The music blotted him out. On and on went the march. I hit the button which told the machine to repeat, but to repeat only this band of the disk. I closed my eyes.
What do you yourself want to remember? Trivia, nonsense, humor.
In my young years I daydreamed incessantly to music; I always saw his brand of images! I saw people and things and drama, and was worked up almost to making fists as I listened.
But not now; now it was just the music, the driving rhythm of the music, and some vague commitnient to the idea of climbing the eternal mountain in the eternal forest, but not a vision, and safe within this thundering insistent song I closed my eyes.
He didn't take too long.
Maybe I had lain there an hour.
He came right through the locked doors, materializing instantly, the doors quivering behind him, the grand violin and bow choked in his left hand.
"You walk out on me!" he said.
His voice rose over the sound of Beethoven. Then he walked towards me in loud menacing steps. I climbed up on my elbows, then sat up. My vision was blurred. The light shone on his forehead, on the dark neat brushed brows that made such a distinct line, as he glared down at me, narrowing his eyes, looking perhaps as hostile as any creature I've ever seen.
The music moved on over him and over me.
He kicked the machine with his foot. The music faltered and roared. He tore the plug out of the wall.
"Ah, clever!" I said before the silence came down. I could scarcely keep from smiling in triumph.
He panted, as if he'd run some distance, or maybe it was only the effort of being material, of playing for spectators, of passing invisible through walls and then coming alive in lurid flaming splendor.
"Yes," he said contemptuously and spitefully, looking at me, his hair falling down dark and straight on both sides. The two small braids had come undone and mixed now with the longer locks, loose and shining.
He bore down on me with all his powers to frighten. But it only brought some old actor's beauty to my mind, yes, with his sharp nose and enthralling eyes, he had the dark beauty of Olivier of years gone by, in a filmed play by Shakespeare, Olivier as the humpback and deformed and evil King Richard III. Irresistible, a lovely trick in paint, to be both ugly and beautiful.
An old film, an old love, old poetry never to be forgotten. I laughed.
"I'm not humpbacked and I'm not deformed!" he said. "And I'm not a play%r of a part for you! I'm here with you!"
"So it seems!" I answered. I sat up straight, pulling my skirt down over my knees.
"Seems?" He used Hamlet's speech to mock me." 'Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not "seems."
"You overtax yourself," I said. "Your talent's for music. Don't wax desperate!" I said, using words more or less from the same play.
I grabbed hold of the table and climbed to my feet. He stormed towards me. I almost flinched, but held fast to the table, looking at him.
"Ghost!" I said. "You had a whole living world looking at you! What do you want here when you can have that? All those ears and eyes."
"Don't anger me, Triana!" he said.
"Oh, so you know my name."
"As much as you know it," he turned to the left and then to the right. He walked towards the windows, towards the eternal light dance of the traffic behind the lace birds.
"I won't tell you to go away," I said.
His back to me still, he lifted his head.
"I'm too lonely for you!" I said. "Too fascinated!" I confessed. "When I was young, I might have run screaming from a ghost, run screaming! Believing it with a total superstitious Catholic heart. But now?"
He only listened.
My hands shook badly. I couldn't tolerate this. I pulled out the chair from the table. I sat down and rested against the back. The chandelier was reflected in a blurred circle in the polish of the table, and all around it, the chairs with their Chippendale wings sat at attention.
"Now I'm too eager,"I said, "too despairing, too careless." I tried to make my voice firm, yet keep it soft. "I don't know the words. Sit here! Sit down and lay down the violin and tell me what you want. Why do you come to me?"
He didn't answer.
"You know what you are?" I asked.
He turned around, furious, and came near to the table. Yes, He had the very magnetism of Olivier in that old film, all made up of dark contrasts and white skin and a dedicated evil. He had the long mouth, but it was fuller!
"Stop thinking of that other man!" he w hispered.
"It's a film, an image."
"I know what it is, you think I'm a fool? Look at me. I'm here! The film is old, the maker dead, the actor gone, dust, but I am with you."
"I know what you are, I told you."
"Tell me what precisely, then, if you will?" He cocked his head to the side, he gnawed his lip a little, and he wrapped both his hands around the bow and the neck of the violin.
He was only a few feet away. I saw the wood more distinctly, how richly lacquered it was. Stradivarius. They had said that word, and there he held it, this sinister and sacred instrument, he just held it, letting the light catch it and race up and down its curves as if the thing were real.
"Yes?" he said. "Do you want to touch it or hear it? You know damned good and well that you can't play it. Even a Strad wouldn't mend your miserable faults! You'd make it shriek or even shatter in outrage if you tried."
"You want me to...
"No such thing," he said, "only to remind you that you have no gift for this, only a longing, only a greed."
"A greed, is it? Was it greed you meant to implant in the souls of those who listened in the Chapel? Greed you meant to nourish and feed? You think Beethoven..."
"Don't speak of him."
"I will and I do. Do you think it was greed that forged-"
He came to the table, consigned the violin to his left hand and laid down his right hand as near to me as he could. I thought his long hair hanging down would touch my face. There seemed no perfume to his clothes, not even the smell of dust.
I swallowed and my vision blurred. Buttons, the violet tie, the flashing violin. It was all a ghost, the clothes, the instrument.
"You're right on that. Now what am I? What was your pious judgment upon me-about to be pronounced-when I interrupted you?"
"You are like the human sick," I said. "You need me in your suffering!"
"You whore!" he said. He backed up.
"Oh, that I've never been," I said. "Never had the courage. But you are diseased and you need me." I continued, "You're like Karl. You're like Lily in the end, though God knows-" I broke off, switched. "You're like my Father when he was dying. You need me. Your torment wants a witness in me. You're jealous and eager for that, aren't you, as eager as any human who is dying, except in the last moments perhaps when the dying forget everything and see things we can't see-"
"What makes you think they do?"
"You did not?" I asked.
"I never died," he said, "properly, I should explain. But you know that. I never saw comforting lights or heard the singing of angels. I heard gunshots and shouts and curses!"
"Did you?" I asked. "Such drama, but then you are very fancy, aren't you?"
He drew back as if he'd let me pick his pocket.
"Sit down," I said. "I've sat beside many a deathbed, you know I have. That's why you chose me. Maybe you're ready to end your little ghostly wandering."
"I am not dying, lady!" he declared. He pulled back the chair and sat opposite. "I grow stronger by the minute, by the hour, by the year.
He relaxed in the chair. That put four feet of polished wood between us.
His back was to the blinkering window curtains, but the dull mist of the chandelier revealed his whole face, too young to have ever been an evil king in any play, and too full of hurt suddenly for me to enjoy it.