Cynosura
Page 17
He never worked longer than three hours a day. More than that, and he would be contributing more to society than society warranted.
“But don’t you think,” I asked him once, “that you should give back to the world as much as you take out?”
“Sure! That’s why I don’t take out very much.”
He wrote the first part of the next letter the following morning, finishing it that night. That he was insane, he didn’t try to hide it. Nor that in the fullness of time he hoped she might join him in that career. A woman in love will do anything whatsoever, provided the man be unwavering enough.
“Want me to go to hell for your sake? I will.” This is the actual line which, having written, he had to wait three weeks to see if she’d reciprocate.
He traveled that weekend to her parents’ farm and spent most of the day with the cattle and making a needed repair to the barn that every day seemed to be leaning more and more to one side than toward the others. He had no special liking for the cows, a bovine genotype consecrated solely to their own immediate interests and not much else. He did speak kindly to them, however, grateful for their passivity.
He was given a meal by his girlfriend’s people, rural fare including the first cornbread he had tasted in years. They were proud of their two standard daughters, but only somewhat proud of the divinity who composes the main theme of this account.
“We sort of hoped she might find a job,” the mother offered.
“Or get married.”
“She was so good with the livestock, don’t you know.”
He endured it. They had some art on the parlor wall that resonated with him, particularly an equestrian scene of Nathan Forrest in full uniform. They had an old piano that had been used by no one apart from their extinct son, a full-scale imbecile who used to pound on it.
At this time, the nights were growing chill enough for the old man to open the grate and set up the first fire of the season, a coal-fueled affair that started off as a yellow thing before turning white as the flame grew hotter. He was given, the boy, a jar of cider which he consumed quickly and gladly, as did also the others. Each his own jar, of course. Turning silent as evening wore on, the group studied the two score of smoldering coals going through a series of tormented facial expressions.
He insisted on sleeping in his girlfriend’s adolescent bedroom, a favor they were loath to grant. There were some clothing articles in there, together with the faint, far-away scent of the woman herself. He suffered. Proceeding with delicacy, he opened the six drawers, the first one first, and spilled their contents on the bed. The actual contents of those drawers, the closet, and the area beneath the bed were not disclosed to me.
He woke late, but then quickly went to work with the harvester, a used-up machine out of manufacture long before. Even so, he was good at mechanics, decently good, and after hurting himself with the wrench, he went to claim his meed of a cinnamon roll and two cups of sweetened coffee.
“Had a letter,” the farmer said. “Seems like they got her playing in that band over there.”
“Good! What else does she have to say?”
“Addressed to me, that letter.”
“Oh.”
“Got her living in a hotel. I suppose it’s just as well we didn’t go with her.”
“And there’re the animals,” the boy reminded them.
“No, they sure wouldn’t let us take them.”
“No. Anyway, I think I’ve got your harvester up and running again.”
“Don’t have any harvesters.”
“He’s talking about that old thing that got left here.”
Just then and for the second time that day, the rooster began ululating from the western gable, a hopeless effort to communicate all the way to Bucharest.
Sixty-one
On the eighteenth of December, she participated for the first time in a European orchestra of good quality. It wasn’t the Berlin Philharmonic, to be sure, and the conductor wasn’t Karajan, but it was better than hog chitterlings and black-eyed peas for a girl who wasn’t twenty-two years old as yet. She had many friends (males) and many enemies (women) in that assemblage, albeit her friends proved too coy, most of them, to come within arm’s length of the girl.
She played her part passably well, the conductor told her, not too hot and not too cold. She replied in her fashion, telling the man that he had done passably well as well. Would they, or not, ever allocate to her a solo to display her musicality and appearance? A few minutes on a golden harp? Publicity photographs, both in color and black and white? Pictures to make her lover more insane than he was already? An emissary from the King? Of all those possibilities it was only the first one, the one starting off with “would they,” that she considered very likely.
She strolled the town, collecting bits and pieces of that uncanny language from off advertising signs. Dressed in a winter coat and head covering, the city thralls no longer shouted at her. This hurt. She purchased a recording of a performance in which she had participated and mailed it to the boy. If he loved her, loving her truly, he would know which notes were hers. She bought a silver blouse with metal buttons. This was same day she had her first real episode when, at just after eight p.m., she fell unconscious in her hotel room and didn’t come awake till three hours (!) later.
Nearly always, she dined in the hotel’s own restaurant, ordering such slight meals as to have made herself an object of exasperation and affection among the staff. Tuesday, they offered her a sprig of watercress and nothing else. To which on Wednesday she replied with a box of chocolates costing about five American dollars. In her lonely room, she still practiced assiduously, not neglecting the pre-Romantic material she didn’t really much care for. There was no doubt but that Haydn had been a fine man, however. She had a supply of extra strings in case her rivals wished to sabotage her instrument. She invested in a gram of powdered eye shadow of a type previously unknown to her, employing the stuff on her first venture to one of the downtown restaurants. It was so strange—her apparel was entirely respectable, almost conservative really, but the men who saw her were just as upset. Excited by this, she hastened back to her room to write her friend and tease him a little bit.
She was so young and was so much what she was, why couldn’t it go on forever? Because then she’d get bored.
Tuesday came again the following week. She was more or less resigned by now to her situation when in mid-January she was permitted to open the Heldenleben of Richard Strauss. She loved those measures, dedicating them in her mind to her far-away manipulator. She wore a silver blouse with metal buttons, but no one complained.
Wednesday came next, a quiet time during which only the notes she made in her lonely room need be noted here.
After that, more than five weeks went past before the first of March at last came up all bright and clear. She had, during this time, shared in more foreign performances than at any earlier period in her American career. She had received another proposal along with a spate of letters inscribed in Romanian, sometimes Hungarian (if she guessed rightly), and one in Danish. I do not mention the messages from her stateside swain.
How she yearned for him! Her bed was narrow, but not too narrow to hold a boy. She had found another pillow in the closet. And this, that her yearning must go on forever, or anyway till she had turned back to atoms once again. And sometimes she yearned for that as well.
On the other hand, she was alone most of the time, and free to apply herself to herself as opposed to society and the outside world. Already she had read most of the books assigned her by her evil friend, and had even progressed far enough in written Romanian to toil her way through an elementary-grade children’s book with pictures in it. Too lovely for a long life, she strove to fulfill her destiny—exercising, primping, dieting, referring now and again to the sexual literature that her mother had provided at the start of her affair. She brought herself up to date for next year’s chemistry class, using an outline I myself had prepared. Conci
se, clearly written (I believe), the thing continues to be available at nominal cost, plus postage.
Sixty-two
Time to get ready for the end of things. She had been doing her stockings in the all-too-tiny sink and was hanging them up to dry when she grew dizzy of a sudden, staggered, and fell to the hard tile floor. I imagine her there. Don’t know whether she lingered for a time or fled straightway to the non-existence awaiting her ever since she was offered inhuman beauty in return for her brief tenure on Earth. Don’t know if she called out or not. Don’t think it was in her character to do so.
She was found in the late afternoon, whereupon the management at once notified the government office, the conductor, her hometown music school, and her parents, in that order. Almost senile by this date, her father sat for a long time, looking down at the floor. “I guess you have to expect things like this,” he told me later on. “It’s a bad situation all around, when things happen. Seems like there’s always something going on somewhere.”
His wife, a more hysterical sort of person, ran outside and then ran back in, furious with music, the boy, Romania, and the girl herself.
I should stop here but for this last business—information I was able some seventeen months later to squeeze out of that country’s horrid bureaucracy. Something from a friend of mine with a position in the State Department.
The girl waited three days to be cremated in assigned order, when suddenly an American of some sort had emerged from the elevator and, with the help of two hirelings and a large bribe (large by East European standards), had taken the corpse over into his own possession. That’s all I know, sorry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tito Perdue was born in 1938 in Chile, the son of an electrical engineer from Alabama. The family returned to Alabama in 1941, where Tito graduated from the Indian Springs School, a private academy near Birmingham, in 1956. He then attended Antioch College in Ohio for a year, before being expelled for cohabitating with a female student, Judy Clark. In 1957, they were married, and remain so today. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1961, and spent some time working in New York City, an experience which garnered him his life-long hatred of urban life. After holding positions at various university libraries, Tito has devoted himself full-time to writing since 1983.
His first novel, 1991’s Lee, received favorable reviews in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Reader, and The New England Review of Books. Since then, he has published eleven other novels—including The New Austerities (1994), Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture (1994), The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (2004), Fields of Asphodel (2007), The Node (2011), Morning Crafts (2013) Reuben (2014), and the William’s House quartet (2016)—which have been praised in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, The Quarterly Review, The Occidental Observer, and at Counter-Currents/North American New Right.
In 2015, he received the H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature.
Notes
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Think of it as if you were writing a novel. If the first page be good, the rest follows.
Table of Contents
Front Matter
Cover
Half Title
Series page
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Main content
About the Author