Dead People's Music
Page 29
Wendy has a toke, and then another, and then the giggles burst out of her like popcorn. We wolf the cheesecake, me too, despite all the food we’ve already eaten.
When Wendy puts The Shining onto the DVD player, pulling Ryan onto the sofa beside her, Toby, Bruno and I retire to our new room, raising our eyebrows at each other.
The bedroom dynamic feels bizarre: like a high school slumber party meets ‘Torn Between Two Lovers’. But I don’t feel torn, I feel fluctuating. One minute it’s Toby that I love, old sock, familiar and intimate, the next, Bruno. But I’ve also gone off them both.
Toby’s lying beside me, wearing creased pyjamas he changed into in the bathroom. He reaches out his hand and slides it between my legs, and I’m almost tempted, wondering whether we could fuck without Bruno noticing; or else with Bruno watching, my dream inverted. I’ve never had a threesome. Bruno’s settling into his sleeping bag, stretched out on the trundle bed, his hair curling across Wendy’s pillow, his Che Guevara T-shirt worn tissue-thin. His arm pops out of the sleeve and it’s olive, slender. His fingers above his head are long, like his mother’s.
I can’t sleep. Toby is still, almost not breathing, his hand slumped between us, and I wonder whether he’s sleeping or just trying to disappear. Fighting my jumpy eyelids, which seem to be inhabited by a family of crickets, I try my yoga breathing, in through my nose, out through my mouth, playing my sequence of music school exercises in my head, remembering each note, the extension of fingers, rolling into thumb position, but still, there’s too much energy in this room. I close my eyes and open them, and it’s 2 a.m. and I’m still awake, or maybe I slept, I can’t tell. I turn; Toby’s definitely asleep now, a flabby rattle at the back of his throat, and I look down at Bruno.
He opens his eyes, looks up into mine, and his are liquid in the darkness. I squeeze the edge of the mattress to stop myself from diving into him. In this hour that doesn’t really exist, that is outside of the normal rules, it seems he wants me. And I could go to him.
Toby has gone by the time I get up, and Bruno is in the kitchen, trying to operate the coffee grinder.
‘It’s kind of tricky, you have to get it in exactly the right position to lock it. Then it will work. Once I banged it down, and it started anyway, then coffee beans flew everywhere. Thought I was going to take an eye out.’
‘Where does your coffee come from? Is it fair trade?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I say, pushing the button, feeling as though my life is being audited. ‘I should ask.’
‘’Cause Fenella has visited some of those coffee plantations in Guatemala, and man, those harvesters are poor. They live in shacks, they have high infant mortality rates and the farmers are getting filthy rich, clear-felling the rainforests to make way for more plantings.’
‘Stop it, I won’t be able to drink it now.’
‘Just thought you should know. What shall we do today? I want to go into Manhattan.’
‘I’ve got to visit my great-aunt — she finally invited me to lunch. I would invite you but I’m only just getting to know her and she might not like me to make assumptions. Besides, Toby would be offended if she met you before him.’
‘You have a great-aunt? Here in Manhattan? Wow, that’s a boon.’
‘Maybe. But my dad is hassling me about the cello she owns and that makes it kind of stressful. Like I can’t just go and enjoy her company, I’ve got to get something from her. So what do you think you’ll do while I’m there?’
‘I’d quite like to see the UN, go check out those NGOs. There’s so much stuff going on here.’
‘You don’t want to go to Harlem and take a walking tour? Then you could ride the subway up with me.’
‘Okay, sounds like a plan. But will you take me to the UN tomorrow?’
‘Okay,’ I say. On one hand, I want to spend this time with him. On the other, the UN sounds as boring as hell.
I push Esther’s buzzer at a quarter to twelve: she was very definite about me coming on time. My life is elastic compared with hers, but her formula has worked and she’s not going to change it now.
‘Hello, Rebecca,’ says Esther, holding the dogs who are barking at her ankles. Today she’s wearing an immaculate cream twin-set and a pleated skirt, the edges crisp as if she never sits down. Around her neck hangs a heavy locket; for a moment I think it’s her medal.
‘Hi, Aunt Esther,’ I say, even though it may be presumptuous to do so. ‘Hi Calypso, hi Terence.’ I squat to pat the dogs, who are straining and yapping at me to go away. I wonder how seriously she takes their judgements.
‘It’s the other way round. This is Terence, this is Calypso.’
‘Sorry.’ I touch their heads, blessing each one, and they stretch their tongues up to lick my palm. ‘I brought some wholegrain bread this time. And some hummus and oranges.’ I hand her my plastic bag before the dogs can maul it.
‘I made chicken soup. It will go nicely.’
It feels good to come to lunch where the host doesn’t anxiously ask me whether I can eat what has been prepared. Esther knows. She doesn’t bother with chitchat; she looks at her watch and ushers me to the bathroom. ‘You want to wash your hands before you test? Otherwise they can be contaminated and you get false readings.’
We test side by side, Esther appearing triumphant when her results are better than mine. ‘It was my walk. I stimulated my metabolism this morning.’
‘I went walking too,’ I say. But Bruno and I stopped for a bagel; he insisted, saying it was part of his Manhattan experience.
We inject ourselves, comparing our same-but-different insulin pens, and eat our lunch, me feeling conscious of my carbohydrate intake, because I’m sloppy compared with Esther. I never weigh my food. I’m reminded of how I feel eating in front of my mother, who applies her nurse’s eye to every bite.
‘So how are you liking New York?’ asks Esther.
‘I love it. It’s so exciting.’
‘Your grandmother didn’t think so. Left at the first opportunity with that farm boy.’
‘What was she like?’
‘What has your father told you?’
‘Nothing much. He’s so focused on his work and his fencing, he doesn’t talk about other things. Just a few snippets, like when the grass grew too long, they got a goat in to eat it.’
‘Grass? A goat? So she really did move to the country.’
‘Wellington’s not the country. It’s just steep; it’s hard to run a mower over a cliff face.’
‘I can’t imagine your grandmother running a mower even on flat ground. She was a dreamer, never practical. Always wandering around with this far-off look on her face, like she’d gotten lost somewhere in her music. She spent most of her time downstairs at Heinrich’s place, playing cello with him. I didn’t stick around much either. I was always out. It’s good I had a crazy youth — I spent my wildness before my diabetes came.’
Suddenly Klara’s conjured, I see her in an old man’s apartment, her hair clipped back from her face, her eyes intent on the music stand before her.
‘Tell me about what it was like growing up.’
Esther fixes me with an odd look, as if she’s going to tell me not to be so nosy. Then perhaps she remembers that I’m family. ‘It was hard. We’d lost our parents, but we didn’t know for a long while, until after the war. But we felt all those days, every hour of those years when they might still be alive and yet not with us. We were in limbo. Tante Dagmar did her best, but she had lost a husband and a son, and had forgotten how to show affection. I don’t blame Klara for escaping into music — I only wish that I could have too. But I didn’t have the talent. I didn’t like its ephemeral quality. All it did was stir up emotions and leave you with nothing. Music is like that, don’t you think? It can make you cry despite yourself, and when you hear a snatch of something from another time, that memory is suddenly in front of you. But it’s not real. No, I always preferred making things. I got the sewing prize at my school. Klara got the music
prize. I might have made instruments, like Heinrich, but you needed an ear for that. I had a tin ear. And now I put needles into myself — I used to joke to Ruby that I liked my job so much, I turned myself into a pin cushion.’
Here is my opening. Here is my chance.
‘Do you still have the cello Heinrich made for you? The one like Klara’s?’
‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t. I gave it to my niece.’
So that woman on the phone was related. ‘But how do you have a niece? I thought you didn’t marry.’
‘Ruby’s niece is my niece. Isabel calls me Aunt Esther. She comes and stays every time she’s in New York. She plays the cello too — you two should meet up sometime. She wasn’t going to, she was going to be a clarinetist until she came to live with Ruby and me for a year, when her parents were having difficulties. Then she found the cello in my cupboard and started playing it secretly. I was so heartbroken when she left. She’s very talented. She went to music school in California and now she’s got a place in the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.’
‘Oh,’ I say, but I’m howling inside. How does this usurper, this outsider, have my replacement cello? I realise that it’s not just my father’s ambition for me to have the other cello; it’s mine too. I have been wanting it as a balm to my damaged career. Something to reverse my fate, a portal into Klara’s indisputable talent.
‘Is everything all right? Do you have low blood sugars?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You look pale. That’s how I look when I feel low. Ruby said my eyes go all milky.’
‘I wanted to see the cello. I’m just a little disappointed, that’s all.’
‘I’m sorry, there was no point me keeping it any more. I heard nothing, nothing, from your father for almost forty years, and your grandmother didn’t let me know that she was sick until the end. By the time I got the letter she had only a few more weeks to live. Your grandfather sent me a telegram to tell me she was almost gone, but those were different times. Plane tickets were astronomical and a boat would have taken a month. I thought about going to New Zealand to meet your father. I thought that maybe I could offer him something, solace perhaps. He was around the age I was when I lost my parents, and let me tell you, it’s a difficult time. But your grandfather couldn’t tell me when would be a good time so to fit in with vacations, and my diabetes made me feel very constrained in those days. I was worried that I might run out of insulin on the boat, that I wouldn’t be able to cope with the ship food. I worried something awful might happen and the doctor would be a fool, only knowing how to treat gout and tuberculosis. They didn’t encourage you to travel. Not like today where my doctor is always bullying me to take a pleasure cruise. And Isabel is so dear to me. She always remembers my birthday. She brings me special chocolate, the kind that is mainly cocoa solids. Anyway, why do you need to see that cello? It’s exactly the same as Klara’s.’
‘I broke Klara’s cello.’
‘How did that happen?’
So I tell her the story, the one about the movie night boys, the botched fix-it job and the closet hide-out. I tell her how my father wants me to bring back an intact cello even though he was jealous of it as a child. I’m crying by the time I get to the end of my confession; it seems somehow worse than when I told my mother. Esther will hate me. She won’t invite me back again; Isabel is niece enough for her.
Esther listens to the story, looking serious. She sighs, fingering her locket. I wonder who is inside it, Ruby, or her parents. Maybe Klara. Maybe Isabel.
‘Well, it’s not your fault, is it? It was those boys who did it. We can’t control everything in life. There are some things that are completely out of our hands, that nobody can make amends for.’
I feel freer, my guilt like a too-tight shirt tearing at the seams. ‘You’re not angry?’
‘Like I said, I never cared much for music. Besides, Isabel tells me it’s not one of Heinrich’s classic cellos. He found better wood to work with after he made Klara and my prototypes. You can go and find out more about him, if you like. There’s a museum dedicated to him in the Lower East Side, a few blocks away from where we grew up. I gave them a couple of letters from Klara as part of the exhibition. It seems like she was a big part of his story — she was his muse.’
‘Really? Wow.’ I have a flashback, Marcella telling me about this funny instrument maker’s museum, how she would have liked to use it for her documentary only he wasn’t Ukrainian, he was a German Jew. ‘Klara’s my muse too. I’m writing a series of songs about her.’
Esther looks grumpy all of a sudden. ‘I don’t understand why she made people feel that way about her. It wasn’t like she was beautiful. She wasn’t even particularly chatty. She was a pain in the ass, excuse my French, growing up. Always losing things, forgetting things. Oh, I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but I suppose we never were the best friends sisters are meant to be. We should have been, since we didn’t have parents, but maybe we were both rebellious in nature. Funny, we got to be much better friends when we were living in different countries. I suppose Klara didn’t have so many people to confide in, so I was it.’
‘I don’t get on that well with my sister either. I love her, but we’re completely different.’
‘So you understand,’ says Esther, smiling at me.
Bruno is waiting for me outside the Guggenheim, where we’d agreed to meet. We’re going to check out the Matthew Barney exhibition, because he’s my new hero, and he’s Björk’s boyfriend. ‘How was Harlem?’ I say. I feel wrung out but good. The erotic shock is there at first, then it fades. We are friends; I shouldn’t fret.
‘Great, it was so interesting but my feet are bloody sore. I checked out Malcolm X’s mosque, and I went to the Apollo. I got you a present.’ He hands me a postcard of Billie Holiday.
‘Thanks.’ She’s in her heyday, silver under the lights. I imagine her funny voice wobbling out with all the feeling in the world. I’m unnerved, remembering the postcards Bruno set me in London.
‘Yeah, I remember how much you liked her.’
I haven’t thought of her for ages; I used to play her album all the time. I used to sing ‘Night and Day’ and ‘The Man I Love’. The latter would freak Bruno out: ‘But I’m here, I’ve come along already’. Maybe the music knew something that I didn’t.
We move inside, taking in the iconic snail-shell architecture. The art on display is weird: skewed grand pianos, shiny yellow and blue cars, fauns with meringue growing out of their faces. It is nightmarish and glorious at the same time.
‘Toby seems nice,’ Bruno says, carefully. He’s obviously decided to overlook last night’s fission, to concentrate on the conversation in between. Or maybe he’s trying to show me what a generous-spirited person he is, the bigger man.
‘Yeah, he is.’ Toby is kind. Toby is infuriating. Toby is useful. Toby is a millstone.
‘So do you think you guys are in it for the long haul?’
‘Depends what day you ask me.’ Wishing I could say, I’d leap in front of a flying bullet for you, Toby. But maybe that’s just what people sing in songs.
‘So you’re still as fickle as ever.’
‘I’m not fickle.’ I smart at this accusation, partly because of the truth within it, but also because Bruno’s judging a previous version of myself.
We pass a C-print of topless cabaret girls in wigs.
‘Nice tits. Not a patch on yours, of course.’
I tingle; he’s thinking of my breasts. Will he want to touch them again? Would I let him?
‘What about you and Fenella? Will you get married?’
‘Nah, marriage is bourgeois.’
‘But do you think you’re till-death-do-us-part?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. I like to think I’ve got options, parallel lives.’ He gives me a funny smile. ‘Whatever happened to us, Beck? You never explained.’
‘I thought I did.’
‘I just got this letter, a Dear John letter. I thought you were bett
er than that. You never really fully explained — you just disappeared. I’ve always wondered about you ever since. I’ve always wondered about us.’
‘Me too.’
CHAPTER 23
London, 1994–5
The hostel seemed empty and quiet when I returned from the hospital, a plaster over the wound where my dextrose had been administered. I went to my particle board room, the walls now covered in band posters and postcards from the National Museum, the Victoria and Albert, and ones that Bruno had sent me. I knew I should wash my sheets or crack open a book, but I didn’t feel like it. I decided to visit Lily, see whether she could tell me what happened. On the way, I stopped at the bathroom, and the mirror was covered in maggoty lines of pus, some of them with bloody tails. This was a regular occurrence. Even though people had put up signs that said ‘STOP wiping your ZITS on the MIRROR. It’s GROSS’, the phantom pimple squeezer continued. Someone had even taken their bowl of instant noodles and spelt the word ZIT on the mirror. They’d been pleased with their efforts, and spelt DISCO INFERNO on the other.
Lily wasn’t in her room. Her Spanish room-mate told me she’d gone to the movies with Martin, another viola player. I felt betrayed. Shouldn’t she have waited till I was back to see if I was okay? Weren’t we in this together? Other times when we’d been hung-over, we’d spent the day in the TV lounge, taking turns to go out for pizza or curry.
I went back to my cell, rereading my letters from Bruno. They told me about his masters thesis on meatworks culture, and all the protests he was organising. He’d got a place on student exec and was experimenting with politics. They told me about how he missed me, pined for me, wanted to lick my inner thighs, how he’d seen a great Japanese rockabilly band at the Valve. I felt a strange mixture of desire and revulsion. The letters also made me think of Lily. I folded the letters up and put them back in their envelope; right now I was going to sleep.