“That was really good,” Maia said, a little louder, and then she said, “How do you play like that? How can I play like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like how you play,” Cass said.
The woman laughed. “It’s here, little bird,” she said, tapping Maia’s chest gently, the knot of bone covering her heart. “It’s all here. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You play?”
“Piano,” Maia said. “But I can’t sing.”
“People always told me I couldn’t sing, too.”
“But you’re a great singer,” Cass said.
She grinned. “That’s because I told them to fuck off.” She rested her palm on Maia’s forehead, a benediction, and then hoisted her guitar and gave them a little wave as she rejoined her band, and the warmth of her touch had lingered long after she’d gone.
The high-pitched whine of the pipes ends and Cass comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a shabby towel thin as paper and worn through in places. “Classy,” Cass says, poking her thumb through a hole. Her thick dyed hair is standing on end. The road suits her: sun’s pinked her cheeks and gilded her shoulders, and her eyes are bright in her tan face. They don’t discuss the lives they’ve slipped as easily as the clothes they shuck at the edge of the ocean. Mermaids. Cass swims like a shark, sure and fearless. Maia’s learning in her wake. Cass is the first person she’s ever let see her naked. Was, she thinks. Cass curls up next to her on the bed, slides one damp arm around her shoulders. “Bony thing,” Cass says gently in her ear. “We gotta fatten you up.” From Cass, this is almost silly; despite her broad shoulders and solid build, speed’s slicked her down to skin and bone, same as Maia. Girls across the country would die for this diet, the wild thrill of their vampire nights. Their new life is like a Lost Boys remake.
“I’m homesick,” Maia says. Cass chins the top of her skull and she buries her face in the curve of Cass’s neck like a kitten.
“We can take you home.”
“Not for that home. I don’t ever want to go back to that home.”
“For Vietnam?”
“I don’t remember Vietnam. I miss the piano.”
“I imagine.”
“And Oscar. My teacher.”
“It must be hard, not being able to play.”
“It’s like part of me is gone. But I don’t know—I don’t know what I am without the piano. Without music. I wanted to know that. I wanted to know if it was really something that I loved, or if it’s just the only thing I know how to do and I’ve done it for so long I don’t know any better. Oscar wants me to be a musician and my parents want me to be a musician but I don’t know what I want, I’ve never even asked myself what I want. I didn’t know I could want things until I met you. I thought coming with you would show me what I was without it. But maybe all I am without it is nothing.”
Cass strokes Maia’s hair, gentling her, murmuring nothings into the whorl of her ear. “I know,” she says, over and over. “I know.”
“I thought running away would fix it,” Maia whispers.
“Running away doesn’t fix anything,” Cass says. “But it makes you harder to find.”
Maia wants to buy bread for sandwiches again. It seems like a good idea. Every idea seems like a good idea with drugs like this twitching through you. Cass jitters and grins. Yes, yes, we’ll cook dinner—With what? Never mind—we’ll clean the car we’ll make a plan we’ll write everything down for this week and the next week and the next. Girl, we have so many plans we can plan out last week, too. Cass waits for Maia on the sidewalk outside the grocery store, tapping her fingers on the cement curb, watching ordinary shoppers in their ordinary clothes: a mom toting sticky-faced toddlers, a droopy old man with glasses, a teenage girl a few years younger than she is holding the hand of a little boy who is maybe hers or maybe just her brother, a woman in a business suit clop-clopping in heels she has trouble walking in. All these humans. Cass is human too, look at this, look at her human hands, if she holds her hands to the sun the flesh goes almost translucent, doesn’t it, not really translucent but lucid, light shining pinkly through the web of flesh between forefinger and thumb. A woman with thick glasses and a mean squint looks at her, scowling, and then Cass puts her hands on the curb again. Maybe they should eat something besides bread. What do people eat? Cass thinks about it, can’t remember. Carrots, people eat carrots. Spaghetti. Bananas. Tofu and avocado. A coffee cup. You don’t eat a coffee cup. You put coffee in it. Cass puts her chin on her knees, hugs her legs to her chest. It isn’t cold. There’s a woman by the door to the grocery store handing out Bibles. She has on a long purple dress—Ugly, Cass thinks, what an ugly dress—and her face is not young but at the same time strangely ageless; she could be forty, or sixty, or any age in between. She’s wearing a scarf over her bushy horse-colored hair. No one wants her Bibles; she’s been holding the same one since Cass sat here, offering it with insistent jerks of her outstretched hand, but everyone who passes ignores her, tugs a shopping cart out of its corral, pushes it through the sliding doors. There’s a lull in customers, the sidewalk deserted, the glass doors snugged shut and unyielding, and the woman offers Cass the Bible with the same enraged ferocity.
“No, thank you,” Cass says.
“Do you know,” the woman says. It’s the first she’s talked. Her voice is surprisingly low and raspy. “Do you know where you will spend eternity?”
“In hell,” Cass says. “With all the rest of my friends.” By which she means Maia. She doesn’t mean to be sarcastic; it’s not until the woman snorts in contempt that Cass realizes what she’s said.
“God has no place for sinners,” the woman says.
“I do,” Cass says, but low, to herself. “I do.” She does.
THEN
Maia won’t admit to herself how hard she’s looking for Cass, but she walks home from Oscar’s every day that week. At the piano, she’s as focused as ever. The Ravel is enormously difficult; she barely makes it through, the first time she plays for Oscar. He tsk-tsks at her. “We must begin more quietly,” he says. “It is as the poem: We enter this world that is made without us already, that beckons us in but does not give us answers. We are part of the water, we are bewitched by the water. Do you see? You must make me believe it. She is trying to bring him in, to sink him. Then here”—he taps the page—“further along, he rejects her, and she is furious. But always you, the storyteller, must be in control. She is angry, but also ruined, do you see? She dissolves without him. All of this you must tell us.”
She plays, as always, with a ferocity that belies the tininess of her world, the penned-in dollhouse of her life. When she was in school, there was school, but it’s been years since she was in school. She studies in her room, now, and takes tests on a paper she mails to an office somewhere. Her mother is supposed to be guiding her but her mother is always, forever, too busy; something has come up, a meeting must be gone to, a dinner party attended, a luncheon, you’ll be fine on your own, won’t you. The truth is, Maia has always been fine on her own. When she’s not practicing she opens her books at random—trigonometry, European history, biology. Triangles, the roof of the Sistine chapel, a diagram of fruit fly genes. Sometimes she falls asleep with her cheek against the thin pages, wakes with cheap ink smeared on her skin. Equations transferring from the text to her body, marking her with some language that is far less useful to her than the language she lives in, the language of her hands. The notes that move from the page to her eyes to her fingers, quick as sound, quicker.
This week, Oscar is harder on her than he’s ever been; maybe he sees in her some seed that Cass has planted. At the piano he is relentless, making her play the Ravel over and over and over for him until she wants to tear the music into pieces and throw them at his head. “You must practice!” he says Friday afternoon, after he’s demanded she play a single measure thirty times in a row. “Have you not practiced? Have you got lazy?”
“I practice,” she whispers. He shakes his hea
d, exhales through his moustache.
“You have gone,” he says, waving one hand. “You have gone to somewhere else, I don’t know where this is. Listen, I have an idea for you.”
“What,” she says, exhausted.
“You must read when you play.”
“Read the music?”
“No, no.” He makes a disdainful face. “Books. You must read books. This is the trouble, I think. You become bored when you practice. Over and over again, the same notes, this is the curse of the pianist; we must play until our body knows the notes so well it is as if we are born with them written in our fingers. Only then can we play with spirit, with interpretation. Only then can we make good choices, do you see? Because it is not the notes you are thinking about any longer, but the music, what is behind it, what it is trying to say through you. Where your body will be when you play, the color of the sound. This is how we play, when we play well. So you read while you practice.”
“I don’t—”
“Always it is no with you, Maia. Poetry isn’t good, it has got its own rhythm.” He frowns. “Unless it is modern poetry, which one cannot help but find quite upsetting. But I don’t think poetry is the thing. And great fiction, you know, it’s not the thing either. If the language is beautiful it is most distracting.” He looks out the window, tugging thoughtfully at his moustache. “Detective stories,” he says.
“Detective stories.”
“Yes, detective stories. Also I find that the newspaper is good for this; of course it’s harder to put at the piano. Not the front page, the front page is always very distressing, this is a country full of criminals. Criminals and disaster. You will read detective stories, when you practice at home.”
Maia gives up. “Sure. I’ll read detective stories when I practice.”
Oscar beams at her. “Next week, my dear, I promise you, you shall see the most wonderful results!”
“Oscar, I read the poem. The Bertrand. My mom had it.”
“Ah, yes. Your mother.” Oscar hates her mother.
“Ondine, the mermaid? She’s sort of horrible.” He raises an eyebrow. “I mean, Oscar, she says she’s in love but she doesn’t care if she kills her lover. She’s selfish. She knows he’ll die when she pulls him underwater.”
Oscar nods. “Yes, my dear, of course. This is true. But it is also—well, we are not speaking of human beings here, for the one thing. We are speaking of creatures of myth. These people, they do not have morals the way that we have morals. They are quite a bit older than we are, you know.” Oscar is discussing mermaids as if they’re a slightly eccentric family who lives down the street. Maia opens her mouth to say something, but he continues. “They do not share our views of the world. But of course it is more than this. When we fall in love we desire only to live in the shadow of desire. We don’t think of the sensible thing. It is no matter if we are a human being or a little fish in the sea. Or this mermaid.”
“But he doesn’t say she’s in love, not like that. She’s trying to tempt him underwater even though she knows it’ll kill him. When he tells her he’s in love with a human woman, she laughs at him. It’s not tragic, it’s—”
“Who are you, child, to say what tragedy is? Have you loved?”
Maia falters in the face of his sudden outrage. “No,” she says. “But that’s not what he says about her. ‘Boudeuse et dépitée.’ He’s saying she’s sulky. Selfish. Not tragic.”
“Love is always selfish,” Oscar snaps. “Always. Love is only interested in taking away all that makes a person what they are, and bringing this person into you. There is no love that does not wish to take and take until there is nothing left of the beloved.”
Maia is quiet. Oscar can’t be right, but what does she know? She has never been in love. She doesn’t know anything about the world except for her own house and her piano and this room where she plays for Oscar. All the years she’s come to his house, and he’s never even let her see the upstairs. She can feel her heart buzzing inside her chest like a bee trapped in a jar, battering itself against the glass. There is a whole world of secrets outside the walls that keep her. When she was younger, she saw her cage as keeping other people out. Now she’s coming to understand that instead it’s made to shut her in.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“I am correct,” Oscar says, imperious. But under his pompousness she can sense something massive, an old hurt calcified. He’s told her countless times he ruined his own life, and that’s why he’s stuck here, teaching piano to her and a sea of snot-nosed wealthy children. But he’s never told her the story of that ruin, or the shape it came in. What kind of wreckage could leave him like this that’s not a broken heart? She may have never been in love, but she’s read books. Whatever Oscar says, love is messier and more grand than he’s willing to let on. Of that, she’s sure.
Oscar doesn’t let the silence build. “You will go home now,” he tells her. “You will practice and practice, with the detective stories, as I have told you.” As far as she knows, there’s not a single detective story in the entirety of her mother’s library. “When you play there must be no Maia. There is only the music, the hands, the muscle of the back. Here, and here.” He pokes her shoulders with one blunt finger. She stifles a yelp. “I have seen you do this before and it is why I am asking you to do it again, because I understand that you are good enough. Even though you do not.”
His last you is almost an accusation. Maia nods. She won’t give Oscar the satisfaction of knowing he’s made her cry. She gathers up her music and puts it in her bag, keeping her back to Oscar so that he can’t see her hands shaking.
“I’ll see you next week,” she says, her voice as even as she can make it. Oscar shows her to the door. She keeps her back straight as she walks away, long after his door closes behind her, long after his house recedes into the distance and she knows there is no one left to see what’s left of her pride carry her home.
But Oscar’s sternness has shifted something inside her and that night at the piano the music changes. At first the Ravel is as difficult as ever, as heavy and shapeless in her hands as dough. Her arms are stiff, riddled with their old familiar aches: strained tendons, cramping fingers, the ordinary pains of the pianist who wishes to be extraordinary. What do I know about love, Maia thinks, staring dully at the keys. What is a piano but wood and string and ivory, felt hammer, metal pedal. No secrets hidden in its body, no clues to how she might make it sing. Frustrated, she runs a set of scales, and then another, and then another, until her mind is empty and her hands are limber, and then she tries the Ravel again.
She can feel the difference in the first chords and wills herself not to overthink it, to let the music come from her like dancing or breathing. She imagines the low murmur of Oscar’s voice, gentling her through the piece. We know the notes, do we not? We have played them many times. They are in our memory now. We have only to let them go, to give them shape. She almost laughs out loud with the joy of it, the music rising out of her like the blood flowing through her veins, pumped through her by the rhythm of her heart even as the meter of the piece tolls through it like a bell. Here it is at last, this window to the other side, this feeling that she lives for, this rare elation. And then she misses a note. What do you know about desire, sneers a little voice in her heart. What do you know about darkness? What do you know about the kingdoms underneath the belly of the earth? She stumbles through a chord. The piece is clunky again and she soldiers through the rest of it without joy.
But for a moment it was there, it was hers.
“That was beautiful, Maia,” her mother says behind her. Maia whirls around on the bench. Her mother is leaning in the doorway, her head tilted, her face soft. Maia has no idea how long she’s been standing there. She looks down at her hands.
“I haven’t nailed it yet,” she says. “The last half wasn’t right.”
Her mother shrugs. “You’ll get it. And it still sounds wonderful.”
“Thanks,” Maia say
s, unsettled. Her mother is so stern that she forgets, sometimes, that her mother is also human; that, presumably, her mother has emotions like other human beings; that her mother also loves, looks at paintings and finds them pretty, listens to music and is moved. Once Maia walked in on her mother listening to The Magic Flute in her office and crying unabashedly. She looked up as Maia came into the room and smiled. They waited together until the end of the aria and then she lifted the needle off the record and sighed. “Your father and I went to the William Kentridge production,” she said. “It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The shadow puppets…” She trailed off and looked tearily at the wall. “It’s really an Orpheus story, you know,” she said, her voice distant. “Charming beasts with flute music. There’s a kind of underworld throughout, and of course for Kentridge the metaphors of colonialism, exploration—but really, at the heart of it, his vision is so magnificent, his scenery so wonderfully realized.”
“You don’t need to lecture me,” Maia said. “You can just tell me you like something.” But though she’d intended the words to be gentle, her mother’s eyes snapped back into focus, and Maia saw that instead she’d landed a blow. “I didn’t mean—” she said, but her mother cut her off.
“Did you want something?”
“I just needed to borrow some paper,” Maia said.
“Oh,” her mother said. “Sure.” She’d handed Maia a few sheets. Maia had taken the paper and fled to the safety of her room.
Dirty Wings Page 6