“This is his last time conducting,” Cosima said.
“So I read and so Trevor told me. Robert Craft is conducting the first half of the concert.”
“Who’s Robert Craft?” Trevor asked.
Cosima shrugged — a large, theatrical shrug. Often that’s how she dealt with Trevor.
“He’s sort of a Stravinsky person,” I said. “He writes a lot about him; and he did a wonderful recording of Anton Webern’s complete works — about five or six years back.”
“Who’s Webern?” Trevor asked.
Cosima laughed. “Have you ever heard him conduct before? Stravinsky, I mean?”
“Yes,” I said. “Once, one summer when I was about fourteen — back in the States. It was at a place called Tanglewood. There’s a big tent there, and the orchestra plays under it. They did two programs that afternoon. Carl Orff had written some new music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream — to replace the old Mendelssohn stuff everybody knows, I guess. They did the whole play. And a comedian I used to see on television a lot named Red Buttons played Puck — even though he was getting pretty old. The orchestra did the music, which was all in unison, with lots of gongs and drums. Then they took the whole stage down. A chorus came out. And Stravinsky conducted the premiere of a piece he’d just written, Cantium Sanctum. It was very atonal. The audience wasn’t very appreciative; when people left the music tent, there was a lot of snickering. But I liked it more than the Orff.” I stood on tip-toe because some of the paying audience just entering — about twelve feet in front of us — hadn’t sat yet. “Tonight Craft is going to conduct The Firebird. Then Stravinsky’s going to do The Rite of Spring. It’s an awfully conservative performance for him to go out on. But…” I shrugged. I’d read the whole concert program two days ago. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t wanted to tell Trevor.
“Mmm,” Cosima said.
Trevor said: “You’re going to be leaving in a couple of days. I bet, after you’ve gone, that English fellow, John, would let me stay up at DeLys’s — if I went there and asked him. Nicely, I mean. He’s supposed to like boys. And, after all, DeLys is my friend, too.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d stay away from him if I were you, Trevor. What are you going to do if he gets after your bum?”
“I’d beat the shit out of him, if he tried anything!” Trevor pulled himself up, to turn from the fence.
“But why would you go up there if you didn’t want him to try?” I asked. “Besides, people will think you wanted him to try. If you went up there, knowing the sort of fellow he is, if something happened, no one would ever believe you hadn’t egged him on to it. I certainly wouldn’t believe it.”
A couple of times, when we’d hitched to Istanbul together, Jerry’s fear of John and anything else queer (except me) had annoyed me — like the afternoon he’d flatly refused to go up to see John for tea in Turkey. But Trevor’s “I’ll beat you to a pulp if you touch me, but aren’t you supposed to like me anyway because I’m cute?” (and often with a “Can you spare a hundred drachma while you’re at it?”), and all with perfect Dartington manners when he chose to drag them out, actually made me mad. John had had a tough enough time; I wanted to keep Trevor out of his hair.
I waited for Trevor to say something back. But my own position as a self-confessed queer, married, and with an occasional girlfriend, made Trevor, if not most of my friends, not know what to say to me at all. I liked that.
Cosima said, “Oh! They’re starting…!”
Applause swelled as, in his black tails, Craft walked out across the platform in front of the orchestra.
The Firebird, The Rite of Spring — they’re pieces you’ve heard so many times you’d think they couldn’t be interesting anymore. But precisely that music, when it’s done well, is so embarrassingly moving. The Athenians certainly applauded enough.
Listening, however, I remembered when Trevor had gotten a recording of the Ninth Symphony. (Jerry hadn’t yet gone back to Kentucky.) Above the orchestral photograph, the Deutsche Grammophon label was brutal yellow. Cardboard on European albums is thinner than on American albums. And Trevor had held this one in both hands, in front of his jeans. Both the knees were torn. The sun made his hair look like some white plastic fiber pushed back from his soap-white forehead, reddened here and there by a pimple. I stood a step below him on Mnisicleou Street, while he said: “The Swiss Bitch told me all of us could come up to her place tonight and hear it. I hope you and Heidi can make it.”
“All of us” turned out to be: my recent roommates, John (who was from London) and Ron (who was from New Jersey); and [English] John (the Cockney electrical engineer); and Heidi (we’d locked Pharaoh in her room, but he barked enough while we were going down the stairs that, in her wire-rimmed glasses and green apron, Kyria Kokinou came out and started arguing that the dog was not healthy for the children in the apartment upstairs — which, finally, we just had to walk away from; with Kyria Kokinou, sometimes you had to do that); and the tall redheaded English woman (who had been first Ron’s, then John’s, girlfriend); and DeLys (who was from New Orleans and whose gold hair was as striking, in its way, as Trevor’s); and Gay (the American woman who played Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen songs at the ’O kai ’E); and Jane (Gay’s tense, unhappy, mid-Western traveling companion); and Jerry (who, with his slightly stooped shoulders, was about twice as tall as anyone else, and had huge hands and feet like some German Shepherd puppy); and sports-jacketed law-student Costas (DeLys’s landlord, who kept laughing and saying, “Well, we’ll squeeze… I’m sure we can think of something… there’s always a way, now…”); and me.
“Oh, my God…!” Cosima said, at the head of the stairs. “I don’t think we’ll all fit…?”
In a kind of attic tower, Cosima’s single room had a desk and a bed in it, with a couple of travel posters on the walls — one from Israel, one from North Africa. It wasn’t any larger, though, than the chicken-coop arrangement I’d left on the roof of Voltetsiou Street; or, indeed, than Heidi’s at Kyria Kokinou’s, which I’d left it for (though Heidi’s room had a shower). I wondered what Trevor had been thinking when he’d invited us. The phonograph was one someone’s ten-year-old sister might have gotten for her birthday: a square box with a pink cover that swung up from a yellow base with dirty corners, on which the table turned.
“I’m going to put it out here in the hall,” Cosima said, “so as many people can hear as possible.”
We sat on the steps, most of us. DeLys, [English] John, and Heidi rested their heads against the gray, unpainted wall-boards. In his black sneakers and white jeans, all scrunched up on the step above Jane, Jerry took his pink-framed glasses off to listen, his eyes closed, his head to the side. (Probably he was taller than the tall sailor.) At the bottom, hands in his jacket pockets, Costas lounged against the newel. The orange light from Cosima’s open door fell down among us. A window high in the stairwell wall showed a few raindrops outside on the little panes.
We were very quiet.
Cosima started the record.
The opening intervals of the Ninth dropped through the stairwell — from the scratchy speaker. Where I sat, the step above digging into my hip, my back pressed against the wall, I had one hand on Heidi’s knee; she put one hand on mine.
After the first movement, while Cosima turned the record over, DeLys started coughing. Costas pulled out a handkerchief and handed it up to her — but she waved it away.