by Rafi Zabor
The most dissonant chord troubfing this music asked a question: how could they be this intimate and he still feel that she was drifting away from him, that he had her less and less and was increasingly inaccurate in his sense of who she was and the life she was living. On the other paw, maybe everything was peachy and in accord with nature and his only trouble was an inability to deal with anything ambiguous. Who knew? He didn't know much of anything at all.
In any case, he enjoyed fistening to records more than he had in a long time, and if at first he listened to a wider range of things than usual, before long he had narrowed his focus to the usual gang of idiots in his pantheon:
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Bird, Bach, Ornette, Trane, for the sake of Weltschmerz the first movement of the Mahler Ninth as conducted by Tennstedt, and lots of Shostakovich. The Bear had loved the Russian long before it was hip to do so—nothing like a posthumous book of anticommunist confessions to reinvigorate your reputation in the West; maybe the Bear should try it sometime; my Russian background, how wild I am about the American consumer ethic generally— and now he listened to his favorite pieces, the Sixth and Tenth symphonies, the Seventh Quartet, the Michelangelo Sonnets in the orchestral arrangement with Fischer-Dieskau singing, and especially the two Viohn Concertos: he listened for solace, for the sense of a friend who had travelled through tough times and stayed whole, but also with a certain technical edge to his interest: what caught his ear was the way Shostakovich was able to modulate, often in quirky half-step increments but sometimes unexpectably all over the place, without losing touch with the homing power of a modal root, the soulful unific gravity of a drone. The Bear wanted to take something from that for his own future use, and he listened with special focus to the first crescendo in the Tenth, the passacaglia of the first Violin Concerto—Oistrakh's recording: wonderful how he could pull a viola sonority from his axe when the music asked for that degree of darkness. He listened to the stepwise chord changes in the setting of "Babi Yar" and the colossal orchestral passacaglia from Lady Macbeth ofMtsensk, in which the tonal center roamed from key to key but the unifying modal thrust was never dissipated or lost. There was a way to do this, thought the Bear, and it was less about modulating from mode to mode—anyone could do that—than about constructing melodies that yoked such modulations together and disguised their movements in bits of melodic misdirection without losing touch with tonality and mother earth. He might have to crack the books on enharmonic modulation as a way of expanding what he knew about alternative scalar arcs available to a pedal-point ground, but it would be no use unless it became so second nature to him that he could skim it off the top of the passing moment and make it hop three times before going under. There was a way—Ornette had his own inimitable version, and Trane had offered a choice of pedal-point or changes as early on as "Naima" in '59—of developing harmonic variegation, introducing greater chromaticism, even to the point of atonality, without losing touch with the heart.
If only he still had a heart.
It was still lying doggo when he played the horn, whatever its openness and exertions in concert with Iris.
He played the first movement of the Shostakovich violin concerto in unison with Oistrakh on the saxophone, then pieced the violin part out on the
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piano in order to see the writing set out clearly, left to right on the keys, care-ftil not to scar them with his claws. See? There was a way to do it. If he could improvise melodies that did this kind of work he might escape the harmonic double-bind that even Trane found himself stuck in some nights, when even all the alternate scales he knew couldn't get him off the ground. . . . That's it. Bear. Improve on Trane. Good idea. Ambitions are hke assholes, and they smell like flowers to the owner. I must be delusional. Give it up.
When he parted ways with friend Dmitri and started working the horn more purely back into the specific tortures of jazz, the by-now-familiar horror was still in place: for want of a connection to a sufficient sustaining principle, his technique was multiplying as if by itself, notes pullulating like infusoria by the thousand. Which made a kind of sense: if you can't invent anything on the primary level, your energy deploys on secondary and tertiary planes, where invention's easier but a whole lot less significant: the reign of quantity: notes proliferate, metastasize, add up to death or a string of zeroes.
Playing as he was doing now was a largely revolting experience, but the Bear decided that he had better make use of it, let his technique expand, and if he ever came all the way alive again his future fortunate self might make use of the material he was turning up now. Technique was a good servant but a bad master. WTien a real Idea finally came, if it came, it used all the technique you had developed to make its own way through the stops of your instrument and yourself, but the analytic, enumerative way in which he knew this at the moment was divorced from the ability to put it into practice. He was still living under the aspect of annihilation, in the spaces between the atoms. He wasn't having fun.
But hadn't Trane gotten all analytic too? Yeah, but not by stumbling sideways covered in fiir and stupid. Trane got there by consciously impassioned search, all those scalar phrases aspiring upward to the object of his future love supreme. Trane had been progressing. Trane had been making his way. The Bear was losing his way in the maze.
For the sake of getting the Sensible Shoes record made, he had managed to dodge the agony of conscience he experienced at playing even one false note. Considering that his performance had been all fake self-impersonation, the album wasn't bad. In fact, since he might never play a true note again in his life, the world being such a fallen place and all. Shoes might turn out to be the best he'd ever do.
This was too hard. He turned oft' his head, put down his horn and went back to records. The Sibelius Sixth, speaking of transmogrified church modes, then on to Bach and Bird. I mean, I love to hear Coltrane bash it out, but Charlie Parker is the incarnation of musical genius. Nobody since Bach is
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even close. Of course when I listen to Trane, he's all there is. Genius by definition incomparable. Sure wish I was a genius too. It would make the music thing go so much easier.
He took a break to drink a quart of coffee in the kitchen.
Iris came up the drive in the Volvo not long after. "You're looking pleased with yourself," she told him once she'd caught her breath and put her new books down and her face had stopped flushing.
"Am I? It's only because I'm seeing you. I've been trying to play music all afternoon and it's been like digging ditches. Feel like taking a romp in the woods?"
Iris shook her head no.
"Baby, you don't know what it's like to ride through a forest on the back of a bear."
"There are a lot of things I don't know," Iris told him.
"Okay, how about a spin in bed?" he asked.
"After I've had a shower, perhaps," she said, flashing a smile and arching an eyebrow as she danced lightly out of the room.
Well, the Bear told himself, in this world you have to take what you can get. He packed up his alto, paused for a minute and went off to join Iris in the shower. Like the gentle rain from heaven. A bear could get used to this kind of life.
One night while washing the dinner dishes—rinsing them preparatory to their ride in the dishwasher, anyway—the Bear heard a fluttery commotion at the oblong window inset above the sink. He looked up. A pale green swallowiiailed lima moth with about a four-inch wingspan had entangled itself in a spider's web and was beating itself against the glass: the moth had not so much torn the web to bits as spun it into one thick strand that was fixed to its right wing, but the awful part was that the spider, a large black hinged gothic thing obviously adequate to the task of stinging a luna moth into a trance of death, was advancing arch and sinister along the webstrand to where the moth thrashed and spun like an image, the Bear felt, of all the world's imperilled beauty.
The Bear had always been a Platonist.
He took sides instantaneously and banged on the window, a fixed rectangle of glass that could not be opened, until the spider retreated cragshaped back along its strand. The Bear rushed out of the kitchen through the dining room and out the side door praying that the moth would still be alive when he got there. His progress through shrub and branch was slow and tangled, but when he arrived at the outside of the window, the moth was still spinning on the braid of web and the spider was still intimidated into its crux of windowframe.
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The Bear bent, grasping the moth as deUcately as he could, and two things surprised him: the thick sohdity of the moth's wings as they beat against his paws and the panic, greater than anything the spider had inspired, that seized the moth once he had touched it. Still attached to the braid of web, it pulled free of the Bear's overcareful paw and plummeted spinning to the ground, coming down hard, the web stretched but still attached. It lay on the ground, still as death. The Bear caught his breath, afraid that he had hurt it, but when he bent and cupped it in his paws it started flapping again, full of panic and vigor. "No no no," he said, restrained it in his left paw, careful of damaging its wings or its two white headfeathers, and pulled at the thick-wound web still fixed to the right wing just below the false eyemark. The web held for a moment, then, without damaging the wing or its pale green dust of color, it came away.
The Bear cupped the luna moth for a moment in his paws, surprised by the feel of its thick white grublike body, then let it go. It flew like a pair of young leaves rejoining its source in the trees. Night was falling, but there was still some light in the sky behind the knit of leaf and branch. The Bear watched the moth disappear from the last of the windowlight, and felt that his effort on behalf of threatened beauty was a small but touching thing, a confirmation of real substance, however incompletely animated, in his core. This irresistible emotion, he felt, was only partly fatuous.
He looked up to find the spider huddled inside the cage of its legs in the windowframe. "No blame," he told it, but wasn't sure.
Later that night, in bed with Iris as he embraced and entered her, it was hard not to make the comparison and see Iris' small bright form as the luna moth and his prowling mass as something sinister creeping down to consume the beauty that trembled in the lethal geometry he had spun, making sure to inject it so it would hold still in the lens of his desire and he could have all the time in the world to glut himself on it.
I am become death the destroyer of worlds. Stop me before I kiss again.
This self-critique was, however, a flitting thing that passed quickly across the night of his mind and disappeared into the trees. When it was gone, he gave himself over to the extraordinary pleasures of Iris, loving the length of her torso, the arch of her back, the twin choirs of her ribs as they rose and fell beneath the sheet music of her skin. Although Iris still seemed to him a vision of ultimate beauty which the world was inexplicably allowing him to explore in this extraordinary fashion, he could feel their increasingly secular sense of the event. They were still some distance from merely dialling up sensations on each other's bodies and being dialled back in return, but their very expertise was making their nighttime conjunctions an increasingly worldly thing.
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The moves were better, the sequences more finely worked, the transitions smoother, the views more gratifying . . . and yet. . . what bothered him? Was there a prude Hving in some shuttered room in his head? Did this happen to fully human couples? The Bear had no one to compare himself and Iris with, and he wasn't sure it would have helped him if he had.
But he was capable of miracles of pure tenderness!
He bent to suck the raised bud of her breast, then held her throat Hghtly in his jaws as he thrust into her again. He heard her breath thicken, felt her spine beginning to shake. He loved this. This was purely wonderful. He watched her face contort as it tried to exceed its capacity for self-expression, and her breath came hard as she climbed the invisible ladder. The sight made his own climax begin somewhere below his heels—he held on just long enough for Iris to make it, then finding flesh it cHmbed his body to the summit and waved a bright flag in the wind.
As for the tantric moment—world-engendering, outside time—if that's what it was, where was it now? He was sure the moment had altered their lives. But what were they making of the opportunity?
The Bear felt an immense melancholy, distinct from his general weariness ^v^th being. He had always had a pure belief in love, and he regretted every ambiguity^ that muddied the view. He was not a realist. He was a talking bear.
"Penny for your thoughts?" Iris had asked him. She was lying on her back and he was canted on his side alongside her, looking down. She had not bothered pulling up the sheet. Her body looked freshly radiant, her skin lightly filmed with perspiration, and there were strands of shed fur around her belly button, a perfect innie into which her flesh poured smoothly from all sides.
The Bear began to brush the fur off with a gentle paw. "My thoughts ain't worth that much," he said.
"I don't believe you."
"You know that Hne of Rilke's? Beauty is nothing but the beginning of a terror we are just able to bear?"
"You think it might be a reference to you? That's rich."
"No, I think Rilke was wrong. I think Rilke was a beginner. I think terror's the beginning of another, greater beauty we find even more difficult to bear, because it's so beautiful it means our undoing. Because in the face of such beauty, self-extinction is the only honest or appropriate response."
"That's a twenty-dollar thought at least."
"Yeah, but I wasn't really thinking it now. It's an import." The Bear had been looking off into the dimness of the room, but he lowered his head to look at Iris again. "I think I experience the beginnings of this beauty with you, and that because of you I'm beginning to see it everywhere." Was he
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trying to plead a better moment back into being? Was this some kind of incantation, a prayer, or just another He? He continued regardless. "You've given me back the trees, the streams, the sky. You've given me back the mountains, the smell of grass. You've given me the sweetness of the world. It makes me want to weep."
But it was Iris who seemed to be crying, and not because she'd been moved by his tender emotion or how he had expressed it. Her face was bright but a tear ran from her right eye and her left was filled with tears not yet fallen. "That's fine for you," she said.
"Iris," he said. "What is it?"
"Look at you, you^re happy, you're winning, you get back the sweetness of the world. I'm so tired of being this weak. I want a self."
"But you're perfect."
She shook her head no. "I have no protection."
"I'll protect you."
"I have no protection^'' Iris insisted. "I need a self of my own. I need a self big enough to be in the world in."
"Well," said the Bear, "I'm trying to get rid of a self. If you can figure out how we can make the exchange, you can have mine."
"You mean it?" Iris asked him. It was an odd question if meant seriously, and she was looking at him with what seemed a strange and misplaced ardency.
"Of course I do," he said anyway. "I'd give you my life if I could."
"I don't want your life. You'd give me your self^'' She grasped his upper arm, and when she couldn't get her hand around it she seized a hank of fur and gripped. "You would?"
"Yep," said the Bear, but he thought the question could not be as literally real as Iris' near-hysterical insistence seemed to say it was. He did not want his girlfriend to be nuts. It worried him. "Of course I would," he said anyway, meaning it, "lock, stock, barrel."
"When we make love," Iris said, "I feel added to for awhile, but it's never quite enough and it doesn't last."
"Funny, after we make love I feel emptied, I feel drained."
"From a httle shp of a thing like me?" She was getting her humor back.
"From a little sHp of a thin
g like you."
"I feel filled." She seemed to be reassessing him.
"Well that's what actually happens, isn't it? I empty, you fill." The Bear watched Iris lower her eyes, then raise them again. "I don't mean I feel bad after. I feel terrific, but after awhile I do feel depleted. My bones feel hollowed out and sometimes my brain seems to have emptied."
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"Poor brain." She reached up to scratch the top of his head. She was recovering.
"Only in the short term. In the long stretch, in my feelings, my perceptions, in my life, I can't tell you how enriched I feel."
"Igive you mountains and trees." She worked her fingers behind his right ear and scratched him there.
"\ uff. That feels good. Absolutely. Mountains, trees, the whole shebang. \ uff. Christ that feels good. Scratch harder. Wuff. And don't laugh at my mammal pleasures."
"You do look funny in dog mode," Iris told him.
"I'd make a bad domestic pet. Wuff. Further down. Wuff, that's good. Won't you come out into those trees and mountains with me? D'you think I meant you to ride on my back naked or something? Wuff. Harder."
"Of course not. You are strange sometimes. You think such odd things of me."
"Because I never meant am^ing so atavistic. I'd just Hke to go out there in the wilderness with you and show you around, introduce you to some things I've seen. You wouldn't have to ride me. I mean, we could just go for a w^alk, hand in hand, I mean paw, if you like."