Good Things I Wish You: A Novel

by A. Manette Ansay

  She had raised him up again.

  Panting, weeping, wild-eyed and wet.

  It was the most beautiful thing Johannes Brahms had ever seen.

  Today Schumann spoke about a peculiar phenomenon that he has noticed for several days now. It is the inner hearing of beautiful music in the form of entire works! The timbre sounds like wind music heard from afar, and is distinguished by the most glorious harmonies…. He spoke of it, saying, “This is what it must be like in another life when we have shed our corporeal selves.”

  —From the diaries of Rupert Becker,

  concertmaster of the Düsseldorf orchestra, 1854*

  11.

  ONE WARM EVENING, IN the middle of May, my mother dropped by just as I was finishing Heidi’s lesson. She’d brought the piano teacher’s obituary, something she’d been promising to show me.

  “He was good to you,” she said, lifting Heidi off the bench and into her arms for a kiss. “He was a friend.”

  “We have five more minutes on our lesson,” I said. “Heidi, do you want to play something for Grandma? How about Musette?”

  “I don’t want to play anymore.” From the safety of my mother’s arms, Heidi shot me a look of triumph.

  “He gave you that portrait of Clara Schumann. Do you still have it?”

  “I don’t know. Heidi, you owe me those last five minutes.”

  “Remember that time he told me I should take you shopping for clothes? He even gave me some coupons.”

  “I didn’t want to use them,” I said. “I didn’t want to go.”

  “Still,” my mother said, placing the obituary on top of the piano, “he meant well. It was a nice gesture, don’t you think?”

  Heidi asked, “Is that man dead?”

  What I said to Heidi: “He had a good, long life.”

  What I said to my mother: “He was kind of an odd person, if you want to know the truth.”

  “He certainly loved his students.”

  “Grandma, will you play a game with me? Will you pretend we are kittens?”

  “Fine with me,” I said, giving up, and as the two of them decided on the location of a safe, warm nest, I bent over the single smudged paragraph of accomplishments, the face that might have belonged to any tremulous old man.

  He wore the same dark wool sweater at each lesson.

  He wore slippers with argyle socks, plaid trousers, a wide leather belt.

  I wore oversize shirts, baggy jeans, tennis shoes. I kept my arms close to my sides as I slipped between the rows of chairs at the monthly open studios, at the master classes with de Larrocha, Watts, Gutierrez, squeezing myself along balcony edges during group excursions to winter symphonies, to summer festivals, to private concerts where the piano teacher guided me forward, introduced me, invited me to play. Afterward, he’d speak to me sternly about what he called the problem of your confidence. It was important, he’d say, to look people in the eye, to speak clearly, to accept a compliment with a smile. As a performer, I’d have to get used to interacting with strangers. I’d have to get used to male attention. And I’d have to learn to dress—was there someone who could help me? My mother, perhaps, or a sister? Would I be offended if he, himself, made a few suggestions?

  He was speaking to me as my teacher, of course, but also as a friend.

  “A little bit of lipstick never hurt a girl,” he said. “Not that I’m suggesting you should paint yourself like one of Herr Brahms’s whores.”

  He apologized for his language. He only wanted what was best. He was trying to protect me, the way Clara’s father tried to protect her, but did Clara listen? Did she? Could I understand how much Clara’s father had loved her, how he would have done anything to save her from the life she lived with Schumann, reduced to a common hausfrau, wiping the mouths and asses of brats? I must find a man who would be prepared to offer everything, but only from a distance. A man who would look out for me. Who would ask almost nothing in return.

  Kissing my fingers, untucking my shirt.

  How can you play if you can’t lift your arms?

  We were at it again, two hands, four. The room echoed with our longing. Still, I wouldn’t let him hold me. In the end, I’d always get up, step away.

  For art is about desire, is it not, and never its consummation?

  “I am beginning to think,” the piano teacher said, “that you are incapable of passion.”

  12.

  FOR SEVERAL YEARS, THERE was a man who was in love with me. L—had gotten divorced after discovering a cache of e-mails from his wife’s lover, and he’d call me (not too often, of course, for I was married to Cal) just to see how I was doing, talk about books, exchange manuscripts-in-progress. We’d talk about love and relationships, marriage and friendship, true friendship between women and men, which we both agreed was absolutely possible, why not? Not only possible. Necessary. At a literary conference, drunk on wine and success, I told him about Cal, our separate rooms, our separate lives. L—followed me up to my hotel room…

  …where I left him standing outside the door.

  All night long, my chest and belly ached with what I thought was virtue.

  “I don’t see how you can stand it,” he said the next time we spoke.

  The last time.

  “It’s not so bad,” I said.

  “Then something’s wrong with you,” he said, and I hung up on him.

  Shortly after my divorce, I heard from him again, a brief e-mail in which he said he’d been sorry to hear about Cal and me. He’d recently remarried, someone we both knew, a woman who writes about horses. She, too, he said, was thinking of me, would keep me in her thoughts. Both of them had been through it themselves. Both of them knew how tough it could be. So how was I doing? Probably okay. But I shouldn’t hesitate to drop him a line if I ever needed a listening ear.

  13.

  “GOING THROUGH A DIVORCE,” Ellen had said as we’d carried Cal’s boxes out to the garage, “is like going through chemotherapy. You have to expect to get really, really sick. The difference with divorce is that you know you are going to get better.”

  Self-Portrait: Gaela Erwin*

  Part III

  Frozen

  14.

  THE SECOND TIME I experienced déjà vu, Heidi was two years old. It was October, a Thursday morning. I’d just started at the university, teaching classes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Each Tuesday, I made the six-hour round-trip commute from West Palm Beach, arriving home just in time to tuck Heidi in for the night. On Wednesday nights, however, I’d stay over in Miami. I’d check into my hotel room by six P.M. I’d write until one or two in the morning, sleep in until eight the next day, when I’d start to prep my graduate seminar.

  This was the longest block of writing time I’d had since Heidi’s birth.

  That morning, just as I’d been packing up my computer, I’d received a call from my mother. Cal wasn’t working at the time. He’d resigned a full-time contract on the promise of another job that, in the end, hadn’t worked out, but we were trying to look on the bright side. He’d been thinking about getting out of teaching anyway. He was thinking about earning a Ph.D. He was supposed to be researching programs, studying for the GRE, but the reality was that he was stuck, not certain what he wanted to do next. If we could have talked about it—but we couldn’t talk about it. The trick to getting along seemed to be avoiding talk altogether. I worked and wrote and took care of Heidi. He read the news on the Internet, blogged with reenactment friends.

  Of course he took care of Heidi on the days I was at work.

  “You don’t give Cal a chance with that baby,” friends and family members said. “Get out of the house. Get out of his way. Let the two of them get to know each other.”

  I believed them because I wanted to believe them.

  I believed them because I waited all week for that single night, alone at my computer, in room 342 at the Holiday Inn.

  “I don’t want to worry you,” my mother said. “But
yesterday, Cal and Heidi came over, and Heidi threw up on her shirt. I offered to wash it, but he said no, he’d take care of it when they got home.”

  “Is she sick?” I said.

  “I think she’s fine,” my mother said. “But this morning, when I stopped by to see if she was feeling better, she was still wearing the same shirt.”

  “Maybe it’s just that he couldn’t get the stain—”

  “She stank to high heaven, Jeanie,” my mother said. “And Calvin looks—well, he hasn’t changed his clothes since yesterday, either. It’s more than a hangover, Jeanie. He’s not in a good state of mind.”

  What I should have said: “I’ll be home on the next train.”

  What I said: “I’ve got to teach in an hour.”

  My mother did not say anything.

  “You can’t just cancel a graduate-level class.”

  My mother said, “You know what you can and cannot do.”

  Now, nursing a Starbucks cappuccino, I was standing at the corner of Ponce and Dixie, preparing to dash across the four-lane highway, as I did every day, to get to campus. Hurricanes had knocked out the pedestrian walk signs, so you had to time the lights, gauge the speed of the on-coming traffic, which tended to accelerate—Miami being Miami—at the sight of a human being actually braving a crosswalk. During the first week of classes, at exactly this spot, a student had been hit by a car and killed. I thought of her today, as I always did, reminding myself to be careful.

  High overhead, a half-dozen vultures circled aimlessly.

  Perhaps Heidi had insisted on that particular shirt and Cal simply hadn’t had the energy to deal with it. Perhaps she was sick, had been sick all night long, and that’s why Cal was in the same clothes: he’d spent a sleepless night caring for her. None of this rang true, but I didn’t want to think about what it meant. By what it meant, I did not mean what it meant for Heidi or, for that matter, Cal. I was thinking about my writing. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about what it would mean to lose those Wednesday nights, and I thought to myself, in exactly these words: “I am a dead woman. I am dead.”

  The light changed. There was a gap in the traffic. I decided to run for the median, wait for a second opportunity to cross the remaining lanes. But as soon as I stepped up onto the narrow concrete strip, I could see exactly what would happen next. Even before I dropped my cappuccino, I knew how it would bounce, still capped, into the oncoming traffic. Even before my left ankle buckled, I knew how my body would feel as it fell, the impact of my hip, vibrations rising through the concrete. The car that would strike me already gaining speed. The steely flash of fender in the split second before, in an attempt to twist away, I’d make things worse by rolling directly into the path of the wheel.

  The traffic lights changed. Changed again. I stood, frozen, on the median. How long was I waiting there before a group of students came along? One of them doubled back.

  Are you okay? You want to cross with us?

  As long as I remained there, the future could not reach me.

  Do you want to take my arm?

  Even now, I can re-create the feeling of that car striking me as if it really happened, though in fact it never did.

  15.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE THE suicide attempt was the first time Clara hadn’t shared his bed. Sheets wet with sour perspiration. Bruises, the size and shape of kisses, dotting her upper arms. Another bruise on the small of her back from the unexpected bucking of his knee. That was the thing that did it. Not that she would ever blame Robert for what he’d done. Hour after hour, the dead were tormenting him, singing the same three notes while he thrashed like a man in physical pain. At last he’d lulled into stillness. She, too, slept for a while—until awakened by the impact of the floor.

  “Stay away from me,” he was shouting. “I will hurt you! I will kill you! How can you bear it?”

  And she looked up at his frenzied face peering down at what he’d done—fat-cheeked, demonic—and answered, “I cannot.”

  “Why not fetch your maid to sit with me?” he’d said, suddenly cogent, calm. So she’d kissed his damp hand and done as he had said, crawling into bed beside Marie, where she slept six uninterrupted hours before awakening to the sound of the milk cart. Marie was already gone. A faint, greasy light filtered in beneath the door, seeped through the rift in the curtains. Downstairs, the cook battled the coal stove. The clop of the milk cart continued on. Everything normal. Everything calm. For a moment, a thought came into her mind, accompanied by guilt as sharp as pleasure. But then she heard him talking, heard the maid’s stout reply.

  The door opened. Marie, fully dressed.

  “Papa is better, I think,” she said.

  Time, once again, to get out of bed. To step forward into the day. Robert already seated at table, fumbling his napkin beneath his great, soft chin. Clara directs the children toward eggs set in cups, toward bowls filled with porridge and cream. She eats. Smiles. Performs. As she’s been performing since the age of nine, through broken pianos and cholera epidemics, through her father’s rages and her husband’s jealousies, through cities and countries and continents not nearly as far-flung as she’d hoped. Even in good health Robert requires just this: familiarity, routine. A house in which children sit in their places. Orderly servants. Clean windows and halls. A room of his own where he keeps his piano, books, compositions, poetry, reviews. Glasses of sweet, dark beer at the pub during the hour or two before supper each night when she closes the door against children and staff, practicing hastily, hungrily.

  Later he’ll wrap his arms around her with the same quick, anxious greed.

  So she’s come to be pregnant with his eighth child. And to anyone here in the twenty-first century who might object to the phrase “his child,” who suggests that these children belong to them both, she’ll insist—urgently, fiercely—that the children, like everything else, belong only to her husband. As the concerts she has performed, the money she has earned, the lessons she has taught belong to him. The few compositions she’s managed during her fourteen years of marriage? These belong to him as well. If she could, she’d drain the very blood from her body. She’d feed it to him as she feeds broth to the little ones, trembling at the lip of the spoon.

  The only thing she has kept for herself: her desire to play music in public, to perform. Since it’s all that she has kept, it’s the one thing he wants. Day after day, it sits between them. The single thing she’s held back.

  But today, as he smiles across from her, the children encircling them both with bright laughter, it seems possible that everything she’s offered, everything she’s given, will suffice. Perhaps Marie is right this time. Perhaps Papa is truly better. Clara is looking directly at him—a look in which everything good must shine—when he says, “Forget about me, Clara. I am not worthy of your love.”

  The words hit her like a slap.

  Forget about me. Forget about us. Forget about all we have meant to each other.

  He said that, she will write in her diary, he to whom I had always looked up with the greatest, deepest reverence.*

  Here it is then: the moment it happens. One small thing is said or done—not the first thing, not the worst—but it cuts, at last, the weathered string that’s bound him to your heart. After this, everything happens in third person. All you can do is watch your own life unfold as if it is happening to a stranger. Even if he hadn’t thrown himself into the Rhine, Clara would have left him that day. She’d have stayed with the neighbor lady until arrangements could be made. She’d have wept and wept and wept and, still, she’d have somehow found it in herself to weep more.

  Weeks later, at the mention of a visit to Endenich, she dissolves into such hysteria that it’s finally suggested, by the doctors, that she send Herr Brahms instead.

  Your treasured husband has not changed at all, Brahms writes to her immediately after the visit. He only became a little stronger. His appearance is happy and bright, his movements are just the same as in the past,
one hand held to his mouth. He smoked in short puffs as usual. His gait and his greeting were more free, firmer, which is only natural since no big ideas, no Faust keep him occupied. The doctor addressed him; unfortunately I was unable to hear him speak, but his smile and, so it seemed, his speech was completely as in the past. Herr Sch. then looked at the flowers and walked deeper into the garden, toward the beautiful vista. I saw him disappear as the evening sun surrounded him beautifully.*

  Does he ask about me? Clara asks in return, though she’s already guessed the answer.

  He loves her enough to release her.

  He will not so much as utter her name.

  What joyful news…that Brahms, to whom you will give my kind and admiring greetings, has come to live in Düsseldorf; what friendship!

  —Robert (in Endenich), in a letter to Clara, 1854*

  For the beautiful word in your last letter, for the love-felt “Du,” I have yet to thank you most cordially; now your very kindhearted wife has also given me joy by using the beautiful, trustful word…I will always strive more to deserve it.

  —Brahms, in a letter to Robert (in Endenich), 1854†

  I have you, beloved Johannes, to thank for the kind generosity you have shown my Clara. She is always writing me about it.

  —Robert (in Endenich), in a letter to Brahms, 1854†

  16.

  HART CALLED AT THE end of May, on the Friday night before Memorial Day weekend. As soon as I heard his voice, I understood I’d been waiting for this call, expecting it like news: good or bad, it was impossible to say. Over a month had passed since our dinner at the Wine Cellar. My academic semester had ended. For the next six weeks, I could write from eight until two, the hours Heidi went to Montessori school. It seemed like a lot of time. It wasn’t. Especially since I was still stumbling, fumbling, searching for whatever was missing from the story I wanted to tell. On the twelfth of July, Heidi’s summer session would end. On the thirteenth, Cal would pick her up for a two-week vacation—the two weeks I’d be in Leipzig. Maybe he’d take her to a reenactment somewhere. Maybe they’d just stay home. Or maybe he’d take her only one week, not two, in which case, as he well knew, I didn’t know what I’d do.