Appassionata (22 page)

I felt such sympathy for her; almost a camaraderie. And yet, although I am ashamed to record this, I envied her too. I envied her the ability to feel so tenderly for one particular person; to have one particular person to mourn.

Vienna

The beginning of Beethoven’s
III
th calls for an almost martial resolve, the foreshortened, abrupt rhythms a summons to a kind of action, some necessary battle. The sounds she hears herself making as she practices express a different foreshortening, a lack of breath. She misses Anzor, her body misses Anzor. She cuts herself off in mid-phrase, in annoyance. Rothman would never allow himself to be undone like this, would never give up his force, his musical potency. But then, Rothman loves his power, and uses music to express it. She’s heard how he once competed with a fellow pianist for the loudest fortissimos. She laughed when she heard this, but perhaps she shouldn’t have. She knows that music calls for power, as being-in-the-world calls for power. And yet, if she loses her ability to be undone, she’ll lose her strength, she’s sure of it … That’s her source, that’s where her kind of power begins, in her willingness to register
the tremors inside herself and give them voice. She goes over the short difficult trill in the opening passage, begins to feel a gathering of momentum, of forward force. It is still not finished, she thinks, the woman question. Perhaps it’s never finished, as the question of desire is never finished, the question of giving yourself up to something you love. Perhaps Rothman after all knows this too … As Beethoven surely knew it and Schubert. Without that, what are you, she thinks, except a mind arrested in a body; without being permeable how can you expand beyond your borders, without submitting how can you burst through your confinement. She puts her fingers on the opening notes of the Sonata’s second movement, the simple chorale progressions. “This is how it is, this is how it is,” the theme seems to be saying, with the most gentle acceptance. Her breathing deepens at last and alters to comport with that mild and lovely statement, and then quickens with the music’s labor out of the quiet accord into a storm of syncopated rhythms, working and winding through a dense, strange complexity to a crystalline register beyond turbulence and desire. Yes, she thinks; yes. This is where truth lies, without statements or conclusions; this is where it can be attained.

Dinner. It’s post-concert, and she’d rather not go. But she must, she’s promised Jonathan, whom she has known since their student days at Juilliard, and who is now an important executive for a recording company. She must go, must meet people, must converse. Bourgeois heroism, rather different from what Anzor has in mind. A sotto voce pang of guilt follows: bourgeois heroism is Peter’s phrase.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Jonathan exclaims genially on opening the door, and gives her a robust bear hug. “This is great! Our star has come.” He still has the powerful physique of a lumberjack, as he did when he so incongruously chose the flute
as his heart’s instrument. He is wearing a black shirt and a fashionably loose jacket; his hair, like an allusion to an earlier persona, is tied into a short ponytail.

The apartment is a hypermodern space carved out of a nineteenth-century interior, with high ceilings and white walls, and impressively sleek pieces of furniture scattered on the polished parquet floor. A slim Japanese woman in a flat graphite-gray dress, looking as streamlined as everything else in the apartment, comes out soundlessly into the foyer. “Noriko,” Jonathan introduces her, with a sidelong glance of proprietorial pride. “She lives here too. She does futures. I mean, the markets,” he clarifies, on seeing Isabel’s confusion. “She’s a whizz at it.”

At the table, she is seated next to a loose-limbed Englishman, who turns out to be the literary editor of a London paper, here on a brief visit. “A sort of reconnaissance expedition,” he explains, “to look at the literary scene here, and how it reflects the political scene. Or doesn’t.”

“You know, I have a gripe with you,” a woman across the table, dressed in a multicolored silk kaftan announces, addressing the editor rather sharply. “Or rather with that place you work for.”

“I am interested in all complaints leveled at my humble paper,” the editor responds with excessively polite alacrity. “We like to know our readers’ views.”

“Not so humble,” the woman retorts, refusing to be jollied along. “You exercise lots of influence, and you know it. I understand, for example, that the prime minister was very pleased by your review of his biography. Or should I say hagiography.”

“But surely you’re not suggesting that we ran a good review
in order
to please the PM,” the editor politely distinguishes. Ah yes, Isabel remembers this technique from her London days. Spell out the implicit insult, so the opponent has no insinuation behind which to hide. Do the English learn it in their debating clubs?

“Well, you did assign it to a total … shall we say acolyte?” the woman persists. “Though how anyone can still be an acolyte of that toothsome hypocrite is beyond my understanding.”

“If he were at least an effective hypocrite,” a dark-eyed bearded man speaking with a German accent throws in. “But from what we can observe here, his government is incompetent to govern. I do not want to suggest the British are inefficient, I do not believe in such stereotypes. And yet we cannot help but observe the mess they are making of everything, from taxes to transport.”

“Taxes notwithstanding, the economy seems to be on a definite upswing,” the editor throws in casually, skewering a piece of boeuf bourguignon with his fork. He knows he’s making a provocation.

“Don’t tell me you give him credit for that,” the woman in the silk kaftan rears up. “He’s been lucky to have overseen super-growth in the global markets, that’s all.”

“Well, I suppose we would give him full credit if the economy declined,” the editor observes, speaking even more languidly than before.

“What do you think, Noriko?” someone asks. Noriko has been silent till now. “Is it luck or good policy?”

“It is all faith,” Noriko responds in a startlingly loud, clipped voice. “Faith in the future.”

“Ah yes, faith, that’s very important,” someone mutters, and the man who asked the question nods slowly, as if unsure whether Noriko has uttered a platitude, or given him a Zen koan to contemplate.

A small silence falls upon the table.

“What I don’t understand is why there’s no protest anywhere,” a Canadian woman bursts out passionately. “I mean, where’s the dissent? The ideology? The idealism?”

“What would you protest, the improving economy?” the editor annoyingly asks.

“The betrayal of … all ideals,” the woman proclaims, an edge of high-minded righteousness in her voice. “Certainly, in our neighboring country—”

“Oh, c’mon, you guys.” This from a long-haired local rock musician. “Can’t we lighten up? Put on Oasis, or something?”

“My country is like a terrible awkward giant—” Jonathan interjects, ignoring the rocker’s appeal; but the Canadian woman leaps in to finish the thought. “Awkward giant is exactly right. You just
walk
all over my country, without even knowing where you’re stepping. I mean, what do Americans know about Canada …”

“It’s good to have someone to hate,” the editor states neutrally, bending over a cube of meat which he places on his fork with painstaking precision.

A small silence again, after which a clean-cut American in a black suit and tie speaks carefully. “I regret having to say this, but in my line of work, you can see why we are not liked by the rest of the world. I’m afraid I’ve been forced to see this clearly.” He apparently studies models of transition. “I mean, have you read the figures on the gap between the rich and the poor in the last years? Not to speak of the rich and poor nations? Now the reasons for it … you know, in my line of work you get to understand that things are very complicated.”

“Well, that is certainly true,” the editor says, this time with apparent sincerity.

“What do you think?” someone asks Isabel. “You see so much. So many countries.”

“I see concert halls, mostly,” she demurs, and isn’t sure what she should say, or even what she thinks. Or why her errant observations should count. Anzor has been hovering in her mind, in the vicinity of the conversation, providing a tacit commentary. “And from there, you could get the impression that we’re living in comfortable times. I mean, on the whole …” She
feels oddly embarrassed. “But you know, I live this cocooned life … I mean, I stay in nice hotels.”

“But maybe we all live cocooned lives,” the editor cuts in, speaking with some earnestness again. “That’s the problem for all of us grizzled revolutionaries. We have won. We don’t want to admit it, but that’s our problem. The terrible stuff, that’s elsewhere. We got ourselves our welfare state and our equal rights and spa vacations if we’re a little stressed, and let’s face it, that doesn’t leave us in a position from which to hurl grenades, does it? Or even get up on the barricades, supposing we could get up on them after our very nice dinners. Very dispiriting, really. Very discouraging.” His tone has slid all the way back from seriousness to multi-edged irony.

“Oh, honestly, you guys …” the rock musician protests again, but nobody takes him up on his mini-revolt, and the conversation moves on, along its familiar grooves. The Discourse; is there anything outside it? She stops following, listens instead to Anzor’s hovering commentary. It’s just as well he didn’t come, he’d hate it all, hate the self-hate, the rightness and the righteousness, the cleverness, the
talk
. Anzor hates his enemies, not himself. But then, Anzor has enemies. The country he professes to love has enemies. But we, Isabel thinks, we’ve had our bloody bouts and our battles, our civil wars and our revolutions. Now what we have is this. The virtual loop of discourse, circling the globe in some meta-space, carrying its reiterated messages from Prague to San Francisco, and for all she knows, to Tokyo as well.

“And then, here we are, in Vienna …” This, vaguely, from a tall Swedish woman.

“The true land of amnesia,” Jonathan states, perhaps a bit too cheerfully. “As is well known.”

As everything is well known, Isabel thinks irritably. She’s fatigued; she’s coming to the end of post-concert adrenaline.

Then the talk moves on to a book about memory and forgetting, and a candid gay novel which is the sensation of the season, and which someone bravely tries to connect to the previous conversation by saying it’s actually all about amnesia and repression, and the sublimation of perversity into the Austrian cult of
Kultur
.

“It’s actually about high snobbery and low buggery,” the editor pronounces unhurriedly, and finally, everyone laughs.

The rock musician stands up suddenly, and announces that he’s leaving. “I’m hoping for a little perversity myself before the night is over,” he says. “Preferably polymorphous, if I can find it at this hour.”

Jonathan beckons her to stay after the others have left, and they move over to a comfortable sofa, while Noriko places herself uprightly in a wooden chair. “You know, you really should record something for us,” Jonathan says to Isabel. “You wouldn’t believe the weird stuff one finds here. From the fifties. Kind of retro, but you know, in a really hip way.”

“Yeah, it’s really weird,” Noriko throws in in her clipped accent. “He makes me listen to it sometimes.”

“We’ve played some pretty strange things in our time, haven’t we?” Jonathan says, directing a comradely look at Isabel. “Remember that piece for sound and silence we did? Half sounds, half silence. I think those were all the directions we had.”

“Do I ever,” she says, and remembers a younger Jonathan, his long hair half covering his face, as he bent over to blow into the small, elegant instrument. It was never clear why Jonathan, who came from money, and who was large and bursting with energy, wanted to pursue the strait and thankless path of a classical musician. Except that he wanted to be Good; he wanted to find some way to restrain and chastize his power, and music, art, was the last good thing in a world cruddy with greed and big power and money. So they all believed, ardently, and up to a point. It
wasn’t clear, either, what it was that he lacked as a musician, what kept him from being merely competent. Perhaps it was just musicality. Whatever that is, she now thinks, the intangible element. There is Jonathan, with his large, somewhat stiff frame; and she reflects that for all his wish to give up his power, he could not yield himself to the inward motions of the music, the dancing flux between the notes, or within them.

“You want to do some coke?” Jonathan now inquires. “I have some really good shit, it would perk you right up.”

“No!” she says, somewhat too sharply, taken aback by the offer. “No thanks.”

“Why, you think only pop musicians get to do drugs?” he asks, more challengingly. “You should see some of your fellow stars. You should see Rothman.”

“Oh yeah?” she asks. For some reason, her curiosity has been piqued by Rothman, and the way he seems to sail through his famous life with such seemingly triumphant ease.

“Yeah,” Jonathan confirms. “He’s really into it. Brings it to the recording studio.”

“Well, I don’t do that,” she says.

“Hey, come on. Why limit yourself?” he asks with a hint of provocation. “You can do anything you want. It’s not a limited world.”

“I guess because I’ve got to get up early tomorrow morning,” she answers, deflecting the challenge. Noriko in the meantime has got up and now returns with a mirror on which she places, with careful precision, some white powder.

“I’d better be going,” Isabel says. “It’s late.” Jonathan gives her a perfunctory hug in the foyer, and she sees that his eyes have gone vacuous. Some sort of sadness has slid into her own fatigue as well. What is it, she thinks as she walks out onto the yellow-lit street, why the melancholy. She remembers Jonathan and herself, in their overheated, aspiring, competitive student
days. He tried hard then to stretch beyond his limits, even as he hunched over his slim instrument. And now what? Jonathan seems sad in his big bulky frame, with the sadness of having gotten most of what he wanted. He’s hit his spirit level. It’s not a limited world, he said; and she adds, and none of us know how to live in it … It’s a mood, she thinks, the post-concert specter, with its acrid thoughts. Tomorrow, she will remember the party with pleasure. It’s just as well, though, that Anzor wasn’t there; she won’t even tell him about it. She knows the icy judgment he would pass on Jonathan and his friends. He would think they’re the masters of the universe, arrogant with privilege, and she feels a sort of protectiveness on their behalf. They’re only trying to live out their lives, she tells him. Trying and floundering. What would
they
make of him, of Anzor, with the embers of anger lighting and darkening his eyes? They might think him quaint. But she could tell them that the cool ironies of the Discourse are no match for his certainties, or for the four-square simplicity of his phrases. She suddenly misses him, wants to get back to his three-dimensional presence, to the strange subterranean thicket of their exchanges and their contrapuntal music.