Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

“Are you seeing anyone?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“You know you can. We agreed, when you arrived here—”

“Yes of course I know. I was seeing someone, now I am not.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need your ‘sorry,’ ” she said. These could have been bitter words but they weren’t. She said them simply, almost lightly. I looked at her, just up the path, the side of her face dappled with light. Straight-backed in her whites. Katia did not need my sorry.

I lowered my head. Ten years ago, I had met her at Sasha’s door. A beautiful girl with an armful of tools. A bouquet of tools. We married so quickly. I made a mistake. It was not that I was careless in my calculations; it was that I was seeking the wrong sum. Sasha’s little sister, a beautiful girl with an armful of tools, reverent and unhappy. She wanted for us to sip clear borscht at dinner, and then to sit beside me, knitting, as I read the newspaper. She wanted for us to have a dog. She wanted for me to grow bored of my devices, to spend summer afternoons building cabinets in the kitchen, or for us to move to the country: to live alone at the centre of a valley, eating apples from the trees around our dacha.

The second time I went to Paris, I brought her with me. The city of lights and love: perhaps I could salvage my error. We had been married for three years. But she hated the taste of French bread, the dank water dripping down alleyways. She hated the unfamiliar bath and the way the Parisian women looked at her. “Lyova, this is shit,” she said.

I gave her money, a map, circled the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Galeries Lafayette. At one of the parties at the Paris Opera I asked a black-haired girl where to go for shoes. She finished her champagne flute in one long swallow. “Rue Meslay,” she said. The next day I told Katia: “Meslay Street. Go, buy anything.” She came back with a pair of slippers. “Calfskin,” she said. I shrugged. She yelled at me: “Aren’t you angry?” They had cost three hundred francs. I remember standing under the crystal chandelier in our hotel room, both of us shouting. Then I went out.

“We must end this,” I said, the morning I left for America.

She lay in bed and closed her eyes.

When I boarded the Majestic , the manifest listed me as a bachelor. I do not know why. I felt somehow vindicated.

When I arrived in New York there was a telegram waiting.

I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU, it said.

I wrote back, SO DO NOT WAIT.

She came on a ship. It was a deliberate misunderstanding, like she was using her life to make a dark joke.

Now Katia and I had been wed for ten years. She did not need my sorry.

Katia sat down on a rock. “Why are you here?”

I didn’t have a quick answer.

“Lev?”

“A visit,” I said, “with an old friend.”

She looked at her hands. “Are you all right?”

“I am wonderful,” I said. “Are you all right?”

I could see her clench her teeth.

“Why are we speaking in English?” I said.

“You are a horrible little man,” Katia said. “You are not all right and we are not old friends. Have you come all the way to New Jersey, to a maple forest, to tell me helpless lies? Why are you here? To tell me you love me? To belittle my life? Or is it to tell me you are dying, something like that?”

I swallowed. A squirrel ran across the path and braided between two trees. The wind had fallen away and the air felt very still. Through a break in the trunks I could see down the rise to the sanatorium, the cluster of nearby buildings, a pasture speckled with cows. An eagle wheeled through the empty space.

I rubbed my eyes.

Katia’s tone had changed. “Lev?” she said.

I crouched in my suit.

“Lev, I didn’t mean … Are you sick?”

I picked up a piece of birch bark, like a discarded message. “I am not sick,” I said.

She was watching me, just barely moving.

“I am lonely,” I said.

I felt the flick of her eyes.

“There was a woman,” I said.

Then she straightened, like a building pulled back to standing. The only colour in her face was in her lips and eyes. I could see her choosing what to say.

She stood up.

“I don’t care,” she said.

She smoothed her skirt with her hands and walked away down the path.

I STAYED IN PATERSON OVERNIGHT. At a church near the guesthouse, a string quartet was performing Haydn. This is a music of astonishing tricks, flourishes that hairpin and buck. The quartet was incompetent. The cellist was graceless; the violinists sounded as if they were golems, made of clay. Only the violist had the capacity for beauty. I wished the other players were dead and it was only that viola, constant, under unilluminated stained glass.

Raspberries, I wondered. Cranberries, bilberries, blueberries, ash berries.

WHEN I GOT BACK to the house in Manhattan, Lucie Rosen was alone on the second floor, practising. It was one of those strange, gloomy mornings: a wet wind, skyscrapers grazing thunderclouds. Lucie had not put on the lights. She stood in darkness with the theremin, repeating two low figures. I came up the stairs and watched her. The gale had come into her face. She seemed fierce, almost stricken.

“Good morning,” I said, when she stopped.

“Good morning.” She used a wrist to smooth the sweat on her cheek.

“Exceptional tone.”

When I said this, Lucie began to cry. Small, contained sobs. I brought her a handkerchief. We stood with the theremin between us. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, no.”

She dabbed her eyes and balled the handkerchief in her hand. For some reason, I was reminded that she owned this house. I felt so tired. I stood beside her, wondering if she and Walter were getting divorced, if she was moving to India or California or Cape Cod. I put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right,” I said.

She swallowed. “Were you there last night?” she said.

“Where? New Jersey—”

“The concert.”

I did not understand.

“At Town Hall.”

“Here?”

“Clara’s concert,” Lucie said in a bitter voice.

I did not say anything.

“At Town Hall. She played the theremin.” Lucie, my best pupil, seemed about to cry again. “Leon, it was beautiful. It was so beautiful.”

There was no thunder, no lightning. It did not rain that day. The clouds passed over and away. Lucie told me about your debut recital, performing works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Saint-Saëns, on a theremin painted with gold curlicues, pink and red and blue flowers, the finest solo performance that there had ever been.

“She held her hands like this,” Lucie said, showing me. “Like this.”

WHEN IT WAS WINTER, the streets filled up with snow. The pipes in the house froze. I invented a stand-alone heater that turned on only when it was cold. I sat in my workshop watching its light flicker.

Sifu died. Jin came round to tell me. He asked why I had stopped coming to the kwoon. I told him I had killed a man, and that one day I had found I could not bring myself to go to a room across town to repeat the same motions, in rehearsal. Jin laughed. He thought it was a joke. “You are scared you are getting old!” he said.

I did not go dancing. I did not go to dinner parties with Frances and Schillinger. Tommy Dorsey and George Gershwin did not come over for spaghetti. I missed meetings, lying on my back on my bed, imagining machines that did not work.