Blue Angel by Francine Prose Page B

friends at Central High were the homely-girl clique. Any boyfriend, any girlfriend would have been fine—anyone but Matt. Who could blame Swenson for wanting to save his child from a felon and a date rapist?
    Swenson talked to Matt’s advisor, then to Matt, who promptly cut Ruby loose. That’s how Swenson saw it: a cat played with a mouse, something distracted the cat, and the mouse ran free. He’d thought the mouse would thank him.
    Swenson and Sherrie know it’s important not to blame each other. Sometimes it’s weirdly sexy, this sharing of their grief, the two of them, connected this way that no one else can feel. But the wedge of all they can’t say is busily doing its damage. Sherrie’s totally innocent. She’d warned him that it wouldn’t work, that Ruby wouldn’t forget. And though Sherrie would never accuse him of having done everything wrong, he knows that she must think so. So he can blame her for blaming him, and because he’s the one to blame.
    Sherrie drains the last of her wine. “Ruby will get over it. Basically, she loves us.”
    â€œWhy would she?” says Swenson. “I mean, why would she love me ?”
    Sherrie sighs and shakes her head. “Give me a break,” she says.
    Â 
    After dinner, Swenson goes to his study. He picks up his novel, with a queasy lurch of misgiving. Holding the pages at arm’s length—admit it, he’s getting farsighted—he reads a sentence, then another.
    Julius walked into the gallery. He knew everyone there, and knew precisely how many of them wanted to see him fall flat on his face. Over the head of a woman air-kissing him on both cheeks he saw his work—the same lines that had writhed on the subway tiles—dying all around them on the gallery walls.
    Who wrote this hopeless moribund crap? Certainly not Swenson. Dead on the walls, dead on the page—a coded warning to himself. He dimly remembers how it felt when his work was going well, how sitting down to his desk each day was like slipping into a warm bath, or a warm silky river, a tide of words and sentences floating him away…. He opens his briefcase and takes out Angela Argo’s manuscript. He’s not going to read it. He’ll just take a peek. Then he starts to read and forgets whatever he was thinking, and then, little by little, forgets about his novel, Angela’s novel, his age, her age, his talent, her talent.
    Mr. Reynaud said, “A little-known fact about eggs. During the equinox and solstice you can balance an egg on its end.” This information struck me as more meaningful than anything I was learning about incubation and hatching. Everything Mr. Reynaud said soared above our high school class to something as large as the universe, the equinox and the solstice.
    I never tried to balance an egg during the equinox or the solstice. I don’t believe in astrology. But I knew that my life was like that egg, and the point it balanced on were the few minutes I got to stay after class and talk to Mr. Reynaud.
    The last ten minutes of practice were hell: how much time was left, how long the piece might take if Mr. Reynaud stopped to yell at the snare drum for missing his cue and we had to start over and finish just as the bell rang. That was how I finally learned math, figuring it all out. If the music ended early—the remainder was what I got. If not, I had a desert to cross—a night or a day or a weekend.
    I was first clarinet. I made sure the others came in on time. I tapped the beat with my foot. Did Mr. Reynaud think that tapping the beat was babyish and stupid? I imagined him watching my foot. I concentrated on the measures, holding the clarinet in my lap. Mr. Reynaud glanced at my clarinet as his eyes skimmed over the band.
    He’d taught us to pick up our instruments three measures ahead of our cue. We knew to put them in our mouths and come in on the downbeat. We did, more or less