Summer Sweat

In the throes of the most destructive love affair of her life, with the composer Gregor Wodicki in the summer of 1975, Adriana Kaplan frequently wanted to die, washing down prescription Benzedrines with vodka in some desolate beautiful place (the Catskills, possibly), yet Adriana was never so distraught as to wish to be dead in any permanent way.

She was too restless, inquisitive, troublesome a young woman for deadness. She especially wouldn't have wanted her lover's wife to outlive her.

She wouldn't have wanted her lover to outlive her by even a few hours.

•

In those days happiness was only subtly distinguishable from misery, yet Adriana would not have wished her life otherwise. Running breathless to meet Gregor in the pinewoods down beyond the old, rotting stables of the Rooke Institute, where they were young, brilliant and neurotic together, 40 minutes north of Manhattan on the east bank of the Hudson River. In the dense pinewoods where on achingly bright summer days the shade was too dark. Splotched sunlight and shadow: neurological anxiety. So in dreams of subsequent years and even decades Adriana would see the unnaturally straight, tall trees as more like telephone poles than trees, or like the bars of a labyrinthine cage. Few branches on their lower trunks and thick, pungent-smelling, needled boughs overhead. Why am I here, what am I doing risking so much, am I crazy? were not questions she could retain as Gregor came loping toward her with his expression of rapt, dazed desire. How like a young wolf he seemed to her, greeting her by digging his strong pianist's thumbs and fingers into her rib cage and lifting her above him as if Adriana, 27 years old and not a small-boned woman, was one of his children with whom he played rough (she'd witnessed this, from a distance) though with Adriana it was deadly serious, no play in it. Gregor would pant greedily, "You came. You came,"--as if, each time, he'd frankly doubted she would come to him. Eagerly Adriana embraced the man, a man she scarcely knew, her arms gripping his head, her heated face buried in his thick, often matted and oily hair, in a delirium of desire that allowed her, as with a powerful anesthetic, not to think of how her lover doubted her love for him, and how she doubted his for her. Yet they couldn't keep away from each other. And when they were alone together, they couldn't keep their hands off each other. Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slick breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. Don't Leave Me. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would release them from each other only when it ceased.

After their secret meetings Adriana went away alone, back to her initially unsuspecting husband. She was bruised, dazed, triumphant. She was covered in sweat, and shivering. This was love, she told herself. Yet also it was sickness. I love you, Gregor, I would die with you that's why I'm so happy.

•

Rarely that long deranged summer did they find themselves in a car together, in the Wodickis' battered station wagon filled with family trash and smelling still, as Gregor complained, of diapers, though his youngest kid was three and by this time the stink should have faded. This was risky, driving anywhere in the vicinity of the Institute. There was no reason for Gregor Wodicki and Adriana Kaplan to be alone together except the obvious. They're screwing each other? Those two? The average IQ of any resident of the Rooke Institute for Independent Study in the Arts and Humanities was perhaps 160; it would have required an IQ only of 80 to figure that one out. So there was the risk, and Gregor's rushed, reckless driving. In a fine misty rain, he hit a slick patch of payment on a country road and the station wagon skidded and his arm leapt out reflexively to protect Adriana from lurching forward into the windshield--"Watch out, Mattie!"--in his alarm mistaking her for one of his daughters. He didn't seem to realize his mistake, nor did Adriana choose to notice, for they were laughing together, relieved, thank God they hadn't crashed. "We can't be together in an accident," Adriana said, more tragically than she'd intended, and Gregor said, "Not unless it's fatal for both. Then, who cares?" He grinned, baring his imperfect, stained teeth. The left canine was particularly long and distinctive.

Afterward Adriana deconstructed this incident. It was a good sign, she believed. He loves me as he loves his daughter. I'm not just one of the women he's fucked in his lifetime, mixed together like family junk in a drawer.

Though he had love affairs, some secret and some not, so it was said of Gregor Wodicki by friends and detractors both that he was a family man despite being a frequent drunk, a user of speed, an unreliable citizen, a primitive-cerebral composer descended from Schoenberg and a general son of a bitch. A family man who adored his kids and may have feared his wife, whose name, Pegreen, filled Adriana with mirth and anxiety--"Pegreen? No, really?" Gregor Wodicki was 32 years old in the summer of 1975. The father of five children of whom the three eldest were his wife's from a previous marriage. He was one of the defiant, unapologetic poor. He borrowed money with no intention of repaying. He bargained with the director of the Institute for an increase in his stipend though he was already the youngest of the senior fellows in the music school. He was hot-headed, difficult, conniving even among a community of temperamental artists and scholars. It was said admiringly, grudgingly, that his music was brilliant but inaccessible. It was said that he'd been getting by on his "genius" since adolescence. The Institute director, Edith Pryce, disapproved of his behavior but "had faith" in him. He went for days even in the humidity of midsummer in upstate New York without showering, laughing at the notion he might offend someone's sensitive nostrils. It was said that Gregor and Pegreen smelled identical if you got close enough. And the kids, too. If you visited their house (as Adriana never did, though she and her husband were invited to big, brawling parties there several times that summer), you'd be shocked at the disorder, yes, and the smells; particularly scandalous was a downstairs "guest" bathroom where towels hung grimy and perpetually damp and the toilet, sink and tub badly needed scouring. There were dogs in the Wodicki household, too, a rented, ramshackle shingleboard house at the edge of the Institute grounds. A family man who nonetheless quarreled publicly with his wife, and exchanged blows with her to the astonishment of witnesses--slaps rather than full-fledged blows, but still. Sometimes in the late evening as summer crescendoed with nocturnal insects, lovesick Adriana drifted by the Wodicki house, taking care to keep far enough away from the lighted windows not to be seen by anyone inside. A mere glimpse of Gregor through an opened window, even if his figure were blurred, was reward enough for her, and simultaneously a punishment. Aren't you ashamed, how can you hear yourself? She was struck by the very shape of the Wodickis' sprawling house, like an ocean vessel, every window blazing light and casting distorted rectangles out into the night.

You could walk up onto that porch, you could knock on that door if you wanted. You could open that door and walk inside if you wanted.

But Adriana never did.

A family man, though he confided frankly to Adriana, in a lumpy bed in the Bide-a-Wee Motel outside Yonkers, that his children were a burden upon his soul. The three older kids he tried to love but couldn't; even his own kids, the three-year-old especially, he found himself staring at in astonishment and disbelief--"Did I really cause that kid to come into the world? This world? Why? Yet he's beautiful. He breaks my heart." A knife turned in Adriana's heart, hearing this. She wanted (continued on page 142)Summer Sweat(continued from page 72) intimacy from her lover, yet she was wounded easily as an adolescent girl. She said carefully, "Of course Kevin is beautiful, Gregor. He's your son."

Frowning, Gregor corrected, "Pegreen's, too."

•

Pegreen the Wife, the Earth Mother. Six years older than Gregor, whom she'd seduced as a youth of 19; she'd been the wife of one of his music instructors at the New England Conservatory. A slovenly-glamorous woman with grayveined black haystack hair, a fleshy, sensual body and a beautiful, ruined face like a smeared Matisse. Pegreen exuded a derisive sort of sexuality like an oily glisten of sweat; in fact, she was noticeably warm in public, flush-faced, with damp half-moons beneath her arms and tendrils of hair stuck to her low, broad forehead. Her eyes were malicious and merry and she wore bright red lipstick like a Forties screen actress. She wore tight-fitting summer-knit sweaters with drooping necks and ankle-length skirts with alarming slits to midthigh. She, too, was a musician and played piano, organ, guitar, mouth harmonica and drums with a gay, giddy imprecision; as if mocking the deadly serious art of her husband and his colleagues. She had a loud, contagious laugh very like her husband's, and like her husband she had a weakness for vodka and gin, beer and wine, whiskey, whatever. She was said to be more experimental and therefore more careless in drug use than Gregor, with a Sixties hashish habit. It was said that Pegreen was devoted to her difficult "genius" of a husband unless she was bitterly resentful of her difficult "genius" of a husband. Certainly they quarreled a good deal, and exchanged blows harder than slaps in private. (So Adriana learned, marveling at a cascade of purple bruises on her lover's back.) Pegreen was the Earth Mother grown ironic about mothering and wife-ing and woman-ing in general. She would appear to have been manic-depressive, though mostly manic, in high spirits. Yet one day following a quarrel with Gregor she bundled the two youngest children with her into the station wagon and drove as fast as the vehicle would go on the New York Thruway. the children screaming and crying in the car when a state trooper stopped her; she'd lost her license for six months and begun to see a psychotherapist. At one point she spent some time in a psychiatric clinic in Manhattan. Gregor said, "Pegreen meant to crash the station wagon, I'm sure. Yet she could not. Her ties are as deep as mine. She isn't truly mad, she has only the showy outward energies of madness." The most disturbing thing Adriana knew of Pegreen was that she'd acquired from somewhere a .32-caliber revolver, which, she boasted, she carried "in my purse and on my person" when she went into the city. She laughed at the alarm and disapproval of her husband's colleagues. She was a firm believer, she said teasingly, in the right to bear arms and in the survival of the fittest.

Adriana protested, "But does your wife have a permit for this gun? Is it legal?" and Gregor said, shrugging, "Ask her." Adriana said, "But aren't you frightened, a gun in the house? Does your wife know how to use it? And what about the children?" Lovemaking left Adriana exhausted and close to tears and her voice dismayingly nasal. You can't make love with another woman's husband for most of an afternoon without fantasizing a certain power over his thoughts, a claim to his loyalty. Though knowing it was risky to pump Gregor about his family beyond what he chose to volunteer, Adriana couldn't resist. Her heart thumped in the callow hope of hearing him speak harshly of her rival. Instead, he turned irritably away from Adriana and rubbed his eyes with both knuckles. They were lying amid the mangled, damp sheets of the Bide-a-Wee. A smell, like that of backed-up drains, pervaded the room. No longer clutched together in each other's arms devouring each other's anguished mouth, they lay side by side like carved effigy figures. Gregor swung his hairy, brutal legs off the edge of the bed and sat up, grunting. "Pegreen does what Pegreen will do. I'll use the bathroom first, OK?"

Twenty-three years later at a memorial service at the Institute for the deceased Edith Pryce, and a decade after Pegreen's death (in an alleged auto accident on the Thruway at a time when Pegreen was undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, 52 years old and still married to Gregor Wodicki), Adriana will hear again that cruel, koan-like phrase. Pegreen does what Pegreen will do.

•

In the Bide-a-Wee, there was not the eerie labyrinthine cage of too-straight pine trees but instead a low water-stained ceiling and a single window with a water-stained blind and that pervasive odor of drains, and sexual sweat. Where they'd lain the sheets looked torn, trampled. There was a sweetly sour odor of matted hair, underarms. The window-unit rattling air conditioner was defeated by July heat rising toward 100° F and humidity like a gigantic expelled breath. Hours in a delirium of angry yearning they'd strained together, kissing, biting and sucking, tonguing each other's livid bodies. Like great convulsing snakes they were. A percussive music in their groans, in their frightened-sounding whimpers and shrill spasm-cries. If either had wished to believe this might be their final meeting, and afterward each would be free of the other, neither believed so now. There was a hook in their bodies impaling both. There would be no easy release. Their eyes rolled glassy-white in their skulls in a mimicry of death. Saliva sprang from the corners of their mouths. Their genitals were tender, smarting as if skinless. Everywhere Adriana's skin smarted from her selfish lover's unshaven jaws and the wiry hairs of his body. Gregor's back was scribbled red from Adriana's mad raking nails. He laughed she would tear off his head with her teeth, like the female praying mantis of legend. Yet perhaps he was afraid, a bit. Where he gripped her shoulders, the reddened imprints of his fingers remained. Her breasts were bruised and the nipples sore like a nursing mother's (though Adriana Kaplan had never nursed any infant, and would not). Afterward Adriana would stare at the marks her lover left on her body, sacred hieroglyphics she alone could interpret. She was cunning, clipping her pubic hair with her husband's nail clippers; her pubic hair which was a bristling bushy black, scintillant, like the hair of her head, which she wore in a single braid like a bullwhip halfway down her back. She wanted nothing to come between her and Gregor, nothing to muffle her physical sense of him. For she seemed to know that this was the only knowledge she would have of him, and this fleeting as breath: their sexual contact, to be protracted as long as possible. Long shuddering waves of what was called pleasure yet for which, to Adriana, there was no adequate term.

If I'm hurting you, tell me and I'll stop.

No. Don't stop. Never never stop.

•

"It just ends." So Adriana remarked of one of Gregor's compositions performed by a string quartet, and Gregor stiffened, saying, "No, it's broken off," and Adriana said, "But that's what I mean. It ends with no warning to the listener, you keep waiting to hear more," and Gregor said, "Exactly. That's what I want. The listener completes the music in silence, himself." Adriana realized that her lover, so casual about others' feelings, was in fact offended by this exchange; it offended him further to be obliged to spell things out, and to (continued on page 159)Summer Sweat(continued from page 142) know that the woman with whom he was involved was musically ignorant. Adriana said, hurt, "I suppose Pegreen gets it? Yes?" Gregor shrugged. Adriana said, "If your music is so rarefied, then the hell with it." Gregor laughed, as if one of his children had said something funny. He kissed her aggressively on the mouth and said, "Right! The hell with it."

•

There was the terrible week in late August near the end of their affair when Adriana believed she was pregnant. Several times in haste they'd made love without using precautions, so it shouldn't have been a surprise, yet it was a surprise, a shock that triggered both terror and elation. Her wish to die was pervasive as a dial tone: You lift the receiver, it's always there.

But no. Why die? Have the baby.

And maybe you'll wind up your lover's one true love.

Even Adriana's mocking voices were shrill with hope.

Every new Institute fellow was summoned to have tea with Edith Pryce in her airy, high-ceilinged office in the old pink limestone manor house, and Adriana's turn had come. This would be a polite ritual visit during which the distinguished older woman would query the younger about her work. Edith Pryce was a dignified woman in her early 60s, so severely plain as to exude a kind of beauty; she wore her ashy white hair in a tight French twist and had a way of elevating her chin as if gazing at you across an abyss not only of space but of time. She'd been a protégée of Gregory Bateson's in the Fifties and had a degree from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In her elegant office there were antique furnishings, an Aubusson carpet and a baroque brass birdcage suspended from the ceiling. It was known at the Institute that each tea with Edith Pryce began with admiring reference to the cage and to the red-gold canary inside, which Adriana supposed was the point, for Edith Pryce was a shy, coolly self-protective woman who did not like surprises. Adriana, blinking tears from her eyes, which were already raw and reddened, exclaimed, "How beautiful your canary is! Will he sing?" Edith Pryce smiled and said that Tristan sang usually in the early morning, inspired by wild birds outside the window. Originally, she told Adriana, she'd had two canaries, this "red-factor" German male and an American yellow female; while Tristan was courting Iseult, he sang continuously and passionately; but once they'd mated and Iseult laid her five eggs, and five tiny fledglings were hatched, both canaries were frantic to feed their offspring and Tristan ceased singing. "I finally gave away Iseult and the babies to a dear friend who's a canary breeder," Edith Pryce said with a stoical air of regret, "and for weeks Tristan was mute and hardly ate, and I thought I would have to give him away, too--then, one morning, he was singing again. Not as beautifully as before but at least he was singing, which is what we expect of canaries, after all. Chickadees and titmice are his favorites."

Adriana was attentive and smiling. She wore tinted glasses to disguise her ravaged eyes and a not-quite-clean white shirt tucked into a denim skirt that, in other circumstances, showed her trim, sexy, tanned legs to advantage. Her hair seemed to have grown coarse overnight and strands were escaping the thick unwieldy braid damp as a man's hand on her upper back. She opened her mouth to speak but could not. Help me. I think I'm going crazy. I've misplaced my soul. I married the wrong man and I love the wrong man and I want to die. I'm so exhausted but I don't want my lover to outlive me, I know he'll forget me. I'm so ashamed, I despise myself but I'm afraid, afraid to die--

Suddenly Adriana was crying. Her face crumpled. She was stammering, "I'm so sorry--Miss Pryce, I d-don't know what's wrong----" Tears burnt like acid spilling from her eyes. Through a vertiginous haze she saw Edith Pryce staring at her, appalled. A telephone began to ring and Edith Pryce waited a moment before picking up the receiver and saying in an undertone, "Yes, yes--I'll call you immediately back." By this time, Adriana understood that Edith Pryce had no interest in her emotions, that the emotional life was in itself infantile and vulgar, and that in any case, she, Adriana Kaplan, was far too old for such behavior. She rose shakily to her feet and stammered another apology, which Edith Pryce accepted with a frowning nod and evasive eyes.

As Adriana fled the office she heard Tristan, excited by her weeping, chittering and scolding in her wake.

•

The first time was in an unexpectedly hot May. Swift and sweetly brutal. A kind of music. Gregor Wodicki's kind of music. Afterward Adriana would recall it as sheer sensation. My God, I can't believe this is happening, is this me? yielded to dazed, gloating I can't believe I did that. It had seemed to her an accident, as if two oncoming vehicles had swerved into each other on the Thruway. She and her husband had attended an Institute recital featuring the premiere of a bizarre composition of Gregor Wodicki's, a trio for piano, viola and snare drum; Gregor himself played the piano with minimalist savagery, grimacing at the keyboard as if it were an extension of his own body. During the tense 18 minutes of this piece, Adriana fell in love. So she would tell herself and, in time, Gregor. (Except, was this true? Undressing for bed that night she and Randall joked that that contemporary music "made no sense" to their ears, they much preferred Mozart, Beethoven, the Beatles.) But shortly afterward Adriana and Gregor Wodicki met again and were immediately attracted to each other, and drifted off together in earnest conversation that ended in an abrupt encounter down beyond the old, rotting stables in the romantic pinewoods. This was an ordinary weekday afternoon in May.

Recalling long afterward that first, probing touch of Gregor Wodicki's. The man's fingers on her wrist. A question, yet also a claim. Like touching a lighted match to flammable material.

How am I to blame, I'm not to blame, it's something that is happening, like weather.

The last time, after Labor Day, sultry-humid heat illuminated by veins of distant lightning, they'd met in the pinewoods, though each was fearful by this time of the other. Adriana knew by this time she wasn't pregnant; after her humiliating encounter with Edith Pryce she'd begun to bleed, and bleed and bleed, and it was over now, the hysterical pregnancy, though in weak moments through her life she would fantasize that in fact she'd been pregnant with Gregor Wodicki's child, the single pregnancy of her life and this precious fetus she'd miscarried because of the extremes of emotion to which she and Gregor subjected each other. In her dreams, Adriana sees the stricken young woman making her way like a sleepwalker through the maze of bar-like trees. Determined not to notice the evidence of other careless lovers in these woods; teenagers who trespass, leaving behind the debris of burnt-out campsites, beer cans, junk food wrappers, condoms. Condoms strewn like translucent slugs amid the pine needles. Adriana saw a used, wrinkled condom with a flurry of tiny black ants crawling excitedly into it, and she gagged and turned away.

But the last time was very different from the first. Gregor's breath was fumed with alcohol, his face beaded with sweat and his eyes dilated, he'd stared at her as if not recognizing her and was reluctant to touch her, not gripping her rib cage and lifting her as always with his hard, hurting hands. Their kisses seemed misdirected, tentative without being tender. Despite the heat, Gregor carried a jacket. Adriana expected him to spread it on the ground but he did not; his manner was vague, distracted, and he made no effort to defend himself when Adriana accused him of not loving her, of just using her, and she slapped him, struck him with her fists, weeping not in sorrow but in rage. Can't believe this is happening! And I have no choice.

•

There was a moment when he might have struck her in return, and hurt her. Adriana saw the flash of hatred in his eyes, but he only shoved her from him, muttering, "Look, I can't. I've got to get back. I'm sorry."

•

Adriana would one day think calmly, with the wisdom of Spinoza, It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.

After Gregor, and after her own marriage dissolved in sullen slurs and recriminations, Adriana embarked upon a number of love affairs. These were explicitly love affairs, so designated beforehand. Some were single-night encounters. Others, not even an entire night. By the age of 33, she'd acquired a reputation as a bright, aggressive critic of American culture who lived a good deal in Rome. She was a sexy, witty girl. She wore blue-tinted metallic designer glasses and consignment-shop clothing of the highest, most quirky quality. She favored silk, brocade, cashmere. She wore her trademark braid like a bullwhip halfway down her back and did not dye it as her hair began to turn prematurely silver. Women were attracted to her as well as men. Gay men "saw something" in her: a deep erotic fury not unlike their own. You made me into a slut, Adriana wanted to inform Gregor Wodicki, but she wasn't certain he'd appreciate her humor. Or that this was evidence of humor.

•

Twenty-three years after that steamy summer, Adriana Kaplan has returned for the first time to the Rooke Institute, to attend a memorial service for Edith Pryce, recently deceased at the age of 84. One of the first people she sees is, not surprisingly, Gregor Wodicki: now "Greg," as he prefers to be called, the current director of the Institute. Adriana knows, because malicious informants have told her, that Gregor, now Greg, has gained weight in recent years, but she isn't quite prepared for the bulk of him. No other word so fitting: bulk.

Adriana thinks, shocked and offended, Am I expected to know that man? I am not.

Not that Gregor Wodicki is obese, exactly. He carries his weight, an extra 60 or 70 pounds, with dignity. His face is flushed and gleaming, his hair has turned gunmetal gray, grizzled, lifting about his dome of a head like magnetic filings. He's wearing a dark gray pinstripe seersucker suit into which his bulk fits like a sausage. Adriana feels a stab of hurt, that that body she'd known so intimately and loved with a fanatic's passion is so changed; yet she seems to be the only visitor who's surprised by his appearance, and Gregor, or Greg, seems wholly at ease in his skin. Seeing Adriana, he makes his way to her with an unexpectedly predatory quickness for a man of his size, and shakes her hand. There's a moment's hesitation and then he says, "Adriana. Thank you for coming."

As once, years ago, he murmured in triumph, You came!

Adriana manages to say politely that she's come for Edith.

"Of course, dear. We've all come for Edith."

Dear. A quaint, ambiguous word. Dear, he would never have called her when they were lovers.

During the ceremony, Adriana studies the face of "Greg." Though this is a solemn public occasion, clearly her former lover is relaxed in his role as organizer and overseer. Where once he was contemptuous of such formalities and distrustful of words ("You can't lie in music without exposing yourself, but any asshole can lie in words. Words are shit."), now he speaks graciously and with a winning frankness. He introduces speakers, musicians. He's become a fully responsible adult. His eyes are rather sunken in the creases of his fattish face yet they're unmistakably his eyes; inside the middle-aged mask of flesh there's a young, lean, handsome face peering out. The mouth Adriana had kissed so many times, sucked and moaned against, more familiar to her once than her own, is a curiously moist red, like an internal organ. Where Gregor was, now Greg is. Amazing.

Adriana never returned to the Rooke Institute after quitting her appointment, but of course she's been aware, at a distance, of her former lover. He hasn't been a practicing composer or musician for years. Adriana had avoided musical occasions when his compositions were performed and skimmed reviews of his work in New York publications--these were infrequent, in fact--but never attended a concert or recital. There were recordings of his work, but she made no effort to hear them. He'd wounded her too deeply, it was as if part of her had died and with that the entirety of her feeling for him. What she's heard of him was unsought: He and his wife Pegreen never formally divorced, though they lived apart a good deal, and there was trouble with one or more of the children, and Gregor remained at the Institute and Pegreen came to live with him during her ordeal with cancer, until the time of her death. Surely Gregor had had other affairs, for he, too, had powerful attractions for both women and men, and sexuality seemed to have been for him as natural an expression as touching, with as few consequences, for him. The surprise of Gregor Wodicki's life would seem to have been his late-blooming talent for administrative work. He'd been appointed by Edith Pryce as her assistant, and had taken over after she retired.

A vague rumor had it that Gregor had been a lover of Edith Pryce. Adriana rather doubted this, but--who knows? She came to suppose she'd never really known him at all, except intimately.

Three beautiful pieces of music are performed during the memorial service by resident musicians. One is by J.S. Bach, another by Gabriel Fauré, and the concluding piece a quartet for strings and piano by "Greg Wodicki." A spare, delicate, enigmatic piece that ends not abruptly but with a dreamy fading away. Adriana, listening closely, blinks tears from her eyes and wonders bitterly if "Greg" might have revised the piece since Edith Pryce's death, to emphasize its elegiac tone. The date for the composition is 1976, the year following their breakup. The music he'd written in the early Seventies had been harsh and uncompromising, indifferent to emotion.

Hypocrite, Adriana thinks, incensed. Murderer.

•

Adriana has declined an invitation to a luncheon after the memorial service, yet somehow she's prevailed upon to remain; fortunately, she isn't placed at the head table with Gregor, or Greg, and the distinguished elderly friends and colleagues of the late Edith Pryce. Midway through the lengthy meal, she becomes restless and excuses herself from the dining room and drifts about the first floor of the old manor house, which had been deeded to the Institute in 1941 with 90 acres of land and numerous outbuildings. Since 1975, Rooke House, as it's called, has been attractively remodeled and refurbished. In a large, paneled library, Adriana skims shelves of books by current and former members of the Institute and is flattered to discover two of her five books: one is her first, a study of American Modernism (art, theater, dance), a slender work published by the University of Chicago, well enough received in its season but long out of print. Here it is on the library shelf without its jacket, naked and exposed; probably it's been here for 15 years, unopened. Stamped on the spine, barely legible, is the author's name: Adriana M. Kaplan ("M" for Margaret). Beside Adriana's books are titles and authors she's never heard of. She feels a wave of vertigo but overcomes it, managing to laugh. Have I exchanged my life for this?

As if she'd had that choice.

•

Though Adriana intended to return to the city immediately after the luncheon, somehow she finds herself in the company of her former lover, who insists upon showing her around the Institute grounds--"D'you like the changes you've seen, Adriana? We've been fixing things up a bit."

This is a modest understatement. Adriana knows that since "Greg" Wodicki became director of the Institute, he's singlehandedly embarked upon a $10 million fund-raising campaign, and the most immediate results are impressive. Several new buildings, a beautifully renovated barn now a concert hall, landscaping, parking lots. Adriana says yes, yes, of course the changes are wonderful but she rather misses the old slapdash style of the place: leaking roofs, rotting barns, water-stained facades, uncultivated fields. "But that was another era," Gregor points out. "A nonprofit foundation like the Rooke could survive on low-investment returns and the occasional quirky millionaire donor. But no longer."

Adriana wants to ask, Why not?

After the initial shock of their meeting there was a suspended space of time (the memorial service, the luncheon) during which Adriana and her former lover seemed to have come to terms with seeing each other again. But now, suddenly alone together, in the stark June sunshine, they are entering another phase, of belated excitement and apprehension. Heavyset Gregor is breathing through his mouth, Adriana is feeling stabs of panic. Why are you here, what the hell are you trying to prove? And to whom? Our most fervent wish is for a former lover's defeat, deprived of our love; at the very least, we wish to appear transcendent, wholly free, indifferent, of that lost love. During the luncheon Adriana had noticed that Gregor was glancing in her direction, but she had ignored him, talking earnestly with guests at her table. But now they're walking along a graveled path side by side, like old friends. Gregor glances down at his bulk with mild exasperation and bemusement and sighs, "I have changed a bit, eh, Adriana? Not like you. You're beautiful as ever."

Adriana says coolly, "I've changed, too. Even in ways that can be seen."

"Have you?" Gregor's tone is clearly skeptical.

As if mildly brain-damaged, or drunk, the two are walking haphazardly along a path between two stone buildings; away from Rooke House and toward the pinewoods. Now, midafternoon, the air has turned humid, almost steamy. A sudden sharp odor of pine needles makes Adriana's nostrils pinch in dread.

Where are the old stables? Razed to make way for a parking lot.

Where is the overgrown path she'd taken into the woods? Widened now, neatly strewn with wood chips.

Though they descend a hilly slope into the shadowed woods, Gregor's breathing becomes steadily more audible and his now rather clammy-sallow skin is beaded with sweat. He's removed his seersucker jacket and tie, rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt, but much of the shirt is sweated through. If this man were a relative or friend, Adriana would be concerned for his health: the bulk of that body, at least 240 pounds, dragging at his heart and lungs.

Inside the woods, there are the sweet, clear cries of small black-capped birds overhead. Chickadees?

Impulsively Adriana says, "That brass birdcage of Edith's."

Gregor says, "We still have it, of course. In Edith's former office, now my office. It's an expensive antique."

"And is there a canary in it?"

Gregor laughs, as if Adriana has said something slyly witty. "Hell, no. Who has time to clean up bird crap?"

They walk on. Adriana takes care not to brush against Gregor, whose big body exudes, through his straining clothes, an oily sort of heat. She hears herself saying, in a neutral voice, "I never told you. Near the end of--us--I broke down in Edith Pryce's office. She had invited me for tea. I began crying suddenly and couldn't stop. It was like a physical assault, I was a wreck. I seem to have thought I was--pregnant."

"Pregnant? When?"

Gregor's reaction is immediate, instinctive. The male terror of being trapped and found out.

Adriana says, "Of course, I wasn't. I hadn't been eating much and I was taking Benzedrine some irresponsible doctor was prescribing for me and I was clearly a little crazy. But I wasn't pregnant."

"Jesus!" Gregor says, moved. He would pause to touch Adriana's arm, but she eases out of reach. "You went through that alone?"

"Not alone exactly," Adriana says, with subtle malicious irony. "I had you."

"But--why didn't you tell me?"

Adriana considers this. Why? Their intense sexual intimacy had somehow excluded trust.

"I don't know," she says. "I was terrified you'd want me to have an abortion, you'd never want to see me again. I wasn't prepared for that." She pauses, aware of Gregor staring at her. His eyes: wetly alert, blood-veined, living eyes peering through the eyeholes of a fleshy, flaccid mask. "I thought it might be easier somehow to--die. Less complicated."

This preposterous statement Gregor Wodicki accepts unquestioning. As if he knew, he'd been there.

"And what did Edith say to you?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"As soon as I cried, she cut me off. She didn't want to be a witness. Maybe she knew about us. But she didn't want to know more. She allowed me to see myself for what I was; a hysterical, selfish, blind and neurotic woman."

"A woman needing help, for Christ's sake. Sympathy."

"It was a good thing, I think. Edith Pryce's response."

"Do you!" Gregor says, snorting.

"Yes! Yes, I do."

In angry silence Adriana walks ahead. What are they quarreling about? Adriana's heart is beating rapidly, she isn't prepared for such emotion after so many years, it's like ascending to a too-high altitude too quickly. She's recalling their last time together in these woods. She'd anticipated lovemaking and there had been none. Gregor's strange edgy behavior. His breath that smelled of whiskey, his queer dilated eyes. She sees the tall, straight pine trees; so like the bars of a cage; a vast living cage in which, unknowingly, they'd been trapped. Erotic love. Deep sexual pleasure. Those sensations you can't speak of without sounding absurd and so you don't speak of them at all until at last you cease to experience them and in time you can't believe that others experience them. You can only react with derision. You're anesthetized. Telling yourself, It's behind me now, I've survived.

"That last time we saw each other, somewhere around here, I think?" Greg-or says casually, wiping his forehead with a much-wadded tissue. "Or maybe--farther down by the river?"

As if the point of this is where.

Adriana glances at Gregor and sees that he's smiling. Trying to smile. His teeth are no longer uneven and discolored but have been expensively capped. Yet there are the sunken, damp eyes. The flaccid froggy skin. Is she falling in love with this man again? Adriana Kaplan's "genius" prince, turned into a frog?

Never. She'll never fall in love with anyone, again. Nor does she like the drift of this conversation. Tempting her to betray 23 years of stoic indifference.

They walk on. The air is slightly cooler here, a quarter-mile from the river. Gregor begins to speak impulsively, ramblingly. "Y'know, Adriana--I don't remember every minute of that summer, to be frank. I'd been 'mixing'--taking speed, drinking. Pegreen was giving me hell. She was seriously suicidal. But I couldn't leave the woman, and I couldn't give you up. I was obsessed with you, Adriana. And jealous of you and your marriage. And my 'youth' passing. And my 'genius.' My fucking music like ashes in my mouth. That last time we met here, you never knew--I brought with me, in the pocket of my khaki jacket--Pegreen's revolver."

Adriana is sure she hasn't heard correctly. "The--gun? You had a gun with you, here?"

"I must've thought--it was crazy of course--I'd use it on you, and then on myself. Jesus!" Gregor blows out his cheeks and rolls his eyes in the adolescent-boy gesture Adriana recalls from 23 years ago when he'd narrowly missed crashing the station wagon.

In the pinewoods, in the strangely peaceful airless air of summer, Adriana Kaplan and Gregor, or Greg, Wodicki stare at each other. Then, unexpectedly, they begin to laugh. Pegreen's .32-caliber revolver, in the pocket of Gregor's jacket. How absurd, how embarrassing. Gregor's laughter is deep-bellied, a contagious hyena laugh. Adriana's laughter is almost soundless, quivering and spasmodic, like choking.

Like Great Convulsing Snakes they were. A percussive music in their Groans in their frightened-soundign Whimpers and Shrill Spasm-Cries.