Then again, he could nuzzle into Brigitte—he nuzzled—and smell her perfume and sweat and want desperately to kiss the string of muscles that stood between her neck and shoulder. So. They could afford a nurse. So they would work it out.
But her playing really was so bad. She knew it was bad, Julian was almost certain, but it was impossible not to wonder. And it was impossible, wondering this, not to think of Cousin Bea’s playing. She had been as gorgeous a pianist as Brigitte was a woman. Julian had tried to let her exit tonight roll off him, tried to focus on Brigitte, but Bea had a way of haunting him when they were in the same house, and Brigitte’s neck was reminding him of Bea’s arms, the way they’d been before the baby, that era so starkly ripped from this one that Julian could almost smell it, summer, boxwoods, saltwater-soaked towels. Before the baby, there had been a length of flesh at Bea’s upper arms, just at the edge of her underarms, secret but not quite, and as she played Julian would watch this flesh, taut and shivering with her movement, and he would imagine, if she were to stop playing and lift her arms a bit more, the scent. This was his first fantasy of a sexual sort, which embarrassed him, because he assumed that other men did not desire women’s armpits. Then he had asked her to marry him and left for school and come back to find her stuffed into the costume of a girl-woman expecting a child, all of her puffed, her skin marked with tiny pocks, those arms bloated, undone, and she seemed either to have no awareness of this or not to care, or Vera had been dressing her, because she wore a sleeveless dress with wide straps that only accentuated the tragic heft of her new arms. And now, ten years later, though she was skinny as a stick, her arms still bore the imprint of that time—they hung, the skin slack, so opposite Brigitte’s tight belly when she undressed at night, the smooth, hard earth she offered up to his hands so that he could feel, if the timing was right, the jostling of their baby. Brigitte said she knew which were kicks and which punches but to Julian they were all the same—they were the baby, saying hello, hello. He was elated and terrified, watching Brigitte’s stomach jump.
In Paris, before he’d met Brigitte, the pregnant Bea filled his mind. The most upsetting thing, somehow, was that within all her foreign, wobbling flesh, her face had looked younger than it had in years. She looked about twelve, he thought, the age she had been when he first noticed that she was a girl. Maybe seeing her next to Vera, who had aged so rapidly that summer, accentuated this effect—still, Bea seemed to have lost something, not only in years but in strength. She walked into his dreams as a six-year-old crying for some small treat she’d been denied, crying about how it wasn’t fair, pleading with Julian to make her case to the grown-ups, but Julian, unable to discern whether the treat had been kept from her because she’d done something bad or because his aunt Lillian was in one of her moods, unable to tell how he might be punished if he helped her, did nothing.
Vera had told Julian that Bea had been forced, but Julian couldn’t bear to listen to his mother talk about Bea in such intimate terms and besides, he couldn’t quite believe her. Bea had always been so stubborn he couldn’t imagine anyone making her do anything—and more than that, he could easily imagine Bea wanting to do what she had done. He had felt her turn his sloppy kisses into a worldly sharing of tongues, felt her teeth find his lower lip. Her wanting had been building for years.
Oakes said it was all bullshit, that if a girl couldn’t keep her legs closed she was asking for it, but Julian didn’t think he believed this either.
All he knew was that he missed her and blamed her.
In Paris, Ira wrote to him. I hope you’re fine, I figure you should want to know . . . The words “should want” brought tears to Julian’s eyes—he felt his father in front of him looking straight into his heart, his missing, his general feelings of lack, the number of times he used the phrase on himself, should want a different girl, should want to drink more heavily, should want what you have. He should want to know, wrote Ira, that his cousin had had a “break” of some kind. I am told of no official diagnosis, you know Henry and his secrets though really it’s Lillian who drives the hush-hush train, claims she wants to create less drama when of course she wants more, but I gather it was of the nervous or hysterical variety. Ira didn’t know or wouldn’t share many details. He wrote that Bea was resting now at a very upright kind of place, I do believe they call it a “hospital” these days, there are pianos in every parlor, I went to visit, passed on your regards, hope you’ll forgive me, but Bea-Bea refuses to play.