Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  “Here—give me the broom. Give it to me, Daddy. Dammit. Now leave the room. Or at least stand back. Jesus. The poor thing could die of fright.”

  “I could die. I thought the goddamn thing was a bat.”

  Maude let her lids fall to slits over dead eyes. “Just stay still. All right? Promise?”

  The bird flew to the highest corner and fluttered frantically along the join between window and ceiling. Maude took one step forward, then another. As she got near the left end of the window, farthest from the door (which Milt had propped open), the bird threw itself to the right. Slowly she took a small step to the right and stood still. The bird flapped rightward. She took another, and, again, the small creature moved on.

  By slow steps and with some retreats, as if they were playing Mother May I, the bird made its unwitting way toward freedom, all the while thinking freedom was just where it was. The window looked like sky.

  Then it found the place where it could get through. Bursting at last into a piece of this obdurate sky that gave way, it was gone.

  Milt found the joy in his daughter’s face as she turned to him unbearable. He’d be the Partridge, the Immerman, whose book she would leave disdainfully in the dust. She would leave and be successful and have a better life. Because of that school. She would leave too.

  4.

  YOU NEVER HEARD Beethoven?”

  Danny Stern grinned, smooth, olive-skinned, his eyes lustrous, soft, and amused. “Nope. Was just a name to me.”

  “How could you never hear Beethoven? It’s on the radio.”

  “Not the station my parents play.”

  “What does it have?”

  “Cocktail music. I don’t know. Perry Como.”

  “I used to like Perry Como. On TV. I can’t believe I’m admitting that. Well, except for his singing.”

  “You liked him except for his singing?”

  When they stopped laughing, she said, “So when did you finally hear Beethoven? I mean, I’m assuming that you have now.”

  He looked as if he had something delicious in his mouth. “It’s the first week of school, right? Heck does his song and dance about the music library, all those shelves of, you know, boxed sets. Not just Beethoven, but you can compare Von Karajan with Kondrashin or whatever. I mean, I’d heard all these names, but it was like the names in the Bible. You don’t expect to get to meet Moses or Gabriel. So, I take out this set of Beethoven symphonies—”

  “Von Karajan or Kondrashin?”

  “Are you kidding? Von Karajan, of course. And I go into a listening room and start with Symphony Number One, and I just go on. I think it was like five, six hours. I just listen until the Ninth is done. And I’m like—I can’t tell you. It was—it was amazing.” He closed his eyes in a way that, instead of shutting her out, seemed to include her in the most intimate privacy.

  She turned her head away, as nervous as if he had touched her. His shelves—looking improvised and, so, as out of place as possible amid the oppressive décor, which really was décor, as if ordered all at once from Bloomingdale’s—were neatly ranged with Beethoven, at the end near the Bach cantatas, and running through a record of songs by Hugo Wolf. He had his own record player, with speakers that folded out like the panels of a tryptich. “High Fidelity” said embossed squares in the corners of the tweedy boxes. He put on the Wolf. Really sad songs, not that she could understand the German.

  “So, do you listen to Beethoven all the time now?”

  “Never.” He looked both pleased and rueful.

  “That’s awful!”

  “It was too much. I listened too much. I used it up or something.”

  “But it was only a year ago.” Maude was shocked. Her aesthetic pieties were outraged. “You can’t ever use up Beethoven.”

  Danny shrugged. “There’s a lot of other great stuff.”

  “But the greatest stuff—the whole point of it is that you can’t use it up. I mean—” But she encountered within herself an unwelcome little plug or blockage, and she knew exactly what it was, her unwillingness to admit that she no longer felt for Botticelli the pious fervor she had felt only the year before, in which even the least bit qualified or tempered assessment of his work felt to her like a personal attack. She had discovered herself in these pictures and secretly embraced them as the way to paint—color without paint texture, all flowing line and limber, limpid decoration. If only someone would teach her how to use egg tempera.

  Because of the coincidence that, at home, the cover of the Pughs’ album of Beethoven’s Seventh was a reproduction of La Primavera (one of the cheapie albums Milt was always picking up at Roosevelt Field), Maude heard that music as a ballet of the Three Graces, of Flora presiding in a flowery dress of the kind Maude espoused, of getting handsome Mercury’s attention and rolling on the carpet of spicy crushed flowers . . . She felt herself to be the melancholy lovelies in the picture. They themselves seemed to be representations of the artist’s yearning and, so, embodiments not only of all that was lovable in women but of the very consummation that art represented, consummation as intensely rich and desired as the other kind and doomed to disappoint. The women looked like objects of desire, but their hurt, puzzled, yet detached expressions were the portraits of the artist’s need to create them and his own sadness at, having done so, still lacking satisfaction.

  She had felt, in short, in the picture (and so in the music) a way to be an artist and herself, Maude, a girl. And before she even got there, already it was failing her. It had already begun to feel wan, distant, faintly immature, like the poet-faced doodles that covered all of her last year’s textbooks in purple ink. Nobody else’s work, however much you loved or identified with it, could show you your own work. Maude knew that any artist’s vision was as individual and differentiated as an individual face and as little to be meddled with; that your duty as an artist was to make your sense of things manifest in the world, and that if you did this faithfully and fully enough, the world would feel its meaning and take it into its own heart.

  She ventured articulating this to Danny Stern.

  “You mean like fucking?”

  She could only imagine what that might be like, as she could only imagine what realization as an artist would be like, though she had spent an enormous part of her life so far fantasizing about one or the other. “Well—or love,” she answered, feeling her ears hot. “Both sides have to go out of themselves toward the other.” The blush only got worse. She looked at him, daring him to let on that it all meant too much to her.

  He considered what she said in his prudent, doctorish, fair-minded way. “It’s funny. These things, I mean, the books you love and all that stuff, they give you so much, you kind of worship the beings who make them. But it makes them, the artists, you know, seem kind of inhuman.”

  “You mean, ’cause you couldn’t write War and Peace or a Beethoven sonata?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you could write a Danny Stern.”

  “Nah. I couldn’t.” He grinned his good-natured grin.

  “And that’s what you love the art for. It’s so human—it’s where you meet the parts of yourself—you feel more understood, in a weird way, in a work of art that you can love. You feel as if you’re in it; you feel as if it’s about you.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You feel it is you. Or that you made it.”

  “That,” he said, “I never feel.”

  She snorted in annoyance. He must be lying. How could you not feel that?

  Before she could voice her skepticism, she felt something soft and warm touch her eyelids. Kisses. She had not even taken in his face coming at hers so that she had closed her eyes in automatic self-protection. He kissed each closed eye and then somehow they were kissing each other’s mouths. The feeling of the other time, with the sideburned senior, poured back, only more keenly. It was a surprise to feel it, but she had felt it once before, so after the surprise of its presence, she could greet it, in a sense, welcome it
back. After the first bout of kissing, they pulled back and looked at each other, side by side on the soft, thick carpeting. She looked into his face and the feeling increased. That hadn’t happened before. It became too strong and they had to lock their mouths together. As if through the mouth came the rest of the body and all the feelings within it.

  They spent hours and weeks of the winter and spring semesters in Danny’s room or sneaking into Seth’s entombed chamber, making out. They themselves used the ugly term, heedless of the way it deprecated the sweetness and intimacy of what passed between them. Or not wanting to share it with the rest of the world.

  Though there was also the immense comfort of being seen by the world as linked. After the first inadvertent, gasping tussle on Danny’s floor, however, Maude felt she would be ruined by being seen with him. She confided in Weesie, or tried to. “Don’t you think he looks kind of goony and young?”

  “Kind of young maybe. I don’t know. He has those beautiful eyes.”

  Maude didn’t know if she liked Weesie noticing Danny’s beautiful eyes. “But I mean, he’s kind of not romantic. I mean, I didn’t exactly put him on, you know, that list.” The list of desirable boyfriends already seemed childish, and a long time ago.

  “He’s the smartest boy in school,” said Weesie factually, and Maude felt a fool. She hadn’t noticed. He was so modest and uncompetitive, the thought did not occur. He didn’t need to compete. He didn’t chase success. He didn’t seem to fear failure. Maybe he didn’t need to.

  She was more aware of his easy grasp after that. She felt his modesty as a law she had unconsciously observed, as if praise were insult and it would offend him for appreciation to be lavished. But her appreciation was in an odd way a new appreciation for herself. She had to explain herself to almost everyone. She didn’t have to explain herself to Danny Stern. Or not quite so much.

  Maude’s clamorous social anxieties and the steeliest competitive edge of her ambitions were softened, tempered, or muffled from within this nest of safety and understanding. She felt strong enough with Danny to dare to go on her way and be happy. For a while.

  5.

  I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’D go away for months, just like that, without me.”

  “You knew I was applying, Maudlin.”

  “I didn’t think you’d go. Don’t call me that.”

  At the end of his junior year, Danny was beginning to look no longer just boyishly pretty but manly and so, even to Maude, handsome. They were in a bucolic park she had asked to go to, where people offered stale bread to swans and geese along a calm, narrow river flowing between bands of velvet grass, blooming shrubs and trees, and artful groves. She had just used up her last bread—the last of a loaf Nina had made, that collapsed back to what seemed a state of raw grain in Maude’s fingers—gulped by the greedy geese who looked astonished by what they had taken in, their heads popping up like burps at the ends of their long necks almost in Maude’s face, they were so tall. She had been laughing, talking to them like overgrown children. Then the couple came to the giant beech that was like a cathedral inside the dark embrasure of its branches, and he had said casually that he’d been accepted for the two months in Africa that summer. Maude had her hand on the grainless bark, over the scar of a heart cut into it with two names inside. HOLLY+DAVE4EVER.

  “You’d never carve my name on a tree,” she went on, low Maria Callas tremolo.

  Danny dug into his jeans pocket and came up with the red enamel of a Swiss Army knife.

  “No. Don’t hurt the tree.”

  He threw it up in the air, casting his gorgeous, lustrous eyes to heaven.

  “Don’t make fun of me!”

  “Maude. Maude.” He took her wrists. “Stop giving me orders a second.”

  She let him hug her and in fact clung to his neck, pressing into him. Then pushed him away:

  “I hate you. You don’t give a shit about me. Just about some people you never met, because they’re poor and black and—chic.” She knew this wasn’t true: he was the kind of person who would refrain from something like joining the Peace Corps if he thought it was too easy a way of looking good. Not that he was old enough for the Peace Corps; his program was a sort of pre-premed clinic in tropical diseases. “The cost of your plane fare could probably keep a whole village healthy for a generation.” She flung herself out of the beech cathedral through a wall of leaves.

  Danny bent to retrieve his penknife from the cool grassless ground before following her out. It was a shock to come back to sunlight on the broad lawn. Maude was standing in the middle, surrounded by acres of perfect grass, clearly lost in her own darkness. She let him walk up to her without running away.

  “How do you know you’ll come back? You might get some horrible disease. The plane might—. Or maybe some nice medical student—some girl who actually likes science, someone sensible, someone literal.” By this time she looked as tragic as if she’d already lost him.

  “Maude—I’m here, for God’s sake. Look up! I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I mean, I am going, but I’m with you. Don’t you get that?”

  “No,” she moaned. “No. I don’t see how—”

  “It’s two months.”

  “When my brother—I remember exactly when it was two months. I kept like expecting every day, today he’ll come back—if I just believe, if I just have faith—and I’d trick myself into seeing him. You know how you can see someone disppearing around a corner, you’re sure it’s them—I’d go unlock the door at night after Milt checked that it was locked, so he could get in. My father patrols the house every night to make sure we’re safely locked in. In this really angry way. Anyway, it was when I realized it was exactly two months that it occurred to me I might never see him again. He might be—”

  “I’m not your brother, for God’s sake. Don’t map your family onto me. I mean, really. Here I am. How can you talk about your brother?”

  “But how can you want to leave?”

  His eyes, normally so soft and lustrous, sparked, and his lower lip stiffened with anger.

  “Please don’t be angry at me.”

  He made a helpless sound and let her burrow into his arms.

  “Please don’t leave,” she said into his warm, delicious shoulder. “I wish you wouldn’t.” He would leave no matter what she said. “I don’t understand why you want to go.”

  “It has nothing to do with you, Maude. Don’t you see? It’s just something I want, and being temporarily away from you is just an unfortunate side effect.”

  “I don’t understand how you can want it if you can’t be with me.”

  He let out a great compression of air but just patted her back. They both knew she’d lost.

  Perhaps to give her something, almost by way of a promise, the next time they were alone together in his bedroom of a future professional, he helped her slide on a condom and guide him into her.

  She had wanted to from the start—it had been he who was cautious, even when he said he couldn’t stand it. She hated his self-control. Repeatedly, she couldn’t stand it but had had to bear it. By this point, they had been naked together, had touched each other everywhere. To let the most intimate parts of themselves go inside and embrace each other’s seemed at once surreal and unremarkable, not a big deal.

  But it was. He was slow and careful and, still, it had been so painful. She knew it had to get better or women wouldn’t be able to stand it. The thin, sensitive tissue seemed to strain and pull less when he was all the way in, but each time he moved, she was shocked at the intense jab she felt where she had never before experienced sensation. She showed the pain by no more than jagged intakes of breath. “Are you all right?” he’d say, halting, and she’d say yes, to encourage him to go on.

  By the next day, the very soreness felt pleasurable, triumphant, and at the same time like a seismic gulch gaping to be filled. At the least she already doubted what she remembered and needed to test the sensation a
gain, like a second olive or a second sip of a parent’s martini. But he was flying that day. She had thought consummation would give her a way of holding on to him while he was away. But—much as adults had always warned—it made it more painful.

  They said goodbye on the phone. They had agreed it would be better if she didn’t have to go with his parents to the airport she still thought of as Idlewild—his prosaic parents, the baldish, matter-of-fact businessman father and stolid mother who it seemed astonishing should have hatched him, these people who couldn’t even have imagined him.

  6.

  DANNY HAD LEFT as soon as classes were over, not staying the rest of Bay Farm’s unusually long (for a private school) year, for the beautiful ceremonies the last week of school, the graduation of those Danny’s own class was about to replace. Maude remembered the year before, when it was like falling in love with the place. She had come into a sense of ownership. For this year’s madrigals and lushness and frenzy of preparations, she was like an established matron, replete in her requited, sealed, and approved love. But in all of this she felt both the absence of her love and a connection to him: the school had brought them together, and everyone there saw them as representatives, in a sense, of each other.

  Then the year ended. Maude, once again working at the public library, alone in the artificial town with her father, felt marooned, lifelines snapped. Weesie too was unavailable, busy in a museum intern program in the city that Mary Jane had arranged for her.

  As a few sad irises struggled through the weeds of the back-yard, Maude was still waiting for Danny’s first letter. Instead, through the slot in the pink front door came a letter from Bay Farm, addressed to Milton and Nina, saying that, due to the increase in the Pughs’ income, Maude’s scholarship had been reduced for the following year.