When Elizabeth, a once close friend of Dexter’s from college, bumps into him at the airport, where she is meeting her younger sister, Vicki, both of them aimless and given to a kind of unconscious destructiveness, Dexter’s family begins to lose its footing. Vicki attaches herself to the pacific Athena with an eye toward arranging her own life along the lines of Athena’s ordinary routines — ironing, preparing food and practicing Bach’s “Little Preludes” at a piano in the kitchen.
Elizabeth, elegant and regal, has long been intermittently involved with Philip, a rock musician who dabbles in casual sex and drugs, and occasionally attends to his self-sufficient, seemingly motherless daughter, Poppy, while also pursuing a fling with Athena. “This hotel is a dump,” he says of the place he checks into with Athena, after she has left the safety and comfort of her life with Dexter for Philip’s glamorous detachment. “I love it.”
Elizabeth, who seems cynical beyond her almost 40 years, looks on wearily, seemingly unperturbed by Philip’s latest dalliance: “He’s always looking for new blood. Something new. A little thrill for that amusement park he calls his mind.” Athena, protected and naïve, imagines that Philip might lead her to the sort of adventurous life that she and Dexter have intentionally not chosen: “Perhaps there was a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves clearly from all notion of consequences. Perhaps this never-quite-present Philip might be that mythical creature, a man who was utterly scrupulous and who was yet prepared to do anything. Perhaps she too might never apologize, never explain.”
By the end of “The Children’s Bach,” havoc has been wrought, and even the roving-eyed Philip has caught a glimpse of the void that lies beneath his antic, restless connections: “I will grow old and die, he thought, without moral consolation.” But the final note belongs to Dexter, who believes in rules and the fleeting possibility of beauty. Athena goes back to him and the house “fuggy with the smell of children.” She opens windows and doors, puts the trash in the incinerator and the sheets into the washing machine, scrubs and mops, and empties the fridge. Order, fragile but real, is restored: “Someone will put the kettle on” and Athena will return to practicing Bach.
