Foreign Bodies Read Online Free PDF Page A

day soon he’d send the truckers for it. Bea herself was a musical blank. A deaf chromosome, a missing vertebra. Leo knew this whenthey married: he valued it. Bea, thinking it over (she often drifted in that direction, even nowadays), believed it was this spinal absence, more pronounced than a mere lack of aptitude, that had pleased him from the start. It kept him immaculate: she could not contaminate him with half-knowledge or meaningless praise. The piano was his mind, his mind was the piano. She had never once touched it, except (obviously!) to dust the legs, the looming sheen of the frame. Her obedient cloth barely skimmed white teeth and thin black lozenges; she didn’t dare set off the secret hammer within, shaped like a foot in a velvet sock, the crier of the cry. The piano was protected territory. She had no entrance there, partly out of ignorance, partly out of reverence. The piano was worshiped.
    And out of the ether, uncalled for, invading, this calamitous foreign body, this unknown niece, this Iris, this scrutinizing violating blue eye, had fingered a key and brought out a sound. A single sound, lone, unattached, desolate. Even chaste. Whereas Leo had sent out thundering swarms, armies clashing, raging unkempt battalions, war whoops, warplanes arcing and plunging, great crushing tanks on giant crashing treads. The noises of ecstatic gods who could kill.
    In those days Leo was a beautiful boy. There was no other way to say it. Handsome is outer and ephemeral. Leo’s beauty was Platonic, embedded in a theory of the world and its implausible reality. His round eyes hinted at the cycle of eternal things, and an inch above them were the faint, just-beginning lines of an intelligent frown. He was not very tall, but this only drew more attention to his head. Leo’s curly head seemed larger than it was because of the very black hair that pushed aggressively upward from his ears and forehead, with no admixture of commonplace dark brown or traces of the Jewish tendency toward the reddish. Out of the forest of wavy blackness, its puffs and folds and spirals glinting as sporadically as foliage in sunlight, two steel eyes took you in with an unrelenting judgment. The nose was severely ideal, like a schoolgirl’s drawing; under it the mild grin. It was this unsettling contradiction — the kindly mouthand Leo’s brazen, strict, assessing stare — that shocked Bea into what she scarcely wanted to admit: an instant wash of infatuation. He acknowledged that they were bound to meet. Destiny was opposed to their never meeting; if you tried to defy destiny, especially if you happened to live merely one city block away, you would implode. And again the careless grin.
    Leo was Laura Coopersmith’s cousin, and Laura was Bea’s classmate at Hunter College: the two of them, in the new low-waisted frocks that showed their knees, sat together in history and English. Laura had contrived a pair of spit curls, each one a brown comma set in the center of a cheek. From her neck waggled a long loop of fake Woolworth’s pearls: it was, she said, the “flapper look,” copied from the pictures in society columns featuring debutantes and nightlife. But this was as far as she would go in boldness. She was serious about her future as a high school teacher and had chosen history as her subject because, she believed, it was factual and objective and couldn’t be argued with. She admired Leo and disliked him: when he wasn’t teasing her, he ignored her. He was an out-of-towner from Chicago, studying piano and composition at Juilliard. To satisfy his frugal parents he had agreed to board with his uncle’s family in New York — Laura’s father and Leo’s father were brothers. Both were salesmen, Laura’s father in paper goods and Leo’s in textiles. The music, Laura explained, was from Leo’s mother’s side. She had hoped to become a professional singer, and once gave a concert of Schubert
Lieder
at the local Y in Des Plaines. Somewhere