by Unknown
I had no idea what he was talking about. But once during a routine practice of scales, he played something that made me twitch.
“What was that?” I cringed.
“It’s a tritone,” he laughed. “An augmented fourth. Meant to be annoying. Diabolus in musica.”
“Diabolic… what?”
“The devil in music.” He lowered his voice melodramatically. “An illegal interval in the middle ages… when music was the dominion of ecclesiastics and monks.”
He played it again, and I winced again. Couldn’t help it.
“Not very pretty, is it? But it has its uses, as you’ve noticed,” he chuckled. “I like it.”
Matthew would also work for hours on a style of improvising he called “spontaneous composition.” It was astonishing to hear. He said he wanted to use his music to cause a transmutation in the soul of the audience, a metamorphosis during which people would be transported to another place, another time. His theories were couched in a kind of spiritualism with which I wasn’t very comfortable, but I listened patiently as he attempted to convey his vision of a perfect marriage of music and cinema. He was convinced that the eventual alloy of the two would have a mystical effect on people.
I told him I thought his aspirations seemed to have theological origins.
“The artistic urge is essentially a spiritual urge,” he quickly replied.
I’d become so much a part of Matthew and Liberty’s household that I felt like a member of the family. Had I known what was about to happen I would have stayed away.
Or… maybe not.
Alone one night with Liberty while Matthew was at the theater, I quizzed her about Matthew’s theories, and she told me he’d been struggling with them for as long as she’d known him. To illustrate, she told me of their honeymoon. He took her to France, and, of course, she was thrilled. But his alternative reason for going there, she soon discovered, was to meet the inventor, George Melies, who had a movie studio in Paris. Matthew had seen a Melies movie based on Verne’s Trip to the Moon, and it had galvanized his thoughts. Although Liberty didn’t really mind the excursions away from their romantic pursuits, it was then she realized she’d forever share her husband’s love with another force.
Something else occurred during the honeymoon, which I found fascinating. Matthew had somehow gotten tickets to the premiere of a ballet by the composer Stravinsky. Liberty said it was called The Coronation of Spring. Apparently, this was quite a coup on Matthew’s part, and the couple prepared for the evening with the greatest enthusiasm. For her part, Liberty’s knowledge of music was parochial, but Matthew explained that Stravinsky was sure to be a giant in music, and their chance to see this premiere was a once in a lifetime thing.
Her eyes glowed as she told me the story, how they dressed to the teeth, how Matthew hired a private cab for the trip from the hotel to the concert hall, how he’d showered her with flowers from street vendors all evening and generally acted the lovesick fool. She was invigorated by it all. Then, the concert…
There had been some controversy surrounding the ballet arising from critics’ reaction to dress rehearsals, so the hall was filled with tension and anticipation. There were whistles and shouts before the curtain even rose. The first minutes of the performance were uneventful, but at one point a few members of the audience began to protest. It was extremely modern music, and from the way Liberty described it the choreography was quite suggestive. The hall lights came up, and the crowd quieted down, but within minutes a veritable riot broke out.
Supporters and antagonists yelled at each other across the aisles. Matthew leapt to his feet in defense of the music and was punched by a man in front of him. Nevertheless, they stayed until the end, at which point Matthew screamed, “Bravo,” for a good five minutes. (She told me his hair stood straight up on end.) He positively shuddered with excitement over the next few hours. He’d never experienced any music with such extreme visual power, he told her. It was evolutionary. A new way. He couldn’t remember much about the dancing.
That event and the trip to Melies’s studio convinced Liberty she’d married an artist. She was deeply in love with him then and still was now. But I detected a certain sadness in her voice, and I suddenly appreciated the simultaneous closeness and distance she felt about Matthew Perdu.
“I love him,” she murmured, not looking at me. “But it’s a changed love… not… not the love of a wife.”
I could barely hear her last words, but the meaning was clear enough.
One night I arrived at the theater late, cold and wet. Things had been harried at the office, and Mr. Smith was especially perturbed at Matthew for leaving early. I made a lame excuse for my friend, then angrily completed both my assignment and the one he’d left unfinished. His tenure at Mutual was fast coming to an end, that was sure. By the time I got to the Nickelodeon, the first performance had already begun.
I rushed the purchase of my ticket, dashed through the lobby hoping I’d only missed a little bit when Matthew’s playing stopped me dead. My sense of space and location suddenly vanished. Time evaporated. Images flooded my mind. Moving images. As if I were having some kind of waking dream. As if a movie were playing inside my mind.
“Aren’t you going in?” The manager interrupted my reverie.
“Oh, yes, of course.” How long had I been standing there? What had I been doing?
“I wish he’d stick to the text, you know,” the pudgy man said. Matthew had introduced me to him once, although he rarely came out of his tiny office off the lobby. “It’s… it’s disorienting, that… that crazy stuff he plays. Sometimes have to close my door or I can’t concentrate.”
“Have you had complaints?” I asked.
“No,” he murmured, “but he’s doing it more and more. Sooner or later he’s going to drive a customer away. I’m going to have to speak with him.”
I went in and watched the rest of the movie. And that’s when I realized I hadn’t missed a thing. I knew exactly what the story was about.
I startled a gentleman in the lobby afterward by grabbing his arm and asking him to listen to my synopsis of the early part of the movie, the part I thought I’d missed. He listened patiently then told me my recollection was correct.
On the way home I told Matthew of my experience. He smiled at me with that enigmatic grin again.
“Yes. I’m getting there. It’s working,” he said, adding nothing further.
By November Matthew was spending almost all of his free time at Harris’s Nickelodeon; hour upon hour in a dreary cell of a room beneath the theater where he’d wait between performances, studying strips of film provided by the projectionist with whom he’d established an enduring friendship (founded, I believe, on the old man’s love of whiskey and Matthew’s ability to provide it). It was a dank place, that dungeon. The smell, the graffiti on the walls, the harsh glare from that single bare bulb above him gave me the impression illicit activities went on here in his absence. I never understood why he preferred to lounge there instead of the lobby, or even outdoors.
“It’s quiet,” was his only explanation, ignoring the hiss of steam pipes, the “clank” and “bang” of monstrous furnaces somewhere… which always made me jump. But there he’d sit, quietly as if meditating, pieces of music and film scattered about the floor randomly.
Liberty seemed to be withdrawing. She was always so patient with him, but as he obsessively pushed closer and closer to some elusive goal only he could see, he was leaving her further and further behind.
I spent a lot of time with both of them, but separately, not together as during our leisurely summer months. My presence seemed to lift Liberty’s spirits, but I was treading on slippery and dangerous emotional ground.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could hear them talking?” I said while watching him tinker with his film in that tiny room below Harris’s Nickelodeon.
He suddenly turned to me with an expression I’d never seen before. A cold, unpleasant darkness swept
into his eyes. And I swear his hair throbbed.
“It would add so much….” I stammered.
“That’s theater,” he hissed. “You want to hear people talk, go to the theater. This is a different art, an art of international language… like music. It needs no… dialogue.”
He said that last word with an unmistakable tone of contempt.
“Almost like dreaming,” I muttered absentmindedly.
“Yes. That’s it. Collective dreaming,” he said. And his eyes were gleaming once again. He continued to work for a moment, then he paused and bowed his head.
“They’ll do it, you know.”
“What?” I asked, troubled by the non sequitur.
“They’ll make the pictures talk. Sooner or later. To satisfy people like…”
“Me?”
He looked up. He tried to dismiss the accusation with a slight smile. It came off as a grimace instead.
“The promise of cinema will have been betrayed” was all he said.
When I watched the movie later that night, I completely forgot that it played without a single title card. You see, he had cut them all out! But I understood it perfectly.
For the next few weeks Matthew was fanatic about his work at the theater. All else seemed a distraction to him. I covered for him at the office. He became gaunt, his eyes lost their penetrating quality. Their vision had turned inward, I believe.
But on Thanksgiving his old spirits seemed to revive briefly. Liberty had prepared a wonderful meal, and Matthew was actually witty and animated, not at all distracted and aloof.
Liberty and I hoped he might take an evening off from the Nickelodeon but our hopes were short-lived. A new film was scheduled, and he couldn’t wait to see it. We watched unhappily as he stepped out into the snowy cold.
Liberty and I sat in front of the fire with our brandy saying nothing for the next hour. I was extremely uncomfortable. My heart, my mind, my nerves were a jumble of conflicting impulses. I wanted to say something, then held back. Silence was a sentinel against my stampeding feelings. Finally, though, it was she who overwhelmed my defenses.
“I’m so lonely, Justin.”
My heart shattered. I was in love with this woman. I had known it for some time, but I’d learned to live with it. Seeing her unhappy was something I could not.
Words failed me completely. I wanted to reassure her, dispel her fear, make everything right. But each time I tried willing my mouth to work, it refused.
Suddenly, I was in her arms. I don’t know how it happened. Not a word was spoken. My hand had reached out to caress her face. An innocent gesture, I meant, but she leaned into it easily, hungrily. And we melted into each other.
There, in the arms of another man’s wife, my best friend’s wife, I was horrified and excited at the same time. I could feel her heart. I was frightened by her passion. How had it come to this? We began to make love.
“My God,” I whispered as I buried my face in her luxurious hair, “what are we doing?”
“We’re going to hell,” she panted.
But as I looked deep within her eyes, it wasn’t hell I was seeing.
For a long time afterward we just lay there in each other’s arms. Listening to the fire… until she finally leaned over me, caressed my face.
“It’s all right now.” And she smiled.
I hurriedly left the apartment in a daze. How could I have done such a thing? How could she?
Before I realized it, I was standing in front of J. P. Harris’s Nickelodeon on Smithfield Street. Had I meant to come there? Had I been propelled by some imp of the perverse, excited to see me confront the friend I’d just betrayed? Had I been lured here by some external force… drawn inevitably by my perceptive friend who wanted to stare into my eyes and silently ask…“Well?”… as if he’d been sure what would happen after he left? Could he have somehow wanted it to happen?
What kind of madness was this? Were they both demons… set out to test me… each one pricking the soft tissue of my conscience to see if it would yield?
My mind ached more than my heart.
And that’s when I saw Williams, the theater manager, trotting impatiently up the street ahead of me.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Williams?” I asked as I fell into step next to him. “You seem upset.”
“You’d be too if you’d been dragged away from a warm holiday meal into a night like this.”
“What’s wrong?”
“That’s what I’m about to find out. Some street urchin arrived at my door with an urgent message from Bellows. Said I had to come to the theater right away.”
At the Nickelodeon everything appeared normal. Except Bellows, the old projectionist, was in the vestibule pacing back and forth like an expectant father. He was extremely pale. And when we came in he stuttered incoherently, which made Williams even angrier. The manager brushed past his tipsy employee and went into his office.
Inside the theater, Matthew’s music filled the lobby. I could see the manager through the cracked doorway of his office going over books and papers. He looked distracted. Matthew was playing like a man possessed. I’d never heard anything so disorganized, unrecognizable. Shrill and piercing, all in the upper registers one moment, then low and growling the next. It made no traditional sense, but it thrilled me anyway.
I felt like I’d stepped into another dimension. Everything around me took on an intense glow, and everything seemed to slow down. Williams came back out of his office carrying the nightly receipt card, but he and Bellows and the ticket girl all looked out of whack. The music overtook all other sound. I could hear nothing else. The walls began to vibrate, then melt. Color saturated my vision.
Suddenly I was no longer standing in the lobby. I found myself in a battlefield. The dead and dying were everywhere, and a green gas permeated the atmosphere. Men gagged, horses danced madly in the throes of death. Explosions rocked the earth. But for some reason I was calm and unafraid. A brilliant white light appeared on the horizon and began to come toward me. I tried to approach it, but my legs wouldn’t move. Then it began to change. For a moment I thought I was facing a beautiful woman. Then it was something else I can’t describe, but it too was beautiful, magnificent. Then the light reappeared. All this occurred within the same instant. The charred, lifeless earth had disappeared in the light. Voices spoke in reassuring, serene tones, but the words were unintelligible. I was swept over by an extraordinary, utter peace. There was music… no, not music… some unidentifiable sound. It came from everywhere, was everywhere, was everything.
And then it all came to an indescribable crescendo… and stopped. I gasped as if coming up for air after being held underwater too long. I looked around. The others appeared to have undergone a similar experience. Williams was sweating profusely.
And that’s when we heard it. The applause. A great roaring wave of it.
The door to the theater swung open, and the audience burst out. Some were in tears, others were laughing raucously. Several were shaking their heads in wonder. Not one, NOT ONE, seemed unmoved.
“So, why am I here, Bellows?” Mr. Williams demanded, waving the nightly receipt card. “We have a full house. They obviously… enjoyed the movie.” He said this last sentence glancing sideways at me with a bit of embarrassment.
“What is so important that I should leave my home and come down here?” he shouted at the quivering old projectionist.
I stared at this audience of excited people as they walked by. I heard comments like “astonishing,” “never seen anything like that,” “extraordinary.” What a wonderful movie it must have been.
“But you see, that’s just it,” Bellows stammered. “That’s just it.”
Williams and I exchanged a suspicious glance.
“There was no movie,” the old man protested.
Williams’s mouth fell open.
“There was no movie,” Bellows carried on. He was slobbering now. “It never got here. I didn’t know what to do. We sold the
tickets, and I sent a boy to the train station to see if it was there. When he came back empty-handed I sent him to you. But then… but then,” he nodded at the theater, “he started playin’. And they didn’t leave. You hear me, they wouldn’t leave. I saw ’em through my hole back here. He was playin’ like a madman. His hair was standin’ straight up in the air. Lord Jesus, I never saw nothin’ like that. I heard ’em laughin’ and cryin’. They’d shout, then be quiet. And his playin’, Mr. Williams… you heard it. But there was no movie. It never got here. There was no movie!”
On the way home Matthew and I rode in silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and I couldn’t look directly at him. But he seemed serene, peaceful, as if all was right in the world.
When we neared our stop, he took my hands in his and turned to me for the first time since we left the theater. I was shocked. His eyes had gone totally white… like albino eyes. They were soft and gentle looking, but the sight of them almost made me cry out.
“Don’t be frightened, Justin,” he said. The tone of his voice calmed me. “It’s wonderful. Believe me. It’s wonderful. I can see everything now.”
“What’s happened to you?” I wept.
“I’ve succeeded.”
And he said nothing more.
We got off the trolley, and I walked him toward his apartment. At the front door he turned to me again.
He smiled and touched my cheek with his hand. His eyes almost appeared to glow. “I love you both.” That was all he said.
He walked slowly up the stairs and fumbled with his keys in the lock.
I never saw Matthew Perdu again.
We got a letter from him several years later. It was the first we’d heard since he moved to California that January. Liberty and I were married shortly after he left, and two sons and a daughter followed in predictable order.
In his letter, Matthew sounded totally content, although he worried that his career as an accompanist might be coming to an end. The studios were committed to talking movies, just as he feared they would be, and the services of musicians on the set for actor inspiration would soon be dispensed with. As a blind man his job opportunities would be limited, especially in the movie business.