She kissed me. “You’re sure?” she asked. “Sickie’s still on the table.”
“I’m sure. I’m not perfect, but better.”
“Okay,” she said, still suspicious but now in a playful way. “We can talk about the concert on the weekend if it’s still a problem. Or do you want me to book myself a ticket right now to come? I’m sure I can take the time.”
“Nah,” I said. “It’s just a few days.”
The days passed. I stayed out of the practice room. It was unprofessional, but what choice did I have? Practising had become as useless as every other remedy.
Antwerp turned out to be the beginning of my final run. A horrible performance on my part, and I didn’t need the others onstage to tell me. When I got back to Maastricht I called Taub and told him I was unwell. I needed time off. No dates, period. He didn’t ask for details. I don’t know what he thought. Maybe that I was burned out, or that there was a personal matter. We agreed I would meet my commitments for the remainder of the season, and while I had the odd booking in some summer festival, Taub would look to his stable of performers to fill the slots. He was probably pleased for the opportunity to show new talent.
“One last thing,” I said. “Keep this hiatus to yourself, please. At least, as much as you can.”
“Of course, Jan, of course,” he said. “We’ve had a long run. You can trust my discretion.”
After Antwerp, I had four months of performing till the summer break. I went back to practising, but with little discipline or zeal. I regressed to my conservatory habits of late nights, then my Sint Ansfried tendency of noodling with the keyboard, as if the instrument were someone I was trying to impress with half-baked skills. Soon I stopped practising altogether and, when I had to perform, did so entirely from memory.
Giving up did not make me healthier. It made me sicker. One morning, after Lena left for work, I stumbled down half a flight of stairs getting the mail. Shortly after, I was kept awake for forty-eight full hours by fevers and chills. Lena took a day off work and called our physician’s office; my regular man was off and the resident who took the call, unfamiliar with my file, prescribed codeine and rest and explained to Lena it was probably a migraine.
“Have you seen Weetman yet?” she asked me. In fact I had been there right after I fell, when Weetman oversaw an ENG and ECOG to test my balance, but all I said to Lena was, “Soon, I’m seeing him soon.”
She may not have believed me, I didn’t know anymore, but it smoothed the edge of her exasperation, and maybe even anger, and I didn’t say anything.
When I faced the mirror after I woke up in the morning, I saw a person staring back who looked one hundred years old. Thunderclaps of pain beat at my ears nonstop, sending me reeling, and on some days it was like the eardrums themselves were being battered. I waited for what Weetman would find next. Seizures. A tumour. Some kind of multiple system disease. At the same time I prepared for what I considered my last concerts.
By that time I was taking the letters out of the closet every day, and looking Dirk up on the computer too. As my prospects of recovery disintegrated with each fresh attack, my mind started charting the course home. The double-lined vapour trails of passing airplanes criss-crossing the darkening sky, the dip at the end of the Grafstraat, the house across the road, waiting, warm, familiar. A mess in the kitchen. An album playing in the bedroom. The light shining up the wall, my head on Dirk’s chest, rising and falling.
With this vision taking greater and greater precedence in my head, everything external, the so-called real world, began to fade. Taub. The days spent at the Bechstein. Even Lena, who never took a step back but kept drifting and drifting.
Then came the beginning of this summer. Lena took Fridays off. We tried new restaurants around town, usually with other couples, in atmospheres boisterous enough that I could retreat into my shell without attracting notice or giving offence. I mustered all I had left to stay consistent with Lena, I loved her so much, I didn’t want her to see how I had turned. But to myself, I counted the weeks till she would head north to her mother. In years past I would have taken the time to be with Lena, but this year I would stay behind. I told her I wanted to work myself into the new season. Plus I had an appointment with Weetman and didn’t want to go back and forth to keep it. Lena tried to convince me to come. At least come for a week, she said. The weekends. One weekend. Just one. For the first time I saw her desperate. It hurt me. But I wouldn’t bend, and, consoling herself that this is what it could be like, the musician married to his routine, she gave in.
The afternoon before she left for the north, as I helped her pack, Lena tried one last time to tempt me. She started with excitement. Come! You’ll love it! Then she moved to guilt. Aren’t you worried I’ll be lonely? And she ended with disappointment. I was being a wet blanket. It would be good for me, she said.
A part of me resented that Lena couldn’t change my mind. But she couldn’t. I watched her get into the taxi the next morning.
*
The next week, my last appointment at Weetman’s office. After several years as his patient, deliberately avoiding the question, I decided to ask him this time whether I had a hope of getting back to normalcy, or at least functionality. For once, I would force him into giving me an honest prognosis. I pictured the scene: sitting on the tissue-covered examination table, waiting for him; the doorknob turning, Weetman entering with chart in hand. I anticipated his words, his manner of delivery, and an array of my own reactions.
On the day, I began with my usual recap. “Lately, when it’s bad onstage, I’ve tried to stay still,” I said as Weetman stood on the other side of the small room, arms folded across his chest. “I sometimes think that if I stop moving, the wreckage will flow away and the music will take over.” I leaned forward and raised my shoulders towards my ears, imitating the pose. “But it doesn’t,” I said. “It just gets worse.”
As I spoke, I wondered if Weetman noticed how calm I was. How objective my description. If so, he didn’t say. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all, didn’t even tilt his head or clear his throat. I mentioned Lena was away, at her mother’s. Maybe that had made it harder to sleep, I said. I’d taken the latest pills he’d prescribed, but I hadn’t noticed an effect.
Normally, Weetman would take notes, ask me to repeat myself, probe me for more information. Then he’d file the notes and open a chart or journal to talk about the results of the latest tests or a new procedure that sounded promising. Maybe something experimental he’d heard about from a colleague or at a conference.
Eventually I ran out of things to say. Except for scraps of scales and the noise of a distant construction site, there was quiet.
Finally Weetman spoke. “I’m sorry, Jan,” he said.
“Jan,” he said. Not “Mister de Vries,” which was what he’d always called me.
“We’ve been reviewing your case,” he said, then started on about “a full regimen,” having “tried the entire spectrum,” “alternative therapy,” “off-label use of prescriptions.” Prior physicians, past diagnoses, new ones. He was, I realized, recapping the course we’d taken. He said other things, too, but I was looking at his hands. They were empty, and had been empty since he came into the room. No charts or journals, no tests results. As he went on, I started to feel a bubbling excitement. Almost ecstasy. I didn’t try to understand or analyze. The more he talked, the more the excitement built.
“There’s nothing left to do,” he said.
I nodded.
“Nothing,” he repeated.
I let the word hang. I had waited years for it, had feared it. But now that I had his expert opinion it hardly brushed against me. It was light as air. Nothing.
“You must try to move on, Jan,” he said. Again with “Jan.”
I smiled. He might have taken it for deflection, a way to cover the helplessness that he imagined I was feeling. Drowning in.
“Thank you,” I said.
Weetman nodded. “Take as
much time here as you need.”
I left the office in a bubble, words and thoughts bouncing almost playfully around me. As I stepped into the street I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a van heading right at me. A loud honk rang through the quiet street. The van passed within inches. A current of wind lifted my jacket and I could feel the cold rush beneath my shirt. I would have to tell Lena about that, I thought to myself. But then, I wouldn’t.
Next was the call from Taub. There was an opening. It was last minute. In Aachen, he said. Fauré’s “Elegy.” The soloist was a young cellist. American. Would I take it?
Today, this morning, I got up early. Before the sun. For the first time in ages, I wasn’t tired. After an instant coffee, I showered, got dressed, grabbed the overstuffed black leather bag, and walked out of the apartment. My car was parked down the street. I opened the passenger side to slip in the bag, walked around the hood, and got behind the wheel.
The quiet streets of Maastricht joined into the autoroute. The sun passed from ahead of me, to above, to behind, in my rear-view mirror. The slopes of the south levelled into the fields of the east.
PERFORMANCE
In my mind I am on the saddle of my old bicycle and the sun is just starting its slow dip in the west. The air is warm, as if the world is hanging an arm around my shoulder and pressing me up to its heart. I see the steeple of Sint Jan getting close, and soon I leave the fields behind and break into the city. Den Bosch. I pedal past the train station and cathedral, glide along the main road, and take a right. A narrow street. Cars parked on both sides. I lean forward in my saddle, reach an arm out wide, spread my fingers to catch the wind.
Next thing I know I’m rolling the car to the dip at the bottom of the Grafstraat. I angle the steering wheel left and park across the street from his house.
It’s been twenty minutes since I saw Dirk drive down the road and into the alley. Dirk, who never had a driver’s licence, who could barely drive his bicycle without posing a danger to himself and others, in the driver’s seat of a functioning automobile. He drove slowly down the street, flashed his high beams at the top of the alley in case of an oncoming vehicle, and parked in the small space at the back gate.
Now he’s in the kitchen. The light is on and I see him through the bay window. I can’t tell exactly what he’s doing, but nothing about his motions say productivity.
I clear a small circle in the condensation on the windshield. Sitting, watching, waiting like this makes me feel like I’m backstage, in the wings. The condensation is the curtains. The end-of-day sky is the dimming of the house lights. The sulphur street lights, springing fitfully to life, are ushers rushing people to their seats, and when they begin to emit their steady yellow halos, they become the stage lights. The tree branches trembling under the evening wind is the opening applause. Kshi-kshi-kshi.
What, beyond the applause, do I hear?
Most prominent is Debussy’s En Blanc et Noir. I hear, on repeat, a passage from the opening movement, when the two pianos begin to go back and forth; jabbing and undercutting, hiding and pouncing. Underlying it is the drip-drip-drip melody of a Gnossienne, played on a keyboard that’s out of tune. The individual notes turn into the high-pitched ding of the audiologist’s machine, into voices asking me questions. Are you? Will you? What is? Fading in and out is “Waterloo Sunset” by the Kinks, which was playing at the Easy when Dirk, Lena, and I were there, except in the present version the guitar sounds like a low moan.
I adjust the rear-view mirror, catching the edge of my midnight-blue Nehru suit, done to the top button. The inky twill looks crisp. Good as new.
On the passenger seat is my black overnight bag. Top not fully zipped, but all the old photos, letters, and postcards securely inside. Dirk in a safety vest, in a tricorne. Dirk and me on the top bunk, leaning back on the hood of the convertible. “Ten francs folded five times equals two francs, it seems.” “I hate you, I love you, You are okay.” And the later notes, Sunrise in Lapland, “I hope you have an excellent year.” Some of my favourite possessions are in here, too. A 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations autographed by Glenn Gould. Gold cufflinks I found in the Galleria in Milan and wore during a command performance for the College of Cardinals. The cork-handled conductor’s baton given to me by Pinchas Zukerman after a four-day program with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa. A score signed by Osmo Vänskä from a show he and I did together at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Lastly, there was what Dirk would call “the sentimental shit.” The stub of a plane ticket to Los Angeles, from my first trip to America. A photograph of myself standing outside the Apollo Theater in Harlem, which I first learned about from the many “Live at the Apollo” albums Dirk owned. And, rolled up and protruding from the top of the bag, the poster Dirk gave me the summer before we turned sixteen, “The Great Janini: Wonder Show of the Universe,” where a man with slicked hair ponders a crystal ball that pours out smoke in sexually suggestive patterns. For years it hung from the back of my bedroom door; my parents never noticed it. If they had, they would have made me take it down. Even though the poster is tightly rolled, I can clearly make out the magician’s dark, mesmerized and mesmerizing eyes. Beacons under their heavy brows. Next to the Great Janini is the return gift; the Marie Antoinette geisha advertising “The Placenta,” carefully wrapped in a cardboard tube.
I take a deep breath and reach for the handles of the bag.
As I cross the street, I feel pressure building in my head, the sounds I’d heard before, becoming louder, less distinct from one another. I count off the endings I’d made up while waiting for the phone to ring on Christmas morning; or in my dorm room, afterwards; or as I took the train from the airport to my hotel in Osaka.
Onto the curb and up the brick steps. Relax, I tell myself. The hard work is done, the worst is over.
The glass door to the vestibule opens with ease and closes behind me. In the corner, a red parka hangs from a coat stand. A pyramid of chopped wood is stacked beside it, and two pairs of boots lean against one another on the sisal mat, under which Dirk sometimes hid a key.
I push the doorbell. The two-tone chime bounces around the house and reverberates in my head.
Feet slide from hardwood to tile. The peephole goes dark, then light. The lock scrapes open and the doorknob turns. A dark grey button-down shirt, blue jeans rolled above the ankles. Bare feet. In a swift once-over I notice a belly, some weight added to the face, and lines crossing his forehead. But he still looks the same to me.
“Yes?” he says, fingers gripping the side of the door.
“It’s Jan,” I say. “Jan de Vries.”
Dirk lets go of the door and drops his arm. He looks me up and down. A crack of a smile appears, showing the edge of his teeth. “Jan de Vries.”
For a moment we are both silent, looking at each other. The first thing I see, in the light coming from the kitchen, is that his wavy hair is gone. It’s buzzed short and mostly grey.
“I thought I’d drop by,” I say. “I mean, I heard you were back, a while ago actually, and I’ve been meaning to stop by.”
“Are you living here now, in the area?” he asks.
“No,” I say, holding up my overnight bag by way of explanation. “I’m still on the road.”
“Right, right. Of course. A musician’s life.”
A gust of wind buffets the vestibule, opening the glass outer door and brushing leaves around my feet. Dirk steps back from the doorway and motions that I should come in.
“Please,” he says.
“Thank you,” I say.
I step into the tiled entranceway and peered into the kitchen. New countertop on the island, a different shade of paint on the walls, but the plates are still stacked on open shelves, the knives paraded on the magnetic strip below them, and the old white melamine table is still in the bay window. Several drawers are open or half-open. A recycling box overflows with juice and egg cartons and beer cans. Two pots sit on the stove, one of them expelling steam.
There’s an open wine bottle on the counter.
“I’m not disturbing?” I ask.
Dirk turns around. “No,” he says.
I hesitate, to show courtesy. The wind, which has died down, is still whistling in my ear.
“Have you had anything to eat?” Dirk asks.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Well,” he says, gesturing to the little white table. “Why don’t you join me.”
I step past the doorway and leave my overnight bag in the entrance. Dirk closes the door behind me and manoeuvres into the kitchen, where he slides his feet into a pair of worn slippers. I take a seat at one of the wicker chairs around the table. A spring coat and thin purple scarf hang off the back of a chair opposite. Magazines and books are scattered on the tabletop. I undo the top and bottom buttons of my jacket. A bit of a refrain, something from late Bill Withers, which Dirk had once affectionately called “the cheesy shit,” drifts in and out of my ears.
Dirk’s voice interrupts. He’s holding a bottle of wine. I nod and he pulls a wineglass from the open shelves, where they’re herded. When he finishes pouring he passes me my glass and for a moment, almost absent-mindedly, raises his.
“The oven,” he says and turns around. He reaches down the counter for a yellow plastic bag and pulls out two cuts of plastic-wrapped meat on a styrofoam tray. He slices the plastic with a knife, then lets the meat slide through the opening onto a baking dish. When the second piece slips out he wraps a tea towel around his hand, opens the oven, and slides the dish onto the centre rack. He fills two soup bowls, spilling a little on the counter, and comes to the table with them.
“What is this?” I ask.
“It’s cauliflower soup. Reheated,” he says.
Dirk tests a half-spoonful then looks out the bay window to the park. Tree branches shudder under a passing breeze. The thought of the wind sends a looping melody through my ear.
School of Velocity Page 14