A Traitor to Memory

To which she produced such a blank expression that I thought I was dealing with a congenital idiot.

I won't ever sign contracts without having read them—no matter what my agent claims this reveals about my lack of trust in his wisdom—and rather than have the poor urchin—for so she seemed to me—wait on the front step while I read through the document, I asked her in and we climbed to the first floor, which is where the music room overlooks the square.

She said, “Oh wow. Sorry. You are somebody, aren't you?” as we climbed because she noticed the art work for the CD covers hanging along the staircase. “I feel like a real dope.”





I said, “No need,” and walked into the music room with her on my heels and my own head buried in clauses about accompanists, royalties, and time lines.

“Oh, this is awesome,” she intoned while I went to the window seat where even now I'm writing in this notebook for you, Dr. Rose. “Who's this guy you're with in the picture? This guy with the crutches? Jeez. Look at you. You look seven years old!”





God. He's possibly the greatest violinist on earth and the girl's as ignorant as a tube of toothpaste. “Itzhak Perlman,” I told her. “And I was six at the time, not seven.”





“Wow. You actually played with him when you were only six?”





“Hardly. But he was kind enough to listen to me one afternoon when he was in London.”





“Very cool.”





And as I read she continued to wander, murmuring from her rather limited vocabulary of exclamations. She took particular pleasure—so it seemed—in an examination of my earliest instrument, that one-sixteenth that I keep in the music room on a little stand. I also keep the Guarneri there, the violin that I use today. It was in its case, and the case was open because when Libby arrived with the paperwork for me, I'd been in the midst of my morning practise. Obviously unaware of the trespass she was committing, she casually reached down and plucked the Estring.

She might as well have shot a pistol in the room. I leapt up and bellowed, “Don't touch that violin!” and so startled her that she reacted like a child who's been struck. She said, “Oh my gosh,” and she backed away from the instrument with her hands behind her and her eyes filling. And then she turned away in embarrassment.

I set my paperwork aside and said, “Look. Sorry. Didn't mean to be a swine, but that instrument's two hundred and fifty years old. I'm rather careful with it, and I usually don't allow—”





Her back turned to me, she waved me off. She took several deep breaths before she shook her head vigorously, which made her hair puff out—have I mentioned that her hair is curly? Toast coloured, it is, and very curly—and she rubbed her eyes. Then she turned round and said, “Sorry about that. It's okay. I shouldn't have touched it and I totally wasn't thinking. You were right to tell me off, you really were. It's just that, like, for a second you were so totally rock, and I freaked.”





Language from another planet. I said, “Totally rock?”





She said, “Rock Peters. Formerly Rocco Petrocelli and currently my estranged husband. I mean, as estranged as he'll let us be since he holds the purse strings and he's not exactly into loosening them to help me get established on my own.”





I thought she looked far too young to be married to anyone, but it turned out that, despite her looks and what appeared to be a rather charming prepubescent plumpness, she was twenty-three years old and two years married to the irascible Rock. At the moment, however, I said, “Ah.”





She said, “He's got, like, this hair-trigger temper among other things, such as not knowing monogamy is usually part of the marriage deal. I never knew when he was going to blow a fuse. After two years cowering round the apartment, I called it quits.”





“Oh. Sorry.” I admit that I felt uneasy with her unburdening of personal details. It's not that I'm unused to such displays. This tendency to confession and contrition seems peculiar to all the Americans I've ever known, as if they've somehow become acculturated to disbosoming themselves along with learning to salute their flag. But being used to something isn't exactly akin to welcoming it into your life. What, after all, is one to do with someone else's personal data?

She gave me more of it. She wanted a divorce; he did not. They continued to live together because she could not come up with the cash to break away from him. Whenever she came close to the amount she needed, he simply withheld her wages until she'd spent whatever nest egg she'd managed to accumulate. “And why he even wants me there is, like, the major mystery of my life, you know? I mean the man is totally governed by the herd instinct, so what's the point?”