paragraph—one of a thousand foolish, useful habits Madolyn had taught him. His wife was still so present in his habits that he couldn’t believe they’d been apart now for four times longer than they’d been together.
Els lay on his back in the enormous bed, trying to conjure up Maddy’s face. Her features had become one of those cheerful études from another century whose melodies he could remember only by spelling out the intervals.
He took up the open book, and once again, for another night, he trained his mind to settle in and read. It took some time to build up a rhythm. The sense of concentrated elsewhere filled him with that primal pleasure: seeing through another’s eyes. But after some paragraphs, a clause swerved and slid him sideways into a drift, a soft passage several pages on, in the middle of the right-hand page, a sense-rich description of a man and woman walking down a street in Boston on a July night, reprised, in misty da capo, again and yet once more, his eyes making their closed circuit, hitting the right margin’s guardrail, looping back around and trying the line again, tracking along the circuit of text, slowing then slipping down the stripped cogway of slick subordinate clauses, retrying the sequence until his dimming sight again found traction—the man, the woman, a moment of regretful truth along the esplanade—before snagging and starting the fuzzy looping climb all over again.
At last, after who knows how many round trips, he jerked awake. And the words on the page, before Els’s now-focused but disbelieving eyes, marshaled like troops on a parade ground and solidified, only to reveal no man, no woman, no night, no Boston, no exchange of intimate insight, but merely a Bulgarian writer describing the secret will of crowds.
He put down the book, shut off the light, and settled his head deeper into the pillow. As soon as the room went dark, he came wide awake. The floorboards snapped and blasted like an exchange of gunfire, and the furnace shuddered like a great engine of war.
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
Els lay on his back in the enormous bed, trying to conjure up Maddy’s face. Her features had become one of those cheerful études from another century whose melodies he could remember only by spelling out the intervals.
He took up the open book, and once again, for another night, he trained his mind to settle in and read. It took some time to build up a rhythm. The sense of concentrated elsewhere filled him with that primal pleasure: seeing through another’s eyes. But after some paragraphs, a clause swerved and slid him sideways into a drift, a soft passage several pages on, in the middle of the right-hand page, a sense-rich description of a man and woman walking down a street in Boston on a July night, reprised, in misty da capo, again and yet once more, his eyes making their closed circuit, hitting the right margin’s guardrail, looping back around and trying the line again, tracking along the circuit of text, slowing then slipping down the stripped cogway of slick subordinate clauses, retrying the sequence until his dimming sight again found traction—the man, the woman, a moment of regretful truth along the esplanade—before snagging and starting the fuzzy looping climb all over again.
At last, after who knows how many round trips, he jerked awake. And the words on the page, before Els’s now-focused but disbelieving eyes, marshaled like troops on a parade ground and solidified, only to reveal no man, no woman, no night, no Boston, no exchange of intimate insight, but merely a Bulgarian writer describing the secret will of crowds.
He put down the book, shut off the light, and settled his head deeper into the pillow. As soon as the room went dark, he came wide awake. The floorboards snapped and blasted like an exchange of gunfire, and the furnace shuddered like a great engine of war.
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
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