Lying in Bed (4 page)

I am not afraid to encounter Clara's past or even her most dissolute thoughts about the present. I am not possessive that way. What she did before we met can trouble me only in that I was not there to see it. Sometimes I wish we'd never met because I didn't meet her soon enough. Her past is beyond me. I mourn my absence from every moment of it. My fondest wish is transport back into the womb with her. As for what is possible, I simply want to see her. Apart from me. Out there. Being someone other than the self she has become with me.

She is, perhaps, that way most when she is on the floor out there beyond our bed, which is centered in the room but is not precisely in the cynosural position of Louis XI's
grand lit de justice
. It is, in fact, flush against the long north wall, so that our hair is tossed uptown while our toes tend toward Tribeca. We are thereby, it is true, deprived of a
ruelle
. But since we live here quite alone and entertain no one but ourselves, this is no sacrifice at all and provides my head its walled support for reading or the contemplation of my wife when she is writing in her diaries. I often lie here at night and watch her at it, always with her back to
me, arched, her shoulders fanned, her neck curved. I imagine her eyes closed, the tip of her tongue protruding from between her slightly overbiting front teeth, the notebook fast upon her clenched, unyielding knees, and one of the many pencils she keeps lined up on the rickrack-pattern hooked rug scratching out words that no one but I can read.

The pencils no longer confound me. In fact, I grow ever more entranced by the very evanescence of their transfer of life from the mind to the page. Like the women in the street who dissolve into the air itself, what is at risk of disappearing becomes all the more desirable. Besides, as Jonathan Goldberg so pointedly explains in the very same essay in which he brilliantly remarks that for both Heidegger and Barthes (despite their differing sexual orientations) “the scene of writing is one that betrays phallic desire,” the pencil and the penis are “etymologically cognate.”

Clara has been decomposing pencils in her notebooks since the day she arrived in New York alone at sixteen, merely a year shy of the fifteen years that Bach waited before he resurrected from his own notebook, which was more literally a musicbook, that sarabande as the opening aria of the Goldberg Variations, which at this very moment Glenn Gould begins to play for me and I fall once more upon the bed.

The sarabande was originally a concupiscent sort of dance that, like many things in celebration of wanton carnality, was banned. It was described in the aptly titled
Treatise Against Public Enjoyment
by Father Juan de Mariana this way: “A dance and song, so lascivious in its words, so ugly in its movement, that it is enough to inflame even very modest people.”

Inflame them to what? A desire to suppress the dance and song? Or a desire to join in? Or are those not the same? Suppression is inevitably inspired by an appetite for what it condemns.

So
BAN THE SARABANDE
went out the call back in the 1590s. But they could not keep a dance step down. By the time it got to Bach, it had gained in dignified beauty what it had been stripped of in licentiousness, rather like the idealization of an old marriage.

This particular sarabande is a theme that is not repeated in these Goldberg variations. In that, it is as unusual as a woman whose beauty is so great that you cannot bear to see her ever again. But then, on your deathbed, you summon her forth, as Bach does at the very end of the Goldbergs as an
aria da capo
immediately following the final variation, the quodlibet, one of whose melodies borrows from a pop song of the day,
Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir g'west
(which translates into something I hope I never have to sing to Clara: Long have I been away from you).

Glenn Gould is less the romantic than I about this sarabande. To him it is some sort of mindless flirt and masculine as well. He calls it “a singularly self-sufficient little air which seems to shun the patriarchal demeanour, to exhibit a bland unconcern about its issue, to remain totally uninquisitive as to its
raison d'être.”
What a condemnation: to shun one's own children and never to question why one is here.

And lest anyone think I and Huxley are alone in finding music “palpitatingly sexual” and sex musical, it is Gould himself who says, “The aria melody evades intercourse with the rest of the
work.”

I take from that a definition of the good marriage: the married person evades intercourse with the rest of the world. Is it any wonder I rarely set foot from here unless accompanied by Clara?

Bach went blind toward the end of his life. I close my eyes and listen to these variations. I am not trying to use them to fall asleep, though they were commissioned to cure or at least make tolerable a count's insomnia. The count asked an eleven-year-old named Johann Goldberg, who worked for him and was also a student of Bach, if Bach wouldn't write something to help the count get through, one way or another, the night. Bach responded with these variations. The count responded with the biggest payday of Bach's life, henceforth and thenceforth. Many a night would the count summon his immortal harpsichordist, who would himself die very young: “Dear Goldberg, please come and play for me my variations.”

I myself am doing a splendid job getting through this night. I am even more content in my solitude and excited by it than I had imagined I would be. And I do not want to sleep.

But I do close my eyes. I close them in order to be blind like Bach.

And then, I open them.

I open them, because ten days before Bach died, his eyesight miraculously returned.

I like to lie here and replicate that experience. All is darkness. And then, ten days before eternal darkness, sight is restored.

What do I want to see, in this brief time before the lights go out forever?

I want to see Clara.

I want to see Clara naked, unmasked, anew.

I do not know what Bach saw in his ten remaining days or what he wanted to see. Anna Magdalena, perhaps.

He certainly would not have wanted to see his grave. Not that there was anything to see, once he had been thrown in and endirted. Though you would have thought that however many of his twenty children had survived would have bought him a headstone, nothing marked the place of his burial. And nothing would until nearly a hundred and fifty years later when his grave was accidentally dug up to make room for the augmentation of the church in whose yard he had shrunk to the size of an oboe.

Do our children think they can sweep our dust even beyond the corners of their minds once we have ceased inventing life? Apparently so. These were the same Bach children who later allowed Anna Magdalena to be buried in a pauper's grave, far away from the husband who had immortalized her with a sensuous if not exactly lascivious sarabande.

If I am buried far from where Clara is buried, I will dig my way through the wet, wormy earth until I lie with her again, forever.

 

 

*
Actually, it was Johann Friedrich Wender who built the organ in the Neukirche at Arnstadt, but John's little joke is more amusing in his employment of the sibilant names of those other great organ builders, Silbermann and Schnitger.

The Goldbergs have put me to sleep. For a few minutes, then, though I am unconscious during them, I am Count Keyserlingk.

“Dear Goldberg,” I whisper aloud to that young boy who has soothed me with such beauty, “please do not die so soon.”

Nor you, Glenn Gould, most enviable of men, to have found ecstasy in art and art alone, and art on its loftiest mission in solitude, and peace, for goddamned once, in death.

That melancholy aside, I am full of happiness. Never, in fact, have I felt at such peace.

I have awakened into almost total darkness. The only illumination in this one huge room of ours comes from the minuscule coinedge of moon that is visible from where I lie through the west windows and from the lumpy counterpane of light that floats in the sky over this city every night, smothering the stars.

I cannot see my own toes. I doubt I'd be able to see my own erection, were I moved to generate it. But I am not. With Clara gone, this place is sexless. I am free of stimulation. I am at peace with my body. My body is my own.

How nice to have one's wife away, not to miss her but not to miss her.

I, former rhetorician—failed rhetorician, to be honest, or at least defeated rhetorician—I wonder if I've created a new figure of speech with that: not to miss her but not to miss her. I have never encountered its like, though some argument might be made that it is a kind of deviant chiasmus, balanced to a degree that would compare with the disconcerting experience of looking in a mirror and confronting your image unreversed.

But better than that, it is as great an example of the need to split an infinitive as there might be: not to miss her but to not miss her.

Still, not missing her, I find myself missing not missing her. It compares to the feeling of guilt over the absence of the feeling of guilt over something that should have produced a feeling of guilt in the first place.

Why do I not miss her?

I turn on my side in the darkness and take one of her pillows from next to mine and pull it into the middle of my body. “Clara,” I say.

I am reminded of August Strindberg, with whose life I became familiar when I learned he and Nietzsche had exchanged correspondence (in four languages, two of them dead), though very few letters actually passed between them before Nietzsche slipped wholly into madness and ceased communicating altogether. Strindberg had experienced his own insanity, particularly after his third wife, Harriet Bosse, had left him. It was at that time he began to
have hallucinations, visions, fantasies, which were to him, in a grand display of what Husserl would come to call transcendental subjectivity, their own reality. “If I see my pillow assume human shapes,” wrote Strindberg, “those shapes are there, and if anyone says they are fashioned only by imagination, I reply: ‘You say only?' What my inner eye sees means more to me.”

I bend my neck and kiss the pillow. I kiss the pillow chastely. But it is, after all, only a pillow, though a special one, for Clara claims to have covered it herself with a piece of Log Cabin quilt that her grandmother had made and given to her in the irretrievable days before she was born into my life. It does not assume human shape, this pillow. It is not Clara herself. She has not left me. Though if she had, I am sure I would have gone mad too and have hugged the pillow to me and have discovered that it
is
Clara, as Strindberg found his wife Harriet back in his distraught arms.

But it does smell of her, the pillow. It smells of the different smells of her hair, of her neck, of her shoulders, of her back, of between her legs from when she flings it down there and, laughing, says, “Fuck me, Johnny.”

“Oh, Clara,” I say, remembering her, and I laugh first at the remembrance and then at the fact that I'm talking to a pillow.

It occurs to me that I never once talked aloud to myself in the year that I talked aloud to no one. It takes the absence of Clara to turn me into everyone's image of a lonely man.

It is interesting to me that I do not want her. It used to be that I could want her just from the smell of her, from any of the smells of her. And the smell needn't emanate directly from her skin or hair. I might smell her on a
pillow, like this, or a chair, a plate, a towel, a brush, my undershorts or hers, and I would want her so much that I seemed to become nothing but desire, shrunk to an impenetrable density of need, like some black hole.

Desire. Not the fulfillment of desire. Desire alone. That longing so pure it decontaminates ambiguity.

When I do not desire her, it is as if she does not exist.

A wife, then, might be said to exist in direct proportion to the husband's desire for her. And vice versa, of course.

How, I wonder, do we stay alive to one another while the years erase us like a reproachful teacher buffing a blackboard?

As I ponder these perhaps unanswerable questions as if I had all the time in the world and find myself hoping that Clara will not come home too soon, I become aware that the CD changer has continued to provide a choice of music that perfectly accompanies my emotional needs.

It is still soloing, as it were, but it has left Glenn Gould's piano for Yo Yo Ma's cello and the Bach suites, for me perhaps the most anamnestic of music since I cannot hear them without being reminded of Clara and my wedding day.

As I am unable to lie here and not think of Clara, though she has, in a sense, ceased to exist for me, so the music seems unable to abandon Bach and his Anna Magdalena.

There is great mystery surrounding these suites for cello. While still living in Cöthen, after the death of Maria Barbara, Bach produced in 1720 a clean copy of his six sonatas for solo violin, perhaps the only music that tortures me even while its beauty makes me weep (no fool I, those pieces are not programmed for this special evening of listening enjoyment).

On the title page of that copy, Bach put the words
“Libro primo.” So if that is Book One, where is Book Two?

There is nothing labeled Libro secondo. And there cannot be a First if there is not a Second, which is to say, the First becomes a First and not merely an Only by virtue of their being a Second.

But here are these six suites for solo cello. Except there is no surviving original clean copy of them. There is nothing but a copy written out in the hand of Anna Magdalena. And while that copy has significant mistakes involving tempo markings and bowings and ornaments, it is still fortunate that Anna Magdalena's handwriting was not quite so sphingine as Clara's, or I would probably not be lying here this evening feeling the sound of this cello in my tranquil loins.

It is my theory that these cello suites were indeed the Libro secondo and thus that they were written soon after the completion of the violin sonatas in 1720 and thus further that they were composed in the heat of Bach's preparations for his 1721 wedding to Anna Magdalena, a prenuptial display of his affection, passion, his desire to lie with her and, to judge from the music itself, dance with her. So, even before they married, he gave her the original of the scores for her to copy them out. For a composer, it was like giving someone your diary to read.