Dirty Wings
Page 19
“June,” Cass says one afternoon. Maia took her father’s car without asking again—being treated as though she’s invisible does have some advantages—and they drove to Gas Works Park, where they’re watching a spittle-streaked, shrieking toddler lunge after some geese with a handful of bread. Cass leans back in the grass.
“Watch out for goose shit,” Maia says.
“Already checked. Summer makes me stir-crazy.”
“Me, too.”
“You ever even been anywhere?”
“Europe.”
“Europe, of course,” Cass says in a fake posh accent. Maia hits her on the shoulder. “But I mean, like, traveling.”
“I’ve traveled lots.”
“You’ve gotten on a plane and come back. It’s not the same thing if you go just to go.”
“Go where?”
Cass shrugs. “Anywhere. Hop rails, hitch. Just put some stuff in a bag and say goodbye to your life for a while. When I’ve been back here for too long, I get restless. I go traveling every summer.”
Maia thinks of Cass leaving her and is overwhelmed by an unexpected sense of panic. Cass is her only friend, and now her best friend; the thought of losing her is as awful as cutting off one of her limbs.
“I’d miss you,” she says. “A lot.”
“I’d miss you, too,” Cass says, taking her hand.
“What if I went with you?”
Cass looks up, surprised. “Why would you want to do that? You have a whole life here.”
“So do you.”
“But you have to practice every day. Get ready for your future. All that stuff.”
“I’m sick of my future.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I am,” Maia says. “I’m sick of it. I’ve never done anything I wanted, anything for myself, until I met you. I’m going crazy from it. That show you took me to—I know that was no big deal, for you. You do that stuff all the time. But all those people—”
“Todd,” Cass interrupts, smirking.
“Todd,” Maia agrees, her cheeks red. “But all of them. All your friends. You just do whatever you want.”
“You only see the good side, Maia,” Cass says. “You don’t see the hard parts. You don’t see us in winter, sleeping in two sweaters and a coat and four pairs of socks, because there’s no heat in the house.”
“It sounds like camping.”
“It’s not like camping when it’s every day of your life.”
“I want to try it,” Maia says. “I want to try something. Anything. I want to go out in the world and forget who I’m supposed to be for a while.”
Cass props herself up on her elbows. “Todd has a car,” she says.
“I have a car.”
“Your dad has a car.”
“He won’t miss it.”
Cass looks at her. “Are you serious?”
“I’m totally serious.”
“What about the piano?”
“It’s not like we’d leave forever. Just a couple of weeks.”
“We could drive to California and back. I know a lot of people on the way down. We could sleep on the beach.”
“Let’s do it.”
“You are serious.”
“I’m always serious.”
“That,” Cass says, “is definitely not true.”
“I have some money,” Maia says. “A thousand dollars.”
Cass whistles. “Even better,” she says. “With that kind of money, we could flee the country.”
“When should we leave?”
“Monday,” Cass says. “Road trips should always start on a Monday.” They grin at each other, elated.
“That’s in three days.”
“Yes.”
“What do I need to bring?”
“Yourself,” Cass says. “A sleeping bag.”
“That stuff you gave me. For New York. Can you bring more of that?”
Cass laughs. “Baby girl, I’ll bring you a fucking pharmacy, you ask with those big eyes like that.”
“Just the two of us.”
“Just the two of us,” Cass agrees.
For the next three days her secret burns in her like a coal, until she is sure her parents will feel its heat radiating out from her skin. The promise of the open road, Cass at her side, gives her the fortitude to weather the bleak silence of her house. She buys a military rucksack at a thrift store and fills it with the clothes she’s bought with Cass, her new-old shirts, her worn-through jeans, her cutoffs. These clothes are like soft skin against her own skin, not stiff and unyielding like the clothes her mother dresses her in. These clothes have their own histories already, their stories tangling with hers when she puts them on. In these clothes, she feels at home. On Sunday night she kisses her father in his study: haze of bourbon, his pipe in its ashtray, the pile of dog-eared manuscript pages. The sight of her father’s book makes her sad. “You’re a good girl,” he says, patting her shoulder. Keep thinking that, Dad, she could say, but she doesn’t.
“Good night.”
“Good night, sweetheart.”
Her mother is in the kitchen, wiping the spotless counters one last time. Her golden hair hangs down her back in soft waves. “Goodnight, Mom,” Maia says, and her mother turns, surprised. For a moment, the wall comes down.
“You haven’t said goodnight to me since you were a little girl.”
“Feeling sentimental, I guess. Have a good class tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
“Things have been weird,” Maia says. Her mother stiffens.
“That’s one word for what you’ve done.”
“It’s not about you.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“You would.” Maia bites back the rest of what she’s almost said. There’s no point in it. Her mother is what she is, will never be another thing, more giving or less harsh. Her mother is not her mother at all, not body or bone or blood. In the world she was first born into these people would have been strangers thousands of miles away, and she would be growing up in a country far from here. Mother is just a word like any other, ordinary until you make it mean something. She knows she is being unfair; this woman has done, to her credit, the best she knows how to do.
“Sorry,” she says. “Goodnight. Mom.”
“Goodnight.” She leaves her mother in the kitchen, sponge moving in smooth circles across the counter’s gleaming surface.
The morning is so easy it’s as though she was born to start running. Her mother leaves for the college; her father shuts himself away. The car keys are in the drawer in the kitchen. She writes them a note. Please don’t worry about me. I need to think about some things. I promise I’m safe. Sorry I took your car, Dad. She checks everything one last time. Toothbrush, Ravel sheet music, underwear, socks. Sleeping bag. When she gets down to it there’s little she wants to bring. She writes a postcard to Oscar—I’ll come home. Don’t be mad. I love you—stamps it, tucks it in the pocket of her bag to mail later.
“Goodbye,” she says to the lifeless house. She won’t miss it, she realizes, looking around her. She won’t miss anything save the piano, and that she can always come back to. The front door shuts behind her, and she is free.
NOW: SEATTLE
Maia puts the Ravel in her bag and goes to see Oscar a week after Jason records his album. She does not tell him she’s coming; instead, she shows up at his front door, at the same time as her lesson used to be, knocks as she always did. When he opens the door he does not seem surprised to see her.
“It took you a long time,” he says. “To come see me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Come inside.”
She follows him through the house to the piano room, her heart leaping at the sight of the Steinway. This, she thinks, this is what I am missing. She crosses the room and touches it, reverently.
“It can be yours again,” he says behind her. “This life, it was so bad? Come back, child. Come back to me. Tell me you will
go to school in the fall.”
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
He sighs. “You are joking.”
“No.”
“You can have this taken care of.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You are ruining your life.”
“Maybe,” she says. “But it’s my life to ruin.”
“Why,” he says. “Why are you doing this? Your whole life is in front of you, Maia. Your career. Go to New York. Forget about this summer. Forget whatever foolishness you have been captured by these last months.”
“I’m broken, Oscar. Something in me is broken. You saw it all along.”
He comes to stand next to her and puts his hand on the piano and looks at it with a love that is so naked Maia almost steps away from him. “I know what it is like,” he says. “There was a time when I was young when I was like you also, always searching, always unhappy with myself, and I made a mistake, and it undid me. I cannot watch you do the same thing.”
“I’m not making a mistake. It’s what I want.”
He dismisses her with a wave of his hand. “You are seventeen years old. Forgive me, Maia, but you are too young and too stupid to have any idea what you want. It will be years before you know anything about yourself, and by then, if you do this, it will have been done, and you will be like me, looking back on all your life with nothing but regret. Do you know what I was? I was a great pianist, Maia. I could have been a Horowitz or a Rubinstein, everyone around me knew this, I knew this. I was teaching a little in the conservatory, you understand, but it would not have been for much longer.”
“What happened?”
“I fell in love,” he says. “I fell in love with one of my students. I was young. He was younger. We were careless, I was found out. It was a terrible, terrible scandal. His father threatened to sue the school—he was tremendously wealthy, you understand, a major donor. All very well for the Greeks, but this is a newer time.” He sighs. “The young man was not—he was not courageous, I think is how you say it. The father threatened to disinherit him. So the boy said that it was I who had seduced him and it looked bad, you see, as I was his teacher. Martha Kaplan was not the head of the department then, of course, but she disliked me, as I was quite a lot better than she was, and so she was most pleased to encourage him. It was the ruin of me, this foolishness, and when it became public the boy never spoke to me again. I had thrown away my life for him, and he would not even see me.”
“What happened to him?”
Oscar laughs. “He went into the stock market. He was not an especially good pianist; it was not his musicianship that I loved. The father had always been mistrustful of the arts. An entire field of homosexuals and destitutes.” He touches the piano again. “My other students rallied for me, but it was no use. It was kind of them. They stole for me this piano.”
“They stole a Steinway?”
“Well, you know, they were fond of me. I think it was quite a project for them.”
“Didn’t the school notice?”
“Oh, of course, I am sure. But it was already such a nasty business, and they did not wish to have any more questions asked. I am only telling you this because I regret it every day of my life, Maia. It is a great joy to me, you must understand, to have taught you all these years, but I had a real life, the beginning of a real career. I would have been great, this is not a doubt. Now instead it is you who will be great. I will not allow this foolishness. You will go to the doctor and have this thing taken care of, and you will leave me here, sad old man that I am, and go to New York, and have a fine destiny ahead of you, have I made myself clear?”
“Oscar,” Maia says. “I’m not you.”
“Young people think they are all different from one another,” Oscar says quietly, “and in this they are always quite incorrect.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “Oscar, I—”
“Do not talk,” he says. “Let us not ruin our afternoon with any more talking. Play for me.”
“What do you want me to play?”
“Play me the Ravel.”
She sits at his magnificent piano, the piano she knows as well as if it were her own. The tenor of it, the weight of the keys, the movement of its pedals under her feet. She knows its moods, the way its tone shifts a little in the winter no matter how dry Oscar keeps the room, the way it opens up again in the summer, like an animal breathing in. She hasn’t played the Ravel for weeks, but it doesn’t matter. She plays now for Oscar the way she played at her audition for those stone-faced Gorgons wishing her failure. Everything she has learned about loss this summer, about wanting, pours out of her and into the keys. Instead of the mermaid she thinks of the producer, his black eyes watching her, the producer in a palace with tall windows that look out over the sea, the producer calling her name, calling her down. I will see you again. The notes washing out of her like waves breaking against the shore, light sparkling across the breakers. Like a ghost she enters the music, her own self washed clear, dissolving away until she is nothing but motes of light, kelp moving in the slow deep currents, the silver wink of a fish glinting. She plays knowing the truth of the fate she’s spun for herself: She could never have played like this if she had not learned what she learned when she left; but in leaving, she’s undone her own future, taken away the chance she had to make this music her life.
After the final chords fade away from the still room, she raises her head and sees that Oscar’s eyes are wet. “You are better than I ever was,” he says. “You are better than I ever was, and you are throwing it away in front of me.”
“I’m sorry, Oscar.”
He shakes his head. “I would like you to leave now.”
“Oscar—”
“Please,” he says. “Please, Maia. Go.”
She leaves the sheet music on his piano and walks through his house alone without saying goodbye.
The producer throws them a party the night the record releases. Jason is so nervous he gets drunk at eleven in the morning. Byron and Percy are beside themselves with anxiety. Maia is confident that if she stays in the house with them all day she will lose her mind. I will see you again. Tonight. Tonight she will see him again. She presses her hand to her chest, as if the flutter there were visible. “Come on,” she says, “let’s go to the park.”
“It’s cold,” Jason moos. “It’s raining.”
“We’ll go to the zoo, then.”
“Let’s just go get breakfast,” Byron says.
“Fine,” Maia says.
“You go,” Jason says. “I’ll stay here. In case someone calls.”
Maia refrains from pointing out that the phone’s been shut off for a week, since none of them has money to pay the bill. “Okay, baby,” she says, kissing him. “We’ll be back soon.”
“In time for the party.”
“It’s not even noon yet.”
“But you’ll come back.”
“We’ll come back.”
Maia and Byron and Percy pile into Maia’s car. They don’t see Cass, with her hood pulled up against the rain, trudging down the sidewalk to the house, Cass climbing the steps to the front porch and knocking. Jason opens the door.
“Hi,” Cass says. “I came by to see Maia.”
“She just left. Did she know you were coming?”
“No,” Cass says. “Do you know where she went?”
“She left me,” Jason says disconsolately.
“Jason, are you drunk?”
“You can come inside.” Shaking her head, she follows him into the living room. Jason and Maia are still sleeping on the pullout bed; they haven’t bothered to put it away this morning. Cass tugs off her wet sweatshirt and hangs it over a chair, perches on the edge of the bed.
“Well,” she says. Jason slumps down next to her and puts his head in his hands. “Did she actually leave you? Or did she just go somewhere?”
“They all left me,” he says, his voice muffled.
“You are drunk.”
Cass can’t tell if he’s baiting her. Oh, fuck you, pretty boy, she thinks, but if he is trying to make her angry she refuses to let him, and if he isn’t, then he is genuinely sad. She feels sorry for him, as much as it pains her to admit it. And he’s not wrong. His clear blue eyes are pleading. He’s lost weight he can’t afford in the last weeks, and his cheekbones are startling, his collarbone as stark and graceful as a girl’s.
“I know,” she says.
“This record,” he says. “This record is going to make us rich. He promised.”
“Who promised?”
“The producer.”
Cass swallows. “Maia told me about him. What else did he promise you?”
“The whole world,” Jason says. “Above and below. He said he would make me famous. He said within a year the whole world would know my name. He said I’d never have to think about anyone leaving me again, because everyone would love me, everyone, and Maia would follow me anywhere, and I’d have more money than I ever dreamed of.”
“Is that what you want?” Cass asks cautiously. Did I do this? she thinks. Did I do this? Or did you? What the hell does he want with a walking tragedy like you?
“I don’t want her to leave me.”
“She won’t leave you,” Cass says. “If she were going to leave you, she’d have done it by now.”
“Everyone leaves me,” he says. “Everyone.”
“What is it, anyway,” Cass asks, sick to death of him, “that she sees in you?”