Affinity

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

  Moved, rising on the unmoving escalator, she imagines tripping, her face meeting the step’s metal teeth—dancer thoughts. Not 23-year-old dancer thoughts, but 43-year-old dancer thoughts. She thinks about Gould’s coming fall. How sad it would be to watch him descend. Better to kill him than to watch his addictions fug out his playing, let his already game tastebuds become unconditional fans of Fran’s Diner. All that life! Why not gather some of it to herself, instead of letting it seep into the air to be inhaled by unworthy Canuck schmucks?

  She’s close now. 5th floor. Optical Services. Did I mention it was a beautiful time? Do you also remember the warmth of oranges and browns, the impressionistic grain of video recorded on magnetic tape, cozily lit by nuclear-powered tungsten? Like Golsheh and Gould, the prime minister did what he wanted. He wanted to dance a pirouette behind the queen’s back? Then he would. He wanted to date the same white-masked black pianist Gould had dated? Then he would. He wanted to go against the grain of reigning disdain for WASPS in Montreal as a teenager? Then he would drive the English stake Elliott between Pierre and Trudeau, and leave it there, separating the French names.

  *

  Gould hears something. A ghost in the building 5 years before it is abandoned to ghosts? Or the constant hum of huge underground turbines flushing air—already flushed through thousands of shoppers—back through the building? Dirty, dirty air, he hears his mother saying. Bang a drum, scare some bejesus, 2 seconds later you have silence. And that’s how all sound was for millions of years, since the dawn of hearing—rising and falling, living and dying. Then yesterday, we made machines, and now we’re forever surrounded by forever sounds, same pitch, same volume, never nuancing. Worse, we figured out how to record, to make eternal even the dying sounds. Who’s to say what this does to us? Who’s to say what seeing millions of beautiful women does to man, evolved only to see a handful in a lifetime?

  His reptilian brain registers movement now, registers the movement as a threat, not incorrectly, as it turns out, just some years prematurely. This is it. The long, familiar hum of routine is about to be drowned out by a rising phrase in a minor key, a phrase that will die one day. He’s about to fall in love. Something in him is about to go haywire. Am I exaggerating? What was Gould’s playing, if not a form of exaggeration? As he said: What was the point of recording a Mozart sonata for the umpteenth time unless you were going to make listeners sit up from the first notes and say to themselves: This is an event.

  He listens. With some difficulty, having no abdominal muscles to speak of, he sits up on his forearms. There he is, middle-aged, in the middle of the Furniture and Beds Department, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the bed, somewhat elevated. He looks across to the mouth of the escalators. In the middle ground, the strangest display he’s seen here—electric blankets hanging from the ceiling, like stingrays, tail wires hanging almost to head height, inviting shoppers to hang themselves. A rueful parody from Golsheh’s friend, the department manager, who had been a marine biologist in Tehran. With his usual prescience, he says to himself: This is an event. And what he imagines isn’t far off: a deranged man with a knife, Beethoven-wild hair, and Bach-like sexual appetites (20 children!) who’s come to stab him, and then diddle him. Gould was afraid of being diddled after death, but that is another story.

  Come to think of it, it’s entirely apropos to this story.

  “Is somebody there?” he says, his voice disappearing into the mattresses and bedding all around.

  “Mr. Gould?” comes the invisible woman’s voice, materializing amidst all that stuff. “I’m so happy to have found you. I wasn’t sure you’d really be here. At these x, y, and z coordinates. At this moment in time.”

  Deranged. Definitely deranged. But a woman. Perhaps he could overpower her. Probably not. Where is she anyway? The sound seems to be coming from somewhere near a pyramidal pillow display, 100 percent Hungarian goose down, for a pre-allergic world. Did I mention it was a beautiful time?

  “Here, now, space, time. It’s nice to know someone else thinks about such things. Most people these dark days seem only to think about their stuff.” He doesn’t know why he’s taking this chatty approach; oh yes, he does. He wants everybody to love him, even the deranged; he’s an artist.

  “Space and time that is of a piece with your first-ever concert, played on the organ here in 1945.” Golsheh has the Persian propensity for poetry, and a lyric voice.

  He doesn’t know how she could know about that; oh yes, he does. He broadcasts all this information about himself into the world. But he’s still startled when people actually hear it. He wants to be heard in every home. He wants to be alone. He wants to live, not too long, like Mozart, but rather longer than Mozart nevertheless. He wants the 800 or 900 years the compression, equalization, and coding of recording seem to offer. As Golsheh would later tell him: he’s a man, he doesn’t know what he wants.

  “It’s funny you should say that,” and he is genuinely struck. “I was just thinking, not 5 minutes ago, that it’s as though all the times I’ve ever played here are lined up together, outside of the time that happens outside this building. Lying here, it’s like 1945 was just this morning.”

  “To answer your question—”

  “Did I ask you a question?”

  “You are who you are, Mr. Gould, because you are not normal. And normal’s no good, you’re right. But a normal person would wonder why I am here, and I feel I owe it to you to answer that question.” She hears the feathers in the duvet being crushed as Gould shifts in bed.

  He’s afraid her plan might not be entirely normal. “Agree about normality, my dear, of course. So no need really to—” To what? Where is she anyway? “Can you see me?” he asks, gripping the covers, which Golsheh’s friend Meriam, the manager of the Furniture and Bedding Department, leaves out for Gould every evening before she goes home, along with a pillow and sheets for his exclusive use. Gould had written her a charming letter detailing his midnight penchant for her Posturepedic, and his germ phobia, and she had been only too happy to oblige the great man. When Meriam mentioned it to Golsheh, she knew at once that she would do what she is about to do.

  She draws her forefinger across the knife handle. It seems to love the heat of her hand. “Only your outline. And you me?” She steps out from behind the pyramidal pillow display. She’s tall. Her hair is big, and tightly coiled. Gold coils catch what light there is and draw it to her right wrist, hanging by her side, by her loose skirt, from another climate. The other hand is buried inside a large purse that could contain anything.

  “Only your shadow.”

  His huge glasses flicker for a second. “What big eyes you have,” she says.

  “The better not to see you with. On second thought, at the risk of asking a normal, unmetaphysical question: How did you get in here?”

  “I hid behind a stack of golf sticks in the basement when no one was looking. At 4:44 this afternoon. The store closed, I dozed, my feet went to sleep, no one found me. 4:44 is a deathly unpropitious number according to the Chinese. No matter. I am Persian.”

  “Ah, yes, I wondered. But your accent is so faint. And you didn’t say: ‘an eh-stack of golf eh-sticks.’”

  “What big ears you have,” she says, and she starts moving toward him, slowly. Something is about to happen. But if he’s the wolf (a lot of arm hair has sprouted since he turned 41), it should be his prerogative to attack.

  “Are you afraid?” she asks.

  “Somewhat. Nothing extraordinary about that, though: I’m afraid of the city of Philadelphia.” And of being diddled when I’m dead, he does not add. “And as to the question I didn’t ask, but you wanted to answer: Why are you here?”

  So she tells him, about the vacant lot, which, for reasons unclear to her, she could only think about in French: terrain vague. She tells him about looking up at the headless CN Tower, imagining a time beyond her final phrase, which he watches her shadow perform, standing over him, right beside the bed now: e
lbow out and down and head up in opposition on the same line—a contrapuntal movement. She tells him that the memory of him playing the 6th Partita had saved her. She hears how hard he is listening through the gloom, which is why she tells him so much.

  The story triggers something in him. It’s majestic. And improbable. On paper, he’d find it twee, unbelievable. But he wants to believe it. It confirms the redemptive power of art, which he’d never quite dared believe in himself. And there’s something about her—the way she moves ever so slowly toward him in a loping limp, as though he were the great magnet in the heart of the earth. Have you ever noticed how the scent of people we fall in love with is already familiar to us when we meet for the first time? He does believe it. Says it to himself again to make sure—yes, he believes it.

  Her leg rests against his, the duvet in between. There’s a softness to its hardness. What light there is pools on the pads of her fingers as they reach toward him. Her other hand grips the knife handle. Now it’s like the back of her neck is drawn upward with a rope, and the sides of her neck splay, like a cobra, about to strike—decidedly, nothing about her body makes sense. It’s a beautiful phrase that makes him fall for her, hard.

  The darkness on her face dissipates a little as it draws nearer. He can make out a substantial, slightly bent nose. Eyes like black holes. Her right hand rocks him gently backward, off his forearms, and onto the pillow, following him down, keeping a constant, frustrating distance between their faces. Now that he’s on his back, looking up, she pulls the knife from the bag, and starts running it softly up the side of the coat, searching for the spot. For a moment he thinks maybe he feels a tiny coolness there, but he can’t credit the sensation; anyway, there are other, more pleasurable ones to attend to. She gives off great heat.

  She imagines unwrapping him—slicing through coat, sweater, shirt, skin. Down into the light at the heart of him. Her sweet breath on his lips, the moment lasts an eternity. She covers half the distance, and half again, and half again, as in a mathematical paradox, eternally condemned to covering increasingly minute distances without ever reaching him. The knife finds the place. Quickly, cleanly, she cuts. Their lips touch. The world shatters into so many stars, the world trembles and the world sways, the world breaks but the world stays. Her knife is back in her purse, and her hand is on his cheek, as though to tell him everything will be OK, and for once, his body understands.

  Reborn, as in a dream, more serene than he has ever been, he takes the elevator back up one floor. Boldly, he makes what many consider to be his greatest recording—the Siegfried Idyll, written by Wagner for the birth of his son. Later used in the opera Siegfried, about a youth who knows no fear. Until he sees a beautiful woman, and wakes her from a magic sleep, with a kiss. At first light, northern cardinals starting to sing, the snow letting up, he descends the 7 floors to his Lincoln Continental, and when he reaches into his coat pocket for the key, he notices that the big, horn-shaped bone button that usually keeps his pocket closed is gone. Not only that, but there’s a small, neat cut in the wool there, from what must have been a very sharp blade.

  She had wanted some thing that had belonged to him. An object to remind her it hadn’t been a dream, that their bodies had actually come up against each other.

  He decides to drive and think, digest the night. He likes driving in the snow. He imagines her tramping snowy sidewalks in her ballerina pumps. Her purse was big, but it’s still hard to imagine a woman like her carrying galoshes. Golsheh galoshes. Every time he tries to recall her face, his memory defaults to the sound of her voice, its quiet and deep. Green swirls up off Lake Ontario, something he’s seen, and knows must mean—something about what was here in the eternal prime, before all this. His cheek still hot where her hand had first touched him. A B-flat beep snaps him back into his lane—he’d been drifting lakeward, into the unplowed part of the 401, his favorite prime-numbered freeway.

  The tempo of his driving scandalizes as much as the tempo of his playing, albeit with an earthier audience. Maybe his presto Lincoln piloting is about doing a Dean, before it is too late, and people start to forget they used to compare the two. Doing a Dean, I mean: crashing into some Donald Turnupseed type, some grad student, say, cruising College Street on his way to prime the SLOWPOKE-2 reactor, the fusion of the Gould and Dean legends, indivisible, except by the Jaws of Life, used widely outside car-racing circles like Dean’s only 7 years from now. In the particle collider others in his building call a parking garage, Gould frequently smashes into concrete columns, rehearsing for his big bang. J. G. Ballard’s Crash, which recreates the Dean crash, is published this year. 23 years later, Cronenberg will make it into a movie, set in Toronto.

  And so they begin. February 3, 1973. At the prime hour of a prime-numbered day, in a prime-numbered month, in a prime-numbered year, they become a couple—the prime prime. Divisible only by him or her. What else could divide them? Her husband could. Brian carried a knife too. A hunter’s blade that could sever the ties that bound them. Her husband the ogre who had stolen her away, up Don Mills hills, down Don Valley valleys. Her husband of the dead gaze. How did she live with this, when she wanted to live?

  *

  It is difficult in 1973 not to know who Glenn Gould is but, reassuringly, Brian seems to have managed it. He likes racquetball, and maraschino cherries, and writing “wash me” on dirty cars, and he belongs to that disconcerting minority of people who are unaffected by music of any kind. Golsheh likes to think that if Brian doesn’t know Gould exists, there can be no affair to discover, no body for Brian’s knife to come up against.

  Gould is a ghost when Brian’s in town. But—alhamdulilah—he is often in Detroit, trying to penetrate Chrysler with the carburetor primer he designed, and then Gould whisks Golsheh up to Uptergrove—his family’s cottage on Lake Simcoe—the sweet, ciggy smell of Brian still fresh on her. Beery bitterness and sea-breeze car freshener. She says the name Uptergrove turns her on. He likes it when she is turned on, but for some reason doesn’t like her saying this. Why not? He thinks about it while playing Mozart, when it is easy to think of other things. Somehow it seems to discount his childhood memory of sitting on his mother’s dimpled knees, Mozart-picking on the Chickering. There is something disturbing in seeing Golsheh straight-back sitting on the same acid-green armchair Grandma Gold (not a typo) and his mother had slumped on, Golsheh’s grace and length superimposed on his mother’s lumpen limbs, her forward-keening (toward glory for her son) torso wrapped—not tightly enough—in glaucous sausage skin. The double-exposed scenes he’d seen.

  In the middle of them, there is a summer evening in Uptergrove, birds and air muted. The silence of a winter evening, everything covered in snow. The world braced for something. Above them blue sky. To the west, a bank of black clouds. Out of the silence, children’s voices, plain playful at first. As they draw closer, they grow darker, like the sky. The skies fall—on the children first. Their blue shirts turn black. They grow from dots into human figures with limbs. They are close now, at the gate, begging for shelter. Gould lets them in. Golsheh goes into the bedroom, adds blouse above skirt, waits, head in hands on the edge of the bed. He can’t recall as vulnerable a sight as her limping away from him, and locking the door behind her. He thinks he hears her sobbing in there. It is absurd. He has broadcast any number of meaningless facts about himself, but not a soul can know the most important one: that Golsheh exists, and he loves her. And so we get a mostly blank year on the timeline of Gould’s otherwise manic life. Having no witnesses makes them feel a little like they’ve never been.

  Those afternoons in Uptergrove: windows open to the light coming across the lake like white folds in shadowed cloth. He plays in his bathrobe and she dances, wearing only a long skirt. When the nuclear warheads fall (as Gould is sure they have every time he hears large furniture being dragged across the floor above him), he and Golsheh can make their living playing piano and dancing for the mutant kings of the New World—every place looking like Gould’
s beloved Precambrian shield. Music—Schoenberg—for melted keyboards, played on melted keyboards, and the roots of her ancient vocabulary of movement meaning something again. And with all the burnt hands, applause would no longer exist—paradise. A heaven filled with the scent of Fartein Valen. How postmodern music would resonate postapocalypse! The holocaust that would break our obsession with moronic pentatonic ditties. Hope that a whole new generation might be raised on atonal music. Kids fishing 3-headed pike off stone bridges, happily humming 12-tone rows instead of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

  Gould’s furrier father began using the name Gould instead of Gold in 1939 in order to disguise what he assumed people would (wrongly) assume to be Jewish roots. Prissy, prejudiced WASPS with money, people like the Eatons might be more inclined to drop dollars on a Gould sable than they would on a Gold sable. The province of Quebec’s tagline is: “Je me souviens.” Has been for as long as I can remember. What are Quebecers supposed to remember? What WASPS with names like Matheson and Gould (who considered himself “the last of the Puritans”) did to them, which, all 20th-century things considered, wasn’t much. In 1973 my parents were hesitating between the names Elliott and Spencer. I’m as old as I write this as Gould was that year. If they’d opted for the former then I wouldn’t have a homonym, also Canadian, alas, who published an unspeakably bad story in The Rusty Toque, and who Googlers must (wrongly!) assume to be me.

  The actor Elliott Gould was born Elliott Goldstein, his father was also in the garment industry, and like Pierre Elliott Trudeau, he wooed Barbra Streisand—Glenn Gould’s only pop-music hero, besides Petula Clark. Elliott and Barbra married, but Streisand couldn’t be persuaded to change her name. Elliott’s natural expression is that of someone who has just seen a ghost. An expression that, engraved over the years, has come to make him look like a ghost. Perhaps this seeming spook-seeing was just fatigue, the black holes around his eyes the consequence of the energy it must have taken for such a hunched, pale, and patently strange-looking man to make a name for himself in sunny Hollywood. Probably there were Goldstein ghosts. Only one subject for literature since 1945. The only place Gould ever played a concert in his comforting overcoat was in sunny Israel. Where he played the Goldberg Variations, a piece containing the name Gold—still legally Gould’s the day he died. Before Gould broke the old way of playing Bach with that first recording of the Goldbergs in 1955, they were better known by another name: Aria with Different Variations.