Of what? he wondered. Him?
Only now did it strike him that Maggie might have her own correspondence with Diane Novak. Through the words he had found music for. To which Maggie, in performance, had brought an exploratory sense, which she was now testing, of the other's shifting emotions, but also her own presence and breath. Is that why he felt so uncomfortably displaced, the only one here who seemed out of tune with the occasion?
The truth was, he was confused.
Very blonde and tanned, very carefully presented, but in a stringy way that was a mite “American,” Diane Novak was not what he had pictured. There were angularities to her that he had not foreseen. Something in the way she came at things — too directly, he thought— set him ill at ease. He wondered now if there had not been in her letters a suggestion of — what? Artfulness and high self-mockery that she had expected him to share but that he had mistaken or missed.
In her letters, not in the poems. She was rounder, softer there. Or was that because he had translated the poems so fully into Maggie's sphere?
Either way, while remaining excited, fascinated even, he had begun to doubt his clear sense of Diane Novak, and was disconcerted by the speed with which she and Maggie, for all the differences between them, had caught one another's tone.
DIANE NOVAKwas also disconcerted. She had brought presents, of course: jewellery of various kinds for the girls, a Ferragamo scarf for Maggie. For Sam a pair of Indian moccasins. He had received them, she thought, as if they were an exchange, not quite adequate, for something she had deprived him of, rather than as a gift, and was suddenly aware of all those little signs of unease she had felt between the lines of his letters and put out of mind, but which in the man himself were too close to the surface to be ignored. Goodness, she thought, what have we got here? She was disturbed a little, amused a little, but also touched.
Because the music he had found for her was so inward, so intuitive and acute, she had assumed a degree of knowingness in him that had led her into a kind of playful exaggeration that she saw now might have been a mistake. He wasn't at all knowing. He was, for all his sleekness, altogether boyish and at the mercy of his own wild starts and emotions.
Proprietorial too, she saw. Of herself, of Maggie. Of everything. She would have to be careful of wounding him. She would have to rely on Maggie to get them through.
Thank goodness, she thought, for Maggie.
She shot Sam a glance that was meant to be reassuring, collusive even, but all he did was look alarmed, and she was reminded yet again of how much of what life cannot deal with may be taken up, taken care of and reconciled, in the work.
She was well aware of what this meant for her own work, and had assumed that he too must know it — which is why she had responded so completely to him. She saw now that he might not. And saw too, almost too clearly, how much of “life” his work might have to make up for.
Scott, meanwhile, had transferred his attention to Miss Stinson, who, seventy-five if she was a day, was glowing in the full light of his interest.
He was amazing, Scott. He had a fund of attention, of youthful excitement over this, that — everything in fact — that seemed inexhaustible and which he bestowed, in an unself-conscious way, on everything in his vicinity. Which was a bit of a problem really. She knew from her own case how easy it was to be misled. But not, in her own case, dangerously; she was pretty skilled, at this point, at protecting herself from ultimate disappointment.
Miss Stinson was telling them how she had discovered Maggie and Stella, while Stella, the subject of the story, sat placid and indulgent, but frowning. It bored her to have these ancient wonders trotted out again — as she would have said, for the forty-second time. Any glory they involved was more important, these days, to Miss Stinson than to Stella herself, who had long since put well behind her the tattered, if once glowing, clouds they trailed.
“Such funny little things, they were,” Miss Stinson told. “With no shoes, and scars on their knees, real harum-scarums. Tomboys.” They were her next-door neighbours, their father a removal man. They were always hanging over the fence to hear the scales that rose and fell behind the blinds of the little house she shared with her sister, and the big practise pieces their students performed. Longing to join in. Well, she had taken them on at last, in exchange for a couple of hours of ironing each week, because their mother had wanted something more for them — but without much enthusiasm. And lo and behold, miracle of miracles, by one of those quirks of fate that make you wonder at things — life was such a lottery, so unexpected, so unpredictable — little Stella Glynn had turned out to be just what her name suggested — a star. The one undisputed triumph of Miss Stinson's career. She won the Sun Aria. Went to study in Paris, then London. Sang at Covent Garden and the Met and was for ten years an “singer of renown,” and was still described that way when her records turned up on local radio. But the gift she had been endowed with had never meant as much to Stella as it did to others. As soon as she could manage it she gave up the irregular life of glitter and savage discipline, married her Swede, and came home. These days she co-managed a successful travel agency. It suited her to a T
Scott, dazzled to find himself in the presence of a real star, even one who seemed little interested in her own faded glow, was leaning intensely towards Miss Stinson, who was telling her story now, in an oddly flirtatious way, entirely for him.
“Go on,” he said, when Miss Stinson paused and seemed for a moment to be following some vivid memory of her own. “What happened then?”
“Isn't this amazing,” he said aside to Diane, with no hint of irony.
Diane was quietly amused. Clearly, whatever else she might be to Scott McIvor, she was not a star.
Sam too was listening, also moved in his way by the familiar tale.
Long ago when they were all young, it was Stella he had been drawn to. She had obsessed and tormented him.
He was studying piano then with Miss Stinson's sister, Miss Minnie. Without Stella, he thought, his real life — the one he had imagined and must at all costs have — would be for ever closed to him.
He had been wrong; had almost made a fatal error, and not only of the heart. When he listened these days to the two pieces Stella had inspired in him, and which he had written for her extraordinary voice, he got a cold feeling at the base of his spine that was only partly for what came back to him, unbidden, of that old attraction, and the young man's bitter hurt with which it was still sometimes infused.
What scared him more was the echo he caught, the pre-echo, of the works he might have gone on to produce; the way his nature, his own gift might have gone if Stella, grand as she was, had continued to be his goal and inspiration. But she had been wiser than he was. Crueller. More honest. Less vain. She had understood, long before he saw it, that the true voice of what he might have in him was Maggie's. When he saw it too he was dismayed and humbled, then swept away by how obvious it was.
Miss Stinson was right. How unexpected, how simple life could be. Though not, perhaps, just at the moment.
He turned his attention to the sunroom where the children were gathered. Frowned. Got to his feet. Maggie, seeing his frown and reading the question in it, waited a beat then followed.
Sprawled on the floor out there the twins were engaged in a game of Monopoly with their cousin Jens. Cassie, who distrusted Jens and often complained about him, but succumbed immediately to the smallest attention he showed her, had been permitted to mind his cash. Jens, of course, was winning. Lars, Stella's older boy, was plugged into a Walkman. Miranda and the two interlopers, as Sam thought of them, were in a huddle of green, pink, and ash-blond heads half hidden behind the door.