McGee doesn’t leave here feeling uplifted.”
“I listened for a few minutes. You have amazing tolerance,” Sam said.
Cecilia winced. “Was it too awful? The poor girl tries, but I think she’s working off sins from some other life.”
“I did wonder what the song was supposed to sound like.”
Cecilia walked into the living room and fetched her violin from the top of the piano, where it had lain untouched for days. “Something like this,” she said, returning to the kitchen and swinging the violin onto her shoulder. She skimmed her bow over the easy notes, the baby tune. Sam clapped in time, so she played another chorus, nudging the sequence, speeding up the tempo, turning and working the melody a little. The lighthearted music chimed in the space between her and Sam. Attentive now, Sam really clapped, and Cecilia showed off, adding the first six measures of a Bach partita before putting down the violin. “It starts that way, anyway.”
“Speaking of Paganini.”
“BA in music.” She made a mocking face.
Sam shook his head, setting his curls bouncing. “You should be giving concerts, not lessons.”
“And who’s going to come hear me, my mother? I haven’t noticed a big call in El Campo for violin concerts.”
Sam leaned back and stretched out his hairy legs. They reached halfway across the kitchen. “Take it from an old promoter: people don’t know what they want until you give it to them. ‘Imagination Is the Mother of Desire,’ or whatever the hell it is we say on the napkin.”
“‘Right Imagination Is the Parent of Right Desire,’” Cecilia said, laughing. Sam had a knack for making things easier; he found ways to soften corners. With his sloping grin and his ambly-shambly grace he reminded her of a clown. David said that even in college Sam had been the jester, the one who could break up tension in a room. Cecilia could well see why Vivy, that coiled spring, had married him. What she had never been able to see was why Sam had married Vivy. Now she said, “You’ve got to keep your eye on the details.”
“There’s your slogan for the new design: ‘Natural High Ice Cream: Keeping Our Eyes On the Details.’”
“‘Keeping Our Eyes On You,’” Cecilia said, grinning to match his sloping, goofy grin.
“‘We Know What’s Good For You: Natural High.’”
“Hey, I can use that one.” Cecilia sat down across from Sam and picked up a fresh piece of paper and a pencil. Sketching fast, she drew a cartoon man with a bulb of a nose and a toothy smile. He wore an old-fashioned body builder’s leotard and stood with his biceps flexed. The muscles popped up round as scoops of ice cream. In each hand Cecilia put a sundae. Then, casting a quick look at Sam, she drew springy curls all over his head and printed “You Know What’s Good For You: Natural High” under the figure’s floppy feet. “There,” she said.
“My feet aren’t that big,” Sam said.
“Artistic liberty.”
“I didn’t know you were an artist. On top of playing the violin.”
“I doodle, that’s all,” she said, reaching for another piece of paper and a ruler. Suddenly she felt self-conscious, as if she should point out how bad she was at math and tennis. His gaze rippled over her like a breeze. “Why don’t you watch some TV or something? You’ll make me nervous if you sit there.”
“Actually, I wouldn’t mind having some ice cream. I skipped breakfast.”
“Help yourself. Don’t eat the Triple Vanilla—it’s old.”
She marked off four straight lines to make a frame, and then started to draw in her cartoon weight lifter, but the easy confidence had gone out of her hand. She kept lifting the pencil, making pointless little lines; she could see already that the new figure lacked the charm of her first sketch. Several times she glanced up to check on Sam, who had heaped a bowl with Almond Carob and now strolled around the small kitchen, spooning ice cream into his mouth and humming. She said, “This is coming out all nervous.”
“Why not just use the one you already drew? It’s perfect,” Sam said.
“It has a smudge. You don’t know the first thing about being a perfectionist.”
“I try not to.” He sucked another lump of Almond Carob from the spoon.
“Easy to see you were never a musician,” she grumbled, glancing at him sideways but pressing down the corners of her mouth. “You front office people never care about the nuances.”
“So I’m the cigar-chomping front man? Thank you very much.”
“And I’m the grubby little fiddler down in the pit with the nervous twitch. Little Miss Pure Art.” She was prattling, she knew. But it was a relief to chatter with Sam Jilet and watch his suntanned toes idly work his flip-flops on and off.
“I can be pure,” Sam said.
“No, you can’t. Only performers are crazy enough to be pure. You, you’ll always have one foot on solid earth.”
“I can be Ivory soap. Ninety-nine and forty-four hundredths percent pure.”
A fat drop of ice cream had fallen onto Sam’s shirt, and a brown ring like a minstrel’s outlined his mouth. “Here,” Cecilia said, handing him a store napkin from the stack she and David kept on the table. This one read, “Responsible Action Is the Gate to Freedom.” She also handed him “The Boat of Commitment Can Sail Over the Waters of Uncertainty” and “The Marriage of Intention and Action Bears the Offspring of Clarity and Joy.” The last one was David’s contribution after a night of brainstorming, and Cecilia thought it was pretty good, even if it did sound like it came from a fortune cookie.
Scrubbing at his shirt, Sam leaned across the table to read the next one: “‘Our Goal Is Not Gold, but Wholeness.’ That had to be Nancy’s. Everybody else’s goal is gold. So is David pure? He’s not a performer.”
“He’s Ivory soap. Like you.” Embarrassed, rushing, she added, “He’s very supportive of my music. It was his idea to have me give lessons.”
“Not exactly performing.”
Cecilia shrugged. “It’s something. And we really do need the money. Not that it’s much.”
“David says you guys are ready to start a family.”
“Did David? I didn’t know we were going public with that piece of information.” Looking back down at her drawing, Cecilia added a tuft of grass under the weight lifter’s feet, then regretted it. Fussy. “David’s full of plans, but they all hinge on me getting pregnant. Which I’m not.”
“Relax. The baby will come, and after the first few sleepless nights you’ll wonder why you wanted it so much.”
“Listen, you don’t need to tell anybody about this,” she said without looking up. “I feel a little vulnerable. I had a dream that Life Tie-ers were hanging over my bed, and Nancy was giving me advice.”
“Vivy’s
