Bellweather Rhapsody (35 page)

She all but trots out of the elevator and down the hall to her room. The snow is easing. The plows, if the news is to be believed, are out on the roads and will work through the night and tomorrow afternoon, clearing the way for parents to arrive by early evening. It’s unfortunate that they’ll miss the concerts, but it would be cruel to keep the students any later, after such an exhausting ordeal.

She’s going to have a cup of tea and call it a night. The light is on in her room, which is strange, but not so strange that Viola thinks about it for longer than the half second necessary to convince herself she must have left it on. She kicks off her pumps, curls her toes into the carpet. Her stockings come off next. She has always loved the feeling of taking off stockings, the fleshy satisfaction of thighs and hips released from compression.

Doug Kirk loved to watch her take off her stockings. “I can see it in your face,” he’d said, “the exact moment you feel free,” and he’d smile lazily at her because he thought he was wooing her with poetry. Poor Doug Kirk. Father of four, two boys and two girls, dual sets of twins, blond and brown-eyed, and Viola, since the last time she saw Doug Kirk, has forgotten everything he ever told her about them. He talked about them constantly. He loved them. If she were the kind of person who felt things, she would feel bad that not one of Kirk’s four children was likely to have their father at their championship games, their graduation parties, their weddings, their whatevers. Thankfully, Viola Fabian is the kind of person who feels nothing at all.

That’s not entirely true; Viola does feel certain things. She feels eyes on her when she walks into rooms. She feels hunger when she hasn’t eaten. She felt Doug Kirk’s lust—naked, stupid, and starving, throwing off heat like a bonfire in a bad suit—the first time they met. He asked her how she’d heard about the position. She replied that she’d seen it advertised in the most recent Association for School Music newsletter. He wanted to make sure she knew it was mostly administrative in nature, that there were conducting opportunities but she wouldn’t be performing—and she witnessed, plain in his eyes as his sentence trailed off, the first time he imagined her naked. She assured him she was looking for a part-time position. She had just moved from California with her daughter and needed a job with a freer schedule to accommodate Jill’s busy travel calendar. He said he’d be in touch after they’d made a decision, and she slid her business card across the desk and said he should be in touch any time.

Three days later, three hours after he called to offer her the job of ASM liaison for western New York, two hours and forty-five minutes after she accepted, Viola sunk her nails into Kirk’s back in a hotel-motel north of the Thruway. Viola felt Kirk’s dry fingertips on her skin. She felt Kirk’s dumb desire, once satisfied, glow even brighter. She felt hungry, because they’d met under the pretense of lunch and ended up sleeping together instead.

Fabian had been sleeping with Kirk for nearly two years, on and off, before she got bored, which was something of a record for her. It was probably because Kirk, relatively speaking, had power. As the head of ASM, he oversaw programming and festivals and solo competitions for every music program in every school district in the state of New York. He scouted at Statewide; he could make young careers with a handpicked scholarship, a glowing letter of recommendation, and an assured acceptance at Westing or any of the other top conservatories in the country. Viola was drawn to power. It belonged to her, was her natural right, and it was only a matter of time and circumstance before she possessed it. Her job as ASM school liaison afforded her a certain degree of power—she chose which schools hosted which regional competitions and festivals, which conductors led which ensembles—but the time had come to move up. Viola Fabian was ready for her promotion.

Two weeks before Statewide, she’d asked Kirk to meet her at that first hotel-motel, the place they met after she accepted the job, because she had something important to discuss with him. Kirk had been every bit as discreet and adept at handling their affair as Viola; his wife, a bland woman Viola had met on many occasions but whose face she could never quite conjure, would be genuinely shocked to discover she’d had an unfaithful husband for twenty months. Viola sensed that Kirk was beginning to fear his family’s discovery of their relationship. His children were becoming teenagers, and the anxious fog of puberty pervading his house had triggered his conscience. He accepted her invitation with a reserve in his voice that told Viola her instincts had been correct. Her timing was perfect. This would be the last time.

She would daydream about it again and again.

Kirk knocks on the door, two short raps, a pause, two more. Viola opens it and puts her arms around his neck before he’s inside. He stiffens and shuts the door with a hurried kick, after which he melts against her. He knows this is the last time too—the last time he sees Viola Fabian like this, pale as the moon, white-haired and red-mouthed, warm to the touch but cool behind her eyes. She refreshes him, Kirk says, like a glass of ice water on a blistering day. Viola tells him that’s the nicest thing any of her lovers has ever said to her. He asks what else they’ve said, and she replies, smiling, “
You bitch. You have no right. You have no heart.
”

Kirk’s eyes change.

I have us on tape,
she whispers into the hollow of his collarbone. She sees her words vibrate through his chest and curl like a serpent around his heart.
I’ve recorded every second we’ve ever spent together. I have your home address and I have an envelope. I want your job. Give me your job.

Kirk’s skin pops with sweat. His face is gray.

You can’t be serious,
he says.
You can’t mean that.

I want your job,
she repeats.
Give me your job.
She smiles because it’s funny, because it doesn’t make any difference whether she has the tapes or not. Kirk is trapped by the mere possibility. Viola stretches, satisfied as a cat, and rolls away across the cooling sheets, wondering which would be more fun: for Kirk to submit, terrified, and hand over his job, or for Kirk to call her bluff and find out it’s anything but?

Kirk’s entire body is gray now, the color of overwashed cotton.

You’re a monster,
he wheezes, and pitches face-first to the floor.

That last part—the part where Kirk falls, the muscle of his heart crushed to pulp by her words—didn’t actually happen in front of her. Doug Kirk made it back to his car, to his office, before being felled by the massive coronary that put him in the hospital bed where Viola Fabian saw him for the last time.

Taking what was hers—namely, Kirk’s job—was more complicated than she’d thought. So she is interim head of ASM,
interim
as negotiated with his secretary, Helen Stoller, because Helen has been carrying a torch for Doug Kirk for twenty-five years and refuses to believe he will never wake up again. Viola knows better. Helen called her in a frenzy the day after his heart attack, clucking and squawking that Dr. Kirk was in the hospital, in a coma, and with Statewide coming up in two weeks—

“Are you asking me to run the whole fucking festival?” Viola said. She almost laughed out loud, picturing Helen Stoller’s fat face stunned into silence. Stoller was stubborn—she wouldn’t give up on Kirk until he’d been cold in the ground for six months—but Viola bullied her for a thousand dollars more than Kirk would have been paid. That took some of the sting out of being named
interim
head, not head. And she could wait. All she ever had to do was wait.

She tugs the elastic out of her ponytail. Her hair, her scalp, her face—it all relaxes. She sits on the edge of the bed and rolls her head back and forth, side to side. Blood throbs in her temples.

Viola pushes her head back, stretching her neck as far as it will go, and sets her teeth.

She needs that tea.

She walks barefoot to the bathroom and fills the electric kettle from the sink. She snaps it into its base, presses the little red switch with her index finger, and sets the tin of loose Earl Grey beside the kettle. Then she opens her train case. Inside are two silver spoons, two matching white teacups and saucers, and an old baby food jar, one of Jill’s, filled with sparkling white sugar.

She’s been trying very hard not to think about her daughter. Not to waste any more effort or time or anxiety on Jill. She looks at the twin cups and saucers and spoons, at the tiny jar, its label long gone, the only feature identifying it as having once held food for her child a word,
GERBER,
in blue on the lid. She grabs one spoon, one cup, and the sugar, and sits down at the desk.

Viola knows she’s different from most people. She suspects that most people, people who talk about feeling sorry or concerned or worried, aren’t lying the way she has learned to do, or at least they’re not lying in quite the same way. She used to ask other people to describe how it felt to be those things, to feel regret or sadness on another’s behalf. Her curiosity was genuine.

Her bafflement even more so—other people spent so much time worrying, fretting, coddling each other, and to no discernible end. It was a tremendous amount of energy wasted, energy that could have been better spent doing, winning, getting. It made them weak; it made Viola, blessedly unburdened, even stronger. Her clarity, her strength, her freedom from sentiment—they were her talents, the gifts she alone could give to the world. Experience had taught her that very few people were qualified recipients. Natalie Wink, for instance, had been an unmitigated failure.

Then there was Jill. Viola remembers the moment she understood she was going to have a child; she remembers writing a list of pros and cons for terminating the pregnancy. She remembers grasping that to have a child, to be a mother, would afford her a power unlike any other, potent and ancient, physical proof of her ability to create life. But the best reason for keeping her was this: a child of her own, born of her blood, would surely be able to accept Viola’s gifts.

In the beginning, she thought she might feel love for Jill, that the physical experience of carrying and bearing a child would transform Viola into one of those Other People. Thankfully, in time she realized this feeling was just another kind of lie, the kind she was familiar with, a lie that everyone else expected to be true as a matter of course. She performed as a mother must. She hugged her child, wiped her face, fed and clothed her, and gave her treats. When Viola thought of her daughter, she thought of the word “useful.” Jill was an extraordinary machine, an instrument perfectly tuned. She gave Viola status, entrance, access; she could be controlled and handled, molded and made to execute. Viola assumed that her daughter was exactly like her, free from the too-human tyranny of feelings, until she found her crying in her bedroom one day. Jill was no older than five or six, disconsolate because they were making Father’s Day presents in school.

“I miss him,” Jill said.

“How can you miss him?” Viola asked. “You never even met him.”

Jill sobbed harder. Viola, for the first time, felt what might have been sadness. Her daughter was not like her. Her daughter was one of the Other People, and would not be able to appreciate what her mother had to offer.

This did not stop Viola from trying, again and again, to teach her.

She twists her hair into a rope around her finger and lays it flat over one shoulder. The kettle is starting to whistle. Viola scoops a teaspoon of Earl Grey leaves into her diffuser. It clinks against the side of the china.

Doug Kirk, before his heart exploded, called her a monster. She pours hot water over the diffuser and calm settles into her bones. She wonders whether Jill would have said the same thing—that she is a monster. Jill had said many horrible things to her over the years, had called her many names, though she can’t remember whether “monster” was ever one of them. From Kirk, it was a wayward arrow, a shot that didn’t hit the mark. Coming from Jill, it might have felt like a compliment, an admission of understanding. Viola would finally know she had taught her something after all.

Viola closes her eyes, letting the steam open her pores. She unscrews the lid of the baby food jar and digs out a teaspoon of sugar.

22

A
PHONE RINGS.

Hastings knows he’s dreaming. It’s one of his elastic dreams, the kind he can half control, so he chooses to ignore the phone and focus on the Scrabble board in front of him instead. Jess kept a Scrabble board out at all times. Their games would last for days without their ever once sitting down opposite each other.
CENTURY
would greet him late one afternoon when he came in with the mail. He would play
YOUTH
off the
Y
, and the next morning, shuffling to the kitchen to make coffee, he’d notice that
DOUGHTY
had sprouted around the
H.
He didn’t truly believe Jess was leaving him until the day he walked into the living room to see
SWIMMER
dangling, unplayed-upon. He’d never suspected it would be their last word.

This board in his dream is empty save for six tiles. He reads them and they don’t make sense. He fiddles with his bow tie. The phone continues to ring.

Perhaps if he squints—he can make out a
W
. An
A
. A
K
.

And suddenly Jessica Mills Hastings is sitting across from him, palms down flat on either side of the board. When she opens her beautiful mouth, Scrabble tiles fall from her lips and he hears them as letters, he hears her chanting, she’s saying—

Hastings is awake. Rudely, painfully, and the damn phone is still ringing.

Where the hell is Sheila? Where the hell is
he?

His back is sore. Well, no wonder, he’s been napping on the swaybacked couch in the front office. This couch has been at the Bellweather almost as long as Hastings. The phone on the desk is ringing, the manager’s phone. That’s why Sheila hasn’t answered it. Sheila’s out front, Sheila doesn’t hear it.