by Michael Cart
“Damp inside.” Oh, what a pair we are, the repartee.
In waltzes Tod Farber, dry as a peacock feather. He hands out the midterm and we settle down to it. The essay questions are equally divided between lyrics and music: English students have to answer one melody question and three lyric questions, and music students vice versa. I select a music question first, because while I used to play the piano a little and know some basic music theory, it’s not my strong suit and I want to get it out of the way.
Select a popular song from the list below, or nominate your own selection, and discuss whether and how the melody (and accompaniment if pertinent) makes the argument that the lyric makes. Speak to tempo, meter, modality, key, length of line, use of motif and variation, repetition, and overarching shape.
The list includes ten songs whose lyrics we’ve discussed in class. I settle on “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.” I write about how the melody starts on the fifth, halfway between the octaves of the tonic, which is a breathy place to start, and can move in either direction. Will it be a torch song from here, or a rhapsody with a hope for a big emotional payoff? Then the melody drifts down toward the tonic in phrases gnarled and tight, the intervals no broader than a whole note. Like someone dancing on a single square of linoleum, but still dancing.
I go on like this for some time, feel I’m on my game. I like the song better once I have written about it. By comparison, the three questions about lyrics seem like three pieces of cake. I’m the first to hand in the paper.
“You’re not dismissed yet,” says Tod. “Hang out through the rest of the session till all the papers are in, will you, dear boy?”
I watch the rain on the window, and tap my fingers on my forearm. It’s the melody I’ve just written about. You’re just too good to be true. Can’t take my eyes off of you. You’d be like Heaven to touch. I want to hold you so much. I imagine that Blaise d’Anjou is watching my fingers on my arm and decoding my message for him.
“Time up. Papers in,” says Tod. People groan and scrawl final lines. Abby Desroches grabs her long bushy hair in a fist and pulls it hard, biting her lip. One of the gay boys collects the papers. I guess it’s David Goldstone. I guess I can give them names by midterm. They don’t threaten Blaise. They don’t threaten me.
“As you’ve noticed,” drawls Tod, “our friend Francesca Comstock hasn’t shown up for the midterm. She’s withdrawn and we shall not see her likes again in the next three weeks. One hopes.”
No one gives Professor Farber any quarter. Even now. He has a way of turning every moment into an opportunity for self-mocking. “I’m going to shake things up a little for the second half of the course. Break up your cozy little partnerships and let you try working with someone else.”
We protest. Most of us have only begun to learn the real possibilities of collaboration. We don’t want to shift now.
Tod listens and plays Professor Big Heart. “You’re a feisty bunch. All right, then. I’m not unreasonable. We’ll stay the ship of state on her course. You’ve asked for it, you’ve got it. I’ll keep working with Monsieur d’Anjou, and—”
“Sir.” Blaise raises his hand. That’s so grade school; no one raises a hand in a college course. “Perhaps I should work with Faroukh, since he’s without a partner now.”
Farber is standing up at his desk. His hands grip the test papers, and one by one he straightens them with compulsive exactitude. The pause is long enough so that everyone feels it. No one moves. “You have saved me from myself,” says Farber at last. “I had hardly noticed Ms. Comstock’s absence, I mean not in this context. Your suggestion makes perfect sense. You’ll have to make up for lost time, but no doubt you’re up to the task. Very well.”
Everyone shambles to their feet. No one wants to stay; no one wants to go out in the rain. Farber snaps his briefcase closed with a flick of his wrists. Then we stand and mull and look anywhere but at each other, Blaise and I, as the other students hunch themselves into windbreakers and hooded sweatshirts marked tupperneck.
We are at the top of the stairs, heading down. He is a little broader, a little taller than I, but not much—an inch or two. Our shoulders bump and I recoil so fiercely it’s amazing I don’t topple into the stairwell. “What’re you working on, then?” he says. “What topic have we got?”
“I don’t know,” I manage to say.
“So far I’ve been responding to lyrics instead of the other way around. You want to work the same way? Farber’s come up with some pretty pasty stuff. Eurofaggy soupy stuff like the rest of that crowd.”
“I’ll work any way you want.”
“Let’s grab some lunch at the union and see. You have the work you were sharing with Francesca?”
I try to listen to his suggestions on how our collaboration might work, though I can barely hear him through the music of blood pounding in my ears. We reach the student union, dripping wet. Standing together in line. A pair. It seems as if I can smell laundry soap all over him, into his socks, between his toes, under his arms, in the warm folds behind his knees, when we sit down together and he curls one leg around the other. It’s a defensive position: I know it. It would take a crowbar to unhitch one ankle from the other. A stick of dynamite to unclench those legs.
“She wanted angry,” I say. “She hated the ballad stuff. She was trying to get me to pull some useful rage. I told her I didn’t have access to the amount of rage she had. She said I wasn’t trying hard enough.”
“She was probably right. Can I see it?”
I pass over a page. Thank you, Francesca, for demanding something other than a dewy love song. “Don’t read it aloud.”
He starts to read it aloud.
“Mergers and acquisitions
Perjuries and inquisitions
Injuries and suspicions
Who were you with last night? Don’t lie.
Hostile takeover
I’ll give you a run for your money.
Don’t move a muscle, you. Don’t even try.”
It goes on like this, I’m sorry to say. He finishes and puts the paper on the table between us. “A lot more ballsy than I’d expected. You seem so mild.”
“I do?” The stupidest, mildest thing I could possibly say.
“I’d been expecting something nostalgic about the highlands of Iran or something. This is very Wall Street. Proto-Americana. I wouldn’t have guessed you’d be up on bull markets, Reaganomics, all this current trickle-down stuff.”
Even the words trickle-down make me squirm. I can’t eat the sandwich I bought. “How do you even know I’m Iranian?”
“Good guess.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“We have Iranian friends in France,” he admits. “Teheran financial guru types who escaped with their buckets of cash during the revolution, four years ago. You sort of fit with them—an American version, I mean.”
We Rahmanis weren’t the buckets-of-cash type of immigrant, but I’m impressed. “Well, what do you think of the draft?”
“This isn’t anything like what I thought I’d be working on, but I can give it a shot. Want to meet me this afternoon?”
“You want me there? Francesca wanted me far away. Preferably Tokyo.”
“Sometimes a weak lyric line has to be reworked to respond to a strong melodic rhythm, don’t you think? We’re supposed to be working together.”
“Guess so. Sure, today’s fine.”
I want to ask him: Why Blaise d’Anjou, of all the un-American names on campus? Why a summer course? Why Tupperneck? But all of that seems massively pointless. He’s Mister Private Eye. His hands are crossed as he eats his sandwich; I’ve never seen the like. Right hand holding the bread, and laid on the left wrist. As if even to stretch his arms out wide would invite the enemy. I can’t ask him anything personal.
“Liked your girlfriend,” he says as we get up to leave. “Take good care of her. And I’ll see you at, say, five? In rehearsal studio E on the top floor of Pierce.”
“Come on, troopers,” says Faroukh. “This is the time to be good, now. You’re going to be good? Right?”
The boys don’t answer. Why should any boy ever answer his father?
Faroukh hoists them out of their seats and adjusts their hats. The sun has gone down, suddenly, ruefully.
He can let them run around a little more if they don’t get too cold. Help them use up some of the chocolate-milk energy. The boys make that Styrofoam-crunching sound of boots in packed snow. They climb on the snowbanks as if they never saw snow back in Minneapolis.
Though he’s brought warm coats for them, and boots and mittens, he carried only an Armani wool sports jacket for himself. Now he turns the collar up and stamps his loafers to keep his feet warm. He’s leaking heat through his scalp, no doubt: Despite his attempts to ignore it, his hair is thinning. I am forty, he says to himself; I’m trim enough, thanks to the gym and to the household need to keep the sweets at a minimum for the boys’ health. My skin is good. I know who I am. The treachery of possibilities that threaten to swamp a young guy—I negotiated them. I’m on the other side. The safe side.
Why then do I remember the perilous moments with such fond affection?
He can’t answer this for himself. He only hopes his own boys are brave and lucky, to stumble into the arms of someone loving when they most need to.
He swoops them both up, surprises them from behind into whoops of laughing protest. “Time to go in,” he says. “Time to get the show on the road here.”
And then I am at the rehearsal-room door, and through it. And closing it. The sun is back, the rain is gone. Blaise is at the piano bench with my page of lyrics set on the rack. The air conditioner is throbbing ineffectually, making a rhythm section of its own.
“Culture Club,” says Blaise. “I’m thinking, ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’”
“Yes,” I say.
“Something sort of quietly rhythmic, oppressive. Paranoid. Stealing around and looking in windows. Like the new Police single. You know, ‘Every Breath You Take.’”
I know it. I know the way the guitar intro evokes someone padding on rubber-heeled shoes, going about his business of surveillance. Storm or sun. Climbing up a tree and looking in a window to see what’s going on.
“Do you know ‘Sweet Dreams Are Made of This’?”
I can’t bring myself to answer, just shake my head.
“Heard it earlier this summer in the U.K. A band called Eurythmics. Don’t think it’s out here yet. Kind of eerie, hastening, urgent. Anyway, that’s what your lyrics make me think of.” He strikes some chords against one another—a kind of hammer-sprung motion, right hand and left, not exactly the same chord but close. The effect is like that of a bird banging around in a cage.
Blaise has changed out of his wet yellow shirt from the morning. Now he’s in a Tommy Hilfiger with dark and light blue stripes. The tail of the shirt drapes over the back of the piano bench. White shorts. His huaraches are kicked off in a corner of the room. His right foot arches on the pedal with a tentativeness, a tenderness that makes my stomach twist like a wet bathing suit being winched to drip on the pavement.
“Come on over. I’ll play what I have.”
I approach him but hang back. The room is only five feet wide and feeds into the gabled window: The electronic rehearsal piano is slotted in sideways, a letter in a mail slot. The light crowns his hair. These rooms were made for solo practicing. There’s no way to be here and not be just about in his lap. Will he feel the temperature in the room rise? I stand apart.
It’s all music to him; he’s oblivious to me. He plays what he has. I am oblivious to it. He notices that much anyway. “What? You don’t like it?”
“Play it again; I’m intrigued.”
“Sit down.” He points to the piano bench with his right elbow. “Here, there’s room.”
I perch, taking up three inches max. “It’s okay, I’m not weird like that,” he says. “You can move in. I’m not David Goldstone or Ian Boyle or one of those guys. Listen, I’m not sure about this bit—is it a bridge, is it part of the main thought?” He circles a finger around two lines.
I’m afraid I’ll squeak. I shrug instead, which he can read even though we’re shoulder to shoulder, noses ahead.
“You can’t be cold; stop shaking,” he says, and puts his hand on my thigh. “You’re jiggering around like a kindergarten boy on the playground.” He plays a bass run. “Maybe it needs just a little instrumental line, about three measures, make this bit a kind of afterthought, but part of the verse, like a moral tacked on—Hey, are you all right?”
“I think I caught a cold in the pool the other day.” My response to his hand has become visible under the treble register so I stand up and turn my back to him, pretending a need to stretch. I need to get away; I’ve already made a fool of myself once this summer. There’s only so much mortification I can take.
He doesn’t answer, just plays the opening phrase, adjusting it.
“Why don’t you work something up, let me hear it later? I’m going to head out now.” I catch myself, adding, “Maybe we could meet up later tonight. What’s your dorm?”
“Busy tonight,” he says. “Besides, I’m not staying on campus. We’ll patch it up another time.”
I’m cursing myself as I leave. I almost turn around. What is he doing once the door has swung shut? Even if I tiptoed back to look, I couldn’t see: The glass panel is a milky white, translucent. I imagine his face sunk in his hands. Next second, though, before my foot has left the top step, I hear his hands working the keys. Instead of the ominous rhythmic thing he started with, he’s playing the lullaby we talked about in class. I gave my love a cherry that has no stone. A song to play for a child falling asleep, not for an accidental slave to love standing outside your door.
The sign is simple and dignified. blaise d’anjou, and the date: black ink in a simple sans serif typeface, eight inches tall. “You’re not here for d’Anjou?” asks a staff person on the granite steps leading to the bright, glassy lobby. She is wearing a lily of some sort on her woolly coat.
“Yes,” says Faroukh.
She catches his irritation. “It’s just, I mean, the children.”
“They’re with me.”
But her smile is appreciative. He knows he shouldn’t let himself get twitchy. He squares his shoulders and they pass through the doors into the crowded foyer.
Tod has been talking about the theater. It’s clearly one of his passions. “What you’ll learn, you babes in the wood, is that all plays are essentially about the passage of time. That is the secret subject of all great theater.”
David Goldstone, who has become the most argumentative of the gay boys, says, “All theater is about time and all songs are about love—what is opera about, then?”
“Opera is about fabulous costumes,” says Farber. “Joke, people. Opera is about stature. There are no operas about peasants. Even in their poverty and consumption, Mimi and Rodolfo are royalty in how they live, how they choose to live, and how they sing about it. The sisters in Dialogue of the Carmelites are more than nuns: They’re saints. What makes them tick, what ennobles them, is the simple emotions. The less complicated, people, the more universal.”
“Is everything so reducible?” says Abby Desroches. “Is this art as lowest common denominator?”
“Live a little more, and decide for yourself. For me, it’s time and love,” says Farber. “Speaking of time and love, where is our Monsieur d’Anjou today? It isn’t like him to be absent. Another dropout? Master Rahmani, what do you do to your partners, I wonder?”
We all look around as if Blaise must be among us, just in a different seat—as if none of us has noticed his absence. Hah.
So far, Faroukh sees no other small children here. He supposes it’s the hour, or maybe a variation of New England protocol he hasn’t identified before.
But that is Abby Desroches emerging from the women’s room off the lobby. Her substantial hedge of hair has gone
gray and tame, but it is still long, and her face is strong and mordant.
Though their eyes meet, she doesn’t recognize Faroukh. How could she—they shared only six weeks of life together, and that was two decades ago. Yet Faroukh has recognized her. The obscure cost of being nonwhite: the stand-out invisibility of it. The accidental glance passes quick over, then beyond you because right-thinking people don’t want to be seen to be studying you to see if you might be the only other cedar-skinned person they’ve ever met.
Blaise doesn’t show up at the pool that afternoon, and I’m sorry I’ve come to swim at all. Soon I’m going to have to go back to my auntie’s, and what little exercise of liberty that Laurel’s arrival has conferred upon me will be done. I have a sudden thought in the locker room: Has Blaise gone off with Francesca, wherever she went? They haven’t seemed to be an item, but maybe they are hiding it from us all.
I decide to keep the scheduled lab session just in case Blaise should show up. I can hear Abby on one side and Herbie on the other, and the laughing conversations they have with their lyricists. I sit at the piano bench and pick out a melody. Performance isn’t my strength, but I can play a little bit. Mostly block chords in the bass, single note solo vocal line in the treble.
“Hey, Roukh.” I look up at Blaise’s approach. As usual his head is down, eyes slanted off center.
“You made it,” I say. Shah of the obvious.
“Thought I should come.” He swings the door closed. “My part of the bargain. Push over.” He is the pianist, but this time I’m on the piano bench already. There’s no room for me to stand between the edge of the bench and the protruding box of dead air conditioner. So I’m trapped. I can’t exactly cross my legs under the piano. I hope he doesn’t touch me, while I’m hoping of course that he does.