The very banality of her task lends her a dignity, adds a richness to her already rich presence, since it illustrates a crucial truth: banality is necessary in the making of splendid music, or splendid anything for that matter, much like the pianist’s probable clipping of his fingernails or the cellist’s dusting of his bow, though such banalities are performed in private, which is just as well.
And then little by little, while the listeners’ eyes yearn toward the page turner, it comes to appear that her purpose is not so banal after all, nor is she anything so common as a distraction. Instead it appears that she has an unusual and intimate connection with the music. She is not a physical expression of it, a living symbol; that would be too facile. More subtly, she might be an emanation of the music, a phantom conjured into being by the sounds, but her physical reality—her stylish clothes and shiny boots—contradicts this possibility, and besides, the audience has seen her enter minutes before the music began and can attest to her independent life. No, the connection must be this: though the pianist is clearly striking the keys and the cellist drawing the bow over the strings (with, incidentally, many unfortunate contortions of his face), it comes to seem, through the force of the audience’s gaze, that the music is issuing from the page turner, effortlessly, or through some supernatural, indescribable effort, as she sits in her golden radiance and stillness. So that as the concert proceeds, the audience gazes ever more raptly at the page turner. By virtue of her beauty and their gaze, she has become an ineffable instrument—no longer a distraction but rather the very source of the music.
Though the concert is long, very long, the air in the hall remains charged with vitality, the seraphic sounds yielding an ecstasy for which the entranced listeners silently bless the page turner. But perhaps because the concert is long and the page turner is only human, not even a princess, she cannot maintain her aloof pose forever. Though not flagging in her task, without any lapse of efficiency, she begins to show her pleasure in the music as any ordinary person might: her eyelids tremble at a finely executed turn, her lips hint at a smile for a satisfying chord resolution. Her breathing is visible, her upper body rising and sinking with the undulations of the sounds swirling about her. She leans into the music, once or twice even swaying her body a bit. While undeniably pretty to watch, this relaxation of discipline is a sad portent. It suggests the concert has gone on almost long enough, that beauty cannot be endlessly sustained, and that we, too, cannot remain absorbed indefinitely in radiant stillness: we have our limits, even for ecstasy. Banality beckons us back to its leaden, relieving embrace. The ordinary, appreciative movements of the page turner are a signal that the concert will soon end. We feel an anticipatory nostalgia for the notes we are hearing, even for the notes we have not yet heard, have yet to hear, which will be the closing notes. The early notes of a concert lead us into a safe and luxuriant green meadow of sound, a kind of Eden of the ear, but there comes a point, the climax in the music’s arc, when we grasp that the notes are curving back and leading us out of the meadow, back into silent and harsher weather.
And this impression of being led regrettably back to dailiness grows still stronger when now and then the pianist glances over at the page turner with a half-smile, a tacit acknowledgment related to some passage in the music, maybe to a little problem of page turning successfully overcome, a private performance within the public performance, which will remain forever unfathomed by the audience and for those instants makes us feel excluded. With their work almost over the performers can afford such small indulgences—a foretaste of the inevitable melancholy moment when audience and performers, alike excluded, will file out into their lives, stripped of this glory, relieved of its burden.
When the music ends, as it must, the page turner remains composed and still: unlike the musicians, she does not relax into triumphant relief. As they take their bows, they show intimate glimpses of themselves in the ardor of achievement, as well as a happy camaraderie—their arms around each other’s shoulders—in which the page turner cannot share, just as she cannot share in the applause or show intimate glimpses of herself. She stands patiently beside her chair near the piano and then, with the same precise timing as at the start, leaves the stage a few seconds after the musicians, deftly gathering up the music from the rack to carry off with her, tidying up like a good lady-in-waiting.
The musicians reappear for more bows. The page turner does not reappear. Her service is completed. We understand her absence yet we miss her, as though an essential part of the lingering pleasure is being withheld, as though the essential instrument through which the music reached us has vanished along with the sounds themselves. We do not wish to think of what ordinary gestures she might now be performing off in the wings, putting the music away or lifting her hair off her neck with long-staved-off weariness, released from the burden of being looked at. We cannot deny her her life, her future, yet we wish her to be only as she was onstage, in the beginning. We will forget how the musicians looked, but ever after when we revisit the music we will see the page turner—black clothes, golden hair, regal carriage—radiant and still, emitting the sounds that too briefly enraptured us.
Credits
“ON BEING TAKEN BY Tom Victor,” “Absence Makes the Heart,” “The Page Turner,” and “At a Certain Age,” copyright © 1991, 1995, 1997, 1999, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, originally appeared in The Threepenny Review, no. 44 (winter 1991), no. 60 (winter 1995), no. 68 (winter 1997), and no. 77 (spring 1999).
“Being There,” copyright © 1985 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, originally appeared in We Are Talking About Homes: A Great University Against Its Neighbors (Harper &Row, 1985).
“Alone with the Cat” (“Face to Face”) is reprinted from The American Scholar 69, no. 1 (winter 2000), copyright © 1999 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, by permission of the publishers, the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
“The First Dress,” copyright © 1994 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, was originally published as “True Romance” in the New York Times Magazine, October 23, 1994.
“Found in Translation,” copyright © 1994 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, originally appeared as “Time Off to Translate” in American Literary Review 5, no. 2 (fall 1994).
“Help,” copyright © 1992 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, originally appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review 31, no. 2 (spring 1992).
“Only Connect?” copyright © 1996 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, originally appeared in Salmagundi, nos. 109-10 (winter-spring 1996).
“The Spoils of War,” copyright © 1980 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, originally appeared in the New York Times, October 16, 1980.
“Listening to Powell,” copyright © 2000 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, originally appeared in Salmagundi, no. 126 (spring 2000).
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copyright © 2000 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
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