The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  The new music, often from European publishers, was crisp and fresh. Sister’s favorites—and mine—came from France, the cream pages of Éditions A. Durand et fils, the publisher of Saint-Saëns and Debussy. Durand employed a sinuous art nouveau font on its covers, its address printed at the bottom left. The words rue and Paris attested to its exotic location, yet also to a real place you could go to if you ever somehow got yourself to Paris, unlikely as that was.

  The paper was thin, so porous it attracted dirt and smudges. The willowy pages were taller than stout American sheet music. I knew from experience, the paper would soon lose its starch. The pages would go limp on the music stand, soften at the edges, wrinkle and tear as I hauled them back and forth from home to school. Before long, the luscious cream paper would be shabby, the allure lost.

  But I always forgot this on the day I received the new sheets. On new music days, today was always the first day of the rest of my life of good intentions. Today I was a believer. Perfection was very near. I could touch it.

  A Saturday morning in May, therefore, and I had biked on my blue Raleigh three-speed to the convent and been admitted by Sister Portress to the strangely empty halls, so busy during the week, up the dark staircase to the fourth floor where Sister Mary Louise awaited me. The room was spacious, but like all music studios it felt cramped, two baby grands bulging their big hips at each other, a white bust of Chopin on one, a bloodless Schubert on the other.

  The windows of the studio were tall, set so high the view was all sky and the ends of a few beseeching elm trees, freshly budded. The aerial view gave the odd sensation of being on a plane, though I had never been on a plane. No problem—mind travel in the practice room had provided the experience of flight long ago.

  On windy days the big panes of glass rattled in their sashes. This early day in May was very windy, overcast, clouds bundling their way from window to window in a big troubled hurry, the windows clattering.

  Today we begin again. This is how Sister Mary Louise spoke on new music days. She too was a believer—what else?—she was a nun after all. She beamed at me. I was a good girl, and such a talker. I could make her laugh. I could surprise her just by saying how something struck me. When the rain hits the black asphalt of the street, I told her one day, it looks just like ballerinas on point. How ever did you think of that? she said in her mild, astonished way. Once I said I wished science would come up with a pill for breakfast, lunch, and dinner so a person wouldn’t have to stop reading for meals—and of course there would be no dishes to do. She looked appalled, as if I had suggested something shameful. Some of us look forward to our dinner, she said, abashed, her plump self settled under the black tarp of her habit.

  Today we begin again. She rose from her chair and went to the tall oak cupboard along the back wall where sheet music was neatly stacked on shelves in a system known only to her. She returned, holding the unblemished folder of Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin in the delicious Éditions Durand cream. The girl with the flaxen hair, one of the watery pieces she favored.

  She sat at the other piano and played it straight through. The lilt of lyrical girlhood floated with aquatic ease from her capable hands over the light-and-dark waters of the Impressionists. She handed me the music. I opened the virgin sheets carefully while she reminded me that the metronome was my friend, and called out as usual, Count, dear, count. She reached over and made several marks on the music with her soft lead pencil to indicate the fingering she wanted me to follow, sometimes overruling the printed fingerings of Durand et fils.

  I didn’t like these pencil marks. They marred the page. But at the end of the lesson I closed the folder and placed the thin sheets carefully between my battered Bach French Suites and Schubert’s sturdy Moments Musicaux, and everything was fine, though the flimsy Debussy extended beyond the heft of Bach and Schubert. But so what? The first day of the rest of my life of good intentions was before me, still perfect, a matter of unbroken imagining. Downstairs, I retrieved my bike, and rolled the music gently, positioning it in the wicker basket attached to the handlebars so nothing would be jammed or damaged.

  I jumped on the bike, took the curb with a frisky leap at the corner of Fairmount and Grotto (the monastic names of those St. Paul streets!), and flew toward home, down the clickety-clack bumps of Fairmount’s creosote paving. The streets still paved with these old blocks—only a few were left in the city—echoed with the memory of horse hooves when you rattled over them.

  Have I ever been so happy for no good reason? A bolt of ecstasy shot through me. I was in New York—no, I was in Paree! On some rue just like Durand et fils. I rode a beam of invisible light straight to heaven—which (the five-year diary well knew) I didn’t believe in anymore, but there it was, and I was in it.

  The happiness arose from relief—I see that now. I hadn’t been humiliated in the usual way by my lurching Bach, my careening Schubert. I hadn’t had to face reality. Always a happy occasion. On new music days Sister did most of the playing. Nothing was expected of me. Now, on the bike, I skimmed madly downhill, demented with liberty. The girl with the flaxen hair was safe in the basket, my own brown hair blew in the wind. I considered trying to steer hands-free, which my brother said girls were no good at.

  How brief the bliss, how long the memory.

  A dark dash of rain, as if targeted, hit the moss-colored Schubert, leaving a forest green stain just as I reached the bottom of the hill. Then another, another, big jots splatting down lazily before the deluge, polka-dotting the sidewalk. I jumped off the bike at the corner of Victoria. Schubert could go, no problem sacrificing Bach.

  But La fille au cheveux de lin must be saved. I couldn’t leave the music in the basket and keep riding—Debussy’s creamy edges peeked out from under Schubert’s shabby overcoat like a delicate silk chemise.

  I put the bike on the kickstand, grabbed the music, lifted my blouse, and stowed the bundle against my blessedly flat chest. And stood there, my arms crossed, the rain coming down now in earnest. Just stood there. I couldn’t get on the bike—I needed both hands to hold the music in place. So my brother is right—girls are no good at riding hands-free.

  Where to go? What to do? I was getting drenched. This rain was no ballerina on point. Furious sheets came down at a horizontal tilt. The music was sticking to my skin.

  A car stopped, a man rolled down his window. Why are you crying, little girl? Are you hurt? I remember he said “little girl.” I hadn’t realized I was crying.

  Never talk to strange men.

  “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair is getting ruined,” I sobbed across to him, maddened with misery, holding myself tightly around the chest, sniveling, snot out my nose. Never call it snot, dear.

  His kindly smile faded. I was a crazy child.

  Did I know where I lived?

  “Of course I know where I live,” I snapped at him. Never give them your address.

  Gently, tentatively, he offered me a ride home—he could fit my bicycle in the back, he said.

  Nothing doing, mister. Never get in a stranger’s car.

  “My new music’s getting all ruined,” I sobbed, furious at him for being available and yet not available, enraged at him for being a stranger.

  If I would tell him where I lived, he said sensibly, he could deliver the music safely, and I could ride home on my bike. Would that be okay?

  I stared at him. Decision time.

  I hedged over to the car, fished the music out from under my shirt, thrust it in his window. The girl with the flaxen hair would have to go off with the stranger. I gave him our address.

  Oh, that’s just a few blocks away, he said. He smiled as if the problem were solved. He told me to ride home safely. Stay on the sidewalks, he said. The creosote blocks get slippery in the rain. A remark my father would make.

  That’s all.

  Except for my mother’s ferocity, the result of
her heartstopping terror when she’d looked out the window to see a stranger walking up the front stairs with my sheet music—the familiar Schubert and Bach. And no me. I thought you’d been hit by a car. I thought you were dead. She seemed exasperated that I wasn’t.

  Why on earth, she wanted to know, didn’t I just keep riding home in the rain? I was so near. We could put the sheet music on the radiator to dry. No harm done. Everything would be fine. I was making a mountain out of a molehill. As usual.

  Her sensible sigh. Don’t act like a sausage. It’s nothing to cry over.

  But Mother, there’s always something to cry over, to think over, muse over, fret and fume over. It’s why, as Montaigne says, a person meddles with writing. Crying is only part of it, not even the important part, though the most theatrical. The little red book with the lock is getting an earful tonight.

  The Debussy had absorbed a little of Schubert’s green. Ruined. Nothing is perfect for long, though sometimes it’s perfect for a little while. It can only be pried out of the moment, sequestered between the red leatherette covers where it begins its career as a memory. Bits of reality are pressed to the pages like wildflowers, flattened and faded, but there.

  Perfect register between self and world—it does sometimes occur, fugitive, fleeting. There it was in the wicker basket on the handlebars of the Raleigh three-speed for its nanosecond. Worth noting.

  The exquisite moment when the music flowed from Sister’s fine old hands, and then my body braved the wind, the blond girl and I taking the turn deftly at Grotto, the horses of history clattering under the bicycle wheels. All of this in a mind full of future, revved with good intentions that would turn—I swear, ma soeur!—into good deeds. I will practice, I will give a perfect performance next Saturday.

  Happiness can hold a lot of freight, and I was overloaded with joy that day, the hooves of the Raleigh clicking on Fairmount before the deluge.

  It was nothing. Nothing to cry over. Nothing at all, really. But how many times has it floated me over despair? Just to think of that moment. The music and the speeding blue three-speed I commanded, hair whipped in the wind, the clattering old paving stones. I rolled this inner photograph gently, molto pianissimo, into the kit bag of consciousness. The ground beat of being, pounding like a heart, forte, forte.

  “It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully,” Montaigne says. He’s thinking of the naked men his simple crude fellow has told him he saw in the New World. There’s that touch of envy, maybe simply admiring wistfulness. To be so perfect in your being. To enjoy rightfully.

  Utter joy is rare. Divine almost, he’s saying. Of course it’s a new world. It always is. This is the essai where, he insists, he would strip naked to display his entire self, if only writing could do that. It is the purpose of such work, its glory, its task.

  You and I talked about this, sitting at the yellow table in the kitchen. You said it was poetry, this quality of attention. Poetry comes first, you said. Now I wonder—why didn’t I ask as we sat there?—did you mean it comes first in human history, the cry antedates the story? Or were you claiming poetry is the greater thing?

  I should have asked. But I do remember that whenever I asked you to judge—as I so often did—which is better, this or that, which is your favorite or the best, you smiled (or frowned) and said, Why do you always have to judge things? Why can’t you love both, let it go at that?

  I couldn’t help insisting, nagging you for choices you refused to make, hierarchies you wouldn’t construct in the face of life’s contradictory richness. We loved to talk about language, trading slang and habits of speaking. The Minnesota passive Scandinavian conditional, as you called it: How old a man would he be? This slithery locution instead of frankly asking, How old is he?

  Toward the end you gloried in listening to kids say Whatever, pronounced with exquisite teen dismissiveness, What-ever, when responding to an ethical dilemma or a parental urgency. What-ever, you said to me the last week, an old man mimicking perfectly a kid without a care, smiling with all the time in the world. What talkers we were in that kitchen, the coffee getting cold between us.

  We met on this, at least, our trust that the moment lies somewhere ahead—not far—when, surely, everything can be said. Perfect register between the instrument of self and the mysterious machine of the world. You listened to me on this point, nodded. Didn’t tease, didn’t say What-ever.

  You got it, what I was thinking. How a person has to stand in the rain, protect the girl with the flaxen hair, the fierce, fragile lyrical self. Not to hide her, not to control her. Just to keep in reserve the alert intimacy of that ardent heart. There’s waiting to do, always. Big part of the job—waiting.

  * * *

  Montaigne called what he was doing “meddling with writing,” as if it were impossible simply to latch onto a subject, write it for God’s sake, and be done with it. He discovered that the act of writing gets all tangled up in what is supposed to be “the subject.” Writing becomes the subject, or becomes part of the subject. Meddling. Maybe a vexed word for describing, for going round and round the “subject” until it becomes the writing. Or the other way around—the writing becomes the subject.

  I was coming down the last lap of my last book, a memoir full of people dying and finally dead—Mother, Dad. You were not far behind (though I managed to pretend that wasn’t so). We were both good at pretending. You were alive in that book full of their deaths. I was painfully aware of just how specific every bit of writing is, full of choices and chances, not theoretical at all, not the business of sweeping statements or smart ideas about “form” or “genre” or anything remotely theoretical. Just subject-verb-object and the hope of meaning.

  Two nights away from the finish of my book, I was working late. I looked away from the computer screen for a moment and there was the dog staring at me. She was on the verge of speech. I could see it. Come to bed. Her eyes said this clearly. It was almost 2 a.m. and for the past four hours I’ve been changing commas to dashes and then back again to commas with the fixation only a fanatic can sustain.

  “You’ve become a crazy person again,” I said right out loud. The dog padded away.

  J. F. Powers was once asked by a colleague in the corridor at their university how things were going. Powers allowed that it had been a tough day—“I spent the morning trying to decide whether to have my character call his friend pal or chum,” he said.

  That’s what it often comes to—thinking how important the choice of pal or chum is, how whatever truth writing lays claim to resides in a passion for just such mad micro-distinctions. This monomania is what a novelist friend calls the six-hundred-pound gorilla of a book. Once the six-hundred-pound gorilla gets hold of you, you’re his (or hers). “Those last weeks of finishing a book are a world in themselves,” she said. “I think that gorilla is the reason most of us write—it’s a real high, but it’s also a subconscious agreement not to be available or even normal for as long as it takes.”

  Montaigne was an obsessive reviser. Or not a reviser so much as an adder-on, an expander. Same with Whitman. Both of them were writers who wrote one book: themselves. Who holds this holds a man (Whitman), and I am myself the matter of my book (Montaigne).

  But as soon as you break away from the gorilla’s embrace of a particular book, those big, rangy questions begin to make their approach again. Maybe this is especially true of memoir, the odd enterprise of “writing a life” that has captivated our literary life for the last two decades or so. We tend to think of the novel as the classic narrative form—ever evolving, but familiar, its stately provenance long the preserve of academic interest and the center of trade publishing. Whereas the memoir seems new or somehow “modern,” a rather suspect literary upstart. And therefore a form that invites interrogation.

  But strictly speaking, autobiography is a genre far older than the novel, and is hardwired into W
estern literary history. Perhaps from that first injunction of the oracle at Delphi—Know thyself—Western culture has been devoted to the exploration of individual consciousness and the unspooling of the individual life.

  That commandment to know thyself was central to antiquity. Plato uttered a version of it; Cicero used it in a tract on the development of social concord. It was such a pillar of cultural, even spiritual value that in the early Christian period Clement of Alexandria felt compelled to claim that the saying had been borrowed by the Greeks from scripture, thus binding the two developing spiritualities—pagan and monotheistic—together in a seamless endeavor.

  Closer to modernity, Goethe is supposed to have said with a shudder, “Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.” André Gide probably expressed this revulsion best: “Know thyself! A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly.”

  But the strongest indictment I’ve encountered came from a student in Indiana who had been conscripted by his Freshman Comp teacher to attend a reading I gave some years ago. He sprawled in his chair with his baseball cap on backwards (always a bad sign), his eloquent body language making it clear he was far, far away. A very What-ever person. Can’t win ’em all, I thought, and carried on, my eye straying back to him like a tongue drawn to the absence of a just-pulled tooth.

  During the Q&A I fielded the decorous questions the students posed. And then, suddenly, apparently in response to something I’d said, my antihero sat bolt upright, and was waving his hand urgently, his face alight with interest. Ah—a convert. I called on him, smiling.