Middle C (21 page)

They don’t let me wear jewelry, said she.

The last months of Joey’s stay at Augsburg were ordinary and awful. Despite his fearful expectations, nothing happened. He heard and learned diddly, as if his fingers were always idle at the piano. The plans he had made, and was making, seemed unnecessary now that the campus had become rumorless and routine as drill. Two years at Augs were too many, although the availabilty of a piano and an organ had been a plus. Still, all he had discovered in that time was that he needed to master what might best protect him; he needed to have learning to hide behind; he needed to know a great many different things to shield his soul from Paul and Pauline Pry; particularly he needed to be conversant with various eras in history, periods of literature, and schools of music, because those subjects seemed to be within his grasp; and he had found out he was not going to fish anything basically beneficial from Augs’s comfortable little pool of banality and superstition. In fact, the place wasn’t even as restrictive and intractable as it should have been … in order to be genuine. As for achieving a reasonable level of religious fanaticism, neither students nor faculty were even fans of God; they just tuned in when a good game was on. They were too smug to be defensive or suspicious. The librarian cut dirty passages out of Chaucer with a razor and kept Rabelais, Baudelaire, and Lawrence locked up. That was the extent of it.

Oh yes … there was the rector and his network of spies …

But if Paul Pry were to open him like a tin, what sort of selves packed so closely would he see? The tin would be empty, not even oily, it would have a tinny sheen, and light would fly from it as a fly flies from disappointment—that was what he’d see. Not a single self or sardine.
Well … not exactly. There
had
been an unprotected period … Joey had had quite a checkered past, a quite romantic former life in fact: an escape over many borders hidden in a womb, survival of the Blitz, ocean voyage, slow trains, bad buses … charity … dinky gifts … humiliation … ah … piano lessons. A tiptoe through the tulips. With Mom. During that time, he’d simply been who he was. Hadn’t he been? Hadn’t he been a habit hard to break?

Becky Wilhelm was a whiz at checkers. She was studying how to be unattractive, so she went to a lot of socials where she played checkers with old men when no one else would, not even other old men. In that way the skill surfaced. She was mistress of the multiple jump, she told Joey proudly. Hey. Wow. He said. Nevertheless, she was a whiz. That she was a whiz was a surprise. Joey beat his soul up about that. Could he call his playing the playing of a whiz? Skizz izz not a whiz, he imagined he heard Chris Knox scoff. Knox had gone out for track—a hurdler, he claimed to be—but twisted his knee at a meet and had to give it up. It took him so long to rehab he lost his tennis stroke. At Augs, this was a serious loss, because a long time ago someone had decided that tennis was to be the college sport. They recruited tennis players who were all tall blond slim kids from Florida and California who looked good in shorts and their tanned cancer-inclining skin. God was a tennis pro, at least that was the suggestion of one Sunday sermon titled, he remembered, “Thirty Love.” Many mornings the
thonk
of tennis balls could be heard even in the quad, and the high mesh fences around the courts could be seen shining in the sun even some way off. Joey found the sport an anomaly at Augs until he learned that community colleges all over the country, most named honestly enough for their communities, were infamous for supplying prospective standouts in various sports with the decent scholastic records they didn’t have coming out of high school, so that after a couple of years they could enter the colleges and universities that had recruited them in the first place. Augsburg, through the coincidence of its name, became a feeder—as the word was. So Knox might be—might have been—a whiz, Joey didn’t know … didn’t want to know … and therefore Joey would continue to live in the dark and see folks as flickers of phosphorescence—alluring, amusing, whizzes—but briefly.

When you’re young, time is a puzzle, like interlocking nails. You wonder
what you ought to be doing or what the future holds or how things that don’t seem to have worked out will work out; and in such a mood, even when you are focused on the future because you are yet to get laid, to bloom, to beget, to find your way, to win a tournament, you nevertheless don’t detail far-off somedays in your head; you don’t feel your future as you feel a thigh … because the present is too intense, too sunny, brief as a sneeze, too higgledy-piggledy, too complete, too total a drag already, whereas there is simply so much future, the future is flat as the sea three miles from your eye while the beach you are sitting on is aboil with sunshine and nakedness. The future is constantly killing off the present by becoming it. The future is too—thank God—vague to deal with. The future may not arrive. Yet that is all you value, all you hope for: fine future things; so you think, I’m not here at present; I’m just a movie made of slow-motion dreams; haven’t I always been, then and now? wondering about
when:
when the dust will settle and the sky clear,
when
I will hear cheers and I’m handed my trophy.

Joey imagined that if old—when he would be old, if he could be old, because in his dream he was always dressed the way he was dressed when he dreamed—he’d wonder what his death would be: when it would arrive, how it would do him in, what he would be wearing: during the early hours of the morning? while sporting his only suit? lost in the ruins of the city? would he die from bawling through tired eyes? go like a bathtub blown through a once-fine view from an upper floor? fall from a break of a board? because death is nothing but detail—a little cough that causes your ribs pain—a siren that stirs you to sit up on your deathbed and regurgitate a ricocheting nail.

So much time lost in thought …

Maurice was Joey’s equal in suspicion. He realized at once that Joey’s sudden interest was a ploy, and he wasn’t particularly pleased to be in someone’s self-help program. Even standing stock-still, Maurice sidled—sidled in a circle—as if searching for the center of the sky. Did Maurice remember, for example, the assignment for Friday? Indeed, it would turn out, he did, but for another class. Was Maurice living in the dorm or did he commute? He didn’t live in the dorm, but he did sleep there sometimes. If you were waiting for the worm to turn, Maurice would keep you waiting until you walked off arm in arm with your impatience, whereupon, leaves eaten, the twig to which his freshly finished
cocoon was fastened would sway a little in the wind. Joey completed his scrutiny of Maurice with grudging admiration, yet he didn’t mind he’d been outwitted—he didn’t care. Maurice’s motives were much like his own—not to be caught, not to be known, not to be disclosed.

Joey asked himself whether he hadn’t cared for Mr. Hirk and found out that although he was grateful to Mr. Hirk, he was only connected to his ailing teacher through music, and that what he really cared for were some mythical singers with magical names and the thin long-ago sounds Joey could, with voice or fingers, never revolve so well around, though they were the center about which he turned, because he did so at a different speed.

Madame Mieux—there! he’d invoked her—name, naughty thoughts, and all—now he’d brought the weird one into view—what were you up to when you asked me over to listen to a piece by Berlioz you knew he’d never written? why didn’t you pick up your pillows, they make a sorry scene, quite tasteless and unsettling? and to come to the door in a drug-induced daze to greet a young and simple pupil? in billowy belongings that didn’t seem quite fastened on you? Seeing you in school standing in front of us in your tight hips and tall shoes; hearing you shout French as if you were on an unreliable telephone … well, Madame, seeing you, hearing you, did not entice any of us to touch or smell or taste Mieux, too; no, did not tempt us to come closer than we had to, loll on one of your souvenir pillows, our noses full of pot smoke, and—who knows? after music, after chocolates—to be done to.

On gray days, when the light was soft and the grass was greener than seemed possible, Joey would often see Professor Pastor Ludens crossing the quad in his customary black suit, stiff-legged, too, like a crow, a bit pompous, bearing two dark books, each held against his chest into which they disappeared—a Bible and the hymnal, Joey guessed. He appeared especially often on autumn evenings when the sun was low and hid behind the treetops as well as in the clouds, possessing so little strength it could not lend the pastor a shadow to precede him on the path to the chapel from whose loft windows Joey would observe him approaching so that, suitably warned, he might slip swiftly from the choir himself, as if his practice were concluded, to sit in his basement room sheltered by the sort of careful silence that signified he wasn’t there even when he was.

After a canny edit of the details, Joey told Miriam about his interview
with Rector Luthardt. She was ready to hit the rector with her purse. How could that man and his renegade church possibly object to Joey’s playing for Saint Agatha? Joey had found a word for Luthardt’s complaint—miscegenation—and Miriam embraced it. It was better, both thought, than “syncretism,” which sounded barbarous. In her eyes, nothing could have justified Joey’s suggestion that he leave Augs more readily than his account of the moon-faced rector’s remonstrances and the suspicion that spying had to be their cause; however, if he were to decamp (as he subjunctively put it to her, though he had made up his mind already), he would need to find work, since her income scarcely kept her afloat; she didn’t need his weight in the boat. In the settlement’s infrequent newspaper, the
Woodbine Twines
(a name of uncustomary originality unsupported by its content), Joey read that a librarian was wanted in Urichstown, a community squatting nearby that was slightly larger than Woodbine and had a distant view of the river. Posting the opening in the
Woodbine Times
(he was disappointed to learn he’d misread its name) was a little like nailing a note to a tree to advertise your lost dog. There was a Greyhound, and he boarded it for what was an annoyingly slow ride, since it seemed to stop like a school bus at every mailbox along the way. When the windows began to move, Joey remembered without nostalgia his long railroad journeys and the sense he had of falling through farther and farther patches of foreign country. It was late spring, and fields and forests were a wet raw green. Tree leaves had reached their fullness for the first time, and Ohio’s low easy hills lulled the eye. The road made slow undulating music all the way to the river.

Just off the customary courthouse square, which told Joseph that Urichstown was a county seat, he found a small tidy stone library funded by the bobbin boy Andrew Carnegie, bless his generous Scot’s heart. At a large semicircular desk sat a woman wearing a huge head of gray hair that the wooden triangle lying there said was the hair of Marjorie Bruss. She raised her head from her reading, and her hair flew as though quail had suddenly taken flight from a hidden nest.

You’re not from around here.

No, ma’am. I’m from Woodbine.

We beat you in basketball.

I wasn’t aware.

That’s a good sign.

Gee. How did you know I’m here about the job?

You don’t have a card. No one comes in here without a card.

How did you know I don’t have a card?

I know the face of everyone who has one, and the hand that holds it out to me. Except for the too-olds and too-ills who can no longer climb the steps.

Well, whom do I see about it?

Indefinite reference.

The job.

You see me. You said “whom.” “Whom” is also a good sign. Miss Bruss paused. It was apparent she was questioning herself. We did put an ad in Woodbine’s fish wrap. She caught his look … read it … revised her remark … Its newspaper.

I went to Augsburg Academy. I live in Woodbine.

That’s a long commute.

I live with my mother, but if I had this job I’d come over here to room.

The way you do at Augsburg?

Yes, ma’am. I played the organ at the school, but now I’m through.

What was your major? For the first time, Miss Bruss picked up a pencil. Her fingers were unmodified.

Um … Music. Um … English.

Music. Good.

The piano is my real instrument.

Are you …? I hear something.

I’m Austrian. My father was. My mother is. She brought me over ahead of the Nazis.

What’s your name?

Joseph Skizzen.

Two
z
’s? She wrote.

Yes, ma’am.

You graduate this spring?

Um.

This job doesn’t pay much. What do you want it for?

My present job doesn’t pay much either. The college covers my board and room.

You’re on a scholarship?

Um … Same as.

Can you catalog, check out, check in, reshelve?

I can learn. I can count. I know the alphabet. They don’t cover cataloging at Augsburg.

Are you a Lutheran? Religious?

I can be if I have to.

Ms. Bruss laughed like a contralto, though her speaking voice wasn’t notably dark.

What do you want it for—this job?

I can’t live off my mother anymore. She can’t afford me. And I want to go further on in school, but I didn’t feel … well, frankly, I didn’t feel I was learning enough at Augsburg.

Augs. She laughed again. Ugh. She thrust the pencil—point first—into her hair. “Further” is good. Delicate distinction. But you’re too young. You don’t look twenty.

I’m nineteen.

Through Augs by nineteen?

I accelerated.

What do you go by?

Jo—Joseph.

Below her hair, Marjorie Bruss had a rosy round face, quick laugh, and happy wrinkles like lashes about the eyes—beneath her hair, no neck and lost ears. I have to tell you.

Ma’am?

No one wants it.

Don’t you get to read?

For days. Maybe that’s a reason no one wants it. But the pay is poorer than bad cheese. The only applicants I’ve had are eighty. They are trying to earn the price of their plot. They will bore me till I lie in one. I need someone who can carry armloads.