Free Orfeo by Richard Powers Page B

left the car on a pull-off in front of a dense stand of pines, and walked into the thick dark.
    Leaf stuff tripped her up, and Clara had to carry her high heels. Deep in the copse, she staggered into him and whispered, Time to get serious . The tip of her tongue followed the words into his ear canal.
    She pulled Els to the ground onto a bed of Scotch pine needles six inches deep. She swept her pleated black concert skirt to her waist and straddled him. Her silk blouse billowed open, and her four feet of hair tented him in a Botticelli skein. She lowered herself with a strange, sharp cry of elated betrayal that he’d try to re-create in various combinations of instruments for the next forty years. She gripped his shoulders and pushed them against the needles, a bare threat: Do we understand each other? He cuffed her neck and made her look at him. He nodded.
    As she took him, a bright light pulsed in his temples. It struck him that he was having a stroke, and he didn’t care. Two more flashes, and Els focused. The white turned into a high-beam searchlight, sweeping the woods. On the far edge of the pines, two policemen were peering into the windows of the parked Beetle.
    His legs jerked; he tried to push her off. But before he could scramble to his feet and surrender, she pinned him back against the earth. Her eyes were manic, swimming. Her lips moved. Something criminal and pianissimo came out of them. Don’t move.
    An officer called, twice, Hello? Els twisted, and Clara fought him down again.
    Don’t. Move .
    A beam sliced across the nearby grass. Pinned under Clara, Els went slack. His skin heard her body-long pulse. She was shuddering now, her mute mouth open, and it took Els several heartbeats to understand that shudder. Searchlights swept through the black grove. A voice called out again, now farther off. At last the police gave up, retreated to their vehicle, and drove away. Peter and Clara lay as narrow as death, on the floor of a night forest distilled by cold. The whole dark woods were speaking, and nothing said a thing.
Blood trickling out of bread at the siege of Tyre rallied Alexander’s beaten troops to victory.
     
     
    Eighteen months pass: three short chamber works and two small song cycles. A young man huddles in a phone booth outside the student newspaper office. In his pocket is a wrinkled blue onionskin aerogram that has taken two weeks to reach him. The world has just escaped annihilation by a few beats. Nuclear silos in an aerial reconnaissance photo of an impoverished tropical island: Peter Els has other worries.
    The aerogram is covered in a wispy, Elvish script. “Peter, Dear. Please don’t think I’ve turned promiscuous, here in Merrie England, but life seems to have gotten complicated.”
    He waits to place the call until well past midnight, when the rates are low. It’s morning on the other side of the planet. No phone at the dorm, and he must come to this public booth with a fistful of coins. Judging by the abandoned campus streets, that nuclear exchange has already come and gone. The air is so bone-crushingly cold that his bare hand sticks to the metal phone faceplate when he takes off his gloves to dial.
    She answers mezzo, muffled, and time-lagged, the gap it takes her voice to travel the length of the transatlantic cable. Peter?
    He shoutsinto the receiver, and his own voice echoes back at him in a canon at unison.
    From the first phoneme, it’s a terrible mistake. They speak like people playing bughouse chess. He asks for clarification, then elucidations to her clarifications, then glosses on her elucidations. His quarters pour into the slot at a staggering rate and he hears himself say things like, First of all, I’m not shouting . A week’s rent, then two, then three disappear, and still he can’t tell what this blithe woman is saying to him or what he’s supposed to do with a worthless degree in music composition and a minor in chemistry, without the sole audience that matters.