by Paul Russell
The symphony had reached its difficult finale: for a moment she caught the orchestra stumble, teeter precariously on the brink. Beside her, Louis flinched in palpable discomfort. If he judged others harshly, she reminded herself, it was because he judged himself most harshly of all. And miraculously, as if her husband had borne the brunt of their disappointment for them, the musicians recovered. The brass blazed brilliantly if raggedly. The strings swam upward in a stirring rush of noise. Like a charioteer trying to rein in his runaway steeds, the conductor flailed about excitedly, though it was clear the galloping orchestra, and not he, was in charge. It didn’t matter; scrappy with exhilaration, orchestra and conductor crossed the finish line more or less together. Beside her, she could tell, Louis was judging all this abysmal, even shameful—Louis who could not put a word to paper though he had tried. Who had even sacrificed their latest summer to the attempt.
And yet, when the applause began, hearty and sustained, Louis applauded as well. “Bravo,” he said quietly, so that only she could hear. The conductor, who had ducked out as soon as the final chord had ceased, returned, his arms open wide, gesturing gratefully to the orchestra that had almost fumbled and then so stupendously recovered. The hall was delirious, though whether the congratulations were for the orchestra, the conductor, or for themselves for having so bravely submitted for the last two hours to the onslaughts of culture, was difficult to say. And what would Sharia Washington think, seeing her teacher likewise worshipfully applaud the music of these dead white males? Could it be that something so simple yet unalterable as her love of Brahms would sadly mark the limits of whatever friendship might be possible between the likes of Claire Tremper and Sharia Washington? If she could imagine, with pleasure, Tracy Parker’s face lit by this music, she held out no similar hope for Sharia. And perhaps her embattled student of color was right—perhaps it was shameful, in a world where people fought and starved and died appalling deaths in appalling numbers, to spend fifty dollars to listen to a hundred-year-old exercise in high-bourgeois entertainment.
The applause had died down. Always there was this moment of confusion, even disappointment: what to do next? Mechanically Claire rose—saying to herself that Brahms was not Wagner, that Brahms, German to the core though he might be, could scarcely be accused of helping to make possible the twentieth century’s carnage—and gathered up her jacket as the lights went up and everyone else (there was not a black face to be seen among them) began to file from their seats.
“I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed that,” Louis told her as they emerged into the lobby.
“I’m surprised,” she told him. “I thought they played rather badly.” Then, remembering his soft-spoken “Bravo” as he applauded, and realizing how tart her appraisal had sounded, she added hastily, “Though they certainly showed spirit.”
“They certainly did,” Louis agreed. “More than enough to go around, really. Not exactly Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, but in the end they won me over. Brahms was partial to small orchestras like this, you know. Especially the one at Meiningen, where Hans von Bülow conducted. Less than fifty players, only ten or so first violins. So we may be hearing, in a concert like this one, something of what the composer originally intended. In fact, when von Billow premiered the Fourth, Brahms rejected his suggestion that they augment the strings. He didn’t want a Vienna Philharmonic sound. He knew perfectly well what he was after.”
As Louis dutifully recited what he had no doubt cribbed from Grove’s Musical Dictionary earlier in the day—he loved preparing himself for a concert, and for the opportunity to educate his wife afterward—Claire half listened contentedly; she could tell that her husband, who took her arm as they left the Bardavon and headed toward the parking garage, felt a happiness that all too rarely descended on him—though whether he expostulated on Brahms and the little orchestra at Meiningen because he was happy, or was happy because he had the opportunity to expostulate, she could not say. She felt a sudden swell of gratitude toward Tracy Parker, who listened so patiently to Louis’s enthusiasms, and whose attentions had allowed her husband, she felt, an extended spell of happiness in the weeks they had known him. Shehad not seen the need to report her own altogether pleasant poolside encounter with the young man, for wasn’t it precisely these little omissions that had made life possible between Louis and herself? Despite their deeply ingrained habits with each other, they still found it in themselves to be, on occasion, genuinely surprising to each other. She who had been so certain Louis was in misery, listening to all that hectic playing: now she was the one who voiced reservations about the music making while he practically sang, he was in such agreeable spirits. And so they went with each other, back and forth, and at the best of times, as she saw it, their relationship assumed the character of a deft, thoughtful, courtly dance whose pleasures, over time, had not been at all insubstantial.
Driving at night, the tantalizing lure of freedom: she loved that. She and Louis had never traveled in the United States, which was not to say that they had not paid visits to their daughters, wherever fate or choice had taken them over the years, Arizona, Missouri, California, and now that Susan and family had moved to Alaska they were no doubt destined to see that state as well. But they had never roamed their own country the way they roamed the back roads and walking paths of Germany and Austria and Switzerland, leisurely and aimless voyages of discovery that had formed, through the years, an archipelago of happy memories—a wandering life altogether apart from their sedentary existence in Middle Forge, disconnected from it the way dreams are from waking existence, an intermittent life that perhaps made its more continuous counterpart possible. On a clear night like this, behind the wheel of the Audi, Claire felt that, just once in her life, she’d like to head west on the open road. Not the busy interstates but the old forsaken highways. The romance of all those world-lost little towns, the great dusty middle states, the high shelf of mountains, the sunset bath of the Pacific.
It had been years since her husband had gotten behind the wheel of a car. He’d been quite an inattentive driver in his day, and so it was perhaps not a bad thing that he had seen fit, not long after he became headmaster, to take himself off the road voluntarily.
She did not mind. Her only demand had been a modest one: if she was to do the driving, she insisted that they invest in an automobile of quality, and though she knew how much Louis had hated to spend the money, he had nonetheless obliged.
Strange to contemplate how any single moment might begin a new life, for had she never taken over the driving she might never have acquired the sense of independence and capability that had led her back to school, first in an evening class at the community college called, appropriately enough, Auto Maintenance for Women, then a master’s and Ph.D. program at the state university and thence, in a not unpleasing circle, back to the community college to which, in her way, she would be forever grateful.
South of Poughkeepsie, much of Route 9 was a depressing gauntlet of fast-food restaurants and strip malls, but after Fishkill the clutter thinned, and for the last couple of miles before coming into Middle Forge the road led through a lonely stretch, one of the last open sweeps of farmland not yet ruined by development.
A pale half moon hung in the sky; some stars were out. The Audi hummed along smoothly, powerfully. They had the road to themselves.
“I’m trying to remember,” Louis said, “the name of that conductor we heard do the Brahms Second in Stuttgart. Do you remember? It must have been in the mid-seventies. I believe he was Romanian. I can’t for the life of me remember. It was quite an extraordinary performance.”
“He had an unpronounceable name,” Claire told him. “That’s why you can’t remember. But yes, I remember that performance very well.”
But what did it mean to remember a performance? She could really remember nothing, twenty years later, except the impression that it had been remarkable. Exactly why it had been so, she could not begin to say. For a moment she was on the
verge of posing that question to Louis, but then she did not, since she had learned that such speculative topics were best left alone between them. She could only conclude that he’d always been a bit of a sexist that way. He and Reid could joust for hours and no doubt such speculative talk was a great deal of the pleasure that accrued when he and Tracy Parker spent their musical evenings together, but between herself and Louis such abstract arguments invariably seemed to turn personal.
The lights of an approaching car dazzled her from her reverie. Reflexively she clicked off the Audi’s high beams just as the other car dimmed its own, and in that instant, as if from nowhere, a large white form suddenly appeared directly in front of the car. “Oh,” Louis said as she drove her foot hard into the brake pedal. The tires shrieked their protest, the car shimmied, stalled out, and abruptly came to a dead stop. What struck her in the moment after was the utter stillness, as if everything held its breath and then, in the next moment, let out a great sigh of relief.
“What was that?” Louis said.
“I have no idea,” she told him. “I don’t think we hit it, whatever it was.”
“No,” he said. “We didn’t hit it. But I wonder if that other car did.”
On the other side of the road, nearly across from them, the oncoming car, one of those bullying sports utility vehicles that she loathed, had skidded off the road and into the shallow ditch alongside. A man emerged. Claire lowered her window. “Are you all right over there?” she called to him. “I’m going to pull off onto the shoulder so we don’t get rear-ended.” She restarted the engine and steered the Audi out of the path of traffic.
“Did you see that?” the man asked. He leaned in through the window, a good-looking man in his mid-thirties wearing a Penn State sweatshirt.
“It looked like a dog,” Louis said. “Only it was rather too large.”
“It sure wasn’t any deer,” the man told them. “It looked like a horse. That’s how big it was. A small horse.”
Claire was sure it had had fur and a snout, whatever it was. The moonlight on its coat had gleamed silver.
“It looked white to me,” she ventured. “A large white wolflike animal.” She doubted it had been anywhere near as large as a small horse—though Louis was right: it was really too big to be an ordinary dog. She had had the impression of speed and purposefulness, as if, in its magnificent and harrowing passage, it had scarcely noticed them.
“Is your car stuck?” Louis asked, leaning across her to address their fellow driver. “Do you need help?”
“I think she’s fine,” said the man. “We were all just lucky there.”
“Well, drive carefully,” Claire told him.
“Same to you,” the man said.
Her surge of adrenaline was subsiding; she felt more spooked than anything else. It had been very close; whatever the creature, they had very nearly hit it. She eased the Audi back onto the road, but could not so easily ease herself back into a sense of complacency as her eyes scanned the dark unfolding fields for the moment that was always poised, when you least expected it, to be upon you.
VII
Fishing in his pocket for change, the boy brought up a handful of coins, which he counted out, one at a time, from his open palm onto the counter where he’d tossed a pack of gum. Entranced, Tracy stood too close behind and scrutinized, recklessly, the blond down feathering the back of a slender neck, the uneven shag of a hairline. When the boy turned his head slightly to the side, Tracy caught the heart-stopping beauty of his profile. Or perhaps not quite beautiful, his nose a bit too large, eyes too sleepy, but nonetheless radiating a secret magnetism, an irresistible force. At fourteen or fifteen, unconscious grace suffused some boys’ every awkward move. This one, neither the most miraculous nor the least, wore a loose-fitting mustard-colored shirt, tails out, sleeves rolled to the elbow, baggy maroon jeans, a leather thong around his neck from which dangled—Tracy shifted his stance in order to observe more closely—a small stone arrowhead. He was no Forge student but rather a townie, and Tracy felt overtaken by a delicious, involuntary spasm of lust he did not attempt to quell. He was allowed this, wasn’t he? In the last couple of months he had learned, around boys he knew, such scrupulous circumspection; now, in the presence of this stranger whose path his was free to cross, he defiantly welcomed lust’s troubling, exhilarating intensity.
What to do with beauty like that, all the energy and perplexity that was adolescence? Where did he live, this boy? Who were his friends? What did he think about? More than anything, Tracy told himself, all he wanted was the impossible—to strike up a friendship, discover some common ground. To speak a language that was as intimate and free as certain dreams, saying darkly, thrillingly, My cock inside of you. Your come in my mouth. Already in that dream he was easing his new friend out of those hip, baggy jeans, exposing smooth young flesh to the surprise of cool air. He focused on the boy’s slim, tight hips; with the tip of his tongue he tasted an asshole’s bitter, forbidden mystery.
His gum paid for, pocketed, the boy turned abruptly to leave, and Tracy took a sudden backward step out of his way. For an instant their eyes met, but it was nothing. The boy hardly registered him at all.
Regretting his reflexes—how pleasurably their bodies might have collided—Tracy hefted his plastic bottle of seltzer onto the counter and pulled out his wallet. “No,” he impatiently told the woman behind the counter as she fumbled to extricate a plastic bag from its companions in the pile on the counter, “I don’t need one.” If he hurried, he might still catch a final, visionary glimpse in the parking lot.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I have to put that in a bag for you. Store policy.” With maddening persistence, the thin, static-charged sheets of plastic clung to one another and would not let go.
He gave up and let her have her way. If only she knew how, like those Siberian miners who, in order to recharge certain vital elements in their sun-starved bodies, periodically bask in treatments of ultraviolet light, he had been infused with a life-giving force. Touched, as it were, by lightning.
When he emerged from the convenience store the boy was nowhere to be seen. The bicycle left crumpled on the sidewalk, which he had observed on entering, likewise was gone. But that was fine. He recalled the precious image to mind, testing its mettle, reassuring himself he’d succeeded in saving the boy up in order to expend him later, at his leisure, while soaping himself in the shower or lying in a drowse on his futon.
At twenty-five Tracy’s mind was already a honeycomb of sweetly preserved images, icons of longing to be brought out and celebrated like those saints who had saved cities from plague or conquest: that ambiguous kid he’d encountered on the path at William and Mary, a blond adolescent who used to kick a soccer ball in the street below his room in Freiburg, the dark-haired stunner in the Stuttgart train station he’d followed into the men’s room and casually positioned himself next to at the long porcelain urinal trough, watching with racing pulse that uncircumcised young cock empty itself of a fierce golden stream, holy moments he had tended faithfully through the years.
When he got home, the light on his answering machine was flashing. As always these days, whenever he saw he had messages an inexplicable panic seized him. Had someone died? Had he been fired? Had they finally tracked him down?
He frequently had to remind himself that he had done nothing wrong. He had never done anything wrong.
“Do you know who’s the meanest drag queen in town?” Arthur chirped. There was a long pause. Unidentifiable music, perhaps opera, played in the background. “Amanda Reckonwith. Get it? You should give me a call as soon as you get the chance, otherwise I’m going to have to march up there and slap you silly. Seriously—I want to tell you about my latest step in regaining control of my body.”
What did Arthur mean? For an instant, hope flashed, then faded. It was his third and most pointed message this week, but Tracy found himself unable to return the call. He despised his panic, but let it master him nonetheless.
As long as he didn’t talk to Arthur, he could pretend the diagnosis had been a mistake, a hallucination—even some ghastly prank his friend had decided to play on him. The alternative was impossible to come to terms with, though he’d certainly tried. He’d made himself face the facts, and the facts made him very desperate. If Arthur really was dying, then the odds were that he, Tracy Parker, who had shared bodily fluids, as the literature so dispassionately phrased it, was following only a few steps behind. Too astonishing for words, and yet, inside his body, he could detect from time to time—what? A whisper or a shadow he couldn’t put his finger on, but that stalked him nonetheless, unnerving in its occasional decision to manifest itself when least expected. Just the other night he had dreamed he stood in his living room. Every step he took sent ripples undulating across a floor suddenly spongy with rot. Water oozed between the boards; through gaps he could make out, underneath the whole house, a horrible abyss of foul black water into which it seemed he might sink at any moment. In his dream, that fetid swamp had been there all along, but he hadn’t known, or he’d known but chosen to ignore it, and he felt both dread and a disquieting sense of recognition, as if it were his body and not his mind that had chosen to dream this dream.
If there was anybody to talk to about this, then it should be Arthur. Tracy felt, all over again, a stark, unassuagable fear. Perhaps later he would call. Perhaps tomorrow.
