REBECCA PYLE
Winter Solstice
Today two young men come, as you once did, to New York. Changelings in New York. It might be good, you think, to enter New York upon the winter solstice—the darkest, bleakest part of winter, when the light evaporates, this cruel, thin, gold winter solstice light—not during those beautiful blue twilights of summer. Then that leaving home, that entering New York, as you also once did, might be quieter, less awkward, less apparent.
You set out strawberries. You are not young. But better, in many ways: you are successful. You live in a pre-war in Manhattan, seventeenth floor. Your pre-war even pre-first world war, not the second.
Your job, successful musician now, is to be a gracious grantor. Of favors.
Not, as your parents once were, begging for favors, politely: as your mother’s Christmas presents to your childhood tutors were hopes—for favors. Jars of lingonberries, chocolates from Switzerland. Always, in a basket. For the good word that might someday be put in—for you.
Once you brought. Now you need no favor in return.
Today, this almost winter solstice day, mid-December, you buzz in the most recent two young men needing favors. Someone has told you their names, which instruments they play. You’ve forgotten where they are from.
Something Colorado.
There seem to be increasing numbers of young men in the world. Young women remain singular and surprising to you—always, like orchid blooms.
You answer their buzz. Let them in. They laugh, love the strawberries. In winter! In New York! They look outside your windows at the street below. You know how their Colorado blond brilliance will fade here, then, one day, reclaim—a brilliance beginning again, flame reclaiming a swamped almost-failed wick. All this you know—will take years.
Students live like rabbits in New York, you say, cheerfully. But you’ll have electricity, unlike the rabbits. Here’s a list of students’ names. You’ve got to have roommates to live in Manhattan—I’ve tutored all these. They might have room for you. They nod, smile.
They head out into winter solstice light—a searchlight trying to find its quarry.
Hollow, or hollowless, winter solstice light. December seventeenth, a week before Christmas.
In an hour you’ll head to a theater on Broadway, to play, to chart mistakes.
You are an expert in—mistakes. Mistakes in the orchestra, mistakes on the stage. Seating, script; score, costumes. Failures in delivery: weary actors. Failures of imagination or scope. Latenesses, of which you are never accused. Missed notes, latenesses (latenesses, it cannot be stressed enough, are cardinal sin). What makes you more than concertmaster is you keep your secrets, confide only to power.
Ear and eye finely tuned, and your discretion.
All that your duty: the real treat, and your real work, and your chore, is your phantasms.
The ones who attend without tickets.
Paradis phantasm number one. She. Dark-haired Paradis! So often, appearing like a gleam in the seats. Something to say to you. What? Once, when you were new here living like a rabbit—she was the one who slipped a single long-stemmed rose in your violin case. Singer, actress, dancer.
Your apartment had a fire escape that did not go all the way to the ground. You knew what to do if fire came: you'd toss your violin to someone down below, and then follow, fighting off flames as best you could.
She’d been in bloom—like a white or a red orchid. Young men, fools like you, had been swarming about her, the sensing of competition urging them to do—ridiculous things.
At the end you discover she had been dating four men at once. Those the days before traveling phones in pockets and handbags; you couldn’t hear phone-chimes; her answering machine you wouldn’t have been privy to—unless you’d shared a place. You were too young for that, too in love with you—violin.
You should have married her. When you yourself lived, dark-haired you, like a rabbit in the city, when she was young, dancing, singing.
Rose in your violin case? So clandestine so scripted so desperate and trite a maneuver—it was—genius.
But—it perturbed you—she had symbolically succeeded—through the rose—coming so close to your violin. Suggesting she, symbolized by the rose, was as important or more important—than your violin. Even equal. Your parents, your tutor had warned you about this. You will never make it, they said. Unless your violin is first.
You took the rose out—which her face told you was her rose—set it down, somewhere. A music stand.
Louis! Your phantasm number two. Rich man who’d easily bought the tallest and the oldest of the old dwelling spots in Greenwich Village: his world was ancient raw brick windowsills, halogen lighting. Also summer houses. Islands. Receptions for the symphony. Top donor list, Louis. Died, something about latent lead poisoning, something no one knew—till months after he was buried. The autopsy, the investigation. Old unreplaced plumbing of his old unbelievably beautiful home in the heart of Greenwich Village—turned out to be his quiet, beautiful, bought-and-owned assassin.
You yourself married his widow: Louis’ widow, she of her lead lawsuit winnings, she—who had been married to him—five years. Louis bought that house in the Village on a fat rich boy whim, she said, began living in it when all his friends were poor, early in his twenties. Apparently poor Louis had liked to read books, do cocaine; that was the rumor. He loved cocaine, could afford it—spent many hours in the evenings in the very vintage lead-lined claw-foot tub in the Village. Apparently lead lingered in the durable beautiful old ceramic linings of old bathtubs. Louise’s—hadn’t that been darling, they were Louis and Louise?—her style was brisk shower and eating at the delicatessens downtown with the most talkative musicians after practice. She’d never wanted to be married to either Louis or you, Louise had told you, eventually. But a woman, she said, spent her life jumping—from one suddenly-there fire escape to another.You knew that, didn’t you, she asked, not looking at your face.
She’d liked, she said, how you held your violin, almost as if it was a baby, she said—nestled to your chin. The last thing she said to you—before the symphony’s trip to China, when you let her divorce you while the symphony was in China—was she was tired of all musicians. They’re always gone in the evenings. Or on another continent, she told everyone.
Back to landlocked symphony patrons for her. Her new place now, you’d heard, a penthouse modern: much higher up than your seventeenth floor in your post-her.
She not one of your performance phantasms—divorce seemed to blot that out, that phantasm aspect, proof that divorces were the deepest of deaths?—but Louis remained a dead phantasm calling out: dead Louis resting across two chairs in the back as if missing the generous comfort of the Village soaking tub kind and generous and warm as the womb—that horrible beautiful tub that was making him secretly foul with lead. You didn’t miss his widow you unwidowed. You didn’t even miss their, her, money. The money had competed with your violin, and, wonderfully, lost.
You wanted to ask Louis what your own end would be—Louis might know. He—Louis—might be able to see what cloud was forming around your own life you were not able to see.
Everyone had one. Or two. Or three. The dark clouds that found their way to you, insulating you, but blinding you to truth.
Phantasm three: your dead great-uncle Gregory, who often slips in front row to the right to remind you it should have been Gregory the uncle always playing the violin. You know he could have played a violin—given good tutors-—five times more finely. But trapped—in the Wisconsin town he and you had come from. Once he’d been more handsome than the Nutcracker King. You gave him a look, when you saw him in the velvet chairs, that you hoped told him clearly: yes, he should have been--in your Jack B. Nimble concertmaster’s chair.
And of course the child. That hard-glow phantasm. Child you never met—who lives, but you have never met. So unbearably handsome. In your phantasm, he never grows taller, only thinner, paler, eyes of greater sadness—of a child marooned in a theatre full of grownups. Lightning pale, a shiver of him in every youngish set of young men coming to your pre-war for young-musician-survival favors. Glow of their ears—the fine hair around their young ears—like his, the phantasm’s, the unclaimed boy’s. Glowing, in a velvet theater seat, he was, always glowing in the dark. Listening, as his mother’s rose had listened, waited. Sudden, or not so sudden, child of Paradis—young woman-in-bloom who laid perfect single rose of red in your case (almost a vase) lined with velvet. Her desperate gambit to have you.
The Rose. You could still see the rose, too perfect, too long, too single. After you’d played, played well, you hoped—you’d returned, opened the unlatched case, and there it was, on velvet. You had to move that imperial thing of thorns—to nestle your violin back into its warm and protected place, in your violin case, on its velvet.
She’d—Paradis—eventually told you the difficult number. Not number of months along; she hadn’t bothered you with that. The number of men.
As many as a chair, she said. You had looked at her without comprehension. That was one. She shook her head. Four, she had then said. The legs.
Were they handsome, you said. Hating the word chair: she knew first chair was every player’s dream. Solo so great a dream you could not bear—to say it or to dream it. First chair was the top of the pile of blocks. The pile of chairs.
Each in their way terribly handsome, she’d said, in a particular, sure way, as if describing mysterious chairs to be chosen from an antique shop. All four. You were very busy with your violin.
Had Paradis ever married? You tried hard to avoid that knowledge. You’d heard he was raised by Paradis and his grandparents, full of Kentucky pity for her New York plight. But that’s only what you heard. You were lost in the paradise world of Louis’s widow, you becoming the anomaly: the musician not desperate or poor. Louis and Louise could gaily deliberately mispronounce Beethoven, Hayden, deliberating on Bee or Hay. They could pronounce Mozart with a z. Everything they said was funny. Rich, they were welcomed anywhere, and they were always late. That was stylish. On a donor list, they were always at the top. Her inherited lead-lined pockets; your new lead-lined marriage. That once-heralded plumbing idea—line them with lead!—had turned out to be—very bad. But lined your own pockets for five years. That oddity—a rich musician with lead-lined pockets—was also fairly well doomed to fail. Money seemed fair trade for practice. Without practice, you fail.
You’d apologized to everyone, returned, resumed the violin practice you’d almost abandoned. Violinists now and then try to persuade themselves—practice is not really necessary. Then, midway through your recovery, your embarrassment, your climbing back up toward your original lofty determination and talent—your schoolteacher parents, with schoolteacher pensions and their house owned forty years in Wisconsin, died within days of each other. A pre-war or post-war means to New Yorkers it’s dignified, historical—now, just off the water, one has become yours. No more George Washington bridge, no Jersey exit every year: upper west side Manhattan, at last, brought to you by the authentic gravities, gravies, of death and grief.
Six thirty. The solstice gloom fully settling in now, a dingy blue, a failed twilight. You think of how Central Park is unattractive really from mid-November till March, winter solstice holding it as if in a tangled, muted snarl of tunelessness, of waiting.
A sound. The buzzer in your pre-war today—again.
The tall boys so blond, you think. Returning. A backpack or a phone or that—that list of names, stupidly left behind, or left behind purposefully, to be able to ask him more questions?
Who is it, you say, into the rectangle of dots in the greenish-gold brass. You hope it is not the super, who reminds you somewhat of your now-dead uncle, uncle Gregory, so trapped by his own relatives, his own town’s requirements. Similarly the young super, trapped possibly for life, guarding this building and its purchasable apartments, its prestige and value far exceeding his.
Elaine, a woman’s voice says. Surrounded by buzzer static. Elaine Paradis.
Of course you hesitate. Almost made up, you’d always thought, that unbearably beautiful last name Paradis. Paradis, you say.
I’m Paradis, she says. I’m Paradis. Or I was once, she says. Before turning into a ghost when I left New York. A pause. I’m here again.
Suddenly beautiful, buzzer’s static, surrounding her name. How much hope, you wonder, has been over-transmitted by buzzer system?
You imagine the two small feet rising, levitating, as if by sheer wish, instead of elevator. She had small feet. Elaine Paradis. Coming to see you! The ascension. But of course—she may be old and tired. Decades have gone by.
You wish the two blond young men were still here with strawberries; she could see them, proof that now youth depend on you. You are—now, so magically busy. Important.
The percolator you have had thirty years—you turn back on—to reheat coffee the boys, the hopeful musicians, had barely touched. Also: for the beauty of its laboring, upsurging, finally-crescendo of its long-worked burble, like a bird finally at the top of its tree.
You love the percolator.
She comes in the door you hold open for her before she has a chance to knock. Has she married? You see no ring. Her hands—both—absolutely pale and plain.
You couldn’t marry, a mocking, self-protective voice in your head says, four men at once. Or—a chair’s four legs.
She is beautiful still. A percolator, she says. Percolator is making its sturdy, furious noises like a steam locomotive. Now puffing its short puffs of steam from its imperial determined permanently-uprisen spout.
The percolator. I remember it, she says. I remember it.
Oh, you do, you say. Of course! You can feel your eyebrows go up like a dancing Russian’s. You know no one else who has kept their percolator. They’ve all gone to various drippy things. Enormous windows looking out at Manhattan now are your backdrop, and here and there woodland paintings great-uncle Gregory of surprising taste and discernment left for you, perfect for this million-dollar pre-war bought with the carefully saved amount your parents left you—their estate.
You bring her a stoneware pitcher of cream, refilled after the visiting Colorado boys. Cream reminds you of trips upstate with Louis’ widow before she was a widow. Good thing her style had been brisk showers, she had said often after Louis’s death. Green green fields, cows, hours driving to the summer houses while Louis—a lucky king who did not know he was deposed, already, by toxic lead and a wild-haired violinist in a symphony—you yourself, once young and hungry for success and status—as he soaked in his fat rich man’s vintage claw-foot bathtub.
Elaine Paradis is still as beautiful as a bowling ball. All gloss, purpose, and purposelessness, a wandering marble made to roll on floors of varnished amber, to knock over tall pins like milk bottles standing high-shoulder like blocking soldiers.
You note her colors are post-911, pavement-and-trees grays, browns, umbers. Survivors’ colors.
Her lips, still full and generous. But every other second or so, she closes her mouth suddenly and somewhat tightly. Keeping herself, you think, from speaking.
Perhaps that she loves you, or hates you.
She eats all the strawberries on the plate, not leaving the one symbolic mystery one most people will leave on a plate. She has a bright look pouring her own coffee—she waves your hand away—but looks sad as she pours the cream. Watching her pouring the cream you realize she looks very like—dear gods—your mother. As your mother might have looked had she been able to become a New Yorker. Perhaps. But Elaine more beautiful, more glossy, the beauty of some greater sadness.
Where are you staying, you say.
I’ve been here a little bit, she says. I’m moving to Scotland tomorrow.
You had begun to imagine her at your favorite hotel, Hotel Roosevelt, very near the musical theaters; a ten minute trip away on the Broadway line. Hotel Roosevelt most gorgeous crescendo ever seen—of chandeliers, fifty-foot lobby ceilings, repetitions of gold. Walking her back to that hotel after—tonight’s performance at the Martin Beck. It—all the adventuring musicians agreed—was always better in a hotel. At the words Hotel Roosevelt, the musicians smiled; they all knew beds there had silken bolsters of creamy white, largeish red cursive Rs embroidered with twisted floss at centers. Breakfasts small and quick but good.
You blink but keep your eyes steady: bringing your own cup of delightfully always bitter and always also sweet coffee, to your lips. The percolator you have been so loyal to all these years makes fine coffee.
Perhaps—sometimes—she hadn’t been a phantasm. She had been there, in one of the thousands and thousands of filled seats the musicians played directly in front of, crazy to see—him. But you know better than to ask. To ask would sound desperate, or wishful, wishful for something you really, certainly, probably hadn’t deserved.
Wonderful, wonderful apartment, she says. Blinking. It owns you now? she says.
She has always been startling. It does own you, you realize, all its great windows and its views and its pale powder-green historically-accurate painted walls. As servants own—a master. As a violin owns its owner. As a child, you would guess, owns its mother.
On a bay, that’s where I’ll be, she says. I’ve already gotten a house. Very little house. Brilliant white stucco on one side. All the fairly massive stone that you see there in Scotland. Window boxes already. Red flowers for the spring. I’ve saved for it. I’ve gotten it. She leans back. She smiles.
Through your mind run images of Scottish men. You once toured Glasgow, Edinburgh; Dundee. The men with very sure steady gaze, handsome red-cheeked and large, you remember, former kings and battlemen who’d had to hand over the Stone of Scone and reins of power to England. But you remember best the mens’ voices: unashamedly musical. Even a postman’s speaking voice more musical—than music. Difficult men to best.
(That violin tutor who had over and over said, slightly threatening voice: your violin must surpass all and any beauty any human voice might have!)
She names, with grace, a bay. The bay across from which she, Paradis, will live. In Scotland. Concise, beautiful, yet merged syllables you would have to practice or say often to know how to say—her way, handsome proud fine Scotland’s way.
You want to practice this way of saying the bay. But all you can think of is she is free and you are free yet it will be she only who will be seeing the boats every day. You will not. Only the cars beneath you, and the secretive sides of buildings surrounded by secretive other sides of buildings, people you cannot talk with, no matter how you admire the light-glow, the enviable mystery of their apartments.
I’m moving to a real bay, she says. They call this the port of New York, she says. But it’s not.
How right you are, you say. Port Authority. But no authority. Or port. It’s not one, anymore, unless port just means water, you say.
New York the death-of-port—as much-vaunted ghostly San Francisco is summed up by the lonely falseness of Fisherman’s Wharf gone whore to tourists. Only the bastard slips, sluttage of slips, boats barely paid a working wage slithering back and forth as cruisers. Repetitions of trips. Housekeepers dreaming of tips. Cruises. Bored human cargo who liked the television illusion of being at sea. Three buffets a day, you’ve heard. The musical cattle drive to the Caribbean, your musician friends call these cruises, the ones who’ve taken their turn playing on the cruise ships. It was where you’d have had to go if you neglected your practice and you didn’t have the safety net, those years, of Louis’s widow Louise. That end of the quay. Strawberries, you’ve heard, being sluiced with a bad quality of milk chocolate under a mechanized chocolate fountain, night and day, the cruise-ship chocolate fountain.
Your parents’ deaths, their final sacrifice for your career made of nothing but vainglorious sacrifices, thank gods guaranteeing you will never, ever, have to sail on a cruise ship playing a violin for money, and chocolate-smothered strawberries.
I’m flying, she says. As if she has read your thoughts about the cruise ships, the boats.
You love her idea of Scotland—the crashing water and the rocks and the sea. You’ve always loved her, you know now in a rush. Or was it because she was here, a bird in the hand? No wedding ring? Yet—her rose, without words, had said she, yes, had loved you, was afraid to tell you.
Take me with you, you say now, like a gambler. I can sell this. My pre-war. Easily. Everyone wants it—something like this. It’s slightly less than a million dollars.
Proud, you are suddenly, of the word sell, instead of the horrible sublease. This beautiful apartment owned by you she’s correctly deduced has made you like a growling landlocked harbormaster—who cannot leave his port.
You remember Scotland. Fish from the port fried that day and served hot and fatty wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. Ale, beer, everywhere. And the voices! The deep voices coming from the men and the lilting voices from the women, very sure also. A harmony, a weaving.
Your mind has gone symphonic. At parties, you could play. For free. Dear gods they’d love a fiddle there. Never shall she have to go bowling for men again. Buzzing on buzzers. You can just live. Why, with your parents’ money—this pre-war’s sale—you’d bought it outright, with cash—you could live together comfortably, even until—death. Her son, his family, if he had one, could even come summers to Scotland to visit. Or to live. Fate must have sent her today to you, in the darkest week of the year, the weakest week of the winter solstice.
You and Paradis had talked, yes, long ago—about going to Paris together. To live, to study; but you’d decided privately, no, France would only have drawn more men to her. You, always practicing, playing. She, alone, bored—with far too much beauty. Now, she was at the perfect and manageable level, her age, her beauty, all in sure fade; you had your inherited small real wealth. You could even put all your first-chair and dependable concertmaster’s life behind you. You could play violin only when you loved playing violin. When you chose.
Then let’s go to Scotland, you say. Together. It is the only spontaneous thing you have ever said in your life. You spread your right hand wide—your bow hand—set it all alone on the slightly sunlit table. Toward her. Paradis. A name that would fit in an opera. You feel all the winter solstice light and more inside your eyes, traveling ahead to spring.
Your eyes feel, as they rarely feel—except at the end of an exceptional concert—fully round. As all are, of course, tucked inside our blinking heads.
If it was spring, yes, she says. Because it’s winter, I’m afraid, no.
You want to say it will be spring in a mere matter of months. But something tells you she does not mean simple seasons. She means your life’s seasons. Her life’s seasons. She leans forward, over the plate where there had been strawberries. You hear crashing china sound, as if the plate has fallen and broken. But it is still there as a planet is always still there, as a planet doesn’t fall out of the sky.
Do you still play the same violin, she says.
Oh, no, you say. You lie. It’s your favorite one still, the one your parents bought you that seemed then beautiful and important far beyond your years. It’s quiet in its case, in this very apartment. In your usually dark bedroom. Umber and grayish brown, on a flamelike caramelly lining of brandywine-red velveteen, in its case; both violin and case beautifully worn.
The very case she’d set the single rose in.
The winter solstice light, beneath this dark that surrounds your apartment after she is gone, is like the throb of headache and foolishness.
Your head aches as it never has before, and you wish for the magic blue, the magic twilight of the spring, when Central Park will be wonderful again.
By then you will not be thinking of Scotland's men, their old kings, signal fires on hillsides, and their kilts, or their braying sounds from bagpipes: their call of reluctant victory and insensate death, the sound of full things and depressed things, the sound of the ocean crashing and crashing, winning and taking and declaring again—I've won.
You set out strawberries. You are not young. But better, in many ways: you are successful. You live in a pre-war in Manhattan, seventeenth floor. Your pre-war even pre-first world war, not the second.
Your job, successful musician now, is to be a gracious grantor. Of favors.
Not, as your parents once were, begging for favors, politely: as your mother’s Christmas presents to your childhood tutors were hopes—for favors. Jars of lingonberries, chocolates from Switzerland. Always, in a basket. For the good word that might someday be put in—for you.
Once you brought. Now you need no favor in return.
Today, this almost winter solstice day, mid-December, you buzz in the most recent two young men needing favors. Someone has told you their names, which instruments they play. You’ve forgotten where they are from.
Something Colorado.
There seem to be increasing numbers of young men in the world. Young women remain singular and surprising to you—always, like orchid blooms.
You answer their buzz. Let them in. They laugh, love the strawberries. In winter! In New York! They look outside your windows at the street below. You know how their Colorado blond brilliance will fade here, then, one day, reclaim—a brilliance beginning again, flame reclaiming a swamped almost-failed wick. All this you know—will take years.
Students live like rabbits in New York, you say, cheerfully. But you’ll have electricity, unlike the rabbits. Here’s a list of students’ names. You’ve got to have roommates to live in Manhattan—I’ve tutored all these. They might have room for you. They nod, smile.
They head out into winter solstice light—a searchlight trying to find its quarry.
Hollow, or hollowless, winter solstice light. December seventeenth, a week before Christmas.
In an hour you’ll head to a theater on Broadway, to play, to chart mistakes.
You are an expert in—mistakes. Mistakes in the orchestra, mistakes on the stage. Seating, script; score, costumes. Failures in delivery: weary actors. Failures of imagination or scope. Latenesses, of which you are never accused. Missed notes, latenesses (latenesses, it cannot be stressed enough, are cardinal sin). What makes you more than concertmaster is you keep your secrets, confide only to power.
Ear and eye finely tuned, and your discretion.
All that your duty: the real treat, and your real work, and your chore, is your phantasms.
The ones who attend without tickets.
Paradis phantasm number one. She. Dark-haired Paradis! So often, appearing like a gleam in the seats. Something to say to you. What? Once, when you were new here living like a rabbit—she was the one who slipped a single long-stemmed rose in your violin case. Singer, actress, dancer.
Your apartment had a fire escape that did not go all the way to the ground. You knew what to do if fire came: you'd toss your violin to someone down below, and then follow, fighting off flames as best you could.
She’d been in bloom—like a white or a red orchid. Young men, fools like you, had been swarming about her, the sensing of competition urging them to do—ridiculous things.
At the end you discover she had been dating four men at once. Those the days before traveling phones in pockets and handbags; you couldn’t hear phone-chimes; her answering machine you wouldn’t have been privy to—unless you’d shared a place. You were too young for that, too in love with you—violin.
You should have married her. When you yourself lived, dark-haired you, like a rabbit in the city, when she was young, dancing, singing.
Rose in your violin case? So clandestine so scripted so desperate and trite a maneuver—it was—genius.
But—it perturbed you—she had symbolically succeeded—through the rose—coming so close to your violin. Suggesting she, symbolized by the rose, was as important or more important—than your violin. Even equal. Your parents, your tutor had warned you about this. You will never make it, they said. Unless your violin is first.
You took the rose out—which her face told you was her rose—set it down, somewhere. A music stand.
Louis! Your phantasm number two. Rich man who’d easily bought the tallest and the oldest of the old dwelling spots in Greenwich Village: his world was ancient raw brick windowsills, halogen lighting. Also summer houses. Islands. Receptions for the symphony. Top donor list, Louis. Died, something about latent lead poisoning, something no one knew—till months after he was buried. The autopsy, the investigation. Old unreplaced plumbing of his old unbelievably beautiful home in the heart of Greenwich Village—turned out to be his quiet, beautiful, bought-and-owned assassin.
You yourself married his widow: Louis’ widow, she of her lead lawsuit winnings, she—who had been married to him—five years. Louis bought that house in the Village on a fat rich boy whim, she said, began living in it when all his friends were poor, early in his twenties. Apparently poor Louis had liked to read books, do cocaine; that was the rumor. He loved cocaine, could afford it—spent many hours in the evenings in the very vintage lead-lined claw-foot tub in the Village. Apparently lead lingered in the durable beautiful old ceramic linings of old bathtubs. Louise’s—hadn’t that been darling, they were Louis and Louise?—her style was brisk shower and eating at the delicatessens downtown with the most talkative musicians after practice. She’d never wanted to be married to either Louis or you, Louise had told you, eventually. But a woman, she said, spent her life jumping—from one suddenly-there fire escape to another.You knew that, didn’t you, she asked, not looking at your face.
She’d liked, she said, how you held your violin, almost as if it was a baby, she said—nestled to your chin. The last thing she said to you—before the symphony’s trip to China, when you let her divorce you while the symphony was in China—was she was tired of all musicians. They’re always gone in the evenings. Or on another continent, she told everyone.
Back to landlocked symphony patrons for her. Her new place now, you’d heard, a penthouse modern: much higher up than your seventeenth floor in your post-her.
She not one of your performance phantasms—divorce seemed to blot that out, that phantasm aspect, proof that divorces were the deepest of deaths?—but Louis remained a dead phantasm calling out: dead Louis resting across two chairs in the back as if missing the generous comfort of the Village soaking tub kind and generous and warm as the womb—that horrible beautiful tub that was making him secretly foul with lead. You didn’t miss his widow you unwidowed. You didn’t even miss their, her, money. The money had competed with your violin, and, wonderfully, lost.
You wanted to ask Louis what your own end would be—Louis might know. He—Louis—might be able to see what cloud was forming around your own life you were not able to see.
Everyone had one. Or two. Or three. The dark clouds that found their way to you, insulating you, but blinding you to truth.
Phantasm three: your dead great-uncle Gregory, who often slips in front row to the right to remind you it should have been Gregory the uncle always playing the violin. You know he could have played a violin—given good tutors-—five times more finely. But trapped—in the Wisconsin town he and you had come from. Once he’d been more handsome than the Nutcracker King. You gave him a look, when you saw him in the velvet chairs, that you hoped told him clearly: yes, he should have been--in your Jack B. Nimble concertmaster’s chair.
And of course the child. That hard-glow phantasm. Child you never met—who lives, but you have never met. So unbearably handsome. In your phantasm, he never grows taller, only thinner, paler, eyes of greater sadness—of a child marooned in a theatre full of grownups. Lightning pale, a shiver of him in every youngish set of young men coming to your pre-war for young-musician-survival favors. Glow of their ears—the fine hair around their young ears—like his, the phantasm’s, the unclaimed boy’s. Glowing, in a velvet theater seat, he was, always glowing in the dark. Listening, as his mother’s rose had listened, waited. Sudden, or not so sudden, child of Paradis—young woman-in-bloom who laid perfect single rose of red in your case (almost a vase) lined with velvet. Her desperate gambit to have you.
The Rose. You could still see the rose, too perfect, too long, too single. After you’d played, played well, you hoped—you’d returned, opened the unlatched case, and there it was, on velvet. You had to move that imperial thing of thorns—to nestle your violin back into its warm and protected place, in your violin case, on its velvet.
She’d—Paradis—eventually told you the difficult number. Not number of months along; she hadn’t bothered you with that. The number of men.
As many as a chair, she said. You had looked at her without comprehension. That was one. She shook her head. Four, she had then said. The legs.
Were they handsome, you said. Hating the word chair: she knew first chair was every player’s dream. Solo so great a dream you could not bear—to say it or to dream it. First chair was the top of the pile of blocks. The pile of chairs.
Each in their way terribly handsome, she’d said, in a particular, sure way, as if describing mysterious chairs to be chosen from an antique shop. All four. You were very busy with your violin.
Had Paradis ever married? You tried hard to avoid that knowledge. You’d heard he was raised by Paradis and his grandparents, full of Kentucky pity for her New York plight. But that’s only what you heard. You were lost in the paradise world of Louis’s widow, you becoming the anomaly: the musician not desperate or poor. Louis and Louise could gaily deliberately mispronounce Beethoven, Hayden, deliberating on Bee or Hay. They could pronounce Mozart with a z. Everything they said was funny. Rich, they were welcomed anywhere, and they were always late. That was stylish. On a donor list, they were always at the top. Her inherited lead-lined pockets; your new lead-lined marriage. That once-heralded plumbing idea—line them with lead!—had turned out to be—very bad. But lined your own pockets for five years. That oddity—a rich musician with lead-lined pockets—was also fairly well doomed to fail. Money seemed fair trade for practice. Without practice, you fail.
You’d apologized to everyone, returned, resumed the violin practice you’d almost abandoned. Violinists now and then try to persuade themselves—practice is not really necessary. Then, midway through your recovery, your embarrassment, your climbing back up toward your original lofty determination and talent—your schoolteacher parents, with schoolteacher pensions and their house owned forty years in Wisconsin, died within days of each other. A pre-war or post-war means to New Yorkers it’s dignified, historical—now, just off the water, one has become yours. No more George Washington bridge, no Jersey exit every year: upper west side Manhattan, at last, brought to you by the authentic gravities, gravies, of death and grief.
Six thirty. The solstice gloom fully settling in now, a dingy blue, a failed twilight. You think of how Central Park is unattractive really from mid-November till March, winter solstice holding it as if in a tangled, muted snarl of tunelessness, of waiting.
A sound. The buzzer in your pre-war today—again.
The tall boys so blond, you think. Returning. A backpack or a phone or that—that list of names, stupidly left behind, or left behind purposefully, to be able to ask him more questions?
Who is it, you say, into the rectangle of dots in the greenish-gold brass. You hope it is not the super, who reminds you somewhat of your now-dead uncle, uncle Gregory, so trapped by his own relatives, his own town’s requirements. Similarly the young super, trapped possibly for life, guarding this building and its purchasable apartments, its prestige and value far exceeding his.
Elaine, a woman’s voice says. Surrounded by buzzer static. Elaine Paradis.
Of course you hesitate. Almost made up, you’d always thought, that unbearably beautiful last name Paradis. Paradis, you say.
I’m Paradis, she says. I’m Paradis. Or I was once, she says. Before turning into a ghost when I left New York. A pause. I’m here again.
Suddenly beautiful, buzzer’s static, surrounding her name. How much hope, you wonder, has been over-transmitted by buzzer system?
You imagine the two small feet rising, levitating, as if by sheer wish, instead of elevator. She had small feet. Elaine Paradis. Coming to see you! The ascension. But of course—she may be old and tired. Decades have gone by.
You wish the two blond young men were still here with strawberries; she could see them, proof that now youth depend on you. You are—now, so magically busy. Important.
The percolator you have had thirty years—you turn back on—to reheat coffee the boys, the hopeful musicians, had barely touched. Also: for the beauty of its laboring, upsurging, finally-crescendo of its long-worked burble, like a bird finally at the top of its tree.
You love the percolator.
She comes in the door you hold open for her before she has a chance to knock. Has she married? You see no ring. Her hands—both—absolutely pale and plain.
You couldn’t marry, a mocking, self-protective voice in your head says, four men at once. Or—a chair’s four legs.
She is beautiful still. A percolator, she says. Percolator is making its sturdy, furious noises like a steam locomotive. Now puffing its short puffs of steam from its imperial determined permanently-uprisen spout.
The percolator. I remember it, she says. I remember it.
Oh, you do, you say. Of course! You can feel your eyebrows go up like a dancing Russian’s. You know no one else who has kept their percolator. They’ve all gone to various drippy things. Enormous windows looking out at Manhattan now are your backdrop, and here and there woodland paintings great-uncle Gregory of surprising taste and discernment left for you, perfect for this million-dollar pre-war bought with the carefully saved amount your parents left you—their estate.
You bring her a stoneware pitcher of cream, refilled after the visiting Colorado boys. Cream reminds you of trips upstate with Louis’ widow before she was a widow. Good thing her style had been brisk showers, she had said often after Louis’s death. Green green fields, cows, hours driving to the summer houses while Louis—a lucky king who did not know he was deposed, already, by toxic lead and a wild-haired violinist in a symphony—you yourself, once young and hungry for success and status—as he soaked in his fat rich man’s vintage claw-foot bathtub.
Elaine Paradis is still as beautiful as a bowling ball. All gloss, purpose, and purposelessness, a wandering marble made to roll on floors of varnished amber, to knock over tall pins like milk bottles standing high-shoulder like blocking soldiers.
You note her colors are post-911, pavement-and-trees grays, browns, umbers. Survivors’ colors.
Her lips, still full and generous. But every other second or so, she closes her mouth suddenly and somewhat tightly. Keeping herself, you think, from speaking.
Perhaps that she loves you, or hates you.
She eats all the strawberries on the plate, not leaving the one symbolic mystery one most people will leave on a plate. She has a bright look pouring her own coffee—she waves your hand away—but looks sad as she pours the cream. Watching her pouring the cream you realize she looks very like—dear gods—your mother. As your mother might have looked had she been able to become a New Yorker. Perhaps. But Elaine more beautiful, more glossy, the beauty of some greater sadness.
Where are you staying, you say.
I’ve been here a little bit, she says. I’m moving to Scotland tomorrow.
You had begun to imagine her at your favorite hotel, Hotel Roosevelt, very near the musical theaters; a ten minute trip away on the Broadway line. Hotel Roosevelt most gorgeous crescendo ever seen—of chandeliers, fifty-foot lobby ceilings, repetitions of gold. Walking her back to that hotel after—tonight’s performance at the Martin Beck. It—all the adventuring musicians agreed—was always better in a hotel. At the words Hotel Roosevelt, the musicians smiled; they all knew beds there had silken bolsters of creamy white, largeish red cursive Rs embroidered with twisted floss at centers. Breakfasts small and quick but good.
You blink but keep your eyes steady: bringing your own cup of delightfully always bitter and always also sweet coffee, to your lips. The percolator you have been so loyal to all these years makes fine coffee.
Perhaps—sometimes—she hadn’t been a phantasm. She had been there, in one of the thousands and thousands of filled seats the musicians played directly in front of, crazy to see—him. But you know better than to ask. To ask would sound desperate, or wishful, wishful for something you really, certainly, probably hadn’t deserved.
Wonderful, wonderful apartment, she says. Blinking. It owns you now? she says.
She has always been startling. It does own you, you realize, all its great windows and its views and its pale powder-green historically-accurate painted walls. As servants own—a master. As a violin owns its owner. As a child, you would guess, owns its mother.
On a bay, that’s where I’ll be, she says. I’ve already gotten a house. Very little house. Brilliant white stucco on one side. All the fairly massive stone that you see there in Scotland. Window boxes already. Red flowers for the spring. I’ve saved for it. I’ve gotten it. She leans back. She smiles.
Through your mind run images of Scottish men. You once toured Glasgow, Edinburgh; Dundee. The men with very sure steady gaze, handsome red-cheeked and large, you remember, former kings and battlemen who’d had to hand over the Stone of Scone and reins of power to England. But you remember best the mens’ voices: unashamedly musical. Even a postman’s speaking voice more musical—than music. Difficult men to best.
(That violin tutor who had over and over said, slightly threatening voice: your violin must surpass all and any beauty any human voice might have!)
She names, with grace, a bay. The bay across from which she, Paradis, will live. In Scotland. Concise, beautiful, yet merged syllables you would have to practice or say often to know how to say—her way, handsome proud fine Scotland’s way.
You want to practice this way of saying the bay. But all you can think of is she is free and you are free yet it will be she only who will be seeing the boats every day. You will not. Only the cars beneath you, and the secretive sides of buildings surrounded by secretive other sides of buildings, people you cannot talk with, no matter how you admire the light-glow, the enviable mystery of their apartments.
I’m moving to a real bay, she says. They call this the port of New York, she says. But it’s not.
How right you are, you say. Port Authority. But no authority. Or port. It’s not one, anymore, unless port just means water, you say.
New York the death-of-port—as much-vaunted ghostly San Francisco is summed up by the lonely falseness of Fisherman’s Wharf gone whore to tourists. Only the bastard slips, sluttage of slips, boats barely paid a working wage slithering back and forth as cruisers. Repetitions of trips. Housekeepers dreaming of tips. Cruises. Bored human cargo who liked the television illusion of being at sea. Three buffets a day, you’ve heard. The musical cattle drive to the Caribbean, your musician friends call these cruises, the ones who’ve taken their turn playing on the cruise ships. It was where you’d have had to go if you neglected your practice and you didn’t have the safety net, those years, of Louis’s widow Louise. That end of the quay. Strawberries, you’ve heard, being sluiced with a bad quality of milk chocolate under a mechanized chocolate fountain, night and day, the cruise-ship chocolate fountain.
Your parents’ deaths, their final sacrifice for your career made of nothing but vainglorious sacrifices, thank gods guaranteeing you will never, ever, have to sail on a cruise ship playing a violin for money, and chocolate-smothered strawberries.
I’m flying, she says. As if she has read your thoughts about the cruise ships, the boats.
You love her idea of Scotland—the crashing water and the rocks and the sea. You’ve always loved her, you know now in a rush. Or was it because she was here, a bird in the hand? No wedding ring? Yet—her rose, without words, had said she, yes, had loved you, was afraid to tell you.
Take me with you, you say now, like a gambler. I can sell this. My pre-war. Easily. Everyone wants it—something like this. It’s slightly less than a million dollars.
Proud, you are suddenly, of the word sell, instead of the horrible sublease. This beautiful apartment owned by you she’s correctly deduced has made you like a growling landlocked harbormaster—who cannot leave his port.
You remember Scotland. Fish from the port fried that day and served hot and fatty wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. Ale, beer, everywhere. And the voices! The deep voices coming from the men and the lilting voices from the women, very sure also. A harmony, a weaving.
Your mind has gone symphonic. At parties, you could play. For free. Dear gods they’d love a fiddle there. Never shall she have to go bowling for men again. Buzzing on buzzers. You can just live. Why, with your parents’ money—this pre-war’s sale—you’d bought it outright, with cash—you could live together comfortably, even until—death. Her son, his family, if he had one, could even come summers to Scotland to visit. Or to live. Fate must have sent her today to you, in the darkest week of the year, the weakest week of the winter solstice.
You and Paradis had talked, yes, long ago—about going to Paris together. To live, to study; but you’d decided privately, no, France would only have drawn more men to her. You, always practicing, playing. She, alone, bored—with far too much beauty. Now, she was at the perfect and manageable level, her age, her beauty, all in sure fade; you had your inherited small real wealth. You could even put all your first-chair and dependable concertmaster’s life behind you. You could play violin only when you loved playing violin. When you chose.
Then let’s go to Scotland, you say. Together. It is the only spontaneous thing you have ever said in your life. You spread your right hand wide—your bow hand—set it all alone on the slightly sunlit table. Toward her. Paradis. A name that would fit in an opera. You feel all the winter solstice light and more inside your eyes, traveling ahead to spring.
Your eyes feel, as they rarely feel—except at the end of an exceptional concert—fully round. As all are, of course, tucked inside our blinking heads.
If it was spring, yes, she says. Because it’s winter, I’m afraid, no.
You want to say it will be spring in a mere matter of months. But something tells you she does not mean simple seasons. She means your life’s seasons. Her life’s seasons. She leans forward, over the plate where there had been strawberries. You hear crashing china sound, as if the plate has fallen and broken. But it is still there as a planet is always still there, as a planet doesn’t fall out of the sky.
Do you still play the same violin, she says.
Oh, no, you say. You lie. It’s your favorite one still, the one your parents bought you that seemed then beautiful and important far beyond your years. It’s quiet in its case, in this very apartment. In your usually dark bedroom. Umber and grayish brown, on a flamelike caramelly lining of brandywine-red velveteen, in its case; both violin and case beautifully worn.
The very case she’d set the single rose in.
The winter solstice light, beneath this dark that surrounds your apartment after she is gone, is like the throb of headache and foolishness.
Your head aches as it never has before, and you wish for the magic blue, the magic twilight of the spring, when Central Park will be wonderful again.
By then you will not be thinking of Scotland's men, their old kings, signal fires on hillsides, and their kilts, or their braying sounds from bagpipes: their call of reluctant victory and insensate death, the sound of full things and depressed things, the sound of the ocean crashing and crashing, winning and taking and declaring again—I've won.
Copyright © December 2018 Rebecca Pyle
Rebecca Pyle has work appearing the past two years (both artwork and written) in New England Review, Bangalore Review, Penn Review (forthcoming), Tishman Review, Wisconsin Review, Watershed Review (forthcoming); in Stoneboat Journal, Requited Journal, Remembered Arts Journal, Poor Yorick,The Underwater American Songbook (her debut poetry chapbook, published by Underwater New York), and elsewhere. She now lives between the Great Salt Lake and the high mountain mining town where the Sundance film festival takes place each winter. Once very long ago while twenty-two and working in London, she almost won the United Kingdom's National Poetry Competition; she shared the first prize purse with Irish poet (and overall winner) Medbh McGuckian. Rebecca Pyle is an oil painter: see rebeccapyleartist.com.
