Lying in Bed

by J. D. Landis

  I have even, this past day, and to replace the conversation I would otherwise have had with Clara, planned the music that will carry me through this evening until her return. And I have programmed it within the ten-disc magazine of my compact-disc player to bring me to that very “edge of desperation” in the realm of sound that my hunger will bring me in the realm of food and the absence of my wife in the realm of desire. And just as the arrival of the Chinese delivery boy will rescue me from my first-world version of starvation, so will the arrival home of Clara rescue me from the disemboguement of mind that such music might bring and from the longing in my body that her absence will inspire.

  Of course, technology being what it is in this benevolently convenient age of ours, I have at hand two devices that will protect me from going over the edge should I begin to lose control: a telephone to summon my food and a remote-control instrument to reprogram or stop my music. But there is nothing here with which I might touch my wife tonight. She is beyond my reach. In matters of love, we remain as primitive as the first human beings, whose primogenial words, according to Otto Jespersen, were sounds of courtship, “something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss upon the tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale.” So was language born. Is it any wonder we cry out in the darkness?

  Just before Clara left this evening, I played Celtic guitar music. And when she was gone, I did something I had never done before: I danced with only the feel of her in my arms. Then I lay down here and used the remote to change the music. I have never been able to listen to it without her.

  So now, alone, I am listening to Bach’s Inventions. All the evening’s early discs are for solo instruments, to reflect my solitude. I have chosen the recording on the clavichord, as distinguished from the harpsichord or piano, because it is the “smallest” of the instruments, the least intrusive, the most homey. It was the domestic keyboard of choice, and the most practical, at the time. I thought it fitting to lead off my music tonight because I am planning to have so domestic an evening for myself, so comfortable and cozy, and the kind of journey of self-discovery that only solitude and darkness and the absence of one’s beloved can provide.

  I believe in these contrasts. There is no desire without deprivation. There is no hunger without depletion. It is not simply a matter of the tempo of life, as it was in the high Renaissance, when a slow dance would be followed by a fast. It is as much a matter of texture, as it became in the Baroque. Musically, I see it as the difference between the stylus phantasticus and the stylus canonicus. Philosophically, it is the dreaminess of Apollo awakening into the rapture of Dionysius.

  And I love the name Inventions. It suggests a certain improvisation, even chicanery, though Bach seems to have used it to mean something as simple as motif. He stole the name from some teaching pieces by the little-known Antonio Bonporti and wrote his own Inventions so his eldest and most beloved son, Wilhelm Friedemann, who was ten years old at the time, might have something interesting and instructive to play while learning the clavichord.

  It is as if your father, to teach you to dance, provides you with instructions on how to leap from the floor and not come down until you so desire.

  When I have thought of having a child, I have been either inspired or intimidated by the example of such magnificent didacticism. I have wondered what I would hope to pass on to him: my philomathic passions; my ability to be both of the world but not in it and in the world but not of it; my fidelity to ideas and to the flesh of one woman; my control over the chaos of life that might, by a stretch, be equated with the taming of chaos that Bach attained in his music, that transport “from the world of unrest to a world of peace,” as Albert Schweitzer put it in writing about The Well-Tempered Clavier, that other, more taxing collection of teaching pieces that Bach himself described as being “for the use and practice of young musicians who want to learn and for the amusement of those who already know this study.”

  Amusement! His unaccustomed modesty is a weapon, and so can his music be unless you learn not to compete with its transcendence. If you listen to such music and say, “Why can’t I do that?” you will hate yourself to the end of your days. It is not art but the failure to achieve it that drives one mad.

  Know your limits. Will I have the courage to pass that on? It is surely the hardest of life’s lessons.

  Love your mother.

  Love her not the way I do, for I am her husband, but love her just as well.

  Love your father too and in so doing redeem all that is past.

  But what good are rubrics? Wilhelm Friedemann, on whom Bach bestowed the purest of his paternal love and the most patient and gentle of his contrapuntal initiations, ended up a drunk and, worse, stopped believing in his gift.

  Even Bach could not provide ease in the world for his child. Not for any of them. And he had twenty.

  I have spent much time pondering what evidence there is of his prodigious sexual life. All those children aside, there is the serious trouble he got himself into with the authorities at Arnstadt when, as they wrote it up, “he caused the strange maiden to be invited into the organ loft and let her make music there.”

  I picture him, as I listen to his Inventions, passing from two-part to the increased difficulty of three, the Sinfonias, though never does he leap so far that he stops cradling the delicate sensibilities of his firstborn … I picture him bending this strange maiden over the bench of his Gottfried Silbermann or Arp Schnitger and lifting her skirts with one hand while with the other he bangs out something he’d learned on his recent pilgrimage to Buxtehude in Lübeck.* The strange maiden herself releases him from his britches and says, “That’s quite some organ,” and Bach responds, “Yes, it’s a Silbermann,” or, “Yes, it’s a Schnitger,” and they both enjoy the joke, and prolong it, as the strange maiden says, “Enter here, Silbermann,” or, “You must have received a nasty blow, Schnitger, for you are all swollen,” and Bach responds to the strange maiden, “It is time for you to sing, with the accompaniment of my organ,” and as her fingers play along the length of him and grasp the thickness of him and finally force him headfirst through her silent, open lips, she begins to sing the only song that pullulating man never did set down.

  Strange maiden. Since I first read of Bach’s encounter with her in the organ loft in Arnstadt, I have become obsessed with her. She has become not simply whoever that adventuresome girl might have been back in 1706 and who is now dust’s dust in some grave surely as unmarked as Bach’s first, but every girl, any girl, who might lift her skirts and laugh and guide a strange lad into herself and then step off the page of history into oblivion.

  It is marriage itself, and Clara as its embodiment, that has made a philogynist of me. When I walk with her in the street—for I am almost never out unless I’m out with her—I am assaulted by the beauty of the strange maidens I see at every turn. They seem etched into the very air even as they part it with the long blades of their legs. But then the air surrounds them, and they are gone, she is gone. Goodbye, I cry silently to her, goodbye into your life. She never hears me, and if she sees me, it is only inadvertently. I am part of the landscape of the city, another man in a tie bleak against the sky. I do reach for them, these women, but only with my eyes. It is not that they are necessarily unattainable, for who knows? Any one of them might yield, if spoken to, illaqueated in the lepid net of language. But then she would be a stranger no longer, and I would no longer long for her. A strange maiden’s desirability resides precisely in her remaining indeterminate and unexplored.

  A wife is as far from being a strange maiden as a woman can be. A wife is known, from the permutable textures of her hair right down to the camber of her toes.

  I am as rare in my mammalian monogamy as the klipspringer, the siamang, the reedbuck, and the incongruously named dik-dik. I want no other woman than my wife. The others, the strangers, who vanish like death, only break my heart. My wife holds it together.

  Those who came after Bach and sought to sanc
tify him, as they believed he sanctified the evil in the world with his masses and motets, proclaimed that the strange maiden whom he lofted by the organ in Arnstadt was his cousin Maria Barbara, soon to be his wife.

  They sought to excuse his sins by uxoriating them. How little they knew of marriage, which withers without the exaltation of sin.

  Bach’s wife died when he was away from Cöthen, where they lived while he accomplished such little things as the Brandenburg Concertos and—how cruelly ironic—the Wedding Cantata, in whose opening adagio the oboe impregnates the soprano.

  When he arrived home from his travels, he was told that Maria Barbara had died and been buried.

  No goodbyes. No final embrace. No vision to carry forever of his wife vulnerable and inviting on her back with her hands on her breasts and her legs demurely open beneath her shroud and within her closed eyes the knowledge of all the untold secrets of her life, never now to be whispered to him through those dry, dampened lips.

  I think of Clara dying without my being there and without my even knowing. I never worry about this during the day, when we are separated, she running her shop, I right here where I always am. But sometimes, at night, when she is out, I feel like Pergolesi’s Orfeo, afraid of death only to the degree that I am separated from her. But we are almost always together at night. We love to sit and talk and drink our wine as this infinite room grows ever darker until finally we grow invisible to one another and our disembodied voices become entangled vapor trails in the illimitable sky. As long as we are talking, I know we are alive.

  I get up from this bed and go to the north windows. The city spreads out before me the chaotic aftermath of a lavish dinner party, all tumbled glass and unfinished heaps of life. Where is Clara in all of this? Is she safe? Is she whole? Is she real? At least she had been wise enough not to carry her handbag in a city where you expect to see people wearing signs that say NO ILLUSIONS—ALREADY STOLEN.

  But what if she too were to die and be buried before I had knowledge of either? I would lie down upon her grave like Julia Duckworth upon her husband’s and attempt to lift from it the veil of grass as I do the nightgown from her knees and thighs at night and claw my way through the dirt into the haven of her arms.

  Unlike Bach, I would take no other wife for as long as Clara were to remain dead.

  Bach lasted hardly a year before he relinquished a maiden’s strangeness and married her.

  She was twenty years old, and her name was Anna Magdalena. That is a wonderful name to be able to whisper over and over as you sink ever more deeply into its proprietress, even better than Maria Barbara, and we may be sure Bach whispered it many times, for Anna Magdalena bore him an even greater number of children than he had been left with by Maria Barbara.

  But what is most enticing about Anna Magdalena, and why I sometimes whisper her name myself into this room when I am alone here in the day and listening to the music I now call forth with my innocent remote, is her being the inspiration for a sarabande that Bach wrote down in a little notebook.

  Clara writes things down in little notebooks too. Not music. Private things. She records her life and fantasies in a handwriting that is such a salmagundi of slashes and dots and scars and the amputation of abbreviation that it is literally cryptographic and therefore leaves her life and mind indecipherable to anyone who might be so crude as to attempt to violate her diaries.

  Only on the day of our first meeting was I privileged to see what sort of thing she records in those pages. Since that day, I have not even peeked, though I find it more difficult as time goes by and we consume one another within the fire of our marriage not to want to see her in those pages, to experience her mind and history apart from how we live our lives together.

  The closer we become in our marriage, the more a stranger she seems to me and the more a stranger I seem to myself. It is as if our separate identities were being erased by the very thing that secures our identities. I am losing Clara even as she becomes more a part of myself. I am losing myself not simply as I become more a part of her but also as I lose her. When there is no difference between gain and loss, the result is not stability but chaos.

  It is ascertainable even in our lovemaking now, which approaches masturbation in its familiarity and inspires aprosexia, as it were, in the very midst of sex, driving us to push one another away in order to be closer, to become strangers in order to remain confidants, to pretend we are not who we are as we claw at each other’s skin and minds on that bed there.

  I do not want to read Clara’s diaries in order to know her better. Quite the opposite. I want to read them in order to know her less well, to be able to say, “My word, this is not the woman I know,” and thereby to find myself wanting her even more than I do. After four years of marriage, I discover it is necessary to recreate the person I know best and love best. This cannot be done without her collaboration, however tacit. But I have promised not to read what she has written. And so, in order to strengthen our marriage and deepen my love for my wife, I must someday betray it and her.

  I am not afraid to encounter Clara’s past or even her most dissolute thoughts about the present. I am not possessive that way. What she did before we met can trouble me only in that I was not there to see it. Sometimes I wish we’d never met because I didn’t meet her soon enough. Her past is beyond me. I mourn my absence from every moment of it. My fondest wish is transport back into the womb with her. As for what is possible, I simply want to see her. Apart from me. Out there. Being someone other than the self she has become with me.

  She is, perhaps, that way most when she is on the floor out there beyond our bed, which is centered in the room but is not precisely in the cynosural position of Louis XI’s grand lit de justice. It is, in fact, flush against the long north wall, so that our hair is tossed uptown while our toes tend toward Tribeca. We are thereby, it is true, deprived of a ruelle. But since we live here quite alone and entertain no one but ourselves, this is no sacrifice at all and provides my head its walled support for reading or the contemplation of my wife when she is writing in her diaries. I often lie here at night and watch her at it, always with her back to me, arched, her shoulders fanned, her neck curved. I imagine her eyes closed, the tip of her tongue protruding from between her slightly overbiting front teeth, the notebook fast upon her clenched, unyielding knees, and one of the many pencils she keeps lined up on the rickrack-pattern hooked rug scratching out words that no one but I can read.

  The pencils no longer confound me. In fact, I grow ever more entranced by the very evanescence of their transfer of life from the mind to the page. Like the women in the street who dissolve into the air itself, what is at risk of disappearing becomes all the more desirable. Besides, as Jonathan Goldberg so pointedly explains in the very same essay in which he brilliantly remarks that for both Heidegger and Barthes (despite their differing sexual orientations) “the scene of writing is one that betrays phallic desire,” the pencil and the penis are “etymologically cognate.”

  Clara has been decomposing pencils in her notebooks since the day she arrived in New York alone at sixteen, merely a year shy of the fifteen years that Bach waited before he resurrected from his own notebook, which was more literally a musicbook, that sarabande as the opening aria of the Goldberg Variations, which at this very moment Glenn Gould begins to play for me and I fall once more upon the bed.

  The sarabande was originally a concupiscent sort of dance that, like many things in celebration of wanton carnality, was banned. It was described in the aptly titled Treatise Against Public Enjoyment by Father Juan de Mariana this way: “A dance and song, so lascivious in its words, so ugly in its movement, that it is enough to inflame even very modest people.”

  Inflame them to what? A desire to suppress the dance and song? Or a desire to join in? Or are those not the same? Suppression is inevitably inspired by an appetite for what it condemns.

  So BAN THE SARABANDE went out the call back in the 1590s. But they could not keep a dance step dow
n. By the time it got to Bach, it had gained in dignified beauty what it had been stripped of in licentiousness, rather like the idealization of an old marriage.

  This particular sarabande is a theme that is not repeated in these Goldberg variations. In that, it is as unusual as a woman whose beauty is so great that you cannot bear to see her ever again. But then, on your deathbed, you summon her forth, as Bach does at the very end of the Goldbergs as an aria da capo immediately following the final variation, the quodlibet, one of whose melodies borrows from a pop song of the day, Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir g’west (which translates into something I hope I never have to sing to Clara: Long have I been away from you).

  Glenn Gould is less the romantic than I about this sarabande. To him it is some sort of mindless flirt and masculine as well. He calls it “a singularly self-sufficient little air which seems to shun the patriarchal demeanour, to exhibit a bland unconcern about its issue, to remain totally uninquisitive as to its raison d’être.” What a condemnation: to shun one’s own children and never to question why one is here.

  And lest anyone think I and Huxley are alone in finding music “palpitatingly sexual” and sex musical, it is Gould himself who says, “The aria melody evades intercourse with the rest of the work.”

  I take from that a definition of the good marriage: the married person evades intercourse with the rest of the world. Is it any wonder I rarely set foot from here unless accompanied by Clara?

  Bach went blind toward the end of his life. I close my eyes and listen to these variations. I am not trying to use them to fall asleep, though they were commissioned to cure or at least make tolerable a count’s insomnia. The count asked an eleven-year-old named Johann Goldberg, who worked for him and was also a student of Bach, if Bach wouldn’t write something to help the count get through, one way or another, the night. Bach responded with these variations. The count responded with the biggest payday of Bach’s life, henceforth and thenceforth. Many a night would the count summon his immortal harpsichordist, who would himself die very young: “Dear Goldberg, please come and play for me my variations.”