“Well, what’s to see? A thunderstorm is a thunderstorm.”
David went to refill his drink. Jane was sitting at the table in the dining room. “Did you hear that?” he asked her.
“Oh yeah. He’s twelve. He isn’t going to be impressed by anything—”
He clinked the ice in his glass at her and asked, “Want one?”
“Sure. I’ll be out there in a minute. I just want to finish this letter to Annie.”
“Tell them if they don’t write us a letter or give us a call we’ll disown them.”
The first rumble of thunder came rolling in, tumbling into their hearing from across the river, from some other world on the far side of the horizon. Then the rains came in, with almost no wind at all. Just weight. When the full Wagnerian force of the storm took over, they turned off all the lights and sat on the porch, hearing and seeing and feeling the way it simply moved in and took command of the entire perceivable world.
“You were right,” Danny said. “It is impressive. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
David smiled, but realized also an aftertaste of sadness, a feeling of loss. He had shown the boy something he had never seen before, but that also meant he had crossed another threshold. For Danny now there would never again be another first time he experienced an electrical storm. The ones to come would all look back to this one.
As he came through the door, he recognized the music as “something familiar.” After a moment or two he realized it was his own string quartet. “Why did you put this old thing on?”
“I don’t know,” Jane said. “I was just going through our records and there it was, and I realized I hadn’t heard it in a long time. Must be years. I’ve always liked it.
“What do you feel like cooking? I got some lamb chops from that butcher in Rhinebeck—want to try those?”
“Sure,” he said.
Listening to this quartet for him was being in a room. The room was large, a little longer than it was wide, and bare. As the thread of the quartet unwound itself, it placed things in that barrenness so that as he turned his head in one direction or another he saw the things that now gave every indication of “having been there all along”—a piece of furniture, a toy heart made out of red plastic that “beat” when you wound it up, the window that he now saw was an old-fashioned window made up of many small square panes, and on its sill was a tin box that said “Huntley & Palmers Superior Reading Biscuits,” and below that, on the floor, a basket full of skeins of woolen yarn, mostly reds, browns and yellows. The room was large enough to contain the fifteen or more years since it had been composed.
He had finished it in the morning of a day when they were supposed to go to a party. They were supposed to go to a party tonight, at Anselm’s. They had been living in Cambridge then, “living in sin” in a small flat on Flagg Street, around the corner from the Orson Welles Theater, and they had been invited to a party by these architect types who lived in a famous apartment in Somerville that was just two rooms wide and three stories high. The sound of thunder mixed with Wagner came down to them from on high, and he said as he looked up to the ceiling, “Der Kinder.”
“Yeah,” Jane said. “At least it keeps them out of trouble.”
She had woken up that morning in Cambridge—they were still sleeping on a mattress on the floor—feeling awful, and by noon she had thrown up a couple of times, her broad Swedish face looking pale, framed by her blonde hair, which she wore short then. He had felt an excitement since finishing the quartet around ten o’clock that morning, an indescribable anticipation that had diffused itself throughout his whole body. He had needed that party at the same time that he had known it could never possibly live up to what he wanted from it, which he could not even have put into words. She had told him to go on without her. Now he heard the main theme restated by the viola. “You’re still thinking about the Riordans, huh?” he asked her.
“Yeah. I keep thinking about Annie. I know I’m not supposed to get pissed at Daniel, but I just feel like getting plastered.”
“Why don’t you?” he said.
Now the room in the quartet was showing him a set of orange crates, painted bright blue and filled with records, stacked against the wall under the print by Jim Dine. He had gone to the party, and found himself “attached to” by a blonde, also from California, who played second violin in an amateur chamber orchestra in Boston and still managed, as she put it, to find time to be married to a graduate student in classics. He was also at home, sick, and could David give her a ride home to Watertown? He had been seeing her at parties and concerts and poetry readings, but he could not recall exactly when they had actually met. She simply insisted that the California contingent had to stick together. Maureen Quincy. On top of the blue orange crates was a small plastic gadget that punched out labels. It was sitting on a large, flat cardboard box, which Jane had made and covered with buckram, like the binding of a fine book, and on the spine of the box she had just punched out with the little gadget: “David Lyman: Collected Works.”
He hugged her now, feeling the tall, brick space of the Mortimers’ kitchen around them that could not hold the four voices of the quartet which were now following each other at a walk around that other room, just walking now, but that movement charged with an anticipation that made it feel as if they were always on the verge of running. This is what being really married meant, he thought. It was a music. It created a room or a house that went with you wherever you went, penetrating the walls and roofs of any room or house you found yourself in. He had needed the party so much it could not fail him. The party was a playing field three stories high where he could run up and down all night long, while the others went on with the business of their games. He knew just enough people just well enough to keep circulating in that way, and even the dancing with Maureen was O.K., until he realized she was making her move. He was “available,” she must have thought, and an edge of hard brightness came into her manner, as well as an almost proprietary readiness to touch him—on the hand, on the arm, on the elbow. At one point, talking to a law student with a glass of sherry in his hand, David heard himself being told, “You were right to come out East and see what civilization is really like.” The Maureen woman standing next to him had actually given the man a raspberry, and David had smiled and thought, Well, she does have some socially redeeming value. But outside, in the painfully cold night air of January, she had slipped once on some ice and grabbed his arm and then “forgot” to let go. The intensity of her need embarrassed him, and at the same time made him feel almost protective. All the way out to Watertown she filled the interior of his car with her talk and her gestures, laughing and putting her hand on his shoulder. “He’s a Casaubon,” she said, finally, about Charlie, her husband, coming down a long slide of very strained humor to land on this note of seriousness and revelation that was able to include also her “Right here,” as she pointed out her apartment building.
He said, “What’s a Casaubon?” as he nosed the car into the curb, where his headlights glared back at him from a waist-high pile of frozen snow. It was dirty.
“A bookworm,” she said.
“Well,” he said, leaving the motor running.
She did not want to stop talking. “It’s a half a block up the street. Could you walk me?” touching his hand. “I feel sort of funny about asking, but please—”
At the door of her building she turned toward him—she had not yet gotten her key out—and said brightly, “It feels like we’ve been on a date. ‘Thank you for a very lovely evening.’ ” She reached her pursed mouth up to him to give him a playful imitation of a friendly goodnight kiss. He thought, So this is what other people’s marriages are like, as he felt that gritty, bitterly cold wind stumbling around his pants legs down below his coat. They were both so bundled up in woolens and gloves and mufflers that he went ahead and went along with it. It would hurt her feelings not to. But suddenly his mouth was full of her tongue and she was grabbing him through all those layers of w
ool and saying, “Oh, David,” and telling him to come on upstairs.
“But your husband—”
“We can go in Wade and Christie’s apartment. They’re in California. I’ve got the key.”
“Look,” he started to say. And the next thing he knew he was walking up a short, dimly lit flight of hallway stairs, and then he was pinned against the inside of the front door of “Wade and Christie’s” apartment, looking down the long straight hall toward the kitchen. He could feel her mittens at the back of his neck and the thick, woolen weight of her against his chest. Looking over her shoulder down that hallway was like standing in a square tube or conduit that was ready, waiting to be filled, to convey some fluid. It was as cold in this apartment as it was outside. “Look,” he started to say, his breath steaming. On his right a door opened onto a living room where a fireplace had been converted to a gas heater. Above the mantel was a mirror that showed him the blank yellow of a wall in the middle of which floated two pictures that might have been Utrillos.
“Why can’t he be like you,” she was saying, “alive.”
“Look,” he kept starting to say. The sliding doors between the living room and the bedroom were open.
“This is crazy,” he said. He was standing inside somebody else’s apartment, somebody named “Wade and Christie,” whom he had never met, and in this place where these total strangers had their lives he was being forcibly seduced by the wife of somebody else whom he had never met, someone named Charlie, a scholar of classics, a bookworm who might this very minute be upstairs, just a few feet above his head, trying to translate Cicero but being constantly distracted from it by paranoid fantasies of this sexy blonde from California he had married two years ago because she seemed so strong and who was now lying face down with her rear end draped over the armrest of the sofa in the living room of the Chelsea Street apartment of an Arab architecture student whom she had picked up at this party to which Charlie had insisted she go without him, and who was now standing between her spread haunches, his pants spilled around his shoes on the red kilim, fucking her in the ass while she hugged the cushion of the couch to her bosom and whimpered like a dog with pleasure. How many lives could he stand in the middle of at once?
“I know it’s crazy,” she said. “It’s mad and it’s bad and it’s sad, but oh it’s sweet! When I saw you conducting the Mahler I said to myself, ‘God, what an animal!’ ”
Through the sliding doors, two rooms away, he could see a lamp on the nightstand next to the bed, a plastic lamp in the shape of a goose. It didn’t look like a child’s bedroom.
“This is awful,” he said now to Jane. “Do you mind if I turn this off? I’d like to hear some Cecil Taylor.”
“Sure,” Jane said.
The party at Anselm’s was a little dull. In the car on the way back, Jane had said, “The men are all being very subtle about going into the other room to snort cocaine, and the wives are still telling jokes about their pet rocks. I love Anselm as much as you do, but those video people from the city are the pits. Competitive? Dog-eat-dog? And this is supposed to be the capital of civilization.”
When they got back to the house, Danny and François met them at the front door to tell them about their adventure. They had gone outside to shoot off the last of the firecrackers, and then realized they had locked themselves out. François gave him a boost up onto the roof of the back porch, and Danny had gotten in through the window. The slanted roof was really slippery, but getting in the window was easy. Anyway, while he was up there he found the beehive, and in snooping around it had actually riled up the bees and he got stung once, on the back of his head. “But now we know the source of the bees,” Danny said.
“Wonderful,” Jane said. “We solve all the mysteries just before we have to leave the house.”
The next morning, packing the car, he looked down the driveway at the back porch and the metal roof that sloped up from it to the window Danny had climbed in. It was a foolish thing to do. They could have hung around outside for a couple of hours until the party was over, or they could have walked up to the college to use a phone to call Anselm’s. The sun that was shining now on the window and the roof and the driveway would be shining like this too, even if the night before had brought them some bad luck.
They were an endless source of worry. If it was not falling out a window or off a roof, it was getting run over. By a beer truck. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. You worried about them falling off the roof trying to get in the second-story window, and then you worried about them getting too good at getting into second-story windows and ending up like that kid who had ripped them off. Albert Boone. The police had spotted the license number and David had picked him out of a lineup the day before they left California. Twenty-five years old. A six-time loser. He had never held a job and didn’t even have a social security number. His arrests were handled routinely by the Career Criminal Division of the D. A.’s office. He was a tall, good-looking kid who was built like a basketball player and had a light of something in his eye that David admired, the way he’d admired the washcloth over the license plate. At the lineup he had strolled into the booth wearing his white prison jump suit with an arrogant, animal grace, and had blown a kiss at the unseen audience on the other side of the glass. David had wanted to applaud him then. But the romance of the gesture had to be followed by the reality of lived time. Another waste.
And the Mortimer boy, that Mozart-Rimbaud-Norbert-Wiener. At age twelve, crushed under the wheels of a beer truck. And the father, “a brilliant and tireless researcher,” the dust jacket of his book had said, indicted for “murder one,” as the TV cops would put it, before his son had even discovered girls. Danny, too, for all his swagger, only looked at the music-camp girls. He was still at that age, in spite of his size and his apparent maturity, when he did his wrestling and grab-assing with François and other boys. Jane had wanted to say something to him about the girls from the music camp, but what the hell. Soon enough. Soon enough David would find copies of Playboy in the back of his drawer, or a handful of those little foil-wrapped rubbers. Plenty soon enough the child in him would die. And even though it had to happen and everyone wanted it to, everyone but the boy himself felt the loss. Maybe the boy felt it too. Maybe later.
The path entered the woods by a “door” in this wall of trees, and even for twenty-five feet or so inside these woods you could still look back and see the house through a couple of “windows” in the branches of the outermost trees. He hefted the shoulder strap of the Uher and began to adjust the headphones over his ears. As he walked, he held the long barrel of Anselm’s mike out in front of him. He felt like a fisherman or a hunter. And so I am, he thought. He aimed the mike at a bird on a branch some fifty feet away, and heard its chirps come through the headphones with piercing clarity. But two feet in either direction and the bird faded out.
It felt strange to be carrying this extremely sophisticated equipment in here, in the ferny green shade of these woods. But that’s what it took, he thought, to bring it back alive. He saw a small clump of Indian pipe, a tall, slender fungus that looked like a translucent waxy-white flower in the shape of a pipe. They were growing out of an old dead log. And here were some tiger lilies in a row along the path, just like the ones along the driveway.
As he walked along, he swept the barrel of the microphone slowly this way and that in front of him, covering the woods on either side of the path. He had the machine set on pause, and was ready to take whatever the woods might give him—if he liked it. So far there had been nothing but the generalized background noise of leaves and branches moving in a small forest. He wasn’t looking (or listening) for anything in particular; he only knew that if something were to come in now over the headphones, something O.K., he would recognize it as such. Like the voice of the house, that imperfect fifth.
On one sweep he heard something crunching, repeatedly, and aimed the mike. It was something chewing. Some small animal, a squirrel or a groundhog. He could hear when
the animal was biting a piece off or when he was chewing a mouthful. It was chewing on something chunky and crisp, like a root or a nut. This was charming. This was an aspect of the woods he had never really thought of. Of course he knew about it all along, but somehow he never consciously thought of the woods as a place where animals ate. Sometimes each other.
He passed the clearing where somebody had set up a small “living room”—couch, easy chair, coffee table, a floor lamp. Even a picture hanging from the ivy-covered trunk of a beech tree. It had been there a long time and had taken a beating. When they had first walked past it, David had thought the Mortimers had put it there, but François told him, “No. Acidheads from the college. They would come here to trip out”
François said, “There. See him?” very softly.
He had heard François’s voice over the headphones. He looked in the direction the microphone was aiming. The bushes were over his head. He could not see anything but the mass of twiggy, leafy branches and trunks of trees, bushes with long, pointed leaves and trees with broad, flat ones, heavy limbs that moved horizontally and masses of thinner branches ramifying in all directions, most of them masked by the green of the leaves. They formed a “wall” he knew would be many feet thick. Somewhere in the middle of that world, unseen, François said again, “There,” and David heard the electronic reconstruction of his voice come through the headphones over his ears. Then he heard Danny’s voice saying, very coldly, as if preoccupied with something else, “Yeah, I see him. I’ll waste the fucker’s ass.” And then a twang! so loud it startled him. He flinched and found himself paralyzed with horror at what he was hearing. When he flinched, the barrel of the mike jerked to the right, and through the headphones he heard a thwup, like a thick body being struck. And then the screams. Someone was dying. Something had struck him—no, her: it sounded like a woman—and she was bleeding and dying, and the screams were enraged and helpless. They were the whole life of that woman giving itself to the speaking of this one panicky bellowing “No!” to death. Trying to say “No” to death. The sound went straight through his breast. The screams were now even gargling, as if the blood had entered the throat, entered the voice itself.
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