either he was unattractive or he thought he was. She was six years older than
him and white and twice his size, but otherwise they matched up pretty well, and
they started keeping company in a big way.
Among the few things that Cletus did not know anything about was music. That the
other kids wasted their time memorizing the words to inane top-40 songs was
proof of intellectual dysfunction if not actual lunacy. Furthermore, his parents
had always been fanatical devotees of opera. A universe bounded on one end by
peurile mumblings about unrequited love and on the other end by foreigners
screaming in agony was not a universe that Cletus desired to explore. Until Amy
picked up her violin.
They talked constantly. They sat together at lunch and met between classes. When
the weather was good, they sat outside before and after school and talked. Amy
asked her chauffeur to please be ten or fifteen minutes late picking her up.
So after about three weeks’ worth of the fullness of time, Amy asked Cletus to
come over to her house for dinner. He was a little hesitant, knowing that her
parents were rich, but he was also curious about that life style and, face it,
was smitten enough that he would have walked off a cliff if she asked him
nicely. He even used some computer money to buy a nice suit, a symptom that
caused his mother to grope for the Valium.
The dinner at first was awkward. Cletus was bewildered by the arsenal of
silverware and all the different kinds of food that didn’t look or taste like
food. But he had known it was going to be a test, and he always did well on
tests, even when he had to figure out the rules as he went along.
Amy had told him that her father was a self-made millionaire; his fortune had
come from a set of patents in solid-state electronics. Cletus had therefore
spent a Saturday at the University library, first searching patents and then
reading selected texts, and he was ready at least for the father. It worked very
well. Over soup, the four of them talked about computers. Over the calimari
cocktail, Cletus and Mr. Linderbaum had it narrowed down to specific operating
systems and partitioning schemata. With the Beef Wellington, Cletus and
“Call-me-Lindy” were talking quantum electrodynamics; with the salad they were
on an electron cloud somewhere, and by the time the nuts were served, the two
nuts at that end of the table were talking in Boolean algebra while Amy and her
mother exchanged knowing sighs and hummed snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan.
By the time they retired to the music room for coffee, Lindy liked Cletus very
much, and the feeling was mutual, but Cletus didn’t know how much he liked Amy,
really liked her, until she picked up the violin.
It wasn’t a Strad–she was promised one if and when she graduated from
Julliard–but it had cost more than the Lamborghini in the garage, and she was
not only worth it, but equal to it. She picked it up and tuned it quietly while
her mother sat down at an electronic keyboard next to the grand piano, set it to
“harp,” and began the simple arpeggio that a musically sophisticated person
would recognize as the introduction to the violin showpiece Méditation from
Massenet’s Thaïs.
Cletus had turned a deaf ear to opera for all his short life, so he didn’t know
the back-story of transformation and transcending love behind this intermezzo,
but he did know that his girlfriend had lost her sight at the age of five, and
the next year–the year he was born!–was given her first violin. For thirteen
years she had been using it to say what she would not say with her voice,
perhaps to see what she could not see with her eyes, and on the deceptively
simple romantic matrix that Massenet built to present the beautiful courtesan
Thaïs gloriously reborn as the bride of Christ, Amy forgave her Godless universe
for taking her sight, and praised it for what she was given in return, and she
said this in a language that even Cletus could understand. He didn’t cry very