In Captivity

By The Plaid Adder
Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com

"Milton, On His Blindness."

"Arise, my St. John, leave all meaner things to low ambition and the pride of kings."

"Pope, Essay on Man."

"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me."

On cue, the telephone rang. Eliza heaved herself from a sitting position to a crawling one and scrambled toward it.

"Eliot!" Jane shouted. "The Wasteland!”

"Wrong," Eliza answered as she lifted the receiver. "It's Prufrock. Hello?"

"Who's Prufrock?" the voice asked.

It posed the question timidly, and in the middle register that Eliza had always had trouble assigning to either one of the sexes. "A poem by T.S. Eliot, but that's not important right now. This is Eliza Littleton."

"Oh good. This is Scott Fielding, I just got your message on my machine about piano lessons?"

"Great! I saw your advertisement in the post office and my parents know Bronski and he said you were pretty good--" The voice on the other end laughed depreciatingly. "No, really. But anyway, I'm interested in taking private lessons and your price is eminently reasonable, at least according to my parents who'll be paying for it anyway, so can you work me into the schedule? I know it's a little late--"

"Oh, that's no problem at all. When's a good day for you?"

"Well, Thursday afternoons would be best, really, around three or four."

"Four's open. When do you want to start?"

"Next week?"

"Sure. Bring your old music. I assume you've studied before?"

"Nine years."

"Good. Well, let me give you directions to where I live...where do you live?"

Eliza dragged a pad and pencil over to the phone and copied down the subway station and string of lefts and rights and stoplights that would lead her from her dorm to his studio next Thursday. "All right, I'll see you then then."

"All right. I'm looking forward to it." She said goodbye, hung up, and crawled back over to where Jane was sitting amidst her strewn notes and flashcards.

"Is it really Prufrock?"

"Yes. It's at the very end right before the whole thing about till human voices wake us."

"Jesus, how do you keep all this in your head?"

"I can't remember anything important so there's a lot of extra space. Watch. Next Thursday I'll completely forget my a piano lesson."

"Was that what that was all about?"

"Yeah. I hope he's good. I've missed my piano lessons since I got here. So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, angels affect us oft, and worshipped be."

"John Donne, Why Don't We Do it in the Road."

"Seriously."

"Air and Angels. I don't think Donne's going to be on it, though, he didn't hand out a review sheet for it."

"On ne sait jamais."

"Saint-Exupery, le Petit Prince."

Eliza leaned back and spread herself out on the rug. "I think we've been reviewing for this for far too long. It's only a midterm, and if we keep going both of us are going to start speaking in allusions. Poor Andrea'll ask us how we want our wafer beef sandwiches tonight and we'll tell her to treat the meat just like a modest fair, nor overcook, nor leave it wholly rare."

Jane groaned. "You're right, it's getting to us. This is pointless."

"Maybe it is," Eliza answered. "Why do we even care about Pope's use of the rhyming couplet?"

"It gives us something to do.”

"No, really."

"I'm serious. Life is a search for something to do. Lit crit is just as good as anything else. Maybe it's all bullshit. But at least we're not hurting anyone. I'd rather critique books for a living than design warheads."

"Oh, me too. It's just...well, it would be nice if I ended up being useful."

"Yeah, well..." She sighed and looked at her watch. "You wanna go eat?"

"All right. But at my back in a cold blast I hear--"

"Eliot, The Wasteland. Let's go."

"You can't sit here," the woman barked, confirming it. Her voice was loud and rough-edged, unsettling coming from that short, frail bundled frame. "This is my spot. I been here since noon. You can't sit here."

Eliza hurried past them.

"Thinks she can just sit anywhere she wants," she heard the woman complaining to her neighbor. "Thinks she can sit on my grate. I was here first!"

"You told 'er, Gracie."

"Yeah. I told 'er."

Eliza sped up just perceptibly, earning the laughter of the man sitting between the women. "See? She's runnin'. She knows not to mess with Gracie."

By an act of sheer concentration Eliza heard only the sound of her own footsteps until she reached the better parts. She was learning to turn the deaf ear; the blind eye was taking a little longer. Eliza only regretted her decision to go to college here on days like this, when she felt that New York was slowly killing something in her, something she would miss but couldn't afford to keep. But fortunately, she had reached the apartment building.

When she knocked, the door opened almost immediately. Two blue eyes peered timidly out of a long, narrow face as a bloodless, nervous mouth smiled a faltering welcome. "Hi. Eliza?" She nodded. "Come on in."

The room was almost entirely bare, except for a futon on the floor in a corner, a small cluttering of dishes by the kitchenette, and a large grand piano in the center. Stacks of brittle, flap-eared music books surrounded it. Eliza smiled as she recognized the familiar yellow covers of the Schirmer editions she had learned on too. Scott led her over to the piano and they sat down on the two benches in front of it.

"I'm not really quite moved in yet," he offered as explanation. "I was just unpacking my old music. I've saved every book I ever bought. I don't know why."

Eliza put her Beethoven sonata collection on the music board. "I brought this along; I was working on the third movement of the Pathetique when I moved to college."

"You've done the first two movements?" She nodded. "Can you play them now?"

"Well, keep in mind I'm a little out of practice."

"Of course. I just want to get an idea of where you were."

The book fell open to the third movement, and the pages refused to stay when she turned back to the first. Scott brought one hand quickly across to hold the pages back; even in the swift movement, Eliza noticed that his fingers were long and fine, and settled into a gentle curve while his hand was moving toward the page. She knew that he had taught them that curve painstakingly, that they were expressive as a human face because he had spent years training them to speak for him. Her own shortish fingers were round, smooth, and rested flat on the glossy keys. She felt her hands tense as she struck the first chord.

The opening grave went well, as it always did. It was the allegro that was touchy, and as she rocketed into it she realized that this time it would take all her concentration to keep it from crashing about her ears. She gave her head little vexed shakes throughout, when she saw the tempo wilfully speed up and leave her fingers in the dust, when she collapsed onto the interrupting slow sections with unseemly and incongruous relief, when she banged the final chords out with too much tinny anger and not enough rage.

"Why are you doing that?" Scott asked as she slumped, muttering curses to herself.

"That was one of my worst run-throughs ever," she said.

"What was wrong with it?"

She started at the beginning and explained it, page by page. He nodded, adding comments here and there, gently correcting overzealous self-criticism where necessary. About halfway through, Eliza finally caught onto the fact that he was using a teaching stratagem on her, but continued to keep up her end of the game. When they got to the end, almost half an hour had gone by.

"You actually didn't do that badly," Scott said, closing the book and resting his hands next to hers on the keyboard. Eliza stared at the fingers as he talked. "And more important, you knew what you did wrong. You must have had a good teacher."

"He was great." A gesticulating, sound-board thumping, Mussolini of the keyboard, but an excellent musician and a good friend. Scott was going to be different. Conscious suddenly of her focus on his hands, she raised her eyes to his face. His hairline was not merely receding; it was retreating, leaving one point in the middle as an exaggerated widow's-peak and long bare streaks on either side in the classic pattern of the prematurely balding. The remaining hair was tied back in a ponytail that was either an attempt to compensate for thickness with length or a concession to the arsty image. Either way, it didn't suit him.

"I can tell. Well, what would you like to work on? Another Beethoven sonata? There are some beautiful ones..." He began flipping through the pages, blue eyes fixed on the shifting notes, lips moving so slightly as he muttered tunes, excited fingers stroking each page as they turned it, lingering over the linen finish of the paper as his mouth lingered over a particularly beautiful melody. "Have you done the Moonlight? Of course you've done the first movement, but have you done the others?"

"Actually, I never have done the first movement. My old teacher said it was a cliche."

The fingers jumped in a quick little jerk and smoothed the page out against the board as his eyes flashed. "It isn't! It's just that too many people have bastardized it. I heard a pair of Russian figure skaters use it as music once, played on a synthesizer at triple the tempo. It's terrible, what they do to these melodies just because they don't have copyrights. It's amazing, the way Beethoven and Mozart get raped every day for commercials."

He was honestly outraged. Eliza supressed the urge to giggle. "Well, that's what he said. I'd like to learn it."

"Good, then, we'll start with the first movement. Why don't you sight read it." He got up and stood at the other end of the room with his back to her as she began.

It was beautiful to see his timidity fall away from him. Tentative and wavering as her notes were, they called a sure and swift spirit out of his overstrung, trembling body that swooped down upon the keyboard with every misplaced note, outraged melody, or manhandled chord. A faint shade of peach rose to enliven his pale cheeks, and his hands were warm when he laid them on hers to correct her touch.

"No, a little faster, a little firmer. Soft, but not fainting." She tried again..."Almost. It's an effect, you want to create a mist, a mist to be a backdrop for the melody...the melody has to shine through the mist. Pull more with your little finger." And suddenly what he was saying seemed to make sense, and she did it. "Yes!" The blue eyes lit. "That's it. Now a little more left hand...not that much. You need a softer touch. Here..."

It was very strange, the touch of his hands on hers. Because she knew that she was not attracted to him, that his long narrow pale face and lanky, disappearing hair dismissed him from consideration on that plane--that his delicate, tenuously fine-tuned personality would have gone creaky and jangling after a close brush with hers, and that therefore she could feel nothing for him. But the dry, warm feel of the fingers that, though relaxed, hummed with the eagerness that animated the eyes, stirred in her a vague tremor disturbingly similar to other tremors she had name­d other things. As soon as he lifted his hands, it was gone.

The lesson ended sooner than she would have guessed, and she closed the book and tucked it under her arm. "So next Thursday then, the first movement?"

"Rape of the Lock."

"Damn!" Jane stabbed her pencil into the hard cover of her textbook and broke the point. "I put down Essay on Man."

"Well, it's Pope, I'm sure he'll give you some kind of credit."

"Not much. Anyway, I think I did all right on the essays, so the IDs shouldn't matter all that much. How'd your lesson go?"

"Pretty well. I think he'll be good for me. I need a sort of restraining calming influence; I have this tendency to just take off and go nuts. He's a strange bird, but I like him."

"He sounds it. You figure he's gay?"

"I don't know. I suppose given his profession and mannerisms it's likely. But I've always had this strange idea about people who exactly fit stereotypes. Like, he seems such the textbook gay man that I'm inclin­ed to believe he's straight."

"Just like you never believe Arlon's drunk because he hiccups and staggers."

"Right."

"Got any spare change for a cup of coffee?”

Eliza looked away. Jane stared back into the brown eyes with their yellowed corneas and said, "No, I don't." They were past him in an instant, and he was repeating his request to the pedestrian behind them.

"I hate panhandlers," Jane said.

"I hate the way I react to them."

"You don't react to them."

"That's what I hate. I mean, maybe it isn't just the money they want. Maybe they also want us to see them. And I can't get up the guts to even give them that."

"I think you're assigning yourself too much importance," Jane answered. "I think our reactions matter a lot more to us than they do to them, and that's why I hate them. When I refuse, they just move on to the next passerby. My refusal goes on my record. They have nothing to lose."

Eliza smiled crookedly. "Assomons les pauvres."

"Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal. Or was it the Spleen de Paris?"

"Spleen, I think."

"Would have to be, wouldn't it?" Jane agreed. "There were no prose pieces in Fleurs du mal."

The rain had driven people off the streets. In the business districts, Eliza knew, there were crowds of men and women slogging purposefully toward their offices or their subways, but here she was alone on the pavement. No one walked through these streets on their way to anything, and the rest of the city offered the residents nothing so valuable that they would risk an unprotected journey through the wet to get it. There were a few faces at windows, turning on her the same dead stare they used on the wet pavement and gasoline-slicked puddles. And the group of boys was still under the awning, hunching their shoulders and muttering in cranky accents that reminded her of the wet chickens she had seen on her grandfather's farm. But the street people had gone somewhere else to get out of the wet; someplace with a roof, like Grand Central.

No one challenged her. Since she was crazy enough to walk alone in a rain like this, the street was hers. At home whenever she walked alone in the rain she sang, stringing together remembered fragments of poems she had forgotten with a singsong impromptu tune. Her voice was strong, but not very good; and the only time she liked its sound was when she sang her own melody to herself and the rain.

But she was not alone now. Behind every cracked facade, in the dark holes between drunk and leaning walls, in the rooms fire had gouged empty, in the alleys rain had swept clean, they were there, just behind the visible. And if she believed the illusion the empty street tempted her with, the first confident note from her throat would release them all from their cinderblock prisons. They would rise out of the dark spaces, the alleys, the cellars, the walls themselves, swoop from the windows, and snatch her away. She would feel an arm around her waist, a hand over her mouth, she would be dragged with them into the close and crawling rooms, pushed up against a paint-stained, scummy wall. They would hiss, "You didn't pay the toll, little girl. You broke the law. For passing through the filthy, litter-choked, barren gutted corner we have been permitted to call our own, there is a toll required. Where is it, little girl? Don't make us drag it out of you." And when they saw her tremble, and that she was too paralyzed even to pray for her life, a nasty smile would gleam in the darkness, and it would hiss, "Yes, that's it. But you broke the law, and there are penalties, penalties for wanting to claim our turf too..."

Maybe she should. Maybe she should sing. If it all came true, wouldn't she have done everyone a favor? She would have freed them all, for one day. They would have the satisfaction of exacting the toll from her, and for a few days the street would be safer for the other travelers. And the next day she could face the man who lived under the steps of the engineering building, exonerated. Depending on how stiff the penalties were.

She knew it was only a nightmare, or rather a fantasy. That if she sang, her chances of making it across the neighborhood were exactly the same as they were if she kept quiet. That her song would not free them. That payment of the toll would be too horrible to survive. That her debts, heav- though they were, did not weigh enough on her to prompt her to martyrdom. That her martyrdom would have benefited no one, not even herself. That her debts and her fear were the last thing on the minds of the people who looked out the windows. But all the same, she was silent.

By now, Scott had got used to her enough to smile with some confidence when he opened the door, and in this case to immediately start fussing. "You shouldn't have walked in rain like this, this is just the time of year people star.,t getting bronchitis. Would you like some tea and honey or something? I've got tea."

She smiled faintly; of course he had tea. Herbal, probably. She knew she couldn't deal with a cup of herbal tea, but she also knew that unless she allowed something to be done for her he would be a solicitous, nervous wreck for the whole lesson. "No thanks, but if I could just have a glass of water that would be great..." He nodded, and fluttered over to the kitchenette.

She studied him while she drank the water. He was watching her intently, concerned, no doubt anticipating her first cough. Fortunately it never came. She put down the glass, produced a slightly sodden sonata anthology, and opened it. "Thanks."

"You ready to play this for me?"

She shrugged. "Sure." He got up and walked to the other end of the room.

She had liked this movement from the moment she sight-read it, and it was about the first time in years she had been really confident about her ability to bring a piece to life. When she laid her hands gently on the last chord and let the echoes ripple out to nothing before she released it, she knew that she had done it right.

When Scott turned around, she jumped; she had forgotten he was there. And looking at his brightened, widened eyes and rapt expression, she wondered if perhaps he hadn't forgotten she was there as well. No, she realized as she saw him walk over with passion quickening his steps and flushing his cheeks, he had simply forgotten about everything but the music--her playing was the only thing he had remained aware of. When he leaned over her shoulder to begin pointing out small details that could be changed, she finally understood where the thrill came from. Reduced to music before him, she slipped out of her body, its overnourished flesh, its tastefully expensive clothing, the mind that carried images too vividly and for too long, the spirit hobbled with thirty different crippling guilts and wound about with self-conscious hypocrisy. By looking at her with the tunnel vision of the fanatic, he had done what her mother's specialty teams of counselors and psychologists had utterly failed to do years ago--he had quite unintentionally freed her.

"Very beautiful. You can really understand it, can't you? There are a lot of people that got to Julliard through being good at following directions. But you really understand what you're doing. Only this diminuendo here is an editor's flourish.”

"So I take that out?"

"Yeah. Well...you could do a little bit. It's up to you. But there's no reason for it to be that pronounced, and it has a subtle but pernicious effect..."

"...on the mood here, with the tempo, yeah, you need the continuity." He nodded emphatically, unsure about what to do with all his enthusiasm. She could see on his face the same confusion she had felt before. She could have explained it to him if they'd been on closer terms. "It's not me you're feeling this inexplicable passion for, it's the music. Attaching it to me would be as absurd as falling in love with your piano." Which, as she thought about it, she could actually see him doing.

When she finally closed her book, she had injunctions to take on the second movement. Nodding eagerly, she tucked the book under her arm.

"It's still raining, do you want me to call you a cab?"

"No, I'll make it."

"Are you sure? It's really nasty."

"I don't mind, really. I like wet weather. Jane was calling me Jemimah Puddle-duck for a while."

"Who's Jane?"

"My roommate. We're both English majors and we made the mistake of taking the same freshman English course. Now we allude each other to death. It's really got out of hand."

He laughed. "You get along?"

"Oh yeah, she's one of my really good friends."

"That must be nice. I've heard so many horror stories."

A wistful expression came over his face. You mean lived so many horror stories, she thought, and kept talking. She wondered what his roommates at Indiana had thought of him, how many times he had been called fag behind his back and to his face. She told him about her life at school for a long time, unable to bring herself to leave him to his bare walls and piano.

When she finally got out the door, it was getting dark.

She hurried through the rain, whose gentle whirr had become an angry pelting on top of the umbrella. She screwed her eyes straight ahead, willing herself not to notice the steady blackening of the gray sky or the jagged hulks that rose up between it and herself, or the lurching, spiraling shadows on the edges of her vision which might be angry people but were probably tricks of the mind and the twisted shapes of the maimed buildings as their outlines shifted against the darkening sky.

She passed the boys' stoop without even glancing at it; she had grown used to their presence and knew that they would be there, spitting their strange language at each other and the passersby. So she didn't notice that they were gone.

It was a complete surprise when he appeared in front of her, and she felt her muscles petrify and her heart begin double-pumping before she even understood that he was there and that the gleam in the dusk before her was not his smile. By that time, he had grabbed her wrist and shoved her against a wall. Once she showed signs of understanding that he had a knife, he let go of her wrist and simply stood two feet away, keeping the blade at her throat.

There was nothing in her, not even fear. She knew that there would be nothing in her until after it was over. She froze and waited for him to finish taking whatever he had come for.

The hand that held the knife was trembling a little, and the point grazed her skin lightly at unnerving intervals. He was waiting too; she had no idea for what. The umbrella was lying in the gutter next to them, and through the rain and dusk she could only see his outline. He was shorter than she was, and skinny, wearing a sodden denim jacket. His hair was plastered to his head and his breathing came loud, though not labored. She wondered how old he was.

"Why don't you scream?”

It was the voice of a young boy, still changing, and she couldn't place the accent. It trembled like the hand, just perceptibly. He was fourteen, maybe. She felt a stinging slit on her neck near the blade. He had maybe scratched her throat.

"I don't know."

"You're supposed to scream. Why don't you scream?"

"I'm scared."

"If you're scared why don't you scream?"

"I'm scared that if I scream, you'll cut my throat."

She heard her voice coming through low but clear, but couldn't grasp its meaning, not even enough to register the disbelief that the sanity behind the sudden madness knew she should feel.

The boy nodded and gulped. She knew that at all costs, she must not laugh. But she wasn't sure she'd be able to help it.

He closed his eyes for a minute. When he opened them they were dully visible as whitish ovals. Their centers were empty holes, black because you could look through them to the street, the black street running with black rain. "Don't scream. Don't move."

"I'm not doing either," she whispered before the sane part could shut the madwoman up. The knife point zigged a little in surprise. He was looking at the blood now, that must look like a dark stain on her pale neck. She must look pale on the black wall, like a ghost already.

For a long time nothing happened. Maybe he was waiting for her to tell him what to do, to give some signal. Maybe he was waiting for her to struggle so he could push the knife into her throat. Maybe he was waiting for her to plead for her life so he could decide to grant it. Maybe he had simply forgotten what came next.

"Don't move," he repeated. Probably thirteen, she decided. Too small to be older. Maybe that was why she felt no fear. Because she could not see the knife, only the little boy. Because she could not be frightened of the little boy, only of the knife, which she could not see. Only the seeing was real, somehow.

He brought his other arm toward her. She wished she could see the knife, because now she could tell she was going to treat him like any other little boy. Don't, the sane part pleaded, I feel the knife. Don't get my throat cut. His other hand fumbled for the button on her jeans. She realized, with dizzying suddenness, that her wet jeans were sticking to her. He would have to use both hands to pull them off her hips.

The hand scrabbled frantically at the waistband, panicked. Somewhere she decided that this was no place for sanity, and as the boy faltered, forgetting his hand held the knife and moving it mechanically to her hips to help the other hand, her leg shot out and hit him with a soft thud. The knifepoint stuck into the fabric of her jeans, scraping a long, shallow track down her leg as she kicked him again. He went over backwards onto the sidewalk. The knife clattered onto the concrete, and before he could get off the pavement she was there, kicking the soft spots, the places she knew it would hurt, until she heard a door open somewhere and she ran, faster than she would have believed possible in wet jeans, mechanically buttoning her pants. If she had stopped to look back, she would not have slowed down, even when she saw the boy twisting slowly on the pavement and moaning.

"I shit you not."

"Well, Jesus, Eliza, are you all right?"

Eliza collapsed into a chair and drew her knees up, hugging them to her chest. Her eyes were abnormally bright, and her breathing was loud and labored. Jane laid a tentative hand on her arm; the skin was cold and wet. She was bedraggled and shivering, and her lips were bluish. Jane reached for the red spider stain on her neck, wanting to wipe it away but holding no cloth. Eliza said nothing.

"You're soaked, too. You want a blanket?" Eliza stared. "I'll get you a blanket." She found one and draped it around Eliza with trembling hands. Eliza felt the tremor, and wondered why Jane should be afraid too. "Are you all right?"

"I will be. I mean, I didn't get hurt. Just scratched."

"But you aren't all right."

"No." Jane gently tugged the blanket under Eliza's chin. "God, Jane, I could have been killed."

"I know. You were lucky."

"I was." Jane found a washcloth and dabbed at Eliza's neck. She flinched at first, then relaxed. The raindrops had spread the blood in thin rivers down her neck, but it was a small, superficial cut. "I think it was because he was so young. He didn't know how. I don't think he wanted to."

"Then why did he attack you?" She saw her hands shake in rage as she dabbed Eliza's neck. She hated the night and the streets it covered, hated the city she had grown up in more than she ever had. She hated the monster who might have left Eliza bloody and ravaged and dying on a wet sidewalk and didn't want her to make him human.

"I think the others put him up to it. There's a kind of a gang that always hang out under this awning there. I think maybe it was some kind of initiation thing. He was so young. Jane, he didn't know what he was doing."

"And you're goddam lucky he didn't," Jane snapped. It was all going to go for nothing, she could see that now. After working on herself for years until the city was powerless to touch her, until she walked through it invisible and intangible and the streets wheeled by as moving pictures, she was back where she started. Some high school runt she'd never seen had shoved his hand through the screen to grab Eliza.

Eliza drew the blanket closer around her and looked ruefully down at it. "I'm getting blood on it, I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it." The screen was splitting, every shudder of Eliza's body spread the tears until she could see the soot gray bars and the eyes outside the cage. "Blankets I can replace."

"I think I hurt him when I kicked him," Eliza murmured. "I must have hurt him, because he didn't get up." She stroked the blanket, staring into Jane's eyes. "He was so young. That's why I fought. Because he was so young." She shook her head, spattering Jane lightly with raindrops. "I shouldn't have hurt him."

"Eliza, are you crazy? Of course you should have hurt him!"

"Yes," Eliza nodded seriously. "I'm crazy. But I'll be all right tomorrow."

"You wouldn't have been, if you hadn't hurt him."

"No, no..." Eliza looked at the dull reddish stain. "That's the biggest difference between here and there. Everything that happens here fades eventually. I'll forget the quotes and I'll forget the inside of the buildings...they tell me I'll even forget you and Arlon and everyone else. And I'll get over this. But if it had gone differently...it would have been permanent. Scars are forever. And it has to be something like that...it seems like someone should have benefited. It seems like there should be a reason for something that horrible. But I'm a wreck huddling under a blanket, and he's lying on his back on a wet sidewalk. It seems like it should have been the price of something, like...somewhere, someone should have been able to escape, through that. But he's there, and I'm here."

Jane had never seen Eliza like that, staring out of large overbright eyes, trembling in the grip of something deeper than dampness, standing firm before some invisible specter even as she shrank from it. She realized then that she had only seen the center of the spectrum, the narrow moderate range of Eliza's personality. In the almost animal nervousness and twitching, in the engulfing blackness of the dilated pupils, she could see the other Elizas, the animal frightened of its own uncomprehended insticts and sensations, the visionary whose view of reality had been blotted out by her consciousness of the dreams it was built on. Jane saw all this, and wordlessly got a towel out of the bathroom and began drying off her hair.

"Thanks," Eliza murmured. "I'm sorry about the blanket, and...everything."

"It's all right. You want something to eat? You missed dinner." Eliza shook her head. "Sure? I'll go get you something if you want."

"All right," Eliza answered faintly. "Tuna sandwich?"

Jane nodded and grabbed her purse and umbrella. "Back in a minute."

She was careful to look straight ahead. She knew that it would be dangerous for her to see anyone. She was going to concentrate on the tuna fish sandwich, and when she went back to her dorm room she would not be angry any more, and then she could take care of Eliza like a friend should.

"Yeah. I got--mugged walking home last week."

She immediately regretted telling him. His eyes got large and his face managed to get even paler, and he put a trembling, tentative hand on her shoulder. "Oh, my God! Are you all right? I should never have let you walk home."

"I'm fine. It was my fault; I shouldn't have walked."

"Well, you'll let me call you a cab from now on. You shouldn't have done that. You could have been hurt."

"I know." He pottered anxiously over to the kitchenette and returned with a small pot and two teacups. "Here. Have some tea." Eliza almost laughed as he poured; tea as the ultimate cureall, from colds to week-old muggings. He put the pot on the radiator on top of a hot pad and they sat on the piano benches.

"This city is so nasty," Scott said, looking inward. "Everything about it is just angry and in a hurry and hostile. Power this and power that." He shook his head and sipped his tea.

"Why do you live here?"

"Because Julliard's here. And so's Carnegie Hall. If I ever want to make it as a pianist, I have to live here."

"You're really going to be a concert pianist?"

"God willing." As he bent to sip his tea again, a thought struck him and his face lit up. "Oh! My first-year recital is next Sunday."

"Where? I'll come."

"Really?" He smiled, and for the first time it was a smile of happiness and not nervousness. "It's in one of the rehearsal halls at Carnegie--I'll give you a poster before you go. Bring friends. They aren't that well attended."

"I will." She managed to gulp down the tea, hoping he didn't notice the instinctive flinch as she swallowed. He watched her anxiously, the very tips of his fingers supporting the rim of the cup as he held it to his lips. A siren screamed by under the window. As the sound died away, she saw the worry line between his eyebrows deepen. He was thinking of what had called the ambulance out that evening, who was bleeding, or suffocating, or shuddering, or freezing, or burning, or already dead on what sidewalk or pavement or floor or mattress. She was so used to the sound of sirens that she hadn't made the reflex glance she once did. But he would never develop the deaf ear, just as she was beginning to realize that she would never really develop the blind eye.

She drained the teacup, not without some difficulty, and put it down on the coaster. He seemed to brighten. She saw a kind of poignant absurdity in the scene, the two of them drinking this nasty-tasting stuff on the hard piano benches surrounded by four bare walls and New York City.

"You feel all right now?" he asked.

"Yes. I'm fine." She opened the book. "I should tell you, I didn't really get the second movement. I mean, there's that slow melancholy first one, and that cataclysmic last movement, and in between there's this chintzy little waltz."

"It's to break the spell," Scott said quickly. "An interlude between the reflective one and the passionate one. I mean, the chintzy little waltz is beautiful in its own right, but..."

"But he wanted the third movement to hit them right in the gut." Scott's smile flickered, and his eyes widened.

"I never thought of it that way, but you're exactly right."

His eyes shone with childish delight at his discovery. "Right in the gut," he repeated, smiling. "I like that."

"Beethoven was a vindinctive son of a bitch."

Scott thought for a moment. "I guess he was. He had good reason."

He got up and walked across the room. She cleared her mind and struck the first chord.

"I don't know. Anything musical."

"Well, you should find something here," Jane answered. "They have some nice posters with cellos and stuff that are a little cheesy, but..."

Eliza shook her head. "I know what you're talking about, but that's not what I want..." Something on a glass shelf caught her eye, and she walked toward it.

"What?"

Eliza picked up a wooden gazelle. On the bottom of the base it said, "Handcarved in Kenya." "Look! A gazelle!”

Jane walked over. "It's pretty. And not that expensive."

Eliza stared at it. The artist had elongated the horns and neck, as well as the legs; it looked fragile and uncertain, poised precariously on tiptoe and stretching its neck over its shoulder, straining to pick out the predators in the distance. Handcarved in Kenya. It was a long way from home.

Jane took it and examined it. "Probably machine-tooled in New Jersey, but what the hell, it's nice. He can put it on his piano or something."

"Yeah," Eliza agreed slowly. "That's just what I was thinking."

She bought the gazelle and had it giftwrapped. They left the store and took a cab to Central Park.

"We can walk there from here," Jane said confidently, climbing out. "We have plenty of time. Besides, I need air."

Jane kicked a small plastic vial that was lying on the path. "They deal crack here at night."

"I know." The sparrows were cleaning the road of bits of hamburger bun and pretzel, twittering to each other. The brazen pigeons kept pace with them, but the sparrows flitted away as they approached. A squirrel stopped halfway up a tree to stare at Jane. Jane stared back.

Both were absolutely still, eyeing each other. All sounds were muffled by the leafy screen, and the two of them were framed alone in their green niche, perfect as marble. Then the squirrel flipped its tail and disappeared into the lacework above them.

Jane turned back to her, and her brown eyes were slightly moist. But the voice was the same as it always had been. "Let's go.”

“I'm wrong for this city, Jane," Eliza said after they had walked a few minutes in silence.

"So am I, and I was born here."

"You don't like it?"

"I like this place." She stared up at the gray sky through the interwoven branches.

"We have lingered by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown..."

"Till human voices wake us and we drown." Jane finished the quote automatically, then seemed to snap alive and turned to look at her.

"So that's why you remember these things."

"That's why."

Eliza shook the box with the gazelle gently as they passed under the canopy, each understanding what the other was not saying.

The rehearsal hall was almost empty. A small crowd of friends and relatives clustered in the center of the balcony. Jane and Eliza sat off to one side.

"Which waltzes is he doing?" Jane asked.

"It doesn't say?" Eliza looked at the program. "Good Lord. He must be doing them all."

"How many are there?"

"24--one in each key. And he's got a sonata and two Debussy preludes..."

"Oh perfect. We'll be here till Tuesday."

Scott opened the door on the left side of the stage and walked out. He was wearing a tuxedo, and though it was his size it hung wrong on him. The bowtie and the receding hairline made him look older, but the face that stayed stubbornly in its twenties gave his whole appreance an otherwordly air--as if a boy had been trapped through some diabolical influence in a preternaturally aged body. He bowed stiffly, and sat down.

"He looks nervous," Jane whispered. He shouldn't be, Eliza thought; we're all his friends, or we wouldn't have come at all. Though she saw an official-looking man in a suit in one corner who looked as if he might be a professor.

He stretched out his arms for the keyboard and the stiffness flowed out of him. He began the Appassionata.

She had expected him to be good, but not this good. He could definitely become a concert pianist. He had that quality they all had, the quality she could spend her life striving for without getting any closer. It was a kind of inevitability, a sound that forbade mistakes or faltering. It convinced them all that he had known this piece before he was born. There was no question of his missing a note. There was no question of his interpretation being wrong. This was an absolute, a truth, immutable and inexorable. And there was no effort. He had simply called the music out of the air, and it was a fait accompli.

Eliza glanced at Jane. She was sitting straight, rapt. When the movement ended, she almost burst into applause, but Eliza nudged her. "After the last movement."

"I forgot."

When the piece ended, there should have been thundering applause. Instead there was a small but enthusiastic pattering from the balcony. He stood up and bowed, looking visibly relieved, and then began the preludes.

At the intermission, Eliza turned to Jane. "Whaddaya think?"

"You must be really good, if he's teaching you."

"Not really."

"Oh bullshit. He wouldn't teach you if you were a hack. He's going to be famous someday. You're really lucky."

"I know."

Jane settled back and watched the empty stage. "Thanks for making me come to this.” The muscles in her throat tensed perceptibly as she swallowed something. She fidgeted in her chair and rubbed one eye with a fist. "I needed this."

Eliza nodded, remembering the stony eyes she had turned on her the night before, remembering the tears that sprang from them in the dark every now and then as she wept for the hardening of the soft places and the death of tenderness. And she suddenly thought of how lucky this was, that music existed to give a tenderness that was not dangerous, that Scott existed to accept his gazelle.

She fingered the box, imagined the gazelle inside it. Jane strained forward to see Scott as he walked on stage.

There were twenty-four waltzes, one after another, with nothing in common except having been written by Chopin and being played by Scott. He played them without breaks between, and the effect was bizarre. She stopped trying to identify particular ones and let herself drift, carried in various directions by different keys. And she began to see the mark of true genius as she realized that he had taken twenty-four befdautiful shards and constructed a crystal. The order was arbitrary and someone else had written the notes, but he had shaped the performance so that it was his, he had created something compatible with what Chopin wanted but undeniably his own. She leaned forward, excited. From that distance, leaning tenderly over the keyboard, he was beautiful. As soon as he took his hands off the keyboard the spell would be broken, and she knew that. But until he got to twenty-four, she would enjoy looking at him.

Numbeger twenty-four came to an end, and he withdrew his hands. For that one instant of dead time between the last chord and the first clap, he looked at the keyboard. And in that instant as the audience hung suspended and silent, and the world faded to fuzzy oblivion beyond the edge of the spotlight, and there was nothing left in the universe but the memory of the music, he was alone, and free.

Jane leaped to her feet and began clapping. The rest of the crowd joined in, a little more subdued. Eliza rose and began applauding and hollering. She and Jane punctuated the prolonged applause with shouts of approbation.

He blinked and flopped his torso forward in a jerky half-bow, and almost fled the stage.

By the time Jane and Eliza had found their way backstage, the others had dispersed and he was glancing around bemusedly and putting on an overcoat. When Eliza hugged him, it took him a moment to realize what was happenning and put his arms around her for a second before she released him. "You were great."

He laughed and almost blushed. "Thanks."

"She's not lying to you," Jane put in. "I came under protest and I loved it. You're really, really good."

"This is my roommate Jane," Eliza explained to his baffled stare.He nodded an acknowledgement. "Listen, in my family we have a tradition of giving our teachers presents at recitals, whether they're theirs or ours, so..." She handed him the box.

His face lit up with the happiest, most ingenuous smile she hadki ever seen on it. "A present? For me?" He took it gingerly, then attacked the wrapping paper like a child. Eliza and Jane looked on as he lifted the little wooden animal out of its tissue paper. His eyes widened, and he breathed in softly. "Oh, it's beautiful! A gazelle!"

"They're not very musical animals," Eliza said. "I was going to get you a little bird, something that sang or something, but I thought the gazelle..."

"It's more me." He beamed. "It's lovely. I'll put it on the piano. Thank you. I'll see you next week?"

"Right. See you. Good concert, really. I'm glad I came." He nodded happily, and they left.

"Let's walk partway back," Jane said.

"All right.” The daylight surprised them as they left the darkened concert hall. Thank God it was an afternoon recital, Eliza thought. "Have you started your Eliot paper yet?"

"No. I have to do that as soon as we get back. You?"

"Of course not, you know me."

"Of course." They strode easily through the streets, which were filled with Sunday shoppers, strollers, sightseers, sidewalk merchants and panhandlers.

"Quarter for a cup of coffee?"

Eliza looked her full in the face. The eyes were bloodshot, but they were very bright blue, set in among the broken red vessels in the nose and cheeks. Putting her hands in her pockets, she felt a dollar. She pulled it out and gave it to her.

"C'mon, let's get out of here before she tells her friends," Jane urged, quickening her pace.

"It didn't help, you know," Jane admonished her.

"I know."

"So why--"

"I don't know."

They walked a little further. "It was nice of you to get Scott the gazelle.”

“Did you see his face? I forgot that it makes such a difference, finding out that someone else thinks of you when you're not there. That you don't have to be your own universe."

"You think it's enough, Jane?" she asked after they had turned their last corner.

"What?"

"Being able to give someone a gazelle at the right moment, is that enough? I think it's all I'll be able to do, ever."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Liza. But if it's all you can do, the question's moot, isn't it?"

They unlocked the door and walked in. The foreknowledge of a night of wrestling with a metaphysical poet began to seep into her and sap her enthusiasm. Jane sighed deeply.

"I really don't want to do this paper."

"But we have to." It started to rain again, streaking the window one slash at a time. Eliza switched on the computer. "Da!"

"Datta: What have I stepped in?" Jane answered from the closet. "Liza, there's a bagel in here."

"I'm sorry, I'll get rid of it."

"Never mind, I've got it." Jane threw the offending breakfast treat into the garbage. "We have to tell Lotta to stop bringing the extra bags home from work."

"Maybe she could give them to a soup kitchen or something."

"Let them eat bagels?"

Eliza shrugged. "Obnoxious, I know. But we throw them away otherwise."

Jane stared out the window at the rain. "We'll ask her about it tomorrow."

Eliza stared at the blank screen and tried to marshal fragmented thoughts into a first sentence. She kept having to kick out the word gazelle. "What are you writing on, Jane?"

"No idea. I hate open topic."

She brought her hands over to the keyboard and typed, "DEATH BY WATER: Release and Captivity in Prufrock and The Wasteland."

Jane came around to look over her shoulder. "That's going to be a lulu to develop."

"Not as bad as the other option."

"What other option?"

"Well, I wanted to call it `But Gazelles Don't Sing.'" She shook her head. "I don't know why. But I can't because there aren't any gazelles in any of it."

Jane clucked. "You're losing it, Eliza. With every passing day."

"Will you love me after I've lost my mind?"

"If you love me after I lose my teeth."

"Deal." Jane sat in her armchair and the sound of the falling rain filled the silence.

THE END