“Fine, you fucking win,” said Nachbor. “Why don’t you call back and play along over the phone, so that all of New York can hear you? Better yet, go marching down to the studio with your fucking sousaphone. Where’s your phone book?” He began picking up objects—books and unopened packages and filthy dishes—with exaggerated motions.
Lowering the instrument, Dahl laughed, thinking he’d done Nachbor a turn, that his friend was giving him a hard time because of their rule. This was the raison d’être of their little rule—to talk about music, well, bad enough, but to actually play it—well, that’s a rabbi at a rib roast right there. But full minutes of this went by, Nachbor’s jaw still clenched, unyielding. And at last he broke his silence. “That was the wrong piece. He misunderstood. Or did me a solid.” The piece had been, Nachbor explained, Nachbor’s own, released on a compilation by a small label alongside a handful of other contemporary American composers, all far more prominent than Nachbor, who packed quickly, perfunctorily, refusing apologies. Apologies from Dahl! Would that anyone in the world could have borne witness to this! Like a Sasquatch sighting.
After that, two years went whooshing by before Nachbor returned Dahl’s phone call. No apology was ever granted, but if before that they’d sidestepped music like some shaky grating over the subway, afterward they avoided it as if they’d known someone who’d gone plummeting through one.
For longer than he’d care to remember, Dahl had lived from semester to semester, floating from residency to residency, landing artist-in-res gigs at colleges and weird high schools where he tucked away his misanthropy like a mild deformity and put on a happy face that convinced principals and music teachers and only the occasional student saw through it (but they still wanted to hear about the March of the Cyclone). In between he’d sniffed bowling shoes and loaded medical waste onto trucks, nervous for his hands lest a hypodermic come spearing through the bag. He’d apprenticed to a typesetter and answered phones for an architect. Every one of these odd jobs, every mundane thing he did, entered the bloodstream of his work, but mostly it allowed him to compose on company time, and he’d savored the whiff of incognito, a spy right under their noses. All the while, his parents kept the same lock on his childhood house, so he always had that to go back to. And then one day the locks were different—they were scaling back, headed south to North Carolina, warmer climes and more space, and they wanted rent, no more olly olly oxen free. He’d have to bank on fellowships. Someplace cold, where he could sit amidst the chills and maybe knock them out of his system, like some form of homeopathy. The envelope from McMurdo was distressingly thin, yet he felt relief, having had this image of his ass freezing to a sheet of ice while spooning watery fish soup into his mouth, the legendary hoosh he’d read about, a word he repeated aloud like a mantra, hoping he could trick it into a tune. Iceland, God bless their ethereal, elf-positive selves, took him. It would be his first gig since the accident. As the plane made its descent toward Reykjavik it felt as though someone had squinched gauze into one of his ears and was tugging it slowly out the other. This had happened to him after flights before, and it always went away, but on top of the chills, it would make life nearly unbearable.
He’d stepped off the plane and taken a cab into the heart of the city, where it felt like someone had wrapped his head in a plaster cast, and he’d barely been able to communicate with the driver, in spite of the guy’s insistence that he spoke English. For the next couple of weeks, he made do, strolling up and down the wide streets, past the gray, red-roofed houses, tilting his head and muttering to himself and trying to convince himself his hearing wasn’t permanently hampered. He sought out brennivín and shark meat in hopes that they’d jolt him back into the land of sound and maybe take out the chills as a convenient side effect. He underdressed severely, thinking maybe frostbite would issue his body an ultimatum: Plan on keeping those fingers? Toe for a toe, both of them yours? He found a composer who made instruments out of ice and who let him try out the frozen versions of the xylophone and trumpet. All was going well until the composer left the room to make them some tea, and Dahl, staring at the xylophone, the icy bars of its keys so perfectly aligned and spaced out, got the nearly uncontainable urge to climb upon it and lie down with his back against it. He was shaking—whether more out of terror that the thing would collapse beneath his weight or out of sheer cold was impossible to say—but he managed to get his butt down and was about to lower his spine when the composer came back in sooner than he’d expected, horror in his eyes as though he’d come upon Dahl and his own wife in flagrante delicto, and—this was perhaps worse—Dahl’s pleas that he might explain himself or that he’d pay for whatever damage he might have done, anything, anything to stay longer and keep discoursing, all falling flat. As he was racing out, chased by doorslam and what he surmised must be Icelandic curses, he wondered at the strangeness of his urge. Surely he could have just lain down on any old sheet of ice, any frozen patch. And yet something about the instrument, its painstakingly sculpted anatomy and pellucid overtones, had set off in him this aurora of momentary insanity. The rest of the trip was nondescript. Gradually, his hearing came back, but the chills refused to abate, and after another week of this he was heading home, citing medical complications that required he be a single Metro-card swipe from an orthopedic spine specialist, load of manure though this was.
North Carolina was the next nonstarter for him. The countryside his parents had moved to seemed to consist of one pig farm after another. Why couldn’t they have gone to Florida? “You get used to it in a few days,” his mother assured him.
You get to be happy as pigs in shit? is what he wanted to say.
They sounded happy, though, and he wanted to visit, but knew that even if he got used to it, the smell would be no less there: porcine fecal molecules—in the air, in your hair. Then he got something in the mail from his old alma mater—not the usual flier asking for money, but a pamphlet about his legacy, about preparing his will, and did he maybe want to think about the Hartford School of Music while he was doing so? He thought of Nachbor—at some point every day, Nachbor strolled through his mind, but this time he had a more specific image, of him tearing open the same envelope. He didn’t know what Nachbor’s bank account looked like, but given all of his successes, not to mention that he’d come from money, he figured not too shabby. Nachbor was the alumnus who such fliers were aimed at. He envisioned a concert hall with Nachbor’s name on it, the acoustics peerless, the seats sublimely comfortable. The last thing he wanted to do was to ask him for help, but he felt like he was down to his last out, and maybe the bulletin was a sign, and he got on the horn. As it were.
Johannes, for his part, sounded delighted to hear from him.
“Did you get it yet?” Dahl asked.
“Did I get it?” Nachbor wondered. “Don’t tell me you’ve sent me a recording, Leonard?” But he sounded, if anything, enthusiastic, or at least relieved, as if he had the inside track on Leonard’s woes.
“I didn’t send you anything, but our illustrious alma mater did. Let’s just say that we’re moving up in the reunion parade, getting closer to the dodderers and the ones who require someone to push them and have IVs in their arms. A few steps closer to the grave.”
“I’m looking right now,” Nachbor said. “Yes. Yes! I see what you’re talking about. This is great! Don’t tell me they’ve hired you to try to squeeze a few more dollars out of me. I give, I gave!”
“How about old Maudsley? Is anything left over after his monthly dubage order has been placed?”
Nachbor laughed. “What the hell are you doing these days?”
And Dahl explained that he was between places, between jobs, between relationships. Lots of betweens. He almost made a joke about microtones, which fell in the murky cracks between the ones generally recognized in Western music, the notes he’d gotten infatuated with in the second semester of his freshman year of college—the dark matter that dominated the universe, that lurked between pinpric
k stars. But the prohibition kicked in. He was like some Orthodox Jew who kept finding himself within sniffing distance of pork, tempted again and again, but always holding off.
He was more than welcome at their place, Nachbor said. At first, he offered Dahl the run of his house in the Berkshires, since they were going on their annual vacation. Did he remember Lindsay, his wife’s, lake house in central Maine that they’d been fixing up for years? It was an eco-friendly place now, and only getting eco-friendlier. He could even dogsit, though on second thought Ralphie loved the lake. The idea of Nachbor’s empty house seemed promising at first, but he saw himself naked and lonely in palatial sprawl in East Crunchboro, Massachusetts. There would be too much light and not even a dog to commiserate with. It felt like a vast chasm opening up in the earth, like the Antarctic ice sheet itself. Thankfully, Johannes went on. There wasn’t a lot of extra sleeping room in the house, not with all of them there, but they did have an old Shasta camper, the giant tin can Lindsay had rattled around in for family vacations as a kid, now sitting in the driveway with Dahl’s name on it.
“Lindsay makes me sleep in there anytime I screw up badly enough,” Johannes said. “But, really, it’s perfectly habitable. I’ll be a little envious.”
“Anytime you need to crash,” said Leonard. “Mi Shasta es su casa.” The chuckle that came through the earpiece then must’ve traveled thirty-two years to arrive, and they could have been eighteen again, the Shasta just one more ridiculous sideshow, and somewhere beyond it the world waiting—biding its time, still patient, then—for whatever was roiling within them.
Need
Roberta Allen
At every party on Saturday night, the way she smiles, first at me, then at the Dutchman, you’d think we were lovebirds, a foot from the altar, honeymoon-bound. I see that smile whenever she mentions him—which is often, especially when she’s in the car driving me on errands. Over and over, I’ve told her and other partygoers in this artsy upstate town that my relationship with the Dutchman is noncommittal, but they just don’t seem to get it. Whenever her white-haired husband sees me alone, he asks, “Where’s your guy?” I shrug and say, “I don’t keep tabs on him.” I remind him that the Dutchman I am dating stays with me only three days a week. The other days he’s at home in the city. I could be prowling the weekend flea market in town, walking down Main Street, or looking in the bookshop window, which I was doing this morning, when he asks me for the umpteenth time.
Later, I run into the woman in the local health-food store whose spine is unusually curved. She says with a knowing smile, her voice full of innuendo, “How’s your boyfriend?”
“Fine,” I reply, my voice flat, as I recall her saying to him at a party: I know you’d like to do me.
These older, well-heeled partygoers, mostly from the city, smoke so much marijuana it must impair their thinking. Or else they’re too old to remember open relationships, even though they once were hippies, like the aging, long-haired dropouts who congregate at the village square. Sleeping around is not something he and I do. In fact, we’ve been faithful ever since we met. At least, that’s what we tell each other.
The wife of the white-haired man is unhappy, but she doesn’t admit it. She and her husband still have sex once a month, she has said. I don’t talk about my sex life. Nevertheless, she has often told me that regular sex has made my hair grow thicker. Once, I actually ran my fingers through my hair.
Why spoil her fantasies or the fantasies of other partygoers who spend time and energy wondering, or gossiping about, the sex they imagine other people are having, or not having, or about the sex they wish they were having, especially with the Dutchman. He is handsome and youthful despite his years. Who can blame them for flirting with him at Saturday night parties, given the scarcity of available older men without paunches draped over their pants and hairs sprouting like weeds from nostrils and ears. Like teenagers at synagogue dances, women dance with women at parties to Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Stones, and men stand on the sidelines and watch until booze, or pot, or both, give them courage enough to make their moves.
In summer, on Friday nights like this one, when local bands play sixties rock at a dance club in a nearby town, I miss the Dutchman. I grow tired of dancing with the same women, week after week, especially with the one who has an unusually curved spine, and shimmies on all fours when she’s drunk enough. After plenty of booze, partygoers repair to the club gazebo, outside in back, to smoke marijuana. I follow after them.
What else can I do?
I depend on the party crowd. They fill in for the wife of the white-haired man when she’s too busy to drive me. Without them, I am stuck in town, watching petunias grow on my porch.
I pray that I pass my driving test soon!
The gazebo is clogged with smoke when the club owner’s wife, a judge, walks by, and looks the other way. None of the partygoers who drive me home from weekend soirees, often drunk, or impaired by drugs, or both, have ever been fined, or prosecuted, or had a license suspended or revoked—as far as I know.
Seated across from me in the gazebo, the stoned psychiatrist from the Bronx, nicknamed The Receptacle by those who follow her sexual escapades, stares at me with glazed eyes. “Whatsamatter you don’ like me?” I recall how she tried to entice the Dutchman at a party by grinding the air in front of him, in time to the music, while he and I sat quietly talking. How annoyed he was by her interruption. She was too stoned to notice.
Driving me to the gym last week, the widowed redhead, desperate to find a husband, said, “I would never date a man as flirtatious as your guy.” Why didn’t I tell her his flirtations mean nothing?
The wife of the white-haired man has told me over and over how unhappy I was before I met the Dutchman.
Unhappy? I asked her. “Did you see something in me that made you say that? Something in my face? My voice? The way I carried myself?”
Her answer is always vague: “I could just tell.”
Is it possible I am happier? Hasn’t my relationship with the Dutchman made me less dependent on the party crowd? When he’s here, he drives me in my Cabriolet convertible, the car I naively purchased before understanding how difficult driving would be for a woman my age. I am almost ready to take my test again.
When I pass, will I still need the Dutchman?
Will the wife of the white-haired man still tell herself she is better off married when she sees me driving wherever I please? How much safer it is for her to complain about his short-term memory loss, and how she has to run his bed & breakfast, curb his spending on collectibles, handle investments, pay bills, do household chores, prepare meals, entertain his ex-wife and their married children and grandchildren, and even entertain an ex-girlfriend, besides hosting parties on weekends for the local crowd. Even her cancer didn’t stop him from depending on her. “No time out for cancer!” was her frequent refrain.
Nevertheless, she recovered.
This last time the wife of the white-haired man went on about how unhappy I had been, I changed the subject by telling her about the kids who continued eating ice-cream cones when their mother lost control of the car and crashed into a ditch, a story my driving teacher told me. I doubt she heard a word I said.
I’ve told her many times I don’t want to be any man’s wife, certainly not the Dutchman’s wife. He has never married; he has lived alone all his life. Every so often, he talks about wanting to fall madly in love, something unknown to him. I hate to admit it, but sometimes I catch myself wishing we were Bill Holden and Jennifer Jones, picnicking under a large shade tree, in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.
Is there a picnic scene?
One night after a party, I was ready to call it quits. But he begged me not to end it. He had smoked pot like everyone else but me. All evening he had chased a beautiful blonde realtor from room to room. Her disinterest made him more persistent. “You better watch that man!” drawled a pretty southern transplant. Later, she would leave her boyfriend because he’d flirt
ed with the same blonde.
Raucous laughter in the gazebo doesn’t stop me thinking about the blonde realtor. Maybe she changed her mind. Maybe she’s entertaining him now in her Chelsea loft. Another blonde comes to mind, a famous female artist I ran into with the Dutchman in the city. After learning that he lived in Soho, the artist looked up at him with big blue eyes and innocently, or maybe not, asked if he ever visited me upstate. He said he’d stayed with me several times. I wanted to say that if several times meant three days a week for nearly six months, then several times was correct, but I let it slide, said nothing.
In the gazebo, I let the white-haired husband interrupt my thoughts. In a loud, raspy voice, he is telling a story everyone but me is too stoned to remember hearing a thousand times before about a woman he dated forty-five years ago, who ended the relationship after telling him he would never make any money. “She’s the one who spurred me on!” he says, laughing, phlegm catching in his throat. “She’s the reason I became so successful. I found her on the Internet recently and told her so. But,” he says, hysterical, barely able to get the words out, “she didn’t remember who I was!” He doubles over in laughter. The others laugh hysterically too—except for his wife, whose smile is pasted on her face.
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