Good Things I Wish You: A Novel

by A. Manette Ansay

  Jeanette

  Date: Saturday, May 27 12:19 AM

  To: Jeanie88@comster.com

  Easy, Jeanie. I’m finding it hard to laugh at anything right now. Sally and I are separated. You get divorced once, okay, but twice?

  L—

  23.

  I GOT MY COMPUTER out of Hart’s car, grabbed muffins and fruit and two bottles of water, then set myself up at the end of the conference table, directly in front of the largest fan. Two hours later, I’d hacked my 230-page manuscript down to 50-odd pages. Gone: all the precious, meticulous details about German life in the 1850s. Gone: the clever subplots involving Clara’s musical contemporaries. Gone: the carefully researched nuances of individual performances. Food preferences and wardrobe descriptions. The exacting layout of the Dresden house. All of it—procrastination, literary filler. Beautifully written ivy disguising a crumbling structure, empty rooms.

  Facts that had nothing to do with the truth.

  There are things about men and women that do not change.

  What was left: Clara’s backstory. Robert’s, too. The first meeting of Brahms and the Schumanns. The moment when Clara finally understands her marriage cannot continue. I am not worthy of your love. And then—an indulgence, a pure waste of time—I wrote the same moment as it occurred between Calvin and me. As soon as I finished, I deleted it. There are things that don’t belong on any page. I wrote, instead, a new scene in which a woman stands at the corner of Ponce and Dixie, unable to step forward, unable to turn back. There were the vultures I’d just seen, the clear sky overhead. There was my university, the corner where I cross the street to work, just blocks from the corner where a student was actually killed. Concrete, crosswalks, modern-day traffic. Nothing I was writing could possibly appear in a novel set in the mid-nineteenth century—

  But wasn’t this something I’d learned again and again? You went where the writing took you. You followed a serendipitous path. Perhaps what was missing from what I’d written was exactly this bridge between present and past. What could I take from the life of Clara Schumann as a working artist, living in the world today? As a mother? As somebody’s former wife? As somebody standing on the edge of what must be a whole new life? Perhaps what was most remarkable, relevant, about the lasting friendship between Clara and Brahms was not that the two were never lovers, but that, indeed, they had been.

  Once I would have said that Cal and I were friends.

  Pilots came and went, some spreading charts beside me. The Japanese students appeared in pairs, studying for the written portion of their test. It felt right to be sitting among them, working in the company of others who shared—if not my passion, a passion. In the end, wasn’t all of it the same? When Midori sat down with a notepad and pen, eager to practice her English, I stopped working to answer her questions. She asked me what I was writing, and when I told her, she giggled and covered her mouth with her hand.

  “You write about me,” she said.

  “Maybe I will,” I said. “You have such an obvious passion for flying.”

  Puzzle lines creased her smooth forehead. I tried to rephrase.

  “Why do you love to fly so much?”

  “Ah! First glider, then plane. My dream is earn commercial license, be pilot. Big plane.”

  “What I mean,” I said, “is why do you love flying and not, say, ice skating or soccer or playing the piano?”

  She shook her head, confused. “I play piano. Maybe I am very good at.”

  “But is the piano also your passion?”

  Another puzzled look.

  “Okay. If you had to choose between playing the piano and flying, which would you choose?”

  “I practice every day. I made promise to parents,” she said. “What is meaning passion?”

  “Love,” I said, “but stronger. Better.”

  “Please write down.” She extended a little notepad.

  I wrote the word passion.

  I wrote, What makes you passionate about flying? What if something happened so you couldn’t fly anymore?

  I wrote, What do you think makes some people want to do what you’re doing and other people, like me, afraid to do it?

  Midori received the notepad from me with both hands. “I will look up in dictionary,” she said. “I will answer all questions. For your book.”

  She bounded away. I picked an old scene.

  Began to revise.

  24.

  IT IS NOT JUST his face that Clara finds beautiful, though she recognizes, there, what others see. Recognizes, too, his awareness of that beauty, his assumption that others will respond to it and treat him accordingly. Robert, one hand held to his mouth, cannot stop touching Brahms with the other, rubbing Brahms’s smooth cheeks in greeting, clinging to him when he leaves. Of course the children cling to him too, the boys fleeing in mock terror from his kisses. And when he plays for them in the evening hours, she and Robert clasp hands as they did years ago, all they once felt for each other kindling, again, into shining flame. What genius. What passion. The mere thought of Brahms’s boyish face, those soft hands and slender shoulders, strikes like flint against the rich, shuddering sound.

  The children lined up on the couches to listen. Passersby standing outside in the cold.

  It is said they remove their caps and scarves so as to better catch each note.

  His outbursts of arrogance startle everyone, of course. “Brahms is ego incarnate, without himself being aware of it,” Joseph Joachim will write to a friend. “The way in which he wards off all the morbid emotions and imaginary troubles of others is really delightful. He is absolutely sound in that, just as his complete indifference to the means of existence is beautiful, indeed magnificent. He will not make the smallest sacrifice of his intellectual inclinations—he will not play in public because of his contempt for the public, and because it irks him—although he plays divinely. I have never heard piano playing (except perhaps Liszt’s) which gave me so much satisfaction—so light and clear, so cold and indifferent to passion.”*

  Clara can’t deny that this is true. However, there is much one can forgive, must forgive, considering his father’s rough ambitions, those childhood nights in the Animierlokale. He has confided in her after Robert has gone to bed, after the maid has banked the coals, the two of them lingering at the piano. She, in turn, has shared her own confidences, mostly about Robert’s ill health which (she is convinced of this, must be convinced) is the result of persecution by those who refuse to understand that great minds cannot be bothered with all the little details of a mundane world.

  Picture them there, priestess and protégé, Clara’s work skirt pressing lightly, innocently, against Brahms’s rough-stitched trouser seam as she speaks of her husband with a passion, a joy, she’d thought had been lost for good. Picture Brahms’s gaze on her animated face, breathless at the thought of himself so close to a woman, this woman, who is untouchable in her genius, her motherhood, her position as Schumann’s wife. Picture Robert upstairs, blanketed in a sleep so deep that for once he cannot hear his own mounting madness: devilish, dissonant notes that tormented him nightly, unceasingly, during the weeks before Brahms’s arrival.

  It is not impossible that all three of them might imagine things continuing exactly this way:

  Clara’s heart beating faster at the touch of Brahms’s knee;

  Brahms choked to shyness as her hand guides his own over secret fingerings;

  Robert stroking those fresh, smooth cheeks, leaning forward to offer his kiss. And Brahms receiving that kiss from them both, Clara and Robert, Clara again. Returning it. Receiving it. Offering it again.

  Morning walks together and lunchtime with the children. Afternoons spent at the piano, scratching at scores, debating each note with a passion that eclipses the page. Robert and Brahms composing variations on Clara’s original themes, dueling at the piano, taking delight in Clara’s delight as she turns effortlessly, gracefully, score to score. Hours of conversation in which everything and
anything is talked about—

  Except this thrum of longing that engulfs them. This warm sense of expectancy that sharpens every look, every word, into its own exquisite point. It cannot be identified because it is everywhere. They are breathing it. Like air.

  Erotically, these types are torn in two directions…Where they love, they do not desire, and where they desire, they cannot love. The only defense against this dilemma consists in despising the object of one’s sexual hunger while, conversely, adulating to excess the soul mate…

  —Sigmund Freud*

  25.

  BY SIX IN THE evening, Miriam and Chuck had closed up shop. No way would Hart be taking me up in the Blanik today. Nor was I going to be home by eight—though, somehow, this didn’t seem to matter any more. Cumulus clouds compressed the horizon; at least the air had cooled enough to make it possible to sit outside. I packed up my computer and returned it to Hart’s car, exchanged it for the short-story anthology, which I took to the edge of the pool. The Japanese students had retired to the dormitory; now and again, voices drifted through the door, which was propped open by a stone. For a moment, dangling my feet in the water, I thought I was hearing the piano.

  Out of tune. Rasping. The G gone sour.

  Sometimes it was hard to distinguish the world I’d reentered from the one I’d left behind.

  I’d planned to look at a new Danticat story, but I found myself rereading, instead, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates for what must have been the fiftieth time, seduced by the quiet foreboding that intensifies with each appearance of the stranger, Arnold Friend, who ultimately talks young Connie from the safety of her home, from behind her locked screen door, and into the car that will take her away. The place where you came from ain’t there any more, and where you had in mind to go is canceled out.

  Then I heard it again: the opening bars of Schumann’s Arabeske . A pause, followed by another few bars.

  Midori was practicing.

  Puffs of wind rustled my pages; the weather vane shuddered, clocked around. Something was building: a system, a storm. I realized the sunlight was gone. At exactly the moment I started to worry, a hand rested cool against the back of my neck.

  “I spent most of my adolescence in a swimming pool,” Hart said. “Lap after lap in that cold, cold water.”

  “Do you still like to swim?”

  He laughed. “I cannot bear the thought of it. Another lost passion, I suppose. Do you still play the piano?”

  “I’m teaching my daughter.”

  “Ah.” He settled himself beside me, unlaced his shoes. “But I have read this story,” he said, peering at the page. “Lit-tle Connie meets the devil.”

  “You interpret Arnold Friend as the devil?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Yes and no.”

  He slipped his feet into the water beside mine. “I am thinking you are someone who fears commitment.”

  “And I’m thinking you are someone who believes in the devil, which is surprising, considering you don’t believe in God.”

  “Arnold Friend is not the devil, he’s her devil,” Hart answered seamlessly. “Lit-tle Connie doesn’t have a chance.”

  “Do you have a devil?”

  “Everyone has a devil.”

  “Not me.”

  “You are certain of this?”

  “Some people attract devils. Some don’t.”

  “He is out there. Trust me.”

  I found myself thinking about the men—boys?—I dated during the years before my marriage. I thought about L—, his sincere and uncomplicated admiration for me. I thought about Cal, but it seemed impossible, now, that we could ever have aroused in each other anything beyond middle-aged weariness.

  “No one would make me open that door.”

  “Someday, someone will coax you out.”

  “Fat chance.”

  His foot grazed mine in the water. “Me, perhaps.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  He looked amused. “I thought not.”

  Another burst of Arabeske spilled over us both like a shower of gold.

  “How many times have you been married?” I asked.

  “Is it already time for true confessions?” From somewhere deep in a cloud, there was thunder. “I see that it is.”

  “Unless,” I said, “you have something to hide.”

  He smiled. “Only my own stupidity. My first and third marriages were with Lauren. She was seventeen when we met. I was thirty-three.” His mouth twisted ruefully. “An excellent age to meet your devil.”

  “Thirty-three or seventeen?”

  “You are funny.”

  “How long were you together?”

  “It is off and on. We married other people in between. The second time we divorced, you could say I did not take this so well. Friederike was ten, and I was the one who supervised her practicing, as you supervise your own daughter, yes? So you understand what this means. The time, the discipline. The commitment.”

  More thunder, sustained this time, followed by a sturdy gust of wind.

  “The court had no such understanding. The child should be with her mother. Basta. Only now the child is old enough to have her own say. So, once again, as you have seen, the topic is under discussion.” He tapped his shirt pocket, where he kept his phone, then looked up at the sky. “I’m afraid there will be no flying for you today.”

  “Too bad.”

  “You are truly disappointed?”

  “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved. But I’m starting to wonder if there’s a connection between how nervous I am about—well, just about everything—and the way I’ve been stuck on my book.”

  “Maybe it would help you to fly, then?”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

  He glanced at me, surprised. Pleased. “I have always found it useful to try new things,” he said, and then: “Help me with the glider, do you mind?”

  A Chopin Polonaise accompanied us as we walked past the pilots’ quarters. “Can I ask you another question?” I said.

  “Sure, sure. The answers are free.”

  “Are you really a famous eye surgeon?”

  This made him laugh. “Who is saying that?”

  “Did you invent some kind of prosthetic eye that senses light?”

  “My God, who do I look like? How do you say—the miracle man?”

  “The miracle worker?”

  “There is no such thing, Jeanette, as a prosthetic eye. Not the way you mean. None of this involves the eye, anyway. It is all about the brain.”

  But another gust of wind blew his words away, and by the time we’d rolled the ASW into the hangar, a dark wall of rain was sweeping toward us across the open field. Directly overhead, the sky lit up. The thunder was continuous, a hammering deep in my chest. Hart closed the hangar door, and when he turned to rest his fingers very lightly on my shoulders, I wondered if the regret in his face was a reflection of something he’d seen in my own. Twelve years of marriage. Richer or poorer.

  The rough kiss of his chin. The spark of his tongue.

  I’d believed we were forever, Cal and me. I’d believed only death could part us.

  We kissed until the rain overtook us, until his hand found the small of my back, guiding me toward the trailer, toward the warm yellow light that shone from the propped-open door. The ax murderer. The entrepreneur. There was no need to hurry. We were already wet to the skin. We were already moving toward where this would take us, where this was going to end.

  But for now, we’d eat dinner with the Japanese students. We’d listen to Midori perform Arabeske, and I’d play selections from Schumann’s Kinderszenen, easy pieces that have lived in my fingers for over twenty years. We’d spend a restless night in the dormitory—the next night, too—Hart on the couch in the main room, me in a twin-size cot beside Midori. And it was on this second morning, the day of my first flight, that the sentence woke me out of my sleep, warm
and glowing as the beam of sunshine splashed across my face.

  That first flight was nothing like what I’d imaged. A few shuddering seconds on the tow, then the lovely, lifting feeling that means you’re in the air. The sound of the wind pouring in through the vents. The creak of the rudder, like a seagoing ship. Hart released the towline at three thousand feet, and I found I was not afraid. Suspended by physics, surrounded by space, I looked out at the world as if for the first time: bitter-burned fields and gummy-eyed sinkholes, the single gray road that had brought me here. Everything familiar. Everything changed.

  “Okay back there?” Hart called.

  “Okay.”

  “You sure?”

  But I was too happy to speak.

  I made it home by seven that night, just minutes ahead of Cal. After that, I was busy with Heidi, who ran through the house touching everything—toys, furniture, even my face—as if to reassure herself that nothing had been lost during the time she’d been away. It took several hours before she was finally able to sleep. Before I could hurry down the hall toward my study, pinning back my hair. Eager as a woman going to her lover. That single sentence singing, still, its song inside my head.

  What I wrote: My first date in nineteen years is nearly an hour late.

  26.

  WHAT MAKES YOU PASSIONATE about flying?

  Character come before person is born.

  What if something happened so you couldn’t fly anymore?

  I am careful. Nothing happens. You will see!

  What do you think makes some people want to do what you’re doing and other people, like me, afraid to do it?

  Do not eat uncook vegetable. Begin each day with hot boiled egg.

  Part V

  Translation

  Düsseldorf, 2006

  27.