“Oh, certainly, the manufacturers’ names have a certain caché—Łozina, Steinway, Petrof.” Lindemann waved a hand. “But most people still don’t know what those names mean, who’s behind them. I suppose they imagine Łozina as some great mother instrument, trailing baby grands behind her.”
Greta and Lindemann looked at one another for a moment, sharing in this strangest of images. Then Greta shook her head, trying to dissipate it. Her hair was pinned back, but a few strands fell over her ears and she felt slightly indecent, like Cinderella shedding her finery at the stroke of midnight.
“I should be going,” she said. “I’ll be needed at home.”
Lindemann looked once more at Greta’s black dress, its creases carefully ironed, her shoes with a high polish. His face was soft, and he crossed the room to her, taking her warm baker’s hand in his own.
“To była moja przyjemność, my good lady. My pleasure entirely. I hope that I see you again.”
Greta stood still, feeling the pace of the man’s heartbeat through his palm. Small moves change you, she thought. A small twinge in a piano wire to make a note come out clean. A smile at one man or another at a dance when you’re young, yielding daughters or sons. She looked into Lindemann’s eyes, each with a crease trickling out from the corner, his head tilted to one side. When he ran his finger over the keyboard of a piano, he noted every small catch, every minute imperfection with a tenderness that astounded her. To be master of your craft, like Saul, was one thing. A beautiful one. But it was another thing to be overwhelmed by your work. Consumed by your love for it.
A recognition flashed between them.
“I should go home.” Greta flushed up the back of her neck.
“Yes.” Lindemann didn’t let go of her hand. “You said.”
I stared at my mother, something hot and sickly mixing around in my stomach. My spine felt rigid and my heart too high; I slid onto the floor from the bed and scooted backward towards my mother’s bedroom door.
“So you see,” Sara said. “Greta cursed us all because her heart was untrue. She didn’t love who she was supposed to love.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. She folded her hands primly over her knee, sitting up now with her back against the wall.
“Whatever do you mean?”
Her eyes searched mine, and though she held her mouth in a perfectly neutral pose, there was a smile hidden behind the cool mask of her face. Escaping through the seams.
“You know.” I squirmed, feeling my tailbone scrape against the floor. “Greta wouldn’t. Do that.”
Sara picked the dirt out from under her fingernails, making a sound like a cat testing its claws. Flick, flick, flick.
“I know one thing,” she said. “You’re just like her. From everything Mama says about Greta, you’re her little double, aren’t you? You take everything there is to have and don’t give a damn about the people who give it to you. You always want more. You can feel the wanting under your skin right now, can’t you?”
I shivered. To this day I can’t be sure whether it was, like my mother said, the fingers of desire I felt. Or whether it was just the flicker of recognition that the stories my mother told weren’t meant to instruct or entertain me. They were meant to destroy something. Meant to infect.
13
Every day now, John comes home and sits across the room from me. He doesn’t look at me. And I think, Good.
We used to come home together and race to the door so we could begin taking off our clothing, running as fast as we could up the stairs so no one would see us unzipping, unbuttoning, shrugging out of shirts and shoes. Or if I got back from rehearsal before him, he would pick me up off the couch and give me a kiss. Hold me in his arms like he was carrying me over the threshold, and then set me back down. Put a blanket over my knees. Kiss my toes.
He wraps Kara into a papoose and walks around the kitchen, cooking for one. The scent of sautéing onions drifts through the door while I’m taking a bath and I dip my head under the water just to escape it for a moment. I get out and drip all over the floor to dig around for a handful of bath salts, which smell like heather. It’s a quiet enough scent that it won’t make me immediately drunk, the way rose would, or patchouli. But when the salts are absorbed into the water with a patter and a hiss, I still get momentarily lightheaded. Slide gratefully back into the bath so I don’t have to stand on my own two feet.
I hear him eating alone at the dining room table, silverware scraping, ice shifting and cracking in a water glass. He babbles to Kara in a light voice but won’t say a word to me beyond the necessary—excuse me, pardon me, are you going to be in there for much longer? And again I tell myself, This is good, when I think about how he used to talk to me almost without ceasing, memories crowding one another to get out of his mouth. Always reaching for the next story, the one that would really explain who he was.
John once described to me a camping trip he took as a child. He grew up in Virginia, in a town surrounded by farmland, with devoted parents who drove him to Blacksburg and later to Richmond and D.C. for voice lessons. It was a safe place, he told me, and so at the age of ten he was allowed to wander and sleep out of doors with only the supervision of a redtick coonhound, Rabbit. She was named for her ears, he said. Long ones, and soft like velvet. In the morning John woke early to the sun leaking milky through the canvas of his tent. He let Rabbit out and stood in an empty field to pee, staring into the morning light with his face upturned. Bold and certain of his place in the world.
After sharing a Pop-Tart with the dog, he proceeded to explore. His parents wouldn’t expect him home for hours. And even then they wouldn’t worry too much, knowing how close he was to the house, how easily they could drive out and find him. Rabbit loped beside him, sometimes pausing to flop into the dirt and wagger around on her back, scratching head and spine. Her tongue lolled out into the pebbles and dried leaves, picking up both indiscriminately and not bothering to shed them when she sprang back up to trot again beside her boy.
Soon they reached a collapsing barn, old bones of a building, cracked and withering wood. John had to step over broken boards to get inside, push aside the remains of a door that still hung on a single rust-bitten hinge; the sky was visible through the holes in the roof. He should have been more careful, he told me. It could all have fallen on his head. But he wanted to see what there was to see. Wanted to know what the barn’s husk looked like, how it felt, from the inside. In his mind, he said, he could have made a second home there. A secret one. And so in a vague gesture of housekeeping, he picked up an old rusted rake and dragged it across the dirt floor, collecting pieces of debris and leaving thin schisms in the dust.
Rabbit was sniffing near his ankles when John used the rake to flip up a piece of corrugated metal and surprised a velvet-tail rattler below. A black-banded snake, coiled up like rope. They all three startled, but while John staggered backward, the snake and the dog both leaned in. John scraped his ankles on a pile of decaying lumber, and as the snake struck Rabbit lunged, so the venomous fangs sank into her leg high up, near the chest. Then the snake was gone. And Rabbit lay on the floor, breath heaving. Leg starting to swell.
I remember we were at a café when John told me this, in public, but he still started to cry. Or at least to tear up. He said it was too far to run back home and get his parents, or so he’d thought at the time. The swelling was so immense and came on so quickly that he could only watch, transfixed, as Rabbit ballooned in front of him. The bite was near her heart. I should have tried, he said. But she was so big, compared to him. He couldn’t carry her, couldn’t drag her behind him without hurting her more and perhaps getting bitten. So he took her big skull in his hands and lay it in his lap and watched her die.