by Tito Perdue
“Aw, I don’t know. I’m thinking of going to Europe.”
“You could stay at my place for a couple of days, if you need to.”
“Naw, I got a car.”
Thirty-two
Back to she, she who had spent five (5) full hours preparing for her concert and then another ninety minutes with her new mentor, an eighty-year-old veteran of the Cleveland group.
“You do have talent,” the woman allowed finally. “How old are you?”
“I’ll be twenty in five weeks from now.”
“No, how old are you now? I’ve never been good at mathematics.”
Both girls laughed. To be sure, the woman was a hag, made much haggier by contrast with the surreal item facing her from about five feet away.
“My God, you’re a beauty. Wonder what you would look like in an organdy gown. Blue, I think.”
“Depends on the shade. And the lighting. I do best in the Sun. Or late afternoon, anyway.”
“Sun, yes.”
“I need to have some photos at Shelton Beach. At about three o’clock.”
“Yes. Along with your instrument?”
“Or maybe on a horse.”
Both girls laughed. Suddenly the hag grew serious. “Don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything like you. You’re going to have a miserable life, looking like that. What, you think the world will leave you in peace?”
“Not at first. But I’m going to retire the moment I see it slipping away.”
“And when will that be?”
“Not sure. When I’m twenty-six or -seven, I guess.”
“I’m over eighty.”
“Oh. And did you have a miserable life?”
“No, I was always a hag.”
Both girls laughed.
She spent more and more time with the hag in the days that followed, right up until the woman brought out a six-foot golden harp that filled the practice chamber. “If you can do that, you can do this,” she said.
“I think I’ll stay with the cello.”
“What did you say just now? Don’t you realize what you would look like with a harp? Sitting off to one side with the spotlight on you? Hmm?”
“Oh.”
“Exactly. White silk gloves up to the elbow. And I know just the hairdresser.”
Thereafter they gave almost as much time to this last-named instrument as to the one the girl had been born to. She learned to play in candlelight, an exasperating exercise that required her to develop extra-perception as it were, and larger eyes. And then one day in late July: “I’ll be glad when I’m thirty years old!”
“Me, too. But that’s not likely.”
Both laughed.
Thirty-three
I don’t know how long he domiciled in that old car. I do know that the next time I drove past his former apartment, it had become a kennel for two large dogs.
He took almost three thousand dollars with him, I later learned, cash money that accompanied him to a standard midlevel southeastern Tennessee town that lay and today still lies in the shade of the Croatoan mountain range. It was not so small, that town, that it didn’t boast a music academy, a reputable one actually, and a community college offering hands-on training in the manual arts.
Are readers still interested in this person? Ineligible for higher education, he had reset his career, opting now to develop his capacity for perfect autonomy. Your autonomous man, and he only, can think his thoughts, and in the fullness of time turn governments upside-down. He studied carpentry therefore, plumbing, welding, and took a course in one of the Japanese self-defense arts, which one I don’t know.
Having perforce to find a new residence, he had billeted himself in the back room of an automobile repair shop, where he earned a wage of some sort. It was odd to see his book hoard piled next to cans of motor oil, auto parts here and there, and the boy not able to read or think till after closing time. I used to visit him from time to time when traveling to the cabin that my previous and current wives and I even to this day still maintain on Lake Peluria. We offered to let him use it, of course; of course, he declined.
I believe it was during this time that his attention began to shift over from books to music, the only place where he could come into touch with the ineffable, he admitted. For much too long, history had focused on what people did with their hands and feet, neither of those parts granting him what he most needed. I wasn’t surprised therefore when on my next visit I learned that he had dipped into his small savings for concert tickets.
He insisted that we travel in his motorized car, a broken-down manufacture that should have been turned in fifteen years earlier. Holding to her hat and purse, my wife of those days said nothing. The town, too, was largely broken down, featuring mostly abandoned warehouses, random dogs, an antique shop with a wooden Indian standing out front. We passed through a district of small but decent homes where the usual nighttime people, young men between about sixteen and maybe twenty-four, were loitering on street corners. The school itself, by contrast a prosperous-looking institution, comprised a half-square-mile of mowed lawns and a dozen brick buildings eventuating in an auditorium with a fountain out front. The lobby was well-appointed and had a display of student artwork offered for purchase. We dithered, having not very much to say to each other. She had been cautioned, my wife, about the boy’s personality and how to accommodate it.
“So you’re a great Dvořák fan, then, are you?” she contributed.
“Yeah. But it’s not me that’s great, but him. Anyway, I’m not very good at small talk.”
The moment came when the moment should, whereon we drifted down to our places, among the best in the house. How much had our prodigy/vagabond paid for these? The audience was a medley of students and adults, a dignified assemblage thumbing through their printed programs. Had only the music begun a few moments later, the boy might have had time to view a photo of the girl on page eleven.
The conductor, a Latinate sort of man, opened with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, Greg Johnson’s favorite of all symphonies. We enjoyed it, too, of course, even if the varlet had to mention (twice) that he preferred the Sixth. He was bending forward, his attention half for the music, half for the players, and the rest for the matron two rows down with the comely breasts. And yet he claimed to have lost interest in such matters.
“Whew,” he said.
I had assigned my wife to sit next to him.
“Why,” she asked, “do you prefer the Sixth so much?”
“Sssh!” he said. “I’m trying to hear.”
The piece ended to applause. It was the sort of evening I particularly enjoy, with civilized, or anyway mostly civilized, spectators, music, adults in adult clothing, and next to me a twenty-two-year-old genius developing at hyper-speed. By the end of the first movement, it was likely he’d be able to read Chinese. And then, too, I had indulged in a foot-tall daiquiri while waiting in the lobby. The ice was of daiquiri, too.
The next symphony brought forth that event, that split-second moment readers have expected. In the intermission, a great golden harp, yes, had been brought onstage and positioned just slightly east of the string section. A phenomenal thing, that instrument, though not so phenomenal as the human exemplar waiting to play it. She was not of this world. A gasp went up from the audience, some of it audible. It needed a second or two before the boy caught sight of it, and another two or three before he was fully cognizant of it. He paled.
“Easy,” I said. “It’s just a girl.”
“Maybe to you.”
Thirty-four
He began to frequent the music academy, venturing regularly across town to browse the academy library or loiter on the lawn with its fountains and statuary. He did see her once, once only and at a distance of about fifty or sixty yards. But hardly had time to come to his feet before she had entered one of the buildings.
He consoled himself by broaching up to a much lesser sort of girl in process of mounting her bicycle.
“That girl . . .�
��
“Forget it.”
“The one that was just here, she . . .”
“I know who was just here. But we don’t give out her name.”
He tried a different tact. “What is your name, I wonder?”
“Marsha. Marsha Havelina. I’m in the orchestra, too.”
“Really! What do you play?”
“Bassoon.”
“Are you telling the truth? When will you be performing next?”
“November. But it won’t have a harp in it.”
He had expected, wrongly, that she might be flattered by his attention. Proceeding on to the cafeteria, he dredged up enough money for coffee and a salad. The sugar was free, and he stored a dozen little packages of it in his pantaloons. Girls were moving back and forth, the beautiful and mediocre interlarded about equally with each other. He should have been reading or earning money; instead he crossed to the women’s dormitory.
“No, she doesn’t stay here,” he was told. “No, no, we can’t give out her name, either.”
“Do you even know what it is?”
“Certainly!” She grinned.
It needed another stroll across campus and fifteen more minutes to find the roster with her purported name on it. And a good name, too, although he had already construed a better one for her, a nine-letter designation redolent of the names used by Poe for his own women. She had her “own place,” he’d been told, but where was it? Placing himself mentally inside that sanctuary, he sorted through her belongings, her toothbrush and comb(s), her pet chameleon, her shoes and hose. Was he going entirely insane?
“So what are you reading these days?” I asked at our next conference.
“She’s got an apartment somewhere. Don’t know exactly where. “
“But do you know approximately where?”
“Not exactly.”
“Perhaps she’s married.”
He paled. He had gone back to reading the Greeks, the Ionians mostly, a good diversion that he could carry out among his arts and crafts lessons. He was also being trained in draftsmanship. He had a lot of respect for those canted desks with sixteen square feet of surface area, the well-fibered paper, the inks and precision equipment, and he seemed to have a talent for the work. Just as valuable were the lessons in auto mechanics mandated by his employer, a coarse man with, or rather without, two missing fingers. He didn’t care for the boy but understood the importance of educating him to the work.
“Well, I guess you’ll be going down to -------- this weekend. What, you got something going on down there?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, when you do, you’re going to want to know about mechanics. Ha, ha, ha! Am I right?”
The genius was getting just three, sometimes four hours’ sleep a night, often rising at early hours to blunder through the darkened shop and make his way out of doors. The Moon glinted gorgeously in the little oil patches that stained the concrete floor, and he spent some time trying to replicate them on notepaper with his set of colored pencils. Perhaps he should have been an artist. No. Instead, he strolled about the block, a place of commerce featuring a government office for unemployed people and a former bakery now used for video rentals. Unemployed? He could cite thousands of pieces of work that needed to be done within a hundred yards.
Saturday, he went again to the music school and, without the needed credential, tried to borrow a book.
“No,” said the woman. “Anyway, that old book is all worn out! Look at it.”
“So give it to me, then, why don’t you? I’ll fix it.” (He was in the midst of a bookbinding tutorial, the best thing to happen to him since forsaking Knoxville.)
The woman smiled patiently. “No, we have a policy.”
He shook his fist at her (not really) and then went and loitered in front of the auditorium till the truth forced him to admit that the girl wasn’t there. She never went out at night.
Meantime his car was growing older, and he dared not drive for more than thirty or forty consecutive miles before pulling off the highway to let the engine recuperate. He had his music with him, of course, and tonight the sky was full of low-hanging stars. A town pulled into view, a mostly abandoned place dating from the agriculture age. He passed a barn bending slowly to earth, its hay loft providing sanctuary to the bats running in and out. He bethought him of his grandfather’s saying that the allocation of living space was God’s privilege, not man’s.
He continued through the night.
Thirty-five
She learned that someone, and not for the first time, was searching for her, an annoyance that reinforced her rule not to leave her apartment after dark. And yet—she admitted it—she had herself been searching for someone for quite a long while.
The first week in October, she took part in a double performance of the Debussy and Ravel quartets. Hardly ever did more than fifty persons attend these events, though recently the audience seemed to be increasing. Apart from that, she continued to spend most of her life in her apartment. For her, solitary times were better than having to accede to the social tedium that characterized the town. She would speak when she had to, smile when that was needed, and had actually become friends, or semi-friends anyway, with the laundry woman born seventy-eight years ago to a twelve-year-old mother.
She was provided a cello coach who had grown up in Wilhelmine Germany. And finally, she learned that she had a rival on the cello, a post-graduate androgyne paid to give assistance to those who requested it. (The girl had rather die than take help from someone under the age of fifty.) Had ever this person nursed an idiot or gutted a hog? But mostly it was his popularity among the girls that made him repellant to her. She knew the kind of taste most girls have. In any case, he proved so discomfited by her that she felt obliged to start a conversation, a banal one devoid of controversial elements. She actually gave the “boy” a parting wink, she was that evil.
It extended, her cruelty, to using bits of paisley to test her lizard’s ability to run through the color spectrum. Normally, the creature had a pale complexion. Other vocations included herbal remedies, lessons on the harp, and caring for the box of purslane on the window sill. But mostly it was her classical recordings, their physical organization, and the delight of hearing them on the superb machine given her by the assistant director.
The middle of October she was asked to play in a Haydn program at the home of a rich person in Troizen City. The guests were approximately thirty in number, the children seven, and the waiters three. A snooty young man in a moustache and slacks was continually hovering about, until finally she wrinkled her nose at him, sending him away. She could not fathom why the women, not all of them unlovely, had chosen to wear pants. As to their intelligence, she had a pretty good idea about that as well.
Came November and the sort of weather for striding off to school in her purple coat. Dark came earlier these days but still left time for walking along the river bank with a pocket full of raisins for the trout. The Sun, her own special star, lit the way. Sometimes she even trespassed into the woods before quickly coming back out again lest it, too, be full of boys. She sought to converse with squirrels who, however, wanted nothing to do with it. And then at 6:45 to scurry back to her apartment and lock the door.
She knew that she was remarkable and knew, too, that it was slipping from her at about five percent a year. She called for bookkeepers (bookkeepers in the sky) to give some heed at least, perhaps even mention her in the archives of perdurable time.
Thirty-six
There’s no doubt but that the boy was spending a disproportionate time in one special section of the library. And so one day in December, with the leaves all umber and orange and mellow and yellow, pumpkins rotting in the fields, and crows mustering in the trees, he inveigled the woman into letting him borrow three several books. Pleased that the Dewey Decimal System was still used in this place, he came quickly to the school’s copy of Croyden’s Biteroot Exponentials, an essential work left in tragic cond
ition. He took it, returning it six days later bound in calfskin with an engraving on the cover.
“Goodness!” the lady said. “Did you do this?”
“I had a bit of spare time.”
She had a pretty face and wasn’t greatly older than himself. He didn’t want her, however.
For weeks, he had attended all the concerts, but never again saw that “Cynosura” in the title, not till Saturday nineteenth when she was assigned to a part in Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht at the Seventh Street Auditorium. He read the pronouncement (three times), and in a sudden access of excitement ran to the car and hied him back home again to finish his work before the performance.
He had duties awaiting him, a four-wheel-drive transmission, his woodworking tutorial, the eighteen bee skeps that needed emptying, plus half-a-dozen other self-imposed projects designed to make him a better and better angel of his own superior nature. His wardrobe was in good state, and in addition to the some three thousand one hundred twenty-six dollars he had put away, he had about fifty in cash that he transferred daily to whichever pair of trousers he was using at the time. He had seven or eight ties, all blue, an antique wristwatch measured in Roman numerals, and a pair of good, black leather shoes. He was still about six feet, one and his person was distributed equably over his substrate frame. No one needed to know about the little .32-caliber revolver he carried always; they never tried to interfere with him, anyway.
So equipped, he sallied forth that Saturday evening and drove forward at high speed with Chausson on the machine. It was a particular instant in the history of time, and he was highly conscious, as he always was when on the road, that he was witnessing it at the first and last possible moment. Soon it would be gone. He followed a blue truck under command of an intoxicated person and then a roadside restaurant framed in neon. He was twenty-three years old, by God, and it were as if he had fifteen sensory organs instead of just the ordinary ones. Moon and night, neon, iridescent advertisements, zero obligations, and a working car.