Angels Go Naked Read online

  Margy thanked her, put the number in her purse, but did not make the call. First, she needed to understand. She needed to see Ann one more time, from a distance, preferably. Maybe that would be safe. Maybe then the thing that happened when you looked at her would not, and she would understand, why all their lives arranged themselves Ann’s way, as if they were the notes and she was the melody.

  Christmas Eve, Margy played chess with her father, which he had taught her as a child, but she was too sick to concentrate, and he won both games. Humming happily, he went off to bed, and she sat waiting in the ornate living room, still decorated in her mother’s taste, Persian rugs and heavy velvet drapes and lamps held up by enslaved caryatids (“early sadomasochist,” as Rachel’d labeled it). When she could hear nothing but the antique clocks, ticking out of sync, she eased her coat out of the closet, and the bolt out of the door.

  Flagging a cab was easier than she’d supposed, with the neighbors all returning home, and she was early for the service at Holy Cross. The cathedral was already nearly full, rows churning with genuflection, kneeling, crossing, touching lips, and she took up a position to one side, beneath a statue of the Virgin, plaster fingers open downward as if beckoning the crowd to climb up into her arms. In an organ loft somewhere above, someone was playing Bach’s most schmaltzy fugue, hamming it up with big vibrato on the bass, while in the aisles people streamed both ways, like refugees from war, out toward the doors and in for midnight mass. Their coats were black and brown and muddy green, with sober scarves and hats, and when Ann’s head emerged from beneath the outer arch, hair glowing like ripe wheat and freshly cut to brush the shoulders of her camel-hair coat, she seemed to light the air around for several feet.

  Margy pressed back closer to the wall. She hadn’t forgotten how beautiful Ann was, but memory could never quite live up to her. Henry’s shoulders framed her head, wide and straight in a navy overcoat, with Rachel tall as he was next to him, looking strangely wrong in a lace collar, wool coat, and heels. None of them had time to glance across the nave. Rachel was clowning for Henry, rolling her eyes and gesturing with her hands, and he gave a grim smile, looking handsome but harassed, as he stepped up to take Ann’s hand. Rachel moved to her other side, and together they maneuvered to a spot behind the final row of pews.

  Now all three stood, Rachel and Henry crowded close on either side of Ann, bantering above her head, while she looked docile as a child, and lost. Henry had a firm grip on her hand, and he kept it well displayed, curled against his chest or resting on the pew in front or in his other fist. Ann’s other hand was out of sight, but Rachel’s arm pressed close to hers, and both their hands plunged down behind the pew, as still as if they’d turned to stone.

  Ann leaned back her head, looking high up toward the ceiling, a parted sea of water shining in her eyes. She said something to distract the other two, and all three of them looked up, as if they could see something descending from above. In a moment, other people near them looked up too.

  The Bach swelled to an end, and the crowd pressed in, packing all the spaces on the floor. Forging a path back through stiff overcoats, miasmas of perfume, Margy stepped out into the cold, pure night. She’d seen enough, and as she hurried up the avenue, alive with pinpoint lights, Salvation Army bells, and taxis rushing through the slush, the city opened up around her, smaller than before, while she felt strangely huge, as if she were parading through the air like the Macy’s Mickey Mouse balloon. A thousand windows lit up small and bright, no bigger than the hollows in a honeycomb, and for a moment she could almost see inside, into the thousand tiny rooms, where figures crossed, and smiled, hiding their hurts, and wanting the wrong things, and spending long nights in their beds alone.

  A Solo Performance

  Joshua, his name was today, though sometimes it was Jennifer. Leaving her narrow room, going down the dormitory stairs, she could feel him on her chest, warm and heavy, smelling of milk and pee. He’d have a squarish head, pink skin, fair hair wisping up above the baby sling. She could see him as she passed the dining hall, though no one in there could. It was a daydream, postcard from a life she didn’t have. Stepping out into the warm fall day, leaving her college, crossing the quad, she was just a skinny girl in bell-bottoms, violin pack on her back, with no baby. Yellow maples glowed. Gargoyles grimaced under bright blue sky. A light breeze ruffled ivy on the library. (The baby would enjoy it, and she stopped to show him, in the sun.)

  Reaching Elm Street, she checked both ways for picket lines. Once she’d turned the corner, met a barricade of broken chairs, a line of cops in glinting riot shields. But this morning no one seemed to want to stop the war. Only the overachievers were out, heads down on their way to physics, music, math. Head down, she crossed the street (cautious, with the baby on her chest, one hand around his warm, diapered behind).

  Across another quad, she could see violinists now, converging from all sides. Lifting her head, she began to walk quickly (steadying the baby with both hands). Now she was Margaret Rose, Violin, who had been picked to do the big Mozart concerto solo with Yale Orchestra. Across the grass, when they saw her, the other violinists slowed, let her beat them to the music school. Striding in, she took the dim steps (careful not to jar the baby) to the floor where Andre’s master class would be.

  The room was packed already with a crowd of violinists, fidgeting and chewing gum. Here at Yale, she spent a lot of time in rooms completely filled with other string players, and all of them would twitch, check wallets, zippers, the exact location of their instruments, as if obsessive compulsion were an advantage on the violin. Margy took her violin out, tuned, tightened her bow, then loosened it, reclipped her barrettes, adjusted her headband. Straight hair was the only kind in style, but hers curled like some low-grade packing substance, swarm of locusts in her field of vision as she played. Clamping it down, she tuned again, rechecked her bow.

  Arching the bow across the strings, she slid into a few bars of the solo, experimentally. Suddenly she felt her belly swell up like a gourd, baby inside, head like concrete, pressed down, stretching her tender parts. Lifting the bow, she let her head tip back. One-two-three, she counted through a big contraction, breathing with the pain. It was just a daydream too, not quite as voluntary as the rest, something her mind would show to her. Eight-nine-ten, she exhaled with the agony.

  “Miss Perfect,” a voice sneered in a whisper behind her.

  Margy sat up. Her belly didn’t vanish, but it moved away, became less real. Engaging the bow, she launched into the hardest passage of her solo, tortuous quick changes, lightning triple-stops. She’d practiced it a million times. Her fingers knew it, hands and arms. To show she could, she went on playing for a few beats after Andre strode into the room.

  Andre was a big man with an anxious face, dark nervous curls just going gray. When he stood in front of them, all motion stopped. Famous for playing cautiously, he was also famous for harsh praise, and sometimes shattered students casually.

  “You are a musical illiterate,” he’d said the week before to a young man, in front of the whole class.

  Now the room went silent as the inside of a rock. His voice was just above a whisper, but it rose to the ceiling like a cathedral oration.

  “The solo in a Mozart concerto is never good enough. The music is always far above your head. Mozart was a genius. You are not.”

  He swept his hand toward Margy, offering the chance to be never good enough. She raised the bow. Her stomach dropped. Everything she knew about Mozart abandoned her. She wavered through the first few bars.

  Andre began to bite his thumbnail, shifted it around to bite the other way. He darted one big hand out in the air. She stopped.

  “Hear that? Play that phrase again. You’re schmaltzing it. That’s junk.”

  She tried again. He leaped to his feet, made little jagged gestures, pinkie cocked as if above a porcelain teacup.

  “Just play the notes, the way they’re written! Not like that!”

 
His black wool legs stood right in front of her. His voice lashed over her. She smelled her sweat. The last allegro seemed a continent away. Why bother, when he wouldn’t like it anyway? Tipping her head back, she let her body stretch around the baby’s head, pain a high note with vibrato, well sustained. She could no longer hear Andre. Breathing with the big contractions, she closed her eyes and played.

  At last he strode out of the room. Limp, shirt wet to the waist, she slumped to her knees, slid the violin into its case. All around, the class filed out.

  A small Asian woman stopped beside her, standing like a truck driver, one hip jutted to the side, cracking her gum. She was a year ahead of Margy, but she looked about fourteen, straight black hair in ponytails that swung as she moved. She chewed vigorously.

  “So, are you nervous when you play, or what? I mean, you know, on stage?”

  Margy stood up.

  “Nervous? No,” she said automatically and stopped. Of course she was, not as bad as when she was a kid. Then she used to throw up, wet the bed. But it seemed bad luck to talk about it, with a solo in three weeks. Better to deny it, like a magic charm.

  “When I was a kid, my mother told me just to say, ‘These people are in for a real treat,’ and sweep out there onto the stage.” It had never worked, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

  The other violinist did not smile. “‘These people are in for a real treat’? Hunh.” She left the room.

  Next afternoon, when Margy showed up at the practice rooms, a trumpeter she knew leaned on a windowsill beside the room she liked to use, eating a sandwich. J.J. had long hair of several kinds, straight blond on top but curly brown below, like pubic hair, with muttonchop sideburns that made him look like a Saint Bernard. She liked J.J., but it was another warm day, peaceful, and she had crossed campus with the baby on her chest. The moment she stepped into the music school, her belly swelled up and the pain bore down on her, too hard to breathe. She breezed by J.J., almost afraid that he might see.

  He lifted his sandwich in salute. “Hey. I hear you don’t get stage fright.”

  “Ask me in two weeks.”

  “Why? You’re not going to be scared then either, are you? That’s not what I heard.”

  She paused a beat. So they were out there quoting her. She couldn’t think about that now. She had a private lesson in an hour with Andre.

  “Don’t believe everything you hear, J.J.,” she called and closed the door.

  A week later, the weather changed. Icy clouds swept over New Haven, and one morning the heat came on in her room. In bed, she felt a hot blast from the duct above, and a wave of nausea rolled up her throat. She leaped to her feet, amazed. Daydreams were one thing. Throwing cold water on her face, she rushed out into the frigid air, walked to the music school. But as she stepped into the hot building, her stomach rolled.

  She had to practice by an open window in her coat, fingers stiff with cold. Back in her room, she taped the heat duct closed, slept in mittens and a hat. But the next day was the same: in the heated dining room, she looked at foods she had thrown up the year before, and had to leave. She couldn’t sit in class. Blue veins started rising underneath her skin, delicate green circles at the eyes. She hadn’t slept with anyone but Henry, ever, and she hadn’t seen him for a year. Meeting her own eyes in the mirror, she tried to communicate with buried portions of her brain.

  “So, do you really think you’re still pregnant? Or is it just nostalgia for that happy time?”

  She thought of going back to see the doctor with the hanging face. But what could she tell him this time? That she had daydreamed just a little bit too much, and now her mind was going to make her live through it again? Surely it would stop. She went back to the Mozart, windows open to the cold.

  Rehearsals started, in a heated room. She got herself well chilled, lying on a frozen marble slab, and dove into the stifling interior. Her chair stood in the inner circle of the orchestra, rows of bodies radiating heat. Her stomach heaved, seasick on its rolling inner tide. The conductor was a famous white-haired visitor up from New York, and his cheeks produced two furious red patches at even a small mistake by any member of the orchestra. Fifty string players watched Margy, waiting for the moment when the error would be hers.

  She tried to banish daydreams of all kinds. But as she crossed campus, an eighteen-wheeler truck roared through the light on Elm, and instantly she saw herself beneath it, bones crushed, breasts sheared off. Gasping, she stood, face in hands. In the practice room, windows open to the cold, she turned her head and saw a rifle poked in through one, aimed at her. But when she whirled to look, the air outside was empty, innocent, two floors off the ground.

  Two days before the concert, she passed a woman on the curb outside the music school who smiled and handed her a flyer with a brightly colored photograph.

  “PAY ATTENTION,” it said. “SOMEONE WANTS TO MAKE THIS LEGAL IN YOUR COUNTRY.”

  The photo underneath was expensively produced, red and white and blue, tiny hands and feet, small curved spines and bulging eyes, tender see-through skin. A bucketful, in fact, ripped in half, sauced with blood.

  Margy made it just inside the first-floor women’s room and threw up in a sink. Quickly she washed her face. This wasn’t happening. She had a concert, she was fine. Shredding the photograph, she flushed it down three toilets, a few flakes at a time.

  J.J. was outside his practice room, closing cardboard in the doorjamb, stuffing a towel underneath, so no one could hear him practicing. He hadn’t hung around her room lately, but she rushed up to him, glad to see a friendly face.

  “J.J.,” she cried. “I just threw up.”

  He toed the towel into place.

  “You, Itzhak? That can’t be true. And here we are, all waiting for our treat.”

  She giggled nervously, then noticed his face. He watched her, not smiling. She stepped back a pace.

  “Jesus, J.J.”

  He finished with the towel, smiled to himself. He stood up straight.

  “Remember what they say, baby. It’s lonely at the top.”

  Pinching her cheeks between his thumb and fingers, he gave her face a little shake.

  “Lo-oo-onely,” he said and stepped inside the door.

  The stage was hot. Dry air whirled up from the floorboards like a wind from hell. Beyond the bright lights shining in her eyes, the audience roared quietly, finding seats, rustling programs. Her father had driven down from Boston, but she could not see him. She could see bored men in black suits, strange women in furs, sneering music students slouched in cheap seats, high up underneath the balconies. Since the nausea’s return, her nose had been acute, and a smell rolled toward her now, perfume, mothballs, sour after-dinner breath. Blue cheese, garlic sausage, gin.

  She tuned the violin, though she had done it twice already in the warm-up room. Lifting the bow, she felt a rill of nausea begin. Stopping, she concentrated on the cool black velvet skirt that slid across her legs. She had worn nothing underneath, and she saw a flash of a cool beach, Wading River, open sea. Henry had married Ann in June, and she had moved down here with him. They might have seen her name for this concert. She peered out past the lights. Her stomach lurched. She felt a sudden need to stand up, take her violin, and walk offstage.

  Too late. To a scatter of applause like rain, the concert master was parading in, Andre’s favorite student, a tall, precise young man with two curls drooped over his forehead. The chair beside hers groaned, and the caustic florals of his deodorant swept over her. The conductor swept in like a man who had no time to give this puny orchestra, and she sat up, caught the stagelights in her eyes, played through the opening Beethoven with the other violins.

  The Beethoven was over much too soon, and the conductor dashed out, not pausing to bow. The concert master turned and looked down at her, thin lips firm, violin held lightly on his knee. “Don’t drag the allegro this time. And try not to smile so much. Do you realize you always smile when you play? It’s a little disc
oncerting for the rest of us. You must realize, it looks a little smug.”

  Margy’s lips parted. She couldn’t organize her tongue. Smile? She smiled?

  He turned back toward the audience, which had started to applaud again, as the conductor almost goose-stepped from the wings. He popped up on the stand, nailed Margy with his eyes, flourished both hands.

  With a crash of sound, the other instruments came in on the introduction to her first solo. The music galloped past her, huge and fast. She tried to count. Had she lost track? She heard the phrase before the entrance to her solo, lifted her bow, and realized in time, it was the false entrance. Thank heavens she had not started to play. But now adrenaline sloshed through her veins. Her stomach rolled into a long, slow curl. Dizzily she gripped the violin, waited for the nausea to stop, and heard a silence on the stage.

  The conductor’s finger quivered in the air above her head. The orchestra pulled in its breath, a hundred mouths in one sharp suck. The moment for her entrance had arrived, and passed.

  She raised the bow, too slowly. It was a dream. The orchestra was a Tyrannosaurus rex with jaws spread wide, waiting for her to step inside. She couldn’t move. The concert master turned, stared down at her, eyes frozen wide.

  Somehow her fingertips pressed on the strings, her arms moved the bow. Dimly she heard the sounds out of the violin, tone as tinny as a fourth grader on a cigar box tied with string. It was the worst concerto solo ever turned in with Yale Orchestra, and she knew it every second that she played. Eyes fastened on the violin, she made herself keep going, going, to the awful end.

  Finally it was over. The audience began to make its roaring sound, like a building falling down. The conductor turned, held out his hand toward her, and even smiled. But she did not rise, and as he strode stage right for the last time, she stood and plunged straight off into the wings, violinists parting on all sides, as if suddenly recalling things they had to do offstage.