“Holland,” a voice called. I stopped. Holland, you see, was my maiden name, a name I hadn’t used in exactly ten years. And with my parents long dead, not even Monica knew it. Three boys kicked a football in the meadow. An elderly groundsman pedalled an ancient black bicycle down a footpath into the trees.
“Six o’clock.” The voice was deep and soothing, a strong presence, insistent but not urgent, and above all, in control. A man appeared at my shoulder. “I’m Hook.”
Perhaps my heightened state still expected an Apollonian Schwarzenegger. What I got, and you’ll forgive me for being so direct, was a Jew. Not an unattractive one, mind, but someone tall and dark, with a little more nose and a little less hair than the perfection I felt my new self deserved. American, without a doubt—jeaned and booted, blow-dried and corduroy-jacketed. But something about his face, less the nose and the mouth than the eyes, definitely the eyes, suggested something more than American, more than Jewish, something wise and pre-Columbian.
“Shall we go in?” He led more than asked, and guided me back across the drive. “Nice house,” he said, turning the knob and opening the door I was certain I had locked. “Cost a million in the States.”
“I’m sorry, Hook,” I finally said, still bewildered by the initial “Holland” and feeling very much like bolting out the front door and climbing the nearest horse chestnut, “I don’t know if I’m up to it this evening.” The whole story followed—the divorce, the growth, the confusion—the two of us standing there in the foyer, Hook in his boots, me in my zoris, the front door wide open, the boys kicking goals in the evening light. Hook shut the door gently and led me to the kitchen table.
“I know all about it,” he said. He drew a bottle of Margaux from his leather shoulder bag and coaxed several glasses down my throat while from secret depths he pulled radicchio and endive, veal and spring rice, and a golden rhum baba that had “Eat Me” written all over the top.
Alice, I thought, that’s who I am. I’m Alice. It’s perfectly natural in Wonderland to wake up in the morning and find you’re six feet tall and 38-D. I’m Alice. But who is he, this American Jew with the magical mystery meal and the overpriced wine? Too tall to be the Mad Hatter, too visible to be the Cheshire Cat. Neither Caterpillar nor Butterfly. Who baked the Eat Me cake? Who distilled the Drink Me hooch?
“I want you to hear something remarkable.” The dishes were rinsed, the bottle was empty, I was drinking Sambuca, and Hook was guiding me into my own parlour. He found the stereo, took a cassette from his pocket, and pushed Play.
There we stood, me looking at the carpet, Hook watching for my reaction, while the most extraordinary music surrounded us. A note, a low note, a red-wine note, full of resin and peel, a violin note, although that not apparent until a full thirty seconds had passed, and still the same note for another thirty. Then another, higher, but only by inches; lighter, but only by grams. Each note vibrating for a count of sixty—eight minutes for the first octave, eight minutes of undisputed beauty, but an eternity for any polite party trick.
By the second octave, it was clear there was no stopping the tape. Hook had invited himself to my house, had cooked me three courses and half a bottle, for no other reason than to make me listen to a G-major scale played on the violin. And the miracle of it: I bought into the show with the same ease I’d accepted my bonus twelve inches. It all seemed right, appropriate, comme il faut. I hadn’t offered Hook a seat. But this was music to stand by.
On and up the scale, well into the third octave, each note setting the stage for the next, each note making sense of the one preceding. Each note carrying movements, resonances, definitions, suggesting beginnings, directions, variations, unravelling diversions, melodies, sonatas, cantatas, concerti, meanings—none played, all possible. Up, up, nearly half an hour, four alarming octaves to an impossible anti-feline G, and then down, down just as slowly, down, with a knee-wrenching, thigh-flexing deliberation, down another twenty-eight minutes to the hollow bottom, beyond which nothing—relief, apprehension, terror.
This was the New Vocabulary, the New Language that Hook had brought me. This was the Berlitz course, total immersion. This was Larousse and Laura Ashley, O.E.D. and Footnotes to Alice, Pith Helmet and Puttees for my safari into the New World of my New Body.
That was the first time I heard Sandor play the violin, although Hook wouldn’t identify the violinist until he’d played me the entire oeuvre, which took the better part of the evenings of the next three weeks. The schedule was invariable. Hook arrived at six with the latest goss from the office, I cooked dinner. Then three hours of violin. The four-octave scale led quickly to Corelli, Vivaldi, and Bach. So effective was the drug that it took me until the next morning to wonder why I was allowing this, if I was allowing this. And by the time I’d determined to retake command of my evenings, it was six o’clock and too late to flee to the Heath.
Hook assumed merciful charge of those early daytimes. The Beeb was led to believe that I was laid up with a post-divorce depression that was contagious to any who had known me married. Hook was entrusted with all communication, which relieved the sympathetic hordes no small amount. He read my mail, he wrote my replies. He materialized a catalogue from Spiegel’s of Chicago, and from that a new wardrobe, not too expensive, but foreign enough that no Englishwoman could tell how cheap.
He taught me how to hook a bra. By midnight he was gone.
You would have thought in those three weeks, we’d have slept together. There wasn’t time in the plan. Not that I wasn’t dying of the itch. There I was, legally divorced and literally Lollobrigidized, without the time in the evenings or the will in the daytime to get it off. The first week, Foss called with urgent lunchtime importunings. I tried to explain the change, what had happened the morning after the divorce. He took the whole story as a metaphoric kiss-off. He wanted to try one more time, to talk, actually talk with me. But I couldn’t see confronting his sixty-four inches with my seventy-two in some seedy haunt near the British Museum, and risking having him faint away and hit his head against a rusty shilling-a-toss gas fire. And as he couldn’t take the time to travel up the Northern Line during the day, the phone calls ceased.
Instead, I drew the curtains, laid my chin music on the turntable, and touched myself shamelessly. The first movement of the Beethoven Concerto was the best, left and right hands working on my approximations of ebony fingerboard and horsehair bow. Or Mischa Elman’s recording of Saint-Saëns’s “Rondo Capriccioso” with its timely grace notes.
But nothing could match the unbearable heat, the physical agony of the Sandor tapes. I sat, I stood, across from Hook, next to Hook, on the carpet, leaning against the mantel, but always away from the speakers that liquefied my very being. I had no vision of Sandor, no picture of face or physique, and never once was drawn to anthropomorphize the torturous sound. But I itched, itched in torment, to wrap my legs around the JBL’s, take woofer and tweeter, crossover and horn deep, deep inside me, to have the sound itself, free of body and psyche, harmonizing with my own perfection. And every midnight, I gazed in silent longing at the bag of X-rated cassettes bouncing away on Hook’s departing bum.
I returned to work at the beginning of November—Hook eased that transition too, guiding me around the stares and the whispers of men who had once known me eyeball-to-eyeball and now had to deal with a retinaful of breast.
I pestered Hook for details about Sandor. All I could glean was a vague story of a child prodigy who had given up performing and recording years before. Hook had attended Sandor’s final master class the previous summer, and by his own account had been the star pupil, though my efforts to provoke a performance from him were as fruitless as my requests for tapes. Something about Sandor’s Method, diktats against stunts, against playing for an audience of even one, against copying his image—something medieval, superstitious.
All other Sandor info—whereabouts, phone numbers, country of residence—were, bien sûr, Top Secret. After a few months, when the itch
had scratched itself dry with its own lack of success, my interest became purely documentary. My new body had given me new powers. I had carte blanche at the Beeb—top camera crews, prime programming time, and the slavering tongues of the Publicity Department. I offered Hook a tithe of my projects, but no bribe was sufficient. He was vaguely uninterested in the business of documentary filmmaking, and was using whatever journalism grant had brought him to the U.K. for entirely private purposes. I suggested he was an agent of the CIA one evening over dinner at Bianchi’s. He laughed. His project was mysterious, he confessed, but far more so than anything the U.S. government could cook up.
One day in February he was gone—desk cleared, no forwarding address, no phone number, poof.
By then, I was used to surprises. Maggie became PM. The City opened up. Lina and Tina Philosopoulos, a pair of kittenish teenage twins, made a middle-size fortune trading olive oil and diverted a large chunk to form a TV production company with myself as creative director. I sold Hampstead. I bought a ninety-nine-year lease on a corner house in a gate off Hyde Park. I bought my production company when Lina and Tina were extradited to Athens for wire fraud. Award followed award, until I made so much sterling that I couldn’t afford to go anywhere near a camera. Morning was spent in First Class, lunch with distributors and accountants, dinner with bankers and ambassadors, drinks, if I was lucky, with the occasional director. Chastity and Cash were inevitable. My films couldn’t lose.
But every night, entirely alone, whether between silk at the Okura or satin at L’Hôtel, I dreamed of the sound of Sandor’s violin, four octaves of rising excitement, four octaves of descending recovery, fifty-seven minutes to fall asleep. And every time I flew to the States, I searched for Hook, in the papers, in the phone book, in casual conversation.
Then one December morning two years ago, one of those brilliant, crisp blue—I had a suite at the Carlyle, fourteenth floor, view of the park—un-London, New York mornings, coffee arrived with The New York Times opened to the Arts page. In the top right corner, unmissable—Hook—same eyes, same nose, a little more flesh, a little less hair. Below—a time and an address, beneath the bowels of Manhattan, in the genitalia of the Lower East Side, well past my bedtime. But rearranged, unbooked, dereserved, and enlimoed, I travelled toute seule to the steam-spitting cobblestones of Downtown.
I queued behind a cordon of downtown types—black shoes, black socks, blond hair, a few nuns. The Plaza de Toros was more of a sandpit than a club. At five minutes to midnight, two or three hundred people were already seated in the circular bleacher. I glanced at faces, searched laps for any other ready-folded editions of The New York Times.
At midnight sharp the lights went out. No dimming, no announcement, no accommodation for conversation. With the lights, all sound. I shifted on my bench, but the acoustics of the club muffled the rustle of my skirt to silence. For five minutes we sat, then a dim light, a bull’s-eye in the middle of the sandpit, a violin and a bow, suspended six feet off the ground. I shifted again, wondering, is this what twelve years has accomplished for Hook, returned him to a prepubescent avant-garde? Is it for this the mystery? I sat for half an hour, impatience on the rise, waiting, if for nothing else, for a glimpse of Hook.
Then I heard it. Starting on the low G, settling there for a count of thirty and for thirty seconds more. Up to the G-sharp, the A, the A-sharp, the B. The violin all the time motionless, the bow hanging parallel to the instrument, all sound impossible, but still—Sound—not from speakers, but from violin, bow, joined in dim light, six feet above sand—Sandor. After twelve years of imagining, here was the sound again, not in my head, but vivid, public, the others around me moving, itching, groping, mumbles, gurgles in the backs of their throats, giving way to screams as the third octave gave way to the fourth and the insupportable scratchless shriek of the high-high-high G.
To this day, I have not seen a loudspeaker small enough to hide in a violin, faithful enough to reproduce the tone I heard in the Plaza de Toros that late night. Conceivably Hook had perfected a form of ventriloquism, so concentrating our attentions on the dangling violin that if the voice of Elvis had spoken to us, we would have been convinced it had drawled out the f-holes.
But this was the voice of Sandor, with a tradition behind it as long and torturous as the Memphis Blues. And now, no longer just the G-major scale that Hook had played me twelve years before in my parlour, but the full range of Western chromatics, all the notes to all the scales, all the modes, from Aeolian to Babylonian, the Full Vocabulary, the Entire Language. Twelve notes to an octave, four octaves up, four octaves down, eight octaves and the final G, one minute per note, ninety-seven minutes to hear every note in the repertoire.
No Sandor. No Hook. Not out front. Not backstage.
It was well past two when I fell down onto the business end of my Carlyle suite, hot and unsatisfied as ever, more angry than aroused. I had grown used to having orders followed, expectations fulfilled—to getting satisfaction. A strategically opened morning newspaper, as innocent as half a grapefruit, had provoked me into the kind of frenzy I had buried long before on the Heath. The phone rang.
“Did you like the concert?” The same cheek. The same Hook.
“I’ve got to see you.” Joan Crawford at her least beguiling grimaced back at me from the mirror across the room, hair askew, telephone like a Dorian Gray goiter.
“That’s impossible,” Hook said, “but look”—before I could hurl twelve years of invective back at him—“I’ve got something for you.”
“Yes?”
“Sandor. It’s time.”
“You know where he is?” I found a Carlyle biro and pad in one unconscious move.
“Nineteen ninety-two,” Hook said.
“In the Carlyle!” Just five floors above me?
“The year,” Hook continued. “Not far off. I want you to do the picture.” I put down my biro.
“Hook,” I said, “what in the world are you talking about?”
“You wanted to meet Sandor?” he asked. “I’m giving you the chance to make a documentary—in time for ninety-two.” Ninety-two, I thought, the United Europe, big deal, what’s that got to do with Sandor?
“Columbus,” Hook said. “Five hundred years. Sandor and Columbus. It’s a helluva story.” I felt like throwing the phone into Madison Avenue airspace.
“Hook”—I put on my cajoling voice—“can’t we have breakfast? It’s two-thirty in the a.m. and, frankly, I am having great difficulty following what I suspect is an interesting and provocative, and, need I remind you, the first, conversation we have had in thirteen years.”
“Listen, Holland,” Hook said. “Go to sleep. We’ll talk, but not tomorrow. There’ll be something for you to read with your coffee—the Carlyle dug up some Devonshire cream. Fax Ben, he’ll sort out the details. Sleep tight.”
“Ben?” Isabella had ridden the waves of Holland’s story with an intensity that gave nothing away, neither comprehension nor bewilderment. “Ben?” she asked again.
“Yes, Ben,” Holland said, standing for a stretch of those long legs and a walk around the fountain. “That was the first I ever heard of Ben.”
“And so, Holland,” I said, “did you live happily ever after?” She stopped and looked down at me, the same bewildered look I saw in the airport when I asked her to help lift your trunk. I offered the girl another kipferln.
“With every other film,” Holland began, “every other documentary I’ve ever made, I’ve known, with absolute certainty, after the last frame has been shot, whether it’s a prize-winner or a dog best left in the kennel. Last night, here in this courtyard, Sandor played for me thirty-one minutes of Bach. That’s it, over there, in the camera, on the wheels, the child of a fourteen-year-old obsession. Last night, I thought that’s it, that’s the ace, the closer, the finish, the coup, the winner. Tonight, I’m not so sure.”
“Ben?”
“That’s it.” Holland smiled at the girl. “Ben.”
HO
LLAND—HANNI’S TALE
Ben Darling,
“S’i’ credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma starìa senza più scosse;
Ma però che già mai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s’i’ odo il vero,
senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.”
Ah.
When Guido spilled his guts to Dante, when J. Alfred told all to T.S., they were convinced that the travelling poets were down in Hell to stay, not out to gather dirt for the unauthorized hardcover, bio-doc, or Studs Terkel oral history.
If I ever thought I were telling my tale
to writers holding return tix,
I’d freeze right up and turn my tail;
But since I know there are no round trips,
if the stories I have heard are true,
open your ears and read my lips.
Poor Guido. Dying for a good natter, dying to tell his dirty secret to someone. How was he to know that Dante would publish, that his story would be studied and ignored by millions of adolescents? How can you tell someone to go to Hell when they’re already eight rings down?
The rest of us tell our tales to uncomprehending girls and immovable old women.
And you. You I tell more.
Still, I wish I had my Carlos.
Why do I think of you now, Ben, with my jumpsuit down around my ankles, on the very loo where I found Sandor peacefully asleep just twenty-four hours ago?
What are you like, Ben?
Strange, how I know you only from your writing, and then, mostly for “BR342J 10DEC LGWMRP HK1 1000 1235.” Are you tall, slim, ruddy like Histon, receding like Duxford, olive-complected like my Hook? Do you have an age, a history, a favourite colour, a sexual preference? Are you attracted to forty-six-year-old women?
A Guide for the Perplexed Page 11