The Weight of Nothing

by Gillis, Steven;

  “An accident,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too,” she looked up and smiled. The story she told began at the Bristeen Academy of Music. “I had shown an early aptitude for piano and my parents were generous in having me trained.” At fifteen she won a national competition, and at twenty was living full-time in France, in a small apartment on the grounds of an old estate donated to the French Academy of the Arts. “I was studying very hard and working with some of the best teachers in the world, including Philipe DarChmonde. Philipe was brilliant,” Elizabeth said, “but we were poorly suited for one another. I was reserved and somewhat timid at the time. I spent my childhood pursuing music, and as a consequence my identity became tangled up in my playing so when I wasn’t practicing or performing I’d no sense of who I was. Philipe on the other hand was all vanity and ego and wanted to instill the same sort of self-possession in me, convinced if I was ever to make the transition from child prodigy to a fully mature musician, I had to broaden my range of experience.”

  At forty, DarChmonde’s own career as a solo performer had slowed after a promising beginning due to an onset of arthritis in his fingers that seemed to flair just as his own rehearsals were going well and his agent booked a series of recitals. “I don’t know how he behaved with his other students,” Liz said “but with me, after an hour or so, as I played and we discussed the nuances of one or two particular compositions, Philipe would alter his approach, begin exhorting me to up the ante and turn myself loose in order to get deeper into the score. Such abstract notions were initially little more than fodder for my imagination, but then Philipe began bringing me books with unusual philosophies and provocative themes. He said I had to open myself up fully to experience if my playing was ever to reach its potential. What he meant by this I wasn’t sure, and still, I appreciated his tutelage and waited to see what would happen as he began taking me to parties and after-hours clubs, had me meet people whose attitudes and talents differed from anything I’d ever known.

  “The grounds of the estate were bordered by woods and I used to walk before dinner along the path near a small ravine. From time to time a dog would meet up with me, a runaway I assumed from one of the nearby farms, large and dark brown, at least eighty pounds, with thick fur and a huge head dominated by a flat nose and square jaw. I began bringing him scraps of food and several times tried coaxing him from the woods but he never once agreed to leave. My practice sessions with Philipe continued through the summer as I was scheduled to perform in Vienna that August and was learning Chopin’s “Piano Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3” and “Concerto No. 1.” “Philipe’s knowledge of Chopin was extraordinary,” she said, “though his insistence that I continue focusing on personal abandonments in order to establish a true connection with my music was now an obsessive theme of our rehearsals. Once when I was playing he brought a woman to the studio, undressed her in front of me and made love to her right there on the floor, all the while barking at me to play on. I could have refused, I suppose, but I didn’t, and while I noticed no immediate influence on my music, I stored the experience away as something Philipe said I could draw upon in the future.

  “Two days later, Philipe suggested I practice for him in the nude. I refused and questioned why he assumed broadening my personal experiences was necessarily tied to sex, to which he said if I could think of another way in which to get my heart to race as fast, by all means, we would try it. I thought for a time, then stood and took off my clothes. We spent much of July this way, with me playing Chopin while Philipe watched and caressed me. We made love often before and after my performance, and while I didn’t think I was falling in love with him, the sex confused me. I was still quite young and shocked when suddenly in early August Philipe came to my apartment for our session and ordered me to not undress and said there would be no more physical contact between us. The arthritis in his hands had returned and he hid them deep in his pockets. I asked if there was something I did to disappoint him, but he replied angrily and told me to just play and otherwise leave him alone. When I faltered over the first movement in Chopin’s “Concerto No. 1,” and surprised myself by weeping, Philipe chided me for being so naive and insisted he was doing me a favor, that the personal experience he alluded to for so long wasn’t limited to our carnal antics—as he called it—but evolved from the ashes now that things between us were over and done.

  “I took my walk as usual that night, mad at myself and feeling both confused and foolish, and entering the woods found the dog waiting for me. I was glad to find him, eager for company, but as I waved and walked toward him, he suddenly began to bark. This surprised me, for in all the months before he never made a sound. I assumed he was hungry and excited to see me, and it was only as I came nearer that I noticed blood on his coat, wounds across his neck and hindquarter and a tear in one of his ears. I hurried to him but his barking only grew worse, and as I knelt to set the food I brought down on the ground, I was knocked over and felt a wet explosive heat tear through my right arm. I lost consciousness and didn’t wake until I was at the hospital where the doctors took me into surgery, removed what remained of my arm, cleaned the wound and sewed everything off. I was later told that my screams brought people from the estate into the woods but I can’t remember any of it. A dog was found standing at my side and one of the caretakers came running with his gun and shot him dead. Sometime the next morning the body of a second dog was found in the woods.”

  Elizabeth stopped then and finished her wine. The details of her story were still spinning in my head as I stared across the table and tried to think of something appropriate to say. Rather than offer up some needless bit of sympathy, I hoped for a more intelligent reaction, but in the end the best I could think of was a somewhat banal, “Things do come at us from all sides, don’t they?”

  “It’s true.”

  “Left and right.”

  “Very funny,” she laughed, and passing her false hand through the smoke I created with my cigarette, swirled the air with gentie strokes.

  We drove out Garber Road after dinner, past where the street lights stopped and the pavement became dirt and the night filled with the sound of my old car moving over ruts and stones. Around midnight we went to Dungee’s for a drink, and later I parked my car near Elizabeth’s apartment and we took a walk along West Washington, beyond the iron gates of the arboretum where Elizabeth spoke aphoristically of deciding to teach after her injury. She described enrolling at the New York Conservatory where she earned her doctorate in music theory and then accepted a professorship in Baltimore. “I miss playing as I once did, but the reality seems pointless to mention. We all miss things don’t we?”

  She asked questions of her own, wondering about my past, all of which I answered in a way I hadn’t for a very long time. I told her about my mother, provided anecdotes about Tyler and my father, described all that happened at my aunt’s and the Haptree Theater and the night my father smashed his piano with an ax and danced beside the hissing flame. Elizabeth walked close to me, her left hand in my right, our hips in rhythm and occasionally touching. The strength of my reserve, inviolable and self-protecting for so many years, faltered as we walked back through campus and I briefly suffered a panic. When I tried to pull my hand away however, Elizabeth clung knowingly and refused to release me. The moon was ivory, large and white as Elizabeth stepped around in front and slipped her right hand beneath my left arm. Instead of kissing her lips, I fell gently against her neck while reaching to touch her perfect fingers nestled then against my sleeve.

  I called her the next day and invited her to meet me at Dungee’s that evening. She came in the middle of my second set and sat at one of the side tables. I finished playing around eleven-thirty and went to join her, ending the night with “Blue Rondo à la Turk.” (Even the kitchen staff who’d heard me play a thousand times before stopped what they were doing and came out to listen.) On the chance of Elizabeth coming back to my room, I spent the better part of the day res
helving my books, folding my laundry, sweeping the floor, and rehanging the Milton Avery print leaning against the wall. I dusted and carried empty glasses from beneath my chair to the kitchen sink, picked up loose papers, washed dirty dishes, made my bed, set out clean towels in the bathroom, and wiped the grime from around the toilet and bathtub drain.

  At six o’clock, I showered and dressed and stood in front of my window examining my handiwork. Everything was absolutely spotless and yet something wasn’t right. The transformation of my room was startling, with even the doorknobs polished and the nicks in the wood floor waxed over twice. Leaving Dungee’s, Elizabeth suggested we go somewhere else. We discussed stopping in at one of the after-hours clubs, walking over to Liberty for coffee, or catching part of the midnight movie at the Main Theater. None of these ideas appealed to us however, and when I suggested going to my place where Liz could see my old piano, she laughed and said, “So you want me to see your instrument, is that it, Professor Finne?”

  Upstairs, I watched her walk through my room, examining the space, stopping so we could kiss, my hands undoing the buttons of her shirt which she let slip down her arms. Instead of a bra, she wore a sleeveless white undershirt, the smooth sides of her breasts exposed. I knelt and helped take off her shoes. She peeled her pants down and stepped from them before we kissed again. A moment later she moved away and to my surprise looked back around my room, frowning now as she said, “This isn’t how I pictured it.”

  She went to my bookshelf first where she removed a half dozen paperbacks and tossed them out across the floor. She then opened my closet and pulled laundry from a cardboard box, removed dishes from the cabinet in my kitchen and refilled the counter and sink. She scattered the stack of magazines and messed the neat lay of my bedsheet. Each time a part of her task was complete, she came and kissed me and helped me remove an item of clothes. When I was naked, she undid her prosthesis and set it on top of my piano. I moved toward her and cupped her half-arm against my face, kissing the knotted end with my lips, tasting her flesh from just below her elbow on up to her shoulder. Elizabeth stroked my head, stared into the disorder she’d created inside my room, and whispered, “There, Bailey. There. Isn’t that better?”

  We spent the rest of the summer together, and when fall semester began, adapted our schedules according to the needs of our affair. We took long walks late at night and went with friends to concerts and movies and parties around town. While I maintained my usual sloth, Elizabeth always had several projects going—teaching and tutorials, composing original arrangements, and writing articles for magazines and journals—her latest on William Schuman, winner of music’s first Pulitzer prize. She read countless books, went to meetings and exercise class, attended conferences and recitals, all in endlessly ambitious waves. Many times I woke in the night to find her up and laboring over one of her new compositions and had all I could do to bring her back to bed.

  As for my own less inspired routine, Elizabeth took no note of it and never made my conduct an issue. Despite all she said the first night we met when she challenged me to take responsibility for my music, she spoke little now about my playing, about my dissertation and the prospect of my teaching position being lost, and insisted only, “If you’re happy living as you do, that’s what’s important.” If I stood for hours in front of a painting by Ad Reinhardt or Marc Chagall, or sat home all day rereading essays by Clement Greenberg or Edward Lucie-Smith, Elizabeth would smile and say, “How wonderful for you, Bailey,” as if nothing in the world pleased her more.

  Here then was something unexpected, for while my contentment typically came as a consequence of subtraction and learning how to jettison with no appreciable residue everything which drew too near, Liz had me suddenly wanting for more. Our lovemaking was performed with rapture and high spirit as we moved in a fluid tangle of limbs spread out wherever the moment took us and leaving me at times to feel like a man on a highwire who, after years of successfully mastering the feat, inexplicably chose to attempt as much while staring into the sun.

  For Liz, believing the universe operated under principles of a delicate confusion did not keep her from finding purpose in the madness, and unable to change what happened to her arm, she reinvented herself by treating the incident as little more than a nuisance best ignored. Initially, I couldn’t imagine how she felt composing music she’d never be able to perform on her own, but as we played her works together I came to appreciate the implication of her effort and how no one in this world was ever more than half of some greater whole. One piece in particular moved me, arranged as both a separate score for the left hand and right, each beautiful on its own yet intended to be played as one, interwoven as it were, transforming the music into a spectacularly imbricated duet; her accomplishment as beautiful as the concertos of William Bolcom and the overlapping quartets of Milhaud, her scores conjoining like two glorious sides of a painting by Duccio, like shadow melting into light.

  Early that fall, I went in the middle of an otherwise uneventful afternoon to stand outside Elizabeth’s classroom window, listening as she lectured on Beethoven’s “33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli.” The composition was universally regarded as Beethoven’s most difficult piece. Elizabeth encouraged her students to “Think of the music as a revelry for all that has ever astounded you in life. Concentrate on the division and unison between each variation, and how change occurs unexpectedly and suddenly from one movement to the next.” She described the many intricacies of the composition, how the transformations in tone were rapid and put the pianist at constant risk of destroying the fragile center of the piece. She said the inherent brilliance of the score was that it grew out of a very simple theme and evolved into something enormously complex. “No one has ever actually mastered it,” she said. “Not Emanuel Ax or Horowitz, nor any of the rest, although some have come closer than others. The key is not to think of failing or worrying about going too far wrong. As performers, the trick is just to play,” and then she pressed a button and a recording of “33 Variations” came through the window, as spectacular as any performance I’d ever heard and one which Elizabeth didn’t tell her class was her at twenty, the year before Philipe and the dogs in the woods.

  In October, Elizabeth attended a conference in New York. She left on a Thursday and didn’t return until the following Monday night. I played Friday and Saturday at Dungee’s, sleeping both nights alone in my room where I had the same peculiar dream. I was outside in a cold and icy rain, following after a woman who looked a good deal like Elizabeth. I knew it couldn’t be her and yet I continued running after her as she stepped around a corner and disappeared. A gust of icy wind kicked up and I felt a sudden stabbing in my right arm. My heart began to race, and when I awoke Sunday morning my arm was quite numb and remained that way until Monday evening when I went to pick Elizabeth up at the airport. No sooner did she arrive in the terminai, hurrying toward me with a wave of her left hand, than the deadness in my dangling limb gave way and I felt completely fine. I tried not to give the incident too much thought, but the reality made it difficult to ignore the course I was on.

  Early that November, Elizabeth’s father flew into town for a day’s visit. Sharply tailored with a patchy head of reddish-white hair, pink cheeks, and coal-dark eyes, Charles Rieunne was a senior vice president for Caldwell Securities, passing through Renton on his way to New York for business. Liz and I took him to dinner and just before ten went back to her apartment for a nightcap where I was persuaded to play a bit of Bellini on Liz’s baby grand and then she joined me for a duet. The conversations between Charles and myself were genial, and as Liz had already told her father much about me, he asked informal questions regarding my teaching, music and art, and only as Liz went to the kitchen for more coffee and to call down for her father’s cab did our exchange become something different.

  “About your dissertation,” Charles guided me to the far side of the living room where he inquired in earnest, “When can I expect to see it in print?”
He wondered what articles I’d published, where I planned to teach once I finished my doctorate, and if I’d any thoughts of doing more with my music.

  I answered as he wanted to hear. I said my dissertation was coming along well and would be finished in the next few weeks. I explained that the University of Renton intended to put me on tenure track once I completed my Ph.D. and mentioned a series of articles published. As for my music, I confided a plan to record Chopin that summer for a small label and that there was the possibility of a short tour. All of this delighted Charles very much. He was eager to approve of me, and before he left in his cab I was given a warm squeeze on the arm and a cheery “So long for now then, son.”

  I regretted my dishonesty as I lay in bed that night, confused and afraid Elizabeth would find out, and getting up I went to stand by the window. The streetlight on the curb glowed brightly, and leaning against the cool glass I wondered again what motivated my deception. (“What the fuck, Bailey?”) I remained troubled in the days following Charles’s visit, dissecting again and again the source of my deceit, questioning what exactly I was calling into play, what alterations my prevarication seemed to be suggesting, and why. More and more I felt there was something I should be doing but feared admitting exactly what.

  In January Elizabeth began spending a good deal of time preparing for her summer tour. There was a large amount of research and rehearsing to do—she not only planned to play original and traditional arrangements in duet, but to provide a series of lectures on a number of influential composers and musicians—and she was assisted in the process by Eric Stiles, a pianist and graduate instructor at the Music School. The aspiring Mr. Stiles, though a second-rate pianist as high standards went, had studied extensively, spent time in Vienna, and published articles on Mendelssohn, Carl Orff, and Leonard Bernstein. Elizabeth turned to Eric for help gathering material on Beethoven and Schubert as part of her first lecture. She had him play the right hand to her left on “Pathetique” and “Sonata in С Minor,” and grateful for his effort, trumpeted to me each night just how invaluable his service had become.