Violin

Chapter 9

I sent the vision flying. I opened my eyes and let them rove over the peeling plaster ceiling of this neglected place, over the indifferent metal decorations that were so modern and so utterly meaningless. I understood the battle now, even as the music flooded me and Lily's voice was right by my ear, intermingled with the music, and part of it.

I looked directly at him, and I thought only of him. I focused on him and refused to think of anything else. He couldn't stop his playing. Indeed, he was energized, he was brilliant, his tone was beyond description it was so controlled yet so relaxed, and the pitch so poignant.

Yes, Tchaikovsky's concerto it was, which I knew by heart from my disks, with the orchestral parts woven right into it, so that it became a rich solo piece of his own making, with the heavy solo thread and all the other threads completely balanced.

Music to tear you to pieces.

I tried to breathe slowly, to relax and not clench my hands.

Suddenly something changed. It was total, like when the sun goes behind a cloud.

Only this was night and this was the Chapel.

The saints! The old saints were back. The old decor of thirty years ago surrounded me.

The pew was old and dark with a scrolled arm beneath the fingers of my left hand and beyond him stood the traditional and venerable high altar, with the fully carved and fully painted figures of the Last Supper beneath it, set in their glass case.

I hated him. I hated him for this, because I couldn't stop looking at these lost saints, at the painted plaster Infant Jesus of Prague holding his tiny globe, at the old dusty yet vibrant pictures of Christ carrying his cross down one side of the room and up the other between the darkling windows.

You are cruel.

And that is what they were, the windows of evening time, darkling, full of lavender light, and he stood in softened shadows, and the old ornate Communion Rail crossed in front of him, which had been taken away a long time ago with everything else. He stood fixed in this perfect rendering of everything I remembered, but which I couldn't have recalled in detail a moment before!

I was transfixed. I stared at the Icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help that hung behind him, over the altar, over the blazing golden tabernacle. Saints, the smell of wax. I could see the red glass candles. I could see everything. I could smell it, the wax and incense again, and he played on, varying the concerto, dipping his slender body into the music and drawing gasps from the crowd that listened to him, but who were they?

This is evil. It is beautiful, but it is evil because it is cruel.

I closed and opened my eyes. See what is here now! For an instant I did.

Then the veil came down again. Was he going to bring her back? Mother? Was she coming, to lead me and Rosalind up the aisle, in old-fashioned safety in the shadowy evening Chapel? No, the memory overrode his inventions.

The memory was too hurtful, too awful. The memory of her not here in this sacred place in the happy times before she was poisoned like Hamlet's mother, no, the memory of her drunk an~lying on a burnt mattress, her head only inches from the burning hole.

That is what I saw, and Rosalind and I running back and forth with the pots of water, and beautiful Katrinka, with her yellow curls and huge blue eyes, only three years old, staring mutely at Mother, as the room filled with smoke.

You will not get away with this

He was deep into the concerto. I deliberately filled the Chapel with lights, I deliberately envisioned the audience till it was the people, had to be, the very people I now knew. I did this and I stared at him, but he was too strong for me.

I was a child in my mind, approaching the Altar Rail. "But what do they do with our flowers after we leave them?" Rosalind wanted to light a candle.

I stood up.

The crowd was magnetized by him; they were so totally in his thrall that I went unnoticed. I moved out of the pew, and turned my back on him and walked down the marble steps and out and away from his music, which never slackened but grew all the more heated, heated, as if he thought he could burn me up with it, damn him.

Lacomb, cigarette in hand, rose from his gateside slouch and we walked almost side by side, fast down the flags. I could hear the music. I looked deliberately at the flags. If my mind veered, I saw that sea again, that foam. I saw it in sudden crashes of wild color; this time I heard it.

Even as I walked, I heard the sea and saw it and saw the street before me.

"Slow down, boss, you gonna trip and break my neck!" Lacomb said.

Such a clean smell. The sea and the wind together give birth to the cleanest finest scent, and yet everything that lurks below the surface of the sea can give off the stench of death if dragged up to the sandy bank.

I walked faster and faster, looking carefully at the broken bricks and weeds growing among them.

We reached my light, thank God, my garage, but there was no gate open there.

Mother's gate was gone, taken away, that old green painted wooden gate fitted into the brick arch through which she had walked right into death.

I stood motionless. I could still hear the music, but it was far away. It was tuned for human ears that were near to him and he seemed bound to that by some rule of his nature that I was very pleased to discover, though I wanted better to understand what it meant.

We walked up to the Avenue, and towards the front gate. Lacomb opened it for me, and held it, this heavy gate that always fell forward, that could slam on you and knock you right down on the pavement. New Orleans abhors a plumb line.

I went up the steps, and into the house. Lacomb must have unlocked the door, but I didn't notice. I told him I would listen to music in the front room. Shut all the doors.

He knew this pattern.

"You don't like your friend over there?" he asked in a deep voice, the words so run together like syrup that it took me a brief second to interpret this.

"I like Beethoven better," I said.

But his music came like a hiss through the walls. It had no eloquence now, no compelling meaning. It was the strum of the bees in the graveyard.

The doors were shut to the dining room. The doors were shut to the hall. I went through the disks which had been put in perfect alpha betical order.

Solti, Beethoven's Ninth, Second Movement.

In an instant I had it in the machine and the kettle drums had put him completely to rout. I turned the volume loud as it would go, and there came the familiar trudging march. Beethoven, my captain, my guardian angel.

I lay down on the floor.

The chandeliers of these parlors were small, not decorated with gold like the Baccarats of the hall and dini ng room. These chandeliers had only crystal and glass. It was nice to lie on the clean floor and look up at the chandelier which had only dim candle bulbs in it.

The music blotted him out. On and on went the march. I hit the button which told the machine to repeat, but to repeat only this band of the disk. I closed my eyes.

What do you yourself want to remember? Trivia, nonsense, humor.

In my young years I daydreamed incessantly to music; I always saw his brand of images! I saw people and things and drama, and was worked up almost to making fists as I listened.

But not now; now it was just the music, the driving rhythm of the music, and some vague commitnient to the idea of climbing the eternal mountain in the eternal forest, but not a vision, and safe within this thundering insistent song I closed my eyes.

He didn't take too long.

Maybe I had lain there an hour.

He came right through the locked doors, materializing instantly, the doors quivering behind him, the grand violin and bow choked in his left hand.

"You walk out on me!" he said.

His voice rose over the sound of Beethoven. Then he walked towards me in loud menacing steps. I climbed up on my elbows, then sat up. My vision was blurred. The light shone on his forehead, on the dark neat brushed brows that made such a distinct line, as he glared down at me, narrowing his eyes, looking perhaps as hostile as any creature I've ever seen.

The music moved on over him and over me.

He kicked the machine with his foot. The music faltered and roared. He tore the plug out of the wall.

"Ah, clever!" I said before the silence came down. I could scarcely keep from smiling in triumph.

He panted, as if he'd run some distance, or maybe it was only the effort of being material, of playing for spectators, of passing invisible through walls and then coming alive in lurid flaming splendor.

"Yes," he said contemptuously and spitefully, looking at me, his hair falling down dark and straight on both sides. The two small braids had come undone and mixed now with the longer locks, loose and shining.

He bore down on me with all his powers to frighten. But it only brought some old actor's beauty to my mind, yes, with his sharp nose and enthralling eyes, he had the dark beauty of Olivier of years gone by, in a filmed play by Shakespeare, Olivier as the humpback and deformed and evil King Richard III. Irresistible, a lovely trick in paint, to be both ugly and beautiful.

An old film, an old love, old poetry never to be forgotten. I laughed.

"I'm not humpbacked and I'm not deformed!" he said. "And I'm not a play%r of a part for you! I'm here with you!"

"So it seems!" I answered. I sat up straight, pulling my skirt down over my knees.

"Seems?" He used Hamlet's speech to mock me." 'Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not "seems."

"You overtax yourself," I said. "Your talent's for music. Don't wax desperate!" I said, using words more or less from the same play.

I grabbed hold of the table and climbed to my feet. He stormed towards me. I almost flinched, but held fast to the table, looking at him.

"Ghost!" I said. "You had a whole living world looking at you! What do you want here when you can have that? All those ears and eyes."

"Don't anger me, Triana!" he said.

"Oh, so you know my name."

"As much as you know it," he turned to the left and then to the right. He walked towards the windows, towards the eternal light dance of the traffic behind the lace birds.

"I won't tell you to go away," I said.

His back to me still, he lifted his head.

"I'm too lonely for you!" I said. "Too fascinated!" I confessed. "When I was young, I might have run screaming from a ghost, run screaming! Believing it with a total superstitious Catholic heart. But now?"

He only listened.

My hands shook badly. I couldn't tolerate this. I pulled out the chair from the table. I sat down and rested against the back. The chandelier was reflected in a blurred circle in the polish of the table, and all around it, the chairs with their Chippendale wings sat at attention.

"Now I'm too eager,"I said, "too despairing, too careless." I tried to make my voice firm, yet keep it soft. "I don't know the words. Sit here! Sit down and lay down the violin and tell me what you want. Why do you come to me?"

He didn't answer.

"You know what you are?" I asked.

He turned around, furious, and came near to the table. Yes, He had the very magnetism of Olivier in that old film, all made up of dark contrasts and white skin and a dedicated evil. He had the long mouth, but it was fuller!

"Stop thinking of that other man!" he w hispered.

"It's a film, an image."

"I know what it is, you think I'm a fool? Look at me. I'm here! The film is old, the maker dead, the actor gone, dust, but I am with you."

"I know what you are, I told you."

"Tell me what precisely, then, if you will?" He cocked his head to the side, he gnawed his lip a little, and he wrapped both his hands around the bow and the neck of the violin.

He was only a few feet away. I saw the wood more distinctly, how richly lacquered it was. Stradivarius. They had said that word, and there he held it, this sinister and sacred instrument, he just held it, letting the light catch it and race up and down its curves as if the thing were real.

"Yes?" he said. "Do you want to touch it or hear it? You know damned good and well that you can't play it. Even a Strad wouldn't mend your miserable faults! You'd make it shriek or even shatter in outrage if you tried."

"You want me to...

"No such thing," he said, "only to remind you that you have no gift for this, only a longing, only a greed."

"A greed, is it? Was it greed you meant to implant in the souls of those who listened in the Chapel? Greed you meant to nourish and feed? You think Beethoven..."

"Don't speak of him."

"I will and I do. Do you think it was greed that forged-"

He came to the table, consigned the violin to his left hand and laid down his right hand as near to me as he could. I thought his long hair hanging down would touch my face. There seemed no perfume to his clothes, not even the smell of dust.

I swallowed and my vision blurred. Buttons, the violet tie, the flashing violin. It was all a ghost, the clothes, the instrument.

"You're right on that. Now what am I? What was your pious judgment upon me-about to be pronounced-when I interrupted you?"

"You are like the human sick," I said. "You need me in your suffering!"

"You whore!" he said. He backed up.

"Oh, that I've never been," I said. "Never had the courage. But you are diseased and you need me." I continued, "You're like Karl. You're like Lily in the end, though God knows-" I broke off, switched. "You're like my Father when he was dying. You need me. Your torment wants a witness in me. You're jealous and eager for that, aren't you, as eager as any human who is dying, except in the last moments perhaps when the dying forget everything and see things we can't see-"

"What makes you think they do?"

"You did not?" I asked.

"I never died," he said, "properly, I should explain. But you know that. I never saw comforting lights or heard the singing of angels. I heard gunshots and shouts and curses!"

"Did you?" I asked. "Such drama, but then you are very fancy, aren't you?"

He drew back as if he'd let me pick his pocket.

"Sit down," I said. "I've sat beside many a deathbed, you know I have. That's why you chose me. Maybe you're ready to end your little ghostly wandering."

"I am not dying, lady!" he declared. He pulled back the chair and sat opposite. "I grow stronger by the minute, by the hour, by the year.

He relaxed in the chair. That put four feet of polished wood between us.

His back was to the blinkering window curtains, but the dull mist of the chandelier revealed his whole face, too young to have ever been an evil king in any play, and too full of hurt suddenly for me to enjoy it.

I wouldn't glance away, however.

I watched. He revealed it.

"So what's it about?" I asked.

He seemed to swallow as surely as a human being, and to chew on his lip again, and then he pressed his lips together for discipline.

"It's a duet," he said.

"I see."

"I am to play and you are to listen, and you are to suffer and to lose your mind or do whatever my music drives you to do. Become a fool if you like, become mad like Ophelia in your favorite play. Become as cracked as Hamlet himself. I don't care."

"But it's a duo.

"Yes, yes, that's your proper word, a duo, not a duet, for I alone make the music.

"That's not so.I feed it and you know. In the Chapel you feasted on me and everyone there, and everyone else there was not enough, and you turned again to me, and mercilessly you made images come that meant absolutely nothing to you, and you tore my heart with the abandon of some common ignorant criminal in your desire to make suffering. Suffering you know nothing about but need. That's a duet as well as a duo.

That's music by two, such a thing."

"My God, but you have speech, don't you, even if you are a musical idiot, and always were, and like to swim in the deep waters of other people's talent. Wallowing on the floor with your Little Genius, and the Maestro, and that Russian maniac, Tchaikovsky. And how you feed on death, yes, you do, you do, you know you do. You needed them all, all those deaths, you did."

He was genuinely passionate, glaring at me, letting the deep eyes widen at the perfect moments to emphasize his words. He was or had been far younger than the Olivier as Richard III.

"Don't be so stupid," I said calmly. "Stupidity doesn't become a being that doesn't have mortality for an excuse. I learned to live with death and smell it and swallow it and clean up after its slow progress, but I never needed it. My life might have been a different thing. I didn’t –“

But hadn't I hurt her? It seemed entirely true. My Mother had died at my hands. I couldn't go out there now and stop her from leaving by the side gate that didn't exist. I couldn't say, "Look Father, we can't do this, we must take her to the hospital, we must stay with her, you and Roz go with Trink and I'll stay with Mother...." And for what would I have done that, so she could have gotten out of the hospital as she had once before, talking her way out, playing sane and clever, and charming, and come home to lie again in a stupor, to fall again on the heater and gash her head so that the blood spread in a pool on the floor?

My father spoke, "She's set the bed on fire twice, we can't leave her here. . . ."

Was that then? "Katrinka's sick, she's going into surgery now, I need you!"

Me?

And what did I want? For her to die, my Mother-for it to end, her sickness, her suffering, her humiliation, her misery. She was crying.

"Look, I won't!" I said. I shook myself all over. "It's vile and cheap, you do, you raid my mind for things you don't need."

"They're always swimming in your ken," he said. He smiled. He looked so brightly, frankly young, unlined and unworn. Struck down surely in youth.

He glowered. "That's nonsense," he said. "I died so long ago there is nothing in me that is young. I passed into this, this 'thing,' as you so described me in your own mind earlier this evening, when you couldn't endure the grace or the elegance that you saw, I became this 'thing,' this abomination, this spirit, when your guardian, your magnificent symphonic master, was alive and was my teacher."

"I don't believe you. You speak of Beethoven. I hate you.

"He was my teacher!" he raged. And he meant it.

"That's what brought you to me, that I love him?"

"No, I don't need you to love him, or mourn your husband or dig up your daughter.

And I'll drown out the Maestro, I'll drown him out with my music before we're finished, until you can't hear him, not by machine, not through memory, not through dreams."

"Oh, how kind. Did you love him as much as you love me?"

"I simply made the point that I am not young. And you will not speak of him to me with any possessive superiority, and what I loved I will tell you not."

"Bravo," I said. "When did you cease to learn, when you threw off the flesh? Did your skull thicken even as it became a phantom skull?"

He sat back. He was amazed.

And so was I, a little, but then my own riffs of words often frightened me. That's why it had been years and years since I drank.

I made such speeches often when I drank. I couldn't even remember the taste of wine or beer, and craved neither. I craved consciousness, and even my lucid dreams, dreams in which I roamed like the dream of the marble palace, knowing that I dreamt, yet there, and dreaming still, the best of both worlds.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked.

I looked up. I was seeing other things, other places. I fixed right on his face. He looked as solid as anything in the room, though totally animated, lovable, enviable, fine.

"What do I want you to do?" I asked, mockingly. "And what does the question mean? What do I want?"

"You said you were lonely for me. Well, I am for you. But I can let you go. I can move on-"I didn't think so," he said with a little flash of a smile that faded at once. He looked very serious and his eyes grew large as they relaxed.

His eyebrows were perfect and heavily black, lifted above the ridge so they made a beautiful and commanding expression.

"All right, you've come to me," I said. "You come like something I would conjure.

A violinist, the very thing I once wanted with all my heart to be, perhaps the only thing I ever tried with all my heart to be. You come. But you're not my creation. You're from somewhere else rid you are hungry and needy and demanding. You're furious that you can't drive me mad, yet drawn to the very complexity that defeats you."

"I admit it."

"Well, what do you think is going to happen if you remain? You think I'm going to let you spellbind me and drag me back to every grave on which I've strewn flowers?

You think I'll let you fling my lost husband, Lev, in my face, oh, I know you've forced my thoughts to him, often in these last hours, as if he were as dead as all the others, my Lev-him and his wife, Chelsea, and their children. You think I will permit this? You must want a terrible struggle. You must prepare for defeat."

"You could have kept Lev," he said softly, thoughtfully. "You were too proud.

You had to be the one to say, 'Yes, go marry Chelsea.' You couldn't be betrayed. You had to be gracious, sacrificing."

"Chelsea was carrying his child."

"Chelsea wanted to kill it."

"No, she didn't, and neither did Lev. And our child had already died, and Lev wanted the child and wanted Chelsea and Chelsea wanted him."

"And so you proudly gave away this man you'd loved since he was a boy, and felt the winner, the controller, the director of the play."

"So what?" I said. "He's gone. He's happy. He has three sons, one very tall and blond and a pair of twins, and they're in pictures all over is house. Did you see them in the bedroom?"

"I did. I saw them in the hallway, too, along with the old sepia photograph of your sainted Mother, when she was a beautiful girl of thirteen with her graduation flowers and her flat chest."

"All right, so what do we do? I won't have you do this to me."

He turned to the side. He made a little humming sound. He drew Lip the violin from his lap, and laid it very carefully on its back on the table, and the bow beside it, and held the violin's neck with his left hand. His eyes moved slowly up to Lev's painting of the flowers on the wall above the couch, Lev's gift, my husband, the poet and painter and the father of a tall blue-eyed son.

"No, I will not think about it," I said.

I stared at the violin. A Stradivarius? Beethoven his teacher?

"Don't mock me, Triana!" he said. "He was, and so was Mozart when I was very young, a little child, so that I don't even remember him. But the Maestro was my teacher!"

His cheeks flamed. "You know nothing of me. You know nothing of the world from which I was torn. Your libraries are filled with studies of that world, its composers, its painters, the builders of its palaces, yes, even my father's name, patron of the arts, generous patron of the Maestro and yes, the Maestro was my teacher."

He broke off, and turned away.

"Ah, so I am to suffer and remember, but not you," I said. "I see. You brag as men so often do."

"No, you don't see anything," he said. "I only want you, you of all people, you who worship these names as if they were household saints-Mozart, Beethoven-I want you to know I knew them! And where they are now, I know not! I'm here, with you!"

"Yes,it is so," I said, "as you've said and I've said, but what are we to do? You know you can catch me unawares a thousand times, but I won't sink again into it. And when I dream, of the surf, of the sea, do I dream what you...

"We won't speak of that, your dream."

"Oh, why, because it's a doorway to your world?"

"I have no world. I'm lost in your world."

"You had one, you have a history, you have a series of connected events behind you, trailing, don't you, and that dream comes from you because I've never seen those places."

He tapped his right fingers on the table, and tipped his head down, thinking.

"You remember," he said maliciously, smiling up at me, though he was much taller, letting his brows do the work of being ominous while his voice was naive and his mouth sweet. "You remember, after your daughter's death you had a friend named Susan."

"I had many friends after my daughter's death, good friends, and as a matter of fact there were four of them named Susan or Suzanne, or Sue. There was Susan Mandel, who had gone to school with me; there was Susie Ryder, who came to give me solace, and then became an ally to me. There was Suzanne Clark. .

"No, not any of those. It's true, what you say, you've often known your women in clusters of names. Remember the Annes of your college years? The three of them, and how they joked about you being Triana, which meant three Annes. But I don't want to talk about them."

"Why would you? The memories are only pleasant."

"Then where are they now, all these friends, especially the fourth. . . Susan?"

"You're losing me."

"No, madam, I have you locked to me." He smiled broadly. "Just as tightly as when I play."

"Sensational," I said. "You know it's an old word."

"Of course."

"And that's what you are, producing all these hot sensations in me! But come now, why not talk straight, what Susan do you mean, I don't even...

"The one from the south, the one with the red hair, the one that knew Lily

"Oh, that was Lily's friend, that Susan, she lived right upstairs, she had a daughter Lily's age, she-"

"Why don't you simply talk of it to me? Why should it drive you mad? Why don't you tell me? She loved Lily, that woman. Lily loved to go up to her apartment and sit with her and draw pictures, and that woman, that woman wrote to you years after Lily's death, when you were here in New Orleans; and that woman Susan who had so loved your daughter, Susan told you that your daughter had been reborn, reincarnated, you remember this?"

"Vaguely. It's a pleasure to think of that rather than the time when they were both together, since one's dead and I thought the letter was absurd. Are people reborn? Are you going to tell me such secrets?"

"Never, and furthermore I don't know. My existence is one continuous strategy. I only know that I am here and here and here, and it never ends, and those I love, or come to hate, they die, but I remain. That's what I know. And no soul has ever leapt up bright before me declaring to be the reincarnation of anyone who hurt me, hurt me-!"

"Go on, I'm listening."

"You remember that Susan and what she wrote."

"Yes, that Lily had been reborn in another country. Ah!" I stopped with shock.

"That's what you make me see in the dream, a country to which I've never been where Lily is, that's what you would have me believe?"

"No," he said, "I only want to throw it in your face that you never went to look for her."

"Oh, pranks again, you have a thousand. Who hurt you? Who fired these guns you heard when you died? Don't you want to tell me?"

"The way Lev told you about his women, how all during Lily's illness he had had one after another young girl to comfort him, the father of a dying daughter...

"You are one filthy devil," I said. "I won't match words with you. For myself, I say, he did have his girls briefly and without love, and I drank. I drank. I grew heavy?

So be it. But this is pointless, or is it what you want? There is no Judgment Day. I don't believe in it. And with my faith in that, went any faith I had in Confession or Self-Defense. Go away. I'll turn the music box back on. What will you do? Break it? I have others. I can sing Beethoven. I can sing the Violin Concerto from memory.

"Don't dare to do that."

"Why, is there recorded music waiting for you in Hell?"

"How would I know, Triana?" he asked with sudden softness. "How would I know what they have in Hell? You see for yourself the terms of my perdition."

"Seems a lot better than eternal fire, if you ask me. But I'll play my guardian Beethoven anytime I please, and sing what I can remember even if I mangle pitch and key and melody-"

He leant forward and timidly; before I could gather my strength I dropped my gaze. I looked at the table and felt a huge misery in me, a misery rising so that I couldn't breathe. The violin. Isaac Stern in the auditorium, my childish certainty that I could attain such greatness-.

No. Don't.

I looked at the violin. I reached out. He didn't move. I couldn't cover the four feet of table. I got up and came round to the chair next to him.

He watched me the whole time, keeping his pose deliberately, as if he thought I meant to do some trick to him. Perhaps I did. Only I didn't have any tricks yet, nothing really worth trying, did I?

I touched the violin.

He looked superior and smo othly beautiful.

I sat right in front of it now, and he moved back his right hand, out of the way, so that I could touch the violin. Indeed, he moved the violin a little towards me, still gripping its neck and bow.

"Stradivarius," I said.

"Yes. One of many I once played, just one of many, and it's a ghost with me now, as surely as I am a ghost, it's a specter as I am a specter. But it's strong. It is itself as I am myself. It is a Stradivarius in this realm as truly as it was in life."

He looked down on it lovingly.

"You might say after a fashion I died for it." He glanced at me. "After Susan's letter," he asked, "why didn't you go looking for your iughter's reborn soul?"

"I didn't believe the letter. I threw it away. I thought it was foolish. I felt sorry for Susan but I couldn't answer."

He let his eyes brighten. His smile was cunning. "I think you lie. You were jealous."

"Of what on earth would I be jealous, that an old friend had lost her mind? I hadn't seen Susan in years; I don't know where she is now...

"But you were jealous, consumed with rage, more jealous of her than ever of Lev and all his young girls."

"You're going have to explain this to me."

"With pleasure. You were in an agony of envy, because your reincarnated daughter revealed herself to Susan and not to you! That was your thought. It couldn't be true, because how could the link between Lily and Susan have been stronger! That's what you felt, outrage. Pride, the same pride that let you give away Lev when he didn't know his left hand from his right, when he was sick with gn.ef, when-"

I didn't answer him.

He was absolutely right.

I had been tormented by the very idea that anyone would claim such intimacy with my lost daughter, that Susan in her seemingly addled brain would imagine that Lily, reincarnated, had confided in her instead of me.

He was right. How perfectly stupid. And how Lily had loved Susan. Oh, the bond between those two!

"So, you play another card. So what?" I reached for the violin. He didn't loosen his grip. Indeed, he tightened it.

I fondled the violin but he wouldn't allow me to move it. He watched me. It felt real; it was magnificent; it was lustrous and mate rial and gorgeous in its own right, without a note of music coming forth from it. Ah, to touc h it. To touch such a fine and old violin.

"It's a privilege, I take it?" I asked bitterly. Don't think about Susan and her story of Lily being reborn.

"Yes, it is a privilege. .. but you deserve as much."

"And why is that?"

"Because you love the sound of it perhaps more than any other mortal for whom I've ever played it."

"Even Beethoven?"

"He was deaf, Triana," he said in a whisper.

I laughed out loud. Of course. Beethoven had been deaf! The whole world knew that, as well as they knew that Rembrandt was Dutch, or that Leonardo da Vinci had been a genius. I laughed freely, kind of softly.

"That is very funny, that I should forget." He was not amused.

"Let me hold it."

"I will not."

"But you just said-"

"So what of what I said? The privilege does not extend that far. You can't hold it.

You can touch it, but that's all. You think I'd let a creature like you ever so much as pluck the string? Don't try it!"

"You must have died in a rage."

"I did."

"And you, the pupil, what did you think of Beethoven, though he couldn't hear you play, what was your estimation of him?"

"I adored him," he whispered. "I adored him as you do in your inind without ever having known him, only I did, and I was a ghost before he died.

I saw his grave. I thought when I came into that old cemetery that I would die again of grief, of horror, that he was dead, that a marker stood there for him. .. but I couldn't."

He totally lost the look of spite.

"And it came so quick. That's how it is in this realm. Things are quick. Or lingering and seemingly eternal. Years had passed for me in some haze. Later, so much later, I heard of his great funeral, from the chatter of the living, of how they had carried Beethoven's coffin through the streets. Ah, Vienna loves grand funerals, loves them, and now he has his proper monument, my Maestro." His voice fell almost to silence.

"How I wept at that old grave." He looked off, wondering, but his hand never relaxed on the violin.

"Remember when your daughter died, you wanted the whole world to know?"

"Yes, or to stop or to take one second to reflect or. . . something."

"And all your California friends didn't know how to sit through a simple Mass for the Dead, and half of them lost the trail of the hearse on the freeway."

"So what?"

"Well, the Maestro you so love had the funeral you so desired."

"Yes, and he is Beethoven, and you knew him and I know him. But what is Lily?

Lily is what? Bones? Dust?"

He looked tender and regretful.

My voice wasn t strident or angry.

"Bones, dust, a face, I can recall perfectly-round, with a high forehead like my mother's, not like mine, oh, my mother's face," I said. "I like to think of her. I like to remember how beautiful she was...

"And when Lily's hair fell out and she cried?"

"Beautiful still. You know that. Were you beautiful when you died?"

The violin felt silky and perfect.

"Sixteen ninety was the year in which it was made," he said. "Before I was born, long before. My father bought it from a man in Moscow, where I've never been, not even since, nor would I go on any account."

I looked lovingly at it. I really didn't care much about anything in the world then but it, ghost or fake or real.

"Real and spectral." He corrected me. "My father had twenty instruments made by Antonio Stradivari, all of them fine, but none as fine as this, the long violin."

"Twenty? I don't believe you!" I said suddenly. But I didn't know why I said it.

Rage.

"Jealousy, that you have no talent," he said.

I studied him; he had no clear direction. He didn't know whether or not he hated me or loved me, only that he desperately needed me.

"Not you," he countered, "just someone.

"Someone who loves this?" I asked. "This violin and knows it's 'the long Strad'

that the elder Stradivari made near the end of his life?" I asked. "When he had broken away from the influence of Amati?"

His smile was soft and sad, no-worse than that, deeper than that, full of hurt, or was it thanks?

"Perfect F holes," I said softly, reverently, running my fingers over them on the belly of the violin. Don't touch the string.

"No, don't," he said. "But you can... you can keep touching it."

"You are the one weeping now? Real tears?"

I meant it to be mean but it lost its power. I just looked at the violin and I thought how exquisite, how unexplainable. Try to tell someone who hasn't heard a violin what the sound is like, this voice of this instrument, and think-how many generations lived and died without ever hearing anything quite like it.

His tears were becoming to his long deep-set eyes. He didn't fight them. For all I knew, he made them, made them like he made the whole image of himself.

"If only it were that simple," he confided.

"A dark varnish," I said looking at the violin. "That tells the date, doesn't it, and that the back is jointed-two pieces, I've seen that, and the wood is from Italy."

"No," he said. "Though many of the others were." He had to clear his throat, or the semblance of it, in order to speak.

"It's the long violin, yes, you are right on that; they call it stretto lungo."

He spoke sincerely and almost kindly. "All that knowledge in your head, all those details you know of Beethoven and Mozart, and your weeping as you listen to them, clutching your pillow-"

"I follow you," I said. "Don't forget the Russian madman as you so unkindly call him. My Tchaikovsky. You played him well enough."

"Yes, but what good did any of it do you? Your knowledge, your desperate reading of Beethoven's or Mozart's letters and the endless study of the sordid detail of Tchaikovsky's life? Look, here you are, what are you?"

"The knowledge keeps me company," I said, slowly and calmly, letting my words speak to him as much as to me, "rather like you keep me company." I leant forward, and came as close to the violin as I could. The light from the chandelier was poor. But I could see through the F hole the label, and only the round circle and the letters AS and the year, perfectly written as he had said: 1690.

I didn't kiss this thing, that seemed a wanton vulgar thing even to think 0£ I just wanted to hold it, put it in place on my shoulder, that much I knew how to do, to wrap my left fingers around it.

"Never."

"All right," I said with a sigh.

"Paganini had two by Antonio Stradivari when I met him, and neither was as fine as this-"

"You knew him as well?"

"Oh, yes, you might say he unwittingly played a heavy role in my downfall. He never knew what became of me. But I watched him through the dark veil, I watched him once or twice, that was all I could bear, and time had no natural measure anymo re.

But he never had an instrument as fine as this. .

"I see . . . and you had twenty."

"In my father's house, I told you. Profit by your reading. You know what Vienna was in those days. You know of princes who had private orchestras. Don't be stupid."

"And you died for just this one?"

"I would have died for any of them," he said. He let his eyes move over the instrument. "I almost did die for all of them. I . . . But this one, this was mine, or so we always said, though of course I was only his son, and there were many and I used to play all of them." He seemed to be musing.

"You did truly die for this violin?"

"Yes! And for the passion to play it. If I'd been born a talentless idiot like you, an ordinary person like you, I would have gone mad. It's a wonder you don't!"

Instantly he seemed sorry. He looked at me almost apologetically.

"But few have ever listened like you, I'll give you that."

"Thank you," I said.

"Few have ever understood the sheer language of music as you do."

"Thank you," I whispered.

"Few have ever . . . longed for such a broad range." He seemed puzzled. He looked almost helplessly at the violin before him.

I said nothing.

He became flustered. He stared at me.

"And the bow," I said, suddenly frightened that he would go, go again, disappear out of vengeance. "Did the great Stradivari make the bow too?"

"Perhaps, it's doubtful. He didn't much bother with bows. But you know that.

This one could be his, it could, and of course you know the wood." His smile came again, intimate and a little wondering.

"I do? I think I don't," I said. "What wood is it?" I touched the bow, the long broad bow. "It's wide, very wide, wider than our modern bows, or those used today."

"To make a finer sound," he said, looking at it, "Oh, you do notice things."

"That is obvious. Anyone would have noticed that. I'm sure the audience in the Chapel noticed that it was a wide bow."

"Don't be so certain of what they noticed. Do you know why it is so wide?"

"So that horsehair and wood don't touch so easily, so that you can play more stridently."

"Stridently," he repeated, with a smile. "Strident. Ah, I never thought of it in that way."

"You attack often enough, you come crashing down. A slightly concave bow is necessary for that, isn't it? What is the wood of the bow, it's some special wood. I can't remember. I used to know these things. Tell me."

"I would like to," he said. "The maker I don't know, but the wood I do know and did when I was alive, and the wood is pernambuco." He studied me as if expecting something. "Does that ring no chords in your memory, pernambuco? Does it have no resonance for you?"

"Yes, but what is pernambuco? I don't-"

"Brazilwood," he said. "And it was only from Brazil that it came at the time this bow was made. Brazil."

I studied him. "Ah, yes," I said.

Suddenly, the wide sea appeared, the brilliant sparkling sea, and the moonlight flooding it, and then a great course of waves. The image was so strong it blotted him out and caught me, but then I felt him lay his hand on my hand.

I saw him. I saw the violin.

"You don't remember? Think."

"Of what? " I asked. "I see a beach, I see an ocean, I see waves."

"You see the city where your friend Susan told you your child was reborn," he said sharply.

"Brazil-." I looked at him. "In Rio, in Brazil, oh, yes, that's what Susan wrote in the letter, Lily was .

"A musician in Brazil, just what you always sought to be, a musiaan, remember?

Lily was reincarnated a musician in Brazil."

"I told you, I threw the letter away. I've never seen Brazil, why do you want me to see it?"

"I don't!" he said.

"But you do."

"Then why do I see it? Why do you wake me when I see the water and the beach?

Why did I dream of it? Why did I see it just now? I didn't recall that part of Susan's letter. I didn't know the meaning of the word 'pernambuco.' I've never been-"

"You're lying again, but you're innocent," he said. "You really don't know it.

Your memory has a few merciful rips in it, or places where the weave is too worn. St.

Sebastian, he is the patron saint of Brazil."

He looked up at Karl's Italian masterpiece of St. Sebastian above the fireplace.

"Remember that Karl wanted to go, to complete his work on St. Sebastian, to gather the Portuguese renderings of St. Sebastian that he knew were there, and you said you'd rather not."

I was hurt and unable to answer. I had said this to Karl, I'd disappointed him. And he had never been well enough again to make the trip.

"Ah, she faults herself so naturally," he said. "You didn't want to go because it was the place that Susan had mentioned in her letter."

"I don't remember."

"Oh, yes, you do, because I wouldn't know it if you didn't."

"I can't make any sea pounding on a beach in Brazil. You're going to have to find something worse, something more specific. Or disentangle it from yoursel£ because you don't want me to see it, which can only mean-"

"Stop your stupid analysis."

I sat back.

Pain had for the moment won out. I couldn't speak. Karl had wanted to go to Rio, and there had been many a time when I was very young that I had wanted to go-south to Brazil and Bolivia and Chile and Peru-all those otherworldly places, and Susan had said it in the letter, that Lily had been reborn in Rio, and there was something else, some fragment, some detail.

"The girls," he said.

I remembered.

In our building in Berkeley, in the apartment above Susan, the beautiful Brazilian woman and her two daughters and how they said when they left, "Lily, we'll never forget you." University people from Brazil. There had been several families. I went to the bank and got silver dollars for them and gave them each five, those beautiful girls with the deep, throaty voices, and soft... oh, yes, those were the accents of the speech in the dream! I looked at him.

The language of the marble temple was Portuguese.

He stood up in rage. He drew back the violin.

"Give in to it, suffer it, why don't you? You gave them the silver dollars, and they kissed Lily and they knew she was dying but you thought Lily didn't. It was only after Lily died that her friend, her motherly friend Susan, told you that Lily had known all along she was going to die."

"I won't, I swear I won't." I stood up. "I'll exorcise you like some cheap demon before I'll let you do this to me."

"You do it to yourself."

"You go too far, much too far, and for your own purposes. I remember my daughter. That's enough. I..."

"What? Lie with her in an imaginary grave? What do you think my grave is like?"

"You have one?"

"I don't know," he said. "I never looked. But then they would never have put me in consecrated ground, or given me a stone."

"You look as sad and broken as I feel."

"Never," he said.

"Oh, we are some pair."

He drew back, as if he were afraid of me, clutching the violin to his chest.

I heard the dull stroke of a clock-one of several, the loudest perhaps coming from the dining room. Hours had passed, hours as we sat here sparring.

I looked at him and a terrible malice grew in me, a vengeance that he even knew my secrets, let alone drew them out and played with them. I reached for the violin.

He drew back. "Don't."

"Why not? Will you fade if it leaves your hands?"

"It's mine!" he said. "I took it with me into death and with me it remains. I don't ask why anymore. I don't ask anything anymore."

"I see, and if it is broken, shattered, smashed in any sense?"

"It can't be."

"Looks to me like it could."

"You're stupid and mad."

"I'm tired," I said. "You've stopped crying and now it's my turn."

I walked away from him. I opened the back doors of the room to the dining room.

I could see straight through it and Out the back windows of the house, and there the tall cherry laurels were lighted against the fence of the Chapel priest house, bright leaves in a flash of electric lights, moving as if there were a wind, and I hadn't-in this big house, creaky as it might be-hadn't even noticed the wind. Now I heard it tapping the panes, and creeping beneath the floors.

"Oh God," I said. I had my back to him and I listened as he walked towards me, cautiously, as if he just wanted to be close.

"Yes, cry," he said. "Why is that wrong?"

I looked at him. He seemed for the moment very human, almost warm.

"I prefer other music!" I said. "You know I do. And you have made this a hell for both of us, this little affair."

"Do you think some better bond is possible?" He sounded sincere. He looked sincere. "That I at this advanced stage, so alienated from life, could be won over to something like love, perhaps? No, there isn't heat enough in love for me. Not since that night, not since I left the flesh and took this instrument with me.

"Go on, you want to cry too. Do it."

"No," he said, backing up.

I looked back out at the green leaves. Suddenly the lights went off That meant something. It meant an hour of the clock and such an hour had just struck, and at that time, the lights went off automatically in one place, and on automatically somewhere else.

I heard no sound in the house. Althea and Lacomb slept. No, Althea had gone out tonight and wouldn't be back till morning, and Lacomb, he'd gone down to the basement room to sleep so that he could smoke where he knew the smell of it wouldn't sicken me.

The house was empty.

"No, we two are here," he whispered in my ear.

"Stefan?" I said. I pronounced it as Miss Hardy had, with the weight on the first syllable.

His face smoothed and brightened. "You live a brief life," he said. "Why don't you pity me that this is my misery forever?"

"Well, then, play for me. Play for me, and let me dream and remember without begrudging you. Or do I have to hate it? Will pure misery given up to you be enough, for once?"

He couldn't bear this. He looked like a lacerated child. I might as well have slapped him. And when he did look up, his eyes were glassy and pure and his mouth quivered.

"Very young when you died," I said.

"Not as young as your Lily," he said bitterly, spitefully, but he could hardly make the words audible. "What did the priests tell you? She had not even reached 'The Age of Reason'?"

We looked at one another, I holding her in my arms and listening to precocious talk, the clever wit and irony born out of pain and tongue-loosening drugs like Dilantin.

Lily, my shining one with a glass lifted among all the friends to toast, her head perfectly bald, her smile so lovely that even I was grateful, grateful to see this so vividly in retrospect. Oh, yes, please, the smile. I want to see it, and hear her laugh like something tumbling merrily downhill.

Memory of talking to Lev. "My son Christopher laughs the same way, that belly laugh, that effortless laugh!" Lev had told me on some long-distance call two children ago, when Chelsea and he were both on the wire and we all cried for the happiness of it.

I walked slowly through the dining room. The lights of the house had all been properly turned out for the night. Only the sconce by my bedroom door remained lighted. I drifted past it. I went into my room.

He followed every step I took, soundlessly but there, there as distinct as a great shadow following me, a great cloak of pure darkness.

But then I looked at his vulnerable face, and his helplessness, and I thought to myself, And please, God, don't let him know, but he is like all the rest, dying and needing me. It's no mere insult to sting him. It's true.

Perplexed, he watched me.

I had an urge to take off these clothes, the velvet tunic I wore, the silk skirt, I wanted to remove all that bound me. I wanted a loose gown, and to slide beneath the covers and dream, dream of the dream graves and the dream dead, and all that. I was warm and mussed but not weary, no, not for one second weary.

I was poised for battle as if for once I might win! But winning, what would that be like, and would he suffer? Could I want this, even from someone so rank and unkind and literally out of this world?

But I didn't brood on him, this young thing, except to know again with a thudding heart that he was truly there, that if I was mad, I was safely mad where no one could reach me but him. We stood together.

I began to remember something, something so dreadful that not a month of my life passed that I didn't think of it, something that came like a big slice of glass into me, and yet I'd never described it to anyone, not a soul, ever, ever, in my life, not even Lev.

I shivered. I sat on the bed, easing myself back, but it was so high my feet wouldn't touch the ground. I climbed off it and walked, and he stepped back to let me pass.

I felt the wool of his coat. I even felt his hair. I reached back in the door of the alcove, right before the dining room and I grabbed his long hair.

"Now, that's cornsilk, but it's black," I said.

"Ah, stop it," he said. He freed himself. It felt slippery and it glittered, the hair, as it left my hand. But then my hand was already open.

He made a dodge into the dining room and darted a long way from me. And then he lifted the bow. No need to tighten the horsehair of the pernambuco spectral bow, it seems, to play now.

I closed my eyes on him and on the world but not on the past and not on this memory. This was for him, this one... and so small and so hard to gather and face, like slicing one's hand with glass. .

But I was driven to it. What would be lost? Not even this trivial and ugly and unconfessed thing was going to push me to the end of all reason. If I could still make lucid dreams, and phantoms too, well, then let him come after me.