Lying in Bed

by J. D. Landis

More quickly than I have ever moved—for I am a man who is nothing if not deliberate in what I do and say, as it is wise to be in contention with a culture in which speed is valued over depth, and action over thought—I am on my feet and have pushed him back toward the bed. As he falls from my hands with so little resistance to the air he seems no more than air himself, I am given an image of him flying back up with his body like a deadly letter E, a martial artist fulfilling the stereotype of his race. But as he hits the bed, he curls up so tightly I think he is going to fit completely into one of the wedding rings on the quilt.

  “Don’t.” His voice remains surprisingly manly, given his embryonic attitude.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Hurt me.”

  “I won’t.” I see him try to look at me, but his glasses are askew with the side of his face pressed into the quilt.

  “Where are you going?” Apparently he can see me. There is desperation in his voice, as if now it is he who does not want to be abandoned.

  I walk away.

  “Why did you throw me down?” he calls after me.

  I say nothing until I return. He remains voluted on the bed, encased like a snail in his virtue. “Here.”

  His eyes are closed. “Where?” He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He shifts his body uncertainly.

  “No, here.”

  He opens his eyes now and squints at the violin case I’m holding toward him. As if he can’t believe what he sees, he pushes himself up with one arm and with his other hand adjusts his glasses on his tiny nose. “You can’t be serious.”

  “You promised,” I say, putting the burden on him to play and removing from me the much simpler one of bequeathing him this violin in what he perceives to be, to judge from his last words, the zaniest of xenial gestures.

  He stands up. He straightens his shapeless pants, tucks his colorless shirt beneath his rope, and in so doing seems to regain his dignity. “No I didn’t.”

  He’s right. “Nonetheless,” I say, “we have a deal.”

  “No we don’t.”

  “Yes, we do. You have to play it for me.”

  “And then what?” He is still uncertain.

  “And then it’s yours. If you want it, of course. Go ahead. Open it up. Take a look at it. Here. I’ll take out the bow.”

  I put the grip of the violin case into his hand. I can see he thinks of laying it down upon the bed, but instead he carries it over to one of the flame-bark worktables.

  I follow him and walk around to the other side of the table so I can watch.

  When he sees the violin, he closes his eyes and brings his palms together at his breast.

  “It’s so beautiful,” he whispers.

  “Here’s the bow,” I find myself whispering in turn.

  He opens his eyes and parts his hands and holds them out to receive the bow.

  “Where did this come from?” He is whispering no longer.

  “From me to you.”

  He smiles slyly, as if he’s caught me out. “I mean its provenance.”

  “German,” I answer. “From the 1650’s. The violin is Italian, of course, and younger—1773, a mere 220 years old. The bow had a fixed frog originally, but after a hundred years that was replaced with this Cramer nut. Otherwise it’s no different from how it was three and a half centuries ago. It’s older than Bach.”

  “What a stick.” He holds it straight out in his right hand. “It’s heavy.”

  “Snake wood.”

  “Not Pernambuco?”

  I shake my head. “Snake wood.”

  “It must be stiff.”

  I see my anguine cock slithering up the inside of Clara’s thigh. I’m tempted to make a play on those words but remain musical: “Polyphony was all the rage.”

  “Perfect.” His narrow eyes shine.

  Just like a violinist to pay more heed to the bow than the box. Just like a man as well, now that I think of it.

  He puts down the bow and carefully takes the violin from its case. He holds it to his ear and plucks a string. Then he looks at the strings and plucks them all. “Gut E and A,” he pronounces. “Wound D and G.”

  “Yes.” As if I didn’t know.

  “How long have these strings been on?”

  “Forever.” Like everybody else, I reduce eternity to my own span. “Since I last played.”

  He picks up the bow and resins it and draws it across the strings. “Can I adjust the tuning to a'=415?”

  “Be my guest.”

  As he tunes the instrument, I wonder what he’s going to play. I wonder also if he will be worthy of this gift, the sight of which has awakened in me memories of jubilation and longing and embarrassment and failure. I remember screaming for my mother to come rescue me. I realize for the first time that when I stopped playing the violin, I stopped doing, acting, and began being. It was the beginning of my downfall and my salvation. I shut the door into the world and opened the door into myself. And no one has walked through that door but Clara. And now this boy.

  He surprises me by putting the violin back in its case and the bow on the table. I prepare to throw my arms around him to keep him here when he says, “Is there some place I can wash my hands? They get all greasy from my job.”

  I can’t let him wash his hands in the kitchen, for the bag of food he delivered is still sitting there in one of the sinks, and I don’t want him to have to suffer the humiliation of confronting what he’s forced to do to support his music. So I point toward the closed door of my bathroom.

  “Be right back,” he says and goes into the bathroom and locks the door behind him.

  Little does he know what privacy of mine he has invaded. No one but Elspeth has ever been in that room, except for Clara on several occasions when she’s surprised me by coming into the shower and soaping me. There is something, she implies—and it is obvious—particularly exciting about the sight of semen flying off in its pure, inspissated whiteness into the lean, cleansing clarity of water.

  While he’s gone I listen again to the music that’s playing. I know I must turn it off but cannot bear to just yet.

  “Excuse me.”

  I have not heard him return. He is standing next to me with the violin and bow in his hands.

  “Listen,” I say.

  “I know the piece. I told you.”

  “Listen,” I say again.

  We stand there next to one another, listening. The quartet is coming to an end with an almost deviant waltzlike rhythm. Tears come to my eyes.

  Silence.

  I put the machine on Pause. “Shostakovich wrote that the year I was born, 1960.”

  He cocks his head and looks at me over the angle of his glasses. His gaze might be considered prurient were I not entering him at a diagonal. Or is this some Buddhist way of skewering the flesh over the coals of oblique curiosity?

  My eyes go dry. My skin tightens. It has taken him this long to notice me. I feel sucked into his languid being as through a straw. He sees into me and finds beneath my stolid clothes the emptiness that I’ve been left in Clara’s wake.

  He could bring me to my knees by lowering his head, so caught up am I in how he looks at me, but he straightens his neck and levels off his eyes and lets me go and says, “I thought you were older.”

  I don’t know whether to interpret this as praise or insult, but I’m delighted nonetheless to find he’d thought me anything. I cannot have him go out into the night with just the violin and nothing of the man who played it years ago when he was innocent and yet to become a living dissonance.

  I pretend to ignore his remark and return to the music. “Shostakovich wrote it in memory of Nina Vasilyevna. His wife. It’s felt by some that the piece marks the beginning of his withdrawal into himself.”

  “He must have missed her.”

  Finally! He knows now that I have told the truth, and he accepts it.

  “Victor Ledin described that waltz at the end as Shostakovich’s last dance with his departed wife.”
>
  “Yes.”

  In his concurrence I can feel my own wife in my arms as we dance near the abyss. I close my eyes and stare.

  Then the music begins.

  It is the chaconne from Bach’s D minor partita.

  I realize that when he’d said, “Perfect,” he was referring not to the bow but to the piece he had chosen at that instant to play for me.

  I have never heard anything so beautiful in my life. The music leaves him and enters me. I am one with it and him.

  I open my eyes and see that his are closed, even as he makes his way through this longest by far of the movements Bach wrote for the solitary violin.

  His ears move as he plays, as he listens to himself playing.

  So involved is Sonny in the music he makes that he doesn’t see or hear me go to the closet or return with the 2-Pound Camp Wonder.

  And when I bring it forth against the back of his neck, he doesn’t know what hits him.

  Who does?

  I HAVE HIT him not with the blade of the hatchet but with the hammer on the opposing side of the blade.

  There is no blood. The force of the blow itself has delivered him from this world of unrest to the world of peace.

  I carry his almost ethereally light body into my closet and place him gently on his back on the floor. Then I return and get the violin and bow, neither of which has suffered from the fall out of his profoundly accomplished hands.

  I visit him once more in the closet and place the violin and bow across his breast. I smile when I see his glasses fallen one last time to the end of his nose, and I push them up to cover his eyes, behind which, closed, there might still sound the music he was playing when he died.

  I am aware of being watched as I do this.

  The bust of Nietzsche gazes upon me as I kneel beside this lonely, gifted boy.

  Tell him, I want to say, tell him what you know: that dying is not a slander. That one should make a feast out of one’s death. That all that is ripe wants to die. That all that is perfect wants to die, and he became perfect. Tell him and tell me too that since one is certain to die, why should one not be gay?

  In the silence that once again invades me and surrounds me, I rise and leave and go back to the lighted closet of my life.

  12 A.M.

  I am lying in bed, waiting for the music.

  The remote is at my fingertips. Clara’s diaries are spread around me over the quilt. The phone is on my stomach.

  I may, on the one hand, seem the very definition of cunctation—indecisive, lazy, dilatory, as if I have all the time in the world to choose my weapon—but on the other I am a virtual paradigm of communication: music and writing and speech are all, literally, within my grasp, and what, after all, is the essence of life if not communication, or at least of my life? It is not praxis that makes perfect, as my father would have it; rather periphrasis, as long as it may take, the circling around of the truth until it is bound up inescapably in knowledge and acceptance and its own expression of itself.

  We are here to tell each other why we are here. There is no higher calling.

  Nor any more painful. So to ease the vivisepulturial nature of this vocation, we are given music and love.

  With love flown, I choose music. A remote control is the penis on the body of aestheticism: hold it, touch it, press it, and it delivers immediate pleasure.

  Releasing the Pause (if only human beings came equipped with same), I hear again the perfect music at the perfect time: the joy and tragedy of life contained within a single evening to the perspicuous accompaniment of congruous sound.

  In the opening duet of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, the soprano and alto sing of a mother’s tears mingling with the blood of her son as she stands beneath the cross on which he hangs.

  The Stabat Mater is sung today today. Or yesterday, as it happens, September 15, on the Feast of the Seven Sorrows, and I would be hearing it yesterday and not today, the brand-new September 16, if I had not spent so much time with the boy who delivered my dinner, for which I have no stomach at this moment, or if Clara had come home on the day she left or never left at all.

  The Feast of the Seven Sorrows is also known as the Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin and is celebrated as the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Among her seven heartaches, all having to do with her son, were, of course, those relating to the Passion; the days she was apart from him when he was a rebellious teenager among the Jews in the Temple; and the prophecy of Simeon, during the circumcision, when Simeon proclaimed her boy was destined for something monumental. Aside from the fact that, like Sonny, I’m not Jewish myself, although I am circumcised, I doubt very much that the doctor who presided at the ceremony burdened my own mother with a similar vaticination. Nothing much seems to have been expected of me. And until today—yesterday, as it now turns out—I had done virtually nothing that would attract attention.

  Even Pergolesi had accomplished more, and he was surely not much older than Wun Gon Jew when he died, at twenty-six, and nearly as poor and obscure, for like Schubert’s, Pergolesi’s fame was posthumous. This very Stabat Mater was written on his deathbed. And as I listen to it on what I hope will be my own deathbed (for this is where I want to spend, and end, my days), I think of Sonny’s mother, whoever she may be, and of my own mother, whoever she may be.

  I am rehearsing my phone call when the phone itself explodes on my stomach. Its dry gargle joins the lament of this woman for her bruised, derided, cursed, defiled son.

  It does not stop. It rings and rings and rings.

  I turn the music louder until it sings away the sound of the phone. But the phone goes on quavering through me from heart to groin.

  I press it into my gut, to smother it, but this only joins my hand to the trembling. My fingers librate, like Clara’s, numb, moving side to side between her legs.

  “Who is it?” I ask.

  I can only imagine. I won’t pick it up.

  It’s Sonny’s mother, come back from the dead to protect her son.

  But it’s too late for that. Besides, he never told me whether she is dead or alive.

  So it’s Hang. He’s looking for his delivery boy. And if I pick up the phone, he’ll say, “Hang, mister,” and I’ll say, “Yes, I probably shall,” though of course that will be metaphoric only, for in New York State we are so benightedly kind as not to kill our killers but to give them the rest of their lives to sit in their rooms reading and thinking and listening to music.

  But Hang has only my address, not my name or number.

  It’s not my father. It never is. Though how fitting it would be for him to call tonight before I call him, when I’ve finally done something, rather than nothing, to earn his condemnation.

  It must be Clara. Who else would call me? The others have no reason. Or, if they have reason, they are ignorant of it.

  But Clara would not call. She knows I never answer the phone, for what need have I had of other people when I have had her?

  But it is Clara, calling to tell me what I already know: I shall sleep alone for the rest of my nights.

  I can feel her through the very twitching of the phone, which I move down to my groin like some pitiable man in the haptic vacuum of his solitude.

  “Oh, Clara,” I say to the phone. I bring the entire thing up to my cheek as the soprano in her aria sings, “Vidit suum dulcem natum morientem desolatum,” most apposite, with its image of a man hanging in desolation for the sins of his homeland.

  As the phone pulses against my face, it throws off like a vein at her neck the sweet smell of Clara. And as I kiss the body of the phone, it finally comes dead upon my lips.

  I am ready to make my own call.

  So I turn down the music and punch out the number and hold my breath as the phone purrs in my ear and don’t let it out until he answers.

  His voice is hoarse. I can tell instantly that I have awakened him, but I can also tell that he doesn’t want me to know this. He cannot bear to appear vulnerable. He was never one to admit
that he needed, or indeed ever indulged in, sleep.

  “I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

  “Who is this?”

  I’m delighted he doesn’t recognize me. I take it as evidence not that he’s forgotten how I sound but that a year of silence and four years of happiness have given me a new voice.

  “It’s John,” I confess.

  He cannot hide the deep breath his body demands of the air around him, for it wheezes through his sleep-dry throat.

  I wait for the crash of his phone in my ear.

  “John?”

  The tone in which he whispers my name is ambiguous: has he forgotten who I am or is he merely surprised to hear from me?

  “Dad?” I say back and try to invest the word with like equivocation. And such a peculiar word it is, so abrupt yet chummy, so fraught with affection for a sound so close to dead. And why these palindromes: DAD, MOM? Are they meant to imply some eternal return, or that mom and dad get you coming and going and that there simply is no escape from them?

  “John,” he acknowledges, though still in an almost intimate whisper, as if he’s not planning to talk for long and is afraid of stimulating himself too far out of sleep with the sound of his own voice. “Where are you calling from?”

  I nearly hang up on him. If I tell him where I am, I’ll end up in his courtroom, where he’ll say he needn’t recuse himself because in fact he doesn’t know me at all.

  Impatient as always, he simply asks another question when he gets no answer to his first: “What time is it there?”

  I look at the clock on Clara’s side of the bed. It’s still a new day. Not too late for her to be out, if she were merely out in the city and had not stepped off into the void, though late enough for me to have begun to become concerned and to have felt that strange mixture of worry and desire that is brewed in one’s mind at the rim of loss.

  “It’s late,” I answer.

  “It’s later here.”

  I don’t understand him. Has he grown old and lapsed into metaphor?

  “No, it’s not.” Even if he’s talking about death, he’s no closer to it than I.

  “Aren’t you calling from California?”

  I think of Clara, leaving California as little more than a child, turning her back on her parents as I, clearly, have been unable to do. Heading east like the weather from what Jack London had named the Valley of the Moon, to be flooded by men.