Orpheus Lost Read Free Page A

Leela.”
    He moved the bow of his mouth, as though feathering an instrument, lightly from her lips to her breasts, but said nothing.
    “I could call you Orpheus,” she said.
    “You could.”
    “But what’s your real name?”
    “I don’t know,” he sighed. “Not really. The one I have isn’t part of me.”
    “The one I’m stuck with isn’t part of me either,” she said. She wrote her name in cursive script across his chest with the tip of her index finger. He reached for her finger and sucked it.“I was baptized Leela-May Magnolia Moore in Promised Land, South Carolina, and you can’t get worse than that.”
    “Promised Land?”
    “It’s the kind of town you can’t wait to leave. To this day, in Promised Land, I’m known as Leela-May. My daddy calls me LeelaMayMagnolia like it’s one single word, but he’s the only living soul who can say it and not get shot.”
    “The name on my passport is Michael Bartok.”
    “Bartok!”
    “No relation to the composer. Or if we are, it’s so distant, it doesn’t count. Bartok was my mother’s family name.”
    “Is she Hungarian?”
    “My grandparents were. Hungarian Jews. My mother was born in Australia.”
    “Then there could be a link with Béla Bartók.”
    “My grandfather and my great uncle played the violin, so there’s music in my genes, but as far as we know they’re not Béla Bartók’s genes. I get music from both sides. I get the Persian classical influence and the oud from my father.”
    “Yet you choose to go by your mother’s family name. It can’t hurt your career.”
    He recoiled and swung his feet to the floor and crossed the room. He pressed his forehead against her window and drummed his fingers on the glass. His agitation was violent. “I didn’t choose —I was born out of wedlock, as they say. That’s the name on my birth certificate. I’m legally stuck with it.”
    Leela went to him and put her hands lightly on his shoulders. She pressed her cheek against his back. “I’m sorry,” she said.
    “Forget it.”
    “I don’t care about the history of your name. I just love the sound of it,” she said. “Michael Bartok.”
    “No one has ever called me Michael. I was Mishka to the family and at school.”
    “Mishka Bartok,” she murmured with her lips against his back. “That’s even more beautiful. A chromatic melody. It’s you.”
    “It isn’t me. It doesn’t feel like me. I don’t know who it is. My visa says non-resident alien . That’s me.”
    “Names are always a problem,” Leela said. “They’re never you. They’re baggage from your parents.”
    “Mine is lost baggage,” Mishka said.
    “Wish I could lose mine. I thought about changing it. Changing the Leela, I mean. Obviously anyone who calls me Leela-May is dead on the spot.”
    “Today is my birthday,” Mishka said. “My father died before I was born. The only thing I know about him is that he played the oud. I didn’t even know his name until I was eighteen. Each birthday, I ask myself: how will I live without knowing who I am?”
    “What I tell people here is that Leela is Sanskrit. Someone told me lila is Sanskrit for the Hindu gods at play. I like that. Sport of the gods. I thought of changing the spelling, but why bother?”
    “Sport of the gods,” Mishka Bartok said. “That’s what we are.”

2.
    A FTERWARDS , L EELA REALIZED , the sliver of years she spent with Mishka were radiant fog. That time was without fixed landmarks. He moved into her apartment and she could remember the way the horse-chestnut candles brushed the windows but not what the headlines were saying. There was making love and making music and studying. There were comprehensive exams and dissertations, then post-doctoral fellowships. There were undergraduate classes to teach. From time to time, dreadful news pushed its loutish way in from the street—news of war, terrorists, suicide bombers, random carnage in American cities—but Leela and Mishka muffled such