Perhaps I had misunderstood. Victor may have only mentioned DTT by way of explanation. I couldn’t remember if he said he was a member or not.
I looked up Charles Reed, and there were many entries, most recently an editorial in the New York Times on his position restricting immigration and stiffening requirements for a green card. Nothing on Benjamin except the photograph Victor had shown me at his father’s swearing-in ceremony, which I looked up in the archives of the Washington Post’s Web site.
I was still at the computer when my mother left the house. She backed out of the driveway and turned left at the Denvers’, the lights in her car shining through the window of Steven’s room.
The bed was made in her room when I went in, and I doubted that it had been slept in at all that night. On my father’s pillow that he no longer used—he slept instead on a futon in the hangar—there was a note.
Dear David.
I have moved to the glass factory. Te amo. Julia
THE LIFEGUARD CHAIR
After dinner Stephen usually agrees to play a board game called FROGS that my father made as a present for me one Christmas. But lately, at Stephen’s insistence, we’ve been having serious conversations about moral consequences instead. Our conversations, which he calls arguments, usually begin with “What if.”
“So, Claire,” he’ll say just as I’m beginning my Algebra homework or planning to call Eva, “what if you are in Cambodia during the time of the Khmer Rouge. You have the chance to save the Roo family, but the price of it—the saving of four children, two parents and a grandfather—will be the sacrifice of your own life.”
“I’d save my own life,” I reply.
“Bad choice,” he says.
“I don’t know the Khmer Rouge, so why would I want to save the Roos from them?”
He tries again.
“Let’s say your best friend has robbed the 7-Eleven of two cartons of vitamin-D milk and a jumbo package of peanut M&M’s Do you turn her in to the police?”
“What difference does it make to you?” I asked. “My best friend is Eva, and she’d split the M&M’s with me.”
I drive him crazy in these conversations.
“Sometimes I wonder if you have any moral consciousness,” he says.
“I don’t want one,” I say.
But Steven is persistent.
“We’ll start again,” he says. “What if you’re living in a village in Germany during the Second World War, and you know that the Jews are dying in the furnaces near your town. You can even see the smoke. What do you do?”
“What did the people in the village do?” I ask.
“Why do you need to know about other people? This question is for you.”
“I’d do nothing. I’m not a policeman.”
“Are you telling me you’d just let the Germans burn up the Jews while you sit in your kitchen happily eating your chocolate pudding and drinking Orange Crush and playing with your yellow haired friends without a care in the world?”
“I’m telling you I don’t like this game,” I say, my eyes full of tears.
“It’s not a game,” he says.
“That’s why I don’t like it,” I say. “I like the old games we used to play, like FROGS.”
C.F., age 14, ninth grade
My own private frog game
VI.
ADAPTATION
1
The letter from Benjamin Reed came a week after I had finished my makeup exams and was working a few hours a day with summer-school students in the biology lab. It came in a brown business envelope, handwritten, “Sophia Lupe” in a large, scrawling script, the letters leaning backward, so he must be left-handed, I concluded.
I had not heard from Victor at all, except once late at night when he gave me the number for his new cell phone, asking me not to call until Benjamin had been in touch. He had been very busy with his job, he said, and hung up. I left a message on his voice mail asking him to call back, it was important. Which he didn’t do.
On the Friday afternoon that Benjamin’s letter arrived, I called again before I’d even left the post office and got his voice mail.
“The letter is here,” I said, walking outside, leaning against the brick wall of the post-office building.
When he didn’t call back immediately, I dialed his number again. “Should I open Benjamin’s letter now or wait for you to call?”
In the lab I left the phone off.
“Open it,” his message said. “And get back to me.”
After class I sat on a cement bench in a small garden outside the life-sciences building and opened the letter.
It was warm and clear, the sun just overhead, but I was shivering in spite of the heat.
Dear Sophia Lupe,
What a mysterious surprise you should find me. And then all of these coincidences between us.
I’m so sorry about your brother’s death. I know it has been an unbearable loss.
I’m living in Ann Arbor studying musical composition at the university and as it happens living a lonely life, although no one would ever guess that of me, since I am by training loquacious—my father in politics, my mother Latin and a musician of such temperament that I can still remember her kissing me good night although she’s been dead since I was six.
I’m glad, however, to be in Michigan, especially to be out of Washington, an unpredictable city short on friendship.
That’s a little about me. Maybe there’s only a little to know beyond what follows.
Your letter inspired this composition. It can be played on an upright piano, even an inexpensive one. Yours, Benjamin
I dialed Victor.
“It’s music,” I said.
“What do you mean, music?”
“Benjamin only wrote a few actual words, and they say nothing.”
I read him the text.
“The rest is music,” I said.
“Damn.” I could hear excitement in his voice. “What do you know about music?”
“Nothing. What about you?”
He laughed. “I certainly can’t read music,” he said.
“I do have an uncle who’s a concert pianist, the one who picked me up the first time we met.”
“Then you must have access to a piano?”
“A new one. Milo just got it.”
“Go home and have your uncle play Benjamin’s letter for you.”
There was street noise in the background, and I had to strain to hear him.
“Then I’ll call you?” I asked.
“Call me tomorrow, and we’ll meet after I finish work.”
“I’ll bring the letter.”
“And bring your answer to it.”
I stuffed Benjamin’s letter back in the envelope. “How do you answer a song?” I asked.
A woman had sat down next to me on the bench, and I got up, walking toward the sidewalk.
“You told him you were a student of musical composition, so he’ll expect you to be able to write a song.”
“I did say that, but how can I do it?”
“Your uncle will make up songs on his new piano.”
I walked along a sidewalk crowded with students, weaving through them, pressing the phone against my ear, thinking how happy it would make Uncle Milo to have the job of writing a song for me.
I was in a charade, a kind of high-stakes fifty-two pickup in which the cards, tossed in the air, fluttered to the ground, and I didn’t bother to pick them up or try to set them in order, too separated from myself to be concerned with consequences.
2
Milo was playing the piano when I got home, and I imagined he had been playing all day. The house was empty—Faith and Bernard at work, my mother relocated to the glass factory, my father in the hangar.
It was early afternoon, not even three, and since my final exams had gone better than I’d expected, I had a meeting with my adviser for next semester’s courses. But after the letter came from Benjamin, I didn’t have the patience to stay at school.<
br />
I slid down on the piano bench beside Milo.
“Now, listen. I’m playing my own song,” he said, stopping mid-tune. “I wrote it today, and you’ll be surprised at how good it is for a stale musician.”
“Play it,” I said, hardly able to contain myself.
“Don’t complain if it isn’t perfect.”
“I won’t know if it isn’t perfect.”
“Oh, yes you will,” he said, throwing his head back, stretching his hands with the long, long fingers across the keys, assuming the seriousness of a public concert.
“It’s quite a sad song, isn’t it?” I asked when he had finished playing.
“I meant it to be hopeful.” He spread his arms in a gesture of despair. “Didn’t you hear the hopeful?”
“Perhaps I didn’t listen well enough.”
“I’ll play it again. Listen carefully.” He played, looking over at me when the tempo picked up, his fingers running up the scale. “See?” he said. “Hopeful.”
“I must have been preoccupied.”
I wanted to get on with my letter and was wondering how to make this experiment with Milo work. I wasn’t ordinarily a good liar.
“This time I heard the hopeful,” I said.
I unfolded the letter, flattening the paper, and handed it to Milo. I had already cut the musical score out of the body of Benjamin’s letter so Milo wouldn’t see the name Sophia Lupe and inquire about her.
“I have a friend who wrote a song for me,” I began.
“A boyfriend.”
“Not yet,” I said.
“You want me to play this?” He put it up on the piano.
“I was thinking you could play and we could listen to it together and then you could compose a response for me to send back to him.”
“So romantic,” he said, laughing. “I had no idea that you, the scientist, with all your treasured carcasses, could be a genuine romantic.”
He leaned over the piano keys, squinting to see the notes on Benjamin’s composition.
“Aha! Like me. He must be a confirmed romantic to the core, or he wouldn’t write such a song.”
He cocked his head to the side, as if he were favoring one ear for listening, his thick, fuzzy eyebrows raised.
When he had finished playing, he rested his hands in his lap, and then he played the melody again.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“It’s lyrical and very sweet,” he said. “If you plan to make him your boyfriend, he’s a good candidate based on this composition.”
“He’s a student of music.”
“The song has the sound of ‘Careless Love,’ don’t you think? Something in the syncopation.”
“I can’t remember ‘Careless Love.’ ”
“ ‘Love, oh love, oh careless love.’ La, la, la, la, la, la, la,” he sang.
“I think his is different,” I said, listening carefully, something I hadn’t done with music before. “More lalala. LA, LA, LAAAA.”
“You’re perfect, Claire, an instinctive musician. LA, LA, LAAAA. I think he must have written the song for you alone.” He zipped his fingers up the scale. “You alone, you alone, are the dream I have known. Beautiful you, you, you.” He stood and bowed. “Thank you everyone. Thank you,” he said, sitting back down beside me. “It’s funny and playful, and he calls it Prelude I.” He slapped his hands together. “Next there’ll be Prelude II.”
“If I write him back in music, yes?” I said with feigned innocence. “Do you think you could compose a response?”
“A response, aha.”
“A song like his to me, in the same spirit. I want him to believe I’m a musician, too.”
“And why does he need to believe you are a musician, Claire?”
“Because I told him I was.”
“You wicked child. Lying at the beginning of a love affair.” Milo shook his head. “My mistake. Always that was my mistake. Lie at the beginning, and then you’re trapped.”
“I wanted him to think we had something important in common.”
“Of course, but you could have pretended something other than music. Music is hard to make up,” he said, moving his fingers lightly up the scale. “And now you want me to write him a song as if you had written it.”
“That is what I want,” I said.
“You’re lucky I’m your uncle.” He took my hand and kissed the fingers. “So I’ll make up a song, immediately, now, before dinner.” He rubbed his own hands together. “Something flirty?”
I nodded.
“Subtle. Just a rustle of the skirt, a click-click-click of high heels on the pavement. Flirty, yes?”
And he began to play, starting, stopping, his head bobbing back and forth until I could hear a melody surfacing in the notes, a kind of dance song.
“Too melancholy,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “It needs to be lighter. Whimsical is what we’re after. Kiss, kiss, kiss. Nothing more than a kiss brushing the lips, yes?”
And he’d change a few notes, play the song again and again.
“Almost perfect,” he said just as Faith arrived from work. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s wonderful,” I said. “Is it wonderful?”
“It’s brilliant,” he said. “I’m a genius.”
After dinner Milo wrote out the song on staff paper and gave it to me.
“This is our secret,” I said. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
“To the future,” he said with a flourish. “And I’ll tell no one.”
“Are you teaching Claire piano?” Bernard asked, coming into the living room after dinner.
“Claire wants to be a composer,” Milo said. “I’m teaching her about composition.”
“I thought you wanted to be a biologist, Claire.”
“I may be changing my mind.”
“I liked it when you were a biologist and your room was full of dead things. I used to go in to look at them, especially the kitten with the white neck.”
“I know you liked the kitten, Bernard.”
“And now that’s over, and you’re going to be a composer.”
“I’m hoping to be a composer,” I said, heading to my room.
In the bedroom I called Victor.
“I’m coming over to your house,” I said. “I have the letter.”
There was a long pause.
“When are you coming?” he asked.
“Now,” I said. “My uncle has written the song for Benjamin, and also I have something I want to give you.”
He gave me directions to his new apartment, but he was vague about our arrangements, as if he didn’t know whether he would be there when I arrived. I could hardly hear him speak.
“You’ll be at home when I get there?”
“I’m not sure. I’m very busy, and we had planned to meet tomorrow.”
“But I want you to see the letter.”
“Then I suppose you can come,” he said. “But carefully.”
“Carefully?”
“I don’t live in the best part of town.”
After I hung up, I pulled out the second drawer of Steven’s bureau, where he kept his shirts. His favorite T-shirts were stacked on one shelf. On the top of the stack was his debate-team tee, dark green, the cotton thin with washings.
FRAYN was written on the back of the shirt and, underneath, CAPTAIN—WALT WHITMAN HIGH SCHOOL DEBATE TEAM.
3
Capitol Hill was barricaded around the Capitol and the Supreme Court, cement barriers between the buildings and the street where lawn had been. Police gathered in groups, stopping cars as they passed, checking the backseats, the trunks, chatting casually.
Victor had moved northeast of the Capitol, on Thirteenth Street between Tennessee and North Carolina, beyond the barriers—922 Thirteenth Street NE, the lower level of a town house, he had told me.
He told me to stop in front of 922, ring the basement apartment, marked B next to the bell, and if he didn�
��t answer right away to call him on his cell phone.
I found Thirteenth Street, but I couldn’t seem to find 922, so I double-parked the car, got out and walked, leaving the engine running across from 916, a row house with lights on the second floor. Number 918 had an outside light, so I was able to see the numbers beside the front door, but 920 was dark, and when I walked up the front steps, the door was boarded shut. There was no 922. The next house, 924, was lit, the television playing so loud I could hear it clearly on the street.
Otherwise the street was empty and silent, not even the sound of cars passing through. I could hear my flip-flops slapping the asphalt.
I should have been afraid, but I was not.
I walked back to 916, where the second-floor light had been on, hoping the occupants knew which one was Victor’s house, but when I knocked, the light upstairs went out.
Maybe I had misheard the address, although certainly he had said Thirteenth Street. The number 922 stuck in my head, but it could have been 942—and just as I was getting into the driver’s seat to call Victor, someone from across the street called out, “GIRL!”
The night was damp and thick, not raining yet, and the humidity dulled the tunnel of light from the streetlamps.
I should have had the sense to drive away, but I had no fear then, not of the streets or this voice on the street or of Victor—I was courting danger, hoping for trouble, testing the limits of fate. After Steven’s death nothing more could harm me.
“Yes?” I replied to the ghost in the dark who had called me “girl.”
“You’re looking in the wrong direction.”
The voice was rolling, southern, male.
I turned the other way, and then I saw him. A man in shadows walking toward me. Young, in sloppy jeans and a jacket, a swagger to his step.
“What’re you doing out here in the middle of the night?”
“I’m meeting a friend.”
He stepped just short of the light from the streetlamp, so I couldn’t see his face.
A Student of Living Things Page 14