Evenings at Five Read online

  Rudy’s chair again

  Perhaps she could handle one more deserving note. Oops, this one was six months old, from the student of Rudy’s who gave him the brass elephant.

  I was in the practice room one afternoon improvising a tune when my professor stuck his head in and said, “Young man, you’d do better to go up to the library and listen to some Beethoven.” I went on improvising, though my spirits were dampened, and after a while Professor Geber stuck his head in the door and said in that unforgettable voice: “Try it in B-flat, it might work better.” It did, and I transferred to his class. I am the one who gave him the brass elephant when he retired. He wrote me a letter I will always cherish, saying he kept it on his desk at home and every time he touched it he thought of me.

  That one will have to wait a little longer, Christina thought, choking up. I can’t rise to it tonight. Lauren’s note had brought back their whole opening scene, like having time’s tail whip you in the face.

  Christina’s study phone

  Chapter Eight

  That cold and rainy afternoon in June of 1972, cocktail time in the fifty-five-room mansion at Saratoga Springs. The artists in residence, in jeans or other studiedly funky getups, are gathered in the downstairs library, a fussy Victorian room with velvet furniture and novels by late-nineteenth-century popular authors and volumes of poetry by Henry Van Dyke. There’s a lady celebrating her eighty-first birthday, a novelist who writes generational novels about Jewish families in Brooklyn, and she’s wearing a blue-and-white patterned dress and nice jewelry and has stocked the bar with bottles of Scotch, bourbon, gin, rum, and white wine, along with the appropriate mixers, so all can have their choice of libations. There are also little dishes of nuts and pretzels, set out by the octogenarian novelist, whose name is Zelda.

  Christina, wearing brown strap sandals with stacked heels, bell-bottomed khaki jeans with a button fly, her grandmother’s gold-and-seed-pearl pendant, shaped like a tiny grape cluster, hanging demurely on its fragile chain just below the V of her faded salmon-colored T-shirt, has arranged herself, mermaid style, on a velvet chaise longue the color of saffron, and sips a Scotch and water, trying to look like a reserved novelist shrewdly summing people up. She celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday (prime rib and two beers) three evenings before at a Ramada Inn in Erie, Pennsylvania, en route to this artists’ retreat, where she has been invited to stay for two full months. On the door of her motel room was a decal of a smiling masked thief tiptoeing away with a bag over his shoulder: PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE VALUABLES IN CAR.

  Although she was exhausted from her all-day drive from Iowa City, where she was on tenure track at the university, she dragged herself out to her blue 1970 Mustang, the car she would still be dreaming about as her ur-car thirty years later, and unloaded the rest of her valuables: her blue IBM Selectric (which she would belt into the Mustang’s bucket seat on the passenger side and drive off with in high dudgeon every time she and Rudy had a big fight for the next ten years, until both machines were replaced and the fights got less dramatic); two months’ worth of ribbons and correction tapes; her cheap typing paper and her two reams of twenty-pound bond; her Webster’s New World Dictionary, College Edition; her brand-new hardbound Roget’s International Thesaurus, Third Edition (“You look so happy with your purchase!” a professor’s wife had called to Christina as she came out of Iowa Book and Supply, and Christina will often think of that woman in years to come when she’s opening her taped-up, threadbare old standby to find a better word, or track down one she’s forgotten).

  Christina clinks the two ice cubes in her Scotch and water and sums up her fellow artists. Some are sweet but not very interesting; most, including herself, are still hungry strivers, a few, including a sneering nasal-voiced twelve-tone composer who told her melody was the enemy, are downright obnoxious. Only old Zelda seems secure in her bounty.

  Since arriving at the mansion, Christina has written fifteen new pages on her novel about three generations of women. She is on page 149 of the book, part one, the grandmother’s story. Part one takes place in 1905, only twelve years after this mansion was built. The scheming housekeeper who will marry the father and steal the two sisters’ legacy has just walked in the door of the farmhouse, wearing her black bombazine dress and carrying her carpetbag. Christina will make herself finish this section, getting through the night the grandmother’s sister runs away with the villain in a traveling melodrama passing through the southern mountain town. Then on to part two, the mother’s story, though the author is dying to get to part three.

  The villa, the orphanage, the factory

  Years later, part one will exist only in typescript in the university archive where Christina has deposited her papers. Part two will never get written. While still at the mansion—Christina and Rudy having burned their bridges and made public their intentions (too public, according to the twelve-tone composer, who was reported to have added, “But the Chosen People work fast”)—Christina will abandon the grandmother’s and the mother’s generations and start the book all over again in present time, writing in a different way: filling in and rounding out as she goes, attending to the sensibilities of the moment rather than trudging chronologically from preplanned point to point. While still at the mansion, Rudy will pack in his tongue-in-cheek attempts to outsmart the Boulez crowd and instead begin a major choral work of sweeping emotional grandeur based on William Blake’s “Four Zoas,” to which Christina has introduced him. Before she has to leave the mansion to resume her teaching duties in Iowa, Rudy will have sketches of the first two songs to play for her: “It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer sun,” and “O, Prince of Death, where art thou?” She will leave her volume (The Poetry and Prose of William Blake) behind with him in Saratoga Springs, and it is to reside on his shelves in the three houses they live in for the next twenty-eight years.

  Toward the end of the cocktail hour, there is a sudden flurry in the library, a galvanizing of the room’s molecules as a tall red-haired man blazes in like a brushfire.

  “So, Zelda, what’s new?” he demands in a voice lower than God’s, and the old lady murmurs something confidentially in his ear as she turns away from the room to mix his drink. Just neat Scotch, he tells her, it’s been an awful two days, he’s been in Manhattan doing a recording session with a bunch of tone-deaf fools. (“There’s a new writer here from Iowa” is what Zelda has murmured. “She’s nice, though she poses a little.”)

  “That’s the composer Rudolf Geber,” says a novelist named Lauren, who has joined Christina on the velvet chaise longue. The twelve-tone composer, standing above the women, says in his snide nasal voice: “He’s very arrogant.”

  Christina looks over to see if the arrogant composer in his yellow polo shirt with the glasses jammed in the pocket has overheard the remark. He’s standing next to Zelda, looking straight at Christina from under his lowering shaggy eyebrows. (“I find you the most fascinating person I have ever met,” he will tell her ten days hence, slapping at his and her mosquitoes with his free hand as they walk arm in arm around the lake, “and I’ve got a good notion to throw everything else out the window, except my work of course. It would be the intelligent thing to do, and I’m the sort to do it.”)

  At dinner, he sits down beside her and begins plying her with questions. His mind ranges all over the place like a searchlight, seeking out the corners where she usually has to play by herself. If arrogance is the refusal to squander yourself on the unpassionate and the unfascinating, then he is arrogant. But toward her there is a generosity of spirit she recognizes as rare, an attention that is larger than self-consciousness. The world around them is soon canceled, but nevertheless, after dinner, when he asks Christina to join him for a walk on the terrace, she feels something close to terror and says she has to go upstairs and work some more.

  As she climbs the baronial staircase to her room, she can’t resist looking back at him. He has opened the French doors and gone outside by himself. Back and fort
h he marches on the blustery terrace, as if he owns the place, red hair rippling in the wind, yellow shirt blazing through the gloaming, canvasing the lay of the land from under his shaggy brows.

  It’s as though he’s known exactly the moment she will look back. With a sweeping motion of his arm, he is summoning her to change her mind and join him. She can see his mouth shaping the words: “Come out.”

  She manages a nervous wave and keeps climbing the stairs. Safe in her room, she brushes her teeth with a tingly spearmint toothpaste and settles down in her bed to read some more of Daniel Deronda. Eventually she turns out the light and falls asleep. She dreams that she is walking along a street with her present lover, the one who awaits her back in Iowa City. Suddenly she looks up and there is the arrogant red-haired composer, standing in an open upstairs window filled with green plants. He is motioning to her: “Come up.”

  “Sorry,” she says to the lover. “I have to go.”

  Facing south at kitchen sink in morning

  Chapter Nine

  Christina wandered into Rudy’s study and turned on his desk lamp. She trailed her fingers along his closed Yamaha grand (he had bought it the day after he watched Laurence Olivier’s deathbed scene in Brideshead Revisited: “What am I waiting for? If not now, when?”).

  She sat down at his desk and stroked the cool flanks of the brass elephant, perusing the day’s junk mail she had placed on Rudy’s desk earlier, an indulgence she continued to allow herself (along with his recorded telephone message, which she could not bring herself to erase).

  Today’s mail that had not needed to be forwarded to Rudy’s executor had included a letter from Verizon, with its priceless boast in red on the envelope: WE HAVE PULLED OUT ALL THE STOPS TO GET YOU TO COME BACK!

  Christina gave an appreciative snort and slid the envelope beneath Rudy’s Seiko watch, still on Daylight Saving Time from last April, and admired her arrangement. The composition of the two objects gave her a visceral satisfaction, perhaps akin to that experienced by her grave-neighbor-to-be, Gertrude von Kohler Spezzi, when she had scooped out another inch of belly from a stone torso.

  Bud announced his return from the great beyond. He shot through the door when she opened it, and protested angrily when she didn’t follow him to the kitchen but instead flung herself out into the freezing December evening.

  “Ah, Christ, Rudy, enough is enough!” Christina yelled. “Verizon wants you back and so do I!”

  A lonely dog answered from somewhere below. She returned to the house and lit some candles, humming a swatch of an unidentifiable hymn. She caught herself humming almost constantly now, as if to compensate for the abrupt withdrawal of music from her life.

  She picked up the cat’s dish, scraped off the dried food, rinsed it and placed it in the dishwasher, got a clean dish, opened a can of Salmon in Chunks for Feline Seniors, making a little pas de deux with Bud as he wound himself in and out of her legs.

  Only after he had flattened his elegant tail and hunkered down to take nourishment did she genuflect on one knee and gaze beseechingly into the crannies of the wine rack.

  A last bottle of Gigondas, placed there months ago by Rudy’s living hand, suddenly materialized and nuzzled its neck into the welcoming curl of her fingers. (“Enjoy a glass of wine with friends,” Dr. Gray had said, “but I’d be careful when you’re home alone.”)

  No, it’s not easy, my love, when you’ve outgrown or outlived all your authority figures. But you’re strong. I remember the time I picked up your hand in the coffee bar in Saratoga Springs. They were playing that popular tune stolen from the Mozart G-minor. We had just decided to set fire to the status quo and be together for the rest of our lives. “Your hand is astonishingly soft,” I told you, “but the grip is like steel.” You’ll work it out, if I know you—you’ll make your own rules. The Cope palled and now you’ll invent your own rituals.

  “Ah, Rudy, Rudy, Rudy.”

  Assuming he was the one being addressed, Bud answered with an upbeat Siamese syllable.

  “You couldn’t walk around the house anymore without stopping for breath, but you could still pop the cork on champagne and open a bottle of wine.”

  Bud vouchsafed another syllable and then segued into his “going out” command.

  (“Don’t look at me like that. I want a decision on your part. Just make up your mind and I’ll do whatever you ask. You want to sit there. All right.”

  . . . the pasha’s daughter’s glass

  Christina had been in her study one summer morning when Rudy’s voice, an octave below God’s, came floating up to her. He was standing at the front door, reasoning with Bud, who was deciding whether or not he wished to go out. She had snatched up a pencil and scribbled the words on the yellow pad beside her computer because of their quintessential Rudy-ness—she knew they would give her a pleasure and a pang to reread someday.)

  Christina accompanied Bud back to the door and he swished out expectantly into the star-filled winter night.

  Back in the kitchen, she reached into an uppermost corner of the cupboard and eased forward Rudy’s cordial glass with the etched grapes, given to him by the pasha’s daughter in Cairo. She drew forth its elegant shape, held it up to the light, then wiped it lovingly with a fresh dish towel, the way Father Paul wiped the chalice with the purificator after communion.

  Across the street from Christina’s childhood home had lived a reclusive old lady, all by herself, in a big ocher stuccoed house, half hidden by overgrown shrubs. Mrs. Carruthers. Mr. Carruthers had been dead longer than most people’s memories. Sometime after five each evening, Mrs. Carruthers’s middle-aged son, Freddie, who worked at the bank, would park his black Packard in his mother’s driveway and dart behind the shrubbery carrying a brown paper bag twisted at the top. A half hour or so later he would emerge, carrying the same bag, twisted at the top, and drive away. Everyone knew what was in the bag and everyone knew the pact Mrs. Carruthers had made with her solitary life. The bag contained a bottle of wine. Inside the house, Freddie uncorked the bottle, measured exactly half of its contents into his father’s old cut-glass decanter, poured his mother her first glass, and drove off with the recorked bottle to his own house, which he shared with another bachelor who worked in the library. The next evening, Freddie would arrive punctually and pour the rest of the previous day’s bottle into the decanter. On the third evening he would bring a new bottle and start the process over again.

  “Well, the sun has just set over the yardarm,” Christina’s mother would announce when Freddie’s Packard pulled in across the street.

  “Do you think they buy it for her by the case or what?” Christina’s grandmother wondered.

  “They certainly can’t buy anything decent around here,” Christina’s mother would say. “They probably stock up when they go on their little trips to Atlanta.”

  Rudy had loved this story and often told it to people. He was fascinated by southern speech and manners and the secrets they covered up yet didn’t cover up.

  Christina measured exactly one full portion into Rudy’s cordial glass. Then she recorked the Gigondas (which Rudy had chosen because it was called “Oratorio”) and scrutinized its remaining level. Four evenings’ worth, if she was careful. (This advice is included in the price of the story.)

  “And then I’ll go from there, creating my own rituals. Taking possession, in nightly increments, of all you meant to me.”

  For the second time since Rudy’s death, Christina sat down in his magisterial Stickley armchair on the other side of the fireplace.

  Christina’s sofa, Rudy’s chair

  Chapter Ten

  The first time in the chair had been back in April, just after Christina had finished with her seven days of shiva-salons and was alone again in the evenings.

  Father Paul and Eliza, a parishioner she especially liked, had showed up around five to see how she was getting on, and after a few minutes of warm, intelligent, dry-eyed conversation with them, Christina found hersel
f whooping and wailing and totally out of control.

  “I just wish I knew where he was,” she managed to blurt between sobs.

  “Have you prayed?” asked Father Paul.

  “I’m not sure I can.”

  “Have you asked Rudy to help you?”

  “No.”

  “Have you read the Burial Office?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to do that now?”

  “Yes.”

  While Father Paul went out to his car to get his Bible and The Book of Common Prayer, Eliza snuggled up next to Christina on the sofa and wept with her like a sister in grief. A year ago Eliza had had to leave her dying father’s bedside in England in order to fly home to her husband, who had just had a stroke.

  “If only I had known it was our last night together,” Christina choked out, “I would have stayed with him.”

  “I know, I know,” said Eliza. “You wanted to be there. All this time you’ve been with him and you feel you let him down at the end. You feel like the disciples did about falling asleep in the garden.”

  “Where should I sit?” Christina asked Father Paul when he returned.

  “Where would you like to sit?” he asked.

  And that was when she chose Rudy’s chair.

  Father Paul dropped cross-legged to the floor like a yogi and spread his open books out on the altar of the coffee table. Eliza sat in the black leather chair, which, for some reason, unlike its matching sofa, had escaped the ravages of the cats.