by BRIAN HALL
She shot him that look. “Your figures are probably better. Nobody’s measured that range as carefully as you have.”
So they collaborated. She crunched the numbers, he introduced her to the subjunctive. They ended up publishing five papers in the Journal of Geophysical Research. On three of them, he insisted she put her name first.
But it was becoming clear he was just taking up space. He would fiddle around, forget what he was doing, go to lunch with Don and Mike, read articles in the afternoon, drift off. It was a disgrace to keep paying him. At his retirement party they gave him a pin and a citation suitable for keeping rolled in a drawer. Don and Mike told jokes, Frances hugged him tearily goodbye. He’d miss her, but he wouldn’t miss her moods.
So now he’s home all day, trying not to turn into Eugene.
Dead house, windowless room. Left and right walls are entirely covered in records, a glorious sight, except for a patch on the right where the ventilation blower is mounted. When Mark was little he would ask if he could rotate the steel crank, and Vernon would say go ahead. Mark would start turning, and after a second or two he’d begin to wail—he claimed like a fire engine, though he sounded coincidentally more like a civil defense siren. Vernon has thought about removing the blower for thirty years. Still thinking.
Not turning into Eugene means keeping busy, so he’s been reorganizing his LPs. He built new shelves above his desk and along the floor to the left of the door, then lugged down the four hundred overflow vinyls he was keeping in a small room off the bedroom, mainly records bought in the last ten years from desperate mail-order outfits offering twenty LPs for the price of one. He’s given pride of place to his string quartets, now arranged alphabetically by composer, from Arriaga to Wynne, in a big beautiful block on the left-hand wall. To paraphrase a line from C. P. Snow, “Excellent! Anyone with half an eye can see that that’s a collection of string quartets.”
The older he gets, the more he finds that string quartets speak to him like nothing else. He doesn’t know why. He has never really understood music, never grasped why it moves him so deeply. He was a bad sax player. He never took music theory in school. He has trouble picking out on the piano the tunes he remembers in his head. (Interesting that he seems to be able to hear them clearly, yet can’t sing them accurately enough to find the right keys on the piano.) He knows what the dominant of a key is, but can’t hear a circle of fifths progression when it occurs in a Bach bass line. When a melody dips below the tonic to linger on the sixth of the scale, it sounds to him like unbearable longing: in the sixth measure of the Méditation from Thaïs, or at the word “stranger” in “My Days Are Gliding Swiftly By,” or (who would believe him?) at the end of the first phrase in the title theme from Star Trek: First Contact, which he heard the other night while flipping channels after a ball game. Why on earth would this be true? Is it a quirk in him, or do others feel it?
While organizing his string quartets, he decided to listen to them all again. He’s gotten to that point in his life where if he doesn’t do things now, he’ll never do them. Some of these recordings he’s played only two or three times, in some cases more than twenty years ago. He made a back-of-the-envelope calculation on the back of an envelope, keeping in mind multiple recordings of some of his favorite quartets, the complete Beethovens and Shostakoviches, too many Mozarts, all those Haydns, and he came up with something like 900 performances. If he listens to two or three a day, it will take him about a year.
Listening to them in alphabetical rather than chronological order will prevent him from getting tired of a particular era. It might also offer interesting juxtapositions. He began ten days ago with Arriaga, of whose three quartets he has two, written in 1821, when Arriaga was fifteen. A decent recording, cheaply produced by the Musical Heritage Society, which inimitably managed to misspell Arriaga’s name in the headline on the back cover. Then the mathematician-serialist Milton Babbitt, whose Quartet no. 2 (1952) Vernon has by the Composers Quartet, and no. 3 (1970) by the Fine Arts. This time around, no. 2 almost started to make a little sense, sounding here and there like a fugue based on tone-row fragments. Then Grażyna Bacewicz’s Quartet no. 7, from sometime in the 1960s—almost tuneful (after Babbitt), occasionally toe-tapping. Why so few female composers? Vernon’s an old fart, yes, an asshole male like all males, but even he noticed that the liner notes were all about the male Pipkov, whose Quartet no. 3 had been paired with Bacewicz’s. Following that, Bach—Art of the Fugue, by the Portland String Quartet, breaking off in the middle of a phrase where Bach put down his quill and died, which always moves this old man—and Barber’s single quartet from 1936, which includes the original version of Adagio for Strings, by the Cleveland Quartet on Red Seal, paired with Ives for that Americana effect. Then five thorny days of Bartók, because Vernon has two complete sets of the six quartets, Tátrai and Végh, both excellent and sounding remarkably alike, maybe it’s a Hungarian thing.
What does Vernon know? Nothing! But Bartók has always struck him as the greatest twentieth-century composer of string quartets. Something about those six—something unsystematic but compelling, something surprising yet inevitable, something nonBabbitty, disCartery, unSchoenbergisch—should Vernon punt, and call it genius?—reminds him of Beethoven. Whom he has now reached! And he’s not cheating by starting with the late quartets, because this yearlong perusal is alphabetical, not chronological, and all of Beethoven’s quartets are by Beethoven.
Plus, he can’t wait, and he might die tomorrow. Thus, Opus 127. Performed by the Pascal Quartet, on the dear old Concert Hall Society label. These were the first Beethovens he ever owned. He bought the whole set when he was still a student in Chicago, and they arrived monthly, in allotments of two or three. Jesus, he feels such nostalgia looking at the covers, in varied hues with a uniform illustration, a scrabbly charcoal sketch of Beethoven’s head, face down and scowling like an angry toddler. Susan was two; his unbearable mother; that broiling attic apartment in which it was so important to keep the LPs perfectly vertical.
This is a mono recording, the master from the late forties. To his spoiled ears of today it sounds tinny. The Pascals play Beethoven with that old-fashioned sweet sound, the vibratos fast and cloying. Too much first violin. There’s tracing distortion toward the end of each side, some of which would be wear and tear. He didn’t buy another set of the quartets until 1962, so it’s likely he’s played each of these Pascals more times than any other record he’s ever owned.
Vargas is asleep on his chest. This always happens. Vernon will lean back to listen and Vargas will edge up his stomach. Vernon leans farther back and Vargas inches higher. The cat ends up with his head tucked under Vernon’s chin, curled on the nearly level surface of Vernon’s expanding girth. Get your fat self out of my sight.
The tone arm has swung back, the turntable has clicked off. Vernon contemplates getting up.
He never wanted cats. Like so many things, it was Gen’s idea. She always said she preferred dogs (from 1958 on, they always had one or two); she couldn’t understand how anyone could like cats, they were so aloof, cat people were annoying nutjobs. Then about twenty years ago a black cat started hanging around the back door during a cold December.
“She looks hungry,” Imogen said.
“You feed that cat, you own that cat,” Vernon said.
“She’s shivering.”
“Shivering is the body’s way of generating heat. We ascribe emotion to it, but a cat doesn’t.”
Imogen set up a box with a blanket on a piece of basement roof that projected out below one of the dining room windows.
“She’ll be living here in no time,” Vernon said.
“Nonsense. She’s too wary.”
Imogen fed the cat. By knocking on nearby doors, she found the family who had owned her and lost interest. It turned out her name was Brandy. The vet pronounced her healthy and in no time she got less wary.
A do
zen cats have followed. They tend to show up after Gen talks too much with her socially maladjusted vet friend at the shelter. They arrive in groups of two or three, like the Pascal recordings, based on the same sketch but in different colors. Several have been lost to cars, so the current trio—Vargas, Llosa, Yolanda—are strictly indoor cats. The dogs are long gone. Vernon doesn’t miss their barking, their hair, their smell, their need for walks. He never wanted dogs, either.
Vargas breathes against his neck. The one thing Vernon is still good for: providing a warm platform for a cat.
She moved into Mark’s old bedroom so suddenly. No more of that! she said. You can just forget about that. That was six years ago.
Get your fat self out of my sight.
You called Susan a whore. I’ll never forgive you for that.
He sweeps Vargas to the floor, gets his fat self up. All his family was heavy, it was in their genes. There isn’t anything moral about it. Doesn’t it say something about her?
Wanting to get that tinny 127 out of his head, he returns the Pascal to the shelf, takes down Budapest’s performance of the same quartet. Kicks Vargas out, closes the door. It’s only a screen door, there’s no other ventilation in the room, unless he wants to rotate the blower crank and wail. Vargas scratches at the screen. Vernon swivels away from him, puts on his headphones, takes the score into his lap.
The opening chords: more balanced, more “chordal.” Mischa Schneider’s wonderful cello sound. He never realized until he bought the Dover scores that half of these opening chords are off the beat. Is a listener supposed to be able to hear that? It was a revelation when he first heard the Budapest play on the radio while he was at RAND. Suddenly the late Beethovens sounded both righter and stranger. The innovative architecture was there. (Vernon is groping; he reminds himself that he knows nothing.) He bought their middle and late quartets as soon as they were issued in stereo by Columbia in 1962. By then, he had this room for listening.
Here comes the Adagio. One of those gorgeous melancholy slow movements in late Beethoven that seem to want never to end, and almost don’t. One false cadence after another, one more variation, one more doodle. A coda that goes on long enough to wag the dog. Vernon is probably reading in too much, but these lingering adagios sound to him like a dying man kicking against his mortality.
Irascible, lonely old wretch, unlucky in love all his life. He didn’t even have a cat to sleep on his chest.
Vernon puts the LP back on the shelf. Opens the screen door. Vargas has disappeared. It’s past eleven, and Gen is still not home. She and Carlos drink while they gab in Spanish. A couple of weeks ago, driving home, she was so drunk she was seeing double. No doubt she’s sorry she admitted this to Vernon.
He stands for a moment in the narrow doorway, looking at the original basement.
He still wonders why the company contacted him. It was 1961. Sure, in his last months at RAND he’d helped out with an absurd civil defense study, but his new job at the Geophysics Lab was unrelated. The Berlin Crisis was all over the news that summer, so maybe the company assumed he’d get back into the Armageddon business. Anyway, the company president called him up and addressed him by his correct name, fed him some boilerplate claptrap and offered him a top-of-the-line home fallout shelter for free. This in exchange for the possibility—which of course would not be construed by the company to imply a commitment—that if Vernon were satisfied with the result, he might lend his name to the company’s advertising, in conjunction, perhaps, with a testimonial that Vernon could craft himself if he so wished, or leave to the firm’s top-notch team of copywriters. Vernon was still furious at the whole booming business—bombs, fear of bombs, more bombs to allay fear of bombs—and at every product, advertisement, and pusillanimous political utterance that fed off it, so he said, Sure, come build me a shelter. In addition to liking the idea of wasting the company’s money, the engineer in him was curious to see how they’d spend it.
They told him they’d treat him well by building the most secure and convenient model, usually reserved for new home construction: a 7’ by 11’ belowground room opening off the basement. Space for six people plus storage.
Vernon asked if they could build him something larger. Say, 10’ by 11’.
After a moment’s hesitation, the company president said, “Of course.”
“I’d rather invite in our closest neighbors than shoot them,” Vernon explained.
“That’s commendable,” the president said. “But may I ask, what about your other neighbors?”
“I’m hoping that the neighbors I let in will shoot them.”
Two seconds passed, after which the president decided to laugh.
One golden autumn day a backhoe and a small bulldozer showed up and proceeded to dig a far larger hole in the side yard than Vernon had anticipated. Subsequently he could see that its size was necessary to permit access and egress to the machines digging it, but Christ, was Imogen pissed. A team of three mixers set concrete footers in the ground and poured a 4” pad, after which a barrel-shaped mason named Hugh constructed the walls out of 12” concrete blocks. The mixers returned to cap it all with a 6” concrete roof. Since the basement floor was only 61” below ground level, the top of the roofing slab exceeded it by 27”, and on top of the slab was going to go 15” of pit-run gravel and 3” of topsoil. To deal with the 45” discrepancy, Vernon was offered the choice of attractive peripheral brick planters or a soil slope. He chose the latter on grounds of needing less maintenance, and requested a 1:4 gradient so that he could cut the grass easily with his hand mower. Thus the mound tapered to the level of the rest of the yard over fifteen feet in three directions.
Vernon thanked the mixers, thanked Hugh, thanked the company president and bowed them all off his property, politely declining to lend his name to their ads. Then he inspected his new room. He estimated the job would have cost him roughly $2500, or one-eighth the price of his house. The increase in resale value was probably less than that, perhaps around $1000. The doorway was only 2’ wide, to restrict radiation from that direction. To assist the blower in ventilation, there was no door, but since radiation, like Chinese demons, travels only in straight lines, Hugh had built a baffle wall just inside the doorway.
Curious about the room’s effectiveness against radiation from an atomic blast, Vernon dug up some shielding data from his cache of unclassified RAND documents. The part of the shelter most exposed to direct radiation was the ceiling, which consisted of 6” of concrete, 15” of packed gravel, and 3” of topsoil. Radiation shielding was measured in halving thicknesses, that is, the thickness required of any material to reduce radiation by half. Approximately 4.5” of soil equaled one halving thickness. The density of a material was roughly proportional to its shielding strength. Soil had an average density of 1.25 g/cm3, whereas concrete was 2.4 g/cm3, and thus, 6” of concrete provided the same shielding as approximately 11.5” of soil. Gravel was around 1.68 g/cm3, so 15” of gravel equaled about 20” of soil. Thus, the top of his shelter had the equivalent of 34.5” of soil, or 7.67 halving thicknesses, which would cut radiation by a factor of 200. Radiation through the buried walls would be virtually nonexistent. The open doorway was harder to calculate, but the baffle wall alone would reduce radiation by a factor of nearly 35, and the preexisting basement might do approximately the same. On the whole, then, the room provided significant protection. If one assumed Vernon had any interest in surviving a nuclear war.
He hired a contractor a few days later to remove the baffle wall. The rest he did himself, hanging a screen door, mounting electrical raceways with masonry screws, an antenna wire conduit near the ceiling, easing his disassembled desk through the narrow door and rebuilding it in situ, etc. Gradually over the years he has improved the radiation cladding by augmenting the walls with a 12”-thick layer of polyvinyl chloride, also known as his record collection. LP vinyl, at 1.3 g/cm3, is slightly denser than soil. Ad
ditionally, it offers higher protection against some forms of radiation because of its high hydrogen content. But ignoring this last factlet—electromagnetic shielding is pretty far outside of Vernon’s wheelhouse—his LPs would still reduce radiation a further 85 percent. Thank you, Beethoven, Babbitt, Bacewicz, et al. Not to mention providing additional field insulation against the idiot ham radio operator four houses away, plus better sound insulation against barking neighborhood dogs, crying children, loitering teenagers, road traffic, ambulance sirens, top-40 crap played by other people’s outdoor contractors, birdsong, Good Humor trucks. In other words, life.
Vernon heads up the stairs to the ground floor. 11:25 p.m., no sign of Imogen. Carlos’s apartment is ten miles away, which is a pretty long drive if you’re drunk as a skunk. Gen used to berate him for sleeping soundly when Susan was out late. She said it was proof he only cared for himself. Now he sits up and worries about Gen, and she sees it as trying to control her.
He leaves the back door unlocked, the porch light on. Checks to make sure the front door is locked. Heads upstairs to his bedroom, consciously lifting each foot high enough. Worries that she’ll kill herself. Worries that she’ll kill a family in the opposing lane. Wonders if she and Carlos do more than practice Spanish. She dotes on him, quotes him. He’s an Old World man, with his dark shabby apartment full of books and his ascot, for God’s sake. (Vernon’s never been there, but on the fridge there’s a photograph of the lion in his den.) He needs a señorita to take care of him and apparently none of his five ex-wives fit the bill. Imogen jokes about that. “He’s terrible,” she says, and seems to mean it.
Maybe what she feels is more sisterly. She was lonely, growing up.
He gets ready for bed, climbs in. Stares at the darkness, kicks against his mortality.
The first thing he noticed, maybe ten years ago, was that he was frequently catching his toe against the riser of a stairstep. Then he observed his handwriting getting smaller. Sometimes in the middle of writing a sentence his hand would stop and he’d stare at it, unsure how to make it move. It also seemed as though his gait had changed. He shambled. He made an appointment with a neurologist and read these and other symptoms from a list he’d drawn up the night before. The man was impressed at his observational powers. “You’ve given a textbook description of the onset of Parkinson’s disease,” he said.
