Heart and Soul (22 page)

“I'm so sorry,” she said, and I could see she meant it. “David would be so angry with me for upsetting you. He wanted to tell you and I wouldn't let him. And now I drop it on you like a big stone.”

I wanted truth, I got truth. But it wasn't so easy cramming it into my brain. It kept bouncing off.

“David wanted you to meet him. He's so proud of François. Was. But I was horrible.” The eyes filled again. “I was jealous of you and afraid of … I don't know what. I'm very protective of my son, perhaps too much.”

“He's beautiful,” I said.

“He is intelligent and loving and happy. I wish he could have had a father all the time, but I knew how it would be before. It was perhaps very selfish of me, but I don't regret it for a moment. François-David is my joy. He's all the music I will ever need.”

I was sitting there trying to put it all together. “How old?”

“Just eight in March,” Terese said. She watched me trying to absorb it. The maid came with the water, but what I really wanted was another dose of wine. I poured myself some, and Terese, too. “I loved David very much, you see,” she went on, “and I knew he would never feel the same toward me. I hoped that if I had his child, it would … tie us. There were only the few times that we…”

Fucked. Believe it or not, I didn't say it. I felt as though Terese's ears would curl up and drop off if such a word passed anywhere near them. “So David came to see you and François sometimes.”

“Yes, a few times every year, but very quietly. I found this house because no one bothers to come to this village.”

“Well, you've done a great job. I tried to track you down and even on the Internet, there's nothing. You've pretty much disappeared.”

We sat in silence for a while. Terese had let go of my hand, but she reached for it again. From the way she was watching me, I must have looked like shit. The truth is, I was fighting bitter envy. Terese had a delicious, daily reminder of David, living right there in her home.

“David told me that he was losing his talent,” she said. “Was this true?”

“Of course not,” I shot back. But that was a lie and this was the first time I truly acknowledged it to myself. My poor David. I looked at Terese. Our poor David.

“Are you feeling any better?” Terese asked me.

I nodded.

“Permit me to give you something to eat.”

I wasn't hungry, but I also didn't want to pass out on the way back to Milan. Terese showed me outside to a table that stood in a grove of olive trees. It was covered with a blue-striped tablecloth and was set for two.

“Is François going to join us?” I really wanted him to, and I really didn't.

“No, he has his luncheon at school.”

Terese was sensitive enough to understand that I needed to be quiet for a while. We ate in silence and watched François play with a puppy on the hillside below. The food was so fresh and light that I found myself finishing everything, the tomatoes and mozzarella, the grilled fish, the fresh vegetables and fruit. And of course the crusty bread that we dipped in some local olive oil.

Afterward, Terese walked me to the gate.

“Wouldn't you like me to accompany you down to the ferry?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “You've done enough.” We stood side by side, gazing across the water to the mountains on the far shore. It was too hazy to see beyond them to the snow-covered peaks of Switzerland.

“I hope you will not be sorry that you came,” Terese said.

“Why did you let me?”

“For two reasons. I believe I'm honoring David's wish. About François.” She stopped as if she was finished.

“You said two?”

“And …” I saw her chin begin to quiver. “David loved only two women his entire life. I had met Aimee. I wanted to meet the other.”

I don't know exactly how it happened, but the next thing I knew we were hugging. Then I left. I felt her watching me as I started down the narrow stone streets, but when I turned back to wave, she had gone.

On the plane home, I thought of a hundred questions I wished I'd asked. How recently did David see his mother? What about his father? What else did David say about me besides that I made him laugh? Then all the questions for myself. Did I really believe that David never loved Terese? Why didn't he confide in me about her and François? Hadn't David abandoned his son exactly as he had been abandoned by his own father? What was David's attitude toward Terese's pregnancy? Even though he'd been moved by the news of our own child coming, I couldn't help remembering how negative he was about it later. And maybe most important of all, Terese had said that loving David had silenced her musically. Maybe he didn't know this, but what if he did? And if so, was he afraid that he would eventually damage me in the same way? Could that concept have contributed to his suicide?

Time flew as we flew, as I tried to process everything I'd learned. I knew it was going to take a while. I didn't expect that I would see Terese again, or François. But by the time we'd crossed the Atlantic and were starting to make our descent along the New England coastline, I'd begun to take some comfort in the memory of the two of them living on that Italian hillside. I thought of François's face, the shape so much like his father's, the eyes dark and sensitive, and that smile. It seemed that David's light had not gone out completely after all.

T
he Monday after I got back, Jake picked me up in his car and took me out to Long Island. First stop was Rocky Beach. Mumma had been such a regular in my apartment that I hadn't felt like I needed to go out there. God knows I didn't have any burning desire to see Dutch. When we pulled up to the house, I sat and looked at it for a second. It seemed unfamiliar or even fake, like a movie set. But I'd had that feeling a lot since David died. I was staring at everything through a different pair of eyeballs.

“You don't have to do this,” Jake said.

“It's okay,” I said.

“I'll beat him up if he gets out of line.”

“He's an old fart in a wheelchair,” I said, climbing out of the car. “How much damage can he do?” But we both knew the answer to that one.

The downstairs had been made into an office, with stacks of papers and posters overflowing everywhere. The plastic flower centerpiece on the dining room table had been replaced by a computer, a printer, and a fax machine. Dutch was in his wheelchair, yanking pages out of the fax. He looked up for a second.

“Jesus, go eat a banana split. You look like shit.”

“Nice poem,” I said. I didn't bother with the kiss. It just didn't seem necessary to go through the motions anymore. I wondered why he'd bothered to visit me in the hospital, unless maybe that was my imagination.

“Where's Angie?” he asked.

Mumma came in with a laundry basket. “She's at a lecture with her boyfriend.”

Jake took the basket from her and we started folding.

“She hasn't brought him around here,” Dutch said. “What's the matter with him?”

“Not a thing,” Jake said, picking up an apple from the fruit bowl. My mind flashed back to Francois, the apple, that grin. “He's fine.”

“What's his line of work?” Dutch asked.

“Hospital administration,” Jake said.

“At least he's doing something useful.”

I knew that was meant for me and so did Mumma. “Come, sit down,” she said in a hurry, still trying to be the peacemaker. “I'll fix you some lunch.”

But there was no smell of something delicious in the oven, no fresh bread cooling on the windowsill. Instead, she came back out of the kitchen with a platter of olives, salami, and provolone. The days of home cooking were obviously over. Wasn't I the one who was always complaining that Mumma was a pathetic housebound slave? And now I found myself wondering, Where the fuck's the ziti?

“How's the campaign, Dutch?” Jake asked.

“Catching flak from the Republican machine,” he said.

I looked at the posters that plastered the dining room wall. They pictured a fireman in hat, boots, the works, seated in a wheelchair. The letters H.O.F.F. stretched across the bottom—for Honor Our Firefighters.

“Look again,” Mumma said.

I did, and my eyes bugged out. The fireman on the poster was Dutch. Well, it was Dutch airbrushed into a slightly older version of Kurt Russell.

“Man, I wish I'd had that photographer for my publicity photo,” I said.

“They barely touched it,” Dutch grumbled.

Jake and I sat down and picked at the antipasto.

“Did you ever get an answer from Christopher Reeve?” Jake asked Dutch.

“Yeah, one of those form letters,” he said.

“But it was sweet as those things go,” Mumma added.

“We're not some half-ass parasite thing here,” Dutch complained.

“They sent a phone number to call,” Mumma said. “We'll follow up on it.” I wondered how long ago she'd lost the cringing look she used to get when Dutch bitched about something in that tone.

I was more than ready to leave. It had always been a mystery how Jake could read me like I was the front page of
Newsday.
He got up and took our plates into the kitchen. Mumma followed him in and I could hear them talking at the sink. Me, I stared at Dutch. He felt my eyes on him and glanced up from his paperwork, but only for a second.

“What did you want from me?” I asked.

He kept his attention on his work. “What?”

“Why have you always been so pissed off at me?”

“Because you could have done something with your life.” Said so casually.

I thought about the magazines that had done features on me and David—
People, Interview, Music Today,
and many more. Charlie Rose. The Kennedy Center. The concert tours, the international acclaim.

“Maybe you wanted me to be a firefighter,” I said.

“You had it in you to be a good one,” he said.

Well, that was a surprise. “You're serious,” I said. He didn't answer just kept on stuffing envelopes.

“You don't think making music for millions of people is useful?”

“You never listened to me, that's for shit sure,” he said.

“That's it, isn't it, Dutch? You just couldn't stand that I went and did what I wanted.”

He looked up at me now. His eyes were faded versions of what they had once been. “You were just like me,” he said.

The son you always wanted, I almost said. But at least I'd got a hint. I'd stepped outside his reach and that wasn't something he could forgive.

“Only a little like you,” I said, and stood up. Jake and Mumma were loading the dishwasher. I had the feeling they were steering clear until Dutch and I had finished. I went into the kitchen, grabbed Mumma from behind, and gave her a hug. “Time to go, Jake,” I said.

On the way to the wildlife preserve Jake said, “You're quiet. What's up?”

I looked out at the condominiums that had crawled almost to the water's edge. “It's kind of amazing actually. I don't care about him anymore.”

“Dutch?”

“He used to get to me like nobody else. It would wake me up in the middle of the night and even make me puke sometimes, I'd get so crazed. I wasted a lot of time on that bullshit.” The gulls were wheeling over the beach. They looked clean and free. “He's pretty much history. Not relevant, if you know what I mean.”

He smiled at me. “I think so, yeah. That's good, Stallone, because there was a long time you kept hoping he'd turn into Father of the Year.”

We drove in silence, passing through the ugly commercial area and into the preserve, where the dunes rose steeply on either side of the road. We pulled into the parking lot and up to the trail house where Jake worked.

“Come on,” he said. “Exercise time.”

“It's nice sitting here.” I really didn't feel like doing anything, and to tell the truth, the sight of the water was getting to me. When I allowed myself to glance at it, I thought about David going under.

“You're looking at the side of a building. Water view's the other way.”

I didn't answer him.

“Oh,” he said, getting it. But he came around and opened the door.

“Time to move your sorry butt.” And time to move on. He didn't have to say it for me to hear what he meant.

The pinewoods stretched back away from the beach. As we walked along the narrow path, there was the smell of warming earth that meant summer wasn't far off.

“Remember when we were kids,” Jake said, “we'd see colonies of terns out here, maybe three hundred at a time? Well, forget about it. The drainage pipes finished that.” He stopped to tear out a bush.

“Hey, what're you doing? That's pretty.”

“Multiflora rose. It's too invasive, chokes out a lot of good stuff. And that's garlic mustard—we don't know where the hell that came from. But there's good news, too.”

“Well, thank God for
that
,” I said.

“Remember when the canals came in and the landfill squeezed out the salt marsh over toward Rocky Beach?”

“Yeah, no more frogs.”

“Or clams either. Here's where we're planting new sea grass.”

“It looks like hair transplants,” I said.

He smiled. “Same principle, I guess.” The wind suddenly kicked up. The sound in the dry grass sounded like distant waves of applause. It made me ache.

He stopped to point at a tangled pile of twigs heaped on top of a pole. “That's our newest osprey nest,” Jake said. “There's three chicks. Our raptor program allows us to tag the parents and put radio transmitters on …”

I was smiling at him. He stopped and laughed. “Carried away?”

“It's good, Jake.”

He swept his arm around. “So you like my office?”

“You're a lucky man.”

His face was tanned already, and even the hairs on his wrists where he'd turned up his cuffs were bleached by the sun. A tingling like a tiny lightning bolt shot up from my crotch to my nipples. It stopped me in my tracks as if I'd never felt it before in my whole life.

“What?” Jake said.

I shook my head. I'd never believed that people are only turned on by their true loves. But that was when the one I loved happened to be alive. This was a whole different story, with David not here to defend himself against any possible infidelity on my part. It seemed so totally disloyal to be having sexual feelings for someone else. Then there was Pauline, of course.

“How's Pauline?” It just slipped out.

Fortunately, Jake hadn't noticed me eyeballing his very fine body. He'd never been much clued in to how women reacted to him anyway. Not like David, who was well aware that any woman he came within six feet of was dead meat.

“Fine. Her students are great. See this stuff?” He ran his hand across the broomlike top of a plant. It looked like a weed to me, but the tender way Jake touched it, you'd think it was the hair on the head of a newborn baby. “It's called phragmites. For years we thought it was an enemy invader but now we find out it fights pollutants.”

“Sucks them right out of the air?” I was concentrating, trying to distract myself from that buzz between my legs.

“No, deep root system that flushes the soil. Are you tired, Bess? Maybe we'd better start back.”

“Yeah, okay.” Actually, I was exhausted. Jake led me onto a wider path where we could walk side by side.

“This circles back to the parking lot,” he said, and tucked my hand in his arm. “I've been listening to your CD,” he said.

“Which one?” David and I had just managed to finish the second before he began to fall apart.

“First. I like it more.”

“Why?” I was curious. Jake had no musical training at all. I suspected my CDs were the only two classical items in his collection of bluegrass and country stuff.

“The second one sounds rushed or something. Nervous. Except for that Ravel piece. That's a beautiful cut.”

I was blown away. “How'd you get so smart?” I asked. In my opinion,
La Valse
was the only decent track on the whole thing. The rest of it, David had been like a demon, whipping me and the technicians into the fast lane and never letting us out. It was not a restful thing to listen to and it sure as hell hadn't been relaxing to record.

We continued along in silence through the short pines, except it wasn't exactly silence. Somewhere along the path, I began to hear music. I wasn't even aware of it at first. When I noticed that Jake was looking at me funny, that's when I realized I was humming “The Happy Farmer,” the same little piece by Robert Schumann that Amanda Jones had played at the school recital back when I was a scabby-kneed brat. Jake understood the significance somehow, although I don't remember discussing how I never heard music anymore. He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.

“Beautiful day,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. By the time we got back to the car, the memory tape in my head had played fragments of a few of the pieces I'd learned over the years, but almost chronologically. I guess I was starting over again.