Last Notes

by Tamas Dobozy

  The truth is, I never paid much attention to Tomlinson. Not at the start. By the time of the accident a staff of at least five was needed to manage the house and business—from cooking and cleaning (and later nursing), to royalty payments, corporate bookings, interviews and articles, and organizational commitments. The staff consisted mainly of music students and minor composers, since Frankenbauer could never turn away anyone in need of a temporary home and quick cash.

  Some thrived under this system: exchanging their labour in return for instruction (which the old man was too generous in providing), cupping their hands around the sparks thrown off by his blaze of genius. These usually stuck around a few years and then left to start their own careers.

  Others hated the old man. Having taken too long to realize their lack of talent, they were unable to imagine a life other than serving Frankenbauer, who then became the source of their considerable despair. (This was, of course, completely false, since any of them, at any time, could have embarked on new careers; and while I saw much during my time with Frankenbauer, the only thing worse than these artists who, in losing hope, had not lost their passion, was the artist who, having reached the pinnacle of expression, realized there was no one out there truly listening.)

  Funnily enough, I wouldn’t put Tomlinson or me in either category. In my case, I had stood a little too close to Frankenbauer’s genius, and while all that light had exposed my deficiencies I had decided, rather than growing embittered, to attach myself to his glory, helping out where I could, and maybe, in the process, earning myself a well-deserved footnote in the biographies (which was far better than most people ever got).

  Tomlinson, by contrast, had served Frankenbauer longer than anyone, but despite having his musical ineptitude continually demonstrated had somehow not lost faith in himself as a genius, filling up score after score with his horrific mediocrity long after most people would have just gone over to hating Frankenbauer full-time.

  You should have seen the condescension with which he greeted Frankenbauer in the hallways, the perfectly paternal smile he’d flash the old man upon hearing his latest composition, the way he spoke of Frankenbauer when he wasn’t present, telling reporters or scholars or house guests that, “Indeed, Felix does produce some very pretty music.” You should have seen the care he took with the old man, as though he were made of eggshell, but careful to stay just this side of exasperating, so that Frankenbauer would never have the opportunity to turn to him and shout, “I’m not that fragile, you idiot!” (Not that Frankenbauer would have ever reproached anyone.)

  As for his own compositions, Tomlinson never mentioned them. And this, finally, is why I think he’s crazy: even the most confident of failed artists, no matter how pious in regard to fame, needs some affirmation of his or her work. But with Tomlinson you got nothing. Nothing. And the only clues to his continued output as a composer were the scheduled performances at venues so tiny they went unlisted in the schedule at the back of the local arts bulletin, and (as I would witness the night I finally opened his door) the stacks of scores cluttering his room, running around the walls right up to the ceiling. The man who continues to create art in the absence of any audience—or even the opportunity to speak about it—is the sort of individual portrayed by models in catalogues for psychiatric equipment.

  …

  The image I have—of Tomlinson getting up from his desk one day, wandering to the workshop for a pair of wire cutters, and then crawling under Frankenbauer’s Saab to sever the brake lines—is, of course, the work of theory. Nobody witnessed the accident, though the car was found by Tomlinson, who that afternoon, for some reason, had decided to go for a “brisk jog,” happening to run right along the only ridge for miles around, a narrow road that he alone knew Frankenbauer would be driving on that day. He called the ambulance. He helped haul the composer’s battered body from the wreck. He rode all the way in to the hospital and stayed there two solid days, being removed only on the advice of doctors, who worried he might be suffering from dehydration. And you should have seen Tomlinson at the first anniversary of Frankenbauer’s funeral, as he walked solemnly, utterly full of himself, up to the podium to perform his horrendous “Dedications to Felix Frankenbauer”: tall and thin, his eyes closed, chin tilted up, jaw knotted, and his right hand set, as it had been ever since the accident, as though it should have been holding a pair of wire cutters.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  When Frankenbauer came back from the hospital he was disoriented, confused, having lost control over several portions of his brain. His care was primarily taken over by Tomlinson, who seemed more attentive to the composer than ever (Frankenbauer had no wife, his sexual inclinations running the other way).

  Almost immediately things started happening. I don’t know how Tomlinson did it, but he managed to convince the old man he’d been a bastard prior to the accident, so that Frankenbauer would come down into the kitchen, see me, and say the most ludicrous things:

  “Erno, I think it is time that you contacted the women whose children I have, for all these years, been refusing to recognize as my own.”

  “Erno, I think we should discontinue our policy of turning away from the door the illegitimate children I have fathered.”

  “Erno, it is time, don’t you think, that I finally revealed to my adoring critics the name of the composer whose work I’ve been plagiarizing all these years?”

  “Erno, I do not think I have been nearly proactive enough in making contributions of my money and, more important, time to all the arts boards, charities, and organizations.”

  “Erno, I would like to apologize to you, to all the staff, for the years you’ve had to endure my bitchiness; for the shoes shined and re-shined; for the shirts ironed and re-ironed; for the scores copied and re-copied—in short, for my perfectionism.”

  And I always replied in the same way: “Mr. Frankenbauer, sir, I’m sorry, but I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about. You’ve always been the greatest of employers to work for.”

  He would look at me as if someone were being tortured in front of him, and he’d shake his head and pat me on the shoulder, turning around so that I too had to turn away, or else witness the soft spots in the back of his skull where the crumpled roof had punched holes in his cranium.

  From then on, Frankenbauer became a magnet for every kind of parasite: women—whom I’m sure he’d never met—claiming support for non-existent children; people who bore no resemblance to him claiming that he, their father, had abandoned them at birth; musicians not worth a cent arriving to point out the various passages he’d stolen from their work; an endless stream of administrators demanding his name on various petitions, his presence at various functions; the rest of the staff claiming all kinds of exemptions for stress leave, demanding bonuses, telling the worst sorts of sob stories in order to squeeze from him a few more dollars per hour. Frankenbauer grovelled in front of them as if he really did need to make amends; as if he should have cared one second for the self-respect of people who not only didn’t deserve any, but who also would have contributed far more to civilization, justifying their births even a bit, by piling their dead bodies around his home as a barricade against others just like them.

  Even then I knew how this sounds, how it reads on the printed page, how it seems the work of an “unreliable narrator” whose blind worship of Frankenbauer makes him miss that the composer really was a monster; that Frankenbauer and Tomlinson actually were lovers; that it was Tomlinson who wrote the compositions Frankenbauer then “tweaked” to world fame; that this story is about art—Tomlinson’s art—as the purest of expressions: done neither for fame nor money nor societal betterment, but out of a selfless love.

  But while I appreciate the conclusion reached by this twist on Frankenbauer’s story, it was Anton Fischer (good old Horace Grober’s foil), not me, who invented it, a critic who, writing in Avant Garde at the height of the controversy following Frankenbauer’s death, suggest
ed that Tomlinson was the only person who deserved to inherit the Frankenbauer estate, since he had been the real genius behind the old man’s compositions in the first place, as proven by recent performances of work “held, for the first time, under his own name.” Fischer argued that what Tomlinson and Frankenbauer had gone through, as lovers, was so claustrophobic, so oppressive, that no one had the right to even think of calling Tomlinson into question. For as long as the controversy lasted, Fischer held that Tomlinson had, in an ultimate proof of love, totally sacrificed himself to Frankenbauer’s fame, and, as a result, had created a music “so imbued with the beauty of that sacrifice” that the notes “could barely contain it.”

  To this day there are a number of people so convinced by Fischer’s argument that they want every recording by Frankenbauer recalled, and the whole catalogue reissued with the name Henry George Tomlinson at the top.

  Except I was there that night, standing beside the piano, and I know.

  Frankenbauer motioned to me from his bed. I put down the tray containing the tea and the six different painkillers for the headaches resulting from the accident. I came over to where he rested on the pillow, his strands of grey hair spread against the sheets like tributaries on a map.

  “Help Frankenbauer up,” he whispered.

  I did as asked, and then we stood there, beside the bed, his head hanging loose on his neck, my feet shifting, uncertain of where to go. He wanted so much to move in a particular direction, but it had taken everything just to ask for help; and, with the choice left up to me, I had no better guess than to guide him to the piano, which was exactly what he wanted.

  “Lift his hands onto the keys,” he said, his voice so hard and yet so quiet that it reminded me of a shard of glass worn smooth. Then, once I had done this, he said, “Open the folder. Papers. Pen.” I opened the folio resting on top of the piano and took out a few sheets of unlined paper covered, to my surprise, with a disorganized pattern of squares and triangles and snaky lines, and, as well, I took out a pen, placing these to the side where Frankenbauer might reach them. Then I lifted out the sheet music underneath and put it on the stand, noticing immediately that the handwriting on it was not his.

  Flexing his wrists, he began. It was the first time since the accident that I’d been able to watch him play, and I was surprised at how he moved his fingers along the keyboard, at how he doodled geometric shapes here and there on the paper, placing them in what seemed to me an arbitrary fashion, as if he had enough strength to lift the pen but not enough to determine where it would fall. His head hung so low it seemed the tendons were no longer servicing his neck. And again I had the sensation that these were not his hands at the keys, their manic vitality so at odds with the limp arms to which they were attached. “Don’t want to play his music anymore,” whispered Frankenbauer, hammering the ivories. “Don’t want them to think they’re his notes.” But I didn’t understand what he meant, since the music he was playing was not the one on the score in front of him—the one written in Tomlin-son’s crabbed handwriting—and which Frankenbauer never so much as glanced at.

  And it was then, in that room, listening to a music whose beauty seemed a side effect of its slow decay into noise, that I first thought I’d figured out what Frankenbauer was doing, though I continued to just stand there, listening until the exhausted composer slumped down on the stool, and then, raising his head, spoke into the polished black wood: “There must be some way to undo what he’s done.” I wanted to grab his head, to draw him away from the keys, because his gaze seemed less to rest on the piano than to want to hammer its way into it, to punch the sort of holes the car roof had punched in him. Slowly, I came around and lifted him, light as bone, back into bed.

  He made no motion of resistance, and within seconds seemed to have fallen asleep, but when I moved to go he groaned, turning to look up at me. “Please?” he whispered, and as I bent to him he put his arms around my neck. “Frankenbauer’s all alone,” he whispered, holding on to me with a grip that was, I guessed, his last refutation of weakness and defeat, of a darkness he knew I could not see, and I had to kneel on the bed or completely lose my balance and fall against him. Frankenbauer continued to pull at my neck, and I continued to struggle, not so much to get away, but to find a position that would make him content, struggling with him as though I were a wave, a water in which it was possible for him to float only by lying very still. And then I was whispering, his twiggy legs and ribs lying flat against the side of my body, his head rising and falling upon my chest. Before his eyes finally closed he murmured something like “Thank you, thank you; you will get paid; Frankenbauer thanks you; your money’s coming.” It was a goodbye or a promise, though less addressed to me than a distant angel, a quiet remark at the end of some other episode.

  “You’re welcome, Mr. Frankenbauer,” I said, lying there in the dark, reaching up to touch his head.

  I was there the better part of an hour, moving his body off mine inch by inch, an agony of contortions where I sometimes had to hold myself in one position for minutes, every muscle tense, even holding my breath to keep him from waking up. But he never did, giving me the chance, once I’d gotten out from under him, to take that score, as well as the sheets he’d written on, off to the photocopier in the nearby office, and then put everything back into place.

  In my room I spent ten minutes rapidly paging through Tomlin-son’s score, confirming that Frankenbauer was neither playing it backwards, nor taking it apart, but rather resisting what it was attempting (Tomlinson’s derivative effort to sound like Frankenbauer), and, somehow, in the process—despite his brain injury and half-paralyzed body—creating art. Next, I picked up the pieces of paper on which Frankenbauer had made his own notations, wondering whether the old man knew that his attempt at resistance was itself a composition of total originality, and therefore noted it down the only way he could. I thought, mistakenly, that it must have been the source of considerable despair for him in those days, realizing in some part of his mind that he was creating the greatest piano pieces of his career, pieces that no one would ever be able to play.

  I spent the next several days downstairs in my room with these photocopies. (I’d returned to his study and rifled through the piano stool, the filing cabinet, his night stand and desk, duplicating everything I came across.) But while I thought I had managed to cross-reference Tomlinson’s score with the coded one Frankenbauer had written that night in his room, I would not be sure until I’d applied my system to another set of the two composers’ pieces. But I found only examples of Frankenbauer’s compositions in the old man’s study, nothing more of Tomlinson’s, which meant I would have to steal them directly from his room.

  It was my first and only time inside. As I’ve said, Tomlinson was quiet, leading a life of extreme privacy, and so I was not prepared for the extent of his compulsion, for the piles and piles and piles of compositions rising from the floor to ceiling, solid as pillars, some of them set so narrowly apart that only a man as thin as Tomlinson could have squeezed between them; for the carefully arranged record collection (oddly lacking even a single recording by Frankenbauer); for the blotting pad on the desk by his portable keyboard, so smeared with India ink it was like tar, retaining my fingerprints as they grazed its surface.

  I was so amazed by the room, and by the thrill of cracking Frankenbauer’s code, that I began searching through Tomlin-son’s manuscripts without even making sure I’d shut the door behind me.

  But when Tomlinson walked in I was disappointed at how predictable it was, how I should have known he’d catch me. What was surprising, however, was that Tomlinson didn’t yell, or throw me out, or even run out and make a report to security. He stared at me for several minutes, frozen in the act of hanging up his coat, and then walked over to the desk and slumped in his chair.

  “There’s no point,” he said, making every effort at pity. “Even if you were to pass off one of mine as your own you wouldn’t find a place or orchestra that would agree
to perform it. My work,” he gestured around the room, “is too far ahead of its time”

  “But I’m—I’m not …”

  He made a motion as if brushing a few strands of hair out of his eyes, making the gesture over and over again, as would a person who’s just walked through a cobweb. “You’re not the first staff member I’ve caught doing this,” he sniffed. “There’s a desperation to this place,” he whispered. “Except the old man, of course, who seems to be doing just fine with his delusions of grandeur.” Tomlin-son paused, and then said, “Well, he did before the accident. Have you heard what he’s playing these days?” He shook his head. “He’s gone from mediocre to worse. And I’m incapable of helping him.”

  “‘Helping him?’” I glanced quickly at the scores I was holding in my hands, and while I again recognized Tomlinson’s handwriting on them, they seemed entirely different, musically speaking, from the one I had found in Frankenbauer’s room. While that piece had been bad—a shameless rip-off of the old man’s style—these were worse for not being rip-offs. And then what Tomlinson was doing became suddenly clear to me.

  But he told me anyway: “Yes, I sit him down every day, and I show him the kind of work he used to compose. His style, you know. It’s ludicrously easy to reproduce. I put it down note for note, hoping he’ll follow along, learn how to write music again. Poor old fool,” Tomlinson shook his head, “he looks at the scores I’ve written out, and then launches into another rendition of that chop suey. It’s all he can play now.” He twiddled his thumbs. “Perhaps, in a sense, it’s a just reward for having lived the kind of life he’s lived. Hurting all those people.”