Affinity

by Affinity- The Friendship Issue (retail) (epub)

  Speed rose to the occasion and decided to leave Springfield and return home on the first of January—an auspicious first anniversary of what Lincoln had called after his own broken engagement the previous year the “fatal first.” Throughout the last days of December, Lincoln began drafting a long letter for Speed that he intended to press into Speed’s hands on his departure. It is a curious scene: the two together, talking of their mutual fears as Speed prepares to return home to marry Fanny, while Lincoln drafts his long letter of encouragement, perhaps storing it, as he wrote it, in his top hat. That letter was meant as a kind of talisman for Speed. In it Lincoln embraces Speed’s struggles as his own. “Feeling, as I know you do,” begins the first sentence, while the second paragraph opens “Why I say it is reasonable that you will feel very badly.” Lincoln sought to soothe his friend from a distance and in the process hold himself together. He allowed himself to become so fully identified with Speed that he could feel as his own his friend’s anxieties about the approaching marriage with Fanny. Lincoln was in and of what Speed felt. For the moment, that deep connection kept them united symbolically, as Lincoln projected himself into his friend’s experience and as Speed held on to the talisman he had been given to ward off the evil eye of hopelessness.

  The turning point of Lincoln’s emotional life was that letter he wrote Speed on February 25 with the knowledge of the successful consummation of the marriage. After that Lincoln was no longer tethered psychologically to Speed and their friendship quickly lost its emotional intensity. Speed developed his own life with his spouse, becoming in time one of the most successful businessmen in Louisville. Lincoln, freed now by his successful vicarious experience of intimacy, was able to try again with Mary Todd. Sometime that summer of 1842 he and Mary started courting in secret; after all the noise of the broken engagement, neither wanted to start up the local gossip machine. It was a thrilling time for both Mary Todd and Lincoln as they planned their wedding with only a very few friends in the know.

  Lincoln, however, turned to Speed for one last note of encouragement before he could finally embrace Mary. On October 5 he wrote Speed about “that subject which you know to be of such infinite solicitude to me.” Lincoln notes the “immense suffering” Speed endured from his engagement to his marriage and how Speed never tried to conceal it from Lincoln. Now, “You have been the husband of a lovely woman nearly eight months. That you are happier now than you were the day you married her I well know; for without, you would not be living,” which is a curious and oblique reference to Speed’s own possible suicide talk at some point in the buildup to his marriage. Lincoln has Speed’s word for his happiness now, however, not to mention the “returning elasticity of spirits which is manifested in your letters.” Just to be absolutely sure, however, Lincoln asks: “Are you now, in feeling as well as judgement, glad you are married as you are?” He knows that such a question from anybody else would be “impudent” and “not to be tolerated.” But Lincoln trusts that Speed will “pardon it in me.” He urges Speed to answer quickly, “as I feel impatient to know.”

  The reply must have been encouraging, for Lincoln and Mary Todd were married on November 4, 1842. A week later Lincoln added in a business letter to a friend: “Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me, is matter of profound wonder.”

  Painting of Joshua Speed, 1842, artist unknown.

  Collection of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky.

  NOTE. This essay is based on material in my book of the same title from Columbia University Press. I would like to acknowledge my research assistant, Wayne Soini.

  Glenn Gould Syndrome

  Spencer Matheson

  Glenn Gould is taking a break from recording his own transcription of the Siegfried Idyll. It is the middle of the night. He rides the elevator from the Eaton Auditorium on the 7th floor to the Eaton’s Department Store on the 6th floor. Outside it has begun to snow. He stops in the Kitchen Appliances Department to test the heft of 5 different waffle irons in a self-conscious parody of the way he tests Steinways. Then he makes his way to the Furniture and Bedding Department, where he lies down on his favorite Sealy Posturepedic. He loves being here in the dark silence that everybody else sees loud with crowds. The residue of shoppers’ hopes that all this stuff will make them happy makes him happy.

  Even in summer, Gould wears an overcoat, sweater, scarf, thermal underwear, flat cap, and knit gloves with the fingertips cut off. Neither personal branding before that term was conceived, nor fear of cold before winter but something stranger: protective gear in a protocol of his own devising. Because at the end of a great love affair that will begin here, tonight, he developed what he conceived of as an allergy to women. He was in the habit of mummifying himself year-round before this, it’s true. But who fully understands a thing when he starts doing it?

  *

  In the basement of the store, a woman emerges from behind an elaborate golf-club display. Her name is Golsheh. She’s been hiding there since last light. Her hip is rock stiff. Her skirt is long, loose, paisley. She is a great dancer, fluent in classical, contemporary, and Persian folk traditions. Admittedly, even in Isfahan there was but a small community capable of appreciating the purity and elegance of her phrasing—smaller than the sort of circle you might find dedicated to public onanism in Ontario. But in Toronto, she hasn’t danced for a crowd of more than 13 people—depressing immigrants in chunky loafers who rue rock sugar. She stopped dancing because with the arthritis in her hip she could barely walk some evenings, and because her physician told her it might stop the miscarriages. It didn’t. The less she’s been able to express herself as a dancer, the more her father’s depressive genes have begun expressing themselves.

  So she had driven to a vacant lot on the edge of the lake, and taken her knife—her peshkabz—from her handbag, and held its tip to the bottom of her ear, ready to take her life. One final phrase to perform: elbow out and down, head up in opposition on the same line. Looking up, she had seen the headless CN Tower, soon to be the tallest building in the world. The space they were building into was about to cease being what it had always been: sky. The pointed tip was already making a slight incision in her soft skin.

  That’s when she remembered the sound of Gould playing Bach’s 6th Partita. It was as though some spirit had poured a revitalizing potion into her ears. She felt its lightness and warmth descend into her body. And that was enough to bring her back from the brink. She let her hand fall into her lap. The impulse to end—alive only moments before—had been killed by the life Gould brought to the music of a long-dead German. She thought of him somewhere out there in the city, imagined a white line rising into the sky from where he was, imagined following the line to him. In Eastern Iran, there is an idea—gowati—that the psychologically ill can be healed by music.

  *

  The ancient knife is in her purse again tonight. Her father, who had died alone in Isfahan, had given it to her—bone hilt, hollow-ground blade—to protect her in the New World. The knife is in her purse because her husband who, being brutal, sees brutality everywhere, orders her to carry it with her for protection. Rising up from underground to find Glenn Gould in an empty department store was going to be a kind of performance, and she knew from experience that if it was to be a good performance, she needed witnesses, spectators, and, since she couldn’t have those, she put the knife in her purse—its possibilities would prick at least some of the expectant tautness she needed into her. The knife is in her purse because she half hopes an Eaton’s night watchman will find her and turn her over to the cops, who would have her prosecuted for plotting the death of a national icon, even if they probably considered him to be a weirdo faggot. In the prison visiting room, she’d be protected from Brian by an impregnable sheet of glass. The knife is in her purse to make us fear for Gould though you can Command-F his Wikipedia page and find no “stab” or “Golsheh.” He died at 50, as he had predicted.

  Gould’s prescience is one of the things she lo
ves about him. Maybe because she fancies she possesses a little prescience herself. She left Isfahan because she sees the prime-numbered beast of 1979 coming. Right after 1978. She left home this afternoon because she senses she can either save Gould as he had saved her, or help make his fall a beautiful phrase. Then again, she’s been wrong before. She had expected to be spotted hiding behind the golf bags. She had expected to be found by a good Canadian man with a snooty WASP name, a Spencer or an Elliott. But she had been found by a charming, violent, hairy man, and had married him cognizant only of the first and last adjectives. What appeared to be a probing and intelligent gaze was actually just a thyroid problem. How silly to have wasted time, hope, and jet fuel when so many men in Isfahan fit that description. Which is the thing about having been a phrase away from killing yourself, you’ve come so close to losing everything that losing anything now seems like nothing. Which realization makes you live, finally. Which is why she’s decided not to wait to be found anymore, but to find. She wanted to meet the man she considered to be the greatest artist in the world? Then she would.

  When she first learned English, she confused which with witch, and the former has remained pleasantly spooky to her. She possesses an Iranian admiration for language, and the dancer’s fascination for literature, the art on the far shore of music. At the beginning of them, she had pressed Brian to pass on any advice as to how she could speak more properly. Funnily enough, the only grammatical instruction Brian ever remembered receiving in high school was to go on “which hunts,” and to cut out that formal pronoun in favor of the more colloquial “that.” Which makes her love her whiches all the more. Canadians colloquialize everything, to the point where the whole society resembles its food: tasteless white mush. Gould’s against-the-grain penchant for big words and florid phrases was one more thing to love about him.

  She goes from Sporting Goods into Men’s Shoes and up from underground on the unmoving escalator in the middle of the art deco store, her ballerina pumps making no sound. Any man walking with her—and what man wouldn’t dream of walking with her?—would have to turn to make sure she was still with him. Fatefully turn, to see her face one last time before she was drawn back into the underworld. Did I mention Golsheh’s beauty? That her face was so exquisite the memory of it might be enough to bring a man back from the brink? She detects movement in her peripheral vision, turns to face it. Through the chained glass doors on the main floor, she sees the snow, beating around the sodium lamps like moths. She hears the silent street.

  *

  Gould pulls the duvet up under his chin. What an extraordinary building. Built 53 years ago, when it seemed like a good idea to have a 1,300-seat art deco auditorium atop a department store. And he had played his first-ever public concert here at the age of 13. A snowy December day in 1945. The darkest notes making their way down through the booming organ pipes and into the store, filling shoppers with foreboding, or the sense that something important had just happened, and they’d missed it. Today is the 3rd day of the 2nd month of 1973 and he is 41—all prime numbers. Old enough he needn’t do things he doesn’t want to do anymore: play concerts, eat food without ketchup on it, fly to New York to record. It’s here—in this building full of stuff—that he’ll encode the sound of his hands moving hammers and dampers. To be decoded and amplified through African diamonds into ephemeral waves out there in the world of unknowable silences, affecting people, or annoying them as they ride elevators. He likes elevators. Likes moving without having to move his body, rising into spaces that were uncircumscribed by walls when he was born.

  He thinks about the empty, expectant seats above, the neat rows and stacks of stuff below: coffee tables oriental carpets TV trays amplifiers drills electric blankets that could become defective and incinerate sleepers styrofoam cups juicers wicker baskets blue bowls basketballs baby bottle teats breast pumps ballerina pumps thimbles scissors thread lighter fluid dental floss paperweights nail clippers hockey sticks doohickeys doilies peppermint pots Eiffel Tower statuettes tourniquets chess sets bookends headboards knickknacks night tables settees toupees tepees baseball gloves oven gloves tape to mend what is broken hammers to break what is whole plastic hall runners and carpet remnants geranium tulip poppy seeds gold chains crosses and Stars of David. The unknowable patterns in which waffle irons and 7 irons go out into the world, patterns Gould imagines, white pins on a Toronto map, shifting into new shapes 13, 23, 43 years from now. 43 is too much somehow, 2016 unimaginable. Gould imagines it, his body underground with most of the now new stuff in this store. How long will a waffle iron lie in the earth ere it rot? 800, 900 years? His pocky corpse might scarce hold the laying in.

  How long would it take him to become a corpse, if someone were to draw a knife along the line of the College Street sodium streetlight lying across his belly? 41 seconds? The juice for those lights, and for the recording equipment upstairs, would be nuclear these days, wouldn’t it? Developed by the SLOWPOKE-1 reactor, which was developed just up College Street. The atom still considered indivisible 41 years ago. Time’s just too presto. He’d like to take it slower. People tell him to take his Lincoln slower down College Street, but he would not like to do that. Siegfried Idyll could be slowed a little. He’ll try when he goes back upstairs.

  That settled, he’s free to turn his mind to more interesting matters. 199, 919, and 991 are all prime numbers he thinks, lying on the Sealy, un-sleeping. He’s pleased with that: lying on the Sealy, un-sleeping. Great assonance. Excise the onance, as he was trying to excise onanism from his afternoons, and you get great ass, and your mind turns to the woman born of your rib in your dreams, the woman you love but haven’t yet met, the woman whose face fades upon waking before being erased by the bright afternoon light. You hope you see her again that night, without that threatening figure beside her.

  In the good versions of the dream, you take that woman to the cottage on the lake. You sit beside the fire with her in silence. Or you listen to Richter’s Diabelli Variations, op. 120: factors coming out the yin yang. Mark of the devil. No, Gould would never record it. It’d be like asking for some affliction. Curse his contrapuntal mind: never a thought of heaven without the thought of hell.

  This is where and how he primes himself to play. The stuff down here in the department store gives substance to his musical thinking. There is no need to sully it with thoughts of the piece itself or—God forbid—piano plunking. Better to save the ketchup calories and uppers he downs for use by neurons, not mutton-headed muscle. Speaking of which, his doctor keeps telling him he doesn’t have enough muscles. That his vertebrae are keening dangerously forward, unrestrained, as in a void, his kyphosis that of a 90-year-old. His physician had actually recommended sit-ups, or Jazzercise—the mutton head. Gould opts for a near-nightly lie on the Sealy Posturepedic, a bed whose benefits are embedded in its very name, whose sound springs resist the great magnet in the heart of the earth, forever drawing him down.

  *

  In their prime, great dancers often conceive of life as a void—incapable of offering resistance to the body. Then they turn 43. And they sadly recall what they knew when they were 2: that life is like this department store—full of coffee tables and stuff you could bump into in the dark. Golsheh goes past oriental carpets and bean bags, and beefy black telephones, all of which will be used to apprise their owners-to-be that someone alive now is dead. 9 years hence electrical signals will be decoded and converted to the sound “Glenn Gould” in these receivers. Little does Golsheh know the part she will play.

  She rises through Lifestyle Gifts and Lingerie, floats past the Ladies’ Powder Room, through the Christmas Bazaar, Carpets and Curtains, and the Fur Storage Service, empty—she imagines—this time of year. All this stuff we’ve gotten along without for millennia—not perhaps without getting a little tetchy at times, but still—superfluous shit. Then again, to pare your life down to a knife wasn’t so advisable either. Golsheh goes through Gardening and Home Supplies. Golsheh means rose garden. Actu
ally Golshan does, but whatever; a rose by any other name, etc. Point is, when she dances, she dances, and when she sleeps, she sleeps, and when she wanders in a rose garden, if part of the time her thoughts turn to coffee tables and stuff, the rest of the time she reins them in, to herself, to her solitude, to the rose garden.

  Golsheh goes through Health, Beauty and Fragrances, tiny droplets of today’s testers suspended in the air: oriental roses, myrrh, pomegranate, musk. Hollow harkening to her life in the Old World. Perfume has always seemed a sad ploy to her—cover yourself up to make people love you. Musk is the secretion of the male deer, the word having immigrated into English from the Middle Persian word musk , which came from the Sanskrit mushka , meaning “scrotum,” because of the similarity in shape of the sac on the abdomen of a male musk deer. Musk is the smell of a dancer in a trance.

  There are darker notes here too, acidic and foreboding, like the smell of a blade, scents she’s sure she can only detect because she’s here alone, in the dark. Notes beyond words—ancient, dissonant, incomprehensible as Gould’s beloved Precambrian shield, which she went to with the last Canadian she dated before Brian—a sensitive but sexless WASP, apparently without any primal instincts whatsoever. She should have held on to him, but she was not sexless, and, anyway, who knew what other adjectives she’d have discovered in time. Now Handbags. Now Babies and Children’s Wear, OshKosh B’gosh overalls and baby shoes, the air powdery and poignant. The scent of something you’ll never have. As poisonous as the smell of someone you’ve loved and lost. She’d be in a busy department store, on an escalator, and she’d smell her father’s Eau Sauvage, and the little girl’s excitement at seeing her daddy again after a long absence would prick her, and then she’d have to look up and see the New World, another man.