The Music School (13 page)

He listened now. The downstairs door opened. In the little skip of silence following the squeak of the hinges, his heart found space to erect a towering certainty, which toppled as the first brutal, masculine steps assaulted the stairs. Still, perhaps she was wearing boots, perhaps in the empty months her manner of mounting had changed, perhaps she was angry, or rigid with determination, or heavy with fright. He noiselessly went to his door, his hand lifted to turn the knob. The footsteps slithered on the linoleum and passed by. He felt relieved. He had lived so long with the vain expectation of her coming that it, the expectation, had become a kind of companion he was afraid of losing. He stared at the wall, dumbstruck by its
stupidity. He turned sick of himself, physically sick, so that his arms ached and his stomach fell and the nagging sour smell behind the baseboard seemed the odor of his own decaying body. He returned to the chair and tried to study.

The outer door opened again, delicately this time. His heartbeats timed the silence. He saw her, dressed in blue or green or brown, ascending the stairs toward him, her lips a little parted in the effort of stealth, and her hand, slightly reddened and bony from antiseptic scrubbings, lightly touching the wall for balance. The silence lengthened, lengthened beyond recall, and he forced himself to admit that there was no one on the stairs, that the wind or a child had idly opened the door from outside and let it fall shut. He rose from the chair in a rage; why didn’t she
know
, know how he wanted her now, not in white, but in blue or green or brown? This was the woman he wanted, the woman much like other women, the woman who talked awry in restaurants, who wanted to marry him, the woman who came to him and not the woman, in white, who left. He had accepted her leaving because of the pledge to return she left behind, the clothes that at last he recognized as her essential clothes, the everyday clothes that contained her other costumes, as skin is beneath all cloth and white is the spin of all colors. He had dreaded in marriage the loss of their mornings, their transposition into the shadowy scale of evening. But she had not explained to him that the mornings were a gift, an extravagance on her part which could be curtailed. She had been neglectful not to explain this, and she was wrong now not to know that he, lagging behind her a distance of months, had followed in the steps of her love and now had reached the exact point she had reached when they had last parted, and that she had only to stop, and turn, and take one step up the stairs to meet him. Yes, she was stupid,
hasty, and cruel not to know his heart, not to hear the great cry issuing from this room; and this blunt vision of her limitations failed to dull his love but instead dreadfully sharpened it, for love begins in earnest when we love what is limited.

“My nurse,” he whispered aloud, at last putting forth, in conscious competition with the tiny notched sighing of the clock, the shuddering of the refrigerator, and the empty scratches of sound in the stairway and hallway, a sound of his own. This speaking, this invoking her aloud, was the only action he was capable of taking. To seek her out would be to risk the final refusal which the silence withheld. To leave the room would be to abandon the possibility of receiving her visit. Even to install a telephone would be to heap another silence upon the furious silence of the stairs and of the doors. He did nothing. He did nothing all morning but maintain, with the full strength of his scattered mind and attenuated body, an unanswered vigil.

At noon, the day’s reprieve arrived. She could not come now. She would be at work. His strenuous wrestle with her absence could be suspended, and did not need to be resumed until tomorrow morning. Perhaps tomorrow he would be weaker and, therefore, less caring, stronger. He felt that these mornings were aging him; he looked in the mirror for traces of the strange painless pain that punished him, like a punctual masseur, for three hours each day. The mirror, too, was unanswering. If anything were to show, it would be in the eyes, and one’s eyes, self-confronted, lose all expression. His frame slowly relaxed, and ceased to feel his heart as an intruder. Like someone dressing in clothes wildly scattered about on the night before, he could reassemble his presence and leave the room. He could enter the twinkling city, eat, keep appointments, confront people, confident that his outward appearance
had not altered, that, just as his body had refused to burst in its fullness before, so now it failed to collapse in its emptiness. Resuming, in part, a student’s interested demeanor, he heard himself talk, give answers, even laugh. He saw, with a double sense of being a fraud and defrauded both, that an existence could be patched together out of afternoons and nights. But his mornings had been destroyed, and the morning of his life taken from him.

 
At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie

B
LOWFISH
with lightbulbs inside their dried skins glowed above the central fortress of brown bottles. The bar was rectangular; customers sat on all four sides. A slim schoolteacherish-looking girl, without much of a tan and with one front tooth slightly overlapping the other, came in, perched on a corner stool, and asked for a daiquiri-on-the-rocks. She wore a yellow halter, turquoise shorts, and white tennis sneakers. The white bartender, who was not visibly malformed, nevertheless moved like a hunchback, with a sideways bias and the scuttling nimbleness peculiar to cripples. He wore a powder-blue polo shirt, and now and then paused to take a rather avid sip from a tall glass containing perhaps orange juice; his face was glazed with sweat and he kept peering toward the outdoors, as if expecting to be relieved of duty. The green sea was turning gray under round pink clouds. A boat dully knocked against the cement wharf, and suddenly the noise had the subtle importance noises in these latitudes assume at night. A member of the steel band, a tall, long-jawed Negro, materialized
in the rear of the place, on a shallow shadowy platform where the cut and dented steel drums were stacked. After un-stacking and mounting them, this Negro, who wore a tattered red shirt and held a dead cigarette in the center of his lips, picked up a mallet and experimentally tapped into the air a succession, a cluster, an overlapping cascade of transparent notes that for a moment rendered everyone at the bar silent.

Then a homosexual with a big head turned to the schoolteacherish girl, who had been served, and said, “See my pretty hat?” His head seemed big because his body was small, a boy’s body, knobby and slack and ill-fitted to his veined man’s hands and to his face. His eyes were rather close together, making him seem to concentrate, without rest, upon a disagreeable internal problem, and his lips—which in their curt cut somehow expressed New York City—were too quick, snapping in and out of a grin as if he were trying to occupy both sides of his situation, being both the shameless clown and the aloof, if amused, onlooker. He had been talking about his hat, half to himself, since four o’clock this afternoon, and when he held it out to the girl an eddy of sighs and twisted eyebrows passed through the faces in the yellow darkness around the bar. The hat was a cheap broadweave straw with a bird’s nest of artificial grass set into the crown, a few glass eggs fixed in the nest, and several toy birds suspended on stiff wires above it, as if in flight. “I designed it myself,” he explained. “For the carnival this weekend. Isn’t it marvellously uninhibited?” He glanced around, checking on the size of his audience.

He was well known here. If he had scraped, from the surface of indifference, a few shreds of attention, it was because of the girl. Her coming in here, at this twilight hour, alone, bearing herself with such prim determined carelessness, was odd enough to attract notice, even at a tropical bar, where everything is permitted to happen.

“It’s lovely,” she said, of the hat, and sipped her drink.

“Do you want to put it on? Please try it.”

“I don’t think so, thank you.”

“I designed it myself,” he said, looking around and deciding to make a speech. “That’s the way I am. I just give my ideas away.” He flung up his hands in a gesture of casting away, and a breeze moved in from the street as if to accept his gift. “If I were like other people, I’d make money with my ideas. Money, mo
nnn
ey. It’s excrement, but I love it.” A brief anonymous laugh rose and was borne off by the breeze. The homosexual returned to the girl with a tender voice. “You don’t have to put it on,” he told her. “It’s not really finished. When I get back to my room, where I’ve been meaning to go all day, if that
fiend
”—he pointed at the bartender, who with his slightly frantic deftness was pouring a rum Collins—“would let me go. He says I owe him monnney! When I get back to my room, I’m going to add a few touches, here, and here. A few spangly things, just a few. It’s for the carnival this weekend. Are you down here for the carnival?”

“No,” the girl said. “I’m flying back tomorrow.”

“You should stay for the carnival. It’s wonderfully uninhibited.”

“I’d like to, but I must go back.” Slightly blushing, she lowered her voice and murmured something containing the word “excursion.”

The homosexual slapped the bar. “Forgive me, forgive me, dear Lord above”—he rolled his eyes upward, to the glowing blowfish and the great roaches and tarantulas of straw which decorated the walls—“but I
must
see how my hat looks on you, you’re so pretty.”

He reached out and set the hat with its bright hovering birds on her head. She took another sip of her drink, docilely wearing the hat. A child laughed.

The homosexual’s eyes widened. This unaccustomed expression was painful to look at; it was as if two incisions were being held open by clamps. The child who had laughed was looking straight at him: a bright round face fine-featured as the moon, rising just barely to the level of the bar and topped by hair so fair it was white. The little boy sat between his parents, a man and a woman oddly alike, both wearing white cotton and having stout sun-browned arms, crinkled weather-whipped faces, and irises whose extremely pale blue seemed brittle, baked by days of concentration on a glaring sea. Even their hair matched. The man’s had not been cut in months, except across his forehead, and was salt-bleached in great tufts and spirals, like an unravelling rope of half-dark strands. The woman’s, finer and longer, was upswept into a tumultuous blond crown that had apparently sheltered the roots enough to leave them, for an inch or two, dark. They looked, this husband and wife, like two sexless chieftains of a thickset, seagoing Nordic tribe. As if for contrast, they were accompanied by a gaunt German youth with swarthy skin, watchful eyes, close-cropped hair, and protruding ears. He stood behind and between them, a shadow uniting three luminaries.

The homosexual crouched down on the bar and fiddled his fingers playfully. “Hi,” he said. “Are you laughing at me?”

The child laughed again, a little less spontaneously.

His parents stopped conversing.

“What a gorgeous child,” the homosexual called to them. “He’s so—so
fresh
. So uninhibited. It’s wonderful.” He blinked; truly he did seem dazzled.

The father smiled uneasily toward the wife; the pale creases around his eyes sank into his tan, and his face, still young, settled into what it would become—the toughened, complacent, blind face of an old Scandinavian salt, the face that, pipe in teeth, is mimicked on carved bottle-stoppers.

“No, really,” the homosexual insisted. “He’s darling. You should take him to Hollywood. He’d be a male Shirley Temple.”

The child, his tiny pointed chin lifting in mute delight, looked upward from one to the other of his parents. His mother, in a curious protective motion, slipped from her stool and placed a sandalled foot on the rung of her child’s stool, her tight white skirt riding up and exposing half her thigh. It was thick yet devoid of fat, like the trunk of a smooth-skinned tree.

The father said, “You think?”

“I
think
?” the homosexual echoed eagerly, crouching farther forward and touching his chin to his glass. “I
know
. He’d be a male Shirley Temple. My judgment is infallible. If I was willing to leave all you lovely people and go dig in the dung, I’d be a stinking-rich talent scout living in Beverly Hills.”

The father’s face collapsed deeper into its elderly future. The mother seized her thigh with one hand and ruffled the child’s hair with the other. The dark German boy began to talk to them, as if to draw them back into their radiant privacy. But the homosexual had been stirred. “You know,” he called to the father, “just looking at you I can feel the brine in my face. You both look as if you’ve been on the ocean all of your life.”

“Not quite,” the father said, so tersely it wasn’t heard.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I haven’t been on the sea all my life.”

“You know, I
love
sailing. I love the life of the open sea. It’s so”—his lips balked, rejecting “uninhibited”—“it’s so free, so pure, all that wind, and the waves, and all that jazz. You can just be yourself. No, really. I think it’s wonderful. I love Nature. I used to live in Queens.”