Augusta Played (35 page)
Jeff was not deflected from his main purpose. He kicked Mario on the ankle. “Daddy,” he yelled, “don't let him hurt you!”
“Don't worry, Jeffrey, it's all right.”
Mario dropped the penknife and grabbed his ankle.
“You're not going to let them do anything to you, are you?” Jeff asked. He looked as though he might cry.
“Of course not,” Richard said.
Jeffrey smiled, worn out and serene, as if a great problem which had been keeping him awake since birth were at long last solved, and rubbed his close-spaced eyes, climbing contentedly into his father's lap. “I knew it all the time,” he said, in that wacky voice of his. “When you were gone all that time, it was because they wouldn't
let
you come home.”
Richard patted his son on the shoulder.
Dinky crouched down beside Phil and said, pointedly, “Isn't that touching? Father and son.”
Before Phil could formulate a reply, Jock said, “Ouch!” as Jeremy's small teeth sank deep enough into that large leg to make an impression.
“Jeremy,” Elaine said, astounded, “you've come to your mother's aid! Jeremy, that's justâ¦that's justâ¦grand!” She felt quite warm inside, looking at her elder son.
There was, going on, a quieting down, inch by inch, of the stage.
“Oh dear,” Cyril said, “oh dear.”
His voice carried clearly. He was on stage.
He was on stage, at the Synthi, saying “oh dear” and turning dials, switches, and knobs, fiddling, so to speak, with the sequencer, in total confusion attempting to determine which dials controlled the length and pitch of which notes, because Dieter had, as stated, retired against the wall, his head in his hands, and Cyril wished, as Tom had, to help. What Cyril was coming up with bore no relation to Dieter's piece, al though, of course, Dieter was one of the very few people in the world who could say this with certainty.
But by this time, the insanity from the stage had moved on, like a storm cloud, and had advanced into the audience. The noise out there was thunderous. The Joint crowd were on their feet, whistling, and yelling at Gus, “Take it off! Take it off!”
“She's getting my applause,” Birdie said, sadly. Yet, deep down, Birdie knew that she had gotten Gus's applause, and she felt awful.
Jock said, “The record's over.” He was rubbing his leg.
Mario was rubbing hisâMario'sâankle.
Birdie's chin started to tremble.
“Don't cry,” Richard said.
“Let her cry,” Elaine said. “I hope she cries till she drowns.”
Norman remembered his father's using an expression like that about his mother. He had gone to his father's office to tell him that he was getting married. “If you marry this person,” Sidney had said, “you are herewith disinherited. I will make it official. I would make it religious, but that would ruin your mother. She would die of tears. I don't want your mother should drown.” How long ago was that?
Birdie thought it was not a nice thing to say, but she didn't feel like fighting about it.
Silence was overtaking the stage.
The Synthi slowed, then stopped, a long note falling off to the edge of the universe like a quasar, descending with distance, until it seemed to touch on silence and drop stunned, like a bee hitting a glass pane, into the place where sound goes when it isn't heard anymore, the forest at the end of time.
“Take it
all
off!” the crowd chanted.
“I wonder which one of us they mean,” Dinky said, lazily.
Tweetie fluttered down to Gus's flute and perched on the low B key, still chirping. The tailjointâthe flute'sâdipped. Gus gave up. She set the handmade silver flute, with its gold mouthpiece and added key, down, and picked up her blouse.
All at once, Cyril jumped back from the Synthi, landing in a sitting position in a tangle of wires, and the overheated, hardworking, huffing-and-puffing, plugged-in and plugging-away little modular system went up in a ball of smoke, like a devoted robot whose electronic brain had been stretched beyond capacity, whose mechanical heart had taken a beating beyond endurance, and with a single poignant last lost cry, collapsed. It was a coda to make men, women, and androids weep.
When the smoke cleared, the Critic with a capital C was gone.
Swearing to himself that never again would he play except as a soloist, the pianist walked off and rang down the curtain. Nobody took any bows.
The curtain separated the castâif they could be said to be a castâfrom the audience. Its heavy folds, as if laden with the history of God knew how many other final acts, comforted the people on stage; it was as if they were wrapped in it against the cold winds of disapprovalâor even the warm winds of acclaim.
They could hear clapping out front, shouts and calls of bravo, encore, and more! more! and, from the Joint crowd, less! less!, but it was as if, slumped in silence on the hidden side of the stage, behind the lowered curtain, Gus and Norman, Birdie and Jock, Richard and Elaine, Jeff and Jeremy, Phil and Dinky, Mario and the pianist, and the two dapper dwarves and now Dieter had formed a tableau, a tacitly agreed-upon outward pose while all but one inwardly wondered what to do next, now, or ever. Alone among them all, Tom reviewed the night's events as they might have appeared to the critic: the canary and the chickâthe bird and the “bird”âdancers, actors, musicians, the audience participating. He peeked through the part in the curtain, and thought to himself, secretly amused,
The aisle is full of noises
. He let the curtain close again.
Such silence possessed the stage as if everyone upon it had been a puppet without a puppeteer, a dummy without a ventriloquist, a spirit, ravishing, awesome or laughable,
sans
sorcerer, or a doll without a little girl to make it walk and talk, and in the final miraculous toyland stillness, as if in a world where all clocks were cuckoo clocks and no time ever brushed with its hands of change golden hair to gray, one serious, measured voice was heard, Tom's, speaking, as if he lived inside them, Caliban's simultaneously achingly accepting and marveling lines:
Be not afeará. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak'd,
I cried to dream again
.
Only Tweetie-Pie hopped around, preening, but he was so sleepy that finally he flew to Augusta's bare shoulder, and slept.
74
G
US
DREADED
even to look at the papers but Norman insisted that he and she and Dieter should stay up for them. The pianist had disappeared. Tom and Cyril had tactfully withdrawn to their own apartment across the hall. Norman and Gus and Dieter sat around in the one-room apartment on West Eighty-eighth with the television buzzing in the background and Tweetie snoozing in his cage, once again safely draped.
“Do you suppose he'll ever speak again?” Norman asked, nodding in Dieter's direction.
“I don't know,” Gus said. “He never said much to begin with.”
The room was coldâthe landlord believed nobody had a right to heat after midnight. Gus was wearing one of Norman's cardigans over her Edwardian blouse and black skirt, with the sleeves rolled up. Norman had on a corduroy jacket. Dieter had wrapped himself in the dark red and blue quilted comforter.
“I'm going to scramble some eggs,” Gus announced.
“You don't know how,” Norman said.
“I'll figure it out,” Gus said, and went into the kitchen. When she turned on the light, several hundred cockroaches skittered for their hiding places. “You know something,” she said, pensively, “I wish we hadn't drowned the mouse.”
Norman said, “You didn't have to take off your top. It was indecent.”
She said, “I should have turned my back to the audience so everybody could see what you did to my mole.”
Norman said, “At least it would have been decent.”
When the eggs were done, nobody could eat them. They were a pale cream color, like paste. “I'll go get the papers,” Norman volunteered. Gus said again that it was a waste of time, ludicrous, but Norman said she didn't understand New York. “Sometimes, Gus,” he said, “your background really shows. It's too bad, but it's a fact.” He ducked out, grinning, before she could throw anything at him.
When he returned, she opened the paper to the music section. “I can't believe he even reviewed it,” she said. “Here, you read it.” She thrust the paper at Norman and he read:
An extraordinary event occurred in Town Hall last night: the debut of a brilliantly gifted young flutist, Augusta Gold. Executing the more conventional pieces flawlessly, with a masterful fusion of technique and expressiveness, she nevertheless came into her own in the première of the last piece, a purposefully chaotic “happening” illustrative of the musical mood of the radical avant-garde, a wickedly humorous demolition of all that is safe and accepted in our unadventurous academies, which seem to suffer from a kind of cultural lag. Surely we cannot have too much of this high-spiritedâdare we say rambunctious?âMiss Gold, who pursued her playing of Dieter Schuyler's theater piece, aptly titled “The Solarbird Suite: Alternative Energy Music,” with what this critic of an (alas) older generation can only respectfully recognize as great “cool.”
Accompanied by piano (frequently played inside), canary, synthesizer (timed to self-destruct, in a witty allusion to Tinguely's kinetic assemblage), a pair of dwarves (one of whom astutely parodied Joseph Papp's Shakespeare-in-the-Park productions, of which we have heard overmuch these days), male and female dancers impersonating striptease artists in a dead-accurate two-pronged satire of high art (Fokine) and low (“Hair”), and audience participation of the sort so well known to us from The Living Theater, which provided a running commentary of a psychodramatic character and perhaps inadvertent phenomenological depth as well as defining a broad new area of musical gesture through deploying said sound sources in the total sound field of the auditorium, Miss Gold triumphed in a performance of multidimensional import whilst never losing the sense of phrasing that sustained the work as a whole. If one may say so without detracting from the otherwise altogether exceptional debut of a remarkably promising new talent, the final low B was to this utterly charmed critic's ears listing dangerously
.
“You did it!” Norman said, tossing the paper into the air.
“I did it!” Gus shouted.
Dieter was inconsolable.
75
T
HAT
WAS
the end, more or less. Norman and Gus stayed together a little longer, but not long enough for Esther to have her reunion. The marriage had ended with the concert. It seemed to them both now that they had only been waiting for the concert to take place, before they ended the marriage. Shortly before Christmas, Norman said to Gus, “I want a divorce.” She was expecting it, but she felt abused anyway.
Norman was smoking a cigarette, lying on the bed. He had been waiting for her to ask for the divorce, but time was going by and still she hadn't asked.
“I was hoping you might decide to stick it out,” she said. “We could give it another try.” She had been lining Tweetie's cage with clean newspaper; now she turned around slowly to face Norman. She dreaded seeing his dark eyes full of fire, his uncombable hair, the way his eyebrows tapered at the ends. She didn't know how she was going to detach herself from these specifics, the particular living definition of “Norman” that she had learned with her fingertips and mouth and legs. But of course it had to be done. She could see that. All the same, she felt as if her heart were a phonograph record, and he had snapped it in half across his knee.
“I thought about it,” Norman said, “but what is there to stick out? Gus, something never quite took. Some connection was never made. All the wires crossed but ours.” He delivered these words nonchalantly, but inside he was aching, his heart was weeping. He happened to see the rings on her finger, the wedding band and the engagement ring, and he felt as if he were the base Indian, throwing a pearl away richer than all his tribe. His wife stood there next to the canary in the cage, drenched in cold winter light, her chin lifted slightly against the pain and humiliation, the upper lip sexy as hell and her hair in flight from her temples, and he didn't want to go. But he also wanted to goâa lot.
The lawyer (Norman got a name from his father) drew up a separation agreement, and on a Sunday afternoon Norman and Augusta walked to a pharmacist on Broadway. The pharmacist was also a notary. He notarized their signatures on the agreement and Norman and Gus were officially dissolved, more or less. It would be two years before the divorce was final. Gus bought a tube of toothpaste and a box of Kleenexâa small oneâfor crying.
Norman found an apartment on 105th so Gus could stay in the place on Eighty-eighth until she was ready to leave. She was going to Germany. It was something she had always wanted to doâto study with Karlheinz Zôller. Dieter gave her some names and thought she might get a post-Webern music group going and make enough to get by, that way; her folks would do what they could to help. She shipped the leaves to Chapel Hill, along with the favorite lamp, and packed her white blouses, and Norman's apartment wound up looking almost exactly as it had before she had ever moved in.
Norman, seventeen blocks north of this activity, felt as though his head was splitting into a thousand pieces with the centrifugal force of the whirl; it would fly off in all directions at once, fragmented. He tried to get hold of Bunny Van Den Nieuwenhutzen, but she had apparently left town. He didn't even try D. D. Jones. He felt that he had had enough of artistic women for a while.
