Songs without Words (20 page)

“He’s gone,” she reported.

“Eliot?” Chelsea asked. “Gone for good, you mean? Or gone for the season?”

“Gone for good. He just left. I told him it was over.”

“Wow! I didn’t think you’d really do that after all these years.”

“It was time I did. It was just clinging to the past, for both of us.”

“Are you okay?” Chelsea asked.

“Yes, fine. I feel such a sense of...relief, I guess I have to say. And hope for the future.”

“Good. I was worried that you might have second thoughts. Since I’m sort of responsible—”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” Harper said. “Not at all. Don’t think that. I needed to do this, regardless. You were just the catalyst. Whatever happens now, I’ll always be grateful to you for that, for giving me the push in the right direction.”

“No regrets.”

“No regrets. Absolutely not.”

“Can I come over?” Chelsea asked, sounding suddenly shy.

“Yes, of course! Why do you think I called?” Harper laughed lightly. Her voice was calm, but her body was in a state of frantic euphoria. Today would be the culmination of weeks of gentle wooing between them.

“See you in a few minutes,” Chelsea said.

“Can’t wait.”

Harper switched off the phone and took a deep breath, relishing the delirious tension in her body.
At last!
she thought, closing her eyes so that she could conjure up an image of Chelsea’s hesitant smile, an expression she had grown to adore. That shyness, it wasn’t lack of confidence. It was lack of presumption. Chelsea took almost nothing for granted, it seemed. Harper found that refreshing and endearing.

She had known Chelsea for six years but still did not know her well. Until recently, she had known her only as Mary Tillotson’s student lover, an interesting young devotee of the woman of arts and letters. For most of this time, Harper had thought of her as simply an extension of Mary. But lately Chelsea had emerged as an individual. She was no longer the impressionable young coed that Mary had taken under her wing. She was a twenty-seven year-old woman who had come into her own.

After being a rare visitor to the university library since her graduation a few years earlier, Chelsea had begun to appear again in recent months. She was back in school, she told Harper, working on her master’s in education. They had started talking, first about books and writers, poets and painters. They had long, sometimes antagonistic, discussions that left Harper feeling stimulated and drained at the same time. During one of these talks, Chelsea mentioned, in passing, that she was no longer with Mary, that Mary had “kicked her out” and that she was living alone in an apartment. After that, their conversations turned more toward the personal.

One day in early spring they went out for a drink, a date that ended up lasting several hours. By the second hour, Harper had felt comfortable and familiar enough to ask a question that had been on her mind for a while—after six years with Mary, what had gone wrong.

“Mary doesn’t comprehend the principle of exclusivity,” Chelsea told her.

“You mean she cheated on you?”

“It’s probably not fair to say it that way. ‘Cheated,’ I mean. Because that isn’t how she would see it.” Chelsea smiled sadly. “Mary actually has a very loving heart. She loves everyone. Almost literally. She thinks of sex as just another aspect of human relations, not something to be denied or suppressed. It’s something to be given as a gift to out-of-town visitors, like a fruit basket.”

Chelsea’s voice had a tinge of bitterness. She had obviously been hurt. “In a way, I admire that. It’s honest and free, but it isn’t something I want for myself.”

“That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me,” Harper said. “Most people expect fidelity in a relationship. I guess things were different in the beginning, then.”

“Not for very long, actually,” Chelsea said, “but I was so smitten, I took what I got, you know? I let her make the rules. It was a classic case of hero worship. I put her on a pedestal. But as I got older, there was no way she could live up to that image, of course. I hate to admit it, but I’m a cliché.”

“So you don’t love her anymore?” Harper asked.

“The relationship is over. I can’t give her what she wants, the unquestioning adoration. She thrives on that. She isn’t able to adapt to something on a more equal footing. She’ll always see me as a student. No, it just doesn’t work anymore, even if I could overlook the occasional dalliance.” Chelsea took a sip of her merlot, looking thoughtful. “Which I can’t.”

Harper was aware that Chelsea hadn’t answered her question about love. She had to conclude that Chelsea still loved Mary. She also accepted the idea that the relationship was unsalvageable. What Chelsea was saying fell in line with what Harper herself had observed over the last several years.

“The others—” Harper asked tentatively, recalling campus rumors that went back to the beginning of her own career, “—are they students?”

“Oh, no!” Chelsea laughed. “No. Mary has a thoroughly maternal relationship with her students, and she doesn’t cross the line.”

“But, you?”

Chelsea looked embarrassed. “That was my doing,” she said. “I forced my way into her life. She resisted, believe me. Her students do adore her, and plenty of them desire her. She’s fended off dozens of students, men and women, and she knows how to do that. Her attitude about them is that they’re
messy
— her word. No, I was a rare exception.” Chelsea narrowed her eyes at Harper. “Look, can we talk about something else, something more interesting?”

Harper found the subject of Chelsea’s relationship with Mary extremely interesting, but she said nothing more about it. The rest of the time was spent on more lighthearted topics. She found herself talking about her family in Cape Cod and her idyllic New England childhood. They also talked about music. On that subject, Chelsea said, “I’m an imbecile when it comes to music.”

“Oh, I doubt that.”

“No, it’s true, even though I go to the symphony and all that.

I like music, but I don’t really get it, if you know what I mean. Of course I like pop music. But classical, it can be a little tedious... sometimes. Sometimes it’s wonderful. Your cello solo that time, that was wonderful.”

“Thanks. You don’t have to like everything. Even I don’t like everything.”

Chelsea smiled. “But opera, that just has to be the worst! I will never figure that out. Mary loves it. I went a couple of times for her sake, but it just seems so ridiculous to me.”

It was nearly impossible, Harper realized, for Chelsea to have a conversation without mentioning Mary, despite her own request to avoid the subject. That wasn’t surprising. Practically her entire adult life had been spent under Mary’s wing.

Harper studied Chelsea as they talked, absorbing details of her appearance—her skin with its fine blond hairs, a nose slightly flattened at the end, the smile which lifted only the right side of her mouth, and her light, pleasant laugh. Glimpses of her diminutive round ears and the tiny scar under her left eye mingled with the faint whiff of a blooming tea rose in the planter box below the open window. An interleaved memory of sight and smell insinuated itself into Harper’s subconscious, producing sensory echoes that resounded in her mind often after that day.

She found herself waiting for Chelsea to appear in the library, looking up from whatever she was doing when she heard the swoosh of the automatic doors opening and feeling disappointed when it wasn’t her. Chelsea’s face appeared in her mind involuntarily, along with bits of conversation or the way Chelsea hooked her hair behind her ear, unhurriedly, with her index finger. These images came to her as she hung clean kitchen curtains or mowed the lawn. They came often and unexpectedly and left her feeling warm and happy. She started mentioning Chelsea to her friends, even Eliot, often just to repeat something clever she had said. And, as springtime waned, she began to wonder if there was any possibility that she and Chelsea could be more than friends.

By May their friendship had moved unopposed into that realm of desire that had always been mysterious and alluring to Harper. Understanding and unafraid, she allowed Chelsea to move deeper under her skin. They went to dinner together, then to a chamber music concert and then to the theater to see Mary Zimmerman’s play
Metamorphoses
. Harper had always had a special love of Greek mythology and Chelsea, with her Morrison education and years of devotion to a woman in love with all things classical, proved the ideal companion for this event. During the performance, they exchanged smiles with one another over special moments in the action, wordlessly conveying their enjoyment. Afterward, they went out for dessert, sharing a piece of Kahlua cheesecake at a round, rickety table in a noisy diner.

“The pool was practically a character in the play,” Chelsea remarked. “And not always the same character. It was sometimes benign, sometimes threatening. It was the one constant. Always there, but you never knew what part it would play.”

Harper nodded. “You’re right. Surprisingly versatile, considering that, as a prop, it never really changed at all.”

“The staging, the costumes, everything, that production was just gorgeous to look at.”

Harper sipped her decaf, watching Chelsea’s eyes. She looked lovely tonight, dressed in heather gray slacks and a cute embroidered jacket over a silky azure blouse. She wore gold hoops in her ears, and her sunny hair was swept up and pinned haphazardly on the back of her head, leaving her neck bare.

“Which story did you like best?” Chelsea asked.

“Orpheus and Eurydice, I think. It’s such an intriguing idea, isn’t it, that you could go into the underworld and bring back a loved one who’s died. To cheat death, it’s something we’ve all wished for at one time or another.”

“Yes, a universal fantasy. I have to agree with you about that one. It was very moving. So full of suspense as he led her back up to the world of the living.”

“I know! I found myself gritting my teeth while they did that slow march out of Hell.”

Chelsea poised her fork over the last bite of cheesecake and looked inquiringly at Harper, who nodded assent. Chelsea took the bite. “He just had to believe she was following him. It was an incredible leap of faith.”

“You could feel his agony. He wanted desperately to look, to see if she was still there or just to see her.”

“And, then, of course, when he turns and looks at her, your heart just sinks.”

“Even though we knew he would,” Harper added.

“Yes, we knew he would, but somehow we hoped he wouldn’t. We wanted a happy ending.”

“We always do.”

Chelsea nodded. “Yes, people do so want a happy ending!” She poured milk into her coffee, then asked, “Could you do it?”

“Not look, you mean?”

“Yes. Just trust, blindly.”

Harper thought for a few seconds and then said, “Yes, I could.”

Chelsea shook her head. “I don’t think I could. I’d look. Wouldn’t be able to stop myself.”

“You can’t make the leap of faith?”

“I’ve never been very good at faith.”

“Even when it comes to love? In that case, what else is there but faith?”

Chelsea smiled crookedly. “Well, maybe a couple of things, but you’re right. Believing in love is largely a matter of faith.”

After dessert, Harper drove Chelsea home, parking outside her apartment building.

“I had a great time,” Chelsea said, her expression conveying more than her words. “I really like you, you know?” She touched Harper’s arm briefly, then slid out of the car on the passenger side.