If you wanted the book on Karl, the official version of his creative life, it went something like this: As a very young man he’d achieved minor fame by writing a suite of chamber works that bounded harmoniously away from the atonal bog where serious music was shrieking and splashing like a sinking dinosaur. Karl’s sunny compositions had the new sound of a time beyond great world wars—the innocent, optimistic 1950s. They won a major prize, got recorded by a first-rate quartet, and for music from the hand of a boy they were surprisingly influential: most experts still listed Karl among the originators of the epochal return to consonance. But Karl himself, it was said, seduced by false muses and beatnik foolishness, had abandoned his original inspirations to devote the rest of his career to inferior experiments in chance and randomness worthy of no greater fame than he already possessed.
The critics who made these judgments had no talent or imagination, and no respect, and they had utterly missed the significance of Karl’s later work. They didn’t even know what chance and randomness meant. Nevertheless, their opinions had shaped his destiny. He was fifty-eight years old, and those precocious chamber pieces were still his only regularly performed compositions. When he wrote them, only a few players in the world could do them right; conservatory students played them passably well today—students who were often surprised to learn that Karl was still alive.
One of his own former students was in his studio as Karl’s car crunched down the long, graveled driveway through the woods; lights were burning in the barn’s second story, and Jennifer’s beat-up Japanese sedan was parked in the cul-de-sac. Karl had been on campus the entire day, teaching in the flourishing summer arts program invented by his wife, and he hadn’t seen Jennifer since their fight the night before—their third or fourth fight in a week. Jennifer was now Karl’s assistant at school, though she hadn’t bothered showing up today. She copied parts for him at his studio, too, and in her free time she did her own work up there. He pulled his Land Rover into the spot between her car and his wife’s Volvo wagon. It amazed him that he’d been famous when he was not much older than this young woman in his workspace right now. He had been the youngest professor ever to hold an endowed chair at the college, back when the trustees were convinced they had the next Charles Ives on their hands.
Lights were burning in the house as well. He saw the shadows that Gloria cast on the walls as she moved around, preparing dinner. When he stepped out of his vehicle, he caught the rich scent of a roast coming through the kitchen’s screened windows. He smelled freshly mown grass, too, and looked through the barn doorway to see it on the rubber tires of the tractor. On its ground level, the barn still housed heavy equipment for the farmer who worked some of Karl’s land and mowed the meadows. The vast former hayloft was Karl’s music studio. He climbed the stairway up to it. “And what’s this my nose detects?” he called out in his fairy-tale woodsman’s voice, flaring his nostrils and sniffing loudly as he entered the cavernous place. “Methinks my nose smells blood.”
“Boil and bubble,” Jennifer said, her back to him at the distant kitchen counter. “Toil and trouble.”
Karl’s studio was bigger and better-appointed than the homes of most professors at the college, though he’d kept it, except for the bathroom, one large, unbroken space. He stood in front, where picture windows looked into the woods from the walls framing his grand piano poised on glossy floorboards beneath the skylight-studded ceiling. In the year since he’d begun his masterpiece, Karl had worked in the barn much of every night, sleeping on the sofa-bed for a few hours before dawn. He needed very little sleep these days.
“More blood, my darling?” he said, switching to the voice of a soap-opera husband. “But, sweetheart, you’ve made so much blood already.”
“I need more blood,” Jennifer replied, doing the vampire voice.
He strode across the gleaming floor to join her at the stove. Three large pots of blood were simmering there, Jennifer stirring them with a wooden spoon. Karl tried to bite her neck like Dracula, but she wouldn’t let him. He used to bite her neck all the time. In the blood’s bubbling turbulence, he saw the chaos that wasn’t chaotic, the randomness that wasn’t chance. But he saw that in almost everything. Jennifer liked her blood fairly thick, with plenty of clots. She seemed especially pleased with this batch. She had discovered recently that if she reserved some cornstarch until the blood was good and hot, it produced numerous misshapen lumps that looked grotesque sliding down her arms and face.
Jennifer was a performance artist. The blood was a prop in her act. There were many props in Jennifer’s act, but blood was the unifying device. She concealed plastic sacs of the homemade blood in various articles she had with her onstage—a child’s fluffy teddy bear, her pearl-encrusted evening bag, the bodice of her white bridal gown. For an hour she paraded about to her own synthesizer score, acting out dysfunctional family relationships and decrying bankrupt, oppressive governments, while the Barbie-doll world hemorrhaged around her. Everything she touched turned to blood. For her finale, she decorated a wedding cake with a bleeding pastry bag.
In Karl’s opinion, her act was an embarrassing, juvenile cliché. It was also a fraud. Jennifer did not genuinely have the elemental fixation upon blood that she portrayed herself as having. An obsession with blood was a serious thing. No, it was merely that bodily fluids were good for one’s career in the performance game—itself the most depraved development Karl had witnessed in his many years in the arts. He had assumed she’d grow out of it, but she was doing quite the reverse, and now people in New York City were participating in her delusion.
“Why don’t you stay for dinner?” Karl said. “Gloria’s making a roast. Rare, the way you like it.”
Jennifer deigned to chuckle over this, and then turned off the burners on the stove. Her blood was finished boiling. “I was going to clean up in here.”
“You can do it later.” He pinched her waist. “I’ll help.”
She created her blood in his studio because her own apartment had a useless kitchenette, whereas Karl, in his prosperity, had a full set of professional pots and pans, not to mention a six-burner Viking restaurant range, and that was just the barn.
“Karl, I don’t really feel like having dinner with you and Gloria.”
“You’ve had dinner with me and Gloria before.”
“I’m trying to concentrate. I don’t feel like feeling stress.”
This batch of blood was for Jennifer’s biggest engagement to date—opening for some famous fake in a New York performance space this weekend. She’d written new material for this occasion, and she was nervous about it. Karl blamed their fighting on this.
“I didn’t get to see you at all today. I’d like you to stay.”
She sighed. “Fine, if you insist. Let me change.”
He came down the barn stairs into the late New Hampshire day and smelled again his wife’s cookery emanating from the house. A man enjoys a nice roast in the evening, he thought, to cheer himself up, and at that instant his heart thing happened again—starting like a bird trying to fly in his chest and then escalating into a punching bag that made him sit on the steps, holding the railing and panting to ride it out. This happened to him two or three times a week, yet his doctors maintained that nothing was seriously wrong with him. Their diagnosis was garden-variety arrhythmia—an irregular heartbeat—and they weren’t inclined to do much about it. At Karl’s insistence, they’d rigged wires all over his chest for twenty-four hours at a time, the surveillance of his quavering ham hock pouring into a recorder clipped to a canvas belt. Later, they plotted his data on long paper scrolls. The black bursts on the green graph paper looked like the Reaper’s palm prints to Karl, the Reaper advancing on hands and knees like a cannibal, yet one doctor after another said it was a well-known, non-fatal phenomenon. They told him to cut out coffee and booze, and stop worrying.
But Karl was more up on these things than the doctors were. For years he’d been studying the phenomenon of chaos, of
which heartbeat arrhythmia was a perfect example. Chaos was not nothing. It was not the absence of purpose and structure. Chaos might even be structure—what human beings called structure—or maybe it was structure seen from the other side. It was reality’s essential ingredient. Everything had chaos in it. But chaos could amplify and feed back, propagating until it destroyed any system it was in. Scientists had lately discovered these things about chaos, but Karl had intuited the truth decades ago. Had he been a scientist, he’d have the Nobel Prize by now. In his music, he’d explored chaos when it was ridiculed and reviled. Now chaos was respectable, but Karl wasn’t. Most of the fundamental properties of reality that Karl believed in—mind over matter, to take an obvious example—would eventually be discovered, too, and presented to the world on television shows, but Karl wouldn’t be around to see them.
The devils stopped playing their bongos in his rib cage; they were finished laughing at him for the moment. He looked up the steps, half expecting to find Jennifer staring down at him, but the landing was empty. He rose and walked gingerly across the graveled drive as though in his stocking feet. No one except Jennifer knew this, but the masterpiece he was composing was about his erratic heart. That was the genius of it, its beauty and raw, flawed life. That was even its title, Heart Chaos I. It literally began with the anti-rhythms of his own mortal pump going berserk, captured one day when he held a tape recorder to his chest despite his mortal terror. Later, he transcribed it verbatim into his overture. When it was done, Heart Chaos I was going to express perfectly what chaos really was—the music of the world.
His attack left him shaky and weak and craving a slice of roast. He entered the kitchen and joined Gloria at the range, where she was stirring a broad sauté pan of creamy sauce with vegetables in it. A large pot of water boiled on a back burner.
“This isn’t a roast,” he said.
“Who said it was?” Gloria replied.
“It smelled exactly like a roast. I smelled it.”
She turned to face him. “Karl, this smells like a roast to you?”
He bent over the sauce and inhaled. “No, it doesn’t. Not anymore.” The aroma dispelled most of his disappointment. He loved creamy sauces for pasta, though they were too rich and he had no business eating them. He’d brought home bad cholesterol numbers a year before. He had no business eating roasts, either, but a person tired of broiled eggplant slices with lemon juice. “Trying to kill me again,” he said.
“Out to get you,” said Gloria, stirring green peas into the simmering cream.
She was twelve years younger than Karl, his first student-affair from his first year at the college. It was thanks largely to her that the small, pretty campus of brownstone buildings was still a college at all, and not some ashram or corporate retreat. The place had been in serious trouble when Gloria left Admissions six years ago to take over the Development Office. Now the college had the beginnings of a well-invested endowment, the hiring freeze was lifted, applications were up. In meetings with the trustees, the provost tried to take credit for the school’s salvation, but everybody knew Gloria was the brains behind it.
“Jennifer would like to stay for dinner,” Karl said.
“Fine. There’s plenty to go around.”
A bottle of white wine was already standing open on the kitchen island. He poured himself some and refreshed Gloria’s glass. “Fair warning, though. She’s in a stinker of a mood. I think she’s terrified she doesn’t have her new lines memorized or something, that her big act isn’t going to go over in New York. She’s been quite unpleasant lately.”
“Well, we’ll have to stay off that subject, then.”
“Or we could get on that subject. We could quiz her. Give her a test, try to trip her up.”
“Karl.”
He looked out the window to see Jennifer crossing the cul-de-sac between the barn and the house. She’d changed out of her blood-spattered clothes into clean jeans and a T-shirt that said AMERICA HAS A REALITY PROBLEM.
She pushed open the kitchen’s screen door and stuck her head inside. “Hi. It’s me.”
“Hello, Jennifer,” Gloria said.
“We’re not having a roast after all,” Karl said, sipping his wine beneath the massive oval rack of hanging pots. “We’re having fettuccine Alfredo.”
“Primavera,” Gloria said.
“Excuse me, primavera.”
“Great,” Jennifer said.
“Karl was positive he smelled a roast,” Gloria told Jennifer.
“It was uncanny,” Karl said.
“Maybe you were smelling a roast in your brain,” Jennifer said. “A roast from your past that once made you happy.”
Gloria laughed. “That’s very funny,” she said.
Karl didn’t think it was all that funny. It was exactly the kind of thing Jennifer was always saying, the prototypical Jennifer statement. She would float around New York City saying things like this, and soon some people would be having a lot of fun with her. “You could put that in your skit,” Karl said. She disliked having her act called a skit. She didn’t care for “act” either.
“Maybe I will,” Jennifer said. “A roast in the brain. I like it.”
Karl caught Gloria glaring at him over her shoulder. “Wine?” he asked Jennifer. “Or would it fog your mind?”
Jennifer laughed. “Nothing could fog my mind more than it is already.”
The girl was the most amazing fount of truth sometimes. Karl poured a glass and handed it to her.
Gloria slid coiled noodles into the boiling kettle and stirred them around, then turned to bestow a gracious smile upon Jennifer. “What’s your mind so fogged about?” she asked.
Whenever Karl watched Gloria socialize, he understood how she could put on her handsome tailored lady’s suits, fly around the country with her computer, and come home with her briefcase full of money for the college. Karl couldn’t get a Rotary Club to give him twenty cents. Gloria had “people skills” in spades. She made people feel good about themselves. Somebody had to do it.
“I’m fogged from working on my show,” Jennifer said. “I’ve been rewriting my script and rewriting my music and trying to memorize everything and stay calm about it.”
“Plus doing your work for Karl.”
“Yeah, that, too.”
“Plus making lots of blood,” Karl added.
“Right, let’s not forget the blood,” Jennifer laughed.
“Are you excited about performing in New York?” asked Gloria.
“Of course! I’m psyched. I’m nervous, too.”
“It’s really important to work there, I guess? As opposed to other cities?”
“Oh, totally,” Jennifer said. “I mean, people do performance in, like, Seattle and Minneapolis and stuff, but it’s not the same thing. People in New York recognize two or three area codes, and if you don’t have one, they don’t even call you. To tell you the truth, even living up here is becoming an impediment to me.”
“I’m not surprised,” Gloria said. “We’re sort of in the middle of nowhere here. Aren’t we?”
“Living here is an impediment?” Karl said. “Since when?”
“Maybe Jennifer is just realizing it,” Gloria said.
“That’s it exactly,” Jennifer said. “It’s just dawning on me. All the work for this show has made me realize how much harder it is not to be there.”
“Makes perfect sense,” Gloria said.
“Are you saying you’re thinking about moving to New York?” said Karl.
“I’ve thought about it, yeah.”
He stepped out from behind the kitchen island. Gloria had her eye on him. “When?”
“If I did it, I’d probably do it pretty soon.”
“Jennifer, school starts in two months. You’re supposed to teach sections of the intro course. You wanted an Instructor appointment. I got you one.”
The blood had rushed to Jennifer’s face. She stood looking mortified, her wineglass trembling and her free hand
stuck in a back pocket of her jeans.
“Karl,” Gloria said, “they can easily find a replacement for Survey of Western Music.”
“That’s not the point, Gloria.”
“Then what’s the point?”
He looked at Jennifer and squeezed an exasperated laugh out of himself. “I guess the point is, when were you planning to tell the department?”
“I wanted to get this performance behind me and then figure it out.”
Gloria put her hand on Jennifer’s shoulder. “I know more about this college than he does. Take your opportunities. Somebody else will cover the course.” Suddenly, the noodles foamed and boiled over on the stove. “You two are making me forget what I’m doing! Go sit down! Both of you!”
When they were all at the table with portions of dinner before them, Gloria poured more wine and proposed a toast. “To Jennifer’s success in New York. I’m sure you’ll be great.”
“Thank you,” Jennifer said.
Karl was fuming in his chair. “Here’s wishing you minor fame,” he said, and smiled witheringly before sipping his wine.
“Thanks, but I think I already have that,” Jennifer said.
Karl heard this like a schizophrenic hearing voices. He looked to see if Gloria had heard it, too, but he couldn’t tell. “You don’t say,” he said.
“Yeah, I think you could say I’m kind of minor famous.” She turned to Gloria. “Some pretty important critics in New York are talking about my work.”
“Karl’s been telling me,” Gloria said. “Congratulations.”
Jennifer shrugged her shoulders. “I mean, you know it’s not real,” she added. “You don’t let yourself believe in it. You don’t think about it when you’re working. But as long as you don’t, it’s not a bad thing. It helps.”
“That sounds like a very wise attitude,” Gloria said, smiling and touching Jennifer’s arm. “For someone so wonderfully young.”
Karl sat like a man turned to stone. “Indeed,” he said. He had told Jennifer those very things, in those words exactly.
He didn’t pretend to be jolly at dinner, though Jennifer and Gloria did, and when dinner was over, Jennifer announced that she was going out to the barn to clean up her blood, and then she was going home to get ready for her trip to New York. Karl remained at the table with the second bottle of wine, while Gloria cleaned the kitchen. For some time, he’d felt that he was living in a bad knock-off of the world, or that the world itself had taken a bad fall on the head and suffered from amnesia now. Nobody remembered anything. Everything Karl saw in the arts was a watery reflection of something he’d seen firsthand decades before, but nobody was saying that. Nobody seemed to recall that all the currently fashionable gestures had been made before, and made better, by better people in a better time. But the most galling thing was that Karl felt, without being able to prove it, that Jennifer had stolen her whole blood business from him.
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