The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 12

  The stuff of Leland’s workday lay scattered across one end of the kitchen island. His laptop. A German-English dictionary older than his daughter. A spiral-bound notebook. Forty-three pages of text in pre-War German. Some strands of hair he’d yanked in frustration from his head.

  One year of high school German, as it turned out, hadn’t prepared him for the sustained effort of translation. Thirty minutes’ labor had produced a single sentence. It was not a good sentence. It was not even a lucid sentence.

  A tapping on the French doors roused him. He hopped down from his stool and opened the door to a young man with a great deal of long black hair and an enormous beard. A killer beard, in fact. A few of the longest whiskers reached his sternum. The man had a messenger bag slung over one shoulder, and he clutched its strap with both white-knuckled hands. Without letting go of his bag, he gave a finger-twiddling wave.

  “Hi,” he said. “Um, I think…”

  At the same time, Leland thrust out his hand for shaking and said, “Dr. Cable, I presume.”

  A safe presumption, surely. John Carter had said his piano teacher was hairy, and almost the first thing anyone would say of this fellow was that he was hairy. On the other hand, he couldn’t, by the look of him, be much over thirty—not too young for a college professor, but younger than Leland had expected—and he frowned in confusion, exactly as if he’d been mistaken for someone else.

  After a moment, though, the bearded man let go of his bag and shook Leland’s hand and said, “Scott. Please. Call me Scott.”

  “Leland. But I guess you knew that already.”

  Feeling an eddy of cool air at his feet, Leland nearly said something about Charleston weather—absurd this time of year, hot all day, cold at night—but if they had to talk about the weather until Anna Grace arrived, he’d surely lose his will to live. He’d expected his wife to do the conversational heavy lifting, and he hadn’t prepared at all. He knew exactly two facts about Scott: he taught piano, and he was hirsute. Two men couldn’t possibly talk about hairiness for more than a minute—Leland was sure of it—and the piano was entirely out of the question. For a moment, he imagined himself sinking to the floor and staring disconsolately at his own toes. The handshake went on and on.

  “You must be freezing out there.” He clenched his back teeth, swallowed, and went on. “The weather this time of year is—”

  Before he could finish, Scott pushed past him and crossed the room. At the island, he dropped his bag on the floor and hunched over Leland’s MacBook, goggling at it as if he’d never seen a laptop before.

  “The transit of Venus,” Scott said, a statement, not a question.

  The screen saver, then. It was the screen saver that had transfixed him. A photo of the sun’s disk filled the display; Venus, having crossed the solar limb, appeared as a crisp black circle. In the next image, a haze of cirrus clouds obscured the sun, and Venus was a roundish smudge. Leland was fairly certain he’d left his browser window open to an online translator—nothing more damning than that—but even so, his fists kept clenching and unclenching. He kept picturing himself leaping across the room and slamming the laptop shut.

  “Is this the ‘oh-four transit?” Scott asked.

  “I’m not actually sure.” Clench. Unclench. “I’ve been grabbing them whenever—”

  “I made a special trip to Maine to see the ‘oh-four transit. That was as far east in the U.S. as I could get. My flight got delayed, and then delayed again, and then canceled, and it was a Tuesday during finals, so I couldn’t really…” He sighed. “I didn’t get to see it at all.”

  “The next one’s in June.”

  Scott raised his right hand. “I swear to Neil deGrasse Tyson and the ghost of Edmond Halley you’re the first person I ever met who already knew about the transit of Venus.”

  “I’m writing a book.”

  Scott’s jaw sagged open. He tugged so hard on his beard that Leland half-expected clumps of it to come loose.

  “Anna Grace maybe didn’t mention it? I write history books. Popular history is the official, you know, ‘genre.’” He made air quotes around genre. The word embarrassed him, as if he used it to claim something he didn’t deserve. It turned out, though, that the air quotes embarrassed him more. His face went hot. “This time I’m trying fiction. Some German scientists came here in eighteen eighty-two, and—”

  He paused. He’d never gotten farther than that. But Scott, still silent, pulled out a stool and sat.

  Leland went on. “Julius Heinrich Franz and Hermann Albert Kobold came here—Aiken, actually—and built an observatory. It’s still there. Part of it, anyway. They didn’t see anything of the transit, so I thought it’d make an unsatisfying narrative as non-fiction.”

  Scott looked over the papers and books laid out on the island. He picked up the document Leland had been trying to translate—a short memoir by Hermann Kobold—and then the notebook that contained the translation. Leland groaned. Even if he never had to admit to Scott, or anyone else, how long he’d worked to achieve so little, what he’d achieved, in itself, was an embarrassment.

  As if to prove that very point, Scott screwed up his face. “Who did this?” he said. “It’s way off. See here? This is the wrong sense of Einrichtung. It should be configuration rather than establishment.” Setting down the notebook, he scratched and scribbled and scratched and scribbled again. He chuckled. “Don’t you love how German piles up all the verbs at the end?”

  No. Leland did not love that. Not at all. But he said nothing. When Scott finished, he leaned to one side so that Leland could read what he’d written. It was a good sentence. A perfectly lucid sentence.

  “I spent a year in Germany,” Scott said. “I guess your translator…ah…didn’t?”

  “No. I’ve never been.”

  “Germany is so…” Whatever Germany was, Scott never said. Instead he opened one hand, as if he’d been holding a small bird and now wanted to set it free. He stared at Kobold’s memoir. “It’s your book—well, obviously—but if you ask me, if you really want transit action, Chappe is your homme.”

  “What is who is what?”

  “A French astronomer. Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche. Chappe. Total rock star. In seventeen sixty-one, he went to Siberia for the transit. He had to hire these giant sledges that ran along the courses of the frozen rivers, with the spring thaw chasing him all the way and the ice cracking and the water coming up under the runners. When he got there—there being Tobolsk, in the middle of nothing—he set up his observatory up on a hill and started taking his measurements. But the river flooded—the thaw, right?—and here he was, this citified weirdo, pointing stuff at the sky and making mysterious marks in a ledger, so the villagers thought…”

  “They thought he was a witch.”

  “Right? And in seventeen sixty-nine, he went south to Baja California, where—” Scott stopped himself. He grimaced and blushed, as if chastened by his own enthusiasm. “I get worked up. If I had the remotest idea how to do math, I’d be an astronomer myself, but…”

  Leland made his commiserating face. “Math is hard.”

  “I know you’re probably looking for the South Carolina connection, but the nineteenth-century transits weren’t as…” Open hand. Another bird took flight. “If I were you, I’d write a novel about Chappe, not Franz and Kobold. Or even better, not a novel at all, but a comprehensive history of all the transits, from Jeremiah Horrocks in sixteen thirty-nine, right up through NASA’s observations of the next one in June. No one’s ever done anything like that, as far as I know.”

  Pulling an empty stool toward him, Leland flumped down onto it. This suggestion of Scott’s could take some time to parse—if it could be parsed at all. Instead of a novel about one transit, write a history of them all. Or, instead of having a daughter and two sons, have a son and two daughters. One would be as easy as the other.

  No. That was crazy. The kids were grown, but he hadn’t committed
a single word of the novel to the page. What if he changed course? It would be more work, sure, but of the kind he loved best.

  “Is this Karen Holmes?” Scott asked.

  “What? Oh. The music. Yes, it’s Karen Holmes. I meant to change it.”

  The iPod had been shuffling for so long that Leland had tuned it out altogether. Half in a daze—all the transits? a history? not a novel? what would that mean?—he stumbled toward the corner shelf. As he crossed, “A Cockeyed Optimist” began with a series of crazy leaping chords on the piano.

  “Leave it,” Scott said. “I like it. A friend of mine—a mentor, really, someone I taught with in San Francisco, Jonah—he’s a major Karen Holmes junkie. And I mean major. He flies to New York to see her cabaret act every summer. Every. Summer.”

  “That’s dedication.”

  “Do you have her disco album?” Scott said. “That was the one thing Jonah couldn’t buy.”

  “Not even as a guilty pleasure?”

  “He would have, but he could never find it.”

  “It’s on iTunes. That’s where I got it.”

  Leland hadn’t intended to admit owning the Karen Holmes disco album. He had an excuse, if he needed one. He was prepared to explain that if you saw Rhythm and Dance listed alongside Bewitched and The Song Is You and That Old Feeling, you’d never guess it belonged in a different genre altogether. But he didn’t need to say anything: Scott was stuck in a different groove.

  “Jonah’s one of those vinyl people, you know? He’d never buy anything on a computer. And apparently all the Rhythm and Dance LPs burned up at Disco Demolition Night.”

  “Disco Demolition Night? I’m surprised you even know about that. You weren’t even born yet.”

  Scott laughed. “You’re sweet. I was six, seven, eight, somewhere around there. But to be honest, I’d forgotten all about it till Jonah wrote a one-act opera based on it.”

  It took a few seconds for all of that to sink in. An opera, of all things, about a publicity stunt, a record burning that turned into a riot. A one-act opera, at that—an oxymoronic-sounding thing, as strange to contemplate as a big detail or a jumbo shrimp. And one final thing: If Scott had been six or eight years old at the end of the disco era, that meant Leland had misjudged his age by a decade.

  “You know,” Scott was saying, “I think the whole concept of a ‘guilty pleasure,’ at least in terms of music, is suspect. It assumes there’s good music and bad music, as if in a moral sense.”

  “Are you saying disco is a sin?”

  It was a joke, but Scott didn’t laugh. “A music professor might say all classical music is good and all popular music is bad. This”—he nodded toward the iPod and speakers—“wouldn’t be good music. It might not even be music at all. Maybe he’d just think it’s noise.”

  For a time, as if by agreement, they listened to “My Funny Valentine,” the gold standard of standards. The piano and bass maundered through a duet. Karen’s voice came in high and floated down a blues scale as a waft of mist might drift downward along a dark slope. Lovely. Amazing. Art, not noise.

  Scott went on. “Maybe it’s even narrower than that. Maybe the prof thinks Mozart was a hack, but Stravinsky was a genius. The kids mostly think Mozart and Stravinsky are equally full of shit, and all classical music is just so boring it seems more like cuneiform. They’re all listening to hip hop, which to me sounds like a bunch of shouting. Our musical taste isn’t just about the music. It’s about who we are. When you’re a teenager and you start fall in love with a certain kind of music, it’s part of inventing your adult self. It’s hard to admit it when you like something that doesn’t fit the persona you created. We call that a ‘guilty pleasure,’ but why be guilty about loving something that was created in the hopes that you’d love it?”

  After “Valentine,” the first cut of Rhythm and Dance began. Leland had never been a fan of disco, but this track was its own thing. A simple piano riff, a funk bass, and a four-on-the-floor beat in the drums. No strings, no brass. All the color and flash came from Karen’s voice. It was so perfect that it must have seemed like low-hanging fruit—a disco cover of “Get Rhythm,” a song that recommended rhythm as a cure for the blues. But it was also so unlikely that no one else had ever thought of it—a disco cover of a rockabilly rave-up by Johnny Cash.

  “Is this it?” Scott’s eyes were wide. “This is it, isn’t it? The Karen Holmes disco album?”

  “Sure is.” Leland’s hips and shoulders moved as if of their own accord. “You can’t not get rhythm when there’s all this rhythm to get, am I right?”

  “You know, when I said all that about good and bad music and not feeling ashamed, I didn’t mean to imply that this is good music.”

  Leland been just about to hustle up some boogie, but he stopped cold. “What?”

  “C’mon, man. You’re too easy.” Scott kicked off his flip-flops. “Do you know the bump?”

  “What’s to know? You just…bump.”

  “It’s the only dance I ever learned. Miss Mahaffey taught us in first grade. We always spent Monday mornings doing the bump.”

  In the space of a single beat Scott could leap and spin a hundred and eighty degrees. The way his hips shimmied and gyred, they seemed to be constructed of magic and wishes rather than muscle and bone. He had some fine goddamned moves. Whirling around, he knocked his pelvis against Leland’s, so forcefully that Leland lost his balance and had to scramble to regain it.

  “Ow,” Leland said, but he couldn’t stop laughing.

  “I’ll never be able to prove it,” he said, “but I think Miss Mahaffey probably spent all weekend dancing and snorting coke.”

  “Hold up, though,” Leland said. “This is the best bit. Are you ready?”

  Scott opened his arms to the air, the room, the world. “Let’s go.”

  The piano exploded into a wild solo. Bluesy, jazzy, honky-tonky: Somehow it crammed a century’s worth of booze-drenched dance music into a single series of chord changes. A sax came out of nowhere and chattered along. A string orchestra had shown up after all—who knew when?—but for once the strings weren’t there for sweetness. These violins and cellos played straight raunch, the catgut equivalent of “The Stripper.” The men danced, shimmied, boogied, twisted, and bumped.

  “I just realized…” Scott took Leland by the hand and turned him around so that they were face to face. “I lied before. Miss Mahaffey taught us the hustle, too. Watch my feet.”

  He started a pattern of steps that got him nowhere—a step back, a step forward, a step to his right, a step to his left. Leland watched and waited for the right place to jump in.

  The front door slammed. China clinked in the cabinets. The iPod slid off its shelf and dangled by its speaker cable. Leland hurried to the corner and scooped up the device in both hands. Its own weight had loosened its connection with the jack, and now it slipped entirely free. The music stopped. Whoever had slammed the door—John Carter, it had to be John Carter—galumphed directly up the stairs.

  Scott and Leland looked at each other.

  “Do you need to…?” Scott said in a whisper.

  “Intervene? See what’s going on? Maybe. I don’t know.” Gently, as if to make up for all it had been through, he laid the iPod on the shelf. “After he calms down, I’ll investigate. It’s a teenage tantrum, that’s all.”

  The door opened and closed again, this time without violence. A brief silence followed, complete except for the distant drone of a jet crossing some far quadrant of the sky, and then Anna Grace called out from the front hallway.

  “I don’t think I understood that,” Scott said. The expression on his face was alarmed and slightly alarming.

  “She’s washing her hands and taking off her shoes.”

  “Should I…? Maybe I should…”

  “No. Stay,” Leland said. “We haven’t eaten yet.”

  Upstairs, a door slammed. And then another sound, a thunk-clang.

  Scott grabbed his flip-flops
by their straps and took a seat on one of the barstools. “You know, I think…” Leaning over, he slipped his sandals onto his feet. “I think there’s a bunch of family stuff going on right now and I’m just…”

  Leland sighed. “I’ll walk you out.”

  Slinging his bag over his shoulder, Scott patted his pockets and glanced around him. “Ever feel like you’re forgetting something?”

  “At least you didn’t forget to bust some beats.”

  Scott grinned. “I had fun. I’ve been here for three or four months now, but I’ve had some trouble, you know…”

  “Making friends? I was born in this house, and I’ve been giving tours in this town for twenty-three years, and I have trouble making friends.”

  “You were born here?” With the forefingers of both hands, he pointed to the floor. “Right here?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “A tree fell across the driveway—big storm—and they couldn’t get out. Mama wouldn’t hear word one of a taxi. She said if she had to give birth in a moving vehicle with a hired driver watching in the rearview, Daddy wouldn’t have another moment of peace in his whole sorry life.”

  In the entryway, all the picture frames had gone askew. It was a thing that happened sometimes, particularly when a careless or angry teenager threw the door wide open and it bumped the wall. Leland spun the thumb-turn, and the deadbolt unlocked with a clack. He opened the door a few inches.

  Just as he’d done at the beginning of the evening, before he’d come in, Scott held the strap of his bag with both hands and rocked from foot to foot. His eyes were a beautiful greenish gray. The exact color of Spanish moss. “Thanks again.” He made for the door, ducking as if he were too tall to fit through. As he set foot across the threshold, he jerked to a stop and turned back. He let go of his bag strap. “Would you…?”

  Leland found himself moving toward him and folding him into a hug. Scott was surprisingly slender, all bones and hair. And so much hair. For a moment, Leland imagined he could wrap himself in it, or part it like a curtain and walk through. His cock begin to harden. He quickly withdrew from Scott and stumbled back a step.

  Scott’s face, wherever it was bare of beard, had reddened. He opened his bag and reached in. Shuffling aside some papers and books, he took out a fat manila envelope. He cleared his throat and said, “What I was saying was, um, would you give this to…?”

  Of all his half-finished sentences, this was the easiest to complete: give this to Anna Grace. Scott, or someone, had written her name across the front of the envelope.

  “It’s Jonah’s opera,” Scott said. “Under the Volcano. I told her I’d…”

  “Right. I’ll—I’ll make sure she gets it.”

  With a nod and a smile of sorts, and a face somehow redder than before, Scott backed through the open door. Halfway across the piazza, he turned and hurried down the steps. Leland rushed to the door, closed it, locked it, slumped against it. Twice in a day, though for very different reasons, he’d hugged an unwilling man. He was a hug robber, a squeeze seizer, a serial clincher. Cradling the envelope against his chest—yes, hugging even that—he rapped his forehead against the door.

  Behind him, the stairs creaked. Anna Grace said, “How’d you get along with Scott? He’s so odd, don’t you think?”

  Leland made a noncommittal noise. How long had she been watching or listening? Had she seen the hug? His erection had vanished, but he discovered that he’d thoughtlessly extended his arms, so that the envelope concealed the fly of his dungarees.

  “Should we invite him for Thanksgiving?” Anna Grace said. “I was thinking we should.”

  In a little while, Leland thought, he’d force himself to turn around and answer his wife’s question. But he needed some time, just a minute or so more to wish vainly for the floorboards and the crust of the earth to collapse beneath him and swallow him whole.