He stopped playing in the middle, stood up, and seemed suddenly naked, vulnerable, bitter, and broken.
“It’s not very good, is it?” he asked the audience, then saw that they had found it excellent—and he became outraged.
“Finish it!” a man cried out, and my heart with him, but this set Felix to shaking and sweating, and he seemed about to dissolve inside his tuxedo. This went on for one eternal minute, and no one knew what to say or do. I sat there imagining that maybe this humiliation was needed, that it might teach him something, move him to another place within himself; but it was all nonsense, and, I knew, too much about me.
June, who had stood listening stone-faced from backstage, finally came out and led him off. His limbs moved stiffly, as if he were a clothes dummy being removed from a window. The audience, to their credit, remained silent. He glanced back at them for a moment, and I heard a collective inrush of breath, as if his look of contempt had been a physical blow. I caught his eye, and he looked at me with shame, as if I had unmasked him. Or so it seemed to me. The audience stared at the piano as if he were still playing it, then slowly people got up and began to leave. The hall was empty by the time I left.
I came to his door the next afternoon and heard him arguing with June.
“You don’t deserve who you are!” she shrieked. “You don’t deserve your talent!”
“You’ll say anything,” he answered. “I only want more out of myself, not the praise of easily satisfied fools.”
“Oh!” she cried. “So I’m one of the fools.”
“You love me, and it blinds you.”
“Are you blinded by your love of me?” she asked.
“No, I’m not. I see you for what you are. And I do not love myself enough to be blinded by my failures—successes to you.”
I cringed at the dilemma he had presented to her: which was worse, his ambivalence toward her and her love of him, or his devaluation of his own abilities? And I realized that we had both been counting on his accomplishments, on his doing well for his audience, to which we belonged.
The door opened, and June ran out weeping into my arms.
“I want more!” Felix shouted out of the depths of the house. “And I’m going to get it.”
She turned from me to shout back at him, but I quieted her. “He’ll get it without me,” she whispered as I led her away, and I knew that he was watching us just before the door slammed shut behind us.
What the audience at the concert could not have known was that he had been revising his work as he played it, hanging at the end of each note, at the edge of one abyss after another, leaping beyond himself until nothing could ever fulfill his ideal. Every newly conquered note became new ground, and he held it just long enough to spy a new mirage up ahead. Listening to the dying vibrations ruined it for him. To appreciate his work he would have to stop and look no further, but he could not stop himself from running ahead. What would it take for him to love his work? Forget as he attained it and see it as a stranger?
He worked suspended between his settled past and a fading future of new music whose fate was to be abandoned. He could never catch up with himself.
“Consider,” I tried to tell him a few days later, “that your ease of composition came from a lack of inhibitions wedded to skill. You trusted yourself. What was easy for you was in fact difficult.”
“That’s easy to say, but it may be untrue.”
“Your accomplishments say otherwise to many people. Your work speaks of high levels of difficulty. Facts, Felix, bow to the facts!”
“Again—difficult for whom?” he asked.
“You’re contemptuous of those who appreciate your work, of the very idea of appreciation, from what I see.”
“If I can see farther, then you want me to blind myself? Lower my sights?”
“But what do you see if you can’t find it? What do you actually see?”
“Sometimes... I see!” he cried.
“What?”
“A brightness—a great open space.”
“Really?” I asked.
He waved his hand at me, and no insult made of words could ever reach the same level of derision visible in his writhing, snakelike fingers, the same ones he played the piano with, the same serpents that sprang to life in his brain when he composed and were now strangling him.
“Ah!” he cried out. “Look, Bruno, we can go around like this forever. I’ll either do something or I won’t.”
“But you’ll know only if you succeed, by your own lights.” Which may well be out, I did not say. “If you fail, you won’t feel that you’ve failed. You’ll still see a road ahead. You don’t ever really want to succeed.”
He had smiled. “Yeah, I’ll always have an excuse. You’re a good logician, Bruno, but logic only makes decisions. It never creates, but only gets to the end of something, with no more to come. Believe me, I’ll know, one way or another.”
“You’ll only think you know.”
“So what would you have me do?”
“Succeed, by all means. But if time grows long, give it up and don’t look back. You’ve already had enough acceptance for two men.”
He smiled. “I wish I knew those guys,” he muttered. “I’ve listened too much to such be-happy-with-what-you’ve-got talk. I’d have had nothing at all if I’d taken it to heart early on.”
“That’s not fair to yourself,” I said. “Early on is not today.”
He rose within himself and answered, “Who said it had to be fair, that anything has ever been fair?”
One night I got a frantic call from him.
“You gotta get over here!” he shouted.
“Now?” I asked. “It’s two in the morning.”
“You’ve got to see!”
“See what?”
“The spiders, Bruno, the spiders! You’ll see them.”
He hung up, and I had to go.
I got on my sweatsuit and drove the few blocks to his house. His garage was open and empty when I pulled into the driveway. Once again he had probably parked the car somewhere and forgotten where, then walked home. The car would be towed, and I might have to loan him some money if he decided he needed it, unless he wanted to hate driving that day.
“It’s open!” he shouted when I rang the bell.
I came in and found him sitting, bent forward, on his sofa, clearly despondent.
“What is it, Felix?” I asked, standing over him, feeling like an executioner.
He looked up at me with a desolate face and said, “I can’t work anymore,” then looked down at his feet in shame.
“Not even on the commission?” I asked, convinced that I had helped weaken him.
“Not even that,” he replied. “Especially that—even if I could.” He hated commissions. They were like school assignments, pure suck-up jobs, a catering service providing fakes to be admired by fools who knew the price of a name.
“But why?” I asked, knowing there was more.
He stood up. “I’ll show you,” he said, laboring toward the piano.
I followed him. We looked into the works, and I drew a swift, deep breath when I saw that it was full of spiders.
“They’re all dead,” he said with the finality of a hammer striking an anvil, then turned to me and added, “I told you there were spiders—physical spiders!”
“But what does it mean?” I asked, shaken but telling myself that they had to be spiders that had come up out of his damp, musty basement into the piano. Pure coincidence with Felix’s necessary fantasy, but a part of me was glad that there were spiders.
He shook his head. “I can’t work now. They were hearing the music for me, taking it out of me just before I heard it. Now I don’t hear a thing, not one note, almost as if I’d never learned how to read music.”
It had all gone much farther than I had realized. Felix was tearing harder at himself, at his talent, and the dead spiders had sent him over the edge.
I looked more closely and saw their bodi
es clinging to the strings, almost as if they had strung another kind of web, for another kind of piano, and died from the exertion of spinning steel.
How could I insist on my original view—that this was all nonsense conjured up by my friend’s unconscious to fire up his need to compose—a wondrous need that stood outside the ordinary world in which he had to live; how could I tell him that now he would have to stand on his own skill and throw the magical crutch aside?
Yet here were the dead spiders, and my theory seemed to pale as I saw their transcendent presence through Felix’s eyes. I turned away and went back to the sofa, sat down and said, “I don’t know what to tell you.”
He sat down at the piano, as if about to play. “It was all real, Bruno,” he said with a strange, grim happiness that embraced damnation. “It doesn’t matter if you still won’t believe me. It’s all over. I’ll never compose or play again. But it had all been real! Real!” He cried out like a raspy trumpet—and was silent.
I almost bit my tongue to keep from saying that a bunch of dead insects scarcely proved their songfulness, but that would be pointless and cruel.
“You do see what’s in the piano?” he asked. “You’re not humoring me, are you?”
I nodded, then asked, “You still know how to play, don’t you?”
He smiled with a feeble finality. “I won’t even try with their bodies stuck to the strings. How could I?”
“You’ll have to get past this,” I said. “You do know that, don’t you? You’ll have to clean out the piano. I’ll call someone for you.”
He closed the keyboard cover and stared at it.
“There’s more,” he said without looking at me.
“Oh? What?”
“I think they were pulling the music from me without my hearing it at all, even before I thought of it, so I didn’t know what was leaving me. They were stealing it out of my deep places.”
“Now how can you even know that?” I asked.
“Because they’re dead and I feel drained and deaf! There’s nothing left.”
I didn’t see Felix for much of that winter. I worked at home for a crossword puzzle company, and won an award before Christmas for my efforts, which brought me a raise. Whenever I called or went over to Felix’s house, there was no answer. Lights were off in the evenings. I imagined that he had gone away to a warmer place, where I pictured him laughing and drinking with all the beautiful women who could never be mine, plunging through their bodies in search of forgetfulness. Felix was amorously skilled and good-looking, but I had often felt that he thought little of it, that the chase depressed him; it was all a put-up job, he had often said, for given reproductive ends, which made him feel like a puppet.
“You know what Liszt once said?” he had asked me in our youth. “That women who watched him play could think of nothing except what kind of lover he would make. Music to send pile-driver fantasies into female brains!”
“He was much better than that,” I had said.
“Of course he was. But you don’t know what people will make of anything! Did you ever watch people at concerts and know which ones were there for the music and which for show?”
Felix had been made for his music; it horrified me to imagine that he might have failed to discover this about himself. Blank sheets of music paper were unbearable to him, as the abyssal void outside of God might have been intolerable during that one eon when the light got away from him and unfolded universes free of his control.
I told myself that Felix had struggled too much to hear his music, and had escaped into some mental space where he was free of music’s lonely demand to structure and shape vibrations eloquent to human ears.
He would never come back, I feared. No one would ever hear him again, or know what had happened to him. I remembered the deluded hope in June’s smile when, despite their several big arguments, she had urged me not to worry.
One evening in late March I stood before Felix’s door, knowing that it would not open, that my friend was no longer there.
But finally it opened, and he motioned for me to come inside. The look on his face was unreadable, his eyes unreachable.
“So how are you?” I asked, glancing toward the piano. It was very dusty.
He was silent, staring at it with me.
“I don’t know why the spiders died,” he said softly.
“Are you composing?” I asked timidly.
“No,” he said, “and I don’t seem to care.”
I had a bright idea. “You’ve stopped,” I said, “and so they couldn’t hear you and died!” and felt stupid for saying it.
He looked at me as if I had just struck him across the face.
“You’re saying my... silence killed them?”
I was suddenly intrigued, not knowing what to say next. I didn’t believe it, but I remembered when I couldn’t ride a bike, and my uncle gave me a glass of “magic red water” to drink, and I “knew” how to ride a bike the very next time I tried.
“It just can’t be that simple,” Felix said. “I can’t believe I starved them to death!”
“Maybe you can... bring them back,” I said, noting his dirty clothes. He hadn’t shaved for days. I didn’t want to sound anxious. “What the hell, give it a shot,” I added jovially.
He was still staring at the piano, ill with inner enemies, and I longed to somehow draw them away from him.
Then we heard the music.
I heard it, and wondered if Felix had rigged the piano to play automatically, or had somehow hypnotized me to imagine it.
But the baby grand was playing.
We crept up to it slowly, like pilgrims arriving at the site of a wished-for miracle. We stood close and saw the keys trembling. The music was ghostly, exploratory, seeking its own shape, by turns rhythmic and lyrical, soft and nearly silent, striving to encompass the stars; then suddenly it was inflamed and hurtful, full of sorrow over lost joy. The music craved the impossible, and wanted it with grace, and I felt that the notes were hunting Felix, like a swarm of insects hunting long-sought flowers.
We stepped around and looked inside. I saw hundreds of new, little spiders scurrying out of their birth sacs.
“They’re back!” Felix cried.
We listened, and I marveled at how all the random scurrying and jumping produced music. They weren’t singing. The spiders were playing, leaping up and down on the strings, exchanging places to sound single notes and grouping to organize chords and flowing passages. There was no question that the piano was being played.
“Not mine,” Felix said blithely, but with anarchy in his eyes.
“Write it down!” I cried.
“That would be stealing,” he said, then smiled. “It’s their music,” he added, and I feared disagreeing with him. Too much was at stake. Fragile links must be protected, I told myself, shuddering. Let the music come to him in its own way. After all, they were his spiders, and there was no end of how many would come up from the basement every spring, especially if it wasn’t cleaned out. Felix, even in his silence, had struck the piano strings with his mind, and that vibration had called to them. My explanations were just as strange as his, but I didn’t care. Felix deserved to be protected by credulity, if that was what he needed.
It was their music, but they were his spiders.
I didn’t know which came first, but it was all Felix, exposing his insides as never before; all the pity and fervor of him was alive in the notes that he was denying as his own.
“I’m leaving him,” June had once written to me. “He’s out of his mind. Maybe as his best friend you can do something to stop his drift.” But she seemed not to have gone very far, I now realized, thinking that I had never understood what passed between them. Not even close.
I didn’t care how the music had crept back into him, or out of him. My friend would be all right again, and it didn’t matter what he believed or what I saw.
There was a knock on the door. The music stopped.
Felix was s
uddenly very still. We waited.
“Felix!” June called to him from beyond the door, and her voice was the airy blue heaven of a flute. “It’s me!” she sang dementedly.
“Stay,” Felix said to me as if to a trusted dog, and I felt that the future was rushing back to him, about to pluck him out of the mire and carry him forward again into starry spaces and caring arms.
He went to the door as if stalking it.
Finally, I heard them talking softly, and wondered why we take an interest in other peoples’ lives, aside from practical motives. We fall into people because we come to know them, or simply like them, quite irrationally, and hold on to them to keep from drowning. Maybe we just want to compare notes, to look out through others’ eyes, to think for a while with other minds. The young just hang out, waiting for something to happen. But the interests of life are surely greater than the repetitive mill of shared experiences. Better questions await, and happier answers beckon. For one thing, the problem of why the mill is a mill, why its repetitive character is so all-encompassing that one can’t imagine stepping outside of it. Miracles don’t happen in the mill. Good things, yes, but they have happened before. We are all inside ourselves, inside our slightly larger shared social inside, yet some of us try to peer outside. Love and friendship are mad dances in which we see ourselves through the other’s eyes. But the recurring interest of seeing beyond our culs-de-sac leads us on. If miracles don’t happen in the mill, then don’t live there. Climb out of people and live alone on some barren shore.
As I waited for Felix and June, I again thought of why second-raters can spot the third-rate and untalented. Because it’s easy to see looking down. But try looking up into the realms of the magicians, and it’s harder, and then all of a sudden it’s impossible. Especially if they seem to be ordinary, and you have to remind yourself of who’s judging. You resent being second-rate, and it makes you blind. Maybe love eases the pain and helps you to see, I thought as I heard June’s voice.
Black Pockets Page 24
