Good Things I Wish You (14 page)

“Well, if all the whorehouses in Hamburg couldn’t satisfy him either—”

“Let me put this to you plainly. He’s young enough to think that Clara will be different. After Robert dies, they travel to Gersau, where he fucks her and discovers she is not.”

He stalked away toward the water. I started to follow, changed my mind, headed up the beach toward the pier. The water’s edge was lined with dark ribbons of seaweed, the cracked ruins of turtle eggs, trash. Ugly landscape. Ugly words. I was tired of this. Tired of him. He could touch me, yes, but on his own terms. He could say anything he wanted.
He wants to be close. He can’t bear to be close.
This was going nowhere. When I got back to the car, he was waiting for me, leaning against the hood. We stared at each other, unblinking.

If only I could find longing as sweet as you do.

“What are your feelings for me?” I said.

“Don’t ask me that,” he said. “Please.”

At home, I opened my journal, placed my hand where his hand had been. Traced his careful writing with my finger.

Then I tore out those pages. Took a long shower. Washed the smell of his cologne from my hair.

Permit a poor outsider to tell you today that he thinks of you with the same respect he always did and from the bottom of his heart wishes you everything good, much love, and a long life to you, the dearest of all persons to him. Unfortunately, I am more of an outsider to you than anything else.

—Brahms, in a letter to Clara, 1892
^*

29.

W
E’D PUT
H
EIDI DOWN
together, taking turns reading to her from
The Sleep Book,
the way we’d almost never done when we were still living under the same roof, planning, step by painful step, to break into pieces everything we’d spent years building together. After she’d fallen asleep, Cal stood in the kitchen, talking about his students, while I loaded the dishwasher, wiped the countertop, turned off the kitchen light.

Still, he didn’t go. It was a long drive back to Lakeland. “I feel like such an outsider,” he said.

“Want something to drink?”

“Coffee would be great.”

I’d expected he’d ask for wine. But he didn’t look as if he’d been drinking much these days. Everything about him seemed cleaner, calmer, and I wondered how much of what he’d suffered—the anger, the depression—had been tied to me, the way that my own fearfulness, my anxiety, had been tied to him. His skin was clear, no puffiness under the eyes. He looked like a much younger man. I, too, was
looking younger. Healthier. I’d bought new clothes for the first time in years. I wore earrings. I’d recently colored my hair.

“Oh, I meant to tell you,” he said. “I finalized vacation plans for Heidi and me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Dad’s summer place the first week. Dan and Kelly are coming, too, with the kids. After that, I’m taking her to a reenactment in North Carolina. We’ll camp out, if she’s into it, but a friend of mine’s renting a room at a hotel, so we can always crash there, if we need to.”

“Perfect.”

In my living room, formerly our living room, Cal sat on my couch, formerly our couch, while I made coffee the way he liked it: boiled on the stove, thick with cream.

“You’re seeing somebody, aren’t you?” he said as I carried in the steaming cups.

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re ready to take off as soon as I pick her up. Then you’re late coming back.”

“I was late tonight,” I said, trying hard not to sound defensive, “because I was working with someone who’s helping me with translations for the book. Twenty minutes. And I called to let you know I was running behind.”

Still, it was twenty minutes he and Heidi sat in the driveway, Heidi staring at the locked front door of her own house.
Offer him a key,
I thought. The words were on the tip of my tongue.

“Why don’t you just admit it? You’re seeing this guy, right?”

“I didn’t even say he was a guy.”

“Why can’t you be honest with me? At least we were always honest with each other.”

“We were always honest,” I agreed.

“Well, I’m seeing someone,” Cal said, picking up his coffee. “She’ll be at the reenactment. She’s the one renting the hotel room. Oh. You put in cream.”

“You don’t take cream anymore?”

“I watch what I eat these days.”

“You look good,” I said truthfully.

“So what’s he like, this translator? The one you’re not seeing?”

I shrugged.

“Rich, I suppose. Probably an attorney. Everything your father always wanted.” His tone perfectly poised on the line between joke and accusation.

“He isn’t an attorney. He likes to read. He’s interested in classical music.”

I was sounding like America now, and Cal deserved something better, didn’t he? I struggled to find something honest to say. Something generous and healing.

“Sometimes he reminds me of you,” I said. “The way he likes to talk about things. The way he likes to debate.”
The way he holds himself aloof.
In a moment, I’d say that, too. So I said, “But what about you? Your girlfriend, I mean. Tell me what she’s like.”

Even though I was looking right at him, I never saw it coming. Cal put down his empty cup.

“She is absolutely nothing like you. Do you think I would make the same mistake twice?”

There are things between men and women that do not change.

Of course they were lovers, Clara and Brahms. How could I ever have thought otherwise? Who else but a lover retains the ability to wound the other person with such passion, such precision? And who else but that lover has the capacity to heal what he or she has done?

I only want to ask you not to transform people into an enthusiasm, through your own, which they will afterwards not understand. You demand too fast and impassioned an acceptance of the talent that you cherish. Art is a republic. You should make that more your principle. You are much too aristocratic…Do not assign a high rank to one artist and demand that smaller ones should regard him as superior…Do not consider my folk songs [translator’s note: it seems he has enclosed them] as more than the most sketchy studies…

—Brahms, in a letter to Clara, 1858
^*

Dear Johannes, of course you do not see or hear that when I talk about you with others, I truly do not do it in exaltation. Yet that I am often mightily gripped by your rich genius, that you always appear to me as someone upon whom the heavens rain their most beautiful gifts, that I love and adore you for so many glorious things—that this has taken deep root in my soul, this is true, dearest Johannes. Do not try to extinguish this within me by cold philosophizing—it is impossible…Why should you wish, by your coldness, to kill the beautiful confidence which allows me to tell you anything? You have already done so, for regarding your folk songs, I am afraid to tell you the happiness most of them have given me…

—Clara, in a letter to Brahms, 1858
^†

I recently read something about enthusiasm in a letter that Goethe wrote to Schiller…where he is saying with a certain reservation, carefulness, etc.: “I always have the feeling that when writings and deeds are not talked about with loving concern, with a certain biased enthusiasm, little is left of them, they are not worth mentioning…Pleasure, happiness, and partiality are the only truths that bring forth reality.” When Goethe is saying this, should I not feel above your reprimand?

—Clara, in a letter to Brahms, 1858
^*

I am sorry I did not write to you about the Hungarian dances [author’s note: which Brahms sent to her], for you know how I like to please you. I only refrained because I feared that you might say something unkind to me, as you have often done in similar cases before. You know, without my telling you, how hard it must have been for me, because it would have given me the greatest joy to write to you about them…

—Clara, in a letter to Brahms, 1858
^†

When I first got the news of the unfortunate reception of your concerto I straightway sat down to write to you. I felt that a kind word would be a solace to you. But then I was afraid that you would answer me shortly and that I should feel offended…. Did you not try the Serenade at all? If you had played this first, your victory would have been certain, because it is a much clearer work.

—Clara, in a letter to Brahms, 1859
^‡

30.

O
NE WEEK PASSED BEFORE
Hart called again. “We had talked about flying the ASK,” he said. “If you are still interested.”

“Hello to you, too.”

“You are angry.”

“You are complicated.”

“I missed you.”

“I missed you, too.”

The private club consisted of three gliders packed into a small, flat-roofed shed, a dented Porta Potti, and a weather-warped picnic table protected by a sun-beaten canvas. We had to call in a tow pilot from the county airport, two miles away, but the lift was good and we were up for two hours, gliding twenty-five hundred feet above the Everglades, cutting from cloud to cloud until we reached the coast. Yellow ocher water hugged the beach, then darkened as it deepened, enriched with cobalt blue. There were white-rib-boned breakers, luffing sails. The dissipating wake of a speedboat dividing around a hard-knuckled reef. Sand sharks migrating along the shoreline, finger-shaped shadows
just a few feet beyond splashing tourists; kids on surfboards; a black, paddling dog. We began to thermal, making tight, dizzying circles within a warm column of air. Soon we were joined by black-headed vultures, open-winged, rising beside us. But by the time we reached five thousand feet, it was nearly five o’clock.

“Better head back,” Hart said.

“Already?” I said.

“Unless you want to land out on the beach?”

“No, thanks.”

He’d been uncharacteristically quiet all day. Or perhaps I was the one lost in thought, looking down at the drained and drought-stricken land, such a contrast from the ocean’s motion and light. Two weeks from now I’d be in Germany, and when I thought about all I had to get done before I went, I wanted to put my head in my hands and weep. Other than attending Friederike’s concert, I hadn’t made any firm plans, and even the concert felt tenuous, connected as it was to Hart. Who knew if we’d even be speaking once another two weeks had passed? I wanted to see the Robert Schumann house in Zwickau, but I hadn’t figured out how I’d get there. I had a vague idea about visiting Bonn and Düsseldorf. Maybe, if there was time, heading south to Gersau. Poking around Lake Lucerne. Staring up at the Rigi.

“Tell me again when you’re leaving for Europe,” Hart called back to me.

I was no longer surprised by how frequently he responded to my thoughts as if I’d just spoken. There were, I supposed, explanations.

“The fourteenth. A few days after you.”

“You can stay with me in Leipzig if you’re interested. I have been offered the apartment of a friend.”

I stared at the back of his head. “I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“If this is a good idea.”

“You need a place to stay. I have a place to stay. Now who is being complicated?”

Back on the ground, I helped him roll the ASK—lighter than the Blanik—into the shed, and then we sat on top of the picnic table, drinking Gatorade as the sun shaped itself into a molten ball above the horizon. The fields around us were planted in squash, but the crop was small, wizened. Here and there, tattered blossoms caught at the light, flashes that reminded me of fireflies. A killdeer called, fluttering, in the dust.

“I will meet you at the apartment,” Hart said, as if there’d been no break in our conversation. “There are trains from the airport; it is easy. You can have a little nap, if you need one, and then we’ll take the tram to Ingelstrasse. Maybe stop for a bite to eat first, if there’s time.”

“What if I just meet you at the concert?” I suggested. “You’ll be spending the day with Friederike, right? She won’t want to share you with a stranger.”

“In some ways, I am equally a stranger.” Hart leaned forward, pinched a mosquito from my arm.

“Come on, you talk to her all the time. Besides, you just saw her in London.”

“For the first time in over six years, yes.”

I thought I’d misheard him. “What did you say?”

“It is true.” He wasn’t looking at me. “The last time I saw her, she was ten years old.”

The sun slipped closer to the horizon’s edge. Flat strips of clouds haloed Miami, a tapestry the color of industrial waste: neon purple, electric orange, lavender, mottled green. I tried to imagine not seeing Heidi for one year. For one month. The two weeks I’d be in Germany without her already seemed like an unspeakable loss.