FRIDAY NIGHT ARRIVED as if it had preceded Friday morning. The last humid afternoons of summer had evaporated into fall, and with a low crack Julia could feel in her elbows the thunder dully snapped and the rains came. The sky cleared and the kitchen brightened like an invisible mouth was blowing into the space. The sun was casting thin pink onto the underside of ever whiter clouds, then causing everything to grow a little thin, grainy, brown. By the time Cal arrived home from work Julia was in her new turquoise dress. It was a size smaller than she wore before all that went down—she hadn’t been able to eat a full meal for a year. They got into Cal’s Audi TT, a purchase he had made two years before their son had been sentenced and their bank accounts run low by lawyers’ fees. They made their way down I-83 into the city, forgoing the prettier drive down York Road so they wouldn’t miss the opening. Cal hadn’t told her what they would be seeing—Dvorak? Beethoven? Bach partitas or solo piano sonatas? Stephen Reich or Rachmaninoff?—and Julia hadn’t had it in her to go onto the Internet to find out what it would be. Searching around for Cassie Black had been about the limit of what she could bring herself to do on Google. The BSO no longer advertised in The Baltimore Sun, so the information wouldn’t be there, either. The Baltimore Sun had never been much of a paper, but a person arriving in their house now directly from 1970 wouldn’t even recognize it as a newspaper at all, it was so thin. It was more of a pamphlet, a flyer, almost wholly devoid of any real news.
As they turned down Calvert Street and then up Cathedral, the Meyerhoff arose out of the city streets before them like an orotund ship arising out of disparate waves, a cone of impenetrable sound arising out of silence, one big vibrating B-flat lifting up above the muted tones of the city.
They parked and walked to the building. Inside Julia felt every look at her as if it were a physical touch, like every person she came in proximity to was too close, their gazes like the literal strike of a needle tip against the skin of her arms. That was one of the strangest things about her loneliness—there was no prickle in her cheeks, her face, though to be sure she blushed. But anxiety itself, the pain of being looked at when you didn’t want to be looked at, arose as prickles across the tops of her arms, the skin on her raw, pink knuckles. She knew Mark loved a Galway Kinnell book he kept on his shelf, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, a book federal agents had confiscated when they tore up his room, but that she found in a bookshop in Fells Point months later, one of her few excursions out of the house in those first months after the bombing. She’d read it maybe two dozen times now, had come to know the impressionistic greens and reds of the Klimt detail on its cover. She guessed that the lines that resonated with her most were not the same lines that struck her son, but hers were the opening lines, about not harming so much as a mosquito or a toad. Its tranquil cadences and sense of pacifism, ahimsa, were so precise Julia couldn’t help but wonder if her son had ever even read that stanza himself. When she looked around her in their house, in their lawn, on the way to the Catonsville Giant, Julia saw the world as a series of signs Mark had missed, drawing him away from his actions. She hoped to read them where he had failed.
No matter. As she walked across the red velvety carpets of the Meyerhoff, Cal went to check their coats, and she entered the airy white space of the hall as if walking onto a spaceship for abduction. She wore her new turquoise dress but she noticed what at first seemed like a galling lack of formality in everyone else in the place. The last time she and Cal had gone up to Manhattan to the Met she’d been surprised at how few tuxes she saw, at how men now often wore suits to the opera, but this was different. A man with a huge beard passed her in a tie-dye Grateful Dead shirt from the Lithuanian Olympic Basketball team. She didn’t believe the bromides about the other senses growing stronger when one went deaf or blind—that hadn’t been her experience—but now she could detect the skunky smell of weed on him. He brushed past her and she almost jumped to get out of his way.
She made her way all the way down to the front row, where Cal had gotten them seats. Three places to her right was a couple as dressed up as she and Cal were, but she looked down to see the man was wearing Birkenstocks. She hadn’t seen those sandals in years. They were just so awful even in the right context. Here in the Meyerhoff they were a direct affront to her sensibilities. Had the entire population of Baltimore lost its mind? She could see the spidery hairs atop his big toes and it turned her stomach. His wife was looking right at Julia now, seeing what she was looking at.
“He insisted on wearing them,” she mouthed.
Though she hadn’t talked to anyone in person other than Cal in months, Julia could tell every word she said just by looking at her lips. Still she didn’t smile fast enough. The woman’s face grew pinched, chastened. She looked away.
Cal arrived back at their seats as the house lights flashed, signaling the symphony was about to begin.
“What on earth is everyone in this place wearing,” Julia said to him. “Has the whole world gone batshit crazy?”
He whispered into her ear in his lowest bass tone: “You’re in for a surprise, and a treat.”
Members of the orchestra took their seats onstage. The room filled with the cacophony of strings warming up and being tuned. To Julia it was a mash of sound and the lightest touch projecting onto her skin. But they were sitting so close she could see as the dust of rosin lifted off the bows of the violins. She could feel the low vibrations of the cellos and basses projecting slow and wavy into the crowd on the balls of her feet. The conductor came out onstage. He, too, was wearing a tie-dye T-shirt along with his traditional tuxedo pants. Now it truly felt to Julia as if she was going crazy—in the year she’d been holed up in the house had everyone lost their sartorial minds? She turned to her husband.
“The Dead,” Cal whispered. The strings started in, violins and violas bowing slow and wide from their elbows. The upper registers were a thin syrup too far above her range but after thirty long seconds or so Julia heard, felt, the familiar bassline. Bump-dah, bumba-dah-bum-dah-bum. Bump-dah, bumba-dah-bum-dah-bum.
They were playing “Dark Star.”
Of all things, Cal had taken her to the Meyerhoff to see the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra play Grateful Dead covers.
Julia drew her right arm in tight to her side so it would not be touching Cal’s. This was at once the worst and the best gift she could have been given. The best because she was out of her house on a Friday night in Baltimore, because she was sitting in a room full of people and not out on an errand and not being forced to think about her son, and she was not feeling the agoraphobia she’d always felt. But it was the worst because she could not think of a cultural event she would rather see less. A symphonic adaptation of the Dead! It was the least revolutionary thing she could imagine. Taking the wild sound out of the wild and trapping it in this spaceship, in this cage—one of her favorite novels of the early seventies referred to museums as “centers of art detention.” Here she was in a center of sound detention. A place where music went to live out its dying days.
“Dark Star” drew into a crescendo she could feel on her skin, the tenor notes like pinpricks all up and down her skin, and she looked behind her. In rows all the way to the back of the Meyerhoff old people—old people! Not aging parents, not youthful middle-agers but old people, people with liver spots on their arms and far more salt than pepper in their hair and their aging beards—bobbed their heads and turned and smiled at each other. Could she give in to the pleasure of it? Could she let Cal have the ease he needed?
For the next couple of songs she did her best. She looked at the woodwinds as they puffed their cheeks out, watched as the indifferent basses took a moment to turn pages and rest their bulging forearms. She tried to forget that they were Grateful Dead covers being played and just allow it to be elemental. Broken down into their component parts these songs were just notes and chords coming together to make a wall of sounds that projected out from the stage and onto her body and for a moment Julia was feeling it, she was moving in time with it, she was overwhelmed by the bass she felt humming in her feet so that she took off her shoes and let the balls of her bare feet rest on the cool floor of the symphony hall and buzz up into her body, and something quieted in her for the first time in as long as she could remember. There was a peace and even an elation that surpassed anything she’d felt when she was down on M Street earlier that week. She couldn’t identify it, couldn’t place it until she realized what it was: she was not thinking about Mark. She was not fretting, she was not worrying. She was not thinking she saw Cassie Black in a Dean and DeLuca’s. She was in an open space, in public, not thinking about her son. She’d returned to the inexorable flow of time.
She turned to Cal and he was bobbing his head now and he turned to her and he mouthed, “‘Scarlet Begonias’!” The song finished and it was quiet in the hall. She could not hear the crinkling of programs and the low hushed chatter of everyone in the room but she gave herself over to it, she awaited the next song.
The violins picked up their bows and the tie-dye-T-shirted conductor lifted his arms, elbows strung up as if marionetted from the ceiling high above them.
The basses and cellos were quiet and the violins bowed their melodies and Julia listened harder than she’d listened in months, in years, and all at once as they played it came over her what they were playing.
She could hear the melody in her head when the chorus hit and the bass started in on its pizzicato and then the words were in her head. Lyrics. She knew them in her heart before they materialized in her mind: a narrator’s lamentation at turning twenty-one in prison, serving the start of a life sentence—and acknowledging all along that his mother had pled with him to do better, to get right. “Mama Tried.” Of all the hundreds of songs the Dead had covered in their career, here it was. It was symphonic, toothless, and interpreted by the BSO, but undeniably they were playing Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.”
In her head she could hear Bob Weir singing it. She looked at Cal. She could see he didn’t know what song it was. He was wholly ignorant of what was happening in her mind, what she knew. He bobbed his head like the rest, all around him, this room full of people who were focused on the music and were not focused on her, this room full of not aging hippies but old people, people who had decades before fought their fights and strove their striving and now were in a position to sit in a concert hall on a Friday night in Baltimore and let the teeth be extracted from the music that mattered to them most, the life be extracted from them. Just like the music, they were all going to die one day and be removed from the inexorable stream of time, and she was, too, they were sitting in that hall, many of them retired, at rest, and she figured while she sat there in the Meyerhoff Hall, at rest, too, her husband next to her and her son having been out of her head if only for a moment, in the time they had left they might as well enjoy it.