—
Janice stopped by about five in the afternoon, and they spread out the schematic and manual on the coffee table. She pulled a small spiral pad from her breast pocket and began writing down numbers from the parts list. It was a long list, and he watched the tanned back of her neck as she wrote. He knew her husband had been killed in Iraq, that she had two almost grown boys. He needed something to replace his music, and when she’d finished writing and told him she’d order the many parts, that they were cheap, he looked into her eyes and asked if she would go out with him.
She glanced at him, head to toe. “Thank you, but that wouldn’t be a good idea,” she said.
“Oh, just a friendly meal someplace. I am, perhaps, past courting age.”
She smiled at him. “No.”
“All right.” He smiled back. “But why not?”
“No offense, but I don’t believe we’re cut from the same bolt of cloth.”
“You’re holding my education against me?”
She looked around the room, at the plain walls, the shrine to the old stereo. “Where has your education brought you, doc?”
“You don’t know anything about me,” he told her.
“I know a train wreck when I see it.”
Talis forced his smile now. “As the students say, that’s cold.”
She folded her tablet. “I’ll pay for these parts and you can reimburse me when I send you the bill for the labor.”
As he held his front door open for her and gave a small bow, she turned her face next to his. “Doc, I favor people who are going somewhere, anywhere. I think you’re stuck in one spot. You don’t seem to want to change things. You’re scared of watching TV,” she glanced down at his black wing tips, “or wearing a pair of loafers. It’s like you don’t have a lot of trust for this old world. You can’t even give up a worn-out radio.”
He took a step back into his house and latched the screen as though protecting himself from mosquitoes or from some more subtle inoculation. “Good night.”
Janice stopped at the edge of his porch. “Hey, I bet you never heard this old one in Latvia.”
“What?”
“What do you call an atheist in his coffin?”
He put his nose against the screen. “My ex-wife told me that one.”
She stepped off onto the firefly-haunted lawn. “Well, what’s the answer?”
He sighed, “All dressed up and no place to go.”
—
On Sunday he usually listened to at least one full opera. He finished marking tests from his vast sophomore class and, as it was a warm, pleasant day, stepped out onto his front porch, standing for a long time with his hands in his pockets and staring at the white oak rocker. He nudged it with a black shoe as if testing its function, then sat down. The street in front of his house was lined with modest frame houses better than his own. He’d been told that they were all made of cypress, and he imagined the primitive and brutal life of the lumbermen cutting away in the steaming swamps a hundred years before. An old corner grocery lay two blocks to his left, and Talis thought of the great wealth the owners had bled out of the neighborhood in the past century with their high prices. One block to his right, an AME church pointed its rusting spire skyward. He heard loud singing and rhythmic hand clapping, shouts of praise springing out into the sunshine, and all he could think of was how these people rhapsodized in a fog of delusion. Maybe it was anesthetic for African Americans to convince themselves that they were happy, that their kidnapping, persecution, and slavery had never happened. Singing flowed up his street, and Talis began to rock in time to “When I Rose This Morning,” not realizing what he was doing. His fingers tapped the arms of the rocker. Around noon his stomach growled, and he decided to walk down to the old store, Macaluso’s, which opened at twelve on Sundays. The storefront had a generous wooden awning above the sidewalk, and he walked up three steps and pushed the door open, its wood worn concave where hands had shoved at it a million times. Inside he smelled apples, and toward the back, freshly cut meat. He asked the butcher to slice him thin pieces of a smoked ham already in the slicer, to go with a creole tomato and a small loaf of French bread he’d already chosen.
“Hey, you makin’ yourself a sandwich?” the man asked.
“Yes, I’m preparing lunch.”
The butcher ran the slicer, then pulled the ham out of the machine and threw in a block of Swiss cheese. “Lemme cut you just one slice of this for the sandwich. No charge. You gonna like it.”
“Well.” Talis didn’t know what else to say.
—
On Monday he returned home early, and in his silent house he actually thought of buying a television. His wife had always demanded one, and he’d argued against it, but he realized now that she’d probably needed the company. He’d been thinking a great deal about his wife in recent days, and that night, for the first time, he dreamed about her, that she was sleeping soft and quiet like a breathing pillow in his bed. When he woke, her presence was still in the dark, and he remembered how at breakfast she’d watch him with her careful eyes while he read a book. For years she observed him with incredible patience. What was she looking for?
At dawn he gave up trying to sleep, rose, and mixed himself a glass of chocolate milk, enjoying the music of the spoon against the glass as he stood in the kitchen, stirring, stirring.
On Tuesday morning, preparing his lesson plans about French royalists slaughtering the population of a Huguenot town, he was struck with a craving for smoked eel. He hadn’t thought of the dish in many years and wondered if he was going a bit daft. All the silence was opening strange windows in his head. That same day, after his usual supper of cold cuts and milk, he turned on his computer and searched half the night for some trace of his ex-wife, finding not one electron of evidence that she existed. He did find her sister’s phone number.
He remembered Camille as a fiercely practical, athletic version of his wife, attractive in a leathery, overexercised way. She answered the phone, her voice a snap of certainty, and for a moment he was afraid to speak.
“Hello, this is Talis.” He tried to sound friendly but had no idea what the woman’s reaction would be.
There was a telling pause before she spoke. “Well, bud, I’ve got to admit, I’m surprised to hear from you. You’ve truly dropped off the radar. Years ago, we tried to contact you.”
“Really. For what reason?”
“That’s water under the bridge now. What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering if you could give me Marlena’s phone number.”
There was a snort on the other end of the line. “You don’t want to talk to her. She remarried a long time ago, has three kids. Why stir up ancient history?”
“Well.”
“In short, I won’t tell you how to contact her. It won’t do anybody any good, in my estimation.”
He spoke with the sister a few more minutes, trying his best to make a connection, finally crying out, “She loved me once.”
The sister came back with, “I don’t know, bud. Now that I’m standing here thinking about it, I don’t think she loved you as you were, but as you could’ve chosen to be.”
“Still,” he persisted, “it would be nice to talk to her.”
The sister took a breath. “Hey, Talis, boat has sailed. No tickee, no washee. By the way, you still worshiping the big zero in the sky?”
This was an old joke between them. “I’ll take a look tonight and see what’s up there,” he told her.
—
On Wednesday he went to Walmart and bought a portable stereo and several classical CDs. He also bought a case of beer, a brand he’d discovered that carried a hint of kvass. He imagined the music and drink would kill some of the silence.
But the boom box gave out a tinny sound and made Bach sound inconsequential and repetitious. He thought, for the first time in his life, that Bach was perhaps a little crazy, playing no great music but only silly variations of scales. The beer, e
specially the seventh one, made him feel old and blatantly down. By midnight he’d had enough music and drink and turned off the stereo, poured out his last open beer, and put on woolen pajamas. After he had covered up and turned off his light, he leaped from bed and switched the lamp on again, staring at the mattress, realizing for the first time that he had slept all these years on one side, on the edge, on one pillow. He never journeyed to the other side or sprawled over the middle. He crept again under the covers, but in the dark he lay on his back and stared toward the ceiling. Once, before daylight, he put his arm out into the wasteland beside him.
—
On Friday afternoon, Janice showed up carrying plastic bags of electrical components bright and rattling like a child’s candy, and a toolbox. She placed the receiver on the kitchen table and unsoldered capacitors and installed new ones until Talis went out and came back with a bag of hamburgers and sodas. “You see, we are sharing a meal after all,” he said, clearing a space for them among the pliers and spools of rosin core solder.
“Just for the record, Talis,” she said, “this is not a date.”
He bit into his hamburger and said nothing, and soon she was back at it, working quickly, taking the circuit boards apart and finishing the capacitors, searching out blackened transistors. While she studied the schematic and made decisions, he told her about his life in Latvia, his father, a small-time politician, and his mother, who worked in a foundry throwing specially measured chemicals into the giant ladles of molten metal. He waited for her to ask him questions, but she didn’t talk while she worked, her eyes lost among the spindly legs of resistors.
On Saturday she showed up early to mow the lawn. Coming in later, she began replacing components at once, filing relays, repairing solder cracks she found with a magnifying glass. Talis pretended not to watch her, but on one pass through the kitchen he said, “It’s amazing how you understand all of that.”
“I don’t really understand any of it,” she told him.
“I mean how all that apparatus pulls sound from the air and delivers it to our ears, working invisibly.” He stood over her and took a sip of tea. “What do you mean you don’t understand it?”
“I can replace parts that will make the sound come back, but I’m not the engineer who designed it.”
“Ah, then the engineer understood it.”
“Probably not. His know-how was made of little pieces of info borrowed from a bunch of engineers working through a lot of years.” She glanced up. “History, as you would say.”
“Surely someone understands it completely.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Even the guy who invented the foundations of audio might not understand this here battleship. It’d be a mystery to him.”
Talis went into the kitchen and made another cup of tea. He began thinking of both the day he was married and the day he received the divorce papers, and how he once thought he understood the two events. But the circuit between those points in his life was too complex, now that he had time to think of it. He wondered if he were the faulty component in the mechanism of their marriage, the one little part that took the music out of their love.
—
Around nine that night, after she had cleaned the control contacts, reassembled the faceplate, but left off the case cover, she connected an FM antenna, dragged the speakers over, and plugged in the unit. Talis hovered behind her as she struggled to turn the receiver upside down on the kitchen table.
“Now what are you doing?”
“I have to take some voltage readings on the bottom to recheck these big capacitors.” She pointed at four black cylinders the size of tomato paste cans.
Janice lowered the silver power switch. First there was silence, then a relay ticked and the speakers gave off a serpent’s hiss. She rolled the dial to the low end of the band toward classical music, watched the signal-strength needle, and landed dead center on a Dvořák string quartet. Talis closed his eyes to listen. After a full minute he nodded solemnly. “The high range is very crisp,” he said. “And the cello, I can hear not only the strings but even the instrument’s body.” He blinked as though regaining consciousness. “Let’s feed the CD player through the set. I’d like to hear voice. Do you listen to opera?”
“I only heard one in my life,” she said, running the wires for the CD player. “In music appreciation we listened to La Bohème and followed along with the translation.”
He raised a forefinger. “I have that. The old production by Sir Thomas Beecham. Jussi Björling was the tenor, and I’m always amazed by his singing.”
In a moment the introduction to Puccini’s opera rumbled out of the set, and Talis listened like a hawk hunting for mice.
Janice began to pack her tools and wire. “Well, does it sound okay?”
He turned down the music a bit. “It sounds different. I’ll have to listen to it for a while.”
“It is a little different. The voices are being formed through new electronics.” She tilted her face and looked up at him. “Eventually, it might even sound better to you.”
He seemed to notice her for the first time in several minutes. “Of course. You’ve done a wonderful job. Music is back for me at last.”
“Oh, I’m not finished yet. The readings are way off on these old main capacitors. And there’s a low hum. The new ones are in the bag here, and I can come back after lunch tomorrow and change them out. I don’t like fooling with those without rubber safety gloves. I’ll leave my tools and put the cover on later. Then we’ll let the components burn in for a couple hours to make sure we’re all set.” She turned the receiver off.
“Thank you, Janice. And if you want to come in tomorrow morning, feel free.”
“Well, me and my boys are going to Mass at St. Ben’s down the street. Then we usually go out to eat seafood at Babineaux’s Café.”
“Do you think you could finish tomorrow? There’s a wonderful opera program in the evening.”
“I don’t know. You might have to wait a bit longer to hear the fat lady sing,” she told him, showing him a little smile as she turned for the door.
—
After she left, he turned on the set, but the hum increased in volume, so he snapped the switch off and began drinking. He sat in the den and tried to prepare a lecture on the Battle of Austerlitz, contemplating the suffering of the 9,000 French casualties as if they were somewhere outside his house, lying in the street and yard. Janice, he knew, would point out that 58,000 in that army were unhurt and returned to France to live as heroes for the rest of their lives. After another five beers he’d finished his preparations for class. He wondered again where his wife lived. If she ever told her children about him.
—
The next morning he dressed and walked down the street to St. Ben’s, intending to meet Janice and her boys when they came out. He’d thought the service began at ten, but everyone was showing up close to eleven, so he drifted in and sat in the last pew of the fairly crowded church. The building was very large and old for an American church. As Mass proceeded he examined the stained-glass depiction of Adam and Eve being driven out of Paradise, images of Christ’s crucifixion, statues of his mourning mother, and the many otherworldly patterns of color and light. He couldn’t see Janice and imagined she was sitting close to the front. With all the depictions of patient suffering in her church he wondered why she was always choosing the bright side of things. Was there really a cheerful side to getting bayoneted at Austerlitz or fed to the lions in Rome?
Talis stood, sat, and moved as those around him did, enjoying the air-conditioning and even the mild strain in his back as he kneeled.
He greeted Janice and her tall sons on the many steps outside the church and asked if he could go to the restaurant with them. The boys weren’t particularly interested in who he was, and from this he gathered that she had not mentioned him to them at all.
“I was inside too. For the service, I mean.”
“You went to Mass?”
&n
bsp; “Yes.”
She looked at him directly, then. “Well, do you have any questions?”
He watched her boys move ahead of them down to street level. “What happened to your husband?”
She shrugged, the big final shrug that says it all. “He was in a bomb disposal unit in Iraq.”
“I’m sorry for you,” Talis said.
“Well, as my dad used to say, when it wears out its welcome, sorry is pretty sorry. You want to go eat some crawfish?”
He put his hands in the pockets of his suit. “Will this be a date?”
“No.”
—
That afternoon he opened a beer to quench the salt from all the seafood. He had never seen so many crawfish in his life. He rocked on the front porch for a long time, watching the street between the AME church and the store. Eventually, Janice drove over. She was wearing her hair in twin braids. These always caught his eye, especially when a mature woman wore them, mocking her age. She came in and changed out the large capacitors, turned things right side up, and attached the case. “Check it out,” she said, standing back against the kitchen wall.
He flipped the switch and the CD of La Bohème bloomed into the room. Bending over the set, he meditated on the little civilization of circuits shuttling its resident electrons, reforming them on a thousand anvils of silicon. The heat of interdependent electrical community rose into his face as it devoured and performed the invisible signals on the disk. He switched to FM and the set drew from the fabric of the air around him a Chopin étude, and it made his head swim to think of all the cell phone, television, radio, shortwave, and computer signals piercing every cell of his body with him unable to hear any of it. He pushed a button to bring back the first act of La Bohème and raised the volume for the beautiful aria in which Rudolfo defines himself to Mimi. He raised the volume again and the sound was both clear and fathoms deep.
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