YOU NEVER HEARD Beethoven?”
Danny Stern grinned, smooth, olive-skinned, his eyes lustrous, soft, and amused. “Nope. Was just a name to me.”
“How could you never hear Beethoven? It’s on the radio.”
“Not the station my parents play.”
“What does it have?”
“Cocktail music. I don’t know. Perry Como.”
“I used to like Perry Como. On TV. I can’t believe I’m admitting that. Well, except for his singing.”
“You liked him except for his singing?”
When they stopped laughing, she said, “So when did you finally hear Beethoven? I mean, I’m assuming that you have now.”
He looked as if he had something delicious in his mouth. “It’s the first week of school, right? Heck does his song and dance about the music library, all those shelves of, you know, boxed sets. Not just Beethoven, but you can compare Von Karajan with Kondrashin or whatever. I mean, I’d heard all these names, but it was like the names in the Bible. You don’t expect to get to meet Moses or Gabriel. So, I take out this set of Beethoven symphonies—”
“Von Karajan or Kondrashin?”
“Are you kidding? Von Karajan, of course. And I go into a listening room and start with Symphony Number One, and I just go on. I think it was like five, six hours. I just listen until the Ninth is done. And I’m like—I can’t tell you. It was—it was amazing.” He closed his eyes in a way that, instead of shutting her out, seemed to include her in the most intimate privacy.
She turned her head away, as nervous as if he had touched her. His shelves—looking improvised and, so, as out of place as possible amid the oppressive décor, which really was décor, as if ordered all at once from Bloomingdale’s—were neatly ranged with Beethoven, at the end near the Bach cantatas, and running through a record of songs by Hugo Wolf. He had his own record player, with speakers that folded out like the panels of a tryptich. “High Fidelity” said embossed squares in the corners of the tweedy boxes. He put on the Wolf. Really sad songs, not that she could understand the German.
“So, do you listen to Beethoven all the time now?”
“Never.” He looked both pleased and rueful.
“That’s awful!”
“It was too much. I listened too much. I used it up or something.”
“But it was only a year ago.” Maude was shocked. Her aesthetic pieties were outraged. “You can’t ever use up Beethoven.”
Danny shrugged. “There’s a lot of other great stuff.”
“But the greatest stuff—the whole point of it is that you can’t use it up. I mean—” But she encountered within herself an unwelcome little plug or blockage, and she knew exactly what it was, her unwillingness to admit that she no longer felt for Botticelli the pious fervor she had felt only the year before, in which even the least bit qualified or tempered assessment of his work felt to her like a personal attack. She had discovered herself in these pictures and secretly embraced them as the way to paint—color without paint texture, all flowing line and limber, limpid decoration. If only someone would teach her how to use egg tempera.
Because of the coincidence that, at home, the cover of the Pughs’ album of Beethoven’s Seventh was a reproduction of La Primavera (one of the cheapie albums Milt was always picking up at Roosevelt Field), Maude heard that music as a ballet of the Three Graces, of Flora presiding in a flowery dress of the kind Maude espoused, of getting handsome Mercury’s attention and rolling on the carpet of spicy crushed flowers . . . She felt herself to be the melancholy lovelies in the picture. They themselves seemed to be representations of the artist’s yearning and, so, embodiments not only of all that was lovable in women but of the very consummation that art represented, consummation as intensely rich and desired as the other kind and doomed to disappoint. The women looked like objects of desire, but their hurt, puzzled, yet detached expressions were the portraits of the artist’s need to create them and his own sadness at, having done so, still lacking satisfaction.
She had felt, in short, in the picture (and so in the music) a way to be an artist and herself, Maude, a girl. And before she even got there, already it was failing her. It had already begun to feel wan, distant, faintly immature, like the poet-faced doodles that covered all of her last year’s textbooks in purple ink. Nobody else’s work, however much you loved or identified with it, could show you your own work. Maude knew that any artist’s vision was as individual and differentiated as an individual face and as little to be meddled with; that your duty as an artist was to make your sense of things manifest in the world, and that if you did this faithfully and fully enough, the world would feel its meaning and take it into its own heart.
She ventured articulating this to Danny Stern.
“You mean like fucking?”
She could only imagine what that might be like, as she could only imagine what realization as an artist would be like, though she had spent an enormous part of her life so far fantasizing about one or the other. “Well—or love,” she answered, feeling her ears hot. “Both sides have to go out of themselves toward the other.” The blush only got worse. She looked at him, daring him to let on that it all meant too much to her.
He considered what she said in his prudent, doctorish, fair-minded way. “It’s funny. These things, I mean, the books you love and all that stuff, they give you so much, you kind of worship the beings who make them. But it makes them, the artists, you know, seem kind of inhuman.”
“You mean, ’cause you couldn’t write War and Peace or a Beethoven sonata?”
“Yeah.”
“But you could write a Danny Stern.”
“Nah. I couldn’t.” He grinned his good-natured grin.
“And that’s what you love the art for. It’s so human—it’s where you meet the parts of yourself—you feel more understood, in a weird way, in a work of art that you can love. You feel as if you’re in it; you feel as if it’s about you.”
“That’s true.”
“You feel it is you. Or that you made it.”
“That,” he said, “I never feel.”
She snorted in annoyance. He must be lying. How could you not feel that?
Before she could voice her skepticism, she felt something soft and warm touch her eyelids. Kisses. She had not even taken in his face coming at hers so that she had closed her eyes in automatic self-protection. He kissed each closed eye and then somehow they were kissing each other’s mouths. The feeling of the other time, with the sideburned senior, poured back, only more keenly. It was a surprise to feel it, but she had felt it once before, so after the surprise of its presence, she could greet it, in a sense, welcome it back. After the first bout of kissing, they pulled back and looked at each other, side by side on the soft, thick carpeting. She looked into his face and the feeling increased. That hadn’t happened before. It became too strong and they had to lock their mouths together. As if through the mouth came the rest of the body and all the feelings within it.
They spent hours and weeks of the winter and spring semesters in Danny’s room or sneaking into Seth’s entombed chamber, making out. They themselves used the ugly term, heedless of the way it deprecated the sweetness and intimacy of what passed between them. Or not wanting to share it with the rest of the world.
Though there was also the immense comfort of being seen by the world as linked. After the first inadvertent, gasping tussle on Danny’s floor, however, Maude felt she would be ruined by being seen with him. She confided in Weesie, or tried to. “Don’t you think he looks kind of goony and young?”
“Kind of young maybe. I don’t know. He has those beautiful eyes.”
Maude didn’t know if she liked Weesie noticing Danny’s beautiful eyes. “But I mean, he’s kind of not romantic. I mean, I didn’t exactly put him on, you know, that list.” The list of desirable boyfriends already seemed childish, and a long time ago.
“He’s the smartest boy in school,” said Weesie factually, and Maude felt a fool. She hadn’t noticed. He was so modest and uncompetitive, the thought did not occur. He didn’t need to compete. He didn’t chase success. He didn’t seem to fear failure. Maybe he didn’t need to.
She was more aware of his easy grasp after that. She felt his modesty as a law she had unconsciously observed, as if praise were insult and it would offend him for appreciation to be lavished. But her appreciation was in an odd way a new appreciation for herself. She had to explain herself to almost everyone. She didn’t have to explain herself to Danny Stern. Or not quite so much.
Maude’s clamorous social anxieties and the steeliest competitive edge of her ambitions were softened, tempered, or muffled from within this nest of safety and understanding. She felt strong enough with Danny to dare to go on her way and be happy. For a while.