Appassionata (14 page)

Anzor, who seems to know the city well, ushers her among the crowds, talking informatively and inconsequentially. He points out a house whose interior was once apparently painted by Vermeer, and she’s pleased by the thought of pleasure she’d glimpsed in his magical rooms just behind the brick, the quiet women at their lutes or their washing, the ordinariness from which people had always extracted so much loveliness. She’s in the loop between the virtual and real, in the seamless cosmopolis; but this time, she feels the thrill of it, rather than irritation.

Allegretto; leggiero. A lightness of spirit comes upon her. There’s nothing she wishes for outside the sparkling light of this moment. They’re making their way across a cobblestone square, when Anzor places his hand on her shoulder, to detain her. His grip tenses; and following the direction of his gaze, she sees a small demonstration of some kind, a cluster of people holding posters, someone taking up a megaphone and shouting. She focuses on the posters, makes out the word “Kosovo.” There’s an instant, tight constriction of her chest. Anzor’s hand continues to hold her shoulder, in a command to stay still. His attention is fixed on the small group, and whatever is being shouted into the megaphone.

“What is it?” she asks. “What’s going on?”

He speaks casually, in a tone which doesn’t quite match his alert stance. “You know, the usual. A demonstration. Something about independence for Kosovo.”

“Does this have anything to do with … what happened in Rotterdam?” she asks. She hasn’t mentioned the Incident to him; there seemed no need, no call for it.

The glance he directs at her is sharp in its inquisitiveness. “I didn’t realize you follow the news so closely,” he says. “Was it in the
Herald Tribune
?”

“I happened to be there,” she says, and feels the return of the previous day’s sensations. The strange excitement, strange desuetude.

“I didn’t know …” Anzor says, turning her gently away from the demonstration. Then he says firmly, as if to make sure she understands: “They’re actually protesting what happened in Rotterdam. They are on the right side.”

The right side … She cannot make out where that might place them, on whose behalf the demonstrators, who seemed to be shouting both in Dutch and in Yugoslav, are raising their voices, or against whom. But Anzor seems to be completely sure. Another statement in C major. She resists its four-square simplicity, then yields to it. She looks at him, and knows that the focus of Anzor’s gaze, the very directness of his presence, are fueled by the same energy as the words. By comparison with him, she is vague, uncertain, dispersed. By comparison, everyone she knows is dispersed. He takes her hand reassuringly, and she feels herself coming into focus, as if the scattered filings of her inchoate thoughts were being gathered by a strong magnetic force. The constriction in her chest gradually dissolves. She lets him lead her through the thickening crowds back to the hotel.

Later, there is the great effort of the concert, the lift-off and then the comedown. When they finally fall into each other’s bodies, it is as if after an enormous postponement, with a ravenousness fed by everything that happened that day, and whose own certainty cannot be gainsaid.

*

The next day she tries to practice, but finds it hard to concentrate. Images of Anzor interfere. They’ve agitated her in the very places from which the music springs, and instead of finding her way to the Debussy pieces she’ll be playing next week, she finds her way to him, his tenor and rhythms … “Poissons d’Or” is nothing more than a dry dutiful exercise … She is in her own watery medium, of longing and yearning and flowing into something, someone else … She wonders, as she has before, if Rothman is ever so unraveled, so undone. She wishes for greater grit, and then unwishes the wish. She cannot undo this fluidity any more than she can undo her being. She is permeable, that is her flaw and her advantage … It is how she experiences the world, how she lets music enter. She remembers Wolfe: “You must know, Miss Merton, that if you want to be an artist, you must have a will of iron. You must be uncompromising in your pursuit.” He meant, you must unwoman yourself. She turns to the opening section of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade, and forgets all else. The theme, with its rueful half-tones, compressed and repetitive like the circling of obsessive thought, the line curling and uncurling from itself, till it eventually expands into openness of major tones and wide arpeggios, pulls her into its vortex till there is nothing outside it. The delicate modulations and intermixings, pensive thought wistful melancholy the breathing of beauty, big and spacious. She grunts, from the effort of adjusting to the shifts with her breath and inner body. She goes over the beginning bars again and again, making sure that no note, no left-hand chord stands out too jaggedly from the fluctuating diminuendos and crescendos. Ah yes: the leap in the left hand is a semi-quaver too sudden. She repeats it several times, till the jump is perfectly incorporated into the flow. By the time she looks up, she realizes that two hours have passed. For two hours, she has been inside time. Then she shakes the Ballade off, remembers the interview she has later that afternoon,
and beyond that Anzor, who will meet her in the next city; and the anxiety of the passing minutes, the beating of restlessness against the skin, is upon her again.

In Between

July 23, 1982

The cellist again. She’s always a few minutes late for her lesson, and bursts in saying, “Hiya,” as if I were her best friend, and there were no question of my being annoyed. A big, indulged child. I wonder why on earth she has decided to become a musician. Her body seems designed for making babies. Still, there is undeniable fluency in her playing, undeniable energy. This must be admitted. But there is no restraint or postponement; no darkness, no struggle with Time. I tried to talk to her about understatement, about working toward a dramatic resolution so that it seems earned. “You mean you have to earn the satisfaction?” she asked. She looked at me with a saucy expression, as if she understood that this was provoking. I told her it is not a question of satisfaction, it is a question of musical logic. Of conclusions that have to be arrived at after a struggle. “Struggle?” she asked again. The notion seems foreign to her. I told her music wasn’t hockey, it was complex thought. The most complex we know, perhaps. “But shouldn’t it be fun?” she asked with complete disingenuousness. “Shouldn’t we enjoy it? Otherwise, what is the point?” Her soul is so alien to me that she might as well be from another planet. I wonder what will happen to our great tradition in hands like hers. She exerts a fascination, this must be admitted. But I do not like being fascinated by her. It disturbs me. Perhaps it is no more than the dubious fascination of the new, of the future.

In her airplane seat, Isabel remembers a demonstration class at the Retreat. Jane, playing a Beethoven Sonata, and Wolfe looking on sternly, as if he wasn’t going to give away anything, certainly not his almost unintentional excitement. Isabel can see his sensitive face responding only with a sort of grinding of his jaw, an extra sharp gaze. His raised finger, interrupting: “You’re not riding a horse, you’re reflecting thought,” he said, addressing all of them. “Music is thought in sound. You have to follow it, like an argument. Reveal the structure. Pare away the excess!” Jane, clearly displeased with the interruption, pouted and made an exasperated gesture with her bow. “What should I pare away?” she asked. “The notes?” You could hear the collective intake of breath among the small group. Nobody else would have dared say such a thing to Wolfe. Jane looked at him with a saucy defiance, then, before he could answer, swung up her bow and played the passage again, with more restraint, more tension. Wolfe allowed himself a barely discernible nod of approval. “That’s better,” he conceded. “You must remember: All art is in the resistance.” He turned to all of them. “I’m quoting Franz Liszt, who may seem to you an unlikely source for such a remark. But every artist worth his salt knows this from his own hard experience and in the bones. You must consent to the struggle, or you will not create anything worthwhile.”

All art is in the resistance. Isabel knows that now, knows the obscure struggles she has to wage with heaven knows what obstacles in order to make music yield its truth. Like hewing away at stubborn stone, even though she is molding the most
impalpable element. But Jane’s pout said she did not really believe that, refused to believe it. To Isabel’s half-envious eyes, Jane seemed to glide through the world as if it offered no barriers to her wishes, and as if there were no price for getting what she wanted. You can always get what you want … That was surely the provocation to Wolfe, and the secret of her charisma. For there was no doubt that Jane had her own, feckless kind of charisma. “The Great Refuser vs. the American Id,” someone summed up the contest between her and Wolfe. The two stars of their little constellation. There was, also, the subordinate contest between Jane and Isabel, for the Great Refuser’s attention. For Jane was not immune to his kind of power, to the need for some insemination of interstellar dust from his older, almost extinct galaxy; for some kind of musical benison.

As it happens, Jane will be playing in Copenhagen when she arrives. They’re in the habit of catching each other’s concerts whenever possible; she’ll go and hear her, of course.

Copenhagen

There she is: Jane. The air in the small concert hall sizzles in response to her appearance. She is wearing a carmine-red dress, flaring spectacularly at the hem; but she walks out on to the stage like a rock star, like a motorcycle driver. Forceful applause, scattered gasps of appreciation. Jane’s unruly black hair descends down to her shoulders, and she takes big steps, with an easy swing and swagger, gripping her cello nonchalantly in front of her, milky shoulders carelessly hunched. A corpulent, rather abashed-looking pianist in a tuxedo waddles after her with diffident air. Isabel remembers a much younger Jane, wearing her
frilly skirts and heavy, laced-up boots, half-waif, half-punk. Now, as she sits straddling her cello, the piano makes a great backdrop for the carmine red. Jane was never shy about going for the obvious, for the main chance.

The pianist plays the opening bars of the first Mendelssohn Sonata. Jane doesn’t exactly straighten out, but it is as if something in her has stood to attention. She readies her bow mid-air, and makes the first attack: the sound is so unerring, so honey-full and resonant, that you can feel the audience startling in turn. And then it pours out, lush, golden sound, unhesitant momentum. Jane’s body sways above the cello, and her bow swings wide; her mouth opens and almost twists with the abandon of the playing. The same expression as all those years ago. Isabel feels a surge of competitiveness, speckled with respectful admiration.

The third movement: Jane’s right leg works up and down with the music, her motions unmistakably inflected by blues and hard rock, by all that euphoric dancing years ago to Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones. She gallops through the bravura passages, fully unstopped, black hair falling into her face, milky shoulders working muscularly into the cello, the music flowing with lubricious ease. The ease that Wolfe objected to, not entirely without reason. Jane’s Mendelssohn is sexy in the idiom of her very own time; and yet the jerky jabs and thrusts of her bow and body bring out something true to the music: its original, radical energy.

In the second half, she plays a new piece especially composed for her, with bluesy jazz melodies, and thumping rhythms of square dancing, and scratchy country fiddle bits, eliding into something newer and stranger still.

Isabel goes to the Green Room afterward, and Jane greets her with sparkling eyes, and without missing a beat. “Hey, girl, this is a surprise!” she exclaims. She’s in frisky spirits, though the
pianist is sitting on the sofa rather limply. “Well, so how was I tonight? Tell me! You know you can always be honest with me.” This, Isabel knows, is true; Jane has always taken criticism like a fighter; without ducking or caving in. But this is not a moment for caviling. Isabel says the Mendelssohn was terrific, and means it.

“Well, what do you know,” Jane says, not hiding her pleasure at the compliment. “And you haven’t been doing so badly yourself, have you, girl? Wolfe knew talent when he saw it, I’ll give him that, the old sourpuss. And he was sure betting on you.”

“Well, not all the way.”

“So you’ve got the
Journal
too. I guess all his disciples rushed out to get it … Did you read the parts about me yet?” Jane asks, bending her head coquettishly. “The good parts? Pages 73 to 81.”

“You’re incorrigible,” the pianist utters appreciatively from the sofa.

“Ah, Tim, my darling.” Jane turns to him, with a mock purr. “I almost forgot about you. You ready to make tracks?”

“Sure,” he says, not moving from the sofa.

Jane turns to Isabel with a coy expression. “We’d invite you along, but we’ve got plans … You know how it is, right?”

“I couldn’t come anyway,” Isabel says. As she leaves, she sees Jane flopping down on the couch beside Tim, and raising her creamy face toward his, as Tim’s arms come up to the nape of her neck. Well, Liszt would have understood, who in his erotic life seemed to encounter practically no resistance at all. You can always take what you want, if you’re an Artist of a certain kind. Jane is drawing on the great tradition after all …

The air outside is agreeably warm, and Isabel ambles back to the hotel unhurriedly, scenes of that Wolfian summer floating through her mind. There was the afternoon walk she and Jane took through a wooded thicket near the Retreat. The sun was dappling the path through the thick foliage and a deer stood absolutely still at the wood’s edge, before fleeing. They were
discussing some compositional problem Wolfe had set them; and Isabel said she’d stayed up the whole night trying to resolve it. Jane pawed the path with her sneaker like some impatient pony. “You stop it, girl, you hear?” she said. “Or I swear you’ll turn into Wolfe yourself. You shouldn’t
punish
yourself like that. The thing about art is that it should be
easy
, don’t you know that
?
I mean, otherwise, what’s the point?”