“Afterward,” says Isolde, “after we finish our drinks, we’re walking down the street toward her car and I’m a bit light-headed. I’m laughing too much. And then Julia says, Most of the girls at school are afraid of me, a bit. It’s nice that you’re not scared.”

Isolde stops. She’s in a yellow pool of streetlight now, wide eyed and short of breath, with her fingers clasping convulsively at the cuffs of her jersey. The music slips into a new accelerated phase, becoming more insistent and discordant. Isolde stiffens.

“I looked at her and I said, I am a bit. I am a bit scared. But it wouldn’t be worth it if I wasn’t.”

Isolde gives a little cry, a strangled involuntary half-sob that afterward will be the only thing the saxophone teacher can remember.

“And Julia looks at me,” she says, “and then grabs the sleeves of my coat, real fistfuls, grabs the fabric and pulls me toward her really hard. And I think I remember there’s one tiny moment before we come together, it’s like we stalled for a moment just at the last instant, and I could feel her breath on my upper lip, sweet and hot and quickly panting. I could smell the black spice of the wine in the small pocket of space between us, and then she kissed me.”

Isolde isn’t looking at the saxophone teacher; she’s looking out, out over the mossy rooftops and the clustered antennae and the pigeons wheeling and wheeling against the sky.

“Only it wasn’t a kiss how I thought it would be,” she says. “She took my bottom lip between hers, and she bit me. She bit my bottom lip, but not so it hurt, more like she was tearing at it very gently, pulling at it with her teeth. And I guess I kind of pulled my head back and gave this gasp and opened my mouth a bit and she still had my bottom lip in her teeth, not so it hurt, really tenderly, like she’d captured it and she couldn’t bear to let it go.

“And then we were up against the wall,” she says, “and I remember my eyes were closed and my hands were clenched in fists on the wall above my head and Julia presses up against me and her hands are pushing and pushing to find the skin underneath the bottom of my jumper, and then she slides her cold hands up my back and she whispers all salty and hot into my ear, I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe it. I can’t tell if this is my fantasy or yours.”

The lights ease back up again, just as the track on the disc comes to a chordal close. Isolde moves over to the stereo and ejects the disc before the next track has time to begin. The sax teacher wipes her face, pulling her hand down over her chin so the soft skin of her cheeks is drawn downward for a brief moment, like a sad clown.

Tuesday

“I understand that this is something you couldn’t possibly have prepared yourself for,” the saxophone teacher says to Bridget’s mother. “I’m shocked myself. I feel partly it’s because Bridget was so dull. I always imagine that the ones who die are the interesting ones, the wronged ones, the tragic ones, the ones for whom death would come as a terrible, terrible waste. I always imagine it as a tragedy. Bridget’s death doesn’t quite seem to fit.”

Bridget’s mother fiddles with the button on the cushion. She looks gray. There is a jeweled stack of gold on the penultimate finger of her puffy left hand, trapped between two swollen knuckles and sunk into her finger like a tattoo or a brand. She pushes the cushion impatiently off her lap and shakes her head in a despairing way.

“If she’d been more original,” Bridget’s mother says, “it might have been easier. If she’d been more original, you see, then we might have worried that she might commit suicide one day. Then at least we would have thought about her death. We would have prepared ourselves for the possibility just by imagining. But someone as unoriginal as Bridget would never think of suicide. She just wouldn’t be clever enough to consider it an option.”

“Yes,” says the saxophone teacher. “I saw that too. Despair is not something that Bridget would have been clever enough to feel.”

They sit quietly for a while. Down in the courtyard the pigeons are fighting.

“And how do you prepare yourself for an accident?” Bridget’s mother says limply, mostly to herself. “How do you prepare yourself for a car speeding in the dark?”

After a while the saxophone teacher says, “Do you have other children?”

“Oh, a boy,” says Bridget’s mother. “Older. He doesn’t live at home anymore.”

“I suppose you called him on the telephone.”

“Yes,” says Bridget’s mother.

“I suppose he’s coming up for the funeral.”

“Oh, the funeral,” Bridget’s mother says. She lapses into silence again and then she says, “I just didn’t think this was going to happen. I wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready. It’s not fair.”

Friday

“Do you know,” Patsy says in a dreamy voice, swaying at the table with her chin upon her fist, “the moments when I’m the most dishonest with Brian are usually the ones when he believes I’m at my most intimate.”

“What do you mean?” says the saxophone teacher. She is sitting stiffly, with her saxophone held upright on her knees. It is a long time ago. She is still holding the instrument with a careful reverence, gingerly even, with both hands, as if it is a new wife and not yet fingerprinted or commonplace.

“I’ll be sitting there and thinking how much he is irritating me,” Patsy says, “maybe if he’s sniffing when he reads, sniffing and sniffing, every half page. And then he’ll look up and smile at me and I’ll feel compelled to say something, in case what I was thinking was in some way visible to him. So I’ll panic and in my guilt I’ll say, It’s so lovely that we can sit here in silence and read like this. It’s so peaceful. I love doing this with you. Which is virtually the opposite of what I really mean. It happens so much. I’ll be thinking how he really is getting rather fat, and then I’ll feel guilty for thinking such an ungenerous thought, so I’ll panic and blurt out, I love you. I’m always motivated by the oddest things.”

“But you do love Brian,” the saxophone teacher says, mostly because she feels it ought to be said. She has only met Brian once so far, at a recital in the old university chapel. He shook her hand and praised her performance and spoke in a booming voice about the renovations to the tapestry and paneling, twinkling down at her from his great height as if enjoying her lack of interest very much. Patsy flitted in and out and slapped at him and said, again and again, “Come on, Bear, she doesn’t want to hear about that.”

“Oh, God yes, I love him,” Patsy says now. “Nearly all the time. A good percentage, anyway. My best percentage yet.”

She laughs and shrugs her shoulders lightly, inviting the saxophone teacher to join in and laugh as well at her foolishness, and the foolishness of all duplicitous women who say the reverse of what they mean. The saxophone teacher gives her a tight-lipped smile and watches Patsy’s laughter dwindle to a head-shake and a sigh. She wants to kiss her mouth. She wants to feel the other woman pull back minutely in surprise, to almost recoil at how strange and forbidden it feels, but then, all in an instant, to respond—even against her will. Especially against her will.

If there was no Brian—the saxophone teacher’s thoughts often begin in this way. If there was no Brian, what then? Is Brian just one man, just one circumstantial, incidental man, or does Brian stand for all men? Is he a symbol for a general preference, a general tendency, and if there was no Brian would there be another, maybe a Mickey or a Hamish or a Bob? She sometimes fears that Brian’s solidity and physical presence has transformed Patsy’s very shape over the years, bowed her and crooked her until she is simply a negative space that parcels the man up, each defining the other. She fears that Patsy will always exist in this way now, Brian or no Brian, curved to define herself around a man, always a man: a yin that reaches out for its counterpointed yang with one arm always curled and one arm always arched, forever.