Augusta Played

Augusta Played

Kelly Cherry

 

 

Dzanc Books

Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org

Copyright © 1979 Kelly Cherry

All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

A portion of this book appeared in
Decade
, December 1978.

The authors wishes to thank the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for a period of residency during which the novel was completed.

Published 2013 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books r
E
print Series Selection

eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938103-89-6
eBook Cover by Awarding Book Covers

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author unless noted by author on the next page
.

‘They soon were wedded, and the nymph appear'd

By all her promised excellence endear'd:

Her words were kind were cautious, and were few,

And she was proud—of what her husband knew
.

‘Weeks pass'd away, some five or six, before,

Bless'd in the present, Finch could think of more:

A month was next upon a journey spent,

When to the Lakes the fond companions went;

Then the gay town received them, and at last,

Home to their mansion, man and wife, they pass'd
.

‘And now in quiet way they came to live

On what their fortune, love, and hopes would give:

The honied moon had naught but silver rays,

And shone benignly on their early days;

The second moon a light less vivid shed,

And now the silver rays were tinged with lead.

They now began to look beyond the Hall,

And think what friends would make a morning-call;

Their former appetites return'd and now

Both could their wishes and their tastes avow;

‘Twas now no longer “just what you approve,”

But, “let the wildfowl be to-day, my love.”

In fact the senses, drawn aside by force

Of a strong passion, sought their usual course
.

‘Now to her music would the wife repair,

To which he listen'd once with eager air;

When there was so much harmony within,

That any note was sure its way to win;

But now the sweet melodious tones were sent

From the struck chords, and none cared where they went.

Full well we know that many a favourite air,

That charms a party, fails to charm a pair;

And as Augusta play'd she look'd around,

To see if one was dying at the sound:

But all were gone—a husband wrapt in gloom,

Stalk'd careless, listless, up and down the room.'

—George Crabbe

(
from
“T
HE
P
RECEPTOR
H
USBAND”
)

CONTENTS

Part One: GOLD

Part Two: LUNCH

1

N
ORMAN
G
OLD
, hearing the clicking of her high-heeled shoes on the pavement behind him, began to sweat. He slowed his own walk. Click. Unmistakably hers. When she turned off onto West End Avenue, Norman congratulated himself on his detective work, which was not bad for a
luft-mensch
with his head in the clouds. He knew where she lived.

So, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing! They say.

Sunlight crackled on the dried-out grass between sidewalk and river. Tufts of greenery grew where the cement had given way to time and weather. Fresh tar glittered in the middle of the road up ahead, like the stripe on the back of a garter snake.

2

I
T
WAS
1966, and Augusta, in the season of her name, was gorgeous. She knew it, too, and didn't in the least mind, though her own beauty wasn't the most important thing in her life. She had dark honey-blond hair, parted in the center, which rose and fell in two wide wings over the temples, giving her a look simultaneously cheerful and angelic. She looked too healthy to be entirely ethereal. Someone had once told her she looked like Tuesday Weld by Vermeer, luminous, innocent, but adult-eyed. Her eyes were rather wide-spaced, rather long and rather hazel, though on occasion exactly the same color as her hair. She had a creamy complexion, a high forehead, a straight, narrow, small nose, and one feature less than classical: her upper lip was unbowed, and this little note of assertive sexiness, which was what men always noticed first about her face, was the fault she fretted over. She tried drawing a dip in her lip with a red outlining pencil, but the pink flesh still showed through close up, and eventually she decided she would live with her mouth the way it was. She couldn't wear lipstick when she played the flute, anyway.

That was what she was generally doing—playing the flute.

At twenty-two—twenty-three come October—Gus was an extremely promising young flutist, potentially, her teachers said, a great one. She had been touched with a certain power, the capacity not so much to charm as to awaken, to make sound as visible to her listeners as light. Her talent was in some measure merely the specific, instrumental reflection of her spirit-at-large, since everywhere she went, she seemed to shed a kind of happy light, an inspiriting, lively-making illusion worked by her hair and skin and the forward mouth and having nothing to do with how she might actually feel at any given moment except that, being who she was, she was usually surrounded by people who were animated and made happier by her presence, and, not being one of those who cling to misery as a mark of individuality, she found it difficult ever to remain gloomy for long in such good company. This life-enhancing dimension had been apparent in her music even at the beginning, when many of the notes were still wrong.

Gus had begun late, but that is not necessarily a bad thing to do with the flute. At twenty-two, most virtuoso performers are getting on, but a great flutist may yet be born.

First, Gus took a music degree in Greensboro. (North Carolina was her home state.) Her parents wanted her to have “something to fall back on,” a phrase that always gave her a silly, teetering sensation. Now she was at Juilliard, studying with Julie Baker—for her lessons, she went to his home—and she had already had a couple of summers in Siena with Gazzelloni. She hoped someday to study with Zöllner in Germany. She had, in fact, begun to make a specialty of contemporary music. A considerable percentage of it was being written for the flute, where the older repertoire was limited, and not many flutists understood modern notation or were as quick as she was at sight-reading it. Of course, the audiences were correspondingly small. The composer Walter Piston had said, “When the computer gives a concert, which sooner or later it will, you can be sure that only other computers are going to go hear it.”

Gus let herself into her apartment on the third floor, tossed her flute case onto the couch-bed, and flew to the window, just in time to catch one transient glimpse of Norman's blue-shirted back as he made a turn to the right at the corner. She had never yet managed a good look at his face, but the back said everything. He always had on olive chinos, that faded work shirt, and boots. Boots, in August! There was only one deduction she could draw—he must want to appear taller than he was. The trouble, she noticed, was his legs; they were too short for his torso. He looked as though he'd stunted his growth sneaking smokes in the neighborhood sandlot. She'd bet anything he saw himself as Peter Falk.

And he had been listening to her. She knew it. He had done it before—here, there. Around. Other girls could feel men's eyes on them, but she was a musician, and she knew when a man was listening to her heels click-clicking on the sidewalk. Sometimes he was in front of her, and sometimes he was in back. He had to be doing something at Columbia. He looked too old to be a student, too intense to be a teacher… He was writing a dissertation, maybe. The streets of this neighborhood were pocked with Peter Falk types who were writing dissertations. They ate lunch in the West End Bar and caught all the foreign flicks at the Thalia. Half of them had gone to Erasmus High in Brooklyn. Yes, but this one was different. He was the kind of man who made demands. He had singled her out and she felt his curiosity was profoundly possessive; he wasn't simply interested, he was riveted, absorbing her like a book, and this made her feel absorbing.

It also made her neck ache, she thought, pulling her head back into the room. The sun had been in her eyes, and now she blinked, adjusting to the room's dimness, and was wiping the windowsill soot from her hands when the telephone rang. She picked it up.

“It's me,” the caller said.

“Me” meant Richard. He always thought “It's me” was sufficient identification, as if “me” couldn't possibly be anyone else.

“Is it you?” she asked, joking. “Is it really you?”

“Come on, Gussie,” he said, mournfully. “Don't do that to me.”

“Do what?”

“You know.”

“Well, why did you call if it wasn't because it's a beautiful day for having your leg pulled”—she dropped her voice, mock-huskily—“the way only your Gussie can pull it?” Her voice became normal again. “Where are you calling from?”

“I'm at the recording studio. I called to say I love you, Gussie.”

Now, Augusta didn't know what men meant by love, but on the whole she thought it was polite not to argue when they said they loved her. She liked Richard. She was even very fond of Richard. But she didn't think she loved him. Perhaps it was because he was married, but she couldn't very well ask him to get a divorce simply so she could find out whether she would fall in love with him if she felt free to. Besides, she had a suspicion he might fall out of love with her if he weren't married. He liked being able to say, as he was saying right now, “I miss you”—though he was only a subway ride away. She had met him when he came to North Carolina for a semester as a visiting artist-in-residence—Richard was a conductor—but in New York, ironically, they got to see each other only about one-fourth as often. That was sad, because part of what Gus liked about him was his looks. He was tall and dark, and all his reactions were extravagant, but delayed, coming after the fact by about thirty seconds, so that she never fully trusted them, though she knew this was the essence of his personality, not some special machinery for dealing with her.

“Richard,” she said now, turning thoughtful, “do you believe in marriage?” She waited thirty seconds, then added, “Naturally, I'm talking about marriage in general.”

“Do I believe in—Why don't you ask me if I believe in God? I might be able to answer that.”

“I wasn't thinking of spending my life with God.”

“I think about it, about spending my afterlife with him, that is. Not anytime soon, you understand, I'm not even forty yet you know”—he said it as if to absolve himself of something, responsibility perhaps—“but in a general sort of way, someday. It's in the cards. My father had a heart attack at fifty-two.”

“I didn't mean to make you so morbid,” Gus said.

“Marriage bears certain similarities to death.”

“Thanks a lot! That's not very helpful.”

“You weren't thinking of getting married?” There was an edge of panic to his voice. It was barely discernible, but it was there, a thin line.

“I wasn't thinking of dying, either.”

“That's good,” he said. “I was counting on seeing you this weekend.”

“You were?”

“Uh-oh,” he said. “That obviously means I shouldn't.”

“No, it doesn't mean that especially. But I'll be out Saturday night.” She was going to hear the Philadelphia, with the unbeatable Murray Panitz playing flute.

“I'll call first and let you know,” he said. “Cheerio!”

Cheerio? Richard was Passaic-born and Massachusetts-schooled, and he had never been to England except on tour, during which he saw only the same dispiriting views of hotel lobbies that he knew from a dozen other countries. There were landscapes, cityscapes, and now, in the latter half of the twentieth century, hotelscapes. His ringing, determinedly undisturbed sign-off reverberated in the room after Gus had hung up.

The receiver was sticky when she put it back on the hook, and she realized she'd been sweating. She didn't do that often; usually, her palms stayed cool and dry as climbing ivy in a sheltering lee. A good thing, too, for a flutist. Then why was she sweating now? It was hot in the apartment, but not that hot.