“No money?”
“Yeah, tuition.”
“Full tuition?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Wow. That’s great! So what did you decide?”
“Nothing.”
“You waiting to hear from the others?”
“No.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I’m going to State, I guess.”
“State? What for?”
“To get a college degree.”
“But why there? You wanted to work with that fellow at MIT.”
“Freshmen don’t go and ‘work with’ Nobel Prize winners.”
“They don’t stay freshmen either, do they?”
“Yeah, well, I decided not to.”
“I thought you said you didn’t decide anything.”
“There isn’t anything to decide.”
She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and hunched her head over and strode along clumping her heels. She looked mad. But after about a block she said, “Owen.”
“Yeah.”
“I am really confused.”
“What about?”
I don’t know how she could go on, I was answering her in such a cold, dumb, uninterested tone. But she went on.
“About Jade Beach and all that.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, that’s all right.”
I didn’t want to talk about it. It loomed up out of the fog much too big and solid and hard. I wanted to turn away and not look at it.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” she said. “See, I thought I had all that figured out. At least for a while. For the next couple of years anyhow. The way I figured, I didn’t want to get really involved with anybody. Falling in love or love affairs or marrying or anything like that. I’m pretty young, and there’s all these things I have to do. That sounds stupid, but it’s the truth. If I could take sex lightly the way a lot of people do, that would be fine, but I don’t think I can. I can’t take anything lightly. Well, see, what was so beautiful was that we got to be friends. There’s the kind of love that’s lovers, and the kind of love that’s friends. And I really thought it was that way. I thought we’d really made it, and everybody’s wrong when they say men and women can’t be friends. But I guess they’re right. I was… too theoretical…”
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t want to say anything more, but it got dragged up out of me. “I think you were right, actually. I was pushing the sex stuff in where it didn’t belong.”
“Yeah, but it does belong,” she said in this defeated, morose voice. And then in the fierce voice, “You can’t just tell sex to go away and come back in two years because I’m busy just now!”
We went on another block. The rain was fine and misty so that you hardly felt it on your face, but it was beginning to drip down the back of my neck.
“The first fellow I went out with,” she said, “I was sixteen and he was eighteen; he was an oboeist, oboeists are all crazy. He had a car and he kept parking it in places with a nice view and then, you know, sort of launching himself onto me. And he started saying, ‘This is bigger than either of us, Natalie!’ And it made me mad, and I finally said, ‘Well it may be bigger than you, but it isn’t bigger than me!’ That sort of finished that. He was a jerk anyhow. So was I. But anyhow. Now I know what he meant.”
After a while she went on, “But all the same…”
“What?”
“It doesn’t belong. Does it?”
“What?”
“With you and me. It just doesn’t work. Does it?”
“No,” I said.
She got mad then. She stopped walking and looked at me with that scowl. “You say yes, you say no, you say there isn’t anything to decide—Well, there is! And did I decide right or didn’t I? I don’t know! Why do I have to make the decision? If we’re friends—and that’s the whole point of it, can we be friends?—then we make the decisions together—don’t we?”
“OK. We did.”
“Then why are you mad at me?”
We were standing there under a big horse chestnut tree in a parking lot. It was dark under the branches, and they kept most of the rain off. Some of the flowers shone like candles in the streetlight, above us. Natalie’s coat and hair were all like shadows, all I could see of her was her face and eyes.
“I’m not,” I said. It was like the ground was shifting under me, the world reorganizing itself, an earthquake, nothing to hold onto. “I’m really mixed-up. It’s just that. I can’t make sense out of anything. I can’t handle it.”
“Why not, Owen? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I put my hands on her shoulders, and she came up close and held me around the ribs.
“I get scared,” I said.
She said, “What of?” into my coat.
“Being alive.”
She held onto me, and I held onto her.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “See, I’m supposed to go on living all these years and I don’t know how.”
“You mean you don’t know why?”
“I guess so.”
“But, for this,” she said, holding on. “For this. For you, for the stuff you have to do, for time to think; for time to hear the music. You know how, Owen. Only you listen to the people who don’t!”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. I was shaking. She said, “It’s cold. Let’s go home and make some weird tea. I’ve got some Chinese tea that’s supposed to be very calming and aids longevity.”
“Longevity is just what I need right now.”
We started back. I don’t think we said anything much going back or while we were standing around in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil. We took the teapot and cups up to the practice room and sat on the Oriental rug. The Chinese herb tea tasted really vile. It left you mouth feeling scoured out, but then it was kind of pleasant once you got used to it. I was still feeling shaken-up, but I was getting used to that, too.
“Did you ever finish the Thorn Quintet?” I said.
Actually it had only been eight weeks since I had seen her, but it seemed like eight years, and we were in a whole new place.
“Not yet The slow movement’s done, and I have the idea for the last movement.”
“Listen, Nat. Your stuff last night, the songs, you know. It made me cry. The second one.”
“I know. That’s why I had to talk to you again. I mean, because I knew we could. I mean, because…”
“Because that’s the way you really talk. The rest is just words.”
She looked at me straight on and she said, “Owen, you are the neatest person I ever knew. Nobody else understands that. I don’t even know any other musicians who understand that. I can’t really say anything. I can’t even really be anything. Except in music. Maybe later. Maybe when I get good at music, maybe when I learn how to do that, then I’ll be able to do some of the rest, too. Maybe I’ll even become a human being. But you are one.”
“I’m an ape,” I said. “Trying to do the human act.”
“You’re good at it,” she said, “the best I ever knew.”
I lay down on the rug on my stomach and looked down into my cup of tea. It was a sort of murky yellow brown, with bits of Chinese sediment floating around in it.
“If this stuff is really calming,” I said, “I wonder if it works on the central nervous system, or the cerebrum, or the cerebellum, or where.”
“It tastes like steel wool pads; I wonder if they’re calming.”
“I don’t know, I never ate one.”
“For breakfast, with milk and sugar.”
“Five thousand percent of the minimum daily adult iron requirement.”
She laughed and wiped her eyes. “I wish I could talk,” she said. “I wish I was like you.”
“What did I ever say?”
“I can’t tell you, because I can’t talk. I can play it, though.”
“I want to hear it.”
She got up and went to the piano and played some music I had never heard before.
When it was done, I said, “Is it Thorn?” and she nodded.
“See, if I could just live there,” I said, “every, thing would be duck soup.”
“You do live there. That’s where you live.”