Overture

Book by Goldstein Yael

I
I AM SITTING IN MY LIVING ROOM, AND THE REPORTER is eyeing me nervously, tapping his foot out of sync with the salsa beat drifting down the stairs. He looks as though he’s raced here straight from the offices of a high–school newspaper, Adam’s apple jumping in his delicate neck, large blue eyes set wide with earnest curiosity in a smooth egg–white oval of a face, though I understand (he’s brought me a collection of clippings as proof) that he’s more established than he looks: recent arts editor of the Yale Daily News, minor freelancing assignments everywhere from The Village Voice to People since he graduated from college last June. His specialty is arts profiles, as he let me know the moment I opened the front door, pushing into my hands the two quarter–page jobs he’s done for Entertainment Weekly; I didn’t tell him that the names in these articles mean nothing to me. We share some tenuous connection, this boy and I, and I am eager to put him at ease: he is the son of the cousin of the brother of God knows who, a line that eventually traces back to my college mentor, Robert Masterson, which is the only reason the kid is sitting here, experiencing what he has now called several times “the most awesome day” of his career.

For half an hour now, he’s been lobbing the usual questions at me, and I’ve been trying to answer as generously as I can. But it’s exhausting to be both truthful and interesting, and I am ready for this interview to end. Unfortunately, I can tell he’s got one last question he’s been holding back, one that he thinks is going to make his interview, of all the dozens of interviews I’ve done this year, of all the thousands I’ve done in my life, stand out. I know this question is going to be dopey–the supposedly trenchant ones almost always are–and I’m feeling antsy and embarrassed for him. But I feel even worse when, after a long pause, he says in an overly loud voice: “Would you say there’s been any single aspect to your life”–he’s biting his pencil between words–“an aspect, or an event, or a...well, the aspect that’s the pivotal one? The one that, you know, made you what you are, the most famous violinist since Paganini?”

“I’d hardly compare myself to Niccolò Paganini,” I say, both because it’s true and because the question annoys me. It’s not the presumption that there’d be an answer to such a question–this I tack up to callow journalism–but the tone of his voice as he poses it. I hear a burrowing, wheedling edge there, and it makes me think, just for a moment, that I’ve been reading this boy all wrong.

“Oh, but haven’t people been making that comparison for decades? Since Vienna, in fact?” he stammers, pushing the blunt–cut bangs off his forehead. When he returns his hand to his lap, I can see beads of sweat have appeared on his wrists, of all places.

“No, not since Vienna. Certainly not that early,” I relent, feeling a new protective swell at the sight of the bony wrists.

“So what was, you know, what would you say it is, the pivotal thing, if there is one? Would you say there is one?”

I look at the beads of sweat, the leg tapping now on the downbeats, the floppy bangs fallen back into eyes glued onto mine, and grab the clearest thought flitting by in the midst of the assorted mental debris. “My love affairs,” I say.

“Your love affairs,” he repeats. His eyes have gravitated away from mine, and I can’t catch his gaze. I’d tried to throw him a line, and now he’s floundering, and so am I.

But we’re saved by a voice booming down the staircase, mingling with the salsa music. “That’s a weird thing to say,” the voice–like a bell trying hard to sound grumpy–calls. “It’s so weird that if I didn’t know better I’d say you were actually being honest. That’d be wild.”

“Is that Alexandra?” the reporter asks, swinging his head around in a motion that makes me think of a child catching sight of the toy he’s about to demand on display in a shop window.

“Yes, that’s Alex, that’s my daughter,” I say, and just then she slouches to the bottom of the stairs.

“I didn’t know she was here,” the reporter exclaims, looking back and forth between us. “Could we possibly? Would it be possible to speak to her as well? I’m such a big fan. Of both of you. Your early recordings together are some of my favorites. I even saw you perform the Van Rheede duet in Brussels when I was a kid.”

Some probing investigative mind you have, I think. It didn’t occur to you to wonder about the source of the salsa music? But because Alex is looking at me with narrowed eyes, I’m quick to say, “I don’t think so. We don’t have much time. I have a lunch date, as I mentioned earlier?”

“Just a few more questions to you, then.” His voice is petulant, aggressive, but as far as I’m concerned, he isn’t here anymore. All my attention is turned to Alex, to her narrowed eyes and what they might mean.

“I wanted to ask about Jean Paul Boumedienne,” I hear the reporter say, as I mentally tick through the possibilities of what might be on Alex’s mind. I stop ticking at the sound of the name, surprised but not yet stunned. The words “Jean Paul Boumedienne,” spoken in the reporter’s high–pitched voice, echo in the room with us, and at first I have the strange suspicion he didn’t say them. I imagined it, I think. It’s an aural conjuring trick caused by too many sleepless nights. I’ve barely slept, it’s true, in the weeks since Alex showed up unexplained and furious at my doorstep. But out of habit, I turn to look at my daughter, expecting the same narrowed eyes that tell me nothing; it’s when I see her narrowed eyes gone hot and white and ghastly that I know.

“Your relationship with him,” the reporter is pressing, and his face, staring intently at Alex, not at me, no longer strikes me as young. “Do you think, perhaps, that that could be the singular thing that made you who you are?”

I want to say, “Where did you learn to link that name with mine?”

I want to say, “What makes you think you have the right to know?”

Most of all, I want to scream, “Alex, why do you look at me like that?” but the reporter is already answering the less urgent of these questions, saying, “It was Robert Masterson who suggested I ask. He told me that Boumedienne was how it all began.”

I watch him long enough to see his thin lips form the words, then whip my head back around just in time to catch sight of Alex’s left foot as it follows the rest of her swiftly out the door.
II
ASK HIM IF HE WANTS COFFEE, I THINK. ASK HIM IF HE wants water. Hold him at bay and hold him in
the dark.

The reporter is sitting ramrod–straight several feet from me, and I can tell, without looking at him, that he’s dissecting the scene in his memory: did something just take place or didn't it? I’d like to think I’m not sure myself, but I am. Something has taken place. I just don't know what. This, in itself, is no surprise; it’s been a long string of I–don’t–know–whats with Alex.

I try to form the words I should say next, that perfect something to deflate the last two minutes, to get him out of my home. I breathe deeply and close my eyes, but what I see is Jean Paul’s face: heavy–lidded blue–black eyes, pale lips curled subtly in unexpected places. So darkly beautiful. So unwelcome. Open your eyes, I demand, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to see the reporter’s boyish face aged with anticipation, or the bland and beige room around us, a room so tasteful it’s clearly not the product of any real person’s taste. I don’t want to swing my feet off the plush white carpeting and tuck them beneath me in a feint of intimacy, to hide that the answer I’m about to offer answers nothing. I have the strange thought that what I really want is to fling my eyes open onto my parents’ West Village brownstone circa nineteen sixty–something. I want to see the narrow staircase crammed with books, the dozens of paintings jostling for space on the walls; when I look toward the dining room, I want to see reds and blues and golds rain down onto my hands from the stained–glass windows above.

I should see all that, because that’s where I am. The reporter is feet away from me, rigid and waiting on the Eames chair upholstered in blandest cream, but I am decades away, under a shower of color, tracing lines across paper. It’s a shame the reporter can't be here with me, because this is probably the closest I can come to answering his question; this is how it all began: sitting at a dining–room table rescued from the original Queen Mary, my five–year–old fingers alive with vibrant shades, but not with talent. What’s really alive is the living room below, shaking beneath my seat, the wood groaning and the glass tinkling its displeasure at one of my father’s foot–stomping tirades. Light swells of jazz mingle beneath this, and supporting it all is my father’s ecstatically violent voice. My mother is hovering around me, her flower–scented arms close, her ghostly pale hand reaching down every now and then, but too lightly, almost afraid to touch the paper I’m carefully filling with lines and curves, though there are canvases of ...