BooksBarbecue
Back A Stone Boat
Chapters (15)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. I: My Mother’s Paris
  5. II: Home Again
  6. III: My London
  7. IV: Winter
  8. V: Valse Brillante
  9. VI: October
  10. VII: Three Loves
  11. VIII: An Almost Perfect Party
  12. IX: Inside the Shell
  13. X: Our Venice
  14. Acknowledgments
  15. About the Author

It took four hours for my mother to die. Freddy was the one who finally found her dead. No one had to smother her. I never looked at her dead. I could hear her voice saying, “I don’t want you to have this memory.” We had to get the death certificate and call the funeral home. While we waited for the relevant people to show up, I played the piano. First I played Scarlatti, whose work I never play in concert. My first serious teacher had told me that I should work on Scarlatti because it would give me discipline. Then I played Beethoven, and then I played the Schubert. My father came into the living room and looked at me playing. It would be touching to say that I had never played that piece better, but in fact, I knew even as I played it that there was, finally, too much emotion, that Schubert had got lost in all my emotion, and that I was playing badly. My playing was not so much an interpretation as a conquest. Nonetheless, I kept on, through the whole piece, because I thought that if I stopped I would go crazy. My father and Freddy stared at me blankly. I put in repetitions that Schubert never wrote, and I pounded on the piano hard enough to break a hammer and I stopped playing only when the doorbell rang, and the three men from the funeral home came in with a stretcher on wheels.

Then I stood at the side of the hallway and told them to be careful of the wallpaper as they wheeled the stretcher back. I noticed that my mother had died on a day with an even number, that her death certificate would list an even-numbered day, which I felt was rather like her.

After the men from the funeral home had left, my father distributed sleeping pills. We did not take the leftover red pills; we took ordinary sleeping pills, the kind my parents kept for jet lag. Still, there was something sinister about my father’s standing at the door to his room with that bottle, distributing those pills, taking one himself before getting into the bed in which my mother had died an hour earlier. “I hope you get some sleep,” my father said. Then he closed the bedroom door. I went into my old bedroom, where I had last slept the afternoon Nick broke up with me, and eventually, under the influence of the pills I had taken, I drifted off into a silence of my own.

X: Our Venice

X

OUR VENICE