A Dove of the East (7 page)

When Michael bought her a Kodak for Christmas, she went around taking pictures of views, and buildings, and when photographing the town she had wished that the streets had been clear of people. Her album was filled at first with shots of seascapes, and boats in a line, and ill-exposed sunsets, and angular rocks by the ocean. But after a few months she learned that people were necessary for photographs, that their faces and their bodies made the best pictures. She tried to explain that to Michael but he understood only partially, because he was a man still wed (and strongly so) to the landscape—it had been his life. She felt this division between them the worst fact of her life. He had been slow to her innovation. She cursed at the wind and exhaled as if to express her anger, as if to say “Damn him.” She continued dreaming of places where he had been and she had not.

Michael was nearing the shore, his face set ever so strongly in an expression that made her long for him inexpressibly. It was like that of an Arab bedouin or a Tartar charging over the plain on his horse, a soldier leading his battery or regiment in close-ordered electrifying precision. His boat caught all the violence of the wind and went faster than it had ever gone, breaking for the opening trimmed with heavy deadening rocks.

She was full of love for him, and yet she had thoughts of being a widow. Her fine imagination presented to her a picture of a woman in black, so beautifully blond and tanned, walking on the beach or in a foreign city, a Mediterranean port, Strega, Ostuni, or Capri, shepherded by memories of her dead husband whom she loved more than anything in the world. She cried for him every night and turned away gentle suitors by the score until the whole world said in unison, “Look how fine she is, and how good,” and sucked in its cheeks and oceans in untrammeled delight at her tight faith to her husband's ashes. She tried so hard not to think that way, but the thoughts came likes waves into the bay, from some sort of sea where she had not been, and wished to go. She tensed with the love of the moment, for her husband was shooting the bar on a violent day in the bright autumn of her twentieth year.

He neared the bar and looked at the wind. His hands closed tightly on the ropes and tiller. Then a silence. She saw his face clearly Everything was still and dark, with silence except for the gentle luffing of his white sails, and the freedom of her apron in the wind.

All her life and all that she had read flashed before her as she saw her husbands frail boat crash against the huge rocks. A part of her beauty vanished, and her dreaming was done.

I
T WAS
approaching five o'clock on a cool afternoon in late October. Harry Spence sat on a stone railing in front of the Jeu de Paume, and as he waited for Shannon he looked through a maze of autumn trees stirred by a wind promising of winter and challenging in its direct cold northernness, a wind which lighted fires. Shannon was extremely tall and graceful. This, her face, and her dancer's body were a continual proclamation that she be taken dead seriously. In fact, anyone not always alert with her would find himself left behind as if in the slipstream of a fast train which had just passed. She stared other women down like a man; they often hated her. In a café she had the same effect as music or a fireplace, quickly becoming the center. Men were drawn to her because they did not immediately fall in love. Her power put them off until they got close enough and then went mad, leaving lovely wives and waiting for Shannon on the street, where if she passed they became speechless as she crossed in leotards and a long skirt, a soft silk scarf trailing.

When Harry took up with Shannon he knew she would leave, but he was privileged to be with her for a time because he would not scare. He was always on guard, convincing her that he too was arbitrary and painfully free, as independent as a cloud sailing across frontiers. It was an act he put on successfully, but it was exhausting. Only a young man could have kept it up. He thought that if her demands had been made on a man older than twenty-five he would have died; frequency of intercourse was only a small part of the monumental task. That year was like a Channel swim. He wondered how he had done it, and how Shannon could always remain Shannon. They all moved like figures inside a furnace, which at the time was appropriate, and constructive, for they sat during the night at small desks and penned words or music, or played instruments, or painted, not knowing who was really good and who would fall back to the small towns of New York and Ohio never to be heard from again, perhaps to be unknown interpreters of those who had remained.

Harry Spence had not come to Paris because it was Paris, although once there he realized that even in imitation long after the originals (none of whom had really been first) the city was still a blaze and a dream. He had been granted a restricted fellowship stipulating that he live in a section of Paris dear to the benefactor and considered by him to be magical in its effect on musical composition. When flying into the city that September, he wished he were a writer of words rather than music. The prospect was stunning, spread white into the bordering fields. Masculine ministries enclosed luxurious gardens of mathematical green—from the air this appeared to be the hallmark of the city. He had had the feeling that he was returning to the vortex of civilization, having indeed been there before, that the inhabitants were possessed of a strange combination of clarity and feeling and were at that moment lighting fires over secret magnetic zones which crisscrossed the earth, making artists, and converged at Paris in the center of wheat and wine-filled French prairies sobered and chilled by blasts from the North.

Wherever children gather at a forge or fire, its red heat giving them warmth in darkness, they learn quickly principles of art. This is what Harry had thought when very young as he sat by a fire with his father and uncle and grandfather in the middle of violet autumn fields which they knew would see frost by morning. The grandfather had passed through Paris on his way to the front; the father and uncle had crossed the Seine riding on the same tank. They had ached from their hearts to see Paris in peace, to live and work there. They had carried cartridges through Saint-Germain-des-Prés and been continually on edge and nervous, for they then were sent to bosky woods near the German border to fight and kill. After his father returned, his life had calmed. He never yearned for the war, but he knew it had made him. There was plenty of thunder in the following peace, haystack-leveling winds to test him, obstacles to his dreams, but none of this later adversity had defined and shaped him as had the war. He wished with all his might that he would not communicate this to his son, that the boy, born after the fighting, would find other means to know himself and would not repeat the horror for the sake of becoming a man. He wished for his son peaceful storms and not the waxen white light of artillery duels. He prayed for this. And Harry
was
different, soft, a baby beyond his time, unknowing of combat and the continual deathly backdrop of war, an almost effeminate university-bred tortoise-shell-glassed composer of music. His father and uncle, the survivors of that session by the fire, rejoiced that he would be thrust into the heart of Paris in a piping time of peace, peace, said the uncle a veteran of four years of solid war, peace, God bless it.

He set up in a small apartment overlooking the Champ de Mars and on the first day of autumn when the returning population was in full frenzy, in a copper-colored bar where he stopped early in the morning to drink chocolate and eat pieces of buttered bread which he paid for as he took them one by one off a round plate, as the streets were washed down and men in blue coats streamed in and out, he looked across the room to a bank of sunny windows where the white dusty light was coming in on Shannon and made her look like an Irishwoman in a Sargent portrait.

Because she was so beautiful in her enlightened posture and expression, and because an intelligence radiated from her, he became very daring and approached the table, cup of chocolate in hand, a beautiful leather briefcase under one arm. He said,
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”at
which she smiled and then laughed, because if they had been two Texas longhorns standing there in the corner of the cafe it could not have been more obvious that both were Americans; the fact was like water pouring over a dam. They went out and walked away hours. His daring began to extend itself for a year's tenure. He fell in love with her, having the peculiar feeling which new kisses can bring, an overwhelming sense of being alive in the face of the present. The world became an energetic frame. It was almost like being the leading man in an opera. Within a week she had moved two wicker trunks into his apartment. She did ballet exercises in the middle of the floor while they talked. She could not have told him that the first night when they walked up the Champs Elysees and basked in the lights and September fountains, a red-bearded Rumanian architect sat staring at her former bed and cursed himself in Hungarian, French, and English, and eventually threw a glass full of Scotch flat up against the wall.

And then she disappeared each morning and came back only after dark, having danced every day down to exhaustion. Harry was writing music, at which he was becoming masterful, in which he was beginning to be able to do anything he wanted. By terrifying bouts of sustained work he was forcing the creation of a great bed of experience, so that in the strong frame and healthy body of his twenties could be found an old man who had lived since the turn of the century, and whose wisdom at the craft astounded and amazed even competitors and the nearly deaf. He could write pieces as deep and blue as a fjord, echoing and quiet, and he could write as red as he pleased, American jazz born of a rich heartland and the death of the wilderness. And strangely, the better he got, the better he got, with no chance of slipping. This stood even Shannon in awe. Once he had said, I can do anything, absolutely anything. I am almost a master, and she had looked mean and tough and said, You can do
nothing,
leaving the room in a fit of envy which meant he could have her for at least another six months until their powers evened out again and she was able to glide and swirl naturally and gracefully beyond the ecstatic points to which his labor had taken him. But he was going farther, and they both knew it.

Winter passed. They had an enormous electricity bill, for the lights burned late at night, with Harry bearing down on his blinding white music pads and then touching the piano as if he were stroking a horse. Shannon danced and danced, slept from exhaustion, and danced again, becoming like Harry one of the ones who did not return in quiet and sadness to the starting point with a series of exquisite memories and some first editions. She danced at the National Theater. His pieces were really performed. Sometimes he conducted, in a light gray and blue tweed suit and his tortoise-shell glasses, and when he turned at the close and faced an approving audience, their feet stamping, the timbers of the hall shaking as if the earth had quaked, it threw him off balance for weeks during which he stuffed himself with good food and could write only music which was so squeaky it sounded like rusty wheels in the high Gare du Nord, music which if played for the pigeons would have made them rise in intolerance and bend in a sheet of white and gray across the plane of Paris sky.

And he ran in the afternoon amid the blue which met buildings softly under the clouds, panting, pushing his glasses back on his face as they tried to fall to the ground. Eventually he built a routine of going all the way out to Neuilly and back, and as he got stronger it wrote Shannon in for another few months, for she could love only strength and could not face weakness. But it was so hard, to run and write, to eat like a beast and then starve, to make love until the dawn and then be fit only for the morgue, to be moved so by the music that it was like an electrocution, complete surrender and exhaustion.

That summer they went to Greece. The winter's rain seemed as far away as medieval European cities, and yet it was in one of these cities that Harry wrote in thundering clear classical style. He took the opportunity to take down good Greek music, and to write barrelhouse rolls to limericks they made up. These became extremely popular at a restaurant in Nea Epidavros called “Yellow House of Nonsensical Pleasure” where the foreigners gathered in the evenings. Of several dozen Swedes, Englishmen, French, Greeks, Americans, and Italians, three had birthdays on the same day, two (including Harry) had perfect pitch, all knew the fountain at Aix-en-Provence (or said they did), and everyone except the women except one was in love with Shannon—as if drawn into the maelstrom; the bright challenge took them up in its hands like moths.

Harry and Shannon slept on the roof; a phonograph played them to sleep. As they watched the stars they became separate. Harry knew she was in love with the doctor, an Oklahoman who had been broken in Vietnam and then come back stronger. He was both larger and wiser than Harry, although he could not compose music, and he called Harry “Spence.” Next to him Harry felt like a young midget, and because he was not fresh or new at Shannon's game he lost early on in the subtle war of deferences at the Yellow House of Nonsensical Pleasure. Harry retired to the piano and played his barrelhouse rolls, and then stopped going there altogether, and then Shannon did not come up to the roof.

He cursed himself for not having the wisdom war brings. His father had told him of lying awake in an open meadow with an automatic rifle across his lap, waiting for the enemy while the sky was filled with artillery flashes and the white lightning of battle, a terror which numbed the little patrol in the field, something Harry might never know. It was one of the major reasons Harry loved his father, his sense early on that the man knew terror and bloodshed, and was grateful and loving just to be alive. They, the men in his family who had started out as merchants and professors and been made into warriors, knew something he could not. But they envied him for his cradle of peace. There was no way to compete with the Oklahoman, with the bronzed face and tranquil eyes which had seen men die in war. Harry was at a loss but determined to push with the same energy which had led them to survive, toward a depth in peace
they
could never know. He too was a fighter of sorts. To take in the whole great compass of the world—this was his task. The expanse of it could kill, and he had to dodge as best he could the potent backlash of music's ecstasy. He left for Paris precipitously, almost without thinking or looking back, and when he arrived he forwarded Shannon her wicker trunks, wondering what she would do with twenty-five pairs of dancing shoes in a wild rocky spine of the Peloponnesus. She had written that if she returned she would meet him at the Jeu de Paume at five o'clock on October 27, the day after her ticket expired.