Augusta Played (8 page)

A concert career, as Gus now said to herself again, does take money. It's an open secret: you need a backer. The world was not overrun with people wanting to spend their money on flutists. Pianists, yes; violinists, maybe. But not flutists. The world, of course,
was
overrun with musicians of all kinds who had everything they needed for a concert career except the money it took. She could switch to orchestra playing, but all these years had gone to learning the solo repertoire. Moreover, her tone had a rare, mellifluous quality, sweet as manna in the wilderness, blown on a wind out of Paradise into the desert, a tone mystic in its ability to fly straight to the hearer's heart. What a waste, to dilute it with an orchestra; and moreover again, she had her own ideas about what she wanted to do with the flute—it would kill her, having to subject herself to the rigidity of a stick.

She could wait for a more convenient marriage, as her mother wanted her to do. But who knew that it would come along? Men like Richard were always already married. Nor was there any guarantee that somewhere in the world existed a man who would not only marry her but finance a debut.

And besides, besides, besides—she reminded herself, slightly disconcerted to find that it had slipped her mind—she
was
in love. Richard was a beautiful dear friend and she loved having him call her, but he didn't do for her what Norman did. Norman took her breath away.

Took her breath away
. The words seemed to wrap themselves around her throat like a scarf, strangling her. All at once, she felt cold, and jumped up to slam the window shut.

14

I
T
WAS
the season of second thoughts. Norman fretted over the lack of freedom in the world, as he saw it. He felt constrained and irritable, like a child in a playpen. He walked up Broadway to Columbia, hunched over in his unbelted Burberry trench coat, bucking the chill wind, and if he appeared to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, it was because he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. You see, if every proposition had to be either true or false, then the proposition “It is true that Norman Gold will marry Augusta”
had been
true or false, but
not
neither or both, long before they'd met each other; from eternity, in fact. And the proposition “It is true that Norman Gold will accomplish a revolution in intellectual thought” was already determined, came with its truth-value attached to it like a luggage tag. Or if truth or falsity only descended upon a proposition at a certain time, like the Shechinah, the Light of lights, on Mount Sinai when Moses received the Ten Commandments, or over the Shabbas feast on Friday at sunset, what happened to the conditional tense? “If Norman marries Gus, he will (will not) accomplish a revolution in intellectual thought”—was that true, false, both, or none of the above? The clear sky seemed hard as ice, as if a well-aimed pick might chip off cubes of cloud.

15

N
ORMAN
AND
AUGUSTA
were married at City Hall on the last day of January, with Philip Fleischman, Norman's erstwhile blood-brother, and Phil's current girl, Dinky, acting as witnesses. Gus wore pale yellow wool, a navy coat, and bone-colored shoes and panty-hose, but the sleet turned the toes of her shoes black when the wedding party returned to the street.

“Right,” Phil said, with a great air of taking charge, “who wants a drink?”

They went to Max's Kansas City, because Phil had a car and because he said Max's Kansas City was the place to go. Gus and Norman, as Upper West Siders, were both inclined to lose track of which was “the” place to go. Phil mocked himself for knowing the in-scene and blamed it on his profession, trendiness being an occupational hazard of counterculture advertising, but the innocent glow in his round cheeks gave him away. For Phil, heaven was eating chickpeas in a crowded room with red walls screened by swirling smoke.

For Gus, heaven was being called “Mrs. Gold.”

“Here's to Mrs. Norman Gold,” Phil said, holding his glass high in the air. At that moment, the crowd standing next to their booth swung in their direction, an unpredicted surge of the human current, and connected with Phil's shoulder. The glass tipped, the drink spilled, and Dinky ended up with a lap full of liquor. During the confusion, Norman sprang his surprise on Gus: “Guess where we're spending the night,” he said, whispering mysteriously into her ear. He named a hotel.

“You're crazy!”

“Bridal suite.” His heart was full of love, overflowing like Phil's drink.

A suspicion entered Gus's mind. “Phil put you up to this, didn't he?”

“Phil,” Dinky said disgustedly, “isn't capable of putting anybody up to anything. Or anything up to anybody.”

“You don't even know what they're talking about,” Phil said to Dinky. “Here, dry your own lap.”

Norman said, “This conversation is getting entirely too gross for newlyweds. Gus and I are splitting.”

“Where are we going?” Gus asked.

“You know.”

“I don't,” Dinky said.

“But I have to go home first. To pack.”

“I packed for you,” Norman said.

“The suitcase is in the car,” Phil said.

Gus was not sure she liked this. She had thought she was getting married of her own free will, but it was beginning to feel as though she was being abducted.

Norman paid the check and they walked two by two back to the car. The wind was cutting a path down the street like a lawnmower made of air, whirring over the pavement. Dinky, a brunette model with exophthalmic eyes and a trick of wetting her lips with her tongue between words as if her speech might otherwise stall at her large, white teeth—it gave her a faintly oiled character, in keeping with the cosmetic and perfumery oils that surrounded her—said, “My skirt is going to freeze under my coat. Thanks to you, Philip. I'm going to get arthritis in my pelvis and be frigid for the rest of my life.”

“If you ask me,” Phil said, “you've got arthritis of the brain.” He retrieved the suitcase from the trunk. “We could give you a lift,” he said to Norman.

“No,” Norman said, cutting him off quickly, hailing a cab. He wanted to be alone with Gus as soon as possible. Christ, she was his wife, and he hadn't yet had a second of peace in which to think what that might mean. It had to mean more than chickpeas in Max's Kansas City. All the way to the hotel, he was silent, thinking, his hand on Gus's bone-colored knee, a smile slung across his face in a wide loop like a lariat, smoke from his cigarette curling upward into his long lashes. Sleet coated the taxi's windshield, and with every sweep of the wipers, there was a thick whooshing sound that reached them in the back seat.

“Some weather,” the driver said.

“Yeah,” said Norman.

“You guys don't look like you're from out of town, if you know what I mean.”

“We're not. And that's no guy,” Norman said, jerking his thumb at Gus, “that's my wife.”

“Hee, hee, hee,” the driver laughed, drawing air inward with each long, harsh syllable. He never seemed to exhale. His back and shoulders, bent over the wheel, just kept rising, filling with heated air from the dashboard vents, the stink of gasoline and wet wool and cigarette smoke. Norman listened to the man's indrawn laughter and imagined the day when he would simply float through the roof of his cab, literally carried away by some joke.

Gus pulled at Norman's coat sleeve. She had been thinking too. The plan had been that they would return to her apartment, finish putting her stuff in boxes, spend the night, and in the morning, on the first of February, move her in to Norman's place. He lived on West Eighty-eighth, and like her, he had only one room, but his room was larger. She would have liked to keep her old room as a private studio, but they couldn't afford it, not with sources of income being cut off all around them. How could they pay for this? She tugged at his sleeve again, but he still didn't notice. In a fit of desperation, a kind of ontological claustrophobia, she said in a voice much too loud, “What about Tweetie-Pie?”

“Your wife has a lithp,” the driver said. “Hee, hee, hee!”

“You,” Gus said to the driver, “are an ass.”

“Phil will bring him over in the morning,” Norman said to Gus.

“I'm an athth,” the driver said. “Hee, hee, hee!”

That braying was still echoing in Norman's head after he and Gus—
his wife
—had been shown to their room and he had tipped the bellhop and shut the door and they had both thrown their coats on the settee in the first of the two rooms that composed their suite. He had managed to sign the register and stand upright without his knees buckling out from under him in the elevator, but he was sure the eyes of the hotel had been trained on him all the way. Now he and Gus were alone in a strange room and the quietness of it was overwhelming, appalling. Normally, being alone with Gus was an unself-conscious pleasure, but here, in this suite of rooms designed for Love with a capital L, every object in it invisibly labeled LOVE, Norman felt as if he'd been handed a sheet of instructions or a list of standards to be met. The settee shouted LOVE, the drapes shouted LOVE, the bed in the next room shouted LOVE, all in a disappearing ink visible only to the infra-red eyes of people in the know, the throbbing outlines of the letters pounding against his informed retinae.

“Take a look at this,” Gus said, calling from the bedroom.

“One of us, me I guess, is supposed to take a bath in this bathroom in here, and meanwhile”—she left the bedroom and walked back to the sitting room—“you take your bath in this bathroom in here. That way I'm in bed waiting for you when you come in, in your robe and pajamas.”

“I don't have any pajamas.”

“Well,” she said, “then we'll have to forget the whole thing. Scrub the whole marriage. It just isn't going to work if you walk through that door in your jockey shorts. That is obviously not what the architect had in mind.”

“Your feet must be soaking wet. Why don't you take your shoes off?”

“Okay.” But when Gus had her shoes and panty-hose off, Norman put his hand on her cool calf, and ran his fingers up the inside of her leg, inching them under the elastic leg band of her bikini underpants.

“Take your dress off,” Norman commanded.

They were standing by the window in the sitting room but the drapes were closed…heavy, figured drapes that made the room seem timeless—as if the room were airtight, sealed against the world and the corruption of change. A languid gold light, overrich as syrup, lay in thick, inert pools on the deep-pile carpet.

Gus reached both arms around her back to unzip her dress, and the action twisted her at an angle so exquisite in relation to Norman that she nearly fainted. Norman had to take his hand away to pull the dress over her head, and he brought her underpants down when he did. Then she shut her eyes as he drew the dress over her face and took her into his arms, dispensing with the bra, and when she opened them again, looking over his navy-suited shoulder in the direction of the door, she saw the bellhop.

She screamed.

The bellboy jumped. He would have put Nureyev to shame. He jumped so high, kicking his legs to turn around at the same time, that he could almost be said to be dancing. But he wasn't dancing. He was running, out of an instinct as old as the Lascaux Caves, an instinct for self-preservation that said it was not safe to look on another man's naked wife. It was evidently an instinct with as much urgency behind it in the twentieth century as in the Pleistocene period, and if Norman was anything to go by, it had retained its validity, because Norman turned around, saw the bellhop, and wanted to kill.

The bellhop had fled, a single, useless, courteous phrase left lingering behind him in the room, the result of a kind of time-lag as if he were traveling faster than the speed of sound. It was, “Compliments of the management, sir,” and it had been delivered with a magnum of champagne in an ice pail which the boy dropped clattering on the coffee table as he turned tail and ran. Norman took off after him.

The first leg of the race was a straight stretch of hotel carpeting from the room to the elevator; then there was a hallway-crossing, and the bellhop made a sharp swerve to the left. Norman caught hold of him in front of an open linen closet.

“You fucking popeyed bastard,” he said (strictly metaphorically, as the boy, unlike Norman, had not even been thinking of fucking, and, unlike Dinky, was not at all exophthalmic,
and
, as Norman was to learn later, was definitely not illegitimate).

“You fucking popeyed bastard,”
Norman said again, with emphasis, unable to think of anything else—and kayoed him with a left uppercut to the jaw and a right to the stomach (Norman was lefthanded).

The boy fell backward into the closet, bringing down shelves of sheets, pillowcases, towels, washcloths, toilet paper, detergent, and a broom. Maids materialized from nowhere, blossoming in the doorways of rooms all along the hall, like primroses springing up after an April shower.

They were standing there, the primrose maids, dumbstruck, and the bellboy was lying there, among the linen, and Norman slowly began to realize what he had done. Without saying a word to anyone, carefully, like a silent film rewinding, he edged back in the direction he had come. When he was around the corner, he tore back to the room. Gus had locked the door.

“For God's sake, Gus,” he shouted in a stage whisper, “let me in!”

Gus opened the door and he whisked into the room but she latched the door again afterward. She was dressed in jeans and one of his shirts but her face was as white as dough and as ready to crumble as a matzo cracker. “What happened?” she asked.

“I hit him.”

“You what?”

“What do you think I did? Asked him back to play gin rummy?”