We ended our tour out on the patio. Here a few unopened boxes remained.
I said, “I’m surprised you didn’t think of homeschooling Will.”
“These days they call it unschooling. For one, there was just way too much paperwork involved. Lesson plans, certificates in postgraduate pedagogy. And for another, I’m against it. Penelope pushed for a while, using me as some kind of rhetorical point. ‘Look how you turned out,’ she says. I keep telling her that I barely made it out alive. She thinks I’m kidding! You get the control, as a parent, but at the cost of social isolation. It’s a lonely enough business not having siblings. I didn’t want to make it worse by denying him nine-to-five camaraderie or the opportunity to get away from his parents for several hours a day.”
“Camaraderie? From what I remember, it was mostly keeping your head down so you didn’t get the shit beat out of you. When the chips were down, your ‘comrades’ ran the other way. Not that anyone would blame them — or you. And I’m not talking Bed-Stuy here. This was down on Grove Street, in the heart of lovely Greenwich Village!”
“Well, you can tell Penelope all about it.”
Arthur stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out over the rooftops.
I said, “I bought your book.”
“Oh no.” He turned. “Well?”
“I went into the bookstore right after we ran into each other, and it’s been sitting in my bookshelf ever since, wedged between Sartre and Henry Miller.”
“Good company.”
“Other books I haven’t read.”
“It’s a strange experience,” Arthur said, “writing a book. For months you’re inside of it, this piece of mental architecture, and it seems to be very important, the most important thing in the world, in fact — every living thought you have comes filtered through the windows of this place. And then it’s finished, you step outside it, back into the world. It becomes public property. You walk past it occasionally and think, What was so important about this place? Well, maybe you can let me know once you’ve read it.” The spiel sounded disingenuous somehow, as though he had said this very thing before in an interview on NPR.
Okay, I was jealous. It used to be that I was in awe of others’ success; not these days. I was too impatient for it myself. Here’s the truth: I had started reading the book (how could I not?), but put it down almost immediately. It was just too good. The way it drew you in from the first paragraph with a tidal force. Each page layered with everyday objects refracted to appear startling and fresh, each observation a reminder of how much in life went by unobserved. Each sentence a jewel, not a preposition out of place. It wasn’t fair that the guy who was the musical prodigy also got to be the guy who could write this well.
I said, “So what happened to you that night?”
“That night.”
“Of the Spring Concert! One day we’re having a — what seemed to me — purely theoretical discussion about cadenzas, and the next you’ve got your pants around your ankles in front of hundreds of parents!”
Arthur sighed like he was relieved to have someone finally, after fourteen long years, ask him about this. “Well,” he said. He gazed at me for a while as though only now taking in who I was, as though my question had prompted his memory of where he knew me from, and not the other way around.
“I remember feeling just — tremendous afterward, just afterward, even as I could feel people’s shock coming at me. I couldn’t really see anything, you can never see anything up there because of the stage lights, but that sense that something, something big, had just happened, and that I had caused it to happen, was palpable. It was an amazing feeling. But then it occurred to me I didn’t have an exit planned. I may have doubted that I could pull it off, so to speak, so I never visualized an after. I remember the need to solve the immediate problems. I had my own feces all over me, and I had to find a place to wash up. I pulled up my pants and just traced my way back down the aisle between the first and second violins, the way I’d come. I went back to the dressing room, used the little water closet there to clean up as best I could. And then I went about the ordinary business of putting my violin away. I took my time, loosened the bow, secured it in place inside the case’s lid, used my cloth to wipe the rosin from under the bridge, and set my violin inside, closed it up, snapped the latches, and when I looked up there was what’s his name.” Arthur pauses, frowning. “Odd. What was his name?”
“The conductor?”
“He was out of breath, forming any number of questions on his lips, none of them coming, and I could hear the slow stampede of the orchestra breaking up, making its way backstage. He finally asked the exact question you just asked: What happened to you? I could tell he was at a loss for how to handle me. His usual method of insults and browbeating didn’t seem quite appropriate here because perhaps he wasn’t sure whether I was entirely sane. Had I had some kind of episode? A mental break? He just sort of stood there — I don’t know if he was really expecting me to answer but seemed braced for me to do some other savage and unfathomable thing. I said, ‘I wasn’t thinking. I was doing.’ Which really must have meant something to me then because saying it felt so true, a paired act to what I had just done onstage. I would recall my saying those words to him afterward and feel, yes — I had just explained something essential about an essential and courageous act. And then, after a while, I would recall the words, recall that I had once felt a certain way, recall that they were meant to explain something, but could no longer remember what. It’s like what I was saying just now about the book. Time sets you apart from your work, your utterance, separates you from it. Some metaphor about birth would be appropriate here. Umbilical cords, et cetera.”
“But what did you do then? After that night you disappeared. What happened to you?”
Arthur tugged at his tie to loosen it and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt. He sat down on a stack of boxes that sagged under his weight. “I lost my scholarship. My violin teacher dropped me from his studio. I wasn’t officially expelled but might as well have been. There was no way I could have paid the full tuition, and even if I could have, after that who’d have taken me?”
I shook my head. “Why did you do it? Arthur, you lost everything. And for what?”
“I could say I did it because I wanted to do something that would be unforgettable to an audience. But then you would point out that any number of acts perpetrated on a stage might be unforgettable, though they — like the one I did perform — would none of them be music, and we’d have circled back to where we began, lo those many years ago: what is music, what is its purpose.”
A nonanswer. Intellectualizing away an act that was so self-destructive, so against our basic nature as social beings. If my cousin’s kids were any indication, pooping becomes a private activity fairly early on, its smells and noises associated with shame — by five or six the very muscles and nerve impulses required will refuse to cooperate if others are watching. So why could Arthur? Why did Arthur? These questions were not answered by his ontological ruminations.
I was going to press further, but Arthur’s attention became diverted — I followed his line of sight back into the apartment. His wife had suddenly appeared and was setting a heavy bag of groceries down on the dining room table as his son, toting a bright orange gun, stalked the room shouting silently. From out here there were only the sounds of air conditioners and traffic. Arthur said, “Shall we continue this inside?”