“Order in?”
“Yes.”
“What? Burmese? Rwandan? Yemeni?”
“Chinese.”
She seemed surprised. “Slumming?”
I'd given her her exit line.
She walked toward me for what I knew was a goodbye kiss. “I was going to tell you not to wait up,” she said. “But if you're going to be slumming ⦔
As she reached for me I reached for the remote control of the CD changer and punched up the Celtic guitar pieces. The exquisite opening harmonics of “L'Hertiere De Keroulaz” shivered through the loft.
She stopped to listen. I knew she would. As she had enveloped me within her quilts, I had done the same to her within my music. We have both learned to acknowledge and appreciate a beauty we had not known before. These intangible new passions are perhaps the greatest gifts we have given one another. Marriage, despite the promulgations of the diamond, gold, and automobile industries, can be measured by no better bestowal. When you close the world around you, you open up the world to one another.
“Dance with me.”
“I can't. I'll be late. But I will when I get home.”
She put herself into my arms. I held her lightly, formally, as if we were dancing. Then she was gone.
As you can feel a hat on your head after you've removed it, I could feel her in my arms. I held her until even this discarnate memory of her body had floated away into the air around me. Then I changed the music and, good house-cock
that I am, lay down on the bed, waiting for Clara.
W
E DANCE OFTEN
, Clara and I, always at home, alone, slowly, close, to the dances I so love in Bachâfor example, the cello suites' allemandes and bourrées and gigues and the sarabande from the fourth that we played at our weddingâand to slow jazz tunes by Miles Davis and John Coltrane and even the normally screaky Ornette Coleman and sometimes to Clara's music, “Stairway to Heaven,” perhaps, before the allégro di bravúra, music with words, and she will hold me with both arms locked around my waist and turn up her head so her lips are at my throat and sing to me in a whisper as we dance here alone in our life, “There's a sign on the wall, but she wants to make sure, because sometimes words have two meanings ⦔
We dance because we love the touch of hand on hand, hand on back, cheek on cheek, the whispering, the innocence of it as prelude to the deeper innocence of the jabber and scream and penetration of unembellished sex.
We dance to tease ourselves into a desire even greater than that we experienced from looking at one another, particularly as the weeks and months and years went by and the surprise of finding someone else at home, even someone ripe and naked, faded, and with it faded also that lust for her or him who was before you, new and unknown.
Nietzsche wrote about becoming who you are and knowing who you are through an abandonment of “all faith and every wish for certainty,” so that you would walk forever on what he called insubstantial ropes and dance near the abyss, and only then would you be free.
We dance because what is marriage if not a dance on the abyss?
I
AM GETTING
hungrier. It is a good feeling, a kind of emptiness to match the emptiness of my home and arms. I am slowly becoming one piece. I am slowly becoming longingness.
But I am not so desperately hungry as to want to order my Chinese food. I am not yet on that edge.
So I activate the remote control and match my own welcome melancholy, which is an emotion I had sought out and loved all my life and have found virtually impossible to locate within the happiness and present-tenseness of my marriage, with Schubert's Quintet in C.
This was one of Schubert's last pieces. As was the case with each of his symphonies, he never got to hear this quintet played, at least not in the corporeal world. But he must have heard it inside his head, just as I would hear language inside my head in the midst of my long period of silence. Schubert would simply lie down in bed, where, like me, he would do most of his work, and write out whole pieces of music in his virtually illegible hand, the way Clara can sit down and bend over her notebook and write out whatever it is she writes out, for the music already existed within him, like an actual event rather than a fantasy spun out of nothing.
Even as Schubert lay dying in bed, the music kept pouring forth if not out; he shrieked right until his final moments that he had new melodies in his head. What an enviable annihilation. I can remember visiting his grave in the Währingerstrasse Cemetery in Vienna and putting my head to the ground in case those tunes might be heard still floating around in his skull. Needless to say, I heard nothing but the sounds of the grass growing richly on the fertilization provided by the rifacimento of the flesh
beneath it.
The epitaph on his tomb speaks of “yet far fairer hopes,” for he was only thirty-one when he died.
I am hardly older than that now. And I know that if I were to die tonight, I, like Schubert, would have left behind my greatest work, for I have achieved inner peace in an existence that sets each man to war with himself.
As for Schubert, no matter what melodies he may have been hearing in his head on his deathbed, this piece to which I am now listening is his greatest and would not likely have been surpassed by him. He knew that, no matter what he shrieked. He is speaking a new language here. He tells us he is going to write in sunny C major and then sets out moving from one key to another nearly from one bar to the next through shifting harmonies and a perplexing tonality that probably would have gotten him shot, or at least ostracized, if the manuscript of this work hadn't sat around unnoticed, undiscovered, unknown for twenty-five years after Schubert's syphilis carried him off. And even then it bothered people. (The music, not the venereal disease.)
As Nietzsche said, all true music is a swan song, though he himself in his misguided desire to be an artist fell into the trap of writing romance (he called his compositions names like “Sweet Mystery” and “A Brook Flows By,” and a piece he composed for Cosima Wagner's thirty-third birthday he entitled “Echoes of New Year's Eve, with Processional Song, Peasant Dance, and the Pealing of Bells”), and romance is what appeals to those human beings born without a mind and therefore condemned forever not to know they have no mind. Hans von Bülow, the canonical Cosima's first husband, whose name is synonymous with sexual humiliation, proved himself a more astute judge of
music than of women. It was not out of jealousy but mere good taste that he told Nietzsche, in perhaps the greatest critical one-liner ever uttered, “Your composition is more terrible than you think.”
Schubert's quintet was indeed the death knell of the Classical era, even as it adhered to the classical form. But its confessions of feeling, its language, is Romantic, in its ambivalence, its suffering and joy, and its constant speculation on both.
Is it any wonder that I so love this piece and that it so disturbs me? I know who I am. I know what I was. The same thing has happened to meânot that happened to Schubert, for I am alive, but that happens in this music.
I have found myself, my voice, and my life in my love for my wife. And I am able to talk about it now, naked, openly, truthfully, when before I met her I could talk of nothing but of what I knew. Never of what I felt.
I am the new man.
I am the very hungry new man.
A
S PART OF
my Classical self, I very rarely miss a meal, particularly dinner when Clara and I are together and, whether home or out, we let the meal go on endlessly as we talk and then, after she has written in her diary and I have lain on this bed watching her write in her diary, we come to bed together, always together, never one and then the other. And if bed is, as Huxley says, the poor man's opera, though we are scarcely poor, we have not wanted for fioritura in the rendering of our love.
But on our first night together, the night of the day we met, as I stepped into my Romantic era, I ate no dinner, I kept to no pattern, I perished. I gave up my life for a new one.
P
ROBABLY THE ONLY
person more astonished than I that I should be walking into my apartment building on Park Avenue with a woman was the evening doorman. He had never seen me with a woman. The apartment had been in my mother's family, and when she left it to me in her will, I told the people renting it that their lease would not be renewed and moved in when they vacated. That had been some five years before. No woman had visited me, aside from Elspeth, who cleaned for me then as now.
But what astonished the doorman even more than the presence of a woman at my side was my speaking to him. For reasons that I could hardly have explained, unless I'd written him a letter, I had stopped speaking to him about a year before. He must have been perplexed, for I had always been friendly in my greetings, and I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't at first feel I had singled him out in my silence, until he must inevitably have discussed with the other doormen and with the superintendent as well what he took to be my rudeness, at which point all of them would have realized from their common experience with me that I had simply stopped speaking. I am sure there was such a meeting, for I noticed, much to my relief, so uncivil had I come to think they must find me, that they all stopped greeting me at precisely the same time. From then on, they might open the door for me as I left on and returned from my daily walk into the city or hand me a package they had signed for and kept secure in the parcels closet, but they never said a word, not even when I tipped them. These doormen were, after all, with Elspeth, my only consistent human contact during that period of my silence, and I found
it comforting that we be equal in the exchange of language and therefore that the burden of speech be lifted from us all. (Elspeth, for her part, went right on talking to me as she dusted and polished, with her usual lack of concern that I even be in the same room, to say nothing of her seeming obliviousness to my utter lack of response to everything she said.)
But how, then, it must have shocked the evening doorman, whose eyes had already opened wide beneath his quasi-military hat at the sight of my jaunty companion in her rambunctious clothes, when I said, as we passed by him through the door he held open, “Thank you, Frank.”
He actually let go of the door, which would have slammed into my shoulder had I not put out my hand to stop it.
“Good evening, Mr. Chambers,” he finally found himself able to say, though by that time I had caught up to my new friend and was walking through the chalcedony lobby toward the elevator.
“I'm terribly sorry,” he called after me, and only the spreading open of the elevator doors, which struck me for the first time as something vaguely sexual, kept me from turning around and asking Frank what he was sorry for: nearly slamming the door on me; having the clean simplicity of our silence come to an end; or seeing me with a woman for the first time and believing like most men that there has been no dictator yet born who can subjugate a man the way a woman can?
The elevator operator wore white gloves. I was tempted to hold out my right hand to him and let him congratulate me on my reentry into the world. But I settled for a mere “Hello, Eddie” and was amazed to find that he held out his hand to me and seemed about to wrap his other hand
around my shoulder until he realized that the elevator would have ground to a stop should he remove that hand from its semicircular brass controls.
“Nice to see you again, Mr. Chambers.” Eddie shook my hand as if I had been gone for a year instead of merely silent.
I could feel his eyes on my companion's bottom as we stood together on the landing while I turned one key and then another in the locks on the door to the apartment, of which there was one per floor. Only after I had closed that door behind us did I hear through it the clangor of the metal gate being pushed shut and then the coming together of the elevator doors themselves. I thought of Eddie rushing down to the lobby and leaving the elevator while it was still bouncing as he limped to Frank to describe the lascivious pleasure he had taken from his
oeillade
and to ask Frank if the dead man had spoken to him too and did he think that woman might have been the one who brought him to life with her fabulous backside and the light in her plummy eyes.
“Have you been away?” she asked as she began to walk into the apartment and I followed, as if it were her place and not mine.
Did the apartment look so uninhabited, I wondered, that it appeared I didn't stay there or perhaps even live there?
“No,” I answered, “I haven't been away, not for a while. I used to go abroad at every opportunity, but lately I've been staying here in the city. Why do you ask?”
She walked through the front parlor and the music room and into the library and headed toward the formal dining room, where not a morsel of food had been eaten since the renting family had departed. I followed her within this maze of my life. “Because the elevator man said it was
nice to see you again. That's what people usually say to someone who's been away. But you haven't been away. Maybe he's been away.”
“Who?” I wondered if she thought I was made up of more than one person. The very idea made me feel desirable, and it was all I could do to keep from sprinting so I might catch up with her and put my arms around her from behind and press her to me and feel the roundness of her buttocks at that place on my upper right thigh where my testicles slept, we being the perfect height for one another.
“The elevator man,” she explained.
“Oh.” I stopped for a moment, but she walked right on. “No, he hasn't been away either.” Now I hurried my steps just to be able to see her as she went through the kitchen and then the pantry and opened the door to the laundry and tried the locked door to the wine room, which would have been too cold for her despite her three little shirts, and found the door at the rear of the kitchen that led to the back of the apartment. “He didn't really mean it was nice to see me again. He sees me every night when I come home. If I get home by eleven, that is. If I get home after eleven, then it's Juan who sees me. Juan is the night elevator man. What Eddie meant was it was nice to hear me again. I had stopped talking for a while. I hinted at that in your shop when I said that language had failed me. I stopped talking for over a year, actually. Today's the first day I've said anything for over a year.”