I chose my host organism for the most naïve reason: it had a colorful history. That color was red.
Of love’s Pangaea, no more than a few scattered islands remained above water. And of Clara Reston, who listened to eight-hundred-year-old conductus as if it were a news flash, he remembered little that couldn’t fit into a five-minute student song. But she had turned Els into a pilgrim listener. Before Clara, no piece had any real power to hurt him. After, he heard danger everywhere.
The composers Els returned to at seventy — Pérotin, Bach, Mahler, Berg, Bartók, Messiaen, Shostakovich, Britten — were the ones that Clara taught him to love at nineteen. But along the way from exposition to coda, he’d betrayed them all. There were years in youth when all Els wanted was to write a piece so perfect it would cripple Clara with remorse. In middle age, he’d wanted only to give her back something, for all she’d given him.
He never thought it strange that she had no friends. She’d jumped out early and alone into adulthood, long before he himself glimpsed their coming eviction from adolescence. He wondered sometimes if her life hid some spooky domestic secret that left her so precocious. She had life’s concert and all its program notes memorized, long before the performance started. Peter! You’ll love this one.
She applied to college in Indiana, to study cello with Starker in America’s best string program. Without a second thought, young Peter followed her. He didn’t even have a fallback school. His stepfather wouldn’t pay for him to major in music; Soviet science threatened the country’s very existence, and as Ronnie Halverson saw it, any able-minded eighteen-year-old had a duty to join the counteroffensive. And so, deep in the late fifties Midwest, Els set off after a bachelor of science. Better things for better living through chemistry.
Freshman year exhilarated him. He sat in the auditorium alongside four hundred other chemistry students while the lecturer scribbled down blackboards full of spirit writing from the world inside this one. The labs — titrating, precipitating, isolating — were like learning to play a wayward but splendid new instrument. Matter was thick with infolded mysteries waiting to be discovered. Coming from the lab, stinking of camphor, fish, malt, mint, musk, sperm, sweat, and urine, Els smelled the heady scent of his own future.
He still studied clarinet. In his second semester, he bested a dozen performance majors for a chair in the top undergraduate orchestra. The other woodwinds refused to believe he was wasting himself on test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks. Clara just shrugged at his perversity. She glanced at him sometimes from across the orchestra, at her stand in the cellos, her patient smile waiting for him to discover what she already knew.
To Els, music and chemistry were each other’s long-lost twins: mixtures and modulations, spectral harmonies and harmonic spectroscopy. The structures of long polymers reminded him of intricate Webern variations. The outlandish probability fields of atomic orbitals — barbells, donuts, spheres — felt like the units of an avant-garde notation. The formulas of physical chemistry struck him as intricate and divine compositions.
Alongside courses in structure and analysis, he sneaked in an elective in music composition. Harmonizing chorales and realizing figured bass felt a bit like algebra. He wrote minuets in the style of Haydn and imitation Bach da capo arias. For Clara’s twentieth, he scored “Happy Birthday” à la late Beethoven. For New Year’s Eve 1961, he gave her his most elaborate trinket yet: a Brahms intermezzo treatment of “How About You?” Clara read through the gift, shaking her head and laughing at a thing so obvious to everyone but its maker.
Oh, Peter. For a bright boy, you’re so clueless. Come on. Let’s play through it.
He tried to explain the plan to Clara. He could graduate with a guaranteed bench job in industry while still making all the music body and soul needed. But she looked away with her maddening sextant look, out to the horizon and over the curve of the Earth, at a future that she could see and he could not.
They spent their every spare minute together. Clara got them reviewing music for the Daily Student. Under the anagram byline Entresols, they championed dozens of new recordings as if they were Adam and Eve naming the animals. Their friends — those who didn’t throw up their hands in disgust at that breakaway state of two — called them the Zygote. While the best and brightest headed for civil rights sit-ins, Peter and Clara camped out in the music library listening room, following along in the score of Strauss’s Four Last Songs while Schwarzkopf sang “Im Abendrot”: We’ve gone through need and sorrow, hand in hand. .
Clara ran point in their discoveries, reconnoitering. She brought Els prizes for dinner: crazy Gesualdo madrigals or brilliant horn passages from late nineteenth century tone poems. And even as Peter scrambled to master her expanding repertoire, Clara blew on ahead of him and found more.
They sang up close, right into each other’s mouths, bending pitches into near-miss dissonance. The grate of those beats sawed straight into their brains. They had not yet seen each other naked. But that shared resonance in the plates of their skulls was as intimate as any sex.
Clara knew her destiny and never wavered. She studied with the demanding Starker, and although the man made her weep almost every week, he led her to tricks of the mind and the wrist that left her playing like an angel.
Music alone, for Clara, had the power to peel away the lie of daily life. She wasn’t sure who Adenauer was, and she didn’t understand why Glenn deserved a ticker tape parade. But a few measures of the Grosse Fuge held more raw truth than a month’s worth of headlines. The force of her pitch-driven Platonism gave her a power over Peter. He had hunches; she had convictions. It was never much of a contest. She had only to smile at his churchgoing, and from one Sunday to the next, he quit his family’s faith. With little more than a cocked eyebrow, she got him to grow out his flattop and trade in his button-downs for pullovers. And on a late March night near the end of his sophomore year, she took the war for his soul into the heart of the enemy camp.
She asked him to meet her after dark on the bank of the Jordan River. He arrived after a miserable three-hour failed struggle to identify an unknown in his Advanced Organics lab. She lay back on the damp, grassy rise, forever staining the back of her blue pencil skirt. He stretched out with his head in her lap, wrecked. They want me dead.
Her face curdled at the chemical reek of him. She combed back his hair with two fingers. Who does?
All of them. The alkenes, the alkynes, the paraffins. .
Peter? She leaned down over him, and her silver lyre necklace charm grazed his cheek. She tugged on the hint of sideburn she’d gotten him to grow out. Who told you that you were a chemist?
Well, I’m not half bad at it, you know. Tonight’s disaster excepted.
And you’re ready to spend your whole life doing it?
He pressed his fingertips into the cold soil. The idea of spending a whole life doing anything filled him with something between wonder and panic.
Are you trying to please your father?
He rolled away, up onto one elbow. You mean my stepfather? My father’s dead.
I am aware. And you’re aware that no one can satisfy a ghost?
I’m not trying to please anyone. I’m learning chemistry. It’s not a bad way to make a living.