Elegy on Kinderklavier

by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

  “Where is Charlie?” he asks, groggy. He’s called his mother by her first name ever since she stopped coming to the hospital consistently. It’s clear he means this as an insult to her, though when she does show up he offers the formality dully, like instead of meaning it to really hurt her he just wants the situation between the two of them to be clear.

  His question, though, is really meant to be a jab at me. A taunt, maybe. It’s useless to try to tell which one, how much malice this stormily intelligent young son of mine can muster. He asks where she is every morning, mostly because he knows that I don’t know. It’s his version of a benediction for the day, a dry thesis for the kind of uselessness his hours will inevitably prove to be. I don’t know where Charlie is. I don’t know if she’s on one of her jags, in which case she is probably wrapped up in the covers of our bed or cocooned on our couch in front of the TV, paralyzed by depression; I don’t know if she’s not left the flat for days, if she’s eaten this week. Or she could be gone, vanished during one of her different periods, wandering any of the tourist sites of our little island country, as she calls it.

  When I answer I try to say something different every time.

  “She’s on a sailing adventure,” I say today. It’s unclear how much I’m taunting him back, how much I’m just tired. “There’s a squall kicking up. She’s somewhere cold, somewhere where the tips of the waves are being sliced off by the wind and stinging her face.”

  Most days I don’t say anything.

  We’re waiting for the people from radiology to come get Haim for his targeted therapy. He has to be under sedation for it, which he likes; a few hours’ escape from full-blown consciousness. But this means he can’t eat anything beforehand, so we don’t talk much until it’s time, because not being able to eat makes Haim miserable. When he wakes up afterward, after sleeping off the sedatives for a few hours, the imagination in his food order will be something to behold. Breakfast burritos! French fries! Sardines! Each time when the food comes he marshals the cart in with fussy waves of the laminated menu, an annoyed maître d’. There is a moment, once I’ve got the dishes arrayed out in front of him on the tray of his hospital bed, when he regards it all greedily, not touching anything yet, and he seems, for a few seconds anyway, to have been completely transported, to have come into some other kind of life entirely.

  •

  These things don’t have a beginning, not really. I’ve reached now the age of narrative, and it’s important to remember that this structure is false, an imposed will, quirk of myself as a thirty-four-year-old man, of an age (reached perhaps a decade or so prematurely) when I have begun to be concerned with the story of what’s happened to me. I once heard an old writer say that the problem with the young is that, for them, the past is still only what’s happened. That is, that they have yet to be drawn into the necessary sadness of thinking about the future with the anima of nostalgia. And if this is so, then I’ve certainly reached that age, which is never made more clear than when I think of Charlie—Charlie who one doesn’t meet but finds oneself in the middle of, like an unannounced storm; everywhere, suddenly, the light is just different.

  It’s a clear, freezing night in the minutes after a long snow has ceased, deep in the bowels of an upstate New York winter. I have wandered into the darkened shadows of the old abandoned buildings on the far side of the river that halves my campus. I am twenty years old; I will graduate on my twenty-first birthday. I have come from a party where I spent an hour watching a young female poet attempt to snort the dust of a pulverized pharmaceutical from the rug where it spilled off a hand mirror. I’ve spent the last twenty minutes standing on the riverbank, thinking about the conversation I had with my mother on the dorm phone that afternoon, looking out the lounge’s window down at the nearly iced-over river and telling her I was lonely, admitting it to her, even though her blunt concern felt worse than the loneliness.

  These buildings are the old, abandoned incarnation of the university whose lights now twinkle with modern life on the rival bank of the river. The university and the university. The past little city ghosting itself uselessly onto the future one.

  Usually there are a few small groups of shadows smoking pot behind the crumbling brick in the openings here and there. Tonight, though, there seems to be no one; the old campus is silent, dark, the half-glow of the snow and the washed-out sky reflecting each other.

  What draws me to the old auditorium is the muted light rippling out from its high, thin windows—a kind of colorless aurora over the snow. One of the side doors is unlocked and I slip inside to see what where it comes from but as I do the light, whatever it was, abruptly flips off. There is the spooling sound of a movie reel flapping at its end, then resetting itself. I notice, breathing in the dark, that the old whooshing furnace is blasting the room with an extreme heat.

  When the light flashes on again I can see that it’s the ambient glow of a black-and-white movie being projected onto a ratty, hanging sheet of muslin at the back of the stage. From the throw of the projector’s beam, someone must have situated it on one of the seats in the tiny balcony behind and above me. Its illumination is so striking in the dark that at first I don’t even notice the girl at the center of the stage.

  She is standing, head down, arms stiff and flat at her sides, feet together, as if waiting for a dance to begin. She is almost naked, wearing only her underwear: a matching, simple white bra and briefs. Just as I’m about to say something, the first tripping, swooning notes of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue fill the room, emanating from two dark shapes in the balcony that look to be speakers. Against the muslin, I can make out the skyline of a black-and-white New York City, which soon switches to shots of blinking neon parking garage signs and markets. It’s Manhattan, or at least the first reel of it, which, as I will find out later, has gone missing from the campus student theater’s collection.

  As Woody Allen’s voiceover sounds, the girl’s head snaps up; her entire body changes, comes alive. On screen the shots of the city are still playing out, but here is the girl, opening and closing her mouth, miming the film’s narration so perfectly it is like the voice is coming from somewhere inside her, a funny, entrancing ventriloquism no less real for its perfect memorization than for the deft bodily mimesis, the ticks and expressions and gestures all spot on. I’m sitting down, about halfway to the stage, without even realizing it. It is almost a dream.

  “He adored New York City,” Woody Allen and the girl say with one voice. “He idolized it all out of proportion. Uh, no. Make that ‘He, he romanticized it all out of proportion.’ To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white, and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Uh . . . no. Let me start this over. Chapter One. He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else.”

  As the light from the scenes, shifting faster and faster now, plays over her body and there is only the bombastic surfacing of the Gershwin, she turns her face out into the audience that isn’t, the torn rows of seats missing covers, and looks right at me, holding my gaze perfectly steady, though I know in the darkness I must only be a shadow, a shape. She does this until the movie proper starts and she begins parroting Woody Allen’s character’s movements and lines without a single mistake, with impossible ease, until it seems that the figures flickering on the rotting muslin are being led by her body.

  Later, I will find out many things about her: that she stole that reel, fixed the auditorium’s ancient furnace herself, and learned Rhapsody in Blue by heart at ten years old and loved it so much she played it nonstop every minute she was home until her mother threatened to sell the piano, which didn’t matter because by then the music had, in her words, passed into her entirely, until she could reenter the composition at any moment, on any note, and play it through in that mental theater all the way to the end, for instance. I will learn that she loves Woody Allen, both Gershwins, and Buster Keaton movies, and that somehow, in her solitary, cu
lturally sentimental self-education she picked up several outdated idioms (like saying “I’m all wet as a science major”) that still slipped out occasionally, helplessly, or that she’d once slept with one of her professors and that this professor had one night described her as “a girl lost in space and time” with a glazed look in his eyes that she had not liked at all. I will learn that she was once, in the sciences, mathematics, and musicianship, somewhat of a child prodigy, and that by the time I met her she’d had enough of describing the world in impossible equations, Schumann overtures, or predictive theoretical physics models, and was now beset on all sides by a terrifying aimlessness, a suspicion of the lack of primary meaning and genuine experience in this world. And I will learn her name, Charlemagne Rosen, the girl I can never keep out of the present tense.

  But for now there is the movie proper, with its better lighting, and, offered up by this, the revelation of her body.

  There is a thin luster of sweat on her skin, and her near-nakedness is explained. The old boiler heater’s gusts have forced me myself, even with my coat shrugged off, to sweat through an under-shirt and sweatshirt, and for a moment, watching the suite of human motion that is laid bare by the sheer fact of her skin, of her flesh, pale and taut, it seems we are sweating together, connected in our agitation.

  She is short, with chin-length blond hair pulled austerely back away from her face. Her shoulders are sturdy and square, but her torso tapers down away from them shyly, into an impossibly delicate waist. There are the legs all out of proportion; the long, slick thighs; the abbreviated curves of the calves. Her silhouette seems to belong in a ballet. I am transfixed by a large freckle hovering catty-corner to her bellybutton, which itself sits strangely high on her stomach, as if to accentuate the faintest glance of tiny, downy blond hairs on the stretch of skin held taut between her hips.

  There is also, of course, her underwear, the way the briefs seem to almost float on her up there on the stage, as she turns this way and that. They are not loose enough to be unsexual and not form-fitting enough to be a thrill, exactly. She is not quite vulnerable in this state of undress, but yet there she is, mid-performance, reenacting perfectly, without ever turning to look, the screen behind her, and there will be nothing more intimate in our life together than her body in this stretch of minutes, than the discovery of the way she unconsciously stands with one foot turned outward like she might plié at any moment, just for me.

  And who could ask for more chance, for life to prove itself more the curiosity that one in one’s youth always secretly hoped it will be?

  Arbitrary a point of experience it might be, in the scheme of things, but here persists that night, reaching out for me again. It’s nostalgia that holds me at such a delicate remove from that feeling, that night in the ruined theater. It is this age of nostalgia—maybe the only true age—which casts the sense that the episode is not yet completed, that I may, in my present or future, be somehow reclaimed.

  How does one tell oneself such a story, if not to pretend a beginning? It is inescapable: her body, organizing principle.

  It is at least true that what jetsam of memory left unruined by what came after is ensouled by her body, particularly this pale bough of a body in her youth.

  “Well, don’t you just hate people who come into movies late?” she said, when the reel was done. “You’re not off to a very good start.”

  •

  That night she took me to her apartment. It was in a nice complex, built up just on the edge of campus in that bright, blocky way that often makes student apartment buildings indistinguishable from prisons.

  As we took the first few steps into her apartment, I looked around. The entire apartment was empty—not a stick of furniture, nor decoration. When I turned my face to Charlie’s I remember the look on her face. It seemed such a vulnerable, honest expression—an ingenuous shame.

  It turned out she spent all her money on rent, knowing she’d be able to afford nothing else, just to claim a space in this upscale complex. It turned out, as we sat on the carpeted floor Indian-style, like little kids, that she spent half the night in the old auditorium to minimize her own heating bill, which she could barely make. In the fridge there was nothing but a magnum of vodka and a bag of thawing corn, the former of which she retrieved.

  Later, when we finally stood next to her surprisingly ornate bed (“moving day dumpster dive”) I moved to kiss her. With a graceful motion, she locked my face into a tight hug, pressed side by side to hers, her grasp strong. I blushed.

  “I’m nervous, OK?” she said.

  “You’re nervous?” I said, her soft, anxious breath in my ear.

  To what end these sentimentalisms? To what fire go these uncorrupted bits of memory? I suppose Haim was there, even then, mixed up in all of it, our little homunculus observer, energies still coiled in a quiet, patient ovum inside of her, years away from his birth. He will not even live long enough, it occurs to me now, to posses it as his own story, privately recalled.

  But that night I looked down at Charlie under me, her leg bent slightly to the side, us both moving, her eyes glued downwards to where we intersected, mouth and brow formed into (mysterious to me, even now) surprise, and I remember the way the air seemed to crackle with a kind of ambient electric static as I looked down at her, as I watched her body as it moved and writhed and squirmed, unbearably sensate, alive.

  •

  Let me be clear about what kind of world we now find ourselves in: Haim’s stretch marks have opened. Haim’s stretch marks have opened, meaning that the long-term use of the steroid meant to control the swelling around the glioma in his brain has caused his skin to thin out from the inside, forming open wounds all over his stomach, back, and thighs.

  The steroid is also what causes him to always be hungry, and to have gained tremendous amounts of weight (thus the stretch marks, thus the open wounds which, because of his chemotherapy, refuse even the basic bodily dignity of closing).

  I can’t say what this small detail of his medical treatment has done to him. I can’t tell you what it is the first time you don’t recognize your own son.

  Before his diagnosis Haim was a small child, skinny but also short for a seven-year-old. We have a picture of him getting ready to go to Hebrew school one Sunday where he’s wearing only a new polo shirt and underwear, and it almost looks like an optical illusion, the way the shoulders of the shirt fit him perfectly but the collar, even buttoned to the top, hangs off his neck and the rest of the material billows down over his thighs. For boys that age, their size balances out their novel, baffling personalities (their features starting to resolve and solidify into what you think, for the first time, they might look like when they’re men). This reins in the slightly terrifying suspicion that they’re really adults-in-miniature, that you’ve failed at protecting them, at preserving that unknowing age when their love for you is still focused, can still be seen, you are convinced, in everything they say or do.

  And so at first the sickness is an insult because of his size, because it seems impossible, no matter what the pediatric oncologists say, that a brain so small and malleable could harbor anything of real magnitude or strength, anything that could survive the vast powers that twenty-first-century medicine might bring to bear on it, but also simply because it seems unclear, exactly, what a human being so physically minute might possibly do to defend himself. It’s only later, in this second year of treatment, when the steroids begin to unmake Haim’s body, that I begin to understand the real insult, the way in which he would be taken from me even as he lived.

  It is an indignity to require of yourself a certain kind of double vision in order to see your son when he is lying there in front of you. To see him with the grace required of an aging lover; to see the once-body inside the thing you are presented with now—to see past and present at once, and have the latter not ruin the former.

  First, Haim’s face billowed out, his two cheeks like twin sails catching a sagging wind. The rest of his bo
dy soon followed, inflating almost cartoonishly. There were the steroids, but also the fact of his decreasing mobility (not even, at first, due to the left-side weakness caused by the glioma, but the pain of several secondary infections—UTIs from all the catheters, kidney stones from some of the medicines, and so on) until he could not (and still cannot) move without a wheelchair. Strangely, even the size of his head seemed to change until it appeared, as it does now, vaguely monstrous, disproportionate and swollen.

  The changes to his face are the most insulting fact to Haim himself. There used to be a mirror on the wall to the left of his bed and when he had visitors he’d stare past them as they spoke, focusing on a spot slightly above their own heads, where the specter of his ruined features stared back, but after a while he made the nurses take it down. He’s right that it is his face, or, more accurately, his eyes, that make the dissociation so striking, so final. His bulbous cheeks and neck-fat change, helplessly, his gaze, give it the slightly addled strabismus of the morbidly obese, and for whatever reason this is a look so antithetical to the six-year-old waif whom I last knew without a glioma on his brain stem that the two seem, most of the time, irreconcilable.

  I think it is his face that Charlie could never quite recoup either. I remember watching her take him in, after the change had occurred, when she returned from the holiday. (We called it “the holiday” because at one point during those long, desperate months of her absence, Haim and I watched Roman Holiday together on the digital projector he and I had rigged up in his room. The room is of a size and orientation where it only really worked if Haim held the digital machine on his stomach as he reclined and the thrown picture was allowed to take up most of the wall he faced, including the door. He picked the movie out himself, out of the midst of another of his unknowable seas of contemplation. Unlike all of the other kids on the ward, Haim never wants to watch movies. We’ve only ever used the projector for two things, that screening being one of them. I don’t know if someone told him about the movie, or if he clued in just from the title. It seemed clear at first why he wanted to watch it, the parallels to his mother too apparent, but then halfway through he asked me to turn the sound off and we just sat with the flickering picture, Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck’s cavorting turning vaguely sad, in silence.)