“Jan! Little de Vries!”
I looked around and spotted the familiar face at the bar. I could tell from the redness of his nose and untucked shirt that he’d had plenty to drink.
“Join me for a nightcap, old boy.”
I shook my head.
“Oh, come on, de Vries,” he said.
He extended his arm towards me. I looked back at Lena, who was still at the table, waiting for the receipt.
“Okay,” I said. “A shot of gin.”
“A single shot? Just the one? Okay.”
Pirm was one of the few who did not ask immediately about Dirk. Maybe he had some inclination. Maybe he preferred to talk about himself. I listened as he rambled about a junket to Shanghai and his opinions on the worldwide transfer of wealth or something like that. The room was loud and hearing him was difficult. But I kept nodding while checking on Lena. She’d recognized a couple she knew and was standing next to their table. The bartender came back with two gins on the rocks. I took a small sip from my glass and replaced it on the bar. I was about to thank Pirm, who made a show of paying, and to make my apologies for leaving, when he said, “Funny thing. Dirk applied for funding from the ministry. Something about bringing Eastern practices like Noh theatre into his program. I think it was Noh theatre. Fucked if I remember.”
I did not understand what Pirm was talking about, though I wasn’t really trying.
“He was on about Claude Debussy’s fascination with Indonesian gamelan and its ‘profound influence’ on Clair de Lune.”
“Reminds me of something I wrote for my Maastricht application,” I said.
“Ha,” Pirm said. “Classic Dirk.”
He signalled to the bartender for a top-up, then leaned in. His breath stunk.
“Out of curiosity,” he said, “when was the last time you actually, you know, spoke to him?”
I tilted my head but didn’t answer. He repeated the question. I looked away and shrugged.
“Come on, de Vries, just tell me the last time you spoke to him.”
“A while ago,” I said.
“A while? Like a few months?”
I shook my head again.
Pirm nodded. Maybe he understood, maybe he didn’t. I was tired and didn’t care either way. Lena had sat down at the table with the couple. She didn’t look like she was staying too long, but neither did she look eager to leave.
Pirm took a long sip from a new drink, then pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped a line of sweat from his forehead.
“It’s funny how these things go, de Vries.”
I cleared my throat. “What things?” I said.
“You and Dirk. I might’ve guessed you two would fall out of touch completely, but it could’ve been the opposite. Care to fill me in?”
“It’s nothing, really,” I said.
Pirm smiled and shook his head slowly. “You know, Jan, we all thought you two were …” He grinned.
I waited for him to finish his sentence, but he was waiting for me to prod him. After a pause, I gave in.
“Us two?” I said.
“Yes, you two,” he said. “You know, you two …”
“Us two what?” I said.
“Well, everyone in Sint Ansfried figured you and Dirk were … you know.”
He elbowed me in the ribs, to underline the point. It dawned on me what Pirm meant. I felt my face flush.
“The sleepovers,” he said. “Always attached at the hip, as it were … It was quite obvious, really.”
I looked over to Lena. She was still talking but sitting on the edge of her seat. Maybe getting ready to leave. Pirm went on. “It was obvious that Dirk was in love with you. That’s what everyone thought, anyway.”
My mouth opened. Nothing came. I ran over Pirm’s words, to make sure I had heard them right, and felt my face grow redder. Pirm wiped a fresh bead of sweat from his brow.
“Well, that’s why Dirk left, isn’t it? America. He made out like it was a lifelong ambition, but I’d known him since grade seven and he never said anything about it. I think it was his parents’ idea. Fresh start.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said.
“How else do you explain his breakdown that first year?”
“Breakdown?”
Pirm cleared his throat, leaned in even closer. “You didn’t know any of this? Nobody told you?” Pirm took a sip from his glass. “Apparently, he spent nights wandering around the city. One time his roommate found him sitting on the edge of a suspension bridge.”
I couldn’t fathom what Pirm was saying. Dirk on a bridge? Dirk alone? I felt the prick of a dagger in my heart. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lena stand up and say goodbye to her friends.
“And I suppose you didn’t know he dropped out halfway through his senior year? He only got his degree years later in Delft.”
Pirm’s words were like little flashes in the dark, too quick to count or grasp.
“All those rumours about him being here and there,” Pirm said. He let out a loud laugh and tucked part of his shirt back into his pants. “If any of those rumours about his one-man world-class road show was true, why would he have ended up back at the drama department of Sint Ansfried? Deputy head or whatever the position’s called?”
Pirm laughed again. Again his shirt came untucked. I looked over and saw Lena winding her way between the tables. She pointed to the coat rack. I waved that I understood and raised a finger to say I’d be a second. When I looked back at Pirm I began to feel a viselike grip on my head, as if all the noise in the room were being directed at me. Pirm kept going, oblivious as before.
“The great Dirk Noosen, teaching high school where we used to be students, living in his parents’ old house. Funny how the wheel turns.” He smirked and adjusted his hair in the mirror behind the bar.
I looked towards the door where Lena was holding our coats.
“It was … good to see you, Pirm.”
“Yes,” he said. “You too.”
He let out something between a cackle and burp. “You know,” he said, “you could send an autographed album to my office!”
The rest of that night, all I heard were echoes of Pirm’s words. I thought of the letter Dirk had sent to my dorm, the program for Elsinoreville. Was it recent, or from years before? That night at the Easy, when Dirk evaded Lena’s questions about university. Had he already dropped out by then? The plans for Gargantua. Could they have been a clue? And what about the address in Ithaca? Was Dirk living there or did he just drop by when he had nowhere else to go? Is that why he had come to Maastricht? As a drifter? I felt sick. What had I missed? What had he been trying to tell me? How, as Pirm said, was it possible I didn’t know?
Of all the nights I wished I could have listened to my white noise tapes or swallowed one of the sedatives I’d run out of, it would have been that one. Lena, who’d had plenty to drink, dozed off. But when I tried to join her I couldn’t fall asleep. My body was in turmoil. As I lay in bed and the minutes turned into what felt like hours, my ears became jammed with clusters of notes, as if some fist was pushing them into the sides of my head. No matter how woozy I became I couldn’t drift away. Any time I nodded off I was immediately snapped back to wakefulness, eyes wide open, with what felt like a sharp object trying to pierce my eardrums. I tried to keep still, stop thinking, tear the sounds apart and reorganize them into some sort of sense. But they forcefully resisted, breaking themselves into an illegible, inscrutable, irresolvable confusion.
From then on my condition deteriorated steeply. Lightheadedness, loss of balance, and double vision, all symptoms I’d read about, were my new, unwelcome lodgers. I went on playing the dates Taub had booked, but I was slipping. It’s true that during most performances there are incorrect notes, botched entrances, but usually there’s such a storm of sound coming from the stage that it is impossible for any except the most learned audience member to detect a mistake. But your peers take note, and they like to be cruel. They won
’t tell, but they’ll show. A violist muttering to her stand partner during a rest. A flash of disgust on a conductor’s face.
I had no choice but to keep it from Lena. She would only have wanted to help, and I would have wanted to show that her help was working. But how could she have helped? And how could I have shown her?
I practised harder, almost furiously. If I couldn’t work through a piece at normal tempo, I’d play it at a faster and faster speed, as if to punish it. I’d wake up earlier than Lena, shut myself in the soundproofed practice room, and hammer away at the keys, almost like I wanted to break them. Make a mistake, start again. Begin with the quarter notes at 152 on the metronome and finish at 208. Once that was done, I’d break the composition into right hand and left hand. A time would come when I wouldn’t know if they were corresponding correctly and I needed to make sure each hand could find its own way through the piece. Faster and faster, again and again.
Lena, who could only see things from the outside, mistook desperation for ambition and took comfort in it. For her, I was back to normal.
After I put a piece through my wringer, I’d do a “simulation.” Always in the afternoon, when I was comparatively at my best. I’d leave the room. Shower. Get dressed in stage costume: button-down shirt, silk tie, jacket, dark pants, belt, shoes. Shine the shoes if necessary. I’d turn off all the lights in the apartment except the halogen lamp over the keyboard. Then I’d set up a digital recorder under the lid of the Bechstein and press Record.
Standing at the door to the practice room, I’d take a deep breath. I could not dispel the sounds. They were off tune, out of rhythm, but their grip was permanent. What I could do was make the room itself disappear. Replace the carpet beneath my shoes with hardwood boards, the darkness with an expectant audience, the threshold to the practice room with the edge of the stage. I could see, in my mind’s eye, the soloist precede me. It was my turn. I’d walk up to the piano, pull the bench away from the keyboard, pinch my pants at the knee, and sit. Reach to the side of the bench to adjust the height. Extend my arms and free the wrists from the shirt cuffs.
In that moment of expectation, when I should have been hearing the first bars recur, I would hear everything else. Sometimes I’d try to corral the noise, but more often I’d try to pierce through it and get to the depths of my mind. To catch a wisp of the wind shaking branches, skimming my sides, slicing through the long grass at the edge of the dykes, rippling the surface of the canal. Stand up, Jan. Hands off the handlebars. Keep your balance.
When I finished playing the piece and returned to the practice room, the loaned Bechstein, the early-evening darkness, I would be sweating, frazzled, exhausted. My eyes would be irritated. My ears would ache as if they’d been jammed against a blaring speaker. But as I pressed the Playback button on the digital recorder, I would feel a skipped beat of hope. I would listen with trepidation to the first notes, bars, lines, pages. And for one page, or two, it would be good. So good. Better than I imagined. But then came the mistakes. At first singly, then in runs. A shambles. I’d need to start again.
Fall came. Panic was cutting into me. My heart was never at rest. Every day I woke up with the fear that Lena knew, or would know soon enough. I started getting out of bed before her, isolating myself in the bathroom or kitchen while she got ready for work. I fixated on my next appointment with Weetman. Considered calling Taub, though I didn’t know what I’d say. Then one afternoon, with Lena at work, a couple of months after running into Pirm, I did something I promised myself I would not do.
I was practising Ernest Chausson’s Poème for violin, with piano accompaniment, for a performance two weeks away in Antwerp. I knew the piece. Had played it dozens of times. Had a well-constructed interpretation to do with Chausson’s family relation to Haussmann and the Poème as soundtrack to the new, clean enchantments of bourgeois Paris. But I could barely make it through the first section without making a hash of some line or run.
I went to the living room, turned on the computer, and waited for the screen to light up. I typed Lena’s password. The desktop loaded. Small icons scattered over an old picture of Lena and me in Italy. I looked for the internet browser and double-clicked. When the search page opened I entered “Dirk Noosen.”
The immediate results were pages about acting and plays, theatre reviews and profiles written by theatre people. Most were old, like the alumni newsletter at the college he’d attended, which listed his name in the pieces, but didn’t follow it with the year of graduation.
I entered a new search, “Dirk Noosen Sint Ansfried.” That did it. The school’s website was top of the list, and I clicked on it. The home page was a picture of the side door to the school, the one everyone used. To the left of the picture was a list. Categories. I clicked on “Staff.” There were about thirty names, ordered alphabetically. I scrolled down. There it was. “Dirk Noosen, Vice-Principal and Head, Drama Department.” I clicked on his name, but there was no link.
I walked back to the practice room. The piano still radiated Chausson’s spooky notes. I dropped the fall over the keyboard and slid past the piano to the storage closet on the other side of the room.
On the top shelf of the closet were my records, which I hadn’t played for years, an old suitcase, a folder of receipts for who knows what, datebooks, business files, contracts and faxes, certificates and memorabilia. At the back, behind some manila envelopes, was the old shoebox. I pulled it out, laid it on the floor, and sat next to it. I grabbed a handful of letters and cards, sifted through the most recent. Lapland, Thailand, other lands. There was one with a picture of a sand dune. The message written on the back was, “The hourglass of time.” I remembered finding this one after I had come home from the supermarket. “The hourglass of time.” I turned the card over and looked at the image. Then I picked out another card, read the message, looked at the image. Then another, and another. The words meant nothing. None of the messages meant anything. It was the cards themselves that were the point. I thought we had been separated by three oceans and fourteen time zones when he wrote these. For the last few of them, and maybe more, he was less than a half-day’s car ride away. I was the one who had gone off. He was always there.
I thought I had been waiting for him. But he had been waiting for me.
That night I came as close as ever to telling Lena. It was not only that I was chasing a fading light, or that panic was building. Or that any day now she would begin to ask questions. It was the distance that was building between us. With every new setback it was like she was drifting farther from me. Sometimes I saw us as two people rooted to their positions in a field. Neither of us was moving, but through a trick of the lens, the space between us was widening. I was scared, I felt alone, and it often brought me to the edge of tears.
As we were clearing dinner, I told Lena I was thinking of cancelling the Antwerp trip.
She was confused. Of course she would be.
“But you’ve been working so hard these past months,” she said. “Harder than I can remember.”
“The world can live without another rendition of Chausson,” I said, “and certainly doesn’t need to hear Chausson played by me.”
I didn’t expect her response. Not just exasperation but disbelief.
“I’ve heard this from you before, Jan, and I don’t like it. It’s not just you onstage. I work to put you out there. So that’s me you’re dismissing when you say that.”
I understood what she was trying to do. It’s what she always did. It’s what I had needed her to do. It should have been the end of the discussion, but I felt the pressure of words forming in my head. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to perform, I wanted to say, it was that I was afraid I couldn’t.
“I … I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said.
Lena shifted closer. A softer tone. “It’s okay, Jan, love. Just tell me.”
“I’ve been seeing Weetman every so often,” I said. “I’ve booked another appointment with him.”
&
nbsp; “And?”
And? I felt like saying. And what do you think? I’ve been seeing a world-class neurologist for over two years, done what’s felt like hundreds of tests, and everything’s getting worse. “And that’s it,” I said.
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
She leaned towards me, looked into my eyes. “You felt better after the first time you saw him,” she said. “Right?”
Was she testing me? Was she distrusting me? I forced myself to look back at her, but could only face her for a second.
“Yes,” I said, “I did. I’m sure he’ll give me something. It’ll pass.”
“So take tomorrow off,” she suggested, not knowing I’d already taken today off, and spent it reading old letters from a hidden shoebox. “I’ll stay home too,” she said. “We’ll pull a sickie together.”
“Maybe,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t, not wanting her to see the state I was in. “Maybe I just need a good rest.”
“And if you really want to, love, you can cancel Antwerp.”
The next morning I urged Lena to go to work. I was feeling better, I said.
“You’re kidding, right?” she said. “After last night …”
“It was just passing,” I said. “A spell. When you told me I could call off Antwerp, it lifted a weight.”
She looked at me as if there was more to say.
“Just knowing I was in control,” I said, “and knowing you were behind me, that’s all I needed.”
School of Velocity Page 13