Music for Wartime

COUPLE OF LOVERS ON A RED BACKGROUND

I’ve been calling him Bach so far, at least in my head, but now that he’s started wearing my ex-husband’s clothes and learned to work the coffeemaker, I feel it’s time to call him Johann. I said it out loud once, when I needed to get him off the couch before the super came up, but I’m not sure I pronounced it right, Germanic enough, because he didn’t respond — though I’m not sure I’d recognize my name, either, in the midst of someone screaming a foreign language. He got off the couch and went to the vacuum closet only because I practically carried him. No easy task, pushing someone so big and sweaty, even with the weight he’s lost since he got here. I’d take him out for some real German food, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the movies about caring for transplanted historical people, it’s never to take them out in public among the taxis and police and department store mannequins.

I’ve kept the curtains closed and the TV unplugged, but I did introduce him to the stereo so he’d have something to do every day while I’m gone. I’m proud of how carefully I did it: First, I dug my angel music box out of the Christmas decorations and played it for him. He seemed familiar with the concept, so I pointed back and forth between the angel box and the CD player, then put on some Handel. He was pleased, not at all scared, and now he’s pushing buttons and changing discs like he was raised on Sony. At first I only let him have Baroque, but recently we’ve been moving up in history. He’s fond of Mozart, unsurprisingly, but for some reason Tchaikovsky makes him giggle. When I played him “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” I thought he was going to wet the couch. Five minutes later he went to the piano and played the main part from memory, busted out laughing at certain phrases. If such a thing is possible, he played it sarcastically. He has a laugh, incidentally, like you’d expect from a pot-smoking thirteen-year-old, whispered and high-pitched. At first, when I thought I was making this all up, I wondered if I’d borrowed that bit from Tom Hulce in Amadeus. But on the phone the other day, my mother said, “Who’s that laughing over there?” At least she thinks I’m dating again.

He doesn’t seem to remember living in the piano. He never lifts the lid to look inside, which I would certainly do if I’d lived there ten days. The morning he came, I was in my sweats playing his Minuet in G — the one you know if you ever took lessons, the first “real” piece you learned by a serious composer: DA-da-da-da-da-DA-da-da. I was remembering that the day I learned to play it was the same day my father, the journalist who wished he were an opera baritone, first took interest in my lessons. I was seven. He would stand behind me and beat time on his palm. He even made up a little song for it, when I wasn’t getting the rhythm right: “THIS is the way that BACH wrote it, THIS is the way that BACH wrote it, THIS is the merry, THIS is the merry, THIS is the merry tune!” I’d keep playing even though it panicked me, and I’d think of the picture from my cartoon book about Beethoven, the one where his father stood behind the piano with dollar signs in his eyes. I wasn’t gifted enough that my father was thinking of money. Maybe he wanted me to entertain at his dinner parties, or just to be better than he was. Treble clefs in his eyes.

I was remembering all this, playing the Minuet in G pretty damn well despite a few glasses of wine, when I started to feel like something was stuck in my throat. Since my hands were busy playing, I didn’t cover my mouth — just turned my head to the side and coughed something up. I think I passed out then, although I don’t remember waking. There’s a bit of time I can’t account for. I remember being in the kitchen later. I remember making tea.

The next day I heard scratching inside the piano and figured I had mice again. I didn’t want to open the lid and poke them out with the end of a mop. I didn’t want them running panicked across the carpet, their terror feeding mine.

The piano’s an old upright, a cheap Yamaha that Larry, my ex, bought used right out of college, before he even bought a couch. Well, not my ex yet — my almost-ex. My ex-in-progress. I thought, If mice eat out the insides, it’s not the worst thing. An excuse to get something nicer.

The scratching kept on for almost a week, and every time I hit a note something would scurry around, hit against the strings. I stopped playing the piano. One morning I was sitting at my little glass table eating breakfast, getting my papers ready for the condo I was going to show, and the lid of the piano lifted up. I’m not a big screamer. In fight-or-flight situations, I tend to pick option C: freeze. I just sat there paralyzed, and out climbed what I can only describe as a small troll. It was about a foot tall, and it moved so fast I didn’t even notice its clothes or hair. It ran smack into the side of the couch, then out to the middle of the floor, where it scampered in smaller and smaller circles. I held my papers in front of my legs like a shield, chased it into the vacuum closet, and shut the door. Assuming it was a hallucination — what else would I think? — I tried to put it out of my mind because I had twenty minutes to find a cab, get across the city, and tell the Lindquists why they should invest their eight hundred thousand in a walkup with non-perpendicular hallways. I told myself I had to go because I was about two failures away from fired. It’s possible that I also wanted an excuse to get the hell out of there.

“It’s a beauty,” I told the Lindquists. “Very raw. And so close to street level! It’s almost earthy!” But Mrs. Lindquist tapped her pink nails on the mantel and said that it didn’t feel like home. I was sure everything would be better when I got back and saw the empty vacuum closet. I reminded myself I’d been dehydrated, that I should drink more than just alcohol and coffee. But when I got home I found my guest fully grown, just a little shorter than I am. He’d let himself out of the closet and was sleeping on the couch.

I had no idea who he was at first. His clothes looked ancient, but I’m not good at fashion history. All I could tell was old, grimy, European, too much lace at the cuffs for my taste. He doesn’t have a wig as in his pictures, just messy, reddish, greasy hair. But after I stared at him for half an hour, he woke up and walked to the piano and started to play. Just scales at first, like he was getting used to it — and then he launched into a couple of those Inventions that drove me crazy in high school. So I looked up Bach online, and it’s definitely him, the exact same fleshy cheeks, the same dark eyes pinched small between thick brows and heavy, sleepless bags.

I decided I should look respectable in the presence of a genius, so I started freshening my face every day in the cab on the way home, not just on the way out. I bought a whole pack of razors at Duane Reade and began shaving my legs again. I tidied the apartment, too. I cleaned out the freezer, all those Ziplocs of Larry’s chili, and I finally filled in the missing lightbulbs above the bathroom sink. It was startling to see my face so clearly there — loose skin on my eyelids that caught the green eye shadow in clumps, and my roots growing in gray. I’m only thirty-eight. Johann is supposed to be the one with white hair. I made an appointment for the spa.

I introduced Johann to soap and deodorant, and the other day while I was gone he finally changed his clothes. Now he’s wearing Larry’s gray flannel shirt and old corduroys. He looks so normal, sometimes I glance up from my magazine and forget it’s not just Larry sitting there, drinking his beer.

When I was ten years old, my father started the game You Can’t Get Out of the Car Till You’ve Named This Composer. He’d have hidden the cassette case throughout the drive, and he’d only pose the question as he pulled up to the curb where he was dropping me. I would ignore his conversation for blocks, knowing what was coming and concentrating on my guess. My older brother had a practiced method of shouting the name of every major composer in a rapid, memorized succession, a litany that started with “RavelRachmaninovSaint-SaënsBeethoven” and ended with “BuxtehudeChopinSchoenbergBernstein.” I took the more methodical approach, at least establishing a general period before naming my probable suspects. Once, when the answer was Smetana, I sat there until I was half an hour late for swim team. I suppose he’d have been proud of me, identifying Bach so quickly.

Johann, no surprise, is remarkable at naming composers. Every time we put in a new disc, I’ll say the name, loud and clear—“Schu-bert”—and he’ll repeat it. I’m not sure if he can read the CD covers, or if he’s used to a more gothic script.

He’s been learning English. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, when I consider that he is a great genius, and he has a good ear and so forth. I came home from an open house the other day and he started pointing around the room, doing nouns. “Table,” he said. “CD Player.” He must get this all from me. I’ve been talking constantly, the way you would with a baby or a dog, things like, “Now I’m putting the milk in your coffee, mmm, that will taste delicious.”

On my way out of the elevator the next morning, my super stopped me, bobbing her head and smiling. “Such piano you play! You are like concert!”

“Practice, practice, practice,” I said. And what propelled me out the door and down the street was a mixture of relief that I’m not crazy and panic that there’s a real human being up there who’s not just going to vaporize. So calling a shrink is out, but calling anyone else is out, too, because they’ll think I’m crazy. I find myself wishing the Ghostbusters were real.

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.

I lied before. The sex isn’t that good. I had low expectations, so I was thrilled he knew anything. But actually he’s pretty stiff, noncreative. I’ve tried things a couple of times, normal things for our society, and he’s pulled away from me, started talking fast in German, turned bright pink.

The last time he did it, I put my clothes back on and decided to ignore him for the rest of the day. I went to the window and opened the curtains. I wasn’t thinking about it, but maybe on some level I did it to scare him. He stood staring down at the cars, saw all the buildings, saw for the first time how high we were. He didn’t cry, but he looked like he wanted to. He stayed there a long time, shaking and mumbling. Then he closed the curtains and ran to the couch, ran bent over at the waist as if he were scared of falling. I’m surprised he never opened the curtains himself while I was at work. You’d think a genius would be more curious than that.

To calm him down, I got my big music encyclopedia off the shelf and showed him all the pictures in the Bach section. The house where he was born, the church in Leipzig, a portrait of his oldest son. He pointed at each and said things I couldn’t understand, but they seemed to make him happy. He flipped back a page to the Vivaldi section and made some kind of joke. He giggled and giggled, so I just laughed along with him.

“Yep, that Vivaldi,” I said. “One funny guy.”

After I put the encyclopedia back on the shelf, I got out the little Chagall book I’d bought at MOMA.

“Here,” I said, and I opened it to The Fiddler. “This is what I think of when you play Chopin. See how he’s making music, floating there above the town? That’s what you sound like, like there’s nothing under your feet but you don’t even notice.”

Bach squinted at the picture, pointed at the fiddler’s face. “Grün,” he said.

“Yes, it’s green. I wouldn’t make fun. You looked strange enough yourself when you were twelve inches tall.”

I flipped to the one called Birthday, the one where a man floats above the red carpet, floats above a woman to kiss her. A city window and a little purse. The man has no arms. The next page was Couple of Lovers on a Red Background, where they’re lying in the red, and they’re red themselves, drowning in it, only they’re not drowning, because up above is a huge blue pool where the real water is, where the blue man throws flowers and the fish-bird jumps down.

“These are pictures of love,” I said. “Love.” He put his hand on his heart. I’d taught him that one the week before. “Everyone in these pictures can float, because they’re in love, or they’re the fiddler on the roof, or just happy.” I pointed out the window. “That’s why we can stay up here so high. It doesn’t seem possible, but it is. Twenty-seven stories up!” I flashed my fingers in two tens and a seven. “Because we’re playing music and we’re happy.”

He crawled back to the window, his nails digging into the carpet, then reached up and lifted just the corner of the curtain. Together we watched the bus shed passengers twenty-seven stories down. Then he looked at me and pointed at the wristwatch I’d given him, the one Larry left behind because it wasn’t digital.

“You want to know how long the building can hold up against gravity?” Although maybe it was something else. How long must he stay here, how many lifetimes have passed since his own, what time is it in Germany?

“Tock, tock, tock,” he said.

I chose to answer the gravity question, because it was the only one I could. “A long time. Long time. It won’t fall down while you’re here, at least.”

Since that afternoon, when he sings the blues, it sounds like the blues.

“I’m so forlorn,” he sings,

“life’s just a sorn

my heart is torn

vhy vas I born

Vhat did I dooooo

to be so bleck… and blue?”

He won’t look out the window anymore, but it doesn’t matter. He knows. Every siren he hears now, he looks at that curtain. I’ve never been in the blissful ignorance camp, but in this case maybe it was too much for one man to handle. Sometime last October, Larry made us stop watching TV so we wouldn’t see bad news. I couldn’t understand how it worked for him, because for me it was worse. If we don’t watch the news, I said, how do we know the city’s not on fire? How do we know we’re not the last ones alive? Since Johann’s been here I’ve kept the TV off, but I’ll turn on my radio when he’s in the bathroom — if only to hear some stupid ad, because then at least I know we’re all okay. Those shrill furniture store jingles are the sound of safety. There’s still money to be made, they say. There’s still something left to buy.

He’s been turning pale, and if I’m not mistaken he’s getting smaller. You can see it around the eyes, the way they’re sinking back into his face. The skin feels loose on his arms. He hardly leaves the couch anymore, and when he does — when he finally gets his courage and dashes to the bathroom — it’s with shaking legs and outstretched arms, like he’s worried the floor will give way any moment. He’s scratched the arms of the sofa to shreds.

Yesterday I played the piano to see if he would follow suit. I brought out my big blue Gershwin book and got through “A Foggy Day” with only three or four mistakes. I’m good, if a little rusty. At the end of high school I was even applying to conservatories, making tapes and getting ready to go on auditions, when I realized that although I could play almost anything you put before me, and skillfully — I’d won competitions, even — I’d never gotten through a major piece without one error. I could play the whole Pathétique flawlessly, then a measure from the end I’d breathe a sigh of relief and wreck the last chord. And so I majored in finance.

“Maybe that’s what you are,” I told Johann after I’d flubbed the last two measures. “Maybe you’re my repressed ambition.” Not likely, the way he sits with his mouth caving in, his glare darting between me and the window.

He sighed. “I’m vhite… in-side,” he sang.

“You’re white all over, Johann,” I said. Though truth be told, lately he’s a little gray.

I get the feeling his tock, tock, tock is running out. But if my test sticks are accurate I started ovulating yesterday, so I only need him to hold out a little longer. We made love twice this morning. I’ll buy him a fattening dinner tonight.

I had to leave him on the couch at noon, lock the door, ride down in my loud, slow elevator to show the Lindquists their fifteenth (and God, let’s hope, final) apartment. Johann didn’t look good at all when I left him there, so small and pale, curled in the cushions. I wonder if I’d be as terrified by his eighteenth-century Leipzig, or if there’s something intrinsically horrifying about our modern world, about this new century, something we can handle only because we’ve been so slowly inured to it. At other moments today I’ve wondered, too, if Johann shriveling in on himself is in fact a sign that part of me is coming back to life. Or that another life is ready to start inside me.

“I have to make money,” I told him as I left. “Deutschmarks, right? You’d understand. I’m sure you wouldn’t have slaved your Sundays away on half the organs in Germany if you didn’t have twenty mouths to feed. I’ll need to buy things. Piano lessons. For the baby.”

And so I left him, and even if he’s still there when I get back, I won’t be surprised if he doesn’t last the night, if he evaporates by morning. But I never planned on his being in the picture long-term. I don’t actually want him to raise the baby. It’ll be easy enough to explain why he’s not around. “Well, the baby’s father is quite a famous man,” I’ll say, “and this would simply ruin his reputation. Believe me. Very. Famous.”

Waiting for the elevator, though, I did something I didn’t know I was going to do. I took out my phone and called Larry. When he answered, I said, “Don’t talk.” I said, “It’s good that not everyone is like me, born expecting the world to come unpasted.” I said, “I see it now. You were up there playing a fiddle with no roof to stand on, and one day you just looked down and lost your grip on the air and fell. And I’m sorry.”

Larry was quiet, and then he said, “Okay.” And then he said, “I’ll call you after work.”

It occurred to me — of course it did — that if I got back with Larry next week, or the week after that, he’d never know the baby wasn’t his. And who’s to say it wouldn’t be? Am I the expert on reality these days?

On the long ride to the ground floor I slid on my stilettos, growing three inches even as I sank three hundred feet. I put on lipstick and prepared to sell the Lindquists a place to live, a nice plot of air so high above the city the Indians didn’t even think to charge beads for it. I practiced saying: Look how convenient. And how stable. It’ll last a thousand years, if nothing knocks it down. I know you’re going to love it.