Angels Go Naked

by Cornelia Nixon

  “How do you make a violin concerto a little longer than it used to be?” it said in green ink, on the wall of her favorite practice room.

  “How do you get a job with the Boston Symphony?” said purple ink right next to it.

  “On your back,” said several different hands.

  “On your knees.”

  Next to the words, someone had drawn a life-sized portrait of a man in a tuxedo, possibly the new conductor of the BSO, or maybe Arthur Fiedler, with a curly blond head where his lap should be. Pointing to it with an arrow was a sign: “Boy, he’s in for a real treat!”

  She went back to her room and drew the blinds. She imagined herself climbing to the roof of the gym, nine stories up with a rose window near the top, and jumping off. She pictured needles sliding into her veins, injecting her with something that would put her mind to sleep. Taking the only drug she had, a tranquilizer saved up since her mother’s death, she slept, and dreamed she was on trial, dancing in the courtroom with Ann, while judge and jury watched.

  “She did it,” Ann said, then swung her arm back and whacked Margy in the face. She woke up, stiff with cold and sick, all the windows open, three A.M.

  She called the doctor with the hanging face, rode the train down on a gray December day. His waiting room was peaceful, three big-bellied women talking quietly beside a broadleaf plant. Their eyes slid to her stomach as she came in, and she smiled shyly, sank into a chair. With a rush of guilty pleasure, she let the daydream start again. Joshua was home, a teenaged sitter taking care of him, and she was Mrs. Henry Bergstrom, only lately made a mother and already in again, perhaps a wee bit pregnant, ready to be teased. . . .

  “Don’t you two do anything else for fun?” the doctor might say, wagging one thick finger as he smiled. She would giggle, cheeks flushed, not really ashamed. . . .

  A nurse shoved back the cloudy window in the wall, fixed her eyes on Margy. “How are you? Any bleeding, nausea?”

  Margy stared at her, lips parted, the flush of pleasure still warm on her cheeks.

  The nurse’s eyes flicked over her. “What are you now, about nine weeks?”

  Margy swallowed, throat so dry it seemed to disappear. The three big-bellied women watched her, smiled. She stood up instinctively.

  “That was last year,” she barely breathed.

  The nurse’s head came forward, as if she couldn’t hear. She was a tall woman with dyed black hair up in a bun, a big bosom, and glasses on a string. Jamming the glasses on her nose, she studied Margy’s chart and threw the glasses off impatiently.

  “Where have you been till now?”

  The room grew clear and sharp, the beveled glass, the dark green rubber plant, the woman’s small but penetrating eyes.

  “What happened to your pregnancy?”

  The car was a Chevrolet Impala, turquoise, with rust, and the man inside had his face hidden in a big black beard, sunglasses, a hat pulled down over the eyes. She had waited for him on a quiet corner of the Back Bay, in a good wool suit, dress flats, a winter coat and brown felt hat, the savings bond her grandmother had given her now rendered down to small bills stuffed into an envelope she held in one gloved hand.

  The man slid the money into his coat and handed her a blindfold, soft black cotton like the curtains used for showing films in school. He told her to put it on and lie down in back, using a phony drawl filled with rounded vowels and crisp consonants, an Englishman’s attempt to sound American. She lay on the squeaking plastic seat, and he must have driven for an hour, listening to Brahms. The Brahms was followed by an ad for a brokerage firm, read in the deep, tasteful voice of the classical announcer. Then baroque flute music, and the first movement of a Mahler symphony.

  Finally they stopped, tires crunching gravel. The back door opened with a groan, and a big hand gripped her arm, Margy staggering passive as a sheep from an hour of being blind. Even through the cloth she could sense the brightening of the air, as if they were near water, hints of diesel oil and rotten crab beneath the snow.

  They went through metal-sounding doors into a space that echoed like a warehouse, and on into a smaller room, where sound closed down to nothing when the door was shut. The man backed her to a chair, told her to sit and not to move until she heard him leave the room. Then she was to take the blindfold off, undress, put on the gown that she would find in front of her.

  The room was fitted like a doctor’s office, skylight above, and very cold. She put on the hospital gown, then her coat. Shivering, she stood barefoot on the cement slab. The sweat was cold beneath her arms, and it smelled sharp as acid, capable of etching steel.

  The man came back. His beard was gone, but a surgical mask and cap and gown had him all covered but the eyes, which were blue and watery, with sandy brows.

  “On the table,” he said, plainly British now. “No coat.”

  The table was dark green artificial leather, padded underneath, but it felt hard enough to bruise. Gingerly she slid onto it, trying to keep the thin gown closed. The man took hold of her around the hips and hauled them to the table edge. Plugging her bare heels into the stirrups, he propped her knees up toward the sky and spread them wide.

  He swabbed her hip and jabbed a needle in. “That’s Demerol. It won’t help much, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  She stared up through the skylight, watched a gull cruise by against gray clouds. His hands moved too fast, and at their first touch she leaped, gasping, lips stiff with cold.

  “None of that,” he said, working something up inside her. “Relax, or you’ll be hurt.”

  The pain inflated out around her, to the ceiling, to the walls, like an explosion in slow motion. She clutched the table, face twisted to one side, drooling on the hard leather. He had not sheeted her, and she could see his bloody fingers and the long-stemmed knives, which he worked inside her, briskly, as if cleaning out a pipe.

  “Stop,” she gasped out once or twice. No other sounds were in the room, except the rasping of her breath and the mushy clicking of the knives.

  Finally he stood up, blood sprayed on his sleeves and freckled on his front. As he moved away from her, the pain diminished, scattering.

  He washed his hands. He told her to get dressed and put the blindfold on. She heaved herself upright, delirious.

  “Where is it?” She didn’t even know what sex it was, or what it looked like, and he did. “Let me see it.”

  He paused, one hand on the door. His pale eyebrows drifted up, and she could see his lips tug underneath the mask.

  “See it? No. You can’t see it.”

  He opened the door.

  “It’s in little pieces,” he added as an afterthought.

  She was crying on the table as the doctor with the hanging face put his hands in her. He made it quick, and patted her bare foot.

  “You look fine,” he said and pulled the sheet down to her feet. “Whoever he was, he did good work.”

  He stood beside the table, one big hand on her sheeted knee. The wattle of his forehead jiggled slightly.

  “Lots of people have disappearing pregnancies.”

  He glanced at the nurse, who quickly turned and aimed her bun at them. Gathering her clipboard, she left the room. The doctor rubbed his forehead, sighed. He wrote a prescription for tranquilizers.

  “Try to relax, you’ll get through this. It’s just that it goes against your instincts.” He squared his shoulders, looked restored to confidence and calm. “The purpose of a woman is to have a child.”

  Margy sat up. The purpose of a woman? Like the purpose of a spoon? With a flourish, the doctor signed his name, held the prescription out to her.

  “Get married, have a nice baby. You’ll forget all this.”

  “Thank you,” she managed to say before he left the room. And she did feel grateful, suddenly. It wasn’t every day that someone told you what your purpose was, while forgiving you for having failed. He wanted her to know that though she had done something dangerous, illegal, even murderous, it wa
s all right with him. She could still have a nice baby, become one of the nice big-bellied ladies in his waiting room. She tried to picture it, but nothing came in view.

  What she could see was this: in a minute, she would walk out to the waiting room, where they’d watch her, knowing what she’d done. And she’d look back, how? A girl with no regrets, relaxed, forgiven, maybe even innocent? It was not a hard performance. She thought she had seen much worse. Sliding off the table, she began to dress for it.

  Season of Sensuality

  The chapel was packed with tasteless Tintorettos, saints with heads cut off, naked sinners plummeting to hell while cheerful cherubs hovered. Wearily Margy and Calvin left and climbed back in the gondola, where Calvin abandoned all pretense, lounging backward so he could stare up at the strong thighs of the gondolier. Calvin was fine-limbed as a Donatello shepherd, in a vanilla suit, white sneakers with no socks, blond stubble like a halo on his head, and he glowed slightly in the fading light. He had been Margy’s friend since shortly after college, when they’d spent two nervous years at a London music institute, practicing obsessively (Calvin on the double bass). Now, by some miracle, they had both joined the Chicago Symphony and lived in the same building in Lincoln Park, sharing free time, opinions, sometimes clothes. They’d planned this trip in a therapeutic spirit, both of them in love with the wrong men.

  “Not love,” Calvin insisted, sighing, as he watched the gondolier. “Pure craven lust. The highest emotion made by God. And that certain je ne sais quoi of knowing they will rip our hearts out in no time.”

  He had been in love before they left with a trumpeter back home. But so far on this trip, he’d fallen for the steward on their plane, a gang of stevedores in Rome, and the Michelangelo David: first the copy in the square, then the real one at the end of the long hallway lined with Slaves.

  “How can you stand it, God?” he’d cried, falling to his knees, figures bound in stone around him struggling to get out. “Bring him to life!”

  He sighed and stared at the gondolier. “But what would you know about lust?”

  Margy sat poised in the center of the seat, where water could not splash on her. The tide cleaned the canals, supposedly, but it was August and you couldn’t tell it from the smell. She didn’t like to think about the tides, creeping underneath the city streets, ten million tons of marble, ten thousand priceless works of art, and nothing holding them except some ancient wooden posts. Fourteen years before, a flood had nearly washed it all away, and every year the ocean rose a little higher up the walls. From its tower half a mile away, a bell so big it had a name began to swing its massive gong, and the city trembled with the sound as the last glow faded from the air.

  The gondola bobbed up to their hotel, and Calvin over-tipped the man as usual, while Margy made her way inside and up the stairs. Tonight she thought she might just have a bath, and go to bed early and read. But Calvin followed her upstairs into her room and threw her closet open, studying her clothes.

  “What you need, to wear with all these floral skirts, is a black leather motorcycle jacket with zippers on the sleeves. I saw just the place to look for it today. I’ll get Francesco to take us there first thing tomorrow.”

  “Francesco? So now you know his name?”

  He pulled out a thin black dress and held it to his chest. “And maybe something with sequins. A wee bit vampy, maybe, don’t you think?”

  She went into the bathroom and turned on the brass tap—the pipes moaned. Pulling barrettes out of her hair, she undressed and slipped on her kimono.

  “See you later,” she called. “I’ll just have a bath.”

  He didn’t answer, and she stuck her head around the door to make sure he had gone back to his room.

  He hadn’t left. In fact, he was in her bed, naked and languid. Leaning on an elbow, sheet draped across one slender hip, he pretended to read her copy of Oggi.

  “Calvin,” she said, “you’re gay. Your bed’s in the other room.”

  He smiled, patted the sheets. “And these are the last days of empire, a lovely time to be alive. Everyone sleeps with everyone now, remember, dear? Half those creeps in the symphony already assume we do it every night, probably with the great Michael Sein. Not that I would mind!”

  She clutched the kimono closer to her chest. “Really, Calvin, I’m touched, but no. Please get out of here.”

  Retreating back inside the bath, she bruised her thigh on the bidet. Behind her, his voice rose in a whine.

  “Oh, go ahead and save yourself for him. Be a crypto-virgin your whole life. He’s never going to sleep with you!”

  “Don’t wear high heels,” Andre had said as she prepared for her audition with the Chicago Symphony. She would play behind a screen, but the jury would hear her walking in, and it wasn’t wise to let them know she was a woman.

  “Jackboots,” Andre said. “Big steps, like a man.”

  Margy considered this advice, then bought a pair of three-inch heels, white linen, open-toed. She was who she was, five feet tall, ninety pounds, female. She also played a piece Andre did not approve, Ravel’s “Tzigane.” Sinuous and Spanish, littered with acrobatic chords, it was considered not entirely playable, even by Ravel, and Andre advised Mozart instead. The hundred other violinists auditioning agreed, and in the warm-up room half of them were running through the Sonata in E Minor, K.304. But Margy took a chance on the “Tzigane,” made the final round, and when the last auditioner had left the stage, stomping in jackboots, she had become the smallest member of a world-class orchestra, though she would sink out of sight when she drew an outside chair, only her hair visible from the good seats on the floor.

  The CSO was like a huge, precise machine, capable of mulching down a skyscraper and stopping half a millimeter from the street. At first she had enough to do just to keep up with it. But gradually she met some men, went out with some of them, men who looked good, cared about the arts, had good investments, good hairdressers, strategies for every move. Still, she found she’d rather just go out with Calvin, to clubs where bouncers dressed in gold lamé and caged guys writhed in underwear above their heads.

  “Tie me to the mast,” Calvin would cry and clutch her arm, Margy dancing in a little patch of open space, no one meeting her eyes, as a solid wall of guys pressed in to rub their butts discreetly against Calvin’s. He liked to dress up in a leather tux, with aviator scarf. He liked his lovers beefy and hirsute, two hundred pounds at least, and dumb.

  “Oh, God, he’s so inarticulate,” he’d moan into her ear after he’d tried to have a conversation with the biggest guy he could find.

  Margy introduced him to her dates sometimes, at dinner in the restaurant of Calvin’s choice (nouvelle Japanese, unisex waitpersons with tattoos on their shaved heads), and both of them would listen as the man explained how to choose a life insurance company, or the best tax shelters for the symphony.

  “Please kill me,” Calvin wrote once on a napkin, handed it to her, and Margy did not see the man again.

  One day at rehearsal, a rumor ran through all the chairs, eyebrows rising on the most impassive faces. They had just been signed to play a benefit for Russian Jews, and the soloist would be a legendary pianist who rarely played in North America. Michael Sein had won the Chopin Prize when he was just fourteen, and everything since then, even edging out the Russians in Moscow. He was close to forty now, and the New York Times had lately said he was the hottest pianist in the world. But he lived reclusively in the south of France and refused to play in public for long periods, except to help the grape farmers, or drought victims in Africa, and never in the States, though he’d grown up in Brooklyn, protégé of a famous New York pianist. No pictures were included on his albums, several of which Margy owned, though other pianists would require the use of an 8-by-10 photograph of them (in black tie, simpering) each time anyone used their names.

  “He is not a pretentious guy,” the concert master kept explaining to small hushed groups. “He wants everyone to call him Mi
ke. But you’ve never heard Rachmaninoff till you’ve heard Sein.” He studied the effect on them, bright-eyed. “You’ve never heard arpeggios till you’ve heard Sein.”

  Margy listened skeptically. She’d met some legends before now: a flautist who thought he was a lonely man (but was a lecher in disguise), a cellist who had played a recent solo with all the verve of a finger exercise (but when the next one came along, he got that too). A famous bassist had made much of Calvin when he played with them. “You’re a real musician, Jim,” he said, getting Calvin mixed up with the fellow who played next to him. Now every time he came to town, he cried, “Jim!” and crossed the room to embrace Calvin in front of everyone.

  Michael Sein arrived, started to rehearse with them. At first he looked entirely unremarkable. Short and stocky, in an old cardigan and beat-up tennis shoes, he hunched over the keys, nothing of him showing but his hair, long black-and-silver curls springing up. The visiting conductor had him play through one time by himself, Rachmaninoff number two. Fingers gently crushing keys, every hammer ringing like a temple bell, he subtly swelled the sound till it was oceanic, stunned the air. When he finished, and sat with head drooped toward the keys, musicians all across the stage slammed down their feet and clacked their bows on music stands. Then he lifted up his head.

  A prickling surge rushed over Margy’s body as her genes stood up to take a look. His large eyes were so pale they were almost colorless, and they inched around the orchestra like beams of pure intelligence. They passed over her and looked away. A moment later, he looked again. The blood drained out of Margy’s brain. Bending toward the floor, she shuffled through her sheet music as if she’d taken out the wrong page.

  “I heard you play once,” he said to her that night, at a party after the benefit. Spotting him across the room, she had retreated to the kitchen, wondering how she would get past him to the elevator door. But a moment later he followed her.