Evenings at Five (2 page)

Ralph the knife, with lime, mint, and ticker-tape glass

Chapter Three

Seven months had gone by. On the day of Rudy’s April funeral some Jewish friends had given her a
yahrzeit
candle, to keep lit for the seven days of shiva. Now it was November and she took the empty red glass container with the Star of David to the local candle store and asked if it could be refilled and a new wick put in. No problem, they said.

The young rabbi who had conducted Rudy’s funeral and burial with imagination and aplomb turned out to be a Jewish mystic. She told Christina that she would come every afternoon at five and sit shiva with her and help with the guests. And on the seventh evening, if Christina so desired, the rabbi would be glad to walk around the outside of the house with her and help dispatch Rudy’s spirit on its transmigratory journey and then cook dinner for her. Christina said she was not ready to dispatch Rudy’s spirit and that she thought she would like to be alone on the seventh evening. The rabbi took it sportingly and continued to show up at five each afternoon in her chic and original outfits. Trim little tweed suits with midcalf skirts, dashing scarves cleverly knotted, colored socks that matched her Guatemalan pillbox hats that served as feminine yarmulkes. She was tiny with long, slim feet, and wore different pairs of hand-sewn Italian lace-ups greatly admired by Christina and the friends who came to the shiva-salons for Rudy. The rabbi didn’t proselytize, but shared her mystical lore if asked. She was a great asset at the five o’clock gatherings: artfully told first-person ghost stories are always a draw, and the rabbi told them well—how she finally had persuaded her beloved great-uncle to leave her kitchen on the fifth anniversary of his death, arranged a little ceremony, then opened a window and felt his unbound spirit take off like a freed hawk into the night. The dead little girl who had to instruct her mother through a dream that it was time to let go. Plus some Kabbalistic timetables of the spirit’s itinerary, how long it lingers where, especially in the first year after death.

On the seventh day after Rudy’s burial, Christina had been sitting alone on the ruined leather sofa with her gin, the spring sun pouring in at the exact spot where Rudy always had to shield his face at this time of year. She kept a sharp watch over the
yahrzeit
candle. It sputtered out at 7:43, and she stumbled tipsily out into the blue-green dusk, just in case Rudy’s spirit was attempting a subtle getaway to spare her the wrenching pain.

A full-grown black bear was sitting with its back to her on the lawn. Hearing her intake of breath, it rose with magnificent insouciance and loped off into the woods with its sleek high-bottomed gait.

And now it was November, and Christina, at first a faithful and then an increasingly immoderate observer of the ghostly cocktail hour (the 1.75-liter blue bottles with Queen Victoria’s brooding three-quarter profile were replaced weekly now, with sometimes a 750-milliliter junior size in reserve in case she should run short on the weekends), was hours away from a nice little health scare.

Soon it would be seven months exactly from the April day when the undertakers lowered Rudy’s coffin into the grave and the mourners formed two lines and took turns shoveling earth on the plain pine box with the Star of David on top.

In the Catskill hamlet where Rudy and Christina had settled, the artists (and their families or significant others) had their own cemetery. Odette, now resting there next to her novelist husband, had told them about the “ah-tists’ cemetery” back in 1976 and encouraged them to buy their plots right away, as space was running out. They had procrastinated, of course, and were saved only the day of Rudy’s death by a new couple from Christina’s church who made her a present of their two plots.

“Gil has decided he definitely does not want to be buried next to his mother,” the wife had told Christina.

Five o’clock sharp. Completely dark in November. “Punctuality is the courtesy of kings”: Rudy always quoted his father’s maxim in French and then translated it for her, as if she might not remember from time to time.

Secure that her full glass (lime but no mint in the winter) with the ticker tape awaited her on its cocktail napkin, Christina paced herself, lighting some candles. The
yahrzeit
one wasn’t back from the store yet. She walked to and fro across the rugs, gazed up at the high ceiling, remembered how they had stood like awed children watching the great bluestone fireplace being laid, stone by stone, by masons who knew what they were doing. Neither of them quite believed they were causing a house they had imagined for themselves to come into existence in the real world. And the builder and all the workmen took care of them like children, pointing out the advantages of having the house face southeast instead of northeast, tactfully suggesting that a bathroom door open not directly into the kitchen but into the hallway just outside.

“It’s splendid, but are there enough closets?” Christina’s literary agent asked when the house was being framed.

“Oh, Lord, closets,” said Christina. “I guess we need some more.”

Their one requirement, when the builder was making sketches, was that Rudy’s studio would be downstairs on the northeast side of the house and Christina’s study would be upstairs on the southwest side.

“I can’t stand for anyone to overhear me composing,” Rudy explained to the builder. “Even when they say they don’t hear.”

On some level of consciousness,
Christina thought,
I must have heard all those years of Rudy’s compositions forming themselves phrase by phrase, probably even note by note, but I told him the truth when I said I didn’t hear, that I was scrunched into some dark soundproof chamber behind my eyeballs, straining for flashes of images that then had to have words matched to them. And he believed me because he had caught me not listening so many times. But then, later, when I heard something of his played at a concert, I could remember hearing it come into being. Sometimes I even had a visual memory of what the day had looked like outside my study window when he was downstairs in his studio plinking and plonking toward a certain sound and then suddenly bursting into a fully realized cascade of melody. And then the scrape of the piano bench, the transfer of his body
(thur-rump)
into his leather desk chair, followed by alternating solos of metronome and electric eraser. I heard without knowing I was hearing all the outer sounds of a work being captured.

She switched on the lamp, sank into the clawed leather with a sigh, crossed her ankles on the pillows, and—still not yet reaching for the frosted glass—dipped into Rudy’s 2001 At-a-Glance appointment diary, the only record of himself he kept.

Bathroom outside kitchen

This was the final one, with entries—doctors’ appointments, upcoming concerts of his music, dating six months beyond his death. (“How I love being the only one on the program who still has a dash after his birth date,” he always said at concerts when his music was played along with that of the classic composers.)

The other appointment diaries, dating back to 1973, the year they had moved in together, lay tumbled beside her on the sofa. Her stash of elliptic Rudy chronicles to carry her through coming nights. In earlier years, Aspen, Geneva, Tel Aviv, all their trips together, the final one being to Stockholm, and the faculty meetings, recording sessions, rehearsals, premieres, and then more and more doctors began to fill up the pages until the final ones looked like these:

10:00 Allis

2:00 Dr. Donnelly

C in NYC

10:00 Allis

11:30 Justine

3:00 Drugstore

11:00 Dr. Paolini

C in Chicago

11:00 Bud (shots)

10:00 Allis

3:30 Dr. Ladd

C in Washington

Cocktails Rosens NYET

Dr. Salzman? NYET

10:00 Allis

C home

Allis was the seventy-seven-year-old Norwegian nurse who came three times a week to give Rudy his Procrit injection and neck massage. She also stayed overnight when Christina was away on speaking engagements. Allis had spoiled the cat by letting him sleep with her and putting out a short personal glass of water for him on the night table so he wouldn’t get his face caught in her tall one: a practice Christina now continued. The lovely Justine, a dancer, was Rudy’s exercise therapist, although he couldn’t do much, but he always came home feeling revived because he had a little crush on her. Dr. Donnelly was Rudy’s oncologist and hematologist, Dr. Paolini was his kidney doctor, Dr. Ladd his cardiologist, Dr. Salzman his ophthalmologist. Bud was the surviving cat, now in his own seventies in cat years, and
nyet
(“no” in Russian) meant Rudy had canceled.

Christina leafed through the last appointment diary. Red ink was reserved for beginning or finishing a work (“Began
Job’s Muses
in earnest. Finished
Epitaph for an Artist
. Finished
Insomnia
”). The only other entries inscribed in red were Rudy’s transfusions or his chemo. Bone marrow biopsies and skeletal surveys got only black or blue ink. Christina herself (“C”) had never rated Rudy’s red ink. Ah-tists could be severe when it came to priorities. The longest of all of Rudy’s red-ink entries was in the 1997 At-a-Glance, during a week of chemo treatment for his multiple myeloma.

Positive but not exuberant

Resigned but not depressed

Finished piano quintet

Did the adjectives refer to the mood of his quintet or to his state of mind that day? Now listening to the quintet more carefully than she ever had before—his most somber, but with glimmers of pure tranquillity—Christina concluded it was probably a conjunction of both.

She sipped her drink and thought of how she had been so eager to get home before dark when Rudy only had twelve more hours left in the world. She sipped and sobbed like a child. If only she had known, she would have stayed in his room till the ICU nurses kicked her out. If only she had stayed. But she had gone home and read a novel late into the night, imagining Rudy either asleep or reading his Muriel Spark.

Back in the kitchen for a refill—Bud had emerged from somewhere and was sitting expectantly in front of his dish—she felt a rush of affinity with Queen Victoria as she cradled the heavy blue 1.75-liter bottle and studied the monarch’s gloomy countenance. Well, what did the queen have to smile about? Even though she continued to have his clothes laid out every evening, her beloved Albert was dead, and she was fat from all the state dinners, and what was left?

When Christina had lived in London in her twenties, she had gotten to know the servants’ chef at Buckingham Palace. He’d taken her on a grand tour of the servants’ wing and introduced her to his colleagues. One of them had told her that Queen Victoria’s nightly bottle of Black Label had continued to be delivered to her quarters until 1956 because no one had thought to rescind the order.

The phone rang in Rudy’s studio. After four rings, his voice, which a conservatory student once described as “an octave below God’s,” came on.

“This is Rudolf Geber. Please leave your name and number, and your call will be returned as soon as
pos
-sible.”