Reunion (17 page)

“Well, we ought to get going,” said Buzz, crossing his knife and fork on his now empty plate thinking like a pirate, I've got the crossbones, now all I need is the skull, discreetly getting up.

“Going?” said Fred, “where?”

“I thought I'd try to bag a couple of seals, maybe I could catch some salmon, Malinche could use a new polar bear stole,” smiled Buzz.

“We want to try the Garibaldi exhibit again,” said Malinche.

Perfect timing. Like they'd been rehearsing all night. But they hadn't. Coats on.

“Well, let me drive you back to Howard Street,” said Ellen reluctantly, “there's a train out to O'Hare from downtown, I guess … ”

“We'll be fine,” said Buzz taking his little black leather bag and flinging it over his shoulder. The seasoned (overseasoned) traveller, thinking that where he'd like to simply go would be someplace like the Midi or a place just off the beach in Sergipe in northern Brazil, or reinhabit the lost ruins in Antisuyo in Peru, where have all the proto-Indo-Mediterraneans gone, long time passing, where have all the Anatolians and Sumerians and Bantu gone, long time ago …

Ellen out the door, Fred making no move to put any coat on, shovel out anything. Buzz could just see him collapse on the sofa, maybe a little Irish Cream or Amaretto, a swig of Seagram's, and the long winter's nap would start its own endless replay.

“It's been great, Fred,” said Buzz, giving him an abraco, “come on up for a visit in spring, it's great, the whole campus one big flowering tree-fest. We began as an agricultural something-or-other … ”

“Just my thing!” he answered sarcastically, for a moment Buzz imagining Fred on his deathbed and Death comes in and Fred says “Jesus, can't you get a haircut and a shave and update that scythe … ”

“It's been,” Malinche flipping through the Rolodex in her head for the right word, “been … ”

“It HAS!” said Fred. More sarcasm. And then a little break in the clouds. Reaching out and giving her a little hug. “You're great for the Buzzcut, you really are, it's written all over the both
of you,” turning to Buzz, “it took a few tries, but you finally made home plate … ”

“I try,” she said, Buzz rejoicing inside that, yes, whatever else happened (and it all, inevitably, would) at least he'd have HER, as inseparable from him as his own skin.

Buzz pushing open the outer door, the wind whisking some snow in.

“Quick, quick, said the Flick to the Quip, quick, quick,” Fred practically pushing them out the door, Malinche still thanking him, “It was really great,” Buzz following suit, “Thanks for everything,” then out, wading through the snow, down the front stairs, looking back at Fred in the window, Buzz for a moment remembering his long-dead (twenty years) father standing in the window of the house in Sun City as they'd drive away after a visit, like a sentinel keeping watch over his own and everybody else's slow slipping down the dark, subterranean river of Time.

Ellen already had the windows cleared off.

“It must have stopped not long after we got home. There's not much more accumulation. I never shovel the driveway or anything, I just plow right through it … ”

Malinche carefully getting into the back seat, Buzz sliding in after her.

Cold plastic seatcovers. Another childhood memory. When he'd go to the hospital with his father and they'd come out and get in the car, always the cold sword slicing up his spine when he'd sit on the frozen plastic seatcovers.

Once last look back at the house, Fred standing there, 3, 2, 1, and then he slipped back behind the curtains and was gone, as they plowed uncertainly down the street, a little slipping, a little
sliding, always the imminent feeling that they were about to spin all the way around or off the street and over the curb, but that never happened, slowly making their way to main streets that had already been plowed.

The Art Institute just as insect-crowded as before, hivelike, bees, ants, this ponderous buzzing swarm, the only difference a new sign up over the entrance:

B
EGINNING IN
J
UNE
. I
F
Y
OU'VE
L
OVED
G
ARIBALDI
, Y
OU'LL
B
E
E
NTHRALLED BY A
R
ETROSPECT OF
L
ES
N
ABIS

“Les WHAT?” asked Malinche, suddenly getting the giggles, “What's a Nabi anyhow? Is it a joke?”

“No, there really was a kind of interior decoratorish ‘school,' Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, Roussel, Vallotton … although I don't know how Roussel got in there, but… ”

A Mr. Five by Five black guy standing out in front this time, different face, same message: M
EMBERS'
T
ICKETS
W
ILL
N
OT
B
E
H
ONORED
T
ODAY
F
OR
T
HE
G
ARIBALDI
E
XPOSITION
, M
EMBERS
' T
ICKETS
W
ILL
N
OT
B
E
H
ONORED
T
ODAY
F
OR
T
HE
G
ARIBALDI
E
XPOSITION
…

“Everything eventually becomes circus, I guess,” said Buzz, depressed by the sheer greed of it all. Was it built in, demand always exceeding production, like you could never build enough malls or have enough channels, E- for Eternity-Mail … ?

“Don't you want to see something else in the permanent collection? Like the Romans or something?”

Suddenly feeling the bottom drop out, the machete wind off the frozen lake, all this pullulating, pulsating sense of bugginess, hooks and claws and stingers, hard roach chitinous carapaces, Cockroachlandia …

“Let's get the fuck outa here, man, come on!” and he turned his back on the great art palace of his youth and started walking down the stairs. If she came, she came, if she didn't, she didn't, driven by all this frenzy into one of his fatal final-decision, renunciation moods.

“So what do you want to do?” she said, grabbing on to his arm, following him down the stairs, “we've still got a few hours.”

Suddenly feeling better, cheered by her unwavering … what would you call it, loyalty, supportiveness … or, if you wanted to smear and not cheer her on, “slavishness.”

Looking down the street. Orchestra Hall. The Fine Arts building.

Flooding with memories, for years, every Saturday night going to the Chicago Symphony concerts. Box seats. And most of the time with Petra Rossini who wasn't really a doll, but beyond dollishness into something like The Classic, thinking Petra and his mind suddenly filled with old drawing rooms and needlepoint chairs, gold-painted display cases filled with snuffbox collections, family portraits in massive gold frames. There had been one portrait of Petra's grandfather downstairs at the end of the hall, in her father's waiting room, her father, like his own father, using the downstairs of the house as a little office just to catch the overflow patients. And Petra's mother would let him in and he'd wait downstairs, the office closed at five, of course, so the whole place would be funereal, the whole life of
the family (ten kids, six girls, four boys), going on on floors two through four, and in the winters like now, on a Saturday night just like tonight would be, she'd always bring him some warm milk and cookies, this tall blonde (Belgian) woman with the fine ankles and overflow of charisma, like he wasn't just some puke come to take out her teenage puke daughter, but the Spanish ambassador come to see the Queen about averting the arrival of the Armada …

Walking past Orchestra Hall, reading the signs announcing tonight's performance: Brahms'
German Requiem
. That was it. Enough and then some.

Would have given anything to just be able to go in and buy a ticket, make it his city again, part of its flesh and flow, instead of just walking by (as he did) and shutting it, cancelling it out, doors closed never to be reopened, those hierophantic moments, Kubelik, the conductor, at the end of his final bow before beginning a concert, giving a slight nod to Professor Schwartzenberg, Buzz's German professor, in the box next to him, before turning and beginning, say, Dvorak's
7th Symphony
, Schwarzenberg the cousin to the Crown Prince of Bohemia, a long-time friend of Kubelick's from Czechoslovakia, families going back, back, back, and Buzz himself with the daughter of the dean of the medical school where his father had studied, everything just right, like the perfect corned beef sandwich or the perfect Gothic arch or perfect black-nyloned leg, the perfect eye-job or the perfect call to prayer echoing over the rooftops of Alexandria from the perfect minaret. Like he'd been up there somewhere, on top of the heap, tweeded and homburged, pipe and horn-rims, someone you took seriously, a “presence” among
“presences.” And then he'd left Chicago and it had all gotten somehow so “strange,” and he along with it, so that strangeness echoed unto strangeness until it became somehow transmuted into The Norm, and when he'd seen Petra just five years earlier at the Art Institute Member's Lounge for lunch, she'd become a lawyer instead of the concert pianist she'd intended to become, and she was widowed and no children, her life all symbiotically tied in with her sisters and brothers, lots of money and big scaly hands and instead of talking about tone, timbre, nuance, a scene from Chabral or a revelation from Messian, all she talked about was pension plans and how much her husband had left her and Rome versus Chicago climatewise and maybe she'd buy a Maserati and maybe not, she'd found this great villa in Tuscany, but Italy was so hot in the summer and what about her brothers and sisters, although if she moved over there, she thought, they'd probably be over visiting her all the time, too bad she didn't have any children, although she didn't want to be tied down, “and besides, you can't really juggle career and kids,” and she'd made her choices and had to live with them …

A little further south and he opened the door of the Fine Arts Building for her and she walked in, the Fine Arts Grill right there in front of them.

“I'm really hungry,” she said, “all that tropical stuff was great and all that, but in this kind of weather … ”

“We can eat afterwards, but first … ”

“What's in here?” she asked as he walked into the old, ornate lobby, stood in front of the complicated, curled and festooned Baroque elevator doors, one elevator up on five, descending … loving the stone, wood, iron … another one of his sacred places,
his St. Peter's tomb, Valley of the Kings, the tomb of Makina Pacal under the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque …

“When I was twelve, Madame Metzger, my singing teacher, put on a production of Mozart's
Magic Flute
and I sang the role of Sarastro, the high priest. My voice had just (barely!) changed from soprano to bass, but I did fine, even on the low notes. I wasn't Alexander Kipnis or anything, but … ”

The elevator slid to a smooth stop and the doors opened, this old, ancient elevator operator sitting there looking at them.

“Come on!” Buzz taking Malinche by the arm. She seemed a little claustrophobic, nervous. Telling the elevator operator “Floor ten, please, Curtiss Hall … ”

“I'll be happy to take you to Curtiss Hall, sir,” he said, “but it's not on ten.”

“Well, it's been, what, fifty years. Revise that! Fifty-two!”

He closed the doors and started up, laughed to himself.

“I was just thinking, I've been working her for fifty five years, I could have been the one who took you up to Curtiss Hall fifty two years ago. What happened fifty two years ago in Curtiss Hall?”

“I sang the part of Sarastro in the
Magic Flute
. Madame Zerlina Muhlman Metzger's All Children's Grand Opera.”

“Madame Metzger. I knew her well. She used to rent a studio here in the building. And she'd always put on her productions in Curtiss Hall. I wonder whatever happened to her.”

“Well,” said Buzz wryly, “she was sixty then, either she'd be a hundred and twelve or dead,” then passing from wry to elegiac, like he was seeing his whole life swimming in front of him inside some crystal ball invisible to everyone else but him, “actually she
died thirty years ago. An old friend of mine sent me a clipping from the newspaper. She got a third of a page in the
Tribune.”

“That's a lot. She was from … ?”

“Vienna.”

Suddenly remembering the day when Mrs. Metzger's mother had come to visit, a Madame Muhlman, a woman who had been a singer herself, had sung under Mahler, the first performance of
Das Lied von der Erde
, something like that, this skinny old shaky lady with a cane, who could hardly speak English.

“They're all Asians coming over now. Asians and Arabs,” said the elevator operator, then kind of becoming aware of Malinche, looking a little repentant, Buzz almost saying, “She's kind of one of them,” but letting it go, she could be southern Italian, Greek, who could say.

Pulling to a stop, letting them out.

“Of course, if I did take you up here fifty-two years ago, neither of us would recognize each other now. The way things, I mean people, change.”

“You're not kidding, pal,” said Buzz as they got out.

“Seeya.”

The doors closed and they were in this vast grey corridor all alone. All shadows and stone, Buzz remembering another day, right there on that floor, another old man who must have been, what, seventy-five then, probably dead for forty years already, the building manager in those days, telling him “Hey, kid, you wanna see something special?” “Sure,” Buzz'd said. And the old guy had taken him back down a corridor, across a catwalk however many stories up it was, already a little on the perilous, rickety side, and opened up a door at the end of the corridor and
they'd walked into the old Auditorium Theater, Louis Sullivan's masterpiece. He'd pulled a few levers, pushed a few buttons and the whole thing had lept alive with lights, a strange Gothic-Art Nouveau combination of cathedrals and forests, the industrial and Neanderthal. “That's the first time anyone but me has seen it for years!” Although that's where his father had ushered in the old days, the 1920's, earlier. When Buzz had been a kid he used to play with all the old
Playbills
and listen to his father talk about his adventures as usher: “I used to always bring coffee into her dressing room when Mary Garden sang. And Galla Curchi and I were pals … ”