How Beautiful the Ordinary

by Michael Cart

  We are nearing the close of our magic week in our dark, private house. Blaise is saying, “So when we finish, it’s back to France.”

  “To college?”

  “A kind of gap year. I think I want to go to college in the States, but what with the tragedy I didn’t get everything in on schedule. Maybe I’ll railpass around the continent and get some pickup gigs. Or hang out in Toulouse and do some busking for the tourists this autumn.”

  I want him to say, Come with me. Come to France. Come away. I wait for him to say it.

  “And you’re reading English at Colchester.” He makes it sound as if I’m going into the mopping of floors at Sisters of Charity. I don’t want to do Colchester anymore, after all this. I want to go to Europe with Blaise. I want this to be the start of my life.

  Imagine Baba when I tell him. If I tell him. If I get the chance to tell him.

  Imagine if Blaise comes back to Buffalo with me. Blaise sitting on the floor, Iranian style, in our walk-through flat with no furniture in the front rooms but beautiful Persian carpets and a photograph of the Imam; nothing in the bedroom but mattresses and books in Farsi; nothing in the kitchen—Maman still rinses rice in a big aluminum bowl while squatting on the floor—nothing but the smell of holy Iran. Nothing but the Silk Road, and where it has brought us.

  And a big American television, on which we will see Blaise perform one day—but we don’t know that yet.

  I imagine holding his hand on the carpet. I imagine him making them blush with pride, that he could choose a boy like me. I imagine rose petals on the floor; Maman is not above that when she has a mind to be joyful. And when her headaches abate.

  While I can hope for it, I already know it is impossible. For now, we have the impossible present, and I try to focus. We’re in the deep window seat on the stair landing, sitting naked with our legs entwined. The outside campus security lamplight comes in through the diamond-paned glass; the mullions make slanted parallelograms across Blaise’s ivory chest into the mauve shadows of his groin. He puts his arms up behind his head and rests like that. I could stretch out a toe and tickle him in the armpit; we could romp and roll right here on the corduroy cushions. But the mood isn’t right. He feels my unasked question and doesn’t answer it.

  Instead he says, “You’ll go back to your Laurel in September, I guess.”

  My Laurel. Hmmm. “I guess not.”

  “Sure you will. I could tell by how she looked at you—”

  “How she looked…” I try not to sound vicious, just sort of curious about myself. “Laurel and I have some bad history behind us and I don’t want to revisit it. Besides—that was—before—all this. You know?”

  “This is just this,” he says. “You’re aware of that, Faroukh. I’m sure you know that.”

  “I don’t know much,” I say, very slowly, very tentatively. “I know what I feel. I don’t even know what I can imagine. But I couldn’t imagine sleeping with you, and it happened anyway. So maybe there’s more to happen that I can’t picture yet.” Maman. Baba. This is Blaise. My new life.

  “There is more ahead for us, of course. We’ll have this accidental romance. It’ll be packed away like, um. Like Monette’s photographs, like Cecile’s crayon drawings. We’ll have this passage to take out and listen to. To admire. You’re not thinking anything beyond the summer. Faroukh?”

  My face is as steel as I can make it. Loving, pleading steel.

  “Roukh. Be real. There’s all the rest of life out there. This is—this is the intro. The prelude. Maybe it announces the theme even—but we’ll pick up the theme in a different key next time around.”

  I don’t even have to say it. Next time around? What, the afterlife?

  But I must say something. “You kiss me, you console me, all that, all that”—my hands flailing in the dark mean the sex the sex the sex—“and it’s a diversion? What’s the main event then, after this? Are you becoming a bishop or a senator or something where it matters?”

  “Don’t be pissy. You’re sounding like the Gay Club. You know perfectly well—”

  “I am sounding like someone stranded in about an acre of shit.” In my panic I am sounding, frankly, like Laurel. The words and also the wobble in the voice; phlegmy. My eyes spill.

  “I want a family. Of course. I want to have kids. I want someone to give Monette’s spoons to someday. After all that has happened to my parents? Losing Monette and their granddaughter? Don’t you think I have any heart? Are you out of your mind?”

  The very words I said to Laurel Finn. The very words.

  How can you argue against the desire for children? I don’t have it, but I recognize it when I see it. Laurel Finn has it: hence her delusion about pregnancy. “You could join the Big Brothers of America. We could get a dog….”

  “We’re going to be a couple with a dog? Faroukh, hello, stop right there—where’d you get this picture? This isn’t Gay Lifestyle 101 we’re taking at Tupperneck Community Day Care—it’s music and lyrics—it’s an interlude—it’s a bridge—”

  “It’s a fucking sham, is that what you’re saying?” I am on my knees, profiled against the window, when the key turns in the lock of Pierce and the door swings open.

  Freeze or flee. If we dart upstairs to our clothes, someone will follow us, find us out. I can’t afford to be tossed out of Tupperneck and jeopardize my financial aid to Colchester. Blaise—by his own admission—doesn’t want to be known as a homo on the side. Our eyes lock, unblinking. Not a muscle flexes in either of us; we have communicated to each other the same strategy. Marble statue. Maybe whoever it is won’t glance up the staircase. Will pick up the mail from the faculty slot or root around for some files in the secretary’s carrel underneath where the stairs turn, and then go out.

  Steps on the creaking floorboards from the former parlor—now a seminar room—to the scratched baby grand piano berthed in the large bay window beyond. The thing, we know, is padlocked with a grotesque industrial hinge stapled right into the wood. Someone is unlocking it and sitting down—in the dark—and starting to play.

  It’s Tod Farber. You learn someone’s playing style in ten minutes. He was an accomplished performer once, but he’s slurring his notes, not so much jazzily as drunkenly. He takes at a glacial clip a few of his favorite standards from the forties. “Just One of Those Things.” It sounds like funeral music.

  I look at Blaise to see if he wants to move. Shall we risk skittering up to our aerie, having Tod Farber hear our naked feet on the stairs? Blaise looks frozen, not so much terrified as bewildered. Perhaps he’s shocked that Farber has stumbled in to provide mood music for our breakup. “Just One of the Those Things,” a song of good-bye without regrets. Farber adds a bluesy cadence and the laziest sort of New Orleans stride—he’s improvising between each line.

  Blaise d’Anjou leans his head back against the wallpaper imprisoned by the shadowy fretwork. It is his turn to cry, but the music is doing the work for him. He can’t do it for himself. He doesn’t look at me; he doesn’t tremble as I do when I cry. He’s Blaise. He’s a bronze statue in the fake moonlight of the amber-colored sulfur lights on the campus. I reach my hand across the distance, touch his shoulder, let my hand trail down his slightly twisted trunk, and feed my finger very lightly into the top of the cleft between the cheeks of his ass. Nothing saucier than that. My little fingerhold has always seemed the most vulnerable inch on his brave young body, his chevalier physique. And I have had experience with vulnerability.

  After a while Farber gets up and stumbles out. Blaise and I don’t speak to each other. We gather our clothes and leave by a back door. No one sees us. No one will ever see us.

  “Ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the board of governors, may I welcome you to the New England Fiduciary Hall of the Tupperneck Arts Division of the State University. What a distinct privilege it is to greet you all here as we gather to honor the work of one of the preeminent composers of our time. Some may ask, why now, and we say, why not? We remember fift
een years of distinctive contribution to the world of music. It is a short period, so far, but what is time to us? Look what, in his thirty-five years, Mozart managed to give us. Sam Cooke at thirty-three, Gershwin at thirty-eight. Stephen Foster at thirty-eight. Chopin at thirty-nine.

  “But I refer toward the morbid as a way to make a point. We are not here to mourn but to celebrate. Music is eternal, and in the fifteen years of the professional life of Blaise d’Anjou we have seen him help the revival of the art song. We’ve enjoyed his contributions to serious film scoring. We’ve seen several popular entries to the top forty, fighting their way against the banality of hip-hop and what I like to think of as techno-coma. I see I offend. How sweet.”

  There is a polite laugh. Most of the crowd is his own age or older. People with money. People to hit up for funds when the time is right. At the funeral last month, Auntie Nurjahan had mentioned hearing word of this fund-raiser, remembering that my one small contribution to American arts had involved Blaise d’Anjou. She’s right about the crowd it would draw. Silvery curls and shining pates and old women with nostrils that splay wide, three inches above their sunken lips. A lot of jewelry.

  Farber hasn’t changed all that much. “I see faces in the crowd here I believe I recognize, but I shall not embarrass you by singling you out for honor or opprobrium.” More polite laughter, a little impatient by now. Farber seems to hear this; he was always smart. “Let us proceed then, ladies and gentlemen, will you join me…?”

  I have to make an appointment to see Professor Tod Farber. “I need to take an incomplete, I guess.”

  “You’ve handed in your assignments on time,” says Tod Farber. “The class is over in two days. You can’t possibly be behind on your work. And as I remember—am I right, dear boy?—you had something of a crisis, needing this course under your belt?”

  We’re sitting in Farber’s office on the ground floor of Pierce. The secretary is ordering manila folders for the start of the fall semester. New personnel are around, reclaiming the building. Out the open door I can just see the cushioned window seat on the stair landing. Someone has left on it a snarl of vacuum cleaner attachments. The air smells of Windex and panic.

  “There’s the final composition. I’m supposed to do it with Blaise d’Anjou.” I can’t say d’Anjou in a French way yet. Tod Farber winces.

  “Yes. Monsieur d’Anjou, our season’s maestro of melodic invention.”

  “We can’t work together. It’s just not working.”

  Professor Farber raises one eyebrow almost drolly. “It seemed to my distant and tired eye you were getting along like a house on fire. Quite the little tendresse, of a purely aesthetic collaborative nature I mean. You were suited, perhaps, is the better word. I’d been looking forward to being the midwife to a new Lennon and McCartney. Rodgers and Hart. D’Anjou and Rahmani. No? Pity. Quel dommage. Surely you can patch it up for this final project?”

  I don’t want to spill my heart to Farber, of all people. I’d rather lose the financial aid. One crisis a summer ought to be enough. “I’ve done my work,” I say. “He’s not talking to me now.”

  “Tsk-tsk. The heartbeats of the young. It’s all love songs, I am always telling you boys and girls, but no one ever listens.”

  “He’s had a family emergency,” I say. This isn’t it, but well, it is. It’s true enough. It’s part of what has happened between us, as far as I can understand it now.

  “Is your part done?”

  “I have a lyric,” I tell him. “But the way Blaise and I were working—it gets refined and revised at the keyboard. And he’s not available.”

  “I’m not prying. I’m not prying one little bit, Faroukh.”

  I’m a lyricist now: I can lie easy as anything. “He won’t say anything to you about his sister, I think. He’s very private. But she died in the spring, in a plane crash.”

  “Ah. Mortality. And of course that’s at the heart of all love songs—but I see I bore you. That’s my prerogative of course—I have the tenure to prove it—but let us be positive. If you will surrender your lyric to me and if I think it merits the credit, I will pass on the text to Monsieur d’Anjou when I see him. Perhaps when his spirits lift, he can do something with it. I don’t see that you should be faulted for his emotional frailties.”

  I hand over the piece. Professor Farber glances at it. “Short.”

  “Pithy,” I reply. “‘Moon River’ is short. ‘Over the Rainbow’ is short. You can say a lot in a few words.”

  “If you’ve grown up enough to know what’s worth saying. Have you grown up that much this summer, Master Rahmani?”

  “‘Yesterday’ is short. Very short.”

  “I see you have.”

  He takes a pen and adds my name to the top; I haven’t remembered that little bit. There’s a lot to learn about being lost in the world, including putting a tag on yourself in case anyone ever wants to find you.

  Not that I am expecting Blaise d’Anjou will ever want that.

  Tod seems to be prolonging this. “The rhythm is very common and I can’t say the rhyme scheme is all that adventurous.”

  “I modeled it on Emily Dickinson’s poetry. She used the scansions of hymn tunes for her model. I figured I could turn it back to a hymn. Of sorts.”

  “What did I say to you about the last word needing to be an open vowel, so that the next reigning diva can hold out the final note for sixteen bars?”

  “I made an aesthetic decision.”

  “A compromise or a decision? Hmmm.” He reads it through again; I watch his eyes moving down the page. In a softer voice. “It has a title?”

  “Oh, sorry. It’s the first line—I mean the first half of the first line.”

  “‘For What It’s Worth.’”

  “Yeah.”

  He smiles wryly. “Well, for what’s it worth, Faroukh, I’m guessing you had a memorable summer here at Tupperneck. I hope you come back someday.”

  “Professor Farber,” I say, standing up and putting out my hand for a shake, “I doubt I ever will.”

  Only as I’m out again on the lawns—now dried to scratchy sedge after our burnt-out summer—do I wonder if Tod Farber thinks that he was the subject of the lyric. Well, no harm if he does.

  The boys respond to the lowering lights by climbing in Faroukh’s lap and standing on his thighs so he can’t see at first.

  Tod Farber twitches a finger and a stocky male undergraduate in white shirt and black trousers comes out and opens the piano lid. The student takes his place seated on a chair by the side of the piano bench. Page turner. He doesn’t get to sit on the same bench as Blaise d’Anjou, thinks Faroukh. Then the guest of honor comes out from behind a curtain.

  Since that accidental reunion in the New York law office, Faroukh has only seen Blaise in the magazines and on Entertainment Tonight. He knows how the cheeks have thickened a little, how the shiny gold hair is already threaded with silver. But thick as ever. Faroukh runs a hand over his own scalp, aerating what’s left; he can’t stop himself. But grins as he does it. Grimly.

  Men at forty don’t wear the kinds of clothes that boys at eighteen wear in the summer. Faroukh can’t tell much about how Blaise has filled out. But a tux does no one any harm, especially someone a little swollen with success.

  Blaise doesn’t speak. He sits and plays. Faroukh finds his eyes dimly wet—not the blatant springs of new, young pain, just an emotive dampness appropriate to a man entering his middle years.

  The short program details the compositions. Most of them Faroukh has heard, either on the soundtracks of rented DVDs from Netflix or, once in a while, on the classical program on NPR. And of course the several genre-busting popular songs, beginning to be covered by the great chanteuses of the day. None of them are here raising money for the music department of the State University, Faroukh notices. But then, why would they? They didn’t live a whole life for five nights in a rehearsal studio on the top floor of Pierce.

  There will be no intermissio
n, he notices. He hasn’t been able to hope he might hear the whole thing, but it won’t be long—forty-five minutes, tops. The university knows that allowing donors to schmooze with the talent will prove additionally lucrative in the long run.

  The Danse Intime. An elegant melody, a fugue written forward and then played backward.

  The Adagio for 9/11. How could a musician just forty know that such a melody lived inside the piano? Had it always lived there until Blaise d’Anjou found it? And had Blaise found it because of what he knew about loss—of his sister, his niece—of anyone he had ever loved deeply?

  Faroukh Rahmani is weeping more openly, but he’s not alone.

  And that is that. The rounds of applause. Faroukh stands with his boys in his arms, and since he can’t clap, he finds himself hooting. He doesn’t know if Blaise will hear his voice in the crowd, or recognize it. He won’t stay for the wine and cheese. He got what he came for.

  Blaise returns. The crowd sits down for an encore the program doesn’t advertise. The young man who has been turning the piano music steps forward. He goes to the music stand opposite the piano.

  Blaise says, “Though I’m not much for public speaking, I have to say this much. The encore was written here—on the Tupperneck campus, back when it was still an independent college. Guess the fund-raising back then didn’t work as efficiently as it will tonight.”

  This time the polite titters are a little nervous.

  Blaise sits down and goes right into the famous opening. Three quarters of the crowd are probably seeing Angela Bassett in that sequence used for the titles. Faroukh only sees Blaise diamonded by the streetlight, age eighteen forever.

  The young man at the music stand sings in a blameless but ineffectual baritone.

  “For what it’s worth, I love you.

  I hope someday you know.

  These words so roundly overdue

  I whispered long ago.

  “For what it’s worth, I mention