Valerie sat up, rocking the raft, splashing them both. “You never told me that. What do you mean, you don’t want them?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But don’t you need them to collect eggs and harvest stuff and put wood on the fire?” Valerie laughed. “All I know is Little House on the Prairie.”
“I don’t want to turn into a mother,” said Christine. “My mother.”
“Listen, I get it, I don’t want kids either,” said Valerie. “At all. But if I were married and lived on a farm, I’d totally have them.”
“Sometimes I miss my old life.”
“You never loved New York, and you didn’t love journalism either. You were good at it, but you always said you hated the bias and slant and trashiness of it all.”
“Maybe so,” Christine said. She went silent, let the whole subject go, feeling disappointed and slightly depressed. She had expected Valerie to say something different; had wanted her to, even.
Someone jumped into the pool near them. Water sloshed into Christine’s ear and gin went up her nose. She coughed. The raft bobbed on the wake. Overhead, the Milky Way sprawled across the length of the sky, a violently lavish expanse of light, exactly as it did on clear nights in the sky above the farm, but it looked more dazzling and savage here. Christine felt a burst of wild, open excitement. Here she was, drunk on a raft in a pool on a ship on a dark ocean, thousands of miles from home. Anything was possible.
part two
THE FLOATING WORLD
chapter nine
Something had been happening to Miriam on this cruise. Maybe the Pacific Ocean had something magical in its ions, maybe its wind strummed her cells, Aeolian harp–like, and produced harmonies and frequencies she could feel but not hear. But she had been feeling a little giddy since the ship had left port.
It was Sasha.
While they performed the Rosamunde Quartet on their second night at sea, she had felt a leaping of their souls toward each other in midair, wafted by the music.
It was crazy to articulate it thus to herself. It was insane. She was the most sensible of musicians, the most determined to attribute the sweet power of a tremolo, the foreboding of a shift to a darker key, a melody’s progression from blitheness to awe, to the mathematical relationships between notes and the fact that the human ear and psyche were attuned viscerally to these things the way a dog’s ears picked up high-pitched noises and caused a tumult of barking. These music-fed emotions weren’t real, they were no more than notes, bowings, changes; sure, they conjured real feelings. But they didn’t themselves cause them.
Still, she could not account for the exalted joy she felt from the opening notes of the first movement. She felt as if the music itself were lifting her soul from her rib cage and transporting it somewhere overhead, where it met Sasha’s soul in a dance. That was the part she couldn’t explain; she didn’t believe in souls, let alone that they could just fly, willy-nilly, from the breasts of elderly violinists, and encounter each other somewhere above their heads.
And yet, it had happened. It felt as real to her as her feet felt on the floor. She turned to her right as she played and looked at Sasha, and he turned to his left and looked over his fingerboard at her, and they both raised their eyebrows at the same time as if to say, Yes! This is an odd thing that our souls are dancing together overhead! But they are!
So she wasn’t imagining it.
They had played this quartet more times than she could remember. It was one of Schubert’s greatest quartets, the full expression of his genius; it was imbued with the composer’s humane and profoundly emotional melodic voice. The conversation between the four instruments was a lamentation and a rejoicing at the same time, sorrowful but light. “Schöne Welt, wo bist du?” the first movement asked. “Beautiful world, where are you?” Her second-violin part moved restlessly around the median, as if questioning, and Isaac’s viola and Jakov’s cello undergirded her. Sasha’s melodic first-violin part was sure and true, as if he were leading them all together into a leap of faith that if they played this piece through to the end, they would find it, the beautiful world. He soared up toward it.
Miriam soared with him, left her body and herself behind and willfully went with him somewhere, where the two of them were conjoined in a twisting dance… Honestly, nothing like this had ever happened with any other piece of music. It was too much. Maybe it was the setting, the light, the romance of the ship. They were playing in the open air, up on the top deck, near the blue-green lit-up swimming pool, under a starlit sky, in candlelight, with torches lit, potted palm fronds rustling and the ocean wind scouring the ship’s surfaces with its salt-rasping tongue. In the dim light, Miriam saw her old friends as if they were young again. All their faces looked awake, sharpened, excited. She knew hers did too.
And there it was again, Sasha’s gaze, seeking out and meeting hers as he played unerringly. They both knew these parts by heart. His eyes were reassuring and playful and full of love, and she felt her own eyes answer him. It was that night again, the one so many decades ago, the night she’d felt herself falling in love with him the first time they’d played the Rosamunde. The feeling hadn’t gone away since then; it had just been in abeyance, held in reserve somewhere, invisible.
Long into the early morning hours after that performance, Miriam lay in bed, too thrilled to sleep, listening to her ex-husband’s gentle snoring, not bothered by it at all. She was happy to be awake, happy to be a violinist, happy to be on the Pacific Ocean again, her natal sea, the ocean that felt most like home to her. But she wasn’t thinking about the ocean. She could only think of Sasha, how kind he was, how graceful and determined, how handsome his face had looked tonight in the starlight and candlelight. He had been so unhappy since his wife died. He’d been a shadow of himself. Tonight, he had come back to her, the Sasha she’d always loved.
She loved him, and she always had.
The thoughts she was having! Like a silly young girl. She’d never had these thoughts about Isaac, and he was her life’s mate, the father of her beloved children. Sure, she had loved him when they were younger, even though he hadn’t made her heart do flips. They’d always been friends and partners, making a life side by side, until they’d eventually started fighting all the time and gotten sick of each other and ended the whole thing. He’d never made her swoon, never given her these crazy, ridiculous thoughts of souls and dances and exaltation. She’d never felt this way about anyone, ever. Except, of course, for Sasha.
Well, here they were on a ship together, maybe for the last time in their lives, or one of the last times, since the quartet would not be able to perform for much longer; their minds and bodies were all failing in various ways. That night may have been the last time they would ever play the Rosamunde, their final performance.
Miriam had to get up out of bed and breathe the fresh air and stand outside and look out at the ocean; her whole skin was tingling, her mind was encased in a bubble that wanted to float out of her skull. The music had ended, but the feeling remained. After being a professional musician for more than half a century, the idea that music might cause something real to happen, might inspire feelings that were true and actual, was a revelation to her. She had heard it could happen, but she’d never believed it, no more than she’d believed in religious visions or near-death tunnels of light or astrological predestination. She was rigorously pragmatic. She was empirical, grounded, and above all else, skeptical.