In the hammock the friend next to me, the one in the middle, sat with her leg pressed against mine. Earlier that day she had said my friend on the other side of her and I both were her best friends but I knew from day to day and even moment to moment alliances shifted. You can’t be equally close to two people at the same time. Her body pressed against mine and not against the body of our friend on the other side of her but this was only because I was taller and both of us heavier than the other friend, who was short and slight, and because the shorter, slighter friend held herself poised in such a way to keep herself from sliding into the friend in the middle. (Though months later, in speaking of the incident, the one in the middle would during dinner bring up that I’d sat stiffly beside her that day in the hammock, avoiding pressing against her, while the other friend unselfconsciously slid into her; which I believe at some point did happen too.) Because the friend in the middle was so close to me, I more frequently gazed across her to meet the eyes of the friend at her other side, the one who’d told the story of X and her unfaithful boyfriend. When she told stories about other people, her eyes flashed. Ever since she had come into the presence of the ex-husband—who was frequently from the deck watching us—she had become younger and bolder and not like the more scattered, unsure version of herself she’d been that morning, when we’d been somewhere else. I was not best friends with her. She lived out of town. But I fantasized about moving to her city, and maybe I would. Then when the friend between us came to visit she would be the one from out of town. Her other best friend and I would have grown closer. We would all be “best” friends. In the mindset I was in (am frequently in) there were a number of foreseeable complications.
During the separation from my husband I woke up crazy with paranoia, and I was mad at everyone because I suspected they had found in me unforgivable fault. I doubted they would attend my funeral but reassured myself that dead I wouldn’t care. When people I had in my head broken up with would send spirited replies to emails I’d sent two days before, back when I’d still thought of us as connected (before they had not attended my imaginary funeral) I felt stupid and relieved.
We lay in the hammock at the end of summer. The uncomfortable sense of feeling pressed into the body of my friend by the slope of the hammock was also very pleasurable. I hadn’t chosen to sit that close. She and I had slid into that position as we submitted to the physics of the hammock situation. Two of us were pale with freckles. Two of us had dark hair and green eyes. One of us had blue eyes. One of us was tall and two of us were short and two of us were skinny. One of us had large breasts. One of us didn’t talk to her mother and one of our fathers had left and one of our sets of parents had not divorced. One of us wrote. One of us painted abstracts. One of us played cello still and one had stopped. One of us put ads on Craigslist asking for male models for short films and photographs and paid the models (who were not professionals) ten dollars an hour. Our work sold. Two of us had at some point had agoraphobia and all of us had problems with depression and anxiety and one of us had tried to kill herself and one of us had been raped and one of us had been molested and two of us had small aged white dogs and one of us had a kid. At the kid’s last birthday party the opened presents that would go to her father’s house went into one pile and the ones that would go to her mother’s in another. Each of us had slept with a man that one of the others had also slept with. One of us had woken in the middle of the night with one of those men, furiously watched his sleeping body, and contemplated leaving because in her dreams she’d become convinced that he’d have preferred to be sleeping with the other, but then she had gone back to sleep.
All three of us could disassociate for long periods of time and then, snapped back to our surface, be unaware of what had been happening, and for how long we’d been away.
When one of my two friends asked me a question or seemed to understand what I was saying I had trouble believing this was really happening. Intermittently each of them would seem impossibly beautiful, too beautiful to be real and nearby. I could not decide if my husband had really loved me. His face and body as he sat in a chair in this little room we sat in with my lawyer before going into court kept flashing in my mind. Back in the kitchen watching my friend with her ex-husband I could not decide whether or not I wished they would get back together. She missed him. She spoke of him, of leaving him, as if an irrevocable mistake had been made. In the kitchen they spoke Albanian with each other. They stood several feet apart. Not knowing the words, I saw only people making sounds at each other, filling the kitchen with atmospheric perfume. I could not decide whether or not people had ever really loved each other if they could stop loving each other. I could not decide if love was real as a thing or something that could never entirely be proven, like God, and could only be experienced in the act of reaching and so in retrospect would always fall in doubt. I could not decide if I could love and be loved factually. At some time in my life the words I love you had seemed like a revelation, not a reason to brace myself for its withdrawal.
One of us was telling another story, a story that had come to mind in response to the story of X. I pushed my foot against the ground to get the hammock swinging (gently). The cookout was for someone’s birthday—the brother of my friend’s ex-husband—and the sound of the others singing “Happy Birthday” to him startled all three of us to look ahead, to recall the context of the party, to remember it was Armend’s birthday, and that there were a bunch of other people at the opposite end of the yard.
THE WAY YOU MUST PLAY ALWAYS
I
From the window Gretchen could see her dad’s car round the curb. The disappearance of it gave her a sense of sudden looseness, as if the weight of her body no longer pressed her to the bench in quite the same way. Safe, she thought. Saved. Because Miss Grant did not plan to tell her parents what had happened last week. She’d neither called nor gone after Gretchen’s dad in the drive, as Gretchen feared she might. She as usual sat in her frumpy old chair and told Gretchen to begin the week’s piece. Anxiously she fingered the fried black tips of her hair and avoided Gretchen’s eyes, or maybe Gretchen avoided hers. She cleared her throat and said, “Tempo. Notice the tempo.”
So they were going to act as if nothing had happened.
The love inside her had room to spread out now. It was part nervousness, part desperation, and a little craziness too, and she felt it begin to rush outside of her and around her, leaving invisible prints of itself all over the things she touched: her bag, her books, the keys, the pages of the music she turned. She wore a silk print dress, inappropriate for lessons both because of its fanciness and the fact that it was dirty, and crossed and uncrossed then crossed her legs again, just to feel the silk.
“You didn’t practice,” Miss Grant said, oblivious to Gretchen’s excitement. Maybe oblivious to all excitement except the cool intensity of her music.
Now that she knew Miss Grant would not tell on her, she felt especially bold. “I don’t care anymore,” she said. She would’ve hated Miss Grant for telling, but also hated her now, because she hadn’t.
Miss Grant bristled. “Don’t care about what exactly?”
“Anything.” Gretchen laughed then, to make the word a joke rather than a challenge, because what if Miss Grant did get mad and tell after all?
Miss Grant sighed. “Let’s try the right hand alone.”
Gretchen focused on the notes this time, noted the three-quarter time, the sharp. But every other measure she played the wrong notes on purpose and eyed Miss Grant askance.
“You’re only hurting yourself,” Miss Grant told her.
* * *
Gretchen didn’t enjoy piano, not really. Her mother had put her up to lessons she wished she’d had herself. “My span isn’t wide enough,” her mom said, waving her fingers, which were cracked and dry from the frequent washings her nursing job required. “You could be a concert pianist though. You have the fingers.” But the true catalyst for the lessons was that she’d a li
ttle over a year ago gotten into trouble, and her parents had thought the piano would “ground” her.
The trouble was that Gretchen’s grandma had found her alone with her cousin Jamie in the basement of her grandma’s house during a family get-together. They had some of their clothes off. Her grandma, sick with the beginnings of dementia, but, on that particular day, lucid, took it in stride. “Kissing cousins,” she said after she delivered the news in full to their parents. Her voice shook but she smiled. “Happens all the time.”
“It sounds like more than kissing, Mama,” her dad said. He turned red in the face and clenched his hands against the top of a chair, just as Gretchen’s mom burst into tears.
It—the petting and probing and laughing in closed dim places—had happened several times before, in other rooms and houses (though Gretchen and Jamie weren’t about to tell this to their family). Though Gretchen knew she shouldn’t have snuck off with him, she still felt shocked by how seriously everyone took their relationship. Technically (barely), she was still a virgin. And she didn’t love him, not exactly, didn’t fantasize about the two of them marrying or spending their lives together, and didn’t even like certain things about him, like the patchy beard he tried to grow, or the way he bit her ear too hard in passionate moments, or his hands inching beneath the elastic of her first real bra when she did not want to do that again, just talk. Did this make the situation more or less corrupt? she wondered. Because she’d gotten absolved too quickly to find out. No one seemed to want to think that Gretchen, who looked young even for her thirteen years, whose wide eyes invited motherly comments from strangers—watch your step there, sweetie; this is very hot, dear; where is your coat?—could be anything but a victim. Jamie, three years older and strange, was the deviant. Because he was already known for photographing decomposed outhouses in fields on the outskirts of town, watching The Godfather films over and over, and refusing to do school assignments he considered beneath him, their parents decided he’d pressured Gretchen into doing what they did. Really she couldn’t remember if he’d touched her first. What she remembered was that during Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, while her mom had been busy giving advice to her divorced aunts on the porch, and her dad had gone off with her uncle to drink in the shed, whenever she’d said, “Look,” or “Listen,” Jamie had been the only one to see past the blur of casserole-covered tables and screaming toddlers and older girl cousins leaning into the boyfriends they’d brought, to notice her.
Because their families had begun to take turns attending holiday gatherings, and because his parents had immediately sent him away to an all-boys boarding school (to his father, his being with Gretchen had been the “last straw”), she had not seen him since they got caught. She imagined him brooding and sloppy in an expensive uniform, wandering around on a lawn beneath great old trees. Did he imagine her attending her new private Christian school, where most of the other students had known each other since kindergarten, and her relief that summer vacation had finally freed her of it? Did he imagine her playing piano?
She’d been taking lessons for a year now, and often wondered just how closely her parents had looked at her piano teacher when they’d decided she would be the one to “ground” Gretchen. Perhaps the word Juilliard, which they so liked saying to their friends, had somehow canceled out the piano teacher’s weirdness.
But because her mom and dad desperately wanted the lessons to be successful, Gretchen didn’t complain. Her parents already slept in separate rooms—it had started the year before—and though they’d explained it to her, that her dad talked in his sleep, she felt in her body the tremors of a bridge linking places much larger than itself together.
“Are you loving the piano?” her mom would say, adjusting her glasses, running a hand through her cropped gray hair.
“Yeah,” Gretchen said, for they had little else safe to talk about these days, since Gretchen’s mom, who’d never even dated anyone before her dad, wanted her to “open up” about all the things Gretchen least wanted to discuss.
Her dad, too, took a strong interest in the piano, his fingers sometimes reverentially skimming its wood, but never touching the keys. She could not bear to think of him knowing about what she had done with Jamie, and yet, whenever he stood near, the knowledge pressed continually at the sides of her thoughts.
“My favorite is Moonlight Sonata,” he said one evening, leaning against the door, voice strangely tender, eyes present in a way to which she wasn’t accustomed. “Can you play Moonlight Sonata?” he persisted.
“Not yet,” she said, fingers lazing over the notes of a new scale that already bored her, looking away. “But I’ll try to learn it, all right?”
* * *
Miss Grant had a pale pinched face, which grew even more pinched when she was angry. The muscles around her eyes often twitched and sometimes the muscle just above the left eyelid started up, making her look as if she were winking. The incongruity of the silly winking and the angry face made Gretchen want to laugh, but also to turn away. A dark dyed fringe cut across her forehead and fanned over her cheeks and flared out haphazardly in back. She rouged her cheeks with terracotta, which did not match the cool pearl of her skin. And she lined her eyes with oily kohl, the line too thick and sloppy to flatter.
Her silver bangles tinkled against one another when she moved her hand across Gretchen’s composition book to write notes. The oversweet vanilla of her drugstore perfume hung about her like a cloud, so that even with a foot between them Gretchen felt pressed to Miss Grant’s bosom, enveloped in her air. Sometimes, when she played all right, Miss Grant would pace behind the stool, in front of the window. She always had on tight black jeans and some kind of ruffled black silk blouse. Her high-heeled velveteen lace-ups clicked across the hardwood floor.
They played in a butter-colored room with a giant picture window that overlooked the long-neglected bramble of Miss Grant’s backyard. Plastic eggs, left from Easter, still hung from some of the trees and in the wind waved defiantly violet, pink, blue, and green above the weeds. With the exception of Miss Grant’s chair, a worn wicker thing that looked as if it had been brought in from years of sitting in the yard, and a peach-colored sofa against the opposite wall, the room was empty.
Miss Grant had a white grand piano, “like John Lennon’s,” she’d remarked when Gretchen and her mother had first visited her house last summer. And on the top of the piano Miss Grant kept a small, framed photo of Mr. Lennon. In the photo, Lennon wore dark Amish-style clothing and stood in a field, alone. The photo looked carefully torn around the edges, and Gretchen wondered if it had been cut from a magazine. During her first lesson, in hopes of embarrassing Miss Grant, she had posed this question.
Miss Grant replied, rather unconvincingly, that it had not. Her words were crisp and carefully enunciated. The accent sounded artificially northern, and Gretchen imagined her practicing it alone in front of a mirror.
“Do you have a thing for him?” Gretchen moved her hand toward the frame, but Miss Grant pushed it from her reach.
“He’s dead.”
“So you like a dead guy?”
“Not in the way you’re suggesting. I admire his”—she paused—“genius.”
“I didn’t know he was such a great piano player.”
“Lots of people don’t understand the charm of his rusticity. His playing was pure.” She then asked if Gretchen would like to hear a song by him, for inspiration. She played “Imagine,” a song Gretchen had heard on the oldies station, and that her mother had deemed sacrilegious because of the line, “Imagine there’s no heaven.” Miss Grant’s long wiry fingers glided over the keys with a sound slightly different from the one on the radio; the notes matched, but the style was more assertive, the harmony thicker, with flourishes here and there that made up for the absence of the words. Her nails were lacquered a dark red, like her lips. With the red lips and her paleness and black fringe, she resembled a distorted Snow White. In the middle of the song she clos
ed her eyes, parted her lips, and swayed a little, which made Gretchen suddenly anxious to leave the room. After she finished playing she was glassy-eyed and quiet. She whispered that she needed to step outside to get the mail.
“The mail?”
“It was late today.”
Really she was out there smoking, in the drive, her clothes absurdly black against the heat that rose from the pavement. Gretchen could see only by standing at the edge of the window, looking out at the most extreme angle. Inside, Miss Grant did not even think to make up an excuse for not holding any letters, but Gretchen let it pass, just because she could.
* * *
Miss Grant had moods. Sometimes, for most of the lesson she stared out the window while Gretchen played. If Gretchen said something unsolicited, a startled look would pass over her face and she’d fold or unfold her skinny black-clad legs and say, “Pardon?” But when Gretchen actually played something well, Miss Grant frightened her. For example, a few months ago, when she’d been craving Jamie still, and let her yearning for him slip into Nocturne in E, Miss Grant had jumped up from her chair and shaken Gretchen’s shoulders, gazed intensely into her eyes, and said, “Do you feel it? There was purity in that, Gretchen. This is the way you must play always.” She held Gretchen’s shoulders too long, long fingernails digging into her skin, and Gretchen had had to pull away, feeling ashamed. She had excused herself to the bathroom and Miss Grant had stepped outside.
Virgin and Other Stories Page 4