The Baroque Ensemble
As Peter Williamson was gently shaking out his wet umbrella in the cloakroom of the university art gallery, he caught sight of one of his students whispering to another young woman. With delicate precision, like a mason dropping his plumb-line (a mason of the artisan variety, a medieval or Renaissance mason), he lowered the loosely furled umbrella into a wooden rack. He could see that the two young women were looking at him furtively, still whispering.
Although he paid scant attention to such banal considerations as popularity, this sort of thing did give him quiet pleasure. That is Professor Williamson, he imagined his student murmuring. To take one of his advanced courses is a spiritual experience. He elevates Pure Mathematics to the level of art.
He hung his coat on a wooden peg and removed his rubber overshoes. Some tasks were difficult to execute in an esthetically pleasing manner. In such instances it was essential to cultivate a dedicated awareness, Buddhist almost, of the singularity of minute actions. He peeled off the rubber skins carefully, as one might peel an apple with a small pearl-handled knife to achieve a fragile but unbroken spiral of rind. He placed the rubbers neatly below his coat. The tide line of slushy snow just above the soles ebbed onto the flagstones.
With only the faintest, certainly indiscernible, tremor of self- consciousness, he walked out of the cloakroom and past the two young women. He did not, as so many of his colleagues would have done, acknowledge his student with any of those fawning mannerisms such as a nod or a “Good afternoon, Miss Marshall.” He did not pander to that sort of thing.
The students were attractive in that particular way of clever undergraduate girls: fresh skin, shining straight hair, breasts modestly taut under sweaters.
Professor Williamson, he imagined his student whispering in thrilled awe, never comes to student parties or anything of that nature. He maintains a high failure rate, considers an A as rare as incunabula, and yet there is a waiting list to get into his courses. It is said to be a compliment of the highest order if he politely ignores you in public.
Yes, he thought to himself. Yes: it is excellence that counts. The populist professors, the fraternisers, the politically aspiring, the television talk-show mathematicians, those who wish to be much seen and heard, verily, they have their rewards. He himself preferred the discreet approbation of the discerning few.
The small auditorium was as yet empty. The concert was not due to start for another half hour and others who had arrived early were browsing through the gallery, their hands clasped behind their backs, their foreheads and mouths puckered as though they had just swallowed something unexpectedly bitter. The creased faces, reflected back from glass frames, announced: I am experiencing the exaltation of art. Peter Williamson disdained these pathetic forms of snobbery.
His deepest pleasures were private and esoteric. He felt for the expectant emptiness of an auditorium prior to a concert the same passionate frisson that he felt for a deserted cathedral: hushed wombs throbbing with possibility and mystery, one’s inner fire – like an altar lamp – the only reference point, the node of illumination.
He sat in the front row where he could contemplate the props set up for the Baroque Ensemble. It was an arrangement of exquisite simplicity, a trinity, that most satisfying and unifying of mathematical forms. At the apex of the triangle which pointed to the back of the low stage stood the harpsichord. Its chair, like a shy debutante glancing nervously downwards at unsure feet, neatly lined up its front legs with those of the instrument.
The base of the props triangle, parallel to the front of the stage, was an Oriental carpet runner glowing with the authentic pallor of antique wool and threadbare scrollwork. A chair stood at each end of the rug, looking inwards, and a double-faced music stand of the same polished mahogany as the chairs stood between them like a low fulcrum. Peter Williamson breathed deeply and slowly to steady his pulse. The purity of it!
His eyes fondled the harpsichord. There were so many levels of virtuosity contained like pieces of sunlight within the prism of a fine concert. The artisans who crafted the instruments, the composers, the performers, the trained listeners – a symphony of human excellence. The keys of the harpsichord were of oak and ebony, gleaming dully with a patina of reverent use. He trembled to think of all the famous hands that had caressed them, all the guest artists.
He partook, as it were – yes, the verb of sacred communion appealed to him – he partook of the restrained sensuality of the Queen Anne chairs, the intricacy of their needlepointed upholstery, the milles fleurs pattern … A sudden burr snagged the flow of his contemplation. The chairs. They were of the right period but the wrong country. For a concert program of French Baroque music the chairs should have been Louis Quatorze rather than Queen Anne. Something by that court designer, Andre Charles Boulle. It was a minor detail, perhaps, but in such niceties lay perfection. The Music Department would do well to consider these things. But alas, how many within the academic community still concerned themselves with the rigours of impeccability?
The small auditorium began to fill up. People filed in silently, worshipfully, and waited reverently in their pews. It was, of course, a religious experience. We are the elect, Peter thought. A mystical communion of initiates following unwritten but ineluctable laws. Faculty members and local doctors and lawyers and other professional people adhered to a dress code of quiet elegance. Vests and fob watch-chains. Tailored suits and modish felt hats for the ladies. Students, the novitiate, dressed casually but neatly in jeans and turtlenecks, permissible because the kind of student who would spend a Sunday afternoon listening to chamber music could be expected to graduate to vests and gold timepieces. Everything was as it should be.
He was pleased to see a number – one might even say, a disproportionate number – of his own students in the audience. He recalled having read several years ago (somewhere among those years one cringed to remember) a statement by Eugene McCarthy. “There are only six harpsichordists of note in this country, and they are all voting for me.” Something to that effect. While Peter Williamson shrank from the vulgarity of politics, it pleased him that such a politician should exist. A fitting sense of priorities.
He felt that something of a similar order might perhaps be said of himself. He imagined, for example, that an obituary in the university Gazette might read: There was always a startling correlation between those students taking Professor Williamson’s courses and those taking an interest in the higher arts. This was so widely known that the Art Gallery, the Choral Society, and other such bodies at this university made use of his class registration records as mailing lists. It was said that even among those students who failed his courses there existed a marked statistical probability of concert attendance.
Now the auditorium was almost full. The three musicians entered. After the applause there was a brief eerie interval of tuning, isolated notes fluttering out to the audience like little truce flags. First the harpsichordist, in response to some cosmic tuning fork, or playing to the flawless whorl of an inner Platonic ear, sounded one or two soft notes, then leaned over her keyboard and reached into the rib-cage of her instrument. She had long white fingers which occupied themselves quickly and confidently as a surgeon’s with the troubled heartstrings, her head tilted sideways toward the audience, her eyes rapt and attentive. Another note tapped – her ear to the heart of things – and she pronounced her patient cured with a softly decisive, almost jocular, chord. Her chin and shoulders lunged toward the keys in emphatic congratulation.
This standard having been triumphantly planted, responses floated up from the flanking troops. From lower right the bassoonist, a huge man worthy of his instrument, offered a ghostly “wouf wouf” in bass. The harpsichordist looked at him sharply, disputing with a gentle note. The bassoonist ran caressing hands over wooden and silver curves and protuberances, licking the thin little reed, running his tongue around it in a questing placating way. Peter William
son found this performance slightly disturbing and flicked his eyes across to the violinist, a blooming girl with porcelain skin whose bow whispered deferentially to the bassoon and the harpsichord, her bowing hand every now and then hovering like a hummingbird over the four fine-tuning adjusters.
This elliptical dialogue of tentative notes, the stating of the hypothesis, was as crisp and clean as a mathematical equation, Peter thought. An uplifting brevity. Ciphers and symbols, baffling to the uninitiated but full of compressed meaning for those who knew the code.
There was a cessation of truce notes, a withdrawal of negotiators, a hush. Then the full panoply of baroque forces advanced gloriously upon the audience with the opening phrases of Leclair’s Triosonate Ré majeur. Peter Williamson closed his eyes.
He gave himself to the sustaining power of those amazingly long phrases with their convoluted rhythms. It was like a theorem of thrilling density, a piling up of opaque and challenging data. He had perfect faith in Leclair as a mathematician, knew that everything would be resolved with a swift and sudden mastery.
He opened his eyes again to observe how the violinist was coping with Leclair’s technical eccentricities, those multiple stops in high positions, the difficult bowing demanded by the rhythm, that peculiar use of the thumb for triple stops. She was managing effortlessly. He drank in the ambrosia of her vitality, the virtuosity of her hand movements, the porcelain translucence of her skin, the soft upper curves of her breasts visible above the black silk décolletage. The moment was almost painful to him. Such wild energy and fragility. So much delicacy. He gripped the arms of his chair to dissipate the intensity of his feelings, to protect himself. The wood was hard and unyielding, an anchor.
Then came the Rameau, loving and restful, a playful interlude between Leclair and the climactic and draining emotions which the Couperin pieces would unleash. Peter Williamson breathed deeply and slowly, gathering his strength, waiting.
There was a brief intermission before the Couperin ordres. People whispered to one another, or strolled to the back of the auditorium, or went out into the foyer to smoke. Peter Williamson sat still and gazed steadfastly at the stage, the better to be unaware of anyone brash enough to gate-crash his privacy.
Although the discipline of his mind was such that he could counter the unpleasantness of physical proximity at a concert, could almost ignore it, still he had been pleased that the seats on either side of him were left vacant. His soul had stretched in the free space.
And then, suddenly, as people drifted back from the intermission, Ethel sat down beside him.
The air contracted, became gritty and polluted and painful, full of dangerous splinters that slashed his breathing into anarchy.
“Oh Peter!” she said, all her gauche decibels dancing dismayingly. “I just noticed you. Isn’t this concert just so very moving!”
Like Prometheus he was to be punished in perpetuity for a single act of courage and kindness.
He gave her a small nod and a smile, trying not to look but unable to shield himself entirely from the shocking inappropriateness of her lank hair, the frightening abundance of teeth, the ill-fitting clothing. He averted his eyes quickly from the lake of red lipstick that dispersed itself in radial tributaries toward the hinterlands of her face.
She put her hand on his arm.
“Peter,” she whispered, with overloud and pointed confidentiality. He was reminded of medieval fables of the old hag who accosted errant knights, a touchstone of their true worthiness. She always turned out to have supernatural powers which arrowed in destructively on any sham Galahad who snubbed her.
“Peter,” she repeated. “Did you notice the way Hymie’s face gets all red and puffed up like a heart under cardiac massage?” She giggled in the hysterical snorting manner of a fourth grade schoolgirl who has just had an unimpeded view of the breasts of the schoolteacher bending over her desk.
Of course Peter desperately wanted to escape. He was inhibited by his own image of himself as a gentleman. To extricate himself politely – oh, it could be done – would be not only cowardly but cruel. Well perhaps not cruel. It was difficult to tell with people like Ethel. Their inability to protect themselves from humiliation was so vast and awful that one wondered whether any single specific rejection registered.
“Professor Hyman is a distinguished bassoonist, Ethel,” he said soothingly, as he would explain a problem to a math-panicked undergraduate girl. “Do you notice how smoothly and mellowly the notes flow out, in spite of the physical exertion required?”
“Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes,” she giggled. “Smoothly. Hymie is a smoothie, a smoothie. A super musician, just super.”
Peter, who had never met Professor Michael Hyman socially, and was quite sure Ethel could not have, had a chilling vision of her giggling into someone’s ear at the faculty club: Oh Pete is just super at Math, just super.
Ethel, he thought, would certainly cure him forever of any rash impulses of meddling compassion.
How could such a person be explained? he wondered. She could only exist, he felt sure, in academia. She was well over thirty, a research associate in the medical school. Within the small structured world of her laboratory she functioned with brilliance. So he had heard. Outside it, she was more or less incompetent. Not lovably inept, like Einstein. But, as he knew to his cost, totally and most unlovably devoid of appropriate patterns of public behaviour.
Peter had, unfortunately, first noticed her drinking alone in the faculty club one Friday night. He too had been drinking alone, but by choice and with dignity. The woman, on the other hand, had listened avidly at the edges of many conversations, tossing in her voice like a frenetic thrower of quoits searching for some peg, any peg. Always missing.
Was she not aware of the sidelong looks, the grimaces, the snickers, the gradual movings away? Peter Williamson, whose initial embarrassment had given way to a sort of horrified compassion, felt he should communicate some basic truth to her. Not so much to alleviate her truly desperate loneliness, but to spare her – to spare all of them – any future disasters. If he could only intimate that a solitude with the head held high, a lonely dignity, was an admirable and noble thing. If he could only snap her out of that craven garrulousness as an act of mercy …
With considerable courage and a quite stoic denial of personal comfort – he was not given to sullying his solitudes – he raised his glass slightly to her, smiled, and nodded. We people who choose to be alone, the salutation said, have a special code to maintain.
His goodwill and generosity had been crudely betrayed. The poor woman battened on to any crust of human kindness like a scavenger. Her needs were bottomless. She came noisily and unsteadily to his table, clinging to his arm in suffocating gratitude. Perhaps in random compensation for general physical disadvantages, her breasts were large and assertive. They pressed against his arm with a smothering unseemly softness. Peter Williamson was terrified.
He was also of course a gentleman. He attempted rational conversation. Even if her voice, punctuated by breathy giggling, had been less loud and shrill, the enterprise would have been doomed. Edging his arm to safety, he had clambered helplessly around her alarming non sequiturs.
“What sort of medical research are you engaged in?” he had asked.
She giggled nervously. “The balls of frogs are very large, you know. Comparatively speaking.” She snorted with lewd laughter. “I dissect frogs.”
Peter Williamson had thought of children raised by wolves, of people who recover from aneurisms in the brain. Perhaps she could be trained, he thought. Perhaps she could be coaxed into adult life by someone with the patience and unselfconsciousness of a saint.
But not by himself. He knew that his own carefully protective solitude could not withstand such an assault. He had eased his act of kindness, gone so madly awry, to a close. He had escaped.
And now here she was again like the Angel of
Death, the old hag herself, with a pincer grip on him.
Useless to him now the harmonic genius of Couperin. In the lurid glare of Ethel’s proximity he saw and heard only the harsh underside of things: the buzzing rib-cage of the harpsichord; horsehair on catgut; beads of sweat on the violinist’s forehead; the bassoonist puffing and snorting like a whale, purple pain at his temples. Peter’s own breath hurt him, as though it raked its way into his lungs across broken glass. His mouth was unexpectedly flooded with bile, and the fine flowering of baroque ecstasy seemed rank and lost and gone to seed.
There were some small errors. Fumbled timing. The violinist a fraction off pitch. He seemed to hear the harried and irritable rehearsals, seemed suddenly privy to murky recriminations between the bassoonist and the harpsichordist who was compressing her lips in a hard ugly line. There were red blotches of anxiety on the upper curves of the violinist’s breasts.
Ethel’s breasts, he was unable to avoid thinking, would bounce and jangle like a lush girl’s, obscenely parodic. Her nipples would be cracked and discoloured and would exude the musty smell of bundles of uncatalogued musical scores in archivists’ boxes. Or of dismembered frogs preserved in formaldehyde. She would giggle hysterically and lewdly.
He feared, from the constriction in his chest, that he was about to be guilty of some unforgivable incident – an asthma attack, a fainting fit … Freud fainted in public once, he recalled. In the presence of Jung. And Yeats had been rash in polite company, repenting in poetry. Now that my ladder’s gone … Ah, Yeats knew all about the dark underpinnings, about the raving slut who keeps the till.
Mercifully, in this blind reeling and ravening about through the debris of his mind, Peter Williamson stumbled against the lost ladder, the way out. He had his feet firmly back on the rung of Couperin, sweet genius of order, mathematician extraordinaire, orchestrator of the scattered and incoherent parts.
Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Page 11