“I can get something on my phone—”
“No, that won’t—”
Her voice is sharp and unpleasant, childish. When she touches the bow to the strings, it squeaks. Her fingers form a chord, but the sound is harsh and wrong, and she begins to mutter to herself as she tries to tune it, humming pitches that she’s not even sure are right. He sits patiently while she finds an app with sheet music, but it’s making her nervous, his wanting something she’s not sure she can give.
“I mean there’s one I used to be able to play, I can’t even remember what it’s called, but…”
She begins, slowly calling forth a series of low notes, feeling the unpleasant softness of her finger pads, the loss of her strong calluses.
“The bridge is really high,” she says.
“It sounds great.”
A few more notes and then it is gone, the melody, the next note just gone. She is a vacuum.
“I don’t know, I can’t remember. It’s just not there, I can’t do it.”
He looks at her, sad. She can see it in his face: he is less disappointed by her inability to play than by the way she is shutting down in front of him, erecting a barrier. She hates her own rising emotion at the fact that she has changed, that she has estranged herself from something she loved.
“Look, I was just trying to find something… nice for you.”
“I’ll find something to play tomorrow,” she says, tucking it back into the closet, knowing that she will not repeat the attempt.I am a competent person, she tells herself, banishing the clumsy, failing feeling, so alien to her image of herself. She never wants him to see her like that again.
Coffee, black and strong, a day yet to come. Orson in the kitchen, behind a stack of scripts, projects to consider.
“I thought we could go to the beach,” she says. “Take some of your homework if you want.”
“Or I could not,” he says, and leans back and looks at her, probably trying to gauge whether she is the erratic child from yesterday or her sane and stable self. She wants to make up for it. To take charge. To demonstrate that she is a source of solutions, not problems, that she will never give him any reason to leave her.
“There’s a sand bar near here. We used to go, sometimes with my grandma, in the summer.” When he smiles, satisfied by this, she kisses him, and packs a beach chair and a book, allows him to laugh at her and tell her that Hegel is not a beach read.Come on now, better get a move on.It is low tide. Focus on the tawny hairs that grow on his knuckles, the song he is humming under his breath, beware the mollusks and razorclams waiting to slice into the flesh of your foot. Spread your towel and put on your wide-brim hat and talk to him like a pinup girl.
“You’re going to have to leave me in a few years, you know,” he says. The water behind them is rising on all sides. His hat is smaller, straw, casts a shadow over half of his face. “When I’m fifty. I’ll be an old man.”
“Well, I’ll be thirty,” she says. “So we’ll both be old.”
“Don’t take the piss. You can only avoid these things for so long.”
“I don’t think it’s been so long yet,” she says.
She’s not taking the piss. The thought of her twenties sliding away from her fills her with dread, the sense of becoming her mother in the only way that counts. She wonders if Orson has ever considered the possibility.Don’t think about it, how doomed it all is, how the moment is arriving where you are going to have to choose your life.
“I don’t know. Maybe I should kiss and make up with Jesus.”
“That’s the last thing he would want.”
“You think he’d turn the other cheek?”
“Something like that.”
“Your mom and I used to go to church together.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “She told me that when she was a girl, she used to make up fake confessions. Because she hadn’t ever done anything that bad. But she was afraid of having nothing to say.”
“God, that’s horrible.” Horrible she felt like she had to perform. But also, in a twisted way, sweet. It’s strange thinking about her mother asSusan, a mortal woman, someone’s friend.
The waves kiss her toes, and she inches her towel farther up the sand. When Orson mentions her mother, there is never pressure for her to add anything, not explicitly. But after last night, the slippage, she wants to give him something. Her own gift, a piece of the woman he knew.Come on, think.She grapples in her mind with a half-fledged thing.
