It took her a second. “Tossman, did you just pull a Coleridge reference by way of The Music Man?”
“Why, yes I did.” He was quite pleased with himself. He leaned back in his desk chair and bellowed out the chorus of the song, banging his ballpoint pen on a stack of student papers to keep the rhythm: “The sadder but wiser girl for me!”
She sat on the chair reserved for nervous students. “I just flipped out at Eden Su. I was trying to patch things up, but apparently I’m not very good at it.” She knocked her foot against a stack of literary magazines on the floor, sending them flying. She started to pick them up, but he stopped her. “So you’re covering my 222?”
“They’re good kids. Sandy took the Pre-Raph.” He searched the jungle of his desk till he found his coffee mug. “And look, Alex, I hope you don’t mind, I told Leonard you were having health issues, dating from your time in Australia. You can tell him I was wrong, but maybe you want to use that to explain what’s been happening. I didn’t say specifically what the problem was, so you could make up whatever you wanted. If you need to take time off, you know Leonard would agree. He just doesn’t want a scene. And he’d recommend you anywhere, as would I. But it would be nice if you stayed.” He smiled at her. He was a good man.
She let out a breath. “Tossman ex machina. You and my brother both, trying to save me from myself.”
He said, “You’d do the same for me. Take a couple more days before you decide anything. Rest.”
Two days later, there was an e-mail from Miriam Kohn: They needed Alex to appear in front of the Grievance Committee after all. “This is in light of an additional encounter between you and Miss Su,” she wrote. “It’s fair to advise you that Miss Su has produced a witness to the conversation.” A witness? The only other students had been passing at least twenty feet away. Well, if Eden could lie, she could, too. Except it was two against one, and Alex could never convince another professor or even a grade-hungry student to pretend to be her witness.
She drank some wine and called Piet and told him everything. “Yeah,” he said finally, “I like your friend’s idea. Say you’re sick. Feminine problems, so they won’t pry too much. Maybe, like, cysts.”
She flopped on her bed. “Sadly, I can’t think of anything better.”
“So why didn’t you ring up Malcolm?”
“Maybe I did.”
“No, I called him to see. Look, I was there when you pulled the card. Seven of hearts meant you were supposed to go all out. Job and man and your life back on track, yeah? So anyway, I set up a meeting for you guys.”
“You’re an ass, Piet.”
“Sure.” She heard him slurping something. His date had gone well, and he was staying with this woman downtown. “Look, Al, what’s the moral of the whole albatross poem? Isn’t it something about taking charge of your life? Like, ‘I am the master of my fate and the captain of my soul,’ right?”
“No, wrong poem. It’s about loving animals. He looks at these water snakes and decides he loves them, and then he gets saved. So the moral is love all God’s creatures. It’s a bad poem, Piet. When you stop and think about it, it’s a really stupid poem.”
“Okay, so it’s about love, though. There you go. Go love your man.”
They met at a little café and bakery near campus, and Alex couldn’t help feeling she was in a movie. She’d watched it a thousand times, how the former lovers meet for coffee—at a table by the window, so one person could watch the other leave, then sit there brokenhearted—and now here they were. Except they were back in a corner, at a table that wobbled, with someone’s kids running around screaming in soccer uniforms. Malcolm maintained an expression of deep concern and leaned a little over the table. He looked tired. He hadn’t shaved.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” Alex said.
“Which part?”
She managed to smile. “I’d say the entire past six months. Starting with the albatross.”
“Have you been seeing someone?”
She couldn’t believe he’d think that. And she was actually flattered. She said, “I would never do that to you.”
His cup was frozen halfway to his mouth. “No—I was asking if you were seeing, like, you know. A psychologist. A therapist.”
“Oh.”
“You just haven’t seemed like yourself.”
“Honestly, Malcolm, I’ve just been drunk a lot lately. I was drunk when I said I couldn’t marry you.”
He nodded and considered this. “How do you feel now?”
“Now? I’m sober.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He made a concerted effort to drink some coffee. He set the cup down and licked his lips. “What do you need from me?” God, the man was so sweet. And she wasn’t the type to appreciate a kind heart while secretly wishing for the rough Harley man. This really was what she wanted.
If she’d learned anything from Eden Su, it was that sitting there mutely doesn’t get you anywhere. Tossman was right—she was idle, a ship frozen in a sea of trouble. And that would never do.
So she said, “I need to know how you see me.”
“I think you’re great, and I love you, but I think it wouldn’t hurt you to get some help.”
“No, I’m actually—I actually need to know what you think I look like.”
He was confused, and for a second she thought she’d have to explain the whole thing, all her vain neediness, but then he reached into his pants pocket for a ballpoint pen, white with a blue cap. He turned over his napkin and began to draw.
“What are you doing?” She leaned to see, but he moved it behind his coffee cup. Finally he held it out, in both hands. It was a stick figure: round head, curly hair in every direction, smiling mouth, happy eyes. Under it, he’d written ALEX.
She laughed. “That’s me?” He put it down on the table and drew wavy lines emanating from her face and body. “What’s that?”
“That’s your amazingness.”
He tilted his head and grinned at her, exactly like someone in a movie—the one the girl was supposed to end up with. And she thought, it wasn’t a Rossetti, but it was good enough. And she thought, if he was dumb enough to take her back, she might be smart enough to marry him.
In future years, when she told that story, she left out the part about Malcolm. It became instead the story of why she left Cyril College, of how she and Malcolm ended up at State, of how sweet Tossman had been to her, that year before he killed himself. Of how even in assessing all her misprisions, she’d still missed something enormous. But where had the signs been? There had been no signs: just poor Tossman slumped on the steps of the music building at midnight, gun in his hand. And no one seemed to know why. And really, she’d barely known him. She’d only read half his books.
She would tell the story to younger colleagues, starting with the albatross, focusing on Eden Su, ending with Tossman, whom they knew about already. The point, the moral, was how easy it was to make assumptions, how deadly your mistakes could be. How in failing to recognize something, you could harm it or kill it or at least fail to save it. But she wondered, even as she told the story, if she wasn’t still missing the point. If maybe it wasn’t something, after all, about love—something she was too cold to understand.
The telling was an attempt, of course, at penance. It never did work; penance so rarely does.
A BIRD IN THE HOUSE
(THIRD LEGEND)
In almost any culture, it’s an omen: of a death, or a birth, or a journey. Sometimes a bird in the house is said to be the ghost of the recently departed. We aren’t capable of seeing it rationally—especially as it falls in love with itself in our windows, as it flaps frantically past family portraits, as it kills itself against our walls.
When I was four months old, my father’s parents saw each other for the last time. My grandmother would be dead within the year, crushed under a bus
on a Budapest street. My grandfather would live on in Hawaii for two sunburnt and hazy decades. The summer of 1978 was a rare convergence for them—Chicago being a fairly precise midpoint, the birth of a baby being a neutralizing force.
The scene, as it’s been relayed to me: my mother in our family room, holding me. My grandmother at the kitchen table with my sister, peeling apples. My father in the living room, playing piano. My grandfather on the stairs, a threadbare towel around his neck. (His blind left eye, doomed in infancy when his tubercular mother broke out of quarantine and kissed it, dripped so constantly that the towel became necessary late in life. He lived out his second half as a hatha yoga instructor, and at least when he stood on his head the tears fell into his white hair and not his mouth.)
And then: A sparrow flew out of the fireplace and past my screaming mother, sprinkling ash, flailing in loud circles. It found its way through the kitchen door, and my grandmother, still seated but reaching one hand straight up, grabbed its tail. The longest feathers stayed between her fingers as the bird flew on, raining small, perfect circles of blood on the kitchen tiles, on the flesh of the peeled apples, on the lid of the Cuisinart.
The Mozart stopped mid-phrase and the bird found the upstairs hallway, following some unhelpful instinct of altitude equaling safety. My grandfather tried to throw his towel over it. When this failed (depth perception not his strength), he rolled the towel and snapped it like a locker-room bully until the wall was smeared with ash and blood, and the sparrow, dazed, beat its wings into the floor and tried to claw a foothold. The old man wrapped the towel around it like a sack, and flung the whole thing out the window with such force that the bird had five full seconds to stretch its wounded wings before it needed to fly of its own accord.
My grandfather credited his luck. He always won at the track, as well. His secret was to bet on the white horse. The white horse was the only one his good eye could follow.
My grandmother, who knew more than a bit about omens, was somber the rest of the day.
When the two guests had returned to opposite ends of the world, there remained in the house only the detritus of their stay: the gifts my grandfather had brought; a brown patch scrubbed indelibly into the upstairs wall; in my sister’s room, where a writing desk had been set up for my grandmother, the typewriter purchased for the visit and the curiously tangled ink ribbons she’d abandoned.
She always shuffled cards as she wrote, but when my mother cleaned she found only five, their margins softly obliterated. Of the Hanged Man, only the bottom half remained. Lost in the fog of whatever world she’d been creating, or in the present world (announcing its intentions so brazenly), or perhaps in some past and brutal one, my grandmother had chewed and swallowed almost the entire pack.
EXPOSITION
[TAPE #2: 4 MINUTES, 13 SECONDS]
Would a glass of water be possible?
June the fourteenth. The theater on
The rumors we heard—on entering the theater—were thus: That Sophia Speri had refused several opportunities to leave the country, that she remained maniacally insistent on completing this final concert. That her husband had divorced and disavowed her, that he had fled. [Unintelligible.] I don’t know, mind you, if this—it was what they said.
Yes.
We heard a man say, “Ah, if she’d been a clarinetist, she might have run through the hills with her instrument. But she’s married to the beast with ivory keys. She’d sooner cut off her own arms than run to a refugee camp in with no pianos.” We did not engage him in conversation. This was heard in passing.
Remember, please, that it was dark.
I believe that everyone in attendance understood the gravity of the situation. The invitations were secret, the hall was blackened. No one uttered her name. I made note of this.
I don’t recall. There—the only further talk was of the music, the sheet music.
That her brother had smuggled it into the country.
This is only what the woman was saying, a woman’s voice in the dark. That he had [unintelligible] the trick by reprinting each sheet of the piano score, along with mismatched lyrics to folk songs, confident that the border police could not pick out the tune. That the piece was thought unperformable by only two hands, a sort of composer’s joke, you know, that it required at least three hands, with one pianist sitting on the other’s lap.
I wish to add that this story cannot be true. Our border police, like all fine citizens, surely recognize our nation’s traditional songs.
Yes, she did.
The information, the story that we overheard—and again please remember that we did not take part, ourselves, in the—the story went that she’d been unwilling to trust a duet partner and had worked her own nail beds bloody.
Three years. And that she had even stretched her hands on a contraption like the one Schumann invented. Have you heard of this? It destroyed his hands, Schumann’s. But then I suppose Sophia Speri understood this to be the last concert of her career. Perhaps she understood the risk.
No, sir. I misspoke. Those were the speculations of others in the crowd. They weren’t my—no.
Around sixty, though please recall that it was dark. The theater holds three hundred.
Among ourselves, only. The three of us.
No matches, no lights. It was a condition of entry.
She had memorized it, naturally.
I do not know.
Her footsteps. And then the sound of the bench, and of course the music beginning.
No one announced her.
We were—will you believe me if I say we were stuck to our seats? We knew that we ought to move, that to stay there any longer was foolishness itself.
Yes, sir. They had been clear and explicit. There was no confusion, either before or during the concert.
Here is where I’ll stumble in my explanation. It was hypnotic. The music. The very reason it had been banned, I’m sure. It hypnotized, it entranced, it gave the listener visions of worlds beyond the borders of—
No, not our national borders. I mean the borders of the human heart.
If I might request more water . . .
I thank you for your patience.
I was saying, perhaps, that it prodded the heart with lust and ambition and false hope.
Around five minutes.
I cannot account for the discrepancy. I maintain, five minutes.
Like every star in the heavens had dropped a fine, taut string, and the stars had wrapped these strings around the earth. Like something our grandmothers used to sing.
Which is to say, it was wicked. To trick us, even us, in this way.
I understood it to be in F. I’m no musician, sir.
One of us moved.
I cannot say.
It might have been. Perhaps we all three moved as one.
[Unintelligible.]
Exactly as planned, exactly as ordered.
We surrounded the piano, and removed the light from his hidden pocket.
We did not hesitate.
The audience—when the light appeared, yes, they saw her. They screamed, but I could not see which way they moved. I assumed most of them were leaving. Please recall that there was no light, except on Miss Speri.
She was beautiful.
I apologize, yes—I mean to say that she remained on the bench. That she continued playing.
Even as the barrel pressed a circle to her temple.
She did not drop a note.
An old joke for you, sirs, with a new punch line: What is black and white and red all over?
We remained, as instructed. On the stage.
and
Let us presume there were sixty, minus us three. But even if we had fired at them—into the dark, as they ran—we had between us only eight more bullets.
May I humbly remind you that those were not our orders?
Even allowing that it was ten minutes, ten minutes of music. The entire piece, the whole concert, would have bee
n thirty.
One-third.
Yes, sir.
A fair amount, I grant.
For our slowness, I apologize, as we have apologized before.
Please let me repeat that it was not for us to fire on the crowd.
Within thirty seconds. A minute at most.
Ourselves?
Again, it had not been ordered. I imagine we each felt, in that moment, that we could be of greater service to alive than dead.
Yes, even with the—please do understand, sirs, that I cannot recall a note of the music. It was complicated, not a child’s ditty that lodges in the ear unbidden.
I could not. Not a note.
Had we been instructed to do so, we would not have hesitated to end our own lives on that very stage.
I believe so. Not to unhear music, but to forget it. Are they not the same?
The only way a lost tune, a truly lost tune, may return, is if one happens to hear it again. Surely you don’t wish to suggest that our new President could permit such an oversight as to allow a second performance of the—
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