Good Things I Wish You: A Novel

by A. Manette Ansay

  “Sure, sure.”

  “It’s the way these things go. You told me that, remember?”

  He traced the downward curve of the steering wheel.

  “Only then,” I said, “you didn’t call. You disappeared. Is that also the way these things go?”

  He said, “There is a certain chemistry that must exist between a man and a woman. I am thinking this chemistry does not exist between us.”

  Ibis threaded their way along the narrow strip of grass that divided the parking lot from the sidewalk. I waited to feel something: embarrassment, maybe. Disappointment. But nothing in particular came to the surface, other than the feeling that we’d already had this conversation. That we were just pretending there was a question on the table, a decision to be made, when in fact it had already been settled.

  At last I said, “The chemistry is more like…murky…don’t you think?”

  “No-no-no.” He looked at me, unflinching. “For me, it is not there. When I think of the sort of person with whom I wish to be involved, I am sorry, she is nothing like you.”

  “Fine,” I said. Oddly enough, it was something of a relief, knowing he wasn’t looking at me as a woman. Or at least not a woman he planned to date. “I mean, it really is fine.” I wiped the sweat from my face and neck. “I’m new to all this anyway.”

  “I know. I am not new to this.”

  “I know.”

  “And yet, there is something about our first conversation. It is difficult to explain. After we met, I arranged to see my daughter in London. I stayed there two weeks. She is a violinist, did I mention this? And she knows all about your Clara. There’s a house in Leipzig where she and Robert—”

  “On Ingelstrasse?” I stepped forward again. “It’s a music school now.”*

  “I must have passed it countless times.”

  “I’d love to get inside it, but I’m not sure it’s open to the public anymore.”

  “It is open for concerts. Friederike has plans to perform there.” A little smile played around his mouth. “It would seem we have another coincidence.”

  She was, in fact, scheduled to perform on the evening of the day I arrived.

  “Friederike will get us tickets. I mean, if you would like that. I am happy to show you around, to be helpful to you. If I may.”

  “As a friend,” I said, understanding him.

  “I think, yes, as a friend,” he said, nodding. “I like to talk to you. I have told you that already.”

  “Men and women can’t be friends,” I said. “You already told me that, too.”

  “I made you very angry when I said that.”

  “You did.”

  “I’m afraid I am still thinking this is true.”

  I started to laugh, I couldn’t help it. “Are you always this complicated?”

  “If we were to leave right now,” Hart said, “I’d have you back by eight. Plenty of time left to chop up your body and bury it deep in the ground.”

  I grabbed my computer case from the floor well beneath Heidi’s car seat, added a short-story anthology I’d been meaning to read. The inside of the Mercedes was leather lined, cool, the color of heavy cream. He was right, I decided, about the chemistry. How could there be chemistry when it was suddenly this comfortable, this easy? No resistance to chafe the match. No rough edges to spark. Getting into this car, sliding into this life, was like continuing a conversation we’d already begun. The smell of the interior was familiar as bread. I recognized the coins in the cup dish, the zippered case for CDs. The beaded bracelet hanging from the rearview. The cubby for the mirrored sunglasses he removed carefully from their sleeve.

  “I do have sunglasses, you see,” he said, concealing his eyes behind the reflection of my own.

  “Pretty bracelet.”

  “It is something belonging to Friederike. Take this. No, this one.”

  “Is it sweetened?”

  “A lit-tle.”

  “I don’t like sweet coffee.”

  “It is the only way to drink this fucking American coffee.”

  “My God, are you always like this? What’s wrong with American coffee?”

  “It tastes like dishwater. It tastes like such strip malls you see everywhere. It tastes like these morally reprehensible high-rise developments.”

  “You just make it worse with sweetening.”

  “Fine, fine. Next time you shall have no sugar.”

  A chemical glitch, I reminded myself.

  Together we buckled up for the ride.

  Part IV

  Blue Day

  Schumann’s Beethoven, 2006

  I am always pleased by Beethoven’s statue and the lovely view towards the Siebengebirge.

  —Robert, in a letter to Brahms, 1854*

  Oh, if I could only see you and talk to you, but the road is too far. I would like to know so much about you, what your life is really like, where you are staying, and whether you still play as marvelously as you did once…. Oh, how I would love to hear your beautiful playing.

  —Robert to Clara, from the asylum, 1854*

  I am haunted by music as never before; at night I cannot find sleep, and by day I am so absorbed by music that I lose track of all else…

  —Clara, in her diary, 1854†

  Eugenie seems to have caught cold, she has no appetite, her face is flushed…The boys are fine, even Felix. We do not progress much with the alphabet, despite large portions of sugar loaf…

  —Brahms (in Düsseldorf) to Clara (on tour), 1854†

  20.

  THE FLORIDA COASTLINE GAVE way to its drained interior, flat, fenced fields fringed with horned cattle, gladiola farms, tomato farms, crossroad towns with their concrete-block churches and faded American flags. Hart talked about agriculture, about industry, about the energy crisis. He talked about the Florida election scandal. He lamented the religious right, religious belief in general, its distortions, great and small. He talked about racism, homophobia, the hopeless situation of the working poor. He reminded me of a man who hadn’t spoken for years, the result of an illness or curse, who must say everything as rapidly as possible before he’d be silenced again.

  At one point, his cell phone started to ring; he answered in English, switched to French.

  Écoute, je ne peux vraiment pas te parler maintenant.

  Non. Non.

  Il faut que je te laisse. Je te rappelle plus tard.

  “How many languages do you speak?” I asked after he’d hung up.

  “Oh, the usual,” he said. “German and Russian. English. French. Some Spanish. I am always working to improve my Japanese.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  We passed a church billboard that read, YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM GOD BY MISSING CHURCH.

  “You can’t hide from Satan by going to church,” Hart said.

  “You believe in Satan?”

  He avoided the question. “You believe in God, I suppose.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “And now I am waiting for the long explanation.” He selected a CD.

  “I don’t believe in any external entity,” I said, kicking off my sneakers and settling my feet on the dash. “What I do believe is that so many others believe that the sheer block force of it has an impact on everyone. Belief in God is the reason, for example, why kids here in Florida public schools are taught creationism.”

  “This is a joke.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not.”

  “America: land of the free, home of the religious right. Must you put your feet there?”

  “I must. You’ll have to deal with it.”

  “It is causing me physical pain.”

  “They’re clean. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m an American, and I’m not preaching creationism.”

  “No, you are just a nice Catholic girl.”

  “Actually, I’m a practicing Catholic. I practice and practice but never get better.”

  “That is funny.” The CD had kicked in, a soft piano introduction
. “So you believe not in God,” Hart said, “but in the significance of God.”

  “Hey, is this Clara Schumann?”

  “You are awfully fond of that word: significance.” He turned up the volume. “Perhaps you rely on it too much.”

  “The G minor Trio!”

  He was pleased. “Friederike recommends this CD. The trios of Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn.”

  “Felix Mendelssohn’s sister, sure! A wonderful composer. By the way, Clara and Felix Mendelssohn were also friends. In fact, Clara named her last child Felix. At Robert’s suggestion, no less.” I glanced at him. “Though I suppose you will tell me that this suggests Clara Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn had an affair.”

  “A significant possibility.”

  “Seriously, did you know she had another lifelong male friend? The violinist Joseph Joachim. Who was also, incidentally, a lifelong friend of Brahms. Robert referred to them, once, as the two young demons.”

  “Three men having inappropriate relations with his wife. No wonder the poor sucker went mad.”

  We were laughing.

  “It would be a fresh angle, that’s for sure,” I said.

  “Ja, but try to publish a story like that in America,” Hart said, and suddenly he was serious. “Religion in this country is worse than communism. Say the wrong thing, think the wrong thing and, look—there’s the Stasi knocking at your door. I suppose you will say I exaggerate, but when I think of what’s happening here, it terrifies me.”

  We were more than five years into the Bush administration.

  I could not disagree.

  Heat waves shimmered over cracked sidewalks, rose from tar-pitch roofs. We passed smashed armadillos, smashed tortoise shells. A black leather ribbon of desiccated snake. Just beyond Yeehaw Junction: seven white crosses all in a row, each with its faded memorial wreath. High overhead, the sky stood watch: cloudless, vast, uncompromising.

  “Blue day,” Hart said, and then he sighed. “Hard to find lift.”

  “Lift?” I said, and he pointed to a lazy spiral of vultures: five black flecks above an irrigated field, drainage canals dry as rust. “What they’ve found is an injured animal,” I said, but he shook his head.

  “They are riding a thermal. A column of air. Warm air rises, yes? There’s your lift. Usually you look for cumulus clouds, the kind—you have seen them?—with those dark, flat bottoms. On a blue day like today, you have to look for birds. Or another glider. Or else you go by the way things feel. Intuition, if you will.”

  “How do you find your way back?”

  “Visually, for the most part. Though there’s also GPS. And I always carry a chart, just in case. Here, I’ll show you.” He reached behind him, steering with his knees, and pulled his flight bag into my lap. “Look in the side compartment,” he said, but I was distracted by a copy of Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman by Nancy Reich, flagged with brightly colored Post-its.

  “What’s this?” I said. First the CD, now the book. It was a little unsettling. All this effort for a woman who inspired no chemistry?

  “Yes, I have been reading about your Clara,” Hart said. “She is compelling, this is true. As a woman, as a person. Friederike is sending me Erinnerungen—”

  “Eugenie Schumann’s memoir? I’ve read it in English, but I can’t—”

  “Perhaps we could look together at both editions. I could also translate letters or entries from diaries—”

  “I was going to ask you about that, but it seemed like a lot—

  “It is something that inter-” ests Friederike. Something she and I can talk about. It is challenging, when one lives away from one’s child, to find a common ground. Especially as time passes. But you are not telling me the whole story, I think, when you speak of Clara’s friendships with Mendelssohn and Joachim. Or perhaps you do not understand the significance of a man the age of Brahms, living in his time, calling a married woman, an older woman, not to mention a great pianist and public figure, Du.* To me, it indicates there was more than—

  “Don’t you two get along?”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “But I do understand—”

  “I understand that Du was usually used—”

  simple friendship between them.”

  “—usually used between spouses or sweethearts, family members.”

  “Exclusively used—”

  “But Clara said she felt like a mother to Brahms. She loved him, yes, but like a son.”

  “Would to God that I were allowed this day instead of writing this letter to you to repeat to you with my own lips that I am dying of love for you. Tears prevent me from saying more.* Ja, that is one devoted son.”

  I stared at him. “You have memorized Brahms’s letters?”

  “It is nothing I set out to do. It happens on its own, I cannot help it.”

  “Have you always had this kind of recall?” I asked, but the question didn’t interest him, and he waved it away like smoke.

  “Should I say such things about my own mother, I believe they would arrest me, these Stasi religious American pigs.”

  “Um, yeah, but you have to take into account,” I said, recovering my footing, “the fact that Clara would have been used to men of all ages fancying themselves in love with her. I mean, she was a phenomenon. Das Wunderkind. Die erste Pianistin. The men were in love both with the music she made and with the way they could speak to her about her music. Almost as if she were not a woman.”

  “Different,” Hart said, lifting a finger, “than speaking to her as if she were a man.”

  “True.”

  “And none of these other admirers, even those of her own station, dared to address her as Du. Certainly she never used it. Except with Johannes.”

  “But this, too, can be explained,” I said. “There’s a quote from her diary where she says that an artist is not to be judged by age, but by intellect—”

  “And when I am with Brahms”— Hart provided the quote—“I never think of his youth, I only feel myself wonderfully stirred by his power and often instructed.”*

  “I wish I had your memory,” I said.

  “Don’t ever wish for that.”

  “But I forget everything.”

  His cell phone started up again.

  “And I,” he said, silencing it, “cannot forget anything. Even when I try.”

  Another church billboard: WHEN GOD SAYS NO, IT’S BECAUSE HE IS GOING TO SAY YES TO SOMETHING BETTER.

  What Hart said: “Such as Satan.”

  “You’re not married, are you?” I asked.

  He gave me an amused look. “At this particular moment in time? I am not.”

  “Do you think you’ll get married again?”

  He considered this. “Sure, sure. Probably. Won’t you?”

  “I would have to have a good reason.”

  It was the first time I’d heard him really laugh. “You did not have good reasons the first time? My, my.”

  I found myself laughing, too. “We thought it would be nice to get married,” I said. “So we did. That’s how young we were.”

  “It was the same with my second wife,” he said, and I was about to ask exactly how many wives there’d been when his cell phone bleated. A text this time.

  “Is there some kind of problem?” I asked.

  “It is Friederike’s mother. That woman will drive me crazy.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What did I do? Sure, you are a woman, so you assume I’ve done something wrong.”

  “Did you?”

  “I flew to London, where I saw my daughter, under the supervision of her teacher. I have spoken to my daughter, since, by phone. These are the recent crimes of which I stand accused. Friederike wishes to study in the U.S., as I have told you. At the Juilliard school. You have heard of the Juilliard school? She has been accepted there.”

  “Wow.”

  “It is not me putting such ideas in her head. Her teacher arranged the audition
. Of course I do not disapprove.”

  “Her mother does?”

  “Lauren herself will never leave Paris. Have I mentioned she is recently engaged? To a man, I might add, who has as little understanding of Friederike’s gifts as Lauren herself. Both would be content for Friederike to remain at the conservatory for the next four years. Marry at twenty or twenty-two. Settle down, have a baby or two. Give up these foolish dreams of a concert career.”

  “All right, I’m sorry.”

  “No, no.” His mood had already settled into weary resignation; he seemed, all at once, like a much older man. “Lauren has her point. You know how it goes. The child is happy with how she lives. Then the father gets involved. After that, she and her mother are at odds.”

  I thought of Cal’s rule, one I’d come to admit made sense. When Heidi was with him, she might ask to call me, but I was not allowed to call her. The intrusion only upset her, disrupted her, interrupted the life he was trying to make for her there. Still, I didn’t know the answer to this: for Heidi, for Friederike, for anybody’s child.

  Hart and I rode in silence for a while, the absence of our daughters connecting us: as solid, as real, as any physical presence. Except that Heidi’s absence was only for the weekend, a total of four nights out of each month. Except that, for me, that absence offered a guilty relief, a gulp of fresh air I could only imagine as soon as I was back in our daily life together: getting her off to school, preparing her snacks and suppers, cajoling her through piano lessons, tucking her into bed. What I wouldn’t have given for a real stretch of time—not just a few weeks, but several months—to write the way I used to write. To immerse myself fully, completely. No need to come up for air every few hours, for hugs and kisses and story time, for fevers and board games, laundry and dishes, endlessly sticky countertops, endlessly sticky hands.

  “Don’t ever forget you are the lucky one,” Hart said, as if he’d been reading my thoughts. “Remember, you are the one with the child. He is the one without her.”