Augusta Played (37 page)

“Maybe we should have seen one,” Gus said, sharply.

“I think we could have done with a little less counseling.”

“What I never understood, Norman, was why you decided to quit precisely when things were getting better for us. Both of us had discovered that the other was more trustworthy than we believed. We both discovered that we were not humiliating each other. I loved you and you loved me, and boom, as soon as we figured that out, you called it off.”

“By the time we found it out, I
wasn't
in love with you anymore. And all you cared about was success.”

“Not success,” Gus said, “music.”

“Success,” Norman said. “Your mother too—she wanted that marriage to end.”

At this, Gus almost whooped, except that she was appalled at the same time as she was amazed. She wanted desperately to say something about
his
family—it was
his
family that had tried to stop their marriage from the beginning. It was his father who had treated her as if she were dirt, and who had made her feel that she was stealing his son from him. It was his family who had discriminated against hers, and because of his father, her father, whose whole life had been devoted to preserving life on paper, felt for the first time an urge to destruction that, Gus knew, was still there: he would have welcomed at the very least the chance to knock Sidney Gold flat on his back. Well, Norman's father was now on his back for eternity, sleeping in a pine box with death for a pillow and earth for a blanket.

“I know what you're thinking,” Norman said.

Norman was thinking that his family had at least had reasons for behaving as they did, and that they had tried to come to terms with the situation, no matter how they bungled it. “Your family couldn't even be bothered to come up for your concert. Why? Because they wrote you off as a serious flutist the minute you married me. You think I didn't see that? I was the monster who converted their daughter—not to a different religious persuasion but to the most diabolical thing of all.”

“What?” Gus asked, hanging on his words in spite of herself. How she loved his voice! She had forgotten the way it rose and fell, switching from Brooklynese to Academe as if from the Lydian to the Mixolydian mode and back again. His eyes had begun to burn again, rekindled.

“Dailiness,” he said. “The ordinary everyday breakfast-lunch-and-dinner life that most women, and most men for that matter, lead. That wasn't good enough for their daughter.”

“You're crazy, Norman. They didn't come up for the debut because my mother's nerves couldn't have stood it. Besides, they couldn't have stayed in our one room with the roach-infested kitchen, and hotels are expensive.”

“Anyway, they didn't need to worry. You couldn't be content living with me”—Norman felt his throat tightening the way it sometimes did and was disgusted with himself; he drank his root beer to open it up—“and you were bound to leave sooner or later. You used me, Gus. You were going to get that debut one way or another. That's what you married me for.” He could tell by the way Gus had bowed her head that he had told her something about herself that she would rather not have acknowledged but couldn't deny. For a moment, he wanted to reach out and touch the top of her head, the single bright beribboned braid, but he didn't. “And it's also why you were ready to divorce me.”

“Do you really think I wanted a divorce?”

“I really think you needed it.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You're the one who asked for the divorce,” she said. “Do you plan to get married again?”

“Yes.”

“You have somebody in mind?” She was sure her heart sounded like the percussion section of the New York Philharmonic.

“No,” he said.

“Why don't you ask about me?” she suggested.

“Why?” he said. “What good would it do?”

“We
lived
together, Norman!”

“That was in the past,” Norman said.

“And you don't think the past can ever be brought back? Not ever?”

“You're talking about redemption again,” Norman said.

“Maybe I'm more Jewish than I ever knew. Maybe my father was right. I don't understand why anybody wants anything the price for which is a life. Any life.”

“You pay with your life anyway. If you can get life back for life given—”

“But you don't,” Norman said. “My father hasn't risen out of his grave lately. I doubt seriously if he's going to rise and shine in Forest Lawn tomorrow. If we hand over the West Bank to the Palestinian Liberation Movement, do you think we're going to get anything in return? Peace and brotherly love? As for buying the past back, listen, Gus: Give us a little while longer and there won't be anything
but
the past.”

“I forgot you're a historian,” Gus said.

“A derivative historian.”

“Cunnilingualphobic.”

“I told you, I accepted all the blame for that.”

“You didn't have to make me hate myself.”

“I didn't do that, Gus.”

“Well, I could see your point. I thought about what it must be like from your point of view and it made me want to throw up.”

“You have to worry only if you don't want to go down on
men
. Although Kate Millett might disagree with me about that.”

“Who's Kate Millett?”

“Forget it.”

“You're wrong about one thing, anyway. The past
can
be redeemed. Through art.”

“I remember you told that moron in the delicatessen something like that. You also said that art's touch was as cold as an unused crematorium.”

“I don't really believe that. Not about music anyway. Music isn't a museum. Art isn't somebody's name.”

“I'm relieved to hear you say it. It's a hell of a way to keep warm at night.” He felt unaccountably jealous.

“But it does do that,” Gus said, “believe it or not, it does. And it brings back all the time in the world. It liberates the past from the future.”

“I could tell you something my father once told me about Beethoven, but I won't.”

Gus wanted to say: If there's something you don't want to tell me, don't try to intimidate me by telling me you're not going to tell me, but she let it pass.

Norman saw the quick flare and fade-out of anxiety in Gus's face, realized she had magnified his comment, and started to explain, but let
it
pass.

“Besides,” Gus said, “what makes you think I like living alone?”

“We both know that marriage is not an answer to problems.”

“Maybe not, but it cured you of your fear of the dark.”

All through the lunch, Gus had been lively, conscientiously vivacious, talking skillfully with her hands, smiling, joking. It was important to her that Norman should not think that she had ever felt defeated by him. This was not purely a matter of pride. If he thought that she looked irrecoverably damaged, emotionally, he would feel guilty; and Gus considered that her only chance of emotional survival lay in sending him away free of guilt. If he felt guilty, she would have to walk around knowing that it was on her account—and the whole point of this lunch, to her, was that she should acquit herself of the last debt she owed him.

“Maybe it depends on the particular problems,” Gus said. “Richard and Elaine Hacking are still together.”

“Well, hell,” Norman said, laughing. “Of course they are. It stands to reason. They're very careful to go looking for exactly the problems that marriage can answer. Neither one of them would know what to do with a real problem.”

“I wanted to ask Richard if he still sees Birdie.”

“Who knows?” Norman said. “Birdie is the most liberated broad I ever met. Personally, I find her terrifying. A man could get lost in that cleavage and never find his way out again. Years could go by. He could grow old wandering in the wilderness between those boobs. There's manna, and then there's glut.”

Gus giggled. “What about Jock?”

“Jock's in a flick on Times Square that makes
Deep Throat
look like
Shallow Tonsils.”

“Everything's changed,” Gus said, sadly. “Even Juilliard isn't where it was. Do you realize that if it was all starting right now, we wouldn't even meet each other? We'd be walking down different blocks forever.”

“But here we are,” Norman said, looking at her intently, “meeting.” He still didn't know why.

“It
is
a kind of redemption. A starting over.”

“Is it? Everything's changed. You just said so.”

Gus sucked the ice in the bottom of the glass, not looking at him. “What about the apartment?” she asked. “Is that the same?”

“Never changes,” Norman said. “The cockroaches are still there. The tile is still peeling. The room still gets cold in the middle of the day and the middle of the night and most of the time in between. It's a bargain now—rents have gone sky-high.”

“Are Tom and Cyril still across the hall?”

“Mario moved in with them.”

“Mario!”

“Why not? He wanted to be an actor. He went to Actors Studio and now Tom coaches him. That's the excuse, anyway. I guess Mario needed a father. Cyril likes having Mario around for protection. You wouldn't think muggers would pick on dwarves, but this can be a crummy city. Not that I would ever live anywhere else.”

“Mario,” Gus said. “Well, that brings me to why I asked you to lunch. I guess the time has come to do it and be done with everything. I have something that's yours.”

The last time a woman had said this to Norman, Elaine Hacking had brought out the Beethoven book. For a second, he expected to see Thayer on the table now.

Gus extracted an envelope from her bag and set it on the table by his plate.

“What is it?”

“Two thousand dollars.”

“Two thousand dollars!”

“Shhh,” she said, “keep your voice down.”

“You don't owe me two thousand dollars,” Norman said.

“Yes I do.”

“I won't take it.”

“Dammit, I saved it just in order to give it back to you. It's not for your sake. It's for mine. I want to be able to tell myself that I paid for my own debut.”

“Shit,” Norman said. “In any case, the money was originally my father's. Believe me, unless Castro sells cigars in Gehenna, he's got no use for it now.”

“Then give it to Esther.”

“What for? She doesn't want it. She hates the million bucks she's already got.”

“Your sister, then.”

“She's rich, remember? Not even counting her share of the inheritance. Besides, her husband wouldn't let her touch money from a
shiksa
. You don't know how it is. She has to take a ritual bath if she sneezes. If she took this money, she'd probably have to spend the rest of her life underwater.”

“What about Birdie?”

“No sir,” Norman said, “not on your life. Birdie won'ttake cash anyway. It would be treating her like a whore. She only takes fox furs and dance recitals and junk, and it's impossible to give a present and then run. The trouble with presents is that it
is
the meaning that counts.”

“I don't care who you give it to,” Gus said. “Give it to Mario!”

“But he's the person who gave it to you in the first place.”

“Then give it to the waitress!” Gus shouted. “I'm going to pay the check.” She picked up the check and walked to the cash register with it.

“I'll do that,” Norman said.

“I invited you.”

Norman looked back at the white envelope lying on the table. “The waitress is going to be getting one hell of a tip,” he said. “She wasn't all that good.”

Gus shrugged. “It's up to you. I don't care about it.” She turned around and held out her hand. “Good-bye,” she said.

Norman shook her hand, feeling rather peculiar about it. Did one shake one's ex-wife's hand? But before he could think what to say, how to summarize his attitude, she was gone, a yellow-and-khaki beauty, a primary source for a painting by Vermeer or God knew who in this present age, angelically golden and less than saintly, cheerfully, energetically bound to the world's wishes, a part of his life disappearing out the door. He ran back to the table and closed his fingers on the envelope seconds before the waitress, leaning over backwards with her tray, reached it. “Sorry,” he said, smiling ruefully at her, “my companion forgot this.” He folded it into his wallet and then rushed out the door. She was nowhere to be seen. No—wait, there she was.

He watched her walking away, downtown, and suddenly, unpremeditatedly, he went after her feeling as if his heart was in his mouth and a cheeseburger in his chest, and tapped her on the shoulder. She wheeled around. “It's only me,” he said. “Not somebody trying to goose you.” He thought his heart might give out on the spot, quit beating and grow as cold as cold meat.

“What do you want?” she asked.

He looked at the unbowed upper lip, the downy shadow in the crevice above it, the long eyes that matched her hair, the well-mannered nose and vulnerable cheek, and the hint of a line at the side of her mouth, the barest suggestion of strain under the eyes, that showed she was on her way to losing something, youth, that no one would ever be able to buy back for her, and he said, “I had an idea.”

She smiled. “I never knew you to be without one.”

“I thought maybe I could buy you a concert at Town Hall. Why not?” he asked. This time he did flick her braid, tossing it back over the gilt-edged temple. “It just so happens that I have two thousand dollars in my pocket, and no one to spend it on. I might as well spend it on you.”

Gus looked at Norman's eager, anxious, blood-dark face, the heavy head pitched forward at her the way he always stood and walked, the eyes with their history of hurt and anger and humor and hypnotic intensity, and almost, for the sake of a sheerly aesthetic satisfaction, she said yes, but then she smiled instead, shook her head no, dropped her eyes, and turned away.