We Are Not in Pakistan (25 page)

“I was so angry you remembered to call and Dad didn't. Never figured out why or how my mother stood his ways all those years.”

Fay was like Camille, talking non-stop when she figured no one was listening. Maybe nobody had ever listened to her, like he'd never really listened to Camille till recently.

“All my daughters have problems with men,” she was saying. “One thinks she's being smothered and can't breathe every time she goes to bed with a guy. My second daughter went to a shrink and then called to tell me she was sexually molested by her stepfather — my second husband. She said to me, Where were you, Mom? And I told her, truly, I didn't know. Tried telling my dad, but he said I was making it up so I could get divorced again.”

Gino played a few chords with pedal; the sound swelled to a resonant sostenuto. A new-fangled digital wouldn't have strings that could vibrate in sympathy like Jon's Schimmel.

Fay clasped her elbows and leaned on the far edge of the piano. “Maybe we all say peace at any price in some way. Just not as quietly as my mother.”

Discord irritates worse when someone points it out, and dampening checks its vibration only momentarily.

She went silent, moved over to the bookshelves, then into the kitchen. The Schimmel was struggling against Gino's attempts to tune it. At least sixty, it was allotted the same lifespan as Gino — three score and ten.

Fay was back. “Did you ever meet my first husband, Art? Suave and handsome — kinda like my father, I guess, but quite a lot shorter. I knew Art had many women on the side, but he always convinced me that unfaithfulness had nothing to do with our marriage.” She gave Gino a warm rueful smile. “I believed him till I went to San Francisco for a convention. I was negotiating teacher contracts, though I never trained as a lawyer — should have. I was thirty-eight and the city was decked out to celebrate the Spirit of '76.”

“I went out for a few martinis with a consultant who also was married, and after maybe three or four he asked me up to his room. And what do you know, he had wine and flowers and candy. There it was, laid out for me when I arrived. And all I could think of was how much trouble he'd gone to, just to get me in the sack. We talked, and after a while he said to me, When I talk you listen, but whenever you say anything, it's about your husband or children. So I think we should just say good night.”

Pin after pin turned into the maple beneath Gino's tools. Camille was that way too, never saying anything about herself. But she could talk about Gino all day, having listened for years to Gino talk about Gino.

“So nothing happened, but I did go back to my room thinking that unfaithfulness has everything to do with marriage. I should know that from watching Mom with Dad.”

“The next night I was still at the hotel, and Mr. Consultant asked me out for a drink again, at the lounge on the top floor, and we both knew it was for the same reason. This time, all it took was a couple of shots and he had to take me down to my room. And he undressed me and put me to bed. When he left, he said, I don't take advantage of helpless women. And I lay there drunk, thinking oh-my-god, there are men in the world who think women are people.”

Gino wanted to tell her there are many men in the world who know women are people, but he hadn't been so good at remembering the principle himself. Fay had barely stopped for breath, like if she stopped talking she might drop dead. For Jon's sake, Gino listened. Jon would have walked out by now, but no matter.

“I went back home to Art, and a couple of months later I had a hysterectomy — I'd been bleeding badly every day. Art came to the hospital and told me he was soooo depressed, and did I think it was male menopause? And all I could think was, I'm in the hospital, gushing blood, and the only thing my husband can talk about is his own male menopause. A couple of days later, I got a box of chocolates and a note: If you call me, I'll be there. My consultant friend still thought I was interesting.”

The high A twanged like a saloon piano. Could the Schimmel's sound board have warped? A slight arc can put so much tension on the strings that a piano can sound too sharp. Gino gazed at the blankness of the ceiling as he listened to it and Fay at the same time.

“When I left the hospital, the doctor said, You're tight as a virgin again, and I thought, A second chance at virginity isn't a gift for just anyone, especially a jerk like Art. And now there was no fear of getting pregnant, either. So once I'd healed I called my
friend from San Francisco and arranged for him to stop by our district office for some consulting. He came, and we had a nice time.” She looked away with a coy expression, as if a bout of old-fashioned Midwestern discretion had trumped the uninhibited Californian act. “A
very
nice time.”

“And then you got divorced?” Gino's head bowed over the instrument.

“Oh no. First I went to a shrink. I told him my husband brings work home every night and we have a compromise — work after the children are in bed. Which was of course when we might have been talking to each other. The doctor said, If he was a violinist and brought home a violin and played it all night, wouldn't you object? If he was a construction worker and brought home a jack hammer, wouldn't you object? Well, yes, I said, that might be a problem.”

“And then you got divorced?”

“Oh no. The next time, I took Art with me. Doc, he said, I need Valium. She gets Valium, why can't I have any? So the doctor gave him a prescription and warned him what would happen if he mixed it with alcohol. And then we sat there for an hour, listening to Art tell us he didn't have any problems. When he left the shrink's office, he went down to the drugstore, then over to his favourite bar and mixed those pills with alcohol anyway, just because the doctor said he shouldn't. Oooh, was I pissed. It was the kind of thing my father used to do.”

Gino tuned and tuned as if adjusting some misalignment between earthly music and its cosmic equivalent. Fay going on and on like this made him wonder how many times Camille must have toyed with the idea of leaving him.

Certainly in the days when Jon and he caroused all night, bar-hopping down State Street. She and Moira stuck it out even when Gino and Jon went over the state border to Chicago and didn't
come home for days — as if they were radical rock musicians instead of straitlaced symphony hacks.

He was down to the red felt temperament strips, and the Schimmel was as pliable as he could make it. He played arpeggios and a few Hanon runs till Fay brought coffee. Then he put away his gear, brought the wing down, closed the lid, and took the velvet armchair beside the couch.

The coffee pot, cream and sugar stood on a gilded wood tray Gino remembered buying in Florence. A gift “from Jon” for Moira. The coffee itself was nothing schmancy, just the regular-smelling brew, the kind with which he and Jon would try to cure their hangovers.

“Why did you stay with Art?” he asked as she poured and handed him his mug.

“I worried what he'd do to himself if I left him. But eventually we couldn't pay the bills so we paid a smart you-know-what lawyer a thousand bucks to put our papers before a judge. We sat with seven hundred other luckless deadbeats in a lecture hall and got ourselves declared officially bankrupt. Afterwards, Art said, Let's find a bar. So we found one. He had two martinis, maybe three, to decompress, and I had my usual sugarless something — Tab, that's what I had. I didn't think much of it then, but that personal bankruptcy would be a monkey on our backs, stay on our record for years. But that night all I felt was the bankruptcy of my spirit.”

A husband should be a good provider, Gino thought, whatever else he is. How did Art feel that night? Art wasn't around to tell his story. “Was that the last straw?”

Fay shook her head.

What is the last straw for women? How much can they take? Gino had dumped a ton of straws on his Camille — disappearing for days, coming home drunk, throwing up, demanding sex, never violent but just never thinking about her in those days. Or
never thinking what he was thinking now: maybe Camille didn't leave when most women would have because she wasn't like most women.

“Oh no, Dad kept telling me Art was just young, that we were just immature, that divorce would harm the children, that I'd lose all my friends. So I didn't divorce Art till '84. By then my old friends were born agains, and they were shocked. Shocked! It's amazing how God loves you and will forgive you anything, even murder, before you become a born-again Christian, but he won't forgive a little divorce afterwards. I had to go get me some new friends, I'll tell you.”

Gino gave a rinky-tink laugh. “Never was much for religion,” he said. “Jon and I figured music was worship enough.”

A look of surprise. “He sure played a lot of religious music. In churches and cathedrals,” she said.

“You can't take God out of classical music.”

“Well, no fear of anyone wanting to do that these days,” she said. “Now everyone's born again, not just my old friends. Did you know you can become a born-again Christian anywhere if you just raise your right hand and say, I'm born again? One of my friends would do it every so often — in my car, on the porch, on the back forty, in a bar. Sounds like sex, doesn't it? Only not as much fun. Now even Art's joined those sanctimonious Promise Keepers — they take your membership money no matter how many promises you've already broken. He's become a family man since he lost his kids. He goes out, guys only, to a stadium every Friday and all of Saturday and then quotes Leviticus about homosexuality.”

“Some men need to do things a different way.”

“Now you sound like my father.”

He didn't — couldn't. “No one sounds like your father.” Gino took up the tongs, dropped a sugar cube in his mug and stirred. “You know the way every musician in an orchestra depends on
the next? Time after time, I saw Jon mold that, saw him smooth the over- and under-confidence of the rank-and-file musicians. In his hands their very dependence became his sound. His sound was the sound of other people's unexpressed feelings, the effect of all their emotions.”

“Yeah, yeah, Gino,” said Fay. “But I wasn't talking about Dad's music. The sound of other people's unexpressed feelings was deafening in this house. But he sure expressed his own feelings — shouting, hollering. And how he could hurt with his sarcasm. What does it matter what his music sounded like? What's important is what he believed, how he treated Mom. And me. How he never noticed Earl wasn't the only one who had kids — I couldn't get even one of my kids to come with me for his funeral. You make excuses for Dad the way he always made excuses for Earl.”

Gino focused on the swirl in his coffee. “Because he was a genius. After performing or conducting all evening, after all the bows and applause, the next day Jon would be sitting right here at that piano. And he'd hear the merest trace of melody in his head and construct another piece. Pure genius.”

“Yeah, a musical genius. And I used to get walloped for interrupting him. But it's not that difficult. You just need to hear it in your head and write it down.”

Gino laughed, shaking his head. “Fay, if only it were that simple! I might have done it too. But I didn't have Jon's creative energy or his persistence.”

“It
is
simple. Used to compose myself, you know.” An ashtray scraped the table as she drew it towards her.

“Uh-huh?” Gino tried to keep his tone indulgent. “I didn't know.”

“Till I was fifteen or so. He never mentioned it? I performed for him several times. On that piano.” She produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from a handbag beside the couch. “Oh, he never approved. Once he said he agreed
with von Karajan — a woman's place is in the kitchen, not in a symphony orchestra. And that was the end of my composing.”

Two equally steep and dimly lit paths seemed to open before Gino. “You know,” he said, sidestepping the one that might imply criticism of Jon, “he's left you such a legacy. Whenever we listen to Jon's music or a musician plays what Jon wrote, we'll forget he's gone. And each performance will be a new interpretation. As if we're communicating with the spirit realm.”

“Spirit realm.” Fay laughed. She lit up and took a long drag, blew a smoke ring. “He sure communicated with the Jack Daniels realm. But you save that line for a concert program, Gino. You know what shocked the hell out of Dad? That I opposed the war in Vietnam. And then that I marched for peace, even after a fertilizer bomb carved a crater into the Army building on campus.”

“Well, he was in the service. Both of us were. Anyway, the explosion was such a long time ago — 1970?”

“Right.” Fay tapped ash from her cigarette with an admonishing forefinger. “And I shocked him even more with my divorces. After that, when Newt Gingrich and his goons took over Congress, I came in wearing a Civil Liberties pin and he said, Now you've really turned into a goddamn liberal. And when I told him liberals got him a National Endowment for the Arts, a musicians' union, Social Security and Medicare, he just laughed. Maybe he thought conservatives give a shit about art — I told him they just want to be seen attending concerts. A couple of years ago I sent him a book about that mean-spirited radio guy he always listened to” — she went over to the bookshelf and ran a glazed fingernail down a spine:
Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot
— “so I'm proud to say I disappointed him.”

“Oh no — never say that. You two just didn't agree on some things.”

“That's putting it mildly. I'm glad I told him he was responsible.”

Gino frowned. “For what?”

“For Mom being buried long before she was dead.”

Gino opened his mouth to say something about Jon to defend him yet console her. Something fatherly and preachy. But he too had laid off the booze and women only when it was too late for Camille.