The Invention of Flight Read Free Page B

obviously enraptured with him and he is kind so he continues talking to her though he feels nothing for her, not even pity, only a mild curiosity about what she will be fifteen years from now, older, ina place she is not accepted, of course a failure. He listens to her and looks around the room, envies the percussionist his ease with women, with the beautiful ones, his hand a moment ago resting on the flutist’s back, and now he is slumped against the wall, the dark-haired singer taking a drag from his cigarette, light gathered and reflected from her bracelet, an earring, as she turns her head, the beautiful line of her forehead a cool that he can almost feel on his own lips, the touch of ivory on his hands, the way she looks at the percussionist now, brushes against the sleeve of his jacket, not accidentally. The pianist wonders what it is about him, how people, things, are drawn to the percussionist to be taken, subdued, some lack of something civilized in him, of domestication, a pull of something somewhat like death. He sighs, turns to the cornet player, and tries to think of something intellectual, says God would come, possibly, if we called Him by His name, Jehovah, Yahweh. Peter would turn if called Pedro, but not if called Boy. He sighs, leans into the rough fabric of the chair, looks at the singer, and thinks Janice, thinks Juanita, says the trouble is that some names are too sacred to be spoken.
    The flutist sees that the teacher is watching the singer with the percussionist and, triumphant from having ignored the percussionist’s touch, she leaves the tuba man in mid-sentence and goes over to sit on the floor in front of the teacher, to bring his gaze to her, secure in the knowledge that she is the one true genius, that her music is not derivative. She can feel the cool underside of the flute on her thumbs, the complication of the valves on her fingers. She purses her top lip and blows downward,feels the warmth of the air on her chin. There is music in that also. She knows that the teacher knows this, is drawn to her because of it, that he in fact loves her, sees her in his fantasies, slim and smooth as metal. She has been his student for years, only lately has she begun to demystify him, to realize that the abstraction, the look of the composer, is cultivated, as his music lately has become, neat formulas repeated from when he was younger, the hair and the skin graying too fast. He is prey to imaginary illnesses, sellers of vitamins and magical yeasts, close to but not yet an old man and afraid of it, fewer women each year. He is bear-like, hoary, reaches out to touch her arm, the roundness of it, tells her that she is quite beautiful, says let us invent one another, and she feels her head bow, her arms slyly and consciously rise toward him until they are level with her face—elbows, wrists, fingertips touching as if bound.
    The singer knows that she is nothing to the percussionist and feels that that somehow protects her, this awareness of his motives, the way he automatically reaches for women like a newly blind man who, in order to move from this room to the next, this street to the next, constantly must feel the touch of something—a chair, a wooden table, a railing, a bush, a tree—or be overwhelmed by the immensity of space around him, once teeming but now, without sight, empty. She realizes also that he is not indiscriminate, reaches only for the beautiful, the talented, is flattered by this attention at the same time she is aware of a certain danger in the clearness of his eyes, the practiced fumbling with keys atdoorways, the lovely structure of his face and shoulders, his hands, something sinister in the way he expects always to be met with yes, with compliance, is so sure of this that he never asks. The one frightening truth she learned as a young girl is that men who ask if they can kiss her are the ones she never wants to kiss. As he talks she becomes aware of the texture of the