“I suppose you called him on the telephone.”
“Yes,” says Bridget’s mother.
“I suppose he’s coming up for the funeral.”
“Oh, the funeral,” Bridget’s mother says. She lapses into silence again and then she says, “I just didn’t think this was going to happen. I wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready. It’s not fair.”
“Do you know,” Patsy says in a dreamy voice, swaying at the table with her chin upon her fist, “the moments when I’m the most dishonest with Brian are usually the ones when he believes I’m at my most intimate.”
“What do you mean?” says the saxophone teacher. She is sitting stiffly, with her saxophone held upright on her knees. It is a long time ago. She is still holding the instrument with a careful reverence, gingerly even, with both hands, as if it is a new wife and not yet fingerprinted or commonplace.
“I’ll be sitting there and thinking how much he is irritating me,” Patsy says, “maybe if he’s sniffing when he reads, sniffing and sniffing, every half page. And then he’ll look up and smile at me and I’ll feel compelled to say something, in case what I was thinking was in some way visible to him. So I’ll panic and in my guilt I’ll say, It’s so lovely that we can sit here in silence and read like this. It’s so peaceful. I love doing this with you. Which is virtually the opposite of what I really mean. It happens so much. I’ll be thinking how he really is getting rather fat, and then I’ll feel guilty for thinking such an ungenerous thought, so I’ll panic and blurt out, I love you. I’m always motivated by the oddest things.”
“But you do love Brian,” the saxophone teacher says, mostly because she feels it ought to be said. She has only met Brian once so far, at a recital in the old university chapel. He shook her hand and praised her performance and spoke in a booming voice about the renovations to the tapestry and paneling, twinkling down at her from his great height as if enjoying her lack of interest very much. Patsy flitted in and out and slapped at him and said, again and again, “Come on, Bear, she doesn’t want to hear about that.”
“Oh, God yes, I
She laughs and shrugs her shoulders lightly, inviting the saxophone teacher to join in and laugh as well at her foolishness, and the foolishness of all duplicitous women who say the reverse of what they mean. The saxophone teacher gives her a tight-lipped smile and watches Patsy’s laughter dwindle to a head-shake and a sigh. She wants to kiss her mouth. She wants to feel the other woman pull back minutely in surprise, to almost recoil at how strange and forbidden it feels, but then, all in an instant, to respond—even against her will. Especially against her will.
If there was no Brian—the saxophone teacher’s thoughts often begin in this way. If there was no Brian, what then? Is Brian just one man, just one circumstantial, incidental man, or does Brian stand for all men? Is he a symbol for a general preference, a general tendency, and if there was no Brian would there be another, maybe a Mickey or a Hamish or a Bob? She sometimes fears that Brian’s solidity and physical presence has transformed Patsy’s very shape over the years, bowed her and crooked her until she is simply a negative space that parcels the man up, each defining the other. She fears that Patsy will always exist in this way now, Brian or no Brian, curved to define herself around a man, always a man: a yin that reaches out for its counterpointed yang with one arm always curled and one arm always arched, forever.
Patsy shakes her head again, as if she can’t believe her own folly, and reaches the heels of her hands up to her temples to smooth the hair away from her aging face. Her wrists are delicate. The saxophone teacher follows the movement with her eyes.
“I heard she’s on Prozac,” everyone is saying by the second week, or, “I heard they had to put her on Ritalin after she was found out, she was that out of control.” Victoria is now marked, doomed to accept one of the polar fates that diverge before her. “Either she’ll end up being totally promiscuous for the rest of her life, and her body will become this weapon she depends on but she’s not really sure how to wield,” the girls whisper, “or she’ll end up this emotional shell, hollowed out and listless and blank. It’s one or the other. You’ll see. She’s screwed up now. It’s one or the other.” They watch her greedily to see which road she will take, craning forward when she comes into a room, and deflating with disappointment and relief when she leaves again.
Victoria shows no signs of taking either path. She is downcast and polite with all her teachers, and in the schoolyard she tries with limited success to patch up the friendships that have been so damaged by her betrayal. The girls look askance at her, especially the ones who were once Victoria’s closest, with whom she should have shared her secret but did not. She asks polite things about the months she has missed, and the girls respond truthfully, but all the while looking at Victoria as if from a long way away, caught between pity and disgust.
“Did your parents ever meet Mr. Saladin?” one of the girls asks one lunchtime. “I mean after you left school. Was there like a meeting or something?”
“Yeah,” Victoria says. “All four of us together.”
There is a sudden fascinated hush. All the girls pause and look at her.
“He’s still way younger than my dad,” Victoria says, “so it was still kind of us against them.” She doesn’t say anything more. She finishes her apple and wanders off across the quad to drop the core in the rubbish bin. When she comes back the bell has rung and the girls are dispersing, looking longingly up at her as they fish for their bags and stow their lunch wrappers away.
“You realize the only way you can make up for this betrayal,” the girls want to say, “is by telling us everything, sparing no detail.”
“You would be a celebrity among us,” the girls want to say, “if you only gave us everything, told us everything, let us in.”
The girls want to say, “It’s unfair that you should have this advantage over us. You are selfish to keep such valuable and dangerous knowledge for yourself.”
The weeks go by.
“I enjoyed your performance last week,” the saxophone teacher says when Julia arrives. “Your performance of the ride home after the concert, both of you in the car together. What you were feeling. What you saw. I enjoyed it.”
“Thanks,” Julia says.
“Did you practice?” the saxophone teacher says eagerly. “Like I asked?”
“Some,” Julia says.
“What have you been focusing on?”
“I guess big-picture,” Julia says. “How one girl comes to seduce another.”
“Let’s start big-picture then,” the saxophone teacher says, and gestures with her palm for Julia to begin.
“I’ve been looking at all the ordinary staples of flirting,” Julia says, “like biting your lip and looking away just a second too late, and laughing a lot and finding every excuse to touch, light fingertips on a forearm or a thigh that emphasize and punctuate the laughter. I’ve been thinking about what a comfort these things are, these textbook methods, precisely because they need no decoding, no translation. Once, a long time ago, you could probably bite your lip and it would mean, I am almost overcome with desiring you. Now you bite your lip and it means, I want you to
Julia’s saxophone is lying sideways across the lap of the cream armchair, the mouthpiece resting lightly on the arm, and the curve of the bell tucked in against the seam where the seat-cushion meets the steep upholstered curve of the flank. The posture of the instrument makes the saxophone teacher think of a girl curled up with her knees to her chest and her head upon the arm, watching television alone in the dark.
“I don’t know how to seduce her,” Julia says. Her eyes are on the saxophone too, traveling up and down its length. “Sometimes I think that it would be like trying to bewitch her with a spell of her own invention if I tried to smile at her and bite my lip and cast my eyes down, if I tried to look vulnerable and coy. Would it even
