Anne Rice - Violin

"If you know Rosalind and can't see her beauty, you're not worth my time," I said.

"And Faye walks in beauty that is beyond your comprehension."

He gasped. He sneered. He looked stubbornly at me.

"You can't recoguize the power of one as pure as Faye in my memory. But she's there. As for Katrinka, I have sympathy. Faye was young enough to dance and dance, no matter how deep the dark. Katrinka knew things. Rosalind I love with all my heart.

what of it?"

He looked at me as though seeking to read my deepest thoughts, and said nothing.

"Where does this lead?" I asked.

"Little girl at heart," he said. "And wicked and cruel as little girls can be. Only bitter now, and needing of me, and yet denying it. You drove your sister Faye away, you know."

"Stop it."

"You... when you married Karl, you made her leave. It wasn't the painful pages in your Father's diaries that she read after his death. You brought a new lord into the house that you and she had shared-"

"Stop it."

"Why?"

"But what's all this to you, and why do we talk of it now? You're dripping from the rain. But you're not cold. You aren't warm either, are you? You look like a teenage rock tramp, the kind that follows famous bands around with a guitar in his hand, begging for quarters at the doorways of concert halls. where did you get the music, the incredible, heartbreaking music-?"

He was furious.

"Spiteful tongue," he whispered. "I'm older than you can dream. I'm older in my pain than you. I'm finer. I learnt to play this instrument to perfection before I died. I learnt it and possessed a talent for it in my living body such as you never will even understand with all your recordings and your dreams and fantasies. You were asleep when your little daughter Lily died, you do remember that, don't you? In the hospital in Palo Alto, you actually went to sleep and-"

I put my hands up to my ears! The smell, the light, the entire hospital room of twenty years ago surrounded me. I said No!

"You revel in these accusations!" I said. My heart beat too hard, but my voice was under my command. "why? what am I to you and you to me?"

"Ah, but I thought you did."

"What? Explain?"

"I thought you reveled in these accusations. I thought you so accused yourself, you so gloried in it, mixing it up with fear and cringing and chills and sloth-that you were never lonely, ever, but always holding hands with some dead loved one and singing your poems of contrition in your head, keeping them around, feeding their remembrance so as not to know the truth: the music you love, you'll never make. The feeling it wrings from your soul will never find fulfillment."

I couldn't answer.

He went on, emboldened.

"You so sated yourself on accusations, to use your own word, you so fed on guilt that I thought it would be nothing to drive you out of

your mind, to make it so that you..." He stopped. He did more than stop. He checked himself, and stiffened.

"I'm going now," he said. "But I'll come when I please, you can be sure of it."

"You have no right. whoever sent you must take you back." I made the Sigu of the Cross.

He smiled. "Did that little prayer do you any good? Do you remember the miserable California funeral Mass of your daughter, how stiff and out of place everything was-all those clever intellectual West Coast friends forced to attend something as patently stupid as a real funeral in a real church-do you remember? And the bored, toss-it-off priest who knew you never went to his church before she died. So now you make the Sign of the Cross. why don't I play a hymn for you? The violin can play plainsong. It's not common, but I can find the Veni Creator in your mind and play it, and we can pray together."

"So it hasn't done you any good," I said, "praying to God." I tried to make my voice strong but soft, and to mean what I said: "Nobody sent you. You wander."

He was nonplussed.

"Get the hell out of here!"

"But you don’t mean it," he said with a shrug, "and don't tell me your pulse isn't ticking like an overwound clock. You're in tireless ecstasy to have me! Karl, Lev-your Father. You've met a man in me such as you've never seen, and I'm not even a man."

"You re cocky, rude and filthy," I said. "And you are not a man. You are a ghost, and the ghost of someone young and morally uncouth and ugly!"

This hurt him. His face showed a cut much deeper than vanity.

"Yes," he said, struggling for self-possession, "and you love me, for the music, and in spite of it."

"That may be true," I said coldly, nodding. "But I also think very highly of myself.

As you said, you miscalculated. I was a wife twice, a mother once, an orphan perhaps.

But weak, no, and bitter? Never. I lack the sense that bitterness requires.”

"Which is what?"

"One of entitlement, that things ought to have been better. It is life, that's all, and you feed on me because I'm alive. But I'm not so worm-eaten with guilt that you can come in here and push me out of my wits. No, not by any means. I don't think you fully understand guilt."

"No?" He was genuine.

"The raging terror," I said, "The 'mea culpa, mea culpa' is only the first stage. Then something harder comes, something that can live with mistakes and limitations. Regret's nothing, absolutely nothing..."

Now I was the one who let the words trail off because my most recent memories came back to sadden me, of seeing my mother walk away on that last day, Oh, Mother, let me take you in my arms. The graveyard on the day of her burial. St. Joseph's Cemetery, all those small graves, graves of the poor Irish and the poor Germans, and the flowers heaped there, and I looked at the sky and thought it will never, never change; this agony will never go away; there will never be any light in this world again.

I shook it off. I looked up at him!

He was studying me, and he seemed himself almost in pain. It excited me.

I went back to the point, seeking deeply for it, pushing everything else aside but what I had to realize and convey.

"I think I understand this now," I said. A spectacular relief soothed me. A feeling of love. "And you don't, that's the pity You don't."

I let my guard down utterly. I thought only of what I was trying to fathom here and not of pleasing or displeasing. I wanted only to be close to him in this. And this he would want to know he might, he surely would understand, if only he would admit it.

"Please do illuminate me," he said mockingly.

A terrible pain swept over me; it was too vast and total to be piercing. It took hold of me. I looked up imploringly at him and I parted my lips, about to speak, about to confide, about to try to discover out loud with him what it was, this pain, this sense of responsibility, this realization that one has indeed caused unnecessary pain and destruction in this world and one cannot undo it, no, it will never be undone, and these moments are forever lost, unrecorded, only remembered in ever more distorted and hurtful fashion, yet there is something so much finer, something so much more significant, some thing both overwhelming and intricate that we both knew, he and I-He vanished.

He did most obviously and completely vanish, and he did it with a smile, leaving me with my outstretched emotions. He did it cunningly to let me stand alone with that moment of pain and worse, alone with the awful appalling need to share it!

I gave a moment to the shadows. The soft sway of the trees outside. The occasional rain.

He was gone.

"I know your game," I said softly. "I know it."

I went to the bed, reached under the pillow and picked up my Rosary. It was a crystal Rosary with a sterling silver cross. It was in the bed because Karl's mother had always slept in the bed when she came, and my beloved godmother, Aunt Bridget, always slept in it, after the marriage with Karl, when she came, or the Rosary was actually in the bed because it was mine and I had absently put it there. Mine. From First Communion.