Music for Wartime (14 page)

That night, I started telling Johann about my life. I figured, if I can’t take this to a shrink, maybe
he
can be my shrink. All they do anyway is sit and listen. So I made us a nice meal, chicken with cream sauce and rosemary, and opened some Riesling. “Johann,” I said, “I understand you had something like twenty children. Babies.” I rocked my arms back and forth, and he smiled. “Not to bring up a touchy subject, because I know half of them died, right? Dead?” He looked confused, but just as well. “Back then people dealt with things and moved on. It wasn’t some life-halting devastation because it was the
norm
. No one went around wailing, ‘Oh, why me, why does God hate me?’ And that’s how I’ve always looked at things. So last year our city was attacked. Let’s just say they knocked down some castles.” I pantomimed it, idiotically, with my arms. “And we’re all terrified, and no one can eat, and no one can sleep. Granted. But to Larry, who didn’t even lose anyone he knew, it threatens his whole worldview, makes him question his religion. I say, ‘So your whole vague, lapsed-Episcopal belief in God was based on those buildings being there? On nothing bad ever happening?’ It was like he’d never previously registered that there was evil in the world. This is the man whose clothes you’re wearing.
Clothes.
And then Larry says I was more upset when we miscarried last year than when the towers got hit. True, true, but really that was the hormones. Johann, you would not believe how the chemicals can wash over you. Your wives never even had to deal with postpartum, did they? Just got pregnant again and squeezed the next one out.”

He nodded, used his bread to sop up sauce, yawned. I don’t know if nodding is something he learned from me or if they did that in old Germany. He was looking very American right then, with the haircut I gave him. And his breath has been so much better since he learned to use the electric toothbrush. I assigned him the removable brush head with the blue edging. I have the pink. And he’s not that old, really, maybe forty. I looked him up again online to make sure I hadn’t altered history, stealing him away like that in the middle of his life, but he still seems to have died at sixty-five. I didn’t learn much else new, except that he never liked pianos. Didn’t think they’d last.

Which is all to say, he’s not bad-looking. It makes you think. Technically he’s a married man, but even more technically, his second wife died three hundred years ago. And it’s not as if I can go out on dates now and leave him alone, and I can’t bring anyone back
here
. Then there’s this: He’s clearly very fertile, and any child of his would be a musical genius. His sons certainly were, and his daughters might have been, given the chance. Could that be the reason this happened, so I can have his daughter and give her a decent shot at life?

The question, then, is how to seduce an eighteenth-century German. If I just show up in a nightgown, he’ll think I’m some kind of harlot.

I did it by introducing jazz. We went chronologically, from my
African Rhythms
CD through Dixieland, and by the time we got through two bottles of wine and up to Coleman Hawkins, he was leaning close, murmuring things in German. I wasn’t expecting much. Every month in
Cosmo
they keep announcing some new sex position, as if for years people reproduced like Puritans and we’re only now figuring out the pleasure aspect. But Johann, he knows exactly what he’s doing.

I try not to talk on the phone in front of him, since he can’t understand I’m not talking to
him
. He’ll laugh when I laugh, try to stand in front of me, nod when he thinks I’m asking a question.

When I got in the cab the morning after our first night together, I turned on my cell for the first time in two days and found a message from Larry. “It’s me,” he said. I could picture him standing with the phone, his back to the smudgy window of his efficiency. “Wondering if my shoe polish is still there. In the hall closet. Call me.” I haven’t known Larry to polish his shoes in the past ten years, so this meant he had a date. Or wanted me to think so.

I called his land line, since he’d be at work. I talked to his voicemail. “Me,” I said. “Wednesday morning. If you left any polish, it’s probably gone. My friend moved some things in, so I had to make space. My friend John. Nothing too serious, but he’s staying awhile.”

When I finished, a prerecorded woman asked if I’d like to review my message. I did. Then I taped over it. “Me. Sorry I took so long. Can’t find the polish. It was old anyway, wasn’t it? You should just buy some new. So. Good luck with whatever the shiny shoes are for.”

The cabbie smiled in the rearview. If he understood my English, he probably approved of my benevolence.

Johann is obsessed now with jazz, especially blues. Funny, I’d have pegged him for a Charlie Parker fan, something more complex. He still speaks only a few words of English—
coffee
,
eat
,
pajamas
,
no
—but he’s memorized a number of blues lyrics. Across the table most nights, between dinner and ice cream, he’ll start into something like “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?” and he even does that low, gravelly Satchmo voice.

“No joys for me
no company
even ze mouse
ren from my house
all my life srough
I’ve been soooooo
bleck and blue.
”

Only he’s grinning when he sings it. I think he’s proud of himself.

When he plays from the Chopin book I got him, it sounds different than it should—sharper, less Romantic, I suppose—but then there’s something wonderful about the way he plays fantastical music in this normal, rhythmic way as if it weren’t Chopin at all, just Hanon warm-up exercises. It reminds me of a Chagall painting: Here are some people, floating above a town. Here is a cow on the roof. Here is the blanket sky, poked through with blinding stars. But this is just the way my town looks at night! I took my easel into the street to paint my flying neighbors, to get the purple starlight right. Normal, normal. Nothing Romantic going on
here
.

I gave him some staff paper the other day, thinking maybe he’d write something while he’s here, but he just looked at it, said, “Nein, nein,” shook his head sadly. Maybe it’s against the rules to compose here, to leave parts of his genius as evidence. Maybe he can leave his sperm, but not his handwriting.

My father used to make me and my brother try to compose. He’d sit us down, have us close our eyes, tell us if we cleared our minds of every noise and picture, something would come. It never did. I feared it was because of my cheating, my inability to filter out random images. I’d almost be clear, and then: Gorilla! Airplane! Christmas! I want to ask Johann how he does it, how he can sit and just concentrate. How he can keep out everything that isn’t sound—the fifty thousand colors of the world, the smell of something burning four stories below.

The longer he’s here, the more I think I should learn German. We could piece together a conversation then, between us.

My Brahms-bearded art professor, the one who introduced me to Chagall in the first place, would use a piano during lectures. The class met in the small recital theater at the back of the fine arts building, and there was a Steinway on the stage, and somehow he’d gotten a key to the lid. He loved to run from his projection screen to that piano, talking about “Colors are like notes; together they make chords.” He probably thought he was being quirky.

“This is blue and green,” he said, playing C and D together. “Analogous. So similar they create tension. Now blue and yellow.” A third. “Now blue and orange.” A fourth.

Another time, he ran to the piano to explain a terrible Rococo painting, something with clouds and bosoms. “The whites in the Fragonard are like
this
,” he said, and trilled high up, delicate and saccharine.

But I was never sure he knew what he was talking about. He lost my faith when we studied
Guernica
and he said there would never be a war on American soil in our lifetime. (No canvas of mangled, color-void bodies. No slaughtered bull, no spears, no pale-eyed crucifixion.) It struck me as shockingly naive for a smart man, very bag-over-the-head.

And he was wrong about colors, too. “They have no innate
meaning
,” he said the second week of class, “but they have
connotations
we all share, as a society and as humans, yes? Green tunes us in to nature, life, so we feel soothed. Blue is sky, so we think dreamy, ethereal, and the same with white. Black is fear. For three million years we lived without electricity, no? There are good reasons we’re afraid of the dark. Red, we see blood. So violence, drama, excitement, passion.” That’s where I took exception, where I still do. For men, yes, maybe. But for any woman since the dawn of time, red means no baby this month. It means, for better or worse, the staining and unignorable absence of a baby.