Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Harmony of the World

IN THE SMALL Ohio town where I grew up, many homes had parlors that contained pianos, sideboards, and sofas, heavy objects signifying gentility. These pianos were rarely tuned. They went flat in summer around the Fourth of July and sharp in winter at Christmas. Ours was a Story and Clark. On its music stand were copies of Stephen Foster and Ethelbert Nevin favorites, along with one Chopin prelude that my mother would practice for twenty minutes every three years. She had no patience, but since she thought Ohio — all of it, every scrap — made sense, she was happy and did not need to practice anything. Happiness is not infectious, but somehow her happiness infected my father, a pharmacist, and then spread through the rest of the household. My whole family was obstinately cheerful. I think of my two sisters, my brother, and my parents as having artificial, pasted-on smiles, like circus clowns. They apparently thought cheer and good Christian words were universals, respected everywhere. The pianos were part of this cheer. They played for celebrations and moments of pleasant pain. Or rather, someone played them, but not too well, since excellent playing would have been faintly antisocial. “Chopin,” my mother said, shaking her head as she stumbled through the prelude. “Why is he famous?”

When I was six, I received my first standing ovation. On the stage of the community auditorium, where the temperature was about ninety-four degrees, sweat fell from my forehead onto the piano keys, making their ivory surfaces slippery. At the conclusion of the piece, when everyone stood up to applaud, I thought they were just being nice. My playing had been mediocre; only my sweating had been extraordinary. Two years later, they stood up again. When I was eleven, they cheered. By that time I was astonishing these small-town audiences with Chopin and Rachmaninoff recital chestnuts. I thought I was a genius and read biographies of Einstein. Already the townspeople were saying that I was the best thing Parkersville had ever seen, that I would put the place on the map. Mothers would send their children by to watch me practice. The kids sat with their mouths open while I polished off more classics.

Like many musicians, I cannot remember ever playing badly, in the sense of not knowing what I was doing. In high school, my identity was being sealed shut: my classmates called me “el señor longhair,” even though I wore a crew cut, this being the 1950s. Whenever the town needed a demonstration of local genius, it called upon me. There were newspaper articles detailing my accomplishments, and I must have heard the phrase “future concert career” at least two hundred times. My parents smiled and smiled as I collected applause. My senior year I gave a solo recital and was hired for umpteen weddings and funerals. I was good luck. On the Fourth of July the townspeople brought a piano out to the city square so that I could improvise music between explosions at the fireworks display. Just before I left for college, I noticed that our neighbors wanted to come up to me, ostensibly for small talk, but actually to touch me.

In college I made a shocking discovery: other people existed in the world who were as talented as I was. If I sat down to play a Debussy étude, they would sit down and play Beethoven, only faster and louder than I had. I felt their breath on my neck. Apparently there were other small towns. In each one of these small towns there was a genius. Perhaps some geniuses were not actually geniuses. I practiced constantly and began to specialize in the non-Germanic piano repertoire. I kept my eye out for students younger than I was, who might have flashier technique. At my senior recital I played Mozart, Chopin, Ravel, and Debussy, with encore pieces by Scriabin. I managed to get the audience to stand up for the last time.

I was accepted into a large midwestern music school, famous for its high standards. Once there, I discovered that genius, to say nothing of talent, was a common commodity. Since I was only a middling composer, with no interesting musical ideas as such, I would have to make my career as a performer or teacher. But I didn’t want to teach, and as a performer I lacked pizzazz. For the first time, it occurred to me that my life might be evolving into something unpleasant, something with the taste of stale bread.

I was beginning to meet performers with more confidence than I had, young musicians to whom doubt was as alien as proper etiquette. Often these people dressed like tramps, smelled, smoked constantly, were gay or sadistic. Whatever their imbalances, they were not genteel. They did not represent small towns. I was struck by their eyes. Their eyes seemed to proclaim, “The universe believes in me. It always has.”

My piano teacher was a man I will call Luther Stecker. Every year he taught at the music school for six months. For the following six months he toured. He turned me away from the repertoire with which I was familiar and demanded that I learn several pieces by composers whom I had not often played, including Bach, Brahms, and Liszt. Each one of these composers discovered a weak point in me: I had trouble keeping up the consistent frenzy required by Liszt, the mathematical precision required by Bach, the unpianistic fingerings of Brahms.

I saw Stecker every week. While I played, he would doze off. When he woke, he would mumble some inaudible comment. He also coached a trio I participated in, and he spoke no more audibly then than he did during my private lessons.

I couldn’t understand why, apart from his reputation, the school had hired him. Then I learned that in every Stecker-student’s life, the time came when the Master collected his thoughts, became blunt, and told the student exactly what his future would be. For me, the moment arrived on the third of November 1966. I was playing sections of the Brahms Paganini Variations, a fiendish piece on which I had spent many hours. When I finished, I saw him sit up.

“Very good,” he said, squinting at me. “You have talents.”

There was a pause. I waited. “Thank you,” I said.

“You have a nice house?” he asked.

“A nice house? No.”

“You should get a nice house somewhere,” he said, taking his handkerchief out of his pocket and waving it at me. “With windows. Windows with a view.”

I didn’t like the drift of his remarks. “I can’t afford a house,” I said.

“You will. A nice house. For you and your family.”

I resolved to get to the heart of this. “Professor,” I asked, “what did you think of my playing?”

“Excellent,” he said. “That piece is very difficult.”

“Thank you.”

“Yes, technically excellent,” he said, and my heart began to pound. “Intelligent phrasing. Not much for me to say. Yes. That piece has many notes,” he added, enjoying the non sequitur.

I nodded. “Many notes.”

“And you hit all of them accurately. Good pedal and good discipline. I like how you hit the notes.”

I was dangling on his string, a little puppet.

“Thousands of notes, I suppose,” he said, staring at my forehead, which was beginning to get damp, “and you hit all of them. You only forgot one thing.”

“What?”

“The passion!” he roared. “You forgot the passion! You always forget it! Where is it? Did you leave it at home? You never bring it with you! Never! I listen to you and think of a robot playing! A smart robot, but a robot! No passion! Never ever ever!” He stopped shouting long enough to sneeze. “You should buy a house. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because the only way you will ever praise God is with a family, that’s why! Not with this piano! You are a fine student,” he wound up, “but you make me sick! Why do you make me sick?”

He waited for me to answer.

“Why do you make me sick?” he shouted. “Answer me!”

“How can I possibly answer you?”

“By articulating words in English! Be courageous! Offer a suggestion! Why do you make me sick?”

I waited for a minute, the longest minute of my life. “Passion,” I said at last. “You said there wasn’t enough passion. I thought there was. Perhaps not.”

He nodded. “No. You are right. No passion. A corruption of music itself. Your playing is gentle, too much good taste. To play the piano like a genius, you must have a bit of the fanatic. Just a bit. But it is essential. You have stubbornness and talent but no fanaticism. You don’t have the salt on the rice. Without salt, the rice is inedible, no matter what its quality otherwise.” He stood up. “I tell you this because sooner or later someone else will. You will have a life of disappointments if you stay in music. You may find a teacher who likes you. Good, good. But you will never be taken up! Never! You should buy a house, young man. With a beautiful view. Move to it. Don’t stay here. You are close to success, but it is the difference between leaping the chasm and falling into it, one inch short. You are an inch short. You could come back for more lessons. You could graduate from here. But if you are truly intelligent, you will say good-bye. Good-bye.” He looked down at the floor and did not offer me his hand.

I stood up and walked out of the room.

Becalmed, I drifted up and down the hallways of the building for half an hour. Then a friend of mine, a student of conducting from Bolivia, a Marxist named Juan Valparaiso, approached and, ignoring my shallow breathing and cold sweat, started talking at once.

“Terrible, furious day!” he said.

“Yes.”

“I am conducting Benvenuto Cellini overture this morning! All is going well until difficult flute entry. I instruct, with force, flutists. Soon all woodwinds are ignoring me.” He raised his eyebrows and stroked his huge gaucho mustache. “Always! Always there are fascists in the woodwinds!”

“Fascists everywhere,” I said.

“Horns bad, woodwinds worse. Demands of breath make for insanes. Pedro,” he said, “you are appearing irresoluted. Sick?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “Sick. I just came from Stecker. My playing makes him sick.”

“He said that? That you are making him sick?”

“That’s right. I play like a robot, he says.”

“What will you do?” Juan asked me. “Kill him?”

“No.” And then I knew. “I’m leaving the school.”

“What? Is impossible!” Tears leaped instantly into Juan’s eyes. “Cannot, Pedro. After one whipping? No! Must stick to it.” He grabbed me by the shoulders. “Fascists put here on Earth to break our hearts! Must live through. You cannot go.” He looked around wildly. “Where could you go anyway?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “He told me I would never amount to anything. I think he’s right. But I could do something else.” To prove that I could imagine options, I said, “I could work for a newspaper. You know, music criticism.”

“Caterpillars!” Juan shouted, his tears falling onto my shirt. “Failures! Pathetic lives! Cannot, cannot! Who would hire you?”

I couldn’t tell him for six months, until I was given a job in Knoxville on a part-time trial basis. But by then I was no longer writing letters to my musician friends. I had become anonymous. I worked in Knoxville for two years, then in Louisville — a great city for music — until I moved here, to this city I shall never name, in the middle of New York State, where I bought a house with a beautiful view.

In my hometown, they still wonder what happened to me, but my smiling parents refuse to reveal my whereabouts.

Every newspaper has a command structure. Within that command structure, editors assign certain stories, but the writers must be given some freedom to snoop around and discover newsworthy material themselves. In this anonymous city, I was hired to review all the concerts of the symphony orchestra and to provide some hype articles during the week to boost the ticket sales for Friday’s program. Since the owner of the paper was on the symphony board of trustees, writing about the orchestra and its programs was necessarily part of good journalistic citizenship. On my own, though, I initiated certain projects, wrote book reviews for the Sunday section, interviewed famous visiting musicians — some of them my ex-classmates — and during the summer I could fill in on all sorts of assignments, as long as I cleared what I did with the feature editor, Morris Cascadilla.

“You’re the first serious musician we’ve ever had on the staff here,” he announced to me when I arrived, suspicion and hope fighting for control on his face. “Just remember this: be clear and concise. Assume they’ve got intelligence but no information. After that, you’re on your own, except that you should clear dicey stuff with me. And never forget the Maple Street angle.”

The Maple Street angle was Cascadilla’s equivalent to the Nixon administration’s “How will it play in Peoria?” No matter what subject I wrote about, I was expected to make it relevant to Maple Street, the newspaper’s mythical locus of middle-class values. I could write about electronic, aleatory, or post-Boulez music if I suggested that the city’s daughters might be corrupted by it. Sometimes I found the Maple Street angle, and sometimes I couldn’t. When I failed, Cascadilla would call me in, scowl at my copy, and mutter, “All the Juilliard graduates in town will love this.” Nevertheless, the Maple Street angle was a spiritual exercise in humility, and I did my best to find it week after week.

When I first learned that the orchestra was scheduled to play Paul Hindemith’s Harmony of the World symphony, I didn’t think of Hindemith, but of Maple Street, that mythically harmonious place where I actually grew up.

Working on the paper left me some time for other activities. Unfortunately, there was nothing I knew how to do except play the piano and write reviews.

Certain musicians are very practical. Trumpet players (who love valves) tend to be good mechanics, and I have met a few composers who fly airplanes and can restore automobiles. Most performing violinists and pianists, however, are drained by the demands of their instruments and seldom learn how to do anything besides play. In daily life they are helpless and stricken. In midlife the smart ones force themselves to find hobbies. But the less fortunate come home to solitary apartments without pictures or other decorations, warm up their dinners in silence, read whatever books happen to be on the dinner table, and then go to bed.

I am speaking of myself here, of course. As time passed, and the vacuum of my life made it harder to breathe, I required more work. I fancied that I was a tree, putting out additional leaves. I let it be known that I would play as an accompanist for voice students and other recitalists, if their schedules didn’t interfere with my commitments for the paper.

One day I received a call at my desk. A quietly controlled female voice asked, “Is this Peter Jenkins?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” she said, as if she’d forgotten what she meant to tell me, “this is Karen Jensen. That’s almost like Jenkins, isn’t it?” I waited. “I’m a singer,” she said, after a moment. “A soprano. I’ve just lost my accompanist and I’m planning on giving a recital in three months. They said you were available. Are you? And what do you charge?”

I told her.

“Isn’t that kind of steep? That’s kind of steep. Well, I suppose … I can use somebody else until just before, and then I can use you. They say you’re good. And I’ve read your reviews. I really admire the way you write!”

I thanked her.

“You get so much information into your reviews! Sometimes, when I read you, I imagine what you look like. Sometimes a person can make a mental picture. I just wish the paper would publish a photo or something of you.”

“They want to,” I said, “but I asked them not to.”

“Even your voice sounds like your writing!” she said excitedly. “I can see you in front of me now. Can you play Fauré and Schubert? I mean, is there any composer or style you don’t like and won’t play?”

“No,” I said. “I play anything.”

“That’s wonderful!” she said, as if I had confessed to a remarkable tolerance. “Some accompanists are so picky. ‘I won’t do this, I won’t do that.’ Well, one I know is like that. Anyhow, could we meet soon? Do you sight-read? Can we meet at the music school downtown? In a practice room? When are you free?”

I set up an appointment.

She was almost beautiful. Her deep eyes were accented by depressed bowls in quarter-moon shadows under them. Though she was only in her late twenties, she seemed slightly scorched by anxiety. She couldn’t keep still. Her hands fluttered as they fixed her hair; she scratched nervously at her cheeks, and her eyes jumped every few seconds. Soon, however, she calmed down and began to look me in the eye, evaluating me. Then I turned away.

She wanted to test me out and had brought along her recital numbers, mostly standard fare: a Handel aria, Mozart, Schubert, and Fauré. The last set of songs, Nine Epitaphs, by an American composer I had never heard of, Theodore Chanler, was the only novelty.

“Who is this Chanler?” I asked, looking through the sheet music.

“I … I found it in the music library,” she said. “I looked him up. He was born in Boston and he died in 1961. There’s a recording by Phyllis Curtin. Virgil Thomson says these are maybe the best American art songs ever written.”

“Oh.”

“They’re kind of, you know, lugubrious. I mean, they’re all epitaphs written supposedly on tombstones, set to music. They’re like portraits. I love them. Is it all right? Do you mind?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

We started through her program, beginning with Handel’s “Un sospiretto d’un labbro pallido” from Il Pastor fido. I could immediately see why she was still in central New York State and why she would always be a student. She had a fine voice, clear and distinct, somewhat styled after Victoria de los Angeles (I thought), and her articulation was superb. If these achievements had been the whole story, she might have been a professional. But her pitch wobbled on sustained notes in a maddening way; the effect was not comic and would probably have gone unnoticed by most nonmusicians, but to me the result was harrowing. She could sing perfectly for several measures and then she would miss a note by a semitone, which drove an invisible fingernail into my scalp. It was as though a Gypsy’s curse descended every five or six seconds, throwing her off pitch; then she was allowed to be a great singer until the curse descended again. Her loss of pitch was so regularized that I could see it coming and squirmed in anticipation. I felt as though I were in the presence of one of God’s more complicated pranks.

Her choice of songs highlighted her failings. Their delicate textures were constantly broken by her lapses. When we arrived at the Chanler pieces, I thought I was accustomed to her, but I found I wasn’t. The first song begins with the following verse, written by Walter de la Mare, who had crafted all the poems in archaic epitaph style:

Here lyeth our infant, Alice Rodd;

She were so small

Scarce aught at all,

But a mere breath of Sweetness sent from God.

The vocal line for “She were so small” consists of four notes, the last two rising a half step from the two before them. To work, the passage requires a deadeye accuracy of pitch:

Singing this line, Karen Jensen hit the D-sharp but missed the E and skidded up uncontrollably to F-sharp, which would sound all right to anyone who didn’t have the music in front of his nose, as I did. Only a fellow musician could be offended.

Infuriated, I began to feel that I could not participate in a recital with this woman. It would be humiliating to perform such lovely songs in this excruciating manner. I stopped playing, turned to her to tell her that I could not continue after all, and then I saw her bracelet.

I am not, on the whole, especially observant, a failing that probably accounts for my having missed the bracelet when we first met. But I saw it now: five silver canaries dangled down quietly from it, and as it slipped back and forth, I saw her wrist and what I suddenly realized would be there: the parallel lines of her madness, etched in scar tissue.

The epitaphs finished, she asked me to work with her, and I agreed. When we shook hands, the canaries shook in tiny vibrations, as if pleased with my dutiful kindness, my charity, toward their mad mistress.

Though Paul Hindemith’s reputation once equaled Stravinsky’s and Bartók’s, it suffered after his death in 1963 an almost complete collapse. Only two of his orchestral works, the Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber and the Mathis der Maler symphony, are played with any frequency, thanks in part to their use of borrowed tunes. One hears his woodwind quintets and choral pieces now and then, but the works of which he was most proud — the ballet Nobilissima Visione, Das Marienleben (a song cycle), and the opera Harmonie der Welt—have fallen into total obscurity.

The reason for Hindemith’s sudden loss of reputation was a mystery to me; I had always considered his craftsmanship if not his inspiration to be first-rate. When I saw that the Harmony of the World symphony, almost never played, would be performed in our anonymous city, I told Cascadilla that I wanted to write a story for that week on how fame was gained and lost in the world of music. He thought that subject might be racy enough to interest the tone-deaf citizens of leafy and peaceful Maple Street, where no one is famous, if I made sure the story contained “the human element.”

I read up on Hindemith, played his piano music, and listened to the recordings. I slowly found the music to be technically astute but emotionally arid, as if some problem of purely local interest kept the composer’s gaze safely below the horizon. Technocratic and oddly timid, his work reminded me of a model train chugging through a tiny town inhabited only by models of people. In fact, Hindemith did have a lifelong obsession with train sets: in Berlin, his collection took up three rooms, and the composer wrote elaborate timetables so that the toys wouldn’t collide.

But if Hindemith had a technocrat’s intelligence, he also believed in the necessity of universal participation in musical activities. Listening was not enough. Even nonmusical citizens could learn to sing and play, and he wrote music expressly for this purpose. He seemed to have known that passive, drugged listening was a side effect of totalitarian environments and that elitist composers such as Schoenberg were engaged in antisocial Faustian projects that would bewilder and ultimately infuriate most audiences, leaving them isolated and thus eager to be drugged by a musical superman.

As the foremost anti-Nietzschean German composer of his day, therefore, Hindemith left Germany when his works could not be performed, thanks to the Third Reich; wrote textbooks with simple exercises; composed a requiem in memory of Franklin Roosevelt, using a text by Walt Whitman; and taught students, not all of them talented, in Ankara, New Haven, and Buffalo (“this caricature of a town”). As he passed through late middle age, he turned to a project he had contemplated all his life, an opera based on the career of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, author of De Harmonice Mundi. This opera, a summary of Hindemith’s ideas, would be called Harmony of the World. Hindemith worked out the themes first in a symphony, which bore the same title as the opera, and completed it in 1951. The more I thought about this project, the more it seemed anachronistic. Who believed in world harmony in 1951? Or thereafter? Such a symphony would have to pass beyond technical sophistication into divine inspiration, which Hindemith had never shown any evidence of possessing.

It occurred to me that Hindemith’s lifelong sanity had perhaps given way in this case, toppled not by despair (as is conventional) but by faith in harmony.

For the next rehearsal, I drove to Karen Jensen’s apartment, where there was, she said, a piano. I’d become curious about the styles of her insanity: I imagined a hamster cage in the kitchen, a doll-head mobile in the living room, and mottoes written with different-colored inks on memo pads tacked up everywhere on the walls.

She greeted me at the door without her bracelet. When I looked at her wrist, she said, “Hmmm. I see that you noticed. A memento of adolescent despair.” She sighed. “But it does frighten people off. Once you’ve tried to do something like that, people don’t really trust you. I don’t know why exactly. They don’t want your blood on their hands or something. Well, come on in.”

I was struck first by her forthrightness and second by her tiny apartment. Its style was much like the style in my house. She owned an attractive but worn-down sofa, a sideboard that supported an antique clock, one chair, a glass-top dinner table, and one nondescript poster on the wall. Trying to keep my advantage, I looked hard for telltale signs of instability but found none. The piano was off in the corner, almost hidden, unlike those in the parlors back home.

“Very nice,” I said.

“Well, thanks,” she said. “It’s not much. I’d like something bigger, but … where I work, I’m an administrative assistant, and they don’t pay me very much. So that’s why I live like a snail here. It’s hardly big enough to move around in, right?” She wasn’t looking at me. “I mean, I could almost pick it up and carry it away.”

I nodded. “You just don’t think like a rich person,” I said, trying to be hearty. “They like to expand. They need room. Big houses, big cars, fat bodies.”

“Oh, I know!” she said, laughing. “My uncle … Would you like to stay for dinner? You look like you need a good meal. I mean, after the rehearsal. You’re just skin and bones, Pet—… May I call you Peter?”

“Sure.” I sat down on the sofa and tried to think up an excuse. “I really can’t stay, Miss Jensen. I have another rehearsal to go to later tonight. I wish I could.”

“That’s not it, is it?” she asked suddenly, looking down at me. “I don’t believe you. I bet it’s something else. I bet you’re afraid of me.”

“Why should I be afraid of you?”

She smiled and shrugged. “That’s all right. You don’t have to say anything. I know how it goes.” She laughed once more, faintly. “I never found a man who could handle it. They want to show you their scars, you know? They don’t want to see any on you. If they discover any, they just take off.” She slapped her right hand on her forehead and then ran her fingers through her hair. “Well, shit, I didn’t mean to do this at all! I mean, I admire you so much and everything, and here I am running on like this. I guess we should get down to business, right? Since I’m paying you by the hour.”

I smiled professionally and went to her piano.

Beneath the high-culture atmosphere that surrounds them, art songs have one subject: love. The permutations of love (lust, solitude, and loss) are present in abundance, of course, but for the most part they are simple vehicles for the expression of that one emotion. I was reminded of this as I played through the piano parts. As much as I concentrated on the music in front of me, I couldn’t help but notice that my employer stood next to the piano, singing the words sometimes toward me, sometimes away. She was rather courageously forcing eye contact on me. She kept this up for an hour and a half until we came to the Chanler settings, when at last she turned slightly, singing to the walls.

As before, her voice broke out of control every five seconds, giving isolated words all the wrong shadings. The only way to endure it, I discovered, was to think of her singing as a postmodern phenomenon with its own conventions and rules. As the victim of necessity rather than accident, Karen Jensen was tolerable.

When we were done, she asked, “Sure you won’t stay?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You really haven’t another engagement, do you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“I didn’t think so. You were scared of me the moment you walked in the door. You thought I’d be crazy.” She waited. “After all, only ugly girls live alone, right? And I’m not ugly.”

“No, you aren’t,” I said. “You’re quite attractive.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, brightening. “It’s so nice to hear that from you, even if you’re just paying a compliment. I mean, it still means something.” Then she surprised me. As I stood in the doorway, she got down on her knees in front of me and bowed her head in the style of one of her songs. “Please stay,” she asked. Immediately she stood up and laughed. “But don’t feel obliged to.”

“Oh, no,” I said, returning to her living room, “I’ve just changed my mind. Dinner sounds like a good idea.”

After she had served and we had started to eat, she looked up at me and said, “You know, I’m not completely good.” She paused. “At singing.”

“What?” I stopped chewing. “Yes, you are. You’re all right.”

“Don’t lie. I know I’m not. You know I’m not. Come on: let’s at least be honest. I think I have certain qualities of musicality, but my pitch is … you know. Uneven. You probably think it’s awfully vain of me to put on these recitals. With nobody but friends and family coming.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, I don’t care what you say. It’s … hmm, I don’t know. People encourage me. And it’s a discipline. Music’s finally a discipline that rewards you. Privately, though. Well, that’s what my mother says.”

Carefully, I said, “She may be right.”

“Who cares if she is?” She laughed, her mouth full of food. “I enjoy doing it. Like I enjoy doing this. Listen, I don’t want to seem forward or anything, but are you married?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” She picked up a string bean and eyed it suspiciously. “Why aren’t you? You’re not ugly. In fact you’re all-right looking. You obviously haven’t been crazy. Are you gay or something?”

“No.”

“No,” she agreed, “you don’t look gay. You don’t even look very happy. You don’t look very anything. Why is that?”

“I should be offended by this line of questioning.”

“But you’re not. You know why? Because I’m interested in you. I hardly know you, but I like you, what I can see. Don’t you have any trust?”

“Yes,” I said finally.

“So answer my question. Why don’t you look very anything?”

“Do you want to hear what my piano teacher once said?” I asked. “He said I wasn’t enough of a fanatic. He said that to be one of the great ones you have to be a tiny bit crazy. Touched. And he said I wasn’t. And when he said it, I knew all along he was right. I was waiting for someone to say what I already knew, and he was the one. I was too much a good citizen, he said. I wasn’t possessed.”

She rose, walked around the table to where I was sitting, and stood in front of me, looking down at my face. I knew that whatever she was going to do had been picked up, in attitude, from one of her songs. She touched the back of my arm with two fingers on her right hand. “Well,” she said, “maybe you aren’t possessed, but what would you think of me as another possession?”

In 1618, at the age of seventy, Katherine Kepler, the mother of Johannes Kepler, was put on trial for witchcraft. The records indicate that her personality was so deranged, so deeply offensive to all, that if she were alive today she would still be called a witch. One of Kepler’s biographers, Angus Armitage, notes that she was “evil-tempered” and possessed an interest in unnamed “outlandish things.” Her trial lasted, on and off, for three years; by 1621, when she was acquitted, her personality had disintegrated completely. She died the following year.

At the age of six, Kepler’s son Frederick died of smallpox. A few months later, Kepler’s wife, Barbara, died of typhus. Two other children, Henry and Susanna, had died in infancy.

Like many others of his age, Kepler spent much of his adult life cultivating favor from the nobility. He was habitually penniless and was often reduced, as his correspondence shows, to begging for handouts. He was the victim of religious persecution, though luckier in this regard than some.

After he married for a second time, three more children died in infancy, a statistic that in theory carries less emotional weight than one might think, given the accepted levels of infant mortality for that era.

In 1619, despite the facts cited above, Kepler published De Harmonice Mundi, a text in which he set out to establish the correspondence between the laws of harmony and the disposition of planets in motion. In brief, Kepler argued that certain intervals, such as the octave, major and minor sixths, and major and minor thirds, were pleasurable, while other intervals were not. History indicated that mankind had always regarded certain intervals as unpleasant. Feeling that this set of universal tastes pointed to immutable laws, Kepler sought to map out the pleasurable intervals geometrically, and then to transfer that geometrical pattern to the order of the planets. The velocity of the planets, rather than their strict placement, constituted the harmony of the spheres. This velocity provided each planet with a note, what Armitage called a “term in a mathematically determined relation.”

In fact, each planet performed a short musical scale, set down by Kepler in staff notation. The length of the scale depended upon the eccentricity of the orbit; and its limiting notes could generally be shown to form a concord (except for Venus and the Earth with their nearly circular orbits, whose scales were of very constricted range) … at the Creation … complete concord prevailed and the morning stars sang together.

We began to eat dinner together. Accustomed to solitude, we did not always engage in conversation. I would read the newspaper or ink in letters on my geometrically patterned crossword puzzles at my end of the table, while Karen would read detective novels or Time at hers. If she had cooked, I would clear and wash the dishes. If I had cooked, she did the cleaning. Experience and disappointments had made us methodical. She told me that she had once despised structured experiences governed by timetables, but that after several manic-depressive episodes, she had learned to love regularity. This regularity included taking lithium at the same time — to the minute — each day.

The season being summer, we would pack towels and swimming suits after dinner and drive out to one of several public beaches, where we would swim until darkness came on. On calm evenings, Karen would drop her finger in the water and watch the waves lap outward. I favored immature splashing, or grabbing her by the arm and whirling her around me until I released her and she would spin back and fall into the water, laughing as she sank. One evening, we found a private beach, two hundred feet of sand all to ourselves, on a lake thirty miles out of town. Framed on both sides by woods and well hidden from the highway, this beach had the additional advantage of being unpatrolled. We had no bathhouse in which to change, however, so Karen instructed me not to look as she walked about fifty feet away to a spot where she undressed and put on her suit.

Though we had been intimate for at least a week, I had still not seen her naked: like a good Victorian, she demanded that the shades be drawn, the lights be out, and the covers be pulled discreetly over us. But now, with the same methodical thoroughness, she wanted me to see her, so I looked, despite her warnings. She was bent over, under the tree boughs, the evening light breaking through the leaves and casting broken gold bands on her body. Her arms were delicate, the arms of a schoolgirl, I thought, an impression heightened by the paleness of her skin; but her breasts were full, at first making me think of Rubens’s women, then of Renoir’s, then of nothing at all. Slowly, knowing I was watching her, she pinned her hair up. Not her breasts or arms, but that expression of vague contentment as she looked out toward the water, away from me: that made me feel a tingling below my heart, somewhere in an emotional center near my stomach. I wanted to pick her up and carry her somewhere, but with my knees wobbly it was all I could do to make my way over to where she stood and take her in my arms before she cried out. “Jesus,” she said, shivering, “you gave me a surprise.” I kissed her, waiting for inspiration to direct me on what to do next: Pick her up? Carry her? Make love to her on the sand? Wade into the water with her and swim out to the center of the bay, where we would drown together in a Lawrentian love-grip? But then we broke the kiss; she put on her swimsuit like a good citizen, and we swam for the usual fifteen minutes in silence. Afterward, we changed back into our clothes and drove home, muttering small talk. Behavior inspired by and demonstrating love embarrassed both of us. When I told her that she was beautiful and that I loved her, she patted me on the cheek and said, “Aw, how nice. You always try to say the right thing.”

The Maple Street angle for Harmony of the World ran as follows: SYMPHONY OF FAITH IN A FAITHLESS AGE. Hindemith, I said, wished to confound the skeptics by composing a monument of faith. In an age of organized disharmony, of political chaos, he stood at the barricades defending tonality and traditional musical form. I carefully avoided any specific discussion of the musical materials of the symphony, which in the Schott orchestral score looked overcomplex and melodically ugly. From what I could tell from a sight-reading, Hindemith had employed stunning technique in order to disguise his lack of inspiration, though I did not say so in print. Instead, I wrote that the symphony’s failure to win public support was probably the result of Hindemith’s refusal to use musical gimmicks on the one hand and sticky-sweet melodies on the other. I wrote that he had not been dismayed by the bad reviews Harmony of the World (both the symphony and the opera) had received, which was untrue. I said he was a man of integrity. I did not say that men of integrity are often unable to express joy when the occasion demands. Cascadilla liked my article. “This guy sounds like me,” he said, reading my copy. “I respect him.” The article ran five days before the concert and was two pages away from the religion-and-faith section. Not long after, the symphony ticket office called me to say that my piece had caused a rush of ticket orders from ordinary folk, nonconcert types, who wanted to hear this “religious symphony.” The woman from the business office thanked me for my trouble. “Let’s hope they like it,” I said.

“Of course they will,” she assured me. “You’ve told them to.”

But they didn’t. Despite all the oratory in the symphony, it was as spiritually dead as a lampshade. I could see why Hindemith had been shocked by the public reaction. Our audience applauded politely in discouragement, and then I heard an unusual sound for this anonymous city: one man, full of fun and conviction, booing loudly from the balcony. Booing the harmony of the world! He must be a Satanist! Didn’t intentions mean anything? So what if the harmony and joy were all counterfeit? The conductor came out for a bow, smiled at the booing man, and very soon the applause died away. I left the hall, feeling responsible. Arriving at the paper, I wrote a review of crushing dullness that reeked of bad faith. God damn Hindemith! Here he was, claiming to have seen God’s workings, and they sounded like the workings of a steam engine or a trolley car. A fake symphony, with optimism the composer did not feel! I decided (but did not write) that Harmony of the World was just possibly the largest, most misconceived fiasco in modern music’s history. It was a symphony that historically could not be written by a man who was constitutionally not equipped to write it. In my review, I kept a civil pen: I said that the performance lacked “luster,” “a certain necessary glow.”

“I’m worried about the recital tomorrow.”

“Aw, don’t worry. Here, kiss me. Right here.”

“Aren’t you listening? I’m worried.”

“I’m singing. You’re just accompanying me. Nobody’s going to notice you. Move over a little, would you? Yeah, there. That pillow was forcing my head against the wall.”

“Why aren’t you worried?”

“Why should I be worried? I don’t want to worry. I want to make love. Isn’t that better than worrying?”

“Not if I’m worried.”

“People won’t notice you. By the way, have you paid attention to the fact that when I kiss you on the stomach, you get goose bumps?”

“Yes. I think you’re taking this pretty lightly. I mean, it’s almost unprofessional.”

“That’s because I’m an amateur. A one hundred percent amateur. Always and totally. Even at this. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have my moments. Mmmmmm. That’s better.”

“I thought it would maybe help. But listen. I’m still worried.”

“Uhhhh. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Oh, I get it.”

“What?”

“I get it. You aren’t worried about yourself. You’re worried about me.”

Forty people attended her recital, which was sponsored by the city university’s music school, in which Karen was a sometime student. Somehow we made our way through the program, but when we came to the Chanler settings, I suddenly wanted Karen to sing them perfectly. I wanted an angel to descend and to take away the Gypsy’s curse. But she sang as she always had — off pitch — and when she came to “Ann Poverty,” I found myself in that odd region between rage and pity.

Stranger, here lies

Ann Poverty;

Such was her name

And such was she.

May Jesu pity

Poverty.

But I was losing my capacity for pity.

In the green room, her forty friends came back to congratulate her. I met them. They were all very nice. She smiled and laughed: there would be a party in an hour. Would I go? I declined. When we were alone, I said I was going back to my place.

“Why?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you come to my party? You’re my lover after all. That is the word.”

“Yes. But I don’t want to go with you.”

“Why?”

“Because of tonight’s concert, that’s why.”

“What about it?”

“It wasn’t very good, was it? I mean, it just wasn’t.”

“I thought it was all right. A few slips. It was pretty much what I was capable of. All those people said they liked it.”

“Those people don’t matter!” I said, my eyes watering with anger. “Only the music matters. Only the music is betrayed; they aren’t. They don’t know about pitch, most of them. I mean, Jesus, they aren’t genuine musicians, so how would they know? Do you really think what we did tonight was good? It wasn’t! It was a travesty! We ruined those songs! How can you stand to do that?”

“I don’t ruin them. I sing them adequately. I project feeling. People get pleasure from them. That’s enough.”

“It’s awful,” I said, feeling the ecstatic liftoff into rage. “You’re so close to being good, but you aren’t good. Who cares what those ignoramuses think? They don’t know what notes you’re supposed to hit. It’s that goddamn slippery pitch of yours. You’re killing those songs. You just drop them like watermelons on the stage! It makes me sick! I couldn’t have gone on for another day listening to you and your warbling! I’d die first.”

She looked at me and nodded, her mouth set in a half moue, half smile of nonsurprise. There may have been tears in her eyes, but I didn’t see them. She looked at me as if she were listening hard to a long-distance call. “You’re tired of me,” she said.

“I’m not tired of you. I’m tired of hearing you sing! Your voice makes my flesh crawl! Do you know why? Can you tell me why you make me sick? Why do you make me sick? Never mind. I’m just glad this is over.”

“You don’t look glad. You look angry.”

“And you look smug. Listen, why don’t you go off to your party? Maybe there’ll be a talent scout there. Or roses flung riotously at you. But don’t give a recital like this again, please, okay? It’s a public disgrace. It offends music. It offends me.”

I turned my back on her and walked out to my car.

After the failure of Harmony of the World, Hindemith went on a strenuous tour that included Scandinavia. In Oslo, he was rehearsing the Philharmonic when he blinked his bright blue eyes twice, turned to the concertmaster, and said, “I don’t know where I am.” They took him away to a hospital; he had suffered a nervous breakdown.

I slept until noon, having nothing to do at the paper and no reason to get up. At last, unable to sleep longer, I rose and walked to the kitchen to make coffee. I then took my cup to the picture window and looked down the hill to the trees of the conservation area, the view Stecker had once told me I should have.

The figure of a woman was hanging from one of the trees, a noose around her neck. I dropped my coffee cup and the liquid spilled out over my feet.

I ran out the back door in my pajamas and sprinted painfully down the hill’s tall grass toward the tree. I was fifty feet away when I saw that it wasn’t Karen, wasn’t in fact a woman at all, but an effigy of sorts, with one of Karen’s hats, a pillow head, and a dress hanging over a broomstick skeleton. Attached to the effigy was a note:

In the old days, this might have been me. Not anymore. Still, I thought it’d make you think. And I’m not giving up singing, either. By the way, what your playing lacks is not fanaticism, but concentration. You can’t seem to keep your mind on one thing for more than a minute at a time. I notice things, too. You aren’t the only reviewer around here. Take good care of this doll, okay?

XXXXXXX,

Karen

I took the doll up and dropped it in the clothes closet, where it has remained to this hour.

Hindemith’s biographer, Geoffrey Skelton, writes, “[On the stage] the episodic scenes from Kepler’s life fail to achieve immediate dramatic coherence, and the basic theme remains obscure …”

She won’t, of course, see me again. She won’t talk to me on the phone, and she doesn’t answer my letters. I am quite lucidly aware of what I have done. And I go on seeing doubles and reflections and wave motion everywhere. There is symmetry, harmony, after all. I suppose I should have been nice to her. That, too, is a discipline. I always tried to be nice to everyone else.

On Kepler’s deathbed, Hindemith has him sing:

Und muss sehn am End:

Die grosse Harmonie, das is der Tod.

Absterben is, sie zu bewirken, not.

Im Leben hat sie keine Statte.

Now, at the end, I see it:

The great harmony, it is death.

To find it, we must die.

In life it has no place.

Hindemith’s words may be correct. But Dante says that the residents of limbo, having never been baptized, will not see the face of God, despite their having committed no sin, no active fault. In their fated locale, they sigh, which keeps the air “forever trembling.” No harmony for them, these guiltless souls. Through eternity, the residents of limbo — where one can imagine oneself if one cannot stand to imagine any part of hell — experience one of the most shocking of all the emotions that Dante names: “duol senza martíri,” grief without torment. These sighs are rather like the sounds one hears drifting from front porches in small towns on soft summer nights.