Part 11 (1/2)

They had never married, but they'd been happy together for ten years. Then he'd been killed in a skiing accident, and she had moved away, with their son.

8.

Friendly reader! Though why I begin this chapter with these words I do not know, as I am fairly certain that what I write here will be crumpled up and thrown into the fire before any reader, friendly or otherwise, has been permitted to see it.

Given the voluminous size of my memoirs, and the frequency with which further installments have been issued by the publisher, the reader may perhaps doubt my ability to view any of the words I write as less than indispensable. But I a.s.sure you: as much as there is, there could have been more. I add, remembering and inventing; and I subtract, when in the rereading something strikes me as unworthy: too small, a private memory that would only be diminished, were I to publish it. The story I am about to recount here may be excised later not because it is too sensational but because I may judge that it is not sensational enough.

It concerns a night spent in Mozart's company. I have written elsewhere of the second opera he and I wrote together, and of the disappointing reception it received in Vienna, after its initial triumph in Prague. In Prague they cheered; in Vienna they yawned and caviled. I have written that Mozart responded to the emperor's remarks on the occasion with great poise-that when the emperor said that the Viennese did not seem to have the teeth for this music, Mozart suggested equably that they be given a little more time to chew on it. In truth Mozart said nothing of the kind. I wasn't there to overhear whatever he said to the emperor. I was in the alley behind the opera house, parting company with my dinner. I'm sure that Mozart's actual conversation with the emperor was perfectly polite and innocuous, if perhaps less pithy than the exchange I invented for publication. I am equally sure that it had nothing to do with Mozart's real feelings on that night.

What Mozart said to me, when I told him that the emperor had opined that the Viennese hadn't the teeth for the music, was, ”Then they can eat s.h.i.+t.” We were sitting up late that same night in my lodgings, and we had sent the servant out for punch, once, twice, and a third time. We went over the performance, the glory of the music, the grandeur and buffoonery of the drama. We recalled the delightful time we'd had writing the opera in Prague, with my old friend Casanova looking over our shoulders and providing unnecessary but vivid advice on seduction techniques and the strategies a rake might employ to escape from a tight corner. We dwelt bitterly on the inexplicably chilly reception our beautiful creation had that night received. Vienna's indifference felt like cruelty, mockery.

The conversation began to wander. I told him of the occasion when I was young and first began to write verses, and a boy who was my friend came up behind me as I sat at my desk, s.n.a.t.c.hed away the paper on which I was writing, and read aloud my ode in deep, overwrought, satirical tones. I was angry at my friend-whom I ceased to call by the word-but even more I was humiliated. He had caught me in a moment of tenderness and pa.s.sion, doing something I was proud of and wanted publicized but which was also deeply secret to me, deeply serious in a way that did not require anyone's approval but could ill withstand anyone's mockery.

Mozart, in turn, told me that when he was little more than a boy he had fallen in love with a beautiful young singer who returned his feelings. He left for a period of several years, to travel and give concerts. When he returned, not much richer but as much in love as ever, he went to a gathering at which he knew the young lady would be present. He wore his best red coat, thinking as he donned it how grand it would make him look in her eyes. But while he had been gone, she had become a celebrated singer and had been taken up by a protector who had both enriched and hardened her. At the soiree she ignored him; when he approached she was too haughty to talk to him, but turned instead to her cavalier and made fun of Mozart's red coat.

He laughed a little, after he told me this story; and I laughed too, to remember my despair when my treacherous boyhood friend was dancing around the room, declaiming my verses and waving the paper out of my reach. We drank more punch. We noted with philosophical wisdom that these hurts go deep, but he had loved again and I was still writing. What we did not say was that with these hurts an edge is worn down. It happens out of necessity-it would not be safe to carry a knife that sharp. But something is lost too: that early, perfect, impractical sharpness, which is so beautiful but which cannot survive being seen.

We felt better after that night. The work was performed again, and its greatness was gradually admitted.

One more brief addition, before I end. A story went around that someone had asked Mozart how he intended to refute his detractors.

”I will refute them with new works,” he said.

It was a confident, valiant thing for him to say, everyone thought. I thought so too, when I invented the story; and I still believe it today.

9.

When Elvira dies, in her early sixties of a heart attack, she will leave her house and her money to her brothers, and all the contents of her studio to Rosina.

It will be almost a year before Rosina can make herself go out there, and then only because one of the brothers calls to say the family is trying to get the place ready to sell. She knows by now that grief is mostly endurance, understanding over and over that the person you loved is not coming back. The drive itself smites her: the dull, flat landscape around the highway, the orchards, the two falling-down farmhouses with trees growing in the middle of them, the village-pa.s.sing these things that used to mean she was getting closer to Elvira, all the landmarks, not remembered for so long but now seen again and remembered perfectly.

She cries in the car, and dreads driving up to the house itself; but by the time she arrives she is calmer. No one is there. It's a strange, sultry afternoon in August: the sky a molten pewter, and the light is white, fierce, burning. The silence, too, is immense. She walks through the high gra.s.s-nothing tragic here, it was that way when Elvira was alive; she never cared about cutting it-to the barn and opens the padlock with the key that came in the mail from Elvira's lawyer.

She knows the inside of Elvira's house by heart. The smoke-blackened wall above the living room fireplace, the kitchen with its sagging cupboard doors, the toppling piles of frayed towels in the linen closet, and the fresh smell of the sheets on the small bed in the guest room and on Elvira's wide bed, where they sometimes spent nights talking in the darkness until they both fell asleep. Rosina was never sure what that meant to Elvira, whose feelings for her might have had a romantic piece. If it was true, she was pretty sure there hadn't been any suffering involved, though she also knew that believing this was easier than admitting the possibility of anything different.

Yet with all the time she spent in the house, she's been in the studio only once, early in the friends.h.i.+p. When she flips on the lights that August afternoon, she will see a vast, whitewashed, raftered s.p.a.ce, crammed with stuff, neither neat nor messy, just occupied-looking. This will choke her again, sting her eyes. It looks just like what it is: a workroom someone walked out of one afternoon, expecting to be back the next morning. Magazines lying open, pens uncapped, a mug with a tea bag trailing out of it, an address book, a crumpled tissue. There is a painting on the easel, and next to it a table jumbled with paints. Crusted brushes in a crusted gla.s.s. The canvas is a small one, about seven inches square: a woman's face. A direct gaze, hair pulled back but with pieces coming loose around the face, a funny asymmetrical half smile, lips slightly parted. Impossible to tell her age: Elvira hadn't painted her skin yet. Rosina will be surprised to find this picture. She had thought, from the way Elvira had told her the story of that disastrous show, that she'd stopped doing these paintings of women.

But what she finds next surprises her even more. Dozens of these small portraits, hundreds of them, stacked in the plywood shelving that fills the old horse stalls. The big paintings of buildings are here, but most of what's here are these women, painted steadily and in utter privacy, apparently for years.

So now there will be years of trying to get these pictures shown. Arranging to have them photographed. Cataloging them. Creating a binder. Writing a description of the show. Naming it: in the end Rosina decides on ”1172 Women,” which, astonis.h.i.+ngly, is how many there are, and she feels strongly that they all need to be seen together, at least to begin with. What was wrong with Elvira's earlier show, she decides-aside from the fact that the critic was an a.s.shole-was that there weren't enough pictures shown. The paintings are individually lovely; but it's the quant.i.ty that is crazily beautiful, the dogged, obsessive, insatiable, repet.i.tive power of face after face after face.

n.o.body wants it. n.o.body has room for it. Finally there's a happy, or happy enough, ending. A woman Rosina sits next to at an opera fund-raising lunch mentions that she has a friend who directs a museum at a college in Texas. Rosina mentions the pictures, the woman offers an introduction to her friend, and eventually the paintings travel (Rosina charters the plane), are shown, are reviewed and praised. Then they travel back, and Rosina puts them into storage. She will keep trying to find them a permanent home.

But before any of that happens, Elvira's house will be sold and the studio emptied. There are a few boxes piled against one wall: books, old sketchbooks, Christmas ornaments. And one box-just a regular brown cardboard box like the others, but this one taped shut-with a piece of paper taped on top of it. A note: Rosina-This is the box I was talking about that night at the Cristinos' dinner party. E.

Rosina will take this box home with her (the rest go into storage for now), and will consider for some weeks what to do with it. She will think of opening it. She will think of keeping it and never opening it. She will not remember Elvira's exact words, but she knows it was something about how the box needed to take its chances, that it needed to go to someone who would do something unforeseen with it. She will remember Elvira talking about happiness, about the times of her life when she was most happy.

Rosina will take a piece of paper and think about what to write on it. Voi che sapete. Voi sapete.

Then she'll decide the h.e.l.l with it, and she will send the box, with no note, off to what seemed to be the latest in the long string of addresses Elvira had written down for Johnny.

The News from Spain.

Some of this is fiction, and some isn't.

At the age of almost sixty, I fell in love with a man who wasn't my husband. And I loved my husband very much. We were in a long, happy marriage, had raised three children, still wanted each other (we would leave work and meet at home sometimes, at lunch). Enough context-more would begin to sound self-righteous. I fell in love with someone else.

Nothing happened. I was married; he was married. We worked together. I could say that we were lawyers, or doctors who shared a suite of offices, or that we had adjacent chairs in the string section of an orchestra, or that he was a painter and I ran the gallery, or that I was the painter. But any of that would be an invention, and that's not the kind of fiction I'm interested in. What I will say is that we worked together closely for many years, and the work was something that mattered to both of us. It wasn't as if I got a crush on my squash partner, and could then prudently decide to play squash less often or find a different person to play with. Each of us had strong reasons to stay there, to keep seeing each other, even after our feelings-mine, anyway; I was never quite sure how he felt-made themselves known.

Such coy, evasive, pa.s.sive, pseudo-Victorian syntax! ”Made themselves known”-as if these feelings had their own lives apart from us, their own dilemmas about how to behave. Should they continue to shuffle around quietly, wearing slippers, in order not to disturb us; or should they stand in the doorway and clear their throats until we had to look up and acknowledge their presence?

My feelings were quiet for a long time. I didn't even know they were there. There was no instant attraction. For several years I liked this man, admired him, respected him, trusted him. He paid attention to whatever he was doing, and he was kind, but rigorous too. I liked where his tolerances and intolerances fell. I thought his jokes were funny.

Then I realized I had started to look at the floor whenever there was a silence between us; I had trouble looking directly at him. I imagined us cooking together: an excellent omelet. I imagined him kissing me; imagined us in bed. When I went to a concert or a museum, I imagined running into him, or going there with him, listening to his smart comments-imagining this while in reality I was there with my husband, listening to his smart comments.

Was I alone in feeling as I did? This, always, was the question. If the man, my colleague, had given me any of the usual small signals of seduction-sizzly glances, accidental brus.h.i.+ngs against-I would have recoiled, and the attraction would have ended right then. But he was correct. Warm, though. Very warm. The way he looked at me, some things he said. I was going away alone on a trip, and he said, not once but twice, ”I wish I could go with you.” And there were other things, occasional remarks that lit me up and made me wonder.

My feelings-let's hold on to this idea of them as shuffling Victorians, let's make them servants, an entire uniformed household staff-were fresh, raw, perpetually startled. They weren't sensible. But they behaved themselves for a while. They were frank, earthy even, among themselves; but they were discreet. They kept their mouths shut and their faces neutral. They never did anything to embarra.s.s me or give me away. They had been trained; as long as they stayed in their own part of the house and I paid their wages-a ridiculously small sum, but they didn't know any better, so I could get away with it-we did well enough together. They were invisible, I wasn't even required to know their names. I underestimated their docility and overestimated my own power, and, like all fables about arrogance, this one turned menacing.

My feelings started to become unruly. Maybe they read something that stirred them up (a revolutionary pamphlet, handed to them on a street corner as they strolled past on their afternoon out), or maybe they just grumbled a lot and egged one another on, nursing the teapot in the servants' dining room. They came to me and said, in a tone that was not insolent but not entirely respectful either, that they wanted more.

You will be noticing, about now, that these servants are something of a threat not only to my peace of mind but to this story. Dangerous as prospective household mutineers, they are more dangerous as a metaphor. Here, too, they want to take over. Now that they've intruded, it's tempting to stay with them, this charming, scoundrelly bunch of domestic malcontents, to name them and give them rooms in the attic and possessions and mothers and sweethearts. I could keep writing about them, and allow myself to be distracted-rescued-from the hard thing I meant to write about. So I am ordering them back to the kitchen. They shuffle down the corridor and through the baize door, obedient for now, but there may be trouble later. There's trouble already. I want them shut away but I heard what they said: they wanted more.

I needed to tell the man how I felt about him. I needed it for a long time-months-without doing anything about it. But then I couldn't stand not to anymore. I know: bad idea. Naming something makes it real, unignorable, gives it power. (So, too, does refusing to name something. I don't want to give this man a fictional name-Pete, Edward, and see? He is instantly diminished-so I'll just call him A. It shrinks him a little, but he's mostly intact, and it's better than the self-importantly secretive and clumsy ”this man.”) I needed to tell A how I felt. We were sitting together in his office one afternoon, working, with the door shut. I told him that I loved him.

He looked at me.

What had I wanted? Not for him to get up and cross the room and take me in his arms. But to see things in his face. Joy. Love that matched mine. Relief that I'd said it out loud for both of us.

But what I saw in his face was nothing. Blankness-as when you mistakenly think you recognize someone on the street and you smile and wave and the person looks back at you: Huh?

The silence went on. We stared at each other. Finally I said I was sorry.

”No, no, no, no,” he said. His face had unfrozen. There was an expression on it: his forehead was creased; he looked troubled, dismayed. ”Please don't.”

Don't what-love you? Say it aloud? Apologize? It was too late; I had already done all three. And the excruciating politeness of that ”please”! We continued to sit there.

”I'm sorry,” I said again; and he said again-although this time at least he omitted the courtesy-”Don't.”

Somehow I got out of there. I had work to do, he had work to do. My daughter was expecting her first baby and I was taking her shopping, to some store out by the malls. She was much bigger than she'd been when I'd seen her last. Her hem was uneven: high in the front and drooping in the back. She was wearing low, old shoes. I wanted to hug her, for that hem and those shoes. We looked at the crib she'd seen before and thought she liked, and then we walked up and down several other rows of cribs. ”I hate them all,” she said. She looked at me and she was starting to cry. ”Why do they make this stuff so ugly?”