Orfeo (3 page)

Three movements of Symphony 41 pass by: destiny and noble sacrifice, nostalgia for a vanished innocence, and a minuet so elegant it bores the bejeezus out of him. And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.

Young Peter props up on his elbows, ambushed by a memory from the future. The shuffled half scale gathers mass; it sucks up other melodies into its gravity. Tunes and countertunes split off and replicate, chasing each other in a cosmic game of tag. At two minutes, a trapdoor opens underneath the boy. The first floor of the house dissolves above a gaping hole. Boy, stereo, speaker boxes, the love seat he sits on: all hang in place, floating on the gusher of sonority pouring into the room.

Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks back down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.

At six minutes into the amazement, the five galloping melodies align in a quintuple fugue. Lines echo and overlap, revealing where the music has been heading from the opening Do. They plait together too tightly for Peter’s ear to make out everything that happens inside the five-way weave. The sound surrounds him, and Peter is immanent, inside it all, a small but crucial part of everywhere.

When silence sets him down once more, he no longer believes in the place. He wanders around dazed for the rest of the afternoon. The family house denies that anything just happened. His lone proof is on the record, and for the next three days, Peter wears out the vinyl with dropping the needle onto it. Even his father yells at him to listen to something else. He falls asleep nightly to the cascade of notes. All he wants to do forever is to take the magnificent timepiece apart and put its meshed gears back together again. To recover that feeling of being clear, present,
here
, various and vibrant, as huge and noble as an outer planet.

Jupiter
beckons, but each visit is a little weaker. Within a month, Peter gives up, trapped again on the unrelenting Earth. He rattles through the rooms and slams the doors of the split-level ranch. He bikes in fury, up and down the cluster of streets lined with homes just like his, streets that twist along each other like a thumbprint whorl. Tunes trickle out from kitchen windows, melodies as savory as the scent of brisket and cabbage. But Peter has no patience for them anymore. His ear has left and gone elsewhere.

He falls out of step with the neighborhood. The pleasures of others begin to baffle him, given where he’s been. Sports feel like pointless seesaws, movies grow way too cheery, and loud cars depress him. He hates the gray, flat, fake, cardboard worlds of TV, although once, to trance himself, he sits and gazes for half an hour at a screen of boiling static, a message from deep space. And even after he kills the tube, he goes on staring at the shriveling periscope in the center of the screen, a portal to that place he can’t get back to.

By thirteen, Peter Els is out of sync with the whole eight-cylinder, aerodynamic zeal of America. He no longer cares whom his tastes embarrass. He needs nothing but his math and his Mozart, the maps back to that distant planet.

One endless June Saturday in Peter’s fourteenth year, his brother Paul and friends abduct him from his bedroom and drag him down to the half-finished basement, where they lash him to a barstool and make him listen to 45s on a portable turntable the size of a steamer trunk. “Maybellene.” “Earth Angel.” “Rock Around the Clock.” They force-feed him hits, sure that they can break the kid and remake him into something a little less square. They even toss around the idea of shock therapy.

Come on, cat
.
Pull your head out of your ass and listen.

Peter tries.
That one’s great
, he says
. Nice walking bass.

He does his best to sound enthused, but the posse sees through him. They drill another tune into him: “The Great Pretender
.
” It’s a catchy sing-along that turns into Chinese water torture after the first chorus.

So what’s the problem this time, knucklehead
?

There’s no problem! It’s just that
. . . He closes his eyes and calls out, downbeat by downbeat:
Tonic. Subdominant. Dominant. Those guys need to learn some new chords.

Criminetly. What’s wrong with the chords they got?

Nothing at all, if those three make you happy. But what’s happiness, compared to an earful of forever?

It’s not about the chords,
Paul spits.

It doesn’t go anywhere, Pauly. It just sits there, circling the drain.

Circling . . . ? Are you bat-shit deaf?
His brother gets that faraway look: the sledge, the sex, the drill of infant rock.
You can’t hear that? Freedom, you dried-up little turd!

Peter hears only harmonic jail
.

The tribunal puts on “Blue Suede Shoes.” Peter shrugs: Why not? Peppy dimestore fun. His refusal to swoon maddens his older brother. Paul cocks back his arm to brain the punk with a Magic 8-Ball. But an ecstasy of backbeat sweeps him up, and he calls out,
Listen to that. Jeez! Does music get any better?

He flicks the cannon shot across the drum-flooded basement. Peter catches it, bows his head, and reads the plastic fortune-teller’s reply:

CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN
.

All my life I thought I knew what music was. But I was like a kid who confuses his grandfather with God.

A boy treads in the shallows of a summer lake. Sky and pine in all directions, the buzz of noisy relatives. The air has the heft of vacation, with Peter back in the early rehearsals for his life.

Call it late afternoon, but hours before dark. This far north, near the solstice, the sun hangs for days near its zenith before dropping into dusk. The lake fills with swimming children: an Elsfest—that annual jag that his errant family branch rarely dares attend. Elses from across the States lay claim to the southern shore of this northern water. Thirty yards out, kids swarm a plywood float lashed to empty oil drums, like ants massing a melting sugar cube. Shore-hugging uncles fish beer bottles from an ice-filled zinc trough and open them on the trough’s handle. Aunts and worse stretch out on beach blankets in a suntan assembly line. Elses in all directions. Not even Peter’s father can identify the whole bevy of relatives. One tiny Russian device—even a conventional one—would finish off the family name.

Midsummer comes with a crystalline theme that Peter has been practicing to death for days
.
He woke this daybreak and woodshedded for hours, up in his hillside hideout, on the Evette & Schaeffer clarinet his father found for him at an estate sale. By the time he joined the others down at the lake, summer’s theme was burned deep into his brain.

His clarinet is the one thing Peter would take with him to the moon or a desert island or prison. His fingers come home to the keys; he practices even here, under the waves of this summer lake. He can swell, launch leaps, race up and down the tube in runs that feel invincible. Playing is like solving a perfect proof—QED.

The tune under his fingers this summer is the new national anthem of his desire. He’ll perform it next month in his downtown debut, with twelve older players. The piece is everywhere, in the bobbing water, in the raft-swarming chatter. He loves that dance suite like he loves his mother, who lies up on the shore of this upstate lake in her gappy one-piece suit with the little skirt that makes her look like a Ponchielli hippo ballerina. He knows the music better than he knows his father, there on his lifeguard rotation, Lucky Strike in one hand and Carling Black Label in the other, conducting the Els uncles in a verbal brawl.

Peter can’t name the secret of the suite’s power. But somehow its first few notes, like the rays of sunrise over eastern mountains, lay down a foundation for all the developments to come. They return at the end, layered against an old Shaker hymn tune, to make a sound bigger than any country. He can’t say how that simple return produces a release so spacious and shattering. He knows only that the piece predicts even this blazing afternoon, these bracing lake breezes. Peter has tried to imitate them, jotting down his own chords on systems of clean staff paper—a boy’s pencil sketch of the stupor that dizzies his head each time he hears this piece’s openness.

He will love this music to death. In a few more years, he’ll snort at its sentiment and mock its stirring progressions. Once you’ve loved like that, the only safe haven is resentment. Peter won’t realize until too late that all he ever wanted was to move a listener the way these variations moved him.

But the throats of his dozens of younger cousins scream another soundtrack altogether. One by one they scramble up on the raft, swivel their broomstick hips, shout,
I’m all shook up!
and jackknife into the water. The older kids take up a game called smear the queer, dunking whoever dares hold an orange beach ball. Bodies plunge. Yelps spatter the air. Peter clings to the float’s algae-coated ladder, keeping his fingers safely underwater. Horseflies as big as hummingbirds nip at his nape.

He watches Minnesota cousin Kate carve her manic path through the swarm. Who knew that such surprise could move about on two bare legs? Peter has scribbled her name with ballpoint deep down in the soles of his All Stars, where no one but he will ever know the word is hidden. He has dreamed of her haunches and the backs of her knees. Now she’s everywhere at once in this water war, colluding, colliding, cannonballing through the air, crawling back onto the float and hitching up a slipped strap as if her apricot tit didn’t just go sunning. Her Mayday cries quicken Peter’s flesh, and the kick of her scissoring legs matches that ballet suite running through his brain. Her smile plots the next escapade even before her last one is finished.

Up on shore, around the hissing grill pits, the Els patriarchs wage a war of their own. Their words reach Peter above the shrieks of the raft battle. The women, from their sun chaises and mah-jongg tables, shout at their spouses to give it a rest. Can it. Or better: bottle.
Hey Mabel—Black Label!
Peter’s three favorite aunts—two real ones and one aunt’s companion, a trio who sing each night around the campfire, reliving the glory years of their Andrews Sisters knockoff act, when their shiny-tight added sixth chords once backed for Sinatra himself—start belting out “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” Half the Els Tabernacle Choir joins in on, “Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.”

But Mister In-Between is everywhere, messing with them. The men wade into current events. They determine what went wrong in Korea. Peter’s father—self-made insurance sales force manager with a captured Nazi flag hanging in his subterranean rec room—declares that America should have bombed its way up both banks of the Yalu until the Chinese saw reason. Elses of all stripes parry him with snub beer-bottle lances.
Get a load of this guy! He’s off his nut!

A squeal from lissom Kate dispels all politics. She launches off the raft, arcing into the air with a C# of delight, a missile aimed to land with deadly precision inside a ring of Pittsburgh male cousins.

When Peter turns his ears back shoreward, the adults have crossed the bloodstained map to Hungary. Uncles decree that going up against the Russians for nothing would have been suicide.
For nothing?
Peter’s father shouts.
We egged those people on; we then left them for dead
. But he’s outgunned, scoffed at even by the chorus line of sunbathing aunts.

The uncles jump from Hungary back home, drawn along by the family need to fight. They squabble over the buses down South, the black and white chess game for the nation’s soul. Karl Els pokes a bottle in his brother Hank’s chest and says that blacks have more right to North America than whites. Uncles swat the air, dismissing him and his whole blighted branch.
Aw, go raise your rabble in the Congo
.

Awful names ring out onshore, words from the forbidden list. Peter’s mother starts to cry. Her husband tells her to grow up. The Elsfest threatens to go the way of world affairs. Peter searches the lake for help. His hundred cousins are hammering out the rules for a game of tackle water polo. His mother sits wrapped in her French towel, sobbing. His father sucks a cigarette through the cup of his hand. Peter glances at brother Paul, who glares back a warning shot. Paul has never been so popular as he is today, and he will not let this party end. On the far side of the raft, little sister Susan, already addicted to giddiness, spins herself silly in her inner tube.

The music dies. His mother combs the beach, gathering up her things and crushing them into her beach bag. Peter slips from his seat on the slime-slick ladder and starts to breaststroke back to the beach. But a voice from behind hooks him.

Hey, licorice stick. C’mere a sec.

Cousin Kate, sleek and shiny as any marine mammal, splits him with a smile. Her challenge unfolds as it has a hundred times already in Peter’s private theater. But she doesn’t wait for a response, just paddles around to the hidden cove on the raft’s deep side. Peter follows, helpless in her wake. The great adventure of his life is beginning at last, and the tune unfolds just as he has practiced it.

He draws near to where she floats, her hand on the raft.

Licorice stick. You like me?

He nods, and she plunges through the water onto him. Her legs wrap around his chest, pulling him down. Her clasping weight swamps him, and they go under. In the green cloud, her coiled body inches over his. Her tongue probes his mouth, filling him with the taste of lake. A thigh whacks his groin. Pain shoots up his whole length, and with it, a filament of sharpest pleasure. He paws her slippery skin and snags a fallen strap. She pushes away, back toward air. A foot catches his face on their scramble upward, and his nose fills up with water. He tastes the murk of whatever comes after life. Liquid goes down his windpipe, and he starts to drown.