Linwood Toomey said something else but each word was like a balloon slipped free from his grasp. Then there was silence except for the gurgle of the creek, and he remembered it was the speckle trout that had brought him here. He thought of how you could not see the orange fins and red flank spots but only the dark backs in the rippling water, and how it was only when they lay gasping on the green bank moss that you realized how bright and pretty they were.
Timothy Crouse
Sphinxes
from Zoetrope
ICAN still hear the satisfaction in Roberto's voice: he’d talked Miguel into shepherding Rosario on her trip to the seashore. And the roguish-ness: “Everybody knows about Miguel.”
Not long after he began taking lessons from me, Roberto one day looked up from the keyboard and asked: “Do you like Rosario?”
“Rosario? What Rosario?”
He said her full name.
“She's a student of mine.”
“I’m going to marry her.”
At the period I remember best, Roberto and Rosario had a little girl, Lili, and lived in an apartment looking out on the mountains. French windows opened onto a dramatic wrought-iron balcony, which Roberto had designed himself. The apartment smelled of geraniums. I always associated this with Rosario's sense of order. Everything in its place, immaculate.
Though I generally required my students to come to me I made an exception as often as possible for Rosario, since being away from Lili impaired her concentration. She was preoccupied with every aspect of her daughters well-being. This concern extended to Roberto, even to myself. She always had waiting for me a draft of her “magic immunizer”-an orchard squeezed into one tall glass-and entreated me to drink every drop. Something majestically selfless lent a becoming gravity to her solicitude.
Late one sultry afternoon I arrived to find Roberto-lank, tan, with the nose of a Caesar-lounging in an armchair. At the piano, Rosario was helping Lili, in her lap, pick out a tune. They all looked fresh and trim- congenitally undisheveled. Rosario put the child down: “If you’re quiet-quiet, you can stay.” With a smile to Roberto: “You, too.” Lili pondered for a moment, chin in fist, then parked herself in a miniature chair. She sat through the entire hour without a peep. Rosario leapt up afterward and cuddled her. “You were so good! Let's play our game.” She pinched her ears, nuzzled her neck, pulled faces at her. To each sally Lili responded in kind, with squeals.
Roberto leaned back and pronounced: “I feel envious of myself.”
Many of my students wanted to confide in me. I used this as an incentive to conscientious preparation: do your lesson well and afterward you can unburden yourself. One-way confessional; no penance, no absolution. The more they revealed, the better I could tailor their assignments. If they pressed me for a reply, I would point to the sounding board of the piano.
One of the stories that Roberto told me dealt with a younger friend of his named Miguel, also a pupil of mine. How they knew each other, I’m not sure; it may have been a professional connection, since Roberto was an engineer and Miguel, at the time I met him, had recently wound up his training as an architect.
“We went sailing together, and the wind quit on us. We’d brought a picnic hamper-it was so chock-full the top wouldn’t close. With nothing else to do, we cleaned it out. Then I dove into the water and began showing off my butterfly stroke. Miguel hollered at me to come back, or I’d get a cramp. I called him a sissy and kept on going, to tease him. A spasm jack-knifed me, crunched the air right out of me. I couldn’t stay afloat. Just as I was giving up-I remember thinking rather calmly of Rosario for the last time-an arm grappled my chest. Somehow Miguel tugged my deadweight to the boat. Hauling me over the gunwale was too much for him: he injured his spine. He still has to wear a brace.”
Other stories that he passed on to me, always in an affectionate tone, centered on Miguel's penchant for strapping youths, which Roberto took to be a commonly known fact since with him Miguel was impishly open about it. He was fascinated by his friend's descriptions of a spangled, promiscuous netherworld, and amused by his ardors. “In the street, Miguel will spot some foxy
Both men had slender silhouettes. It would have been difficult to tell them apart at a distance, if not for Miguel's gait. Lumbar twinges caused him to stiffen his naturally balletic glide, like a dancer working on a treacherous floor. He had curly hair (Roberto's was bristly), and his face was longer than Roberto’s, with sharper features, nostrils that flared. Each man had a peculiar way of actuating his attention. When I put a problem to Roberto, he would flick the tip of his nose, as though rapping his intellect awake. Miguel would bite down on one side of his underlip, and slowly release it. Roberto used to scold Miguel for this habit, warning him that he’d get canker sores.
Of the three, Rosario had the most pianistic talent. With her octave-spanning fingers, autonomous left hand, knack for sight-reading, and affluent musi-cality, she could have surmounted the drawback of a delayed start and made a career for herself. (She had a lovely voice, too, and might have become a singer.) Scales, arpeggios, the “Gradus ad Parnassum” never wearied her. Exercises that Miguel and Roberto would have done with clenched teeth, such as practicing pieces a half tone higher or lower than written, she regarded as a lark. While the two men were still plunking away at “The Little Orphan,” she bounded through
She had one odd weakness-rushing the final measure of a piece.
“Look, Rosario: there's a fermata at the end. The composer wants that note prolonged.”
She would blush.
“A work isn’t finished until the last resonance has faded.”
She assented. But as soon as she approached a double bar, she seemed to go blank.
“What happens to you?”
“The piano gets snatched away from me.”
I’d been teaching Miguel for almost a year when he told me: “A lot of people think I’m homosexual. It's an act I put on, to lull husbands.”
He was no doubt capable of bringing it off, what with his fine-drawn lineaments, his wounded dancer's grace, his streak of flamboyance (which I had to curb repeatedly in his music-making).
“I only sleep with married women,” he went on. “Fewer complications that way. Except sometimes… There was an underage pantheress who used to prowl the nightclubs. Her husband-a bulldog, with a pencil mustache- came up to here on her” (he sketched her bust) “and liked to exhibit her, doing tangos. She always managed to brush me on the dance floor.
“I redecorated their apartment for them, as a favor. Nouveaux riches, unsure of their taste. We did a heap of shopping for furniture and fabrics. I flirted, ostentatiously, with the brawnier clerks.
“They had a country place. He said I must spend a weekend, go deer hunting. I recoiled-the poor helpless Bambis and so forth. He chuckled: ‘You can keep my wife company while I’m off in the woods. I don’t suppose you’ll object to a nice haunch of venison.’
“So I rode the train to a whistle-stop in the hills. He met me. ‘My bride is under the weather, unfortunately, and couldn’t make it out. Maybe tomorrow. There's someone here I think you’ll like, though.’ He drove me to their chalet, and did the honors. The walls were studded with antlers; each rack involved a saga. At last, he excused himself. After a few minutes, he reappeared-in a geisha wig and a kimono, mustache powdered over, rouge
