Anna Magdalena was clearly receptive. Suffering from temporary dysgraphia, she could hardly write straight as she heard the cello in her mind. Perhaps she even felt like the cello, held firmly between the legs of her man, stroked by a bow that she knew to be, and to remain, hard, for in the early 1700s the flexible bow for cello was not yet used, which accounts for a certain lack of polyphony in these suites if not in the reaction of Anna Magdalena to them.
They were, in essence, a kind of wedding present to her, or so I have always theorized, which is why, aside from their tendency to make me feel like dancing, they were the music I chose to play at my wedding.
It was a simple wedding.
It was the most wonderful day of my life.
But it was not the most important day of my life. The most important day of my life was the day I found Clara. Had I not found her, I could not have married her. So the day I found her was the most important day of my life. More important even than the day I was born.
Had I not been born, I would simply not have lived.
Had I not found Clara, I would not have come to life.
O
N THE DAY
we met, barely four years ago, I was wandering the city, listening to music through my headphones, trying to escape the tyranny of language.
I was functional, at that time in my existence, only when I was moving. It was, in the words of Matthew Arnold, an “illiberal, dismal life.” Today, I leave this room without her only to take back something secret for her. Then, I was always out in the street, always walking, like some tormented St. Jerome in Chalcis, trying to keep up with my thoughts and to escape my thoughts.
I was afraid that if I lay down, my thoughts would race ahead of me, a visible net of words that would spin from my mind and wrap round and round my head until I was bandaged from crown to Adam's apple, featureless, sightless, suffocated. Words can be a merciless enemy, and I tried to avoid them the way one would some deadly, unseen bacillus or a plane about to crash whose shadow swells upon the rutted surface of the earth.
In those days, once I returned home from my daily sciamachy
with morphemes in the hope of embracing the gentler Morpheus, I even tried to sleep standing up, because I hoped thereby to induce in myself a habit of sleepwalking so I might keep moving. Thus, while others all over the city were lying in bed and pulling their blankets to their chins and pounding their pillows, I was finding a congenial corner in one of the many rooms of my apartment and leaning into it with my eyes closed and my hands prayer-like to protect my face from the insidious crack where walls meet.
I never did learn to sleepwalk, or if I did I managed to do it without ever waking up or stepping out a window, and I always returned to the corner to which I'd condemned myself the night before, where I'd awaken at first light to find myself on the floor with the top half of my body against one wall and the bottom half against the other wall and my posterior, suitably enough, in that crack, though my crack and the walls' crack, with what I thought was equal idoneity, made the sign of the cross.
It was a terrible way to sleep. It was a terrible way to wake.
But it was not, I thought, until I found Clara and learned how to live, such a terrible way to live.
I was rich from inheritance.
I was free from the necessity to work or even to educate myself.
I was able, from the moment I awakened on the floor to the moment I went to sleep where walls met, to search for myself without having to ask directions of another.
So there I was, walking aimlessly around the city with my portable tape player hooked into my belt, my cache of AA batteries in the pocket of my suit's trousers causing me
to look as if I wore myself on the left instead of the right, and my fanny pack bulging with whatever tapes I had taken along that day for the eighteen to twenty hours I customarily filled my head with music to accompany or better yet obliterate my thoughts.
I don't remember what I was listening to when I found the notebook. I would remember had I known how significant a moment that was to be in my life. But I didn't know. And so the music that chaperoned the first touch of my flesh to something touched by Clara's flesh has escaped the catalogue of my existence. I have tried so incredibly hard to reconstruct that moment and hear what I had been hearing when I saw that little notebook hanging open over the curb, colorful binding up, the edge of the curbstone in the gutter of the book so that half of it faced the serenity of the sky and half the gurging traffic in the street. I wondered why I thought, “Look at that book asleep there,” until I realized, as I stepped over to it and looked down upon it, that it was bent just like me when I lay asleep on the floor, split in half by the crack of the walls.
I leaned over and picked up the notebook. I could see and feel it was one of those common blank books sold in most bookstores and representing today's most popular and accessible literature. But its covers had been overlaid with a cloth material that was worn and faded and skinsoft like something that I recognized even then must be from an old quilt. It was glued or pasted, one piece on the front, one on the back, so the spine of the book was blank and black with its original imitation-cloth binding.
I stuck my thumb into the place where the book had fallen open over the curb. I was afraid that whatever might
have been written there would have been erased by rain or the sodden slime that regularly accumulates along the edges of the city's streets.
But when I turned the book over to look, I found myself elated to see writing covering both pages that faced me.
I was shocked, however, first to see that the writing was in pencil, which to me was almost as evanescent as something written in chalk and that in fact had already begun to fade, though whether from its being in pencil lead or from its lying in the street I did not know.
And then I was shocked to see the writing itself.
I had never seen anything like it. It was chaotic and seemingly indecipherable. But I reminded myself that language was my game, had been my life, and that if this were a new language, I might as well be the first human being to learn it. So I thumbed off my music in what turned out to be a profoundly aposiopetic actâI broke into earsplitting silence, as it wereâand began to read what was written there.
I don't know what stunned me more: to find that I was able to read it or to read what it said.
A man came into the shop and said he wanted to buy a quilt for his wife. “Do you want it for the bed or for hanging?” I asked. “For the bed,” he replied. “Does the bed get much use?” I asked. “I don't see what business that is of yours,” he replied. “I'm trying to determine fragility,” I explained. “She is very fragile,” he replied. “Of the quilt,” I said and laughed. “We're not going to fuck on it if that's your concern,” he said. “I'm sorry to hear that,” I said. “My hanging quilts are for admiration. My crib quilts are for comfort. And my bed quilts are for fucking on.” Now the man laughed. But nervously. “We've been married for 12 years,” he said. “So.” “It's dead,”
he said. “My quilts are alive,” I said. “If you buy one you'll kill it.” I wouldn't sell him a quilt. He left. I spent the rest of the day happy at the thought that I hadn't sacrificed one of my quilts to his unhappiness. I also imagined spreading out a Star of Bethlehem on the floor and having him fuck me while my hands held onto the points of the star and my heels rode his ass all the way to Jerusalem. When we were done, that's the quilt he bought. It saved his marriage. I watched him spread his wife out on it. They were beautiful together. I numb my fingers. Words fail me.
I stopped reading, not because of any effort it took to decipher such griffonageâI found it barely more difficult to read than something printed in the most relaxed Helveticaâbut because my hands were shaking. I suppose my reaction was like that of someone to whom money is important and who finds some large sum of it lying on the sidewalk: he can't believe his good luck; he flushes; he trembles; he is afraid someone is watching him; he grasps his treasure to him; he is filled with an unfathomable desire for more.
One feeling he does not experience, however, is the wish to locate the true owner of what he has found. And of all the feelings I had with that notebook clutched to me, none was greater than my desire to return it to the woman who had written it. (I assumed it was a woman, though the handwriting was not particularly feminine, and there was nothing in what I had read that apodictically qualified its author as female.)
Who would write such a thing? I wondered. For whom? Was this Derrida's Mystic Pad, meant to isolate and consolidate the world? Who would run a business like that? Who would deal with inanimate objects as if they were
alive and would be affected by where and with whom they lived? Who would laugh like that? I could hear her laughter in my head, where the music had been. Who would desire such a man given up as dead and record such a fantasy of sex and betrayal and forgiveness and reparation? Who would find the failure of words to come from the numbing of fingers on the pencil as mine had come from the numbing of my entire being?
How, I wondered, was I going to find her? I could go to every shop in the city that sold quilts, but even I knew how popular those vanishing old pieces of American history had become, so that would encompass almost every antique store, and they numbered in the hundreds, I was sure.
Then I opened the book again and looked at the first page. It was blank except for these words:
See. Be.
.Won Ton Disc
She might as well have written: If Found, Please Return To ⦠I knew exactly where to find her. I nearly knew her name.
I remember laughing happily. The sound of it, even within the sounds of the horns in the street and the wheeze and plop of tires and the yapping of passing pedestrians, startled me. It had been so long since I'd heard from myself.
So I marched off to do my good deed. I listened to no music on the way. Instead, I rehearsed what I was going to say. I thought I'd better do that, since I was so out of practice.
Sure enough, right where I thought I'd find her, not at
some Chinese restaurant (Won Ton) or a record store (Disc) but at 200 Columbus Avenue (i.e., one-tenth One Ton Discoverer of America), I came upon a small shop ingenuously named Call It Quilts, and after I had pressed the crime button and in my suit and tie was immediately buzzed in and walked up to the young woman who walked right up to me so that we met in the middle of the shop with quilts hanging all around us the way they do now here in this loft of ours, though it is too dark now to see them, I held the notebook behind my back, cleared my throat, and said, “Hello” (my final choice from the trinity completed by “How do you do?” and “Here”).
It was the first word I'd spoken in over a year.
I
DO NOT
know how to describe her. How I wish I could bring her forth the way Roger Fry does the adulterous Vanessa Bell in a letter I found in the Tate. “I can tell of your beauty,” he informs her, and goes on with the most exquisite description of the queer silkiness of her palm and the waves of hair that ripple round her ears and the great planes of her torso and even the compelling shape of her armpits. I have never been able to see Clara in order to describe her, not to myself, and there is no one else to whom I would have had either the opportunity or inclination. When she is not before my eyes, and I try to see her, she explodes in my mind into a million pieces, and they do not coalesce until she walks through that door, as she will do soon enough though not too soon, I hope, for I am enjoying myself immensely alone here on the bed in the dark while the music from our wedding lustrates my being.
This indescribability of her, as if she were wholly ungraspable, has both perplexed and pleased me. I think, “She is your wife, you ought to be able to summon her
image at will,” and I think, “She is your wife, but she remains forever mysterious.”
And so I live with her poised between guilt and beguilement and feel I may never actually see her until I see her in our children. But then, I wonder, will our children be like me and not want to see us in themselves or will they love us enough to be pleased that we inhabit them?
When I think of our daughter, who exists now only in the mirror of the future, then I believe I can begin to see Clara.
Sometimes I think she is not beautiful to anyone but me. I can hear my mother, who had died before I met Clara, saying, “She is an acquired taste, like licorice,” which my mother pronounced like the alternate
ambergris
. Be that as it may, it was a taste that I, who admittedly had very little experience with women, acquired very quickly.
“May I help you?” she asked.
So unsure was I that I could render language concrete, as if sound itself might be considered lithoid and words little stones tumbling from the tongue, I cleared my throat again. I spoke. I recognized my voice and felt reunited with myself.
“I would like to buy a quilt for my wife,” I said.
“Do you want it for the bed or for hanging?” Her voice was exactly as I'd heard it in the notebook, provocatively world-weary, ironic.
“For the bed.”
“Does the bed get much use?”
“Oh, yes.” I found myself excited to be departing from her script. “Why do you ask?”
“I'm trying to determine fragility.”
“I'm very fragile,” I whispered, a secret between us.
“I can tell,” she said, surprising me completely.
I took a deep breath and, still keeping my hands behind me with the notebook in them, stood up straight and stiffened my body. “How can you tell?”
“I can tell,” she said certainly.
“I'm very strong.” I wanted to show her my hands.
“Fragile things aren't weak. They're delicate. The best old quilts are some of the strongest things ever made by hand. Their fabric is supple like skin. Their stitching holds forever. But over time they've become fragile. Their delicacy is their strength. It's their beauty. They don't want to be lived on anymore. Or touched. Just admired.”