Harmony

"You'd think I just brought you out of an Iowa cornfield," Calvin teased. "Like you've never seen a city before."

"But this isn't a city, it's the city." Ginny's head was so far back, staring upwards to take in the forest of buildings outside Penn Station, that she would have missed the curb had Calvin not taken her by the elbow. Once they climbed into a cab, he wondered if she was going to roll down the window and stick her head out like an excited puppy. He pointed out landmarks to her as they passed, growing slightly more nervous as they neared his parents' block. This was the first time that he was bringing someone home to meet his family. If they didn't like her...but how could they fail to like her? They seemed thrilled that he was bringing anyone home. He ought to be more concerned about what she might make of them.

Ginny hopped out of the cab before he even opened his door, turning in a slow circle on the sidewalk while he paid and hauled their bags from the trunk. The trees on the street were all strung with lights. It crossed his mind that this part of the city wasn't very different from some neighborhoods in Boston; what if she was disappointed?

"I hope you weren't expecting a 75th floor penthouse," he said.

"Are you kidding? This is lovely. How old are these houses?"

"Most of them are prewar." He led her up the steps and into the foyer. His mother opened the door just as he was about to let himself in.

"Hello, hello! You must be the famous Ginny. We're so glad to have you."

"Thank you, Mrs. Jansen," Ginny said, and Calvin watched them embrace. He was relieved his mother had answered the door and not his father. She was ferociously intelligent, but less obnoxious about it than than his father.

"Please, call me Roz. Where did you get that adorable hat?"

"It's vintage! The woman I work for gave it to me in honor of my first trip to New York."

"That's right, Calvin mentioned it was your first time here. Well, you've certainly dressed for it, we've been having quite the cold snap..."

"Is she here? IS she real?" Another voice rang out from the apartment's interior, and then his sister appeared in the doorway, draping her lanky body against the frame. "Oh, my God, Calvin, I thought you were kidding. You really did bring a girl." She stuck out her hand. "I'm Olivia. Positively astounded to meet you."

Ginny laughed, shaking her hand. Before he could say anything at all, Olivia tipped her head backwards into the apartment to yell, "Daaaaad! Come out here, he wasn't kidding!"

Calvin wondered if it was too late to dash back down the street and catch the cab back to Penn Station. But then his father appeared, all two hundred fifty bespectacled pounds of him, in his rattiest Yale sweatshirt with the pipe in one hand.

"Hmm," the Professor said, looking her over from top to toe as if she were a curio. Calvin felt like smacking him.

"I've heard so much about you," Ginny said with her most winsome smile. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you."

"If you really think it's a pleasure, Calvin must have been telling you lies about his childhood." He took a puff from the pipe and grinned back at her. "Come in, come in, we're all standing in the foyer like fools." Calvin's family enveloped Ginny, leaving him in the foyer with the bags.

"Good to see all of you, too," he called, bringing them over the threshold.

"Let me show you your room," Olivia said, not even turning to look at her brother. "I have to ask you, what do you do about his head being so big? Do you squint at him all the time so that his upper body seems proportional?"

"Hey!" Calvin tried, but Ginny dissolved with laughter and Olivia was leading her through the living room into the back hallway, out of earshot. Before he could contemplate the potential ramifications of this, his mother embraced him and kissed him on the cheek.

"Calvin," she said, beaming at him.

He felt like he was in fourth grade, bringing home the TriState Math trophy. "Mom, it's not a big deal."

"I know, I know, it's just nice to see you so happy. She seems lovely."

"Was her hair that frivolous color when you met her?" his father asked.

"Yes. Yes it was. I happen to like it. And if you say anything else about it--"

"Play nice," his mother interrupted. "How did you meet her again?"

"She was at a poetry reading I went to in Cambridge this summer."

"Really? That's how you met?"

"That's what I just said."

"How whimsical," his mother said.

"Serendipitous," said his father.

He could hear Ginny's high-pitched laughter mingling with his sister's shriek somewhere off in the house. "You haven't even met her yet."

***

Later that night he shut the door to his room and threw himself on his bed without even turning on the light. Every time he came home he slid back into his old room like a comfortable pair of shoes. He could hear the same old street sounds out his window, smell the same old fabric softener on the sheets, see the same backwards numbers on the backwards clock he'd gotten for his tenth birthday. For once he didn't feel like listening to music; he was grateful for quiet. He stripped off his pants and shirt and lay on top of the covers in his boxers. He was tired, but couldn't fall asleep. Ginny's presence in his home was an anomaly; it concentrated all his attention.

Dinner was both revealing and excruciating. While his mother poured wine and they passed around the salad bowl, the questioning began. Calvin wished he could have spared her the scrutiny.

"Calvin says you met him at a poetry reading?" his mother began.

"That's right." She smiled at him across the table.

"What were you doing at a poetry reading?" Olivia asked him skeptically.

"Looking for a text." He shrugged. "And I found one."

"He cornered me when it was over and insisted I let him write a song from one of my poems." She smiled.

"Well, tell us about yourself," said his mother. "I can't get anything about you out of Calvin."

Calvin took a moment to savor the irony of this while Ginny answered, "I'm a part-time student. I work as a live-in companion for an elderly woman. I'm saving quite a bit of money that way, I don't have to pay Boston rent."

"What do you study?"

"Languages, mostly. Eventually I'll get a Bachelor of Arts degree, probably in English."

"And Ginny--is that short for Regina?"

"Virginia. My mother nicknamed me when I was a baby, and it stuck."

Calvin almost dropped his fork. Did she make that up? She'd never told him that, but he didn't want to let on to his family that this information was as new to him as it was to them.

"And where are you from, originally?"

"Let her eat," Calvin interrupted. "You're all almost done with your salads and she's barely taken a bite."

"Fine," Olivia said. "Where's she from, Calvin?"

Despite himself, he glanced at Ginny. She was smiling, but she wasn't looking at him. "I grew up in North Carolina," she volunteered, "by the coast. I couldn't believe it when Calvin said he grew up in Manhattan. I used to wish I could live there when I was growing up. It seemed like such a fantastical place. North Carolina wasn't anything exciting, compared to here."

"I can imagine," the Professor said. "I can't abide most small cities. They're all awash in chain stores and car dealerships and houses that all look the same. No character to speak of. It's good you were attracted to Manhattan. It means you wanted more out of life."

Cal rolled his eyes at Ginny and she winked back at him.

"Why did you move to Boston?" the Professor asked.

"My father has some family in the western part of the state, so I was familiar with the area. I've always liked Boston, it's so full of students."

"Are your parents still in North Carolina?"

"Yes." She volunteered nothing more, but of course his inquisitive family had to pry.

"What do they do?"

Calvin watched her closely. She twirled the pasta gracefully onto her fork and brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. "My mother is a veterinarian. My father used to teach at a little college outside Wilmington. Now he's retired."

"A teacher!" The Professor was pleased. "And what did he teach?"

"English literature."

"What was his specialty?"

"The Victorians." Her voice was calm and measured. Calvin wanted to pull her out of the room so that he could have her to himself. "I don't have any siblings," she continued. "Really it wasn't a very exciting childhood. Not like Cal's, I gather."

His parents and sister all laughed. "Well, he certainly was an unusual child," said his mother. "Did he tell you about the time he got in trouble for refusing to participate in recess?"

He sighed. "No, Mom."

"My six-year-old son came home with a note that said he absolutely refused to take part in recess. He told the teacher it was a waste of his time and that he didn't want to play with the other children because they were all imbeciles."

Ginny choked on her wine.

"Well, St. Matthew's was a very progressive school, but you couldn't have a student calling the others imbeciles, so they asked us to have a family conference about the values of participation and being polite."

"I was proud of him," the Professor put in. "I'm sure they were imbeciles."

From there, the conversation stayed away from Ginny. By the time they moved to the living room for coffee and dessert, he remembered thinking that it wasn't going too badly. The Professor was behaving. While they drank hot chocolate and ate pie, his mother and sister told more stories and asked Ginny to describe how she got her hair so completely, vividly red. The Professor sat in his ancient leather recliner with The New York Times. The radio was on low and playing Schubert's "Unfinished." Calvin was glad to see Ginny enjoying herself, glad to have her next to him and under his arm. He was just beginning to drift away into the music, contemplating what the last two movements might have sounded like, when his father said, "How's the year going so far, Calvin?"

"Fantastic."

"And your thesis?"

He shifted on the couch. Ginny, noticing the change in his body, stopped talking to his mother and glanced at him. He gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze and said, "It's well under way. I told you I found a text."

"Right. Your poet." He nodded at Ginny. "I'd like to know what you think of his music."

"I think it's fascinating."

"Oh, don't say that. That's what people say when they're trying to be diplomatic. Let me put it another way. Would you listen to it to be inspired? Encouraged? Do you find solace in it? Beauty?"

Calvin felt his anger rising. "We can have this argument until the end of tie. It doesn't matter. I don't care if you like it. I don't care if Ginny likes it. I don't care if anyone particularly likes it."

"That's always been abundantly evident."

"Says the foremost expert on modern music."

"Don't forget who taught you to play the piano."

"And we were having such a nice evening," Olivia said.

"Well," Ginny said, "You asked me if I'm inspired by it, or comforted. I don't think I'd put it that way, although I wasn't lying when I said I found it interesting. But I don't really ask it to do anything when I listen to it. I try to meet it on its own terms. It's what he's been doing with my work, better than I could have imagined. If I need comfort or encouragement, I go to Calvin."

Calvin wanted to kiss her. He settled for raising an eyebrow at his father.

After that, things were less tense, the evening wound down. He wished for an opportunity to pull Ginny aside and talk to her alone, but it never arose.

***

Ginny peered down the hallway at Calvin's closed door. On the ride up Cal had said that his parents were only putting her in the guest bedroom because it was an excuse to use it. Still, it would be awkward to simply waltz in in front of his parents or sister. She had been waiting a little while, letting the night settle. But now the house was getting colder.

She padded down the hall and gently pushed his door open. "Calvin?" she whispered.

In the light from the street she saw him sit up in his bed. It was barely big enough for the two of them, but he raised up the covers. "Get in."

She crawled under them and hissed, "It's freezing."

"All the money they make, Dad still turns down the furnace at night and rails at the oil bill." He pulled her close, rubbing her arms. "I'm sorry you had to put up with all that."

All that: just the normal questioning one could expect from a boyfriend's family. She had kept it together, she was proud of that, and she could keep it together for a few more days. She wanted so badly not to spoil this for Calvin by sinking into one of her depressions.

"It's fine. They're not as bad as you think. Not even your dad." She could see, already, how much the two men needled each other. She also could see that they were very much alike, and that Calvin would rather have died than admit it.

"I'm glad you think so. They seem to like you a lot."

"Will they like me less if they find out I'm in here?"

"Not unless you wake them up."

She smiled. "So long as we're quiet?"

He moved to pull down her pajamas. "That may be more of a challenge for you than for me."

How strange, to be making love to him in his old narrow bed. They had never been so careful, moving silently and slowly, until increasing urgency outweighed the risk of being heard. Still, she sank her teeth into his shoulder to help her keep quiet when she came.

When he rolled off of her she felt overheated and a little dizzy; she could feel the blood pulsing through her body in her temples, and she knew that soon she'd have a headache.

"I'm sorry I bit you," she whispered.

"I loved it." Already his voice was thick with sleep. "I love you."

Within minutes he was out, but she would never be able to get comfortable in this tiny bed--at his apartment he had a double, and at Cynthia's she had a queen all to herself. Carefully she extricated herself from their entwined limbs. He sighed in his sleep but did not stir.

Back in the guest bathroom she cleaned herself up, drank water from the sink. She found a bottle of ibuprofen in the bathroom cabinet and took two. Usually sex made her euphoric, but now she felt tired, and knew it would be a long time before she got to sleep.

I won't do this, she told herself. I'll be fine. She kept repeating it to herself as she lay there in the dark of the guest bedroom.

But it all went to hell the next day anyway. She had finally fallen asleep and then woken up to a nightmare, an old one that she hadn't had since before she started dating Calvin. In the dream she was watching her mother burn, shrivel away into ash, to nothing that could be saved. Afterward she did not want to go back to sleep and so crept downstairs. She was in the kitchen sipping tea when Calvin's parents wandered in.

She managed to make merry enough chat with them, and then with Olivia, who came in a bit later. She was desperate for Calvin to wake up--not because there was anything wrong with his family, just because she hated being at the center of their attention without him there to buffer her--but she also knew that he'd been working himself half to death lately. Finally, after all of them had eaten, Calvin's father said he wouldn't be making eggs all morning and sent Olivia to wake him. Then Ginny wished she had been the one to do it, because Olivia's method was to pound on his door and yell, "Cal! Get up already, unless you want me to spend some more time alone with your girlfriend!"

When Calvin materialized in the kitchen, he was disheveled and seemed disoriented. "Why didn't anybody wake me earlier?" he said irritably.

"Ginny told us to let you sleep." The Professor sipped his coffee and eyed his son with amusement. "She said you've been working very hard lately."

She thought she saw a resentful look cross Calvin's face. As his mother laid out a plate of eggs for him, he took a liberal swig of black coffee.

"What are you kids going to do today?" his mother asked.

Calvin glanced at her.

"I'd like to go out and see the city," she offered. "If it's all right with you."

He nodded curtly, but he still seemed distracted.

"Ginny, did you know that Cal's huge head has an entire map of the five boroughs?" Olivia said. "He knows where everything is. Everything. Like a human GPS. We always call him up when we forget what cross street something is at. Like, Calvin, where's that diner from Seinfeld?"

"It's not a parlor trick," he snapped. Ginny felt her heart sink a little. He was in a mood she recognized; he wanted to lock himself away somewhere and work on music. The constant needling of his family, no matter how good natured, would not help. She hated being the cause of it.

His low mood persisted, even as they went out and about in the city. He said so little she began to feel irritated in turn; so irritated that she decided to go ahead with skating, his bad mood be damned. She hadn't skated in years, and she had always wanted to skate here.

The rink was fairly crowded. Calvin struggled onto the ice beside her, but all it took were a few awkward scrapes of her boots to remind her body what to do. She fell easily into the gliding strokes.

Calvin, still trying to get his balance, gaped at her.

"I took lessons for a few years when I was a kid," she explained, taking his arm to steady him.

He started to skate more or less in time with her. "This was in North Carolina?"

"Yes."

"With your mother the veterinarian? Your father the English teacher?"

If he'd asked it in a different tone of voice, she might not have felt the same flare of anger. But he was almost being snide, after all the questions about her life, the ones she'd had to answer this morning, calmly and sanely, alone under the gaze of his family--all because she was trying to be kind to him, trying to make this a good time because she knew it was important to him--well, fuck that. He had no idea what it cost her. "Does it really matter?" she snapped.

"Yes, it does. I want to know if you were lying to my parents the way you lie to me."

She picked her toe, coming to an abrupt stop. Calvin tried to stop beside her, lost his balance, crashed to his knees on the ice. "Dammit, Ginny!"

She skated away from him. People were looking at them now, but she didn't care. She slid off the ice and started walking back to the skate rental. She untied the laces with angry, rough jerks of her wrists, pulled off her skates, and tossed them back into the bin.

"What the hell?" Calvin said, catching up to her.

"You can be a real asshole sometimes."

"So can you," he shot back.

"I am from North Carolina," she spat, fighting to keep her voice low. "And my dad does have family in Massachusetts. A brother. And I don't have any siblings."

"This is the stuff you've been refusing to tell me for months?"

"But I did lie to your parents," she said, raising her voice over his. "I lied about my parents. Because one of the things you don't tell your boyfriend's family at Christmas is that your mother's dead, and that your father was indicted for killing her. Is that enough information for you, Cal, or do you want the details? Do you want to know what she looked like after she died? I can tell you. I was there. Do you want to know?"

"No." Calvin looked stunned. Good - let him feel it for a little while.

"Can your genius brain grasp why I don't like to talk about this?"

"Ginny--"

"Shut up," she hissed. "You can't fix it, and you can't make me feel better about it. You have no idea. I don't even want to be around you right now. Go back to your happy healthy family and play the fucking piano. I know that's what you've been wanting to do all day anyway."

"Ginny--"

But she was already turning to go, pushing through the crowd.