He surprised Clara at semester’s end, with a fresh copy. She sat on the foot of her dorm room bed, under the poster of the young Casals, reading and nodding in silence. When she looked up, her wet eyes looked almost timid. Still, she smiled that all-foretelling smile. Well, she said. Bravo. Encore.
Pythagoras, discoverer of harmony’s math, also discovered my bug: Serratia marcescens. It looked like blood seeping out of old food.
Clara’s reward waited for him at the year-end concert. The program was some attempted Cold War rapprochement: Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s Firebird. Els loved it all, even those baggy exotics. Something had happened to his ear, and in that month, everything from Machaut to the “Mickey Mouse Club March” struck him as a masterpiece.
Playing in orchestra felt like sitting in the general assembly. Each section set off on the agenda of its own private timbre, but all combined under one baton into a surprise leviathan. From his perch in the center of the winds, Els glanced to his left, over the lip of his music stand, past the conductor, to see Clara in profile, second chair, her cello nestled in the vee of her long black concert skirt, her white silk blouse tightening against her breasts as the instrument rocked and breathed. She played like a distracted Firebird, her graceful neck pressed against the fingerboard of her instrument, her bow arm tracing out sideways-eight infinities in the air. As the slashing accents set off Kashchei’s infernal dance, Clara glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking. And as if it were scored into the note heads on the staves in front of him, Els saw what dance waited, later that night, when the music ended.
What had they done together, until then? Incandescent things. Crimes against their upbringing that left Els stunned by the cunning of his lust and wracked with holdover Lutheran guilt. But these were the early days of the New Frontier. His own daughter would giggle her way through worse by age sixteen. No self-respecting thirteen-year-old in 2011, keeping public stats on her social network page, would even consider it sex.
After the concert, Els found Clara in the orchestra rehearsal room, putting her cello into its coffin. The Russian music and her bohemian soul left her so flushed she couldn’t talk. The night’s plan was so obvious in their furtive faces that Peter was sure her resident director would detain them both for questioning when they snuck into her dorm to borrow her rich roommate’s Beetle. They had no route. Clara sat abandoned in the car, still in concert clothes, feet up on the dash, open to fate and free of the Earth’s pull. Peter’s hands shook on the wheel. They drove to the quarries outside of town, left the car on a pull-off in front of a dense stand of pines, and walked into the thick dark.
Leaf stuff tripped her up, and Clara had to carry her high heels. Deep in the copse, she staggered into him and whispered, Time to get serious. The tip of her tongue followed the words into his ear canal.
She pulled Els to the ground onto a bed of Scotch pine needles six inches deep. She swept her pleated black concert skirt to her waist and straddled him. Her silk blouse billowed open, and her four feet of hair tented him in a Botticelli skein. She lowered herself with a strange, sharp cry of elated betrayal that he’d try to re-create in various combinations of instruments for the next forty years. She gripped his shoulders and pushed them against the needles, a bare threat: Do we understand each other? He cuffed her neck and made her look at him. He nodded.
As she took him, a bright light pulsed in his temples. It struck him that he was having a stroke, and he didn’t care. Two more flashes, and Els focused. The white turned into a high-beam searchlight, sweeping the woods. On the far edge of the pines, two policemen were peering into the windows of the parked Beetle.
His legs jerked; he tried to push her off. But before he could scramble to his feet and surrender, she pinned him back against the earth. Her eyes were manic, swimming. Her lips moved. Something criminal and pianissimo came out of them. Don’t move.
An officer called, twice, Hello? Els twisted, and Clara fought him down again.
Don’t. Move.
A beam sliced across the nearby grass. Pinned under Clara, Els went slack. His skin heard her body-long pulse. She was shuddering now, her mute mouth open, and it took Els several heartbeats to understand that shudder. Searchlights swept through the black grove. A voice called out again, now farther off. At last the police gave up, retreated to their vehicle, and drove away. Peter and Clara lay as narrow as death, on the floor of a night forest distilled by cold. The whole dark woods were speaking, and nothing said a thing.
Blood trickling out of bread at the siege of Tyre rallied Alexander’s beaten troops to victory.
Eighteen months pass: three short chamber works and two small song cycles. A young man huddles in a phone booth outside the student newspaper office. In his pocket is a wrinkled blue onionskin aerogram that has taken two weeks to reach him. The world has just escaped annihilation by a few beats. Nuclear silos in an aerial reconnaissance photo of an impoverished tropical island: Peter Els has other worries.
The aerogram is covered in a wispy, Elvish script. “Peter, Dear. Please don’t think I’ve turned promiscuous, here in Merrie England, but life seems to have gotten complicated.”
He waits to place the call until well past midnight, when the rates are low. It’s morning on the other side of the planet. No phone at the dorm, and he must come to this public booth with a fistful of coins. Judging by the abandoned campus streets, that nuclear exchange has already come and gone. The air is so bone-crushingly cold that his bare hand sticks to the metal phone faceplate when he takes off his gloves to dial.
She answers mezzo, muffled, and time-lagged, the gap it takes her voice to travel the length of the transatlantic cable. Peter?
He shouts into the receiver, and his own voice echoes back at him in a canon at unison.
From the first phoneme, it’s a terrible mistake. They speak like people playing bughouse chess. He asks for clarification, then elucidations to her clarifications, then glosses on her elucidations. His quarters pour into the slot at a staggering rate and he hears himself say things like, First of all, I’m not shouting. A week’s rent, then two, then three disappear, and still he can’t tell what this blithe woman is saying to him or what he’s supposed to do with a worthless degree in music composition and a minor in chemistry, without the sole audience that matters. He asks her what’s changed and she answers: nothing.
So everything’s finished, then? Dead?
Her silence says that even early death might be luckier than he thinks.
There’s something playing in the background, on her stereo, in her little stone room in a medieval college cloister on the other side of the globe. Mahler. Mahler at breakfast, and although she denies it, he knows she has company. Another set of eager, learner’s ears.
But even now, in this frosted phone booth, under a streetlight that steams in the sublunary cold, melodies occur to him — devices and forms he never could have come up with on his own. His swollen, graying fingers fumble with the aerogram. He wants to scribble out a mnemonic to help him retrieve these sounds, once the concert is over, but he’s too numb to grip a pen.
So it was all a lie, he says. It all means nothing.
The echo turns her voice into a stretto. Peter. This has to happen. It’s something good, for both of us.
So this is it.