Violin

Chapter 6

I SAT up in the bed. He sat beside me, his legs so long that even on this high four-poster, he could sit in manly fashion, and he stared at me. The violin was wet. He was wet, his hair soaked.

"How dare you!" I said again. I reared back, bringing my knees up. I reached for the covers, but his weight held them.

"You come into my house, my room! You come into this room and tell me what I will and will not dream!"

He was too surprised to answer. His chest heaved. The water dripped from his hair. And the violin, for God's sake, had he no concern at all for the violin?

"Quiet!" he said.

"Quiet!" I spat at him. "I'll rouse the city! This is my bedroom! And who are you to tell me what to dream! You. . . what do you want?"

He was too astonished to find words. I could feel his groping, his consternation.

He turned his head to the side. I had a chance to look at him close, to see his gaunt cheeks and smooth skin, the huge knuckles of his hands and the delicate shaping of his long nose. He was by any standards-and even filthy and dripping wet-very handsome to look at. Twenty-five. That was the age I calculated, but no one could tell. A man of forty could look so young, if he took the right pills and ran the right miles and visited the right cosmetic surgeon.

He jerked his head round to glare at me!

"You think of trash like that as I sit here?" His voice was deep and strong, a young man's voice. If speaking voices have names, then he was a forceful tenor.

"Trash like what?" I said. I looked him up and down. He was a big man, thin or not. I didn't care.

"Get out of my house," I said. "Get out of my room and out of my house now, until such time as I invite you here as my guest! Go! It puts me in a perfect fury that you dare come in here without my bidding! Into my very room!"

There came a banging on the door. It was Althea's panic-stricken voice. "Miss Triana! I can't open the door! Miss Triana!"

He looked at the door beyond me and then back at me and shook his head and murmured something, and then ran his right hand back through his slimy hair. When he opened his eyes fully they were large, and his mouth, now that was the prettiest part, but none of these details cooled my anger.

"I can't open this door!" AIthea screamed.

I called out to her. It was all right. Leave it be. I needed some time alone. It was the musician friend. It was all right. She should go now. I heard her protests, and Lacomb's sage grumbles beneath them, but all of this on my insistence finally died away, and I was alone again.

The creaking boards had charted their retreat.

I turned to him. "So did you nail it shut?" I asked. I meant the door of course, which neither Lacomb nor Althea could force.

His face was still, and this stillness perhaps resembled whatever God and his mother might have wanted it to be: young; earnest; without vanity or slyness. His big dark eyes moved searchingly over me, as if he could discover in all the unimportant details of my appearance some crucial secret. He didn't brood. He seemed an honest, questing being.

"You aren't afraid of me," he whispered.

"Of course I'm not. why should I be?" But this was bravado. I did for one second feel fear; or no, it wasn't fear. It was this. The adrena line in my veins had slacked, and I felt an exultation!

I was looking at a ghost! A true ghost. I knew it. I knew it, and nothing would ever take the knowledge away. I knew it! In all my wanderings amongst the dead, I'd talked to memories and relics and fed their answers to them as if they were dolls I held propped in my hand.

But he was a ghost.

Then came a great coursing relief. "I always knew it," I said. I smiled. There was no defining this conviction. I meant only that I knew at last there was more to life, and something we couldn't chart, and couldn't dismiss, and the fantasy of the Big Bang and the Godless Universe were no more substantial now than tales of Resurrection from the Dead or Miracles.

I smiled. "You thought I would be afraid of you? Is that what you wanted? You come to me when my husband is dying upstairs and you play your violin to frighten me?

Are you the fool of all ghosts? How could such a thing frighten me? why? You thrive off fear-"

I paused. It wasn't only the vulnerable sofrness of his face, the seductive quiver of his mouth; and the way his eyebrows met to frown but not to condemn or forbid; it was something else, something analytical and crucial that had occurred to me. This creature did thrive off something, and what was that something?

A rather fatal question, I realized. My heart lost a beat, which always frightens me.

I put my hand to my throat as if my heart were there, which it always seems to be, doing these dances in my throat rather than in my breast.

"I'll come into your room," he whispered, "when I wish." His voice gained strength, young and masculine and sure of itself. "There's no way you can stop me. You think because you spend every waking hour doing the Danse Macabre with all your murdered crew-yes, yes, I know how you think you murdered them all-your Mother, your Father, Lily, Karl, such stupid monstrous egotism, that you were the cause of all these spectacular deaths, and three of them so ghastly and untimely-you think because of that, you can command a ghost? A true ghost, a ghost such as I am?"

"Bring my Father and Mother to me," I said. "You're a ghost. Bring them over to me. Bring them back over the divide. Bring me my little Lily. Bring them in ghostly form if you are a ghost and such a ghost! Make them ghosts, give Karl back to me without pain, just for a moment, one single solitary sacred moment. Give me Lily to hold in my arms."

This wounded him. I was quietly amazed, but adamant.

"Sacred moment," he said bitterly.

He shook his head, and looked away from me as if disappointed ut mainly disrupted by the remark, but then again he seemed thoughtful and looked back. I found myself riveted by his hands, by the delicacy of his fingers and the hollow-cheeked yet flawless youth of his face.

"I can't give you that," he said thoughtfully, considerately. "You think God listens to me? You think my prayers count with saints and angels?"

"And you do pray, I'm to believe?" I asked. "what are you doing here! why are you here? why have you come! Never mind that you sit here, lazily and defiantly on the side of my bed. why are you here at all-within my sight, within my hearing?"

"Because I wanted to come!" he said crossly, looking for a second rather painfully young and defiant. "And I go where I would go and do what I would do, as perhaps you noticed. I walked your hospital corridor until a gaggle of mortal idiots made such a riot there was nothing to do but retreat and wait for you! I could have come into your room, into your bed."

"You want to be in my bed."

"I am!" he declared. He leaned forward on his right hand. "Oh, don't even consider it. I'm no incubus! You won't conceive a monster by me. I want something far more critical to your life than the play thing between your legs. I want you!"

I was speechless.

Furious, yes, still furious, but speechless.

He sat back and looked down before him. His knees looked quite comfortable on the side of the high bed. His feet actually touched the floor. Mine never have. I am a short woman.

He let his greasy black hair fall down around him, in streaks across his white face, and when he looked at me again, it was a quizzical look.

"I thought this would be much easier," he said.

"What's that?"

"To drive you mad," he said. He affected a cruel smile. It was unconvincing. "I thought you mad already. I thought it would be... a matter of days at most."

"Why the hell should you want to drive me mad?" I asked.

"I like doing such things," he said. The sadness flashed over him, knitted his brows before he could brush it away. "I thought you were mad. You're almost... what some people would call mad."

"Yet painfully sane," I said. "That's the problem."

I was now utterly enthralled. I couldn't stop studying all the details of him, his old coat, the wet dust that had made mud on his shoulders, the way his big dreamy eyes sharpened and then mellowed with his thoughts, the way his lips were moistened with his tongue now and then as if he were a human being.

Suddenly a thought came to me. It came crashingly clear.

"The dream! The dream I had of the-"

"Don't talk of it!" he said. He leaned forward, menacingly, so close now his wet hair fell down on the blanket right by my hands.

I pushed back against the headboard for leverage and then with the full strength of my right hand I slapped him. I slapped him twice before he could get his wits! I pus hed the covers back.

He rose and moved awkwardly away from me, looking down at me in pitiful bewilderment.

I reached out. He didn't flinch. I knotted my hand into a fist and struck him full in the chest. He moved back a few steps, no more concerned with such a weak blow than a human man might have been.

"The dream came from you!" I said. "That place I saw, the man with...

"I warn you, don't." He cursed, his finger flying out to point in my face even as he backed up and drew himself up like a great bird. "Silence on that. Or I'll wreak such havoc on your little physical corner of the world you'll curse the day you were ever born...." The voice faded out. "You think you know pain, you're so proud of your pain. .

.

He looked up and away from me. He drew the violin up to his chest and crossed his arms around it. He had said something that displeased himself. His eyes searched the room as if they could really see.

"I do see!" he said angrily.

"Ah, I meant as a mortal man, that's all I meant."

"And that is all I mean, too," he answered.

The rain outside slackened, grew soft and light, so that the various leaks and trickles gained in volume. We seemed in a wet world, wet but warm and safe, he and I.

I knew, knew as clearly as I knew he was there, I knew that I had seldom been so alive in my life as I was now, that the very sight of him, his being here, had brought me back to a fire in life I hadn't known in decades. Long, long ago, before so many defeats, when I'd been young and in love, perhaps I'd been this alive, when I'd wept over my failures and losses in those early energetic years, when everything had been so very bright and hot to touch, maybe then I'd been this alive.

In the maddest grief there was not this kind of vitality. It was more akin to joy, dance, the sheer penetrating and hypnotic power of music.

And there he stood, looking lost, and suddenly looking at me as if he would ask something, and then looking away, his dark brows knitted.

"Tell me what you want," I said. "You said you wanted to drive me mad? why?

For what reason?"

"Well, you see," he said quickly in response, though his words were slow, "I'm at a loss." He spoke frankly with raised eyebrows and a cool poised manner. "I don't know myself what it is I want now! Driving you mad." He shrugged. "Now that I know what you are, or how strong you are, I don't know what words to put it in. There's perhaps something better here than merely driving you out of your mind, assuming of course that I could have done it, and I see you feel Superior in this regard, having held so many deathbed hands and watched your lost young husband, Lev, dance on drugs with his friends while you merely sipped your wine, afraid to take the drugs, afraid of visions!

Visions like me! You amaze me.

"Vision?" I whispered.

I wrapped my left hand around the bedpost. My body was shaking. My heart did pound. All these symptoms of fear reminded me that there was indeed something here to fear, but then again, what in God's name could be worse than so much that had happened? Fear the supernatural? Fear the flicker of candles and the smiles of saints?

No, I think not.

Death is plenty to fear. Ghosts, what are ghosts?

"How did you cheat death?" I said.

"You flippant, cruel woman," he whispered. He spoke in a rush. "You look angelic. You, with your veil of dark hair, and your sweet face and huge eyes," he whispered. He was sincere. He was stung, and his head bent to the side. "I didn't cheat anything or anyone." He looked desperately to me. "You wanted me to come, you wanted-"

"You thought so? when you caught me thinking about the dead?

Is that what you thought? And you came to what? Console? Deepen my pain?

what happened?"

He shook his head, and took several steps backwards. He looked out the back window, and in so doing, let the light unveil the side of his face. He seemed tender.

He turned on me in an angry flash.

"So very pretty still," he said, "and at your age, and plump, even so. Your sisters hate you for your pretty face, you know it, don't yo u? Katrinka, the beautiful one with the shapely body and smart husband, and before him the string of lovers she cannot count. She thinks you have a prettiness that she can never earn or produce or paint or claim. And Faye, Faye loved you, yes, as Faye loved all, but Faye couldn't forgive you your prettiness either."

"What do you know of Faye?" I asked before I could stop myself. "Is my sister Faye still alive?" I tried to stop myself, but I couldn't. "where is Faye! And how can you speak for Katrinka, what do you know about Katrinka or any of my family?"

"I speak what you know," he said. "I see the dark passages of your mind, I know the cellars where you yourself have not been. I see there in those shadows that your father loved you too much because you resembled your mother. Same brown hair, brown eyes. And that your Sister Katrinka cheerfully bedded your young husband, Lev, one night."

"Stop this! what? Have you come here to be my personal Devil? Do I rate such a thing? I? And you tell me in the same breath that I'm not half so responsible as I seem to think for all those deaths. How are you going to drive me mad, I'd like to know? How?

You're not sure of yourself at all. Look at you. You quake and you're the ghost. what were you when you were alive? A young man? Maybe even kind by nature, and now all twisted out of-"

"Stop," he pleaded. "Your point is clear."

"Which is what?"

"That you see me clearly, as I see you," he answered coldly. "That memory and fear aren't going to make you waver. I was so very wrong about you. You seemed a child, an eternal orphan, you seemed so..."

"Say it. I seemed so weak?" I asked.

"You're bitter."

"Perhaps," I said. "It's not a word I favor. why do you want me to feel either pain or fear? For what? why! what did the dream mean? where was that sea?"

His face was blank with shock. He raised his eyebrows, and then again tried to speak but changed his mind, or couldn't find the words for it.

"You could be beautiful," he said softly. "You almost were. Is that why you fed on trash and beer and let your God-given shape go to waste? You were thin when you were a child, thin like Katrinka and Faye, thin by nature. But you covered yourself with a concealing bulk, didn't you? To hide from whom? Your own husband, Lev, as you handed him over to younger and more beguiling women? You pushed him into bed with Katrinka."

I didn't respond.

I felt an ever-increasing strength inside me. Even as I shuddered, I felt this strength, this grand excitement. It had been so long since any emotion such as this had visited me, and now I felt it, looking at him in his bewilderment.

"You are perhaps even a little beautiful," he whispered, smiling as if he meant quite deliberately to torment me. "But will you grow as large and shapeless as your sister Rosalind?"

"If you know Rosalind and can't see her beauty, you're not worth my time," I said.

"And Faye walks in beauty that is beyond your comprehension."

He gasped. He sneered. He looked stubbornly at me.

"You can't recoguize the power of one as pure as Faye in my memory. But she's there. As for Katrinka, I have sympathy. Faye was young enough to dance and dance, no matter how deep the dark. Katrinka knew things. Rosalind I love with all my heart.

what of it?"

He looked at me as though seeking to read my deepest thoughts, and said nothing.

"Where does this lead?" I asked.

"Little girl at heart," he said. "And wicked and cruel as little girls can be. Only bitter now, and needing of me, and yet denying it. You drove your sister Faye away, you know."

"Stop it."

"You... when you married Karl, you made her leave. It wasn't the painful pages in your Father's diaries that she read after his death. You brought a new lord into the house that you and she had shared-"

"Stop it."

"Why?"

"But what's all this to you, and why do we talk of it now? You're dripping from the rain. But you're not cold. You aren't warm either, are you? You look like a teenage rock tramp, the kind that follows famous bands around with a guitar in his hand, begging for quarters at the doorways of concert halls. where did you get the music, the incredible, heartbreaking music-?"

He was furious.

"Spiteful tongue," he whispered. "I'm older than you can dream. I'm older in my pain than you. I'm finer. I learnt to play this instrument to perfection before I died. I learnt it and possessed a talent for it in my living body such as you never will even understand with all your recordings and your dreams and fantasies. You were asleep when your little daughter Lily died, you do remember that, don't you? In the hospital in Palo Alto, you actually went to sleep and-"

I put my hands up to my ears! The smell, the light, the entire hospital room of twenty years ago surrounded me. I said No!

"You revel in these accusations!" I said. My heart beat too hard, but my voice was under my command. "why? what am I to you and you to me?"

"Ah, but I thought you did."

"What? Explain?"

"I thought you reveled in these accusations. I thought you so accused yourself, you so gloried in it, mixing it up with fear and cringing and chills and sloth-that you were never lonely, ever, but always holding hands with some dead loved one and singing your poems of contrition in your head, keeping them around, feeding their remembrance so as not to know the truth: the music you love, you'll never make. The feeling it wrings from your soul will never find fulfillment."

I couldn't answer.

He went on, emboldened.

"You so sated yourself on accusations, to use your own word, you so fed on guilt that I thought it would be nothing to drive you out of

your mind, to make it so that you..." He stopped. He did more than stop. He checked himself, and stiffened.

"I'm going now," he said. "But I'll come when I please, you can be sure of it."

"You have no right. whoever sent you must take you back." I made the Sigu of the Cross.

He smiled. "Did that little prayer do you any good? Do you remember the miserable California funeral Mass of your daughter, how stiff and out of place everything was-all those clever intellectual West Coast friends forced to attend something as patently stupid as a real funeral in a real church-do you remember? And the bored, toss-it-off priest who knew you never went to his church before she died. So now you make the Sign of the Cross. why don't I play a hymn for you? The violin can play plainsong. It's not common, but I can find the Veni Creator in your mind and play it, and we can pray together."

"So it hasn't done you any good," I said, "praying to God." I tried to make my voice strong but soft, and to mean what I said: "Nobody sent you. You wander."

He was nonplussed.

"Get the hell out of here!"

"But you don’t mean it," he said with a shrug, "and don't tell me your pulse isn't ticking like an overwound clock. You're in tireless ecstasy to have me! Karl, Lev-your Father. You've met a man in me such as you've never seen, and I'm not even a man."

"You re cocky, rude and filthy," I said. "And you are not a man. You are a ghost, and the ghost of someone young and morally uncouth and ugly!"

This hurt him. His face showed a cut much deeper than vanity.

"Yes," he said, struggling for self-possession, "and you love me, for the music, and in spite of it."

"That may be true," I said coldly, nodding. "But I also think very highly of myself.

As you said, you miscalculated. I was a wife twice, a mother once, an orphan perhaps.

But weak, no, and bitter? Never. I lack the sense that bitterness requires.”

"Which is what?"

"One of entitlement, that things ought to have been better. It is life, that's all, and you feed on me because I'm alive. But I'm not so worm-eaten with guilt that you can come in here and push me out of my wits. No, not by any means. I don't think you fully understand guilt."

"No?" He was genuine.

"The raging terror," I said, "The 'mea culpa, mea culpa' is only the first stage. Then something harder comes, something that can live with mistakes and limitations. Regret's nothing, absolutely nothing..."

Now I was the one who let the words trail off because my most recent memories came back to sadden me, of seeing my mother walk away on that last day, Oh, Mother, let me take you in my arms. The graveyard on the day of her burial. St. Joseph's Cemetery, all those small graves, graves of the poor Irish and the poor Germans, and the flowers heaped there, and I looked at the sky and thought it will never, never change; this agony will never go away; there will never be any light in this world again.

I shook it off. I looked up at him!

He was studying me, and he seemed himself almost in pain. It excited me.

I went back to the point, seeking deeply for it, pushing everything else aside but what I had to realize and convey.

"I think I understand this now," I said. A spectacular relief soothed me. A feeling of love. "And you don't, that's the pity You don't."

I let my guard down utterly. I thought only of what I was trying to fathom here and not of pleasing or displeasing. I wanted only to be close to him in this. And this he would want to know he might, he surely would understand, if only he would admit it.

"Please do illuminate me," he said mockingly.

A terrible pain swept over me; it was too vast and total to be piercing. It took hold of me. I looked up imploringly at him and I parted my lips, about to speak, about to confide, about to try to discover out loud with him what it was, this pain, this sense of responsibility, this realization that one has indeed caused unnecessary pain and destruction in this world and one cannot undo it, no, it will never be undone, and these moments are forever lost, unrecorded, only remembered in ever more distorted and hurtful fashion, yet there is something so much finer, something so much more significant, some thing both overwhelming and intricate that we both knew, he and I-He vanished.

He did most obviously and completely vanish, and he did it with a smile, leaving me with my outstretched emotions. He did it cunningly to let me stand alone with that moment of pain and worse, alone with the awful appalling need to share it!

I gave a moment to the shadows. The soft sway of the trees outside. The occasional rain.

He was gone.

"I know your game," I said softly. "I know it."

I went to the bed, reached under the pillow and picked up my Rosary. It was a crystal Rosary with a sterling silver cross. It was in the bed because Karl's mother had always slept in the bed when she came, and my beloved godmother, Aunt Bridget, always slept in it, after the marriage with Karl, when she came, or the Rosary was actually in the bed because it was mine and I had absently put it there. Mine. From First Communion.

I looked down at it. After my mother's death Rosalind and I had had a terrible quarrel.

It was over our Mother's Rosary, and we had literally torn apart the links and the fake pearls-it was a cheap thing but I had made it for Mother and I claimed it, I, the one who made it, and then after we tore it apart, when Rosalind came after me, I had slammed the door so hard against her face that her glasses had cut deep into her forehead. All that rage. Blood on the floor again.

Blood again, as if Mother had been living still, drunk, falling off the bed, striking her forehead as she had twice on the gas heater, bleeding, bleeding. Blood on the floor.

Oh, Rosalind, my mourning, raging sister Rosalind! The broken Rosary on the floor.

I looked at this Rosary now. I did the childlike unquestioning thing that came to my mind. I kissed the crucifix, the tiny detailed body of the anguished Christ, and shoved the Rosary back under the pillow.

I was fiercely alert. I was like prepared for battle. It was like an early drunk in the first year, when the beer went divinely to my head and I ran down the street with arms outstretched, singing.

The pores of my skin tingled and the door opened with no effort whatsoever.

The finery of the alcove and the dining room looked brand new. Do things sparkle for those on the verge of battle?

AIthea and Lacomb stood far across the length of the dining room, hovering in the pantry door, waiting on me. Althea looked plain afraid and Lacomb both cynical and curious as always.

"Like if you was to scream one time in there!" said Lacomb.

"I didn't need any help. But I knew you were here."

I glanced back at the wet Stains on the bed, at the water on the floor. It wasn't enough to bother them with it, I thought.

"Maybe I'll walk in the rain," I said. "I haven't walked in the rain for years and years."

Lacomb came forward. "You talking about outside now tonight in this rain?"

"You don't have to come," I said. "where's my raincoat? Althea, is it cold outside?"

I went off walking up St. Charles Avenue.

The rain was only light now and pretty to look at. I hadn't done this in years, walk my Avenue, just walk, as we had so often as children or teenagers, headed for the K&B

drugstore to buy an ice cream cone. Just an excuse to walk past beautiful houses with cut-glass doors, to talk together as we walked.

I walked and walked, uptown, past houses I knew and weedy barren lots where great houses had once stood. This street, they ever tried to kill, either through progress or neglect, and how perilously poised it always seemed-between both-as though one more murder, one more gunshot, one more burning house would set its course without compromise.

Burning house. I shuddered. Burning house. when I'd been five a house had burned. It was an old Victorian, dark, rising like a nightmare on the corner of St. Charles and Philip, and I remember that I'd been carried in my Father's arms "to see the fire," and I had become hysterical looking at the flames. I saw above the crowds and the fire engines a flame so big that it seemed it could take the night.

I shook it off, that fear.

Vague memory of people bathing my head, trying to quiet me. Rosalind thought it a wonderfully exciting thing. I thought it a revelation of such maguitude that even to learn of mortality itself was no worse.

A pleasant sensation crept over me. That old horrific fear-this house will burn too-had gone with my young years, like many another such fear. Take the big lumbering black roaches that used to race across these sidewalks: I used to step back in terror. Now that fear too was almost gone, and so were they, in this age of plastic sacks and icebox-cold mansions.

It caught me suddenly what he had said-about my young husband, Lev, and even younger sister, Katrinka, that he, my husband whom I loved, and she, my sister whom I loved, had been in the same bed, but I'd always blamed myself for it. Hippie marijuana and cheap wine, too much sophisticated talk. My fault, my fault. I was a cowardly faithful wife, deeply in love. Katrinka was the daring one.

What had he said, my ghost? Mea culpa. Or had I said it?

Lev loved me. I loved him still. But then I had felt so ugly and inadequate, and she, Katrinka, was so fresh, and the times were rampant with Indian music and liberation.

Good God, was this creature real? This man I'd just spoken with, this violinist whom other people saw? He was nowhere around now.

Across the Avenue from me as I walked, the big hired car crept along, keeping pace, and I could see Lacomb muttering as he leant out the rear window to spit his cigarette smoke into the breeze.

I wondered what this new driver, Oscar, thought. I wondered if Lacomb would want to drive the car. Lacomb doesn't do what Lacomb doesn't like.

It made me laugh, the two of them, my guards, in the big crawling black Wolistan car, but it also gave me license to walk as far as I wanted.

Nice to be rich, I thought with a smile. Karl, Karl.

I felt as if I were reaching for the only thing that could save me from falling, and then I stopped, "absenting myself from this dreary felicity a while" to think of Karl and only Karl, so lately shoved into a furnace.

"You know it's not at all definite that I will even become symptomatic." Karl's voice, so protecting. "when they notified me regarding the transfusion, well, that was already four years, and now another two-"

Oh, yes, and with my loving care you will live forever and ever! I'd write the music for it if I were Handel or Mozart or anyone who could write music . . . or play.

"The book," I said. "The book is marvelous. St. Sebastian, shot full with arrows, an enigmatic saint."

"You think so? You know about him?" How delighted Karl had been when I told the stories of the saints.

"Our Catholicism," I had said, "was so thick and ornamented and rule-ridden in those early days, we were like the Hasidim."

Ashes, this man! Ashes! And it would be a coffee table book, a Christmas gift, a library staple that art students would eventually destroy by cutting out the prints. But we would make it live forever. Karl Wolfstan's St. Sebastian.

I sank to dreariness. I sank to the sense of the small scope of Karl's life, a fine and worthy life, but not a great life, not a life of gifts such as I had dreamed up when I tried so hard to learn the violin, such as Lev, my first husband, still struggled to maintain with every poem he wrote.

I stopped. I listened.

He wasn't about, the fiddler.

I could hear no music. I looked back and then up the street. I watched the cars pass. No music. Not the slightest dimmest sound of music.

I deliberately thought of him, my violinist, point by point, that with his long narrow nose and such deep-set eyes he might have been less seductive to someone else-perhaps.

But then perhaps to no one. what a well-formed mouth he had, and how the narrow eyes, the detailed deepened lids gave him such a range of expression, to open his gaze wide, or sink in cunning secret.

Again and again, old me mories threatened, the most agonizing and excruciating bits of recollection drifted at me -my Father, crazed and dying, tearing the plastic tube from his nose, and pushing the nurse away . . . all these images came as if flung in the wind.

I shook my head. I looked around me. Then the full fabric of the present wanted to enwrap me.

I refused it.

I thought again very specifically of him, the ghost, refurbishing in my imagination his slender tall figure and the violin which he had held, and trying as best as my unmusical mind could do to recall the melodies he'd played. A ghost, a ghost, you have seen a ghost, I thought.

I walked and walked, even though my shoes were wet and finally soaked, and the rain came heavy again, and the car came round, and I told it to go away. I walked. I walked because I knew as long as I walked, neither memory nor dream could really take hold of me.

I thought a lot about him. I remembered everything that I could. That he had worn the common formal clothes you pick up in the thrift shops more easily than casual or fashionable clothes; that he was very tall, at least six foot three I calculated, remembering how I had looked up at him, though at the time I had not been very dwarfed or in any way intimidated.

It must have been after midnight when I finally came back up the front steps, and heard, behind me, the car sliding before the front curb.

Althea had a towel in her hands.

"Come in, my baby," she said.

"You should have gone to bed," I said. "You seen my fiddler? You know, my musician friend with his violin?"

"No, ma'am," she said, drying my hair. "I think you run him off for good. Lord knows, Lacomb and I were ready to break down that door, but what you got to do you did. He's gone!"

I took off the raincoat and entrusted it to her, and went up the stairs.

Karl's bed. Our upstairs room, ever illuminated by the red light of the florist across the street through lace and lace and lace.

A new mattress and pillows, of course, no indent of my husband here, no last bit of hair to find. But the delicate carved wooden frame in which we'd made love, this bed he'd bought for me in those happy days when buying things for me had been such pleasure for him. why, why, I had asked, was it so much fun? I had been ashamed that fine carved furniture and rare fabric had made me so happy.

I saw the fiddler ghost distinctly in my mind, though he was not here. I was alone in this room as a person can be.

"No, you're not gone," I whispered. "I know you're not."

But then why shouldn't he be? what debt had he to me, a ghost I'd called names and cursed? And my late husband burnt up even three days ago. Or was it four?

I started to cry. No sweet smell of Karl's hair or cologne lingered in this room. No smell of ink and paper. No smell of Balkan Sobranie, the tobacco he would not give up, the one my first husband Lev always sent him from Boston. Lev. Call Lev. Talk to Lev.

But why? what play did it come from, that haunting line?

"But that was in another country; And besides, the wench is dead."

A line from Marlowe that had inspired both Hemingway and James Baldwin and who knows how many others....

I began to whisper a line from Hamlet to myself, ". . . 'the undis-cover'd country from whose bourn no traveler returns.'"

There came a welcome rustling in the room, the mere stir of the curtains and then those creaks and noises in the floor of this house which can be brought merely by a shift of the breeze against the dormers of this attic.

Then quiet came. It came abruptly, as if he'd come and gone, dramatically, and I felt the emptiness and the loneliness of the moment unbearably.

Every philosophical conviction I'd ever held was laid waste. I was alone. I was alone. This was worse than guilt and grief and maybe was what... no, I couldn' t think.

I lay down on the new white satin spread and searched for an utter blackness of body and soul. Shut out all thoughts. Let the night be for once the ceiling above, and beyond that a simple untroubled sky, with meaningless and merely tantalizing stars. But I could no more stop my mind than my own breath.

I was terrified my ghost had gone away. I'd driven him away! I cried, sniffling and wiping my nose. I was terrified that I'd never see him again, never, never, never, that he was gone as certainly as the living go, that I'd cast this monstrous treasure to the wind!

Oh, God, no, not so, no, let him come back. If the others you have to keep to yourself for all Time, I understand and always have, but he's a ghost, my God. Let him return to me....

I felt myself drop below the level of tears and dreams. And then.. what can I say?

what do we know when we know and feel nothing? If only we would wake from these states of oblivion with some certain sense that there was no mystery to life at all, that cruelty was purely impersonal, but we don't.

For hours, that was not to be my concern.

I slept.

That's all I know. I slept, moving as far away from all my fears and losses as I could, holding one desperate prayer. "Let him come back, God."

Ah, the blasphemy of it.