Adrienne Celt - The Daughters

A collector , Michelle had said. I could see it. The thing was, when Finn set his toys back down they disappeared — out of sight, out of mind. That was why I felt new each time he turned in the saddle and met my gaze. In a way, I was. And in a way — even though it meant he forgot me each time he turned his back — I liked it.

That night Finn started a large fire in the brick-lined pit in the ranch’s courtyard. The next day we would walk to the amphitheater in the midafternoon, and from there the real party would commence. Although I was not in fact obliged to do more than smile and retreat to my room, I lingered beneath the darkening sky, skirting away from the smoke of the fire.

“I hate white rabbits,” people chanted whenever they saw me ducking another cloud. “I hate white rabbits, I hate white rabbits.”

I thought they were making fun of me, but the wife of an architect I’d ridden with before assured me that it was a kid’s game meant to chase away the smoke. I put a hand up to my throat.

“I just have to be careful. If I inhale too much, I’ll sound awful tomorrow.” I rubbed my fingers down the crest of my neck, where an Adam’s apple would have been on a man. “I can already feel it building up.”

“Of course,” the wife said. She took a sip of whiskey-laced tea from a delicate teacup. All around us people sat on logs, balancing china plates on their knees while the fire illuminated their faces erratically.

Just as I decided that I ought to sneak away, someone brought out a few guitars, and to my surprise the group converged around them. I thought my presence was just a whim of Finn’s — an embellishment, like the china and the beef bourguignon. My concern over tomorrow’s performance was half a put-on: it was true that I didn’t want to inhale too much smoke, but the show I was worried about would take place in New York a week hence. This was the desert. These were desert people, at a party for their wealthy friend.

As the instruments were strummed and tuned, the crowd reshuffled themselves and began to sing. Country songs, old James Taylor, Johnny Cash. Then they veered towards folk songs, or so I assumed anyway, being unfamiliar with absolutely all of them. The songs seemed tied to the singers’ bodies, borrowing rhythm from hands slapping or feet landing against the dirt while couples danced. I settled myself on a stone bench some distance from the fire and watched them. Listened. While two women wove a harmony so sleek I could feel their voices rolling through one another like strips of silk being tied into a knot. While the guitars bantered, and skipped, and ran. While Finn played and sang, a smile opening his face so wide it became another face entirely.

Easy to read. Empty of expectations, save one.

I don’t know how long the music went on, but by the time it stopped the cold from the sky had settled down over our shoulders, dampening the fire. I shivered, sitting lonely on my stone bench, and the shudder in my body startled me properly awake. Standing up, I stretched my arms to the stars and shook out my hair, taking one last look towards the bonfire. Finn was sitting with a guitar flat across his lap, the fingers of one hand stroking the strings, the fingers of the other hand muting them. He stared at me and I stared at him until finally the night was so fully quiet that I walked back to my room just to hear the sound of my footsteps falling.

And, when Finn followed behind me, his.

In Chicago, after ending my call, I’d made a show of powering my phone all the way down and tucking it into my purse. John seemed pleased, growing more gregarious as we ate. When our waitress brought over the dessert menu, he asked her for a split of champagne to accompany our almond praline macarons.

“To what do I owe this sudden joie de vivre?” I accepted a glass from the waitress but didn’t take my eyes off John. He took his own glass, tasted it. Smiled.

“To impulsivity?” he suggested. “Impetuousness? Impishness?”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Infatuation?” I offered. “The attitude of an infantile, indulgent impresario?”

John toasted me. “Indeed. At your service.”

“All right,” I said. “All right.” We sat quietly for a time, listening to a Bach fugue playing over the stereo and sipping our champagne. I let my gaze travel out the window, around the room, but my eyes kept drifting back to John. His hair was thinning away from his temples, something I’d never noticed. It looked good on him. A slight tightening. But I felt a little hollow pocket in my chest, knowing this was something I should have seen before.

When you’re young and your love is new, you map the geography of a person’s body inch by inch. You want to know them so well you could make another version of them, one wrought out of gold and filled with light. And so when you touch your lover, you’re also molding and reshaping their avatar. This rib slightly lower down. The birthmark higher, above the hip. Later, you don’t look so hard. After so much careful scrutiny, you come to believe that you know all the secrets of your beloved’s skin and bones. You run your hands over the golden version in your head, thinking it is the real flesh. Thinking you can do everything by memory. We were only four years married, that night. And yet his hair seemed like a revelation.

“I’m going to tell you something,” John said.

I raised my eyebrows. “What?”

“Oh, I think the story of the man who’ll take you away.” He ran a nail down the stem of his glass. “What do you think this time? Zeus the swan, or Zeus the bull?”

A little sigh of relief escaped me, though I couldn’t have said why. I suppose I thought he was going to reveal something terrible, something that I could never unhear. After all, there had been times lately when I caught John assessing me carefully, slantwise. Like I was a creature invading his home, which he was afraid to startle.

My touring frequency had risen to an alarming pitch — I flew to a different performance every few weeks, sometimes jumping from one to the next and staying away for a month at a time. More. When I came home, John seemed surprised to find me there, doing what I always do. Lounging in bed, reading a score in a state of undress. Picking a plum out of the refrigerator and eating it.

But the stories of my kidnapping were old standards. John used to tell them often, to make me laugh. When he wanted to say that I was beautiful. A god sees a maiden on earth and can’t stand to live without her. Steals her while wearing the skin of a beast and takes her essence for himself.

“Well,” I said, “I’m going to Arizona, right? Some rich so-and-so with a ranch.”

“Okay.” John tilted his head, waiting.

“So the bull, I’d think? Southwestern?” I could see that something about my answer didn’t sit right with John. A little frown crossed his face, then disappeared. “Or maybe Greece doesn’t translate well to contemporary American landscapes?”

“Not an inspired choice,” he agreed. “Maybe it would be better to pick something new. Go down an uncharted road.”

He sat back in his chair, tilting it onto two legs in a way that always makes me nervous. One false move and crash , we can’t come back to this restaurant, ever again. On the stereo, Bach changed to Vivaldi.

“Someplace,” John continued, “remarkable.”

“All right,” I said. But I felt, again, that little shiver.

The wonderful thing about Bach is that his music always says what it means — his exploration, his sense of exercise, is plain in each line of notes as they ascend and then descend in turn. And in Bach’s case, clarity is not at odds with transcendence. They are one and the same: a pure thought, a wordless feeling. Vivaldi is more of a piece with the backways and canals of Venice. His tone is light and seems to follow — as his titles promise — the seasons. But under the sunlight of it, under the whiff of clean snow, I’ve always felt something lurking. People laugh at me when I tell them this, but I maintain that Vivaldi is untrustworthy.