He saw the VU meters start to climb and heard the car engine in the headphones at the same time, and looked up. Oh damn. He did not want to go all the way back to the threshold point he had found back there and start tracking in all over again. Could he just switch off and start it all over again from here? He could include the car noise in the tape. It was part of the real world he had been recording. He could also just edit out the noise later.
He sat down on the porch swing, laid the cassette machine on the seat next to him and adjusted the headphones carefully over his ears. Then he turned on the machine. Danny was setting an arrow on the grip of the bow and pulling back the string. He looked tall and lithe, built like a basketball player. Jane stood beside him and a little bit behind. She had stuck a feather into the back of her hair, and when she saw David had noticed it, she clapped her hand over her mouth a few times, smiling. They were standing on the front edge of the lawn, fifty feet or so from the target, which they had set up directly against a tree, at the line that marked the beginning of the woods.
“You’re going to lose your arrows!” he yelled at them.
They turned toward him and opened their mouths, saying something he could not hear. Danny’s arrow moved in what looked like slow motion, leaping out and up and then settling down again into a sort of groove, and entered the target somewhere close to the bull’s-eye.
He loved to work on the porch, which felt like being in the house and outside it at the same time. He had done some of his composing here, but it was too distracting, finally, and now he saved that for the studio down in the basement (cellar, he reminded himself), where it was cooler and almost totally soundproofed. But often he would dub a mixed tape that he wasn’t quite satisfied with onto a cassette, and then take the Uher up onto the porch, sit on the swing with his headphones on and run it through.
Now he was in that non-space the headphones created. His left ear was listening to waves crashing, with some inland birds calling during the quiet phases and a very high soprano sax playing a staccato lead line laid over the whole thing. His right ear was gripped by a synthesizer generating a repeated syncopated three-bar figure over and over again. The bass was too heavy on this channel and he had changed his mind completely about those crashing waves. There was no way to fix them, no way to make them be felt as ironic. They had to be cut, but that would leave a hole in the texture at this point. He could not think right then what he would put in that place.
Danny walked up to the target, gave him the thumbs-up sign, which he returned, and pulled the arrows out. They had all been tightly bunched around the center, even though he had not hit any bull’s-eyes. Behind him David could feel the house, the solidity of its bricks and its roofs, the big chunky square spaces that its rooms coolly enclosed. It was a great house for the summer. It dated back to the eighteenth century, which probably explained some of its quirks—the way all the rooms on the ground floor were rather small with very high ceilings. The kitchen had actually been separate from the rest of the house, though some later owner had built over and around the breezeway, joining the two parts with a short hall, in the same style and brick as the rest. Then the kitchen had been redone recently: the brick had been exposed (probably re-exposed—in the other rooms the brick had been plastered over), ugly cabinets built in and all the usual convenience and status gadgets installed.
The spaces of these rooms somehow enclosed or included history, too. People had probably sat on this porch wearing silk knee hose and white wigs. Maybe it had been built by descendants of the original Dutch settlers, some burgher who made a handsome living from the sawmill he had built on the stream where François’s father was still building his house. In fact, that house had been a sawmill or the site of one. The people would eat in the dining room behind him wearing their frock coats and their lacy cuffs, the ladies’ brocaded gowns sparkling in the candlelight as three young boys played a Mozart trio, the cadences mixing with the clink of the silver on the china and the conversation.
“Tea?”
“Yes. Tea.”
“In the harbor. I don’t believe it.”
“But it’s true, I tell you.”
“But it’s mad. Dressed up as Indians!”
Mozart. Mozart might work too. Foss had done it with Bach in the Baroque Variations. Bach’s notes ended up sounding like ocean waves, white breakers of sound crashing on some shore. But he wanted to keep the definition of the notes. He could hear the Köchel 282. The kid would have written it just about the time these people behind him were having their conversation. He would have been what—eighteen? He pulled the headphones off. Now he could hear the K. 282 on tape coming over the big speakers in the studio downstairs, the little room gripped in the clarity of that lyricism. He would stop the reels and hold the tape between his thumb and index finger and pull the tape quickly past the playback head, watching the real-time indicator go crazy, hearing all that lyricism flatten out as the notes staccatoed their way out of the machine with no interval at all between them in a hammering, metallic techno-scream. He would have to transpose it all down about two octaves, but it might work. Anselm would make his usual noises about “stealing,” and he would have to explain about stealing. He turned off the cassette machine and stood up. Danny called out to him, “Come on, Dad, see if you can do any better!”
David waved him away and lurched into the house. He sat at the piano picking out what he could remember of the opening of the sonata. It was in E flat. He tried it down two octaves, and then sat with his hands in his lap trying to hear that as it would all come crowding out of the speaker at three times this speed, with the notes stacked up on top of each other the way things looked in a telephoto shot. It sounded a little like some of Nancarrow’s things for player piano, but of course the Mozart had a melodic basis, a solidity of understructure.
He looked around the room, only then realizing the magnitude of the change that had come over him when he walked through the door back into the house, something that skittered around on the skin of his shoulders and upper arms. Outside it was hot, bright and sticky; in here it was cool, dim and comfortable. The crisp whiteness of the walls, the classical proportions and the accents in delft blue, the open lid of the baby grand—they all spoke of civilization, of the straightness of lines and the geometrical arrangements that civilization imposed. Outside his wife and son were shooting arrows and facing a solid wall of woods. That wasn’t any wilderness, by a long shot, but it sure was the opposite of this. Even calling the trees a “wall” was an attempt to impose on them a kind of order that had never resided in them.
But then if the house imposed an order on the world around it, it imposed that order also on the people who lived here. In this living room or parlor, which was on the small side anyway, they had tried to crowd a sofa and a coffee table, a set of speakers and, along with the baby grand, a set of drums and a chord organ. Lost in a corner was Danny’s amp. Being in the room was like trying to relax in an elevator. What the hell must these people have been like?
Anselm knew them, he didn’t know how well. The father had taught in the history department here. History of Law. The wife was a tennis player. She had also done things like organize a women’s chorus for the faculty wives. They were all, obviously, a pretty musical bunch. The son had been something of a prodigy—played all kinds of instruments, wrote poetry, was some sort of whiz kid at electronics, too. He had actually put together the studio downstairs. David was certain the money came from the wife: you sure as hell were not going to put together a studio like that on a history professor’s salary. The boy had been about Danny’s age—twelve—when he’d been killed in an accident. A year ago? Two years ago? Then the father had gone completely to pieces and eventually got involved in a shooting. David had never gotten all the details, and it was of course the details that would bring them to life. Now they were just “the Mortimers,” a name that preserved only a shadow of their actuality in a kind of limbo in which they were neither forgotten nor real
ized.
He went into the kitchen and got a beer out of their fridge. Were they the ones who had chosen these cupboards? Ugh! They couldn’t have been all that filthy-rich, because someone had done a fairly amateurish job of installing the dishwasher: the side panel did not come flush with the wall. A couple of bees were buzzing into the windowpane. He leaned against the counter and picked up the bottle and lifted it to his mouth and drank out of it. He felt the cold beer fill his mouth and slide down his throat. He was curious, standing here in their kitchen, what their conversation must have been like—at breakfast, say. How would you talk to a child prodigy? (Danny was a bright kid, and a pretty talented musician, but—) It must be like dealing with another species, like talking to a Martian. You really could not get more foreign, more other.
But then what must it have been like for the boy? Mozart had been pretty freaky, but only in one area. This kid had composed and written poetry and known enough about electronics to put that studio together. It had taken Anselm three weeks to figure out that one random-switching circuit, and this kid, at eleven or twelve, had in effect built a recording studio, complete with mixing capability and oscilloscope monitoring down there under the house. He had even patched together a number of jerry-rigged random sound generators.
Well, where was the stuff? Where were the poems? Where were the kid’s tapes? Did he write any music down, even performance notes? Where had they gone? He would have to ask Anselm.
The kitchen window looked out into the woods. Its rectangle was filled with a green fluttering as the leaves, stirred by a breeze, alternately caught and reflected the light that drifted down to them. It might have been a window that looked out onto a light shaft. What did it mean to say a man had “gone completely to pieces”? What did it mean to say the boy had “been killed in an accident”? Just a little way through that dense mass of green outside this window, his son was shooting arrows at a target. What would it mean to be the father of a boy who had “been killed in an accident”?
He put the beer on the table and looked at the bees. Their bodies littered the windowsill and the floor under it. Danny had forgotten the bee patrol again. He thought of Frank, the cat the Riordans had gotten for them. He had had no idea he could get to feel that way about an animal. Daniel and Annie had a friend in the Richmond district with a litter of ginger kittens—“marmalade cats,” Jane had called them—and as soon as they saw him they picked out the sharpest-nosed, feistiest little one, and took him home, where he immediately hid in a rosebush. When he poked his head out through the leaves—a marmalade-colored rose with whiskers—Jane wanted to call him Rose.
“You can’t call a male cat Rose.”
So they ended up calling him Frank, and they still kept a photograph of him in the hall: Frank, lying on a pillow, the afternoon light coming through the windows and through the brass bars of their bed. Even in repose he had some of that sharp-nosed, feisty quickness. David could never have predicted that he would cry the night the McCormacks, the neighbors from behind them, had knocked at ten-thirty. He had been sitting in the living room reading and they had told him, “Your little cat is lying on the sidewalk over there. I don’t know if he’s dead or anything, but he doesn’t look good.”
Someone had given him a cardboard box. Frank was lying on his side with his eyes closed, his sharp nose still. He did not have any mark of violence on him, except for some blood that had dripped out of his mouth and thickened a little on the sidewalk under his head, glistening in the hard light of the streetlamp, but he lay there with his different legs crumpled under him or sticking out in a way that nothing that was alive would lie that way. David used the box to pick up the body of Frank, which was already beginning to stiffen, and he heard himself whimpering. He had to tell Danny. A cat. How had he died? It was impossible.
He took the beer and went out onto the porch to get the cassette. He would have to call Anselm to get the Mozart from the music library. He would also probably have to tape it at the college. As he picked up the cassette, Danny called out to him.
Across from the chapel, Danny pointed out a tiny stone building with stained-glass windows that David had simply assumed was some sort of smaller, private chapel. “Have you seen this?” Danny asked.
“Oh sure.”
“No, I mean what’s underneath it.”
They walked over and David read that it was the family vault of the Barstows, the family that had founded the college. They looked in through the barred gate. Danny pointed to a doorway in the side wall, across from the altar. “Know where that goes?” he asked.
“Another vault, I guess.”
Danny beckoned him around the corner, where he showed him a hole where the bricks had fallen away, down at ground level. The hole looked down into the cellar of the vault. A short flight of stairs led down from the door Danny had pointed out. The long marble boxes were stacked neatly against the walls.
Danny pointed down into the cellar with a smile and said, “Nineteenth-century recording and de-composing studio.”
“Ugh!” David said.
The poems were a gift of love. LOVE SONGS TO DEATH from her own child. Only for the sweetness of saying “No.”
That was what the poems said when David did find them.
Someone, the Mortimer boy in all probability, had written that across the title page of the typescript of the poems, and had put the black spring binder that contained them on top of a shelf of tapes in the studio down in the cellar, where David found them the same day he totally re-envisioned the piece he and Anselm were working on and decided to tape the voice of the house itself, LOVE SONGS TO DEATH was typed in caps, centered on the page, and everything else was written in what he took to be the kid’s handwriting, using a pen with a very wide nib.
He had been lying in bed with Jane in the afternoon. Danny had gone off with François to a place that was actually called Bishbash Falls, and they would have the house to themselves. He had gone down to the studio to work, but knew he would just putter around for a while, till one of them would start it and then they would decide to “take a nap.” And sure enough, Jane came down with the mail, calling down the stairs, “Requesting permission to enter the catacombs! Mail call!” The people who had rented their own house for the summer—the Jerk family (that was Danny’s name for them)—had written to say that the burglar-alarm people had come to install the system and that it was working fine. And the cats were fine. Oh, and also they had had a small flood in the upstairs bathroom that wasn’t their fault and they sincerely believed they should not be charged for it—it had caused only “barely noticeable” water damage in the ceiling of the living room. Bullshit. Edith Sanders had written Jane, and in the middle of her letter gave them another view of the jerks: that Edward Jerk, the father, hung around on the landing at the top of the stairs trying to get a look into their daughter’s bedroom window. What a creep, trying to pry into their private lives like that. Jannie felt violated and of course now refused to do any baby-sitting for them. There was also a good note from Michael Harrison in San Diego. But nothing from the Riordans.
The day was bright and hot, though heavy, and it was supposed to storm up later, maybe tonight. It was pleasant sitting on the porch swing reading their mail with some Haydn drifting out to them from the cool inside of the house like the ice clinking in a glass. Jane was wearing shorts and a blouse he could not really see through but that made him want to try. Her torso was long, and though she complained that her legs were too short they seemed fine to him. She put her hands behind her head and stretched, smiling at him, and there were her breasts. He went over behind her and kissed her behind the ear, saying, “Mmm, you’re wearing perfume.”
“You finally noticed,” she said. “I was wondering what it would take to get you out of that tomb of yours.”
“Tomb?” he said. “I’d always thought of it as nice and womby. And speaking of wombs ...”
They went upstairs and made love very slowly and deliciously in the dim
ness of the Mortimers’ bedroom, with all the windows open but the shutters closed, and afterward he lay there in a half-doze, looking at the changing patterns of light on the ceiling and listening to the sounds of the woods and the sounds of the house. There was one sound in particular, or a group of sounds, he was trying to hear. It was a series of ticks and groans, some of them coming together to make what would have been a perfect fifth, except the high one was a little flat. An imperfect fifth. The house was playing double-stops on itself. His stomach gave a long rumble. He had been hearing that imperfect fifth regularly for some time now, in the morning and again in the evening, but only if he remembered to listen for it. It was obviously the house expanding and contracting with the changes in temperature, and the sound (or sounds) seemed to come from somewhere below him, somewhere deep in the understructure of the house. He told himself he would find it one of these days.
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