Music for Wartime

by Rebecca Makkai

  And I thought, maybe that’s what I would have done, if I’d leapfrogged up there into Peter’s body, if I needed to get away before anyone realized I was a fraud: I’d hit the painting and make the show stop. But I didn’t think he’d done it on purpose. Or at least not consciously.

  It was a good five minutes before the woman in the suit stepped away from the painting and signaled that we could continue. She stayed there, though, in the corner of the room, frowning. I assumed she’d have a long night of paperwork now. I felt bad for her.

  I took the mike again and said, with a big fund-raising grin, “Now you’ve seen what fine security your contributions support!” Lauren was at the front of the crowd, shaking her head to show how disappointed she was, as if I hadn’t gotten the message yet. “We’re going to try that one again.” I waited for a meek laugh from the audience and then turned to the actors. Peter looked at me with those blank, jumpy eyes like he didn’t even recognize me, like I was just another blurred member of his audience, watching and breathing and waiting for him to fail. I’m still not sure what I felt, standing there. Maybe I felt my heart break, or maybe I felt Peter’s heart break. When you’ve known someone that long, when you formed yourself around his personality back when you were just a fourteen-year-old lump of clay, isn’t it really the same thing? Aren’t his heart and your own somehow conjoined? Perhaps that’s what I could never explain to Carlos: Ours was a kind of first love that wasn’t aimed at each other, but somehow out at the world. We We were forever side by side on the chapel bench, watching the show.

  Peter whispered something to the short-haired actress and handed her his papers. He held up his open hands to the audience in apology, ten pale, bony fingers, then walked around the people and out of the exhibit.

  “The Gum Flew Away,” the woman read, the clarity of her voice a reassurance, a wiping clean. “By Sam Demarr. First, all the gum flew off, leaving Chicago in its spearmint dust. Then the department stores floated away.”

  I thought of following Peter out. I’d done it so many times before, chasing him down as he stormed from a party, calling his name five times until he finally turned to look at me, tear-streaked or red-faced on the wet sidewalk. “He didn’t mean it,” I’d usually say, or “You’re just drunk,” or “We all love you.” I never said that I did. Just all of us, meaning everyone at the party, everyone he’d ever met, everyone who’d ever seen him from across the street. It wasn’t true anymore; the world didn’t love him, just I did, and I had the feeling that even if I could say that, it wouldn’t be enough. And if it were, then what? What would I do with that responsibility? And now Lauren, who was still my boss if I was lucky, was finally shooting me a look of conspiratorial relief. “Actors,” said her face. “I know,” said mine.

  It hit me like cold water that I wouldn’t see Peter again, that he’d avoid my calls until he drifted to another city to try again and fail. Someone would hire him at a third-tier regional theater on the basis of his résumé, and he’d last one show, if that. He probably wouldn’t know how to give up.

  After the readings, I propped myself up at the microphone and said my bit about membership and shortening the pledge drive with early donations, and Institute Steve said something I couldn’t follow in his nasal little whine, and I got a drink in my hand. It was cold enough outside that I wanted to drink just so I wouldn’t feel the bone chill on the way home. I chatted up as many people as I could stomach over the wine and shrimp. People didn’t want to talk to me, though. What they wanted was to meet the actors. “I saw you in Phèdre at the Court,” a woman said to one of the actresses, who smiled graciously. “It was just gorgeous. You wore that red dress. Tell me your name again.”

  Another woman asked the actor who’d read the Stuart Dybek piece to sign her program. She didn’t seem to notice Dybek himself standing a few feet away, laughing with a friend and wiping his glasses on his tie. If the actor found the request strange he didn’t show it, signing his name on the margin of the paper. Peter would have written something like “Peter Torrelli is fabulous. Love and kisses, Pablo P.” Or the old Peter would have, the one who knew magic.

  I felt the wine go to my head, and I felt relief that the whole thing was over. I drank more to shut out the suspicion that I was glad Peter had left. I got through the next hour and walked out into the cold, relieved to be drunk and half-expecting to find Peter there on the sidewalk, eighteen years old and scribbling in ballpoint pen on the knee of his khakis. He was gone, and there were just people waiting for buses and people waiting for taxis, everybody waiting to leave.

  It was like that after our kiss sophomore year, the way I’d stood frozen thirty seconds and then ran after him into the cold night, one of my duck boots untied, my left palm bleeding in parallel paper-cut stripes. He was gone, and I stayed under the school’s archway entrance looking for his breath in the air, thinking it would tell me which way he’d gone. I thought, If he ran back inside I’ll follow him, and I’ll kiss him again. If he got a cab, there’s nothing I can do.

  He had found a cab that night, as he probably had now. Or maybe he’d slouched all the way down Adams, his parka blurring him into the frozen crowd, the crowd sweeping him onto the train, the train shooting him up north and off the face of my earth.

  This is the way it happens: First, my friend floats away, leaving Chicago in his dust. Then he leaves me—no breath above the concrete, no voice in the air to catch and hold. Then the Berghoff closes, and the radio stations all shut down. The school chapel folds its benches and windows and flies away. The frozen sidewalks peel up like strips of gum. The skyscrapers drift like icebergs into the lake, up the Saint Lawrence and out to sea. The citizens grab for things to rescue, but everything’s too cold to touch. Mayor Daley holds a press conference. “We can’t save it all,” he says.

  In a month, they’ve all forgotten. Standing in the empty streets of their empty city, the people look up and say to no one in particular, “Something used to be here, something beautiful and towering that overshadowed us all, and it seemed so important at the time. And now look: I can’t even remember its name.”

  COUPLE OF LOVERS ON A RED BACKGROUND

  I’ve been calling him Bach so far, at least in my head, but now that he’s started wearing my ex-husband’s clothes and learned to work the coffeemaker, I feel it’s time to call him Johann. I said it out loud once, when I needed to get him off the couch before the super came up, but I’m not sure I pronounced it right, Germanic enough, because he didn’t respond—though I’m not sure I’d recognize my name, either, in the midst of someone screaming a foreign language. He got off the couch and went to the vacuum closet only because I practically carried him. No easy task, pushing someone so big and sweaty, even with the weight he’s lost since he got here. I’d take him out for some real German food, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the movies about caring for transplanted historical people, it’s never to take them out in public among the taxis and police and department store mannequins.

  I’ve kept the curtains closed and the TV unplugged, but I did introduce him to the stereo so he’d have something to do every day while I’m gone. I’m proud of how carefully I did it: First, I dug my angel music box out of the Christmas decorations and played it for him. He seemed familiar with the concept, so I pointed back and forth between the angel box and the CD player, then put on some Handel. He was pleased, not at all scared, and now he’s pushing buttons and changing discs like he was raised on Sony. At first I only let him have Baroque, but recently we’ve been moving up in history. He’s fond of Mozart, unsurprisingly, but for some reason Tchaikovsky makes him giggle. When I played him “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” I thought he was going to wet the couch. Five minutes later he went to the piano and played the main part from memory, busted out laughing at certain phrases. If such a thing is possible, he played it sarcastically. He has a laugh, incidentally, like you’d expect from a pot-smoking thirteen-year
-old, whispered and high-pitched. At first, when I thought I was making this all up, I wondered if I’d borrowed that bit from Tom Hulce in Amadeus. But on the phone the other day, my mother said, “Who’s that laughing over there?” At least she thinks I’m dating again.

  He doesn’t seem to remember living in the piano. He never lifts the lid to look inside, which I would certainly do if I’d lived there ten days. The morning he came, I was in my sweats playing his Minuet in G—the one you know if you ever took lessons, the first “real” piece you learned by a serious composer: DA-da-da-da-da-DA-da-da. I was remembering that the day I learned to play it was the same day my father, the journalist who wished he were an opera baritone, first took interest in my lessons. I was seven. He would stand behind me and beat time on his palm. He even made up a little song for it, when I wasn’t getting the rhythm right: “THIS is the way that BACH wrote it, THIS is the way that BACH wrote it, THIS is the merry, THIS is the merry, THIS is the merry tune!” I’d keep playing even though it panicked me, and I’d think of the picture from my cartoon book about Beethoven, the one where his father stood behind the piano with dollar signs in his eyes. I wasn’t gifted enough that my father was thinking of money. Maybe he wanted me to entertain at his dinner parties, or just to be better than he was. Treble clefs in his eyes.

  I was remembering all this, playing the Minuet in G pretty damn well despite a few glasses of wine, when I started to feel like something was stuck in my throat. Since my hands were busy playing, I didn’t cover my mouth—just turned my head to the side and coughed something up. I think I passed out then, although I don’t remember waking. There’s a bit of time I can’t account for. I remember being in the kitchen later. I remember making tea.

  The next day I heard scratching inside the piano and figured I had mice again. I didn’t want to open the lid and poke them out with the end of a mop. I didn’t want them running panicked across the carpet, their terror feeding mine.

  The piano’s an old upright, a cheap Yamaha that Larry, my ex, bought used right out of college, before he even bought a couch. Well, not my ex yet—my almost-ex. My ex-in-progress. I thought, If mice eat out the insides, it’s not the worst thing. An excuse to get something nicer.

  The scratching kept on for almost a week, and every time I hit a note something would scurry around, hit against the strings. I stopped playing the piano. One morning I was sitting at my little glass table eating breakfast, getting my papers ready for the condo I was going to show, and the lid of the piano lifted up. I’m not a big screamer. In fight-or-flight situations, I tend to pick option C: freeze. I just sat there paralyzed, and out climbed what I can only describe as a small troll. It was about a foot tall, and it moved so fast I didn’t even notice its clothes or hair. It ran smack into the side of the couch, then out to the middle of the floor, where it scampered in smaller and smaller circles. I held my papers in front of my legs like a shield, chased it into the vacuum closet, and shut the door. Assuming it was a hallucination—what else would I think?—I tried to put it out of my mind because I had twenty minutes to find a cab, get across the city, and tell the Lindquists why they should invest their eight hundred thousand in a walkup with non-perpendicular hallways. I told myself I had to go because I was about two failures away from fired. It’s possible that I also wanted an excuse to get the hell out of there.

  “It’s a beauty,” I told the Lindquists. “Very raw. And so close to street level! It’s almost earthy!” But Mrs. Lindquist tapped her pink nails on the mantel and said that it didn’t feel like home. I was sure everything would be better when I got back and saw the empty vacuum closet. I reminded myself I’d been dehydrated, that I should drink more than just alcohol and coffee. But when I got home I found my guest fully grown, just a little shorter than I am. He’d let himself out of the closet and was sleeping on the couch.

  I had no idea who he was at first. His clothes looked ancient, but I’m not good at fashion history. All I could tell was old, grimy, European, too much lace at the cuffs for my taste. He doesn’t have a wig as in his pictures, just messy, reddish, greasy hair. But after I stared at him for half an hour, he woke up and walked to the piano and started to play. Just scales at first, like he was getting used to it—and then he launched into a couple of those Inventions that drove me crazy in high school. So I looked up Bach online, and it’s definitely him, the exact same fleshy cheeks, the same dark eyes pinched small between thick brows and heavy, sleepless bags.

  I decided I should look respectable in the presence of a genius, so I started freshening my face every day in the cab on the way home, not just on the way out. I bought a whole pack of razors at Duane Reade and began shaving my legs again. I tidied the apartment, too. I cleaned out the freezer, all those Ziplocs of Larry’s chili, and I finally filled in the missing lightbulbs above the bathroom sink. It was startling to see my face so clearly there—loose skin on my eyelids that caught the green eye shadow in clumps, and my roots growing in gray. I’m only thirty-eight. Johann is supposed to be the one with white hair. I made an appointment for the spa.

  I introduced Johann to soap and deodorant, and the other day while I was gone he finally changed his clothes. Now he’s wearing Larry’s gray flannel shirt and old corduroys. He looks so normal, sometimes I glance up from my magazine and forget it’s not just Larry sitting there, drinking his beer.

  When I was ten years old, my father started the game You Can’t Get Out of the Car Till You’ve Named This Composer. He’d have hidden the cassette case throughout the drive, and he’d only pose the question as he pulled up to the curb where he was dropping me. I would ignore his conversation for blocks, knowing what was coming and concentrating on my guess. My older brother had a practiced method of shouting the name of every major composer in a rapid, memorized succession, a litany that started with “RavelRachmaninovSaint-SaënsBeethoven” and ended with “BuxtehudeChopinSchoenbergBernstein.” I took the more methodical approach, at least establishing a general period before naming my probable suspects. Once, when the answer was Smetana, I sat there until I was half an hour late for swim team. I suppose he’d have been proud of me, identifying Bach so quickly.

  Johann, no surprise, is remarkable at naming composers. Every time we put in a new disc, I’ll say the name, loud and clear—“Schu-bert”—and he’ll repeat it. I’m not sure if he can read the CD covers, or if he’s used to a more gothic script.

  He’s been learning English. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, when I consider that he is a great genius, and he has a good ear and so forth. I came home from an open house the other day and he started pointing around the room, doing nouns. “Table,” he said. “CD Player.” He must get this all from me. I’ve been talking constantly, the way you would with a baby or a dog, things like, “Now I’m putting the milk in your coffee, mmm, that will taste delicious.”

  On my way out of the elevator the next morning, my super stopped me, bobbing her head and smiling. “Such piano you play! You are like concert!”

  “Practice, practice, practice,” I said. And what propelled me out the door and down the street was a mixture of relief that I’m not crazy and panic that there’s a real human being up there who’s not just going to vaporize. So calling a shrink is out, but calling anyone else is out, too, because they’ll think I’m crazy. I find myself wishing the Ghostbusters were real.

  That night, I started telling Johann about my life. I figured, if I can’t take this to a shrink, maybe he can be my shrink. All they do anyway is sit and listen. So I made us a nice meal, chicken with cream sauce and rosemary, and opened some Riesling. “Johann,” I said, “I understand you had something like twenty children. Babies.” I rocked my arms back and forth, and he smiled. “Not to bring up a touchy subject, because I know half of them died, right? Dead?” He looked confused, but just as well. “Back then people dealt with things and moved on. It wasn’t some life-halting devastation because it was the norm. No one went around wailing,
‘Oh, why me, why does God hate me?’ And that’s how I’ve always looked at things. So last year our city was attacked. Let’s just say they knocked down some castles.” I pantomimed it, idiotically, with my arms. “And we’re all terrified, and no one can eat, and no one can sleep. Granted. But to Larry, who didn’t even lose anyone he knew, it threatens his whole worldview, makes him question his religion. I say, ‘So your whole vague, lapsed-Episcopal belief in God was based on those buildings being there? On nothing bad ever happening?’ It was like he’d never previously registered that there was evil in the world. This is the man whose clothes you’re wearing. Clothes. And then Larry says I was more upset when we miscarried last year than when the towers got hit. True, true, but really that was the hormones. Johann, you would not believe how the chemicals can wash over you. Your wives never even had to deal with postpartum, did they? Just got pregnant again and squeezed the next one out.”

  He nodded, used his bread to sop up sauce, yawned. I don’t know if nodding is something he learned from me or if they did that in old Germany. He was looking very American right then, with the haircut I gave him. And his breath has been so much better since he learned to use the electric toothbrush. I assigned him the removable brush head with the blue edging. I have the pink. And he’s not that old, really, maybe forty. I looked him up again online to make sure I hadn’t altered history, stealing him away like that in the middle of his life, but he still seems to have died at sixty-five. I didn’t learn much else new, except that he never liked pianos. Didn’t think they’d last.

  Which is all to say, he’s not bad-looking. It makes you think. Technically he’s a married man, but even more technically, his second wife died three hundred years ago. And it’s not as if I can go out on dates now and leave him alone, and I can’t bring anyone back here. Then there’s this: He’s clearly very fertile, and any child of his would be a musical genius. His sons certainly were, and his daughters might have been, given the chance. Could that be the reason this happened, so I can have his daughter and give her a decent shot at life?