I sat up. That was a shocking thing, to have so recollected his voice, to have imagined it so close to me. But not a terribly unwelcome thing. There was no frar in me.
I was alone in the big dirty front room. The headlights threw the lace all over the ceiling. In the painted St. Sebastian above the mantel the gilded halo gleamed. The house creaked and the traffic crawled by, a lower rumbling.
"You're here. And it was, it was, it was a vivid dream, and Karl was right here beside me!"
For the first time I caught a scent in the air. Sitting on the floor, my legs crossed, still all filled up with the dream and the strictuess of Karl's voice-"Not that way! You don't understand. Stop it!"-all filled up with this, I caught the scent in the house that meant his body had begun to rot.
I knew that scent. We all know it. Even if we have not been to morgues or battlefields we know it. We know it when the rat dies in the wall, and no one can find it.
I knew it now. . . faint, but filling all of this whole house, all its big ornamented rooms, filling even this parlor, where St. Sebastian glared out from the golden frame, and the music box lay within inches. And ihe telephone was once more making that click, time for the lie, click. A message perhaps.
But the point is, Triana, you dreamed it. And this smell could not be borne. No, not this, because this wasn't Karl, this awful smell. This was not my Karl. This was just a dead body.
I thought I should move. Then something fixed me. It was music, but it wasn t coming from my disks strewn on the floor, and it wasn't a inusic I knew, but I knew the instrument.
Only a violin can sing like that, only a violin can plead and cry in the night like that.
Oh, how in childhood I had longed to be able to make that sound on a violin.
Someone out there was playing a violin. I heard it. I heard it rise tenderly above the mingled Avenue sounds. I heard it desperate and poignant as if guided by Tchaikovsky; I heard a masterly riff of notes so fast and dexterous they seemed magical.
I climbed to my feet and I went to the corner window.
He was there. The tall one with the shiny black rock musician hair and the dusty coat. The one I'd seen before. He stood on my side of the corner now, on the broken brick sidewalk beside my iron fence and he played the violin as I looked down on him. I pushed the curtain back. The music made me want to sob.
I thought, I will die of this. I will die of death and the stench in this house and the sheer beauty of this music.
Why had he come? Why to me? Why, and to play of all things the violin, which I so loved, and once in childhood had struggled with so hard, but who does not love the violin? Why had he come to play it near my window?
Ah, honey babe, you are dreaming! It's just the thickest yet, the worst most hypnagogic trap. You're still dreaming. You haven't waked at all. Go back, find yourself; find yourself where you know you are... lying on the floor. Find yoursel£
"Triana!"
I spun round.
Karl stood in the door. His head was wrapped in the white cloth but his face was stone white and his body almost a skeleton in the black silk pajamas I had put on him.
"No, don't!" he said.
The voice of the violin rose. The bow came crashing down on the lower strings, the D, the G, making that soulful agonizing throb that is almost dissonance and became in this moment the sheer expression of my desperation.
"Ah, Karl!" I called out. I must have.
But Karl was gone. There was no Karl. The violin sang on; it sang and sang, and when I turned and looked I saw him again, with his shiny black hair, and his wide shoulders, and the violin, silken and brown in the street light, and he did bring the bow down with such violence now that I felt the chills run up the back of my neck and down my arms.
"Don't stop, don't stop!" I cried out.
He swayed like a wild man, alone on the corner, in the red glow of the florist shop lights, in the dull beam of the curved street lamp, in the shadow of the magnolia branches tangled over the bricks. He played. He played of love and pain and loss and played and played of all the things I most in this world wanted to believe. I began to cry.
I could smell the stench again.
I was awake. I had to be. I hit the glass, but not hard enough to break it. I looked at him.
He turned towards me, the bow poised, and then looking right up at me over the fence, he played a softer song, taking it down so low that the passing cars almost drowned it.
A loud noise jarred me. Someone banging on the back door. Someone banging hard enough to break the glass.
I stood there, not wanting to leave, but knowing that when people knock like that, they are bound to come in, and someone had caught on that Karl was dead, for sure, and I had to go and talk sane. There was no time for music.
No time for this? He brought the notes down low, moaning, loud arid raucous again and then high and piercing from the strings.
I backed away from the window.
There was a figure in the room; but it wasn't Karl. It was a woman. She came from the hallway, and I knew her. She was my neighbor. Her name was Hardy. Miss Nanny Hardy.
"Triana, honey, is that man bothering you?" she asked. She went to the window.
She was so outside his song. I knew her with another part of my mind, because all of the rest of me was moving with him, and quite suddenly I realized he was real.
She had just proved it.
"Triana, honey, for two days, you haven't answered the door. I just gave the door a hard push. I was worried about you, Triana. You and Karl. Triana, tell me if you want me to make that horrible man go away. Who does he think he is? Look at him. He's been outside the 'use, and now listen to him, playing the violin at this time of night.
Doesn't he know that a man is sick in this house-"
But these were teeny tiny sounds, these words, like little pebbles dropping out of somebody's hand. The music went on, sweet, and demure, and winding to a compassionate finale. I know your pain. know. But madness isn 't for you. It never was. You're the one who never mad.
I stared at him and then again at Miss Hardy. Miss Hardy wore a dressing gown.
She'd come in slippers. Quite a thing for such a proper lady. She looked at me. She looked around the room, circumspect and gently, as well bred people do, but surely she saw the scattered music disks and empty soda cans, the crumpled wrapper from the bread, the unopened mail.
It wasn't this, however, that made her face change as she looked at me. Something caught her off guard; something assaulted her. Something unpleasant suddenly touched her.
She'd smelled the smell. Karl's body.
The music stopped. I turned. "Don't let him go!" I said.
But the tall lanky man with the silky black hair had already begun to walk away, carrying in his hands his violin and his bow, and he looked back at me as he crossed Third Street and stood before the florist shop, and he waved at me, waved, and carefully placing his bow in his left hand with the neck of the violin, he raised his right hand and blew a kiss to me, deliberate and sweet.
He blew me a kiss like those young kids had done in the dream, the kids who'd brought me roses.
Roses, roses, roses . . .1 almost heard someone saying those words, and it was in a foreign tongue, which almost made me laugh to think a rose by any other tongue is still a rose.
"Triana," Miss Hardy said so gently, her hand out to touch my shoulder. "Let me call someone." It was not a question, really.
"Yes, Miss Hardy, I should make the call." I pushed my bangs out of my eyes. I blinked, trying to gather up more light from the street and see her better in her flowered dressing gown, very neat.
"It's the smell, isn't it? You can smell it."
She nodded very slowly. "Why in God's name did his mother leave you here alone!"