And the Dark Sacred Night (39 page)

A
S SLOWLY AS THE
first weeks had passed, that was how quickly the summer began to burn away once the time of their initiation loomed close. They coaxed and bullied their sonatas, concerti, cantatas, and fugues to a more acute state of perfection than they had ever pushed the most important recital piece. If they had once been sculptors, now they were diamond cutters.

On her best days, Daphne felt as if the cello were her Siamese twin, joined to her body at her left ear, where its neck thrummed under the dictate of her fingers, and at the tenderest part of her thigh, where its voice rose from the hollow of its belly. When Natalya finally escorted them to the Silo, to rehearse in the open air, Daphne discovered how much more care and diligence she had to lavish on strings and bow, which sagged in complaint at the humidity.

That final week, they hammered down every segue in
Carnival of the Animals
until it resembled the perfectly rotating carousel that Natalya had asked them to envision, each creature passing before the listener with equal pageantry. Thursday, she released them at ten-thirty. She instructed them to leave their instruments in the studio—no overnight obsessing allowed—and to sleep late in the morning. She would arrange for breakfast to be delivered there exactly twelve hours hence. They would play the piece through only one more time.

Daphne touched Malachy’s shoulder as they walked out into the soft, sweltering darkness. Except when a thunderstorm scoured the air, nearly every night was hot now, the heat as thick as custard, clamorous with insects and saturated with the pungence of mown grass, pinesap, and the minerals exuded by the evaporating lake. Lightning pulsed silently, in all directions, along the seam fastening the sky to the horizon.

“Swim?” she said.

Others had the same idea—especially with the promised luxury of sleeping in. They started toward the dorms to change.

“That does make sense,” he said.

“But our place?” she said, lowering her voice. “Let’s just go. Now.”

When they lagged behind the main group, Seth turned back and slowed as if to wait, but then he leered at them and mimed a big smooch, waved them off with a laugh.

As always, it was empty, as if the only purpose of the place was to wait for them and no one else all the long hours they worked, ate, and slept. The surface of the lake seemed to quaver with expectation.

But they had never gone swimming here, not together. Even in late July, the water was bracing, though Daphne didn’t mind; she was used to similar lakes near her home in New Hampshire. “Have you been in at all this summer?” she asked him. “I’ve never seen you go in.”

“By myself. At dawn sometimes, when I wake up too early. Farm boy that I am.” He sat on a rock. Would she have to go in first?

They had no suits, of course. Daphne hadn’t forgotten this detail. In the second or third week, she had gone skinny-dipping with the night owls—the fast crowd, mostly the campers from New York City—but there had been drinking, too, and the last thing she wanted was to get herself sent home. She had never joined them again.

What she had in mind now, however, would take more fearlessness than breaking any of the rules. Just don’t think about it, she told herself. She stripped to her bra and panties and, without turning to look at Malachy, leaned down at the edge and pushed herself off in a shallow dive. Several long strokes away, she turned around, treading water.

Malachy’s arms enfolded his knees. She couldn’t see his expression, but she knew he was watching her. “You’re a graceful swimmer,” he said.

“I love the water. It’s beautiful tonight. It’s warmed up a lot this week.”

“So you say.”

“Come in. Come
on
.”

He stood slowly. He turned his back to her, and at first she was
afraid he would leave. But then, taking his time, he removed his shirt and trousers, draping them over the rock. His white boxers gleamed against the woods behind him. He came to the edge and dove, more vertically than she had dared.

Just as she worried that he ought to have surfaced already, she felt a surge of colder water against her legs. He came up beside her. She cried out.

“Keeping the upper hand,” he said. He swam away, staying parallel to the shore. She followed him until he stopped. Their arms brushed underwater.

“You know what you are?” he said.

“What am I?”

“You’re dangerous,” he said cheerfully. He bobbed up and down as his arms milled the water around him, requiring her to keep a small distance between them. “You are a beautiful danger, Daphne. You scare me sometimes.”

“How am I dangerous?” Though what she wanted to hear was how he found her beautiful.

“You just are.” His voice obeyed the rise and fall of his breathing. His shoulders broke the surface now and then. “I’ve written a limerick for you.”

“Oh no.”

“Not to worry,” he said. “It’s respectful.”

She waited.

Daphne faced him. They were still treading water, growing winded. She said, “That’s respectful?”

“Well, not of me.”

“Let’s forget about being respectful, okay?” Abruptly, she swam for shore. She pulled herself up on the rock, realizing they had no towels. Now the air felt cold, and she shivered. “Come back,” she called out, “before you
do
drown!”

When he emerged, she saw how the summery cotton of his underwear clung to his penis and hipbones. His chest was narrow and hairless, his rib cage deeply furrowed, his nipples large and startlingly dark.

She said, “You’re the beautiful one.” She couldn’t help it.

She felt him resist, just briefly, before he kissed her. But then, to her relief, it seemed easy, even instinctive, this much of their skin meeting, the sensation of water streaming from their hair and finding its way along the contours of their nearly naked bodies. Finally, she thought. Finally, finally this. After all the talking, the practicing, the teasing, the almost-this, now and finally
this
. She had no idea what would happen next—or rather, she did; she simply had no idea how.

When they came apart to breathe, she said, “I’m so in love with you,” though she hadn’t meant to. “I am so in love with you, I can’t not tell you, I don’t care if I’m the first one to say it.”

He held her gaze. He wasn’t smiling, but smiling would have seemed trivial to her. “You are amazing, Daphne. Sometimes I think I won’t know what to do without you when we leave this place. Sometimes I can’t believe we’ve ever been anywhere but this place.” He sighed. “It’s so strange, isn’t it? This whole summer. Good strange, but … weird strange, too.” He sounded alarmingly sincere, the habitual irony drained from his voice.

“Of course it’s strange,” she said. “But that has nothing to do with me and you, how I feel about you. That—I mean us—we’d feel this way anywhere.”

“Would we? Can you really tell what’s real here and what’s not?”

She squeezed his shoulders, hard. “
This
is real.” She didn’t care if she sounded angry.

He ran his hands up and down her arms. “Daphne, I take things slowly.”

“You? Slow?” She thought of the way he played the most relentless passages of the Bach sonata, how his flute cast notes into the air like a furious scattering of seeds; or what about his quick-witted irreverence? He was anything but slow—or, for that matter, modest. And then it dawned on her: he was a virgin, too. He felt the same fear she did, except that for a boy the fear was doubled.

For the first time, he was the one to kiss her, the kiss more insolent
than tender. As she had wished, respect was off the table. He spread his hands across her buttocks and pulled her against him.

“Lie down,” she whispered.

“No,” he whispered back. He held her, not roughly but with an authority, a knowingness, she wouldn’t have guessed. When she started to grasp at the elastic of his shorts, he stopped her. He took her left hand and pressed it, instead, against the right side of his chest. His nipple rose against the center of her palm.

He kept her pulled tight against him, so that it felt as if they were dancing, the tempo slow yet fraught. She broke away from his mouth and breathed into his ear, “I want you.”
Inside me
, she wanted to say.

He had barely gasped, “You
have
me” before he uttered a fierce, indecipherable word and pushed against her harder, over and over. Gradually, without releasing each other, they became motionless. She knew they were equally stunned, afraid to look at each other’s faces. Her bent arm was hot and numb, pinned between their bodies; she didn’t dare pull it free.

He was the one who stepped back. Without meeting her eyes, he turned toward the water, still wearing his boxers, and dove in.

“Wait,” she said. All she could do was follow.

He swam straight out, not swiftly but with a clear determination for distance.

“Where are you going?” she called out.

He stopped, but still he faced the opposite shore.

“China,” he said. “Or maybe just upstate New York.”

She caught up and reached clumsily for his shoulder. “Are you running away from me?”

“I’m always running away. From too many things.” He gave her a sidelong glance, half smile, half grimace.

What was she to say? Would he never return her honest feelings? And yet what had she fallen for? If she had wanted earnest or gushing or even possessive, there were other boys with those qualities.

He swam close to her, kissed her on the mouth, and said, “Time to go. Tomorrow is our big day.” He swam back to shore. By the time she caught up with him, he was dressed, his shirt soaked through, his sneakers dangling from the fingers of a hand.

——

Friday night—their Friday night—arrived, and here they were: the boys in their dark suits, many of them bought for this purpose alone (too late, Daphne noticed the price tag dangling from the armpit of Oboe David’s jacket) and the girls in demure funereal dresses, their prescribed modesty a trial in the heat. Natalya’s gown was also black—but strapless. With her glossy hair surging from her face like a mane, she formed a fierce silhouette against the glare of the klieg lights above and, below, the mosaic of the spectators’ faces: a full house and, despite the rumor of a storm, the meadow crowded, too.

Near the front of the stage, the two pianists faced each other across the lacquered expanse of their twin instruments, the arabesque of one tucked neatly into the other. In the brief silence after Natalya switched on the lectern light and before she raised her hands, Daphne glanced furtively backward: there he was (of course he was), aligning his fingers with the polished keys, flexing his lips against the aperture.

But once Daphne raised her bow, his presence was immaterial. She swam in the music much the way she had swum in the lake the night before: diving, surfacing, finding a rhythm to suit the currents, at times treading water. Natalya had promised they would play perfectly, and they did (or sensed they did). No one, however, could have anticipated the rumblings of thunder, the recurrent fissures of lightning, faraway yet bright. The wind blew skirts and unfastened tresses of bobby-pinned hair. Their music was clamped to their stands, which in turn were held in place by miniature sandbags.

Only when they finished playing, as they stood and bowed to the applause (and the shameless cheers of their parents), did Daphne wonder if anyone had ever been struck by lightning here—up on the stage or out in the wide exposed meadow. Antony Carpenter-Rhodes had assured them he would suspend the concert if the storm showed signs of heading directly their way. For now, it lingered over an adjacent valley, pinned there by unseen pressures.

Single file, they receded from the stage and took their seats in the audience. Daphne glanced across to the parents’ section; her mother and father, who had seen her only briefly before the concert, beamed and waved. Her mother, wiping her eyes, blew Daphne a kiss.

The rain, when it arrived, was sudden and punishingly loud. It arrived in the middle of a guitar piece, a flamenco-tinted duet that
seemed like a brazen taunt to the hovering storm. Except for the technicians—captains of the foundering ship—everyone fled: as the rain intensified, they scattered fast, some for the nearest practice studios—screen doors slamming again and again—others running for the pillared gate and their cars in the lot beyond.

Daphne lost sight of Malachy, whose seat had been two rows behind hers. And then, in the dim, wet pandemonium of bodies hellbent on seeking shelter, she found herself pulled into her mother’s embrace. Her mother was soaked to the skin and smelled of her special-occasion Chanel. Daphne’s father kissed her tenderly on the cheek.

“You were a star!” he said, shouting to compete with the rain.

“No, you were
the
star,” said her mother. “Oh, honey, that solo.”

Daphne wanted to feel touched by their praise, by their presence after more than a month’s separation. But all she could feel was that they didn’t belong here; she was ashamed of herself, but it was true. This place was hers. “You’d better go,” she said. “The roads.” Unlike parents who had taken trains or even planes to be there, hers would drive the few hours it took to return home. They were not the type to splurge on one of the nearby country inns.

She saw them to the gate; she hugged them again as quickly as she dared. She promised to call the next day.

And then she ran, through the undiminishing rain, to the main house, where she knew they would all be gathered, her new friends, celebrating. She paused, as briefly as she could, to pull off her shoes and lift her sodden skirt. The grass was deliciously silken against her stockinged feet.

She woke from a dream in which Natalya was announcing that Daphne’s brother, Andrew, had been killed. And this time Malachy was there with the others to hear the news. He leaned against the pool table, aloof, without expression, while everyone else embraced her, keening in sympathy. (
But none of them know Andrew!
Daphne was thinking as she struggled toward consciousness, breathing hard.)