adolescent.
Luke said carefully, “With.”
“Fucked,” she said. “I was fucking someone else.”
“That guy you were seeing last fall? You were with that guy?”
“I wasn’t seeing just one guy.” She took off her coat, throwing it over the back of her desk chair. “Are you happy now? You get to be the saint again.” Luke didn’t say anything. “Aren’t you even going to call me a bitch?”
He stared at her.
Shoulders back, posture carefully perfect, she stepped around him, going to the mirror over the dresser. Her hands shook. The hair looked even worse than she’d expected, with a patch of frizzled black on the right side, the left half the way it was supposed to look, a dark red curtain to her waist.
“Pass me the scissors,” she said. “It was time for a change anyway.”
“What are you doing?” Luke said. “I don’t even know you.”
She said, “Huh,” as if he’d said something mildly interesting. She was surprised by her own coolness. Why couldn’t she be like this more often, instead of awkward and messy?
He picked up the scissors from her desk. Their eyes met in the mirror.
Suddenly her own falseness frightened her. “Here,” she said more quietly, and held out her hand for the scissors.
“I’ll do it.”
He took hold of the long side of her hair, wrapping it around one hand. Her head jerked back; she stifled a cry. He opened the blades as wide as they would go. The cold metal brushed her skin, higher than he needed to be cutting, but she didn’t stop him.
The soft crunch of hair shifting against the blades, then the scissors snicked closed. Luke stepped back, hair bandaging his hand. He unwrapped the hair—it took a long time, there was so much of it—and let it fall to the floor.
She wanted to take it all back. “Luke—”
“Shut up,” he said quietly, dropping the scissors on top of the hair.
Wendy sat on the bed, trying not to cry. If she started, she didn’t think she could keep it soft, and all her housemates would hear. The swatch of hair lay over her knee; she realized she’d been stroking it like a cat.
A knock on the door; after a moment, Kim slipped in the room. “I heard—” Her eyes went to Wendy’s hair; she put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, my heck.”
Kim usually spent the weekends at Ian’s these days, and Wendy said, “You’re back early.”
“It wasn’t such a good weekend. You?”
She’d cut off the burnt hair, which lay in a snarl on the dresser. The roomed smelled terrible, like when she had cavities drilled at the dentist. Wendy said, “Yeah, not so good.”
It was the first time she’d admitted any unhappiness. When Kim laughed, it seemed like all Wendy had ever wanted from her.
Kim sat carefully next to Wendy on the bed. “Your hair used to be so long.”
Sometimes on the street, strangers had come up to Wendy to tell her how beautiful her hair was. She reached up, touched the bare back of her neck. The vertebrae felt round as marbles. “I know. I don’t want to think about it.”
“I think I can straighten it out. If you want.”
Wendy nodded. She closed her eyes: Kim’s hands on her hair, the tiny tug of scissors with each cut. It went on, it seemed, a long time. Kim’s hands arranged her hair, then withdrew. Wendy opened her eyes.
Kim moved in front of her, checking that the hair was even. She said, “Now people can see your face.”
Thirty-two
Pieter sat on one of the molded plastic chairs of Cort’s small airport, awaiting Gyongyi Horvath’s flight from Hartford. On the runway, a man brought a stepladder out to a small plane. Under one arm he held a roll of paper towels, and the wind meant that he had to crouch over to climb, bracing himself as he sprayed the windshield with glass cleaner. He ripped paper towels off the roll and wadded them in his hand. He wore a torn blue jacket and moved with grace. As he stretched out across the windshield, Pieter thought: Ben.
After all this time, Pieter still didn’t know how to stop being reminded of Jordana’s lover. And of course it wasn’t him, just a tall kid, jumping down to the pavement, shaking hair out of his face.
“Your flight’s coming in,” said the woman behind the desk.
High against the hard blue sky, the nail
head plane dropped toward them. It took on features: wings, then nose cone. Pieter had met, over the last fifteen years, only a few of these flights, only when the visiting musician was a cellist, one Pieter was interested in. He didn’t think Gyongyi Horvarth was a great cellist. Her playing did not quite stretch to pure euphoria or pure pain; she struck him as dramatic rather than passionate, gifted but not inspired. She was not, for example, as good as Jordan Cohen, Jordana’s father, had been. She was very famous, though, and that was interesting in itself.
The boy was on the runway now, using plastic rods to guide the plane to the gate. His arms moved back, forward, back. In the landscape of black trees and sage-green hills, his orange signals were the only color.
Gyongyi Horvath was the second person off the plane. Pieter was holding up a piece of paper on which he’d written her name in ballpoint pen, but when he saw her he realized how unnecessary the sign was; even if he hadn’t known her face from her CDs, she was carrying a cello case against her right hip. She wore a long camel-colored coat, and her short hair was cut to fall over one eye. She carried herself as though she were beautiful, shoulders back, hand extended for a sharp, almost fierce, handshake. Close up, she had three small moles on one cheek, something he didn’t remember from pictures. The wings of her nostrils were chapped: a cold.
“How was your flight?”
“They barely had time to serve drinks. Up and then down again.” She used one hand to describe a quick spike in the air. She didn’t thank him for picking her up. She must have been picked up from many airports. They made small talk, waiting for her luggage. Through the window, the boy was unloading baggage now, his jacket open, heaving suitcases onto the belt that brought them into the terminal. He used the back of his forearm to wipe sweat from his face.
Cort’s airport had only one baggage claim. It would have been quicker, Pieter thought, to just wheel the cart into the room and let people pull their luggage off themselves, but the airport seemed to want to act out the conventions of a larger place. At least the boy wasn’t also responsible for flying the planes and serving the drinks. When Gyongyi Horvath’s black suitcases appeared, she pointed them out to Pieter and he stepped forward to lift them. She was carrying her cello, and he would have insisted on carrying the bags anyway, but he was struck by her assumption that he would.
They got into his car and began the drive to Cort, about twenty minutes away. He and Gyongyi talked about the orchestra, about Friday’s concert. He said, “We’ll go to your hotel before dinner. Drop these things off.”
“I’ve been on the road for two months.” She sat forward in her seat again, turning the car’s air vents with her hands. He felt cool air, then its absence. “Hotel rooms are beginning to really depress me.”
“You could stay with us. Our son’s room is empty.”
“Oh, that’s nice, but I’ll be fine,” she said instantly. “I shouldn’t complain. The hotel’s fine.”
“Well, if you change your mind. …” He was relieved, though. He’d made the offer without thinking about Angie; they couldn’t possibly have a guest. These last three months—since Luke had gone back to school—Angie had barely left the house. She never went out on her own; if he or Jordana ran errands, she always wanted to come along but then trailed listlessly behind, complaining that it took too long.
Gyongyi said, “I am looking forward to dinner Monday, though.”
She was still turning the vents—he thought at first she meant to adjust them, then realized she was fidgeting. Her hands were small for a cellist and strong, the nails lacquered a dark rose. He’d never understood women’s painting their nails. To begin with, nails were such an odd feature, tiny bits of horn. How far down did they go, and what was the line between nail and non-nail? His own nails made him think of fish scales, flat and iridescent. His mother had used red polish, Revlon’s Fatal Apple. He remembered her brushing it on slowly. Her hands had been old, with a silveriness beneath the skin. When she was alive, she had repelled him. She stole from restaurants, butter pats and sugar and jam. She emptied the bread basket into her purse and called for more—Pieter squirming in his seat, hissing, Mother, I’ll buy you bread. She didn’t steal ketchup, though: Ketchup hadn’t come to Holland until the Canadian liberators brought it, and so she didn’t associate it with scarcity. He’d hated the way fear kept her from leaving the block and then, increasingly, from leaving the apartment. Then from leaving even the bedroom.
His mother had never let him forget that he’d gotten out. She’d stayed and almost starved; his father had died in the bombing of a munitions factory in Germany where he’d done forced “volunteer” labor. Only Pieter was unscathed. But he’d been six. It was hardly as though he’d chosen to desert, or as though his parents hadn’t chosen to stay.
What enraged him most were his mother’s stories of defiance: gluing the German stamps onto the wrong corner of the envelope, greeting acquaintances with a meaningful O zo, which with a heavily significant look came to stand for oranje zal overwinnen. Orange will triumph. Or Hallo: hang alle landverrders, traitors, op. She presented these stories of petty resistance as evidence of courage, of what she’d endured, her face solemn and self-congratulatory beneath her flame-orange hair. When Germans came into a restaurant, the Dutch would stand and leave, until a law was passed that no one could leave a restaurant within ten minutes of a German’s entrance. After that, if a German entered a restaurant, everyone would take off their watches and place them on the tables, counting off exactly ten minutes. Since her death he’d been able to pity her. During the Hunger Winter she’d eaten tulip bulbs and wallpaper paste: Of course she hoarded things, of course she wanted someone to recognize her valor. He couldn’t believe pity hadn’t surfaced earlier, while she was still alive. At the same time, he suspected that if she were to come back somehow, his pity would dissolve again.
Gyongyi Horvath had turned to look out the car window at the potato fields. It was June. In the rearview mirror, her suitcases filled the backseat. Day gave way to evening as fields gave way to town, to square lawns, the chink and hiss of sprinklers across the darkening grass. He imagined they were married. Gyongyi came into their kitchen in a silk concert dress, her arms around his waist, lips against the back of his neck. In this vision, simultaneously, he and Gyongyi were both who they were—Gyongyi a famous cellist, Pieter a supportive husband—and they were other people: Pieter the famous one, Gyongyi the supportive wife.
As he drove, they made conversation about the Brahms they’d play in concert the next two nights. The orchestra had been practicing with Pieter taking the solo part; Gyongyi had been playing the piece too, with different orchestras all over the East Coast. It turned out that they both loved Brahms. Of modernists, they loved Janácek and Webern, admired Schoenberg. “You know who’s severely underrated, though?” asked Gyongyi Horvath. “Joaquín Rodrigo. A friend and I are working on transcribing the Aranjuez for cello.”
A brief silence fell. He tried to think what to say. The Aranjuez was written for the guitar. Pieter wished he’d thought first of transcribing it. Then he smiled wryly at his jealousy; he didn’t even like the piece.
How incompatible his life was with art. He couldn’t imagine Gyongyi Horvath sitting on a plastic chair at Jiffy Lube, flipping through a tattered People magazine while she waited for an oil change, or spending an afternoon on hold with insurance companies, or realizing the only bread in the house was starred with blue mold. He couldn’t imagine her using a dull knife to scrape the mold off before putting the bread into the toaster.
Jordana lay on the living room couch, reading in the near-dark, Bean curled up by her hip. Pieter turned on the light.
“You’re back.” She sat up, squinting. “I didn’t even notice it was getting dark.” Beside her, the cat stretched, yawning so widely Pieter could see the delicate ribbing of the roof of her mouth.
“How is she?” he asked, gesturing with his shoulder at the ceiling, toward Angie’s room.
; “She’s at her computer, playing that dungeon game.”
“Still?”
Jordana nodded. Leaving the book splayed face down on the couch arm, she stood and stretched. Pieter had been wrapped up in Gyongyi Horvath for the last five hours, and the deep familiarity of Jordana’s appearance startled him. Her body still moved him: her height, the dungarees rolled up at the cuffs, the black cotton T-shirt so old it had faded greenish. She had long bony feet. Pushing hair back from her eyes, she asked, “Have you already eaten?”
He held his wrist toward her so she could see the watch: it was almost ten.
She said, “Maybe I’ll have some crackers and cheese. I don’t feel like cooking.”
“You never feel like cooking.”
She laughed. “Sometimes I feel like cooking. You can’t schedule flights of genius.”
“Oh, is that what they are?”
“That’s what they are.” She came over and rested her head against his chest.
He stroked her hair. “If you could schedule a night of genius for tomorrow. …”
“For Gonggi—”
“Gyongyi.”
“—Gyongyi Horvath. What’s she like?”
What was she like? “Very polished. Polite but distant. The whole conversation was about Friday’s program.”
“Was she nice?”
“Hard to say. She was playing a role.” Often, talking to Jordana was how he knew what he thought. He spoke slowly. “She’s used to being taken out to dinner, and used to downplaying that she’s famous and the people taking her out are not. I guess that makes her nice. She was very pulled together, in a suit. She kept twisting her fingers under the table, though.” Before Jordana, he hadn’t noticed details like that: the books on people’s shelves, whether someone wore a wedding band (Gyongyi Horvath did not).
“Did Nita have on one of her ornate sequined things?”
“Of course.”
Jordana laughed. Her head was still resting against his chest; he lifted his hand to stroke her hair. She sighed. He imagined Gyongyi coming into the kitchen. The stiff black satin of her dress flared behind her like the wings of a skate. A small girl with dark straight-cut bangs raised her arms, asking to be lifted. It seemed to him that his whole life had gone by, elsewhere and without him.
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