Two-Part Inventions Read online

  His words troubled her, his plans. He would make sure of it. With his contacts, his persuasiveness, his perpetual motion, he would find gigs for her, if not in New York then back in the smaller venues, where the audiences were not quite so demanding or couldn’t afford New York prices. For all she knew he’d have her flying to obscure hamlets all over the country, sending her off into the chilly embrace of panic.

  The following week she tried to get moving. She had to keep her job at the ballet studio and see her students. The trays of coffee and rolls stopped arriving every morning. Obviously Phil thought she had mourned enough. She practiced, but halfheartedly. The worst way to practice, as she well knew. If you can’t put yourself into it, don’t do it at all, Richard used to say. Wait for another day. Do something else, study scores, listen to recordings. Don’t play using half of yourself. Cynthia, on the contrary, believed in putting in several hours no matter how you felt. Don’t let your fingers start forgetting. They’re your most loyal allies. The rest will come back when it’s ready. As in school, there were too many opinions to choose from. She had to decide for herself, and while she leaned toward Cynthia’s view, she couldn’t always carry it out.

  In the afternoons she lay on the couch, going through new scores, looking over the piano works of John Field, the Irish composer famous in his time who created the nocturne form that influenced Chopin. But soon the pages would fall to her lap and she would question every decision she had ever made. Invariably, the interrogation arrived at the decision to marry Philip. It went back all the way to that first coffee with him after the Serkin concert at Carnegie Hall, and oh, the glamour of the place. Who could have imagined what that meeting on the stairs would lead to? Maybe the man she lived with, ate with, slept with, was all wrong for her. Had Elena been right, that day at the Juilliard auditions, when she said he was superficial? Was there really nothing more to him than the self-assurance, the glib words, the easy competence? If she hadn’t been so hasty she might not be lying here on this couch, waiting for him to come home, dependent on his words, his plans....

  But who else would try to help her as he did? No one else could or would get her what she dreamed of, and that she seemed unable to get for herself. She didn’t have the temperament, she’d once overheard her father saying to Gerda. “She looks fine and she can get by on charm for a while, but for the long run she’s not tough enough.” Maybe he had known her better than she imagined.

  Philip had the temperament, she thought as they made love late at night. Here as in everything else he was energetic, managerial, effective, as if he were directing a performance and must make sure all went off splendidly. And Suzanne would think, Why complain of this? He does it so well. He makes me feel so good. He is my husband, after all. It’s not hard to love him as I’m supposed to. Still, the voice she dreaded would intrude in a murmur, even during her pleasure. It spoke not in words at those moments, but in insinuations, images. Maybe she could be someone other than this cosseted creature, object of these lavish attentions. What else or how else she might be, she didn’t know; she hadn’t enough experience. She wondered about other possible lovers, no one she knew, imaginary men who might make bizarre demands, who could elicit something in her that she sensed obscurely but that had never had the chance to assert itself.

  When it was over she retreated back into remoteness, even while folded in his arms or holding him as he lay with his head on her chest. She quickly felt separate. Philip remained present, connected, talking, wanting to maintain the intimacy. Maybe he had no private self to retreat to. The longer they were together, the better she understood that his staying connected was his mode of being in the world: Movement, intrusion, management were his way of affirming his reality, just as long ago, playing the piano and being recognized were hers, and showing her off had been her father’s. She was the instrument of Phil’s becoming real. Her success would make him super-real; then she would truly be his creature, at the piano no less than in bed.

  Two weeks after the recital Suzanne privately labeled a nightmare, when her last student of the day had left, she lay on the couch watching a late-afternoon talk show, something she would have scorned before as wasting precious time. For years, she had regarded every moment as time to be consecrated to her work, her aspirations. There was no spare time to squander. Now, time was plentiful; it stretched out farther than she could see. She could barely manage to practice an hour or two at a stretch, and did so only out of habit and a sense of obligation.

  On the TV screen, a fat, curly-haired, thirty-ish man—his size made him look older, but he had a baby face—with puffy cheeks and sloping shoulders was telling the unctuous host about the miracle of Overeaters Anonymous. It was those rounded chipmunk cheeks that first stirred a sense of familiarity, and then the voice, soft and husky for a man, as if pulverized by the rolls of flesh it had to pass through before emerging. She had heard that voice before. After a few moments, it hit her: Arnie Perchusky from her old block in Brooklyn, whom she had not seen or thought of for almost fifteen years.

  An odd figure to serve as her personal madeleine. The images returned not in a rainbow of revivified sensation, but in waves of distaste and humiliation: Arnie Perchusky, the Cyclone, the sickening plunge, the sea below, the surf curling up like bits of abandoned confetti. The years she could not wait to be done with, years of waiting for her life to start. Waiting for now. And here it was, now, and what was she waiting for?

  That summer evening she was sitting on the stoop of Eva’s house with Alison and Alison’s older brother. Before long, a group gathered. Eva was preening and tossing her head to show off her new feather cut with blond streaks. Her older sister, in an identical hairdo, had just gotten her driver’s license, which she displayed proudly. Alison’s current boyfriend turned up (they changed every few weeks, but there was always someone—it was those phenomenal breasts, the girls agreed), a freshman at Brooklyn College, along with two of his friends. Paula brought a cousin visiting from Philadelphia. The Schneider brothers from around the corner were there, the older one home from his first year at an upstate university, the younger a high school sophomore but reported by Paula to be a great kisser and to keep a stash of marijuana in his underwear drawer. And Arnie Perchusky, the enormously fat boy who lived down the block with his fat brother and sisters. Arnie wore a gray gabardine windbreaker over Bermuda shorts, despite the heavy, humid evening. To hide his fat, Suzanne thought.

  Alison’s boyfriend suggested they all pile into cars and drive to Coney Island to celebrate the end of the term. There were enough of them with driver’s licenses, enough parents willing to hand over the keys. Suzanne drifted along in a mood of lassitude. She rarely joined in group sprees, but she loved the sea and couldn’t pass up a chance to be there. The sea at night, the stars—yes. She could wander off from the others and dip her feet in the surf. In the car, driven shakily by Eva’s sister, Elvis crooned “Love Me Tender” on the radio and they sang along. As always when she heard music, Suzanne couldn’t help playing the notes silently with her fingers, against her palms. A hot breeze blew in the open windows, tinged by salt as they neared the ocean.

  They walked on the boardwalk in twos and threes. Across the wide beach the surf was loud, the waves high and swift, roughing up the few twilight swimmers, who surfaced, shook themselves off, and dived into the next one. Suzanne was heading down the steps to the sand, when the boys insisted they must all go on the roller coaster. The Cyclone, guaranteed to make the girls scream, their stomachs flip. Suzanne refused. The Cyclone terrified her, but the girls urged her on. “You’ve got to try it. Just once in your life,” Eva said. It was Eva’s idea to pair her with Arnie. “He’ll protect you,” she whispered. “You’ll be wedged in so tight, there won’t be any room to fall out.” That was loud enough to be heard, and Suzanne felt sorry for Arnie, who must have noticed the giggles and smirks.

  To silence them, and because the hot night and salt air cast a spell of passivity, Suzanne agreed. It w
ouldn’t last long. She’d hardly ever spoken to Arnie alone; he was simply a fixture of the street, occasionally latching on to their group. Now they were wedged tightly into the seat of the car, the metal bar as it clicked into place making a furrow in Arnie’s soft, thick middle. He smiled wanly, no more eager than she, it appeared, to be on the Cyclone. The flesh of his hip and thigh pressed hotly against her. In the car ahead of them were Alison and her boyfriend, arms wrapped tightly around each other.

  As the car began to move, Suzanne and Arnie exchanged a look of mortified resignation. Suzanne shrugged and tried to smile. At least she didn’t care what he thought of her; had he been a boy she wanted to impress, she would have to pretend to be enjoying herself. With Arnie, nothing mattered. Ten minutes from now it would be over, she would have done it, no one could tease her for being scared.

  The car ascended slowly at a forty-five-degree angle with deceptive calm, but she knew the descending angle would be sharper and rapid. As it paused, quivering at the crest of the highest curve, she looked down at the people strolling about far below, and at others on the Parachute, the Whip, the Ferris wheel. The carousel music was a mere tinkle in the distance, like wind chimes, and way out at the edge of the ocean, the surf was squiggly lines drawn in white chalk. When the inevitable plunge came, they were almost vertical, and her insides fell into her throat. She screamed louder than she thought she could, a monster-movie scream. From then on there was no relief: It was either the plunge or the anticipation. At each plunge, she screamed and thought she would die, yet knew she would not; the contradiction and the captivity enraged her and left her throat tight. In between the plunges she told herself it would not last forever, but the few minutes stretched out surrealistically.

  Arnie did not scream, boys couldn’t allow themselves to scream, although once or twice she heard something like a squeaking yelp. He held his breath and clutched the bar. They didn’t exchange a word. She didn’t even feel an impulse to grasp his hand. Despite his enormous presence, his soft sweating flesh against her, she felt utterly alone.

  The ride didn’t last forever, but the view from above and the sick dizziness did last, a sensation she could call up from memory at will—and often did. The ride came to evoke her entire childhood in Brooklyn: looking down, helpless, at the whirling, chaotic, beautiful world—crowds, motion, music, roiling sea, glimmering first stars in a royal-blue sky—but fearful she would never return to it, trapped by Arnie’s mound of soft inert flesh and, at her middle, by the cold metal bar.

  When they got off, shaking, they edged away from each other, embarrassed—strangers who’d shown each other their fear. All the rest of the evening she could call up the damp warmth of his flesh pressing against her. On the ride home she made sure they weren’t in the same car.

  At some point since that night some dozen years ago, Arnie had apparently discovered Overeaters Anonymous. On the TV show, he did look less fat than in adolescence, but clearly he was not yet finished with the twelve-step program, which he credited with changing his life. He spoke at length, more than Suzanne had ever heard him speak before. “I learned that if you persist, with trust in yourself and faith, you can accomplish anything you set out to do.”

  She switched off the set and sank lower into the pillows. It was more than the Cyclone that Arnie on the screen brought back: It was the entire block where she had grown up, embedded in her, an enclosing frame for everything that had happened since. She had left it as soon as she could, moving uptown to Mrs. Campbell’s apartment near Juilliard. Her parents had fretted, but Richard helped convince them that the long subway ride twice a day sapped her energy. Since then she had returned only to visit, as seldom as she could, but the people in each of the small row houses remained as vivid as they had been back then, a tableau she could not expunge: the Schiffs, who owned the funeral parlor half a mile away and kept a somber black Cadillac in the driveway; the podiatrist and his placid wife, who sat on the porch all weekend and from that high perch smiled beatifically at everyone who passed; the girls she played with, whose idea of the exotic was Eva’s father’s dentist books with pictures of blighted mouths; the kindly Grubers next door to Richard, who in vain set an example of friendliness and said he was a good neighbor. And especially their daughter, Francine, who worked at a publishing company in the city and in the evenings sat on the porch chatting as she waited for her date to arrive: the law student. At some point, Francine had vanished for a year and returned polished and brightened, a blank gloss over her face and words. She had a breakdown, Gary told Suzanne, because her fiancé—remember that fellow who used to come round for her?—ditched her and she fell apart. That girl had no inner resources, Gerda murmured, standing at the sink. After her return, Francine vanished into her bedroom for a while. But soon she was up and working in the city again, not bothering with the suits or high heels any longer. She grew frumpy and sat on the porch in a cotton shift on the summer evenings, smoking cigarettes and staring into space.

  It was the sight of fat Arnie and the memories he called up that roused Suzanne from her stupor. It wasn’t over yet. She’d managed her escape from that cocoon, and she must not go back. She was not Francine; she had inner resources. She’d let Philip make plans and would do what he proposed. If that was why she’d married him, so be it. He promised, and he would keep his promise. It was his way of propitiating the gods who had ruined his childhood. If he did well enough, they would not ruin his adulthood as well. Or was it his way of ensuring his reality, just as her father had had to show her off? She would help him, as she had helped her parents when she was a child.

  She told him she was ready to try again, and he hugged her. “That’s my girl,” and a shudder snaked through her.

  ON THE STRENGTH of her winning the contest, and of that single New York appearance, disappointing but fortunately not lethal, Philip again began arranging appearances for her in small towns all over the East Coast, places Suzanne had never heard of. No matter that it felt like a step backward. She must keep going—that was the main thing. She traveled; she kept a bag packed with necessities; she got used to folding up her concert clothes (she exchanged the severe navy blue dress for a red one that showed more leg and less cleavage) at short notice and heading for the train station or the airport. She got used to nights alone in motels with plaid bedspreads and paintings of dogs and horses on the walls, to bad coffee, to playing on unfamiliar instruments, to meeting people and behaving like a professional—polite, cooperative, self-sufficient. She dreaded each new performance, each new trip. The bookings were in smaller and smaller places: a party for a volunteer ambulance squad; a benefit for a local Little League team held in a high school gymnasium for an audience of unwilling teenagers and their teachers; once, a ticket to her recital was the reward at a silent auction for a nursery school.

  But the panic didn’t change, and this she could not get used to. Every time she came onstage it was the same: the ice creeping up her legs, the sweating, the sense of distance and unreality, her fingers moving of their own volition. She did the exercises, the breathing, the mind games, and she managed to play adequately while battling the panic, but she could take no pleasure in it.

  She no longer yearned for the panic to disappear; it was a part of her, something she carried with her like the nightgown and toothbrush permanently packed. Each time, she thought she couldn’t go through it again, but she kept going because she could see no other path. She was hardly aware that over the years of practice she had developed a will of steel.

  After a matinee performance with a string quartet in Silver Spring, Maryland, a benefit for a Catholic charity, she’d hardly been able to stand up and take her bows, her legs were so shaky. The charity’s director, an elderly man whose finely tailored suit hung loosely on his bony frame, asked if she was all right, if he could get her anything. It was mortifying, he so old and frail, so courtly and concerned, and she so young and strong, barely able to move. She was fine, she said, trying to smile, and yes,
maybe he could get her a glass of water. He was planning to take her out for an early dinner with the other performers, but she pleaded a family emergency. He was disappointed; she regretted offending him but couldn’t explain. They barely spoke as he drove her to the station.

  This must stop, she thought as she left the train at Penn Station. She’d tell Phil she needed a break. She wouldn’t go home right away, not until she could summon her strength. She knew what his arguments would be, and his ceaseless encouragement, which had begun causing her mild nausea.

  “Why don’t you give it up?” she said to him once, nearly a year ago. There was no need to explain what she meant. He looked at her with a stunned face. He was holding a container of milk, about to pour some, and he put it down because his hand shook. “Give it up? This is what we planned from the very beginning. Things are moving along. All you need is patience. Do you want to waste your God-given talent?”

  God-given. She’d never expected to hear a word like that from him. If anything, the talent had begun to feel demonic. “Sometimes plans don’t work out. If I can accept it, why can’t you?”

  “You don’t have to accept it so fast.” He came over and took her in his arms. “I know it’s hard. But try just a little longer. One of these days the panic will simply go away, and then you can do what you were born to do.”

  He didn’t understand. When she was in high school, then at Juilliard, she’d thought she would want to die if she couldn’t play the piano onstage. Now she was ready to relinquish it. Not happily, but with resignation. What she had planned to do all her life was simply not within her powers. She wasn’t one of the lucky ones, like Elena. She had the talent, but not the grit. Very well, she had no choice but to accept it. But there was no arguing with him.