Part 8 (2/2)
He made it easy for her, he made it easy by being completely himself, blond, quiet, with a series of identical Bic pens clipped to the pocket of his short-sleeved s.h.i.+rt, always some variety of blue (to match his eyes?), some plain, some with a white stripe, or a yellow. His translations were always on time and always nearly perfect, yet not so perfect as to render them unlovable: there were one or two words crossed out, never an infelicity, but occasionally a slight swerving away from the most desirable nuance, the word's best, truest sense.
And he helped by the way he looked at her, adoring, and yet with a calmness none of the others, particularly the young men, could muster. It was only the young men she gave her attention to; the young women, reminding her too sickeningly or too pathetically of herself, were never candidates for her full regard, with their implied dreams of palhood, confidences exchanged, cuddle-ups under quilts with the inevitable redolence of domestication.
Sometimes he came carrying an instrument in a small black case.
She had heard a cla.s.smate ask which instrument it was and he said, simply, ”Oboe” with the confident person's lack of need for further explanation.
And yet, because, after all she was his teacher and possessed of a knowledge and accomplishment he clearly valued, because she was female and young and small of stature, with a hint of the fas.h.i.+onable in her close-to-the-skull hair, the multiple silver studs in each of her earlobes, she knew she could, if she chose, exercise what all this had given her: the power to intrigue him, John Lavin, a young heteros.e.xual man.
At first, she was undecided as to what her path might be. Would she keep him at arm's length, be hypercritical, hyperdemanding, and in the end order s.e.x from him as her due, as a privilege he ought to think of himself as fortunate in having been asked to exercise? Or should she start this way and gradually soften, suggesting that everyone who had preceded him had been a disappointment and that he, only he, had fulfilled the promise which made her feel less futile, less alone.
She had no desire for him. He was all transparency, there was no place that was fecund or capable of the dense growth that was the only environment in which desire and then satisfaction could, for her, take root. His lightness was repulsive to her. But taking the place of a darkness emanating from him was the sense of stain she would impose from her own body onto his, his blondness, his fairness, his quiet sense of his own worth, his embodiment of the notion of right doing, of having got things straight once and for all and living that way, with no sense of any future need of emendation fueled her purpose. A purpose not s.e.xual in its flavor but which, she knew, could only be worked out on the unused, pure body of this boy. She would approach him and leave him unfresh; his sweet skin would nevermore be lovable in quite the same way. The vessel of dreams would be not only scratched and flawed, but its surface invaded with a growth.
She knew it would be easy, but circ.u.mstances made it easier still. He told her that the next year he was going to Rome, taking a year off to study with his oboe teacher, who had relocated there.
”Well, then,” she said, handing him his final paper, on the shape of the Horatian line, which she had graded A+, ”Your grade's in, I have no more power over you, I'd like you to join me for dinner, so I can wish you bon voyage, and congratulate you for your first-rate work.”
John Lavin blushed. The boy is blus.h.i.+ng, she said to herself, seeing his heart, the red tight muscle in the center of his chest, overflowing with blood from the presence of- what, she wondered- astonishment, embarra.s.sment, desire, shamed desire, grat.i.tude, the apprehension of a pleasure?
At dinner, in the town's best restaurant, which offered oversmall portions of pasta or fish, she insisted that he talk about his family. He was glad to, she could see the pleasure, greater than the one with which he approached his meal, at the prospect of opening up his family's life to her.
”I guess I'm proudest of my mother,” he said. ”She was trained as a musician, but she really gave it up for us. She went back and got a social work degree, she's working in the hospice movement. I mean, she does what I think of as the hardest thing in the world. She's with dying children and their families.
”My father works in insurance, but I don't think that's really where his heart is. But he had all of us to support, and he was great about it.”
Loretta realized she never knew what Richard Lavin had done, she had never cared; he was hardly present, only as Martine's husband, or the children's father; for himself, he was nothing.
”His real love is woodworking, that's what makes him happy. He's set up an amazing workshop in the bas.e.m.e.nt. And my mom's even got him to learn the recorder. I have three younger brothers, and we have a family recorder group. My mother really has to lean on the younger ones to practice. I'm the only one she didn't have to force, but everyone's glad she did it, because we always have our music. I'm the most grateful to her, she gave me my music, what an incredible gift. But we're really a happy family, I think it's because my mother's so incredible. All my brothers feel good about themselves. My brother Luke's into acting, Matt's a great organic gardener, I sometimes think Mark thinks of nothing but soccer, but my mother says I should get off his case. He's the least musical of us all.
”Sometimes I feel bad about my mother's music. She has a lot of talent as a pianist, but it's been so long since she's practiced. Sometime I'd try to get her out of the kitchen to practice, but she'd just laugh at me, and say she'd made her choices, and she knew they were right.”
Loretta saw the kitchen. She would have liked to ask him if the kitchen had changed, but of course she knew she couldn't. She saw the shower that she was afraid to use, and the cot she slept in in the sewing room, and the form in the shape of Martine's body.
Then she saw her mother in the church, and what she imagined was the look on Martine's face, although she'd allowed herself to see nothing when her mother was doing what she did. But it was Martine who came over afterward, when her mother was taken away, came to where she was standing near Our Lady's altar, which her mother had attempted to destroy. She leaned down toward Loretta, putting her arms around her shoulders. And, meeting Martine's eyes, Loretta didn't know what she needed to find there but she knew it had to be exactly the right thing.
What she saw was relief. She saw that Martine was relieved that it was Loretta's mother who had done this thing and not Martine and not anyone connected to her. And Loretta knew that Martine believed that because she'd seen it up close, but not so close that it had touched her, that she'd been spared.
But she had not been. Loretta would see to that now.
He accepted her invitation to come back to the apartment. She told him to sit on the couch while she made coffee.
In the kitchen, she put the coffee into the espresso pot and lit the flame. Then she walked into the living room. He was sitting with his eyes closed, his hands folded at the top of his head. She ran the top of her thumb around the outline of his lips. She allowed him to initiate the kiss, then she took over.
He was overwhelmed by his own ardor, and for a moment the simplicity of what he was so visibly experiencing made her want to send him home. But she thought of his mother's face, and of her mother's- wild, defeated- her mother whom she had not seen again after that day. Because of this she did not give in to her impulse to end the whole thing right there. She made herself go on.
She took his hand and led him, like a child, into the bedroom. He seemed willing to leave everything up to her. She unbuckled his black belt and pulled his jeans down but did not take them off completely. She left his shoes on but kicked off her own. She took off her skirt and panty hose and underpants. She unhooked her bra but did not take it off and she kept her s.h.i.+rt on. She climbed on top of him. It was important to her that she felt she was doing something to him, that nothing was being done to her. It was she who was planting the seed, a seed which, without her, might never have taken root in the pure soil that could have been his understanding of the world. He would know now that it was not a sure thing, not a guarantee that he would remain spared. That the darkness that invaded Loretta's mother and taken her over and made her do shameful things, a darkness stronger than anything that could be fought against, was not something to which he was impervious. And if he knew this was true of himself, he would know it was true of the people connected to him. Perhaps he might think there were people in the world who were impervious, who were safe. But he would understand that they were people very unlike himself, so unlike himself as to be unrecognizable.
As she expected, it was over quickly. So quickly that she ought not have been surprised at the speed and completeness of his transition from abandonment to shamed regret. She put on her skirt, leaving her panty hose in a coiled lump at the side of the bed. He didn't know what to do about covering himself.
”I haven't done this before,” he said.
”Well, you have now,” she said, stepping into her underpants.
She could smell the coffee, which had boiled over; she imagined the mess that had been made. She had stopped thinking of him. She was thinking of how angry it would make her to clean up the coffee which would have spattered all over the white surface of the stove, maybe onto the walls and floor, that the pot would be ruined, that the kitchen would be full of the dark, bitter, ruined smell of burnt coffee for days, perhaps.
”It's time you left,” she said, and he obeyed her.
She was glad of his obedience. It made her feel that she had done her job and done it well.
As she wiped the brown spots from the stove, the walls, the floor, imagining all the time what he might be doing as she scrubbed, she knew that she was feeling something like what others might call happiness.
She thought it was unlikely that he would say anything of what had happened to his mother, and too bad she could say nothing to hers.
I Need to Tell Three Stories.
and to Speak of Love and Death.
I want to tell someone these stories that have come together as one story in my mind. There is no reason to connect these stories. Only one of them happened to me, not in the sense that it was done to me, but I was there when it happened. The other two were told to me by a friend who was dying at the time we spoke, but neither of us knew that he was dying.
The person who told me the stories has been, for forty years, the lover of one of my closest friends. I will call the lover of my friend N. You should know that both of them are men.
We were sitting at the dining table, a long refectory table, in my friend and N.'s London flat. The flat is very beautiful; a place of elegance and order. N. and my friend are close to many artists; on the walls of the living room, or sitting room as they would call it, are paintings and drawings and some sculptures by the artists who are their friends.
N. is famously fastidious. Guests are warned: There are twelve rules for the bathroom alone. The toilet paper must unroll upward and not downwards. The towels must be two inches apart. The showerhead must be replaced exactly. There are more rules, but I do not remember them. I would like you to remember this, this fastidiousness, the lapse from which you will witness when you hear the third of the stories. I believe that there is an ideal of fastidiousness in the world. An ideal of impossible purity in a world that is, in its very essence, impure.
I don't remember why N. was telling me these stories, why he began telling me the story of his friend and her father. We must have been talking about fathers. I don't remember why or what we said. I am very often thinking about my father, but I work hard on not talking about him as much as I would like. In part, I think I can't talk about him because I have written about him so much that I'm afraid all talk about him is not real talk but literature. I do not want to turn my father into literature. So I talk about him rarely, when I'm sure that what I'm saying is something simple, something I have not gone over and over in my mind.
My father died when I was seven.
My father, whose love for me s.h.i.+nes always on the horizon of who I am: pure, glowing, unblemished. The moon of my father's love over the lake surface of my life. Like a romantic painting: the black or purple sky, the black or dark green sea, the wide moon slinging spears of light across the darkness.
It is possible, of course, that I didn't mention my father at all, perhaps N. only mentioned the woman, only told her story because he was about to meet her for supper that night. I don't remember, I really don't. The story is so powerful that it obliterates the lead-up, like a wave that would obliterate a path to the sh.o.r.e. This was the story as he told it: ”My friend loved her father very much. He was a scholar and she herself became a scholar in the very field where he had achieved his eminence. Her father was very handsome and very charming and her mother was beautiful but cold. She did not love her mother and she believed her father did not love her mother. She believed, although they never spoke of it, that her father loved her more than he loved her mother. She was actually quite sure of that.
”Her father died when she was twenty-four. Some months after he died, her mother said she had something that the daughter must see. She took her daughter up to the attic of their house and opened an old trunk. In the trunk there were many notebooks.
” ? found these after your father died,' the mother said. ? think that you should see them.'
”When my friend opened the journals and began reading she discovered that they were the record of explicit p.o.r.nographic fantasies that her father had had about her from the time that she was a very little child. My friend had a nervous breakdown. She has never recovered.”
When N. tells me this, I try to make a heading under which to file this story in my mind. I have several from which to choose: Moments that are never recovered from Causes of rage and hate Unspeakable desires Ugliness that should be hidden or destroyed She thought she had what I have with my father: pure, unblemished love. Safety, clarity, a place as clean and sheltering as my friend's flat. Fastidious.
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