The Music School by John Updike Page B

would rise, with the diffidence she used to think graceful, and go to her and say, “Hey. It’s you.”
    Her face would smile apologetically, lids lowered, and undergo one of its little shrugs. “It’s me.”
    “I’m so glad. I’m so sorry about what happened.” And everything would be understood, and the need of forgiveness once again magically put behind them, like a wall of paper flames they had passed through.
    It was someone else, a not very young woman whose hair, not really the color of her hair at all, had, half seen, suggestedthe way her hair, centrally parted and pulled back into a glossy French roll, would cut with two dark wings into her forehead, making her brow seem low and intense and emphasizing her stare. He felt the eyes of his companions at lunch question him, and he returned his attention to them, his own eyes smarting from the effort of trying to press this unknown woman’s appearance into the appearance of another. One of his companions at the table—a gentle gray banker whose affection for him, like a generous check, quietly withheld at the bottom a tiny deduction of tact, a modest minus paid as the fee for their mutual security—smiled in such a way as to balk his impulse to blurt, to confess. His other companion was an elderly female underwriter, an ex-associate, whose statistical insight was remorseless but who in personal manner was all feathers and feigned dismay. “I’m seeing ghosts,” he explained to her, and she nodded, for they had, all three, with the gay, withering credulity of nonbelievers, been discussing ghosts. The curtain of conversation descended again, but his palms tingled, and, as if trapped between two mirrors, he seemed to face a diminishing multiplication of her stare.
    The first time they met, in an apartment with huge slablike paintings and fragile furniture that seemed to be tiptoeing, she had come to the defense of something her husband had said, and he had irritably wondered how a woman of such evident spirit and will could debase herself to the support of statements so asinine, and she must have felt, across the room, his irritation, for she gave him her stare. It was, as a look, both blunt and elusive: somewhat cold, certainly hard, yet curiously wide, and even open—its essential ingredient shied away from being named. Her eyes were the only glamorous feature of a freckled, bony, tomboyish face, remarkable chiefly for its sharp willingness to express pleasure. When shelaughed, her teeth were bared like a skull’s, and when she stared, her great, grave, perfectly shaped eyes insisted on their shape as rigidly as a statue’s.
    Later, when their acquaintance had outlived the initial irritations, he had met her in the Museum of Modern Art, amid an exhibit of old movie stills, and, going forward with the innocent cheerfulness that her presence even then aroused in him, he had been unexpectedly met by her stare. “We missed you Friday night,” she said.
    “You did? What happened Friday night?”
    “Oh, nothing. We just gave a little party and expected you to come.”
    “We weren’t invited.”
    “But you
were
. I phoned your wife.”
    “She never said anything to me. She must have forgotten.”
    “Well, I don’t suppose it matters.”
    “But it
does
. I’m so sorry. I would have loved to have come. It’s very funny that she forgot it; she really just lives for parties.”
    “Yes.” And her stare puzzled him, since it was no longer directed at him; the hostility between the two women existed before he had fulfilled its reason.
    Later still, at a party they all did attend, he had, alone with her for a moment, kissed her, and the response of her mouth had been disconcerting; backing off, expecting to find in her face the moist, formless warmth that had taken his lips, he encountered her stare instead. In the months that unfolded from this, it had been his pleasure to see her stare relax. Her body gathered softness under his; late one night, after yet