by Gerald Elias
Yumi’s situation seemed as precarious, her career balanced on the head of a pin. It had been Aaron Kortovsky, the first violinist of the New Magini Quartet, who had spearheaded Short’s dismissal six years earlier. Kortovsky had taken an intractable artistic situation and compounded the problem by making it politically ugly, thinking that firing the first shot across the bow by recruiting a Times correspondent for an interview about Short’s termination he would gain an advantage in the public arena. It backfired in a way he could have predicted had his ego not blinded him. Short not only went public himself, he sued all the members of the quartet, including Yumi, even though she had become a member only as Short’s successor. In a countermaneuver, Kortovsky officially changed the name of the quartet from the original Magini String Quartet to the New Magini String Quartet and reapplied for nonprofit corporation status. He claimed that since there was only one member of the original all-Russian ensemble left, cellist Pravda Lenskaya, the name of the quartet should reflect the change. In reality, he was attempting an end-around Short’s tenacious pursuit of legal vengeance, and in that he failed. The four musicians were now on the brink of seeing their bank accounts, homes, even instruments go up in smoke if Short was successful in his litigation. It would be almost impossible to explain to a nonmusician what the loss of a beloved instrument means. To be forcibly compelled to give such an instrument away would not be far removed from giving up one’s own child. Jacobus imagined the judge doing a Solomon act and sawing a violin in half in order to be fair. When asked if that was the kind of resolution he wanted, Short’s response was that, tragic though it might be, they brought it on themselves. And now the expectation was that the judge would be making a ruling within weeks.
Jacobus found that he was shivering from the cold, damp fog that had condensed into droplets on his dark glasses.
As the orchestra made the miraculous transition, seamlessly changing meter, key, and tempo into the second theme of Beethoven’s love song for humanity, someone elbowed him in his ribs.
“Hey, pal, you want a pair of these?” asked the voice next to him.
New York accent, Jacobus determined.
“What? A pair of what?” he asked.
“Shhhh!” said someone else. “Shut up.”
More New Yorkers, thought Jacobus.
His neighbor whispered, “Earmuffs. I’m no fucking Eskimo.”
“How the hell do you hear the music?” Jacobus asked.
“Doesn’t matter. We hear the Ninth here every year. Besides, Beethoven was deaf. Wasn’t he?”
Jacobus got up and moved to an empty seat. Cold, tired, wet, he should have just gone home but hoped that the last movement, the greatest single movement of symphonic music ever composed, would somehow redeem the performance. In that, he was again disappointed. If the musicians were laid low by the inclement weather, the singers suffered even more. The vocal quartet caterwauled like alley cats in heat, and the crowning sixteen measures of fortissimo high A’s in the soprano section of the chorus sounded like a synchronized swim team in a pool with a great white shark.
By the time the symphony came to its crashing conclusion, the antipathy between the orchestra and conductor was palpable. Jacobus heard the seats of the folding chairs around him snap up, but he suspected the audience rose, not to give the performance a standing ovation, but to flee to the protective comfort of their Volvos and Mercedes-Benzes. Tomorrow’s review would no doubt extol the conductor’s heroic, historically informed efforts while tongue-lashing the musicians for their halfhearted response. Equally certain was that the musicians’ artistic committee would demand that management never again engage the boy wonder. What happened after that, who knew, except that next year there would be someone standing on the podium.
* * *
Jacobus followed the exodus to the main gate, shuffling along the packed clay floor of the Shed that had become as slippery as ice from the moisture it had absorbed, guiding himself with his right hand on the row of seat backs. With his left hand, he slapped his rolled-up program against his thigh to try to ward off stiffness in both appendages.
Within moments of arriving at the gate, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Hi, Jake,” said Yumi. “Am I late?”
“Only about three movements’ worth.”
“Hmm. That bad?”
“The ‘Ode to Shit’? Nah, it wasn’t that bad. It was worse.”
Yumi had parked in the handicapped section for Jacobus’s convenience, so they were inside the car and out of the soaking mist within moments, but Jacobus felt miserable.
“Did you have a chance to think about what we should do about the lawsuit?” Yumi asked.
“Yeah. No. I’ll think about it. Maybe the judge’ll come up with a reasonable solution. Mind if I smoke?”
“Not in the car, please. Yes. I think he will too,” she said, turning on the engine, and the heat.
They spoke little during the fifteen-minute winding drive through the darkened Berkshire hillside. Jacobus tried to put his mind to the quartet’s dilemma, but his concentration quickly wandered as he pondered the irony of musicians engaged in mortal combat over music that celebrated the brotherhood of mankind. Rarely did a light penetrate the mist-enshrouded woods; of course for Jacobus, it didn’t matter.
TWO
SUNDAY
It’s not rare for the chill of autumn to announce itself in August in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, but this year it arrived even earlier than usual. Labor Day was still more than a week off, yet during the night they had had their first frost, a heavy one, at that. When she woke up, Yumi was able to etch her initials with her fingernail into the frozen condensation that had crystallized on the inside of the drafty, time-worn single-pane windows in Jacobus’s house. Outside, the mist had not yet risen above Monument Mountain, and what was left of the grass was silvery spiked with frost. It would melt during the course of the day, but the handwriting was on the wall for a long winter.
Jacobus was huddled in a blanket with his back close to the woodstove, trying to coax the obstinate chill out of his arthritic bones. He had no doubt all the Millers’ heirloom tomatoes would be shot to hell. Jacobus, himself, had a single tomato plant near the screen door in the back, keeled over in the same cramped plastic pot in which he had bought it two months earlier. This current frost caused him no concern for its welfare because for weeks it had been standing withered and dead in mute testament to his negligent care. In any event, he didn’t like tomatoes.
“What’ll it be, Jake?” asked Nathaniel, leafing through the Times. “New turmoil in central Africa, intrigue in Peru, drastic cuts in funding to arts organizations…”
Jacobus didn’t respond.
* * *
Friends and colleagues since their college days, the blind, irascible, and wizened violinist Daniel Jacobus and the corporeally extravagant, congenial African-American former cellist Nathaniel Williams made an unlikely pair. The tradition of Nathaniel reading Jacobus the Sunday Times, initiated as an afterthought at some point after Jacobus emerged from his blindness-induced seclusion so many years ago, had developed so innocuously over the years that neither could have recalled when it became routine. Today’s news had left Jacobus with an unsavory taste in his mouth, like Tuesday’s meat loaf: Why, of all people, was he allowed to stay alive, he wondered, when the world was going to hell?
“I was just in Peru,” Yumi interjected. “With the quartet. Our South America tour. Read that one.”
“‘An uneasy quiet reigns over Lima,’” read Nathaniel, “‘where a body, apparently the victim of torture, was discovered only two blocks from the presidential palace in the Plaza Mayor, reviving nightmares of drug wars and political killings in this strife-weary—’”
“That’s enough!” said Jacobus. “I’ve had it. Throw it in the fire.”
“All of it?” asked Nathaniel. “You don’t want me to burn the crossword!”
“The whole damn thing.”
Nathaniel furtively extracted the crossword, and then the arts section, and then the book review, camouflaging the sound of his actions with idle humming. In the end, all he tossed into the stove were the classifieds and real estate sections before returning to his chair on the opposite side of the coffee table from Jacobus.
Yumi, visiting Jacobus for an infrequent violin lesson—Jacobus called it a “tune-up”—was seated between Jacobus and Nathaniel, and continued to ponder her opening Scrabble move. With partners for Scrabble or chess or checkers a rare commodity, the sightless Jacobus more often used the table to eat what he referred to in cynical self-deprecation as his AM-FM dinners, since TV was no longer an option, and even if he could see, there was nothing good on anyway. Trotsky, Jacobus’s gargantuan bulldog, snored peacefully under the flimsy folding table, his massive left flank nurtured by the stove’s radiating heat, unconsciously licking drool from his muzzle and offering up deep, contented sighs.
“You and Trotsky seem to be hitting it off,” said Yumi.
“Uch, they should’ve put him to sleep when they had the chance.”
“Jake, that’s not funny! Dogs understand vibes.”
“Who’s joking?”
Trotsky, having heard his name, awakened and licked Jacobus’s hand, then went back to sleep.
“See?” Jacobus said. “He’s slobbering all over me. He doesn’t even understand commands, like ‘Die.’ How many dogs do you know of get expelled from Seeing Eye school?”
“Jake, Trotsky couldn’t help it. After all, it wasn’t his idea to be a Seeing Eye dog. And who enrolls a bulldog in a course like that? Why did the previous owner do it, anyway?”
“She told me the dog was so ugly, only a blind person could handle it. She forgot about the sense of smell.”
Jacobus heard the clinking of Yumi’s Scrabble tiles as she rearranged letters on her rack.
“Trotsky has a good sense of smell, then?”
“Hell, no! I do!”
“Then why did you keep him if he’s so much trouble?”
“He was given to me by a former student who was trying to get rid of him because he howled when she played. So she tried the Seeing Eye school and when that fiasco ended she asked me to take him for a week.”
“Why is she a former student?”
“Because I howled when she played. Plus, at the end of the week she never came back and didn’t leave a forwarding address. I think she knew something. Now are you going to play Scrabble or cut bait?”
“I’m working on it.”
Jacobus, still experiencing bouts of the shivers from exposure to the elements at Tanglewood the night before, felt like death warmed over, except he wasn’t warmed over, and wasn’t sure how he was going to be able to make it through a lesson with Yumi this morning. But she had returned from her month-long vacation at her mountain home in Kyushu, Japan’s south island, bearing gifts from her family and from Jacobus’s friend and colleague Max Furukawa, so maybe he would just let her play, emit an occasional harrumph, and get it over with. Thank you very much. See you next week. That will be a hundred dollars.
“Lima didn’t seem so dangerous,” said Yumi, who was seated to Jake’s right. “Maybe because we were in a nice part of town. The people there were so sweet.”
A damp gust interrupted. It rattled the overgrown English ivy consuming the stony exterior of Jacobus’s house, making a brittle fluttering noise, which, like the clattering of his own chilled bones, seemed to chide him for his growing geriatric fragility. Jacobus extracted a modestly used tissue from within his woolen wrappings, and in strident defiance, triumphantly trumpeted a snootful of mucus into it.
“And the food was so good!” Yumi continued. “Jake, did you know in Peru they eat—”
“Just make your word already,” he muttered.
“Okay,” said Yumi, “here I go. ANT.” And for Jacobus’s benefit: “A-N-T, vertically, with the N on the star. One, two, three, double-word … six points.”
“A half hour and all you can do is ANT?” asked Jacobus. “What kind of pissant word is that to open the game?”
“I really have bad letters.”
“What?” he said. He didn’t hear her.
“I said, ‘I really have bad letters.’”
“And after all I’ve taught her,” Jacobus mumbled to nobody.
“My turn,” said Nathaniel.
“Speaking of which,” Yumi said to Jacobus, “I wanted to ask you about one of my students.”
“Not now,” said Jacobus. “I want to see if it’s humanly possible to top ANT.”
Using his fingernails, Jacobus read the grooves of his Scrabble tiles. M-O-O-O-R-X-Y. He made his decision. When Nathaniel finally got around to finishing his move, Jacobus would place the R atop ANT and make the words RANT going down and ROOMY going across. A triple-letter score for an O. Sixteen points. Not bad for such shitty letters.
“Are you going to take all day?” Jacobus asked Nathaniel irritably. “Or are you going to wait until the fire’s totally out.”
“You have somewhere else important to go? Like last night?” asked Nathaniel. “I’m tellin’ you, you go to one more concert, it’ll kill you, not that that would be such a bad idea. You just about froze to death last night, and now, just to keep you warm, here Yumi and I are sweatin’ up a storm.”
“Yeah, I can smell that.”
“Here you go!” said Nathaniel triumphantly. “S-A-V. I’m adding it to the beginning of ANT to make SAVANT.”
“Bravo, Nathaniel!” said Yumi. She clapped her hands.
“Dammit!” said Jacobus. “You took my word.”
“Your word! My, my. I didn’t realize you owned it. And I’ve got a double-letter score on the S. Ten points.”
Jacobus fumed. “Just put another log in the stove,” he said, “and don’t look at my letters.” The same fingertips that had spent a lifetime understanding Bach and Brahms now fidgeted for a few extra Scrabble points.
He was having a hard time concentrating. Not just because the unoiled hinge on the door of the woodstove squealed like a pig at the abattoir. Not just because he felt miserable, that the concert last night left him deflated, and that Yumi was bugging him about some student. What was preoccupying him right now was that with this damn clogged sinus he was having trouble hearing, and he was frightened to death. It was bad enough being blind, though blindness wasn’t as odious as deafness. He couldn’t imagine there was any visual art produced in the past thirty years worth seeing and was just grateful that a day before he was stricken with what the medical establishment refers to as foveomacular dystrophy, and what humans call sudden blindness, he had taken a break from his concertmaster audition preparations for the Boston Symphony and went to see a Turner exhibit at the Fine Arts Museum for inspiration. He could still conjure up the memory of the images of those Turners, if not the images themselves, those breathtaking expanses of sky and water.
But he couldn’t imagine being deaf and unable to hear music. How had Beethoven survived? Survived! Deafness had made him an even greater composer, a superhuman composer.
But blindness and deafness? How would he communicate? If he were unable to hear his own voice, would he sound like a raving idiot? Jacobus would kill himself. But how would he go about doing that if he couldn’t see or hear? He could find a knife. Or a rope. How would he do it with a rope? Wrap it around his neck? Then what?
Jacobus put his hands around his neck and squeezed a little. This is only a test. It’s just a goddamn head cold, he told himself. It will go away. It will go away. I should have taken those goddamn earmuffs. The performance wasn’t worth hearing anyway. I should have taken those earmuffs from that fucking—
“MORON!” shouted Jacobus.
“What did I do now?” asked Nathaniel.
“Not you, for a change. That’s my word.”
Yumi laughed.
“What’s so funny?” asked Jacobus.
“Only that Nathaniel chose SAVANT and you chose MORON.”
“Jealous.”
He placed the first four letters in front of the N in SAVANT.
“Wait a minute!” he said. “I’ve got an O, an X, and a Y left. OXYMORON. All seven letters! Double-letter on the M, and triple-word too! Best word I ever had.”
“Don’t get all hot and bothered,” said Nathaniel. “The game ain’t over yet.”
“Like hell it ain’t,” he said, toting his points in his head, starting with the extra fifty for using all seven tiles. It was dizzying. Easily a hundred-point word. He was beginning to feel better already.
Trotsky, luxuriating in the warmth of the woodstove, was sufficiently roused from his stupor by the excited conversation to determine it was now time to roll over to toast his right side. At that moment Jacobus’s phone rang, an old-fashioned black Bell Telephone rotary model with a ring like a fire drill warning. As Jacobus didn’t often get calls, Trotsky never had gotten used to its shocking shrillness, so just as the semiconscious dog was turning over, the ring made him jump in alarm. He whacked his sledgehammer head against the bottom of the lightweight coffee table, spewing the entire Scrabble game all over the floor.
“You were right, Jake!” laughed Nathaniel. “The game sure enough is over. All over!”
“Goddam dog,” snarled Jacobus, further infuriated when he heard Yumi trying to stifle a laugh.
Trotsky, finely attuned to the subtleties of his master’s every mood, was already licking at Jacobus’s corduroy pant leg, his slobber soaking in, the stub of his tail trembling with love.