Two

Tattersall lost no time in trying to square himself with Mayo. He seized the first opportunity to rehabilitate his image in that quarter, now opened up against him like a second front. After all, he saw more of her than he did of Lucy.

He caught sight of her running up the library steps the following Monday afternoon, her long legs flashing and her black hair bouncing on her shoulders, and decided to wait in the street for her to come out again. He was carrying a brown leather attaché case, filled, at the moment, with washing machine parts, and wearing a blue blazer with a white shirt open at the throat. An ascot had been removed and pocketed since leaving the house, in a moment of self-doubt. This was more Gioconda-phobia, which might be a name for the fear of being laughed at (or, what is worse, smiled at) especially by women. Even women fear the derision of their own sex more than that of men.

No such vacillation, in any event, attended the contents of the attaché case. Tattersall made no bones about liking to tinker with his hands, of plain liking to do his own repairwork, whether of machinery or furniture. He had dismantled Sherry’s broken Kitchen King and was carting some of its smaller organs down to Mr. Tompkins’s sales agency, for scrutiny and possible replacement, doing so on foot since Sherry needed the car to take the wash to the coin laundry. He not only did not mind such errands. He enjoyed them. Like many husbands, Tattersall liked those aspects of domesticity that got him out of the house.

The attaché case was heavy, and he set it down while he waited. He more or less hid behind a tree from which he could keep an eye on the library without being seen himself. He had decided to give it five minutes. If Mayo did not emerge by then it meant she had gone in to study, not merely to return or draw books. Five minutes did go by, but he gave it a few more. He was debating whether to light a cigarette when the door opened and she tripped down the stairs to the sidewalk. He snatched up the attaché case and ran across the street after her.

“Well, good afternoon, Mayo,” he said, trying not to pant too heavily as he slowed to draw abreast of her, for she had settled down to a normal stride herself. “How did you like your uncle’s talk? I didn’t get a chance to see you afterward. I thought he did a bang-up job.”

“It was all right as far as those things, you know, go,” she answered in her rapid, gliding whisper. “I just don’t know much about conformity.”

Mayo’s speech was heavily studded with you-knows, a habit Tattersall found intensely irksome as a general rule. You-knowers, in fact, put him on edge. You waited for the next one, clocking them almost. Mayo you-knowed you to death. She even incorporated the expression into other expressions. “He’s a hail, you know, fellow well met,” she might have said of her uncle.

“It’s what you expect at a dinner like that, I guess,” she whispered, hooking her leather bag over her shoulder. “I wouldn’t know. I never, you know, go to them.”

Mayo had the tendency of many people, particularly young people of a certain stamp, of preening themselves on their ignorance of those areas of life familiarity with which would stigmatize them as commonplace. The realities of bourgeois existence fell especially in that category, gaps in their comprehension of which was deemed commendable, to be preserved if at all possible—almost a form of perception. She knew nothing about Big League baseball or Little League baseball, she knew nothing about the PTA, or about banquets at which establishment platitudes were rained on the unresisting.

Then this was all he got for his pains. To be as much as told that he had rebuked a boor on behalf of balderdash of which she took an even dimmer view than he did. He longed to say it wasn’t a world he made either, to tell those watchfully innocent, gently ridiculing doe’s eyes, “Don’t give me that Mona Lisa gaze, my dear. I didn’t come out of the Dodge Rebellion owning two cars. This is a satchelful of built-in ob, you know, selescence that I’m at least waging a little war on by doing my own repair work, and not letting every contraption I buy give up the ghost when the manufacturer wants it to. Oh, no! What’s your generation doing?”

The take-over generation spawned like smelts, they swarmed like bees. Why did they then not take over? Why had they not already done so? Were there still some few not quite of the voting age at which they could elect, as threatened, the representatives who would legalize not only pot but LSD itself? They would take that till they were forty, when they would be ready for Medicare and candidates for relief—guests from then on of the square society. Guiltily shoving the ascot farther down in his pocket, Tattersall changed the subject.

“How did you like the music? The concert the other afternoon.”

“All right of its kind. I just don’t think the quartet was very good. So the composer didn’t get a fair, you know, shake.”

“There’s an even farther out concert this afternoon. The German composer Witkopf? He’s demonstrating some of his electronic music in the Student Center lounge. I’m on my way to it,” he fabricated. “Care to come along?”

“Oh …” She frowned uncertainly at the Tower clock.

“It starts at two, and it’s an easy place to sneak out of. I know, I’ve lectured there. We’ve just time to make it.”

“We should certainly be out by half-past three,” Mayo whispered.

Tattersall’s spirits rose as he struck out across the campus beside this enchanting creature, swinging the heavy briefcase as though there were nothing in it. He held a forefinger against the lid to secure it, since one of the catches was sprung and he was afraid the other might not hold the weight of all the hardware by itself. Here it was again, the eternal second chance, the opportunity to sparkle on a subject in which, music being a kind of hobby with him, he was passably versed, and as they hurried under falling leaves, yet through the warm November sunshine, he briefed his young charge on what they were about to hear.

The innovation that awaited them in this instance was something known as “plaid music.” The coinage, Witkopf’s own, was intended to emphasize the separate but equal themes running at right angles to one another, or visualizable as such, like the patterns in a fabric. The result was best grasped by being imagined as music standing on end (like a plaid garment hung on a line), with a vertical theme, a melody in the sense of its being composed on notes going up and down the scale, interwoven with a sound principally harmonic, a single sustained noise varying in volume and depth but with little use for pitch, so that in its persistence it could be imagined as fixedly horizontal.

“Or you can think of it as warp and woof,” Tattersall panted as they sprinted up the stairs to the lounge. “I don’t care. It’s more legitimate than might at first appear. It’s basically quite rooted in tradition, when you think of arpeggios against held notes, say, which runs through the history of musical …”

They slipped into the last two seats left, one of them available only after an elderly gentleman had removed his hat from it and set it on his lap. Tattersall sat with his thirty pounds of hardware on his. Repulski rose to introduce Witkopf, who in turn gave a short introductory talk about what he was driving at. The composition they were about to hear was a recording of a symphony of his made in Stuttgart the summer before. The comments being rather technical, Mayo drew a small notebook and pencil from her bag, and after a few moments of inconvenient scribbling on her knee, leaned toward Tattersall and whispered, “May I use your briefcase?”

“What?” he said, looking away.

“Your briefcase. To write on.”

“There’s no paper in it,” he whispered back, pretending to misunderstand.

“No, to write on. For a desk.” She wrote in the air to illustrate.

Feeling for the third time in as many days that malevolent agencies were conspiring to keep the back of his neck roasted, Tattersall picked up the attaché case in both hands and transferred it from his knees to Mayo’s. Then he looked away again, trying to do so in a negligent manner, but he knew perfectly well she was turning to gape at him.

“What in God’s name have you got in here?”

“Another chapter of Oxenfelt’s novel.”

An old lady in a black hat turned around to glare at them, the forerunner of many another scowl from various directions. These Tattersall welcomed, as they put a necessary end to Mayo’s interrogation. They all again concentrated their full attention on Witkopf.

Witkopf refuted most of what Tattersall had said in defense of his music. It had no roots in tradition whatsoever, according to him. It owed nothing to anybody, living or dead. It was a revolution overturning the form of government, indeed government as such, and not merely offering another change of administration such as even such radical innovators as Stravinsky and Schönberg had done. Conventional instruments themselves were dispensed with except insofar as they might offer their electronic contribution to those of picks and shovels, saws, vacuum cleaners, running faucets, and anything else at hand. For all sound was to be regarded as music, and the sequences, or modalities, to follow on recording, often unplanned and unexpected, were improvised out of what painters and sculptors, too, called “available materials.” A basic reverence for reality, in short, permeated it all. There was one effect achieved by using a violin to beat a rug, another by blowing a flute underwater. The human voice was employed, but in arrangements and to purposes arbitrarily chosen by the composer, often on the spur of the moment, actually as the conductor. Thus the music was in part aleatoric, that is, the product of chance, hence replete with random turns and unexpected developments to which Witkopf urged his audience to listen with closed eyes, the better to keep an open mind, and simply give themselves to what they heard without prejudice or predilection. There would be “loud hushes” interspersing the rhythmic and arhythmic sections, in which they might recompose their minds and await the next “duration.” They must feel perfectly at liberty to hiss, but in so doing they would be only aleatorically contributing to the whole. That ought to be borne in mind. It was only fair to remind them.

Tattersall abandoned the horse blanket he had planned to keep in mind as an aid to comprehension, and instead let the succession of noises that followed have their way with him, though not precisely in a manner envisioned by the composer. What he did was dwell freely on whatever they suggested to him in the way of physical objects. The tradition of composers who painted musical pictures was vast, self-justifying. Tattersall made no effort to find logical or even emotional order in the tonal happenstances they were now served—to which he did not take too kindly now that their originator had undercut his defense of them—but simply converted the squeaks, rasps, buzzes, gurgles, murmurs and rumbles into their, for him, optical counterparts, and as arbitrarily as Witkopf dished them up. Thus he “heard”: chicken livers, a glass of blood, pancakes revolving on a phonograph turntable and maple syrup poured on records, a public fountain plashing motor oil, medical capsules filled with tiny multi-colored shot made to explode at staggered intervals, prolonging repose or excitement in the swallower. That kind of thing. In the climaxes of the music, which issued from four huge amplifiers stationed in the four corners of the room, he imagined all of these objects as being fed into an enormous Disposall, in which they were assimilated at inconceivable temperatures and extruded at the other end in the form of long, pure sheets of metal known as Silence. The audience was at long last put into it, everyone, including the old lady in the black hat sitting directly in front of him. There was a faint, final grinding as she went, a delicate crunch of bones, shoes, jewelry, corset stays, the works.

Tattersall momentarily gave off this reverie to glance about him. Many heeded the composer’s admonition to close their eyes, though one or two used their fingers to stop up something else. A fragment of Repulski’s profile indicated his brown jawbreaker eyeballs to be shut in meditation, exemplifying the passivity required by a fair surrender to this medium. A long silence of the kind promised by the author, for the digestion of received impressions and the preparation of the spirit for a fresh course of effects, fostered the sense of legitimate trance among the listeners.

It was then he felt the point of Mayo’s elbow gently prodding his ribs. He turned. Silently, she indicated that she was finished with the attaché case and would appreciate having its great weight removed from her lap back to his. Tattersall nodded. He reached both hands over and, grasping the handle with one and bracing a corner with the other, began to lift it off of her knees onto his own. It was then that the next modality occurred—all that could have been asked in the way of a random sequence with available materials.

Either Mayo accidentally unlatched the single good clasp, or it had also now broken under the strain. With nothing to hold it shut, the lid fell back under a sudden shift in the contents of the briefcase, which also simultaneously made the briefcase slide off of Tattersall’s knee. A misguided attempt on Mayo’s part to help was partly responsible for the awkward angle at which it tilted. When the lid flopped open, everything spilled out on the floor. The objects included a pump, a hose, a timer, a solenoid (a contrivance which transmits instructions from the timer to the rest of the wash machine) and an elbow-shaped pipe assembly. In addition there was an assortment of incidental mechanical giblets such as nuts, bolts, gaskets and lock washers.

The cascade of hardware was followed by the crash of the attaché case itself, which slipped out of both their hands. Instinctively, Tattersall moved to retrieve the articles and put them back. But the folding chairs on which they sat were too closely crowded for such a tidying up, which would have necessitated getting down on all fours—not to mention prolonging the disturbance with more racket and to-do. So he got back into his chair as quietly as he could. The last thing he saw before folding his arms and closing his eyes was a twisting sea of faces. Everyone was turning to glare at him, with the exception of the composer.