Notwithstanding the fact that Eric was a dowdy figure with a protuberant chin and round belly, an unkempt mop of black wiry hair, globular nose, and pasty skin, I felt a certain jealousy toward him and couldn’t help but notice Elizabeth’s smile each time she described Eric’s enterprise, how her voice rose and held a note of exhilaration as she rattled off his skills and achievements. Perturbed in this way, convinced I could do everything the efficacious Mr. Stiles was hired for—and better—I suggested to Liz, “Why not let me help you?”
“You?” I fully expected her to appreciate and accept my offer, but was rebuffed instead with kind thanks and firm assurances that my assistance wasn’t needed. “You have your things and I have Eric.”
Annoyed by the insinuation that I somehow couldn’t be trusted with the task, I wondered if this was how Elizabeth felt about me when it came to her work, what did it say of our affair? I imagined what Charles Rieunne would tell me if he knew the truth, how he’d laugh at my ignorance, and in terms of my carefree aesthetic say, “If you prefer to be irresponsible, why should you expect my daughter to take you at all seriously?”
I slept little that night, struggling for answers, and reaching what seemed the best-laid plan, got up early the next morning and began pulling together the existing pages of my dissertation. I went to the library and conducted additional research on Josef Albers and the influence Gestalt psychology had on his art, incorporated the new material into current chapters, and typed everything into my computer. The process was productive, the whole of my effort performed exclusively for Liz’s favor, though I failed to enjoy a single moment of my labor. I cursed throughout, my mood dissolving from idle and calm to temperamental and distant, abrupt and even harsh. The change in my demeanor was obvious the moment I crawled from bed each morning, grousing and grumbling on my way to gathering up all my nесessary notes and books before skulking off to campus. Liz and I quarreled over what was wrong, and when she questioned what I was doing, I snapped, “I’m just trying to finish. I want to get done, that’s all.”
“Since when?”
“Now.”
Who could blame her for being startled by the sudden shift, and yet somehow sensing what I was up to, she stroked the side of my cheek with her false hand and said only, “All right, Bailey, if that will make you happy.”
Clever girl. How I delighted in her company! How much I wanted then to kiss her thighs, to sniff her neck, and lick her face and the back of her knees. The depth of her generosity moved me, her words alone making me glad. After another day of much the same, I put down my book, my pad and pen, and quit my effort with an exhausted “That’s enough for now.”
Elizabeth sat across the room at my piano, working out a new score, and turning to look at me again, she replied, “You will when you want to.” I spent the next four days sitting in my room, reading Chekhov and Richard Ford. Saturday night I played at Dungee’s. Elizabeth came downtown with me, and as I ran through a medley of Brubeck and Bud Powell, she applauded the energy of my performance and smiled at the pleasure I exhibited. We made love that night, and relieved, my dark spirits lifted and I was restored.
Returning to old habits was a comfort, and so inspired, I tried not to dwell on the irony of sustaining love this way.
As reward for coming to my senses—and not that Liz didn’t wish I’d eventually finish my dissertation or one day choose to do something more with my music, but knew such had to happen on my own terms—we entered a period of renewed jubilation. Our affair seemed sweeter after clearing this first awkward hurdle and we enjoyed a time of rediscovery and confirmation. Eager to celebrate our happiness, we decided to consummate the moment by getting a pet. “Something we can share together” we agreed, and went the next day to Chapperman’s Pet Emporium, where we settled on a yellow-green parakeet in a silver cage.
Elizabeth immediately disposed of the cage, allowing Clarence—as she named our bird—to fly about my apartment as he chose. “We need to respect Clarence’s freedom and not confine him against his will,” she said, a view I accepted in theory, though I wondered in secret how Clarence would ever know he was being restrained if we never let him out.
A bird in open flight is a glorious spectacle, graceful in its glide and stretch of wings, but a parakeet darting about in cramped quarters is an altogether different thing. Despite our best intentions, Clarence could not adjust to flying inside, and no sooner did he get going in one direction than he was forced to quickly draw up, his tiny feet thrust in front of him, his wings pumping frantically in a desperate countermotion, straining not to smash into the walls at high speed. After several days of bruising his beak and exhausting his spirit, he abandoned flying altogether and took to walking back and forth across the floor.
I voted for returning the bird to his cage, but Elizabeth said we should learn to be accommodating. This meant keeping a constant eye out as Clarence pranced about the apartment, forcing me to monitor my steps, checking the cushion in the chair before sitting, and watching where I kicked off my shoes or dropped my books. All sudden turns, sideways strides, and backward actions were discontinued as a matter of course. Where Elizabeth had no problem adapting and easily maneuvered about the room with Clarence beneath her feet, I was less disciplined, nervous and uncoordinated. So convinced my own clumsiness would eventually reduce Clarence to a feathery goo, I had no choice but to work with him in an effort to incorporate his habits into mine.
Such enterprise was difficult for me, and still I managed to conduct myself with diligence in arranging drills and practices until bit by bit Clarence and I got used to one another, my once stuttering stride giving way to a more fluid sense of movement about the apartment. My effort thrilled Elizabeth, my ability to develop an awareness of where the bird was at all times. “You see what you can do when you put your mind to it?” she cheered, her smile a mix of gratitude and great relief. I was delighted to please her and have her look at me with such happiness, though in the process I came again to wonder if such ambition was a part of love I was somehow supposed to sustain.
Toward the end of February, Elizabeth invited a group of people to her apartment. (Although we spent most nights together, we still maintained separate addresses, and for the evening we agreed it would be best if Clarence remained at my place.) On hand were Eric Stiles and his date, a willowy clarinetist named Amber Tilman; Dr. Willum Kabermill, the dean of the Music School, and his wife Eunice; a few more of Liz’s colleagues; and Niles for me. Our guest of honor for the evening was the pianist André-Seve Harflec, who came with his girlfriend, Janet Minot. Andy—as Harflec insisted everyone call him—was an old friend of Liz’s, a musician on the verge of real fame and due in four days to perform a recital at the Miller Theater in New York.
I played host, took coats and helped set out the hors d’oeuvres, made drinks, and engaged in conversations while Liz saw to Andy. (Harflec was a slender man with dark brown hair cut about the edges of his pretty face and arms forever bent and reaching forward.) Liz wore a sweater dress that fit her figure snugly, her own hair done in a way I’d not seen before, a single thick tail made on the right side extending in an orange arch. I watched her standing near the piano, Harflec beside her, shoulder to shoulder as others in the room came and spoke with them. They smiled at one another with a familiarity composed of history, and noting the ease with which they carried on, I continued observing them even as I was involved in my own conversations.
I was talking at one point with Eric and Niles when Andy’s girlfriend came over and held her empty glass out in front of me. “Drink,” she said. Dressed in black, with bare shoulders and smooth, creamy-white skin, her body slightly fuller than Liz’s, a provocative face, her attractiveness wielded with aggression, Janet was obviously a girl used to turning heads. Instead of taking her glass I pointed her toward the bar. When she came back a minute later she said dryly, “You might at least have asked what I was drinking before you sent me away.”
“I had a feeling you’
d find what you want.”
“I usually do,” she held her glass with two fingers. “Your girlfriend’s lovely. Andre’s been talking about her all day.”
“You mean Andy.”
“Whatever,” there was dissmissiveness in her tone, a worn sound which seemed to arrive from a great distance. I glanced across the room again, at Liz and Andy laughing together over some such thing Dr. Kabermill told them, and looking back at Janet—she’d made herself a whiskey with a single cube of ice—I could imagine without much trouble the whole of our affair; the banter between us performed in prurient waves without future complication, no entanglement or emotional wondering as we enjoyed our sex with ease and a like understanding. Such an uncomplicated arrangement made me laugh to think how fast I would have pounced as recently as last summer. (Janet in her tight-fitted dress and golden hair so thick and long I could imagine clinging to it like reins.) The issue then was not temptation but the reality of its absence, how steadily in the last few months my need for Liz had reached a point beyond anything before. Laying in bed at night, I’d try and pretend she wasn’t there, and occasionally when she was off teaching or working on some other project, I’d tell myself she didn’t exist and that the emotions I felt were a deliberate fiction. The exercise always alarmed me however, and I’d quickly quit the test, though not before the experience took its toll.
I was just about to excuse myself from Janet when Andy and Liz came to join us. Elizabeth slid in next to me and wrapped her left arm around my back as Harflec stood close to her right. “Bailey,” he said my name as if it was for him something of a curiosity. “I was just telling Lizzie that Evgeny Kissin is coming to hear me in New York and she is so jealous. Do you know Kissin?”
“Not personally, André.”
“No, of course not. And Andy, please,” he gave a shameless sort of smile, and after confiding in some detail his friendship with Kissin, looked me up and down and asked about my teaching. “Lizzie tells me you’re an instructor at the university.”
“Art History. I’m an adjunct.”
“Yes, well, I must say it seems quite a coup for your Renton to have landed Elizabeth.” He said no more about me, and touching Liz on the shoulder, went on to say, “When I heard she was leaving Peabody and coming here, of all places, well, frankly, I wasn’t sure what to think. Don’t get me wrong,” he had a way of sublimating his insults behind a wink, “your university has a fine reputation.”
“But it’s not the Peabody.”
“Exactly,” he nodded, satisfied I understood, while Elizabeth spoke in defense of Renton, referring to the excellent faculty Dr. Kabermill had put together and how the autonomy she had here to conduct her work and develop her own curriculum had many advantages over the more established institutions. I appreciated her statement, but the university was not the focal point of Andy’s comments, a truth not lost on Janet who rolled her eyes when our guest of honor said, “Yes, of course, but Renton is so saturnine, is it not? An odd place for music.”
“I would guess Gershwin and Copland would argue otherwise.”
“Ahh, American composers, of course. You do call them composers, don’t you?”
I was once more watching Liz, waiting to see what part of Andy’s criticism registered and which I could ignore as trite party banter, when Andy told a story about a time Liz and he were in France. “The music, my God! Do you remember?” The purpose was as before, to make me understand that Liz’s presence in Renton was an aberration, the insinuation impossible to miss, Harflec driving the point home every chance he could.
“Why don’t we talk about something else,” Janet yawned and André quickly replied, “But sure. Janet hates when I get to rambling about music and I’m certain it must be taxing for you as well, Bailey.”
Again Liz rallied to my defense, mentioned my piano playing, my knowledge and talent which I interrupted to say, “I dabble is all.”
“Yes, well, it must be pleasant for you. Sometimes I wish I could simply—what is the word?—dabble, to relax a bit and enjoy the lighter fare.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, André,” Janet waved her whiskey glass in front of his face and frowned. Andy’s own expression filled with surprise as if to intimate—quite falsely, of course—that he truly didn’t understand. “What did I say? I meant only there’s something to relish in the ability to enjoy a simple tune and play such as a lark. A serious musician doesn’t have that luxury,” he puffed out his narrow chest for Liz’s benefit. “A hobbyist can enjoy whatever he fancies while a real pianist can never be satisfied banging out such a rudimentary repertoire as Beethoven’s Appassionate’ or Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition,’ for example. There is for us always the issue of challenging one’s talent.”
To his credit, André Harflec had, in fact, made his reputation performing the world’s most difficult compositions, works by brilliant yet obscure figures such as Godowsky, Alkan, Medtner, Henselt, Catoire, and Kaputsin, which other musicians avoided as a matter of course. Critics regarded Andy as a technical wizard, whose hands the reviewer Alex Ross referred to as “a wonder and a marvel,” the mastery of his interpretive performance exceeded only by the voodoo of his dispatch. All this aside, I found the man an ass, and when he goaded me further with, “Music is music, don’t you think, Bailey? It’s good to be able to appreciate both the simple tunes and the classics and play each the same way,” I felt Liz’s fingers on my waist go tense and draw me in tighter.
“What I mean,” Andy said while moving toward the piano, “is that all music has a fundamental center. Even the more difficult arrangements I play can be dissected and reduced to where someone such as yourself can figure out their essence and knock them off in a modest fashion. For example,” he sat then and played an elementary send-up of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which he soon transformed into ragtime, classical, and jazz. “You see, it’s all there,” he smiled as everyone in the room turned and listened to what was going on. “As for the more sophisticated works, someone such as yourself needs merely find what notes he’s comfortable with and tease them within your limitations.”
He performed then Nikolai Roslavets’s “Etude No. 1.” The piece was nothing less than a fundamental marvel which no one—save Harflec—dared play anymore. While Roslavets invented his own harmonic system based on altered scales, his “Etude” infused with double sharps and flats creating a glorious white elephant of a knuckle buster, Andy seized control of each note, stared at Elizabeth then glanced at me in order to make sure I understood the depth of his inspiration. So completely mesmerized was Eric Stiles by Andy’s playing that he drifted back and appeared to hide behind his date. Liz was awed as well and the corners of her mouth rose as André turned the air electric. I was envious, worse than before when I tried to impress Liz by finishing my dissertation, and with the manifold of my happiness now forever diverted, removed from the days when sloth and leisure were able to sustain me, I conceded the stakes were infinitely higher and required something more.
I waited for Andy to finish and as he stepped forward to bow while the room burst into applause and cheered his name, I slipped behind and took my seat at the piano. I was out of my league, for sure—but what purpose heaven then?—and sneaking a final peek at Liz, uncertain what I could pull off, I closed my eyes and was back again at my father’s piano, laying down the notes as they came into my head, guiding them through the tips of my fingers like a hot current passing through ten separate wires. Where Andy performed with his upper body stationary and in faultless display of his command, I rocked and swayed as madly as ever, producing grand accompanimental refrains while knocking out Roslavets’s “Etude No. 1” with my own mastery and verve.
Although I never heard the piece before, the notes formed in my head with the unmistakable preciseness of an echo. At some point during my playing, oblivious to everyone but Liz, whom I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at, and with my eyes still closed, I grew frightened by what I was doing and nearly thought
to stop, but by then I couldn’t and finished with a flourish. Opening my eyes, I turned first to Liz whose face was fixed in absolute amazement, and then through the silence of the room with everyone in shock and no one quite sure what they just witnessed, I grinned at our astonished guest of honor, and said, “Something like that then, Andy?”
A fluke? Most definitely and not to be repeated. (What did I know about love after all and how to yield what was required?) Liz glowed and brought me a fresh drink. She kissed my cheek and stood close by while everyone congratulated me on my performance. Even Andy gave a begrudging “Good show,” only to leave soon after, excusing himself with the mention of an early flight out in the morning. I acknowledged the response with a diffident shrug of my shoulders, my interest only in Liz, elated to have made her smile the way she did—the expression on her face a mix of revelry, shock, and wonder—and was otherwise clueless at the time about the can of worms I’d opened.
Later that night, after everyone was gone and we’d cleaned up from the party, rinsed the plates, and put away the remaining food, we took a walk across town and wound up back at my apartment. Liz’s mood remained sanguine, and when I asked if she was worried about André who was clearly upset by my performance, she smiled and insisted Andy was a big boy and could take as much as he dished out. “Besides, your playing was remarkable.”
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