Elegies for the Brokenhearted (19 page)

You developed a good reputation with your teachers and became one of their particular favorites. In your first year you composed a piano concerto that worked through slow and careful building, through the repetition of seemingly identical phrases that were in fact slightly different. Through a process of almost imperceptible shifts over the course of the work, everything changed, and by the end the listener arrived at a place that was, musically, in perfect opposition to the place he'd started. It was a theoretical work that appealed to the mind more so than the heart—very much the fashion of the time. Your teachers agreed that with the appropriate inspiration, perhaps a summer in Europe, you would make something of yourself.

People were always trying to befriend you, but you rebuffed them, thinking them common, foolish, spoiled, talentless, crude. Often when people approached you, you dismissed them with a comment which they at first took to be genuine, but later felt the sting of.
I hadn't realized,
you'd say,
kerchiefs were back in style. How quaint.

You lived in a small room in a boardinghouse, nothing more than a bed, a dresser, and a small desk. Your suits hung in your closet, two blue and two black, one gray. On top of your dresser you kept a silver grooming set—a brush and comb, a razor and dish—that your grandmother had bought for you. Other than this your room was unadorned. You believed in keeping yourself free from distractions. The music you hoped to compose was spartan, meticulous, and you believed it would only come to you in an environment of perfect order.

Of course there were difficulties to city life. The noise of your neighbors, the blare of sirens and horns coming up from the street, the rush of planes overhead. For the isolation you needed you stayed late at school each night, working in the practice rooms, but this had its downside: On the walk home you were often taunted by groups of teenagers. “Hey, little man,” they said. Once you were mugged at gunpoint by a mere boy, probably ten years old. You'd handed over your wallet without protest but even still the boy punched you in the stomach, and you'd folded up and fallen to the ground. After that you'd stopped carrying a wallet and never kept more than five dollars in your pocket, but you were mugged, still, for sport. Three more times.

You allowed yourself the occasional indulgence—you were human, after all. Your grandmother sent you a check each month, and you got into the habit of spending almost all of it in a single evening. You took yourself out to fine restaurants, and later to clubs, where you engaged in what you referred to as
the pleasures of youth
. You took up with different men, and sometimes went home with them to their rooms. But none of this really mattered, you said, not now, and not even at the time. You were determined to make something of yourself, to become the greatest composer in the world, and something so small as love, you thought, would never distract you.

Then, in your junior year, you fell in love with one of the school's professors, a middle-aged composer whose name you couldn't bring yourself—even twenty years later—to speak. There was nothing particularly special about this man. Many times you'd recalled the moment you'd first met him, and thought little of him. On first impression he was nothing more than another balding, nearsighted professor in a tweed jacket. You'd met him at a cocktail party thrown by another professor, and you remembered overhearing him talking about the end of the war. “Everyone knows,” he'd said, “it's a positively Malthusian model of warfare.” You'd thought him arrogant, dull. You'd spoken with him briefly and you'd noticed that his teeth were stained, that he gave off the odor of a stale pipe.

After the party he didn't cross your mind again until you recognized his name as you registered for spring classes. When you saw him again, in the classroom, he gave off much the same impression as before. Halfway through calling roll he'd quit the process and thrown up his hands. “It doesn't matter,” he said. “I'm not going to learn any of your names until you impress me with something you've written.” Several weeks later, after he'd looked at your work, he invited you back to his office so he might play a line of music for you, and after that you met every week to listen to records. He took you out for coffee. You took long walks in the park, talking of music at first, and then other things—books, politics. You said little. Every question the professor asked you turned back to him. You made note of all his habits and adopted them as your own. You tried to pretend that all your life you'd been reading and drinking and eating the same things he did. He read
The New Yorker,
you read
The New Yorker
. He drank espresso, you drank espresso. He gave you gifts, rare recordings. You used your grandmother's checks to buy him gifts. A fountain pen, a rare cloth-bound Molière.
And you can imagine what happened from there,
you said.
I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say there were moments. There were moments of great passion. I became, I suppose, obsessed.

Naturally there were complications. This man, this professor, was twice your age, and married with two small children. His wife was a plain woman with a great fortune. The quality of this man's life—the relative luxury and leisure he was afforded—was due to her. He would never leave her. You understood this. But sometimes in bed you spoke of the future, of traveling together. You couldn't help yourself.

One day toward the end of the semester you met for coffee and he told you he couldn't see you anymore. My wife, he explained, my children. My job.
I would never,
you said,
I would never betray you
. But he told you he was ending things, that it was the right thing to do. As you sat across from him you felt part of yourself collapse, fall away and crash like a wall of ice from an iceberg. You lost your hearing for a moment. In a daze you removed a bill from your wallet and tucked it beneath your plate. You wiped the corners of your mouth with your napkin, placed it on the table. You stood to leave and the professor said something—made a protest or an appeal of some kind—but you didn't hear it, you had lost your senses.

You spent an entire week in your room, in bed, trying to recall every moment you'd spent with him. You wrote down every scrap of conversation you remembered, everything you'd worn, every gesture you'd made. You dragged your notes for clues. Had you said something? Had you betrayed a lack of intelligence, of taste? You were sick with shame, with grief, and you couldn't return to class. You missed your finals, took incompletes in all your classes. All of the music you'd been working on flew out of your head. You thought about dying. You wanted to die.

You had one friend at school, a rich girl named Tweedy Livingston—one of those tall, horse-faced socialites for whom nothing had ever been difficult—and to save you from your misery she invited you to accompany her to Ogunquit. You spent the month of July at her family's rented home, living in opulence. You'd eaten every night at fine restaurants and had never seen, the whole time, a bill presented to Tweedy—she was one of those people who kept open tabs. You spent nearly the whole month in dining rooms, smoking and drinking, cracking open mussels and lobsters. One night you ate at the Oasis and on your way out saw its baby grand sitting empty in the corner of its bar. Tweedy had asked you to play. All evening you took requests, and as you played you felt at ease for the first time in months. At the end of the night the restaurant's manager offered you a job—their player had just quit—and you agreed to start the next day.

Initially you only planned to stay for the summer. But when August came around the idea of returning to school was still too painful. You decided to play at the restaurant until it closed in October, then return to New York and finish your compositions. You settled in at the Bavarian. You made a decent living, you had time to work on your music. You started to compose a symphony, and soon it obsessed you. You thought of it all the time, even in dreams, and there were days that it played so loudly in your head that you were obliged to take a sleeping pill just to dull its effects. You kept imagining the day you finished your symphony and put it into the hands of your advisor, who would immediately recognize its genius, stage it, record it. You imagined the prizes you would win. Upon your return to New York—after a long, self-imposed exile during which your reputation as a brilliant eccentric was solidified—you would be celebrated, redeemed. You imagined the look on your lover's face when he heard your masterpiece performed. You saw him collapsing in tears, falling at your feet. You spent long hours playing out these scenes, and they appeared so vividly in front of you that you sometimes reached into the air to touch them. If you could only finish your work. All that season, closed up in the Bavarian with Mrs. Strauss, you were just on the edge, you sensed, just on the edge of breaking through.

But fall had turned to winter, then to spring, and before you knew it you were back at the Oasis for another season. By then Mrs. Strauss had stopped charging you rent in exchange for your help around the house. You had become family. Sometimes when she called to you from the kitchen she accidentally called you Karl, and often in your mind you thought of her as your grandmother. Your real grandmother had disowned you—when you left school you had broken her heart—and Mrs. Strauss had replaced her.

During your second year in Maine you'd started taking a regimen of pills. You took pills to stay awake and pills to sleep, pills to enliven and pills to settle your nerves. At times you believed that the pills were the only things keeping you alive. Other times you convinced yourself that the pills were killing you and you stopped taking them. But then you'd be overtaken with shakes, or sweats, or bouts of intense, insufferable panic, and you'd start all over again.

You had taken on other lovers, from time to time, but had found all of them lacking. What pleasure they offered to you, eventually, amounted to far less than their inevitable disappointments.
Love,
you said,
is for fools.

With your work you'd gone through phases of striving and phases of abandon. But it hardly mattered now—you had struggled too long and now there was no solution. Even if you finished your symphony, it would have taken twenty years of your life and would hardly be worthwhile. And if you simply gave up, moved on, what could you say you'd been living for?

Sometimes in the middle of the night I woke to the sound of your playing in the parlor. It was always the same little song, notes in a minor key, ascending and then descending and then ascending again, like a leaf blowing in the wind. It was the loneliest song I'd ever heard.

 

I
t was only after I'd given up on Malinda that—in accordance with one of those immutable laws that seem to dictate the universe—she showed up. One night, while I was mopping the kitchen floor at the end of my shift, one of the cooks went out through the swinging door into the lobby, and in the gust of sound that came into the room I heard Malinda's laugh. I knew it anywhere. It was brash and forced, and it cut through the noise of any room—it carried longer and louder than every other voice. The door swung open and closed, open and closed, and I stood leaning against the mop handle, listening, a hot twisting in my chest. In place of the excitement I'd expected to feel when I found Malinda there was a nervousness, and with it something else, something akin to anger. Malinda was here, alive and well, and with something to laugh about. Suddenly I saw all of the stories I'd told myself about her—the troubled circumstances she was in, the reasons she couldn't manage to get in touch with me—as delusions, the pathetic fantasies of a desperate person.

I finished mopping, letting my heart settle. Then I went out into the lobby and stood at the entrance to the bar. You were playing music from
Brigadoon,
and there was a small crowd still lingering around your piano. In the opposite corner of the bar the waitstaff sat around as they always did at the end of the night—counting and straightening the cash they'd made, making plans for the rest of the evening—and at the center of them all was Malinda. I hardly recognized her. She had bobbed her hair and dyed it a bright, flaming pink, and she had tattoos running up both of her arms, extending onto her chest and neck. She wore a black sleeveless dress wrapped around her like a bath towel. Sitting next to Malinda was a red-haired man in a green tracksuit. He had an unfinished, embryonic quality—he had a weak chin and a clipped, fleshless nose. In a hoarse shout he was telling a story about hitting a policeman in a construction zone. He spoke of himself in the third person. “So Scotty's going real slow, trying not to hit those orange cones, and the next thing you know Scotty's side view mirror clips a cop by the belt and spins him around like a fucking top.”

People laughed.

“So what do you think Scotty does?”

“Take off, man,” someone said. “Take the fuck off.”

“Nope,” he said. “What Scotty does, he pulls over and gets out and offers various solicitous ministrations.” He waggled his eyebrows. He was apparently one of those people who took pleasure in using words he considered to be rare and lofty. “I give him my card, my license and registration, I offer him all kinds of compensation. And you know what happens? He says he's fine, he just lets Scotty go. And Scotty just drives on, my friend, with enough in the trunk to send me up for twenty years.”

The whole time Scotty was talking he had his arm around Malinda, and she stared up at him adoringly. By all appearances Malinda was happy, but the sight of her under the spell of such a repulsive person turned my stomach. I stood and stared at her. Whoever this was—this pink-haired, exuberant person—it wasn't Malinda.

Finally Malinda's eye fell on me, and all of the mirth drained from her face. She sat frozen, and we stared at each other for a moment. Then, as if with the flick of a switch, she leapt up and squealed. “My little sister!” she cried. “My little fucking sister!” She crossed the room and hugged me. She smelled of some kind of sweet liquor. Brandy, rum. She was so thin I could have snapped her.