The knocking was odd and irregular, and she wondered if they had come back with the girl’s drunken father. Or sent him alone. And she deserved their spite, she realized. How condescending must it seem, for the lady in the big house to offer to buy something nicer? Excuse me, could I please make your grief a little more tasteful?
It took her a good half a minute to realize the knocking wasn’t irregular at all. It was the William Tell Overture, in perfect rhythm. She stood and walked slowly to the door, bow still perpendicular to her stomach. She called, “Lev?”
“No.” The voice was familiar and vaguely hurt, and the knocking stopped. She opened the door and there was Gregory, his violin case and his duffel bag at his feet, as if he’d never gone anywhere at all.
He said, “I come to plead sanctuary. I saw your cross out front. This is a church, correct?”
And what could she do but laugh and invite him in? She made a pot of coffee, and he lit a fire with the wood left from September, and the whole time she didn’t ask what he was doing there, and he didn’t offer an explanation. She wanted to ask if he thought he was in a movie, that he could just show up at someone’s door expecting love or sex or friendship, or whatever he was after. But there were worse kinds of movie.
They pulled the couch up to the fireplace, and she told him about the note that was still out there under her windshield wipers.
Gregory said, “And I showed up the same day? It’s a sign.”
Instead of asking what it was a sign of, Celine said, “I don’t believe in signs.” She was holding her cup in both hands, grateful to have a fire to look at.
“Sure you do.” She didn’t answer, and so he said, “You must, because you believe in music.”
“But you came today on purpose. Did you figure it out, about the anniversaries?”
He put his coffee on the floor and finally unbuttoned his thin coat. “I came because I have another solution. I think you should leave this place.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You don’t seem happy here, and there’s no good answer to the cross problem, and I want you to know you’re welcome to stay with me in the city. Just for a while. A week. A month. Longer, if you want.”
“I teach, you know. At the college.”
“Which is closer to the city than to this house.”
The warmth was getting too much for her, between the hot cup in her hands and the fire, and the blood roaring through her face.
“You’ve exiled yourself out here, and I don’t know why. Come live with me and be my love, as they say.”
“Who says that?”
“I do. I just did.” He laughed, and she refused to look at him, she absolutely refused, but she could hear his fingers touching his beard. She could see his brown shoes, stretched toward the fire.
“Gregory, I’m an adult. I can’t run away from my problems.”
“But,” he said, “wasn’t that what you were doing when you bought this house?”
“So I should just run away again.”
“Think of it as running toward something.”
“What, I’m Cinderella, and you’re going to sweep me away in a pumpkin?”
He leaned so far into her field of vision that she couldn’t help but see him. “We’ve been over this. You’re Snow White.”
She said, “Listen. You’re crazy, but I’m not insulted. I will forget, for the sake of the quartet, that you ever presumed to tell me what to do with my life. The old folks shouldn’t quarrel in front of the children.” She didn’t add that she was terrified. That she was tired of running in any direction, away from things or toward them. That maybe the reason she’d bought this house, so big and solid and remote, was the hope that it would keep her pinned down in one spot for the rest of her life, where she wouldn’t have to make decisions. That the cross bothered her so much because it was a wedge in her perfect isolation — an invasion.
She brought Gregory a bowl of butternut squash soup and a glass of wine. They tried some of Bach’s two-part inventions, but they had no sheet music and they couldn’t remember any through to the end. Celine kept trying to sing Gregory’s part, to remind him, and they’d both end up laughing.
She said, “The bad news is, your sheets are dirty. The good news is, it’s your own dirt.”
He said, “See? Another sign.” And he went up to bed without even trying to kiss her.
Celine stayed down to make sure the fire was fully dead. She straightened Gregory’s shoes by the door so they lined up perfectly with her own, and she made sure all the doors were locked. She sat back on the couch, and at that very moment the last log tumbled forward against the grate, shooting up a shower of sparks.
If she still believed in signs, they would indeed be clear today: the dying fire, the scene of death on the lawn, the ripped-up note under her wipers. Time to move on. And here was Prince Charming on her doorstep with his fiddle. What other sign could she be waiting for? Except, perhaps, the one that would make her believe in signs again at all.
She walked up the stairs and brushed her teeth and looked out the bathroom window. There were no streetlights this far out in the country, and so no cross, no flowers. You’d never know anything was out there at all, beyond your own reflection on a glassy sheet of blackness. And what a reflection! She stared in bafflement at this bright-eyed stranger. There she was in the mirror, too, her pulse so fast and exuberant she could see it in her neck and temples. She scratched her cheek to see if it was sunburnt or just flushed.
Well, there were signs like crosses and runes and totems, and then there were the signs of the body. Those ones didn’t play fair, didn’t sit on your lawn and wait for interpretation. They hijacked you. Before her body could betray her any further, before it could carry her to Gregory’s door, she grabbed the shampoo from the side of the tub and squeezed a good quarter cup of green slime right on top of her head. She said out loud, “You’re not going anywhere like that.”
But the shower didn’t help, the ratty towel didn’t help. She put her clothes back on.
The lamplight under Gregory’s door. This stubborn and idiotic lust. Sometimes, after all, a thing wasn’t an omen but the event itself, as solid and irrefutable as an oak in the path of your little motorcycle.
She walked into the guest room and sat on the edge of Gregory’s bed. He closed his novel and tugged the sheet up to his armpits. He was bare-chested. “I bet your apartment doesn’t even have room for a cello,” she said. “You want to hear a cello every morning when you step out of the shower?”
“Yes. I want that very much.”
“You’re not going to take me out on a date first? And we might hate each other. Don’t you think it could ruin the quartet? It could.”
He held his hand out to her, palm up. It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t offering any answers but that.
And she took the hand, and he pulled her into the bed and under the covers, and even in the lamplit darkness, even as the whole house dissolved around them into the gray, ecstatic haze of two a.m., she was wide awake.
His mouth on her shoulder was warm. The universe flipped in on itself. She found the deep and hollow place where his neck became his chest.