by Evan Dara
But the scrim tears when he turns up College Street. Rounding the corner, Marcus sees that massive, tapered, cement blocks have been placed around City Hall. Camouflaged with dripping begonias, the barricade secures the buildings new perimeter by turning the curb into a balance beam. He refuses to participate, and approaches the broad Beaux Arts building – its long row of white pilasters, its structural red brick, the jutting central clocktower with its several set-backs – via the tarmac Street.
Cops and backup staff in grey uniforms control the one entrance. There, a white hut has been set up. Through its one window, Marcus sees a table, a chair, a shiny white board scrawled with thick-line marker, and nothing else. Beyond the hut, a corridor of new fencing narrows into the main building. The site is preternaturally quiet. Here, no shims flicker.
Marcus turns up buoyantly and, smiling, approaches a redwood-necked guard sitting at a card table. They exchange words, but Marcus immediately sees they needn’t. No way, no thing, without an appointment. No chance, not ever, without an appointment. But the telephone—
Marcus steps away. When he looks back, the guard already has his nose in a magazine about motorcycles. Leaving further, Marcus scans the scene, sees two Mercedes parked at egotistical angles in front of the main entrance and a Fairley’s truck idling around the corner, on Main.
The vision reinvents gratitude for him all over again.
—
The dark spots on the squash: nothing; forget them. He can reuse a napkin without introjected social zetzing. Digestion. Whoever dreamt, millennia ago, the hyper-elegant ergonomics of the spoon?
Then the washing up, also a privilege. For Marcus, scrubbing and rinsing are now an integral part of dinner, and as he verticals his main plate into the drying rack, he is visited again. Involuntarily, his heart itself is summoned. Marcus turns, hands still wet. Cellos and lower brass bring warm precipitates to his chest; murmurs of timpani fan them to flame. He stops in place, and realizes: Neighbor Baker has fine taste. It’s a record, early ’50s, but one he doesn’t know.
Marcus moves towards the drifting signal. After a few measures more, a soprano puts a toe in, lofts a ballad about what all ballads are about. Marcus can’t place the voice, but he’s pleased to discover it, to learn from it, from the swerves in its grain. And he stays with it, thoughtless, taken, until the final chords, ground back down to strings, hinting at unresolve.
Marcus breaks away to dry his hands. But then another song comes over, a mock cha-cha with the same singer, still unrecognized. It’s a gutsy tune, spirited: this chick has something – and Marcus wants more of it. He goes to his side window and raises it up, receives a drench of freezery air and an immediate swelling and cleansing of the sound. Standing in place, getting cold, Marcus drinks it in: he can now hear the sandpaper in the soprano’s voice, individuate the mid-range winds. Were there always castanets?
The song runs one more chorus, closes on a plangent sixth chord. Marcus, coming down, lets his eyes move to his neighbor’s bulb, behind its always-unruffled shade. Regaining awareness of the cold, he folds in his uncovered arms and waits, hoping the world will again slide into string harmony. But it doesn’t happen. Marcus stays in place for a full minute, another, desire rising, hopes deflating. But his yearning remains, and, when it isn’t answered, dramatically crescendos. So Marcus decides to go independent, to meet his own needs. He walks to his Garrard turntable – no CD can do justice to jazz in winter – and puts on Betty Carter, going immediately to Some Other Time. A favorite track even after twenty years, first for feasting, then for snacking. And that night, it still tastes gritty-sweet.
Staying on his feet, he positions himself directly between his tall, thin LSA 2 speakers and, soon, finches are flitting around his neck, sent for a visit by Betty C. The tune wraps after those handkerchief-wistful Harold Mabern arpeggios, and so does Marcus. Four minutes of such music is enough: he must leave room for the rest of life. Marcus returns to his turntable, lifts the cartridge, pulls the tonearm, folds the album away. He notices, then, that the room is cold, and so goes to his still-open window with his lower arms extended, just in time to hear Neighbor Baker cue up Dinah Washington doing What a Diff’rence a Day Makes.
Marcus stops mid-step. He knows the record, lives with it daily, can never say no to Belford Hendrick’s high-sheen strings and wordless chorus. Always, every time, it imprints small, prickling blisses. Leaving his window wide, he goes and sits on his couch, crosses his legs to better face toward the angel sound. He pulls his Merino wool blanket over the top of his body, melts then reconstitutes himself, becoming better, stronger, over the course of the tune’s fleeting-eternal two-and-a-half minutes.
Then, more silence, but Marcus has an idea. He throws off his blanket, walks to his stereo rig, puts on No More in Life by Irene Reid, and twists the volume from five to seven. The tune invites, hints, provokes, suggests, then delivers in ways that both wildly surprise and sum up all that has come before. And when the track finishes, after a gap of a minute or so, Neighbor Baker counters by playing a translucent soprano that Marcus is sure he has never heard – which Marcus repays with Maxine Sullivan’s all-time definitive take on S’posin’. Baker comes back with Gloria Lynne’s Then I’ll Be Tired of You, and their exchange continues into the night. Each offered song is followed by a pause, but before long the intervals quicken and the two are trading like Ella and Diz, goosing their big band back to glory when everyone said those days were gone.
—
The next afternoon, Marcus starts his blog:
Where would we be without habituation? Every scent would distract, every sound would overwhelm, every photon would bring agony to the eyes. Thoughts would stab like just-sharpened knives. History would be a minefield we are forever crossing, towards a future that continually incapacitates with fear and with dread. We would eternally have to confront the reality of Madonna anew.
And yet, habituation extracts a cost. For when our senses and aspects shutter down, we progressively lose the ability to respond, to feel, to savor. Peaks become plains. Life flees itself, when we take it in stride.
Yet, there is a way out, and it is as simple and instinctual as the neurological contractions of habituation. As the eminent American writer Thornton Wilder once observed, in his novel The Woman of Andros, an undeniable forerunner to his great work, Our Town: “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”
How to make our hearts conscious? How to makes our treasures again into treasures—
—
Nine a.m., and he hits the schedule easily: stretches and extensions, general warming, then lower-body work. For this latter, he puts together a sequence – knee-bends, squat-thrusts, low-impact just kind of jumping around – that he senses will build and tone, based on the remembered phrase, larger muscles to small. Then sit ups – he manages twenty-eight – followed by upper-body stuff: palm-to-palm isometrics, push-ups, and pull-ups, these on a thick dull-silver bar he’s installed in a doorway of his living room. (One visit to Fairley’s.)
Afterwards, he works up the gumption to try something that, for whatever reason, he’s always wanted to attempt: shadow boxing. He angles his drafting lamp, clamped to a worktable, up to three hundred degrees. Then Marcus starts to bobble, and to move his arms in ways that won’t seem too ludicrous. Punching out and pulling back, his black fists bat-fly all over the wall. But he soon sees the need for discipline, and so directs his hands to harry only the spines of the books and journals in his hutch. It becomes good fun, and he continues for maybe eight minutes. But after all that, he can only award himself a TKO. The texts remain standing.
It’s all prep for that afternoon, the official launch of organizational assembly and pre-design. Directly after lunch, Marcus sits down to his feast. He begins with his title, and that one’s easy: General Director of the A-burg Gratitude Center. He also names himself CEO (Chief Exhilarating Officer), but understands that any job description will
subsume only a fraction of his functions. At the outset, he’ll also have to be – he dawdles the words – personnel manager, head theoretician (Idea Architect – he likes that better), fund-raising coordinator, event planner, and, most demanding of the lot, assistant to himself. Marcus smiles: he’s up for all of it.
But he’s aware there’ll be many positions simply beyond his training, if not his capacities. He’ll need accountants, tax advisers, building architects, publicists, all kinds of experts just to lay the base …
He is looking forward to working with, guiding, all of them.
—
He conceives, he researches, he envisions, but he always makes sure to get out of the house. His evening strolls have become more important to him than ever. Oxygenate, refurbish, insert clarifying distance – of course they do that. And in homage to the demands of his great New Work, he has started calling his p.m. walks re-constitutionals. But mostly they let him return to essences.
One night, he starts off in the direction of Leddy Park. Against the moon-bright sky, a winged silhouette lifts. It frees us to celebrate the inexhaustible richness of existence, to herald the preposterous grandeur of the creation. It wrests our attention from what we do not have – that sad modern obsession – to the infinity of things that are truly ours. Gratitude brings us close, into contact, it racks focus from me-as-subject to any other subject, it melds and merges. It shatters the solipsism that, while seeming to constitute us, is actually our unmaking. It is the way out that is also the way in …
Forty minutes later, before heading back in, he stops at the corner of Loomis and Weston, its tight conjunction of two-story homes. As every evening, the houses’ windows’ hundredfold lights are at work. Outlines become frames, glarings self-douse, night went geometric. Before his eyes, the suburbscape hives with beacons and snuffs. It continues to touch him, this fidgety pricking of the void, as distant citizens attempt to turn abandoned bedrooms, unused hallways, cold kitchens into advertisements for inhabitation. Yet, he thinks, look at the spree for more than a second and it only shows that no one is home.
Or could there be something else? Marcus takes another moment, looks at the play of enlivened windows. Are there patterns?, he wonders – sitting rooms before dining nooks, dens followed by walk-in closets, living spaces waiting on just-darkened entranceways. He becomes absorbed in this study, but soon concludes there are no harmonies, no regularities. Not one nightlight seems linked to another. The only non-randomness he perceives – and this is speculative, he only has so many eyes in his head – is that no two windows facing each other, from adjacent homes, shine at the same time. He exhales: maybe the house-masters believe this would work against the goal.
Marcus shrugs and settles back in to the spectacle. In time, he comes to admire the homeowners’ skill in simulating being-there-edness. Just tell yourself they’re Christmas lights, he thinks, contraptions turning mystery into cheeriness, via wires. That they’re mechanical defenses working perfectly, issuing signals that communicate precisely the opposite of what’s intended.
—
He continues to attack his early regimen with a relish that can startle him, given his history with exercise. Workouts, he’d always thought, exhaust, but he exits his fifty-minute grunt with more zest than when he went in. He doesn’t know how many mornings he’s been at it, and doesn’t care. The important figure is sixty-one – today’s number of sit-ups.
Likewise, he never thought he’d warm to what’s now filling his 11 a.m. slot. But viral marketing, he’s found, is a bug that bites quick. Marcus loves learning schemes that systematize what he instinctively feels. Keep it short, simple, Visual; make it memorable, preferably through surprise and/or juxtaposition. Play on the already known. He doesn’t want to believe that civilization runs on so low a grade of coal, but resistance crumbles quick. If he remembers the rules, that’s proof he should remember them: they work.
Afternoons, he develops his understanding of how inadequate his original conception of the G Center had been. There will be so much more to do: logo, letterhead, curriculum development, site selection, student housing, and just keep going. How to get the funds to raise the funds to obtain the funds that are needed? It is a total ride on the winds, charting this vision that blooms under the living waters of practical imagination. The bigger it gets, the bigger, he feels, he becomes. The challenge makes the challenged.
He soon sees that a key contribution will be to establish G’s empirical underpinnings, and so dedicates major time to that. He must make his field into a real discipline, he thinks, a hard science. Surely, it warrants such study, and this can only deepen appreciation of G’s subjective benefits. He’ll work to find the biochemistry of gratitude – to see, for example, if G correlates with spurts of potassium ions in the neocortex, a rumored source for the oceanic feeling. And he’ll make sure to ground his findings in numbers. Not just cuddly math – G makes life into a non-zero-sum game, with the winners (everyone) fore-ordained – but rigorous accountings. He’ll find gratitude’s base equations. Relative happiness plus or minus trauma, multiplied by family parameters. Time divided by stress, raised to the cube of accomplishment. Luck times insight squared, whose product – more luck – generates a recursive quadratic function that leads to heaven’s door.
He isn’t, entirely, joking. He must use every weapon in the arsenal. This is the big one, he knows, the laic grail. The stakes could hardly be higher. It will take time, which he will give, turning it into gold.
—
His supper is both immensely meaningful and nearly imperceptible. The peas and tomatoes and mung beans are just great that night, subtle, warm, flavorsome. Chewing – a blessing. But the meal passes from sit-down to bring-things-to-the-sink in the time of a Tatum, finished before undertaken. Marcus, lost in self-sparks and thoughts, feels nicely full from a feast he does not remember having eaten. Someone must have made that stuff go away.
To honor dessert, Marcus brings it into his living room. He sits at the main table, low by his woven couch, and cuts himself a wide slice of apple pie – Fairley’s doesn’t do that too bad. But before enlisting allies plate and fork, he rises, goes to his computer, bends to it, and hears lyric music from elsewhere.
Marcus straightens up. But he no longer needs to turn. Neighbor Baker is again at it, playing a CD. Tonight, it’s a soprano from the mid-’40s, probably – judging by room tone, and phrasing in the woodwinds – recorded in Chicago. Once more, Marcus doesn’t know the voice. But he is certainly acquainted with its purpose. Neighbor Baker is giving him the best kind of directed education, in the universality of emotional truth.
Marcus listens for four minutes, feels it as a suspension in warm silk. And then he takes a decision. He looks at his wall clock: just after 7 p.m. – not too late. And outside is not too cold. His house is in presentable shape: the floor is passably clean, and all the papers – mostly printouts and research notes – stacked on his worktable will make a correct impression. Marcus can wear what he has on. Yes, he took a wide wedge, but there is more pretty-good apple pie. And there’s coffee.
Just inside his front door, Marcus puts on his parka. His move can not be incomprehensible, he reasons; it can’t even be misunderstood. They’ve been volleying tunes for weeks, and they are evidently graced with the same, or compatible, tastes. Not one Baker song has grated. Here is the natural next step. Yes, Marcus would rather do it by phone – and he would rather not do it by phone.
Marcus opens his door, steps into placid night. After closing up, and not bothering locking, he hears that Baker has put on a new selection. Outside, the sound is crisp, if softer, buffeted by wind. Again, Marcus does not know the voice. Something to ask about.
Marcus walks from his house towards the street, zipping his parka to his chin, still susceptible to the chilly air. He stops at the sidewalk. Emanating mist, he looks left and right. He takes his ungloved hands from his pockets, disciplines the semicolon in his chest, turns towards Neighbor Baker’s
home, and starts to walk.
Approaching the property line, he sees Baker’s inside light, seeping through a shade covering a window in the front of the house. This is reassuring: the bulb hadn’t only been for him. It has a general function. Marcus walks on, gets close to the worn bluestone leading to Baker’s door. For whatever reason, he takes three-four steps past this point, then stops and doubles back to the bluestone trail. He pauses at the junction, turns smoothly, puts his foot on Baker’s walkway, sees the light in Baker’s house go out.
Marcus jolts to a halt. In a matter of seconds, the music goes off, too.
Still off-balance, with one leg extended, Marcus looks at Baker’s front door, then at his dark and silent window, then down to himself. He gathers in all his limbs, turns around on Baker’s erratic bluestones, smoothes his coat, and goes off. He pivots onto the communal sidewalk – but again walks in the wrong direction, heading away from his own house, not towards. He takes a few steps, quickly corrects. No worries. Marcus is now heading home.
Inside, Marcus closes his door, takes off his coat, hangs it on its curvy hook, accepts fingers of insinuating warmth. He turns, looks around his living room, steps in. That evening, he decides, he’ll continue researching Vermont-based accounting firms with experience in non-profits. He hadn’t gotten deep enough into the subject first time out, a few days earlier. He sits to his computer, still alight, and gives words to Google. Just when the tally of 8,740,000 results comes up, he hears a click, then a sally of strings, and a been-there alto paints pale silver upon the night. From the first note, this lady singer seizes focus; time, a shawl, drapes across her shoulders. Baker is listening again. Another languid tune – orchestrated by Nelson Riddle? – delivered by another mid-century siren. Again, Marcus does not know the voice. Again, it is a good one.