HE DID LIVE. Although all his life he wanted to follow his mother and father into realms of which he had no fear if only because they were there, and by sharing in their defeat to know, honor, and love them well, he lived intensely and deeply even so. Music kept him steady on course. Its magic clarified existence, stimulated courage as if from thin air, and illuminated that which could not be understood except in the language of music itself, and of which, when the music ceased, the only remnants were the conviction and desire such as one has when longing to re-enter a dream.
Whether or not the rhythm and syncopation of music matched the pulse, the atomic and subatomic timing within the body, or the symphonic motion of countless electrons in every nerve, channel, and cell, its wavelike melody and narrative elevated all things. Without this, Jules, when he was young, would not have been able to go on. So he sought it out, he studied hard and practiced until he bled, and it saved him.
Through the fifties and into the sixties, when a lucrative career and glory were possible in classical music, his fellow students worked for fame and riches. Moved by ambition – some so much so that they worked harder than he did – they went further. In his field, François did the same, rising to the position of someone respected by his peers and sought by every facet of journalism, even Indonesian TV. Jules was left behind. When whatever talents he could proffer had opened opportunities to rise, he froze, unable to perform in public. He associated the joy of success with betrayal of his mother and father, and as if to be true to them in their darkness as, he imagined, they moved through eternal space, he failed time after time.
But just the music was enough. It made a quiet existence better than that which was royal or rich. Every step and misstep brought him closer to them and made him loyal to all who had come before. Though it never succeeded completely, music promised that sin and suffering might be washed away.
OTHER CITIES HAVE been or in time will be liberated, but the nature of Paris is such that when it was liberated in 1944 its beauty swelled as if fed by an artesian stream the Germans had been unable to stem. By coincidence, fashion, or the lack of dyes in wartime, the women of Paris at the Liberation were dressed mainly in white. In their simple white dresses as they marched at the forefront of crowds in celebration, they were like angels. At the Liberation, the impure were made pure, and people who had never experienced happiness suddenly came to know it.
Paris after the war was the creation of Paris before and during the war, and little of the stress and emotion was lost or forgotten. So when Jules was a boy, first in Reims and a few years later in Passy, he was living as much in the war as after it. He always remembered, and often would recall, how at eighteen and brimming over with energy and invincibility – before his induction, before the pine-covered mountains of Algeria, before the experience of exiting an aircraft in flight – he rode on a summer day upon the rear platform of a bus on the Boul-Miche, one of those buses that seem to have been part of Paris forever and to be destined to last just as long, but did not. If you were young and agile, you hopped onto the back as they were moving, and smiled at the angry conductor – if he was there to catch you – who then gave you a cardboard ticket after you had paid up.
Jules had just been conscripted and was saying goodbye to the Quartier latin and a way of life he had closely observed but never embraced, as had for example François, who without inhibition gave himself over to study while surrendering his body to wine, tobacco, and frenzies of the intellect. On the bus, Jules looked down the boulevard as the traffic made clouds of almost-sweet diesel smoke. It was hot, and the overarching limbs of the trees swayed slightly in the wind. Nineteen fifty-eight – everything seemed possible.
MORE THAN FIFTY-SIX years later, the buoyancy of youth long gone, he would make a telephone call to set in motion a series of events that were they to go smoothly or even just adequately would as in the last movement of a symphony unite disparate currents into one stream. Although he himself would never see the braiding of the threads, he hoped that they might save Luc; help Cathérine and David; punish the son-of-a-bitch, lying, dishonorable Jack and the crazy, son-of-a-bitch, lying, dishonorable Rich Panda; allow him to escape jeopardy for what he had done on the Île aux Cygnes; and, finally, achieve at last his greatest ambition.
It would start with a telephone call from which everything else might cascade. Although somewhere south and east of Iceland, eight miles in the air over the darkest ocean, he had laid down the rough outlines of what he had to do, he went over it again and again to rehearse the details and anticipate the unexpected. The dangerous things he had done in his life he had done either in the heat of the moment or as a soldier without choice in the matter. Here, he had a choice, and passion could easily ruin what calculation might achieve.
Before he made the call, to steady himself, clear his mind, and create a kind of alibi, he re-established his routine. It was as if he were two people, one embarking upon something complicated and dangerous, the other quietly going about his business. He would retreat to the routine whenever he felt himself beginning to falter, but, when he regained his footing, go out again.
He began to run once more, gently. He had lost weight in America and now, because of François’ revelation, perhaps only a claim, when he could not eat. Blood pressure and chemistry, pulse, and stamina had to be honed to near ideal levels for his age. He would sleep well, eat sparingly, and work as hard on his endurance as he could without pushing enough to trigger the end.
He placed his faith on the frequency of exercise rather than on its intensity or the length of a single session. This made him very, very busy, in that he would run, swim, and do calisthenics and weights four times a day. He ran so slowly that it was almost like fast walking. The swimming was low key as well, as were the calisthenics. In between sessions, he would nap. This regime was so demanding of his time that he had to take regular days off to attend to other business. He did, however, have a lot of time – on the long terrace, in the pool, before he slept, and as he sat in a café for lunch or tea – to work on his plan, which as it grew in detail he kept exclusively in his memory, with nothing written.
Neither tiring himself nor dropping dead, he passed into the new year, during which he would run ten kilometers and swim two every day, and do hundreds of abdominal, stretching, and weight exercises, with much rest, and civilized meals of small portions. He gave up reading the papers and hardly attended to his mail, which would accumulate as if on the desk of the kind of irresponsible person he had never been.
One did not need to read the papers to know about the massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher market, or the beatings, boycotts, divestments, and threats. Three years before, after the murder of Jewish children in Toulouse, Jules had come to a conclusion that others were not quite ready to adopt even at present. Now his answer to these events, as most people reacted with surprise, was to maintain a stoic silence and keep up the kind of program common to young musicians embarked upon pre-competition: epic, cloistered practice. What they did was like what Olympic athletes do, like the life of a ballet dancer, the charrette of an architect, or the self-isolation and Herculean work of a great scholar. Though Jules had something else in mind, he pursued it with similar devotion even if the months of discipline would no longer be necessary after one single unthreatening hour.
He didn’t have much to do with anyone except Cathérine, David, and a few waiters and clerks in Saint-Germain-en-Laye whom he had known for decades. The man at the swimming pool wouldn’t even look at him now. He said, once, and only once, after admitting Jules twice a day for a few months, “Congratulations, you now have the body of Arnaud Schwarzenaigre, but if you keep this up you’re going to drop dead.”
“Thank you,” answered Jules, as he tossed his towel into a bin and headed out into air so cold it froze the water left in his hair. But, warm and ruddy, he enjoyed the wind.
He still had not made the phone call, but he had the plan in his mind in as much depth and detail as if he had practiced it a thousand times. He had done the necessary research. All that remained to set it in motion was to press the buttons on the telephone. The new term had begun. He paid no attention, because he thought he had left that life behind. But he hadn’t quite done that, because no plan is perfect.
SAINT-GERMAIN-EN-LAYE that winter was paler, cleaner, and quieter than Paris. The stones had not been as darkened by soot. As the buildings were lower, more blue sky was visible, and, of course, as it was on a height, it was windier. Except during market hours, the streets were fairly empty, sometimes achieving the winter silence of a country village. Just as the great forest and the long views in all seasons brought the contentment of nature, so did the clarity of winter and the cold that swept cleanly through the town, quieting the streets and returning people to the stillness and assurance of home, with red coals in the hearth.
This kind of winter, the Christmas kind, of lights and joys in darkness, is then often subsumed in the raw, wet cold that kills off the season as it grows old. But rain and sleet can turn into beautiful white snow in the aftermath of which the ground is blinding, the air clear, and the sky blue.
One afternoon in February, Jules was between his penultimate and last exercise sets of the day. He would fall into a narcotic-like sleep in these interludes, and wake up flushed and freezing once he tossed the covers to the side. Going out into the sleet or rain was painful, but he did it time and again. It strengthened him so much that it was dangerous: he was not supposed to live like a young recruit in basic training.
Still in his running clothes, he was cold and he had the fever-like remnants of a nap in winter. Some stretching and calisthenics warmed him up and he was just about to go out when he heard a brutal knocking on his door. This had to be Claude the gardener, who knocked with an identifiable coarseness, as if the cold and wet outside were resentfully petitioning the comfort of a heated house.
It was indeed Claude, whose face was redder than Jules’ even though in winter he was not outside that much and spent most of his time in the gatehouse, looking at television and drinking the kind of red wine that comes in square cartons. He’d come through the fog and drizzle. “There’s a girl at the gate,” he said. “She says she has an appointment.”
“What?”
“There’s a girl at the gate. She said she has an appointment.”
“I don’t understand,” Jules said, mainly to himself.
But Claude took it literally. “A woman, a female. She’s standing near the gate. She says that she, the woman, the female, has an appointment – a meeting, a rendezvous – with you, Jules Lacour.”
“I got it.”
“You said you didn’t.”
“I mean, I don’t have an appointment with her. I don’t have an appointment with anybody.”
“I’ll tell her that.”
“No, no. I may have forgotten.”
“What should I tell her? She has a big case.”
“Let her in.”
“What if there’s a machine gun in the case and she wants to assassinate Shymanski?”
“Shymanski’s not here and he’s not coming back.”
“He always says that.”
“This time it’s for real. The sons are selling the house. New owners on the first of September. Everything changes.”
“I didn’t know that,” Claude said, visibly sinking. You could see it in his face.
“Maybe they’ll keep you on.”
“If they don’t I’ll go on strike.”
“You’re in a union?”
“No.”
“There’s probably enough time to form a gardeners’ union if you start today. Meanwhile, tell the woman, the female, to come in.”
“Does she know where to go? Has she been here before?”
“Point to my door. And, Claude ….”
“Did you tell her anything about me?”
“No. Why would I?”
“Although what I have in mind doesn’t apply to her, that’s good. If anyone else comes to me from now on, please tell him nothing about me.”
“Him? Who is he?”
“No, if any people come – them.”
“What would I tell them?”
“Nothing. That’s why I said tell them nothing. And, after this, for everyone who comes to visit me, if you’re discrete, I’ll give you twenty Euros.” It was part of the plan.
“Twenty Euros? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Go. Don’t let her stand in the …” – he looked up – “snow.”
THE DRIZZLE HAD become a snow squall when the wind picked up from the west. It drove dark clouds at great speed eastward over the palisade of trees in the park, across the sunken cut of the Seine, toward the tense, ugly walls of La Défense, and then over Paris, which in the thick of the snow was as relaxed as Manet’s Olympia reclining on her divan. Large flakes sped nearly sideways in almost parallel lines and were frequently seized by whirlwinds that made them knock about in captured circles, rising, falling, jerking left and right, and sometimes just holding position in the air, like confetti in a photograph. It was almost night, and sometimes the squall was violent enough to obscure the gatehouse.
Coming through alterations of light and dark was the tall, slim figure of a woman. And as Claude had said, she was carrying a massive brown case behind and at her side. In the islands of the squall, color came through like a sunburst – yellow, white, gold, and some black. And as she got closer, Jules thought he had gone mad. For the slim, young figure approaching seemed in appearance exactly the same as the woman in the hotel in Beverly Hills. At first, because of what his eyes told him, he thought it was she.
It was Élodi, dressed in a yellow print silk dress that if not of precisely the same pattern as the dress in California was very close. Élodi’s hair, which had been straight, was now buoyant and wavy. Jules didn’t really know what women did to their hair – his was cut every month for ten Euros and that was all, except that in the summer the sun lightened it by many shades – but now Élodi’s hair, previously a white gold, was richer, almost the color of brass. The silk dress was tight on her body. She wasn’t wearing a coat and seemed not to mind the cold. The dress clung to her abdomen as if it were her skin, the silk firm against her breasts.
She walked straight to him, stopped, and paused. Other than that she was carrying a cello, he had no idea what she might be doing there, although just that she was there separated him momentarily from all his concerns. The snow fell for some seconds of silence and accumulated on her hair and on the silk covering her shoulders. A light air of perfume clung to her as a remnant of a formal occasion. Although dressed exquisitely, because she was focused on work she seemed more beautiful than if she had been dressed primarily for show. When she saw him she asked, “Are you going running?”
“I was.”
Inside, as the door closed behind them, she said, “In the snow?”
“When I was a young soldier in the mountains of North Africa, I would stay out all night in the snow. You get used to it, and it becomes a point of pride. You don’t have a coat.”
“I’m not cold. What mountains?”
“In Algeria.”
“The snow there must be less snowy, I would think.”
“Mostly it disappears the next day with the sun.”
“I shouldn’t interrupt you,” she said, the cello still suspended from her shoulder and not touching the floor.
“That’s all right. I can be done for the day.”
“Doing what?”
“I run five kilometers and swim one, twice daily.”
“Why?”
“I have to pass a very important physical.”
“You won’t pass if you’re dead.”
“That’s what they always say, but what do they know? You can put that down.”
She carried the cello into the expansive room with the piano. As she put it down she looked about, and through the portes fenêtres that led to the terrace. Having taken note of the gatehouse, the address, the grounds, and the Château itself, she said, “I didn’t know you were a billionaire.”
“I didn’t know either,” he replied, “because I’m not. You’ve heard of Henri Shymanski?”
She shook her head to indicate that she hadn’t. Had she been older, she would have. Jules thought this was both charming and frightening.
“Pharmaceuticals, jet engines, hotels, ships … banks. The house belonged to him, and now it’s his sons’. I ran it, watched it, and gave lessons to his Brazilian spawn.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“His wife is Brazilian, and the boys are like animals. It’s made him perpetually sad. He wanted them to play the piano, to be physicists or artists, to be upright, dignified, honest, and deliberative.”
“And they’re not?”
“No. They look and speak like drug kingpins, go around with a retinue of bimbos and strumpets, play music in their cars that cracks foundation walls as they pass, beat people up in bars and pay them to shut up, and they sleep until three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Not my type,” she said, sitting down on the sofa. “Where were you?”
“Where was I?” he repeated. “When?”
“You didn’t show up.”
“For what?”
“Two lessons. I waited through, the whole time. They don’t know,” she said, meaning the administration, “so I have credit, but no instruction.”
“What lessons? I have nothing until spring.”
“No, you’re on the calendar, for me.”
Jules went to his computer and called up the schedule. She was right. “No one told me.”
“How often do you look at your email?”
“I don’t, really. If I don’t expect anything.”
Incredulous, she said, “You don’t look at it unless you’re expecting something?”
“No.”
“Okay, but, on average, how often?”
“Maybe once every two or three weeks. I prefer the telephone or the mail.”
Élodi found this funny enough to laugh. Laughter changed her, and, because he really loved it, he found it as upsetting as it was wonderful.
“You’re my student now?”
“Yes. I told you I would be.”
He read her name in the computer: “Élodi de Challant,” he said. It was the first time he had seen it. “Very aristocratic.”
“A thousand years ago.”
He looked at her from top to toe. She was not at all, as the other students had said, strange. She was rare, breathtaking. “I don’t see,” he said, “if indeed your ancestors were magnificently refined, that in those thousand years anything was lost. Did you grow up,” he asked, “as one of your fellow students speculated, a lonely girl in a house full of books?”
“I did. I did. From my room you could see the Alps – snow-covered – and we had enough land so that not a single work of man was visible around us. A swimming pool, horses, a tennis court, but neither my father nor my mother played tennis, so I would hit the ball against the backboard – and play the cello, another thing you can do alone, although of course,” she said pregnantly and a little archly, “you need a teacher.”
“What does your father do?” Jules asked, thinking that her father was probably young enough to be his son.
“Neither of my parents is living. My father tried to make money but lost it. He was never good at that.”
“The tennis court? The swimming pool? And the rest?”
“Inherited.”
“You’re here for the lessons I owe you?” He thought, what am I doing? And he felt a chill and something akin to falling.
“Only if you want to. I had a job in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and thought I would stop by, since you never showed up.”
“I’m so sorry. Would you mind if I changed? I don’t feel comfortable giving a lesson in running clothes. Maybe if it were summer and everyone else was in shorts.”
“I’ll set up. Is that yours?” She gestured to Jules’ cello leaning in a corner. “Obviously it’s yours, but I mean, it looks …. Like mine, it’s not just off the shelf, is it?”
“No. It was my father’s, and it’s very old, Venetian. I heard him play it only once.”
“Why?”
“Let me change. Did you bring music? Do you have anything specific in mind?”
“Neither.”
“Then I suppose it’s all up to me.”
WHEN JULES RE-ENTERED, fully dressed, he looked younger and more dignified than when he was in running clothes. Among other things, in near panic mode he had combed his hair, and the cut and collar of a polo shirt does wonders. Élodi had taken a chair opposite the chair closest to Jules’ cello, her own instrument resting as casually against her as a sleeping child, the bow in her right hand pointing relaxedly at the floor.
Before Jules sat down he asked if she would like something to eat or drink. “Thank you. I spent the afternoon at a wedding reception, and the musicians ate for yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”
“I remember doing that,” Jules said. “Sometimes we drank so much Champagne that what we played sounded Chinese. We were terrified that we wouldn’t be paid, but they never seemed to notice, because they had had twice as much Champagne. And young people who have just been married never notice anything but themselves anyway. I remember that, too. It’s as if you’re in an opium dream.”
Élodi seemed slightly hurt by this. He thought he understood, although if it were so it would be very hard to believe. He took both a paternal interest and the liberty to ask, “No boyfriend?” He wanted her to understand that he was too ancient to be exploring with his own interest in mind, but to his embarrassment he realized after he spoke that he was doing just that.
She understood perfectly. She shook her head in an almost imperceptible motion that meant no, and that she suffered.
“Inexplicable,” he said. She had brought forth every fatherly instinct in him, and he loved her in that way, too. “Absolutely inexplicable. Except that perhaps you scare them off because they think they can never come close to matching you.”
“I’d hardly say that. It’s just like everything else. I have refined expectations, a very slim pocketbook, and I don’t want to be rescued.”
“Someone will come along, someone with equally refined expectations and an equally slim pocketbook, and you’ll fall in love like crazy. My late wife and I – that’s her,” he said, pointing to a photo of Jacqueline that was on the piano: she was in her gray suit, and devastatingly beautiful – “had the best time of our lives when we had nothing. I know that’s a cliché, but you’ll see.”
Élodi nodded and looked down. She thought after seeing the picture of Jacqueline that what she had assumed and felt about her attractiveness to Jules was both incorrect and presumptive. She was as beautiful as Jacqueline, but she knew that remembrance of things past is the preeminent anchor of the heart.
Jules understood from her expression what she might have been thinking, but rather than explaining to her, as he could not, that the pull of Élodi in the present was no less than the power of Jacqueline in her absence, he changed the subject. They had already waded in too deeply, as they had the first instant they beheld one another, and the first time they touched. Even so, no water was too deep to exit. He’d done so before, and would do so now.
“I’ve been remiss,” he said, “and I apologize. The next lesson will be in the studio in the Cité de la Musique.”
“I hate it there,” she said. “I hate the architecture. I hate the commute. The Romans made the age of concrete, and it took a thousand years to come to this ….” She pointed at the warm, rich wood of her cello. “Look at the patina, like the skin of something that’s alive. And now our age is again the age of concrete.”
“We could meet in my office at the old faculty. They didn’t think about this when they built it, but the acoustics are better. Wood and stone.”
“Why not here? Isn’t it allowed?”
“It’s allowed, but it’s so far.”
“It reminds me of my house.”
This caused him to ask, “How is it that, for someone with a slim pocketbook, you dress as you do?” He meant beautifully. “The suit you were wearing when we recorded ….”
“Chanel.”
“Chanel. And this?” He gestured toward her sunburst of a dress.
“A young designer in Italy, young but expensive. The only friend I have in Paris is an apprentice – I can’t tell you for whom. I promised. They buy these clothes to reverse-engineer the cut, the fabric, the stitching, tailoring. They literally take them apart. She smuggles out the pieces and fits them to me and to herself.”
“That’s a great trick,” Jules said. “And,” to compliment her again, “it works.”
It was almost dark enough not to be able to tell a white thread from a black thread, and Claude threw a switch in the gatehouse that sparked on the lights illuminating the compound. Though normally the curse of billionaires, the security lighting now caught and exaggerated the snow, making each gyrating flake glow against the black sky and thickening the snowfall so that it appeared twice as dense as it really was. Student and teacher stared at the storm shining beyond the windows as snow fell almost silently, muffling sound. Because he wanted to love her and knew he could not, there was nothing left to do but begin the lesson.
“I THINK I CAN now afford to be direct. If not in absolutely everything, certainly in this. I have nothing to lose, nowhere to go, and I’m just about finished.”
She heard in his tone and saw in his expression that this was something, if tinged with regret, that was pleasurable in the freedom it bestowed.
“My duties have been lightened, and are probably in the midst of being lightened further as we speak. I’m not … not so much in demand. I was never much in demand, but now there’s almost nothing. That’s why I don’t even check the schedule.
“What I’m supposed to be able to give you is, first, a moderate amount of musicianship, the equivalent of explication de texte, say forty percent; then a huge dose of theory, fifty percent; and ten percent of vagary about the philosophy and spirit of music. That is, about the ineffable, of which the moderns think even one percent is too much.
“But I’m deficient according to present beliefs. I give seventy percent to musicianship, ten percent to theory, and twenty percent to the ineffable. That’s what makes me vulnerable, because, obviously, the ineffable is ineffable, so it’s not as if I can punch a clock and claim a salary for doing what by definition is invisible. But if my teaching and your learning are successful, they’ll have effortlessly and undetectably strengthened and purified your musicianship, mating with it so that they’ll be indistinguishable both to the audience and to you. That is, together they’ll be ninety percent. But, enough, I’m not a statistician. I short-change theory, which is what the leaders in the field crave, because I don’t like it. I’ve never brought myself to assimilate it and I have no patience with it. The language and syntax of music, like the language and syntax of all art, is as imperfect as our bodies. And its relation to mortality is the same as our own. Though the music of language can do this almost as well, nothing expresses so closely human sorrow, joy, and love – in its rhythms, its changes of tone, and changes of tempo – as music. People say God didn’t speak directly to us. Maybe He didn’t, but He’s granted us a powerful part of His language, with which, at the highest, we can come close to dialogue.
“You know Levin of course.” Jules had never experienced heroin, but had read that in coursing through the arteries and veins it brought a burst of love and pleasure. He tried not to look at Élodi, but felt intense love and pleasure when he did, so much so that he was unable not to look at her.
“Yes. Who doesn’t?”
“You’ll have to take his course. He plays like a machine. Never a mistake, never a variation. Have you heard his cadenzas?”
“I haven’t.”
“And you never will, because he can’t do them. The imperfections in how music is played – the small, sometimes microscopic variations in tempo, in pressure on a string, in emphasis – are what give us even in the midst of its perfections the pathos we need so that we can truly love it. It’s like a person, whom, though so many of us do not know it, we love as much on account of imperfection as anything else. That’s what’s so stupid and wasteful about people who pride themselves on their standing, their appearance, their achievements. Love is the great complement to imperfection, its faithful partner.”
“What about God?” Élodi asked. “Who’s perfect, and yet loved?”
“For Jews God is perfect but imperfect. The God of Israel is jealous, demanding, and sometimes cruel. We argue with Him. It’s like a goddamn wrestling match, and exhausting. If you’re a Christian – I say ‘if’ because these days people your age all seem to be proud atheists – your God is split into three parts. He suffered as a man, He was tempted, He even died, just like the rest of us. The more perfect something is, the less it can be loved – like a face, a body, voice, tone, color, or music itself. In playing a piece, don’t strive for perfection: it will kill the piece in that it will prevent it from entering the emotions. That’s the kind of advice you can’t do anything with except perhaps later, when you don’t even know you’re doing it. It’s part of the freeze of counterpoint.”
“I’ve never heard that expression,” she said.
“Stasis may be a better word – the liberation of the space between two contradictions. Let me explain if I can. If two waves of equal but opposite amplitude meet in water, what do you get?”
“Flat water.”
“In sound?”
“Silence.”
“Right. From agitation, peace, a perfection that you might have thought unobtainable from the clash of contradictory elements.”
“I think you’ve explained the magic of counterpoint very well.”
“Not really. It’s inexplicable. I’ve noted it, that’s all. Half of humanity’s troubles arise from the inability to see that contradictory propositions can be valid simultaneously. Certainly in music, where the product, in the emotions and in understanding, is superior to the elements that produce it, and has no sound.
“This is nothing new. We have Yang and Yin, Keats resting within the riddle, the Hegelian Dialectic, the whole story of the sexes – and even Versailles.”
“Yes. You take it from there.”
Élodi felt not only excitement but that she was embraced, loved. She looked up, as if to receive an answer. She always did this upon solving a problem that took some thought. She had done it so often in exams that she was an expert in gymnasium ceilings – their beams, ropes, protected lamps, pulleys, and nets. “I see,” she said. “Versailles is simultaneously a crime against humanity in that it was possible only because of the virtual enslavement of a whole nation for centuries, and a tribute to humanity in its occasional beauty.”
“What do you mean occasional?”
“The buildings, at least, and most of the interiors, are pretty horrible in their excess, but if you focus on the details – much like the abstractions you can produce by enlarging great paintings – there is often consummate beauty, lots of it, hidden in the whole, where the work of the craftsman as artist is sheltered from, in the case of Versailles, the monstrous overall conception.
“And the gardens,” she went on, enthusiastically and entirely on her own steam, “though a contradiction of nature because they were dictated by an overly vain human design, nonetheless are saved by nature. They’re the real beauty. Versailles would be impossibly nauseating were it not saved by them, wouldn’t it? Nature has the talent to soften, forgive, and remake, to create something beautiful out of our mistakes, paradoxes, and counterpoints – even when it comes to you invisibly.”
“Exact!” Jules exclaimed, approvingly and to compliment her.
She leaned forward, modestly looking down, pleased with herself, and asked, “What shall we play?”
“Any piece you know well and would like to play.”
“I’ve been working on Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren.”
Jules was astounded that she picked this, the signature and emblem of his life. But he tried to check his astonishment, for it was a very well known piece and now quite popular. “Good,” he said, “I’ll fill in the second part.”
“There is no second part.” You could see in her face that she thought, how can he think there’s a second part?
“I’ll make one – following, echoing, reinforcing. After all, what we’re dealing with is a transcription. We have a lot of latitude. And don’t worry, I’ll watch you. I’ve been doing this a long time.”
She lifted her bow and, after counting to four, began to play. He joined in after the first phrases, offering a respectful but almost playful counterpoint. She was fully taken up by the music, and when they finished she had the satisfaction of having followed it beyond its explicable bounds.
“Beautifully done,” he said, “with technical virtuosity, love, and – let’s call it – lift off. But let me ask you this: when you held the bow, did you know that you were holding it?”
“Yes.”
“And when you fingered, did you know that that’s what you were doing?”
“Of course.”
“Lastly, did you feel the cello against you?”
“How could I not?”
“Then here’s part of my twenty percent and their not-even-one percent. Ideally, and it might take years – who knows? – you should be totally unaware that you’re holding the bow, fingering the strings, that the cello is against you. You shouldn’t be pushing the sound, it should be pulling you. That is, although you’re the agency producing it, you should feel only that you’re riding upon and within it as it carries you.”
“And how do I achieve that?” she asked somewhat skeptically.
“By understanding but then forgetting it – after a billion hours of practice. If you think about how you walk or how you speak normally, you’ll stumble. If you trust that the world has its own grace and that sound has its own life, you can enter into both. And only then will musicianship, theory, and the ineffable combine into something greater than the sum of its parts. For this I frequently use an analogy that, however, I feel uncomfortable about using now.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s about sex.”
“Try it.”
“Sex? I’ve already tried it.”
She smiled, slightly. “I mean the analogy. I’m not going to scream as if I’d seen a mouse. I’ve seen plenty of mice and I never screamed.”
“I haven’t ever mentioned this except in a class full of people, and even then I cautiously introduce it.”
“Well you didn’t cautiously introduce it now. I’m twenty-five years old,” she said, as if that actually meant something. Immediately upon saying it, she felt keen embarrassment for trying to impress that her twenty-five years had conferred upon her a weighty maturity. She saw a faint and compassionate expression that he kindly tried to keep to himself.
“All right. But don’t take it wrongly.”
“I won’t.”
“First, wait. There are a few things I forgot to mention.” He then referred her to the center of the piece by playing it himself. She was almost exasperated by his diversion, and yet fascinated by half a dozen points of musicianship that he conveyed as effortlessly as if he had done so thousand times before, which he had.
“I see, I see,” she would say, and then play a few bars, repeating them until she got it. “That’s interesting. That’s good.”
This lasted for about half an hour during which they both were fully absorbed. Then, thinking he had escaped, he said, “Now, to get the particulars right, you have to paint at first with a very broad brush. Technicians like Levin have no idea of what that means. The broad brush in this case, for this piece and for the classical era from Bach through Mozart, and partly into Beethoven although he marked the transition from classical to modern, is the spirit of the age. Human nature was the same, eternal and universal truths were the same, but conditions other than those of the natural world were different, and the difference must be understood.”
“What does that have to do with sex?” she asked. “You want to skip it, don’t you? All right, skip it.”
“No. That’s not so. It’s just that when I say it in class people twitter and smile stupidly. I hate the coyness.”
“I don’t twitter, I don’t smile stupidly, and I’m not coy,” she said, with an almost royal severity.
He loved it. “I’m not saying you would, or are. Clearly you aren’t. All right. I’ll go there. The layers I spoke of – musicianship, theory, and spirit – have equivalents of a sort in sex. From top to bottom, first you have just love, transcending mortality, when the physical is elevated paradoxically because it becomes unnecessary and pales in the presence of love. It’s a perfect and rare experience, as fleeting and insubstantial as evidences of the soul. I would risk saying that both parties become, as much as is possible in this world, agencies of the divine.
“The next layer down is earthbound and more erotic, and yet not entirely so. Through eros, the other person is central and always in mind. The overwhelming feeling is one of truth and discovery, of knowing someone else intimately and beautifully. Though this is less refined and more common than the first layer, it’s by no means accessible to everyone. It’s pure love but without a connection to the divine.
“At the bottom layer you have independent eros, in which – somewhat like the highest manifestation but in an entirely opposite way – the particularity of the partners disappears. The sex runs itself and feeds upon itself, which takes you out of yourself in a different way than the other two ways, but it certainly does.
“Most of us stay mainly in one area, which might encompass, for example, the top half of the bottom band and a bit of the middle band. And the range oscillates north or south as slowly as a storm front. In music it’s the same. You have the same progression from the base, which is rhythm more or less, through the middle, which is all those things of musicianship and even theory, that make one delight in knowing and feeling it. The highest level is ineffable, so refined that it cannot be captured.
“But ideally, and rarely, in both music and in love, there’s a fourth layer, which is when one can exist in the three layers simultaneously – driven, orgasmic, automatic; then, more gently, simultaneously knowing, loving, discovering, sharing, holding back nothing; then, again simultaneously, spiritually, ineffably, even religiously. When all combine, you ascend to another band, whether in music or in love, and you’re in heaven.”
“Is that all?” she said, meaning the opposite, and, frankly, wanting to try it.
“Yes.”
“It’s not a line you say to a dressed-up girl in a hotel bar in Davos?” She didn’t mean this at all, but she had to take the charge out of the atmosphere.
“I’ve never been to Davos,” Jules said, blushing unnecessarily, “and besides, it’s too long to be a line. It’s something true that I said to a beautiful girl in my house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but at my age you can say such things without being suggestive.”
“Really?” she said. “You think so?”
“I hope so. I hope I haven’t offended you. I apologize if I have. I look upon such things like someone who’s pulling away from them. The fact of departure is now so strong that I no longer fear it. You can look upon them as someone who’s arriving.”
“Theoretically, and I’m not much one for theory myself,” she said, “would it not be possible to meet in the middle?”
“Nature punishes the effort. December/May makes for a great story as long as you can skip the end. It’s maybe what stimulated Goethe to write Faust. It’s not that it’s inherently evil, but that the way things are renders it impossible – except perhaps for a few bright moments contrasting with a sad decline.”
Élodi took this as a rejection of an advance she was not sure she had either made or wanted to make, because like him she moved between strong attraction and a kind of repulsion that was, in fact, an artifact of attraction. It was confusing to both of them. His love for her was benevolent and giving, as it would be for someone much younger. At the same time it was a desire for her as a woman, pulsingly sexual, intolerant of anything standing between them, even the thinnest silk, or air. Like two positive charges, the magnetic attractions flared in alternation and were not compatible or even present at one and the same time. As one rose on the horizon, the other declined, but only to return and drive out what had driven it out before.
So teacher and student maintained their distance, each thinking that they would do so forever. This became so highly charged that, to escape, Jules took the lead and returned to the matter of music. “The difference in the spirit of one age with the spirit of another,” he said, “despite the constancy of both nature and human nature, is legible in music. Death, pain, and tragedy still rule the world, though in the rich countries of the West we insulate ourselves from them as never before in history. But when death, pain, and tragedy were as immediate as they were to everyone, even the privileged, in the time of Bach and Mozart, you have darkness and light coexisting with almost unbearable intensity. Which is why in all of these great pieces – although neither in dirges, which I cannot stomach, nor in silly, triumphal marches – you have the tension between the most glorious, sunny exultation, and the saddest and most beautiful mourning.
“The Bach we did today is just that. It was my father’s favorite piece, on this very instrument.” He held it out, and brought it back. “He knew how joyful it was, and yet how sad. It was the first piece I heard him play, and the last.”
“I do love it,” Élodi said, after which followed, to their surprise, their satisfaction, and even to their excitement, a perfect, contented, extended silence.