The Fermata (20 page)

The point is, in any case, that I could never get interested in a woman who was passed out drunk, or was sedated, in a coma, or dead; for then she is unconscious of me, and what I want is to be with her when she would be conscious of me but for the fact that I have interjected myself into a chink of her day so infinitesimally brief that she can’t know that I have come and gone.

The way the discussion came up with Rhody was that she announced, on the plane, apropos of tiny Latino swimsuits, that more and more she was interested in seeing naked men and their penises. She said she liked the idea of
semis
—by which she meant penises that weren’t totally hard, since a hard straight line was unbeautiful against the human body, nor totally soft and wrinkly either, but rather loungingly, curvingly full and interested and ready to be teased straight—like
(she explained) Jimmy Cliff’s penis in
The Harder They Come
. I got animated, because I love talking about sex, and I impulsively decided that this was the right moment to begin to confess my Fold history to her, couching it first as a hypothetical case. All right then, I said to her, what did she think of the idea of some sort of chord on the piano that whenever you played it, stopped time? Say back when she was at Tufts, her piano teacher (someone on whom she’d told me she’d had a crush) had been working on a conclusive edition of a piece called
Map
, by a once forgotten but now increasingly respected twentieth-century composer named Mascon Albedo. Say that, in comparing the microfilmed manuscripts with the 1903 Yates and Boling edition of the work, Rhody’s piano teacher, Alan Sparkling, discovered a surprising number of significant errors and righted them. As his corrections accumulated, he began to feel not only that
Map
was a much greater work than anyone could have known, but also that he, Alan Sparkling, was developing a sure instinct for Albedo’s style. And his instinct told him that there was one chord which, even though it checked out as correct against several of the relevant manuscripts, still sounded quite wrong, or at least incomplete. It didn’t sound at all like the chord Albedo would have written at that moment in the piece. And it was a chord of crucial importance to the meaning of the work—a very soft chiming that arrived after a long stretch of murkier pianism that should have come off as strange and triumphant, but as it stood did not. The chord was surmounted by a fermata.

Sensing a major discovery that would crown his new edition, Sparkling went back to Sewanee University, where Albedo’s manuscripts were kept, and looked again through some of the notebooks that the Master had kept during the time he was
composing that particular movement of
Map
. Albedo’s later life had been decorated with odd incidents and minor scandals—there had been actual rumors of insanity. In the notebooks there were tantalizing annotations over certain motivic scraps—things like “Oh God, yes!” and “And here the Field develops greater potency.” Alan began to have the sense that
Map
had been more than a piece of piano music to Albedo; that it had constituted some sort of magic sonic recipe or spell for him. He also began strongly to suspect that the errors in the Yates and Boling edition had not been the fault of the publisher but had been intentional last-minute alterations on Albedo’s part, meant to disable whatever powers
Map
gave its performer, so that he, Albedo, could remain in sole possession of them. Finally, in one of the notebooks he came across a heavily erased part of a page under a large fermata and, with the help of a magnifying glass, was able to read the chord written there. It was an incomparably finer variant of the wrong-sounding fermata chord in
Map
.

Deeply impressed with himself, Professor Sparkling took the last plane to Boston, sure now that he had a masterwork of twentieth-century music in his briefcase, polished, cleaned, restored, awakened from its dodecaphonic slumber by his profound scholarship and delicate musicological instinct. The next day was his day of giving piano lessons. Rhody was his very best student; and that morning she tore through the
Tombeau de Couperin
with such verve that, on a whim he didn’t himself quite understand, he turned toward her with an expression of great seriousness and seized her shoulders and told her that she alone must work up the new authorized version of
Map
. He made a copy of his own corrections for her so that she could incorporate them into her score. A week passed. Alan, gloating over his discoveries, played bits and
pieces of
Map
for himself, and listened to it skimmingly in his head, but he devoted most of his time to finishing his article about it for
The Quarterly of New Music
. Since it was a formidably difficult work, he did not make any attempt to play the whole composition through, even sloppily, from beginning to end. That was what gifted students like Rhody were for, he felt.

All that week Rhody devotedly practiced
Map
, conscious of what an honor it was to be the first person to reanimate the cleaned-up version. It soon became clear to her that Professor Sparkling’s enthusiasm was justified: Mascon Albedo stood revealed as no mere minor-league friend of Luciano Berio, but as a leaping titan of pianism. Though the surface of the piece had struck her ear at first as knotty and over-intellectual, as she perfected her performance of it she found that on the contrary it had an almost disturbing secondary sensual appeal: it made her exceedingly aware of the physical reality of her own playing. If the piece required her to play a simple A-flat-major triad with her left hand, she would feel in doing so as if the black A-flat and E-flat keys were soft, low, tree-covered hills, smoothed by forgotten glaciers, and the C between them a fog-filled valley, over which her poised fingers were parachuting very early in the morning; an ordinary pile of perfect fourths and fifths would slice through her like the stave of a hard-boiled-egg slicer; she could sense the felt-covered hammers thumping against the piano wires as gently as the noses of sheep in pens or fish against glass; she felt with extraordinary vividness her right foot making its little jumps on the sustain pedal, hosing off any recent blendings and allowing a new concord to rise up clean from its mud-wrestling past. The piece seemed to rediscover the amazement every pianist should properly feel at the invention of the
piano. Moreover, playing it did very odd things to her perception of time, though it did so only when she began right at the beginning and went straight through.

Another piano student, Paul Mackey, knocked on her practice-room door on the eve of her lesson with Professor Sparkling. He asked her what she was up to. She was evasive, saying only that she was doing an Albedo piece for Sparkling. Paul seemed impressed and asked if he could hear some of it. Reluctantly at first, Rhody began playing it. Paul paced in the tiny room as he listened; he had the distracting habit of doing laps around the piano while he listened to his friends play. But the music was so powerful that Rhody found that she could successfully ignore him, at least until something unexpected happened. She came to the emended chord, the soft one dangling like a trumpet vine under the fermata, and played it, holding the sustain pedal down, and glanced up at him to get his reaction, and saw that Paul was completely motionless, halted in mid-step in some sort of trance. The chord slowly faded; when it was inaudible, Paul ajbruptly looked at her and said, “Why did you stop?”

“Why did
you
stop?” said Rhody.

“What do you mean?” said Paul. “You just hit that weird staccato chord and then stopped playing.”

“It was hardly a staccato chord,” said Rhody. “It had a fermata over it, in fact. Look.”

Paul examined the music and raised his eyebrows. “Well, you certainly played it like a staccato chord.”

Rhody pondered Paul’s reaction for a second and then began a few bars back and finished the piece. This time there was no unusual behavior from Paul.

That night she had a dream in which she did Kegel exercises with a vaginal barbell until her PC muscles were so
strong that when she went onstage under black-light and inserted a red Swingline 99 hand-held stapler in her vagina, she could staple a glowing airplane ticket with it. Professor Sparkling was in the audience, watching her staple the airplane tickets that the other men shyly brought up and held between her legs. He had a tube of phosphorescent motionlotion that he squeezed on the shaft of his penis so that, as he began to stroke it, it glowed with a pale blue light. He walked up the side stairs onto the stage and knelt before where she sat on a black Thonet chair. He held in one hand the manuscript of his paper on the history of Mascon Albedo’s deliberate disimprovement of
Map
. He was almost invisible except for his semi-soft glowing penis, although the
EXIT
sign cast a faint reddish tint on his wild Dershowitz-for-the-Defense hair and hairy shoulders; he placed a corner of the manuscript between her thighs and she lifted herself off the seat of the chair and positioned the jaws of the Swingline around the paper and groaned like a weight-lifter and tightened her vaginal muscles as hard as she possibly could and successfully got the stapler to force a staple through all nine pages. There was applause. Professor Sparkling bowed and walked away, stroking his penis in a scholarly way. In the background, the whole time, the fermata chord from
Map
chimed and faded, chimed and faded.

Still under the influence of her dream, she went to her nine o’clock lesson in a state of disoriented, stumbling horniness. “This is a momentous occasion,” Professor Sparkling said archly. He sat as he usually did on a low couch with one ankle on the opposite knee, a copy of the piece open beside him. “All right,” he said and gestured to her to begin. She played. When she came to the fermata chord, she splayed her fingers to play it and brought her hands gently down
and felt both middle fingers descend into the low white key-vales, curved as ballet dancers curve their middle fingers when they stand in second position. Relying on the sustain pedal, she looked over at Sparkling: like Paul the day before, Sparkling was frozen, staring, stopped dead in the act of scratching his upper thigh. She could make out the profane, broccoli-shaped outline of his cock and balls under his loose cuffed pants. Hurriedly, before the chord wore out, she lifted her skirt and slid first her left and then her right middle finger high up into her slot and tickled her cervix. Then she resumed playing the piece. When she finished, Sparkling applauded, as much for himself as for her. “Wonderful, wonderful,” he said, standing. “It’s a strange and moving piece, don’t you think?”

“I do,” said Rhody, looking down at her two middle fingers, which were still slick from her juicy insertions.

“My only question is about the fermata,” said Sparkling. “I don’t understand why you cut it so short. It’s the highlight of the whole work. Let’s try it like this.” He put his fingers over her fingers and played the chord with her. He took note of something. “Why, may I ask, are your two middle fingers perspiring so?” he asked.

“They do that,” she said.

“Ah.”

He requested that she play the work through from the beginning, and this time he stood behind her, his arms crossed. When she reached the fermata chord, she came down on it a little harder than she had the first time, to give herself a longer fade interval. She twisted around to face Alan behind her, taking care to keep her foot firmly down on the sustain pedal. He was as still as a statue. She unzipped his fly and deftly hauled out his taciturn musky handful. She gave his
cock three long stretching sucks. It was big and luncheon-meaty in her mouth; sucking on it was like sucking on a carnalized version of his voice or mind. She fully intended to put his dick away before the
Map
chord ran out on her, but her sucking took a little longer than she planned and she barely had time to turn back to the keyboard and continue playing to the end. She heard a little cry of surprise behind her and some hasty zippering.

When she was done she turned again toward Sparkling and waited silently for his reaction. He looked greatly disconcerted; he was trying to figure something out that couldn’t be figured out; his obvious mystification and flusterment, so unusual for him, was endearing.

“Was the fermata a little better this time?” said Rhody.

“Yes, I think it was.”

“It’s a very powerful work,” said Rhody, relishing Professor Sparkling’s speechlessness. “It’s quite different in effect from the published version.”

“Yes, it is,” Sparkling said.

And let’s say that that was the end of the lesson (I told Rhody). And say that she made a tape of herself playing the fermata chord, shaking the tape recorder to get it to work, and say that she went to the sound lab and sampled this sound (which did indeed appear to be a staccato chord to the listener) and regenerated it, so that simply by hitting the
PLAY
button on a Walkman she could stop time for up to thirty “minutes.” Wouldn’t she, I asked her, take advantage of her freedom by hitting
PLAY
whenever she had the slightest inclination to check out the indolent dick-specifics of any man who caught her eye?

At first I thought she really liked the idea, because she said “Hmm!” to this with a certain amount of enthusiasm.
At one or two places during my hypothetical story (which I have jazzed up here a little for posterity, although it is in its main outlines as I presented it to her), she had gotten an interested glint in her eye. But to my dismay, the more she considered the whole concept of time-perversion, the more she seemed to turn against it. I tried to win her over to it with more examples: wouldn’t it be even slightly interesting to her to be in some public place like Park Street Station, waiting for the train, and to be able to hit
PLAY
and go right through the crowd of men in their ties and jackets and briskly pull their pants down, so that their idiosyncratic idols peeped shyly out from behind their shirttails, available for all sorts of casual assessments and comparisons and cursory fondlings? Surely she would do that if she had the fermational power, wouldn’t she? If she were in a certain mood?