Plays Well With Others

by Allan Gurganus

  Mr. Copland, beaky as the bad witch while gentle as the good one, greeted Robert via one rickety hug. He shifted weight from his cane to Gustafson, a fine move. Robert introduced us to “Aaron” in a gracious if general way, so as not to tire the old man. And Copland, facing us, said, “Fellow member of the boy’s cult, I presume?” Such an intimacy sprang up between us all.

  Ossorio and his three best lieutenants were already present and stood around, proud as fathers at a confirmation, which we hoped this would be. Angie hurried over to them, Marco interpreting, explaining everything in his solemn, sweet way.

  Copland commandeered Robbie aside, a conference over the hastily copied parts, choice of tempi. Maestro was attended by a charming young woman; she showed him a few yellow Post-it reminders (those were new then). Copland’s memory was just beginning its total tragic implosion. But he could still manage whatever score was placed before him. We, settled, watched his helper feed him many colored pills, offer the water glass, wait to see each tablet downed.

  As promised, Mr. Copland himself would conduct. Robert had once explained to me how good the best New York musicians really are. Bad ones could not get work here twice. It was Darwinian, the high quality that orchestrates so many West Side apartment buildings into all-day rehearsal halls. Robert swore: a cold pre-breakfast sight-reading by Manhattan professionals was often better than four full rehearsals anywhere else on earth. My fear: Robert might prove wrong. My fear: today they’d be sloppy or bored. They’d see Mr. Copland’s interest in our ringleted beauty as nepotism or worse. What if the string section yawned at this hour, and hurt my darling’s feelings? I would hurt their hands, or bows, or both.

  Somehow, this all seemed too good to be quite real, except as in a children’s tale. I could not quite trust it.

  Thrilled, restless all during, I kept trying to accept it, but felt like some dog circling itself before settling in high grass. Couldn’t stop some inner spinning above a spot too long promised to feel comfortable once achieved.

  Robert, ceremonious, situated before me. To his left, Angie wedged herself completely under one of his tapering ivory arms. Parts of massive Ansel’s upper right quarter fit somewhat beneath Robert’s other wing. Nina had chosen an aisle seat, arranging her skirt, rechecking makeup. (Robert had palmed off her giftpacket to Copland, pointing at the soprano, who waved, Queen Mum gracious.) Marco and Gideon flanked me. Clustered around us, two dozen others that our composer had asked, all of them wanting, even prior to seven a.m. to participate in history, to draw as close to Robert as possible. I recognized a dozen faces from AA; we signaled. There were other composers, a tight group Robert consulted and supported. The Stones’ manager sat third from left, talking to Mrs. Park, our adored small-credit-granting greengrocer. She’d dressed in black, looking like the diplomat she was. Ossorio and his crew kept turning back to Robbie with winks and thumbs up. “Aren’t they cute all dressed up in sharkskin vests and collar pins?” Angie leaned my way. “I’d like to fuck every one of them.”

  “So what else is new?”

  “You say the sweetest things, dear. But I really do feel a heart attack coming on, I’m so excited. Me, I just paint the pictures, chainsaw them through the floor, ship them off. You stuff your wishful li’l fantasies into manila envelopes and cower at home, waiting. But, an orchestra wholehog? That first oboe is a definite possible. See him? The hair? Can you believe this level of prep and fuss? Or is it just its being ‘early morning’?”

  Today my pockets bulged with a little thriftshop jewelry for Robert, plus some one gizmo for each of our inner-circle pals. It was always like Christmas, you knew to give your every sibling-elf a remembrance of comparable value.

  Assistants now helped Mr. Copland rise. He uneasily achieved the stage. His gray hair curled long in the back, eyeglasses perched at the end of a character actor’s complicated finger of a nose. There was something magical about this very old man encouraging the unheard music of a boy so new.

  Copland hooked both canes over a little railing, an oddly glamorous sort of walker, built up there by some pipe-fitter just for him. He appeared unsteady. Then stabilizing himself by leaning forward against pipes, he lifted a frail baton. Mr. Copland tapped his music stand three times and, both arms already lifted, half-turned back—to smile at Robert, nearly falling, not. His was the smile Robert lured from all of us, and though I could not see my friend’s full face, I watched its outlines broaden from behind. I noted Robert’s long neck tense, curls shifting; I felt the wattage of such joy leaving him. It aimed toward Copland, smiling, and a bored-looking orchestra, eager to just get this non-union favor over with.

  Then Maestro gave a clean fast downbeat.

  Robert had always told me that the greatest works begin in the middle—(we’d once sat through the first blast of a stellar Tenstedt performance, the B-Minor Mass, sat holding hands like children on their inaugural plane ride). The first tone cluster of his own First Symphony now hit us like a wind. You could feel ten emotions lean right in against you with the great good G’s. Our features spread into a backflung butter of Happiness. Blastoff ripples the grinning faces of young astronauts. There followed an upsurging breath intake, a sense of comfort arriving by earned degrees, then slowly some half-mean vindication. “You see!” There had been such anger banking up in our own long hard wait. For this. At last!

  If our group’s first response to The Gustafson Sound was to plop back against our seats, whoa—now, as music progressed, we tipped first forward then slowly more sideways. Five minutes in, we’d teepeed shoulder to shoulder nearer each other, against. A little scared, there came this need to touch beloved familiars.

  If Robert’s first big work was too good, didn’t it court trouble? Shouldn’t he have made some moments of his work flatten into being just so-so, for safety’s sake? And how did our own efforts—in our other fields—stack up? Could we ever prove worthy of such a moment? Then how, in our own forms, might we try preserving, say, him, say this, now?

  We huddled closer. I noted with a curious smugness—as if taking credit myself—that the Stones’ manager, a tough worldly cockney, and Mrs. Park were all but slung against each other like some old fond married couple. Ossorio and his pals sat straight as for the Pope.

  The first movement of Robert Gustafson’s First Symphony, unwinding, soon registered its curious authority. Somehow the brass section suggested the very gleaming engine of the tragic liner itself. You could really hear that in there. Being a musical illiterate (except for what Robert’d taught me) I still don’t quite know how he managed it. You received whole waves of sound that seemed a large crowd’s parting cheers. Ives-like drifts escaped at least two bands (one onboard and one ashore?). Waiting, I caught first strains of “Bicycle Built …,” a hymn to locomotion, one 1912 form of love. The programmatic part never impeded the music’s blowing forth, stark and beautiful. It sounded somewhat wild. No Glassy minimalism here. Instead, forward-motion percussiveness. I detected moments of Edwardian craft—an Elgar swell that had the cushiness of the top liner on its first crossing. There was this tightened-stomach-muscle sweetness boiling just underneath everything. You heard why Copland might respect what our Robert was trying. There was a sensuality I associated so fully only with Robbie here, right here. The Robbie who fed people leftovers he filched, who’d fixed up nine live-in couples straight and gay, who was always lending out his bed, or tracking down free long-range cat-sitting sublets, lucrative short-term jobs. He was still every inch the preacher’s kid—just that willfully bad, exactly that helplessly good.

  We followed his symphony from ship’s launching to certain sea-swells reminiscent of surge and surf in Peter Grimes, then “La Mer.” You began to hear the ship achieve its cruising speed as ballroom music of the period came curling back at you in stray wafts, seablown snatches.

  Six years aborning, much of this had hatched while he was blind, and all of it was new to us.

  Underneath, some dark beating insistence grew even
louder, a jagged figure in the strings as we approached the inevitable iceberg. Robert shook his head “No” twice, as if deciding “Ouch, we’ll soon change that.” From behind, I noted his platinum locks toss at some bassoon effect he must’ve felt he’d calculated right. He now turned left, to mug for Angie, who was melted against him, and in that flash, Robert’s profile appeared to me, as I’d first seen it the elevator, some Roman emperor’s, maybe the young Augustus who bribed state sculptors to make him even more immortally ideal. Aimed forward again, Robert stared at the frail conductor, arms lifted, pointing, pulling, leading. Robert’s music now seemed our very anthem, its Wagnerian scale emotional and unashamed.

  I felt molten I was so confirmed. So sure then—of our promise. The knowledge that we, our group, had finally wound up—the dispossessed kids and outland losers, girls unmarried and boys subject to arrest for simply making love—where we’d all always belonged. What was I scared of? Leaving New York. But what was New York? Just these, my people. I knew I’d never have to leave them. Hooray!

  I have always been so lucky in my friends. I scanned these slouching loved ones—poor Nina, on the aisle, still awaiting her other night at the opera, and yet so cheerfully willing to wait. Angie, predestined major, having known it even as the preeminent fourth-grade Wildlife muralist in the Georgia public schools, patient for immortality even at her most fraught and engagingly insecure. Ansel, who went about New York with a leathern factuality that made it seem another (if fairly sizable) farm chore. Gideon with his luxurious tastes and creamy company, his ambisexuality, his fluent French and Arabic, his expectations of the best in every cuisine and any language. Marco—such earnest faith in human goodness, in common sense, his chest ever rattly with political buttons that seemed instructions to himself as well as warnings to the world. And me. Me, here, alive, amid, among them.

  I cannot say how blessed I felt then. The auditorium was warming. A rumbling from the subway under us and it almost seemed that the whole building had lurched, like some great independent vessel cutting loose. Our circle occupied just a sixtieth of the best seats in the hall’s finest forward section. Robert had accused me years before of being happy. I felt that finally. A daily quota, enlarging my daily capacity.

  Almost shaming, getting this darn much of it at once. As always, during the best moments, at that age, I sat guarding most of an unexplainable erection.

  Sometimes when you’re experiencing upheavals of emotion, your eyes will choose some convenient target. I guess my ears were just so glutted that my eyesight needed a brief rest. Sometimes at very good concerts, I must fight to keep from thinking past the music, from fixating only on my fiction waiting back home; I resist channeling music’s power toward my story in progress, letting aural energy course into/through my invented figures awaiting me on good white paper, pumping them with further drama, value, opacity.

  Today I struggled against that. I wanted this to only be about and for our Robert and his work. Maybe that’s why my eyes came to literally alight on him—a familiar simple spectacle, one whose grace and sex and tone I never tired of: Robert’s shapely arm, the left one nearest. Its light hair silver-gold, more like pinfeathers than any coily manly tufts. The left arm still curled around Angie’s rust-colored rayon shoulder. Robert’s skin looked springy and supple, a pink tone overlaying the shade of old ivory. You could see his arm’s every ligament and swell.

  Black cuff rolled back, his skin’s tone was, as ever, coral and butterscotch with a translucent wash of flat burnished white. Now, with my own head rolling to Robert’s rhythms, I, slowed by the emotions his music demanded, half noticed then slowly fixed upon what my overstimulated eyes had found before my mind quite did.

  Four inches from Robert’s wrist, indentation, a mark no bigger than a tuxedo shirt stud. His skin had sort of sunk in there, like the purposeful perforation atop some bisque salt-cellar. Indented, tinged an angered purple-red-black new to me, this was not a scratch, not quite a bruise. It was a … hole. It seemed a sign of odd corruption, the body’s slight and temporary inability to heal itself.

  It’s nothing. Listen, instead. —But, helpless, my eyes kept darting back to the thing, just eleven inches from my nose, eyes kept denying it then reworrying what was, after all, just one tiny tiny flaw. A first.

  The mark seemed to have befallen our darling from his inside out, not the usual outside in. Friends around me—joined to the music—sniffled, nodded, communed. Robert’s grin at some triumphant passage of storm and impending shipwreck, rearranged his curls and I let myself tip even nearer the perfect arm’s sole stain. Here was the one body we all wanted, comically loving even our own futile longing after it.

  Odd, the better his music now grew—the harder and meaner did this vacuum dent appear.

  I must ask Robert about it, after. Point it out. Soon. But not now, of course. Not today. Certainly not this week.

  I recalled the ominous birthmark in one tale of Hawthorne’s. From a fairy tale, I recalled the curse that some blackhearted witch hurled at a baby during its own white christening. In milk, black ink dropped, blossoming.

  I cannot say I knew what I was looking at. I mean, you heard about The Spot. But couldn’t this be anything?

  And yet I no longer quite listened to Gustafson’s First. —Instead, I’d started making sentences. They are my own vice, after all. My own poison. A more interior music.

  These sentences all began with dares—“If …”

  “If somebody this good and generous and talented …

  “If after hearing only this much of it, he goes and gets in any way …

  “If our group, after everything we’ve been through while trying to start off right, if if, then I will, if …”

  To now sit here, my hand resting in group-hands, to hear the stick-thin big-headed Mr. Copland pull this orchestra through the cataclysmic finished parts of Robert’s work, it was so thrilling. But music had abruptly come to feel titanically sad. (I didn’t really know what the hole in Robert meant—but some of it, I simply felt, as any healthy animal must.)

  I saw how the musicians, capable complete professionals even just past seven a.m., had slowly grown half-involved with the score. Some of those not playing had ceased studying their watches or sipping coffee from Styro-foam. Instead, not wholly uninterested, they followed along, even scouted the development a few pages ahead. The harp player kept staring through her strings out here at Robert. A wind machine had been tracked down, left over from a David del Tredici concert. The gale now started building toward storm’s own yodel howl. The ballroom oompa-rendition of “Bicycle Built for Two” was breaking up, metamorphosing toward hymn played soon for real, for keeps, played as art, not just distraction, “Nearer My God…”

  Ushers, off to the sides, placing the usual nonprofit fund-raising brochures on seats—had slowed to a halt. They soon stood facing just the orchestra. I saw how their eyes cast upward with listening.

  When it was done, a musical offering that seemed to stop midnote, all ushers and some of the players applauded. The first violinist tapped his bow to his stand, then aimed that bow our way, seeking the composer. Mr. Copland turned with the help of railing and, beating his stick onto the metal crossbar, signaled Robert to rise. Our boy did. Those of us brought to cheer, we so surpassed ourselves that, next day, we found ourselves hoarse. Ossorio and friends soon made it a standing ovation: “Composer, composer!”

  Robert’s arm, the small angry hole in Robert’s otherwise ideal arm, those were briefly almost lost to me. As I, crying, clapped like mad. And kissed everybody, including an old lady usher.

  I cannot say I knew what I was looking at.

  Robert, settled, turned around, studied us each in turn. He took my hand. “And this one,” he said of me to all our others. “What would any of us do without this one mothering us to death?”

  I’ll never forget his oval face then. Its glow, I swear, just radiated, heavenly. Robert pulled my palm forward and he nodded, moving to kiss
my hand. But, for one split end of a single second, one interior alarm went off; I resisted, preventing my own pulling back; but knew I’d feared … contagion. From him! It was a dumb creature response. That’s when I first guessed how large a thing all this was going to have to be.

  He pressed my palm to his cheek and the consoling thought came: I’ll know every inch of him forever.

  Warm face on my chill hand, I felt one cheekbone’s magic ledge—Most Beautiful Boy. The meat of my palm met the cool bone in his violin of a face.

  Everybody patted Robbie. “Well,” he shrugged, “for a beginner …” Then laughed, ashamed of his own pride.

  Odd, I sat wishing his parents had been here. Maybe I should write them. But how ever to describe a day like this?

  When he finally stood, I saw Robert reach into the seat beyond Angie’s and lift, what? Those white calla lilies I’d forgotten. The sight of him holding those scared me. He offered half of them to Mr. Copland.

  “A really quite momentous launching,” so the Times announced just two days later. The conductor had invited a critic to come sit, hidden, in the balcony. We never even saw him. After our years of scouting for a real reviewer at our circle’s hundred off-brand openings, we never even guessed the guy was tucked up there. We never even knew what hit us.

  It would be one of two times Robert Christian Gustafson ever heard performed any of the symphonic work (of Robert Christian Gustafson).

  Because the musicians were union, because this was an informal and indeed unscheduled rehearsal, because the union local’s rules protected players’ concert rights and their talents’ value, no recording could be made. So no proof exists of that morning’s power. Except, of course, in the memories of those alive who still remember it.