Last Notes

by Tamas Dobozy

  “You’re a pro,” he said, shaking his head. “A total pro. The two of us could make buckets of money.” And here he outlined his plan, beginning with the sort of clients who came to him: people all haggard and twitchy, obviously beset by unwanted company, and looking for some way out of the friendship short of violence. “You’ve been out of practice lately, but I don’t think it would take you long to regain your winning form,” he said. “I mean look at your record. For years you treated your best friends like shit. Years. They liked you so much they were willing to put up with being snubbed over and over and over again! You’ve got something special, son. People are attracted to you. They form attachments.”

  He continued: “You know what I think it is? I think it’s because you’re weak. Because you never stand up for yourself. Never come back and actually confront them on how they’ve hurt you. It’s easier to just stop seeing them. And that makes you perfect.”

  I couldn’t help but nod here. He was right: I was a weak person, unable to withstand honesty, and unable to force a confrontation. I’d tried to change this, to fight back, but Bolez—being, as Lucinda said, quicker and sharper—always got the better of me. Alternatively, I’d tried to just follow my natural tendency to give without receiving, to support them without being supported in turn, but it was too hard. There was still the nagging voice of pride telling me I was being taken advantage of. I was, as he said, perfect.

  His plan was to bring me in on the ground floor, as a full partner. He would meet the clients, figure out their needs, and then he’d come to me. My job was to go over to the client’s place, meet the friend they wanted to get rid of, work hard at winning his or her affections, and then, once the unwanted friend was fully hooked, once they’d stopped being friends with the client in order to be friends with me, I would turn on them quite suddenly, becoming cold and distant, and ultimately cutting them free as only I knew how. For this, we could charge upwards of fifty dollars an hour, plus GST and PST, and could probably write off most of our expenses as tax-deductible overhead. It was, the man who’d come out of the corner of my eye said, “a win-win proposition.”

  I took another gulp of air. “Let me ask you a question,” I said; and when he nodded, I continued, “Are you on drugs?”

  “I was, but I found Jesus.”

  “Okay. Get the hell out of here.” But as I turned to stare at him, forcing him to disappear under the directness of my gaze, I caught a last glimmer in his eye, a cold and ruthless attachment, so intense it made me feel as if he’d crawled right into my body and taken up residence. It was such a creepy feeling I never wanted to look at him again.

  Which meant, of course, that before I knew it he was back.

  As early as the next morning he was there, sitting on the edge of my bathtub as I brushed my teeth and stared out the window, his legs, encased in a sharply pressed pair of pin-striped trousers, dangling over the rim. “You know what I’ve decided? I’ve decided that if I’m going to go off drugs, then I’m going to go off all drugs. The doctor’s prescribed me these antidepressants. He says they stop the obsessive-compulsive cycle that brings me back to narcotics. But, I mean, what’s the difference? Coke. Antidepressants. They’re both chemicals in my brain. They’re both drugs. If I’m going to go clean, then I should go totally clean, don’t you think?”

  “There’s a difference between narcotics and medication,” I said. “Maybe it would be good for you to try a different drug for a while, you know?”

  “I don’t see the difference,” he said. “It’s all chemicals.”

  “Well, maybe you shouldn’t make generalizations. Every drug is different.”

  He stopped swinging his legs and sat up straight on the edge of the bathtub. “Jeff, I know I’ve failed you.”

  “No you haven’t.” I stopped brushing my teeth. What was he talking about?

  “No, I’ve failed you. So here’s what I propose. I’m going to stay sober for one whole year as a way of proving my friendship to you. Until such time as I’ve proven to you that I am clean we will have no contact….”

  That was it. Something came over me then, and instead of going for my usual diplomacy, I snapped, “Hey, don’t draw me into this twisted thing.”

  “But…”

  “I am not part of your addiction. You understand? I will not be your substitute fixation.” “You don’t understand.”

  “Oh, I understand.”

  “You’re no friend of mine, Jeff.”

  “No?”

  “No, you’re not. You’re not worth being sober for.”

  When I got downstairs to the kitchen I found him standing there with a spatula in his hand and a fresh carnation in his lapel. Breakfast was on the table, already prepared. He wished me bon appétit, and then asked whether I’d given any more thought to his proposition. I told him no, not really, but my voice was less assured than it had been the day before, and reluctantly I took a bite, but only one, out of the best scrambled eggs I’ve had since Lucinda left.

  I saw him the rest of that day. He was up in the west balconies at the recital hall, dangling his feet over the edge of the railing and riffling through his wallet. He was in the restaurant, sitting with an older woman who had had a very bad facelift, both of them sending the waiter back to the kitchen time and again with their meals, and finally turning to me (they’d chosen a table right beside the one my agent and I were seated at), saying “I can’t believe you eat in this place.” I tried to ignore him. “He eats in this place because you like to eat in this place,” he said to my agent, Ed Morton, who, at first, seemed not to be aware of him. But when he started saying things to him like, “Don’t you find Jeff just a little too accommodating? He’d shine your car for you if you got him just one night at the Met,” Ed found it impossible not to pay attention. I didn’t get it. Wasn’t this guy just a figment of my conscience? Ghosts are only supposed to be seen by the people they’re haunting, aren’t they? Or can ghosts just do whatever they want, appearing whenever and to whomever they please?

  When he saw that the salt shaker I was using was empty, he got up and walked over, handing me the one from his table. I had just been buying for time, appearing to do something with my food in order to avoid eating it, but this new salt shaker solved both problems, because when I tried to use it I found that the top had been unscrewed and a heaping of salt poured out over my food. “These composers,” the man who’d come out of the corner of my eye laughed, standing by our table, “all idiot savants. Wouldn’t recognize an old trick if you played it on them a hundred times.” My agent—being the greasy type who represented second-stringers such as myself—wasn’t used to being flattered by being invited to join in the humiliation of someone else (usually, he was the one being humiliated), and so was soon laughing, and inviting the man who’d come out of the corner of my eye, and his aged lady friend, to join our table, both of them nudging me with their elbows every time a joke was made at my expense, expecting me to be a good guy and laugh along. This went on for forty minutes before I finally turned and stared at the man who’d come out of the corner of my eye; and, again, in that second before he disappeared, as I looked at him, I felt that horrible sensation of being violated.

  When I got home the laundry had been done, the stove cleaned. And as I went to sleep I could feel someone running his fingers through my hair and singing a lullaby. I yelled and howled that he stop, but the singing went on until I was finally, between shouts, worn down into a fitful sleep.

  By the next morning, he was back, but alone this time. He was holding up a newspaper, reading aloud from the first section: “‘Cassandra Davis and Marlene Holden are willing to take the fight over adoptions for gay couples right to the Supreme Court.’ Oh God,” he said, “could you imagine growing up with those two for a mother and a father, or rather a mother and a mother, or, rather,a father and a father” he snickered at his own joke, and then shook his head sadly. “You know, sometimes the Holy Spirit is a long time in descending upon th
ese sinners. But God must have his reasons for keeping them in the dark. God always has his reasons.” He shook the paper, folded it up, and moved behind me as I sat staring at the blueberry pancakes he’d prepared; and he began massaging my shoulders. “You know that anything is possible for the Holy Spirit. It says so in the Bible.”

  You’re completely demented, I thought.

  Then he went on about how the Bible was the word of God. I pointed out to him that if this was the case then God must suffer from a bad stutter, since there were as many Bibles as there are Christian sects.

  “Well, I read a version that was prepared by a group of Christian scholars from various denominations in Lyons, France, in 1969.” He stopped massaging me, reached into the satchel, pulling out a version of the Good News Bible, and began reading from the introduction. “They left out a few books included in other versions because they were redundant.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, snickering. “So what used to be the word of God is now redundant. Last year’s writing by the Holy Spirit is this year’s redundancy. This year the Old Testament books, maybe next year one of the Gospels. Don’t the Gospels just repeat each other? Is the word of God that unstable?”

  “I got you a present,” he said, changing the subject.

  “Please,” I begged. “No presents.” It was bad enough that he was making me breakfast—not that I would eat it.

  “Do you need a ride to work? It’s on my way.”

  “No!”

  “We could be a great team.”

  “Go away!”

  “Oh, as long as I make food and give you a massage and sing you to sleep?”

  “I don’t care about those things.”

  “Yes you do. You just don’t know how to take the bad with the good.”

  “I don’t want any of it.”

  “Just being honest,” he shrugged. “Why can’t you love me?”

  Infuriated, I gazed directly at him, and this time he seemed to slip entirely out of my field of vision, scuttle off to the side, and pass up my cheek to the corner of my left eye, where I could feel his little hands taking hold, as if he were crawling inside. The only way to stop the feeling was to turn my head in his direction, at which point he would reappear off to the side, and the feeling would stop for a minute or two, and then begin again.

  “Excuse me, sir?” It was the investment counsellor. I shifted my head again and looked at her. Then, after a minute, I shifted my gaze away, looking somewhere else. The man who came out of the corner of my eye kept reappearing and I was trying to make him vanish. “Excuse me, sir? Sir, are you all right?” Yes, yes, I nodded my head, and then looked behind me. “You have to sign, sir.” Every time I looked down at the mortgage papers, it took me forever to read past the rows of figures and fine print, the debit and asset columns, the various brackets and categories pertaining to the condition of my house and payments to date, and then he would be there, at the edges of my vision, asking questions: “Hard day at work?” “What did you spend all your money on?” “Don’t you think you’re smoking too much dope?” “See the tits on that teller?”

  When I flashed in his direction he’d be gone, and then I’d have to grip the pen and go back to the form until, finally, unable to even sign my own name without his interference, I turned from the counsellor and rushed out of the bank, with her yelling at me from behind and waving the paper in the air.

  It was hard to run while looking all around to make sure he kept vanishing, keeping my gaze fixed on no point and every point in particular, wishing I had the eyes of a fly, that I could see in every direction at once, that there were no edges to my vision. And, finally, after I had been running for some time—and after I’d tripped and fallen, and been helped up by strangers whose hands I shook off—I passed a horse and carriage, one of those tourist attractions that take you around the historic downtown. I stopped and looked at the horse, standing there, the bluebottles buzzing around it unnoticed, its blinkers set sharply against its cheeks, its quiet expression suggesting it was blissfully lost in the solitude of tunnel vision. Inspired, I put my hands to either side of my eyes, reproducing the effect of those blinders; and with that the man who’d come out of the corner of my eye finally disappeared.

  I was three blocks from home, walking this way, when the kids saw me—the kids who’d chased that autistic man into my gar-den—and nudging one another began to follow, whispering at first, then pointing, then opening their mouths to yell insults and to laugh. After that I felt a rock hit my back, someone stepping on my heels, then my hands. And all I could think of was how badly I wished I were in my home, far away from them, and from everybody else.

  Last Notes

  ON A COLD MONDAY in the winter of 1995 a nurse unwound the bandages from around Felix Frankenbauer’s head, and the composer walked unassisted for the first time since the accident, staggering to a piano to find he could no longer write musical notation. Recalling the scene, I see Frankenbauer pause above the blank sheet music, pen in hand, utterly bewildered, as if what the nurse had pulled from his head was not a bandage but rather a spool of memory tape, wrenching it out, fist over fist, exasperated at its length, ripping, balling, and dropping it into a dirty bucket. In truth, however, this image is the effect of hindsight, my mind doubling back on itself, for what I really saw was Frankenbauer pause above the paper, and I thought nothing of it. And for the next six months he fooled us—pretending to write music while actually filling page after page with nonsensical scribble—though he must have known we’d find out eventually.

  But even if this had been the loss it first appeared to be, Frankenbauer would have had nothing to complain about. For the better part of thirty years he’d been a leading composer, internationally recognized, his many recordings stocked in the sections reserved for classical music. There were symposiums devoted to him; prestigious labels bidding for his performances; crowds at the door— young and old, fund raiser, fan, student, peer—whom I had to turn away in my capacity as “second assistant to Felix Frankenbauer.” I would tell them, yes, it was reasonable to want “just two or three minutes” with Frankenbauer, but could they imagine if he agreed to every such request? He’d have no time for music. And I was made crazy by the way they clearly understood this argument, but refused to accept it, demanding “just a second” of the composer’s time, as if, in the end, they couldn’t have cared less about new music issuing from Frankenbauer; as if the music he had already created was only there to establish him as an authority so they could get his endorsement for their projects. Inevitably, it would reach the point where I would have to tell them he was and always would be unavailable, threatening the truly persistent with the police.

  Yes, Frankenbauer had reached the pinnacle, and so I believed he had less reason to complain than other men who, late in life, might have lost significant portions of memory after being struck on the head, repeatedly, by the roofs of their cars as they flipped end over end down an embankment.

  It was like watching a man who wants desperately to live being driven to suicide. He never said anything, never complained, nor did he take it out on his staff, either through verbal abuse or mass layoffs. Instead, he spent a lot of time at the piano, trying to satisfy the conflicting demands of a world that recognized his genius, and a genius besieged by that recognition. I watched him lose months of his life striving for a solitude he hated; and, watching this struggle, I grew angry at a world that, having heard of Frankenbauer’s accident, and suspecting his imminent death, grew more insistent than ever.

  In the end, it broke him. If only they could have been happy with the few hours he set aside each day for appointments. But the instant he opened a slot on his schedule the door would be flooded by people who’d heard he was seeing visitors. By then, Frankenbauer was too sick to manage that kind of crowd, though he saw them anyhow, driven to it by the suggestions Tomlinson planted in his head (part of Tomlinson’s efforts, I am sure, to sabotage the old man’s career). All of this meant that Fran
kenbauer had to stay up into the night, needlessly weakening himself, in order to satisfy his urge to create, playing into the morning while all the staff also stayed awake, ears pressed to the walls, listening to a music so unlike anything he’d done we came to believe the accident had jarred something loose in him—a late flowering of genius that put all his previous masterpieces to shame.

  I had never heard anything like it. The notes veered off in every direction, as though repelled by one another, as though the last thing they wanted was to unite in harmony; and yet there was music there: an odd, dying call, as if persecution (if such a thing is possible) had its own scales and chords, its own whimper before the process ran its course. Shortly after the bandages came off, Frankenbauer would play for hours, his hands moving in fits against the keys, the look on his face suggesting he was as surprised as we were by the curt rhythms, the jarring notes—the sound of a talent trying to erase its signature. Within days, however, his face settled into a relaxed, content expression, and he no longer held his hands as though they’d been taken from someone else and sewn onto the ends of his arms; so that for a short time before the headaches started—before his decline and death—he played music, perhaps for the first time since he’d sat in front of a piano, as if it was exactly what he intended.

  He was also making marks on paper by then, though had we seen the pages we would have all rushed for tape recorders. What Frankenbauer played was different every day; our mistake was in thinking it a single piece being worked to perfection. And, so, I suppose there’s some truth to the accusations made by Horace Grober, writing in Contemporary Classical Magazine, that we—by which he means the staff present for Frankenbauer’s final compositions—are in some way culpable for the loss of the music. But while Grober is correct in seeking to blame somebody, he is wrong to indict anyone other than myself.

  Iwonder how Henry George Tomlinson feels these days, the music legally in his possession, scrawled across a thousand pages in a code so arcane Grober wastes whole columns lamenting the failure of musicologists at decrypting it. And Grober’s not the only critic who feels as if he’s stranded on a desert island with nothing but crates ofgold to eat; more than a few ofthem think nostalgically of the days they might have put Frankenbauer in a headlock and squeezed the information out.