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By Root 608 0

he takes a new place among them. No longer is he the pampered, gifted boy whom they must instruct about the world while protecting him from it. In knowing Beverly, he showed himself, in a larger sense, more knowing. On Beverly’s advice, he grows a beard. Beverly’s voice, the cigaretty undertone, her diction, at once sharp-edged and louche, challenge him in a new way. She talks passionately about artistic growth. She says he must break out of the comfortable cocoon of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where he feels so easily at rest and listen to the music of John Cage and Varèse and Schoenberg. Particularly of Messiaen, whose synesthesia fascinates her. She talks about Messiaen’s idea that each chord represents a specific color. She says that unless he lets the dark bitter tones enter in he will remain a competent pianist, but one among many, and if he wants to break out of that circle and enter the circle of the great, “I don’t believe in words like ‘great,’ not for myself anyway,” he says and she replies with impatience, flicking the ash of her cigarette on the floor, “Oh, nonsense, Adam, you must dream big and your dreams must include chaos and darkness.”

And in her filthy room, listening to music he has only just learned to like, he feels the lure of her challenge. He does want to grow as an artist; he doesn’t want to rest in safety. Miranda is safety; she is certainty, and rest and perhaps … he will not finish that sentence. He takes another drink of gin and Campari, which he actually doesn’t like, but knows to be the right thing to be drinking when listening to John Cage and taking Beverly up on her offer to run his fingers up and down the multiple scars on her arm, marking her suicide attempts. She takes the twenty bottles of pills from her medicine chest and puts them on her coffee table, burned by cigarettes, and says, “I’m a mess, Adam, don’t you think I’m a mess?” He thinks of her passionate, inspired playing of the Messiaen. And he says, “No, Beverly, I think you’re a kind of genius.”

And she says, “Adam, you are my fortunate island. You are my island of the blest. So often I feel that I am a small, unseaworthy boat, rocked back and forth by tumultuous waves, and then the glimpse of you, reachable, makes me know that I’m all right. That I will be all right.”

The words she uses, “a small seaworthy boat, rocked back and forth by tumultuous waves,” strike him as false. He suspects that she’s said this before, to other people. But then, suppose she never has, suppose he really is the only person who makes her feel safe? Is it that he’s had too much to drink, is it that he fears Miranda no longer loves him in the way he loves her, unquestioningly, uncritically, that she no longer believes he’s enough for her, that he fears she’s not enough for him, that she has not written in three weeks, and what she writes is dry, perfunctory, as if she can’t take her mind away from the compelling horrors to bring it back to him. The man she says she loves.

Beverly is weeping. She has drunk too much. She’s talking about her “bitch mother, the refrigerator.” And her father, “the drunken bully holding the purse strings like a whip.” And her brother, banished from the house for being homosexual (she thinks he’s in France somewhere, no one knows exactly where he is, they haven’t heard from him for five years). This pileup of loss and deprivation (he thinks of his mother, his grandparents) breaks his heart, and there she is, her frame so frail, her legs looking as though they can barely support her, and she is saying, “Hold me, Adam, I just need you to hold me. It’s hard for me to ask for things so simply, but I must.” He can’t refuse; he is holding her; her dark hair comes loose from its pins, smoky, hypnotic, her full breasts, unhampered by a bra, press up against his chest, and how does it happen, they are kissing, then they are lovers, and he is a betrayer, and in the morning he only wants to be away from her and she knows it and weeps again and says, “I knew it. I knew you’d be just like everyone else. Everyone who comes