“Why’d you say, ‘Not at all,’ when the man said, ‘Nice to see you’?” his older daughter says, and he says, “Did I? I’m sure he knows I meant, Yes, it has been — you know: ‘Thank you very much…. Not at all,’ meaning — well, ‘You don’t have to thank me,’” and she says, “That’s different; then you’re answering him. I’m sure he felt insulted, that you were saying it wasn’t at all nice to meet him,” and he says, “And I’m sure he didn’t feel that and that he didn’t even hear my response to his ‘So nice to see you, sir.’ He’s probably now telling his wife, ‘I can’t believe it. For the second summer in a row I thought that man — you see him standing there with the girl, waiting for his order to be called? — was Fritz Sepulska. You remember, the pianist who has a summer home around here or, for all I know, now lives here full time. Fritz looks just like him, or did till a few years ago, when I last saw him. The resemblance is remarkable: same hairline, long face, the nose, height, slender build, narrow eyes. You’d think he’d be mistaken daily by people who know Fritz up here — he’s very well known, particularly because of all the musicians around — and that if Fritz ever saw him he’d think he was seeing his long-lost never-known twin brother, or his brother a couple of years younger than him. But this guy says he’s thirty years younger, or at least twenty-five. He can’t be. Maybe he doesn’t take care of himself and Fritz does; I know Fritz used to work out rigorously and was pretty much a teetotaler. And somehow because of that — well, other than for disease and drugs, nothing ruins you faster than heavy drinking, right? — and though there might be a vast age difference, they’re physical look-alikes. Now you can see him; he’s picking up his order. But actually, with a child that age … no, she’s probably his granddaughter, not his own kid. In fact, maybe it is Fritz and he doesn’t want to talk to me for some reason, or to anyone. But he said I made the same mistake last year, and I remember it, though not as well as he; he says it was in the market in town. But he could still be Fritz, and last year when he told me that it was also because he didn’t want to speak to me or anyone. I haven’t heard anything about this, but maybe Fritz has become a recluse of sorts, or simply gone nuts or lost his memory through some disease, so he doesn’t even remember who he is. But then why wouldn’t the girl have said something? “Excuse me, sir, but Grandpa Fritz has had some trouble the last few years….” Anyway, if he isn’t Fritz — and really, he can’t be; Fritz would have to be seventy-five by now, possibly eighty; he’s been retired from teaching for ten to fifteen years, if my memory’s right — then what do you think this man does, something in music or a related field? Certainly not a violist or violinist — no permanent abrasion under his chin from years of pressure of the instrument’s body. He has the slumped posture and slight pot of a pianist, and I didn’t look at his fingers and hands, but they could be as long and strong as a pianist’s too. He also has the face of a musician — the unhealthy complexion and head lost in sounds. And, like most of us, not a very deep intellectual look, since I have to admit we don’t read much but music scores and occasional escapist literature when we have the time, or have much interest in any other art or interpretive form or theory or even news but music. In other words, we’re typically not big thinkers. We feel and express — that’s us — and without that and the hours of practice we have to put in a day, what would we be? I bet that he’s a high school music teacher who was trained as a serious pianist for a number of years but loves jazz and hated practice and rehearsals and in college where he got his education degree to teach music he played in an extemporaneous ragtime band and might even have been a disc jockey on the college radio station. And that those two kids — you see the second one who just joined him? Even younger than the first — are from a second marriage. And that he also has two from his first marriage, but they’re grown up and maybe in college or past it and are interested in becoming, just as these two will be, anything but musicians or music teachers because of their father’s meager income and displeasure with the profession. And his wife, the present one. Well, I don’t know what she does; usually they’re opera singers or musicians, or have been trained to be, or music teachers too. But for some reason I think she’s very much like the first — in looks, build, hair color, and the way the hair’s combed — and that both of them resemble his mother. But I see her reading a lot of serious books — women musicians are different that way from men — that she checks out of the library in town, every so often firing a piece she’s made in some pottery class and cooking gourmet meals from recipes she’s cut out of the
New York Times. What he must be thinking of me, though? “Is that guy clear out of his head? Does he forget notes and whole musical passages when he plays as much as he forgets faces and potentially embarrassing mistakes from year to year?” Well, I can tell him I didn’t forget his face; that I actually remembered it but put the wrong name to it, not that if he told me his a dozen times I’d remember it. I’m saying, I bump into him by mistake once a summer, so why should I be expected to remember his name or not to mix it up with someone else’s every now and then? While he must see my name and photo in the program notes if he goes to the Hall’s concerts, and I’m almost certain he does: a Sunday-goer with the wife — kids left with friends — rather than the Friday night concerts, since they don’t want to leave their children with friends too late or at home alone. Or he’s saying, “You see that gentleman over there?” Saying this now to his kids. “He’s one of the two violists for the Hall’s artist-faculty concerts and also a viola teacher of young student artists who come up to the Hall’s chamber music school for seven weeks. He’s pretty much a hotshot in his field, having helped found the Razumovsky Quartet, which was one of the best in America for many years. And from what I read in the local newspaper last year and in the area’s arts free weekly just last week, he’s made a couple of recordings and been a soloist over the last thirty years with some of the leading orchestras and chamber ensembles in this country and abroad, as well as being the principal violist for the Metropolitan Opera. Now why he thinks I’m Fritz Sepulska is a mystery to me. But you kids like to read mysteries — Nancy Drew and such — so maybe you can solve this one for me. Because do I look so old? Sepulska’s got to be approaching eighty. So let’s say this violist’s eyesight isn’t too good … so because of that we’ll add ten years to the Fritz he sees. In other words, and not to get too confusing, though he thinks of me as eighty, he sees me as seventy but feels that’s what a healthy eighty-year-old man looks like … but do I look that? Even sixty? I thought I looked pretty good for my age — fifty, maybe; possibly forty-five. I haven’t lost all my hair and my jaw hasn’t begun to slack, and my neck, in only the last year, I think, is beginning to get wrinkled and also a little hollow in front the way the necks of most older people do. And that pot that people past fifty-five seem to have no matter how thin they are and how much they purge themselves and exercise — well, that’s starting to show despite every countermeasure I take, including sucking in my stomach while holding my breath. And the gray, if not even the white hair in places, like the sideburns and on my chest; and those webbed feet, I think they’re called, off the ends of my eyes, and that deep quarter-moon gash running around both sides of my mouth … you know,” and, as would seem with this guy, because of the inarticulate way he spoke to me, he shows with his fingers what he means, since he doesn’t have the words to explain it. “But my posture’s pretty good — sturdy, straight, I’m not bent over at all — and my ankles are still strong and not turned in and my legs don’t wobble and shake. And my arms because of the stretch band and ten-pound dumbbells I work out with are as solid if not solider than they were when I was twenty or thirty and never exercised. How old do you two think I look? Be honest,” and his younger daughter says, “When will they be ready with our order?” and he says, “Everything’s freshly made here, though maybe a little preprepared, so if it had come out in a minute or two I’d have wondered how far in advance the dishes had been cooked,” and the older one says, “Shouldn’t we have ordered the large portion of potato skins? It’s only fifty cents more and you get twice as many pieces,” and he says, “Listen, last time we did, you left half of it here,” and she says, “We had what was left wrapped and took it home with us,” and he says, “And threw it out several days later. This time, you finish the small order, you can get another small order, and the second one will come out hot like the first one, just the way you like it, and with a new container of sour cream. But my biceps,” he says to them, “my forearms and arms — I mean, they’re not, they couldn’t be — the arms of a seventy-five- to eighty-year-old man. No man that age could have arms as solid and thick as mine, and if he did — well, it’d be highly unusual. And I just don’t see a musician — and a pianist, no less, who has to take such delicate care of his hands and arms, and one still playing as I’m sure Sepulska does. Those guys never stop practicing and performing, with some of them in their nineties, and one of them — Mishaslavski or something — a hundred, but still banging away onstage when they’re long past remembering their own names, even, or at least the names of their children. Anyway, I don’t see any musician my age, except maybe a bass player or tympanist, and both of them mostly from dragging their instruments around, having the arms I do,” and his younger daughter says, “Show us your arm muscles. You always say you will someday but never do,” and he says, “It’s too silly. I did it as a young boy and later as a joke to girlfriends, but I couldn’t do it anymore and for sure not here,” and she says, “You can say we’re now your girlfriends. Just show them once and we’ll never ask again, agreed?” she says to her sister, and the older girl says, “Okay, agreed,” and he says, “When we’re in the car maybe, or sitting down here, if no one’s around or looking, and very quickly,” and the younger girl says, “Good,”’” when a woman in the enclosed stand where they take the orders and make the food yells over the loudspeaker, “Ninety-two!” and Gould says, “That’s us, or maybe she’s saying how old she thinks I am … anyone want to bet?” and Fanny says, “Don’t be funny, Daddy,” and goes to the pickup window in the stand, their tray’s waiting, and she carries it to a picnic table — the man’s at the next table and looks at them and smiles and turns back to his wife — and Gould says to his daughters, “Ready?” and Josephine says, “Ready what?” and he says, “The muscle thing,” and Fanny says, “But people are around, and that man who called you Fritz is looking,” and he says, “Shh, don’t rub it in by repeating it so he hears; I don’t want him thinking something’s wrong with his memory — older people get very sensitive about that, think maybe their mind’s going or something,” and raises his arms and flexes his biceps, and Fanny touches one and Josephine the other, and Fanny says, “Oh, they’re big, like the poster I saw of a big hockey star without his shirt,” and Josephine says, “Where’d you see that, in one of your teen magazines?” and he glances at the next table, and the man and his wife are looking at him and the man shakes his head, not disapprovingly, really no expression whatsoever that says anything, and looks away, and the woman nods while she smiles and seems to mouth something to him like, “Very pretty girls.”