Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

Then again, he could nuzzle into Brigitte — he nuzzled — and smell her perfume and sweat and want desperately to kiss the string of muscles that stood between her neck and shoulder. So. They could afford a nurse. So they would work it out.

But her playing really was so bad. She knew it was bad, Julian was almost certain, but it was impossible not to wonder. And it was impossible, wondering this, not to think of Cousin Bea’s playing. She had been as gorgeous a pianist as Brigitte was a woman. Julian had tried to let her exit tonight roll off him, tried to focus on Brigitte, but Bea had a way of haunting him when they were in the same house, and Brigitte’s neck was reminding him of Bea’s arms, the way they’d been before the baby, that era so starkly ripped from this one that Julian could almost smell it, summer, boxwoods, saltwater-soaked towels. Before the baby, there had been a length of flesh at Bea’s upper arms, just at the edge of her underarms, secret but not quite, and as she played Julian would watch this flesh, taut and shivering with her movement, and he would imagine, if she were to stop playing and lift her arms a bit more, the scent. This was his first fantasy of a sexual sort, which embarrassed him, because he assumed that other men did not desire women’s armpits. Then he had asked her to marry him and left for school and come back to find her stuffed into the costume of a girl-woman expecting a child, all of her puffed, her skin marked with tiny pocks, those arms bloated, undone, and she seemed either to have no awareness of this or not to care, or Vera had been dressing her, because she wore a sleeveless dress with wide straps that only accentuated the tragic heft of her new arms. And now, ten years later, though she was skinny as a stick, her arms still bore the imprint of that time — they hung, the skin slack, so opposite Brigitte’s tight belly when she undressed at night, the smooth, hard earth she offered up to his hands so that he could feel, if the timing was right, the jostling of their baby. Brigitte said she knew which were kicks and which punches but to Julian they were all the same — they were the baby, saying hello, hello. He was elated and terrified, watching Brigitte’s stomach jump.

In Paris, before he’d met Brigitte, the pregnant Bea filled his mind. The most upsetting thing, somehow, was that within all her foreign, wobbling flesh, her face had looked younger than it had in years. She looked about twelve, he thought, the age she had been when he first noticed that she was a girl. Maybe seeing her next to Vera, who had aged so rapidly that summer, accentuated this effect — still, Bea seemed to have lost something, not only in years but in strength. She walked into his dreams as a six-year-old crying for some small treat she’d been denied, crying about how it wasn’t fair, pleading with Julian to make her case to the grown-ups, but Julian, unable to discern whether the treat had been kept from her because she’d done something bad or because his aunt Lillian was in one of her moods, unable to tell how he might be punished if he helped her, did nothing.

Vera had told Julian that Bea had been forced, but Julian couldn’t bear to listen to his mother talk about Bea in such intimate terms and besides, he couldn’t quite believe her. Bea had always been so stubborn he couldn’t imagine anyone making her do anything — and more than that, he could easily imagine Bea wanting to do what she had done. He had felt her turn his sloppy kisses into a worldly sharing of tongues, felt her teeth find his lower lip. Her wanting had been building for years.

Oakes said it was all bullshit, that if a girl couldn’t keep her legs closed she was asking for it, but Julian didn’t think he believed this either.

All he knew was that he missed her and blamed her.

In Paris, Ira wrote to him. I hope you’re fine, I figure you should want to know… The words “should want” brought tears to Julian’s eyes — he felt his father in front of him looking straight into his heart, his missing, his general feelings of lack, the number of times he used the phrase on himself, should want a different girl, should want to drink more heavily, should want what you have. He should want to know, wrote Ira, that his cousin had had a “break” of some kind. I am told of no official diagnosis, you know Henry and his secrets though really it’s Lillian who drives the hush-hush train, claims she wants to create less drama when of course she wants more, but I gather it was of the nervous or hysterical variety. Ira didn’t know or wouldn’t share many details. He wrote that Bea was resting now at a very upright kind of place, I do believe they call it a “hospital” these days, there are pianos in every parlor, I went to visit, passed on your regards, hope you’ll forgive me, but Bea-Bea refuses to play.

What was it Ira wanted Julian to forgive? That he spoke to Bea on Julian’s behalf? That Bea wasn’t playing piano? Or that Ira told him about this not playing? It was a bewildering thing to learn — harder to imagine, in some ways, than an asylum.

In his mind, in Paris, Bea continued to play. She had lost the weight. She looked her age again, tired but lovely in her uncommon, dark way, her face tilted over the keys as she worked out some problem. Julian felt as if he were the one who had discovered Bea’s loveliness — he hoped and also worried that no one else would ever see it. He wondered if in her eyes now there was some sign of her breakdown. He looked out across a French café and one or two of the women looked back and he asked himself: if they were crazy, would he know?

Even more troubling was another question, grown out of silence, what Ira did not say: that Bea’s baby had been born. Julian left in June, when Bea’s walk turned heavy — she had to have been nearly as far along as Brigitte was now — but he heard nothing from home until September, when Ira wrote to tell him that Vera had died. Don’t even think of coming back, you won’t make the service and besides she wouldn’t have wanted you to abandon your work. There was nothing about Bea, though she had to have had the baby by then. Julian forgave the omission. He assumed his father wasn’t thinking clearly. He himself was bushwhacking through the news of his mother’s death: one day he didn’t believe it; the next he forgot; the next he left his colleagues at their midday coffees and wandered the streets, indulging his isolation among the foreign faces until, finally, he cried. But then he got the second letter, about the asylum, and the silence about the baby became more pronounced, a black scrim he parted only to find more blackness. He dwelled there, trying to grow an explanation. He knew the silence was meant to mean that everything went as planned, birth, orphanage, etc., but he couldn’t help feeling it meant just the opposite, for those items alone, he thought, would not have thrown Bea so profoundly off course. She was too stubborn, her ambition huge. (And outsized, if Julian was honest, for she was excellent but not a prodigy, not Amy Beach.) “I’ll get to Symphony Hall or die trying,” she liked to say with a studied drollness that was easy to see through.

But he had been in the business of checking facts (along with dismantling them, when necessary); he knew that a feeling was not a fact. In his letter to Ira, he wrote, Everything went smoothly with Bea’s condition, I assume? knowing as he sent it off how vague and cowardly his words were. Months passed before Ira wrote again and he made no mention of Julian’s question — Bea, he said, was at home again, better, apparently, though Lillian had not yet allowed him to visit.

Julian rooted at Brigitte’s nape. She was playing “Grand Old Flag” now, leading the group in her scratchy soprano, “The emblem of / The land I love!” She was so proud of having learned these words. Julian reminded himself that when he was back in New York, living his life, working at his uninspiring but entirely respectable work, scaling each day’s minor pinnacles and faults, he rarely thought of Bea. In a couple days he and Brigitte would go back and set up the nursery and all this, Oakes and Rose, even Ira — though part of Julian wanted to take his father with him, his thinning calves where the hair had fallen out or rubbed away, his fingernails, their half-moons the pale pink of a baby girl’s bonnet — would fade. Brigitte jiggled on his lap, mashed his femur, demanded he pay attention. Still, he could not shake the panic in Bea’s eyes when he’d asked her to play. Tomorrow, he decided, he would take her aside in a quiet moment and tell her he was sorry, say it simply, I’m sorry about the piano, just that, not making her explain. I’m sorry, and walk away. Let her be. Stay away from the silent gap.