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SUMMARY: "He will want and want some more. You will hate and love him. Give yourself to him and he will give everything to you; as someone once said, 'Love is, above all, the gift of oneself'."

`Etude




"You do not know how to give," he had said last night. "You try, but do not know how. And you must learn what you want in return."
Defeated, she lifted the sheet off herself and sat up at the edge of the bed. With effort she got up, slipped her jeans on, and went to study.
She didn't wake Dino up, but brought with her a mug of Nescafe' and settled in the chair. The pungency of the black brew briefly dispersed the sleepiness in her head.
She had heard the melody one day in the past. But her fingers today felt thick, clumsy, undisciplined. The tips were blistered on the left hand and her thumb cramped from fatigue.
"How are your exercises proceeding?" Anastasi had asked her at the music conservatory the other day, giving her a pat as she stretched the knotted muscles of her back.
"Just fine."
He had looked at her with those knowing eyes, weighing and regarding, as he stood in front of her, twice attempting to say something that he did not.
She enjoyed watching his curiously delicate manner. He used his large hazel eyes to tell more than his tongue--but that morning she pretended to busy herself preparing, not looking at him for long, for she knew he was probing her. She had even evaded their usual patter.
"You're not well?" he had finally acquiesced.
"Not very. It'll pass."
He put the stool and foot rest in place, shifted ebulliently with brisk, spirited movement. And he paused a little. He did not sit immediately, but delayed this moment of focus. He relinquished himself to it as thoroughly as to his playing. He was never hurried at this particular stage; he never rushed at this point. It was, she thought, a kind of liturgy in him, just as when he was performing, he was undividedly surrendering.
Yet Anastasi could be as utterly grave or severe. His reproaches were the bleakest she had ever seen. He taught as a evangelist man preached. It was for this thoroughness, she imagined, that she felt esteem for him.
Ilianna now raised the instrument off her lap and laid it upright next to a desk scattered with music sheets, a copy of Chosen Country by J. dos Passos, and Mary Magdalene portrayed weeping.
She heard Dino get up and she shut her eyes. The tiny garret closed in on her and a sudden vortex made her slump to one side. She caught herself from falling and sprung her slight, lean torso up straight on the uncomfortable chair.
Two years, Anastasi had said. Two hard years for the fingers to break in. "Don't give up," was his favourite infamous statement, "you come to me with a perfect right hand."
She whiffed the heavy blue smoke meandering into her cubby-hole study from the Gauloises Dino was smoking in the kitchen. Her throat tightened and her nostrils pinched. He was making Greek coffee. Its rich fragrance mingled, somewhere along the way, with the silty wafts from his cigarette and made her head whirl. Oblivious to her discomfort she could hear him murmuring/singing, " Take my hand/Take my whole life too..." to himself--the King was The King for him.
She sat there listening and listlessly stared at the only two paintings in the apartment, one was an Andrew Wyeth and the other a Norton Simon.