He was walking home from school with a girl from class: “Not me,” she replied. “I love life.”

He wondered where she was coming from, for he saw nothing he loved; nothing he liked, not even money or beer, or her for that matter. He would have liked to take a baseball bat to smash in a car window. “I hate this shit hole town,” he muttered. “When I leave I’ll never come back.”

She was silent at this. Perhaps she thought he was insane, not just angry. Anyone could be angry at the age of seventeen, especially growing up in a dirty industrial town like this one. But Karl was especially angry. He scowled at times when he smoked a fag, letting it dangle from the corner of his thin lips, then strangled it between two fingers and spit roughly into the snow. He didn’t want to go home.

Home was where hell waited: two middle-aged, bored and boring people who masqueraded as parents — people with social pretensions, people whose goals in life were a bigger car, a bigger house, more damned furniture to stuff into spaces to fill the hollowness of their hearts. Karl intuited all of this without being able to put it into words, but he felt a lot was missing from life.

There was no joy in his house, nothing at home that mattered. So he read. He read a great deal. And he hung around with friends who smoked too much and drank beer while underage. They were fellow nihilists who would have liked to reduced life to rubble but, instead, they drank to destroy themselves and got into trouble with the law.

A friend of his had recently been caught after stealing a car. He had done this not for any profit, but to go joy riding along the Beach Strip in the middle of the night. The cops had caught him just before the car went off the bridge into the lake for the kid had no license and hardly knew what he was doing. He just wanted to smash the car and himself into a wall but ended up in a jail cell instead. Karl would attend his trial, just to see what happened.

Karl wandered aimlessly in the dark as snow kept gently falling. It muted all sounds, gave the world a sort of battened down existence. It made him feel he couldn’t possibly be missing anything for everyone was shut up in their homes, in their boxes, watching TV. He would have kept walking and smoking endlessly if the sludge hadn’t begun seeping into his shoes, wetting his socks. It was uncomfortable and only added to his irritation.

He had gone to see Linda last day. She was his supposed girlfriend but actually just another desperado. Linda was always trying to seduce him without knowing how. She would invite him over when her parents were out of for the evening. She would sit next to him on the couch sipping on her beer suggestively, talking nonsense, nervously.

He knew what she was up to. She was trying to get pregnant. Karl’s friends at school had warned him. Some of Linda’s girlfriends had gotten knocked up and had found meaning in life; they ended up as single moms. There was welfare, after all, and parents. Getting knocked up was a way of life for girls of Karl’s class, but he would have none of it. Parenthood was a trap. A deadly trap. Once you were in it you were history, screwed for life. No, Karl had greater ambitions. He longed for freedom. He would escape one day. But, in the meantime, he would have to put up with a lot of shit.

He liked learning but hated the atmosphere at school for he could never let his guard down. One of his classmates, Ivy, had serious mental problems. He had cornered Karl in the toilets the other day, had tried to stick a switchblade into Karl’s stomach. It nearly penetrated the skin were it not for the thickness of several layers of clothing. Ivy had chuckled and grinned like a fool: “Nearly gotcha there…” Karl would have to get hold of a knife. There might be a repetition of this madness and he would have to fight back for there was chaos at school.

The place was too big. It was the largest high school in the Commonwealth, proudly self-proclaimed in the brochure the school produced to impress god-knows-who. There were two shifts per day: one in the morning, another in the afternoon; there were two principals and vice-principals and several hundred teachers to several thousand students. The place looked like a late-Victorian factory, with large, glazed industrial windows, and thousands of lockers in the hallways that led to one-way staircases always busy until the bell rang.

The school was designed to train workers for the city’s factories, the smelters and railway car industry that provided work for generations of migrants from Europe, Russia, Italy, and elsewhere. They came for the jobs and the hope of a middle-class life: the American Dream. Karl’s Nightmare.

Karl and his entire generation was destined for the steel mills. Eventually, they would come home Friday nights like their fathers, with a lunch bucket and hard hat in hand and a cigarette in the mouth, smelling of a few from the beer parlor. They would hand over their weekly paychecks to their wives who might work at the new supermarket on the edge of town to make some extra cash for the kids.

If the men were drunk enough, there would inevitably be a scene: their wives would throw a few dishes and scream bloody murder while the men would tell them to shut the fuck up. The kids would sit silently in their bedrooms, praying the parents had forgotten of their existence.

It was a scene that played itself out endlessly and added up to Life. And those were the times the kids would steal out of the homes, very cautiously lest anyone call them to account. They would loiter in the semidarkness of alleyways, smoking cigarettes and talking of escape. They would dream of places in the sun: Mexico, Florida: I’m goanna get outta here, so far away, and I’m gonna do something… I don’t know what yet, but I’m not spending my life in this shithole.

That was Karl talking. His friends had it just as bad. Ivy was a nutter, but he had his reasons to be sure. His father had run out on his mother, left her with three kids to raise on a waitress’ salary. Strangely, the woman wasn’t bitter; she seemed resigned, like she had deserved it; that’s all there was to life and she accepted it. Of course, Ivy’s mother was a Catholic. You had to be to accept such a lousy fate.

And Linda, well she had never seen anything beyond the steel mills of the area where she lived. She had been born there among the blowing coal dust and the smog. She had no ambitions except to get knocked up, married or not.

These thoughts were going through Karl’s mind one day as he sat daydreaming in his English class. It was the end of the term and the teacher — who everyone suspected was a faggot but nice enough since he kept his hands to himself — the teacher was wandering around the class as though uttering a soliloquy, but he was talking about the students. “You. And you…” he was saying, prophetically pointing to people here and there. “You…” And then he pointed at Karl “…and you… You four are going to college.”

College?… University? Karl was momentarily in panic. College had never occurred to him. People of his type didn’t go to college. He couldn’t imagine what people did there, what they learned, what became of them. He hadn’t entertained ambitions except to get out on the road, get a job somewhere and make his way as far south as possible. College was not for immigrants.

That day was pivotal in Karl’s life. It was the day a possibility announced itself: the chance to take existence into his own hands and direct his own fate; the day to get out of the loathsome town.

It was dark by the time the afternoon shift got out of school. The snow was falling and he spotted the girl he had talked to in such a bitter mood days before. She eyed him suspiciously as he approached. She was relieved to see him smile. Karl took out a pack of cigarettes, pulled one out and, grinning, said: “Want one?”

At Gary's Wedding

Thai woman with cigar

Girl on a boat

Hairdresser, China

Leslie, China

Rita, China

Under a Red Umbrella

Manchu girl, China

German girl, comforting

Lauren, China

“No problem. We’re practically neighbors!” yelled Beulah from the passenger seat.

She was a bleach blonde, bulky lady, a bit too made up in my estimation and certainly very vocal compared to Dave. He just drove: eyes straight ahead in anticipation, smiling as though at a private joke.

“We’ll take you home. But why not come to our place for a drink first,” said Beulah.

Drinks? At three in the afternoon, I wondered. Well, why not? I was curious about this couple…

They lived a few minutes pace from my place. There were no more than fifty inhabitants in the junction, for that’s all it was: two rural roads bisecting farmland and forest.

Dave and Beulah’s house was one of those one-type fits all that are common in American suburbs. There was the obligatory driveway and garage with the basketball hoop, a house without charm or character.

It wasn’t a moment after I entered their home that I realized something was amiss. On the dining room table there were more bottles of booze than I had seen in any bar. It seemed there was a party going on.

“What’ll you have? Scotch? Bourbon? Gin? All of them?…Ha. Ha. Ha…” laughed Dave, already pouring himself a hefty Jack Daniels.

I hardly replied before I had a scotch on the rocks in hand. This was service. And, at three in the afternoon.

Beulah appeared with a drink in hand. “We start early,” she laughed, moving like a sailing ship, arms extended sideways.

Dave was a government employee, Beulah a housewife, and as I soon learned, their only son had just left home for the first time in his life to attend college out West, several thousands of miles away.

“My baby’s gone,” lamented Beulah. “GONE. And now I’m stuck with HIM,” she shouted, scowling at Dave.

Oh. Oh, I thought. So that explains the bar.

“Gone! Flown the nest. And now, there’s only us two…” she said more softly, taking a drink.

Then, remarkably, she broke into song: “PLEASE RELEASE ME LET ME GO, FOR I DON’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE…”

Beulah went on like this for several minutes as Dave looked chagrined. He poured himself another one.

I now got the impression I had been invited to witness the sinking of the Titanic. This couple was going fast and needed someone to appreciate it all; they needed a witness to their pain.

Dave chuckled but said nothing. Beulah kept singing, then stopped to say: “I wannahnotherbaby… I wannababy…Ole Dave there made mine go! He convinced him to go out West to college…”

This was getting embarrassing. I stammered something about needing to get back to my humble abode, but this raised objections from Beulah:

“Oh come now; you donthaftago… DAVE! Pour the man another drinkypoo… Let’s party!”

She lit a cigarette and put on a Latin dance tune, then began gyrating her hips and shaking her fat ass.

“Mybabyshgone. Mybabyshgone…” she sang.

“Whosgonnamakemeanotherbabieeeeee…?”

For the first time, Dave made eye-contact with me. He did not seem amused but sad, desperate perhaps. Most likely he didn’t know what was happening in his life, his marriage, and I supposed this is where I was supposed to offer some help? But, what could they expect of me? I was twenty-three years old and they were my parents’ age.

“I gotta get back to my place or my wife will be worried…” I stammered.

Beulah kept singing and dancing as Dave walked me to the door. He seemed like a nice fellow. He offered to lend me his canoe any day I wanted it.

Then, as he opened the front door, he said: “I hope this isn’t what you got to look forward to…”

I went home. As I entered my domain, I heard my young wife ask:

“Where have you been?” and I was afraid to explain…

One day there happened to be the annual show of student work on display at the school gallery. I wandered around, hoping to see something interesting, a new perspective on the familiar, something that would challenge me a bit. But what I found mostly was imitation Picassos or van Goghs, poor copies of  avant gardists, but nothing that made me stop in my tracks to take a closer look.

I would have been through the entire show within a few minutes had I not overheard a couple of men talking on the other side of a partition on which paintings were hung.

“This has real feeling… very authentic. Nothing phony about this one…” I heard. “I’m voting for this one.”

“Absolutely. The only thing worth looking at in this show…” came the other voice.

I was curious, so I peeked around the corner and recognized two of the senior professors of the college. They must have been part of the committee that chose a winner.

I waited a moment until the two men had moved on. I was by now very curious as to which picture they seemed to think was the best. I turned the corner and found it.

It was a pencil drawing of a kitten. A girl student had done it. The loving care with which the cat was rendered came across loud and clear. Every stroke of the pencil was carefully executed with great concentration. The picture was devoid of any pretense, any claim to fame; it was kitsch in its sentimentality, but indisputably honest. Yes, this was the best piece of all.

I considered that a generation ago, this little drawing would not have impressed anyone. In fact, a student would have been sent packing among peals of laughter. But times had changed. The art world was being flooded with imitations; homages to this and that prominent figure; references made to so and so, ad infinitum. Just as in the world of film where re-makes were the norm, in Art people seemed to have run out of visions. Nothing was original and everything was commercial. Art had become just another racket.

But now here was a girl’s drawing of a her kitten….

Juan Carlos would often kneel with his abuela in front of the Virgin, asking divine intercession with God on every conceivable matter. These usually involved matters of health but could include matters like finding lost keys and the like. As prescribed, Juan Carlos said his prayers on going to bed, expecting fully not to wake up if he should omit a prayer or a mass on Sunday when he did his best to follow the sermon with attention.

At one point in his  life, he considered becoming a priest or at least a monk, for his young mind could conceive of nothing more noble than to work in the service of the Lord of Mercy and Love. In preparation for a life of self-sacrifice, he placed rocks under his mattress to make his sleep as uncomfortable as any saint ever had it. In other words, by the time he was fourteen, Juan Carlos was well on his way to being a  soldiers of Christos in the celestial cause of the Lord. He would work hard to spread the spirit of agape, the love of mankind.

Juan Carlos used to visit an aunt, a middle-aged woman similarly devoted to the Virgin and Jesus Christ. She took all of her meals in a boarding house run by two elderly sisters—faithful Catholics both—the senoritas Gonzales. They ran a dining room frequented by members of the town’s military and aspiring business elite who favored capitalism over communism in the hope of getting a green card to the United States of America. As such, a lunchtime meal at their boarding establishment presented a cross-section of who mattered.

The senoritas Gonzales were elderly and portly but not too proud to personally serve their patrons the daily bread and soup and chicken and rice and flan (as desert) that was the fare at the boarding house. They were proud of their role in society, and they appreciated a word from a colonel or a professor on the quality of the soup or the ceviche.

Like many locals, the sisters were very proud of their Spanish ancestry — their links to the European motherland, far distant from where their fate had cast them among the indios whom they neither liked nor could figure out.

Their ancestor, Senor Enrique Gonzales from Alicante, had emigrated to the New World two centuries ago in search of wealth beyond human comprehension and fame eternal, only to marry another European cast off and begin a line of descents that culminated in the sisters Gonzales. However, what all of them had in continuity, apart from their Iberian race, was their culture and religion, and it was this that tied Juan Carlos, his grandmother, aunts, and the elderly sisters in a bond that defied anything the modern world could throw at it.

One day, Juan Carlos was visiting his aunt at the Gonzales sisters’ boarding house. The place was abuzz with the usual lunchtime crowd: a colonel or two, businessmen from the center of town, teachers, some clerics, and a foreign tourist. Two waiters in white aprons were occupied serving meals while the more elderly of the sisters stood in the pantry clutching her crucifix on her ample bosom, hoping all was going as intended. But then there was a sudden, insistent KNOCK on the door.

One of the waiters made his way to the door and opened it. Momentarily curious, the young Juan Carlos shifted his attention from his aunt to the door, wanting to see what transpired.

The waiter opened the door to reveal an elderly, haggard looking indigenous woman with a cloth sack on her back, clutching an infant in one arm, with a hand outstretched. She looked up imploringly at the waiter and muttered something almost incomprehensible, but Juan Carlos heard the faint word “comida”. The woman was begging for food.

The waiter seemed unmoved, but looked in the direction of the pantry where his mistress stood clutching her crucifix; he was awaiting his orders.

“Shall I get her something to eat…?” he asked.

“NO!” came the reply. “Shut the door!”

The waiter slammed the door in the woman’s face.

And that is when Juan Carlos opened his eyes. And this made all the difference.

He taught her D.H. Lawrence: that whole trip about finding yourself through sexual liberation. They read The Virgin and the Gypsy together. She seemed taken by it; identified with Yvette wholeheartedly, while he, fox that he was, thought of himself as the rakish outsider, the gypsy, product of the civilized imagination, the Ur-force in Nature.

They flirted harmlessly on the back porch of her father’s house, one of the biggest on the lake, with its own boat house and grand lawn once used for garden parties but lately just ignored. Her father was a very old lawyer on his second marriage to a woman half his age. But none of that concerned John the tutor as he led the woman’s daughter through The Virgin and the Gypsy.

The daughter was a 19 year old redhead, a ravishing creature full of life, but quiet and naïve like a sleeping volcano awaiting the signal to announce herself in an eruption. At first, he didn’t realize that she was thinking of him, the tutor, as the signal. He thought of his meetings with her just as harmless flirtations, and a bit of paid teaching thrown in. So, he was surprised when the redhead made her move.

It was in a coffee shop after a lesson. She had just taken her seat and wanted to discuss D.H. She was impressed particularly by Yvette’s desires to be “initiated” into the Lawrentian society of primordial heroes.

She stirred her coffee, looked John in the eyes and reached out to touch his hand: “Initiate me,” she said quietly.

Fool that he was, John was taken by surprise. “But,… I’m your tutor,” he managed.

The moment came as quickly as it went. He didn’t know what more to say, and she didn’t know how to resurrect her request.

“We could go to the park…” he offered, but the moment was fleeting and gone.

He was picturing a hotel room on the park, a magic afternoon with the redheaded virgin; he the romantic hero initiating her into the world of adulthood. But she seemed rejected. She hung her head, suggested he ought to drive her home.

The trip back to her house was quiet, with him scheming and her pensive, and remote.

She got out of the car and wandered towards her house on a tree-lined avenue. She bent down to pick up a large chestnut leaf from the road. As she did so, her long red hair caught the afternoon sunlight just so; magically—unforgettably radiant orange. And he realized what a prize he had let off the hook.

And then she disappeared inside her home, and he never saw the Virgin again.

She used to hang around the decaying colonial hotel to chat with a desk clerk who introduced Harry to her as his “novia” — girlfriend or fiancé — a claim she laughingly denied even as he made it.

She offered to show Harry around town one evening, and so they went to a “Club Obscuro”, someone’s idea of an underground nightclub.

It was in the cellar of a solid colonial building in a rather dark part of town. There were several unlit, dingy places there, but this one must have been on top of the list for ridiculous enterprises. There were no lights at all in the Club Obscuro, but there was a luminous buzzer on the wall at each table so patrons could call waiters for service. Harry suspected it was a place for lovers to go for a private bit of smooching or more; hence the darkness.

At any rate, they ended up there sitting in the dark, at a flimsy wooden table with a bottle of rum between them and not much to say. And they became increasingly drunk. Finally, Harry decided they ought to leave. He called the waiter and paid. But then Harry had trouble getting up. He was laughing as he stemmed himself against the table when it collapsed. They hurried out of the place, up the stairs and onto the dark street. That was his first date with Lucy.

On their next outing, she took him to where she lived with her aunt, a woman with two kids abandoned by a no-good husband. The kids and their mother and Lucy all slept on a large decrepit mattress on the floor. Except for a single light bulb and an electric fan, there were no modern devices in the home. The floor of the place was trampled- down mud; the walls were rough and bare except for a picture of the Virgin Mary. The aunt made a meager living mending people’s clothes while Lucy seemed not to do anything at all.

Then Lucy decided Harry ought to see a village where her brother was working as an electrician. They took a bus through dry, hilly landscape to the remote town known for its indigenous burial tombs to which no one ever came.

Lucy’s brother was a taciturn, gloomy man who let Harry know that his one wish in life was for enough capital to purchase a piece of land where he could build a house for his family. He made the point several times, always glancing at Harry while indicating with gestures exactly the expanse of land he had his eye on. Harry didn’t respond, although he knew what the brother was getting at. Lucy was supposed to have something to do with all of this. Just what that was Harry later found out.

Harry had no romantic interest in Lucy at all. She wasn’t particularly pretty, or intelligent from what he could tell, so he was a bit surprised when she forced her way into his bed that first night at her brother’s. A younger brother was asleep in the room as a chaperon (or a witness?), so this was not supposed to happen.

Once she was under the sheet beside him, offering herself like some sacrificial lamb, Harry tried to shove her out, but she was insistent, and it nearly came to intercourse. Harry was very suspicious as to what this was all leading to; finally he got her to go back to her bed.

Next day they pretended nothing had happened. What this was all about became known to him only much later.

It was time for him to leave the country. Lucy was clearly upset. She cried a bit and asked for a picture to remember him by, so Harry gave her an old ID card with his photo on it. She also asked for a lock of his blonde hair, so he allowed her to cut off a curl. She seemed to cherish these as souvenirs. He had no suspicions, although in retrospect, maybe he ought to have known better.

Harry left Colombia and continued his journey, but it wasn’t until several months thereafter, when he was back in his own country, that strange afflictions began to appear.

He had just gotten married to a woman whom he loved when strange events began to happen. One of the first of these occurred when Harry was part of a group of young men hired to tear down an old barn out in the countryside.

They had demolished three out of four walls of what used to be a very large wooden barn. There was still one wall standing, propped up by a couple of four-by-four beams. Harry was watching the boys saw through one of these when the whole twenty foot structure came plunging down towards him. He felt a board just brush the top of his hardhat as the wall hit the floor with a thunderous, dust-raising crash, that left him standing in what just happened to be a section where boards had already been removed.

The boys looked at him in astonishment. One of them said: “You must have nine lives. You could have easily been killed.” But soon Harry thought nothing more about this.

Some weeks later, though, Harry was cycling out in the countryside when a dog came running out of a farmyard to bite him in the leg, for no reason at all. “He’s never done anything like this,” said the farm wife apologetically as she attended to his wound.

The same thing happened when a few weeks later Harry was looking for a radiator in a car junk yard. He had just come into the yard when he decided to look into a dog house. He wanted to see if the dog was home. It was – a Doberman pincher shot out and bit him in the thigh and tore a strip of his jeans down to his shoes. Harry got a free radiator out of that one. Fortunately, the dog didn’t have rabies.

Then Harry was sitting with his newly-wedded wife in a park, having a picnic with his in-laws, when a baseball flew out of the blue to hit him in the right temple. Smack!

Out of all the people present, why him? But Harry didn’t ask himself that. He just saw it as an accident.

Next, his wife was driving his car, but she neglected Harry’s advice to keep the speed below 60 miles per hour. The old motor had to work too hard at anything above that. However, Harry had fallen asleep while she was driving, so he wasn’t aware that she had ignored these instructions.

The consequence was that the pressure in the motor squeezed out all of the oil and the motor seized up. They had to call a tow truck to get them to a garage where they were assured the car was now junk. Harry sold it as scrap for fifty bucks.

But then a couple of years later, Harry was approached by a policeman who wanted to know why he had abandoned his VW on the side of the highway. Seems Harry had been suckered by the garage mechanic into selling a car that could be repaired. For years, the mechanic had been driving illegally with Harry’s license plates still attached until the car finally gave up the ghost.

Next, Harry’s wife decided to have an abortion without telling him. She had gotten pregnant (she was a fertile little thing). He only got wind of this because the doctors needed a signature from the father of the fetus to legally abort. Harry signed it reluctantly because he had wanted children, but they were poor students still, and the prospects of a happy marriage did not seem to be in the cards.

His wife was not happy at all. She had failed to get into university because, mysteriously, her application was lost in the mail. She also did not find a job in the town where Harry was attending college.

The couple moved into a house out in the countryside. They had the flat upstairs while the landlord and his family lived on the ground floor. Harry and his wife invested in furniture, a stove and a fridge, expecting to live there for at least a year. But then, for no apparent reason, the well of the house went dry. The remaining supply of water would not be enough for all, and so they were asked to move out. And No, they would not get their security deposit back.

So, now Harry and his wife had no place to live, no car, and she had no job; they existed on his student loan, which wasn’t much. They moved into town, but that didn’t bring happiness.

On the home front, things did not look any more encouraging. The wife was bored, so she found a friend, a young film student who decided she was so attractive that he would put her into his film. She mentioned the guy to Harry but never introduced him. At first Harry was glad she had found something to occupy her.

But then one day Harry came home to find the door to their apartment locked from within. He went to a corner telephone call box but at home no one answered. When next he tried with his key, the door opened, but his wife was not there. Later, she came home, saying she had been shopping. That was it. No further explanation. Harry had his suspicions but put them aside, not wanting a confrontation.

Several similar incidents happened in the space of a few years. The couple moved to Europe where, on a belated honeymoon in Paris, they were both food poisoned. They spent a week in bed recovering.

Then they split up because they were not getting along. She found a job taking care of a rich old woman while Harry found a part time position teaching English. Still, Harry loved his wife and hoped for better days, but found his feelings not reciprocated.

Yet she was having a great time: she was offered the position of mistress to the head of a company; she went to bars and clubs with friends – while Harry pined and wrote poems for her in a rented room. They moved to another city where she found a job teaching kids in a junior high school, while Harry worked as a translator. In all of this, they found no bridge of love and mutual understanding. On the contrary, they were living completely separate lives, married for convenience sake more than anything else. Still, Harry had hopes of happier days. But these never came.

His relationship with his wife steadily declined to the point where Harry could trust her no longer. On several occasions, she was missing for weekends; at one time she was gone for ten days without explanation. During all of this, Harry kept hoping things would improve, that she would discover some love for him; but this never happened. His marriage turned out to be an empty, meaningless affair.

Then one day Harry happened to mention to his wife all of the bad luck that dogged them, and she told him this: When Harry had returned from Colombia, she had opened a letter addressed to him. It came from Columbia, and it was empty except for a strand of blonde hair shaped and bound into a little figure. She recognized it as a voodoo doll and had burned it in the fireplace but had not told him about it as she wanted to shield him from its message.

Since his divorce many years ago, Harry’s life has settled into a not unpleasant routine, with lots of work and travel, but devoid of love and affection.

His past and the lock of hair still come to mind some days, and he still wonders what to make of it all.

Frankie knew the look. It said: One second more and you’re gonna get it. Right in the damned face. WHOP!

But today it didn’t come. He had waited with a churning stomach for the slap across the face yesterday and again today and he would wait for it tomorrow until he couldn’t take it anymore; his stomach was in such agony.

Each dinner time, he would eat quickly, tell himself to keep his nerves, don’t display fear; get away from the table as quickly as possible.

His hand shook as it held the soup spoon; he tried to focus, forget he was at the dinner table. Forget his hand was trembling. Why would it not stop trembling?

“Don’t eat so fast,” his mother would say softly: “Chew your food properly. No wonder you have stomach trouble.”

“Lie across the chair,” his mother said after dinner, pulling a kitchen chair from under the table. “Lie on your stomach for a while and the pain will go away.”

The pains went away. But the nightmares didn’t. In them a hand would lash out as though with a life of its own, smash into his face, fling his head aside, leave it stinging hot. In real life, he would cover the shame with his own hand and retreat to his room to await further punishment. It never came, but he expected it.

Long into the night, unable to sleep, he would await the heavy steps of his father on the stairs. The wooden stairs would creak. He waited for the door to open, the horror to begin; but it didn’t. Night after night, it didn’t happen, yet still he expected one day to be beaten to death while he was half asleep.

He planned his escape from home. He took after-school jobs, saved his dimes, his quarters, and his dollars. While he attended school, he worked part-time in a tuxedo rental-agency and then in a department store; he shoveled snow in the winter, cut grass in the summer, saved and saved for the time he would be able to get away from the family. But, he was still under-aged and could not legally live on his own. He would have to endure and await his time.

By the time he was sixteen, Frankie had taken up crime. He shoplifted habitually: any and every useless thing was fair game for liberation. Packets of foreign stamps that he neither wanted nor collected; tools of various sorts he had no need of; shirts, socks, musical records, a leather vest, ties he never wore; lures for fishing when he never fished.

Any and every steal-able thing he stole. And, without fully being aware of it, he wished to be caught — caught and sentences to a correctional farm for boys he had seen on TV. There he would be among his type: young criminals from similar backgrounds who would understand him and be his friends. Conviction meant liberation.

And one day liberation came. Frankie had been boosting cartons of cigarettes from a grocery store for weeks and selling individual packs to his fellow high school students. It had brought a nice profit. But he had been careless, perhaps on purpose.

Frankie had just approached the cashier, when he noted the store manager waiting on the far side of the cashier. He realized he could still return the items, claim they were the wrong thing; there would be no consequences. But, he didn’t…. Fate had tossed the dice and so it had to be.

He was transported in the back of a police cruiser to the local cop shop, was finger printed, charged, and put into a jail cell. To his own surprise, he felt relieved.

He was released on bail pending a trial. During that time, the horrors of domestic life continued, but so did the hope of being removed from the house, being taken to a correctional farm and looked after by the state until… well until her grew up.

But, this did not happen. On the day of his trial, a Salvation Army captain interviewed him minutes before it was his turn to face the judge. His mother was with Frankie. “Has the boy ever been in trouble before? No? Well, no need to be concerned. I doubt he’ll be sentenced.”

And he wasn’t. Instead, he was returned to the horror called home.

The old man had his moods. Mother claimed they coincided with the full moon. A full moon meant watch out; take cover, punishment time is at hand. If father had been a drunkard, his black moods would have had an excuse. He would have been able to say: “Sorry. I guess I had too much to drink.” But he wasn’t a drinker at all. If anything, he abstained; he was a model citizen, a provider, a family man. He was just in foul moods of which the family bore the brunt.

The neighbors once commented to Frankie what a lovely family he had. His parents’ friends too thought Dad was a gem: such a great sense of humor, a real card, not bad on the dance floor either. And the kids were well behaved, very quiet and respectful. Ideal, really! — An ideal family, worth preserving in photos. Stuff the lot of them and display them in a museum: The Ideal Middle Class Family.

People were fooled. As soon as his parents’ guests left, the darkness fell over the home. Frankie hurried off to bed and waited…waited for the heavy footfall on the stairs. This was the routine for years and years.

Father would come home promptly at 5:30, at which Frankie retreated to his room and mother went to work making last minute preparations for dinner which began promptly at 6:00.

Father would enter the kitchen not looking at anyone, saying not a thing; he’d wash his hands as was his routine and take his place at the head of the table. As though on cue, Frankie would come downstairs to take his place in the hot seat—the place next to the patriarch where he could receive punishment for whatever offense he had caused. Not showing up would raise anger; he had no choice.

As the family ate in silence, the six o’clock news presented the war in Vietnam; crimes were being committed against hapless civilians on a monumental scale. Human beings were being incinerated with napalm, reduced to cinders; fields and forests were set alight, acres of land and water were poisoned for generations to come. This was life. This was the way it was.

There were episodes in his family life that were as inexplicable as they were terrible. Once, father said nothing to anyone in his family. He would come home, get ready for dinner as usual, and say absolutely nothing.

He would greet no one; he would not say good night, or good morning, or good bye. Not a syllable escaped his lips. And he would not look at anyone. It was as though everyone was invisible. The result, of course, was more tense meals filled with expectations of a volcanic flare up. But this did not happen; this was far worse, tenser, more stressful, more filled with the potential for ultra-violence. This situation lasted for three months.

During this time, in bed, Frankie listening anxiously for his father’s heavy footfall on the stairs, waited for the door to be pushed open, the axe produced and the bloodbath to ensue.

Yet, he felt there were rules of a universal sort: he told himself that as long as he remained tucked under the covers, nothing could happen. He was not violating any rule. He would survive.

But he would need to escape. He would need to escape….

The problem with this bond it that its conditions are seldom articulated. Each party assumes that the other knows and subscribes to the unspoken terms of what is and is not permitted within the relationship. This silent agreement comes into effect once the couple begins intimate relations, that is once sex enters the picture.

These assumptions are at the back of the minds of those in a love relationship, irrespective of what they may tell themselves. Each partner longs for permanence, for love beyond any superficial level of physical communion. However, as the present tale is about to illustrate, unvoiced feelings often lead to betrayal in modern love.

Middle-aged Frank was still good looking, despite a bit of grey around the temples and a bit of weight around the mid-drift. He had a winning smile and could be charming when he chose to be.

He had been living in Europe for ten years when he met Erika. On a rainy day, he spotted her getting off the commuter train. She worked in the same office complex as he did.

On this particular day, the morning drizzle and the light combined in a perfect way to illuminate her demure, shapely figure in the haze in front of him. He was so charmed that he felt compelled to offer her the protection of his large black umbrella. The girl’s hair was already damp as he spoke:

“Hello. You’re getting very wet. Can I offer you shelter under my umbrella?”

She looked over at him with large but suspicious brown eyes. A few drops jumped off her eyelashes. She looked absolutely enchanting.

“Oh. Thanks. Nice of you,” she smiled shyly. “Thank you. You work here too?”

She was a little out of breath from battling the drizzle but accepted his offer. They headed out of the drizzle for the doors of the glass tower.

Frank was an American in Germany. He was a reserved man, but every once in a while he dared to hope that a chance encounter might be the beginning of something meaningful and exciting. He had had a couple of futile love affairs behind him, all with migrant workers in the country — people without relatives or friends, women who were happy someone took an interest in them. Ultimately, though, there was no meeting of hearts and minds and only sad regret remained.

The Germans are a tribal people, despite the superficial cosmopolitanism of their modern cities. This means they tend to look on the stranger as someone who comes to work but not to stay and raise a family amongst them. In this they are very European.

In all his years in Germany, Frank had made no German friends, although he had met numerous foreigners like himself. So, when he met Erika, a “real” German, a tentative hope awoke in him.

Erika worked in a department for which special security clearance was required. She was one of the firm’s elite researchers. Frank learned this not from her, but from a colleague.

When next he met Erika, it was again by chance in the company cafeteria.
She was sitting alone at a table, bent over a bowl of soup and a sandwich. She was frowning, engrossed in thought, but when she noted him coming to her table, she smiled immediately. He asked if he could join her.

“Yes certainly. I haven’t forgotten you and your umbrella… Frank, was it?”

He was pleased and encouraged that she had remembered his name. It had been a week since their first meeting. He hadn’t forgotten her at all.

The cafeteria was noisy with the clatter of dishes and chatter, but they did manage to hear each other. He asked why she looked so serious, then he followed up with a series of questions intended to keep her talking, keep her smiling, keep him enchanted.

Frank thought he was the cause of her apparent improvement in mood. He did all of the probing, evaluating, weighing of responses, to see what the possibilities were; although, for the most part, she seemed quite incurious about him. She smiled during the good-natured interrogation, seemed to enjoy his attentions.
For his part, Frank was waiting to be asked but volunteered little about himself.

Lunch hour came to an end. He left to go back to work wondering if anything had been accomplished. She seemed a conventional woman in a good job, as unremarkable as he was. Still, he sensed there was far more to her than what he had been able to glean. She was so secretive.

Frank saw Erika in the cafeteria again a couple of days later and decided he would have to ask her out if things were to progress. So they made a date for dinner the following Saturday. High hopes for happiness took flight.

When he called her on Friday night to confirm arrangements, there was no answer. No machine clicked on to take a message.
She must be out, he thought. A touch of worry went through him. She must have lots of friends; maybe she went out every night of the week. He thought he would seem dull to her. Perhaps all those smiles were smiles of derision. Maybe she needed to lead men on in order to get her kicks, to confirm her attractiveness.

Women were complex creatures even to themselves. They played games. Frank went to bed that evening with his hopes dashed. He upbraided himself for being stupid, for having dreamed of impossibilities. Why should Erika be interested in him?

But, Saturday brought a different picture. The rain had ceased, the clouds parted and the sun shone in the late afternoon. He called an hour before they were supposed to meet.

“Yes, it’s on,” she assured him: “Sure, I’m expecting to see you at the station. Six o’clock sharp? There is a nice restaurant nearby.” Her voice was enthusiastic; her mood upbeat. Frank was happy.

Erika came off the train ten minutes late, but she smiled her apologies, and it was alright. The sun was just about to set as they made their way to the restaurant, arm in arm, almost like a married couple. Frank was both nervous and elated.

The puzzle-that-was-Erika lessened a little over dinner when she filled in some facts of her life. She had lived with her parents in the East till the Wall came down; thereafter she had gotten this job. Her academic credentials were impressive; her father had been a professor high up in the East German research establishment; now he was retired. It sounded exciting.

Frank seemed to be in reach of the “real thing”, a genuine German woman with a history. However, as earlier, Frank did most of the asking. For her part, Erika seemed incurious. Frank worried, but suppressed his doubts. Have some faith, he told himself.

You can’t really tell much from a word or a smile. Most of the time, we hear what we want to hear and see what we want to see. More often than not, people aren’t even sure what they want from each other. They more or less wait to see what happens, what possibilities present themselves. Life will fall into place, they say to themselves. Life will begin one day; I just have to be patient. Frank was patient.

Frank came home, turned on the television set with its sound turned off, then sat staring at the screen, listening to the rain.

He felt that the evening had been a failure. He had probably made a fool of himself. Maybe his eagerness showed; she was probably disappointed.

He had decided not to see her again, but fate had other plans. When he stepped onto the commuter train the next day, there she was, all smiles. She chatted and he listened; then she fell silent.

As they walked to work, he stared at the blank faces of the commuters around him, wishing he were somewhere else. “What are you doing for lunch?” he heard himself saying.

Frank and Erika were married six months later.

Of all illusions about security, marriage has to be the biggest. We assume vows still mean something, even though we know times have changed and words themselves have become devoid of their magic properties. No higher powers or profounder meanings are hidden in their forms. Still, Frank believed there was something in a vow. So he vowed everlasting devotion.

But from the start of their life together there were signs of the turmoil to come, yet Frank chose to ignore them. Her parents, for instance, did not take to him. They saw him as a former capitalist enemy and now some kind of opportunist, although just what he wanted was unclear to them, as they themselves had little in the way of wealth.

The father looked at Frank from behind his thick DDR glasses and saw an unambitious shirker, someone beneath what his daughter was capable of snaring. Of course, given that she was in and out of relationships with alarming regularity, marriage might not be the worst option, he concluded.

Frank’s conversations with the father increasingly took an ideological turn. According to the older man, America was at the root of all of the problems that had brought down the socialist states. The arms race, for instance, was a plot to bring socialism to its knees and subject it to capitalism.

Frank listened to the old man’s diatribes and cringed. Such conversations became trials of patience, but Frank considered himself a patient man. Besides, he wanted to be accepted into his wife’s clan. And he had taken the vow.

Erika was determined to see her parents on most weekends. She was like a homing pigeon that flew East no matter what Frank had planned for the day.

“I have to see Mutti and Vati this weekend,” she would say when Frank proposed something.

“You know they’re expecting me for lunch. But you don’t have to come, you know…” This last statement was said in a tone that implied he really was not expected.

It pained Frank to see how dependent Erika was on her parents. She was an only child, the apple of their eyes, and it became apparent he wouldn’t be able to wean her away from home anytime soon. But, be patient, he told himself. Be patient.

Life ran on as it was supposed to: an endless round of work, shopping, eating and sleeping; workdays followed weekends, rain followed snow, then sunshine and more rain. Somehow things didn’t feel any different than before. Frank didn’t feel changed as he had expected to. He and his wife hadn’t “merged” in the sense of “two becoming one”, as popular thought liked to have it. If anything, he thought, something had been lost rather than gained, but he couldn’t articulate it.

Then one day, life did change. Erika didn’t come home. She had gone to the vegetable market, a ten minute stroll from where they lived. Frank had stayed home to vacuum the flat, planning on lunch. Twelve o’clock came and went, then it was three, but Erika still wasn’t there. He assumed she’d stopped off at a friend’s, but where?

Six o’clock arrived and she still wasn’t home. He began to worry. He called friends, then the parents. No, Erika hadn’t been by that day. Finally, he phoned the police. They had no reports of anyone injured or taken into custody. Did he want to file a missing person’s report? No. He decided to wait.

Erika did not come home that evening. To appease his worry, Frank went looking for her. He walked to the market then retraced the steps she would have taken to the apartment. He looked for something dropped – a clue of some sort. From a payphone, he phoned his own answering machine: No message.

His stomach in turmoil, his wretched mind racing, he did not want to go back to an empty apartment. He went into a bar instead.

Finally, around ten o’clock, he went home, expecting a friendly Hello…There you are! But, she was not there.

That night, he nodded off only a bit, sitting up in the glare of the television set. In the morning he called the parents once more, then some of her friends. No one could offer any reassurance. He called local hospitals, wrestled with the option of reporting her missing to the police. He walked the empty neighborhood once more, sinking deeper and deeper into despair.

What had happened? He felt somehow responsible for Erika’s disappearance. He felt guilty but couldn’t say why. He had failed to assure her of his love, had failed to provide somehow, had proven disappointing. But in the late afternoon, when he entered the kitchen of their flat, there she was.

Startled, she turned from the stove to look at him, a wooden ladle in her hand. She laughed: “I’m sorry. So sorry…I ahh, I forgot to come home.” She casually licked the ladle, and stuck it back into the spaghetti sauce.

He was stunned.

With her back turned to him, she added: “I was at Josie’s and I just forgot, that’s all. Ha. Ha. Ha. I forgot the time. We were talking all night long, and then I stayed for lunch. We had a few drinks, a little party.”

He stared at her, incredulous. He said nothing.

Now her expression changed. Her mouth became hard as she said vehemently: “Besides, you don’t own me!”

With that, she wiped her hands on a towel and stomped off into the bathroom.

Frank didn’t know what to say or do. He would keep silent so as not to further upset her. He would have to figure things out. He felt foolish and helpless.

When Frank called Josie from work, Josie said she hadn’t seen Erika that week or anytime recently. This revelation troubled him deeply. It occurred to him that he could not trust his wife. He worried and wondered at her duplicity. She had lied. What else had she lied about? Still, he said nothing to her. He wanted to avoid any confrontation until he figured things out. He needed to be patient.

Things did not get any better. A few days later, after continuous tension between them, Frank came home early. He was desperate for answers. He needed to know where he stood.

Going to the bedroom, he quickly but carefully went through Erika’s dresser. The drawers revealed nothing. He went into the large closet where her skirts and dresses hung. He went into pockets, then through the many boxes on the shelf above. Nothing. He wasn’t even sure of what he was looking for except an end to his turmoil.

That evening he waited impatiently for over an hour for her to come home. But six o’clock went by, then seven, then eight, then nine. By eleven o’clock he was partly asleep in front of the mute television set when a smallish bang from the hallway woke him up. The front door had closed. Feet were moving about, trying to remain quiet. He heard a clothes hanger being put onto a hook. Then he heard:

“You’re still up…? I tried not to wake you…”

A hot flash went through Frank. He tried to remain calm, play his cards to his advantage. Confrontations would not work with Erika. But, what was he supposed to do, what to say? He reacted instinctively.

“Where were you?” he growled in restrained anger. She looked at him, a touch worried now.

Concerned, she said: “I know you worry. But you don’t have to worry, you know. I can take care of myself. I’m a big girl.”

“I’m not worried about your being a big girl,” he growled. “You’re a married woman. Are you forgetting that?”

She looked at him for a moment, seemingly unsure of her next line. But it came:

“You don’t OWN me!” she shouted. ”YOU DON’T OWN ME!”

Taken aback, Frank thought she was right. He didn’t don’t own her. She was, after all, liberated.

He had agreed in principle that men and women were not to be bound by conventions. But this … this surely was going too far.

He tried to find words which would put her on the defensive, but nothing came to mind. He couldn’t think properly; his head was in turmoil; words just wouldn’t come…

He sprang from his seat and in a flash he was upon her. His outstretched hands seemed automatically to lock onto her throat like the teeth of a rabid dog; hands began to squeeze—hard.

“Fucking whore! I’ll kill you!” He squeezed and squeezed.

The more adrenalin that pumped into his brain, the bluer Erika’s face became. Her eyes bulged; her throat gurgled, when all of a sudden something clicked in Frank’s mind: he was committing murder. Stop. Stop he heard his brain say. He loosened his grip to let her stagger away, stagger away into the hall, then stumble into the bathroom. His mind reeled but it came back. The adrenalin shock subsided.

The bathroom door locked with an accusing click and he was alone. The room sank into a dark quiet; the television’s grey-blue light flickered as though a cold flame had begun to lick the place.

Frank lowered himself into his chair. He was frozen, drained. He had done a terrible thing, and now he would have to pay for it.

Erika did not come out of the bath. He remained immobilized on the couch where he went to sleep. In the morning, she was gone.

Erika did not show up for work that day. Frank went to the Personnel Department to see if she had called in sick. The woman behind the counter looked at him perplexed. A husband who didn’t know whether his wife was sick? He hoped he would not attract attention. He felt a keen sense of culpability.

That day he came home early, but she was not there. Erika’s travel bag was missing. Yet, most of her things were still in the drawers. He had a faint hope of her return.

Later, when he went to the bank to check on their joint savings account, he found that several thousand Euros had been withdrawn, although the bulk of their savings remained. He was both worried she would not come back and angry at how he was being deceived.

She was gone ten days. Then one night Frank came through the front door. He smelled the aroma of cooking. Spaghetti! She had returned.

He froze momentarily in the hall, afraid he would spoil things. Maybe she had had a change of heart. Words failed him; he had not been prepared for this. The strange thing was his sense of relief that she had come back at all. A burden fell from him as if by a miracle and he felt grateful.

“Hi. Come and eat,” he heard her joyfully calling. What was going on?

She had a bottle of wine, two glasses, a candle, and two big plates on the kitchen table. At the stove, she stood with an apron on, a wooden ladle in hand, and a shy smile on her face – the picture of happy domesticity. It seemed a miracle. She was penitent. He was astounded.

As he took a seat at the table, no words came to mind. It was as if they were both in a soap opera, and it was Act III Scene I. What would happen next? He wasn’t in charge of direction. That much he realized.

She took a seat opposite him, folded a napkin demurely on her lap, smiled a bit coyly as if this were the first meal she had ever cooked.

“Hope you like it,” she said.

Shaking his head, he couldn’t help smiling at the absurdity of it. He ate cautiously, as though expecting to be struck by a rolling pin or to be told she had poisoned the sauce. She wanted something. What did she want? What did she want?

“You’ve changed your hair,” he ventured softly, bent over the plate.

“You like it? I’ve always wanted it short.”

“I missed you…”

“I think it looks better like this, don’t you?”

“Couldn’t you have phoned? I was so worried about you.”

She was silent. Then, the script demanded a change of tone, a change of mood.

“It’s actually none of your business, you know. I’m a free woman. No one owns me.”

She said this calmly, deliberately, as if she were a lawyer and he a client being told the nature of the charges against him.

Frank’s brain would not function. The weeks of worry and strain had worn it out. He went blank; his eyes would not focus; his hands began to tremble as sweat formed on his forehead.

He got up without a word, went into the living room where he turned on the television set, and sat down, staring at the screen without seeing a thing. Control. Control yourself, his inner voice said.

In the kitchen, Erika finished up, then went into the bath. Moments later, she came out and went to bed. The bedroom door closed almost silently.

Much later, Frank recalled only that at some point during the night he had gone to the kitchen closet, gotten a hammer and had entered the bedroom.

He couldn’t remember what happened next, but in his mind he did see a dark figure standing in a doorway, an object in his hand and a dark room before him. And silence. He only ever recalled an overwhelming silence.

The phone rang only once on the same evening. A woman’s smoky voice asked if I were the one who placed the ad in The Spectator? “Yes Ma’m,” I replied. The woman introduced herself as Lara Hennessy. She was in charge of a music festival in town and was looking for a male secretary, a kind of “jack of all trades”. Was I interested? Could I come by the office downtown the next day? Yes. Yes. Yes, I assured her. At that point I was desperate for a job.

The next day I went down to the office on the town’s main drag. I had never heard of the Festival of Sounds. Must be something new, I thought. When I walked into the rather cramped office, the first thing that met me was a cloud of cigarette smoke. Negative, I thought. But, then my caller hailed me with one arm raised.

“George! Are you George?” she queried, cackling between “COUGH… COUGH. COUGH… GEORGE! Come. Come. HAVE A SEAT. How are you? I’m Lara.” We interviewed rather briefly. In fact, I hardly said more than Yes, I could type and take notes… sort of. I was willing to go downstairs for coffee and was willing to promote the festival, design the ads to put into the papers and so on. It all sounded interesting, and I thought it would probably give me valuable new skills. Fate had spoken. I started the next day.

Things began with coffee. I went downstairs in the old building to a dimly lit coffee place and bought Lara her morning brew. But I also made my first mistake. “This is sweet!” she said as she took her first sip from the cup. “Sweet. Did you put SUGAR into this?”

Unhappy, she ordered me to go down to get another cup: “Black, no sugar, no milk.” As I left the office, I thought I heard a muted sneer: “Moron. Off to a good start….”

The rest of the day went a bit better. My immediate assignment was to drive to the airport to pick up the guest artist of the music festival. He was a pianist, well-known, famous even, although I had never heard of him.

Edward Bellamy, virtuoso in Beethoven. He would give several concerts and master classes during the two weeks of festivities. My job was to be his right-hand man, in addition to doing everything else that needed to be done for the festival.

I arrived at the airport late. For the occasion, I was given a rented car since my own wasn’t fit for a prince of music. As I pulled into the short term parking lot, I noted the lone plane on the runway and a thin line of passengers disembarking. I rushed into the hall of the terminal. The place was almost deserted, even though it was the tourist season. I wondered if Bellamy had already disembarked and gone in a taxi. But, then I saw him.

You couldn’t mistake Mr. Bellamy — a tall, thin man wearing an expensive, black wool coat, dark glasses and a black, wide-brimmed hat. Here he was a big city person in the provinces and made an immediate impression, sort of like a Magus.

On his approach, an airport policeman stiffened as though he were an honor guard. I was duly impressed. Accompanying Mr. Bellamy was an equally tall, stately person.

She lugged a large cello case on a trolley while el Maestro pulled a suitcase on little wheels. I waved to attract their attention. “Ah… Are you here to meet us? Good. Good. Take this.” I was handed the Maestro’s suitcase and joined the missus behind the great man as though we both were his shirpa.

“This is Christine, my wife,” he said in an offhanded manner.

She and I exchanged smiles, but none of us shook hands. Mr. Bellamy seemed to be in a hurry. We drove into town in silence. The Maestro looked pensively out of the window at the passing forest and lit one cigarette after another. His wife sat stiffly at the other end of the back seat, her expression a blank. I got the idea they weren’t speaking for some reason. I noted in the rear view mirror she was very pale in the face, dark-haired, exceptionally attractive.As for him, he still wore his shades despite it being early evening.

Outside, the woods were getting dark and cold. The house we had rented for the couple was not ready. Now, whose fault was that, I wondered?

Christine and I unloaded the baggage from the car while the Maestro stood looking around the living room with obvious concern. “Well. What did I expect?” he said to himself. “You got a vacuum cleaner around here?”

Christine and I pulled out drawers from the chests in the bedroom, made the beds, puffed up pillows, while the Maestro did the vacuuming. It seemed he was sensitive to dust. All the while, though, he was smoking.

I glanced at Christine more than once. She seemed to be taking this housework in stride. I also noted that she and Mr. Bellamy had a serious dignity that would really impress our local music fans. Without doubt, they’d all seen Bellamy’s picture on his CDs and maybe had seen him in concert on television.

When we were finished, the Maestro tried to tip me, but I declined with a smile: “It’s my pleasure to have you both with us,” I said. “I’m at your service. Please.”

This brought a hesitant smile from him. They were tired. I handed him the key and saw myself out.

The next day I picked up Mr. Bellamy. He wanted to inspect the music hall where he would work his magic. He wandered around the darkened stage and inspected the grand piano. He asked me to lock the auditorium doors.“I want to try it out undisturbed.”

He sat at the piano and, tentatively, as though it was a delicate little thing rather than a formidable black machine, he ran his fingers lightly over the keys. Then he got into the mood and picked up the pace. In minutes he was pounding at the instrument as though he were trying to destroy it. BANG. BANG. BANG went the keys. He worked up a sweat. I decided I ought to leave quietly. I’d pick him up in an hour.

In subsequent days, the Maestro came regularly to the concert hall. He always asked me to make sure to lock all the doors; after that, I would leave him to bang on the instrument.

One day, outside the main doors to the auditorium, I found a group of elderly ladies listening secretly. “Marvelous. Marvelous,” said one of them smiling. I was no judge, but I took their word for it. His fans would know.

  As the concert date approached, Lara became increasingly nervous. Her hands shook more than before. “We need to raise more money. How are we going to pay the musicians?” She said this through a haze of smoke. Her hair all out of place, she looked like she hadn’t been sleeping. We now had half a dozen virtuosos on hand. Cellists, violinists, a harpist, and several pianists. But, only five students signed up for master classes. We would have to hit our sponsors for more cash although the concerts, fortunately, were sold out.

One evening, as I took the Maestro and Christine home, he asked me to come in. “Join us for some spaghetti, will you? Christine is an expert at spaghetti.” As I had no plans, I accepted. Out of earshot, Christine set to work in the kitchen as Mr. Bellamy pulled the cork out of a bottle of wine. “Surprised you have a good wine store in town,” he said, pouring a glass of red. “Not bad. Not bad. Have some…” He poured me a glass. We sat in the aging furniture that came with the rented house.

It embarrassed me somewhat that these fine city people, famous people, should have to contend themselves with our poor provincial hospitality. Then, with no prompting, Mr. Bellamy looked me in the eyes and said: “I’ve been waiting to make it big for years…. The expenses, you know. It’s hard to keep up. Christine’s a fine cellist, but she hasn’t gotten a break yet. And she’s not getting any younger. Nor am I….”

He sounded embarrassed; his gaze dropped. Then he said, “You know, it’s not easy being a musician…” and he told me his story. Mr. Bellamy had been born under another name altogether. He had immigrated to the new world with a name I couldn’t pronounce, let alone remember. The music establishment now knew him only as Bellamy. He had been a child of ten when his parents decided Eastern Europe held no future. They decided their only son, who was already showing an aptitude for music, would best be educated in America.

In the new country, Mr. Bellamy had not found it easy to learn the language because he was a very quiet, introspective child who endlessly practiced the violin and the piano.

He couldn’t make up his mind which better expressed his sense of isolation but ended up with the piano thanks to the fact that his school had one to practice on. There were prizes to be won and he won many before he matured into an equally introspective, shy man of twenty.

That’s when he met Christine at the conservatory. Christine was Central European as well, but from a country adjacent to his. She was able to converse in Mr. Bellamy’s tongue, having learned it at school. She played both the violin and the cello. Christine and Mr. Bellamy married while both were still students. Then Mr. Bellamy’s father went bankrupt in a business deal and committed suicide, leaving the young man and his mother virtually without support. Mr. Bellamy, accompanied by his young wife, began to play piano in the lounges of hotels. They made a modest living as musicians, but the money was never enough for the lifestyle they aspired to. For a time everything seemed to be getting better.

But then, three years into their marriage, Christine miscarried and fell into a deep depression. She spent weeks at home while Mr. Bellamy played piano at the hotels. Finally, when he realized he couldn’t make enough money with music, he drove taxi during the day and played the piano at night. This took a physical toll on him; he lost weight and became remote and irritable; dark rings formed around his eyes. He began to blame Christine for not holding up her end of the marriage: “You can’t mourn forever,” he would say to her, but she met such rebukes with deathly silence.

Christine got no better. The life force seemed to be oozing out of her day by day. She took to lying on the couch and staring into space or spending days in bed. Her illness began to undermine their marriage. Mr. Bellamy started to drink.

One evening at a hotel, an attractive older woman invited him to the bar for a drink. They ended up in her hotel room for most of the night. (Here he paused a moment as though unsure he ought to be telling me more. He took another sip of wine but continued.)

The woman turned out to be wealthy, and she had sympathy for Mr. Ballamy’s plight. She recognized his talents and decided to help promote his career quietly and without demands, except that he share her bed occasionally. It would be their secret. Eventually, Christine recovered, but she also discovered her husband’s secret. She gave her husband an ultimatum: “She goes or I go.”

The rich woman went, and Mr. Bellamy had to work twice as hard to make a living. He gave piano lessons, drove cab, and played at the hotels.

This continued for two years until he was able to cut a CD which was moderately successful. He expected more record contracts, but piano music wasn’t as popular as he had expected. When sales languished, he resorted increasingly to drinking. At that point in the narrative, we heard Christine coming from the kitchen.

Mr. Ballamy cut short his story, giving me the impression he didn’t want her to know he had spilled so much. Just why he told me his story still isn’t clear, but I concluded the wine must have loosened his tongue, perhaps to a regrettable degree. Christine served the dinner, which was delicious. Then, Mr. Bellamy went out on the porch, saying: “Christine doesn’t smoke.” He lit up outside in the darkness.

In the glow of the cigarette, he reminded me of a nineteenth-century figure in a long coat, seen in pale profile. Meanwhile, Christine and I sat at the table across from each other, finishing our third bottle of wine.

“Edward — Mr. Bellamy — is a grand artist. A genius,” she said and added: “But he hasn’t been getting the breaks. Piano concerts aren’t big sellers these days. We don’t know what will become of us.”

She glanced at the dark figure on the porch, and then she cast an imploring look in my direction. I stayed still, hoping Mr. Bellamy would return to the table. I didn’t want to hear another confession. But, with a deep sigh, Christine opened up: “Edward got off to a slow start in music, but he used to sell well, considering… He’s had concerts in Europe — Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, London even. He was doing quite well actually. Financially, we used to be better off though. We’re still waiting for his big break. I often wonder if it will come…”

Her voice trailed off, and she seemed to forget I was present. “He’s always taken such good care of me…”

Bellamy returned to continue the evening on a lighter note. The day of the festival opening was only a night away. We worked overtime in the office. There was more smoke than ever before and, for the first time, I noted that Lara kept a bottle under her desk. Her words were more slurred, her smile more crooked, and her cigarette dropped more than once.

“Didn’t you ever learn to type a letter properly?” she scowled without looking up at me. She was becoming increasingly critical. I retyped a half dozen letters to donors that evening, unaware that she had clandestinely retyped others weeks before. The day of Mr. Bellamy’s concert came.

In the morning, I was busy typing up a few late appeals for money while Lara made anxious phone calls. People had to be paid in advance as our credit was dead in the water. Not enough students had signed up for master classes. Still, I looked forward to sitting in the audience that evening with Christine to watch the Maestro work the magic keyboard.

His concert was billed as the highlight of the festival. But, I sensed something was wrong in the office. “George!” she called. “Come here a minute.” I faced her directly. The tone in her voice said it all. My chest constricted as my heart began to pound. I could see it in her blurry eyes. “We’re going to have to let you go. This is your last day. I’ve had to get a new secretary. Someone who can actually type. Come by for your pay after this week.”

My mind went limp. Christine… Mr. Bellamy…. The concert… How could I attend their performance with this hanging over me? I went home, deeply depressed. The concert went on without me.

In the papers the next day, Mr. Bellamy was lauded as the best thing that had happened to the festival since it was established. For his interpretation of Beethoven, he was declared a “genius”. For her solo cello performance, Christine got a similar review the day after.

She was called “brilliant”. I never saw the Maestro and Christine again, but I read about them in the papers. Mr. Bellamy went on to give concerts in New York and in Tokyo and he cut several CDs, all of which sold well.

Christine wasn’t mentioned as often, but I knew she’d be pleased at her husband’s success.

Then one day I read an article in the cultural section of our local paper. It said that a famed musician named Edward Bellamy, aged 54, had committed suicide after he had accumulated massive debts. He was survived by his wife.