Alongside courses in structure and analysis, he sneaked in an elective in music composition. Harmonizing chorales and realizing figured bass felt a bit like algebra. He wrote minuets in the style of Haydn and imitation Bach da capo arias. For Clara’s twentieth, he scored “Happy Birthday” à la late Beethoven. For New Year’s Eve 1961, he gave her his most elaborate trinket yet: a Brahms intermezzo treatment of “How About You?” Clara read through the gift, shaking her head and laughing at a thing so obvious to everyone but its maker.
Oh, Peter. For a bright boy, you’re so clueless. Come on. Let’s play through it.
He tried to explain the plan to Clara. He could graduate with a guaranteed bench job in industry while still making all the music body and soul needed. But she looked away with her maddening sextant look, out to the horizon and over the curve of the Earth, at a future that she could see and he could not.
They spent their every spare minute together. Clara got them reviewing music for the Daily Student. Under the anagram byline Entresols, they championed dozens of new recordings as if they were Adam and Eve naming the animals. Their friends—those who didn’t throw up their hands in disgust at that breakaway state of two—called them the Zygote. While the best and brightest headed for civil rights sit-ins, Peter and Clara camped out in the music library listening room, following along in the score of Strauss’s Four Last Songs while Schwarzkopf sang “Im Abendrot”: We’ve gone through need and sorrow, hand in hand . . .
Clara ran point in their discoveries, reconnoitering. She brought Els prizes for dinner: crazy Gesualdo madrigals or brilliant horn passages from late nineteenth century tone poems. And even as Peter scrambled to master her expanding repertoire, Clara blew on ahead of him and found more.
They sang up close, right into each other’s mouths, bending pitches into near-miss dissonance. The grate of those beats sawed straight into their brains. They had not yet seen each other naked. But that shared resonance in the plates of their skulls was as intimate as any sex.
Clara knew her destiny and never wavered. She studied with the demanding Starker, and although the man made her weep almost every week, he led her to tricks of the mind and the wrist that left her playing like an angel.
Music alone, for Clara, had the power to peel away the lie of daily life. She wasn’t sure who Adenauer was, and she didn’t understand why Glenn deserved a ticker tape parade. But a few measures of the Grosse Fuge held more raw truth than a month’s worth of headlines. The force of her pitch-driven Platonism gave her a power over Peter. He had hunches; she had convictions. It was never much of a contest. She had only to smile at his churchgoing, and from one Sunday to the next, he quit his family’s faith. With little more than a cocked eyebrow, she got him to grow out his flattop and trade in his button-downs for pullovers. And on a late March night near the end of his sophomore year, she took the war for his soul into the heart of the enemy camp.
She asked him to meet her after dark on the bank of the Jordan River. He arrived after a miserable three-hour failed struggle to identify an unknown in his Advanced Organics lab. She lay back on the damp, grassy rise, forever staining the back of her blue pencil skirt. He stretched out with his head in her lap, wrecked. They want me dead.
Her face curdled at the chemical reek of him. She combed back his hair with two fingers. Who does?
All of them. The alkenes, the alkynes, the paraffins . . .
Peter? She leaned down over him, and her silver lyre necklace charm grazed his cheek. She tugged on the hint of sideburn she’d gotten him to grow out. Who told you that you were a chemist?
Well, I’m not half bad at it, you know. Tonight’s disaster excepted.
And you’re ready to spend your whole life doing it?
He pressed his fingertips into the cold soil. The idea of spending a whole life doing anything filled him with something between wonder and panic.
Are you trying to please your father?
He rolled away, up onto one elbow. You mean my stepfather? My father’s dead.
I am aware. And you’re aware that no one can satisfy a ghost?
I’m not trying to please anyone. I’m learning chemistry. It’s not a bad way to make a living.
He wanted to add: For two, if that interests you.
Peter, it’s 1961. You’re a white man in college. And you’re worried about making a living? That’s what dance and wedding bands are for. No musician with your talent ever ended up in the gutter.
He tried to tell her: Chemistry made sense. Its problems had clean and repeatable answers. Its puzzles read like cosmic rebuses. Manipulating fundamental stuff, shaping whole new materials with properties that could raise the quality of life . . .
But Clara wouldn’t see the splendor in the system. She bent her arm along the crease of his chest. You think the chemistry won’t get done if you don’t do it?
You think no one’s going to play the clarinet if I don’t?
Clarinet? Who said anything about clarinet?
Her whole insane plan for him took shape and buzzed around his head. He swatted it away. She snared his wrists and held them to the chill ground.
Put away the Lincoln logs, Peter. Playtime’s over. Music pours out of you when you snap your fingers. That’s called a vocation. You don’t get a choice.
He sat and tilted his head at the girl Platonist, like he was the RCA dog and she the inscrutable gramophone. Then he started to hear them, those souls lined up in the celestial anteroom, awaiting reincarnation: all the preexisting sounds that only he might bring into being. The deep symmetries, the forms and formulas of chemistry that had so absorbed him for two years, turned into a mere prelude. It was true: he’d been trying to please someone. But that someone called for another pleasure.
He lay back in her lap and looked up at her inverted face. She opened her shawl to settle it again around her shoulders. Her draped arms were wings as wide as the night sky.
These pieces you want me to write, he said, awash on pure possibility. How many do you suppose there are?
She leaned down to answer him. How easy it would be, he thought, to kick out into the center of the lake until he couldn’t kick anymore.
FOR THE NEXT five weeks, when he should have been studying for final exams, he worked in secret. He stole hours from labs, from classes, even from Clara, who turned giddy with concealed suspicion. He took to working in lightning shorthand, sketching out music in quick, clean strokes, the way a child might scribble a crayon moon, a loopy forest, and a gash of campfire, and call it night. There was no time for orchestration. The thing unfolded on the simplest scale, for solo piano and voices. But he heard every line in massed banks of instrumental color. The wayfaring winds, the swelling support of brass, a raft of low strings bearing forward.
He had the perfect text, the end of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Clara had recited the stanza from memory on a freezing picnic in Cascades Park, during winter’s last hurrah. They’d lain wrapped up together in a cotton sleeping bag, cradling a thermos full of hot tomato soup between them, their lashes dusted with fresh snowfall while she spoke:
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
He studied the words for days, listening to the sounds contained in them. Then the phonemes and accents led him forward. Note by note, phrase by phrase, he relived that picnic in the snow: the sun low in the sky through the bones of an oak, promising some hidden continuance, and that shivering girl holding a thermos in her mittened cellist’s fingers, challenging him with a few chanted
and expanding words, her face hungry, pale, and amused, already knowing what would become of all the young men and daring the old ones to look back. Each measure he wrote changed the ones he’d already written, and he felt them all, already being altered by the unformed noises of the years to come.
As his pencil spilled lines onto the blank page, all Els had to do was listen and guide each new note to its foreordained place: They are alive and well somewhere. He could write for forever; he could write for no one. He wasn’t choosing: simply detecting, as if he were running a dozen different assays to determine an unknown that, by reactive magic, precipitated out in the bottom of his test tube, solid and weighable.
The song took shape; he focused the nub of his will to a sharp point. Fear lost all traction, and that current of well-being he’d experienced a few times before in life, listening to the Jupiter or stumbling into Mahler, flooded into him. A cherry-picker taller than a redwood plucked him out of the rubble-filled culvert where he lay and lifted him to the watch room of a lighthouse. The worst that could happen in throwing his life away revealed itself to be a blessing. Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.
The piece was simplicity itself: a triplet-driven, Phrygian figure in the high voices, while beneath, arpeggios moved in contrary motion, in wide slow waves. Each new entry took the evolving figure into higher registers. The blend strained toward something archaic, a folk tune an ethnographer might find in a remote mountain village of a failing monarchy, to bring back to his studio in the decadent capital and flesh out with volunteer harmonies.
He stole from Mahler, to be sure: the blurred boundary between major and minor. The shaky key regions that wheeled off, before the end, into wildness. A spinning waltz, a distant brass band. Slow ascent tumbling down in a heartbeat, only to climb again in the reprieve of the next measure. All the individual components had a familiar air. But the thing as a whole had never quite existed before Peter wrote it down.
Building toward the climax, Peter discovered that he’d laid its foundation well in advance, in the germ material of the opening phrases. A four-note figure, drawn from the original triplets, rose and expanded into a five-note one, which overflowed into the full, rising, seven-note assertion of certainty:
All goes onward
Onward and outward
Outward: nothing collapses . . .
Then came the transforming final phrase, the one that was waiting for him when he reached it, almost as if he’d envisioned it all along.
Teasing out the piece on a baby grand in a music building practice room gave him a pleasure so complete it might as well have been illegal. Clara was right: he was shaped to do this work, even if the work had no use for anyone alive or dead. Paying off his stepfather’s wasted investment, putting in years of scut work at minimum wage, playing to empty auditoriums peppered with a handful of listeners hostile and indifferent: his entire misspent life spread out in front of Peter. Drunk on birthing up this first-time thing, he saw the future, and he recognized it from way back when.
For weeks, turning and shaping, Els saw everything: the young men and the old, the women and children, alive and well, needing no one but him to spring them. He stepped off into the void and felt no fear. It didn’t even feel like a choice. Chemistry died an easeful death. But that death was different from what anyone might imagine, and luckier than even an old man of seventy could yet suppose.
He surprised Clara at semester’s end, with a fresh copy. She sat on the foot of her dorm room bed, under the poster of the young Casals, reading and nodding in silence. When she looked up, her wet eyes looked almost timid. Still, she smiled that all-foretelling smile. Well, she said. Bravo. Encore.
Pythagoras, discoverer of harmony’s math, also discovered my bug: Serratia marcescens. It looked like blood seeping out of old food.
Clara’s reward waited for him at the year-end concert. The program was some attempted Cold War rapprochement: Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s Firebird. Els loved it all, even those baggy exotics. Something had happened to his ear, and in that month, everything from Machaut to the “Mickey Mouse Club March” struck him as a masterpiece.
Playing in orchestra felt like sitting in the general assembly. Each section set off on the agenda of its own private timbre, but all combined under one baton into a surprise leviathan. From his perch in the center of the winds, Els glanced to his left, over the lip of his music stand, past the conductor, to see Clara in profile, second chair, her cello nestled in the vee of her long black concert skirt, her white silk blouse tightening against her breasts as the instrument rocked and breathed. She played like a distracted Firebird, her graceful neck pressed against the fingerboard of her instrument, her bow arm tracing out sideways-eight infinities in the air. As the slashing accents set off Kashchei’s infernal dance, Clara glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking. And as if it were scored into the note heads on the staves in front of him, Els saw what dance waited, later that night, when the music ended.
What had they done together, until then? Incandescent things. Crimes against their upbringing that left Els stunned by the cunning of his lust and wracked with holdover Lutheran guilt. But these were the early days of the New Frontier. His own daughter would giggle her way through worse by age sixteen. No self-respecting thirteen-year-old in 2011, keeping public stats on her social network page, would even consider it sex.
After the concert, Els found Clara in the orchestra rehearsal room, putting her cello into its coffin. The Russian music and her bohemian soul left her so flushed she couldn’t talk. The night’s plan was so obvious in their furtive faces that Peter was sure her resident director would detain them both for questioning when they snuck into her dorm to borrow her rich roommate’s Beetle. They had no route. Clara sat abandoned in the car, still in concert clothes, feet up on the dash, open to fate and free of the Earth’s pull. Peter’s hands shook on the wheel. They drove to the quarries outside of town, left the car on a pull-off in front of a dense stand of pines, and walked into the thick dark.
Leaf stuff tripped her up, and Clara had to carry her high heels. Deep in the copse, she staggered into him and whispered, Time to get serious. The tip of her tongue followed the words into his ear canal.
She pulled Els to the ground onto a bed of Scotch pine needles six inches deep. She swept her pleated black concert skirt to her waist and straddled him. Her silk blouse billowed open, and her four feet of hair tented him in a Botticelli skein. She lowered herself with a strange, sharp cry of elated betrayal that he’d try to re-create in various combinations of instruments for the next forty years. She gripped his shoulders and pushed them against the needles, a bare threat: Do we understand each other? He cuffed her neck and made her look at him. He nodded.
As she took him, a bright light pulsed in his temples. It struck him that he was having a stroke, and he didn’t care. Two more flashes, and Els focused. The white turned into a high-beam searchlight, sweeping the woods. On the far edge of the pines, two policemen were peering into the windows of the parked Beetle.
His legs jerked; he tried to push her off. But before he could scramble to his feet and surrender, she pinned him back against the earth. Her eyes were manic, swimming. Her lips moved. Something criminal and pianissimo came out of them. Don’t move.
An officer called, twice, Hello? Els twisted, and Clara fought him down again.
Don’t. Move.
A beam sliced across the nearby grass. Pinned under Clara, Els went slack. His skin heard her body-long pulse. She was shuddering now, her mute mouth open, and it took Els several heartbeats to understand that shudder. Searchlights swept through the black grove. A voice called out again, now farther off. At last the police gave up, retreated to their vehicle, and drove away. Peter and Clara lay as narrow as death, on the floor of a night forest distilled by cold. The whole dark woods were speaking, and nothing said a thing.
Blood trickling out of bread at the siege of Tyre rallied Alexander’s beate
n troops to victory.
Eighteen months pass: three short chamber works and two small song cycles. A young man huddles in a phone booth outside the student newspaper office. In his pocket is a wrinkled blue onionskin aerogram that has taken two weeks to reach him. The world has just escaped annihilation by a few beats. Nuclear silos in an aerial reconnaissance photo of an impoverished tropical island: Peter Els has other worries.
The aerogram is covered in a wispy, Elvish script. “Peter, Dear. Please don’t think I’ve turned promiscuous, here in Merrie England, but life seems to have gotten complicated.”
He waits to place the call until well past midnight, when the rates are low. It’s morning on the other side of the planet. No phone at the dorm, and he must come to this public booth with a fistful of coins. Judging by the abandoned campus streets, that nuclear exchange has already come and gone. The air is so bone-crushingly cold that his bare hand sticks to the metal phone faceplate when he takes off his gloves to dial.
She answers mezzo, muffled, and time-lagged, the gap it takes her voice to travel the length of the transatlantic cable. Peter?
He shouts into the receiver, and his own voice echoes back at him in a canon at unison.
From the first phoneme, it’s a terrible mistake. They speak like people playing bughouse chess. He asks for clarification, then elucidations to her clarifications, then glosses on her elucidations. His quarters pour into the slot at a staggering rate and he hears himself say things like, First of all, I’m not shouting. A week’s rent, then two, then three disappear, and still he can’t tell what this blithe woman is saying to him or what he’s supposed to do with a worthless degree in music composition and a minor in chemistry, without the sole audience that matters. He asks her what’s changed and she answers: nothing.
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