by gay walley
“You had pretty interesting men, Daisy.”
“Not really. I thought they were witty just because they laughed at my jokes. The English husband was aristocratic, but so old fashioned. Victorian. That type just likes to drink. Too boring, darling.”
“What about Pierre?” Duet remembered that Michelle had said that Daisy and Pierre were continually in bed together. Couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
“We fought all the time,” Daisy said. “Only one of my men was any good.”
Duet knew that to be the other Englishman, a British writer who was the only one who never married her grandmother. He was dead now and her grandmother couldn’t get over it. “If he had lived, I would be with him. His wife would have died by now and I could be there. Maybe I should have killed her.”
“Very funny,” Duet said, unsure if Daisy meant it or not.
“I know. This is life. Disappointing.”
“But what if I went to Vienna. Would you come with me and show me where you grew up?”
Silence for a minute. “Darling, I have no desire to see the Viennese. None of them. Perhaps they have changed. But since when does nature change?”
“It was politics.”
“It was barbarism and barbarism is mankind. Stay in the States and don’t leave it.”
Duet didn’t want to argue.
“Are you okay?” Duet asked.
“No one my age is okay. I have no boyfriends. I can’t make myself attractive anymore. What is okay? I can eat. I can watch television. I can have a coffee with friends. Boring. It’s boring. My past is now more interesting than my future. What is good about that?”
That sounded like her grandmother. Had Michelle even told her mother that her granddaughter was a freak of nature? Somehow Duet felt she hadn’t because her grandmother was the type to make comment. Not to be silent. Although with these Europeans you never knew what they would speak of and what they would not speak of.
She must tell her grandmother. The next time they visited.
“You know that old joke,” Daisy said. “A son calls his mother and says, “Mom, is anything okay?”
Duet smiled.
“Okay, enough stupid jokes,” her grandmother said. “What about you and a boyfriend?”
“I may like someone.”
“What do you mean you may? Just like him. Don’t shilly shally. Dive in. So what if you get hurt? You are too timid, Duet. I have always told you that. You can’t be timid in love. Take a risk, for god’s sake.”
I have my reasons for being timid, Duet thought. Obviously her grandmother does not know. More proof her mother is insane.
“Well, what is this man like?”she heard.
“He is I think of German and Austrian background, too.”
“Jewish?”
“No.”
Silence.
“This is America. Sixty years later, Daisy.”
“Yes, German men are very good looking,” her grandmother said, in a distasteful tone.
“You found Saddam Hussein attractive,” Duet said, teasing.
“Why not? What does this German do?”
“Daisy, he’s an American…”
“ I know. I know. I am joking. Look even I have slept with a German or two. Voluntarily.”
“If things go well, maybe you’ll meet him.”
“As the Muslims say, Inshallah! God willing. Maybe everybody says that.”
“Okay, so you’re not going to Vienna with me.”
“I am not. But my heart will be with you. And keep your American passport.”
Duet laughed. “What a greenhorn you are.”
“I am a lot worse than that,” her grandmother said. “Call me after your date with the German.”
“Austrian.”
“What difference does that make?”
Duet got off the phone. More emails about yesterday and the Mahler Society. What was it? A dragnet? One of the notes struck her: Someone commented that Picasso had said, What a man does is all that counts, not what he intends to do. Congratulations!
But it was strange to Duet that this attention about her music did not make her happy. This proved to her that it was not attention she wanted. She found these constant emails and the promise of meetings exhausting. She liked making the music, not talking about it.
Her evening with Oskar was as always pleasant, witty. He was dressed exquisitely in a beautiful shirt and suit and she liked that he was upbeat about anything they talked about, though he hardly paid attention to her news about the Mahler performance. Instead, he insisted she turn to a musical idiom that might make her more well known. Had she considered becoming like Lady Gaga?
No, she said, she had not. He did not understand that she already felt under an infrared spotlight, she had no desire to place herself under a brighter one. And she had no desire to become a greater freak than she was. However, he did mention one topic that unnerved her.
“What is the name of your friend Paula’s boyfriend again?” he asked, turning serious again.
“Lars Nevark.”
“He makes video games, right?”
“Yes. Why? Are you thinking of investing in him?”
“There is a company, I think it’s his, that is doing incredibly well. Sort of over the top well. “
“Yes, that’s what Paula says.” But Duet noticed that Oskar was sounding suspicious. “And?”
“He’s being investigated.”
“For what?”
“For cooking the books, and let me tell you,” he continued, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
Oh poor Paula. “Your friend Paula,” Oscar continued, “may become an inmate visitor. What are his politics?” Oscar asked.
“Right of right, apparently.”
“Must be him. It’s in the Wall Street Journal. Not to mention, I think they’re also investigating he’s playing some subliminal tricks with his video games. Show the article to Paula.”
“I’m surprised she hasn’t seen it since she spends night and day following his every action. Even if he was the founding father of the Klu Klux Klan, it wouldn’t affect her passion. He could be building nuclear arms in his apartment and she would think he was just in need of her love –“
Oskar was busy eating his chocolate ice cream and seemed to have dismissed the subject.
She texted Paula and said, Read the Wall Street Journal. Article about Lars.
Paula texted right back.
Duet looked at Oskar, “She knows.”
Then Duet texted Paula and said they would talk about it tomorrow. She wanted to be supportive to Paula if she was to find out that the man she thinks she loves is not who she thinks he is.
As always, she and Oskar went home together. She waited for him in the bed as he took a long shower and then he got in next to her, damp and smelling of a lemon scent. She turned to him and again she noticed how he never kissed her, nor touched her. She ran her hands over him and then she moved on top of him, his eyes closed. Why did he not want contact with her? He came and she wondered what he thought about as she moved on top of him. She did not even blame his coldness on her anatomy. She knew this was simply what he preferred, a kind of distant sex. She left in the morning, still liking him, but somehow a little sad from his not wanting to hold or cherish her. Is this coldness of his what Daisy meant? Yet, Heinrich Boll was German and one of Duet’s favorite writers and he would not be cold. Beethoven would not be cold. Then again he might be.
The following Tuesday she had dinner with Maurice, the head of the Mahler Society. They met at Bistro 60 and she was waiting for him in a corner booth. He immediately put his briefcase down and he, like every man she seemed to be meeting, ordered a scotch. She refrained, for she was finding that alcohol tired her. They spoke of music vigorously and he told her he had collected 170,000 cds. He was putting them all on a website. He also had written a 900 page book analyzing Mahler’s work. Had he also collected 280 wives? she wondered. Where would a wif
e even fit into his apartment, she began to consider, as it also turned out he collected old movies and old books. What sublimation is that?
He said, “You are not only talented but beautiful.”
She smiled, tightly. That’s what you think.
He asked her if she would like to go to a concert the following week and she agreed. She did not have the wit with him that she did with Oskar, but she admired his seriousness. Maurice was passionate. And that always led to something interesting, even if you didn’t know what it would be.
When they met for dinner before the concert, Maurice had brought her a book on Mahler and they were both a bit embarrassed when she opened it. “ You know,” Maurice said, “you look a bit like Alma. Fortunately you’re not like her,” he added. “She didn’t understand his work, alienated his friends. She was all about herself, a narcissist. Not worthy of him.”
Strangely, Duet felt protective of Alma. What does Maurice know about what Alma went through?
Maurice seemed to have the same gargantuan belief in his own agenda as Mahler had about his. Maurice was a musician manqué, it turned out. He had chosen the law rather than conducting which was what he wanted to do. He admired how she was putting more effort into her music than her job.
“Well, my job has to pay the bills,” she said.
He nodded. But she was a female, not a man forced to take care of a family. She remembered her father saying men like to take care of women. She had been surprised. All of them? she wondered.
Maurice was talking about his love for the English writer Hugh Walpole and he asked her very little about herself. He had no idea how boring that was. True, his was not a monologue about hairstyles but, even so, a solo performance like this dragged. She suddenly realized the importance of changes in music or discussion. Mahler of course had known this.
They shared a cab home and he gave her a brief kiss on the lips as she got out of the cab. Oskar never kissed her, which Paula said was strange.
No, Duet said to herself, I cannot get involved with someone else.
There was a message on her machine. She pushed play. It was her mother. “Come home darling. Your grandmother is ill. It is terminal and I think you should spend some time with her. You are the only person she seems to like and you are the only person who can stand her.”
Duet smiled. At least her mother was honest.
Next tape message. Her mother again. “I know you hate coming home but it will be good. As you get older, family is more important. Come this weekend. Stay longer if you can.”
She texted her mother she would come and then went to bed. She knew there had been something different about Daisy.
The next morning, after Paula assured her that Lars was being set up, which Duet did not believe, Duet arranged to have Paula cover for her at work. The grey haired lady boarded the dogs (for quite a lot of money, Duet thought). She cancelled her next dinner with Maurice, “Of course I understand,” he wrote back, and she wrote Oskar. He too understood and said he would write her while she was gone. She hesitated a minute, then texted him. “Why not come there and meet me? It will be a holiday for you. The air is purer and my dad is a great guy.”
She waited for the text back. She expected him to come up with a clever excuse.
“I’ll be there next Tuesday,” he wrote. “At 3.24 pm.”
She smiled. “You are an endless font of surprises,” she texted back. And then went to Orbitz to get her ticket.
Seventeen:
She’d forgotten how pleasant the oak-tree lined roads of upper Washington State were, with their horse farms quietly and gracefully recessed behind them. She’d forgotten the different shadings of green of the trees and the abundant gardens. She’d forgotten the endless blue sky and the hibiscus flowers everywhere. As she passed all the open spaces, she felt guilty not having To Be and Not to Be with her. They would think they were in heaven although they seemed to live a charmed life no matter where they went. She looked down at her cell phone to sneak a peek at them. Oh god, she loved them. She missed their endless pacing, the constant motion. Maybe they had wolf in them.
Once she got home and hugged her mother and said hello to Helena, the Austrian cook, she realized she’d also forgotten how great it was to be in a warm house sitting at the dining room table with her parents eating that black bread and herring that her father always imported for some peculiar reason. She’d forgotten how wonderful it is to be loved, even if you’re ambivalent about who loves you. Just the being regarded with warm eyes and loving attention was healing. She found herself even delighting a bit in her mother right now. She admired how here Michelle was losing her own mother, but still seemed overcome with joy just at seeing her daughter.
The three of them, once they finished eating, sat away from the table and began talking about the flight and her work. It became immediately clear to Michelle that Duet was not the least bit interested in her job and she was glad that they probably could leave her enough money because it seemed that this girl was an artist. Well, they say a tough childhood is a prerequisite to art, and Duet could only have had a tough childhood, her mother surmised. God it had been touch and go.
Michelle looked over at this slender young woman whose face was beginning to take on the more honed expressions of acquired tastes and beliefs. As Duet’s father went on about the future of PR, in this internet content age, a subject which bored all of them, Michelle remembered Duet as a little girl. No one could have loved that little girl more.
Throwing on mismatched t shirts and pants and running around at top speed, her hair stringy, Duet had been intrepid, always liking to play. She had worn all Michelle’s heels and blouses as dresses and would insist on going out to lunch and dinner with these ill-fitting clothes hanging-off her. Duet had loved her dolls and made each of them meals out of sand. Duet had loved the mail, always waiting for Daisy to send her a card or a gift and, to Daisy’s credit, she had done that for Duet. Daisy had been a better grandmother than mother. Maybe by the time Duet came, Daisy’s love affairs were waning and she had more time for family. Who knew?
Michelle never told Daisy about Duet’s double configuration because she did not want to be lectured about it. Daisy could have made vulgar jokes, Daisy could have insisted on hospitalizations, but most likely Daisy would have minimized it, because Daisy could trump all of them with what a difficult childhood really is.
Some survivors become religious. Others become bitter. Others become workaholics. Daisy became daft. She just didn’t get close to anyone. Duet was the best she could do and even there, there was a kind of distance, as if Daisy didn’t want to know too much of Duet’s life, since it might make her jealous. Daisy had never had a chance. Men couldn’t get through to her, careers didn’t matter, neither did a family. Daisy was dead inside. And now she was going to be dead outside.
And yet Daisy was not dead inside. Both Michelle and Duet knew it. There was some flicker behind those dark eyes.
Duet stood up from the table, “You don’t mind if I take a quick nap before seeing Daisy? I want to be strong.”
“It’s okay,” Michelle said. “She’s drugged most of the time anyway. It’s pancreatic cancer. Immediate.”
“Oh.”
“Take a nap. We’ll leave for the hospital in about two hours.”
“Okay.” Duet started to leave the dining room and then suddenly bent down and kissed her mother, something Duet rarely did. But the kiss could not protect Michelle from losing a mother she never had. And it didn’t protect Duet, as she began to climb the stairs, from the memories which were about to assail her. Her teenage years in technicolor, where she hated all of them, her friends, her family, herself.
She lay down on her bed, and maybe with the fresh lavender scent ***of the sheets, she could do nothing but remember.
They had been in this very bedroom years before, she and Ann McNichol, a girl her own age who was quick witted but not as pretty, which always made Duet feel a little superior. They
’d spent the afternoon showing each other new jeans they’d bought, showing each other handbags in magazines they liked. Going onto Facebook and looking at guys they had crushes on. Posting pictures on their own Facebook pages. Finally, after confessing to having sent lovestruck emails and texts to certain boys, and having experienced exploratory kisses with these same boys, Ann told Duet the truth: she’d slept with Patsy Gallivan’s brother. Duet had been amazed. First of all Paul Gallivan went to the Catholic Loyola high school and was beyond cute, even played the drums at school dances, and second of all, Ann hadn’t told anyone about losing her virginity.
“What about you? How come you don’t go out with anyone?”Ann asked.
Duet looked at herself in the mirror (a habit she had then) before answering, as if she was checking in with a best friend. ‘I …uh…”
“You HAVE?” Ann screamed.
“No, no…”
“Well, what? You’re acting mysterious.”
Duet was so tired of carrying this horrible information around and keeping it to herself. Somebody had to know. “Well, I am built like a weirdo.”
“What do you mean? You have a great body. I wish I had breasts.”
“No, I mean… well… I have two…”
“Yeah,” Ann laughed, “most girls have two…”
“No, I have two… I have two….” And here Duet put her hands up and made a V sign, while pointing at her lower regions.
Ann looked confused, and then seemed to get it. “Oh come on. Very funny.”
“It’s not funny. “
“You’re joking, right?” Ann was not sure what was going on.
“Don’t ever tell anyone. Ever.” And the way Duet said that, so pleadingly, made Ann begin to fathom that it might not be a joke.