Good Things I Wish You (4 page)

But Hart wasn’t listening, intent on his own thoughts. This was something I could understand. All my life I’ve been accused of not paying attention when, in fact, I have been listening with that other, inner ear. Couples in the courtyard were dancing now, and I watched them as I waited. The men led the women with such command. The women didn’t miss a step. At last Hart said, “She must have been a beautiful woman, this Clara, to interest a twenty-year-old man.”

“More like compelling.”

“A beautiful woman is always compelling.”

“But a compelling woman isn’t necessarily beautiful,” I said. “I’ve got a photo of Clara taken in 1854, just after Robert’s suicide attempt—”

“You have an actual photograph?”

I am a rational person.

“Okay, a
copy
of a photograph. My point is that, as many times as I’ve looked at it, I still find it deeply affecting.”

The photo shows a thirty-five-year-old woman more beautiful than any girlish image, but untouchable, unreachable, her gaze that of a stone. Her eyes are hollowed by weariness. Her shoulders slump. One gets the sense that, as soon as the exposure is complete, she’ll quickly turn back toward whatever darkness lies waiting for her full attention.

“My piano teacher gave it to me,” I continued, “for my sixteenth birthday. He said I could learn something by looking at it. He said it would help me understand things about men and women most people don’t figure out until after it’s too late.”

“Things,” Hart said, “such as those you are writing about in this book?”

This pleased me. “Yes,” I said.

“You had a relationship with this teacher?”

There was no segue between topics. There was no change in the tone of Hart’s voice, in the close set of his mouth. He was studying me coolly, impersonally.

“We were friends, of course,” I said, trying to sound
nonchalant, “if that’s what you mean by relationship.”

“An
inappropriate
relationship?”

I pictured Hart in a tile-floored research lab: white coated, peering into a microscope. “Alas, no. I was a nice Catholic girl.”

“I do not believe you,” he said.

“He was thirty years older than me,” I said, hating the pleading note that had crept into my voice. “And married. And, anyway, he’s dead now. Someone sent my mother the obituary.”

“What I meant,” Hart said, “is that I do not believe you were ever a nice Catholic girl.”

“Oh.” I could feel myself flush.

“Besides,” he said, signaling the waiter, “men and women can never be friends.”

This, then, was the end of our date. Hart paid the bill, waving my hand away, and then, as if released from chains, we stood up at exactly the same time. To my surprise, he gave me his business card, so I handed him mine.

“Maybe you wouldn’t mind helping me,” I said, “if I get stuck on a translation.”

“Sure, sure. We will talk on the phone. It’s the way these things go. Do you want to go flying with me some time?”

“Flying?” I said, confused. “Like, in a plane?”

“No-no-no, not a plane,” he said. “A glider.”

“I don’t even know what that is,” I said, and then, as I was reading the name of his company (Viso-Tech) and his full name (Reinhardt Hempel), he asked how my marriage ended. Again, there was no transition between
topics. When I didn’t answer, he answered the question for me.

“I suppose he was unfaithful,” he said. “It is the usual thing.”

“Calvin wasn’t cheating,” I said.

“Then you,” Hart said, and now he was impatient. “Come on. It is always the same.”

Abruptly I awakened from whatever was holding me here. This man was a stranger. I never had to see him again. I could drive home to the safety of my daughter, listen to the music of her breathing as she slept.

“I wish I
had
cheated,” I told him. “I wish it with all my heart.”

I left him beside the table. The entrepreneur. The rational person. The ax murderer. I did not look back. By now I was more than two hours late; it was my babysitter who would kill me. And indeed, she was waiting for me at the door: twenty-one years old, radiant, furious, her purse already slung over her shoulder.

“Where
were
you?” she said, as if she were the mother and I the recalcitrant child. “Why didn’t you call?” And, like that child, I could offer no explanation. All I could do was tell her I was sorry for staying out too long.

Clara Schumann at Thirty-five
^*

Part II

Virtue

7.

H
EIDI WAS ASLEEP, TANGLED
in blankets, some large and square, some rectangular, one no bigger than a handkerchief. Each had a cool, silky border she liked to scratch as she fell asleep. I rubbed the smallest one against her cheek; she sighed, curled her hand into mine. She’d inherited my wide palms as well as my good ear. Already she was finishing the first Suzuki Book; she could sight-read simple melodies, if she wanted. Lessons were battles, of course, at her age, but hadn’t my own been the same? Briefly, I lay down beside her, but I couldn’t get comfortable, couldn’t find enough space for my adult limbs between her stuffed animals and decorative pillows, puffs of pink and white sheets. Something had unsettled me. Hart had unsettled me. The more I thought about the end of our conversation, the more it made me mad.

Men and women can never be friends.

Outside Heidi’s window, coconut palms rattled their thick, dry fronds. Beyond them, in the lake, frogs called to one another—you could hear everything through the glass—and now and then, there came another kind of
cry, high pitched and sustained. Nothing close to wilderness is left in Palm Beach County, but this little man-made lake, at least, still offered a bit of peace. Tarpon churned the brackish water. Anhingas spread-eagled in the cypress trees. Great horned owls nested in the strip of woods that divided us from the highway.

Once I would have said that Cal and I were friends. Would always be friends. No matter what.

I slipped out of Heidi’s bed, paced through the kitchen and family room, circling twice through the pocket doors before heading down the hall toward my study. Marks from the furniture Calvin had taken with him—the dining room set, the antique chairs, the guest bed—were still embedded in the carpeting, like the fossilized prints from some prehistoric animal. Above my writing desk there’s a portrait of a skull, haloed in gold leaf, on a striking blue background. It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, and I bought it directly from the artist, believing I’d tuck it away to look at someday, a comfort, perhaps, as I lay dying. But shortly after Cal moved out, I hung the portrait over my desk. It helped—it still helps—looking up at that portrait. Assuming the old attitude of reverence. Remembering such loveliness exists, regardless of how empty I might feel.

Robert, dying in the asylum, asked for a portrait of Brahms, and while some claim the request was rooted in jealousy, Jan Swafford’s biography suggests that Robert merely longed to look upon something beautiful. A suggestion that seems utterly believable to me, especially when
you read Robert’s letter to Brahms on the subject:
I received your picture through my wonderful wife, your likeness that I remember so well, and I know its place very well in my room, very well—under the mirror.
^*
When you note that Robert welcomed Brahms as a visitor. And how carefully, tenderly, Brahms wrote to Clara of his impressions, putting a bright face on a darkening picture, expressing his affection for them both.

“Do not heed those small and envious souls,” Clara wrote in the diary intended for her children, “who make light of my love and friendship, trying to bring up for question our beautiful relationship which they do not understand nor ever could.”
^†

In August 1856, two weeks after Robert’s funeral, she and Brahms vacationed together in the Swiss town of Gersau. There they hiked the slopes of the Rigi, boated on Lake Lucerne. Free at last from Clara’s marriage, in that beautiful place far from home, something happened between them. Correspondence from that period has been destroyed, some of it at the urging of Brahms, some of it at the request of Clara’s oldest daughter, Marie. All we know for certain is that they returned to Düsseldorf separately and sadly. Brahms departed thereafter for Hamburg, while Clara embarked on yet another punishing concert
tour. Still, they remained—by their own definition—“best friends” until Clara’s death in 1896, when Brahms would exclaim, “Apart from Frau Schumann, I am not attached to anybody with my whole heart.”
^*

He died in 1897—jaundiced, obese, alone—eleven months after her passing.

There is no evidence that marriage was ever discussed, either with each other or with mutual friends, to whom each wrote long and intimate letters, most of which have survived.

There is no evidence of hanky-panky.

I stared up at the portrait. The portrait stared down on me.

What happened between them in Gersau? There was something I was missing. The same thing other writers—biographers, memoirists, contemporary novelists—had also struggled to see. Hart’s business card floated in my purse; I considered giving him a call. Our conversation didn’t seem finished somehow.

But by now it was almost midnight. And it wasn’t Hart I wanted to talk to.

Truth be told, I was longing to talk to Cal.

8.

W
E WERE MARRIED FOR
twelve years, Cal and I. His depression had always been part of our lives. First there were good years, with bad stretches. Then there were bad years, with good stretches. And then there were the years when it settled in for good, never talked of but always present, a phantom presiding over our table, slipping a cold hand into our bed. Cal ate compulsively, but without satisfaction. Evenings he drank, quietly and alone. These were the years he began changing jobs—from private schools to public to private again—looking for the right faculty, the right students, the right administration.

He was restless. He was bored. Increasingly, he was angry.

At first I thought the reenactment trips were a good thing. They gave him an outlet, a focus, a purpose. But each trip served only served to increase his dissatisfaction. Night after night, he’d stay up too late, e-mailing and blogging with people he’d met. I’d hear him on the phone, ranting against colleagues and coworkers, family members, friends. Everyone around him was holding him back. Everyone was secretly against him.

These rants were never against me.

Then, one day, they were against me.

Still, I defended him, protected him. I tried to conceal what was happening, even from the closest of our friends. I waited for the man I’d loved to resurface, the way—I am certain of this—Clara waited for Robert, year after year. And, like Robert, Cal always did reappear, as exhausted as a swimmer who has nearly drowned, though each time his return was less complete. The difference in him was so gradual that at first I didn’t understand the change. I thought it was just that we were aging, fading. I thought it was simply a trick of the light.

I am a rational person,
Cal liked to say, but there’s more to all this than reason. Had we behaved like rational people, there would have been no Heidi, who is the antithesis of reason: filled with emotion, bursting with light, passionate about everything, everything, everything from the fit of her socks to the stroke of a pen.

It often worries me that I frequently inhibit Clara in her practicing, since she does not wish to disturb me while composing…she sometimes lacks time nowadays, and I am responsible for that and yet cannot change it. But Clara does recognize that I have to nurture a talent, and that I am full of the most beautiful energy right now and still do have to make use of my youth…we are really most fortunate to have each other, and understand each other, understand so well, and love each other with our whole heart.