The Soloist (16 page)

I hadn’t decided whether I thought Philip Weber was insane when he committed his crime, but if he had really been in the state of mind Dr. Libertson was describing, it seemed
plausible that he could have killed someone without understanding what he was doing. I knew from a very brief but unforgettable experience that it was possible to be wide awake but feel and act just as in a dream. It happened to me after that last recital in Chicago. I’d put the cello down on the floor of the stage and walked away. Once I’d made it behind the curtains a stagehand led me to the dressing room. My mother came into the room, and I remember being surprised at how calm she seemed. Someone delivered my cello to the room and my mother put it in its case for me, and it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever seen her touch the instrument. We left by the stage door and walked toward a waiting cab.

My mother was trying to put the cello in the front seat when all of a sudden, with an almost audible
whoosh
, I felt my normal sense of being present drain out of me. Just as in a dream, I saw myself walking down the sidewalk. Everyone I could see was staring at me, or so it seemed. They looked drained of their souls; they seemed to be marionettes sculpted out of pliable rubber. I must have stopped walking, because next I remember the marionettes standing in what appeared to be a perfect circle around me. The buildings stood in a larger concentric circle around us, with me at the dead center of it all. The composition of the scene, like that of a Persian miniature, seemed too symmetrical to be real. Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, the feeling of unreality disappeared. Things looked asymmetrical and mundane again, people looked less puppetlike and once again seemed to have souls, and I felt my sense of presence—of being an awake mind inside a real body—return to me. The whole episode probably lasted less than ten seconds—I had taken only four or five steps away from
the cab—but for that time I was truly lost. If my body had decided to suddenly jump into the street or push someone into the traffic, I could no more have stopped myself than I could have willed my heart to stop beating or my stomach to cease digesting its food.

When it came time to cross-examine the doctor, Mr. Graham asked which of the psychological tests given to the defendant confirmed the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Dr. Libertson smiled, as if he had been waiting for the question, and answered that no test can absolutely confirm a diagnosis of schizophrenia; the disorder has to be inferred from behavior, and from responses to treatment.

“I see,” Mr. Graham mused, waving a fly off the railing in front of the witness stand. “And what about insanity—is there any test that can confirm a diagnosis of insanity?”

“No. Insanity is a legal term, not a medical one. It’s up to the court to decide if he was legally insane or not.”

The prosecutor nodded politely and said in his soothing voice, “Yes. Thank you, I was just about to get to that. I’d like to read something aloud to the court.… Just a moment …” He went back to his desk and pulled a sheet of paper out of his briefcase. “Here it is.… This first quote is from a report published by the American Psychiatric Association. It says, ‘The line between an irresistible impulse and an impulse not resisted is probably no sharper than the line between twilight and dusk.’ Would you agree with that, Doctor?”

“In theory, yes,” the doctor conceded.

“Ah. Thank you. This second quote is from another report on the insanity defense, published by the American Bar Association. This says, ‘Experience confirms that there is still
no accurate scientific basis for measuring one’s capacity for self-control or for calibrating the impairment of such capacity. There is, in short, no objective basis for distinguishing between offenders who were undeterrable and those who were undeterred, between the impulse that was irresistible and the impulse not resisted, or between substantial impairment of capacity and some lesser impairment.… The question is unanswerable or, at best, can be answered only by moral guesses.’ ”

Mr. Graham looked at the doctor, again without seeming confrontational at all, and asked, “What about that? Does it sound right?”

Dr. Libertson did not look pleased at the way the testimony was going, but he kept his composure and answered, “I have no choice but to agree that there is no absolutely objective basis for telling the difference, no.”

Mr. Graham nodded gently, then said, “So all of this means, doesn’t it, Doctor, that in the absence of a conclusive medical diagnosis of insanity, it will be the jury’s moral sense that decides, won’t it?”

“Objection!” Ms. Doppelt cried out. “This line of reasoning is gratuitous. He’s trying to invalidate the doctor’s testimony by asking him legal-philosophy questions, not medical ones.”

“Sustained. Mr. Graham, please.”

The older lawyer bowed his head toward his female opponent in a gesture of penitence. “Dr. Libertson,” he resumed, facing the doctor once again. “Isn’t it true that many criminals who are not insane nevertheless have personality disorders that make them violently antisocial, and without any sense of remorse for what they do?”

“That’s a different type of illness, but yes.”

“Ah. The reason I mention this, Doctor, is that I want to remind the court that mental illness by itself does not automatically make a man legally insane.”

“Objection,” Ms. Doppelt protested. “The prosecutor is testifying, not questioning.”

“Sustained.”

I was intrigued by the quote about self-control—the one that suggested that trying to establish the boundary between an irresistible impulse and an impulse not resisted was like trying to determine when twilight ended and dusk began. We all think we can tell when someone is mentally ill or psychologically out of control; an inappropriate facial expression, a voice with an unnatural rhythm, a subtle awkwardness of movement—even the slightest cues give us an immediate sense of recognition. But maybe we aren’t as good at identifying mental illness as we think. In a way I wished the defense attorney would let Philip Weber get up on the witness stand, because I felt I could tell a great deal from listening to him and watching him react. But Judge Davis had warned us that the defendant did not have to testify, and Ms. Doppelt had made a point of informing us that sometimes it serves justice better to let the evidence argue on behalf of the accused rather than the other way around.

Our day ended with the doctor’s testimony. On the shuttle ride out to the parking lot I at last had an opportunity to ask Maria-Teresa how she liked the tape I’d given her.

“You want the polite answer or the rude one?” she asked.

“The honest one, I suppose.”

“Saint-Saëns sucks,” she said, grinning and lighting a cigarette.

“Do you mind not smoking in here?” Mrs. Friedman asked loudly, glancing at me as she spoke. She had not failed to notice the attention I’d been paying Maria-Teresa. I suppose I shouldn’t have given it any thought, but I’m not used to being disapproved of.

“It wasn’t really that bad,” Maria-Teresa explained, tossing her cigarette out the window, “I mean, I’m sure it’s incredible music and I’m just too thick to get it, but it just didn’t hit me. All those instruments, all those fast notes, but it didn’t mean anything; it was like hearing a whole crowd of people talking in another language.”

“It didn’t move you at all, then?”

“Well, again, I’m sure it’s great music.…” She shrugged and looked at me apologetically. She was a philistine, all right, but what an inexplicably stimulating experience it was to have a beautiful woman tell me that Saint-Saëns sucks! I don’t think I’ve had a conversation with someone unimpressed by classical music since I was six years old. What could I talk to her about? I wondered. Should I have been talking to her at all?

I told Maria-Teresa that I was surprised she could enjoy Mozart but remain unmoved by Saint-Saëns.

Her eyes lit up. “Yeah, but that’s because I have some kind of image to associate with it, you know? When Amadeus is in bed sick, but that old guy is making him write the music even though he knows it’s killing him, and you hear the music as he’s writing it? I’ll tell you one thing, Mozart gives great sound track, boy.”

“Yes,” I said, “but now, every time you hear Mozart, you’ll visualize a bunch of actors acting out a scene that never really happened. That business about Salieri killing Mozart is pure nonsense, you know. Those Hollywood—”

“Those Hollywood phonies!” she teased, imitating my habit of fiddling with my tie. “Don’t have an aneurism, OK? If I wanted the truth, I could always watch public television, but life is boring enough as it is. Don’t take offense or anything, but for a guy who can’t be much older than me, you kind of act like a character in a movie with subtitles! Come to think of it, we’ve been going about this totally the wrong way; I think you should borrow some of
my
tapes, instead of the other way around.”

“Really? Do you think they’d cure me?”

“Does Imelda like shoes?” she rasped. “You better call up
that university you teach at and tell ’em you’re quitting your job. I’ll bring you something that’ll make you want to take up guitar.”

The shuttle dropped us off at the lot and we said goodnight. My car was at the far end of the lot. Just as I reached it, I heard someone curse loudly, and I turned to see Maria-Teresa slapping the roof of her car. She must have slapped too hard, because then she started cursing even louder, all in that smoky voice of hers.

I went over to see what was wrong.

“I locked my fucking keys in my fucking car,” she growled. I looked inside, and there they were, gently swinging from the motion of her slapping the car.

“Do you have another key?”

“Yeah, but it’s at home. Shit! It’s a good thing I dispatch ambulances and don’t drive the fucking things! Can you imagine if I did this after putting some poor cardiac arrest in the back? Christ!”

When I asked if her husband could bring the key to her, she laughed. “What day is it today? Monday? He’s probably in Indiana. Either that or Colorado.”

I offered to drive her home to get her key and then drop her back off at the lot, but she said she didn’t want me to have to go to the trouble, and that there was an easy bus she could take. I said that I really wouldn’t mind, and added that this way she could lend me a tape right away. I said that if I was going to have to quit my teaching job after listening to her music, I would have to get started on the paperwork as early as possible. Finally she relented.

“Nice car,” she said as I unlocked the door for her. It was an old Jaguar, not the flashy E-type but the old sedan,
something I bought and had restored as soon as I could afford one. I told her that I fell in love with this model when I lived in Germany and saw them all the time on the autobahn. Naturally she asked why I had lived in Europe, and I told her a little bit about the years I had spent with von Kempen.

“Speaking of that,” she said, “I remember the lawyer saying he listened to one of your records. Do you have a tape of it that you could lend me?”

“You didn’t read the label?” I asked. “I was the soloist on the Saint-Saëns tape.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth and slid down in the seat. “Oh, man, I’m so sorry!” she said, to my sheer delight. I was overjoyed that finally—
finally
—she was blushing rather than me.

“No need to apologize,” I said. “I’ve had worse reviews than that, I can tell you.”

“Well, what do I know, anyway. I blame society.”

She directed me to her home, which at first looked like a dilapidated shack, but on closer inspection turned out to be a charming little bungalow that really only needed a new porch and a paint job.

Inside, the house was a mess. Maria-Teresa apologized, but said that when her husband was away she enjoyed not bothering to keep house. “You want a beer before we go back to the lot? I really appreciate your doing this for me.”

“No, thanks. I’m not much of a beer drinker.”

“What do you drink, just out of curiosity?”

“Wine, gin, scotch—whatever.”

She rolled her eyes up into her head. “When you drink gin, do you drink it out of one of those Y-shaped glasses?”

“Sometimes, yes. Why?”

“I just want to know what I’m up against here—as far as picking out a record for you, I mean. It sounds to me like you’ve got some kind of premature aging thing that makes you want to listen only to music by dead guys. It must be far along by now. We’ll have to start gradually—I don’t want you to have a stroke or anything.”

She walked over to a small table that was overflowing with cassette tapes. Most of them didn’t appear to be in their boxes. The furniture in the house was all overstuffed and looked as if it came from Sears, and there were no bookshelves or books anywhere. “Actually,” she said, fingering an earring, “I’ll want to give this some thought. I can pick one for you later. You probably want to get going, huh?”

“I’m not in a hurry, but if you have things to do …”

“No, I don’t have anything to do. You sure you don’t want a beer while you’re waiting, then? I’m gonna have one.”