Dark Plums (24 page)

“I feel peaceful here, Max,” she said.

They sat in silence for a while.

“But for you I think something is missing,” he said.

Despite all her pretense, he sensed her true feelings about their sexual life. Last night was one of the few times he was certain that she
had experienced orgasm. He knew it from the relaxation that spread over her body and from how she had slept afterwards with the quiet, rhythmic breathing of a child. For a while he had watched her in the moonlight.

“No, Max. Nothing is missing.”

He shook his head. “I do not think that is the truth,” he said. “Adrianne, such happiness you give to me. I want that you too feel happiness. Is it college or books or a job … or friends your own age? I am content with this life, but what are you doing to fill up the day? It is not enough to cook and clean and please an old man.
Meine liebchen
, you are young.”

His tenderness moved her. After reflecting, she said, “I'd like to take piano lessons. When I was a child, I played the piano and had lessons from the time I was nine until I was twelve. Then my father died, and my mother sold the piano. I've always missed it.”

“
Meine liebchen
, I shall buy you a piano.”

“Oh, Max. Really!”

“My retirement money is not that much, but if a piano will bring you joy, we get one tomorrow.” He stroked her breasts, enjoying their softness.

The next afternoon they drove to a music store in Burlington where Max rented a Baldwin baby grand, with an option to buy it. The piano nearly filled up their small living room. To make space, they pushed the coffee table and two overstuffed armchairs against the wall.

As she wanted to review everything from the beginning, Adrianne bought stacks of elementary music books. She began to practice Hanon finger exercises.

“You're so good to me, Max.”

He beamed with happiness.

To her surprise, the daily routine of their life propelled her into practicing with an intensity she had never before experienced. She found herself gaining an ever deepening pleasure from her music. Each morning after the breakfast dishes were done, she would play. The first two weeks she reviewed several Clementi studies and a Bach prelude she had learned years ago. The third week she went on to practice a Schubert sonata.

Max would listen, nodding drowsily as he smoked his pipe, sometimes falling asleep, sometimes beating his fingers in rhythm. He enjoyed hearing her practice, he said, and no, it didn't bother him to hear her repeat over and over again the same chords, the same melodic fragments, and the same scale exercises.

Her wrist and finger muscles grew tired from practicing. She learned to be patient, as with daily effort the music began to sound beautiful.

Max suggested that she study with a teacher. They found a sparrow-like elderly woman in Middlebury who had once been a concert pianist. During Adrianne's first lesson, Max listened proudly.

Adrianne played the piano all day and into the evening, stopping only to make their meals and take occasional walks. It was getting colder; the days were getting shorter. Snow fell, covering the branches and coming up as high as the windows. She and Max bought snowshoes. Sometimes they would be snowed in for a day or two after a storm.

“You must memorize all that you learn,” her teacher said at the beginning of the second lesson. “That way the music will always be with you.”

“It takes so much time.”

“You will develop the capacity to memorize. Your memory is like an unused muscle. If you are serious, you will think and dream music. You must go to concerts and hear musicians perform. It's quite different from just listening to a record. Will your father take you?”

“My husband,” said Adrianne, reddening.

The teacher pursed her thin lips together and flicked a piece of lint from her skirt. Wisps of white hair escaped from her chignon. Embarrassed that the teacher had mistaken Max for her father, Adrianne faltered over the Bach prelude she was beginning to play. “I'm not interested in your personal relationships,” said her teacher in a dry voice. “I want to see what you can do with the music.”

Occasionally after this, Max and Adrianne would drive to Boston for a concert and spend the night in a hotel. Adrianne would listen to the performers with rapt concentration, as she tried to absorb all that she could.

Music began to fill her brain and the pores of her body. During
that long winter and after the snow melted as summer approached, there was little else to do but play the piano, cook and clean up meals, take walks in the woods, tidy the house, and keep Max company. Her weekly lessons became the high point of her life.

Max did not like jazz, so she played mostly classical music. But she loved jazz, and at times she would play a Billie Holiday song or some classical blues, or something by Ellington or Miles Davis.

“This jazz is discordant, strange to me,” Max would say.

“More than Schoenberg?”

“Ah, I do not like the Schoenberg either! When you finish with the jazz music, please play some beautiful Brahms.”

She wrote to her mother that she was working as a waitress and gave only a post office box address.

About once a month her mother responded with notes on monogrammed paper, in which she described her activities at work as well as various social activities, such as dinner parties or theater.

Adrianne continued to improvise fictional accounts of her life for Elena, just as she had done when she was with Alfredo.

Ever since the time with Gerald, Adrianne had tried to shield herself from her mother. Odd as it was that a physician in his late twenties should seek out an eighteen-year old girl simply for companionship, her mother had appeared to believe this was the case. Finally, one evening after she and Gerald had broken up, in despair Adrianne had confessed the truth. However, she had omitted the part about her pregnancy and abortion.

“You will suffer the consequences,” said her mother in a cold tone, pushing down hysteria. “May God forgive you. If Gerald does not want to marry you, perhaps you ought to go away.”

During the next two weeks, Adrianne made preparations for her departure for New York. Elena never again referred to what had happened, but everything unspoken seemed to roll into an intangible mass of shame and guilt inside Adrianne. Adrianne felt her mother's condemnation, mingled with a strange, secret kind of satisfaction at her daughter's suffering.

It was then that Adrianne had gone to confession (again omitting the part about her pregnancy.) But the priest's coldness echoed her mother's.

During their second winter, Adrianne and Max were invited to a Christmas party by a couple who lived nearby and who were potters. Among the guests was an actor from Boston. As he and Adrianne talked, a sexual current began to flow between them. Perceiving this, Max grumbled, taking her by the arm, and insisting that they leave the party.

That night, as she watched Max undress, she was struck anew by the whiteness of his body, his large chest, his spindly legs. He stood a little swaybacked. She was Max's prisoner, she thought angrily. She was still a prostitute really, giving her body to Max in exchange for all that he could offer, but not giving herself out of desire.

Yet Max could caress her in such a way that he almost mesmerized her at times. “Ah, my angel,” he would murmur. “How happy you make me. I do not deserve such happiness. Never did I think would have such joy.”

That night when they got into bed, his warm hands crept along her spine, kneaded her buttocks, and moved on to her vagina. On other occasions, when she felt more kindly towards him, she would let herself sink under the spell of his hands. Now she stiffened in resistance as she thought of the actor.

However, out of a sense of obligation she reached down between Max's legs. His penis was limp. Expertly, she massaged it until it came to life, and then she guided him inside her. While he thrust deeper into her, she watched them both from a point high above her body, as she used to long ago when she fucked strangers.

Finally he climaxed. “Ah, is so good,” he sighed. She hurried to the bathroom to wipe off the semen, just as she had done in the past with tricks. Unable to sleep, she gazed at the moonlight shining through the curtains while he snored.

A few days later she came down with the flu, and painful memories of her life in Manhattan began to obsess her. One night she dreamed that the gypsy, Ramón, was plunging a knife into her heart.

Thoughts of all the men she'd been with tormented her. She loosened herself from Max's sleeping grip, got up, went into the kitchen, flicked on the light, took out a carving knife from the rack
on the wall, and stared at it.

In his bare feet and robe, Max tottered in. “My angel, what you are doing?”

He wrenched the knife away from her. It fell to the floor. She, too, fell down on the icy linoleum and sobbed. Tenderly, he held her and caressed the nape of her neck. “Tell me, what is it, my angel?”

In bed again beneath the warm goose down, she whispered it all to him—or almost all. So that was how she had been living when she came to visit him in the beautiful white wool dress. That was how she had acquired her sexual skill!

“Is all right,
meine liebe
.”

“I'm not worthy of you, Max,” she sobbed. He held her in his arms, filled with the sense that they were both impure. He, too, had used her young body and spirit. For her, perhaps he was no more than another trick. Did she love him at all, or had she only been pretending all along?

“I can leave if you want,” she sobbed. “I can go back to New York, or Texas, or anywhere.”

“No,” he said emphatically. “I do not want that you leave.”

For the next few days and nights they barely touched each other.

One morning as she was practicing a Brahms piece that he particularly liked, she faltered, then broke down and lay her head on the piano keys and sobbed. At that moment something in him melted. All along he had suspected something like this. Yet he had hidden this suspicion from himself. Poor child! A bird with a broken wing.

“It's all right,” he said. He came over to her and held her, gazing full into her face.

With a shock, she realized the truth of his compassion. He loved her. He accepted her with all her faults. He forgave her the past. And perhaps she could forgive herself.

Music was a ray of light, a sunbeam on which she could float out of the darkness of her former world. Some classical music had almost unbearably sad passages. By not evading the sadness, she developed strength. She discovered parts of herself which had lain dormant.

Through the long winter, while the sky and hills were white with snow, she played the piano for hours on end. The harmony she found in music began to weave its way subtly between their bodies when she
and Max were in bed. She would drift off to sleep listening to music in her mind, and sometimes felt as if she had been practicing in her sleep.

A spasm of coughing came over Max as he rocked in his oak chair. He should be smoking fewer cigars. Far away from the people he had known for so many years in his congregation, he was lonely. He missed the synagogue. Out here in the country there were none.

Adrianne does not love me as she would a younger man, he thought. She is kind to me, as she would be to a grandfather. She is nearly younger than my
kinder
. He stubbed out his cigar. Ah, but he liked what she was playing now, a Schubert piece. She faltered on a melodic phrase, played it again and again until she got it right, and the repetition soothed him.

Now she was going into an
arpeggio allegre
, and he followed it. He believed that she had the touch of a true musician.

His bank account was dwindling. However, he had enough set aside in stocks and bonds so that they could live comfortably on the interest. He must teach her something about finance, show her what securities he had and how to manage them, so that after he died she could live comfortably.

He sensed that he was going to die soon. In dreams a voice told him he was already dead and in a kind of gray no-man's land waiting for something. He was silent about his premonition because he did not want to frighten her.

One February evening when Adrianne came back from a long walk in the woods, she was so cold that she decided to take a bath immediately. The house was quiet. She thought that Max was probably dozing. After she finished her bath, it was still unusually quiet. Disturbed, she went into his study and there she found him slumped over in his chair. He was not breathing, and his skin felt icy.

“Max!” she cried.

Silence.

When she lifted his head, it felt heavy, and he was rigid. Terrified, she pushed her hands hard against his chest again and again with a rhythmical movement to start him breathing, but nothing happened.
Then she thought of opening his mouth to blow into it, but she could not pry open his lips.

Although she knew it was too late, she called an ambulance.