“You’re only as old as you feel.”
At the moment, I felt 125 years old. She settled back into her seat and watched the rest of the ballgame without another word on the subject. On the way home that afternoon, she switched the car radio over from the rock station to classical, and as the orchestra played Mahler, she laid her head against my shoulder and closed her eyes, listening.
Tess and I went out to the porch and sat on the swing, quiet for a long time, sharing a bottle of peach wine. She liked to hear me sing, so I sang for her, and then we could find nothing else to say. Her breathing presence beside me, the moon and the stars, the singing crickets, the moths clinging to the porch light, the breeze cutting through the humid air—the moment had a curious pull on me, as if recalling distant dreams, not of this life, nor of the forest, but of life before the change. As if neglected destiny or desire threatened the illusion I had struggled to create. To be fully human, I had to give in to my true nature, the first impulse.
“Do you think I’m crazy,” I asked, “to want to be a composer in this day and age? I mean, who would actually listen to your symphony?”
“Dreams are, Henry, and you cannot will them away, any more than you can call them into being. You have to decide whether to act upon them or let them vanish.”
“I suppose if I don’t make it, I could come back home. Find a job. Buy a house. Live a life.”
She held my hand in hers. “If you don’t come with me, I’ll miss seeing you every day.”
“What do you mean, come with you?”
“I was waiting for the right time to tell you, but I’ve enrolled. Classes start in two weeks, and I’ve decided to get my master’s degree. Before it’s too late. I don’t want to end up an old maid who never went after what she wanted.”
I wanted to tell her age didn’t matter, that I loved her then and would love her in two or twenty or two hundred years, but I did not say a word. She patted me on the knee and nestled close, and I breathed in the scent of her hair. We let the night pass. An airplane crossed the visual field between us and the moon, creating the momentary illusion that it was pasted on the lunar surface. She dozed in my arms and awoke with a start past eleven.
“I’ve got to go,” Tess said. She kissed me on the forehead, and we strolled down to the car. The walk seemed to snap her out of the wine-induced stupor.
“Hey, when are your classes? I could drive you in sometimes if it’s during the day.”
“That’s a good idea. Maybe you’ll get inspired to go back yourself.”
She blew me a kiss, then vanished behind the steering wheel and drove away. The old house stared at me, and in the yard the trees reached out to the yellow moon. I walked upstairs, wrapped up in the music in my head, and went to sleep in Henry’s bed, in Henry’s room.
What possessed Tess to choose infanticide is a mystery to me. There were other options: sibling rivalry, the burden of the firstborn, the oedipal son, the disappearing father, and so on. But she picked infanticide as her thesis topic for her seminar in Sociology of the Family. And, of course, since I had nothing to do most days but wait around campus or drive around the city while she was in classes, I volunteered to help with the research. After her last class, she and I went out for coffee or drinks, at first to plot out how to tackle the project on infanticide, but as the meetings went on, the conversations swung around to returning to school and my unstarted symphony.
“You know what your problem is?” Tess asked. “No discipline. You want to be a great composer, but you never write a song. Henry, true art is less about all the wanting-to-be bullshit, and more about practice. Just play the music, baby.”
I fiddled with the porcelain ear of my coffee cup.
“It’s time to get started, Chopin, or to stop kidding yourself and grow up. Get out from behind the bar and come back to school with me.”
I attempted not to let my frustration and resentment show, but she had me culled like a lame animal from the main herd. She pounced.
“I know all about you. Your mother is very insightful about the real Henry Day.”
“You talked to my mother about me?”
“She said you went from being a carefree little boy to a serious old man overnight. Sweetheart, you need to stop living in your head and live in the world as it is.”
I lifted myself out of my chair and leaned across the table to kiss her. “Now, tell me your theory on why parents kill their children.”