Accelerando. Ma non troppo.
1977. Only 2 more years until Iran fires the first volley against modernity. The opening piece of violence in a shape-shifting war that will mar the century to come. Both Gould and Golsheh like to read novels in which couples are buffeted, then torn apart by great historical forces. Being buffeted by nothing and no one, they become annoyed with each other. Both are unable to chart the waters of their anger to their source, the overhanging vegetation being too thick, as it was in southern Ontario, when the Europeans arrived. Gould’s obsession with the North grows—blank white landscapes, the same in every direction, lethally cold.
Both dress their primal rage up with some other idea, covering it in layers and layers of ideological clothing, believing it disguised. Getting it ready to go onto the stage of their relationship, the auditorium empty. She reproaches him for leaving the stage, liveness, life itself. In favor of disembodied simulacra of sound. Vanity, she says—the false promise of a technological eternity. She reproaches him for desecrating Bach with commerce, stamping the crass Columbia Records logo onto something sacred. They’ve been together for some time; she knows how to hurt him. She returns to a daily dance practice and she reproaches him for becoming ever more riddled with the Western malady of search for momentary satisfaction in ever-new sensations. He reproaches her for reproaching him so much. She faces the pain in her hip, and he tries to buoy himself in a never-ending succession of stimulations with painkillers, uppers, muscle relaxants, antianxiety meds, and sleeping pills. She turns to God. He reproaches her for believing in God only because she was in a cold, empty country that didn’t. He says she’s only a contrarian, that if she’d stayed in Isfahan she’d be a rabid atheist. They’ve been together for some time: he knows how to hurt her. She believes in the immutability of the physical, of the body. He believes in thought, in ideas. She limps, he leans toward her, as though praying, please let’s stop this. But he’s as unable to stop as she is. She forms a small troupe, and choreographs a piece—the jumping-off point is the simple phrase she almost performed on her neck. He envies her moving up out of the lowly standing of performer, as he wished he could. Being an artist saves her. His art had saved her. Being an artist is killing him. He only ever eats fried foods and ketchup. She grows taller, closer to the sky. Her olive skin whitens. His white skin turns green. They love each other. They can’t stand each other. She leaves him.
Maraschino cherries are going out of fashion. Nobody sees the point of the 7th floor decorative auditorium topping anymore. Sound no longer has a place above stuff. They board it up, leave it to dust motes and ghosts, until September 2001. The store floors—basement through 6—are converted to offices. All the new stuff needs new space, so it is moved into the bunker-like Eaton Centre, which has no windows on the world, nothing to remind those inside that time is passing, just the nuclear-generated lamps of eternal acquisition.
Where once there were black telephones 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 Sealy Posturepedics—now there are smoky offices. Where shoppers once wandered, bright with the promise of stuff, office workers now schlep dim eyed down dim corridors with bathroom keys on waffle iron–sized keychains, as though to void oneself was to void oneself of short-term memory. Secretaries smoke cigs, gulp diuretic Folgers instant coffee in styrofoam cups, log time, wishing it would go faster, wishing themselves after work, at dance classes, or Jazzercise, resuscitating their broken desk-job bodies. Where there was a Sealy Posturepedic, now there are work-space dividers stopping pulp and paper salesmen from seeing, but not hearing each other: “Well how are ya, Hal? How’s the weather down in Brampton today?” Wishing themselves with Frampton Comes Alive! and some pot at night. The bosses in the corner offices buy the stuff that makes time go faster: magnetic tapes giving way to floppy disks that demagnetize, giving way to hard drives full of stuff that seemed important then, their 1s and 0s seeping into landfills now. None of it annihilated by hijacked planes, but almost all of it gone forever nevertheless: the work, the stuff, the people. Only one subject for writing since 2001.
Thomas Bernhard published a goodly novel about Gould the year after he died, then translated it into English 11 years later. About Gould’s genius making 2 almost geniuses allergic to the piano, and life itself. One kills himself.
To too meticulously describe a condition that has yet to affect the general populace is not believable. But remember that only a century ago, even the term allergy was unknown. Modernity unceasingly creates new conditions for ever more allergies. For Gould, the prime sufferer of what might (wrongly!) be mistaken for a misogynistic condition, it begins, like so many spirals begin, as sadness. Golsheh is gone. Acute, unfulfilled desire for her becomes something else.
The first symptoms present as lightheadedness while playing Hamlet with the Lower Rosedale Shakespearean Society, when Gould reaches across his coffee table to touch the arm of the woman playing Ophelia, though she’s already dead at this point in the play, an arm so Golsheh-like, so Golsheh-lithe:
How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?
FIRST CLOWN. I’ faith, if he be not rotten before he die—as we have many pocky corpses now-a-days, that will scarce hold the laying in—he will last you some eight year or nine year: a tanner will last you nine year.
Then he is doubled over while sharing an elevator with a woman wearing a silk scarf, white camel-hair coat, and a broad hat that casts a shadow over all except her bright red lips. He almost wretches looking at the women’s underwear section of the Eaton’s catalog. Not to mention driving into a Dundas telephone pole after seeing Wonder Woman on a billboard. He’s always been good at associative thinking—he sees what is happening. He takes measures. Barricades himself in his apartment, and in funky-stuffy all-male recording studios, where he hopes he will be safe from the deadly memories beautiful women might incite.
Gould is wrong about some things, right about others: chunks of Mozart being chumpy, Lincoln Continental seats being comfortable, and being under Mount Pleasant ground at the age of 50. He considers waiting until the prime of 53 but his back hurts, and anyway no one had ever noticed his other births and deaths—that he’d played his first public concert at 13, recorded the (32-part) Goldbergs at 23, or retired from live performance at 31.
So in the fall of 1982 he gets up, viscera a moment after bones, farts softly, makes some Maxwell House instant coffee, pops a couple uppers, sits down, downs an Arrowroot, and rereads the letter he wrote to Golsheh in the middle of the night, propped up in bed. He asks her to come to him. They have not seen each other since she left him, 5 years ago. Satisfied, he picks up the phone and calls down to the concierge of the Inn on the Park: “I have a letter for you, Tara,” he says. “Please flomp tomple it to its destinated flooby doober.” Tara doesn’t exactly speak Gould-ish, but she has the vocabulary of an intelligent dog and, anyway, a concierge is safe to assume that a guest does not want her to spell-check (though this mightn’t have been a bad idea in Gould’s case) a letter, but to do what concierges are, 99.1 percent of the time, asked to do with letters: mail them. He puts his hand on C7, his painful seventh vertebra. He hears a C7 chord spiral out of the Siegfried Idyll, the piece he’d fearlessly recorded for piano just after meeting Golsheh, and conducted for orchestra 2 months before this, in what was to be his final recording. A new melody tries to fly and crashes. His sense of accomplishment forever dinted by not having become the composer
he so wanted to be. He had been too afraid. To press keys was one thing, to draw music out of the void was another.
Comes the appointed night. 3 o’clock in the morning. Gould lies on his bed, waiting for her. It strikes him, in an expression it would be anachronistic to attribute to him, that in a few moments, he’ll be “living the dream,” the dream of dying, his beloved at his side. Even if, in the dream, most people don’t usually die because their beloved is at their side.
No one notices her as she crosses the lobby of the Inn on the Park on the diagonal, heading for the stairs instead of the elevator. She hates elevators. Walls all around, descending underground, like a coffin. She rises to him on her own 2 legs—her limbs more and more mantis-like. Limbs Gould had loved. Were they? Human tissues regenerate every 7 years at the outside, they say. She is mostly a new person already. Gould gave her the courage to leave Brian, and leaving Brian gave her the courage to be with someone good. Some part of her yearns for Gould still.
He’s left the door open a crack. She peers in, the darkness from the corridor spilling into his apartment. He’s in bed, looking at the ceiling, looking funereal snazzy in his navy suit, red carnation in buttonhole. There’s a blue bowl on the table, a yellow box of Arrowroots, an envelope from Herbert Kutscha, Kempten, Federal Republic of Germany, on his doormat. She steps on it; he’ll be happy to have a trace of her when she’s gone. In her pocket, she fingers the button she took from him in 1973, that close-distant night on the 6th floor of a department store moved underground, when they had started loving each other.
His reptilian brain registers movement on the periphery of his vision, correctly and contentedly registers the movement as a threat. She slips through the door and glides to the edge of the bed. Even lying on his back, he is hunched forward, his body riven by its singular devotion to the piano. His humpback had always been disturbing to her, but here, tonight, in the half-light, she sees the beauty of it. She notices the formerly white socks, which look like they’ve been dipped in coffee and dried on a radiator, several times. On the toe, the old Air Canada logo. He couldn’t have flown for years.
The space where this happened is air now, crisscrossed by drones, birds, and maybe even meteorite pebbles that had, in larger form, ricocheted off the spacecraft Voyager, which contains the compressed sound of Gould playing the prelude from Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier in an isolation booth. The Inn on the Park was brought down, the blank space overdubbed with the stubby Toyota on the Park. Gould being a Lincoln man would have found Toyota suspensions too tight, too upright. Then again he loved the tightness of the Sealy Posturepedic.
“No overcoat?” she says. “No gloves?”
He shakes his head, as though to suggest they needn’t speak anymore, and they won’t. She pulls her purple scarf—it has 100 tiny mirrors sewn into it—from her neck, elbow high and out and down, head up on the same line, her hand sweeping wide and close to his face. It’s a long moment he seems to have seen before. A curtain closing, hiding her away as it reflects him back to himself. Then it’s pulled open, and he sees her loosened hair, her pale neck, her dear face, again. A beautiful phrase.
He holds his hand out. Time is still thick. He fears there isn’t enough left of what they’d had, that she won’t touch him. It’s dark outside. There’s a new light in her eyes. She is with somebody, maybe even somebody good, he sees. Good. She puts her hand in his. It is like being branded. He knew it would hurt. He didn’t know it would hurt this much. He pulls her toward him, and she follows. It would be wrong to say she knew she was killing him. And it would be wrong to say she didn’t realize something was happening.
She lifts her fine hand, and he sees the knuckle bones have risen, pitched tents under her skin. The arthritis makes it look like she’s clenching some invisible object. A knife, he thinks. She is actually holding something. It’s the button. The talisman she doesn’t need anymore. She touches his cheek now. Lightning enters his body where her skin meets his. He imagines tiny blood vessels blooming there. Many men, not just those in the kind of solitary confinement prisoners and late-period Gould experience, say they’d die to be touched by a beautiful woman. Only Gould has actually done it. Her hand drops to rest on his collarbone, the pain dangerously close to his heart. Ogre’s hands encircle his neck.
With her other hand, she describes an elegant arc whose end point is the other collarbone. Her left hand slides up and over his shoulder and blooms behind his back, dropping the button onto his pillow. He hears the small sound, a blip, barely alive before it dies. Now he’ll have a thing to remember her by, she thinks, to remind him I wasn’t just a dream.
Gould’s heaviness, the draw he’s always felt from the great magnet in the heart of the earth, finally—finally—gives way to a light, exquisite emotion. He feels he could fly away. Slowly, solemnly, as though she knows exactly what she is doing, she bows her head toward his. They drink each other’s breath. They remember. He can see the starbursts of tiny black stains on her irises, which he remembers he used to think of as the scars of some ancient sadness. He had forgotten her eyes. How had he forgotten her eyes?
The moment lasts an eternity. She covers half the distance, and half again, and half again, as in a mathematical paradox, as though eternally condemned to covering increasingly minute distances without ever reaching him. And then, when their lips finally touch, the world shatters into so many stars, the world trembles and the world sways, the world breaks, but the world stays, and when she opens her eyes, there they are, the sky over his fallen face the pale blue of fresh day. She gets up and leaves, closing the door softly, not wanting to wake him. He has had his stroke. The encounter wasn’t quite enough to kill him immediately, as he had hoped. He will live his last 7 days in darkness, seeing nothing, only hearing.
There is 1 witness. The Inn on the Park night watchman notices her striding under the rising moon, birdsong beginning in the waxy-leafed trees lining the driveway. She will mark his mind in a way that will puzzle him for years. There is her beauty, of course, but it’s more than that. There is something about her lightness, and some sense—it hardly made sense—that he had seen a woman who had accomplished something. And eventually, without ever having shared it with anyone, the thought of her will grow quieter and quieter, until it gives way entirely to silence.
Head Full:
Prelude to a Friendship
Paul Lisicky
We were walking beneath thick trees, laughing too hard, and we both felt it at the same time. It passed from eye to eye, quick, gone. The awareness felt like the click on a cap of medicine. We were here, now. And though we’d only been taking long walks for two weeks, it was already getting harder to imagine when we hadn’t been trying to crack each other up. I hadn’t even known I’d been a corpse. I’d been in dead time, waiting to be undead. What follows is an outtake from my book, The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship, which wants to think about my twenty-six years with the novelist Denise Gess. I think of this as a prelude to the action in the book: those late, last minutes before an unexpected best friendship got under way.
I’d heard her name before I saw her face. It came from the mouth of my first creative writing teacher, a lithe, athletic woman whose impeccable appearance summoned up a bygone Hollywood: part Janet Leigh, part Tippi Hedren. She said Denise Gess as if it was a name I should know, or was going to know very soon. There might have been a current of resentment in this news. After all, my teacher was a gifted, dedicated writer. She’d been a student of Donald Barthelme. She had already written several novels, none of which had been published, and every time a book of hers cycled through the rounds, she altered her name a little, adding a syllable or clipping off a name, as if she were starting all over again. She led me to think that Denise Gess, a student in the graduate program in English she was encouraging me to apply to, was a name I should know. Denise’s first novel, Good Deeds, was already getting rave reviews months before it even came out.
For me “Denise Gess” inevita
bly summoned up Judith Guest, the author of Ordinary People, a novel that had been popular back then. Or maybe not so much the novel, but the movie, starring Mary Tyler Moore in a devastating, eviscerated performance. I was scared of this performance, maybe because I couldn’t find Mary Richards, the vulnerable character she played on TV, anywhere in her face, wrists, ears. This role seemed to swallow her whole. Where was her big, happy head, her tiny body, her dancer’s legs, the personality of a sixteen-year-old girl attached to the body of a woman, so determined to be perfect? Where was her funny voice with the endearing slide in the vowels? Always about to burst into tears even when she was smiling, soldiering on? This Ordinary People Mary leeched all the playfulness out of her eyes, which might have been why I associated the name Denise Gess with something curated, moneyed, and clean. It couldn’t have been further from my own last name, which I didn’t say aloud so I didn’t have to take in the confusion in anyone’s face. I just introduced myself as Paul, as if that was all you ever needed to know.
She was already at the seminar table of my romantic poetry class when I first walked in. It didn’t occur to me to sit anywhere close to her. Instead, I took a chair at the opposite end of the room so I couldn’t be subject to any conversation. I opened my textbook, aimed my face down at Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. I tried to imagine a compelling point about how the two sets of poems fit together: maybe there was something to say about how “A Little Boy Lost” dialogued with “A Poison Tree.” For the next five minutes I tried coming up with a scrutable perspective to slow the dense, high panic in my chest. I thought of a bat, a chirping brown bat, knocking on my collarbone from inside.
Affinity Page 28