Orpheus Lost Read Free Page B

noisy intrusions with passion and their passions were brainy and carnal in equal parts. Leela, high on discovery, would explicate the mathematics of the sound holes of violins; Mishka would demonstrate tonal mysteries of the lute and the oud. Skittish with words but profligate with melodic expression, Mishka composed their lives. “Listen,” he would say. “Here is the sound of this morning before you woke up,” and he would close his eyes and draw his bow across the strings of his violin.
    And how, given Gluck’s opening bars to the saga, could Leela have thought that the ending would be other than what it was?
    Che farò senza Euridice?
    What will I do without that which I cannot do without?
    At night, after lovemaking, damp and satiated, Leela would light candles in the bedroom and Mishka would play: sometimes Persian music, sometimes early Baroque, sometimes his own compositions. He would sit naked in the chair by the gable window, backlit by neon updrafts of glare. Their apartment was on the third floor, tucked into the attic of an old Cambridge house. It was just far enough off the Square and off Massachusetts Avenue that police sirens and the urgent mating calls of ambulance vans were percussive but faint, as was the vulgar news of the nation and the world.
    If Leela pulled at the sheet to cover herself, Mishka would protest, though not in words. Please don’t do that , his eyes and the strings would beseech. She thought of him as a kind of musical version of Renoir, as a Modigliani. He worshipped flesh; he painted in cadenza and cantabile, in major and minor mode. She would find scribbled scores under a flower on her desk: sonatinas, rondos, études. Portrait of Reclining Nude with her Face to the Wall. Nude in Street Light Turning Away. Mishka’s scoring was in heavy lead pencil with cross-outs and cloudy gray areas of erasure. The scores were signed: To Leela, love Mishka .
    “But I don’t turn away,” Leela protested. “I never turn away. Why is your music about loss? Why is it always and only about loss?”
    “Isn’t that what music is for?”
    Leela was envious of the oud, of its voluptuous inlaid curves, of the way he held it, of the way it brushed the silk skin of his crotch. She was envious equally of his violin when it nestled in the curve of his neck. She was jealous of his oblivion: of the way he would play a few bars, pause, closehis eyes, hear silent and inner music, scribble down notes in a kind of frenzy, cross out, erase, play again. She would move languidly on the sheets and spread her legs. “Come back to bed,” she would coax, and though Mishka kept his eyes on bow or plectrum, though he focused on the fingering of chords, his penis would thicken and he would play more violently, tilting at arpeggios, crashing through thickets of thirds and diminished fifths until all his defenses gave way and he surrendered and offered up his instrument as truce flag and laid it down and went to her.
    “You shouldn’t interrupt,” he would reproach, “when I’m composing.” He would touch his forehead to hers. “Can you hear the music inside my head? It gets loud when you interrupt.”
    “I prefer the music of your body.”
    “The music in my head is Sonatina for Leela who Interrupts . It gets loud for fear I’ll forget it before I can write it down. If you lie still and quiet—”
    “How can I lie still and quiet?”
    “Put your ear against my heart…Like that. Can you hear?”
    “Mmm. Syncopation.”
    “Not my heartbeat. Concentrate.”
    “What am I supposed to be hearing?”
    “The sonatina. Before I have written it down.”
    “Mishka, you’re crazy,” she would say tenderly, biting shoulder or buttock or thigh.
    “I’m not crazy. Can’t you hear it? What’s that line about heard melodies being sweet, but those unheard being sweeter? Who wrote that?”
    “Keats, I think.”
    “Keats was right.” When he was a child, he explained, in his grandparents’ house in northern