She took a deep breath and produced a low note that rose like a column from her diaphragm, as she had been taught. Then Iggy Pop started up again. She lay down on the bed, she couldn’t remember a single line, and in three hours she had to be on stage. She turned and in surprise regarded the little dark spot spreading over the pillowcase, as if it was not hers, the tear sucked in by the finely woven cotton.
During the curtain calls Lucca couldn’t understand how they had pulled it off so well. She didn’t know whether she had been good or bad, she had merely followed the patterns laid down by the words and movements, mechanically like a toy train that rushes confidently around on its rails. But everybody talked of how she had lived the part, so full of genuine feeling. She was the centre of the first-night party, everyone wanted to kiss her and give her a big hug, even people she had only met once. She allowed herself to revel in it without holding back. Otto stayed in the background, he spent the evening in a corner with one of his friends. When she walked past them she could hear the sarcasm in his voice.
When they got home he did not spare her his outspoken opinion of the play, and when he read the reviews, which all emphasised her performance, he snorted and warned her not to let herself be flattered by such a pack of fawning poodles. She asked if he was jealous, but that was showing off, she didn’t believe it herself. It was not a great success with audiences, and the flowers she had been given, gift-wrapped like the ones at the big theatres, withered after a day or two. Otto was the one who threw them out, the flat stank like a bloody brothel. He said it in his usual studiedly bragging tones, as he did when he wanted her to understand he didn’t really mean it. But why couldn’t he grant her a spot of success, when he wallowed in admiration like a happy pig in his mud?
She thought of the contrast between Harry Wiener’s sympathetic, eloquent compliments and Otto’s scornful comments. Who was she to believe? Maybe neither of them. Obviously the Gypsy King had had his demonstrable reasons for smothering her with his wit, but why couldn’t Otto be generous about her success? Was he jealous, after all? In her scattered thoughts on the way home from swimming she confused the order of events, and saw Otto’s scorn after the première as a reaction to the Gypsy King’s erotic tricks three weeks later.
Maybe Otto had foreseen what might happen in the wake of her first outstanding reviews and the first newspaper interview she had ever given, in which she was presented with doe eyes, long legs and high acting ideals. Maybe he even felt that all the attention she was suddenly getting was a threat to his right of possession to what lay hidden behind those very eyes and between those very legs. If she had wanted to she could easily have stayed there in the Gypsy King’s Mercedes. She could have gone up with him just like that into the legendary roof-top apartment where so many had gone before her, a little shy, a little girlish, with a coquettishly nervous hand constantly running through her hair, with her coat still on, as he mixed drinks and told stories about his meetings with Bergman and Strehler.
Otto cycled fast, as if trying to throw her off, and she had to tramp on the pedals to keep up. Sweat stung her forehead and her cheeks and made her blouse stick. When they had to stop at a red light she rode up beside him. She held on to his shoulder for support without putting her feet down, while the crossing traffic passed in a blue mist of exhaust and dazzling reflections. She couldn’t see his eyes behind all the shining movement in his shades. He smiled as he put out a hand and moved a lock of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes and stuck to her forehead. She felt like kissing him, but the lights changed to green.
She ought to be glad he had shown a touch of jealousy at the Gypsy King’s come-on. It must be proof that after all she meant more to him than he cared to shout about. But that wasn’t like him, it was more like Daniel. It was ironic, she hadn’t thought of him for several months. Perhaps he was still sitting with his broken heart in his lap picking at the scabs.
She had never promised him anything. She broke it to him gently, at the same time safe-guarding herself. He sat on the piano stool staring down at the lid covering the keys. She could see herself, legs crossed, as a misty shining reflection in the curving instrument. The grand piano took up a third of the room, and his unmade mattress occupied another third. There was just room in between for the small table where he wrote out his scores. Here he spent most of his time bent over his bizarre music with its scattered, shrill notes and confused chords written for an orchestra he only heard in his own dark curly head. She had been fascinated by the invisible aura that spread around him when he played to her so that even the depressing surroundings took on a mystic air. He raised his head and looked at her through little steel spectacles. She stood up and walked to the window. He said he loved her. It was all very sad.
At the end of his street there was a damp-stained viaduct, and on the corner a run-down discount supermarket boasted garish posters advertising special offers. From the window she could look down on the street in front of an auto-repair shop. Splotches of bird mess shaped like flames covered the skylights and the cracked asphalt was blotched with oil. A tree stood in a corner of the yard, and even its roots were black with oil where they emerged from the asphalt. It was raining, the drops struck the window with a muffled sound and speckled the view with little pearl-shaped domes in which earth and sky changed places.
She turned round when she had taken in the scene’s inventory of details. He asked who it was. He had been badgering her for a month at all hours of the day, at the Drama School, in cafés, on the telephone. He had burst in to pester her in the middle of the night in the crazed hope that she could be persuaded to love him. As if sheer dogged persistence could serve his cause. She conjured up Otto’s secretive face, which she had been studying that very morning in bed while he was still asleep, to note each particular of it. The uneven arch of his brow beneath the long fair hair, strong eyebrows, broad nose and full lips.
Daniel had been jealous from the start, even when he had her to himself. On the other hand he could be happy in his ignorance, when she came straight from another man to visit him in his ascetic apartment. She felt like a dazzling guest from a differently callous and profligate world, and she marvelled at how abruptly reality could change in the space of a few hours. He gave her tea in the English faience cups he had inherited from his grandmother as he described the piece he was composing. She let him talk and studied the pictures on the tea cups of romantic lovers reclining in little rowing boats, rocked by tiny waves on a lake in the moonlight, surrounded by mountain peaks, tall trees and reeds swaying gently in the wind.
When they lay together on his mattress he could go into ecstasies over her high-heeled shoes and lace underclothes and the black stockings mingled with his biographies of composers and symphony scores like sexy meteorites come flying from space to land in the midst of his solitude. She had enjoyed closing her eyes and listening when he spoke of his music or read aloud to her from the Bhagavad Gita or Omar Khayyam. She had taken pleasure in playing with the idea of the oddness in the combination of him and her, but it had been only a game, an idea.
It had never occurred to her that it would be other than what it was. That he should be the man to exclude all other men. She had certainly not anticipated much. She had deferred all anticipations to some indefinite time, completely open to what might happen. The future had been white and untouched, and she had felt about it as you do when you open the door of a house in the country one morning when snow has fallen. You hesitate on the threshold, hardly having the heart to go outside and leave tracks in the unbroken whiteness where only the blackbirds’ claws have left simple dots and dashes that end as abruptly as they begin.