And maybe the ideas would come, Larent thought. But there were still no drinks.
“You know,” Moto said now, expertly accommodating the silence Larent clung to, “the best show I’ve seen here, or no, the one I remember most clearly, here or anywhere, maybe, I actually saw with Renna. It was Dianogah. Almost a reunion show. Definitely a band on its last legs. Maybe that made it even better.
“We had these fake IDs. This was a decade ago. Even more than that. I didn’t know the band that well—I still don’t, it was really a band other musicians turned me on to—but the first thing I heard as I came in were these two basses, one clean, with very light gauge strings, I’m assuming, because it seemed to be tuned in a higher register than a regular bass. The other was fuzzed, rumbling beneath, maybe in a dropped tuning. Behind both was this frenetic beat that was still precise somehow. Made me think of the Minutemen, D. Boon. Slint just as much, though. Classic, before-our-time stuff. And for those first songs there wasn’t a guitar on stage.
“The place was slammed, nauseatingly full. We watched most of the show wedged in the corridor. No one much moved, no one could, I guess. So we all just took it in. There was a constant stream of speech from both bassists. I couldn’t make any of it out, not sure that it mattered, but after a few minutes they turned to singing this simple melody—which they could barely hold, of course. Part of the charm.
“The clean bass started sounding overtones. This entrancing line. He held it for a long time while the rest of the music dropped away. Just this little five-note figure. And as the rest of the band sat around, paced, smoked, whatever, out of the audience steps this man: short black hair, long-sleeved polo, red canvas shoes.
“He lifted the strap of a black bass over his head, holding the cable in his free hand. The other Dianogah bassist set his beer down and started picking a steady stream of As. All the while, the overtones kept sounding.
“Now this third bassist—Bundy K. Brown—plugs in and strums across the strings. Nobody’d seen him in years, post-Tortoise, but there he was, the anti-legend, and the crowd playing it off like it was nothing. So he keeps strumming, head down, twisting the tuning pegs in big turns, all in the same direction, bouncing between them, loosening the strings haphazardly, sending the notes, already low, plunging. The amp can’t even resolve these notes, they’re so low, and what comes out is this sort of unpitched roar. Bundy catches the strings in his hand—they were wobbling, visibly—and pulls his head back up, as if satisfied with the tuning he’d arrived at, if you could call it that.
“The drummer had returned to his stool by this point. He taps out this delicate beat on the tom and snare, no bass, pumping the hi-hat. A final overtone rings out, and Bundy starts picking this really intricate riff that’s right on the lower border of what you can hear.
“He had been tuning, or detuning, and even though those notes were mostly gravel, texture, they were still pitched—barely, but still. And what I assumed we were in for, a blaring noise piece, this cacophony, never came. It turned out to be this carefully shaded tune, with Bundy supplying the deepest layer of the harmony, through a sort of percussive melodic line. And the drums matched this with the opposite, a melodic percussive line.
“So these three post-rock bassists gave us ten minutes plus of something not far from counterpoint, in the lowest registers, at immense volumes, and in rumbling, near-inharmonic tones you took in through your chest, your skull, more than your ears. This place just shook, everything and everyone. It made me a little sick. But I guess there are good sorts of sickness. Renna didn’t feel quite the same about it, I think. But there was nowhere to go, we were packed in too tight for that. So she waited through it.”
Moto brought his eyes in line with Larent’s. “Or I guess I don’t really know how Renna felt. Just that she hardly talked, when we were getting drinks afterward with some of her friends, or with me, on the train back to Massachusetts, to school. It’s hard to believe it didn’t make an impression. She was probably preoccupied. With you, I’m thinking now. Like you, right now—this entire time, really.”
Larent smiled. “Just listening.” Moto was right, of course. But he was dwelling on more than musical failures. Renna had been on the fence about him then, in school, and he was already in love with her. After that, they’d had their few years. Then not. Now, she might be back on that fence. Or else, he thought, what they had was all they ever would. It looked like a lot. It was a lot. But if nothing changed, it would shrink to a blip in the years to come.
“No, it’s fine,” Moto said. “Maybe she was listening too. Not to me, but just playing it all back in her head. I don’t think we actually talked about the show later. Anyway, Bundy did play another couple of songs, the opener off the first Tortoise record, and then ‘Dreams of Being King,’ which was, I’m remembering, the perfect summation of Dianogah. But none of that sticks in the mind like that first piece with Bundy.”
In the far corner, behind the gear, a young man with hair poking out beneath a logo-less baseball cap got up from a table and in one motion hopped over a couple of drums inverted on the floor. Their silver snares rattled from the Fahey. He flipped the power switch on the Korg; the speakers popped and the Fahey cut out. With the palm of his left hand he rocked the modulating wheel back and fingered a minor seventh with his right. The wheel drew the chord smoothly down a step to D minor. “Like that?” he yelled over the Korg’s pipe-organ tones. He let go of the wheel and the chord snapped back to E. The three at his table nodded vaguely as they swigged from dark bottles of beer.
While holding the chord he put his cap on the keyboard and leaned over the keys, brought his face close to them. His hair, three shades of brown distinguishable under the stage lights, fell over his face. He brought his head back up and rested the cap lightly on it, with the bill angled down over his forehead, obscuring his eyes.
Several long rows of buttons ran above the Korg’s keys. Above them was a narrow screen, as wide as the keyboard, flashing parametric data: pitch, amplitude, attack, decay, and such. He riffled through the presets and the chord showed itself protean, incarnated by turns in violins, in guitars, in trumpets, in piccolos, in vibes, in oboes, and finally, in tinny synth tones. The screen showed a timbral profile for each in green, broken down into a few dozen categories. The last preset displayed most simply. The graphs were smooth, the mathematics of the sound free of natural complications like the overtone series.
He blinked heavily and brought his left hand back to the keys, away from the buttons. In those planar tones, with his cap covering his eyes and his shoulders raised, he sounded the opening bars of Satie’s third Gymnopédie. The rendition was airless, free of heat or cold. But the score wouldn’t submit, not wholly, to the slightness of its dress. Gravity remained.
Larent studied the player’s hands, perhaps for a meaning of some sort. He ran his thumb across a broad knot in the wood of the table, pressing his finger into a divot.
“Ridiculous,” he said.
Moto laughed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Yes.”
“And still no drinks?” Larent asked.
They turned toward the doorway. There was no one.
The music ran its course.
9
Albert coten, anders jaikies, frank relleau, and Harold Kames—the four sat in a row. On one end was Coten, his cuffed flannels, tailored in gray-purple Super 150s, falling finely over his crossed legs. He sat up in his chair and pulled it imperceptibly forward before settling back. An old Monte-grappa cut across the blank legal pad in his lap. The ruby celluloid of the pen held the light, glowing as if lit from within.
Kames, at the other end, reset the sleeve of his blazer to a half-inch of his shirtsleeve. He fingered a cufflink as his watery gaze met the broad doors at the back of the auditorium. Relleau and Jaikies, sitting between the other two, only looked into the stage lights.
Men and women, middle aged and primly dressed, had filled most of the seats, except for the rows in front, which
were occupied by younger men, mostly students wearing the off-duty uniform of the well bred: loafers, shaggy-dog sweaters, and button-downs with rumpled collars. Two generations of Halsley wealth.
The hundred odd seats, arranged in several tiers, were three-quarters full now, and the flow through the doors had slowed to a trickle. Kames stood and took the podium.
“Let’s begin, I think,” he said. “To start, then, a brief statement of tonight’s theme. My colleagues and I—some of you will know this—have been thinking through, over the last months, a few of the contrasts that give shape to political orders, social orders. Tonight we want to see if we can throw a bit of light on that between the mercantile and the martial. By mercantile we mean not the economic theory of that name so much as the broader orientation of the merchant toward life, and of societies that take the merchant’s outlook, if only implicitly, as the primary mode by which to apprehend the world. Societies that treat the merchant as offering a template for citizenship, you could say. In the same way, by martial we mean the outlook of the warrior—not only the brutish or rapacious conqueror, but equally, the defender, the guardian.
“Except for our revolutionary period, and not even then, really, this country has never known anything resembling a martial order, or its common descendant, the royal order, the earliest monarchs often being triumphant warlords themselves, if they are not backed by them. The martial and the noble, the royal, these are really one category.
“Now, to put it in the crudest, quickest way, one which I can only hope we will improve on tonight, the merchant’s life is built around a particular ethos, we can say, one that invests certain notions with special importance. Among these: exchangeability, trade, consumption, profit, calculation, consensus, negotiation, persuasion, dissimulation, connivance.
“The values of the noble are, as we said, molded by the demands of war. So we have the knights of Europe, the samurais of Japan, the kshatriyas of India. The appealing qualities first: courage, honor, loyalty in action. And then the less approachable ones, which are nonetheless bound up with the others: an acceptance of the necessity, and the permanent possibility, of violence; of the unequal distribution of virtue and wisdom among men; and of the reality of unexchangeability—of seeing some matters as musts, whatever the cost, personal or social, which you can call, in a language that will be familiar to our philosophers, the deontological limits on action and citizenship, ones that cannot be gainsaid or inputted into any broader moral calculus.
“This is much too simple, of course, but it gives the flavor, I hope, of what’s to come.” Kames looked back on the other three and lifted his brow. “Anything to add, then, just at the start? Surely I’ve muddled things. Albert, will you help?” There was mild laughter.
Coten put his hands on his thighs and cleared his throat. “Sure. My own training,” he said, still seated, “is in the philosophy of politics, as Harold’s is in law and history. I would just add the following. If—if—you think virtue and wisdom should have pride of place in our social decision-making, there is, and it’s distressing, there is no guarantee that decisions made that way will yield popular consent. The ‘wisdom of crowds’ is reassuring, and if you look hard enough you can find cases that seem to substantiate it. But there are too many negative results to sustain the idea. It just doesn’t look like the popular bears an inherent correspondence to the good. We take this as a truism in domains outside politics. In art, of course, but also in science. We don’t take polls to decide on the load-bearing capacities of bridge designs. We leave it to the people who know better. Should we assume politics must be different?
“So this is another way of seeing the dispute between the noble and the merchant, for whom popularity, in the end, not goodness, accuracy, quality, strength, beauty, and so forth, must be the guiding principle. And that’s just because the most valuable product, from the merchant’s point of view, must be the one that sells. Otherwise, well, he goes out of business.”
Relleau, a political correspondent for Halsley’s newspaper of record, with a master’s-level training in both history and anthropology, brushed blond curls from his eyes before taking his turn. “If one looks at our situation, where conceptions of the good are now beyond number, and where the communities answering to many of these conceptions are perpetually stymied in the elections, simply for lacking scale, numbers, it’s difficult to tell them that our political arrangements are as they should be. Anyway they aren’t listening, are they? Coalitions in the legislature, and between interest groups, are the obvious route in situations like this, and we have gotten that for some time. But what is more interesting, and newer, is how the last decade has seen a kind of turn toward other approaches, in particular, to certain forms of aggression, not always of a bloody sort, or mounted directly against the people, but against state institutions. Infrastructure—assembly halls, schools, and so forth. But that is still violence, dead bodies or not. And it might be a more potent one in the end, we don’t know. The elections, in November, might tell us. We’ll see how many are brave enough to show up at the polling stations.
“In some ways, however, it isn’t an altogether different approach, because this extra-democratic aggression has itself turned coalitional. We hear of libertarians, and also the advocates of direct democracy, collaborating in some of the destruction—in its funding and sometimes its execution—of voting booths, subways, public monuments. We hear even of Muslim and Christian groups acting jointly. And they are targeting not just abortion clinics, but scientific institutions more generally: the flooding of UCLA’s genomics center, most recently. This sort of collaboration was unthinkable just ten years ago. But today they are agreed on something, the substance of which isn’t totally clear, even to them, one feels.
“But this is getting pretty speculative, so I think I’ll leave it there. What do you make of this, Anders? Your research intersects with this in interesting ways.”
The young sociologist with the burgeoning reputation, formerly of Bonn but now full-time at the Wintry Institute, leaned over the arm of his chair toward Relleau. “For just the reason you mention, I’m going to save my remarks for the discussion. If that’s all right,” he said, smiling broadly.
“That’s just fine, Anders,” Kames said. “I think they’ve had all they can take of general remarks, anyway. So, we’ll all do just twenty minutes or so, and at the end we will open up the discussion to our very patient audience, for an hour or beyond, whatever we are feeling like.
“And I did mean to say at the start—I’ll say it now—thank you, to our guests, fellows, and regular attendees, for coming to these sessions of the Wintry Institute. And of course to our founding donors, who have put us in a financial position to forget about finances. It’s left us free to follow the argument wherever it leads, to examine our homilies open-endedly, without thumbs on the scale. We are very lucky to be what we are. Let’s see where we go tonight.”
10
The first intervention was nothing of the sort. Thirty floors up, at the Four Seasons, Lewis sat on the edge of a California king, slugging Caol Ila from a crystal lowball short on lead. The door was ajar. The desk sent her up, a Junoesque brunette with a bronze clutch, wearing silk the green of those portraits of Laurette (Matisse was still the master, Lewis thought). He felt he ought to be in tails, not this linen blazer that could use a pressing. The cut of the dress—high-back, ankle-length, flowing around the legs with a matchless drape, subtly pleated above the waist—played nothing up or down, neither flaunting nor withholding. Distortion was needless. The dress was her equal, and together they formed a pair of autonomous beauties, as handsome couples do.
She sat on the bed at his beckoning, not too close to him, and laid her hands in her lap decorously. The watch flashed in the low light of the nightstand lamp. Breguet. He studied its face, the immaculate guilloché work. The hands, at eleven and twelve, blued, not painted. The case too, it glowed whiter than stainless, in a way peculiar to gold. And the strap’s irregu
lar crosshatchings, the crispness of the black, bespoke alligator.
Lewis rarely confronted finery anymore, only when he saw friends from the old life, or his mother. The august materials, the fabrics, hides, metals, and minerals, the aura of ultra-skilled labor emanating from their rendered forms—these were woven through the mise-en-scène of his youth. Their reappearance, though, in these circumstances, attached to this woman, left him of several minds.
Through a college friend, son of a pop icon and now a practiced layabout, he’d made these arrangements with Life, Halsley’s top escort service. Three grand for ninety minutes. Utterly wasteful. But Lewis felt life telescoping. They’d asked him if, for another fifteen hundred, he wanted to include dinner; for five figures she could even be rented out for the weekend. He’d declined. The girlfriend experience didn’t appeal. He liked Janus.
She ventured a few pleasantries, sustaining that dazing restraint. The faux-gentility—there was no question of authenticity, given her vocation—it only estranged him. Her tony clientele must have expected this, at least initially, especially at dinner, if they took that option.
He remembered speeding the encounter past these awkwardnesses: first a rote offering of a drink (she declined) and then, while holding her by the Bregueted wrist that still lay in her lap, a wordless unzipping of the dress. She leaned her face against his, only grazing it, letting her breath fall on his neck, which he could just barely feel. She went no further, and she said nothing. She was merely keeping his pace, letting him lead.
He pulled her to her feet and disrobed her with a care that seemed directed more at the dress than at her. The stitching was close to invisible, patently hand-done. The silk was even finer than he thought, with a pleasing weight. Givenchy. He folded it over the desk chair and turned back to her. She was standing in matte-black bra and panties, smoothing the copper-brown curls that fell just beyond her lightly freckled shoulders. To the smallest degree possible her eyes had brightened, and they fixed on him without the hint of the coquette, calibrated to project only gentle desire.
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