When She Was Gone (12 page)

He didn't know exactly what they were after when they came, but he did know he was safer playing the notes more logical than any conversation. They knocked on the door at eleven
PM
, a posse, a little flock of men with uniforms and nightsticks, with huge silver flashlights. He was wearing a gown, his mother's, champagne silk, open in the back like a maw, and he saw himself in the mirror, so he tugged it to the floor, never mind that they might see through the stained glass. He grabbed his robe and wrapped it around his body, all bruise from within. The gown rested like a half-melted woman in the hallway. Perhaps he'd worn it for two days, though he didn't remember putting it on, he rarely remembered putting it on, only that he was safer in his mother's dresses, that he used them when he was most lost to anchor himself to the corporeal world. He hadn't needed to leave the house after his Wednesday library trip; it had rained and he hadn't felt like biking or walking, only drinking tea and playing his music or thinking his music, and what crime was there in not leaving his house? For a minute he thought they were coming about the dresses. But what crime was there in a dying man wearing his dead
mother's dresses? And who should care? He was almost old, after all. He was dying. He'd felt old for decades now, since his aunt was gone, older still since he lost the job, older still since he'd lost the order inside his body, since he was being consumed.

He opened the main door and they spoke through the screen.

“Mr. Leonard?” It was the one he knew, Beau, from around the corner on Pine, only there was nothing casual in his posture, nothing that made Mr. Leonard even think he might offer coffee to this man. The light was horrible, so he shaded his eyes.

“That's a little bright,” he said.

“Oh, is it?” asked another one of them, whose chest was huge, pigeon huge, puffed, his voice too round for someone older than ten, Mr. Leonard thought. He held his beam closer, like a sword, like a challenge.

“That's enough, Pete,” said Beau, lowering his own beam.

“Of course,” said Mr. Leonard. “It's halogen, isn't it? Or one of those mercury-vapor lights? You want to come in?” He was humming as he spoke. An old habit. The kind of habit that used to make people think he was strange. In fifth grade, humming the angry rhythms of Mars from Holst's
The Planets
while he gave his report on the solar system. It wasn't his fault; his mind couldn't separate one from the other.

“We have some questions, sir. You know about this missing girl?” It was Pete. His beam was lowered, but still erect, an offending object, still threatening.

“Linsey Hart was my next-door neighbor,” said Mr. Leonard, suddenly alert.

Pete grunted. Beau shuffled, then stepped inside. Mr. Leonard backed up. The lights.

“I'd like you to sit,” Beau said to Mr. Leonard.

“I'd rather stand,” said Mr. Leonard, thinking that his robe had a hole where the belt loop was worn. Too much tugging taut over the years. They all gazed at the gown on the floor. They stepped around it. When it was off, it was ridiculous to imagine he had been wearing it.

“Sit,” said Pete, and gave him a little shove. It didn't hurt. “Christ,” Pete punctuated Mr. Leonard's collapse, and turned back to the hallway, tapping the dress with his toe. “What the hell is
that
?”

“A gown,” said Mr. Leonard.

“Calm down, Pete,” said Beau.

There were four men in his living room, and he looked at the piano longingly. He stepped past Beau and Pete and someone else, whose face he couldn't see under the hat brim, hat still on, very rude of him, and sat on his bench, reaching the single safe shore in the house. He had no slippers, and suddenly his feet were very cold; his toenails felt as though they were freezing off his body.

“I don't like that you said she
was
your next-door neighbor,” said Beau. “I would think you might say she
is
your next-door neighbor.”

“Christ, Beau,” said the third man from under his hat. “You gonna lead him or what?”

He had a high tenor tone; he sounded like a child. All these children in his house, at his piano. Mr. Leonard wanted to introduce their recital. Instead, he fingered the keys, not pressing enough to sing them. But he heard them just the same, the melodic line from
The Damnation of Faust
.

“I said
was.
” He was humming. Stop, he thought, but he couldn't. Maybe they could hear him and maybe not. Maybe they heard the music and maybe they heard the words or maybe they just heard what they wanted to hear.

“Because she's going off to college,” he finished. But it didn't matter, Pete was holding up their search warrant, and the two men whose names he didn't know were already moving things, his things, pressing their thick fingers between the spines of his bound scores, tearing at the records as if they might house something other than moments, something other than performance, something other than simple music.

“What are you looking for?” he asked Beau, who was gently opening the piano. He couldn't bear that, it was like someone was prying open his mouth. Even Beau, who had sat at that piano.

“I'm not supposed to say,” said Beau, wincing as he dropped the lid on his own fingers. At least there was no wooden crash, thought Mr. Leonard.

“No,” said Mr. Leonard. “I suppose not, but perhaps I could help you if you told me.”

Beau considered this for a minute. “Maybe,” he said.

They weren't going to find it until they told him, and they
weren't going to tell him tonight. What they were after was buried in the side yard beneath the slowly dying dogwood, wrapped around the tiniest of bones.

•   •   •

For a while, before his father died, Mr. Leonard thought he might be a composer. He was performing then, competing, medium-size gigs, but nothing beyond accompanying Met competition finalists in concerts in the park in the New Jersey suburbs, or his own big solo pieces in small college concert halls, his audience half retirees, half faculty, some of whom brought papers to grade while they listened. Once, he played at Nordstrom's near Christmastime. He didn't like that, felt oppressed by the stringent Easter lily perfume and the clattering of boot heels as they stepped off the bottom of the escalator, just missing the rhythm of the moving stairs. He'd called his father, because he started having music dreams, music he couldn't identify, even by humming the bars over and over, which usually eventually found them their rightful names in the file drawers of his mind. He'd been teaching on and off at the Manhattan School of Music. He liked the intimate conversations with students in the tiny, mouse-and-cinnamon-scented practice rooms. Mostly upright pianos, mostly windowless rooms, so they had to make windows and light of the music. He hardly ever worked them through scales then, even beginners got simple pieces, because even at its worst, the beautiful bones of the music were better than the broken rhythms of simple scales,
accompanied by the thunks and sighs of metal expanding inside the radiators.

“I'm thinking,” he said to his father, who was in Vienna, finishing an opera season. “I might go in a different direction.”

“South?” his father said. “Never trusted Florida.”

“No, I mean with the teaching.” Of course, his father was teasing. His father didn't like to talk about Mr. Leonard's music, only his own. He'd begin, and his father would overtake the conversation, as if they were in a race toward final punctuation.

“You know, those who can't do—” He didn't finish this old argument. Mr. Leonard never knew whether his father even wanted him to
do,
wanted to conduct his own son in some great Rachmaninoff concerto with the New York Philharmonic, standing ovations, no one could say there was any nepotism, Mr. Leonard having made it on his own, or whether his father would've been happier if his son had become an accountant, an orthodontist, anything but his own tortured successful road. Mr. Leonard knew his father took sixteen capsules every morning, heart pills, useless in the end, C and other vitamins, fish oil, Valium. He'd had the prescription since Mr. Leonard's mother's death, and he wondered whether his father had grown immune to the fog, because it never made him sleep, only move through the day instead of finding sticking points like flypaper in the corners of the room. The secret to his success.

“No,” he said. “I mean, I like teaching, and I have to pay the rent, but I'm having these music dreams.”

“Dreams of grandeur or dreams of measure?” His father breathed heavily into the phone, as if he was running in place while talking to his son. Mr. Leonard imagined the hotel room, ornate brass bed, thick brocade curtains, gold velvet upholstery, stainless, pine scented.

“Dreams of measure.”

“You have two choices, write it down, or do your best to forget,” said his father.

His adviser at Julliard told him he could take some more composition classes. He'd never loved them; he'd had one inspiring teacher at the beginning, then duds to follow, men trapped in their own simple rhythms, their own repeated tonics, I, I, I. Always leaning toward the minor keys, toward simple passions and dark clothing.

“No,” said Mr. Leonard. “I know how to write them down, and I can hear more than three or four voices, it's orchestral. Not symphonies, I don't think. Or maybe, maybe just movements.”

“You really need to take your time to become a composer,” said his former adviser, chewing a toothpick. Mr. Leonard used to love the stuffy little office where they'd gone over his plans semester after semester, but he was done now, done with the room, done with the soft arms of study. It was all his own heavy wagon now, the music.

“No,” said Mr. Leonard. “Not become. Already
be
.”

“I disagree. You are already a musician, you were born a musician, but a composer is something to become.”

“No,” said Mr. Leonard, surprising himself. He hadn't
come to argue with his mentor. But he was thinking of his father, thinking of the way his father had never stopped
being
a conductor, a consummate musician, even the day after his mother died, when he gave a lecture at Tanglewood, a final talk on the history of dance music. His mother was dead, and Mr. Leonard lay in the narrow bed in the rental cottage, his mother's blue jeans, the only thing his father hadn't packed away, wrapped around him like a thick, grass-stained scarf. She'd worn them outside with him; they smelled of the backs of her knees. He had been waiting for his father to collect him, to make all the changes that were coming, the cleaving of the remaining two. But his cleaving was the other kind, apart. He'd gone into his music like Orpheus into the underworld and had never come up again. That last glance was banishment.

Mr. Leonard took a sabbatical from the teaching, and only performed the best-paying gigs. For six months he slept and woke and wrote the music of his dreams, but even though he heard them orchestrally, his pencil stopped after a melody and a single harmony, point and counterpoint—he couldn't replicate the grandeur of what he'd heard. He felt like a banished angel, as if he lost some senses between waking and sleep. When he woke, his head throbbed, his forehead felt as though it were splitting, a division between the lobes pressing outward from inside against his subcutaneous fat, the skin itself. His ear rang, a spontaneous high thrum, which started and stopped without warning. Mr. Leonard was being made ill by his own music. He sat at the little desk he'd bought at a yard sale in Queens, linoleum top, curved metal
rim, a perfect round-edged rectangle of space, chips of mica in the yolk yellow surface, and he couldn't get past a scattering of notes. They looked like dots to him, just dots, for the first time in his life since he'd learned to read music—at age three, learning music as a second language, or first, concurrently with learning to read English—it made no sense to him. Poppy seeds, ants, buds, scabs, ellipses, the lines were vines, road divisions, hairs, guitar strings, flat lines, nothing, nothing. His head pulsed with the whining sound, with wanting the music he'd made, or had been given by God, if there was a God, then why was God torturing him?

When he told his father it wasn't working out, his father sighed into the phone. An abrasive sound, perhaps it would've sounded sad in person, but through the phone it sounded as though his father was hissing at him.

“Ah well,” he said. “Ah well. I suppose those who can't do—”

“Fine,” said Mr. Leonard. “I'll teach.”

“No,” said his father. “I was going to say, those who can't do what they were born to do might need a bit more ripening before they are ready to speak.”

Mr. Leonard was so surprised by this almost encouragement he said nothing.

“Of course,” his father finished, “those who can't do also teach. So go forth and teach, my son, go forth and teach.”

•   •   •

“This is one weird asshole,” Pete said, kicking at a pile of scores in the bedroom. The bed itself was full of music, of
books and loose sheets, lying in the bedclothes like extra blankets. A hundred printed sheets of paper, fifty books, and pencils, and blank pieces of staff paper, and eraser crumbs from single notes written and erased. The ghosts of treble clefs and meter markings pressed into the staves, then gone, never right. On a table by the bed, there were apples in a bowl, letting loose the scent of sweet rot. Neat stacks of dried apricots, like a sculpture. Orange Stonehenge. Pete flicked at the fruit and it fell.

“His socks are all organized but his bed's all covered with this shit—” He kicked at the bedpost, his boot snapping a pencil.

“It's music, dude,” said Carl, who was wishing he hadn't volunteered to come along on this search.

“Who the fuck listens to this anymore?” asked Pete, throwing the scores on the floor and kicking at them. He had reddish mud on his boot, and it fell off onto the worn Chinese carpet in little filthy rectangles. Carl knew Pete liked a little Christmas music, that he stopped at the mall to listen to the carolers in Nordstrom, that he didn't hate classical music. Carl had played clarinet in the marching band. He liked a little parade music; he liked the Messiah sings at his church. And so did Pete. They'd even listened to the classical station together once for about ten minutes, sitting in the Jeep on the downtown beat. Carl liked it when they had the Jeep—the seats were comfortable and the heater worked well without drying out your whole face. He thought about the Jeep to stay calm while he dug
through the old guy's drawers with his gloves on. Looking for pink.