You Were Wrong (5 page)

The dining room table had gold, clawed feet and was made of a fine, dark, quietly polished wood, had rounded ends and fitted pads to prevent spilled food and drink from bleeding through the linen cloth to the wood, “because wood comes from trees, as we all know, which, in order to stay alive, must absorb air, water, and nutrients, and this very property of the wood that keeps it alive can make it ugly when it’s dead,” said the man who was then new to the house, Larchmont Jones, with a wink at Karl, one of the repertory of gestures during the long dinnertime disquisitions that caused Karl to want to tell the man to blow him, though that outcome would of course have ultimately been unacceptable. And there was the sideboard groaning with dinner foods, half of a duet of groans of boy and former tree. And what would cause a person to buy a little wooden stand whose purpose was to display a plate, eating surface facing out for diners to consider as they ate their food? Maybe it was the not-completely-despicable sentiment that
Isn’t it amazing how sometimes ordinary household objects if looked at in the right way can be works of art?
but you couldn’t really trust most people with a sentiment like that because experience had suggested to Karl that there wasn’t a sturdy enough partition in the human heart between it and the one that went,
Isn’t this plate certain evidence of the perfect commingling in me of wealth and discernment?
In any case, the sideboard plate display was new to the boy and alien to the family culture he’d been naturalized into, as was the jackass who’d brought it.

But the point was, there sat his mother in her auxiliary spot at the dining room table in the mind of the son who’d survived her, listening inscrutably to the maniac, the cause of the trouble, discourse interminably on the troubles in the Golan Heights, the challenges that beset the American labor movement, the Women’s National Basketball Association, oil drilling in the Arctic wilderness, or the economy, stupid—perfectly good subjects ruined by the man who held them captive in his mouth. And what was this lady doing in Karl’s mind as he stood in this unlikely kitchen of his twenty-seventh year? There was, that he could tell, no incident on the night of the dinner now in his thoughts, if such a dinner had existed outside of them, no remark or action of his mother’s for him to remember her by. This may just have been one of those quiet image-clusters passing through one’s brain on its own time, a messageless emissary from the old world to the new, his ordinary mother in her crisp blouse come back through the revolving door of time.

Karl looked up at Sylvia Vetch, whose hand was on the top of his head. He was sitting on the grimy kitchen floor. “You done with your work break now?”

“Why am I sitting down?”

“I don’t know, what about my question?”

“What question?”

“Is there a legally binding document?”

“Why do you insist on this?”

“Because it’s controlling your life.”

“Who are you?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Because I don’t know who you are.”

She helped him to his feet with her sweaty hand. “This is who I am.” She stood and looked at him, inches from his body, taut, a violin string in pants, toes grimed along the seams, hair black, straight, pulled up in a bun. He was dizzy, and left the kitchen.

“Where you going?”

He vectored for the front door, out of it, back down into the dark backyard, cut off from the sun by trees. Out in the small plot of grass and sand and fragrant conifers with soft brown flaky bark, he had another memory of his mother, the one of her in a sunlit room at the hospice on white and sunshine-smelling sheets, bed cranked up, face immobilized, pale and waxy in a predeath mask. He started toward the woods he’d come up from, and in which he’d been held by the woman he’d just left standing in the house above him, but then, the hug in mind, went back up the hill along the side of the house and in the front door. Stony, his back to Karl, stood in the kitchen where Karl had stood, and Sylvia had not moved from her spot. Stony wore Karl’s yellow hat. “I’m Karl,” he said. “I got beat up by two boys. My mother is dead. One day I’m gonna own her house!” Sylvia laughed, saw Karl, stopped. Stony turned, saw Karl, snatched the hat from his head, turned back, hid his face from Karl. Sylvia did not. Hers was agonized. A soft cry escaped it. Karl fled.

FOUR

HE RETURNED HOME.
There was no worse violation of a soul than hope. He showered in the bathroom with the lesser towels, “his” bathroom; the possession of bathrooms and the consistency of towels, were these the important considerations in the life of a young man? Meandering in the dark hallway he had met her in the day before, he heard badly played piano music. Larchmont Jones this fine Saturday afternoon in spring was home attempting Chopin’s Nocturne No. 4 in F, Op. 15 No. 1. He worked the first theme repeatedly, like a high school marching band tromping back and forth on the balding patch of grass next to the faculty parking lot. The piano was in the rec room next to the pool table. Chords made their way doggedly up the stairs. He thought of his blended family’s passions for the rec room’s two adjacent items of furniture. He and this man had played a game of pool while his mother practiced this same song. The two immovable objects were close enough that for some shots a focused player might tap the lustrous black body of the Steinway baby grand with the butt of his cue. They had placed, man and boy, a wager of ten dollars on the game, which Karl even at that time had understood to be nothing for the man and everything for himself, a concrete iteration of the stakes in the ongoing matchups the man had a genius for drawing him into and he a genius for losing—a daily dose of death that he resisted justifying as practice for the final one awaiting him. Jones had sunk two stripes on the break and another on each of his next three shots, then missed one, strategically, it seemed, leaving his stepson to ponder how an arrangement of colored resin balls on a flat felt surface could be so precise a physical embodiment of the moral experience of humiliation. Teen-Karl—a creature whose ill-fitting skin man-Karl had botched the molting of—uttered one of the wrong remarks he was famous for in his own mind, the kind the person who says them doesn’t quite hear till they’re outside his head and then is powerless but to rue: “I wish she wouldn’t practice when we’re trying to play.”

“Interesting”—the boy marveled at his adversary’s ability to fashion weapons from ordinary household objects such as
interesting
—“that we have arrived at a moment in history when these two activities can compete head-to-head in the same room of a modest family home. Had one an old-fashioned godlike view of humanity, now correctly proved immodest and false by leftist historians, one might be able to assign a clear hierarchy of value to all the leisure activities a given family could pursue, and from this vantage pocket billiards would be so far down the staircase, if you will, from serious music in the European tradition that one wouldn’t think of pitting the two against each other in a battle of wills, let alone arrive at the conclusion that pool should be given precedence over Chopin. But in today’s modern world, in which ours is surely not the only suburban house where a pool table and a piano sit side by side like a pair of hippopotami cooling in the river of bourgeois culture, and in which most of what goes by the name of
value
has been rightly shown to be a matter decided not by Nature but by Agreement, one cannot simply assume the superiority of great music over parlor sport, so as far as that goes I take your point.” He was diabolical. “On the other hand, old-fashioned though this too may sound to your young ears, I do believe there are times when the men of a household must defer to the wishes of its lady, so I advance the idea that we wrap up our game quickly and leave your mother to practice her instrument.” Whereupon Karl missed his shot, Jones made one and missed one, Karl made two then missed, and Jones handily won the game along with its ten-dollar prize. Belinda Floor, mute of mouth in the rec room as at the dinner table, made manifest the darkness of her son’s heart through the enraged tangle of bass notes that began the nocturne’s second theme. Or so the young man at the top of the stairs twelve years later—now—liked to think, but music and memory were kinds of information mostly unsusceptible to literal deciphering. The moods they evoked were a wordless form of knowing that could leave a person feeling stupider than before he’d been awash in them.

The same pained piano tones traveled the air of the house repeatedly and without apology, like a series of farts produced by an old sick dog whose smell’s effect on others is the least of his worries. The sound threatened Karl’s delicate numbness. With no place to go, he came down the stairs, went for the door, and heard the word “Chopin.

“He composed that nocturne one winter on Majorca, do you know Majorca? I could show you on the map, let’s go to the rec room and I’ll show you. Or if you have to go out now that’s fine. A world map, think about it, a map of the world. The entirety of the planet color-coded on a big piece of paper, every inch of land parceled into nation-states, ‘landscape plotted and pieced,’ as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, who was just a boy when Chopin died, and he died quite young, late thirties. He got sick as a dog on Majorca, off the east coast of Spain, the same latitude as Wilmington, approximately—cold, in other words, in the winter, and him holed up in a Carthusian monastery—the Carthusians, interesting sect, hermits living together in humble clusters—very poor heat retention in these monasteries and who knows why Chopin chooses this place seeing as he’s famous across the continent, all the hotels booked I suppose. The great composer’s deep, bronchial cough resounds off the monastery’s stone walls and the island’s doctors come one by one to see him. On Christmas day he wrote to a friend, ‘The first doctor said I was going to die. The second said I was dying. The third said I was dead.’ It’s good to have a sense of humor in these situations, and a companion, which in Chopin’s case was George Sand. This was not a homosexual relationship, George Sand was a lady writer who took the name of a man and sometimes dressed in men’s clothing. She had two children, they came along. His great French piano was held up in customs so he was composing on a tin can by all reports. You’re Chopin and you’re on Majorca and you’re composing your nocturnes and your scherzos while running a fever and coughing up blood into this piece-of-junk musical instrument with your cross-dressing girlfriend’s two kids fighting over a doll at your feet, now that’s what I call genius.”

Larchmont Jones was thin but had lately begun to bloat. He leaned in the doorway between the living room and front hall of the house, with his gray goatee, French-cuffed yellow monogrammed dress shirt, pressed khakis, slip-proof loafers with decorative leather tassels, and tight yellow knee socks to help the circulation, to which the calf muscle, Jones had once informed him, was crucial, an ancillary pump, a second little heart on the lower floor of the establishment. Every day now people wearing dress shirts arrived in Karl’s life to impede him. Jones looked tired. His face was gray and red. The darker skin beneath the eyes was gathered in loose bunches like dusty drapes resting on a carpeted floor. Thin, frameless spectacles held the puffed-out end of his nose. He was neither pleasant nor well. “Tell me what I’m doing wrong,” he said.

“What?”

“On the Chopin. I’m, you know, going for supreme delicacy, but uh.”

It might be worthwhile to mention at this time that just when Karl had cut short Stony’s imitation of him, complete with hat, he’d begun to feel a new kind of energy—let’s call it
energy
—in his limbs and head. “I feel different,” he’d already said to himself several times on the drive home and in the shower, reprising a famous line from the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
television program. “I’d say you’re within a thousand kilometers at most of supreme delicacy,” he said now to Jones.

The older man raised an eyebrow in acknowledgment of his housemate’s wit. “Just a few minutes of close listening, with sarcasm, even, I’d certainly appreciate. How for example would you say I’m handling the rubato?”

“What’s rubato?”

“It’s short for
tempo rubato
, which in Italian literally means ‘robbed time,’ and it’s when you play some little bits of the song slower and others faster than the sheet music literally tells you to. Chopin encouraged this to give a piece of music that romantic feel.”

“Well so I’m guessing rubato doesn’t mean you play each note as if it was from a different song than all the other notes are from.”

“Now you see? That’s exactly the kind of useful criticism—again, sarcasm notwithstanding—”

“I gotta go.”

“Humor an old man.”

“Which one?”

“The one who may well be out of your hair in a matter of months.”

“Why, are you going somewhere?”

“Maybe. And this place you’re going with such urgency is?”

He didn’t like Jones’s slightly opened mouth. It, like his raised eyebrow, acknowledged something, who knew what? He may really only have wanted piano help on this occasion, he was nothing if not sentimental and self-involved, and often appeared not to know he’d practically raped Karl a thousand times with his unhappy wit, but it also needed to be taken into account that he hadn’t yet remarked on Karl’s face, and that he’d been known to keep a comment to himself and use the silence that replaced it as a filament to tether Karl to him. But Karl felt filament-proof, inoculated if you will that very afternoon against being duped or bested for at least the rest of the day, and, mistaking pain for wisdom, chose to abandon the exit and enter the rec room.

“Now if this rec room were somehow the foyer of the famous Steinway Hall in New York City, which was the biggest music venue in town till they built Carnegie Hall, what you’d see here would be one of each of every piano they made, including an example or two of their custom models for elite clients, because while the backbone of their branding scheme was the ubiquity of the piano—you had a piano because you had one and you didn’t question having one because you didn’t question having a table and plates to eat off of—the, uh, donut hole if I may now switch metaphors of the brand was the whiff of rarity, the whiff of difficulty, of aspiration, it’s got to hurt you a little to have a piano or you wouldn’t really want it. Was it the black American author James Baldwin who said that the failure of the American labor movement could be attributed to the symbolic desire of every worker for the boss’s daughter’s hand in marriage? Am I making sense here or am I just rambling?” Jones said as he played a few inaugural chords that were not all that different to Karl from getting punched. “The Steinways were Germans, by the way. Still are, they’ve got a plant in Frankfurt I believe or Hamburg, cities that sound alike to us but probably have little to do with each other if you’re actually German. They’ve got to this day a bold business plan that bespeaks genius.”

Karl had never been comforted by the power of boldness or genius. He really did hope in spite of everything he knew about life that the meek would inherit the earth, though he didn’t see how they could all share it and be any better off than they were now.

Jones played the first theme once through and Karl paced more rapidly than he felt Chopin would have wanted him to on the far side of the pool table, keeping it at all times between the music and himself.

“All right so what should I do here?”

“Take some piano lessons.”

“It’s a fair point. I get so busy during the week—someone’s got to slay the dragons—so I’m lucky if I get an hour here and there to practice, and then too I’m restless, easily distracted. I’d do better if there weren’t a pool table also in this room. If each one had its own room I’d be good at both, but as it is I’m
not
good at both. I pushed your mother to move to a bigger house, even after she got sick, but it eventually doesn’t feel right, someone’s leaving this world and you’re trying to get them to move to a bigger house. Now I guess you and I are stuck here, locked in mortal embrace so to speak.”

“What do you mean?”

He sat up straight on the piano bench in right profile and cut his right eye toward Karl. “Should I dare?”

“Dare what?”

“Play the second theme.”

“You could be sodomized by the second theme.”

Jones played what seemed to Karl a loud, fast, random group of notes with both hands.

He knew Jones kept a permanent record of every aggression and would repay each in triplicate with any of his own far more various and refined modes of attack, often long after the fact, perhaps posthumously. Karl didn’t care. A beautiful not-caring was happening to Karl; he knew he wasn’t in charge of it and didn’t care about that either. Things were really and truly changing, whether for the better or the worse hardly mattered.