The Weight of Nothing

by Gillis, Steven;

  “The others seemed to like it well enough.”

  “You think?” she kicked off her shoes. We were upstairs by then, Liz undressing near the closet before disappearing into the bathroom then slipping into bed. I sat on the floor with Clarence, joining Liz after a minute, eager to be praised and even rewarded for my playing, kissing her neck and lower onto her shoulders and the first soft knoll of breast. “What about you?” I asked. “Did you like what you heard?”

  “You know I did,” she positioned her left hand beneath my chin, preventing me from exploring further down, drawing my head back from under the sheet and causing me to look at her then. The anticipation in her face, the expectation and hopefulness were different from the gladness I found there earlier as I knocked off Roslavets’s “Etude,” and when she asked, “What about you? What did you think of your playing?” I answered cautiously with, “I was good enough, I suppose.” I tried to resume kissing her then, turning my head so I could get at her fingers still holding my chin, but Liz drew away, sat up on the bed, smoothing her T-shirt down and scolding me slightly. “I’m serious. What happened tonight is significant.”

  “For whom?”

  “You don’t think it’s worth discussing?”

  “There’s nothing to discuss.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Liz’s expression filled with disbelief, her good humor lapsing, and when I shook my head, she raised her half-arm like a broken marker and demurred. “So what are you telling me, that you thought you’d sit down in front of André-Seve Harflec, before Eric and Dr. Kabermill and a half dozen other world-class musicians and bang out Roslavets for them and call it a night?”

  “Something like that,” I tried to laugh off the aggravation in Liz’s tone and went so far as to remind her that we had this conversation months ago and she agreed that I was right to do whatever I chose with my music.

  “I said the ultimate decision for handling your talent is your responsibility.”

  “All right then.”

  “And that’s what you did tonight. You accepted the responsibility,” she tried to amend her position, said her support was predicated on the assumption that I was happy playing in relative anonymity while pounding out rock and jazz at Dungee’s, only “You and I both know that’s not true anymore.”

  “Do we?” I tried again to throw her off, insisted what happened tonight was no big deal, but my comment only added fuel to Liz’s fire. “Sure, Bailey. Anyone could have sat and played the way you did. Why should your success with Roslavets convince you it’s time to start taking your music seriously?”

  “It shouldn’t,” I answered as a matter of fact, and reminded her again, “I was only trying to put your friend in his place when I played tonight.”

  “Meaning what? That you think so little of your music now that you’re content using it as a party trick?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just that Andy pissed me off.”

  “So it bothered you that Andy assumed you were a second-rate musician?”

  “Sure.”

  “Because you know you have talent.”

  “It bothers me because André’s an ass.”

  “Because you don’t like anyone talking down to you when it comes to music.”

  “Because I don’t like anyone who’s a smug son of a bitch.”

  “Because you have talent,” she said again, her half-arm atop the sheet, her prosthesis laid out inside its velvet case across the room. She continued to argue, insisting, “You never would have sat down to play if you didn’t think you had something to prove. You know you’re good and you wanted Andy to hear. What you did tonight made everyone sit up and take notice. You can’t just ignore all that now,” her face had gone red with annoyance, and when she said, “They won’t let you ignore it,” the phone rang as if on cue and I went to answer it.

  “Mr. Finne? Bailey?” the voice was vaguely familiar, a somewhat formal yet eagerly pitched sound. “Willum Kabermill,” the man said, “Dr. Kabermill from the Music School.”

  I looked over at Liz, then turned myself sideways, keeping my face from her though she already seemed to know the nature of the call.

  “I hope it isn’t too late. It is late, isn’t it, but I just couldn’t quite wait until morning.”

  “It’s all right. We weren’t sleeping.”

  “Good. Excellent. About your playing this evening, Mr. Finne,” he went on to compliment my performance saying, “I was most impressed. We all were. The consensus, Bailey—may I call you Bailey?—is that we’d witnessed something extraordinary. A discovery of this kind happens most infrequently.” He asked then about my training, where I might have studied and played professionally, and with each answer I gave he sounded all the more surprised and excited. “I have some people I’d like to hear you perform. A showcase if you’re at all interested, a few colleagues and agents who know how to manage these sort of things. Assuming, of course,” he paused briefly before his own exhilaration got the best of him and he started in again. “A chance like this. A talent like yours. I’d like to help in any way I can,” he spoke in sound bites, in enthusiastic bursts, alternating between further praise and additional questions regarding my playing, stopping only after I promised to call him the next day with my decision.

  Liz remained on the bed, listening and watching for my reaction. “The others will call, too,” she said as I shrugged my shoulders and returned to sit beside her. I wasn’t worried about any of the others—“Let them call.” I could only think of how to answer Liz as she asked, “So, now what?”

  “Now nothing,” I was unprepared for any of this and told her, “Let’s sleep on it.”

  “What’s to sleep on?” she was unwilling to let the matter drop, afraid my ambivalence would only increase by morning. “You should at least be curious.”

  “Of what?”

  “Where this might lead.”

  “I don’t need it,” I scooted back so that I was now across from her on the mattress. “I like things just the way they are,” I smiled tentatively and made an effort to reach for her but she pushed my hands away. “Do you?” she asked. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why bother showing Andy you could play?”

  “I already told you.”

  “And I think it’s more than that.”

  “More than what?”

  “I think you want something different. I think all these years of avoidance have caught up with you. I think you need more.”

  “I do or you?” the question came out before I could stop myself and I wished I could take it back. Liz gave my statement just enough pause to let me know my claim had registered, then said as if I hadn’t spoken at all, “Playing Roslavets. Playing Shostakovich, George Crumb, and Thomas Tallis, it makes you happy. I know it’s true. Playing with the big boys no matter how much you deny it. Living as you have is all well and fine if it’s still what you want, but how can it be now, Bailey? Jesus, what are you so afraid of?”

  I crossed my legs and faced Liz who sat with her back against the pillow while Clarence on her shoulder bobbed his tiny head. (“What, Bailey?”) Her question suggested a patience worn thin, and while I wanted to answer with reassurance, I had nothing new to say. I sat in silence looking at her on the bed, the red of her hair in the lamplight, the shape of her cheeks and green of her eyes. After a few seconds I reached out again, my hand falling inside the empty space of her right arm where her fingers should have been. I curled my hand around the void and clung to the absence, and thinking of my mother then and the way love inspired her to sing for my father even as she was otherwise reluctant to perform, I found myself anxious to experience exactly what my mother felt in the time before love seduced her and brought her outside and dropped her into the cold white snow. Inching my fingers up, I said her name, said, “Liz,” and gave her what she wanted.

  In the days that followed, as the aftereffect of my playing at Elizabeth’s party acquired a life of its own, we became sin
gularly disciplined in our ambition. Liz was eager to help me pick out the three arrangements I was to perform at my recital. (I had phoned Dr. Kabermill the next day and agreed to play for a select audience, a date was scheduled for late April—I said I needed the time to prepare—and one of the small auditoriums at the Music School was chosen as the site.) Roslavets was a unanimous choice, but while Liz was of the opinion I should keep with the classics, Ornstein’s “Danse Sauvage” or Scriabin’s “Sixth and Seventh Sonatas” for example, in order to give my performance cohesiveness, I was of the opinion that a work of jazz would better exhibit my range and skill and selected an obscure composition by Clark Terry. As for the third and final score, I gave in and settled on Pierre Boulez’s “Second Sonata.”

  I undertook a rigid schedule of practice, conducted my rehearsals in secret, thanked Liz for offering to help whip me into shape but said, “I prefer if you were surprised.” The weeks passed more swiftly than I expected, my commitment unprecedented, and while on occasion my mood fell off and I questioned what exactly I was doing, my sense of incertitude never reached the point it did with my dissertation. Here was what Liz wanted, and here in turn was what I needed to give her. If I exhibited anxiousness, if now and again my spirits darkened and I worried about the effect of surrendering myself so completely to anything and the risk my desire created for possible disaster, Liz took my ambivalence in stride, restored my faith while assuring me, “It’s all only natural, Bailey. Don’t worry, I’m here. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

  On the evening of my recital, I arrived at the Music School just after seven, decked out in my usual jeans and light cotton shirt, determined to be comfortable. Dr. Kabermill greeted me at the door, reached to shake my hand, then changed his mind—unsure if I was one of those self-absorbed performers resistant to having his fingers touched—and settled for resting his palm beneath my elbow and walking me into the room. (Dr. Kabermill was a short man with thick brown glasses, a puffy pile of dark grey hair, and a mouth somewhat too large for his chin so when he spoke—as he did that evening with great anticipation—the bottom half of his face opened up comically like that of a puppet.) The hall he chose was more intimate than the larger auditorium, with six rows of chairs for an audience of thirty. I was introduced to a group of writers and agents along with a few professors I knew from Liz’s party. Eric Stiles was there, standing with Liz as I entered the room. After chatting with people who’d traveled from as far away as Boston to hear me perform, I settled onto the piano bench while Dr. Kabermill delivered his opening remarks.

  Liz smiled at me expectantly from her seat in the front row. (How lovely she looked!) I was not the least bit nervous, my recent rehearsals having gone quite well and whether it was the lighting then, or how the room felt suddenly heated—as if a great vent was sucking out all the air—or if it was fear waiting until the last possible moment to take hold, or the image of my father which came to me as he danced in the yard just after my mother’s death, I’d no idea. Perhaps it was worry for winding up as deranged as he if I exposed my love through this sort of pledge and something unforeseen still happened, but as I began to play and started with the first notes of Roslavets’s “Etude,” the cooperation from my hands turned erratic, the music channeled down intercepted so what came out was an unruly din and clamor.

  At first those in the audience were sure I must be joking, but when I didn’t stop and continued with a sway and bounce which made my father’s convulsions look tame, a murmur began to pass through the room, a questioning of whether I realized the dreadfulness of my performance. After a short while, as the notes I struck descended faster and faster into chaos, everyone in the hall turned their heads, dumbstruck and wondering if the person next to them was experiencing the same appalling exhibition. I went on for two minutes or more, banging through the “Etude” before switching gears, plummeting further while breaking into a spastic rendering of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and then “Bad Luck,” and while I can’t be sure when I realized the awfulness of my playing, at some point I got up on my own and walked out the door.

  I went directly back to my apartment, where Clarence followed me to the bed as I sat with my head in my hands and tried to make sense of what just happened. I stared out the window, toward my bookshelf, and across the room where a silver-framed print of a painting by Francis Bacon, a Christmas gift from Elizabeth, was displayed exactly where Shannon’s poster of Diebenkorn’s Large Woman once hung. The picture was entitled Self-Portrait and showed the face of a middle-aged man whose features were greatly exaggerated and oddly contorted. An exhausted, day-laborer’s face, both comical and frightening with hair thick and black combed off his forehead, clipped short above an enormous brow, a single strand dangling down between Bacon’s deep-set eyes. A crooked and beastly nose centered the face, created with broad, aggressive strokes, the mouth pulled violently up and sideways across a chin that was split and drooped to the left like a dab of wet putty.

  I came from the bed, and standing before the print, recalled how during the early part of his career, Bacon was highly regarded by contemporaries and critics, but attacked in the middle years for using the same narrow group of images and inventions, abstract portraits of distressed and tormented souls, twisted and bent in deliberately shocking ways. Bacon, in turn, insisted that using only a handful of subjects did not restrict the substantive evolution of his art, but rather helped improve his eye and refine his craft. (Of painting, Bacon said such was a way to “challenge the boundaries of my perceptions and conquer my recognition of the world as a meaningless cluster of stars. I am an optimist,” he said, “but about nothing.”) After much debate, in the time before his death, nearly all detractors agreed Bacon’s later works had evolved appreciably, his painting demonstrating a lyrical and incorporeal conceptualization despite the familiarity of themes.

  I took two steps closer and compared Bacon’s approach in handling his art to the narrow net I cast over my own life, and despite surface similarities, found our inspiration entirely different. Where Bacon was absorbed in a single-mindedness aimed at an altogether visionary sort of evolution, I was confining as a matter of avoidance, undisciplined and erratic in my projects, drawn to episodes of sloth while refusing to commit to anything long enough to demonstrate actual regard. Even now, when I tried to please Liz, my focus splintered like cold light passing through a cloud. The reality unsettled me, everything that had happened that evening, and struggling to come up with a way I might explain myself to Liz, I wound up unable to think, all paralyzed and addlepated.

  Clarence left the bed and hopped onto the piano where he sang, “Twee-twee!,” whistling louder when I failed to respond, bobbing rhythmically, hitting the wood with his tiny beak then jumping onto the keys. He strutted across the ivory, his talonlike feet dancing back and forth as he encouraged me to play.

  I shook my head. “You don’t understand.”

  “Tweeee!”

  “Clarence.”

  He glared at me then, as only a bird can do, leaped from the piano and pecked at my leg. I moved away from him, went to sit back on the bed, but he followed after me and resumed gnawing at my ankle. I endured his supplication as best I could, trying once more to explain, saying “I’m sorry, but I can’t,” over and over until finally he seemed to grow tired of me and walked across the floor. The closet was open and he disappeared inside, returning a few seconds later, pulling the miniature bike Liz bought for him several weeks ago. (Purchased as a joke, the bike was of no interest to Clarence until now.) I wasn’t sure at first what he was up to, and watched as he dragged the bike into the center of the room, his yellow and green tail feathers jutting straight up in the air before he stopped and released the cycle, stared at me and gave a commanding whistle.

  The bike was six inches high, red with a thin yellow corkscrew stripe painted around the center post and frame. The tires were real rubber, the pedals designed for a birdlike motion and a special handlebar Clarence could operate when perch
ed on the seat. He whistled again and I got down on my knees and balanced the bike while he climbed aboard. The process of learning to ride was difficult and Clarence had trouble with the pedals, with keeping the bike upright and gaining enough momentum to travel in a straight line. He spent ten minutes falling and climbing back on, though eventually he got the hang of it and managed to ride from one wall to the next, pedaling better and better still, his balance improving, becoming secure and unwavering.

  After establishing his expertise, he hopped off the bike and walked back to the piano, whistling for me to follow. I hesitated much as I had earlier, unwilling to be inspired by the machinations of a bird. “You don’t understand,” I said again, all of which caused Clarence to shake his head and whistle harshly “Twee-twee!” I grew angry, and scooping up the bike, held it out in front of him. “You think it’s so easy? What do you know about it? Why don’t you try a real trick.”

  I went to the closet then and retrieved a stretch of twine that I attached between the bookshelf and the chair, a distance of some six feet and a good thirty-six inches off the floor. Undaunted, Clarence leaped up and stood on the string. I lifted the bike and placed it on the stretch of twine, gripping the rear wheel while Clarence climbed on board. It took a while for him to grasp the difficulty of this new trick, such a fine measure of balance and how the slightest error sent everything crashing. Soon however, I began reducing my assistance and he learned to open his wings just enough to feel steady, monitoring his own momentum, understanding how much speed was required to keep the bike upright, churning the pedals inside his claws and flapping his wings at the end of each ride.

  No sooner did he master the stunt than he stopped again and jumped from the bike, went back to the piano where he stood atop the sounding board. I ignored him as best I could, even as his whistle became a screech and he dove toward the keys. Despite his limited weight, he managed to pound hard enough to produce a clear middle C. I turned to face him and told him sternly, “Forget it. I won’t. I can’t,” to which he responded by flying from the piano and crashing hard against my chest.