Not suggesting anything. You do what you need to.
I thought I might.
Every playful thing in her now disgusted him. He hung up. Ten minutes later he called her back to wish her well. He got her machine, and left no message.
He spent a week humiliating himself, calling old friends and neighbors, pretending to be catching up after years of neglect. Then he’d ask, stony-casual: Did you make it to the wedding? When at last he found a guest, he insisted on being tortured with a full description. The music was straight-up Mendelssohn, played by a small ensemble of gifted students from New Morning.
IMMORTALITY FOR BEGINNERS came to life, a vigorous corpse flower. Twelve hours of music was an eternity. Els wrote long, slowly mutating, terraced fantasias that pulsed and sighed and exploded. He scattered the peaks and valleys. He borrowed from voices dead for centuries and made them chatter posthumously. And he repeated, recombined, and looped everything until the whole was wide enough to stretch from dawn to dusk.
Bonner loved the finished score. He pointed to a favorite extended passage. It’s hilarious, Peter. I didn’t know you were so nasty.
What are you talking about? Els asked.
The question surprised Richard. I thought . . . you mean this part isn’t a parody of reactionary crap?
No, Els told him. It is reactionary crap.
But Richard adored the eclectic score. His choreography was in-your-face, rancid, and divine: slung hips and puzzled arms, heads twisting in synchrony, glances raised and lowered like divine lunatics reading a celestial tabloid. He had to cycle the performers, who spelled each other out, relay-style, over the course of the monster marathon.
The piece took most of a year to put together, and it was over in a day. From sunrise to sunset on a Saturday in July, bewildered listeners filtered through a renovated warehouse loft in the old butter and eggs district, watching crazies proclaim the coming reconstruction, from pure information, of everyone who ever lived. Most stayed for a while and left shrugging, but a few souls camped out, lost in the endless middle of things. The Times review ran five hundred words. It admired the choreography’s giddy novelty and called the music of thirty-nine-year-old Peter Els evasive, anachronistic, and at times oddly bracing. But this reviewer admits to leaving after an hour and fifty-three minutes.
The party afterward, in the gutted loft, lasted almost as long as the performance. Everyone was spent. Els pushed his way into the drained celebration. The Velvet Underground growled out of someone’s cheap boom box, homesick and way too loud. Richard started throwing stuffed grape leaves at the bottles of wine lined up on a long sideboard across the room. Each time he knocked one down, he’d do a little Martian hornpipe and spout obscene rhymed couplets. The cast stood by, watching the show. Two male dancers started a color commentary.
That’s what happens when you stop sleeping for two weeks.
And add some creative pharmacology.
Bonner heard the pair and began pelting them with crudités. A young, splay-toothed oboist named Penny came up to Richard, touched his elbow, and asked if he was okay. Bonner flipped the back of his hand as if to return a Ping-Pong ball and slapped the girl across her face. The room went dead, and Els, who’d known the man longest of anyone, stepped up to Richard and took his arm. The choreographer reeled on him.
Oh, fuck me with a rubber mallet! Look who’s here. If it isn’t the morals police.
Come on, Richard, Els said, working an arm around Bonner’s shoulder. Closing time.
Bonner shoved him. Don’t touch me! Get your little chickenshit hands off . . .
Els recoiled.
Richard pointed at him, his thumb a gun site. You, my friend, will never be more than a polite mediocrity.
The whole ensemble froze in a ring around the two men. Stunned dancers with daubs of face paint still rimming their eyes looked on as Lou Reed purred, “Shiny, shiny, shiny,” into the echoing air. It might have been a coda to the Bonner staging that had just played for the last twelve hours.
Have I done something to you? Els asked. Hurt you in some way?
Someone said, Finally lost it. Someone said, Make him puke; he’ll be fine.
Bonner aimed at Els and clicked off a shot with his finger. Then another.
Els said, You didn’t like the score? You should have told me months ago, when I could have done something about it.
Bonner reeled on him. You, my friend, will never make anything but steamy, creamy, lovely shit. Know why? You need to be loved too much. He turned on the tittering audience: Who wants to give Tune Boy here a little love? Somebody? Anybody? Come on! He’ll trade you pretty things for it.
Els held up his palms, like some medieval Jesus stepping from the tomb. He turned and threaded his way out of the room, pulling free of the few pairs of hands that tried to stop him. And so beginner’s immortality came to an end.
A WEEK LATER, Bonner traced Els through mutual friends to the tenth floor of a Brutalist apartment block in Long Island City and sent him a singing telegram: four white suburban kids in tuxes crooning “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” Els didn’t bother to reply.
He got a job working nights as a cake decorator for a bakery in Queens. By day, he apprenticed as an unlicensed plumber’s assistant, knocking around in a blasted van through the Upper East Side, repairing the fixtures of the rich and famous. Once he helped rebuild a shower stall for James Levine, who looked frailer in person. He fraternized with no one but his two plumber bosses, his geriatric neighbors, and the Dominican grocery cashiers who rang up his cold cuts and cereal. On bad nights, when his body demanded release, he used the past: Maddy as she was the night she sang his Borges songs.
From time to time, melodies occurred to him, broad melancholy phrases from places he’d forgotten—listening with Clara, lessons with Kopacz, those years of war with Mattison, the songs he and Sara used to improvise. He never bothered to write the phrases down.
He did write one piece in those months, an odd, glinting setting of Pound’s “An Immortality.” On the day they met, Maddy had coached Els on what a soprano could and couldn’t do. Now he took everything she’d told him and threw it away. He wrote for a voice that could reach any note, one that might levitate the Pentagon if it wanted. He added two parts for unspecified instruments, lines that billowed like ribbons on the page. The harmonic language was a wash of things old, new, borrowed, and blue. It sounded like a troubadour song come loose in time. It sang of love and idleness; nothing else was worth the having.
He copied the chanson on cream-colored parchment and mailed it to his ex-wife. He dedicated it “To Madolyn Corr, on the occasion of her marriage. May the future change the past for the better.” She never acknowledged receipt. Not long after Els sent the gift, he learned that Maddy, Sara, and Charlie Pennel were moving to the western suburbs of St. Louis to start an alternative school.
OUT IN THE void of the Central Time Zone, Sara rediscovered music. At eleven, Andy Gibb. At twelve, Anne Murray. Then came thirteen’s key change. When she next came to visit him in New York, she was a torn T-shirted fake anarchist with “London Calling” on her Walkman, and he, an old guy whose music was worse than a museum. They were supposed to spend ten days together. They ran out of things to talk about in ten minutes. He took her around town. The only place that interested her was CBGB.
The second night of her stay, he told her, Let’s make something.
She looked at him puzzled. She doped out the question and shuddered. I’ll pass, thanks. A long week later, she was gone, and he didn’t see her again for another year.
HE WORKED ON the edge of the city, celibate, for almost four years. He saved money. He listened to everything he could put his hands on. He stopped anticipating, stopped making edicts, stopped planning. Mostly, he waited. For what, he wasn’t sure.
One April Saturday night, he swallowed half a hit of acid that he’d gotten two years earlier from the percussionist for Immortality for Beginners. Peter had hidden the tab awa
y in his sock drawer, for when he felt equal to extinction. At some point in that year-long night, he found himself on top of a high-rise near Gantry Plaza, looking out over a silk sheet of water on a shimmering green quilt of a city. While he watched, the great, urgent message of the future took shape and revealed itself to all who could peel free from themselves and hear. Life was infinitely clear, infinitely redeeming. He scribbled the message into his pocket notebook, where he kept all his musical ideas. The words were a perfect mnemonic, and just rereading them would forever rejoin him to the endlessly brocading transfiguration. He would need only look at the words again a year from now, or fifty, and they’d turn his every anxiety into a matter for laughter and embrace.
The next day, he lay still and did nothing as his cells knitted back together. Then work took him up again. A week went by before he glanced into his notebook. There he discovered the magic reminder: “Keep living.”
He heard about a cabin up in New Hampshire in the foothills of the White Mountains that a friend of his boss was trying to rent. The place was tiny, and a year’s rent was less than he now paid every three months. All he needed was a reference, and his boss supplied one without reservation.
No offense, Mozart, but you aren’t cut out for plumbing. You always struck me as more of the mad backwoodsman type.
Els packed up his half a dozen boxes of salvage. Clothes that would serve him for a few more years, until they dissolved from washing. Polaroids of his father and mother, sister and brother. A picture of a woman who had been his wife, with a gecko skull on her chest and a cicada in her hair. A stack of printed parts and handwritten scores. A quilt: Night in the Forest. Reels and cassettes of music of his that he no longer recognized. A song his seven-year-old daughter had written for him called “Good Days Are Best.” And a scrap of torn cardboard that had once been part of an improvised toboggan. And still something in him waited to scribble down the tune that would raise everyone he ever knew from the dead and make them laugh with remembering.
If a lion could sing, we’d know it right away as a song.
Els went to New Hampshire to escape New York for a season. He stayed ten years. Later, he could recite everything he did in that decade in a little under five minutes, and leave out nothing crucial.
And yet those years in the woods were the most productive of his life. He got stronger. He believed, for a while, in his body. In spring, he’d walk up into the White Mountains, into the vistas of Cole and Kensett and Durand. Twelve-mile days were his specialty. He composed as he hiked, and he kept his ideas intact until he got back to the bungalow. In summers he biked; in the autumn, he chopped wood. In winters, he shoveled out by hand the two-hundred-foot gravel drive that connected him to civilization.
He ate well, by the standards of the day. He read every work of eccentric history that the North Conway Public Library owned. That’s how he met the librarian, Trish Sather, who soon began to visit Els at his bungalow twice a week, on nights when her husband and son had hockey practice. Trish would park a quarter mile from the house, fooling no one. Peter cooked for her, they’d have gentle sex, and if time remained, from their hundred minutes, they wound up talking books or playing backgammon. It was a kind of love, although neither ever used the word. Afterward, Trish would shoot home, push her bookmark forward thirty-five pages in War and Peace or Crime and Punishment, and settle at the kitchen table, ready to cheer her returning boys’ triumphs and nurse their tragedies. Like the making of strange musics—their affair was a victimless crime.
Trish liked cowboy songs, and she played Els no end of the old high lonesome. Three sad ballads and they were stupid with desire, taking no more than the rest of the album side to find what they each needed. This happy arrangement lasted until the night, some twenty months on, when Trish, under the flannel sheets and topped by Maddy’s quilt, stroking her pill-swollen breasts, said, You don’t really trust me, do you?
What do you mean? he asked, knowing already.
You write music all day long, every day. Even Sundays. And you’ve never played me a single song.
Els went limp and sighed. The sound angered her.
What? I embarrass you? You think I’m too big a dipshit to get what you do?
He sat up, suddenly middle-aged. There’s nothing to get.
You won’t even let me try.
He looked around the room, his cabin. His soul was a house on fire, and he had to get out.
I don’t have a tape player, he said.
She squinted at him. In my car.
They sat in her Gremlin, windows up and engine idling, surrounded by autumn and listening to warped, years-old tapes on a cheap deck. He played her the work he’d saved from the last quarter century. Greatest hits—maybe an hour’s worth in all. He knew it would make her late, that she’d have to lie her way back into her own home. The last piece was a clear, high-voiced girl he once knew, singing, Time is a fire that consumes me. But I am that fire.
Bright sparks going over a mountainside. Whelp, he said, when the concert ended. That’s my life.
She sat behind the wheel in the dark cab, her teeth clamped to a fingernail. She seemed more stymied than chagrined.
Well, shucky darn, Peter. Sometimes it’s fine. But other times? It just sounds . . .
Like noise? he suggested.
Outside, the geese were heading south.
Els ended things two weeks later. Thereafter, he bought his books in garage sales and dime-store bins. Only when he heard that the Sathers had moved up to Burlington did he return to the library reading room.
CABIN ECCENTRICS WERE common in those parts, and the villagers knew his species. Word got around that he’d been some New York bohemian who had some kind of breakdown. One night, half crazed with loneliness, he wandered into a bingo game at the American Legion. His ear had grown acute with so much silence, and he heard a vet at a nearby table tell his wife, Look who’s here! The burnout artist.
He lived simply, earning a little money as a builder’s assistant and handyman for the elderly. He spent almost nothing, except for food and his criminally low rent. For a while, he tried to send Maddy child support, but she never cashed his checks.
When Sara was a sophomore in high school, she sent him a letter accusing him of being the reason why people thought she was a freak. He flew her out for a visit. For three days she lay on the couch, fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube, answering his every suggested activity with, No thanks; I’m good. She listened to jackhammer, monochordal drones that he could hear through her earbuds from the other room.
The day before she flew back to Missouri, she asked, Could you buy me a personal computer? Mom doesn’t think I need one.
You’re interested in computers?
Her eyes swept up behind her lids. Why is that so hard for people to believe?
It’s not at all, he said. You can do amazing things with them.
She lifted her head from the armrest of the couch, trying to spot the trap.
I once wrote music algorithms on some of the earliest mainframes.
Huh, she said. That might have been cool. And the duet was over for another year.
In New Hampshire’s lost notch, Els’s music abandoned all pretense of system. He fell back on a diversity that bordered on plagiarism. He’d lived all his life under the tyranny of originality. Now he was free to be as derivative as he needed.
The sketches began to flow again: a double concerto for bass clarinet and sopranino sax. World Band—a juggernaut symphonic pastiche that ran a fourteen-note motif through a dozen ethnic styles. A setting of Rupert Brooke’s “Safety,” for tenor and brass quintet:
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.
Els sent the score of World Band to an acquaintance from grad school who ran a festival in the Low Countries. Something in the piece—perhaps the virtuoso kitsch—caught on with a European audience tired of having to work so hard for pleasure. The new m
usic ensemble that premiered it in Utrecht took it on tour, playing it throughout the Île-de-France and Rhineland. One day he got a royalty check for a little over four hundred dollars—about a tenth what his boyhood paper route paid him for the same number of hours’ work. He pranced around the cabin cackling and rubbing his hands. Then he remembered God taunting the rabbi after his Sabbath hole in one: So? Who you gonna tell?
HIS BROTHER CALLED, out of the blue. Els hadn’t spoken with him in three years. Paul’s voice still sounded like a punk of ten, but with a finger dragging on the record.
Paulie! Jesus, how are you? I can’t believe you’re calling. Who died?
After five fat seconds of nonplussed silence, Paul replied, Mom.
Carrie Els Halverson had been visiting London with a high school girlfriend she’d rediscovered after her second husband Ronnie came out and left her. The two were inseparable, traveling together twice around the world. But this was Carrie’s first trip to a country where they drove on the left, and on a pretty June morning in 1986, she stepped off a curb in Westminster and was hit by a cab that didn’t even have time to sound its quaint horn.
Peter flew to England. Paul met him at Heathrow. He’d grown so large, slow, and sallow that Peter didn’t recognize him. Between them, they managed to contact their sister, in an ashram in Maharashtra. Susan sent back a muddled telegram, the last Els would ever receive, about how their mother hadn’t died but was simply becoming something else. The brothers had the body cremated, and they spread the ashes illegally in a corner of Chelsea Physic Garden. This was on the second day of summer. The sky was ridiculous with blue. Peter tried to say a few words and found he couldn’t. His brother touched his shoulder.
That’s okay. I knew her, too.
In the three days they spent handling death’s logistics, Peter was surprised to discover how much he enjoyed his adult brother. Paul swam in a sea of theories. Everything from the morning’s headlines to the license plates of buses had hidden significance. But Paul’s torrent of interpretations had something joyous to it. Buried patterns everywhere. It sounded, sometimes, almost like musicology.
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