Thank You for the Music

by Jane McCafferty

  What happened to me will be hard to describe, and yet I feel a tremendous need to try. You may want to close your eyes, like a small child in a narrow bed. There is no glowing clown night-light in this room that scares you, no ruthless, drunken parent refusing to keep the door open. Nor will this story give you bad dreams. Perhaps it is just a story of coincidence, but I don’t think so.

  It became apparent to me that I had to climb a certain fence. I spotted the fence from the window of my car as I was driving in the early afternoon on the empty freeway. You might not find it strange that such a thing would become apparent to me; after all, fences beckon climbers every day. And I am not such an old man, really, so one needn’t conjure the image of a spindly, depleted crab clutching onto cold links with blue and desperate hands. One might argue that this rising urge to climb the fence was not that extraordinary, that contained within the “very being of a fence” (I am no phenomenologist) is a loud invitation to people like me, who, as you might have gathered, have natures that are in some sense “fenced out” of this world, and by no means do I pretend to suggest that such a nature is rare or admirable. Quite the contrary.

  From the highway I seemed suddenly to see it for the first time. It was not poetic. It did not inspire memories of past fences, which I would’ve resisted. It was the thing itself, the cold gray links in the autumn light. The car was warm, and suddenly I resented its comforting confines. I wanted my hands on the fence.

  This particular fence happened to surround the stadium, the large, modern stadium where baseball is played. There are men who easily made the transition from the old, intimate stadiums, men who embraced Astroturf the way others after them would have to embrace video screens and the increasingly prolific assault of meaningless noise. I am not one of those men. I regret this now, for had I been less reactionary, I would have enjoyed more evenings of baseball with my wife and son, neither of whom are living anymore. The two of them would go along without me, after my son begged and tearfully pleaded with me to join them, after I answered, as usual, “I have to catch up on some reading.” Finally his mother would grow understandably disgusted, and drag him off, saying, “Let’s leave your father to his brooding, Lawrence.” This is not my son’s real name; I would not call a child Lawrence. I prefer not to speak his name aloud like this, which you will understand.

  I parked the car on a side street, got out of the car, buttoned my coat, put on my hat, and crossed the freeway while a terrific gust of wind seemed to push me in the direction of my desired destination. I had to hold my hat down. Usually such a wind would irritate me; I am not a man who likes to be pushed. But at the time I thought only, What a strong wind. And now it seems strange to me, like a gift from nature, as if nature itself was propelling me toward the fence.

  I climbed the fence slowly. My arms shook, and my hands hurt as I climbed, grabbing onto the links. I imagined the people driving by on the freeway, holding me in their minds for a moment, then letting me go. I worried that a cop might sight me, but not as much as I would have worried had I been younger. My white hair, my lined face, the skin that sags around my eyes, all of these protect a person from having to explain himself. Nobody expects it, and nobody’s interested. Easier for them to conclude that you’re nuts. You’re climbing the fence because you’ve gone round the bend. You’re having a delusion. You’re climbing to get next to the stadium because you loved Ted Williams too much, or Clemente, or Willie Mays, or Vida Blue, or your son the baseball fan in his backward red cap and buck teeth and darting black eyes. The cop might have said, “Hey there, hey, grandpa, what’s up?” Or would a cop today perhaps be frightened even of a respectable-looking old white-haired man climbing a fence, as if that old man might turn and pull a loaded gun out of his coat pocket, and fire the gun just to feel a part of society?

  If purity of heart is to will one thing, then I had purity of heart as I continued my climb. Once on the other side, I stood and examined my hands; they were red and raw-looking, and still shaking, and I looked at them in a kind of scientific wonder. My heart hammered away at my chest. I dropped my hands down to my sides and began to walk toward the stadium. On the ground level a series of long white doors stood in a line like a group of doctors. I walked by the doors, not interested in them enough to try opening them.

  Soon I found myself slipping under a metal bar that blocked a ramp leading to the heart of the stadium. I could hear the soft soles of my shoes thudding against the concrete as I walked up the ramp through a cold hollowness, while a part of me lingered behind, watching, thinking, and nearly saying aloud, What are you doing here? Where do you think you’re going? We all make these efforts to turn into policemen when the police don’t show up. But I was not about to stop and answer that voice; I was not capable. I was occupied by a need to collect myself, to force myself into a suitably solemn state of mind, as if I were approaching a great occasion of some sort, an occasion that demanded the heart, not the body, be appropriately dressed. As I ascended the ramp I could look to my right at the city skyline, frozen in the gray autumn sky, like a world I was leaving behind.

  Soon I was on the top floor. The place was emptier and colder somehow than anyplace I had ever been before. I tried, briefly, to imagine my son and wife here, lost in a shuffling summer crowd, the boy begging his mother to spend five dollars on a pennant, his mother refusing, the way she knew I would refuse, the boy knowing not to press the issue. The two of them would walk along, not holding hands, not needing too, for they would never lose each other. Between them was a bond that was palpable in the air, as if their very bodies extended beyond what I could see with my naked eye, as if there were no space at all between them. They would be the quietest people in the stadium; the boy’s eyes watchful, serious, lit with intelligence I couldn’t see, and his mother’s eyes blue and introspective, though somehow seeing everything around her at the same time. The boy in his faded black sneakers, a cheap glove on his hand in case a ball came his way.

  I continued walking. I whistled for a moment, just to hear the echo. A strange bird in a stadium, lost. What are you doing?

  I badly wanted to look at the field.

  Up here was another series of doors, and they were locked; I tried six of them, and gave up. But then, as I was walking away, thinking I would return to my car and a more reasonable version of myself, I decided to try one more door, the seventh door, which opened easily, mysteriously, so that I was almost fearful.

  Now I was inside, and much to my disappointment, I looked down and saw that the field was covered with a dark green plastic. What had I been thinking? Of course it would be covered. Our great nation’s splendiferous Astroturf needs protection from the elements, stupid man!

  Surrounding me were thousands of orange and yellow plastic seats, dabs of paint in the vast silence, the haunted emptiness that told me I had better turn around and head back down the concrete ramp. Instead, like a man with a ticket stub, I walked over to section D-5, and took a seat in aisle 3, a seat in the middle of that aisle. I sat and folded my hands on my lap. I sat there in silence and looked down at the covered field.

  I became aware of something remarkable. I mean to say another person was in the stands, a bit higher up than me, in a yellow section, on the other side, above what should have been the third-base line.

  My first response was to get up and run, but I am never a man who acts on his initial sense of things. And so I sat and stared across at my company, who from that considerable distance seemed to be a woman, neither young nor old, in a blue coat. Surely she had seen me, and surely she was finding this situation as odd as I was, yet she seemed oddly comfortable. Together we sat in that emptiness for twenty minutes or so, and it became apparent after the first five minutes that we were staring at each other. It was difficult to see that, but in a space so empty it was quite easy to sense it, for there was little else to sense, save for the ghosts of summer. I began to wish that I smoked, for I would certainly have smoked at this time, and with an ember burn
ed a hole in what was becoming the acutely surreal fabric of my day.

  Some more minutes passed, when finally the woman made her first gesture, which amounted to a rather ornate wave, as if she imagined herself in a parade, on a float. The fluidity of that wave I could never describe. It was a wave that demanded nothing from me, not even that I wave back, and so I was moved to do exactly that, though my wave was sharper, perfunctory, and embarrassed. I’m not a man who could wave like I was in a parade even if I was in a parade. As soon as I waved, she stopped, and as if with a will of its own, my hand flew up and waved again, the same short wave. She did not return this wave with a wave. Instead, she did something that I would have to describe as wonderful, in the original sense of that word.

  She stood up on her seat.

  I sat there and watched her standing. I smiled, irresistibly, for this gesture was like a child’s. Who else stands on chairs? Always it is children, attempting to reach something they need, and always they are told to get down. Get down off that chair! If they refuse to get down, someone yanks them down, and leaves a red mark on their wrist. This woman stood stone-still for a while, and then she wrapped her arms around herself.

  It was then that I stood up on my chair. I cannot explain the emotion that overtook me when I was standing and facing her across that distance. This time I waved first, and she waved back, immediately, and quickly. We stood there for no more than ten minutes like strange, overgrown children. Above us I could feel the gray sky rushing westward.

  She took off her blue coat.

  Under her coat she was in a maroon dress. I imagined it was a knit dress, of fine quality. For a split second she looked like my wife; the dark hair, the taste in clothing. Had that moment lingered I might have called out her name, but things began to happen very quickly. I knew it was my turn to take off my coat, which I placed on the chair beside me. It was time to show the woman in the maroon dress my black sweater, my gray pants. My legs felt weak, and one of them began to move with dread and with yearning and with a kind of odd grief that I believe the woman recognized, for she once again wrapped her arms around herself, and began slowly to rock from side to side. I could not look elsewhere, though my eyes hurt me as I stared.

  I stepped down off of my seat and began to walk toward her. I circled over to the next section, all the while looking at her. She had not moved. And she gave no sign that she wanted me to stop my circling, no sign that she would run if I tried to join her in the yellow seats above the third-base line. She gave no sign, but I knew all the same that I was to stop there in section E, near center field. She in turn stepped down and walked to the seats above what would have been home plate, until she was once again directly across from me. I suppose I began to understand that we were dancing.

  Soon enough that understanding depressed me, and I sat down. I rubbed my eyes. I did not want to dance this dance. I did not want, anymore, this intrusion of absurdity. I watched a cloud of swallows move eastward above us. I closed my eyes.

  “Will it rain!” she cried out, suddenly, as if sensing my approaching despair. Her voice was small and sturdy and echoed in the stadium’s chamber. “Will it rain!” she cried again.

  I could not bring myself to shout back. I stood and shook my head yes. Yes, it will rain.

  “Will we talk!” she cried out now, louder than her first question. “Will we sit and talk!”

  And this time I wanted to cry out, louder than I have ever shouted anything in my life, “Where?” But again, I could not bring myself to shout into that gray void. I tried to shake my head yes again, but I’m not sure that I even managed to accomplish that. The distance between us was overwhelming. It pressed against me. I somehow knew that any effort of mine to cross it would prove a mockery. Any words I managed to shout would blow back into my face like paper scraps. I expected that she would soon leave the stadium, mistaking my powerlessness as rejection of her. And I would leave too, and remember her every so often as the woman in the stadium.

  She did not leave. This tenacity impressed me, then moved me. I stared across at her, then once again stood up on my chair like a child. More swallows in the sky, and a huge boom of some kind shook the city, the sort I hear every day, some sort of dynamite used for construction no doubt, but at that moment I imagined it was terrorism, war. Another huge explosion. Another. Then silence.

  And so we, the children on chairs, went on staring. A sprinkle of rain joined us, then stopped.

  I felt the wind in my hair, and saw the wind in the woman’s hair. The sun slipped out from behind a cloud. And then the woman began to slip off her maroon dress, so that I saw her white shoulders in the gray light shining, and nodded my head. She wore a white slip that also had the quality of something that glowed. The slip came down to her knees. She looked very fine in that slip in those yellow seats. Imagine her as sunshine.

  For a moment I forgot my perspective of distance, and saw her as five inches tall, someone I could slip into my pocket, someone I could make a bed for in my glove compartment, someone who could drive with me everywhere. This strange thought saddened me so that sudden tears stung my eyes.

  My son died two years ago, when he was thirty, in a car wreck, when he was drunk one night, or perhaps on a drug. We had been estranged for several years before this happened. Perhaps this is one reason I remember him most as a boy, a boy who loved or tolerated his father, a boy who I carried in my arms at night in the alleys of that old city, when he was small, when I could never sleep, when I felt the solidity of his body in my arms as the one certainty on this earth. Looking at the woman in her slip I remembered his mother, the night after his funeral, when our house was empty of relatives again. She was not wearing a slip, yet she stood in our bedroom with the same vulnerability of a woman wearing a slip. The best way to defend oneself against the invasion of memories is to impede their initial entry. If you’ve noticed. One memory gives rise to the next. You remember your wife in your bedroom the night after you bury your son, and then you are bound to remember your own abominably judgmental heart, which sat in your chest with its own cold eyes. Pull it together, you were thinking then. Pull it together, you’ve been crying all week and I’m sick of looking at you. My wife looked up at me in pure shock, as if she’d heard my heart, as if finally realizing the depth of my lovelessness. It is a look that pleased me at the time. I felt anointed by her vision because I knew it was finally the truth she saw, that despite the good things I have said and done, it has always been the truth, that always the innermost eyes of my heart have been cold to the suffering of others. But no, I was not, as it turns out, loveless.

  I took off my sweater, my pants, and my shirt. The sun was gone. The woman across from me was naked now. I had begun to weep. I undressed the rest of the way, and dropped each article of clothing on the seats beside me. The air was cool but I did not shiver. We stood there facing each other for what seemed a good while. I could tell you she had a long neck, and a long waist, and long, heavy legs, and that all of her seemed lit up somehow. Perhaps because the air against us was cold, she began to dress, and of course I did the same. But as we dressed, we looked at one another. Finally dressed I cried out the same question she had posed. “Will we talk!”

  “Where!” she shouted back, and I smiled uncontrollably.

  “On the field!” I shouted. “Down on the field!”

  “On the field!” she shouted back.

  “Yes!”

  We sat under the green plastic covering, near home plate. It rained. We may have been campers. I was filled with a kind of astonishment, a kind of fierce gratitude to find myself in the presence of this woman. She was back in her blue winter coat. We both seemed to understand that neither of us wanted to smile at what had transpired between us, or even speak of the strangeness of it, though her eyes told me she felt the same astonishment that I felt.

  “Are you a baseball fan?” was the first thing she said to me. She had green eyes. Her voice was low-pitched and clear. She held her head stiffly
, her neck stretched forward. She may have been fifty years old or so. She had that rare quality of seriousness, or gravity, without the predictable contemporary persona that feels compelled to mock the gravity, that laughs and skates over the seriousness.

  “I was a baseball fan. As a boy, I loved the game as much as anyone. And you?”

  She lowered her eyes. Before she answered I felt compelled to give her an image of myself. I interrupted her as she began to speak. I said, “I lived in Brooklyn. On summer nights I lay awake listening to Dodgers games in the dark. The room was hot and my sister in the next bed asked too many questions.”

  This was not the memory I meant to give her, but she looked at me as if she could see that old room, how frightened I was for reasons I couldn’t name, how the windows looked out on tall buildings across the street, and sometimes a moon. She smiled.

  “I slept in my underwear,” I added.

  “Of course you did.”

  We looked at each other.

  “And you kept your baseball cards in shoe boxes under your bed,” she said.

  “Yes, I did. Lots of them.”

  “My husband played for the old Class D league.”

  “And you watched his games faithfully?”

  “He was my best friend,” she said. “Would you like an apple?”

  She took an orange from her coat pocket.

  “I mean an orange,” she said, and smiled.

  “Thank you,” I said. She was staring at me now. Her eyes were the eyes I would’ve expected, cleansed with recent tears. It was strangely easy to hold her gaze.