Thank You for the Music (21 page)

But now she was at the end of the hall with a view of the living room, where Bennet stood before the sliding glass doors, still in his coat, a blanket draped over his head like a scarf. Should she whisper his name? Walk toward him, stand beside him? Talk to him, somehow? Or should she leave him alone, turn back and find her bed again?

Her body was frozen in place; her hand pressed hard against the wall. “Bennet? It's Jonny. Are you all right?”

“Jonny,” he said.

His head was bowed down into his hands.

Her body did not move, but her heart, her spirit, whatever it was that filled her, rushed toward him and surrounded him so that she felt she had no choice but to follow it, to go to him, to say his name and feel her own trembling hand reach out to his shoulder. “Bennet, Bennet.”

“I can't face up to what I'll never see again,” he said. She felt herself a small child in his arms as he turned toward her now, the black coat opening just enough for her stunned head to lay against his chest in the absolute darkness of love.

W
ERE SOMEONE TO APPROACH ME SOMEDAY
and demand that I define myself, as best I could, in one sentence or less, I would not need a long sentence, nor any time to drum up a few choice descriptive words such as “demanding,” or “tenderhearted,” or “brutally honest,” all of which would be true in some sense, the way that almost anything said about anyone can be true, given the complexities and vagaries of the human character. Instead, I would simply say, “I am a man who loves to drive.”

I'm retired now from a small college, where for over twenty years I played the role of a basically decent though hard-nosed professor of philosophy, a thin, appropriately wild-haired aging man in a long dark coat, known for extracting from my students little wisdom teeth they never knew they had, and spilling the quiet drama of my lectures into the voids of their hearts, even when words in my mouth felt like mothballs, though real mothballs, I knew, had much greater purpose.

I was probably never cut out for the job. Like most, I began in a state of feverish desire to leave the mundane world and enter the world of ideas, a desire whose source I know now was a kind of self-loathing.

Having nothing to do with the college anymore, I wake up early each morning, dress, and walk out to my car, a ghastly old gold tank of a Buick I found for three hundred dollars two years ago. I stop at the donut store where the girl with green hair hands me a large cup of coffee and a newspaper, then gives me the condescending wink some young women like to give old men. But I like her. I imagine she is weary of her job, but she displays none of that.

First I drive to a hilltop that overlooks the river. I park in a lot behind a green tilted-looking greasy spoon called Rudy's, and I sit and read the paper and drink the coffee and look down at the water. You are no doubt thinking I'm a man of considerable nerve to be stealing your time like this simply to tell you how I begin my day. But how I begin my day is now essential to me, and dictates what happens during the rest of the day; when fueled by black coffee and the paper, I drive, usually on the highways, listening to a local talk show, enduring the relentless drill of loneliness without a trace of self-pity. In this world, things happen to you when you're lonely that simply don't happen otherwise.

What happened to me will be hard to describe, and yet I feel a tremendous need to try. You may want to close your eyes, like a small child in a narrow bed. There is no glowing clown night-light in this room that scares you, no ruthless, drunken parent refusing to keep the door open. Nor will this story give you bad dreams. Perhaps it is just a story of coincidence, but I don't think so.

It became apparent to me that I had to climb a certain fence. I spotted the fence from the window of my car as I was driving in the early afternoon on the empty freeway. You might not find it strange that such a thing would become apparent to me; after all, fences beckon climbers every day. And I am not such an old man, really, so one needn't conjure the image of a spindly, depleted crab clutching onto cold links with blue and desperate hands. One might argue that this rising urge to climb the fence was not that extraordinary, that contained within the “very being of a fence” (I am no phenomenologist) is a loud invitation to people like me, who, as you might have gathered, have natures that are in some sense “fenced out” of this world, and by no means do I pretend to suggest that such a nature is rare or admirable. Quite the contrary.

From the highway I seemed suddenly to see it for the first time. It was not poetic. It did not inspire memories of past fences, which I would've resisted. It was the thing itself, the cold gray links in the autumn light. The car was warm, and suddenly I resented its comforting confines. I wanted my hands on the fence.

This particular fence happened to surround the stadium, the large, modern stadium where baseball is played. There are men who easily made the transition from the old, intimate stadiums, men who embraced Astroturf the way others after them would have to embrace video screens and the increasingly prolific assault of meaningless noise. I am not one of those men. I regret this now, for had I been less reactionary, I would have enjoyed more evenings of baseball with my wife and son, neither of whom are living anymore. The two of them would go along without me, after my son begged and tearfully pleaded with me to join them, after I answered, as usual, “I have to catch up on some reading.” Finally his mother would grow understandably disgusted, and drag him off, saying, “Let's leave your father to his brooding, Lawrence.” This is not my son's real name; I would not call a child Lawrence. I prefer not to speak his name aloud like this, which you will understand.

I parked the car on a side street, got out of the car, buttoned my coat, put on my hat, and crossed the freeway while a terrific gust of wind seemed to push me in the direction of my desired destination. I had to hold my hat down. Usually such a wind would irritate me; I am not a man who likes to be pushed. But at the time I thought only, What a strong wind. And now it seems strange to me, like a gift from nature, as if nature itself was propelling me toward the fence.

I climbed the fence slowly. My arms shook, and my hands hurt as I climbed, grabbing onto the links. I imagined the people driving by on the freeway, holding me in their minds for a moment, then letting me go. I worried that a cop might sight me, but not as much as I would have worried had I been younger. My white hair, my lined face, the skin that sags around my eyes, all of these protect a person from having to explain himself. Nobody expects it, and nobody's interested. Easier for them to conclude that you're nuts. You're climbing the fence because you've gone round the bend. You're having a delusion. You're climbing to get next to the stadium because you loved Ted Williams too much, or Clemente, or Willie Mays, or Vida Blue, or your son the baseball fan in his backward red cap and buck teeth and darting black eyes. The cop might have said, “Hey there, hey, grandpa, what's up?” Or would a cop today perhaps be frightened even of a respectable-looking old white-haired man climbing a fence, as if that old man might turn and pull a loaded gun out of his coat pocket, and fire the gun just to feel a part of society?

If purity of heart is to will one thing, then I had purity of heart as I continued my climb. Once on the other side, I stood and examined my hands; they were red and raw-looking, and still shaking, and I looked at them in a kind of scientific wonder. My heart hammered away at my chest. I dropped my hands down to my sides and began to walk toward the stadium. On the ground level a series of long white doors stood in a line like a group of doctors. I walked by the doors, not interested in them enough to try opening them.

Soon I found myself slipping under a metal bar that blocked a ramp leading to the heart of the stadium. I could hear the soft soles of my shoes thudding against the concrete as I walked up the ramp through a cold hollowness, while a part of me lingered behind, watching, thinking, and nearly saying aloud,
What are you doing here? Where do you think you're going?
We all make these efforts to turn into policemen when the police don't show up. But I was not about to stop and answer that voice; I was not capable. I was occupied by a need to collect myself, to force myself into a suitably solemn state of mind, as if I were approaching a great occasion of some sort, an occasion that demanded the heart, not the body, be appropriately dressed. As I ascended the ramp I could look to my right at the city skyline, frozen in the gray autumn sky, like a world I was leaving behind.

Soon I was on the top floor. The place was emptier and colder somehow than anyplace I had ever been before. I tried, briefly, to imagine my son and wife here, lost in a shuffling summer crowd, the boy begging his mother to spend five dollars on a pennant, his mother refusing, the way she knew I would refuse, the boy knowing not to press the issue. The two of them would walk along, not holding hands, not needing too, for they would never lose each other. Between them was a bond that was palpable in the air, as if their very bodies extended beyond what I could see with my naked eye, as if there were no space at all between them. They would be the quietest people in the stadium; the boy's eyes watchful, serious, lit with intelligence I couldn't see, and his mother's eyes blue and introspective, though somehow seeing everything around her at the same time. The boy in his faded black sneakers, a cheap glove on his hand in case a ball came his way.

I continued walking. I whistled for a moment, just to hear the echo. A strange bird in a stadium, lost.
What are you doing?

I badly wanted to look at the field.

Up here was another series of doors, and they were locked; I tried six of them, and gave up. But then, as I was walking away, thinking I would return to my car and a more reasonable version of myself, I decided to try one more door, the seventh door, which opened easily, mysteriously, so that I was almost fearful.

Now I was inside, and much to my disappointment, I looked down and saw that the field was covered with a dark green plastic. What had I been thinking? Of course it would be covered. Our great nation's splendiferous Astroturf needs protection from the elements, stupid man!

Surrounding me were thousands of orange and yellow plastic seats, dabs of paint in the vast silence, the haunted emptiness that told me I had better turn around and head back down the concrete ramp. Instead, like a man with a ticket stub, I walked over to section D-5, and took a seat in aisle 3, a seat in the middle of that aisle. I sat and folded my hands on my lap. I sat there in silence and looked down at the covered field.

I became aware of something remarkable. I mean to say another person was in the stands, a bit higher up than me, in a yellow section, on the other side, above what should have been the third-base line.

My first response was to get up and run, but I am never a man who acts on his initial sense of things. And so I sat and stared across at my company, who from that considerable distance seemed to be a woman, neither young nor old, in a blue coat. Surely she had seen me, and surely she was finding this situation as odd as I was, yet she seemed oddly comfortable. Together we sat in that emptiness for twenty minutes or so, and it became apparent after the first five minutes that we were staring at each other. It was difficult to
see
that, but in a space so empty it was quite easy to
sense
it, for there was little else to sense, save for the ghosts of summer. I began to wish that I smoked, for I would certainly have smoked at this time, and with an ember burned a hole in what was becoming the acutely surreal fabric of my day.

Some more minutes passed, when finally the woman made her first gesture, which amounted to a rather ornate wave, as if she imagined herself in a parade, on a float. The fluidity of that wave I could never describe. It was a wave that demanded nothing from me, not even that I wave back, and so I was moved to do exactly that, though my wave was sharper, perfunctory, and embarrassed. I'm not a man who could wave like I was in a parade even if I was in a parade. As soon as I waved, she stopped, and as if with a will of its own, my hand flew up and waved again, the same short wave. She did not return this wave with a wave. Instead, she did something that I would have to describe as wonderful, in the original sense of that word.

She stood up on her seat.

I sat there and watched her standing. I smiled, irresistibly, for this gesture was like a child's. Who else stands on chairs? Always it is children, attempting to reach something they need, and always they are told to get down.
Get down off that chair!
If they refuse to get down, someone yanks them down, and leaves a red mark on their wrist. This woman stood stone-still for a while, and then she wrapped her arms around herself.

It was then that I stood up on my chair. I cannot explain the emotion that overtook me when I was standing and facing her across that distance. This time I waved first, and she waved back, immediately, and quickly. We stood there for no more than ten minutes like strange, overgrown children. Above us I could feel the gray sky rushing westward.

She took off her blue coat.

Under her coat she was in a maroon dress. I imagined it was a knit dress, of fine quality. For a split second she looked like my wife; the dark hair, the taste in clothing. Had that moment lingered I might have called out her name, but things began to happen very quickly. I knew it was my turn to take off my coat, which I placed on the chair beside me. It was time to show the woman in the maroon dress my black sweater, my gray pants. My legs felt weak, and one of them began to move with dread and with yearning and with a kind of odd grief that I believe the woman recognized, for she once again wrapped her arms around herself, and began slowly to rock from side to side. I could not look elsewhere, though my eyes hurt me as I stared.