bow hand and by the time he had completed its visible and invisible complexities—twenty-six fine bones in the fingers and wrist, loose joints, fingernails, palm lines boding—the room was completely dark. There was much left to do. Her soft forearm, her muscular upper arm, the crease of her underarm waited undrawn.
Nyssa said, Let me see.
She was surprised when he held up the sketch of her hand. She tossed the pages to the floor and wrapped herself into him in the pure pleasure of self-immolation à deux.
They returned over and over to their drawing game. Nyssa’s portraits grew more abstract. She worked more in sound than in shape. She rendered Donal’s body a thicket of notes on a musical staff, a new musical composition a cappriccio. She secretly took her sheets to her practice room to play. Donal dissected her, bit by bit by bit, and tacked his pages to the wall in joined pieces of her portrait, the proportions according to his preferences—a hand the same size as her head, her lovely toes larger than her breasts, the soles of her feet. Nyssa commanded him to make love only to the piece of her he had just drawn, rose and sank in the pleasures he could act upon each lovingly observed morsel of her body.
She favoured the loom of novelty and devised new ways to separate herself from Donal, persuaded that delayed touch was sweeter. Sometimes in the middle of making love she stopped, got out of bed and made him listen to her play her fiddle. Sometimes she commanded him to get up and play basso buffo with her. Then they’d start all over again.
On the island of brown tree snakes, only one type of gecko escaped extinction. When it got caught, it peeled itself free of its own skin and left the snake with nothing but a dry bag in its methodical jaws. Donal admired the gecko’s cunning. He watched Nyssa as the days passed and it seemed to him that she was peeling off her old skin but he could not say why.
No other animal suffers so much as a frail human fated and drawn by love to the infinite possibility of wisdom. Nyssa was enthralled by Donal’s fast devotion to the perils and transcendence of horsehair on sheepgut. He showed her gentle tricks to coax from her violin a sound more pure. He said, You can train your instrument, and he tried to stretch her talent. All notes planted themselves effortlessly in her mind. She looked at scores and discerned their patterns. She preened and stretched like a cat at Donal’s unmasked pleasure in her quick ear and nimble fingers. She found intonations that rang together with his, all other sound disappearing from heaven and earth.
But Nyssa grew bored with pitches so perfectly matched. She teased him by sliding up and down around the notes. When he couldn’t entice her back, he played harmonics. His long strings rang out in a way her shorter ones could not. He hit the note and ran his finger up the string from the nut without really dampening it. He made a deep, echoing bell tone that punctuated her cheeky dissonance. She listened and was strangely moved by hearing him strut and display what he could do. She watched his great hands seek sounds that might please her, listened to him venture uncomfortably beyond his beloved consonance and felt tender toward him. They played for themselves and for each other. They played and played as one, and sometimes when they finished and the music fell silent, they were astonished and even a little afraid.
They’ll be missing me, Nyssa ventured restlessly one twilight, lying on the carpet where they’d dropped head to foot, touching Donal’s inner forearm with her toe. How long have I been gone?
Donal traced his lover’s foot, ignoring what he feared most from her. He said, kissing the tip of her left baby toe, Let’s try the beginning of the “Très Vif” section of the Ravel. He watched her wade into and wend through the difficult piece, concentration alight on her clear forehead over arched eyebrows, admired her tenacity in its unfamiliar terrain.
Perhaps I should send word, she said, withdrawing her toe.
The river is full of ice, he said.
She pulled herself up to her elbows and said, They’re old. Nana needs me.
They’re fine, answered Donal. There were worse storms before you were born. Stay. I’m old too.
She said, I will scold you for being old before your time.
It