Adultery & Other Choices (3 page)

‘I told Paul I'm going to take an instrument.'

‘What do you think of that, Paul?'

Mine's better
, he thought, looking at Mr. Kirkpatrick's kind brown eyes with crinkled corners and seeing his father's ruddy face and blue eyes and thin wavy hair, nearly black now though his mother said when she met him it was blond curls; seeing his father's broad shoulders and deep hairy chest and hairy arms and hearing the gruff voice; he was shy with all fathers, he went each year in dread to the Rotary father and son luncheon where, in turn, he had to stand on a chair and speak his name to the upturned faces; yet he wasn't shy with Mr. Kirkpatrick, he felt with him now the stirrings of relief, felt drawn to him as though by trust and love, and he wanted to say:
Music is for sissies
; he wanted to say:
Susan smokes
; he wanted to say:
I could beat up Eddie
; and he wanted to show them he could.

‘I guess it's all right,' he said.

‘You should do it too,' Susan said. ‘Y'all could learn together.'

‘Maybe I will,' he said.

Next day the sun and a cold wind dried the earth and after school Paul and Eddie talked to Brother Eugene. He was tall and kept pushing his glasses up on his nose, and his black robe smelled of chalk dust where he had wiped his hands. They told him they wanted to learn the trumpet but he said they should take the French horn. He took them up the wooden stairs to the second floor and unlocked the bandroom and showed them a French horn. He said if they learned to play it they could easily play the trumpet and cornet as well; but they should learn the French horn because the band had all the trumpet players it needed for years to come but soon there would be a shortage of French horns. If they worked hard they could start playing in the regular band in two years when they were only in the seventh grade; they would wear uniforms and go on band trips to play at football games and they would march in the homecoming parade and Mardi Gras parade and many colleges gave band scholarships. He raised the horn to his lips and blew a series of notes.

When Paul got home he told his mother and sisters. Amy said Maybe he'd be a famous trumpet player like Harry James, Barbara said It might be nice and his mother said It was very exciting but they would have to wait and see what Daddy said. She made cinammon toast and a pot of tea and they all sat at the kitchen table. When his father came home Paul listened through the closed kitchen door to him and Mike. From windows he had watched Mike greeting his father as he emerged from his car, his father's near-scowling face suddenly laughing as the dog ran to him and leaped up at him, his father crouching and pushing Mike back with gentle slaps, Mike growling and wagging his tail and barking, jumping again and again to his father's hands and loving voice. Now in the living room they were laughing and growling, and they came into the kitchen, Mike following through the swinging door, and his father's sweeping glance quizzical in the silence which he then broke with hello, kissed Paul's mother, poured bourbon and water, and went to the living room to read the evening paper.

Usually at supper his mother and sisters talked about school and the nuns or a dress his mother was making for one of them or about other things that Paul paid no attention to while he ate. But that night they were quiet and he knew they were waiting for him. Mike came to watch them and his father said: ‘Mike, you know better than that. Go back to the living room. Go on.'

Mike went back and lay on the rug, watching them.

‘Paul?' his mother said. ‘Did anything new happen at school today?'

Paul looked at her urging brown eyes. Then his father said: ‘Why should anything new happen?'

Watching his mother he saw that the question was to her.

‘I don't know,' his mother said. ‘It can't be the same
eve
ry day.'

Barbara was watching him. He looked at her and said: ‘It's pretty much the same every day.'

When they finished eating, his father took a piece of ham to the living room and dropped it between Mike's paws.

That night Paul lay in the dark in his room adjacent to the living room and listened to them through the wall. He knew it was eleven o'clock because his father had finished reading. Every week he read
The Saturday Evening Post, Time, Collier's, The Reader's Digest, Life
, and a mystery or a book by a golf pro. While he read Mike slept beside his chair and now and then his father's hand lowered, with stroking fingers, to Mike's head. At eleven o'clock he slept.

‘Paul wants to take the French horn.'

‘Where's he going to take it? To the picture show?'

‘He's serious about it.'

‘Who, him? Who talked him into it?'

‘Nobody did. Eddie's going to start, and they've talked it over, but I'm sure Eddie didn't—'

‘Ah: Eddie. When was all this?'

‘Today.'

‘Today. All of a sudden he's a musician. Did you ever hear that boy say he wanted to be a musician till now?'

‘Well there has to be a first day for everything.'

‘Why didn't he tell me himself? Is that what all that monkey business was about at supper?'

‘He was afraid to.'

‘Afraid to? Did he tell you that?'

‘No, he—'

‘Did he ask you to ask me?'

‘No, I just—'

‘Why is my son afraid of me? Can you tell me that? I've spanked that boy three times in ten years. What's he afraid of?'

‘He's very sensitive.'

‘Sensitive. If he's so sensitive why doesn't he know—Never mind: do they have the horns at school?'

‘You have to buy one.'

‘Buy one.'

‘Or maybe rent one.'

‘Or maybe rent one. Goddamn.'

‘It means a lot to him. He'll be in the high school band. Maybe he can get a college scholarship.'

‘Goddamn,' his father said.

At breakfast his father was reading the paper. Paul waited. He had finished his oatmeal and milk and toast, the girls had gone to brush their teeth, his mother was putting the dishes in the sink, and finally he rose to leave too when his father lowered the paper and looked at him.

‘What's this your mother tells me about a French horn?'

The blue eyes were gazing into his and he could see in them the silence when he and his father were trapped together in a car, and the relief he felt at all his father's departures and the fear at his arrivals.

‘I decided not to,' Paul said. ‘It costs too much.'

‘Wait a minute: that's not what I asked. Do you want to play the horn?'

‘I guess so.'

‘Son, I can buy a horn; I can borrow for that. Do you or don't you want to learn to play it.'

‘Yesterday you wanted to,' his mother said, and he looked at her. She quickly nodded her head, then gestured with it toward his father, then nodded again. In one of his frequent daydreams he was captured by a band of amazons and taken to a tropical island where they lived; they were tall and lovely and they fed him and cared for him and he could not leave. There was some threatening yet attractive mystery about them too, as if they all shared a secret and it had to do with him; perhaps one morning they would tie him to an altar and sacrifice him to the sun; his heart plucked out, his soul would rise above the beautiful women. He wished he were with them now.

‘Yes, I'd like to.' he said.

‘All right,' his father said, the paper rising into place again; then from behind it he muttered: ‘Why didn't you say so.'

Paul stood there until he was sure his father was reading again and was not waiting for an answer.

Twice a week Paul and Eddie arrived at school carrying their cased horns bumping against their legs and in the afternoon, after an hour's lesson, walked home with them. Paul was a victim of newspaper and magazine cartoons. Why hadn't he'd thought of the
size
of the horn? In cartoons only the inept carried large instruments, usually tubas, and their practicing made cats and dogs howl, neighbors shout, close windows, throw old shoes. Now when he walked home carrying the horn, he was no longer anonymous: anyone driving by could see what he was. After supper he went to his room and closed the door and tried to play the notes. The horn was silver with a shiny brass bell and holding it and depressing its valves smelling of oil he wished he could give it the love it deserved. His father had brought it home and opened the case on the dining room table and displayed for Paul and his sisters and mother the horn nestled in red felt. A hundred dollars, he said; I hope it's worth it. Oh let's don't talk about money, Paul's mother said; I hate the dirty old stuff. Two days later Eddie's father bought a used horn, a gold one with two dents on the bell, and Paul felt deceived.

Sitting in his room he looked at the notes on the page; they made no sense to him. He began to hate the notes themselves, the way they sat inscrutable and arrogant on the stern bars which he didn't understand either. At times he thought he was simply stupid; he would have preferred that to the truth which sometimes surfaced in his mind: that while he and Eddie sat before Brother Eugene tapping the music sheets with his baton, tapping their horns with his baton, sometimes tapping their knuckles and hands with his baton, Paul was not there: he watched himself looking at the notes; he listened to himself trying to blow them; and all the time he was in suspension, waiting. He was waiting for something to happen. One afternoon he would all at once love the horn, he would know and love the notes, and his lips would blow sweet silver. Or one day someone would steal his horn. Or the school would burn to the ground or Brother Eugene would drop dead.

On the first night he practiced at home his father said it sounded like a bullfrog. Paul said it was hard to get the lips right. He played every night for the first two weeks, making sounds that had nothing to do with the notes he glared at on the sheet, wanting to cross them out with a pencil, to gouge them with its point. For the first time in his life he was living a public lie. With his father he had lived a lie for as long as he could remember: he believed his father wanted him to be popular and athletic at school, so Paul never told him about his days. But now the lie had spread: it touched his mother and Amy and Barbara and Brother Eugene and even Eddie. He hated the lie, not for its sin but for its isolation; and every Tuesday and Thursday he carried the horn to school as though it were a dead bird; and in the afternoons he climbed the stairs with Eddie to the band room and to Brother Eugene's growing impatience; then entering his house he put the horn on the closet floor, wanting to kick it, and at supper he answered questions about his music lessons. After two weeks of practicing at home his father asked him, the gruff voice trying to be gentle and bantering, if he'd practice when he came home from school, not at night. As lovely as the French horn is, his father said, it wasn't meant to accompany reading.

Nor was anything else. When his father came home in the evenings Amy took her records off the record player. After supper, except during the Sunday night radio shows, the living room was quiet. If friends of Amy or Barbara came over they went to the girls' bedroom and closed the door. The phone was in the hall and when Paul talked to Eddie at night he turned his back to the living room and spoke in a low, furtive voice. Lying in bed he could hear Mike scratching a flea, his father returning one magazine to the rack and getting another, his mother yawning in the chair where she read. But he was grateful for that silence resting on his horn too. He started practicing before his father came home; but if his mother was shopping or playing bridge he put the horn away and when she came home and asked if he had practiced he said yes. He saw the end coming.

He did not know how it would come, and when it did he felt betrayed again: Eddie phoned Paul on a Wednesday night and said he wasn't going to the lesson tomorrow, he was quitting.

‘I haven't enjoyed it very much,' Eddie said. ‘Have you?'

‘I don't know. It hasn't been so bad.'

‘I've hated it. I don't like the French horn. It's big and clumsy and I don't like the sound. I wish now I had taken the clarinet. Daddy says Brother Eugene used us, he talked us into the French horn so he'd have some for the band. He says if I want to take the clarinet after a while I can get lessons from somebody in town.'

‘What about the horn? What are you going to do with the horn?'

‘He'll sell it back to the store.'

The phone was outside his sisters' room. Barbara had been reading on the bed she shared with Amy; now she was watching him. When he hung up she said: ‘Eddie quit, didn't he.'

‘Yes.'

‘What are you going to do now?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Why don't you quit?'

He shrugged.

‘Just tell Daddy you've tried it and you don't like it. He can sell the horn. Paul: what are you going to do—take those silly lessons till you're twenty-one years old?'

Next day he went to his lesson. Without Eddie, his clumsy hypocrisy filled the room: as Brother Eugene called for a note Paul assumed a look of memory and concentration while his fingers pressed any valves they touched and he blew into the horn. Brother Eugene paced back and forth, turned his back to Paul, then spun to face him.

‘Paul, you're not practicing. You've learned nothing in a month. At least when Eddie was with us you could watch his fingers. Why aren't you practicing? Don't you know you owe it to your father? He had to sacrifice to buy that horn. It's a beautiful horn. If you have no pride in yourself, can't you at least do that much for your father?'

‘He won't let me.'

‘What do you mean, he won't let you?'

‘He won't let me practice. He likes quiet in the house.'

Brother Eugene tapped the music stand once with his baton then pushed his glasses higher on his nose.