whose literary preferences were
largely unknown to him.
And Peter, who’d written the songs for forever and for no one, but also to strike remorse in the heart of the woman who’d cut him loose from across the Atlantic four years earlier, now wanted only to put his ear up to the clavicle of this other, warmer woman and hear what there was inside her so worth humming about.
Doing anything later? he asked.
Depends, she answered, her mouth full of melted provolone. How much later?
For two weeks they walked everywhere, under the color-shot trees and out into the harvested fields. The last few deciduous flares of October played against clear eggshell skies, and Els’s adopted town had never looked so beautiful. Maddy Corr told him about her favorite harebrained scheme.
Know what would be a total trip? Take a dozen friends up to my family’s fifty acres in Crow Wing County and farm it. It’s sandy as hell, but you could grow cranberries. There’s a cottage, a barn. The chicken coop could be winterized. Farm by day, make music under the oaks at night!
Els shook his head at the miracle of her. You have a dozen friends?
She laughed, thinking he was joking. How about you? Forbidden fantasies, Mr. Composer?
But Els had none, unless it was to have already written Ligeti’s twenty-part, micropolyphonic Requiem before Ligeti did.
Maddy’s eyes crossed a little when he went on too long about harmonic structure. She had no need to talk about music, only to make it. But in her presence, Els couldn’t help himself. He told her about every sketch lying dormant in his workbooks. She laughed and dared him toward her, fingers fluttering underhand. Bring it on, champ. Let’s see what you got.
She showed him her latest art: a quilt bigger than both of them, pinwheels of azure and ochre. She wrinkled up her nose. Learned how to do this from my maiden aunt when I was twelve. Kind of an old lady hobby, isn’t it?
Something magical to it: rags into riches, scraps into art. Els ran his fingers over the intricate design, its moons and suns and stars. Does it mean something?
Maddy snorted and wrapped the thing around him. It means you don’t have to be cold at night, if you don’t want to. That night they slept under it together, and it turned out she was right. Soon after, she began to steal his shirts and work them into her next, more dazzling design.
Nights with Maddy were a slow build. In a few small steps, she taught Peter the cadence of her desire. They moved on her kapok mattress like a single, eight-limbed thing. All the fragments of Els’s desire came together like that effortless fugato Mozart’s Jupiter had predicted, back in childhood. And for the first time in years, Clara’s decision to leave Els for dead felt luckier than anyone could have guessed.
Without meaning to, he told Maddy Corr about a pan pipe dream all his own. They were lying in bed, site of all their best discussions. I want to write music that will change its listeners.
Change how?
Move them beyond their private tastes. Bring them to something outside themselves. He lifted one arm into the air, the wistful reach of a thwarted lover. Does that sound crazy?
She reached up, too, and drew his skyhook hand back down to her chest. Crazy’s up to you.
I’m not sure what that means.
Those hundred thousand peace protesters, trying to levitate the Pentagon?
Okay, Els said. I get it. Crazy.
No! She crushed his fingers in hers until he winced. They could have done it, if they’d really wanted to. Science is built on stranger things.
He rolled over and draped his arms over the fall of her hip. Keep talking, he told her. I’m listening.
Cage again: “What is the purpose of writing music?. . A purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.”
Four weeks on, Els and this humming woman slalom in the dark, late for the evening’s spectacle, searching for a building they can’t find. They have directions, but the hopeless kind of directions midwesterners give: north, south, east, west. Left and right would be too easy. It’s as if the brain of every farmer out here in the endless Cartesian plan of prairie is magnetized. Maddy is a bubble of tantric bliss behind the wheel, forever a sightseer in her own life. She pilots the microbus like a dogsled, and Els won’t live to see twenty-seven.
Her ear always hears him, in every key. She turns to look, takes his elbow, and smiles. The microbus skids sideways down the street, sending an oncoming car to the curb.
You’re worried about being late? For somebody who consults the I Ching to answer journalists’ questions?
I don’t want to miss anything.
A week ago, at a gathering in the student union, Els heard Cage tell a distraught composer, If you want to order creation around, that’s your problem, not mine. Welclass="underline" guilty as charged. Creation is much in need of ordering. That’s what Els thought composing meant. But Cage’s creation has other plans, and Els just wants to understand them.
Three months ago, at the performance of Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano, Els watched the pianist crawl under the instrument and wallop it with a mallet. Someone in the audience began to scream. The widow of a venerable School of Music professor stormed up onstage and started hurling chairs at the soloist. The police arrived and hauled the widow away as she shouted, Ladies and gentlemen, this is no laughing matter! But everyone around Els in the hall just chuckled and applauded, sure that the antics were all part of the piece in question.
There! Els yelps, and points off into the dark, where clumps of people converge on a dappled brick cow palace wrapped in pools of light. The Stock Pavilion. That afternoon, the building was full of sheep being led through a ring in front of a judges’ reviewing stand. Tonight, it’s the venue for Musicircus, a multimedia extravaganza staged by the master of chance, who has, for the last half a year, been leading this land-grant university to hell twelve ways to Sunday.
Maddy coaxes the microbus into a parking spot. The pavilion throbs when they step out, even from half a block away. They make their way to the crowded doorway, where bursts of thunder and light escape the building every time the doors open. A dazed clump of people already bail out of the building, shaking their heads, palming their ears, and discharging some top-shelf profanity.
Inside, it’s something out of Dante. The cavernous oval swarms with people gone feral under the waterfalls of light. Bands, dancers, and actors perform on platforms throughout the space. Down on the show floor, milling past the livestock judging stands, spectators jostle, jockey, flinch, and wince, grinning, wigging, gaping, shrieking, and freaking at the happy havoc. They drift in a giant clockwise whirlpool, like Mecca hajjis circling the Kaaba, around a tower of rubber tubes and lead pipes in the center of the show floor, on which they take turns banging.
Maddy clutches Peter’s arm. He pulls her close, and together they plunge into the bacchanal. Above them, in the steel trusses, floats a corona of balloons ranging from tiny exclamation points to weather gondolas. An old man presses past them, closer than he needs to, smiling at Maddy and Els as if possessing a great secret. A roar goes up nearby. By the time Els steers them to the cause, the roar has floated farther downstream. A thrilled kelpie races around, trying to herd the wayward humans into something like a flock.