Remorseful. The word, beautiful, heavy, cushioned, and enveloping and therefore different in its texture from everything in the room, consoled Veronica for a minute. The word stopped her tears. But it was only the sound of it that did that. The sound was purplish, or no, dark blue; it moved slowly like a royal robe. But the meaning was sharp; it pressed the surface of her skin and settled its blade in the organs of her stomach. She wanted to go to the bathroom. But she was afraid to move.
Remorseful.
Mrs. Bordereau was looking straight ahead of her, not at Veronica who sat a little to the left of where her gaze stopped. Mrs. Bordereau knew things about her. She understood that there were things wrong with Veronica and, looking at her, with her white hair in a net, and her gla.s.ses, Veronica knew she wasn"t a person who spoke if she believed there was a chance she might be wrong.
Remorseful. It was a kind of being sorry. Veronica was very sorry. She wanted to tell Mrs. Bordereau everything she was sorry about. I"m sorry, I"m sorry, she wanted to say. I wish I was not the person who I am. I"m sorry I see things and I make up stories to myself. I"m sorry I make my father angry and my mother tired, that I stole her place with my grandmother and that my grandmother loves me too much because she thinks I"m something that I"m not. I"m sorry I saw Philippe and Aunt Maddie and the dots of blood. I am remorseful and I will change my ways. I will not see too much and I will not make up stories. I will not take a place that is not mine; I will not see the things I am not meant to see, and if I see them I will tell myself that I have not.
The clock ticked and the rays of light grew shorter on the wooden floor. Veronica believed that everybody had forgotten where she was, that they would not remember until the thing that was happening to Aunt Maddie was over. She did not know how long she had to sit across from Mrs. Bordereau, but she knew she couldn"t move because Mrs. Bordereau knew everything and she must prove to her that she had understood, she was remorseful, but she would not let people know that she was, because that was the sort of thing you kept a secret, that other people shouldn"t know.
Mrs. Bordereau"s eyes had closed. She was asleep but her hands were still folded in front of her. Veronica believed that both of them could stay there forever. It was quite possible that n.o.body would come for her. She could not for the life of her imagine what the right thing was to do.
When the bell rang downstairs, the force of it frightened her. It was sharp, it was a sound of iron. Mrs. Bordereau opened her eyes. She got up and walked to the door. Veronica stayed still. She knew it would be Delia. Her grandmother would tell her something, she did not know what, but she knew it would change her life. But that was wrong. The change had happened. It was already much too late.
Eleanor"s Music.
"Do be sure, dearie, that you get the plain yogurt for your father. I brought home vanilla by mistake last week and he was ready to call out the constabulary."
"Entendu," Eleanor called back, straightening her collar in front of the spotted mirror in the hall. How like her mother to use the phrase "call out the constabulary." It was the kind of charming phrase that was all too rare in this overwhelmingly crude world; soon that kind of charm, that kind of light playfulness, would be lost entirely.
How she loved her mother! Still perfectly beautiful at eighty-six. The only concession she"d made to her age was a pair of hearing aids. "My ears," she called them. Everything her mother touched she touched carefully, and left a little smoother, a little finer for her touch. Everything about her mother reminded Eleanor of walking through a glade, from the chestnut rinse that tinted what would be silver hair, to the shadings of her clothes. Each garment some variety of leaf tone: the light green of spring with an underhint of yellow, the dark of full summer, occasionally a detail of bright autumn: an orange scarf, a red enamel brooch. Wool in winter, cotton in summer: never an artificial fiber next to her skin. What her mother didn"t understand, she often said, was a kind of laziness that in the name of convenience in the end made more work and deprived one of the small but real joys. The smell of a warm iron against damp cloth, the comfort of something that was once alive against your body. She was a great believer in not removing yourself from the kind of labor she considered natural. She wouldn"t own a Cuisinart or have a credit card; she liked, she said, chopping vegetables, and when she paid for something she wanted to feel, on the tips of her fingers, on the palms of her hands, the cost.
Some people might consider these things crotchets or affectations, but Eleanor considered them an entirely admirable a.s.sertion of her mother"s individuality. As she considered her father"s refusal to step outside their Park Avenue apartment without a jacket and tie, regardless of the heat of the day or the informality of occasion. And, she supposed, it might be said that his continuing to smoke a pipe when there was clear evidence that it was hazardous to his health could be interpreted as a stubborn self-indulgence. But she always liked hearing him say to a born-again nonsmoker, "At my age I have the right to not listen to a bunch of d.a.m.n fools who want to tell me I can live forever."
No, they were marvelous, her parents. She adored them, as she adored the apartment on Park Avenue where the three of them had lived since Eleanor was three. Except for the years she"d been married to Billy. Then she had lived downtown.
She had been shattered when Billy had told her he was leaving but it had just seemed natural to let him keep the apartment and for her to move back in with her parents, "until you"re back on your beam," as her father said. It was eighteen years later, and she"d never moved out.
She knew that many people thought it odd, to say nothing of unhealthy, for her to be living with her parents at the age of fifty-one. "Health," said her father, "is the new orthodoxy. The new criterion by which we are judged of the fold or outside it. In the old days, they just tested people by trying to drown them, and if they survived they were drowned because it was proof they were of the devil"s party. But that"s too good for the health nags."
So she didn"t listen any longer to the whispers she might once have overheard: that there was something wrong with her going on living with her parents. She had long ago given up that last residue of her embarra.s.sment, which at one time, like a pile of dried leaves, could be set adrift by the slightest wind, and would flutter inside her, cause her to place her hand, splayed-out and flat, against her chest. Something had damped the pile, she liked to think of it as a gentle, constant, nourishing rain. The pile of leaves never flared up now. No, she never thought of it at all.
She enjoyed her life. She liked her job, teaching music at the Watson School, directing the chorus and the a cappella singers. She knew that the girls found her a little old-fashioned, a little stiff, but she believed that they were secretly pleased to have in her a sign of unchangeable standards; she allowed them to tease her, occasionally, but would not give in to their demands to include one rock-and-roll song at the Christmas concert, and she refused to disband the bell ringers, although it was, each year, increasingly difficult to find candidates. She deliberately stopped the repertory of the chorus at Victor Herbert, although one year she had allowed a Johnny Mercer song- "Dream, when you"re feeling blue, dream and they might come true." She"d been surprised that, to the girls, that song was from the same out-of-memory basket as Purcell or Liszt- it had happened before they were born and was therefore apart from them. But that was her job: to instill in them, gracefully she hoped, a sense of the value of tradition, of the beauty of the past. If that meant she wasn"t one of the most popular teachers, well, she had long ago learned to live with that. She had her votaries, one or two a year: never the most popular girls and, increasingly, not the most talented.
But she had something that the other teachers didn"t have: she had a professional life. She was a member of the chorus of the Knickerbocker Opera Company, a small company that had three performances a year: Amahl and the Night Visitors at Christmas, a Gilbert and Sullivan in late February, and in early May one of the operas in the common repertory- Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor. She wasn"t paid much, but she was paid. She felt this distinguished her, and she thought of the words "distinguished" and "distinction." Being in the company allowed her to attach both words to herself. She was not an amateur, like many of her friends whose relationship to the arts was a species of volunteerism.
Her friends were dear to her, essential, old friends, some from when she was a student at Watson herself, some from Bryn Mawr, newer friends, one young colleague who was struggling with the fledgling string quartet, others from her book group. She was proud that her friends ranged in age from her parents" compatriots to a twenty-five-year-old ex-student, now an investment banker who sang in a Renaissance quintet and traced her devotion to music straight to Eleanor.
And there was Billy. People thought it was peculiar that she should be such close friends with her ex-husband, as they thought it was peculiar that she lived with her parents. But she was proud of that as well: she considered the shape of her life not peculiar, but original; she lived as she liked; real courage, she believed, was doing what you believed in, however it appeared.
Of course, if it had been up to her, she and Billy would never have split. And some people might find that peculiar too, that she would have been willing to go on with a marriage that had no physical side to it- or no, that wasn"t right, because many of the pleasures she and Billy enjoyed were physical, winter skiing in Colorado, swimming in Maine in summer, ballroom dancing in their cla.s.s on the West Side. She thought it was such a narrow understanding, to think that in a relationship between man and woman, "physical" and "s.e.xual" were precise synonyms. She firmly believed that they were not.
And she didn"t believe that her relationship with Billy, even now, was devoid of a s.e.xual component. She knew he appreciated her as a woman, and that his appreciation was that of a man. He had come to her, weeping, confessing that his problems in bed with her had nothing to do with her, or with him for that matter: it was just the way he was; he had fallen in love with Paul, and realized for the first time the way he had always been, the way he had always been made, what he had been afraid of, had repressed, but could no longer. Because love had come his way.
"Love," she had said, as if she"d just picked up, between two fingers, an iridescent, slightly putrefying thing. "And what do you call what we have for each other, devotion, loyalty, shared interests, shared values, joy in each other"s company, what do you call that if not love?"
She didn"t say, "Don"t you know that I would die for you," because although she meant it, she didn"t want to mean it, and certainly, she would never say it. It sounded too operatic. Opera was the center of both their lives, she as a singer, he as an accompanist, but she had no interest in living at the intense, excessive temperatures opera suggested.
He had knelt before her (a gesture that was far too operatic for her tastes) and took her hands. "Of course I love you, Eleanor. I will always love you. You are my dearest friend, and always will be. But this is of another order."
"Get up, Billy," she said. "You must do what you think you must. I"ll stay with Ma and Pa until you come to a decision."
She was sure he"d come around, come to his senses, show up with flowers, take her to an expensive dinner, where they would eat luxuriously, drink an extravagant wine, and not mention what she thought of as "his little lapse." But no, it didn"t happen; he moved in with Paul, or rather Paul moved in with him, and she moved in with her parents. It seemed sensible; she had the option of moving in with her parents and he had no other way of staying in New York. He taught music at St. Anselm"s, the boys" school that was the brother school to Watson. And Paul was a conductor. He led the Knickerbockers; Eleanor had never begrudged his talent. That paid very little, though, and he survived by doing legal proofreading. He"d never, as far as Eleanor could see, been able to support himself in any reasonable way. So it was better that Billy kept the apartment; anything else would have been vindictive. And above all, she didn"t want a vindictive parting.
That had been eighteen years ago; she had been thirty-three. She and Billy had been married for nine years. A marriage blanc. That was a nicer way of putting it than using the word "unconsummated." On their wedding night, he"d said he just wasn"t ready, and he had never been ready, and she had never felt free to bring it up. She"d thought they were happy, and she didn"t miss what she"d never known. He was affectionate; they shared a bed, and held each other, sometimes, in the mornings. She found him beautiful; sometimes she was moved to weep at the sight of his back when he was shaving. But she would never tell anyone the truth of her marriage, and she would never speak to Billy about it: she couldn"t see the point.
They still had lunch together every sixth Sunday, and of course they saw each other at the Knickerbocker Opera, where she was in the chorus and he was rehearsal pianist. They had never, officially, divorced.
The chive-colored scarf that she tied around her neck was a present from him on her last birthday. Really, Billy was wonderful at knowing what would suit her; his gifts were always exactly right. If she bought a new pair of shoes, he noticed, and was complimentary; he would take her hand and tell her that she still had the alabaster hands of a Canova statue.
If she changed the shade of her lipstick he"d comment, disappointed. He said, "Eleanor, my love, you must promise me that no matter what, you will be the one I can count on not to change in the slightest bit."
She had been glad to promise. And, looking in the mirror, she could be satisfied with her looks. With her look.
"Eleanor Harkness has a kind of timeless elegance." She had never actually heard anyone say that about her, but she imagined it was the kind of thing that people thought.
She believed- she hoped it wasn"t vanity- that she was fortunate in her looks, that she still had the right to think of herself as a good-looking woman. Good-looking in a way that brought with it neither danger nor corrupting adulation. "Neither Madonna nor wh.o.r.e," she"d said to herself once, of herself, feeling a thrill in the harshness of the sharp words, uttered in silence, resonant only to her own ears. She believed she had the kind of features she would have chosen for herself: small, neatly made, her eyes gray-green, a modest, well-cut nose, a moderate mouth with a generous enough underlip. "A witty mouth," Billy had said once, and she had treasured that.
She patted her hair one last time in front of the mirror. She was particularly fond of her hair- beginning to gray now, but still arranging itself, when she took it out of its pins, in vibrant, abundant waves. But she never let it down in public: she clasped it to the back of her head with bone or tortoisesh.e.l.l or amber clips and pins. No one saw her hair as she saw it as she sat in front of the dressing table that had been her grandmother"s: carved cherry, with cl.u.s.ters of oak leaves and acorns forming an arch across the top. It was a secret thrill: to pull the last bone pin out of her hair and watch it fall down her back. Occasionally, she might have wished to do that for a man, that set piece of ancient feminine allure, but she had come to understand that what she would really have liked would be to do it not in a bedroom, but on a stage.
If she had any disappointment in her life, it was that her music had not come to more. But she had refused to dwell on it. As her mother always said, "It does no good to sit in the damp dark smelly places of the mind. It only leads to rot." But sometimes she allowed herself to wish she had performed more, that she could give recitals of lieder and songs of the French composers she so loved, Debussy, Faure, Ravel. It had been ten years since she"d had a recital; when her beloved teacher died, she had taken it as a sign and didn"t look for a replacement. She could never have borne the kind of singer"s life that required so much pushing and striving. She was pleased to think of herself walking lightly, gracefully, into a s.p.a.ce that seemed provided for her. Not the star of the company, but a member of the chorus. That was pleasing, that was satisfying. She was a fortunate woman. She knew it wasn"t vanity that shaped this self-a.s.sessment. It was, rather, a habit of mind she had inherited from her parents. She was certain that acknowledging such an inheritance could never be thought a form of pride.
It was a perfect autumn morning, and she took pleasure not only in the weather but also in her being perfectly dressed for it. She knew that her panty hose were not silk, but they felt silky, nearly the color of her flesh, but a shade or so lighter. And riding lightly over them, the satin lining, a lighter shade of chive than the fine wool of her skirt itself and the scarf Billy had given her. Her blouse, of course, was silk; at first glance it seemed gray, but looked at more closely, examined for a while, it was obvious that it had been dipped in a bath of bluish green. A shade to complement both her eyes and the loden of her cape, in its turn set off by Billy"s scarf. The sun made the mica flecks in the pavement sparkle, she wanted to say, like diamonds; she was pleased by the sounds the heels of her Ferragamo oxfords made- so comfortable for walking but, because they were Italian, not earnest looking. The sky was slate blue and the yellow maples flashed against it as if they"d been scooped out of a plane of light the slate concealed and shielded. A perfect day to walk across Central Park, this Sat.u.r.day, October seventeenth. Children played with large b.a.l.l.s in bright primary colors; rash boys skated dangerously: girls, their dress another kind of danger, sauntered, smoking, tipping back their soda cans for the last sweet drops.
She knew that Fairway would be crowded, but even the crowding was, today, enjoyable. She imagined a.s.signations at the cheese counter- surely the blonde thirty-year-old and the bearded ginger-haired fellow holding a green bicycle helmet would meet up once again for drinks, for dinner, maybe- who knew- for life. The cheese man gave out samples, try this try this, this Brie is from Belgium, don"t be prejudiced, it"s cheap but good, and this Asiago- he kissed his fingers to his reddish lips- I envy you if you"re trying it for the first time.
She bowed her head when he offered her a piece as if she were a knight taking upon herself the tribute of a king. Yes, half a pound, she said, and half a pound of Port Salut. She bought three kinds of dried bean- pinto, fava, cannellini, modest and sensible as old jewels in their barrels. Her mother was planning to make a hearty soup. She bagged two pounds of McIntosh apples with the smell of autumn on them. Where, she wondered, did they grow? Into her cart she carefully placed endive, arugula, free-range eggs. The yogurt, plain, that her mother had told her to be sure of. She would take a cab home. What she had bought would be too much to carry through the park.
She put all the food away, keeping out for her lunch and mother"s the Port Salut and two of the largest apples.
"Mustn"t linger. Rehearsal," she said, wiping her lips with the flax-colored napkin her mother had laid out. She brushed her teeth, put on some lipstick, and made her way downtown.
The Knickerbocker Opera Company rehea.r.s.ed in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Holy Paraclete Episcopal Church on Thirty-second Street and Madison Avenue. Eleanor took the Lexington Avenue bus downtown, glad to find one of the single seats vacant; she preferred not having to share a seat, which so often meant either having to shift to let the inside person out or stepping over the person on the aisle. She was looking forward to having a cup of tea with Billy before rehearsal, tea with lemon to keep her voice clear. He would order, as he always did, a c.o.ke, a habit she found boyishly endearing in so sophisticated and cultivated a man.
She was the first to arrive. She saw him frown, as he always did when he walked into a restaurant, as if he were at once displeased to be in the room at all and concerned that the person he was meant to meet might never arrive.
She hadn"t seen him since the tenth of June, their wedding anniversary: he hadn"t, of course, forgotten. He and Paul had spent the summer at the house in Maine that had been his parents", where he and Eleanor had spent their summers when they were married. She had often wished that Paul would betake himself to an artist"s colony- preferably in Europe- one summer and that Billy would invite her to Maine once again. It had never happened; each year she would listen to Billy"s groans about what had fallen off or broken down at "the old manse." It was a rare instance of insensitivity on his part not to imagine that such a recitation might be painful for her. She spent her summers, as she had as a child, in her parents" cottage on Cape Cod.
He looked young and fit and tan in gray wool trousers, oxford shirt, blue blazer. There were lines around his eyes, but they suited him, made him look less provisional, less the eternal boy. She thought how much better-looking a couple she and he made than he and Paul. Paul had put on weight, and the look that was, in his youth, romantic and bohemian had become, in middle age, merely slovenly. She was sure that this change must be a grief to Billy, who cared so very much about the look of things.
"How"s every little thing, old girl," he said, kissing her cheek.
"Eight as rain, old boy."
"I see you kept yourself out of the Wellfleet sun. No chance of your marring your alabaster perfection to catch a few rays."
"I think we all need to be careful about skin cancer with the ozone layer thin as it is. Not that Pa would think of sunblock."
"How are the terrible two?"
"Very well indeed: they send their love."
"Dearest, I want you to be the first to know. Paul will make the announcement. Instead of doing Iolanthe this spring, we"ve commissioned a new work."
Eleanor"s heart sank. She had little taste for contemporary music and Billy knew it. She wiped the corner of her mouth.
"It"s a very fine piece by a young composer, a protege of Paul"s. The commission is a great thing for him."
She didn"t want to ask where the money came from to pay this protege. Instead she said, "What a fine thing for Paul to have done."
"Yes," Billy said, "I think it is. He"s quite young, this fellow, twenty-four, but he has an extraordinary gift, he can write lyrically and satirically at the same time. A bite, but an aftertaste of sweetness. This piece is called The Dream of Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol relives the highlights of his life in the moments before his death."
"Andy Warhol?" she said, not even trying to conceal her shock. "An opera about Andy Warhol? Hardly a suitable subject, I"d have thought."
Billy"s face reddened. He wiped his mouth, very much as she had just done, with the white cloth napkin.
"Try and keep an open mind, there"s a good girl. We"ll be pa.s.sing out the score today. Must dash."
He left her to pay the check, which was, she thought, most unlike him.
She was never sure how many of the Knickerbockers knew that she and Billy had been married. She never wanted to bring it up herself, because she wasn"t certain if she wanted it known or not. Billy was universally loved by all the singers for his kindness and admired for the suppleness and flexibility of his accompaniment, so l.u.s.ter would attach to her if it were known that she had been his wife. On the other hand, everyone knew that he and Paul were partners, so humiliation would attach to her, inevitably, as a woman who had been left. But to be left for a man was not the same- by a long chalk, she had always told herself- as being left for another woman. And she found it hard to determine which would attach to her more securely: l.u.s.ter or humiliation. So she had held herself back from the other people in the chorus; after twenty-five years of being a member, there was not one of them she could call a friend. Even those she had thought of as close acquaintances had left the chorus, because they had reached a certain age, the age at which their voices weren"t up to certain musical demands. She was one of the older members now- but that was all right, she liked to think that she maintained a nice balance: she kept her reserve but she was friendly to everyone. If, occasionally, she picked up a whiff of resentment, she reminded herself that musical people were temperamental and self-centered, and that it had nothing to do with her.
She was asking Lily Streicher, who had been to Tuscany, how her summer was, when Paul walked in, dressed in navy pants, a yellow shirt (untucked, Eleanor noted, to hide his belly), and black loafers that made his feet look like thick fish, steaming in a too narrow pan, on the verge of spilling over the sides. The look of his feet in their ill-fitting shoes made her own feet feel hot; she wiggled them slightly in her Ferragamos.
He was carrying a stack of scores and he laid them dramatically on the top of the piano.
"Something exciting, boys and girls. Papa has quite a special treat."
There was a stir among the singers; Eleanor felt complacent in her secret knowledge.
"I"ve commissioned an opera for us. By the next genius among us; we"ve stolen a march on the MacArthurs. I"ll pa.s.s out the score and Billy will play some bits for you. It"s called The Dream of Andy Warhol. I"ll allow the composer to fill you in. It"s my honor to introduce him. Ladies and gentlemen: Desmond Marx."
Certainly, there wasn"t a gasp when the young man walked through the door, but there was something like it in the feeling that spread through the air. It was as if a Bronzino had walked in, Eleanor thought, one of those arrogant courtiers in velvet and satin with the full lower lip and dissolute, commanding stare. Desmond Marx was beautiful: there was power in his beauty, and he knew it. His black jeans were creased perfectly, as if they"d just been pressed; his shirt, a bluish violet open at the neck, spread itself lightly, easily, over his muscular torso; he wore loafers- the same loafers Paul was wearing, but without socks, and his feet were thin and shapely in the loafers whereas Paul"s looked overstuffed.
"Hi," he said, looking challengingly at the chorus. "Well, as Paul told you, my opera is called The Dream of Andy Warhol and I know perfectly well it"s a lot different from the kind of thing you do. Maybe a little bit shocking for you. But I think Warhol was a great visionary, the person who had the clearest vision of his time and ours, its violence, its strangeness, and this is my vision of his vision. I like to think it brings out the pathos and the grandeur of this artist. And I look forward to your responses."
"Billy, if you would," said Paul.
Billy and Paul looked at each other, Eleanor thought, like a pair of cats that had swallowed the cream. She wondered where this Desmond Marx was living; Billy had said he was staying with them. It was, as she very well knew, a one-bedroom apartment. She wondered if they had recently got around to buying a foldout couch.
Eleanor didn"t know if everyone feared, as she did, the harsh, atonal sound so typical of contemporary music. But Billy was right; Desmond Marx had a lyric touch, and the melodies were sweet and haunting.
"Turn to the first scene in the Factory, the second place where the chorus comes in," Paul said.
There was the sound of turning pages. Someone giggled. Eleanor didn"t know why at first, and then her eye fell on the second page of the section that the chorus was meant to sing. She took her gla.s.ses off and put them on again. Surely she couldn"t be reading what she thought she saw.
"f.u.c.k me, suck me f.u.c.k me suck me." The words were peppered all over the page like a noxious mildew.
Someone else giggled. One of the tenors coughed.
"Anyone have a problem?" Paul said, challengingly.
Did she imagine it or was everyone looking at her? She"d been in the chorus longer than any of the others, except Randy Brixton, the tenor who had coughed. And nothing would make Randy Brixton speak up; he was pathologically disinclined to conflict. He would give way if anyone so much as asked him anything, so much as indicated he might have to a.s.sert himself. Randy would be no help. She looked around at everybody in the chorus, trying, in her teacherly way, to make eye contact. But no one would look up from the score.
"I don"t know whether I have a problem, which would suggest something stemming from a personal set of circ.u.mstances, but I believe there"s a problem with the Knickerbocker chorus, taking into consideration our history and the nature of our audience, singing words like these."
"Anyone else like to respond to this outburst?" Paul said. She had always known he disliked her, but he had made a point of being coldly correct with her. She tried to get Billy"s eye. Surely Billy would back her up. But Billy had his eye on the score; he was turning pages, as though he were looking for something real.
"I"d hardly call it an outburst, Paul. You asked for response. I"d a.s.sumed it was a question asked in good faith."
It was as if a knife had been thrown down on the ground between them. Mumblety-peg, she thought, remembering a game she"d played in her childhood. One of those words that didn"t sound like what it was. Which was certainly not the case with the ones on the page she was holding.
Silence shimmered in the air like an iron ring. Paul was indicating by his particular silence- a silence that was separate from the others as if it had been traced with a chalk line- that what she had just said wasn"t worthy of a reply. And that was, she felt, the most insulting thing that he could do. The pusillanimity of her fellow choristers appalled her. She felt it was time to take a dramatic stand; that, she believed, would put some spine into some of them at least.
"I cannot bring myself to use such language," Eleanor said.
"You can"t bring yourself. Then I suppose we"ll have to do without you. But let me make this clear: you will sing in this opera, or you will not sing with us at all. This season or any other."
"You can"t do that."
"Oh yes, my dear, I"m the director and I can. And many, I"m sure, would support me in saying that it"s a bit overdue. You might have made a graceful exit as many of your cohort have, but you"ve outstayed your welcome. Your taste is as tired as your voice. It"s time to leave now, Eleanor. Pick up your toys and go."
She waited a few seconds, certain that someone would come to her defense. But no one raised eyes from the score or the ground at their feet. And Billy was looking into s.p.a.ce, as if she had already left the room and he was waiting for the next thing that would happen.
She understood that there were no words that would do anything but weaken her position. She made her way to the front of the chorus- she was, unfortunately, in the third row- and heard her heels making a sharp clack-clack on the gray linoleum floor.
She closed the door and flung her cape around her shoulders, pleased at the military suggestions of the gesture. She was afraid her face must be bright red: heat climbed up it as she thought of Paul"s crude words, his vulgar insults. She was certain that Billy would be behind her in a moment; certainly, even if he didn"t stand up to Paul, he wouldn"t allow her to make her way home like this, entirely unsupported.
But as she climbed the last stair, opened the heavy door, and found herself shocked at the brightness of the day, she began to realize that Billy was not going to follow. Why had it been so difficult for her to admit, always, that he had always been a coward? And why had she tried for so long to deny what Paul was, what he had always been, an insignificant and stinking little t.u.r.d. She banished the word from her mind; she would not sink to his level. Or to the level of the little Bronzino, the Bronzinetto, she called him to herself. Desmond Marx. Composer of that preposterous atrocity. The Dream of Andy Warhol. She"d have liked to call it instead The Nightmare of the Modern Age.
She must have been walking very fast, propelled by her rage, her shock; before she knew it she was in front of her building. Had she really walked forty blocks in half an hour? She could smell her sweat underneath the wool of her cape, the silk of her blouse, and it shocked her with its robust meatiness. She had never before a.s.sociated such a smell with her own body.
She couldn"t bear to wait for the elevator, propelled as she still was with rage. She burst into the apartment, hardly able to get her key into the lock. "Anybody home?" she called. Her mother"s bedroom door was closed. Well, she would open it; she felt, today, she had a right. It was something she never did, but now she couldn"t help herself. She had to tell her mother.
She knocked three times, but didn"t wait for a response. At first, she couldn"t tell whether or not her mother was there; the heavy velvet drapes were closed and she could barely make out her mother"s shape under the satin coverlet. But then her eyes got used to the light and she saw her mother, lying on her back, her mouth open. On the night table beside her bed were her hearing aids, and in a gla.s.s, one on top of the other, the two halves of her dentures. Her mother"s open, toothless mouth made her head look like a skull.
Had she known, had she ever considered, that her mother was toothless, that her mother wore false teeth? When had that happened? How was it that in all the years that they had lived together it was something she never knew? The rage that had consumed her body now spilled over to her mother. Why had her mother kept this from her? And how could she allow herself to be like this? It was against everything her mother stood for, to be lying here, in the middle of the afternoon, the drapes closed against the brilliant autumn sun, impervious to every sound, impervious to her shocking appearance.
She knew that she must leave the room. But she allowed herself to look at her mother for a few more seconds. Her mother was very old. Her mother"s life was almost over. She was, lying on her back, cut off from light and sound, her countenance a corpse"s, trying out the position she would, quite soon now, Eleanor realized, be permanently taking up.
There was something she wanted to say, but she didn"t know exactly what the words might be. "It"s over, it"s finished." Was that what she wanted to say? But whom would she say it to? Her mother was deaf; her mother was asleep- she supposed it was peacefully- and her father was nowhere around.
She had been stolen from, and the thief had been not only thief but a.s.sailant. She resisted the impulse to go to the mirror and see whether, as a result of the a.s.sault, her looks had changed. That would be ridiculous, that would be- her mother"s word, always used mockingly- "dramatic." This was her life, it was not an opera, and she would live it as she always had, as her parents always had: with dignity, on her own terms. And yet there had been this theft- must she think of herself now as impoverished, as her parents had never had to do?