Poe's Children (25 page)

“I haven’t seen it today,” Louise says. “Maybe this won’t work. Maybe it would rather live here.” All day long she’s had the radio turned on, tuned to the country station. Maybe the ghost will take the hint and hide out somewhere until everyone leaves.

The cellists arrive. Seven men and a woman. Louise doesn’t bother to remember their names. The woman is tall and thin. She has long arms and a long nose. She eats three plates of spaghetti. The cellists talk to each other. They don’t talk about the ghost. They talk about music. They complain about acoustics. They tell Louise that her spaghetti is delicious. Louise just smiles. She stares at the woman cellist, sees Louise watching her. Louise shrugs, nods. She holds up five fingers.

Louise and the cellists seem comfortable. They tease each other. They tell stories. Do they know? Do they talk about Louise? Do they brag? Compare notes? How could they know Louise better than Louise knows her? Suddenly Louise feels as if this isn’t her house after all. It belongs to Louise and the cellists. It’s their ghost, not hers. They live here. After dinner they’ll stay and she’ll leave.

Number five is the one who likes foreign films, Louise remembers. The one with the goldfish. Louise said number five had a great sense of humor.

Louise gets up and goes to the kitchen to get more wine, leaving Louise alone with the cellists. The one sitting next to Louise says, “You have the prettiest eyes. Have I seen you in the audience sometimes?”

“It’s possible,” Louise says.

“Louise talks about you all the time,” the cellist says. He’s young, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. Louise wonders if he’s the one with the big hands. He has pretty eyes, too. She tells him that.

“Louise doesn’t know everything about me,” she says, flirting.

Anna is hiding under the table. She growls and pretends to bite the cellists. The cellists know Anna. They’re used to her. They probably think she’s cute. They pass her bits of broccoli, lettuce.

The living room is full of cellos in black cases the cellists brought in, like sarcophaguses on little wheels. Sarcophabuses. Dead baby carriages. After dinner the cellists take their chairs into the living room. They take out their cellos and tune them. Anna insinuates herself between cellos, hanging on the backs of chairs. The house is full of sound.

Louise and Louise sit on chairs in the hall and look in. They can’t talk. It’s too loud. Louise reaches into her purse, pulls out a packet of earplugs. She gives two to Anna, two to Louise, keeps two for herself. Louise puts her earplugs in. Now the cellists sound as if they are underground, down in some underground lake, or in a cave. Louise fidgets.

The cellists play for almost an hour. When they take a break Louise feels tender, as if the cellists have been throwing things at her. Tiny lumps of sound. She almost expects to see bruises on her arms.

The cellists go outside to smoke cigarettes. Louise takes Louise aside. “You should tell me now if there isn’t a ghost,” she says. “I’ll tell them to go home. I promise I won’t be angry.”

“There is a ghost,” Louise says. “Really.” But she doesn’t try to sound too convincing. What she doesn’t tell Louise is that she’s stuck a Walkman in her closet. She’s got the Patsy Cline CD on repeat with the volume turned way down.

Louise says, “So he was talking to you during dinner. What do you think?”

“Who?” Louise says. “Him? He was pretty nice.”

Louise sighs. “Yeah. I think he’s pretty nice, too.”

The cellists come back inside. The young cellist with the glasses and the big hands looks over at both of them and smiles a big blissed smile. Maybe it wasn’t cigarettes that they were smoking.

Anna has fallen asleep inside a cello case, like a fat green pea in a coffin.

Louise tries to imagine the cellists without their clothes. She tries to picture them naked and fucking Louise. No, fucking
Louise,
fucking her instead. Which one is number four? The one with the beard? Number four, she remembers, likes Louise to sit on top and bounce up and down. She does all the work while he waves his hand. He conducts her. Louise thinks it’s funny.

Louise pictures all of the cellists, naked and in the same bed. She’s in the bed. The one with the beard first. Lie on your back, she tells him. Close your eyes. Don’t move. I’m in charge. I’m conducting this affair. The one with the skinny legs and the poochy stomach. The young one with curly black hair, bent over his cello as if he might fall in. Who was flirting with her. Do this, she tells a cellist. Do this, she tells another one. She can’t figure out what to do with the woman. Number five. She can’t even figure out how to take off number five’s clothes. Number five sits on the edge of the bed, hands tucked under her buttocks. She’s still in her bra and underwear.

Louise thinks about the underwear for a minute. It has little flowers on it. Periwinkles. Number five waits for Louise to tell her what to do. But Louise is having a hard enough time figuring out where everyone else goes. A mouth has fastened itself on her breast. Someone is tugging at her hair. She is holding on to someone’s penis with both hands, someone else’s penis is rubbing against her cunt. There are penises everywhere. Wait your turn, Louise thinks. Be patient.

Number five has pulled a cello out of her underwear. She’s playing a sad little tune on it. It’s distracting. It’s not sexy at all. Another cellist stands up on the bed, jumps up and down. Soon they’re all doing it. The bed creaks and groans, and the woman plays faster and faster on her fiddle. Stop it, Louise thinks, you’ll wake the ghost.

“Shit!” Louise says—she’s yanked Louise’s earplug out, drops it in Louise’s lap. “There he is under your chair. Look. Louise, you really do have a ghost.”

The cellists don’t look. Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. They are fucking their cellos with their fingers, stroking music out, promising the ghost yodels and Patsy Cline and funeral marches and whole cities of music and music to eat and music to drink and music to put on and wear like clothes. It isn’t music Louise has ever heard before. It sounds like a lullaby, and then it sounds like a pack of wolves, and then it sounds like a slaughterhouse, and then it sounds like a motel room and a married man saying I love you and the shower is running at the same time. It makes her teeth ache and her heart rattle.

It sounds like the color green. Anna wakes up. She’s sitting in the cello case, hands over her ears.

This is too loud, Louise thinks. The neighbors will complain. She bends over and sees the ghost, small and unobjectionable as a lapdog, lying under her chair. Oh, my poor baby, she thinks. Don’t be fooled. Don’t fall for the song. They don’t mean it.

But something is happening to the ghost. He shivers and twists and gapes. He comes out from under the chair. He leaves all his fur behind, under the chair in a neat little pile. He drags himself along the floor with his strong beautiful hands, scissoring with his legs along the floor like a swimmer. He’s planning to change, to leave her and go away. Louise pulls out her other earplug. She’s going to give them to the ghost. “Stay here,” she says out loud, “stay here with me and the real Patsy Cline. Don’t go.” She can’t hear herself speak. The cellos roar like lions in cages and licks of fire. Louise opens her mouth to say it louder, but the ghost is going. Fine, okay, go comb your hair. See if I care.

Louise and Louise and Anna watch as the ghost climbs into a cello. He pulls himself up, shakes the air off like drops of water. He gets smaller. He gets fainter. He melts into the cello like spilled milk. All the other cellists pause. The cellist who has caught Louise’s ghost plays a scale. “Well,” he says. It doesn’t sound any different to Louise but all the other cellists sigh.

It’s the bearded cellist who’s caught the ghost. He holds on to his cello as if it might grow legs and run away if he lets go. He looks like he’s discovered America. He plays something else. Something old-fashioned, Louise thinks, a pretty old-fashioned tune, and she wants to cry. She puts her earplugs back in again. The cellist looks up at Louise as he plays and he smiles. You owe me, she thinks.

But it’s the youngest cellist, the one who thinks Louise has pretty eyes, who stays. Louise isn’t sure how this happens. She isn’t sure that she has the right cellist. She isn’t sure that the ghost went into the right cello. But the cellists pack up their cellos and they thank her and they drive away, leaving the dishes piled in the sink for Louise to wash.

The youngest cellist is still sitting in her living room. “I thought I had it,” he says. “I thought for sure I could play that ghost.”

“I’m leaving,” Louise says. But she doesn’t leave.

“Good night,” Louise says.

“Do you want a ride?” Louise says to the cellist.

He says, “I thought I might hang around. See if there’s another ghost in here. If that’s okay with Louise.”

Louise shrugs. “Good night,” she says to Louise.

“Well,” Louise says, “good night.” She picks up Anna, who has fallen asleep on the couch. Anna was not impressed with the ghost. He wasn’t a dog and he wasn’t green.

“Good night,” the cellist says, and the door slams shut behind Louise and Anna.

Louise inhales. He’s not married, it isn’t that smell. But it reminds her of something.

“What’s your name?” she says, but before he can answer her, she puts her earplugs back in again. They fuck in the closet and then in the bathtub and then he lies down on the bedroom floor and Louise sits on top of him. To exorcise the ghost, she thinks. Hotter in a chilly sprout.

The cellist’s mouth moves when he comes. It looks like he’s saying, “Louise, Louise,” but she gives him the benefit of the doubt. He might be saying her name.

She nods encouragingly. “That’s right,” she says. “Louise.”

The cellist falls asleep on the floor. Louise throws a blanket over him. She watches him breathe. It’s been a while since she’s watched a man sleep. She takes a shower and she does the dishes. She puts the chairs in the living room away. She gets an envelope and she picks up a handful of the ghost’s hair. She puts it in the envelope and she sweeps the rest away. She takes her earplugs out but she doesn’t throw them away.

In the morning, the cellist makes her pancakes. He sits down at the table and she stands up. She walks over and sniffs his neck. She recognizes that smell now. He smells like Louise. Burnt sugar and orange juice and talcum powder. She realizes that she’s made a horrible mistake.

Louise is furious. Louise didn’t know Louise knew how to be angry. Louise hangs up when Louise calls. Louise drives over to Louise’s house and no one comes to the door. But Louise can see Anna looking out the window.

Louise writes a letter to Louise. “I’m so sorry,” she writes. “I should have known. Why didn’t you tell me? He doesn’t love me. He was just drunk. Maybe he got confused. Please, please forgive me. You don’t have to forgive me immediately. Tell me what I should do.”

At the bottom she writes, “P.S. I’m not pregnant.”

Three weeks later, Louise is walking a group of symphony patrons across the stage. They’ve all just eaten lunch. They drank wine. She is pointing out architectural details, rows of expensive spotlights. She is standing with her back to the theater. She is talking, she points up, she takes a step back into air. She falls off the stage.

A man—a lawyer—calls Louise at work. At first she thinks it must be her mother who has fallen. The lawyer explains. Louise is the one who is dead. She broke her neck.

While Louise is busy understanding this, the lawyer, Mr. Bostick, says something else. Louise is Anna’s guardian now.

“Wait, wait,” Louise says. “What do you mean? Louise is in the hospital? I have to take care of Anna for a while?”

No, Mr. Bostick says. Louise is dead.

“In the event of her death, Louise wanted you to adopt her daughter, Anna Geary. I had assumed that my client, Louise Geary, had discussed this with you. She has no living family. Louise told me that you were her family.”

“But I slept with her cellist,” Louise said. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t realize which number he was. I didn’t know his name. I still don’t. Louise is so angry with me.”

But Louise isn’t angry with Louise anymore. Or maybe now she will always be angry with Louise.

Louise picks Anna up at school. Anna is sitting on a chair in the school office. She doesn’t look up when Louise opens the door. Louise goes and stands in front of her. She looks down at Anna and thinks, this is all that’s left of Louise. This is all I’ve got now. A little girl who only likes things that are green, who used to be a dog. “Come on, Anna,” Louise says. “You’re going to come live with me.”

Louise and Anna live together for a week. Louise avoids her married lover at work. She doesn’t know how to explain things. First a ghost and now a little girl. That’s the end of the motel rooms.

Louise and Anna go to Louise’s funeral and throw dirt at Louise’s coffin. Anna throws her dirt hard, like she’s aiming for something. Louise holds on to her handful too tightly. When she lets go, there’s dirt under her fingernails. She sticks a finger in her mouth.

All the cellists are there. They look amputated without their cellos, smaller, childlike. Anna, in her funereal green, looks older than they do. She holds Louise’s hand grudgingly. Louise has promised that Anna can have a dog. No more motels for sure. She’ll have to buy a bigger house, Louise thinks, with a yard. She’ll sell her house and Louise’s house and put the money in trust for Anna. She did this for her mother—this is what you have to do for family.

While the minister is still speaking, number eight lies down on the ground beside the grave. The cellists on either side each take an arm and pull him back up again. Louise sees that his nose is running. He doesn’t look at her, and he doesn’t wipe his nose, either. When the two cellists walk him away, there’s grave dirt on the seat of his pants.

Patrick is there. His eyes are red. He waves his fingers at Anna, but he stays where he is. Loss is contagious—he’s keeping a safe distance.

The woman cellist, number five, comes up to Louise after the funeral. She embraces Louise, Anna. She tells them that a special memorial concert has been arranged. Funds will be raised. One of the smaller concert halls will be named the Louise Geary Memorial Hall. Louise agrees that Louise would have been pleased. She and Anna leave before the other cellists can tell them how sorry they are, how much they will miss Louise.