Kyra Read online

  When he said “now,” it was like the flowers—wild, delicate, startling.

  Afterward we swam on the ocean side. The wind that day came from the southwest, bringing miles of blue sky: summer blue, fair blue, angelic blue, the bluest blue, and the water blue-green, tinged with gold.

  On the way back, we picked huckleberries, our teeth turning red-blue from the stain, and when we got back, we talked about that—the huckleberries.

  I had done what I had vowed never to do. I had opened myself to another man. And it was a mistake.

  Anna didn’t think so, not that first morning when we talked, not through that whole sensuous summer. If you can accept that something as cultivated as gardenias can grow fresh in the wild, without brown edges or a sickening smell, then this too could happen. I didn’t think it was a mistake at the time.

  One night after a performance, we made up a game called change the ending. You choose a story and then find a point where someone can do something to turn the action in a different direction. Andreas went first. He chose Tosca. “What if Spoletta, Scarpia’s agent, is a member of the resistance, a mole who has tunneled his way into the highest echelons of the police, to Scarpia. Then, when Scarpia writes the order for the mock execution, telling Spoletta it would be as they had done once before, with Count Palmieri, Spoletta recognizes the name, Palmieri, and knows that the count had really been shot. Before giving the order to the sergeant, Spoletta erases Palmieri’s name. When Scarpia asked Spoletta, do you understand, meaning the part about Palmieri, he understood completely. But this time the execution really will be fake. Spoletta subverts Scarpia’s intention. Cavaradossi lives and Spoletta leaves with the lovers. It’s a victory for art and love, and for the resistance.

  “Your turn,” he said, delight in his face. The game at once lighthearted and serious.

  I didn’t know any opera other than Tosca. My mind went blank. And then I remembered the line Andreas had recited here that first day, from the Player’s speech in Hamlet. I would choose Ophelia, not the mad scene but before that, when she and Hamlet are together and her father and Claudius are spying on them. I had played Ophelia once in school and I remembered the lie. What if she told the truth when Hamlet asks her, “Where is your father?” What if instead of lying and saying, “He is at home,” she points to the curtain Polonius and Claudius are hiding behind and says, “Right there.” Then she and Hamlet would leave and go to Wittenberg together.

  “Bravo,” he said. “You see, there is always a way.”

  In the mornings, when I walked the beach, he would often be there with Jesse. There was a stream that cut through the sand, and at the beginning of summer it was full, water rushing through. Jesse loved it. He built elaborate waterways, moats and canals lined with strips of kelp. I showed him how to make drip castles and decorate the walls with seaweed and shells. One morning he found a shark’s tooth and we made up a story about a shark. It was a nurse shark, and he attended the people whom the other sharks had wounded, even though he hated the taste of blood. “That’s not real,” Jesse said, his eyes scanning our faces. “No,” Andreas said, “but it’s a good story.”

  “Tell me about your mother,” Andreas asked one day. I had been working all morning, trying to speed up the construction crew. It was very hot. They broke early for lunch and went off to swim.

  “My mother was part Gypsy, or at least that’s what she liked to think, because she never really fit into Viennese society. One time when she was young and in Rome, the Gypsies stopped her. They wanted her to come with them, they said she was one of them. She didn’t go. But she told her mother what had happened and asked if it was possible. Her mother, who was always honest—she wouldn’t necessarily tell you things, but if you asked her, she always told the truth—said it could be true. My mother had been a wild child. She had dark hair, green eyes, and olive skin. Which was odd because most of her family was blond.”

  “Like you,” he said. “But you’re also wild.”

  “Maybe it’s Gypsy blood. I like to think of myself as something of a wildflower, like my mother. Later her mother told her that she’d been adopted. My mother hadn’t thought to ask.”

  Anna was making lunch.

  “You know, the thing is I feel a freedom with him I’ve never felt with a man before,” I said.

  She put the knife on the counter and turned to face me.

  “In what way?” She wiped her hands on the dish towel and sat down.

  “You know, it’s odd, but I thought Simon saw me. What I realize now is that he was with me, we were with each other. But that’s different. It’s not my sense with Andreas. I’m thinking of that day in the church when I had brought in drawings for the Act Three sets and he looked at them and then looked at me, with an expression on his face that I can only describe as awe. As if up to that point he had thought I could be helpful, but in that moment he saw me as an artist. I mean, I know this sounds pretentious, but I don’t know how else to say it. He saw me as myself. And now…” I looked out the window. I wasn’t sure I could talk about it. How I felt seen by him when we made love. As a woman, but then that sounds like a cliché.

  “I think you need to listen to this,” Anna said.

  My back arched. I didn’t need her to tell me what I needed to do.

  “I mean the vow,” she continued, “it was a tribute to what you had experienced together, you and Simon, but the vision of this city, I would have to say, is yours.”

  Something in me balked. But it was true. It was like a kind of psychological suttee. Throwing myself on the fire. Suddenly the light seemed too bright.

  Our mother used to say, Listen to your feelings. Feelings don’t lie. I thought it was true, but too simple.

  When I sat on Anna’s bed that first morning after Andreas and I had made love, I said falling in love again was like a fire on the beach. You think it’s been extinguished, and then you discover it’s burning again. Except now it seemed like starting something new.

  “Maybe it is,” she said, a faraway look in her eyes.

  Anna and I had debated living with men versus not living with men. Anna thought that for men, sex was a stand-in for emotional closeness. With Tony, her question was, could they be more intimate if they didn’t have sex? I said the question was absurd. Like tying your hands behind your back. Sex was the road to intimacy with men. Anna was skeptical. I had watched her with her boyfriends. I always felt something was missing, something I wanted with a man. More intense, more complete. She called me a romantic. I didn’t think that was true.

  Anna loved playing with Jesse. When he was annoying, it didn’t faze her. She taught him seven-card rummy and casino, bought books of riddles, told knock-knock jokes. She would spend long evenings with Abe, bringing a bottle of red wine and sitting for hours playing cards and listening to his stories. “I’m a simple man,” he told her, “a butter-and-egg man.” That had literally been his business. His wife? He said he had gone to Olympus and brought back a goddess. That had confirmed one of Anna’s theories: men idolize the women they love, they don’t see them as human. It spells disaster, she said, because sooner or later they discover they are human. You should have been an academic, I told her. She said it was a fleshless occupation. She preferred to do therapy, dig at the site. But that too was artificial. In many ways, we were looking for the same thing. Something real that we could believe in.

  It was an amazing summer. As if from some other time. Scientists were talking about global warming, the hole in the ozone layer. The previous year, in August, suds had appeared in the water of the bay, as if the washing machines of the world were draining into the sea. Tiny jellyfish, like tapioca seeds, floated amid the bubbles, and when you swam you got stung. Everyone went out and bought Adolph’s meat tenderizer, even the vegetarians. You sprinkled it on and it took away the sting. But this year the water was clear. No suds, no jellyfish. August brought a string of hot days. We made love in the clearing after we swam, our bodies still cool from the wat
er, and afterward we swam again. It was as if the earth had healed, like they say the ozone layer can repair itself.

  By the end of July, our life had taken on a rhythm. In the early mornings, we went to the beach with Jesse. “Kyra,” Jesse asked one morning looking straight into my face, “are you going to come and live with us?” His eyes were wide. He wanted a mother. Or maybe he just wanted me. I said that wherever I lived, we always could play. I thought it was true. Andreas didn’t say anything. He was experimenting with new projects, what to do next. He and Peter had various plans for the future. Andreas had brought me into Jesse’s life. I was sure he wouldn’t have done this without thinking. Jesse had lost his mother; it would be cruel for him to get close to another woman and then have her disappear.

  When we dropped Jesse off at the small playgroup that had been formed for the summer, Andreas went home to study scores and I went over to the site. At noon, we swam. Cormorants sat on the rocks in groups of four or five, like a committee. Some of the tech crew were spearfishing, and the birds watched them with consternation. The days were still long, it seemed that the summer would go on forever. At low tide, you could see through the water, green where it was shallow, then shades of blue.

  In the afternoon, Andreas worked with his troupe. Often I sat in and watched. On the weekends, after performances, we would go to the theater and improvise plays, using bits of costume, dressing each other for the parts. I gave him a purple robe, he gave me a crown. He had come into my kingdom, joined my project. Together, we would find a way. A path had opened in front of us and we had taken it. It was a summer of hope.

  At the beginning of August, he had to leave for a few days, and then there was a week when I was away. Other than that, we were together. At night, the crickets were loud. We slept in his cabin, our lovemaking extended, our bodies stretched out on the sheets. We talked about the future.

  I don’t know what else to say, except to tell you how it happened.

  In French the word for tide is marée. Yet the French speak simply of the sea. La mer monte and la mer descend: the sea rises, and the sea falls. Our bodies are like the sea, our cells bathed in salt water. And maybe the French are right. You don’t have to talk about gravity or the moon, but just about the sea, the way it comes in and then goes out.

  He left.

  And then I really didn’t know. What was real. What I had made up. Like we made up those stories. What had happened, what I had only imagined had happened, or wanted to happen? Anna tried to help. She did her best. I feel badly about what I did to her, about not telling her. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I could hardly tell myself. I feel worse about having involved her in the way that I did, without her knowing what she was doing. But then in a way I didn’t know either, until the last moment, what I would do. I don’t know what I thought.

  It was Peter who told me that Andreas was leaving, that he had an offer he couldn’t turn down. In Europe. I didn’t know what to think. What was I supposed to do? Say fine, that’s great, I’m really happy for you? What?

  Peter said that Andreas was going back to Budapest to start his own troupe.

  I should have listened to those operas. The ones he liked all ended badly. I was mesmerized by the stories and the music, or maybe by him. But I didn’t listen. Maybe I believed we could improvise and find a way out.

  In the end, a fight. We were standing under a pine tree, the cones stubby, naked, looking strangely exposed in the first light. I had gone for a walk, come out near his cabin. He was standing in the middle of the clearing, alone.

  He turned when he heard me.

  “I was thinking about Pelleas and Melisande,” he said. “It would be perfect here. It’s set in a forest.”

  “I hear that you’re leaving,” I said. “Peter said.”

  His lips turned white. “It’s not certain yet.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Did you think I wouldn’t know?”

  It was as though he were another person. He didn’t answer. Mute. He saw the anger in my face.

  I walked off, got on a boat, went to the Vineyard with Tony to get some seedlings. I didn’t know what I was doing.

  Andreas came over that night. Anna was out. He said he wanted to talk. He said he had not known how to tell me. He said he wanted to explain what had happened.

  I looked at his face. He did not look like himself. He started to speak, his story sounded convincing. If I listened to it, I would lose myself. Something else was true. What he was saying did not make sense.

  Outside the night was cold. Venus, bright in the western sky, beckoned through the window. Suddenly the house felt crowded. “What are the plans?” I asked. I sounded like my father. That was always his question.

  I took my jacket and went outside.

  He followed.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I knew you’d be upset. I don’t want to go. I want you to know that. I have to do this. I told you that Irina and I had started a company, but they shut it down. She joined the dissidents because she wanted me to have a company, be able to do my own work. You know that having my own company is something I’ve always dreamed of.” He stubbed his foot against the dry soil, loosening a clod.

  How could you not tell me?

  How could I tell you?

  Did you think I wouldn’t know?

  Something was wrong. The rhythm between us had stopped. Fear pooled inside me. I tried to start again, find the beat—shock it into motion, like they shock hearts.

  I was furious. That much was clear.

  “I had hoped…” he began. “I had hoped that you would—that knowing me and knowing also what has been between us, you would—”

  “I would what?”

  I knew this was not the way. I could not stop. A river of anger rose, crested, spilled over the barriers.

  “I am trying,” he said. “I’m trying to talk with you. I didn’t know that Peter was going to say something. I wanted to tell you myself. It was something I thought you would understand. But it is fruitless when you…”

  Without fruit.

  We came to where there was a flat rock on one side of the path. He sat down. “There is no point in continuing this way,” he said. “Do you want to destroy everything? What do you want me to do? Give up my dream? I wouldn’t ask you to do that. I would understand.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said. But what was the point? It suddenly seemed hopeless.

  “What do you want?” he asked, exasperation edging the question.

  I felt I was being led into a trap. What do I want? What does it matter what I want? My heart was racing. There was nothing for me to say, nothing more to say. I thought of Cordelia, Lear’s daughter. When Lear asks her to say how much she loves him, she says nothing.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He said nothing.

  I felt the ground shift under me. Frantically, I grasped at logic.

  “Because if…if I…if this means anything to you—”

  “You know how much you mean to me,” he interrupted.

  But he didn’t mean it anymore. He didn’t sound like he meant it anymore. The rhythm was off. This was only making it worse. He was leaving. He hadn’t told me. He didn’t want to tell me. Because I would be upset? Is that a reason?

  “You act like a stranger,” I said. Once he had been a stranger. But then he had become something else, something intimate, my lover, more like a husband, joining me in that space we had made for ourselves at the top of the clearing where the wild gardenias grew, small delicate flowers, white skin, so thin you could see through it, and the faint pink at the throat. What do they call that part of the flower where the pistil and the stamen are? Lie with me, he had said, arms and legs entwining, until our bodies…I would not lie.

  “If you are going to leave, then leave.” Abruptly I turned away, heading back to the house.

  There is a day in August when you know that summer is over. It happens each year. The water turns dark, loses transpa
rency. The currents have shifted, the wind has changed direction. The fall term would begin soon. If I could take myself back into that life, that structure, that order. I had been interrupted, lost my boundaries. Interrea, in the middle of things, he had come. And now he was leaving. Where there had been a whole, now there was a hole. The opposite of dependence was independence. This was the new world.

  Anna had gone over to play cards with Abe. She said that when Andreas came in, he stomped into his room. They had asked, he had said he had to read Maeterlinck’s play. It was the story of Pelleas and Melisande, the basis for Debussy’s opera. When I heard this, I was astounded. I don’t know where he found the concentration, but maybe leaving me didn’t really matter to him.

  I had been with Andreas when he found the book of Maeterlinck’s plays in the stacks of Widener Library, the air cool, dusty, quiet on that hot August day. He had come into Cambridge to meet me. It was the end of the week when I was away. I had sent him a postcard, “I am alive and well and living in C major.” The postcard had a picture of a boat with white sails. I remembered the game about changing the ending and signed it, “love, Iseult.” He came the next day.

  That night it had been so hot. We sat in my apartment reading the play. He was planning to stay in Boston. They would do Pelleas and Melisande at Peter’s theater that winter and bring it to Nashawena next summer. He and Peter were planning a cycle of operas. He wanted to do a read-through with the singers before they left the island. The lamp drew a yellow circle of light around him. He read aloud, turning the pages.

  Golaud, the widowed grandson of the old King Arkel, is hunting in a forest when he comes upon Melisande, weeping over the loss of a crown that has fallen to the bottom of a well. He brings her back to the gloomy castle, and she becomes his wife. But she is much younger than Golaud, the age of Pelleas, his half brother who also lives in the castle. Pelleas and Melisande are drawn to each other. One day they are sitting at the edge of a fountain. She is playing with her wedding ring and it falls into the water. When Golaud asks her where the ring is, she lies. He becomes suspicious, observing her with Pelleas, seeing their childish play. He lifts his young son Yniold up to Melisande’s window to spy on them, but Yniold tells him they are standing apart in the room, silent, gazing at the light. Then one night Golaud comes upon them clinging to each other by the fountain. He takes out his sword and kills Pelleas. Melisande is terrified and runs away.