Often, she found stray friends of Kolya’s when she came over, crashing, as they put it, on a mattress placed next to the grimy kitchenette. The places they lived in then … Isabel particularly remembers a girl named Sabine, who seemed to stay there forever. She was on the plump side, and wore slovenly T-shirts, under which her big breasts moved about amorphously. When Isabel asked her about her studies, Sabine revealed that she’d dropped out of school, and all that nonsense, and that she was working at a strip club. “Isn’t that dangerous?” Isabel asked, trying not to betray that she was appalled. “Nah, I just dance,” the girl said. “I’m good at it, too. I like it … Actually, I’m a kind of artist,” she concluded proudly. “That’s what I’m called.” The word which constituted the imprimatur for just about everything. “Besides,” Sabine added, in further explanation, “it’s kind of … romantic.” “Romantic?” Isabel asked incredulously. “Yeah,” Sabine confirmed, drawing the word out dreamily. “The men there … they can look but not touch. You should see how they look at me.” Isabel remembers Sabine’s young mouth twisting downward, in an odd expression that combined a barely camouflaged eroticism with something like shame, a wounded shame.
After another two weeks, when the girl’s clothing had taken over such floor space as there was in the pathetic room, Isabel asked about her parents. “Aren’t they worried about you?” she asked. “Do they know what you’re doing?”
“C’mon, give her a break,” Kolya intervened from his bed. “What are you, some kind of parental substitute figure?”
“That’s OK,” Sabine said quickly, and rather politely. She clearly didn’t want to get thrown out of Kolya’s miserable quarters. “They know … I mean, they don’t really care … I mean, you know, they want me to go to university. They’re,
like, so standard … But they’re away a lot. They’re in the Bahamas right now.”
Where are the parents, Isabel thought then, where are the real parents. But Sabine’s mother and father did show up eventually, and took her back to their apparently chic SoHo loft. Kolya said they practically screwed up their noses in disgust when they came to collect Sabine. “Like some package,” he added. “Like she was some big lump.” Isabel privately thought this was not an inaccurate description of the girl.
Their own parents had been long absent; Carlos dead of a heart attack, and Lena back in Buenos Aires, from where she communicated with them irregularly. Occasionally, Kolya asked Isabel to talk about their father, whom he didn’t remember at all; and, sitting at the foot of his large bed, which took up most of the apartment, she had tried to bring up scraps of memory. The atmosphere of their house on the pampas, where they spent part of the year, with the long grasses outside; the cowboys she sometimes glimpsed on their horses. The tangos Lena and Carlos often played on their old record player, and whose fierce syncopations whipped Isabel’s small body with near violence. The figures of her parents dancing to the scratchy melodies, moving across the wooden floor glidingly, gracefully …
Then there was the mega-fight, as she described it to Kolya, in an attempt to make light of it. Though it was the great caesura, there was no doubt of it even then. She doesn’t remember how it started, but she can see her parents standing up and shouting at each other loudly, without restraint, as if she weren’t there. Then her mother beginning to cry, copiously and unwillingly, as if the tears were a further humiliation. Her mouth contorting horribly, she picked up the nearest thing to her—a Dresden porcelain figurine standing on the table—and hurled it, almost at Carlos, but not quite, all her uncertainty, her
impotence, contained in this curtailed trajectory.
“Please, Lena, you’ve known about her for a while now,” her father said in a pleading tone. Isabel remembers this exactly. The primal scene.
“Of course I know, you made sure I’d know,” her mother shouted. Then she sat down at the table and put her head between her arms, still trying to hide her tears.
“And I mean, what were you doing when this was going on?” Kolya had asked, but Isabel found her sensations at that moment difficult to describe. She can still envision herself, though, as if she were looking at someone else: a child seated on a tattered couch, wide-eyed and perfectly still, a mere conduit for what was passing between the man and the woman; absolutely attentive, absolutely absorbent. She was so quiet that the two of them forgot about her, and she seemed to disappear even to herself, so powerfully was she suctioned into the hurricane of emotions in their little living room, into the two large creatures, struggling with each other. She was equally dispersed into all points of the room, the light and the blowing curtains, her mother and father, and the passions hurling between them. She was in all of them at once, at every point of the configuration, an absorbent reed for the passage of light in the room, and the passage of grief and rage.
Then her mother started crying, terribly and openly. Isabel remembers the return of something like her own being, her will. She slipped off the sofa, wanting to go over and console Lena. But it was Carlos who bent down over her, and stroked her hair, and then held the nape of her neck as if to steady her. Her mother quieted; Isabel can still sense the full ambivalence of that moment, and the sensuality of her mother’s response to her father’s large fingers. A strange lethargy, almost like sleepiness, suddenly invaded her own small body, and she got up on the sofa again and lay down. That, in turn, brought her mother’s attention
to her, and she looked at Isabel with awful, red-rimmed eyes. “Oh my poppet, I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “Please go, Carlos,” she said, no longer storming. “Really, you’d better go.”
She still feels the stab of that sentence, declaring the end of her childhood, of simplicity. But as she moves through the memory, she thinks, if Schubert moves within me, it may be partly because of this.
What Kolya remembered best was being taken by Lena to Sunday services in the Orthodox church in New York, where they all settled for a while, after their wanderings. He loved the heavy scent of white lilies and incense, and the gorgeous basso profundo chants. Isabel remembers the chants as well, vibrating even more deeply than the tango, with their dense, almost unmoving power, as if the sounds were concentrated matter, rather than voices in motion. Lena’s turn to religion was brief, but intense; it was her way, Isabel understands now, of mourning her marriage. Their mother still understood something of religion’s claim on the soul, and Isabel dimly sensed it through her: the basso profundo acceptance of suffering, the promise that we experience ourselves most wholly in giving ourselves up. For Lena, it was only what happened to her that counted, rather than anything she made happen herself. It was only when she was plunged into love or disaster that she felt she had a deep, human fate. So, after the catastrophe of her husband’s departure, it must have consoled her to be in a place where she could imagine that she had been subjected to a fate, rather than anything smaller or nastier; and where she could try to acquiesce to it, rather than thrash against it in fruitless protest.
Lena lowering her body to kneel, Lena bowing her beautiful head till it touched the cold church floor … Isabel remembers the gestures of surrender with a sort of queasiness. But maybe her mother took her growing children to church because she wanted to pass something on to them after all, out of the
scattering of her own life. To pass on something especially to her little son, from whom she had so carelessly turned away, in rejection or just indifference. Indifference, Isabel says to Lena’s imago, which is worse than rejection, because it renders you nil. That was the heart-twisting thing about Kolya’s pale childish face that day in Provence. He looked somehow erased, as though he knew he had been rendered null and void, expelled from the circle of love. So perhaps Lena was trying to give him something instead. Poor substitute, Isabel thinks bitterly … And of course Kolya didn’t take up her compensatory offering. No religious option for him, except maybe for some leftover seeking, which Isabel felt in him like a pulsation; seeking for … what? Something to pour himself into, with all his keenness and hurt, something outside the boundaries of his own self, although it had no shape or name. A trace, old and seemingly as useless as the appendix. Certainly, Kolya had no words for what he wanted, except for some vague notion of Experience he’d caught from the general air, and which kept eluding him with a vicious irony, the harder he pursued it. He only knew that he wanted to be transported; to abandon himself. An ecstatic without a cause, like so many. For a while, Isabel worried that he would follow a friend who had joined the Moonies. But Kolya was simply too lucid to fall for something so, as he put it, “un-dialectical.” He needed his meaning-systems accompanied by logic. So he spent his days in the bleak flat, and at night ventured out into his clubs, where the drugs got stronger and more expensive. He was trying to pry the doors of perception wide open, he told Isabel. Surely, she wasn’t such a nerd as not to understand that? Not to appreciate a whole twentieth-century tradition of experiment, of trying to find the truth behind the paltry appearances of reality? Was she, like, from another century? Isabel, in her Budapest hotel room, winces at the memory of one awful afternoon, when he told her, his eyes
wide open and hypnotic, about a dream in which the governing spirit of the universe had telephoned him; and the phone number from which It was calling was a perfect circle. Kolya kept trying to dial the number repeatedly, in her presence; then curled on the bed in a posture of fetal despair, and said, much more terribly, “Nothing ever works in my life. Nothing that really matters. I am an unloved person, how can anything ever work out?”
Such a small injury, Isabel thinks, his mother shooing him out of the house, turning away from his small face, as though it didn’t please her. Surely not enough to account for what happened … But the worm of desolation had bored into him, and kept burrowing deeper and further, until there was nothing but desolation, and then the sight of his young body on that awful bed, in his open-necked shirt and mauve scarf. Sitting up in her hotel bed, Isabel emits a small gasp. The mauve scarf was Kolya’s signature, his small sign. Pain adheres to such details. The two terrible friends, drugged and panicked. One of them, with matted filthy hair, kept pacing the room with a sort of impotent defiance, as she held Kolya’s wrist, willing the pulse to continue until the ambulance arrived. “It’s not our fault!” he suddenly shouted, and hit the wall with his fist. “Fuck it, it’s not our fault!” “Yeah, man,” the other one muttered from his position on the floor. “He shouldda known.” The one seated was swaying to and fro in a sickening, automatic gesture, and with a look of abject, absent fear on his face. Isabel ran into the bathroom and threw up. When she came back … the Adam’s apple under the mauve scarf was moving even more faintly. Isabel still hears a remote scream, coming from herself, not a controlled, coloratura scream from a Verdi death aria, but a dissonant, graceless eruption of raw pain.
And that was all. And that was all. Just one of his generation’s scarifying statistics. The best minds of my generation have been undone … Part of his generation’s story; that was what Isabel’s
friends kept offering as solace, as if making Kolya into a sociological fact would somehow make it easier to accept his death. When did that begin, she wonders, the conversion of ourselves into sociological facts. It won’t do; won’t do for Kolya, whose young man’s face is still appealing to her in all its bruised puzzlement. It won’t do for his spectral presence, which she wears like a gauzy shroud on her soul, and which impels her search, as though she could offer him something still, some kind of counterpoint, a consolation.
In the morning, a recording session. The studio is in a low stone building, picturesquely overgrown with green vegetation. From the white-walled room where she will play, she can see the control console, the gleam of high technology. The piano, in the middle of the white space, looks like some geological beast, left over, in its great bulk, from another epoch.
She warms up with some arpeggios, waits for her cue. “Ready to roll?” the technician asks through his microphone, and smiles at her encouragingly. She gives him some test sounds, pianissimo, fortissimo, treble, bass. She’s recording a sequence of Beethoven Sonatas, and she starts with Op. 109. The technician tells her he won’t interrupt till the end of the movement; they can go over the corrections later. When she finishes, she looks up at him to see how she’s done. She respects the views of technicians highly. This is where real criticism happens, in praxis. He gives her a thumbs up, and summons her to come into the cubicle and listen with him. She sits in front of the console, with its array of buttons and levers. The sound, through the earphones, is startlingly clear, pellucid. No surround of moisture or breath is perceptible, just crystalline notes. It always takes her a moment to accept this sonic perfection, this distillation from her breathing, roiling effort. The technician is following with the score open, and when they come to a transitional passage between
theme A and B, he presses the stop button. “Did you hear that?” he asks. “Yes,” she says, and though she hardly knows this man’s name, this is a moment of precise communion. They’ve heard exactly the same thing: the bass figuration in the left hand is a decibel too loud, and several notes have fallen out of alignment.
“Do you want to redo it?” he asks, and she nods, and goes back to the piano. There’s no need to discuss what she needs to do, they’ve heard the same thing. She waits till her concentration returns, and begins a few bars earlier, so as to elide into the passage in question, then segues into a bar on the other end. She gets a high thumbs up, and joins the technician in the cubicle again. “Perfect,” he says. “It will go right in.” There’s another passage to redo toward the end of the movement; and then they go over the whole thing bar by bar for fine-tuning. A ritardando, she thinks, is too exaggerated, and he speeds it up by a smidgeon on the computer. The graph on his screen pulses just perceptibly faster. He takes a few bars apart, and makes a few bass notes more pronounced. Now the line fits, seamlessly.