by J. D. Landis
Clara has always placed her quilts strategically (and separate from the Madonnas I have given her as gifts) and with the sense of humor that I had never imagined could accompany sexual mystery. She keeps threatening to find a quilt called Trip Around the World to hang like a flag from the ceiling above our bed, and already, on the wall behind the bed, there is an Amish Puss in the Corner, and there, directly across from our bed, is a Swastika from Missouri, perfect evidence of the corruption of beauty in the mêlée of history.
She has also joked to me that someday she is going to buy me a Contained Crazy if I don’t get out more.
But I don’t want to get out more. I prefer my life here in the loft, which has become my version of Wittgenstein’s eternal hut, though he, lover of men, chose always to live in the utter solitude I had believed to be my own destiny B.C., as I might denote my life Before Clara. I remain, however, some kind of underground man, even if in my case I am buried in the sky. (Though I must confess that when I still dared read fiction I was infinitely more impressed with that other madman’s voice that could say, “It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.”) And with these quilts all around me, and the little antique rugs and samplers Clara has put here and there, I feel I am in the very midst of America, right in its fist, as it were, as I so often find myself in Clara’s fist and I see myself as she sees me and learn to love myself as she loves me in that great generous blessing of self-acceptance that marriage, finally, sweetly, kindly brings.
As I have said, this loft is one great room. We designed it ourselves and deliberately created no place for either of us to hide. The only private spaces are the two bathrooms, hers of Italian tile and with a bidet, mine of stone and with a sauna, and the two giant closets.
Those closets are nearly as large as other people’s studio apartments, and while neither of us has had occasion to hide in our closet, we do keep all our things in them, for when you live in one big room and are as menseful as we two and want that room to be as orderly as we want ours, you must have a place to put all the incredible number of things one accumulates on this earth, from clothes and papers to weapons and toys.
I have never been in Clara’s closet, and she has never been in mine. (Only Elspeth, our maid, who comes but once a week, like all good maids on Thursday, 10:00 A.M., has been in both.) We agreed, when we created this large public space of ours, that each of our closets would be off limits to the other. In the beginning of our marriage, we locked our closets. But I have not locked mine in months (years, now that I think of it), and to judge from the way she will open her closet door after a long day at work and throw in her clothes before coming to me with a smile and a greeting to get her hug and glass of wine, I don’t believe she locks hers either.
My clothes are in my closet. (I haven’t many, and they are as conservative as I, Clara’s attempt to Armani-ize and brief me notwithstanding; I have always been the first to admit that it is my mind that is dandified, not my corporeality.)
So are my books.
And whatever we have in the way of security for life in a city as renowned for its violence as its vertu. This is the place, after all—this pinnacle of civilization, this hub of finance and the arts, this seat of learning and lotophagy—where women are thrown off roofs in some sort of post–forced-coital tristesse, where tourists invite the knife by their very blondness, where the automobile siren is the Queen of the Night’s nightly aria, where beggars are our village idiots, and where democracy will, probably in the nick of time, yield to what Arnold called “the refinement of an aristocracy, precious and educative to a raw nation,” or else to the “thou shalt” of the herd. In the meantime, and for all the good they may do us should the hordes of victims of the failure of family planning reach our loft, I have a sword Clara bought me at a flea market, a bayonet from an army-surplus store, a baseball bat my father once gave me in the mistaken belief that the wand makes the magician, and something called a 2-Pound Camp Wonder that combines a hatchet blade, hammer, nail-puller, and pry bar, which Clara and I ordered from The Sportsman’s Guide early in our marriage when, like many couples, bestirred by a bucolic urge and goaded by the apparently inescapable urban image of making love in a sleeping bag, we said we should try camping, though we came to our senses before we’d bought a tent, a tarpaulin, or even the sleeping bag itself. All this is laughable, of course, both in its fire power and its necessity. Or thus I feel it, so ubietously content am I, contained securely in my marriage and my home, which I leave so rarely, my little piece of safe and colorfully quilted (I am tempted to say, as I lie in bed, buntinged) America. We are immune here to the ravages of the dissolution of law in this city, this country, and to the violence of domestic breakdown when love has died and in its place comes, like some aberrant antonym, rage.
Because I have accumulated fewer things than has Clara, I have volunteered my closet for our financial records, including canceled checks and tax returns. It also holds: a copy of my thesis (I never was able to confront the oral part of the exam); my bust of Nietzsche, which I thought rather audacious, even modish, for my undergraduate lodgings first in Vanderbilt and then in Jonathan Edwards, though now I realize that it probably would have kept the girls away if I hadn’t succeeded in doing that without its help; “The Final Resource of French Atheists” as well as the other erotica with which Clara has tried to enlighten me; and my old violin, which I have kept despite its painful associations and the large sum of money for which I could undoubtedly sell it because it reminds me of that first day in Clara’s shop when she said, “I’d like to see it,” and I said, “The violin?” and she responded, “Your apartment,” and that is what led me to have the courage to invite her home with me that evening and to be with her every evening, every night, since then, which is why it is so comforting to have this night to myself, as I listen to the music that played at our wedding and find myself beginning to grow hungry and wondering if Clara is growing hungry or whether she has eaten by now and where she might be eating and with whom.
I was very careful not to ask her anything about her evening when she told me this morning she had a dinner date for tonight. I simply said, “That’s nice,” and told her I would miss her.
In anticipation of her absence, I found as the day went on that I desired her less, as if my body had been in preparation for this evening and my mind had known enough to start early on its journey toward the kind of self-discovery that can be made only in separation from thoughts of, and desire for, the beloved. I am willing myself to learn the truth about myself. I want to make “all being thinkable,” as Nietzsche said. He called that the will to truth and said it fills one with lust.
I am still waiting for the lust. But I’m in no hurry.
So that when Clara came home from work, I found I could not wait until she’d leave again for dinner, so interested had I become in what I would discover in her absence tonight.
Without emotion, I watched her dress. She replaced one set of layers with another. I have never met anyone who dresses like Clara, with such cepaceous perfection. It is as if she is making a quilt of herself, fabrics and colors overlapping one another, textures and revelations. She usually wears tights, whether with or without a skirt, and I find her shapely legs, with their thin ankles, muscular calves, and girlish thighs, even more sensual wrapped in bright, opaque colors than naked. If the tights are worn simply as leggings, she will often offset the startling sight of her high, arcuated behind with a clashing pair of drooping socks, though sometimes she’ll also wear socks over the bottom of her tights when she wears a long shirt atop them, sometimes one of my shirts, which I gather has always been a woman’s stratagem to make a man desire her (though I can’t imagine that its opposite—a man wearing a piece of his woman’s clothing—would have the same effect on her).
Tonight, just those few hours ago, she put on no tights whatsoever, which surprised me, and a dress, black, a color she rarely wears. It didn’t occur to me
then that she might be dressing this way to try to assure me that wherever she was going and whatever she would be doing, she was invading her evening in her most demure apparel. And it probably didn’t occur to her that she was all the more desirable for the somberness of her outfit, like a beautiful woman at a funeral.
“You look beautiful.”
“Thank you,” she said distractedly, for she was bent over her handbag and pawing through it.
“You’re not planning to take that out, I hope.”
“Of course not.”
She emerged from her handbag with what looked like house keys, some cash, a blank check, and a credit card, which she put into the pockets of her dress. Clara seems to be the rare woman who can be separated from her makeup and comb for long periods of time and not feel as if calamity might strike. She does little enough to her face to change it: some eyeliner to amplify the warmth of her gaze and occasionally a dusting of some sort of fleshly powder when the effects of our lovemaking are still visible on her artless skin. Her hair scarcely needs its comb. She keeps it short (I doubt very much she is out getting a haircut tonight), it always seems to fall with its own perfect taste over enough of her ears to allow her earrings their mysterious dangle, and I never love it more than when we sit at an outdoor cafe for dinner early on a summer evening and I watch as her hair takes more light from the carmine spill of the sun than does the glass of chilly Chénas in her hand, unless it’s when I see it swept between my fingers when her head is in my hands and her eyes are in my eyes.
“Are you going to cook?” she asked.
“You know I can’t eat my own cooking when you’re not here to tell me that Jacques Pépin won’t be sending out a death squad.”
“Order in?”
“Yes.”
“What? Burmese? Rwandan? Yemeni?”
“Chinese.”
She seemed surprised. “Slumming?”
I’d given her her exit line.
She walked toward me for what I knew was a goodbye kiss. “I was going to tell you not to wait up,” she said. “But if you’re going to be slumming …”
As she reached for me I reached for the remote control of the CD changer and punched up the Celtic guitar pieces. The exquisite opening harmonics of “L’Hertiere De Keroulaz” shivered through the loft.
She stopped to listen. I knew she would. As she had enveloped me within her quilts, I had done the same to her within my music. We have both learned to acknowledge and appreciate a beauty we had not known before. These intangible new passions are perhaps the greatest gifts we have given one another. Marriage, despite the promulgations of the diamond, gold, and automobile industries, can be measured by no better bestowal. When you close the world around you, you open up the world to one another.
“Dance with me.”
“I can’t. I’ll be late. But I will when I get home.”
She put herself into my arms. I held her lightly, formally, as if we were dancing. Then she was gone.
As you can feel a hat on your head after you’ve removed it, I could feel her in my arms. I held her until even this discarnate memory of her body had floated away into the air around me. Then I changed the music and, good house-cock that I am, lay down on the bed, waiting for Clara.
WE DANCE OFTEN, Clara and I, always at home, alone, slowly, close, to the dances I so love in Bach—for example, the cello suites’ allemandes and bourrées and gigues and the sarabande from the fourth that we played at our wedding—and to slow jazz tunes by Miles Davis and John Coltrane and even the normally screaky Ornette Coleman and sometimes to Clara’s music, “Stairway to Heaven,” perhaps, before the allégro di bravúra, music with words, and she will hold me with both arms locked around my waist and turn up her head so her lips are at my throat and sing to me in a whisper as we dance here alone in our life, “There’s a sign on the wall, but she wants to make sure, because sometimes words have two meanings …”
We dance because we love the touch of hand on hand, hand on back, cheek on cheek, the whispering, the innocence of it as prelude to the deeper innocence of the jabber and scream and penetration of unembellished sex.
We dance to tease ourselves into a desire even greater than that we experienced from looking at one another, particularly as the weeks and months and years went by and the surprise of finding someone else at home, even someone ripe and naked, faded, and with it faded also that lust for her or him who was before you, new and unknown.
Nietzsche wrote about becoming who you are and knowing who you are through an abandonment of “all faith and every wish for certainty,” so that you would walk forever on what he called insubstantial ropes and dance near the abyss, and only then would you be free.
We dance because what is marriage if not a dance on the abyss?
I AM GETTING hungrier. It is a good feeling, a kind of emptiness to match the emptiness of my home and arms. I am slowly becoming one piece. I am slowly becoming longingness.
But I am not so desperately hungry as to want to order my Chinese food. I am not yet on that edge.
So I activate the remote control and match my own welcome melancholy, which is an emotion I had sought out and loved all my life and have found virtually impossible to locate within the happiness and present-tenseness of my marriage, with Schubert’s Quintet in C.
This was one of Schubert’s last pieces. As was the case with each of his symphonies, he never got to hear this quintet played, at least not in the corporeal world. But he must have heard it inside his head, just as I would hear language inside my head in the midst of my long period of silence. Schubert would simply lie down in bed, where, like me, he would do most of his work, and write out whole pieces of music in his virtually illegible hand, the way Clara can sit down and bend over her notebook and write out whatever it is she writes out, for the music already existed within him, like an actual event rather than a fantasy spun out of nothing.
Even as Schubert lay dying in bed, the music kept pouring forth if not out; he shrieked right until his final moments that he had new melodies in his head. What an enviable annihilation. I can remember visiting his grave in the Währingerstrasse Cemetery in Vienna and putting my head to the ground in case those tunes might be heard still floating around in his skull. Needless to say, I heard nothing but the sounds of the grass growing richly on the fertilization provided by the rifacimento of the flesh beneath it.
The epitaph on his tomb speaks of “yet far fairer hopes,” for he was only thirty-one when he died.
I am hardly older than that now. And I know that if I were to die tonight, I, like Schubert, would have left behind my greatest work, for I have achieved inner peace in an existence that sets each man to war with himself.
As for Schubert, no matter what melodies he may have been hearing in his head on his deathbed, this piece to which I am now listening is his greatest and would not likely have been surpassed by him. He knew that, no matter what he shrieked. He is speaking a new language here. He tells us he is going to write in sunny C major and then sets out moving from one key to another nearly from one bar to the next through shifting harmonies and a perplexing tonality that probably would have gotten him shot, or at least ostracized, if the manuscript of this work hadn’t sat around unnoticed, undiscovered, unknown for twenty-five years after Schubert’s syphilis carried him off. And even then it bothered people. (The music, not the venereal disease.)
As Nietzsche said, all true music is a swan song, though he himself in his misguided desire to be an artist fell into the trap of writing romance (he called his compositions names like “Sweet Mystery” and “A Brook Flows By,” and a piece he composed for Cosima Wagner’s thirty-third birthday he entitled “Echoes of New Year’s Eve, with Processional Song, Peasant Dance, and the Pealing of Bells”), and romance is what appeals to those human beings born without a mind and therefore condemned forever not to know they have no mind. Hans von Bülow, the canonical Cosima’s first husband, whose name is synonymous with sexual humiliation, proved
himself a more astute judge of music than of women. It was not out of jealousy but mere good taste that he told Nietzsche, in perhaps the greatest critical one-liner ever uttered, “Your composition is more terrible than you think.”
Schubert’s quintet was indeed the death knell of the Classical era, even as it adhered to the classical form. But its confessions of feeling, its language, is Romantic, in its ambivalence, its suffering and joy, and its constant speculation on both.
Is it any wonder that I so love this piece and that it so disturbs me? I know who I am. I know what I was. The same thing has happened to me—not that happened to Schubert, for I am alive, but that happens in this music.
I have found myself, my voice, and my life in my love for my wife. And I am able to talk about it now, naked, openly, truthfully, when before I met her I could talk of nothing but of what I knew. Never of what I felt.
I am the new man.
I am the very hungry new man.
AS PART OF my Classical self, I very rarely miss a meal, particularly dinner when Clara and I are together and, whether home or out, we let the meal go on endlessly as we talk and then, after she has written in her diary and I have lain on this bed watching her write in her diary, we come to bed together, always together, never one and then the other. And if bed is, as Huxley says, the poor man’s opera, though we are scarcely poor, we have not wanted for fioritura in the rendering of our love.