100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  As the foremost anti-Nietzschean German composer of his day. therefore, Hindemith left Germany when his works could not be performed, thanks to the Third Reich; wrote textbooks with simple exercises; composed a requiem in memory of Franklin Roosevelt, set to words by Walt Whitman; and taught students, not all of them talented, in Ankara, New Haven, and Buffalo (“this caricature of a town”). As he passed through late middle age, he turned to a project he had contemplated all his life, an opera based on the career of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, author of De Harmonice Mundi. This opera, a summary of Hindemith’s ideas, would be called Harmony of the World. Hindemith worked out the themes first in a symphony, which bore the same title as the opera, and completed it in 1951. The more I thought about this project, the more it seemed anachronistic. Who believed in world harmony in 1951? Or thereafter? Such a symphony would have to pass beyond technical sophistication into divine inspiration, which Hindemith had never shown any evidence of possessing.

  It occurred to me that Hindemith’s lifelong sanity had perhaps given way in this case, toppled not by despair (as is conventional) but by faith in harmony.

  V

  For the next rehearsal, I drove to Karen Jensen’s apartment, where there was, she said, a piano. I’d become curious about the styles of her insanity: I imagined a hamster cage in the kitchen, a doll-head mobile in the living room, and mottoes written with different colored inks on memo pads tacked up everywhere on the walls.

  She greeted me at the door without her bracelet. When I looked at her wrist, she said, “Hmmm. I see that you noticed. A memento of adolescent despair.” She sighed. “But it does frighten people off. Once you’ve tried to do something like that, people don’t really trust you. I don’t know why exactly. Don’t want your blood on their hands or something. Well, come on in.”

  I was struck first by her forthrightness and second by her tiny apartment. Its style was much like the style in my house. She owned an attractive but worn-down sofa, a sideboard that supported an antique clock, one chair, a glass-top dinner table, and one nondescript poster on the wall. Trying to keep my advantage, I looked hard for telltale signs of insanity but found none. The piano was off in the corner, almost hidden, unlike those in the parlors back home.

  “Very nice,” I said.

  “Well, thanks,” she said. “It’s not much. I’d like something bigger, but . . . where I work, I’m an administrative assistant, and they don’t pay me very much. So that’s why I live like a snail here. It’s hardly big enough to move around in, right?” She wasn’t looking at me. “I mean, I could almost pick it up and carry it away.”

  I nodded. “You just don’t think like a rich person,” I said, trying to be hearty. “They like to expand. They need room. Big houses, big cars, fat bodies.”

  “Oh, I know!” she said, laughing. “My uncle . . . would you like to stay for dinner? You look like you need a good meal. I mean, after the rehearsal. You’re just skin and bones, Pet—May I call you Peter?”

  “Sure.” I sat down on the sofa and tried to think up an excuse. “I really can’t stay, Miss Jensen. I have another rehearsal to go to later tonight. I wish I could.”

  “That’s not it, is it?” she asked suddenly, looking down at me. “I don’t believe you. I bet it’s something else. I bet you’re afraid of me.”

  “Why should I be afraid of you?”

  She smiled and shrugged. “That’s all right. You don’t have to say anything. I know how it goes.” She laughed once more, faintly. “I never found a man who could handle it. They want to show you their scars, you know? They don’t want to see any on you, and if they discover any, they just run.” She slapped her right hand into her forehead and then ran her fingers through her hair. “Well, shit. I didn’t mean to do this at all! I mean, I admire you so much and everything, and here I am, running on like this. I guess we should get down to business, right? Since I’m paying you by the hour.”

  I smiled professionally and went to her piano.

  Beneath the high-culture atmosphere that surrounds them, art songs have one subject: love. The permutations of love (lust, solitude, and loss) are present in abundance, of course, but for the most part they are simple vehicles for the expression of that one emotion. I was reminded of this as I played through the piano parts. As much as I concentrated on the music in front of me, I couldn’t help but notice that my employer stood next to the piano, singing the words sometimes toward me, sometimes away. She was rather courageously forcing eye contact on me. She kept this up for an hour and a half until we came to the Chanler settings, when at last she turned slightly, singing to the walls.

  As before, her voice broke out of control every five seconds, giving isolated words all the wrong shadings. The only way to endure it, I discovered, was to think of her singing as a postmodern phenomenon with its own conventions and rules. As the victim of necessity rather than accident, Karen Jensen was tolerable.

  Here sleep I,

  Susannah Fry,

  No one near me,

  No one nigh:

  Alone, alone

  Under my stone,

  Dreaming on,

  Still dreaming on:

  Grass for my valance

  And coverlid,

  Dreaming on

  As I always did.

  “Weak in the head?”

  Maybe. Who knows?

  Susannah Fry

  Under the rose.

  There she was, facing away from me, burying Susannah Fry, and probably her own past and career into the bargain.

  When we were done, she asked, “Sure you won’t stay?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You really haven’t another engagement, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “I didn’t think so. You were scared of me the moment you walked in the door. You thought I’d be crazy.” She waited. “After all, only ugly girls live alone, right? And I’m not ugly.”

  “No, you aren’t,” I said. “You’re quite attractive.”

  “Do you think so?” she asked, brightening. “It’s so nice to hear that from you, even if you’re just paying a compliment. I mean, it still means something.” Then she surprised me. As I stood in the doorway, she got down on her knees in front of me and bowed her head in the style of one of her songs. “Please stay,” she asked. Immediately she stood up and laughed. “But don’t feel obliged to.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, returning to her living room. “I’ve just changed my mind. Dinner sounds like a good idea.”

  After she had served and we had started to eat, she looked up at me and said, “You know, I’m not completely good.” She paused. “At singing.”

  “What?” I stopped chewing. “Yes, you are. You’re all right.”

  “Don’t lie. I know I’m not. You know I’m not. Come on: Let’s at least be honest. I think I have certain qualities of musicality, but my pitch is . . . you know. Uneven. You probably think it’s awfully vain of me to put on these recitals like this. With nobody but friends and family coming.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, I don’t care what you say. It’s . . . hmm, I don’t know. People encourage me. And it’s a discipline. Music’s finally a discipline that rewards you. Privately, though. Well, that’s what my mother says.”

  Carefully I said, “She may be right.”

  “Who cares if she is?” She laughed, her mouth full of food. “I enjoy doing it. Like I enjoy doing this. Listen, I don’t want to seem forward or anything, but are you married?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.” She picked up a string bean and eyed it suspiciously. “Why aren’t you? You’re not ugly. In fact you’re all right looking. You obviously haven’t been crazy. Are you gay or something?”

  “No.”

  “No,” she agreed, “you don’t look gay. You don’t even look very happy. You don’t look very anything. Why is that?”

  “I should be offended by this line of question
ing.”

  “But you’re not. You know why? Because I’m interested in you. I hardly know you, but I like you, what I can see. Don’t you have any trust?”

  “Yes,” I said, finally.

  “So answer my question. Why don’t you look very anything?”

  “Do you want to hear what my piano teacher once said?” I asked. “He said I wasn’t enough of a fanatic. He said that to be one of the great ones you have to be a tiny bit crazy. Touched. And he said I wasn’t. And when he said it, I knew all along he was right. I was waiting for someone to say what I already knew, and he was the one. I was too much a good citizen, he said. I wasn’t possessed.”

  She rose, walked around the table to where I was sitting, and stood in front of me, looking down at my face. I knew that whatever she was going to do had been picked up, in attitude, from one of her songs. She touched the back of my arm with two fingers on her right hand. “Well,” she said, “maybe you aren’t possessed, but what would you think of me as another possession?”

  VI

  In 1618 at the age of seventy, Katherine Kepler, the mother of Johannes Kepler, was put on trial for witchcraft. The records indicate that her personality was so deranged, so deeply offensive to all, that if she were alive today she would still be called a witch. One of Kepler’s biographers, Angus Armitage, notes that she was “evil-tempered” and possessed an interest in unnamed “outlandish things.” Her trial lasted, on and off, for three years; by 1621, when she was acquitted, her personality had disintegrated completely. She died the following year.

  At the age of six, Kepler’s son Frederick died of smallpox. A few months later, Kepler’s wife, Barbara, died of typhus. Two other children, Henry and Susanna, had died in infancy.

  Like many another of his age, Kepler spent much of his adult life cultivating favor from the nobility. He was habitually penniless and was often reduced, as his correspondence shows, to begging for handouts. He was the victim of religious persecution, though luckier in this regard than some.

  After he married for a second time, three more children died in infancy, a statistic that in theory carries less emotional weight than one might think, given the accepted levels of infant mortality for that era.

  In 1619, despite the facts cited above, Kepler published De Harmonice Mundi, a text in which he set out to establish the correspondence between the laws of harmony and the disposition of planets in motion. In brief, Kepler argued that certain intervals, such as the octave, major and minor sixths, and major and minor thirds, were pleasurable, while other intervals were not. History indicated that mankind had always regarded certain intervals as unpleasant. Feeling that this set of universal tastes pointed to immutable laws, Kepler sought to map out the pleasurable intervals geometrically, and then to transfer that geometrical pattern to the order of the planets. The velocity of the planets, rather than their strict placement, constituted the harmony of the spheres. This velocity provided each planet with a note, what Armitage calls a “term in a mathematically determined relation.”

  In fact, each planet performed a short musical scale, set down by Kep­ler in staff notation. The length of the scale depended upon the eccentricity of the orbit; and its limiting notes could generally be shown to form a concord (except for Venus and the Earth with their nearly circular orbits, whose scales were of very constricted range) . . . At the Creation . . . complete concord prevailed and the morning stars sang together.

  VII

  We began to eat dinner together. Accustomed to solitude, we did not always engage in conversation. I would read the newspaper or ink in letters on my geometrically patterned crossword puzzles at my end of the table, while Karen would read detective novels or Time at hers. If she had cooked, I would clear and wash the dishes: if I had cooked, she did the cleaning. Experience and disappointments had made us methodical. She told me that she had once despised structured experiences governed by timetables, but that after several manic-depressive episodes she had learned to love regularity. This regularity included taking lithium at the same time—to the minute—each day.

  The season being summer, we would pack towels and swimming suits after dinner and drive out to one of several public beaches, where we would swim until darkness came on. On calm evenings, Karen would drop her finger in the water and watch the waves lap outward. I favored immature splashing, or grabbing her by the arm and whirling her around me until I released her and she would spin back and fall into the water, laughing as she sank. One evening, we found a private beach, two hundred feet of sand all to ourselves, on a lake thirty miles out of town. Framed on both sides by woods and well-hidden from the highway, this beach had the additional advantage of being unpatrolled. We had no bathhouse in which to change, however, so Karen instructed me not to look as she walked about fifty feet away to a spot where she undressed and put on her suit.

  Though we had been intimate for at least a week, I had still not seen her naked: Like a good Victorian, she demanded the shades be drawn, the lights out, and the covers pulled discreetly over us. But now, with the same methodical thoroughness, she wanted me to see her, so I looked, despite her warnings. She was bent over, under the tree boughs, the evening light breaking through the leaves and casting broken gold bands on her body. Her arms were delicate, the arms of a schoolgirl, I thought, an impression heightened by the paleness of her skin, but her breasts were full, at first making me think of Rubens’s women, then of Renoir’s, then of nothing at all. Slowly, knowing I was watching her, she pinned her hair up. Not her breasts or arms, but that expression of vague contentment as she looked out toward the water away from me: That made me feel a tingling below my heart, somewhere in an emotional center near my stomach. I wanted to pick her up and carry her somewhere, but with my knees wobbly it was all I could do to make my way over to where she stood and take her in my arms before she cried out. “Jesus,” she said, shivering, “you gave me a surprise.” I kissed her, waiting for inspiration to direct me on what to do next: Pick her up? Carry her? Make love to her on the sand? Wade into the water with her and swim out to the center of the lake, where we would drown together in a Lawrentian love-grip? But then we broke the kiss; she put on her swimsuit like a good citizen, and we swam for our usual fifteen minutes in silence. Afterward, we changed back into our clothes and drove home, muttering small talk. Behavior inspired by and demonstrating love embarrassed both of us. When I told her that she was beautiful and that I loved her, she patted me on the cheek and said, “Aw, how nice. You always try to say the right thing.”

  VIII

  The Maple Street angle for Harmony of the World ran as follows: SYMPHONY OF FAITH IN A FAITHLESS AGE. Hindemith, I said, wished to confound the skeptics by composing a monument of faith. In an age of organized disharmony, of political chaos, he stood at the barricades defending tonality and traditional musical form. I carefully avoided any specific discussion of the musical materials of the symphony, which in the Schott orchestral score looked overcomplex and melodically ugly. From what I could tell without hearing the piece, Hindemith had employed stunning technique in order to disguise his lack of inspiration, though I did not say so in print. Instead, I wrote that the symphony’s failure to win public support was probably the result of Hindemith’s refusal to use musical gimmicks on the one hand and sticky sweet melodies on the other. I wrote that he had not been dismayed by the bad reviews Harmony of the World had received, which was untrue. I said he was a man of integrity. I did not say that men of integrity are often unable to express joy when the occasion demands. Cascadilla liked my article. “This guy sounds like me,” he said, reading my copy. “I respect him.” The article ran five days before the concert and was two pages away from the religion-and-faith section. Not long after, the symphony ticket office called me to say that my piece had caused a rush of ticket orders from ordinary folk, non-concert types, who wanted to hear this “religious symphony.” The woman from the business office thanked me for my trouble. “Let’s hope they like it,” I said.

&
nbsp; “Of course they will,” she assured me. “You’ve told them to.”

  But they didn’t. Despite all the oratory in the symphony, it was spiritually as dead as a lampshade. I could see why Hindemith had been shocked by the public reaction. Our audience applauded politely in discouragement, and then I heard an unusual sound for this anonymous city: one man, full of fun and conviction, booing loudly from the balcony. Booing the harmony of the world! He must be a Satanist! Don’t intentions mean anything? So what if the harmony and joy were all counterfeit? The conductor came out for a bow, smiled at the booing man, and very soon the applause died away. I left the hall, feeling responsible. Arriving at the paper, I wrote a review of crushing dullness that reeked of bad faith. Goddamn Hindemith! Here he was, claiming to have seen God’s workings, and they sounded like the workings of a steam engine or a trolley car. A fake symphony, with optimism the composer did not feel! I decided (but did not write) that Harmony of the World was just possibly the largest, most misconceived fiasco in modern music’s history. It was a symphony that historically could not be written, by a man who was constitutionally not equipped to write it. In my review, I kept a civil pen: I said that the performance lacked “luster,” “a certain necessary glow.”

  IX

  “I’m worried about the recital tomorrow.”

  “Aw, don’t worry. Here, kiss me. Right here.”

  “Aren’t you listening? I’m worried.”

  “I’m singing. You’re just accompanying me. Nobody’s going to notice you. Move over a little, would you? Yeah, there. That pillow was forcing my head against the wall.”

  “Why aren’t you worried?”