The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  David took a sixth laudanum drop and held the bead to the light before putting it in his mouth. A wind had begun to blow, a whisper of which stirred his pubic hair. He and Chopin began to talk of women as women walked by.

  “Why are there so many older men with younger women?” David asked.

  “Is that so hard to understand?”

  David rolled onto his side to watch a passing pair. “I mean, how do they get away with it? Why is it so public here?”

  “I knew a man, Dr. Bixel,” Chopin said. “He married a seventeen-year-old girl when he was sixty-three.”

  “I know people who have years between them, but not all at the beginning like that,” David said.

  “Dr. Bixel’s first wife died. The girl he married was his late wife’s niece.”

  “Isn’t that slightly incestuous?” David asked.

  Chopin trilled his second and third finger on his own chest, there where it seemed something had been taken out. “Poor girl,” he said. “She did not understand why everyone pitied her.”

  “They’re just so public about it here."

  “But why not public?” Chopin asked, sitting up. He reached for his shirt and began to put it on. His tie lay out like a dried fish. The sun dipped below the buildings, casting a cool shadow. A dark quiet fell on the breeze, which now bore the odor of the night already covering land far to the east.

  “I think this mix of old and young means…it means three things,” David mused, feeling his own clothes for dampness. “One, that the guy’s got wealth, two, he’s an incredible lover, or three, the girl has problems.”

  “What about you?”

  “Younger women?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” David said, then remembered the student he’d brought home. But the memory was distant, hazy, almost indistinct from rumor. “No. They sound too young. You?”

  “No,” Chopin said.

  “Of all your piano students?”

  Chopin stood to place his feet through the legs of his pants. “Never,” he said, adamantly. “Although to guide their little fingers on the keys, ah, that itself can bring one a few moments of bliss.”

  David remembered Chopin having said something similar before, wondered when, then recalled that Chopin’s reply lay within a collection of the composer’s letters. He wondered if everything Chopin was telling him lay within public reach, already written down. Three women walked towards them, their laughter a common language that kept their nationality open. They were pretty and tall, their hair blonde against skin of the fleshy kind. Hallmarks of nineteenth century beauty, though these women were thoroughly modern.

  “Allemagne. The women were not beautiful in Berlin,” Chopin said.

  “These women aren’t from Berlin, then.”

  “What makes you so certain?” Chopin said, examining them closer as they passed. He paused. “You may be correct. They look like Polish women.”

  “Polish women are good-looking?” David asked as he dressed.

  “They could always bring me out of my melancholy,” Chopin said, then smiled.

  The two of them moved down the esplanade again, now quickly emptying of sunbathers and giving way to couples in evening dress. “You never got married. Why?” David asked.

  “No,” Chopin sighed. “No love can replace the first love. The one. An innocent relationship turned to dust by the most mundane things. The way she offered a chair to another man before me.” He sighed again. “But conversely, a man only truly knows his faults when he’s with a woman. Of course, knowledge of one’s own inequity stops few men. One can, like Liszt, build a life around women. I lent him my apartment on numerous occasions for his little trysts, unwillingly of course. Always a bit afraid that I would return to find Franz’s lovers not yet gone, or something left over, a necklace or scarf, something that would spoil the room. But even among these friends, even in the freedom of Paris, it was hard to get the crucifix out of one’s head. Look at Liszt. He turned religious at the end, becoming Canon of Albano! But what am I saying,” Chopin laughed. “Women. I can’t even dance the waltz. There you have me. I can write the music, know the steps, but cannot dance it. Besides, all my life I’ve been nearer a coffin than a marriage bed. What about you?”

  “No, no first loves of that kind,” David said, unable to remember, although it seemed as though there must have been one, a woman no one would remember because he’d never mentioned her. “I have a wife, though. She was in Paris when I was crushed.”

  A raindrop landed on David’s neck like a moth. The day’s humidity had rallied into early evening thunderheads. The approaching rain roared like a distant waterfall.

  “Come with me,” Fryderyk said, taking David by the arm. They descended into a nearby metro tunnel just as the air cracked with thunder and the skies opened. “I’m in a nostalgic mood.”

  Chapter 13

  The lights inside the concert hall began to dim just as David and Chopin arrived. The audience’s whispers grew momentarily louder as the darkness increased, as though their words needed to be spoken now, or else be swallowed and forgotten. David had attended his fair share of concerts with Bianca, but he had never been a whisperer like almost everyone else here. He never felt he had something to say which couldn’t wait until the concert was over. But he had always liked listening to the sound of an audience and the way a thousand conversations could draw to a simultaneous close.

  Chopin gestured. “This way.”

  After sunbathing, David had followed Chopin onto metro cars, down streets and past small dark parks. He continued following him here in the interior darkness of the concert hall, now through an open doorway, up a flight of stairs, then up another of spiraling metal that elevated them to a catwalk hanging over the stage. David slowed. Under most circumstances, he was not afraid of heights. The fear only entered him when he dealt with heights over unknown or unusual surroundings, like the orchestra below him. The entire catwalk swayed imperceptibly. He gripped the handrail and followed Chopin.

  Below them, the funereal black piano gleamed like polished stone. Applause showered through the audience like rain as a conductor took to the stage from a side door. He bowed, faced the orchestra and took up a baton. The musicians appeared tense to David, their hands aflutter with tics as they loosened joints and shook out the urbane and inconsequential movements since they’d last played. They twitched and moved uneasily in their seats, adjusting their coattails and flattening the creases of their black dresses. Then they began fitting their instruments to their bodies with great deliberateness, as though searching for the most comfortable position in which to bear something of great weight for a long time.

  A young man emerged from the same door as the conductor, turning the remaining drizzle of applause back to full storm. He walked in front of the concert grand and bowed deeply, like a Japanese man of low rank. His smile vanished as he took his place at the piano. His eyes showed a far-off gaze, like someone waiting for a plane to appear, or the evening’s first planet. Examining the keys as though to make sure they were all there, the pianist then glanced up, met the conductor’s eye and nodded. It was the only outward gesture of a telepathy they seemed to share.

  The first few rows of the audience were illuminated by the stage’s glow. David’s eyes lingered on a tragic-looking woman, the kind of woman to whom he’d always felt drawn. Then he wondered if this was true or just a line he’d jotted down someplace. He’d never imagined the consequence of scribbles.

  “My second piano concerto,” Chopin whispered, as the concert began. “My youth.” His legs dangled over the catwalk, his forehead pressed against the hand rail, and his undone white tie hung plumb over the pianist’s slightly balding head below. The concerto began and made the concert hall seem to have never held stale silence or the rise-and-fall whispering of ten thousand syllables. Like life itself, music gave off an illusion that it had always been there, and would continue, ceaselessly. From David’s vantage point, the violinists’ bows wer
e like stalks of grain weighed down by the force of a wind. The bows spread apart, then rolled together as a musical gust darted over the field of musicians. In the brief pauses when the violinists didn’t play, the scattered bows gave the impression that the wind-like thing had spread out to the edges of the field of strings, to the slow broad cellos, and from there dispersed. But quickly, the wind would return, bringing the scattered bows back into a unison of movement. The pale wrists of violinists flicked in unison. David thought the correlation between the music and the movement had all the intrigue of magnetism. A giant pull above or below the stage that affected the direction of the bows, and he wasn’t sure if the movement made the music, or if the music made the movement, or both.

  The orchestra gazed intermittently at the score—each stand shared by two musicians—while the pianist went unaided through his ten thousand notes, each played at its own speed, weight and touch in relation to those to come, or those yet sounding and dampened by the pedal. Such physical proximity to the music was enough to make David dizzier than heights could. There seemed something else at work, some occult beauty taking over the pianist, although David knew the art was mostly work. Yet the suspicion remained. David found himself listening more intently than he’d ever listened. The piece was filled with sentimentality—something he’d always tried to avoid in life, mostly because the word carried a stigma of insincerity, a play-act of love or loss. He made it a point to teach his students the difference between sentiments and sentimentality. The latter was something to be avoided in writing, in music, in art, in love, because its evocation wasn’t true. Sentimentality tugged on heart strings. Although now, David wasn’t so sure. He recalled that Chopin had written the piano concerto with a young woman in mind, Konstancia Gladkowska, a Polish singer, of which no desired relationship came. After a quarter of an hour of listening, David found himself weeping a charade of tears that hurt as much as living tears. Sentimentality seemed anything but disingenuous. The music evoked emotions without the composer’s person present to attest to the love or affection—at least as far as the audience could appreciate. It was the ghost of love from another century playing out now before the audience, from which a few damp eyes wet the darkness, exhibiting the tears of joy or sadness, perhaps half-chastising themselves for reacting so to music, and yet—like David himself staring out over the audience—finding themselves helpless. It was sentimentality that endured and held evocative power. It was sentimentality that was far more immortal than the short run of true feelings toward a true love. It leapt over time and death. David could then think of only two forces that bore infinity in their grammar. Sentimentality was one. The other, fear.

  For some time, David’s eyes had rested on a violinist’s wrist, white amid the blackness of tuxedos and gowns. And so he was surprised when he spotted Fryderyk walking into his view, down below on the stage. David’s gaze shot down the catwalk, empty now but for the row of unlit spotlights. Below, Chopin stepped calmly in front of the orchestra, approaching the pianist from behind. By now, the piece was in its final movement. Fryderyk Chopin hovered a hand over the pianist’s back, like a blind man testing the willingness of the sighted to guide. The pianist’s hair was black and wet, the balding spot on his head more visible, the tips of his hair like quills. Chopin touched the pianist and brought his other hand to rest on the man’s other shoulder. The music softened perceptibly and became more delicate. The conductor glanced at the pianist several times, but did not receive a response until the end of the performance, when the pianist’s face shone with reverie.

  When the conductor turned to the audience, David too stood and applauded, even if it meant being unseen and unheard, high up on the catwalk. The audience rose in their seats. He felt both ashamed and proud to have spent the day with Chopin. Imagine, he thought, to have swum and chatted about nothing, to have forgotten there was this music in him. The pianist collected bouquets brought forward by elegantly dressed girls unused to both formal gowns and presenting flowers. He handed a rose to a violinist who wove the stem into the strings of her instrument. David felt so uplifted by the day and the concert that it was not until the pianist emerged from the wings for a third bow that David noticed Chopin had left the stage. David hurried the length of the catwalk, then down the stairs, hoping to glimpse him again near the stage. By now, though, the audience had begun to collect their light summer jackets and purses and head toward the exits.

  “Chopin!” David shouted. He thought he saw a glimpse of a man in a white tie leaving through an exit. “Fryderyk!”

  A mis-aimed spotlight cut through the air, illuminating a balcony where people moved anxiously out of the bleaching light, a pipe of lit air swirling with dust. Then, in the distant edge of the dispersing crowd below, David recognized Chase, the photographer from the cafe. Beside him was a familiar face who had her arm in his. It was Jade, their neighbor from home. Beside them both, he spotted Gaudin and, to David’s surprise, Bianca. The sight of his wife made him gasp with want. To touch her, speak to her, to cry in her arms, to relive his life knowing what was and wasn’t important. To treat life as though it really ended and give the concentrate of his yet unexperienced happiness to her in a kiss, a whisper in the night. To merely keep his eyes on her. For her to merely look his way. Was this just sentimentality, he thought, and did it matter? Bianca wore a black dress and the necklace he’d given her on their fifth anniversary. She was neither smiling nor seemed sad. Gaudin whispered something to her and she turned away to hear him.

  “Bianca!” David shouted, climbing onto the stage to get a better view. He had not seen her since the morning of the fall. When he had visited the apartment, it had been locked. He had stayed for an entire day and night for her to return before realizing she was gone. And now, here she was! The stray spotlight was being moved back into its correct position, the light momentarily crossing into David’s path, blinding him and filling him with dread that he might, at such a precipitous moment, disappear. He knew it would come to this eventually, whiteness or darkness and then, nothing. The light left him and he was again in the rich dimness of the hall. Somewhere, memories of himself stoked in the minds of others.

  “Bianca!” he again shouted. She did not turn. He felt torn between making his way through the entire crowd to her, or following the faint promise of Chopin’s white tie. Between the woman he loved but who could not hear him, or the man who could see him but was long since dead. He dove into the crowd, blindly following Bianca. He hoped to see her outside, and if she could not hear him, to at least look at her, perhaps catch a glimpse of her mind through the pupils of her eyes.

  Outside, a heavy night rain with a bite of chill in it had replaced the long, hot day. The promise of another morning seem tenable. The departing crowd leapt into taxis and disappeared down streets. In the darkness, David felt like a traveler without a guidebook, someone who has led himself down some ill-chosen alley in a land with foreign gods. He saw no one who resembled Bianca. Heard no catch of her voice. Instead, he detected the trot of horses and saw a carriage ride past. Fryderyk waved from within.

  “The one!” Chopin shouted. “The one!”

  A woman laughed from inside the carriage as the whole vision disappeared around the corner, the sound of the horses’ hooves scrubbed from the air by the falling rain. It had been so long since he’d heard laughter. David remembered how, more than any other sound he could cause to issue from a woman’s lips, laughter was his highest pleasure. Bringing Bianca to laughter was a satisfaction greater than the result of any concupiscence. David wiped the rain from his face and then examined his hands. They seemed to belong to someone else. That sense of proprioception—of his body in space that had come back to him upon seeing Chopin—was faltering, making him feel present one moment, then as though he were steering his body from the distance of galaxies. He needed to send word to those who thought of him. He needed, soon, to revisit Baptiste.

  As he faltered down the steps, feet unsure, David spotted the inves
tigator Gaudin. Bianca, Chase and Jade were not beside him. Not willing to gamble another night in the city alone, David hurried after Gaudin, following the back of a light coat that soaked up the spattering rain. There was a flash in the sky, followed by the faint crack of a bottle rocket’s burst. David waited for more, but the rain had already rinsed the smoke from the sky.

  From an open window in Gaudin’s apartment, David watched the tattered tail of the rainstorm. The puddled streets grew smooth and reflective, like obsidian and opal. David collapsed into a chair and listened to the sound of spray from cars driving down the nearby boulevard. On a table in front of him lay an undecipherable scrawl of notes. David’s command of French limited him to understanding only a few words of the handwriting, and these words were unspecific and meaningless without more contextual clues. He noticed that Gaudin had acquired Regi’s translated text and notes of the Chopin book, as well as some of David’s own notebooks. The smallest notebook lay open to a sentence. David read it for the tenth time that evening: Night fell on him like a voluptuous lover; fragrant, moist, then almost uncomfortably heavy, the lightness of anticipation missing, or the gravity of the act somehow more affecting. David remembered when and where he’d written that line, during a break in one of his classes while a student was talking to him endlessly about some film and he was pretending to take down the names of the director and principle actors. He also remembered the vase that would later be tipped and broken by this student. How much he’d wished he’d seen the film—her favorite film—before he called off the brief affair. The film had been about suicide. He had to drive to her in the middle of the night and calm her down, pushing her mind in a new direction, debasing himself for her sake. He left her in her apartment bedroom with a scowling friend, then drove home, his glove compartment filled with the cutlery he’d taken from her butcher block on his unescorted way out to his car. If he’d broken her confused heart, he didn’t want her stabbing it, too. He was always worried about people’s precipitous instability, but reprehensibly inept at discerning their hair triggers.