The rose variations, p.8
The Rose Variations, page 8
“Let’s not get carried away,” said Rose. Even more than grief, she had to admit that she had felt relief, immediate and persistent relief to have it gone—the fetus gone and her mother far away enough that if Rose never told her, she’d never know.
“I’m in trouble,” said Ursula and came back to the bed and slumped down, resting against Rose. “I have to get out of this situation. It’s making me unfit to be with people. I’m going to quit. Really. You can go in with me Monday and I’ll do it—I’ll tell them.”
“Now, now, Doctor Kaiser,” Rose said. They’d got themselves into a state, cooped up in the apartment. Rose would be flying out to Minnesota the next morning. They mustn’t lose heart. They’d stay in better contact. For the moment, unless Ursula meant to go to bed and to sleep, they ought to bundle up and collect the freon horn and go out walking.
Chapter SEVEN
Rose lived a nun’s life that winter: up early, compose an hour, tea and toast, classes, coaching sessions, a Coke at lunch to keep her alert through class prep and on into the evening when, after a quick supper and more tea, she turned herself over entirely to her music. And if, in the late hours, she went stale, she availed herself of the phone: Ursula, when she could get her, or Alan, though with Alan she had to steer clear of the subject of Frances.
Frances and Alan were still on, somehow. Rose had stumbled on the two of them kissing in Alan’s office. However, when Rose called Alan late at night, Frances was never in evidence. At school, Frances was polite to her, correct and clear, and, as time passed, seemed no longer to notice her and radiated neither envy nor pity.
Rose had a student, Victor Zeiss, who seemed especially bright and funny but had trouble retaining concepts. He came by her office hours twice a week for tutoring and, during their talks, developed the puzzling habit of changing the subject to himself. One afternoon, she saw he was flirting with her. The realization overtook her physically: she caught her-self blushing and had to think why. He gave a light, triumphant laugh. He was not much younger than she, five years younger at most. He had a marvelous, broad face and high coloring. She enjoyed his easy conversation. Had she somehow beckoned to him? He sat there, watching to see what she’d do.
She’d do nothing. Another student would be along soon. Her office hours were always full; in fact, other faculty teased about her popularity, which annoyed her. She was there because of music. She took a breath and brought Victor back to music.
Some of the music she was writing might be terrible, she suspected— unconsidered, unformed, and raw. But it was going—all flow and no ebb. She seemed made to work. The end of the school year and of her appointment was drawing nearer, but she’d saved fully half her salary. The money would last at least another nine months and wherever she went, she’d be writing music. She’d sent for a brochure from the Minnesota Composer’s Guild. If she could win a concert grant, there’d be money to rent a hall, hire professional musicians and play to an audience far beyond students and professors at college recitals. She had purpose and focus. Her road lay straight ahead.
One night while she was washing dishes, Guy knocked at her door. She felt a startled ache at the sight of him, of his work-roughened hand on her doorframe.
He hadn’t called first, he said, because he thought she might refuse to see him. She brought him in, made tea and let him talk.
He had lived in the neighborhood all winter and had sometimes seen her at a distance, he said, but had tried to keep out of her way.
Out of her way? Was she so harsh a person?
Come spring, he’d go north. As he described plans for the summer’s stonework, she rediscovered her pleasure in the directness of his gaze and the melody of his voice. If this had been the olden days, they’d be, by now, a settled pair—married with a baby on the way—and working out how to stay close, now that the “being in love” was over. But it wasn’t the olden days. She hadn’t had to marry him. Had she loved him? Oh, she had. But it was over and she’d survived. She had, deep inside herself, changed the subject. Still, she felt how much she liked him. She almost wished he was speaking a language she didn’t understand so she could simply enjoy the sound. His voice was a clarinet, and then it seemed he was cooing at her. He reached for her and she leaned back. He shuddered and clasped his hands. She thought she’d better wake up and hear what he was saying.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
He shook his head. “Look. Can I call you?”
She’d be leaving her borrowed apartment soon, as the school year was winding down. Come summer, she’d be gone and he’d be up north. What harm would it do if he called her?
He dropped in again every few nights, calling ahead with shy formality. Once, for no reason she could think of, she put her arms around him as he stood at the sink and he turned and, with great relief, kissed her. But she wouldn’t let him lead her to bed and he didn’t press it. He imagined she was afraid. Of what? Of getting pregnant again? She was, and his tender concern touched her, but really her mind was elsewhere.
She asked him out to a college recital. They went and she enjoyed being seen with him. She took care that the students—that Victor Zeiss—should see them. Victor caught her glance and raised his eye-brows. All evening, to her surprise, she was more aware of Victor than of Guy. But Guy wasn’t stupid. She couldn’t parade him around and then send him home like a schoolboy.
On the first warm day in April, he went up north. It was understood that she wouldn’t visit—there was only the shack with the one bed. Still, she caught herself longing for open sky and birdsong. And, as it happened, she knew someone else who lived in the country, to the south.
During her grad-school years, guest musicians frequently performed in Philadelphia, among them an astounding cellist named Lila Goldensohn. Goldensohn gave a disheartening first impression: stiff and unsmiling, she took her place onstage, her heavy black hair massively subdued in a gold clip like something she’d killed for a trophy. Her brow weighed down over her eyes and her prominent jaw clenched as she lifted her bow. She was only a little older than Rose. Her concert career had begun in her teens; she’d been a prominent soloist for years. Rose had wondered that she couldn’t afford to relax a little.
The moment she drew her bow across the strings, however, her stage presence no longer mattered. The sound eclipsed the sight of her, as though the ear could for once overthrow the almighty eye. In the fluid notes that crested and fell, the surging and slowing and rising again, Rose heard, that first time she’d witnessed Lila Goldensohn, what she had previously known only in her head and had never been able to produce in her own playing. The sound emerged as though from a single body, musician and instrument as one, and each note seemed sung.
Rose had ventured backstage after the concert and, trying to express her excitement, had burst into tears. She was mortified, but, to her surprise, the cellist was pleased. The forbidding features relaxed and her eyes, under her heavy brow, seemed actually to twinkle. When Rose tried to withdraw, leaving way for other fans, Lila stopped her and asked Rose her name and address to add Rose to her mailing list.
Rose ventured that she would write music for Lila.
“Really?” murmured Lila. “Well, maybe you will.”
Every few months afterwards, Rose had received a notice detailing concert dates, though always with the same grim photo of Lila, glowering over her cello. When Rose came to St. Paul, she’d sent along her new address to Lila’s management, but, for a time, heard nothing. The sound of Lila’s cello was never far from her mind, and she frequently put on a Goldensohn recording when she went to bed, so that exalted sound was the last thing she heard before sleep. Then in late winter she received not a concert notice, but a letter with a Minnesota address.
I have retired from the concert hall—in fact, I no longer play. I’m out here on my farm with a bunch of women, not a hundred miles from you. Why don’t you pay us a visit?
It was March then, however, and every weekend seemed to bring a fresh blizzard and travel warnings. Rose found it difficult to fathom that Lila would quit music. It seemed wrong, offensively wrong, when she played so sublimely. Rose’s disappointment was, of course, for herself, though she had no reason to believe that Lila, with her Carnegie Hall dates, her raves in The Times and her following in Europe, would interest herself in the work of an unknown.
Rose wrote a brief letter expressing delight that Lila lived so near and defiantly enclosed a short piece for the cello, a piece of her own music.
At length, Lila replied with a letter very much like the first. I’m afraid I haven’t opened your score. Josie, the other musician here, has taken a peek at it and says it’s good. Did I mention I own a farm here? We’re the great farmers. Why don’t you come out?
On the Friday before Easter, Rose drove her beat-up station wagon out through the city’s western reaches, past the Flying Cloud Airport to where the highway dropped south into the wilds of the Minnesota River Valley. In the fragile warmth of April, the willows and sumac, swamp alder and cattails were poised to unfurl in all shades of green. Her front seat rode high, the springs and upholstery bearing up stoutly over the rusted wheel wells. Despite a chilly breeze, she rolled her windows down to let in birdsong and the almost-audible rustle and buzz of growth.
On a rise above the Crow River, to the east of the tiny town of Cosmos, off a county road and down a dirt track that ran a mile to a grove of ancient elms and willows, the farmhouse stood, and the barn—not a fat, red, gambrel-roofed dairy barn, but a steep, weathered white, with a tin roof that swooped up to the ridgepole, making an incurved mountain shape behind the house, which was a story and a half and many-windowed. At first view, the house was all eyes.
Rose cut the motor and got out. Out of the stillness, sounds oozed and burst: the push of river water, grass rubbing on grass, and another sound, a chorus of nasal yawping and blatting. Then laughter burst, entirely human, and a white-blonde woman in a long chambray dress came zigzagging around the corner of the house, chasing a white-blond boy who was juggling an Easter egg. Her skirt gathered up in a fist, the woman halted and signaled to the boy, who rushed indoors as she strode forward in welcome.
“Here you are, Rose. I’m Wilma,” she said, and wrapped her in a quick, cinnamon-scented embrace. “You can’t go in yet.”
Yawping again—voices, but not human. Bleating. A small sign over the front door read: The Goat Pasture.Wilma led her on a tour of riverbank and goat shed, where half a dozen black and white ewes, heavy-uddered and shaggy, rushed to them. Rose had never before seen goats up close. Leaning over the fence, she reached and buried her hand in warm, coarse hair.
Wilma shouted toward the house, “Ready or not!” and they went inside.
A bow dragged across cello strings. In the middle of the front room, dim at first, after the dazzle of outdoors, sat Lila in overalls, bent to her instrument, her untamed hair spread across her shoulders, playing with her unmistakable verve the short composition Rose had sent her, while a woman with a dark little rattail down her back played accompaniment on piano. Rose was struck dumb. The sound was all she’d hoped. Entering the fullness of the music felt strange, like setting foot on unknown land, though she herself had mapped it.
Then came a second shock: Lila looked up and Rose saw she had a beard. Dark, soft bristle covered her jaw line—a beard was what it was, and a mustache. For a split second, Rose felt tricked, as though this were some sort of masquerade. But it wasn’t a costume Lila had on; it was something that grew from her body. Lila put down her bow and Rose approached and embraced her awkwardly, avoiding her face. A peculiar smell enveloped them, pungent and slightly chemical. Rose glanced at the cello and the open case, wondering at its source. Lila put her hand to her face. Rose let her breath out and brought her hands together, applauding.
“You rascal,” she said. “I thought you’d given up music.”
Lila grinned back at her, beard, mustache and all. “Maybe you’ll talk me back into it.”
“Oh, I will,” said Rose.
She was soon introduced to Josie at the piano, to Wilma’s little boy, Noah, and to the other “farm girls,” as they called themselves—round-faced Dinah and skinny, nervous Peggy, who presided over the kitchen where a vegetarian supper was in progress.
The house was as plain as a convent or a Shaker house. Pictures on the walls were hardly needed: the many windows brought in the outdoors in great swaths of light, hot gold and fuzzy green. The front room—or common room, as they called it—held a scattering of ladderback chairs along with Lila’s huge rocker, polished cherrywood, silent on its runners. A dining table at one end folded in or out to seat as few as two or as many as ten. On the river side, three bedrooms were tucked under a wide stair-case which led upward to a low-ceilinged master bedroom, reserved to Lila as owner of the farm, which had belonged to her grandparents. There was running water in the house, but no indoor bathroom. An outhouse stood in a screen of lilacs. It was a two-holer but could be locked from inside. Rose wondered if she would have to share it, if she would mind. A half-moon window was cut high in the door.
They gave her the little room upstairs across the stairwell from Lila, a room with a round window that looked out over the meadow. After rice, asparagus, goat’s cheese, and apples, Rose lay down beneath the round window, but, jittery with delight, she barely slept. Light sleeping seemed a feature of the place, though it might have been the effect of spring. Downstairs in the common room, in the wee hours, she found Wilma and Josie playing Chinese checkers. Above them, she was almost certain she heard Lila wandering.
At first light, Rose stumbled outside over the soggy ground. Sunrise was huge in flat country. Swallows dipped, chattered, spiraled. Her eyes filled with sky and wind and grass; her ears, with a vague, oceanic roaring.
Why did they call the place the Goat Pasture, she wondered. Why not Chanting Wind or Star of the Prairie? Goat Pasture seemed so prosaic. “You don’t know goats,” observed Peggy.
“Anyway, it’s a prosaic sort of place,” declared Lila. “No fancy philoso-phies, just the land, and each person doing as they please.”
Rose extended her stay until the last possible moment, dawn of Easter Monday. The night before, they fired up the sauna, shed their clothes, and hung them on pegs on the side porch, the seven women and the boy. The cedar-lined hutch held a metal barrel of glowing rocks. They sat thigh to thigh on facing benches. At first it wasn’t quite hot enough. Peggy stood and climbed lithely into Dinah’s lap, snuggled against her breasts, and Dinah leaned down and kissed her.
“Look at the lovebirds,” Lila growled.
Rose hadn’t realized. She tried not to stare. She’d known lesbians, though never, she didn’t think, at close range. She wondered whether the little boy ought to be seeing this. But it was only affection, after all. It wasn’t as though they were doing it in front of him. “It”? What exactly did they do? Rose sup-pressed a giggle—it seemed somehow silly, the thought of what they did. Wilma dumped water on the rocks, Dinah and Peggy moved apart in a cloud of steam, and Rose was abruptly ashamed. How dumb not to have known. She’d been quick enough, meeting Alan, to think he was gay. But then he’d proved her wrong, hadn’t he, carrying on with Frances? What did she know about all that? She imagined another woman’s body would be familiar, and at least there’d be no fear of getting pregnant.
So it was that sort of a thing, a lesbian commune. Were all of them that? Late at night, she asked Wilma.
“Not exactly,”Wilma told her. “I’m bi.”
Rose regarded her.
“I go both ways—men and women.”
“Oh,” said Rose quickly.
“That’s how I got my Noah.”Wilma nuzzled the little boy, who’d fallen asleep against her. Wilma had known Lila since high school and, when Lila inherited the farm, had come out there with her little boy, leaving her husband behind. He’d been a good husband but couldn’t tolerate Wilma’s need for an occasional girlfriend—had been heartbroken by the girl-friends. Josie came next. She’d been Lila’s secretary during her concert years. They’d found Peggy at the food coop in nearby Litchfield, and Peggy had brought Dinah; like in “The Farmer in the Dell.”
“So Peggy and Dinah are a couple. And Josie’s with me sometimes, though not so much lately. And Lila is, well, Lila. Like Garbo, she walks alone,” said Wilma. “And you?”
“I like men,” Rose said quickly.
Wilma shrugged. Rose was welcome all the same.
Following the Easter visit, she drove out as many weekends as she could, sending music ahead. Lila always greeted her, ready and rehearsed to play. She commented sparingly, offering here a change of tempo, there an observation that she “wondered” about a certain passage. Rose didn’t mind Lila’s censure. Lila’s ear seemed unerring, and Rose had three new ideas for every one Lila “wondered” about. More rarely, Lila called a passage “interesting”—her highest praise. Letting her gaze linger on the leonine mane and the jar-like, bearded jaw, Rose sometimes slid into thinking of Lila as a man. That was incorrect. Lila was just as much a woman as she, and when Lila played her music, Rose was led deeper into what she’d begun to explore, her soul’s own country. Lila cut Rose’s gratitude short. Apparently, the music meant something to her too. One evening in mid-May while they all sat at the table after dinner, the breeze blowing through the big room and spreading the fragrance of lilac, Josie leaned back in her chair.
“So, Rose, when are you moving in for good?”
“Oh, well,” Rose spluttered. “Have I been invited?”
“Lila,” said Wilma, rolling her eyes.
“She talks about it all the time,” said Josie. “I thought you two had it worked out.”
“I could rent a room in Cosmos so as not to overuse your guest room,” Rose ventured.
