-- Lester Burnham, in American Beauty
*****
I thought I'd surprise you, again, she said nonchalantly or perhaps ironically, with a smirk of expectation twisting at the corners of her mouth as she approached the table and registered the look of complete shock that
enveloped my face.
I could only stare back at her face with incomprehension, a dream materialised before my eyes. A good dream? A nightmare? Who knew?
I mean the initial shock didn’t allow anything else to flow past into the
brain, to register any feelings or thoughts on the matter. Like when you’re
cut and that split second when the cut is white before the blood suddenly
starts rushing.
I wasn't sure how to introduce her to every body. My girlfriend, my muse,
this bird I know? I looked over at Albert for a clue but Albert appeared to be
as dumbstruck as I was. Anastasia of course, revelled in the moment of indecision, knowing the powerful effect her unexpected appearance would have on us.
Hi everyone, she said to those gathered around us, those whose curiosity
was piqued by her appearance and my reaction, the blood draining from
my face. I’m Anastasia, a friend of Witold and Albert, she introduced
finally in response to our silence. And before we could supplement, deny
or agree with that information everyone was enthusiastically returning the
introductions and no one had any idea that they were in the presence of
a woman who possessed the most beautiful voice they might hear during
the entire festival. If, of course, she was finally going to sing with us.
I allowed myself a momentary fascination with the reality of seeing here
There in the flesh before me. It seems odd but sometimes you can imagine
someone so often and so unyieldingly that you almost forget the details of
what they actually look like.
Their face becomes a blurred homogeny of dreams. You don’t visualise
their eyes or sense the tactile softness of a cheek to cheek caress. It’s as
though they’ve existed only in a textbook somewhere in your student past
and the words you were forced to memorise and recite still stick in your
mind, randomly, yet you aren’t sure why and can’t force that memorised
text from your head.
Shock often registers in the body with numbness. Yet I could feel myself
saying nothing. No air moved my adducted vocal chords to sound.
Unlike the first time she appeared unannounced in Utrecht, I could not
accept this arrival without question, even if I couldn’t verbalise those
questions. I didn’t embrace her without reservation, grateful for the opportunity to do so after so many months of waiting.
No, as we drank each other in carefully, (the others had since gone back
to their conversations acutely oblivious to our history and it was as though
we occupied an invisible, silent bubble among them,) she seemed to be
assessing my capacity for pain, trying to distill from the look in my eyes
some sign of forgiveness or joy or anger. She said nothing but put her right
hand against my arm, gently. And I of course, stunned into silence, was running through a catalogue of emotions not unlike watching those varieties
of fruit spinning in a slot machine waiting for the spinning to stop and the
conclusion to make its presence known. Was there anything to forgive? I
didn’t even know. Yes, my heart did pirouette a moment or two but then as though a hamstring pulled in mid movement, the joy was immediately tempered by the pain.
Of course I had questions for her. Well, I had them in my mind, still
formulating, incubating in those few moments, but I was still incapable of
verbalising them. I assessed as much as possible in those tiny moments;
how did I really feel about her being here?
Fuck, of course, I was elated, I told myself silently. And each time I
allowed that recognition to creep in, bam! The shadow of her
disappearance re-emerged and the questions were blown back in my face
in order: Why did she leave Utrecht so suddenly, without even speaking
to me, leaving me some stupid fucking letter in her wake? How did she
even discover that I’d be in this little village on this particular weekend?
How had she gotten here and most importantly, why in the hell was she
here to begin with?
But those questions were to go unspoken for the moment. I can't
say that I didn't care, I most certainly did, but there are questions you sometimes don't necessarily want to know the answers to and rather than
spoil the surprise of her appearance immediately I preferred to push
those questions to the back of my mind and accept her as instinctively
I'd know she wanted to me to accept her – without question, without
precondition and without asking for more - which is precisely how I
played it.
As she carried on talking with what seemed to my cynical eye to be a
practiced nonchalance, as if it were perfectly naturally for her have left with
a letter and then just as suddenly and unexpectedly reappeared here,
materialised out of nothing in front of me, carried on talking as did those
around us, she succeeded in pulling me into this vortex, the initial
introductions wore away and suddenly it was just the two of us among
them and I stood in my glorious lethargy listening to her escapades in
Torino, Budapest, Zagreb and Vienna, to name a few. I tried to imagine
a selfless self that could simply wallow in her being here – to simply be
grateful.
She wanted to be treated as a crowd would treat her - appreciative for her appearance, mesmerised by her presence, tangled in her web. She preferred
to be loved rather than possessed, I could see that plainly for the first
time and the stage had always been the safest place, the only place to feel it.
It might have been the shock of seeing her or the space which had grown
between us but as she was no longer simply a dream, a figment of my
imagination, as she stood there real enough in flesh and blood I could
almost perceive her in that moment as a person, a flawed person, not an
icon, not an image, not a memory.
I tried to imagine that if this was going to be the only time I would see
her then I wanted it to be a pleasantly memorable rather than a desperate or
confused experience. Notwithstanding the notion that the last thing she'd
come all this distance and come to all this trouble for would be to
listen to a puny man with his puerile notions of possession react in
a vain and disdainful fashion instead of simple appreciation.
I wanted desperately to grab at her and caress her simultaneously and yet I
felt oddly torn between loyalty and fear compounded by the uncertainty of
how I should treat her, not just when we were alone but more importantly,
in this public venue. And these thoughts allowed me to consider further
the full implications of why she had chosen to appear when she had, here
in a public place, a safe place where I wouldn't intend on mauling her with
my selfish, hungry hands or with my probing accusative questions.
I was swaying slightly both from the beer and excitement. I couldn't
very well leave the venue with our appearance due up later. Too many
people had been told in advance, too many were waiting to see for
themselves what these two weird American guys were going to do. There
will be time, there will be time.
As a distraction, while she spun her tale of cities and gigs I tried to think
of the other lines that followed in that Prufrock poem by Eliot, knowing
I’d once memorised them and hearing them in the back of my mind while
I deliberated and debated my next move, our next move, for certainly we
couldn’t simply stand here in the hall drinking beer and pretend nothing
had happened, that her sudden appearance was as normal and ordinary as
her suddendisappearance.
And so it was with ignoring the lines of the Prufrock poem I was
desperately trying to recall as a distraction or indeed, as a guide, that I
finally lost my desperate grip on patience.
So, I interrupted suddenly, as casual as possible, Are you here to play
with us again, then? I managed to ask this with what I presumed formulated
on my face a teasing smile but playfulness, I knew was not a strength of
mine, not with so many raw emotions on the line and so perhaps my face
betrayed my impatience, perhaps my voice rang with bitterness and
cynicism, it was hard to tell.
She didn't say anything for a moment as she seemed to attempt to decipher
the basis and intent behind my query which even I wasn’t completely
certain about.
Why don't I have a glass of wine while I consider she asked, snuggling unexpectedly into my arms and smiling, as though postponement,
diversion and hinting at what I was certain to want was a sufficient tactic.
It's been a long journey, she clarified.
And so we finally had a few private moments over drink, clearing a
table for ourselves in the front of the hall where others were hungrily
wolfing down forkfuls of goulash and dumplings, slurping their beers
and either revelling in the previous performance or talking excitedly about
the one to follow. Not that I really understood what they were saying in
any event but I’d grown accustomed, listening as I did daily to a language I
could only understand in tiny snatches, to perceive rather than actually
understand what people were talking about. Facial expressions, circumstances, tone, all useful aids. Or had been, deciphering foreign
tongues. But these new skills were of no use in attempting to unravel
the mystery of the woman before me.
I suppose you’re wondering, among other things, how I found you here,
she began after a sip of wine, her tongue perched momentarily on the
wine stain of her lip as she peered into my eyes attempting to read what
registered inside of them.
I'd actually intended on surprising you in Prague, Witold. It‘s been so
long and your letters have been a great comfort but as always, they aren‘t
the same as seeing you. It‘s been crazy touring, you wouldn‘t believe it.
Anyway, I just haven‘t had time before now to come up to Prague to see
you and even now it was only because I’m on my way to a performance
in Krakow, or I was at any rate.
I'd taken the train from Paris and believe me, there wasn't going to be a lot
of time to prepare but once I was on the train I knew there was no way I
could forgive myself if I didn't stop in to see you.
(Of course, in my mind, even whileI digested her words, the initial instincts
I thought to myself but not aloud, was why didn’t she just ask me to join her somewhere if she was so busy, surely she’d known I’d have come straight away and then the bit about no way to forgive herself, well, fuck, I tried to stifle an ironic laugh, how the fuck did she forgive herself for dropping me without the grace of doing so face to face but by a sneaky little letter under
the cover of the night?)
I mean you know, a few times when I was close, I tried to senf a postcard to you but even then, most cities I go to, I’m not there for very long and since
you don’t really have a telephone or any way to really get in touch with you,
well, it’s been difficult. Especially since I don’t always know the next stop
on the tour. It’s all been happening so fast.
So anyway, when I got to Prague, in transit to Krakow, I just took a cab and went to that pub you mention so much, Shot Out Eye? I even had a hard
time getting a cab to find it because I didn’t have the address or even the
name in Czech. Anyway, I figured you mention it so much in your letters,
you were more likely to be there than your own flat. She gave a short giggle.
Funny, isn’t that, Witold? Left with the choice I figured I’d be more likely
to find you in a pub than your flat…anyway, I made a few enquiries about
you two and it was then I found out that you would be here at this festival.
This morning I woke up and decided to come, even though it's out of my
way and yes, even though it meant cancelling, much to the anger of my
manager, the show which was scheduled for this evening. I still have to
leave first thing for a show tomorrow night but I thought at least we'd have
a little time together. I've missed you terribly Witold. I try to make it to
Paris once a week just so I can go back to my flat and find all your letters
waiting there and as soon as I pick them up, I get back on the train and go
wherever the next performance is scheduled for with those letters bundled
up to comfort me in all those days and nights in between. I've dreamt so
often of being with you again that I can hardly believe it myself.
Why else would I go to this much trouble to see you even knowing you
are going to be preoccupied with the festival just for the chance to feel
you properly relax in my arms and tell me more of all those wonderful
things you write about in your letters? (I couldn’t tell who she was
trying to convince more, me or her.)
But…if you miss me as much as you say, and not that I'm doubting it,
Christ knows how often I've dreamt of hearing you tell me these
exact things, still I can't help but wonder, knowing as you must how
willing I would be to drop everything and follow you, why you don't
just allow me to follow you on tour? That way we could see each
other all the time. That way…
She held up her right hand, touching my wrist gently with her left.
I could tell you a lot of stories, Witold. I could make up excuses, the strain
it would put on me for my performances, the difficulty of the logistics, and
yes, I would like nothing better than to have you there with me, for support,
for your affection, for reassurance, but the truth is, I'm far too afraid to allow
you to accompany me. Afraid of what you wonder? You name it. Afraid of
getting hurt, afraid of hurting you, afraid of disappointment, afraid of losing
this incredible feeling I have reading your letters, knowing that every day
you are somewhere out there thinking of me, dreaming of me. Do you have
any idea what a comfort that is to me?
But why would you prefer it to the actual thing?
Quite simply because nothing, no one, not at the moment anyway, could
live up to what you've created. I certainly am not the person you've
imagined me to be, god knows, no one could be. I don't want to
discourage such infatuation but there are truths about me that might ruin
your illusion of me and to be honest, I'd be crushed to find out that your
illusion of me has been shattered. When I left with just that letter I was
taking an awful chance that I’d lose you, I know. But it was a chance
that I had to take. And then, when you started writing to me again, my
God, I was relieved, so relieved. You see, it's your dream of me that
allows me to consider that I might just be worthy of such a dream. It's what
has allowed me to enjoy myself all these months in between. The knowledge
that someone out there anyway thinks of me in the way you write about me,
in a way no one has ever treated or considered me before. It isn't your heart
or my heart I'm afraid of breaking. It is that dream, yours and the one that
yours allows me to hold on to. A tiny sliver of sanity.
Already she’d spilled more to me about herself, about her feelings, about
her inner workings and thoughts in this short flurry of words than in all the
times we’d spent together combined. For the tiniest of instances of self-
recognition, I was dismayed to think I’d spent so much time pining after
someone I knew so little about. Perhaps that dream was a common one
after all, a tiny sliver of sanity. Perhaps that was the purpose all along.
I didn’t bother saying anything for awhile and neither did she. Her eyes searched mine for a faint hint of recognition but despite myself, despite the inner joy I felt at what she’d said, with the introduction of the idea that this,
all these months of infatuation had simply been a diversion for not just me
but for both of us, I questioned the authenticity of any of the feelings I
thought I’d had. Still, you don’t suffocate an infatuation as powerful as
mine was for her with a few words. Especially not when her words, if I
chose to interpret them in such a way, were actually an acknowledgement
that she too cared, that there was the thinnest hope of moving this beyond
a simple sliver of sanity.
I took another sip of courage, finally moving, flinching, and cleared my
throat.
Not that I need a definitive answer to this today, or even this month or any time in the near future but just to satisfy my curiosity, do you ever envision
a time when you would allow yourself to reveal those things about yourself
to me that you think would destroy the purity of my thoughts of you or has this illusion carried me as far as I'm ever going to be able to travel with it?
She smiled obliquely and took a larger sip of wine, large enough to finish
off the glass. How about another glass of wine while I think about that a
moment, she cooed as the tension in our nerves screamed out for a respite.
I searched for the waiter who, busy as he was, had managed to spy the emptying of the glass and was quickly on the job, bringing another two
glasses to the table obediently, ticking our drink slip and disappearing
again.
Armed with another sip of wine, her eyes never leaving mine, her hand touched mine again.
I'm glad you don't ask that as a definitive question because if it were, I'm
afraid I would have to tell you that it has carried you as far as it can. But
neither of us really wants to believe that and so why should we concern
ourselves with killing it off before we've ever given it a chance? Are you
in that much of a hurry to get on with your life? You see, this vagabond
life you and Albert are living seems to fit so perfectly with my own.
Had you been a young man on a career path looking for a wife to settle
down and have kids with, had you been a man who knew what he wanted
and wanted to take it without waiting, had you been childish and demanding,
I'd have viewed you as an entirely different entity. But you aren't. Time
appears to be something you have plenty of and I would only ask, perhaps
beg of you your patience, your recognition that you do in fact have plenty
of time to allow this relationship to find its appropriate path rather than
pushing it along ahead of schedule out of necessity or impatience. Can we
agree on that for both our sakes? Patience?
I felt myself swelling with emotion – love, infatuation, illusion whatever it
was I might choose to call it – I felt my hands quivering with joy and
requited expectation. This was no ending, just a beginning. And yes, a
strange beginning to be sure, but clearly a beginning and a promise. I
squeezed her tiny hand as hard as I dared and kissed each knuckle on that
hand gently, feeling that joy in every one sending us both quivering.
Of course we can agree that, Anastasia. I will wait for you for as long as it takes.
Her face eased. She held her stare a moment longer before searching
out my pack of tobacco and began rolling herself a cigarette. In
that case, she said smiling, looking down and then looking back up
at me and smiling again, I'd be happy to sing with you two today.
*****
Oh shit, I wanted to get up and dance and sing and hug and kiss every
single face around me. I was losing my mind with rapture. Not of course,
because we were going to go on stage together for the first time ever, the
three of us, but because she was here at all and not only that she was here
at all but that we’d actually held a discussion about our future together.
The future. Well, it was not a definitive future by any measure but it was
a hell of a lot more that I had to go on than I’d had a few hours before.
Without little further preamble, I took her by the hand and we walked back
out into the hall to the table where Albert, Mikhail and the rest were sitting
watching the performance. We sat down in the space created by several
sliding over, hunched over the table in conference with Albert and began
discussing the songs we would perform.
*****
With Anastasia joining us we were suddenly a trio again, her arrival was a
punctuation of our performance. It wouldn’t be about us, we whispered, but
her. Even Albert seemed a little unnaturally giddy as he slurped his beer and
explained various tactics for masking our insufficient talent with Anastasia’s
sweet voice. Our own music was of no consequence, he elaborated. We
would just tried to play as obsequiously in the background as possible.
The others were naturally quite interested in these new developments. We
all kept fairly low key about Anastasia’s talents; yes, she sang, no, she
didn’t play any instruments, yes, we’d played together before, no we hadn’t
been expecting that she’d show, no we were quite happy to have her join
us and yes, they were all going to be in for a little treat, no doubt.
We were buoyed by her arrival, naturally. Suddenly we felt like we had a
little credibility. Not credibility based upon the stories Mikhail had
dreamed up to sell us to the promoters and get us on the bill but real
credibility, a real chanteuse. And after all these months, after the false
start of that club in Amsterdam, after those hours rehearsing in Utrecht,
most all of which was now out the window it’d been so long ago, we were
finally going to see what we could do together.
When she excused herself at one point to freshen up, Albert leaned in conspiratorially. So what’s the deal then? I shrugged. No deal. I mean,
well, I dunno, she kind of implied that she’s got a few things to sort through,
the gigs for one, I dunno personal shit I guess, but that in essence, if I’m
willing to continue waiting for her, well, it might be worth my while in the
end. It isn’t much but it is, as they say, better than nothing.
Well I’ve got to hand it to you Witold, you’ve been persistent, I’ll give you that. I’d have never kept at it like you did. Not after the way she left. But what the hell, she’s here, I mean, this is great. Now we can avoid a long afternoon and evening of humiliation and embarrassment.
Eventually we were summoned to the front side of the stage and backstage
and as the act on stage was tapering off, received instructions on set up; the
sound check was going to be as brief as possible, they were running a little
behind on time, Mikhail, who had come along as a translator, explained to
us. And then, just like that, the band on stage was off.
We ordered a quick shot of slivovice for bravado and good luck when suddenly the canned music faded and someone got on the PA to announce,
the infamously awkward, Damy a panove, Stalin’s Mother.
Muffled, half-hearted applause but for our group, towards the back.
Albert stood there holding his bass, leaning backwards as though
that bear of a bass would knock him over from the weight and the
dozen beers that proceeded him.
I held the sax in front of me, too much adrenaline flowing through me to
stand very steadily, gathered a deep breath and staring at a fixed point above
the heads of the crowd because I was terrified suddenly, gasping for air.
But then Anastasia stepped out there with the dusty spotlight in front of
her and she had her back to me: so when she began to sing, and if
you could describe a voice as velvet and chocolate wrapped around a
cherry you would have hers, a slow and tenuous caress, her voice
bounced back from the walls of the hall past her and to Albert and I as
she began the opening lines of a morose, pained version of My Funny Valentine.
It wasn't hard to follow at all.
I'd hit a low note every ten seconds or so, Albert plucked here and there
when it seemed appropriate and before we knew it the place had fallen
absolutely silent.
The crowd, every face I could discern from my vantage point, bartenders
and waiters and kitchen help and doormen all stood there, transfixed by
Anastasia's voice. I wouldn’t have described it as being something more
beautiful than they’d ever heard but you have to understand, the majority
of the afternoon had been filled with mostly booming male voices, hoarse
blues and very little jazz. Especially jazz sung by a diminutive woman with
a powerful song which seemed larger than her own lung capacity, her own
body could have produced.
All those times we’d rehearsed back in Utrecht, what we could remember anyway, gradually began to filter back in because you don’t forget things
like that - Albert and I didn’t anyway because we’d had really pretty much nothing to compare it to or replace it with in the interim.
But whatever we’d rehearsed, as we’d always played only for ourselves in
that flat, had been rehearsed without an audience so there was no way of
knowing what to expect. Yes, she’s sung hundreds of times for audiences
and knew precisely what she was doing, how she was doing it, how she
would draw them in and exhale them back out gently into their seats, how
goose bumps would appear on their flesh. She knew the reactions and was
prepared for them. She knew how good she was in essence, what she
expected from herself and what she expected from her audience and knew
from the very start, even with the two of us clanging around in the
background, this was going to be her audience and she was going to make
sure they remembered that.
And even though I thought I was concentrating on playing, in essence, even
as I played ever so gently, I was listening to her like one of the audience
myself and I was also noticing how silent and motionless the audience had
become.
I’d never seen an audience transfixed by anything Albert and I had ever
done together. At best we were background noise with the risk of becoming
annoying. But that was just the two of us. With Anastasia on stage, we were transformed. And out there, into that blackness the stage lights were
blinding us from, there was no fumbling with glasses and silverware, no more
idle conversations breaking ice over and over, no more bottles opening or
glasses slid across the wooden bar counter. Just Anastasia's voice, like lying
down on your back in the grass, closing your eyes to the sun.
When she was finished she just stood there as though waiting for us to start
the next song. But before we'd even considered what next, the crowd had
suddenly woken themselves, hooting and whistling, shouting, holding up their
drinks. She brought the mic stand over in front of me.
Your turn. she announced, turning on her heel and taking a seat off
to side of the stage.
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