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9 April 1971:
Lake Shaheen, New York
Are we going to see Daddy? Where is Daddy?
Momma? Where is Daddy?
This day at twilight when the sun appears soft as an egg yolk at the horizon a solitary car is observed descending route 39 into Lake Shaheen from the north. In this dense-wooded landscape in the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains all horizons are foreshortened. Vehicles appear suddenly around curves, rapidly descending into town, though this car, driven by a woman with a blurred face and long streaming hair, is being driven at about thirty-five miles an hour—a careful speed, a calculated-seeming speed as the car approaches the railroad crossing at the foot of the hill.
A quarter-mile to the east, the 5:48 P.M. Chautauqua & Erie freight is also approaching the crossing, much more rapidly.
Say you're the proprietor of Texas Hots Café. Say there's no customer in the café at just this moment, so you've been smoking a cigarette and staring out the front window of the café at nothing you haven't seen a thousand thousand times before. Not noticing still less giving a damn that the window is greasy, should be washed. Not noticing still less giving a damn that the asphalt in front of your café is beginning to crack, bad as the asphalt parking lot of the old train depot across the road; that weeds are growing in the cracks, like unwanted thoughts. Thinking that life is emptiness mostly—you managed not to get killed, blown up, or shot up too bad in the war—now your reward is, this emptiness at twilight of a day in early spring so cold and so cheerless it's indistinguishable from late winter, and even if a few more customers straggle into the café before you shut down for the night there's still this emptiness at the core, an emptiness you'd associate with Lake Shaheen, population 760, except you know it's elsewhere too, and anywhere: a stillness like the stillness between a faucet's slow drips. Yet so crowded sometimes, so much commotion inside your head there are moments when you can scarcely breathe, and you yearn for sleep to fill your head like soft warm concrete. All this while not really watching the car descending the hill toward the railroad crossing except to think with mild reproach No headlights but then it isn't dark yet, only just almost-dark, the sky overhead is vivid with waning sun and roiling clouds blowing down from Lake Ontario twenty miles to the north. You aren't aware that the car you're seeing is Duncan Quade's beat-up 1968 Chevy sedan he left behind when he moved away from Lake Shaheen sometime last summer, nor that the driver is Duncan Quade's wife, Hedy, who grew up around here, one of those Lake Shaheen High girls so pretty, so smalltown sexy-glamorous that guys are all over them from the age of thirteen onward and they wind up married before graduating from high school, next thing they're mothers, and there's no next thing after that. Or anyway, no next thing they can see for themselves. And if their marriages go wrong, what then. But you aren't thinking yet of Hedy Quade or the likelihood that the small tense figure you half-see in the passenger's seat beside Hedy is probably the Quades' little boy, and behind Hedy in the backseat is a smaller child, probably the little girl. You don't know the kids' names: Duncan might've told you, but you don't remember the names of kids not your own.
And you aren't really watching the train yet. Except to note its lights are on.
This is the early-evening train, two passenger cars and the rest freight, coal and oil, the 5:48 P.M. through Lake Shaheen five days a week, that doesn't stop at Lake Shaheen but continues on to Port Oriskany fifty miles to the west. Truth is, you scarcely hear the trains any longer. You opened Texas Hots in 1946, back from the war (France and Italy, 1944–45) with a shot-up knee and a perforated eardrum and the trains passing the café and the shingleboard bungalow at the rear where you and your wife live are no more perceptible than pulse beats in your brain. People always asking how can you sleep through those damned trains and you just shrug, sure you sleep through the trains and so would anybody else in your position, anybody normal. If you'd been asked—as nobody of your acquaintance in Lake Shaheen or among customers likely to come into Texas Hots would ask—possibly you'd admit that you take comfort in the trains, their regularity east-west, west-east along the same tracks day following day. The locomotive whistle long and drawn out and melancholy, the clattering wheels. Vibrating of the earth at your feet. Especially you take comfort in the 5:48 P.M. because it signals the waning of the day and the coming of night which is your best time so you can sink back into sleep, head filling with sleep that no train whistle or clattering freight cars can penetrate.
Except today, a day you haven't yet noted has a date, is to be different. Tonight, you'll have a damned hard time getting to sleep.
Those mare's-tail clouds in the northern sky over Lake Ontario looking as if they'd been torn apart by angry fingers.
"Jesus. What?"
For there is getting to be something wrong. You're seeing it now. The steady speed of the car, the rapid approach of the train. Perpendicular lines, forces. Route 39, the raised railroad tracks. Instinctively you've been waiting for the car to slow. To brake to a stop at the crossing. You've begun to recognize the car, belongs to a local resident, Duncan Quade you're thinking though thinking too that you haven't seen the man in Texas Hots for a long time, nor anywhere in town; you haven't time to think It isn't Quade, even drunk he knows better than to race a train.
9 April 1993:
Institute for Semiotics,
Aesthetics, and
Cultural Research,
Princeton, New Jersey
Is this a mistake, is this a cruel trick. Don't ask.
I am not one to ask such questions.
I'm a scarred girl. I'm a marred girl. I'm damaged goods. I
take what I'm offered, usually. For I am not offered much.
The ticket to the concert was sent to me anonymously. There, in a cream-colored envelope, fine paper stock, waiting for me in my mailbox at the Institute. My name as I'd never seen it, in an elegant old-fashioned script, blue-black ink executed with a felt tip pen—
L Quade
The rest of the address was typed, not handwritten.
I opened the envelope slowly. The secretary had told me there was something "very special" in my mailbox that morning, "looks like a wedding invitation." I'd murmured, confused, thinking that the woman was teasing me, "Oh, I doubt it. Not me."
My hand shook just a little, opening the envelope. There was no return address. The postmark was local. L Quade is not a name I would ordinarily be called in this place.
A single ticket fell out. Fell to the floor. Quickly I retrieved it, a pulse pounding in my throat.
It was for an upcoming performance in a local concert series, held on the university campus. This was a series of distinction which I sometimes attended but the seats I could afford were at the rear of the hall or in the balcony. This seat was C 22, center. A seat priced at forty-five dollars.
"A friend! Someone is my friend."
I smiled. I felt that I was being observed by the Institute secretary, perhaps by others. I wasn't yet suspicious. I wouldn't guess at the significance of the date until another time.
23 April 1993:
Princeton, New Jersey
He's hunting us. We have to escape him.
Hunting she'd always said. Your father is hunting us.
In the early 1970s before stalking had been invented and
promulgated by the media.
I went to the Friends of Chamber Music concert in Richardson Auditorium on the Princeton University campus, there I was shown to my plush-red seat C 22. Never before had I sat so close to any concert stage. Never before in so privileged a position where I would be able to watch a distinguished pianist's fingers at close range.
I arrived twenty minutes early. Basking in the significance of the occasion.
A friend, a friend! Who is my friend?
A young Japanese pianist would be playing that evening. Brilliant but controversial: his interpretations of classical piano pieces, as of difficult contemporary music, were said to be "radical"—"original."
Did I like it that other early arrivals were glancing at me, yes I did. That solitary girl midway in a row of yet-unoccupied orchestra seats.
A girl, you'd be led to think. Not a woman of twenty-eight.
An attractive, rather doll-like girl you'd be led to think. If you didn't come too close.
If the overhead lighting wasn't too bright.
I have to admit, I'd thought about exchanging the forty-fivedollar ticket for something cheaper. My stipend at the Institute— "stipend" was the term, not "salary"—kept me, like most graduate students, at just above the poverty line; and living in Princeton was not cheap. But I refused to give in. No! You will not. This evening is a gift, you have an unknown friend.
I wanted to believe this. I knew better, but still I wanted to believe.
For the occasion I wore a green velvet sheath that fitted my lanky body like a glove. A green velvet headband pushed my glossy black hair from my face. There was something very still and precise about me, like a doll in an upright, seated position; my face was a perfect oval. This oval had been shattered and mended in a filigree of near-invisible cracks, but as long as you remained at a distance—at least eighteen inches, depending upon the lighting—you weren't likely to know this fact.
What has happened to you?
Were you in a car crash?
When did it happen?
In fact it was rare that anyone asked, now that I was an adult. Living in a new part of the country where people tended to be polite, even formal. I'd endured public schools in Nebraska, Arizona, New Mexico and each morning now in New Jersey I woke to the relief of no longer being a child or a teenager; no longer being Hedy Quade's daughter.
Strange, the envelope had been addressed L Quade. In Princeton, at the Institute, I was known as Lara Quade; no one could have known that I'd once been Lorraine Quade and that I'd changed my name as soon as I'd been old enough.
I might have changed my last name, too. But I had not.
He's hunting us. The three of us. His.
After more than twenty years, I doubted this was so. My father Duncan Quade had long vanished from my life. Mostly, he'd vanished from my thoughts. (Though I had a memento of his. Just one.) My mother had fled with us after the accident at the railway crossing and we'd never seen or heard from Duncan Quade since.
At least, I had not seen or heard from him.
We had our separate lives now. Hedy, Ryan, Lorraine/Lara.
Whoever had sent the ticket to L Quade, I assumed he was a music lover and maybe like me he favored the piano. Maybe, unlike me, he played a musical instrument. He'd noticed me at these concerts and possibly he knew me from the Institute where I was a research fellow and just possibly he took pity on me (I didn't want to think this, but it seemed logical) in my cheap balcony seats. He'd seen me from a distance of more than eighteen inches, and he'd liked what he saw. The glossy black hair, the perfectly poised head, an air of something withheld you might misinterpret as depth, integrity.
He was certain to be significantly older than I was and he was
certain to have much more money than I had.
He was certain to be he.
The scars at my hairline were delicate as lace, you'd have to have a magnifying glass to see them clearly. Others, shaped like commas, on the lower part of my jaws and throat, you'd swear were slivers of glass still embedded in my skin.
Still other scars, brutal corkscrew twists of skin, of the sick color of curdled milk, were hidden inside my clothes, and these, on my back, my buttocks, my upper thighs, you weren't likely to see.
Jesus! What happened to you?
Car crash? Fire . . . ?
Still, I liked it that men's eyes drifted onto me sometimes in public places, and snagged like fishhooks. It wasn't my fault, I was blameless. I encouraged no one. I deceived no one. If I seemed to promise something I was not, the misinterpretation was not my own.
"Excuse us, may we—?"
I had to stand, to allow a couple to squeeze past me. The seats in Richardson Auditorium were old, handsomely refurbished but small, and the space between the rows was narrow, as if the old Gothic building had been designed for a smaller species of men and women. The couple took seats C 21 and 20. Beside me, C 23 was still empty.
It was 7:50 P.M. The auditorium was filling steadily. Here and there were younger patrons, very likely music students, for there was a strong music department at the university and many performers and composers locally, but most of these younger patrons were seated at the rear of the hall and in the balcony, not in the front-row seats. Overall, the audience for serious music is an older audience: the average age in Richardson that evening must have been sixty. Patrons were subscribers to the series, well-to-do supporters of the arts. That tribe of Princeton patricians who were Caucasian, very wealthy, tastefully dressed and unfailingly courteous. I understood them to be good people: the kind of people Hedy Quade would identify, with a hurt little smile that hid her anger, as money people.
I understood that they were good people. The couple beside me, white-haired, elderly, fussing with their programs, their coats, the woman's handbag. Not my benefactor. Not these.
The Caucasian-patrician smell of women's discreetly lightened hair, expensive leather handbags, men's aftershave lotion and cologne. Seated among them I wondered if I might be mistaken for one of them: except I was conspicuously alone. If you belong to a tribe you are never alone.
Don't hate! Be grateful.
Scarred marred girl must always be grateful.
I think it must be because my mother had planned for me to die, with my brother Ryan and herself, at the age of six. You learn to measure living, the beat of your pulse, against that other: extinction. Lorraine Quade 1965–1971 chiseled on the child-sized grave marker in a country cemetery in a wedge of upstate New York called Lake Shaheen.
If so I'd have been six years old forever. My brother Ryan would have been nine, forever. My mother, Hedy, thirty-one.
Thirty-one! So young.
He took my life from me. What's left now, isn't me.
It isn't me doing this now. It's what he has made me.
I was sitting in my plush-red seat and I was trying to concentrate on the program, reading about the young Japanese pianist who held the Diplomino from the Conservatorio di Musica in Bologna, Italy, his numerous awards and recitals and music festivals. This evening he would be playing sonatas by Samuel Barber, Bartók, Prokofiev. I was trying to read, trying to concentrate on the words, trying to drive away my mother's long-ago voice.
Remember I love you. You, and your brother.
"Do you come often to this series? My husband and I have been coming for twenty-six years . . ."
The white-haired couple beside me was trying to engage me in conversation. I had the idea that the woman, seated closer than her husband, had noted my damaged/mended face. The man was more likely to have mistaken me for a daughter of their tribe, oddly alone. In my green velvet sheath many times marked down and sold at $12.99 at the Second-Time Around Shop just off Nassau Street, that might in fact have once belonged to a young woman of their acquaintance. In my green velvet headband that gave me the demure feminine look of a pre-Barbie ceramic doll. I tried to be polite but my replies were vague, faltering.
Never never show it. Nothing of what you feel.
For all I knew, maybe these were my benefactors. Wealthy eccentric music lovers who bought blocks of tickets to send out anonymously. If I was disappointed, I didn't intend to show it.
The seat to my right, C 23, was still vacant.
The house lights were dimming. The Japanese pianist appeared, brisk and somber, with a little bow glancing out into the audience as if to check, yes we were there, something alive and expectant was there, to mirror his dazzling performance.
Music is my other world to live in. Where I am not-known to myself. Where I have no memory. Where no voices from the past intrude, nor even my own. There, I become entranced. I am capable of feeling happiness at such times.
I have no talent for music, I think. No voice. Except I can recognize what music is or anyway what music is not: life.
Then, this happened.
A late arrival came, just after the first movement of the Samuel Barber sonata, to sit in C 23. A clumsy figure. Graceless as a runaway truck down a steep incline. He sat so heavily, the entire row of seats shuddered. His knees were jammed tight against the back of the seat in front of him, jarring that row also, provoking people to glance back at him, annoyed. Shifting in his seat, that was too small for him, he poked me with his elbow. "Hey. Sorry."
The dramatic mood of the opening movement of the Barber sonata had been shattered. As if a megaphone voice had overwhelmed a merely human voice. I felt my heart beat in disappointment, chagrin.
I'd wanted to believe that my anonymous benefactor would be sitting in that seat. The measure of my disappointment made me realize this.
The intruder was a youngish ox of a man with unshaven, stubbled jaws and punk style hair. No one associated with the Institute though (possibly) a graduate student at the university, an unorthodox composer or performer. He was panting, as if he'd been running. He gave off a smell like singed hair. His hardlooking head had been shaved like a skinhead's at the sides and back, but the rest of his hair was combed back long and lank and tar colored. His hands were big-knuckled, their backs covered in coarse dark hairs. As the pianist plunged into the second, forceful movement of the sonata, these hands gripped the man's knees as if to keep them from twitching; still, his left foot, close to mine, began keeping the beat, pushing just ahead of the beat. I felt such anger, a flame might have been lighted against my skin. You don't belong here, why have you come here!
I felt the danger of this individual as you feel the danger of standing too near the edge of a precipice.
Though you have no intention to throw yourself over. Yet, you feel the danger as a physical sensation.
I knew the tricks of mental discipline: I'd made myself into an almost purely mental person, since adolescence. I meant to concentrate on the pianist, and on the music; and I did. Avidly I leaned forward in my seat, to avoid contact with the stubblejawed man. I stared at the illuminated keyboard, the pianist's agile fingers. The auditorium was filled with flawlessly executed musical notes like shattering glass. Here was power! Here was beauty. I would ignore the intruder beside me, my heart beat in disdain of him.
No one will cheat me of this.
I could feel the stubble-jawed man making an effort to relax. Hot-skinned, he seemed, and edgy. He must have felt clumsily out of place. He must have wondered why he was here. Now he sat with his arms folded tightly across his chest, holding himself in a kind of straitjacket. There was something wayward and careening about him that reminded me (uneasily, guiltily) of my brother Ryan whom I hadn't seen in years: poor clumsy shorttempered Ryan whose speech became slurred when he was excited, and whose left foot dragged when he walked, the result of minor brain damage.
This man was dressed like Ryan, too. Or what I recalled of Ryan. A well-worn leather jacket, unzipped. Khaki work trousers, hiking boots.
An anomoly, in this genteel Princeton setting.
Yet I managed to ignore him, mostly. The piano music was captivating. By degrees, I might have been alone in the auditorium beyond the brightly lit stage: there, the enormous Steinway concert grand piano dominated, and the figure of the very young-looking pianist with his remarkable flashing fingers. I was beginning to be placated, consoled. This was the place music brought me to. If I can't achieve such beauty I need to know that others can. The third movement of the Barber sonata was an adagio, precisely if rather coolly executed. The last movement was a bright leaping allegro, that seemed to me musically complex, intricate,
and must be enormously difficult for any pianist to play. The percussive forward-motion of the conclusion had the drive of an accelerated heartbeat that left me breathless.
The sonata ended, abruptly. The pianist stood to accept his applause. He bowed, now shyly smiling. How happy he was: you could see it now. That buoyant relief of having made his way through something treacherous.
Beside me, to my annoyance, the stubble-jawed man was clapping his ungainly hands, as if the music had meant something to him. Again his elbow collided with my arm.
"Hey, shit—I'm sorry."
He smiled at me. A twitchy belligerent smile, I thought it. As if he mocked me even as he feigned an apology.
The pianist exited the stage. In the interval before the Bartók sonata, the audience began to hum and buzz with voices.
Beside me, the stubble-jawed man made a show of peering at his program notes. "'Samuel Barber. American composer.' Never heard of him, have you?"
Was he talking to me? I hardly glanced up from my program, nodding a vague cool reply.
"Takes getting used to, huh? That kind of music."
When I didn't reply he persisted. "Cerebal music, is it?"
"Cerebral."
The stubble-jawed man laughed at my correcting him. I couldn't tell if he was laughing at his mistake, or at my Princeton prissiness in correcting him.
"This guy, 'Okado'—'Okada'—he's pretty good, I guess? You heard him play before?"
I had to admit, I had not.
The stubble-jawed man shifted his knees, clumsy as clubs, against the back of the seat in front of him, and another time the woman sitting there glanced around at him, annoyed. He ignored her. He seemed to have taken a definite interest in me, out of boredom perhaps. I wondered that he hadn't left the concert after the first selection. "Weird, a Jap—a Japanese person—playing American music. I wouldn't."
I wondered if I was being prodded to ask: What music do you play, then?
I said nothing. My nostrils pinched against that smell of something singed, and, beneath, a yeastier odor of a man's body, dried perspiration, clothes not recently washed. I was reluctant to look this stranger directly in the face, knowing that's what he wanted. I was a challenge to his masculine vanity. I was possibly a puzzle to him: alone? And is she good-looking, or is there something weird about her face?
I wanted to protest I'm not freaky like you. I belong here.
The pianist returned, and began the Bartók sonata. Bartók! Here was music that could frighten you, it was so percussive, obsessive. The pianist's hands hammered out chords rapid-fire. I thought it must hurt, such music. Perhaps it wasn't music but raw yearning sound. Beside me the stubble-jawed man, the man I wished to despise, stared at the stage and listened intently. His left foot kept the hectic beat. This was music you couldn't not listen to, it raced through you like neutrinos piercing solid objects. The Bartók piano sonata of 1926 was a powerful piece of music but it left me unmoved, only shaken; there was something chilling in its austere authority.
At intermission I thought He will leave, he's had enough.
I wanted this. And yet, I was anxious that the stubble-jawed man should depart, as abruptly as he'd appeared.
But he didn't leave. He stood by his seat, stretching his long legs and yawning. He was nerved-up, restless. This wasn't a rock concert—not quite!—but the Bartók had made his blood race. He glanced about the auditorium, squinting. I understood that he was keenly conscious of me.
On my other side the couple lingered in their elderly way in their seats. Chatting with friends in the row behind them as if the Bartók sonata had passed through their tastefully attired bodies leaving not the slightest trace.
I too stood, stretching my legs. I would have liked to walk up the aisle, I would have liked to pass among the chattering crowd in the foyer where the obsessive hammering of the Bartók piece had rapidly faded and was now not even an echo; there, I might see whether I knew anyone here this evening, and whether anyone knew me. A familiar face from the Institute, perhaps. Lara Quade. Are you enjoying the concert I've arranged for you?
Except my way was blocked.
I didn't want to stumble past the elderly couple, and I didn't want to push my way past the stubble-jawed man, who seemed to want to talk. I sensed an air of belligerence in his manner as if he felt, just maybe, someone was playing a trick on him.
" 'Bar-tók.' He's something, eh?"
I murmured, yes. I thought so.
"You play piano?"
I murmured, no. I did not.
"This 'Princeton.' You live here?"
I murmured a vague yes. It was true, I lived in Princeton for now.
As a research fellow at the Institute, I was a temporary presence. I had no permanent rank, title. We "fellows" laughingly called ourselves seasonal laborers. (In secret, each of us fantasized being kept on, or re-hired at a future time.) Some of us were serious about continuing our academic careers and some of us, like me, had possibly come to a dead end.
The stubble-jawed man stared at me, assessing. "What d'you do? Teach?"
A faint sneer to the word teach.
No one likes a teacher. I knew.
I shook my head ambiguously. Let this guy think what he wished.
Less and less likely now it seemed to me that my mysterious benefactor would identify himself. I had to suppose someone had bought a block of tickets and distributed them arbitrarily. This happened often in Princeton, though never before had I heard of tickets being given out anonymously; usually there was a patron, someone you were meant to thank.
The stubble-jawed man loomed over me. He was easily six feet three or four. Inside his worn mud-colored leather jacket he was wearing what looked like a black, much-laundered T-shirt with the logo of a rock band, unfamiliar to me. Heavy metal, I supposed it. I was reluctant to look at him too closely, knowing that he was watching me.
He was saying, as if this information might surprise me, "This is my first time here. 'Princeton.' I don't live too far away, up the Turnpike, but I never come here. It's not like other places in Jersey, huh?" There was a subterranean reproach to this remark; a craftiness that made me edgy. I so rarely spoke with strangers, I had no idea how to play the game of such casual-seeming yet shrewdly directed speech. For the stubble-jawed man was assessing me sexually, I knew. Yet so long as I rebuffed that knowing, and gave no sign of returning such an interest, I was free and clear of him. I believed this!
I hadn't wanted to be looking at him. Yet I saw a flash of a belt buckle: a silver Z.
He said, disdainfully, "This place, it's kind of old, I guess? Like, what?—a hundred years old? Two hundred?" He meant the auditorium, the elegantly refurbished Gothic building that was like a museum to enter.
I said I wasn't sure. Mid-nineteenth century, probably.
"Where I come from, old is just old. Here, old is a fucking big deal."
" 'Historic.' "
I was surprised to hear myself say this, impulsively. As I'd supplied the word cerebral earlier.
"Yeah, right—'historic.' Meaning M-O-N-E-Y. That's the big fucking deal." The stubble-jawed man laughed harshly, but with pleasure.
I lifted my eyes to his face, smiling. I felt weak suddenly, as if I might faint.
His eyes!—his eyes seemed familiar to me. Very dark and deep-set and rounded like a horse's eyes. There was a look of heat to them, as if thoughts beat hotly behind them; they were so dark as to appear black, and glistened strangely. I might almost have said hungrily. I had to wonder if he'd been noticing the scars at my hairline, beneath the pretty velvet headband; if he'd caught sight of the flurry of comma-scars at my jawline.
His own skin looked roughened, his nose was long and hawkish with dark cavernous nostrils. His mouth was fleshy, sullen-seeming, even when he smiled. For there was something ironic and withheld about his smile. You believe this? Believe me? I'm a nice guy? You can trust me? His eyebrows were coarse and wiry and nearly met over the bridge of his nose, giving him the primitive look of a mask carelessly shaped in clay.
I would think afterward: I didn't want to seem rude to him, that was it. He knew no one else there.
The surprise was, this man wasn't so young as you'd think at first glance, not twenty-five but in his early thirties. (My brother Ryan's age, if Ryan was still living.) His forehead was creased, one of his canine teeth had grown in at a rakish angle, scum-colored. His hot intense eyes fixed on my face, he was telling me how music meant a "helluva lot" to him since he'd been a young kid, music he'd hear on the radio, it was this secret place you could crawl into and hide and nobody could follow. He'd played in a band in northern Jersey for a while but gave it up, that wasn't what he wanted, other people in his face. Music was something he wanted for just himself. For his soul.
I wondered if I'd heard this correctly. I was feeling dazed,faint.
"Like sleeping really hard, y'know? That kind of dreaming, so hard it hurts, it's more real than real life, you don't remember what it is when you wake up but you sure remember— something."
The stubble-jawed man bearing the initial Z on his belt smiled at me as if goading me to say, Hey yes: I know exactly what you mean.
For some reason I said, instead, "But—why are you here, tonight?"
He smiled, shrugging. "Why? Somebody gave me a ticket."
The second half of the concert, a sonata and several short piano pieces by Prokofiev passed in a rapid blur. I was conscious of the pianist's virtuoso playing and yet it seemed to me no more than a disjointed cascade of piano notes. Somebody gave me a ticket. The piano notes were confused with the pulse beating rapidly in my throat and the intimate presence of the man beside me. That smell of something singed, yeasty. I tried not to see out of the corner of my eye how the stubble-jawed man watched the pianist, frowning and grimacing. In the silence between musical phrases I heard his breathing that sounded unnaturally loud.
Somebody gave me a ticket.
The pianist exited the stage for the final time. My hands stung from clapping. I had the choice of following the elderly couple out of the row, or turning in the direction of the stubble-jawed man as he prepared to leave. Unconsciously it seemed, I turned to my right. I saw the man in the aisle, glancing back at me. His big rounded horse-eyes, with their unnatural glisten.
I intended to say nothing to him, simply to walk past him. But I heard my voice lift in a shy, quick question: "You said— somebody gave you a ticket?"
Already he was fumbling in his jacket pocket. He brought out a cream-colored envelope, carelessly folded.
"Yeah. Weird! It came in this, in the mail."
I took the envelope from his fingers, he'd shoved it at me. It might have been the identical envelope in which my ticket had been sent to me. Except the handwritten name was different, of course—
Z Dewe
Beneath this was a typed address, a street in Metuchen, New Jersey. So that was where Z Dewe lived: an hour's drive away.
" 'Z.' For Zedrick."
Zedrick! I smiled at the name.
"Sometimes 'Zed.' "
I understood that I was meant to say I'm Lara. But I couldn't utter the words.
Yet I did something then that I would wonder at, afterward. At the time it seemed so natural I didn't hesitate.
I, too, had brought the cream-colored envelope to the concert, in my bag. In fact I'd been carrying it with me for the past two weeks, as if naively imagining I might see the handwriting replicated somewhere, and could identify it. Now I showed the envelope to Zedrick Dewe, as a child might show another child something of enormous interest to them both. "This was sent to me, with a ticket for tonight's concert."
Zedrick whistled thinly. I liked it that I could surprise this man, he had no idea who I was.
Zedrick took the envelope from me and examined it. I understood that he was memorizing my name, possibly; he'd know now that I could be found at the Institute for Semiotics, Aesthetics, and Cultural Research on Washington Road.
What a pretentious name! I wanted to laugh and assure Zedrick Dewe, yes I knew this was so.
Zedrick said, "Just the ticket inside? No note, huh?"
"Just the ticket."
He checked inside the envelope. To make sure I hadn't missed anything.
He said, "I figured, why not check it out? This thing tonight. It isn't my kind of music usually. But, see, nobody sends me anything, much. Kind of, I live alone. I keep to myself and for sure I don't know anybody in Princeton. But I can't figure it, what it
means."
I said, "Maybe someone sent tickets out arbitrarily. For no reason. Taking names from a phone directory." Not that I believed this, or wanted to believe it.
"Shit, why'd anybody do that? What sense is that?"
Zedrick Dewe was one who didn't like tricks played on him, you could see. He was roused to fury, at the prospect of being perceived as some sort of dupe, even of a beneficent act.
We were leaving the auditorium together. Outside, we descended the sandstone steps with numerous others who glanced at us curiously, especially at tall hulking Zedrick Dewe with his brutish hair, his stubbled jaws and odd clothing. I wondered if anyone from the Institute had seen us. I wondered if my appearance here, with so strange a companion, might be reported back to the Director. By this time I'd nearly forgotten my expectation, or my hope, that my anonymous benefactor would speak to me. I'd all but forgotten my benefactor.
In the presence of Zedrick Dewe, it was difficult to think of a purely notional being.
The night air was damply chilly. I slipped on my trench coat, I'd been carrying over my arm. I noted that Zedrick Dewe didn't help me with the coat as any Princeton man would have done, whether he knew me or not. I thought In his world, you don't touch people casually.
How like my parents' old, lost world. Upstate New York of a bygone era. Only dimly could I recall, I'd been so young a child then.
We were drifting in the direction of Nassau Street. But by an interior route. Like individuals who have no idea where they are headed so long as they remain together. Yet reluctant to leave each other. I might have mentioned to Zedrick Dewe that I lived about a half-mile away, I would be walking back home. Zedrick Dewe mentioned having parked close by. These were isolated remarks. These were remarks encoded with meaning. Swiftly my brain worked but could come to no conclusion. I will have to get away from this man only just not yet.
Crossing now a near-deserted quadrangle of the campus. This, the oldest part of the university. Here there was a flawlessly maintained green, tall trees, eighteenth-century buildings facing one another across a grassy space. Zedrick Dewe was saying, with the swagger of an intimidated man, that he'd "tried school, for a while" but quit because being told what to think, what to do, "pissed me off." I supposed that this was meant to impress me. I waited for him to ask me about the university, but he did not. Through his eyes I was forced to see familiar scenes subtly altered: the picturesque façade of Nassau Hall, illuminated at night by artfully placed spotlights, vivid and unreal as a stage set. Beyond, the yet more unreal Greek-temple façades of Clio and Whig Halls, startling white, like papier-mâché. High overhead, shreds of cloud were being blown across a quarter-moon that shone with unnatural brightness, like neon. I was tempted to tell Zedrick Dewe of the research I was doing for the Director of the Institute: amassing data on the earliest examples of "automata"—
"humanoid" mechanisms.
But I could think of no way in to such remarks. No way that wouldn't threaten a man whom education has pissed off.
I thought It's time: ease away from him.
If he asked me to have a drink with him, I would say Thank you, but—
Yet we continued to walk together. As if we were headed for the same destination. Zedrick Dewe was less talkative now. His manner had become somber. So close beside me, he loomed taller than me by several inches. He must have weighed 190 pounds, approximately ninety pounds more than I weighed. I was beginning to shiver. Waves of exhilaration and dread rose in me, leaving me weak. I was hearing still the rapid-fire hammering of the Bartók sonata. My nerves were taut as piano strings.
If Zedrick Dewe had touched me suddenly, I would have recoiled from him.
We wandered into one of the few wooded areas on the main campus. Along a drive bordered by tall trees. These were evergreens, there was a sharp smell of pine needles in the soft earth underfoot. I led Zedrick Dewe across the grass and around to the rear of the old, fastidiously restored Italianate house that had been the residence of the university's president Woodrow Wilson in an early decade of the twentieth century and was used now for less elevated university purposes. Here was a garden, formal and proper as a funeral, here were curving graveled walks and beds of tulips of many colors that looked, by moonlight, like a single color. "We should go in that direction," I said, pointing toward an opening of evergreens around a corner of the Wilson house, "back to Nassau Street. If—" I happened to touch Zedrick Dewe's arm, the sleeve of his leather jacket. Instantly he took hold of my
wrist. His fingers were strong, closing about my wrist.
"Take me with you, O.K.?"
"Take you—where?"
"Wherever you're going."
The man's voice was urgent, pleading. But his fingers were strong.
Overhead, the quarter-moon had shifted in the night sky. So quickly, the moon moves in the sky. It had become a faint glowing shape nearly hidden by clouds. Wisps of cloud, shreds like broken cobwebs or broken thoughts. If you had not known it was a moon, you'd have had no idea what that curious glowing object was meant to be.
Excerpted from TAKE ME, TAKE ME WITH YOU © Copyright 2003 by Lauren Kelly. Reprinted with permission by Harper Paperbacks, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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