The Music School (9 page)

The girl giggled and shuttled her eyes between the two adults, to make sure they were serious. “Luh crrayong,” she said.

“
Bon
,” Kenneth said. “Charlie.
‘Le crayon.’
 ”

The boy was four, and his intelligence had a way of unpredictably sinking beneath waves of infantile willfulness. But,
after a moment’s hesitation, he brought out “
Le crayon
” with an expert twang.

“And Vera?
‘Le crayon
’?”

The baby was just learning English, and he did not press her when she looked startled and said nothing. The lesson continued, through
le feu, le bois, la cheminée
, and
le canapé orange
. Having exhausted the objects immediately before them, Kenneth drew, and Marie identified, such basic components of the universe as
l’homme, la femme, le garçon, la jeune fille, le chien, le chat, la maison
, and
les oiseaux
. The two older children took to bringing things from other parts of the room
—un livre, une bouteille d’encre, un cendrier
, and an old
soulier
of Charlie’s whose mate had mysteriously vanished out in the yard among the giant cactuses. Nancy fetched from her room three paper dolls of great men she had punched from a copy of
Réalités
left in the house. “
Ah
,” Marie said. “
Jules César, Napoléon, et Charles Baudelaire
.”

Vera toddled into the kitchen and came back with a stale cupcake, which she held out hopefully, her little face radiant.

“
Gâteau
,” Marie said.

“Coogie,” Vera said.

“
Gâteau
.”

“Coogie.”

“
Non, non. Gâteau
.”

“
Coogie!
”

“
Gâteau!
”

The baby burst into tears. Kenneth picked her up and said, “You’re right, Vera. That’s a cookie.” To the other children he said, “O.K., kids. That’s all for now. Tomorrow we’ll have another lesson. Go outside and play.” He set the baby down. With a frightened backward look at the baby-sitter, Vera followed her brother and sister outdoors. By way of patching
things up, Kenneth felt he should stay with Marie and make conversation. Both remained sitting. He wondered how much longer it would be before Janet returned and rescued them. The unaccustomed sensation of yearning for his wife made him feel itchy and suffocated.

“
Le français
,” Marie said, spacing her words clearly, “
est difficile pour vous
.”

“
Je suis très stupide
,” he said.

“
Mais non, non, monsieur est très doué, très
”—her hand scribbled over an imaginary sketch pad
—
“
adroit
.”

Kenneth winced modestly, unable to frame any disclaimer.

She directed at him an interrogative sentence which, though she repeated it slowly, with various indications of her hands, he could not understand. “Nyew Yurrk?” she said at last. “Weshing
ton?
”

“Oh. Where do I come from? Here.
Les États-Unis
.” He took up the pad again, turned a new leaf, and drew the Eastern Seaboard. “
Floride
,” he said as he outlined the peninsula and, growing reckless, indicated “
Le Golfe de Mexique
.” He suspected from her blank face that this was wrong. He put in a few dark dots: “Washington, New York,
et ici, une heure nord à
New York
par avion,
Bos
ton! Grande ville
.”

“Ah,”
Marie said.

“We live,” Kenneth went on, “uh,
nous vivons dans une maison comme ça
.” And he found himself drawing, in avidly remembered detail, the front of their house on Marlborough Street, the flight of brown steps with the extra-tall top step, the carpet-sized front lawn with its wrought-iron fence and its single prisoner of forsythia like a weeping princess, the coarse old English ivy that winter never quite killed, the tall bay windows with their transom lights of Tiffany glass; he even put the children’s faces in the second-story windows.
This was the window of Vera’s room, these were the ones that Nancy and Charlie watched the traffic out of, this was the living-room window that at this time of year should show a brightly burdened Christmas tree, and up here, on the third story, were the little shuttered windows of the guest bedroom that was inhabited by a ghost with a slender throat, sleek hair, and naked moonlit shoulders. Emotion froze his hand.

Marie, looking up from the vivid drawing with very dark eyes, asked a long question in which he seemed to hear the words
“France”
and
“pourquoi.”

“Why did we come to France?” he asked her in English. She nodded. He said what he next said in part, no doubt, because it was the truth, but mainly, probably, because he happened to know the words. He put his hand over his heart and told the baby-sitter,
“J’aime une autre femme.”

Marie’s shapely plucked eyebrows lifted, and he wondered if he had made sense. The sentence seemed foolproof; but he did not repeat it. Locked in linguistic darkness, he had thrown open the most tightly closed window of his life. He felt the relief, the loss of constriction, of a man who has let in air.

Marie spoke very carefully.
“Et madame? Vous ne l’aimez pas?”

There was a phrase, Kenneth knew, something like
“Comme ci, comme ça,”
which might roughly outline the immense ambiguous mass of his guilty, impatient, fond, and forlorn feelings toward Janet. But he didn’t dare it, and instead, determined to be precise, measured off about an inch and a half with his fingers and said,
“Un petit peu pas.”

“Ahhhh.”
And now Marie, as if the languages had been reversed, was speechless. Various American phrases traditional to his situation—“a chance to get over it,” “for the sake of the kids”—revolved in Kenneth’s head without encountering any
equivalent French.
“Pour les enfants,”
he said at last, gesturing toward the outdoors and abruptly following the direction of his gesture, for Vera had begun to cry in the distance. About twice a day she speared herself on one of the cactuses.

Janet was walking up the driveway. As he saw her go in to the baby-sitter he felt only a slight alarm. It didn’t seem possible that he could have been indiscreet in a language he didn’t know. When he came indoors, Marie and his wife were talking at cheerful length about what he gathered to be the charm of Le Musée d’Antibes, and it occurred to him that the reserve that had existed between the two women had been as much the baby-sitter’s as Janet’s. Now, from this afternoon on, Marie became voluble and jolly, open and
intime
, with her mistress; the two held long kitchen conversations in which womanly intuition replaced whatever was lost in nuances of grammar. The children, feeling the new
rapprochement
, ceased yowling when their parents went away together, and under Marie’s care developed a somewhat independent French, in which, if pencils were called crayons, crayons must be called pencils. Vera learned the word
gâteau
and the useful sentence
“Je voudrais un gâteau.”
As to Kenneth, he was confident, without knowing what the women said to each other, that his strange confession was never mentioned. The
bébé-sitter
kept between herself and him a noticeable distance, whether as a sign of disapproval or of respect, he could not decide; at any rate, when she was in the house he was encouraged to paint by himself in the fields, and this isolation, wherein his wife’s growing fluency spared him much further trouble of communication, suited his preoccupied heart. In short, they became a
ménage
.

 
Twin Beds in Rome

T
HE
M
APLES
had talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, had the final effect of knitting them ever tighter together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy. And their lovemaking, like a perversely healthy child whose growth defies every deficiency of nutrition, continued; when their tongues at last fell silent, their bodies collapsed together as two mute armies might gratefully mingle, released from the absurd hostilities decreed by two mad kings. Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die. Burning to leave one another, they left, out of marital habit, together. They took a trip to Rome.

They arrived at night. The plane was late, the airport grand. They had left hastily, without plans; and yet, as if forewarned of their arrival, nimble Italians, speaking perfect English, took their luggage in hand, reserved a hotel room for
them by telephone from the airport, and ushered them into a bus. The bus, surprisingly, plunged into a dark rural landscape. A few windows hung lanternlike in the distance; a river abruptly bared its silver breast beneath them; the silhouettes of olive trees and Italian pines flicked past like shadowy illustrations in an old Latin primer. “I could ride this bus forever,” Joan said aloud, and Richard was pained, remembering, from the days when they had been content together, how she had once confessed to feeling a sexual stir when the young man at the gas station, wiping the windshield with a vigorous, circular motion, had made the body of the car, containing her, rock slightly. Of all the things she had ever told him, this remained in his mind the most revealing, the deepest glimpse she had ever permitted into the secret woman he could never reach and had at last wearied of trying to reach.

Yet it pleased him to have her happy. This was his weakness. He wished her to be happy, and the certainty that, away from her, he could not know if she were happy or not formed the final, unexpected door barring his way when all others had been opened. So he dried the very tears he had whipped from her eyes, withdrew each protestation of hopelessness at the very point when she seemed willing to give up hope, and their agony continued. “Nothing lasts forever,” he said now.

“You can’t let me relax a minute, can you?”

“I’m sorry. Do relax.”

She stared through the window awhile, then turned and told him, “It doesn’t feel as if we’re going to Rome at all.”

“Where are we going?” He honestly wanted to know, honestly hoped she could tell him.

“Back to the way things were?”

“No. I don’t want to go back to that. I feel we’ve come very far and have only a little way more to go.”

She looked out at the quiet landscape a long while before he realized she was crying. He fought the impulse to comfort her, inwardly shouted it down as cowardly and cruel, but his hand, as if robbed of restraint by a force as powerful as lust, crept onto her arm. She rested her head on his shoulder. The shawled woman across the aisle took them for lovers and politely glanced away.

The bus slipped from the country dark. Factories and residential rows narrowed the highway. A sudden monument, a massive white pyramid stricken with light and inscribed with Latin, loomed beside them. Soon they were pressing their faces together to the window to follow the Colosseum itself as, shaped like a shattered wedding cake, it slowly pivoted and silently floated from the harbor of their vision. At the terminal, another lively chain of hands and voices rejoined them to their baggage, settled them in a taxi, and carried them to the hotel. As Richard dropped six hundred-lira pieces into the driver’s hand, they seemed the smoothest, roundest, most tactfully weighted coins he had ever bestowed. The hotel desk was one flight up. The clerk was young and playful. He pronounced their name several times, and wondered why they had not gone to Naples. The halls of the hotel, which had been described to them at the airport as second-class, were nevertheless of rose marble. The marble floor carried into their room. This and the amplitude of the bathroom and the imperial purple of the curtains blinded Richard to a serious imperfection until the clerk, his heels clicking in satisfaction with the perhaps miscalculated tip he had received, was far down the hall.

“Twin beds,” he said. They had always had a double bed.

Joan asked, “Do you want to call the desk?”

“How important is it to you?”

“I don’t think it matters. Can you sleep alone?”

“I guess. But—” It was delicate. He felt they had been insulted. Until they finally parted, it seemed impertinent for anything, even a slice of space, to come between them. If the trip were to kill or cure (and this was, for the tenth time, their slogan), then the attempt at a cure should have a certain technical purity, even though—or, rather, all the more because—in his heart he had already doomed it to fail. And also there was the material question of whether he could sleep without a warm proximate body to give his sleep shape.

“But what?” Joan prompted.

“But it seems sort of sad.”

“Richard, don’t be sad. You’ve been sad enough. You’re supposed to relax. This isn’t a honeymoon or anything, it’s just a little rest we’re trying to give each other. You can come visit me in my bed if you can’t sleep.”