* * *
Fiona Xiu was Miss Grant’s only other student. She had started lessons last June, a month after Gretchen. Fiona looked Chinese but sounded American. Sometimes, when she arrived early for her lesson and had to wait on the peach sofa, her hair caught the light from the window and hung against her shoulders like a sleek, glossy curtain. In the summer her broad cheekbones also took on a sheen, but in the winter they turned dry, almost powdery. On every reasonably bright day she waved at the dust particles in the shaft of sunlight that cut in diagonally from the window. The waving distracted Gretchen. She could not help but be more interested in Fiona than the song she played and could not help but turn to watch her every minute or so. She watched Fiona crazily batting the air, and she envied her shoes, which looked strappy and sexy and womanlike.
They had begun lessons around the same time, but Fiona played from a level 4 book, while Gretchen played from a level 2.
Every now and then, when Miss Grant had to get a drink or go to the bathroom or step outside, she left them alone together. Fiona’s sentences were peppered with the word “fuck.” She’d played “Für Elise” “a hundred fucking times.” The weather was fucking hot. Her new espadrilles were fucking cheap. When Gretchen had once slipped and said, “Fuck,” her parents went hysterical. But, according to Fiona, when she said it in front of Mrs. Xiu, she just frowned. Mr. Xiu didn’t even care. Fiona said this was because they were “fobby.”
Perhaps Miss Grant had shaken Fiona’s shoulders too, and said, This is the way you must play always. If Miss Grant had done this, Gretchen would feel relieved, but also disappointed. More relieved than disappointed though, because playing well didn’t suit her. To play well—what Miss Grant seemed to think of as well—you had to put an ache into the music, a kind of happy-misery that made the music but also came from it. And so playing well in front of people humiliated Gretchen, like getting caught with Jamie (her grandmother watching, the shaft of light from the door, Jamie not even knowing to look up until she told him). And if she wasn’t going to play in front of people, what was the point of playing at all? She didn’t see it. Playing well was for someone like Miss Grant. Someone who had a crush on a dead guy she didn’t even know.
* * *
“You will not wear that dress,” her mother had said at home. “You’ve worn it to church twice in a row.” Though Gretchen had gone on sorting through the hamper of dirty clothes for the dry cleaner’s. She had sprayed the dress with air freshener while her mom yelled on, her voice trying to sound hard instead of scared.
Now she crossed and uncrossed her legs, felt the smooth swish of the silk, however unfresh, against her knees.
As she played (lazily, poorly) she could hear only the clink of the keys and could not listen for the sounds that might have drifted from down the hall, from the room where Miss Grant’s brother stayed. To her the song was like a little prison of sound.
II
The bathroom itself was unremarkable, distasteful with outdated hair products and mildewed tiles. But the hallway intrigued her. It smelled not bad, but stale and closed and faintly sweet, like the house of a very old person, not a young person like Miss Grant. The brown-and-gold paisley wallpaper was peeling and yellowed with moisture around the edges, and the look of it matched the smell of the hall. Unlike her hallway at home, there were no pictures of children or beaches or family reunions. All of the doors along the hall were shut (Gretchen’s parents had an open-door rule), and this made her crazy with curiosity. She had expected Miss Grant’s doors to shield secrets. Maybe a shrine to John Lennon, of the sort the psychos liked in the crime-investigation shows her parents watched. Maybe a journal describing Miss Grant’s sins. Maybe a cold, dark emptiness, like the look that flitted over Miss Grant’s features from time to time.
It had been no less than a month ago when she heard him.
Miss Grant had gone outside, Gretchen to the bathroom, like any other day. And she had heard a muffled cough. At first she thought Miss Grant had gotten a little dog. She cracked the door—the last door—and found a man.
He was a slender, almost gaunt man in a white-and-green-checked bathrobe, lying on his side on the bed, the sheets half twisted off the mattress. The overhead light was not on, but sunlight streamed through the half-open blinds and fell in diagonals across the bed. The man held a homemade cigarette to his lips, the smoke of which smelled like dirt. He took her in with calm curiosity, gave her an all-over glance, and said, “Hey.”
His presence so surprised her that she didn’t say anything for a minute, just stared at him, and the cigarette he held, the thin snake of smoke that straightened and disappeared just past his head. He held it not the usual way, but between his thumb and index finger. “Is that pot?” she said finally.
The man bolted upright against the headboard and raised his eyebrows. “Absolutely not.”
He wore nothing beneath his robe, and she could see the dark blond fuzz of his chest. Despite the fact that part of his wavy, wheat-colored hair had been shaved off, and that the lack of hair revealed an odd, dimpled, stitched-over stretch of scalp, he had a strikingly handsome face. His eyes were the color of the mint juleps her father, despite her mother’s protest, drank on summer weekends—the color of mint leaves submerged in bourbon. His prominent nose had obviously been broken once, which made him seem especially masculine.
“It is, isn’t it?”
“So what? I have a brain tumor. I can do whatever I want.”
Philosophically, this intrigued her. He was watching porno on TV. (She didn’t know a lot about porno, but knew enough to recognize it.) A couple doing it in an office, in a chair. With his remote, the man stopped the show, so that the screen went blue. He grinned and bent toward her. His grin looked knowing, sly, revealed a set of straight, lightly stained teeth. He reached out and gently poked her shoulder. Something in her belly stirred, this due not to his touch but to his smell. He did not smell good. But something in his musk, part dirt like the joint he smoked, part winey and sweet, made her want to put her face to his neck, the way she had with Jamie.
At that moment Miss Grant appeared in the doorway, a pale floating face in the blackness of her clothes and the shadow of the hall. “Please go back to the piano room. Now.” Then, lower, almost whispering to him, I’m trying here, Wes. I’m really trying.
“But she let herself in. I didn’t think she was real.”
“Why wouldn’t she be real?” Miss Grant said, voice cracking. She threw her hands up in the air. The man shrugged and half collapsed against the headboard. Miss Grant whirled around, scowling, and ushered Gretchen out into the hall. Out of the room, she made a weak smile and said that she was very sorry if her brother had said anything strange to her. “He isn’t feeling well.”
In the piano room Gretchen played “Blue Swing.” Miss Grant introduced G-sharp minor. Gretchen played this a few times, and then it was time to go. As she rose from the stool Miss Grant placed her hand on Gretchen’s shoulder, her touch awkward and clammy and a bit too forceful. She must have thought that Gretchen would tell her parents about what had happened. To Gretchen, the idea of this—of her telling her mom about the man—was almost laughable.
* * *
She thought of him all the long summer week, she alone in the house with them at work, lying in bed past noon to imagine what she might have said to sound older. Mostly elderly people and yuppies lived in their neighborhood, and two of the three streets led to dead ends, but still she’d sometimes put on her clothes and walk slowly about with the ridiculous (she knew) idea that he might for some reason drive through. When she found the remnants of someone’s late-night party—cigarettes, beer bottles—in the more private cul-de-sac, by the woods, she thought how easily he might slip down to meet her while all the people who would stop such a meeting slept. Except he was sick. Would he get well? When? She had no one to confide in. Her few friends from school were on exotic vacations of the sort her parents would never take her on (in Augus
t they spent a week at Pawleys Island, as they had for the past fourteen years of her life). And so the sleeping late and sweaty walks and quiet desire melted into a thick, heady dream.
Usually, in the evening, her parents jarred her awake with eager, needy voices. Tortured her with their idea of “family togetherness” time, which was watching crime-investigation shows while eating pizza. The shows featured grave detectives hunting down crack dealers and serial killers and questioning prostitutes. Her father, who worked at City Hall, enjoyed catching flaws in the shows’ details. “That’s not how it happens,” he’d yell authoritatively at the actor on the screen, causing her to start. And so she couldn’t even understand the point of them watching it. Usually she slipped away fifteen minutes into a show, after she’d finished her pizza. (Though too often one of them would notice her absence and at the foot of the stairs beckon to her in a jokey or irritated voice, until she returned, only to leave again, the cycle inescapable.) But that week, she forced herself to sit with them through two shows so that during commercials she could ask her mom speculative questions about brain tumors. Apparently the issue was far more complicated than she realized, and her questions led only to more questions. To divert suspicion she finally had to say she found a bump on her head. Her mom looked amused rather than worried, but said, “Let’s check.” With the same fingers she used to go through Gretchen’s drawers and closet while Gretchen was out—like one of the detectives from the show, looking for clues that would reveal Gretchen’s sinister element—she probed Gretchen’s scalp. Her gentle-intelligent-suspicious fingers made Gretchen want to cry.
“That’s not how it happens,” her dad snapped happily at the TV, making things normal again.
* * *
But next lesson she didn’t see him. Miss Grant did not go out to smoke. She lingered in the hall when Gretchen went to use the bathroom. When he finally showed himself, it felt like a miracle, although he was just passing through the piano room to get to the kitchen.
Standing, he was not especially tall, but long-limbed, and he moved languidly through the room with a slack bored face. This time, the bathrobe flailed open to reveal plaid pajamas. He did not look toward the piano, where Gretchen sat playing “Devil’s Curtsy.” But on his way back from the kitchen he paused by the stool, waved the butt end of an unopened Schweppes bottle at her, and said, “You again.”
She glanced up at him and felt herself blushing. He grinned. Even with the mottled skin—grayish pink today, feverish, maybe?—he was the first person whom she wanted simultaneously to stare at and look away from. Fixing her eyes on the shaved-off part of his head made her feel less nervous.
“Ah, you’re into scars? You might also be interested to know that, due to youthful indiscretion”—he shook his head dramatically and rolled his eyes upward—“I have a plate in my head that’s set off metal detectors in airports all over the world. Luckily that didn’t stop me from getting into Juilliard.”
“You didn’t go to Juilliard,” Miss Grant exclaimed in an earnest, worried voice. “I did.”
He laughed hysterically.
Miss Grant scowled now. Sighed. “We’re in the middle of something here.”
“Hmm. In the middle of something,” he said, mocking her affected accent—nearly the opposite of his own soft drawl—and tapping his fingers across the piano top. “Everyone’s in the middle of something, May.” He looked past her and winked at Gretchen. “But it’s rude to say so.” Without another word, he turned away and padded slowly down the hall, the belt of his robe trailing behind him. Miss Grant looked flustered. The eye began to twitch.
Perhaps she noticed that Gretchen trembled too, for she was now offering her a cup of tea. Gretchen accepted.
Miss Grant boiled the water in a red-and-silver teakettle and gave Gretchen permission to select any mug she wanted from the shelf. Gretchen had never been invited to have tea (or even a drink of water) before. There were all kinds of mugs, some simple and modern-looking, some rustic and handmade, a few real dainty teacups with saucers. Gretchen selected a blue-and-white teacup. Miss Grant placed three tea bags in a jade teapot and poured water from the kettle into it. They sat at a little square table in front of the window. Miss Grant leaned forward, toward Gretchen, with her elbows propped on the table, and said that the way Gretchen had just played “Devil’s Curtsy” interested her. As a beginner, she herself had played it “indolently,” as Gretchen did, and though the music said to play it another way, she preferred their way. Gretchen had not meant to play it any particular way—did not understand the meaning of the word “indolent”; perhaps it was another piano term she’d failed to memorize. But still she had pleased Miss Grant; she half-smiled and mumbled in agreement. A silence followed. Then a long stare from Miss Grant, a flicker of her lipsticked smile and her white fingers slipping through the black tips of her hair. Now she frowned severely. She began to speak of her grandparents, whom she’d lived with in this house, when she was Gretchen’s age. She did not touch her tea but wrapped the fingers of one hand around her cup. She said that her grandmother played every morning and night. You woke to music and you fell asleep to music. Sometimes you woke up in the middle of the night thinking you heard a song until you got to the piano and saw that no one was there. That happened still. Which led Miss Grant to the theory that you did not create music but let it pass through you. “An instrument is simply a tool. I can feel all of the music my grandmother played still in the house. I think you can feel it too, Gretchen.”
Gretchen nodded, though she felt nothing like that, didn’t want to feel it. It was funny to realize that Miss Grant thought she was someone else. Miss Grant had never talked so much before, not like this. She stared intensely at Gretchen, her eyes full of light.
“At Juilliard, I had a fiancé named Gregory.”
Miss Grant told Gretchen that both she and Gregory had recitals in the same week. They both ended up wanting to play the same concerto. Gregory always worried that she played better than him, and he asked her if she would play something else, since he was a third-year student and she a first. She said no. He told her if she played the concerto, he did not want to see her anymore.
“I played it, Gretchen. I played it perfectly.” There was a long pause—the words had an air of triumph—and finally she sipped from her tea. The fingers of her other hand played nervously across the tabletop, and for no particular reason, Gretchen feared Miss Grant would try to take her hand. Perhaps she would cry. She watched Gretchen with wet expectant eyes, the spell broken by the creak of the door and the appearance of Fiona Xiu. A pair of leather sandals with braided straps snaked around her ankles. She smacked on a wad of blue gum.
Miss Grant started and her tea sloshed over the rim of her cup. She offered Fiona a cup, which she declined, and got up to rinse out the teapot. Fiona joined Gretchen at the table while Miss Grant stepped outside.
Fiona studied the fancy teacups on the table, and glanced over at the cup-laden shelf. She had a vivacious, moon-shaped face and black eyebrows plucked in perfect tapering arches.
“That’s a fuckload of cups.”
Gretchen nodded. She watched Fiona push back the cuticle of her index finger, and as nonchalantly as possible asked Fiona if she’d noticed Miss Grant’s brother living in the back. Fiona said that she had. “He, like, came out one day in the middle of my lesson and said something like ‘She’s been marked from the start.’ And then he pointed to her feet and said one of them was bigger than the other. He’s a nut.” She picked up Gretchen’s teacup and examined its blue-and-white arabesques. “He was trying to rattle her. I think. He’s cute for an old guy. Or, he would be if the side of his head wasn’t fucked up.” Fiona took a sip from Gretchen’s cup. She did not hand it back.
The screen creaked, and Miss Grant came back into the kitchen. Gretchen’s mother had pulled up, she said. Gretchen paused for a moment to stare at Miss Grant’s feet. One foot was in fact at least a size larger than the other.
I
II
“Are you still loving the piano?” her mother liked to say, leaning in the doorway, sometimes lightly rapping her nails against the piano’s headboard, her smile forgiving Gretchen for not wanting to talk with her about boys or secret feelings, about any of the things that mattered; her eyes catching Gretchen’s father’s as he passed by the door and stopped to stand by her, their bodies closing the space between inside and out.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Can you play Moonlight Sonata?” her father would ask, in a tone that suggested he did not remember asking twice before. Many nights since her parents had begun sleeping apart she had, jolted and sweaty from some nightmare she couldn’t remember, lingered by the door to the guest room, now her father’s door, to catch him talking in his sleep. But during these times she had heard nothing but his breath.
“I’ve always thought it was the most beautiful piece of music,” he went on.
“Not yet. But I will,” she promised. “Probably,” she began to retract.
No.
The words felt oddly disconnected from her, like lies. Or like their faces, desperate for affection she could not give them, leaning toward her. She did not think, I am lying. She did not think in reply to her father, Even this little thing I can’t do for you. But afterward this was what she felt.
IV
Yes, Miss Grant had moods. Now she scrutinized the theory workbook pages she’d assigned last lesson. She stabbed at the pages with her red pencil, and from time to time looked up to glare at Gretchen, who was ambling through her scales while Miss Grant marked. Did she stab harder at the pages than usual? Did Gretchen imagine this?
Gretchen hadn’t practiced her prescribed schedule (she rarely did), though she convincingly executed simple melodies or scales whenever her parents passed by the room.
During the last few lessons, she’d halfway opened the door to Miss Grant’s house—Miss Grant gave her permission to let herself in at lesson time—so that her mother would see and pull down the drive. And then she’d shut the door and stay outside on the stoop, hurriedly filling in the pages. But today—of all days—because Miss Grant stood outside smoking, she had had no choice but to hand over the half-finished assignment. Part of her wanted Miss Grant to yell at her, to tell her she’d done a terrible job. “You’re bad and stupid,” she imagined Miss Grant saying, as Gretchen’s mother, who never called her names, had once said to her in a dream. No, she thought, when Miss Grant stopped suddenly, looked right at her with a steely expression. Miss Grant looked down again, went on with her marking. She spent a great deal of time scrawling notes that Gretchen never read. No sounds touched the air, none but the scrape of the pencil tip.
Virgin and Other Stories Page 5