Appassionata (28 page)

She goes down to the bar the next evening, and drinks without thinking. A man in a white jacket puts his tanned hand on hers, and she feels its heat. He asks if she would like to get some fresh air, and she says OK, why not, all right. It’ll be a diversion, it’ll distract her from her Thoughts. As they walk toward his apartment, he tells her he is a businessman, and works mostly in Africa. She asks him what he does, but he is evasive. Suddenly, she’s sure: He’s an arms dealer, he delivers precise instruments which shred the body to those unhinged-looking child soldiers she’s seen on TV. She looks at the man’s thick-featured face and his Rolex watch with revulsion. He indicates a pleasant villa, where he lives; does she want to come in for a drink? She peers at the house vaguely, and without a word turns round and begins to walk away.

“Hey,” he says, grabbing her roughly by the shoulder. “This isn’t fair.”

“Don’t you dare,” she says, and something in her voice must convey its own menace, because he lets her go. “Don’t you dare use that word, or I’ll call the police.” She means the word “fair.” Now he must conclude she’s not quite right in the head, because he shrugs and makes an exaggerated gesture with his arm, indicating she’s quite free to go.

She goes back to her white room to watch the news. This is really what she wants to do, administer her own punishment to herself in her own monastic cell. Punishment for what? For her innocence, in excess of what is allowed, her need for Anzor, her need to believe in Anzor, her need for rapture in excess of what is allowed. For her insistence that there is something beyond the
banal surfaces of things. For not getting it. That’s the moral crime. She has had the presumption to want to live in beauty, to glide above the intractable concreteness of the world. She has wanted undue privileges.

On television, a debate about pension plans, then another about whether ethnic cleansing in Bosnia is equivalent to genocide. An obscure guerrilla group somewhere in Indonesia has conducted its very own massacre. There’s an image of an armless body, and she turns away and tries to keep her stomach from lurching. But the group apparently has a good cause, a just cause, an excellent cause. Moreover, they are careful not to target women and children. These are the kinds of distinctions, she thinks, she must learn to make:

*  Do they kill only others, or also their own.

*  Do they kill only those who have done them harm, or anyone who is conveniently within range.

*  Do they kill for reasons of state, or of statelessness.

*  Do they kill for any reason at all, or just for the hell of it.

*  Do they kill functionally, just to kill, or do they wish to inflict extra suffering and pain.

*  Do they kill to provoke or to retaliate.

*  Do they kill because they have too much power, or because they do not have enough.

She used to think that what mattered was the difference between piano and pianissimo, between a crescendo which ascends into triumph, and one which signals calm resolution. Instead, she should have been paying attention to the differences between a massacre and an act of war, mowing people down out of despair or out of conviction; mass killing perpetrated by deliberately marching armies, and carnage perpetrated in orgiastic mayhem. What use is her kind of knowledge, in the face of this? The exquisite
nuances of Schubert, the hypertrophied involutions of Strauss, the whole super-subtle history of the soul? One thudding sound renders them null and void. Obsolete. No ideas but in music, that is what she has believed. She sees herself through the eyes of the camouflaged guerrilla in the Indonesian jungle, through the sights of his gun, the lens of his relentless, monotone Belief. From that perspective, she can be swatted like a fly, and maybe she deserves it, she’s so hypertrophied, so … unnecessary. What does it matter if she, or another like her, is deleted from the face of the earth? She has spent her time examining the demi-quavers of her own perceptions, considering how to move from lyricism to storminess in a Chopin Scherzo without violating the integrity, the truth, the truthfulness, of the musical line. She has crossed the world at will, and has worried about whether it is sufficiently
interesting.
A late bloom of a luxurious time, a superfluous woman. From the perspective of the grenade. And she has no perspective from which to answer it. Her sickness unto death extends to herself. She has nothing with which to answer the guerrilla, or the terrorist. Or herself.

One afternoon, she turns on the radio, and the sounds of Brahms’ Third Symphony startlingly reach her, in all their somber, stately beauty. She turns it off as if stung. This is danger, pain. She does not want such beauty to exist in the world. Let there be no more beauty. Let there be no more love. She’ll never love again, how could she? She understands now that the world is pervaded by poisonous hatred, she has breathed the air of virulent ill will. Wolfe knew this, now she knows it too. She has seen the laughing faces of boy soldiers in Africa, the merry swagger of Serbia’s henchmen, and she knows they’re intoxicated. They’re having the time of their lives. It is their laughter that is killing meaning, that injects the veins of the world with venom. The cold touch
of mockery, under which all love and sense wither. Death administered with insouciance. If this can be done … No, let there be silence, at least; let there be no more music. Let there be no false consolation. Wolfe was right. She’ll never love again, she’ll hate coldly, as the world deserves to be hated. As it is right to hate.

About two weeks after her attempt to disappear herself—has it been only that long?—the phone she has failed to disconnect emits its startling rings. She looks round in confusion, before picking up. It is Anders, calling from New York. Apparently, someone spotted her in her Marseilles neighborhood after the television report, and contacted the local police, who in turn contacted Rougement, who in turn passed the problem on to Anders, where he apparently felt it properly belonged. Anders, who usually rides over all impediments placed in his way like a Caterpillar truck, sounds positively abashed. Is she all right? She isn’t in some nasty kind of trouble, is she? There’ve been all kinds of rumors flying around. Briefly, she feels disconcerted at the thought of what these rumors might be, a twinge of embarrassment coming from some former self, which would have cared about such things. Which would have cared.

She tells Anders the rumors are likely to be all wrong. When he understands that she is not in danger and has come to no bodily harm, his voice regains its full pugilistic force. Isn’t she being a bit of a prima donna, frankly? He wouldn’t have thought this was her style. “I mean, I understand you were shaken,” he shouts into the telephone. “Who wouldn’t be? I probably would have been rattled too.” She stays quiet by the telephone, as he rolls on. So OK, missing one concert would be perfectly understandable. But why not call him up? Why not talk to him—isn’t that what he’s there for? Why go to these … histrionic lengths, just because some detonating device was placed outside the concert hall? “It wasn’t even inside the hall, was it?” he clinches
his argument. Frankly, he thinks she’s being a bit precious. Well, she thinks so too. When she doesn’t respond, he changes his tone. “Who were these guys, anyway?” he asks, with some concern. “I mean, they sound like a really bad crowd. Evil. Are you worried they’ll come after you again?”

She says no, but, nevertheless, there is no way she can perform right now. Or even play. Or practice. “I’ve tried,” she tells him, dry-voiced. “And I can’t.”

He considers and swerves from his assertive course. “Are you depressed? Is that the problem?” he asks almost hopefully. Depression has plenty of precedents in the biographies of performers, it would provide a respectable explanation. “You can tell me, you know,” he persists, more kindly. “I’ve had plenty of clients with problems, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Depression is an illness, and if that’s what you have you need to get yourself some help. Meds, if you ask me, not that talking stuff. Never knew anyone who got any benefit from it.”

She considers if he’s right, if he has hit on the right diagnosis, and says no, she doesn’t feel depressed, not really.

“Well then, what is it?” he demands impatiently. “How would you define what is going on?” Good question, she thinks. But she cannot tell him what she really believes: that she is having a crisis of meaning; and that it is this strange, outmoded condition that is weighting down her arms and paralyzing her fingers.

“But I need to be able to tell people something!” He’s booming again into the receiver, and she flinches.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and means it. She is behaving badly, and wishes she could behave otherwise.

“You know this has financial consequences, don’t you?” he says. “I’ve had frantic calls from people all over Europe.” She feels another twinge of anxiety, from the former self; then the indifference returns. Years of Zen meditation could not have achieved a detachment from matters concerning her ego as complete as this.

“Please handle this however you think is fair,” she says, and means this too.

Anders breathes hard, as if stopped in the middle of a run. “Well, I can’t say I understand what’s going on,” he says. “But call me if things change. I’m sure we could have you booked again in no time. Who knows, we might even be able to turn this to some kind of advantage … No such thing as bad publicity, eh?”

“Sure,” she says, playing along. “I’ll let you know if I feel I can play again …” But she’s speaking to him as though through some filmy barrier, from the other side of some great divide. She is surprised herself at how remote she feels from the things that have been of utmost concern to her; from what she has called her life.

“Well, don’t take too much time about it,” he advises, the boom subsiding to a more friendly growl. “Publicity doesn’t keep forever. Just don’t forget, everyone has a sell-by date.”

She opens Wolfe’s
Journal
the next day, as to a forgotten conversation.

September 1, 1982

They’re leaving, the youths of this summer; the briskness of fall is in the breeze, and in the trembling of leaves. Before she left, Isabel Merton looked at me shyly, as if wondering about everything that had been left unsaid. Then she came up delicately, as if I were some forest animal that might skid away, and gingerly, she embraced me. She said, “I wanted to thank you for everything you have taught me this summer.” Her delicate, feminine body in my arms … her smooth skin, her almost audible heartbeat … I felt a keening, acute sensation in my chest. The erotics of teaching. For although I do not know her body, I know something of her mind. I have listened to the tremors of her musical soul. What I feel for this young girl is not so much Eros as pure Agape.

I quoted Edwin Fischer to her, the purest of pianists: “To be a medium, a mediator between the divine, the eternal and the people.” I told her it was my parting thought, for her to take away. I allowed myself to hold her for a moment before letting her go. She looked at me with her great green eyes as if hoping for an answer to a question. But of course I could not give it to her. I could not even acknowledge that a question had been asked.

But alas, I cannot avoid my own questions or my unfinished composition. I must keep distilling until it achieves absolute purity. And yet, I sometimes wonder whether it is that ambition which is the sin. Last night, after they left and the wind battered at the windows of my cottage, I felt a great anxiety come upon me, as if I had committed a fundamental error and must pay for it. As if the Devil would come to collect his dues … Or my very own demons. They call me the Great Refuser, apparently. They are not wrong.

The phone rings for the second time in several days, and she shudders in response. It is Peter.

“For God’s sake,” he says simply, after ascertaining it is she who has answered the phone.

“You’ve talked to Anders,” she states.

“Do you know how worried … how utterly frantic everyone has been?!” Like Anders, he is shouting, though with a different sort of anger.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and again, means it. “I just … had to have some time out.”

“Time out?” he repeats incredulously. “Is that all?” She doesn’t answer, and can almost sense, over the long-distance wires, his resentful bafflement. “Are you OK?” he finally asks.

“Yes,” she says, though a note of sadness has crept into her voice. “I’m fine. Basically.”

“Well then, could you tell me what’s going on? If you still deign to talk to … people who care about you.” His voice is thickened now with hurt reproach. She has not shown him much trust in these last weeks.

“Maybe I’m just being a capricious artist,” she says, with false nonchalance. “You know, bourgeois heroism can get to be pretty exhausting sometimes. For a sensitive artist type.”

“Oh come on,” he says, suggesting that her flippancy doesn’t merit a response. “We’ve known each other for a long time. Just talk to me, will you?”

She takes in his concern. Yes, they’ve known each other a long time.

“OK, I’ll try,” she says, and her voice cracks a little. She hasn’t realized how abandoned she has felt; even though it is she who has done the abandoning, who has given herself to abandonment, who’s been lost to herself. “But get ready for a longish story.” She decides to make full disclosure, of a different kind than she offered to the Barcelona police. She owes him that much. She manages to speak evenly as she tells him about the first encounters with Anzor, the rooms in Warsaw and London, the sheikh; but her voice cracks again as she describes what happened in the concert hall.

“The bastards,” Peter says when her account comes to its end. “Goddamn bastards.”

“Yes,” she says, resignedly. “But the thing is …” She stops herself, then decides to go on. “The thing is that … you know, I fell for him.” That seems the right phrase. Love, fortunately, no longer seems to apply.