by Matt Dean
"That's right, Susan. His second-place finish was strong enough to reinvigorate his beleaguered campaign, but this traditional rule of thumb bodes ill for his chances in today's election." Bill Harmon sounded as if he badly needed to clear his throat. "Some of the other popular indicators people are looking at seem considerably more tenuous. For example, in eight of eleven past elections, whenever the American League has won the World Series, it's coincided with a Republican win in the election. And the Toronto Blue Jays, this year's World Series champs, are in the American League."
"Another bad sign for Clinton."
"That's right, Susan, but that's not the most unusual of these popular indicators. The most unusual, certainly, would be the quality of the year's Bordeaux harvest. A bad year usually bodes well for the Republicans."
"And this was a bad year?"
"A very bad year. Meaning it's possibly a bad year for Mr. Clinton."
Bill and Susan droned on. According to the dashboard clock, it was eight-thirty-three. For once, I wasn't running late. My polling place was just a few blocks away, on Albert. I had long passed Albert; I would have to double back. Just before Lexington Parkway I edged into the left turn lane. At Lexington I waited for the light. A pair of Clinton volunteers stood on the opposite corner, in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken, smiling and waving. As I made my left turn, I honked and waved back.
* * *
Christa sat at her desk, Onslaught open before her.
"Are you volunteering to read that instead of me?" I asked her.
She slammed the book shut and drove it across her desk with the butt of her stapler, as though it had at just that moment become the most revolting thing on earth, too filthy to touch with bare fingers. "It's all yours," she said. "I'll tell you, though, having read about six paragraphs, I think I might actually vote."
"Please do," I said. "I just stopped on the way, and I was one of about seven people."
From Martin's office came a crash, a metallic clatter, the rustle of paper. Martin swore loudly.
To Christa I said, quite softly, "Not a good morning, I take it?"
She shrugged and pushed the book a couple of inches farther away from her. "Take that, please."
* * *
The previous afternoon I'd read about a hundred pages of Stinson's book-that is to say, about as much of it as I could stand.
The book's first few chapters described a case study of political correctness run amok, an initiative undertaken by the Minnesota State Legislature to make statutory language gender-neutral. Stinson vilified the "time-wasting pinheads" who had conceived the idea. He bestowed his sympathies upon the "loyal servants of the public good" who had been forced to spend their valuable hours working on the project. He ridiculed the countless statutory passages that, "in the cause of correctness," had been rendered gawky or inelegant. His contempt for "awkward constructions" and "passive voice" filled nearly ten pages.
Sitting now at my desk, I picked up where I had left off. The next chapter was an orgy of invective; in it, Stinson enumerated the many gender-neutral word choices he found egregious. "Firemen" had been replaced by "firefighters," although at the time of the initiative there had been no female "firefighters" anywhere in the state of Minnesota. "Fishermen" had been replaced by "anglers," although as anyone knew, "angling" referred only to fishing with rod and reel, and not all who fish do so with rod and reel. As for the rejected alternative, "fishers," Stinson spent a page and a half expounding a theory that the Biblical echo-"fishers of men"-made the word anathema to liberals. "Flagmen" had been replaced by "flaggers." For Stinson, this was the worst example; "flaggers," he wrote, "is an ugly, made-up and patently ridiculous word."
He wrote:
Any child knows, men and women are biologically and emotionally different creatures; vastly different. It is not without reason that firemen have always been and should be firemen, that fishermen have always been and should be fishermen, and flagmen have always been and should be flagmen.
Saith the Lord (Corinthians I, 14:34-35), women "are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home.???"
Our language is being watered down, thinned out. One has the sense that these champions of "correctness," "neutrality" and "diversity" want to strip everything of its meaning, to make everything contain any meaning that any potential reader is "comfortable" with. Look at the newspaper of record for any large city. You will find any number of classified advertisements for "waitstaff" and "servers." "Servers"? Is a subpoena to be delivered to the table with your tiramisu? What's next? "Persons prepared for or engaged in armed struggle" instead of "soldiers"?
By noon I'd read seventy-five pages, but I'd had to reread-and reread and reread-so many paragraphs to get their sense that I felt as if I'd read several hundred pages.
Without a word or a glance in my direction, Martin strode by, out of the office. He wore a distracted, pinched look that-I knew from long experience-meant things weren't going well with his colon. I stood and stretched and peered over the cubicle wall. Christa's chair was empty, angled toward the wall. She'd slipped out without my noticing.
In the hush of the office, without the distraction of Stinson's execrable prose, I found that I still heard the Beethoven string quartet in my mind's ear. "Es muss sein! Es muss sein!" Could it really have been about a dispute with his housekeeper?
One of my favorite places in all the world was a small room on the third floor of the Saint Paul Public Library-the Art and Music Room, a high, narrow space, overheated in winter, with a catwalk of creaking wood and thousands of musical scores filling its tall shelves. I knew I could find a copy of Beethoven's string quartets there, and surely the library's nonfiction section would contain something that described the history behind them.
The walk to the library could seem toilsome even on a pleasant day-and today was certainly not a pleasant day-but it usually took only half an hour round trip. Parking always seemed more complicated, somehow. I slipped into my jacket and dashed out the door before Christa or Martin could reappear to distract me.
* * *
After the walk and the cold air and the climb up the wide marble stairs, the Art and Music Room seemed even more overheated than usual. I was alone with the tall wind-rattled windows and the many scores. As I climbed the narrow steps up to the groaning catwalk, I felt as if I were mounting the forecastle of a ship. I found the Beethoven string quartets, complete in three slim paperbound volumes. Along their purple spines they were tattered and frayed.
Downstairs, in the card catalog, I found a book titled Beethoven: The Seventeen Quartets, by someone named Terrence McNamara. Seventeen quartets? A librarian fetched the book from the stacks. It was a chunky book in ordinary reddish cloth covers, shabby around the edges. On the way downstairs, I glanced at the preface. Within a couple of paragraphs McNamara explained that he counted the Great Fugue as a seventeenth quartet; it was, he wrote, "ahead of its time in every particular, not least of which is a singularly modern sensibility as to structure. It is no less than a full quartet in a single movement."
I paged through the table of contents. The sixteenth quartet had a chapter to itself. I turned to it and skimmed the first few paragraphs, which described Beethoven's health and finances. The opening of the chapter didn't answer my question, but it certainly seemed to be leading up to it.
At the circulation desk a librarian handled the volumes of quartets as if they were precious icons. "You've been up to Art and Music," he said. I nodded. "Someone was telling me that the librarian who designed that room was in the Navy in World War Two. He added the catwalk because it reminded him of being aboard a ship."
"Interesting," I said. I brushed my hair back from my forehead. Clearly, the world's librarians and Public Radio personalities were conspiring to fill my brain with cocktail party trivia. "Did you know," I said, "that Beethoven's last quartet was inspired by a dispute with his housekeeper?"
* * *
The clocked ticked slowly that afternoon. I worked my way diligently through Stinson's book, but the quartets and McNamara's book sat at my elbow, tempting me.
When I could no longer resist McNamara's mute seduction, I turned again to the first page of chapter fourteen.
In 1826, at the chaotic end of a chaotic life, Beethoven found himself in the midst of pandemonium. His health was poor. His accounts were in extravagant disarray. His relations with his brothers, always argumentative, were ever more fraught.
Fraught. What a good word. I resolved to use it more.
The appearance of his room and of his person were peculiar and untidy. Friends and acquaintances eschewed public contact with him. The reader has no doubt heard that Beethoven was supposed to have caused a cattle stampede?
Cattle stampede? More cocktail party trivia. So McNamara was part of the conspiracy.
Again as before, Martin debouched from his office, looking grim. Chastened, repentant, I closed McNamara's book, slid it aside, and returned to my assigned reading.
At last, some forty-two hours after I'd first stepped into the office, it seemed, I heard Christa shuffling papers and slamming her desk drawers. I waited for the rustle of her vinyl typewriter cover. Five o'clock at last. I marked my place in Onslaught and packed up to leave. I leaned into Martin's office to say good night. He looked up from a book, peered at me over pince-nez, and grunted.
Christa and I walked out together.
"Any plans?" I asked her, and immediately regretted it. Her plans, if she had them, would surely include Tory.
"Dinner and a movie where nothing happens," she said, and gave an appreciable sigh.
Ancient machinery trundled in the elevator shafts. Above the brass elevator doors, numbers glowed: 4, 3, 6, 5.
"Let's walk up," I said. "It's only one floor, for pity's sake."
As we climbed, she said, "I hate to jinx it, but things seem to be going well. With Tory, I mean."
With my forefinger I tapped the dark cherry paneling in the stairwell. "Better knock on that before you say anything else."
"Taste in movies aside," she said.
"And jackets."
"Beg pardon?"
"Never mind."
* * *
At the library I'd neglected to pick up a recording of the Beethoven quartets, but Cheapo Records might have one. I took a circuitous route home-up the hill to the cathedral, right on Summit, past the James J. Hill House and the opulent homes of robber barons, past the governor's mansion and Hamline University, past Craftsman bungalows and enormous Victorian painted ladies set back from the tree-lined boulevard, and at last to Snelling. The streets were wet and slick. Snow had begun to collect in the gutters. The going was slow.
In Cheapo's Classical section, I found several recordings of the string quartets on CD, and a two-cassette compilation of the early quartets, but nothing on vinyl. The clerk, a tall woman who, in spite of her dark brown hair, reminded me of Jonquil, led me to the used section, where at length she found a boxed set of LP's: The Guarneri Quartet, The Complete String Quartets and the Grosse Fuge. On the box cover, wavy rays of orange and red issued forth from a bust of Beethoven in silhouette. I would have bought it at almost any price, but it cost only thirty dollars; I couldn't pass it up.
When I got home, I dropped the books and my jacket inside the door. Tearing the quartets from their acetate envelope, I rushed to the stereo. I flipped through the records until I saw number sixteen. I eased the platter onto the turntable. I set the needle at the beginning of the second and final track. Instead of the cello moaning the familiar motto, all four instruments played in octaves. A brief, mysterious, emphatic theme ended in a strangely ominous trill. A pause. And then, still in octaves, a couple of snippets of something that sounded like incidental music for an old melodrama, the kind of music that might accompany a black-cloaked villain as he snuck from tree to tree, stalking the pinafore-clad heroine. Another pause. And then, again, something completely different-a slow theme of ravishing beauty and pathos in the first violin, answered by weeping chords in the other instruments. What was this?
I paged through the liner notes until I found the track listing. Of course. I'd put on side sixteen, not the sixteenth quartet. Side sixteen, track two, was the Grosse Fuge. The Great Fugue. The liner notes referred to the work's "spartanic, gaunt power" and called it "one of the most difficult pieces in the entire literature."
The instruments hammered away at an obsessive dotted rhythm, a march for goblins or witches. The countersubject seemed to be the first theme-the mysterious organ-like unison-but played on the odd beats, with rests in between. I sank to the floor, scanning through the index of McNamara's book. The longest passage relating to the Great Fugue began on page two hundred.
The piece had originally been the finale of the fourteenth quartet, Opus 130. Beethoven's contemporaries had found it difficult, remote, abrasive. I understood completely. If someone had announced this as a Stravinsky piece written in nineteen-twenty-six, rather than as a Beethoven piece written in eighteen-twenty-six, I wouldn't have blinked an eye. At the urging of Matthias Artaria, Beethoven's publisher, the composer had split off the Great Fugue into a stand-alone piece; his last completed work had been a new finale for Opus 130.
The goblin march ended abruptly. A new, softer theme began. Arpeggios eased upward. A whole new fugue, in a new, remote key. No, not a fugue; the viola and cello played a pulsing, homophonic accompaniment underneath the new theme. Surely Bach had begun spinning in his grave even before Beethoven's ink had dried.
* * *
In college, I'd been crazy to write a fugue. Counterpoint in general had exerted a strong pull on my imagination, but no other species of it had captivated me quite like the fugue. Even so, fugue had eluded me. I'd written a dozen canons or more for my senior composition symposium with Dr. Benton. All had looked so good on the page, and all had sounded like garbage when played. The first two I had titled "Fugue in A minor" and "Fugue for Piano, Four Hands," but in reviewing each piece Dr. Benton had said sourly, "Good work, but not a fugue."
Somewhere in the spare bedroom where I kept my sketches and my staff paper and my old theory textbooks, somewhere in a notebook or in a manila envelope, I still had those old canons I'd hoped to turn into fugues by sheer force of will.
I set aside McNamara's book and cranked the volume on the stereo. In the workroom I sat cross-legged on the floor and sorted through my sketches and notes. Months had passed since I'd looked at The River. I'd barely thought about the piece since that nightmarish night in September when Tom had disappeared from my life.
Now, I tried to impose some kind of order on the scattered pages. I created a stack for each section. The prelude was a chaotic contrapuntal work-not a fugue, Dr. Benton surely would have said-in which the themes seemed to spin out without end, into more and more remote keys, with no clear path to a resolution. The four choral sections were full of parallel fifths and unresolved tritones. I tapped each stack against my knee to straighten it. I laid the stacks in parallel lines along the wall.
There was a box, a square cardboard box that had grown wonky from riding in the back of my car and from being shoved around in the workroom. In the box I'd stored all the scraps of poetry I'd collected and had begun to set to music. I'd started with a few stanzas of Hart Crane, from "The River" section of The Bridge. Gradually I'd begun to accumulate anything to do with the Mississippi, and then anything to do with any big river. I dug through the box and found a tumult of prose and poetry-wavy and smudged photocopies, tidy hand-printed transcriptions on ragged sheets of staff paper, half-legible scribbles on Post-It Notes.
I found the three-subject spiral notebook I'd bought for my last semester in college, the disastrous semester in which I'd cut almost half my classes. Each section of the notebook contained a few pages of notes, a few pages of Tom-related doodling, and then dozens of blank pages.
On page after page of colleg
e-ruled paper I'd written our names in my juvenile scrawl. Jonah Thomas Murray and Gregory Thomas Hill. Hearts enclosed pairs of Thomases. Circles and arrows linked them. Tom and I had made much of the fact that we had the same middle name. It had seemed like some kind of sign.
I stripped away the used pages, crumpled them, tossed them aside. Dipping into the box, I dredged up a handful of poetry scraps and began to copy them neatly into the notebook.
* * *
6 - The C Minor Mood
A little after seven o'clock, Christa called. "It took forever to vote, so we decided to skip the movie, but Tory knows this great Thai place he wants me to try. Tag along?"
She was talking very fast. My brain felt sluggish, addled. After a time, I said, "I was planning to stick around here. I was just going to-."
"What on earth is that music in the background?"
The Guarneri Quartet coaxed flash and pomp out of the Great Fugue. Near the end, a series of chunky chords ushered in a brief passage, seemingly a parody of old courtly dances. "It's Beethoven. I was-."
"It'll do you good to get out of the house. We won't be late. You can put shelf paper in your kitchen cabinets tomorrow."
"Shelf paper? I wasn't putting-."
"You know you want pad thai."
Now that she'd mentioned food, I realized that I hadn't eaten all day. I was famished. Except for a few Healthy Choice dinners buried in the hoarfrost of my freezer, the cupboard was bare.
"Lobster clasps," I said.
She paused. "It's buttons, you dick."
* * *
Just as I emerged from the house, Christa's white Cabriolet slid sideways into the front curb, coming to rest so that it blocked the snow-clogged street. Bluish smoke poured from the tailpipe and bruised the snow beneath. The bass line of an old Prince song rippled the plastic window in back, a mallet hitting a drum skin. When I reached the car, the rusted-out passenger door swung open. It rattled to the crazy beat of the mistuned engine.
Tory sat in the passenger's seat, damned letterman jacket and all. "Hello again," he said, clambering out of the car. He fumbled with a lever near the floor, flinched when the seat snapped forward. "I'll sit in the back. I can stretch my legs across." He went in feet first, trying to step all the way across the back seat in one ungainly movement.
