by Cara Hoffman
“Doesn’t mean anything.” He shrugged, amazed at how inarticulate he’d become in just a week. How he didn’t even bother. Right now he was drinking in the same bar with the Patricks. He was sitting with a woman who’d been his peer in every way, and whose life had been tanked six years ago by some jackass party boy and she was still trying to make good. He shook his head and started over. “I think Lauren may be having some real problems,” he began, then Patrick crossed the bar with a fresh drink in his hand and stood beside Holly, resting his other hand on her shoulder.
“Anyway,” he said to her. “Getting back to my point before we were sidetracked by this romantic tale of woe, you have to engage them especially if you think they are looking down on you. I’ve had conversations with professors in houses where Gerry and me were working odd jobs and they are blown away by what I’m reading, by the thought experiments I’m undertaking. You should see their faces.”
“We’re talking,” Holly said to Patrick, giving him a shy smile and gesturing at Shane. But Shane couldn’t tolerate another of his uncle’s interruptions, couldn’t stand the things he said.
“That’s just great,” Shane told him. “Of course the people whose garage you’re cleaning out are shocked you’re reading things from their freshman seminars. You were a national merit scholar, now you’re a newspaper delivery man, how many of those do you think there are?”
Holly said, “Prolly more than you think” at the same time Patrick said, “None.” And Shane shook his head at both of them.
“No, none,” Patrick said again, taking no offense at all—as this was all clearly part of some fundamental case he was making. “Or not too many. I’ve had conversations with these people and they say I should be teaching their class. You know I could have done that if I’d actually wanted to.” He shrugged and took a gulp of his drink. “It was my choice. But I just didn’t want to. I got offers to go to St. Lawrence and George Washington.” Patrick laughed mockingly, shook his head and raised his glass to his lips again, smiling to himself. “People think if they hold out a bone you have to sit up and beg.”
Shane’s rage roiled again and his uncle watched with amusement.
“What are you going to do about it?” Patrick asked him belligerently.
“About what?” Shane asked tightly.
“This great weight upon you whenever I talk about having the things you never had.”
Shane looked genuinely startled. “Excuse me? Having what I never had? You seriously think I’m angry because I’m jealous of you? You never had a fucking thing, Paddy. You never had a thing.”
“You’re mad because I got freedom and you don’t,” he said, slowed by drink and whatever grand vision it provided. “You all care so much about what people think and how they see you. All of you.” He waved his hand in a dainty circle and spoke in a falsetto: “All the little sheep, little college sheep, grazing along.” He dropped abruptly back into his normal speaking tone. “I’ve got riches up here. I’ve got things they can’t imagine.” Patrick straightened his shoulders, raised his chest expansively; he breathed deeply, smiling a wistful self-congratulatory smile, and Shane knew they were about to be the audience for one of his drunken soliloquies.
“Here’s what I have that you don’t. That you can’t get—can’t even begin to get. I wake up at four in the morning amidst this beautiful decay, this city that’s an object of your scorn. I get to smoke and read and drink coffee and then load the car, all simple but complexly transcendent pleasures. I get to feel my muscles working. I get to see the faces of the grotesques that do this job—they’re real people, you know. People your kind don’t want to know exist because they’ve got nothing, not even books. But they’re beautiful, dressed in their dickies and thermal underwear, smoking generic cigarettes, pulling the bundles off the great filthy truck from the printers and heaving them onto the loading dock.”
“Patrick, shut the fuck up,” Shane told him. “Enough with the Herman Melville of the loading docks routine.”
“What you can’t stand, boyo,” he said, invoking his father’s accent, bringing on some pugnacious, bred-in-the-bone fury that had no place in this country or century, “is that I love this life and I want this life. I can live in my little room and read Nietzsche and have more wealth and depth than you’ll ever have following orders about what you’re supposed to think and learn. You just keep lapping it up and maybe you’ll be a good little professor one day and perpetuate the whole sycophantic monstrosity all over again.”
It was a mistake to have told him to shut up and Shane knew it. Patrick’s competitive nature would guarantee a longer monologue, and Patrick had an advantage over normal people because he didn’t care if what he said made sense or not; it was more about the cadence of the language and the emotion it carried. Shane had seen this his whole life. Regardless of his high-school glory days, Patrick didn’t actually know much, didn’t retain information for very long at all. He rarely finished anything he started reading and couldn’t articulate concepts or follow more than a basic plot, but he did read on occasion, he did remember the names of titles and authors and memorized big words he liked the sounds of, and the uncanny nature of these acts where they lived was enough to convince himself he was intelligent. Patrick was versed in nothing and because of that he was doomed to perpetual audience, perpetual awe, everything a mystery. He had placed himself on a pedestal—he was his own high-school sweetheart.
Patrick was so ignorant he didn’t even understand the fundamentals of his own poverty, had created a mystique and heroism around it, made it about being looked down upon by professors who were suddenly shocked to learn of his genius, exploited by some phantom elite, even as he was paying the Guinness and Marlboro empires for his own death on credit. Shane concentrated on not responding.
“I’m a loser to you!” Patrick went on, and Shane stopped himself from nodding in agreement. “Home from college just a few days and you can’t even pretend you want to spend time with us. I’m a loser to you? Guess what? Nine tenths of humanity is losers. You, my friend, are outside of real life! You’re the freak. I’m not ashamed to be what I am. I’m closer to real brilliance and transcendence and all the things you worship down there at your dainty little school than you’ll ever be. I can go home and read Cormac McCarthy and Faulkner and Heidegger and Husserl. All. Goddamn. Night!” He viciously enunciated the T in night and jabbed a finger into Shane’s chest, leaving it there while he took a trembling, menacing step forward. “I’m closer to them than you’ll ever be.”
At that point Shane actually laughed; he could see the sweat on his uncle’s upper lip and smell his inky, dirty clothes. The man had just shouted the name of Husserl in a dive bar, as if it was part of some incantation to bring him power.
“Let’s just take a break here for a minute,” Holly said, trapped in her seat at the booth. She put her hand on Patrick’s arm.
“No,” he said, choked with emotion, buoyed by drinks. “Hon, this is just what we were talking about the other day. Just exactly what we were talking about.”
He turned to Shane. “I’m not keeping my little foot in line to make sure my interpretation is correct. I’m reading masterpieces in the white-trash wilds.” His face was red now and he was shaking his head emphatically. “You, you just degrade people like me—poor people, you look down on me and the joke’s on you because I get the real meanings. I get what you never will. In MY way, not the way that keeps the world all buttoned up tight. I get it in MY way. In MY way!”
Shane sighed and shifted in the booth. He was trying not to speak because it would only make it worse. There was a certain tone Patrick took, halfway through the grandstanding, where it became entirely comic, one of those rousing speeches from the end of a ’60s-era movie. Some hushed and grandiose pronouncement. He whipped himself up into a rage, his body tense, almost bringing himself to tears at the thought of his own bravery in the face of the struggle for authenticity.
“I’m the last wild
animal in this region,” he said, teary eyed and grinning defiantly at his nephew. “All the rest of you are afraid,” he said, and raised his voice to falsetto again: “Like your poor little mother, pinching every penny, terrified to do the slightest thing for herself because she’s so—”
At this Shane stood up and punched his uncle hard in the mouth. Holly leapt from the booth and stood in front of Shane, putting her arms around him to block whatever response might be coming, but Shane pushed her away, trembling with rage. Patrick staggered back, put a hand to his face but managed to keep hold of his drink with the other. He smiled and his teeth were slick and red with blood. He took a frightfully calm step toward Shane, his eyes dancing.
Gerry and Shamus were standing now, looking at them. Gerry laughed and folded his arms across his chest, waiting.
“Go,” Holly said, turning to Patrick, pointing to his barstool. “Go. Enough. Enough.”
“Sit down now, Paddy,” Shamus said. “You’ll get us thrown out before suppertime.”
“How does it feel?” Patrick asked his nephew thickly through the blood pooling in his mouth. “You thought you left this place, you thought you belonged out in the suburbs at a Quaker school. You’ll be here the rest of your life no matter where you go. Your polo pony friends aren’t in a bar today beating the souls that raised them, are they?”
“Enough,” Holly said again. “Shut up, now.” She pulled some napkins off the pile on the table and pressed them to Patrick’s mouth, to his split lips. He closed his eyes and took a breath, relaxed, almost relieved, as he held her delicate hand to his face.
Eleven
AFTER VESPERS TROY went back into his office and riffled through his filing cabinet for Lauren’s CD. Something he hadn’t thought about for four years. It was packed up with the music he’d photocopied for her, parts of librettos and heavily marked four-page arias, a repertoire he’d chosen for her voice and for her temperament. Her neat narrow writing annotated the margins of the piece.
He’d asked her to return all the music before she left, for safekeeping and for other students who might need it—not as a punishment; her decision was her decision, and as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t terrible. He still had his insurance paid for by them, what little he had left was due mostly to military benefits. And service is temporary. All those things you see and do over there, temporary. A small price for what it enables you to do later if you’re smart.
“You have no other students,” she’d said, looking up at him plaintively, her dark brown eyes darker still for the circles beneath them. He laughed at her. There was that. But it would do her no good to feel special. He had to compose himself or he would start laughing really hard at her. That ratty watchcap she wore, all she needed was some coal rubbed on her cheeks. The little match girl shivering in the icy air from all the stark holy music she insisted upon singing, thinking he was angry at her, not aware she was Maria Callas at eighteen.
“Someone else might come along,” he’d said. “Some boy or girl who might not be able to buy his or her own score.”
He knew it wasn’t likely though. When she sang for him the day Ms. Heimal brought her in, he had to drown his first thoughts. Which were that he could almost taste the timbre of her voice. He listened to the little art song she’d prepared and then asked her to sing some scales. She had a three-octave range, comfortably extending beyond high C. Her voice was clear, smooth and sweet and rich. It was bell-like. Drinkable. About to spill over the rim. Filled with a natural exuberant power, untrained, wavering between release and restraint.
But where the voice was light and strong the girl looked tired. Even back then, wiry and tired, her long hair pulled back in a ponytail, she wore ripped jeans and a flannel shirt, generic sneakers.
“Lovely,” he said, purposefully, professionally. Not letting her hear his excitement. “Can you come in after school?”
“I have to do chores and then pick up my brother,” she said, not what he’d asked and too much information. “But I have a study hall like fourth period so I can ride my bike here before lunch.”
“Fine.” He nodded. For the next two years she would come during the day. After that he added some late-afternoon practices. She would show up in a track uniform and sometimes bring a distracted little boy who had a hard time keeping quiet unless he was playing with those plastic blocks that snapped together. They were both thin, sleepy, ragged-looking children. They reminded Troy of himself.
He had never met her parents. They did not come to her recitals. Once he’d suggested in passing that her mom take her to Knapp’s music store out by the mall. The little boy’s head whipped around from where he was playing to look at her. And she’d said simply, evenly, “I can ride my bike there,” but did not look up from her score.
It was hard not to think about Lauren. She was a serious student and high on what came naturally to her and she had a rare focus, could be entirely in the piece for the mintues it lasted, be transported. She was the kind of musician who is alive as the vessel for the voice, whose discipline was created by a desire for discipline itself and the physical need to sing, to leave the material world, leave the body. It was his job to teach her that the voice is the body. It was his job to break her of reliance on her innate abilities so that she could actually use them. She was attached to little but the praise of teachers and the chattering ragamuffin she dragged around with her and doted upon. And Troy knew better than most that those things would get her nowhere.
It wasn’t just talent or drive, though, she was simply a good student. She did what was written and did what he told her to do, and she came in wanting to know things, technical things, things that mattered. The great mistake students make is to ask how a piece is supposed to feel or sound before they’ve mastered it. She never did that. She respected what was on the page and tried to live up to it first before daring to ask a question about it.
“What was that?” he asked her that day, pulling his hands abruptly away from the keyboard.
“What was what?” she asked, looking toward the door as if she’d missed some noise from outside.
“That sound.”
She looked confused.
“Pick up to rehearsal G, second system,” he told her tersely so she could find it in the score.
“An F sharp,” she said.
“An F sharp,” he repeated deadpan. “Sing from rehearsal D.” And she repeated the phrase, airy and with ease, up through her belly and into her head until the high note where she pushed the sound from her throat.
“Do you hear that?” he asked her.
She shook her head, shrugged. “It’s harder on that one note. I just need to get a better F sharp.”
He said, “Yes, of course, how interesting. Maybe you can go next door and borrow an F sharp from someone.” He watched her face fall. He said, “Support it. Sink into the ground. It’s a push and a pull at the same time. Again. Pick up to rehearsal D.” She sang the note and he stopped her. “Again,” he said. She sang the note and he let her continue to the end of the phrase before stopping her. “It’s pressure in your body, not a lungful of air that you need. Again,” he said. “You should feel in your lower abdomen like you’re about to laugh.”
When she did what he wanted he saw it in her face, saw her listening, watched her eyes change, watched her smile. She wouldn’t be doing that piece wrong again.
• • •
Lauren Clay, fresh from her middle-school chorus—with no sense of her real talent, no sense of the difficulty of the pieces he was asking her to sing—but still weak in her body, slouched at the piano in a black hooded sweatshirt, the liquid silver sound of her voice just beginning to come into vibrato, ringing, and filling the empty echoing church, waking him after a long sober slumber, bringing him home.
Lauren had a soloist’s voice and she liked winning, which made it a pleasure to take her every year for juried competition. He sat off to the side and the judges convened before her in their folding metal
chairs. She wore the same black linen dress that started out too big and got smaller every year. Her eyes lined with charcoal-gray pencil, a thin blue beaded bracelet on her narrow wrist, her hair tied back. And each year she got a perfect score right down the line. One hundred percent from timbre to sight singing. The day he brought her to Curtis was one of the proudest in his life. He knew what resonated there in her throat, in her mouth, in her chest. The spirit and pleasure and joy and grief that she could bring clear and whole to the sound. He knew what would happen that day, and he had not been wrong.
It was the All State and All Eastern concerts—the yearly trips that her high-school choir teacher drove her to, that Troy credited for her idiotic obsession with choral music, with the crush of harmony and anonymity and with spare, clear sounds. Sleeping in hotels and practicing all day long and coming to love the ease and grace and oceanic power of voices fitting. Caught up in it like watching waves crashing. It was a short step from there to holy music, and that he knew was his own goddamn fault. And from there to the starkness of minimalism, something he hadn’t expected. As if she wanted to live only in winter, to be buried in ice, wanted no other sound in her head. He joked about the pieces she chose to practice the last year she was there. He’d rub his hands together. He’d say, “I can see your breath.”
But all that was a long time ago. She was back now, and silent. He would love to hear her sing an aria now that she was not a girl. Sing alone with her woman’s voice. He tapped her CD against his knuckles absently. He would play it in the car, figure out what she had to do next, call Curtis himself if he had to. The last thing he wanted was for her to start hanging around the church with him. Hanging around and not singing like she was on guard duty. Bored, distracted, and vigilant at the same time.
Troy put on his long tweed coat still damp from the morning rain, locked the clutter behind his office door, and went out the back into the parking lot. A group of men were standing just outside, hunched close to the building beneath the stone archway to stay out of the rain, passing a bottle back and forth.
