Necessary Lies(16)
Her clothes took just a few hangers in William’s closet.
She loved watching William move through the kitchen in his red apron, among the scents of food, adding herbs to the steaming pots, pouring wine into them, setting the timer, turning the roasts, lighting cognac on steaks. Foods had their own chemistry, he said, there was a science of mixing tastes, a sensitivity to the palate that had to be trained and then indulged.
She touched the lids of his musical boxes, with their brass, ebony and mother-of-pearl inlay, turned the brass keys to listen to the tunes of Weber, Mozart, Bellini. He had repaired them all, she learned, big and small, fascinated by the simplicity of their mechanisms. All that was necessary was a spring, a cylinder with steel pins that would lift and suddenly release the tuned steel teeth, and a brake of sorts. “Mechanical music, a challenge for the human mind. Clarionas, multiphones, hexaphones, Violano-Virtuosos.” His eyes sparkled when he showed her his treasures, opened the boxes to point to the perforated paper roll, the Geneva stop-work that prevented the springs from overwinding. These air brakes as he called them had parts with funny names, the governor, the butterfly, the flyer, the worm.
“Play them for me,” she asked and he walked around the room winding them for her. The bells, the chimes, the soft tunes filled the room, and she laughed and clapped her hands, delighted. When he was away, she would open his violin and touch the strings, the black pegs, the smooth black hollow where he rested his chin. He had told her that violins remember, that when they were played with mastery for a long time the wood captured the exquisite sounds within itself, kept them for the future. “Nothing else matters, nothing but love,” she whispered into the resonance holes and laughed.
In the evenings, lying in bed, hands behind his head, William watched her as she moved around the bedroom in her ivory lace nightgown, one of the many presents he gave her. “You are so beautiful,” he murmured and she felt a pulsating, throbbing warmth rising inside her, crouching between her legs. After they made love, when his muscles tensed and when his head fell against her neck, she listened to his breath, shortened and raspy, broken by the sighs of pleasure, and then she listened to the beating of his heart.
“It will hurt,” William told her. “It always does. But we will be all right, won’t we?”
“Yes,” she said. “We’ll be all right.”
She did not think of it much until then, the pain of parting with Piotr, breaking up her marriage. With William beside her she was happy, blissfully happy.
In the first week of December she dictated Piotr’s number to the operator. By the time he picked up the phone her heart stopped a million times, a torrent of little deaths. Her palm was sweaty, and she gripped the receiver too hard. She was to remember this for a long time afterwards, the spasm, the tingling of her hand.
Piotr didn’t understand. “You’ve met someone? You are not coming back?” he asked, as if she were talking of something entirely impossible, ridiculous even.
She had to repeat, for the connection was poor, the buzz of static overwhelming, and then there was the echo that made her hear her words as if they were spoken into a vacuum, returned to her before she had finished speaking. It humiliated her that he didn’t understand. In her mind she had already altered the past, made him expect her desertion, and his surprise was an affront, a slap on the cheek. How could he not understand? How could he not see it coming? Did she pretend so well? Feign her happiness with him, her love? For she must have feigned it. If she truly loved Piotr, she would not be in love with William now. Would she?
Marie, of course, did not think so. “You are not the first woman, darling, to discover you can love two men at the same time.” But Anna could not believe it.
Now, with Piotr at the other end of the receiver, Anna did not know how to find words sharp enough, words that would make him hear, that would make him understand.
“Please. Try to forgive me,” she said. “I didn’t think it would happen, and I can’t explain it. It’s all my fault. I’m sorry.”
William was in the other room when she made the call. They were still unsure of their territories, still learning to judge what could be demanded and what should be left unsaid. He paced the living room floor. He could hear her speak, but he could not understand what she was saying. Her voice, he would tell her later, seemed to him all consonants, sharp, whistling, a shiver.
Piotr must have understood finally, for he told her to suit herself. “I haven’t really known you, have I?” he asked, and then she heard a muted curse and a slam of the receiver.
She wept the whole evening. She let William rock her to sleep, give her a tall glass with gin and tonic. She drank hastily. Sleep was an escape, long, deep, incoherent, filled with the images of the world disconnected, hands, knees, the warmth of someone’s skin. Wetness. The pillow was wet when she woke up, in the middle of the night, alert.
She slipped out of the bedroom, quietly not to wake William up. In the credenza drawer there was an old packet of cigarettes she had spotted a few days before, a leftover from an old, discarded habit. The window in the living room had a stained glass panel, and she sat in the wicker armchair, legs curled up, staring at the grey patterns of squares and circles. The taste of smoke surprised her; she had not smoked since that day, thirteen years ago when she met Piotr on Partisans’ Hill. It hit her lungs with a force she had forgotten. Her brain swirled. She inhaled the smoke deeply and let it out. Another long drag, the glowing tip sparkling and fading in the dark. She sat like that for a long time. Cars passed, the lights made patterns on the ceiling, flashes of light, one chasing another. She did not move. In the morning William found her with her head resting on her arm. Asleep.