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  Henry cleared his throat. “What kind of story?” he asked, pointing to the cover of his daughter’s book.

  “Oh!” Alice exclaimed. “It’s hard to say.” She bit her lip, revealing her large opalescent teeth. “It’s about this young man who’s innocent. Almost like a saint,” she said, touching the spine of her book thoughtfully. “He’s in love with a general’s daughter, but there’s also this tortured, fallen woman. She’s beautiful and mad, all these men are in love with her, but she doesn’t like any of them. One of them gives her a hundred thousand rubles, but she throws them into the fire.”

  “Sounds like a stupid book,” James said.

  “It’s not,” Alice said.

  His wife cut off a piece of her salmon and put it onto Henry’s plate for him to try. Henry couldn’t help but notice the gentle slope of her hands, her maternal fingers and clear, rounded nails. They had been at an ice-skating rink, he remembered, when he first touched her hand. She had clung to the wall, wearing a bright yellow dress—a dress, even though they were skating!—but he realized she had worn it for him, and as she tottered on her skates, he had taken her small cold fingers into his own.

  His wife’s jade bracelet gleamed in the light as she turned her wrist. The waiter came and refilled their glasses of water. Henry touched his glass, felt the beads of condensation along his fingertips. He thought of the woman at the hospital, imagined her lying awake at this hour, trying to forget the dryness in her mouth. Perhaps she swallowed her own saliva for relief, moistening her lips with her tongue. He lifted the glass to his mouth, his lips parted to receive its coolness.

  Something clinked against his teeth. A pink mass floated up toward his lips.

  “Dad, my water!” James laughed.

  Henry saw a pink retainer sitting in the glass he was holding. His family erupted into laughter.

  “I put it in there for a rinse,” James said.

  “You know your father is getting confused,” his wife said.

  “I didn’t see,” Alice laughed. “Did he really drink from it?”

  People began looking over at their table. Henry flushed, realizing that he was still holding the glass of water in his hand. He felt a painful throb in his chest, as if his heart were swollen, but he knew that it would be years before it finally gave out. He could hear it beating louder and louder now as he set the glass on the table and waited for his family to quiet down.

  SONATA FOR THE LEFT HAND

  I. Palm Reading

  In July, before the levees broke in New Orleans, my friend Kate and I had our palms read in Jackson Square. We arrived in the city after a tropical storm. Thousands had lost electricity, and beautiful old trees had fallen. We were there to attend our friend Sylvia’s wedding, and there was news that a hurricane might hit that weekend. “We never get tropical storms this time of year,” Sylvia told us. “So bizarre. I hope Friday stays nice and dry.”

  On Friday, Kate and I sipped cafe au lait as the rain poured down in sheets. We were sitting under the huge awning at Cafe du Monde, and bedraggled pigeons pecked at our feet. The floor was heavily dusted with powdered sugar, and the pigeons looked as unhealthy as could be — what you might expect from a diet consisting of powdered beignets. We were sorry for Sylvia and her spoiled wedding, but in an hour the downpour had stopped and the sun was out again. It was so hot we could see steam rising from the sidewalks.

  We walked along Decatur Street past the fortune-teller stands in Jackson Square, and Kate glanced at me with a doubtful smile that was at once ironic and full of longing. The fortune-tellers sensed Kate’s need and offered her a reading for ten dollars. “Go ahead,” I encouraged her, and she presented her palm with sad, hopeful resignation to a gypsy woman whose sign declared that she had thirty-seven years of palmistry experience.

  “My dear,” the gypsy woman said immediately, “you are too obsessed with love. Your preoccupation has been with love, my dear, and your mind has been clouded. You need more sense, my dear. Men are a dime a dozen, and you need to hurt them before they hurt you. Forget them, my dear. They aren’t worth your love. You need to focus on other things. Have you ever thought about going into the medical profession?” Kate stared at her blankly. “You write perhaps?” Kate nodded. “Keep writing and focus on that. Start finishing things and begin acting with your head, my dear, instead of your heart.”

  When the gypsy woman had finished, she regarded me with sharp, humorous eyes. “And you, my dear?” Her face, with its thick, glossy skin, was the color of apricots, and her fingernails were painted a muddy orange. I shook my head, reluctant to part with ten dollars, but Kate and I had not walked a block before I regretted it. The gypsy woman didn’t seem surprised when we showed up at her stand again, and I smiled and gave her both my hands.

  “You have a bright aura,” she said, looking at me and smoothing my left palm. “And you are not one to cry over spilled milk, though you have suffered a recent disappointment, I see. He was not the right one for you, my dear. You are going to marry a businessman in two and a half years. He will be rich, my dear, even though you don’t care about money. And you will have three children, one quickly after the other. I know, my dear,” she said when she saw my face fall, “you are not patient with children. I know this, but you will have three.”

  Such was the fate the gypsy woman condemned me to. I felt a certain satisfaction that my life would turn out so dull. “A businessman!” I said merrily. “Three children!”

  Kate sighed. “Sometimes I think arranged marriages would have suited me just fine. I like the idea of being handed someone and having no other options. It would save me time and a lot of worry. A man gives you a sign, he emits his little light, and you move toward him, but then he just flickers off, and you’re left in the dark again. It’s like trying to catch a firefly.”

  “Or a cab on a rainy day,” I said.

  Kate mused. “Is a man more like a cab or a firefly?”

  That evening Sylvia was married in City Park with three red roses in her hair. We felt a drop or two on our arms, and the sun weaved fitfully in and out of the clouds, but a storm did not break over our heads and everyone commented on the luck of the newlyweds. It seemed fitting that Sylvia, a passionate exhibitionist who was born on Valentine’s Day, should be married between a tropical storm and a hurricane, possessing such grace as to be touched by neither.

  The reception was held at the groom’s home, but because there had been no electricity in the neighborhood for four days, the family had been forced to rent generators. Neighbors had come to their aid and donated fans, and these were spread out around the yard and inside the house. Kate and I sat outside at a long table lit with candles, and it was pleasant to eat crawfish gumbo and sip cold champagne, our dresses stirred by the blowing fans. Everyone spoke loudly over the drone of the generators, and now and then I heard the intimate whine of a mosquito and slapped at my bare shoulders.

  We gathered inside the house for a slide show. Photographs of Sylvia and her husband from the time they were children were projected one after another onto the wall. A little Sylvia wearing her mother’s sunglasses sitting on a beach. A young Dan sticking his hand in the mouth of a plastic shark. Photographs of them in Halloween costumes, smiling with their families, sporting bell-bottoms, new perms, braces. A delightful naivete shone on their faces, for how were they to know what was coming and who they were going to love? It was a story of two lives coming together, and I thought the slide show made a convincing case for the hand of fate.

  I couldn’t help but think of Vincent, whose childhood photos I had never seen. A few weeks ago, we had parted ways, and now 1 felt a bitterness rise up within me at the thought of his family, who would always be dear to him, who would always be in his life, whereas I was shut out of it. The last time I had seen him, we had taken a walk together along the narrow country road that ran in front of my house, and I had explained that I loved him and he said he felt nothing at all. Two large dogs came running out from a neig
hboring farm, trailing beside us and barking. The dogs began chasing each other, and one of them knocked into Vincent, who stumbled and fell. “Oh, my dear!” I said, reaching my hand toward him, but he moved away and got up off the road by himself. I couldn’t understand it. He had loved me once, and now he couldn’t even bear to touch my hand.

  Toward midnight, Sylvia rushed up to me and Kate to say good-bye. “I wish I had more time,” she said, and we watched as she took off her satin high heels and exchanged them for sneakers. “I just wanted to say I love you both. I haven’t found such good friends anywhere. I’m not drunk, I really mean all this. . .” And she pressed her hand to her heart, then hugged each of us before she ran off to find Dan. In a short while, they were walking arm in arm to their battered blue VW van, as everyone cheered and blew soap bubbles at them. Sylvia threw her bouquet out the window and Dan honked the van’s horn all the way down the street, and then our lovely friends were gone.

  “Anne, do you remember that night when we were at Sylvia’s and sketched each other?” Kate asked.

  “Of course,” I said. I remembered it clearly. Sylvia had made a sketch of my face floating in a sea of black, my eyes closed, as if I were dreaming. At one point, she had stared at me, and said, “I see now. You’re entirely in your head, aren’t you?” I was a little taken aback and didn’t know whether to be pleased or wounded. It was a dissection as well as a caress, and it was like this as we sketched, our hands moving over paper as we followed the hills and shadows of each other’s faces.

  “I still have some of our sketches pinned on my wall,” Kate said. “It makes me think it isn’t hopeless after all, that at least somewhere in the world people see me as I want to be seen.” She began to cry because no matter how many gypsy women tell her to act with her head, Kate will always wear her heart on her sleeve. I took her wrist and shook it gently.

  II.Dream Lounge

  Vincent always seemed so contemplative, sitting on my porch in the early morning, smoking his first cigarette of the day and drinking black coffee. He held the cigarette slanted between his fingers, his right hand resting on his lap, and I liked to watch him flick off the ash and bring the cigarette to his lips. Where we lived in upstate New York, it was winter six months of the year and there was snow on the ground until April. We sat on the porch wearing our winter coats, mugs of steaming coffee resting on our armchairs, our breath turning into vapor. Vincent had a perfect memory and recited verses to me:

  Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring

  Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers

  Comes autumn with his apples scattering;

  Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

  It seemed as if the snow would never melt under a sky so white, and when I walked along the salted streets in town, warm air unfurling from my mouth, I felt the hopelessness of the season, as if I were suspended in a dream.

  Vincent thought I was an innocent. He said he could tell just by looking at me. Sometimes, though, when he drank himself into a stupor and I held his arm to keep him from falling on the sidewalk, I thought he was the naive one. Of course, his vulnerability appealed to me. When we made love, he sometimes left bruises on my breasts, and afterward, I felt oddly pleased looking at myself in the mirror. For once in my life, I didn’t recognize myself, and I was sorry when the colors faded and there was nothing but blank skin as before.

  I had been hired to teach English for a year at an elite boarding school in the Adirondacks. The closest city was two hours away, and many of the young single teachers usually wound up at the local inn on Friday night for drinks. This is how I met Vincent. He came up to our table with one hand in his pocket, the other holding a martini, looking very dapper in his light brown suit and gold tie. I would later discover that he was popular with his students, who liked to call him Gatsby. Vincent had a loose grin on his face, and I envied him immediately. He seemed more at ease than any of us in that room. He sat down next to me, and I found out that he taught Philosophy.

  “So who do you prefer? Plato or Nietzsche?” I asked him.

  “I like both, actually. I’m amphibian in that way.”

  Caitlin, a teacher who, like me, had just moved here several weeks before, was asking everyone at the table what there was to do in this town. She had already tried the two pizza places and the execrable Chinese restaurant, and during her first week in town she had broken down and gone to the movie theater and watched an inane film about sexually attractive clones. “But the really creepy thing was that slide show before the movie started,” she said, and everyone else at the table burst out laughing. “You haven’t seen it?” she asked me. “Before the movie starts, they project all these happy snapshots of people in town. I’d been here only a few days, remember, but I recognized half the people smiling in the photographs. It was terrifying.”

  “Well, I don’t know if this will interest you, Caitlin,” Vincent said, “but Richard Goode will be performing in the chapel next month.”

  “Who is Richard Goode?” she asked.

  “He’s a pianist. One of the best.”

  The conversation drifted, and I turned to Vincent and asked if he played the piano.

  “Only left-hand pieces,” he said. I thought at first he was being whimsical until I glanced down at his hands. His right hand rested in his lap, the index finger pointing stiffly out and the other fingers curled painfully under. “Oh, that one isn’t worth looking at,” he said, and he put it back into his pocket. “Now, I do like my left hand. I think it’s my best feature.” He showed it to me. It was a fine hand, the hand of a pianist, with long, sensitive fingers and short, broad nails.

  “A beautiful hand,” I agreed.

  “Why, thank you,” he said, studying it in a fond, careless way. Then he looked down at his glass, which was empty except for an olive dangling on a toothpick. The waitress came by and asked if he wanted another martini.

  “Please.”

  “Bombay Sapphire, right?”

  “With three olives.”

  His hazel eyes, with their flecks of gold, were bemused yet curiously inert. I should have stood up then and wished him good night. He probably had no other thought than to retreat further into his haze, and I knew it was foolish to follow a person in search of his own pleasure.

  He gazed at me for a moment as if I reminded him of someone. “There is a needle poking me in this chair,” he said gravely.

  “There is? Where?”

  He took my hand and guided it to the spot. Beneath the blue fabric, I felt something sharp against my finger. He let go of my wrist and smiled at me. Later he would confess that he had pointed out the needle in order to touch my hand.

  He invited me to his place to play the piano, and as we walked to his apartment, I felt exactly as I did when I was a child and had to perform in front of a group of strangers. My hands were icy cold, and my chest felt tight and hollow. During my last piano recital, when I was thirteen years old, I had frozen in the middle of a piece, unable to remember what came next. There was a terrible breathless silence in the audience as I stared at my hands resting lightly on the keys, and I felt far away but also at the very center of things, as if I were attending my own funeral. I started the piece over from the very beginning, but this time an automaton was playing. Everyone clapped in relief when I finished. I stood up and looked out over the audience and saw my piano teacher covering her face with her hands. She had known me since I was six years old, and at the beginning of my first lesson she had made me take off every single one of the bright tinsel rings I had worn for her.

  Vincent lived above a florist shop in a redbrick walk-up. His apartment was elegant in an impersonal way, as though he were a boarder living in already furnished rooms. I would find out later that his antique cherry furniture had been handed down to him from an aunt in Charleston, its genteel character sullied by piles of paper, coffee mugs, empty beer bottles, and saucers turned into ashtrays. Above the mantelpiece, he had hung his diplom
as, and most of his books were depressing leather-bound editions with gold lettering on the spines, glossy little caskets I would hesitate before opening. In the dim light, his piano crouched like a dark, sleek animal in the corner.

  I sank into an orange parlor chair and listened to him play a waltz by Brahms. My sister and I had played the same piece as a duet, but we had played it as if a relentless metronome were ticking inside our heads. Vincent played the piece with leisurely grace, a spaciousness between the notes which suggested a longing for something else. He followed the Brahms with a more difficult piece by Scriabin, and though he played well I noticed gaps in the music where his one hand could not accomplish the work of two. The music was more poignant to me for this reason, but I knew it would offend him if I ever said so.

  “Don’t you want to play?” he asked when he had finished.

  “I’m not very good.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “I get more pleasure listening to you play.”

  He smiled at my cowardice. When I wrapped my arms tight around myself, he asked if I was cold.

  “No, I’m fine,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” He got up and closed the window. “Why don’t we play something together?”

  I sat beside him on the bench, and Vincent suggested we try the Gladiolus Rag. I thought it would be easier to play the part for the left hand, but I kept hitting the wrong notes. Vincent played the melody with beautiful ease, and I felt bad that he had to suffer me as his duet partner. Finally, I gave up and took my hand off the keyboard. “It’s too painful to listen,” I said.

  “You are very hard on yourself, aren’t you?” he asked, and he began to kiss me gently around my lips, small chaste kisses that surprised me. For some reason he made me think of a giraffe the way he kissed me with his mouth closed. His innocent grazing was oddly touching. We kissed some more, and I asked if we could move to his bedroom.