Read Evenings at Five for Free Online Page B

Edition
(“You look so happy with your purchase!” a professor’s wife had called to Christina as she came out of Iowa Book and Supply, and Christina will often think of that woman in years to come when she’s opening her taped-up, threadbare old standby to find a better word, or track down one she’s forgotten).
    Christina clinks the two ice cubes in her Scotch and water and sums up her fellow artists. Some are sweet but not very interesting; most, including herself, are still hungry strivers, a few, including a sneering nasal-voiced twelve-tone composer who told her melody was the enemy, are downright obnoxious. Only old Zelda seems secure in her bounty.
    Since arriving at the mansion, Christina has written fifteen new pages on her novel about three generations of women. She is on page 149 of the book, part one, the grandmother’s story. Part one takes place in 1905, only twelve years after this mansion was built. The scheming housekeeper who will marry the father and steal the two sisters’ legacy has just walked in the door of the farmhouse, wearing her black bombazine dress and carrying her carpetbag. Christina will make herself finish this section, getting through the night the grandmother’s sister runs away with the villain in a traveling melodrama passing through the southern mountain town. Then on to part two, the mother’s story, though the author is dying to get to part three.
    The villa, the orphanage, the factory
    Years later, part one will exist only in typescript in the university archive where Christina has deposited her papers. Part two will never get written. While still at the mansion—Christina and Rudy having burned their bridges and made public their intentions (too public, according to the twelve-tone composer, who was reported to have added, “But the Chosen People work fast”)—Christina will abandon the grandmother’s and the mother’s generations and start the book all over again in present time, writing in a different way: filling in and rounding out as she goes, attending to the sensibilities of the moment rather than trudging chronologically from preplanned point to point. While still at the mansion, Rudy will pack in his tongue-in-cheek attempts to outsmart the Boulez crowd and instead begin a major choral work of sweeping emotional grandeur based on William Blake’s “Four Zoas,” to which Christina has introduced him. Before she has to leave the mansion to resume her teaching duties in Iowa, Rudy will have sketches of the first two songs to play for her: “It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer sun,” and “O, Prince of Death, where art thou?” She will leave her volume (
The Poetry and Prose of William Blake
) behind with him in Saratoga Springs, and it is to reside on his shelves in the three houses they live in for the next twenty-eight years.

    Toward the end of the cocktail hour, there is a sudden flurry in the library, a galvanizing of the room’s molecules as a tall red-haired man blazes in like a brushfire.
    “So, Zelda, what’s new?” he demands in a voice lower than God’s, and the old lady murmurs something confidentially in his ear as she turns away from the room to mix his drink. Just neat Scotch, he tells her, it’s been an awful two days, he’s been in Manhattan doing a recording session with a bunch of tone-deaf fools. (“There’s a new writer here from Iowa” is what Zelda has murmured. “She’s nice, though she poses a little.”)
    “That’s the composer Rudolf Geber,” says a novelist named Lauren, who has joined Christina on the velvet chaise longue. The twelve-tone composer, standing above the women, says in his snide nasal voice: “He’s very arrogant.”
    Christina looks over to see if the arrogant composer in his yellow polo shirt with the glasses jammed in the pocket has overheard the remark. He’s standing next to Zelda, looking straight at Christina from under his lowering shaggy eyebrows. (“I find you the most