Middle C (29 page)

Marjorie and Joseph also discussed music and books. Schenker, Joseph kept to himself. He didn’t know enough to discuss him in any case. But he was quite taken with the ideas of scale-step and voice-leading, which he understood as constituting the
x
and
y
axes of musical space. Tonal color, he thought, ought to serve as the third. However, he knew he hadn’t grasped what the introduction called “Rameau’s great error” concerning the figured bass. It would become clear, he hoped, in time, or as the pages turned. There were personages, like Joseph Fux (or Rameau, for that matter) who had not previously been in his landscape, and whose acquaintance he had to make. For the first time, Joseph’s greed for knowledge might be satisfied. The many books that were at his arm’s length made him giddy, anxious, hasty as a glutton who fears competition from a multitude of other mouths.

Time, too, became real, and its paradoxes fascinating. He had in hand, for instance, a book of Ruskin’s originally issued in the 1850s; meanwhile Shaw and Shakespeare sat close by, with volumes about them from every ensuing decade. Yet all of these works were here in the sight of his eye, so that he—Joseph Skizzen—might read Shaw before Shakespeare, Piñero before Sophocles, the little or the late before the long ago and very great; because, for him, the past, which he surely recognized and honored as historical, was as real right now as it once had been; the past was present in an altered form, of course, but Ruskin’s words on Ruskin’s page were the same as the day Ruskin wrote them, as was his dislike of geometric form, expressed by him with such conviction. In these fulminations, Euclid’s tidy squares, his pretty rounds and triangles, were set against the exfoliate nature and shape of plants, animals, and even men, as if the two realms were enemies—the abstract versus the organic for the title
in fifteen rounds. This bout was as present to Joseph’s mind as it might have been to one of Ruskin’s immediate readers. The past is present on the page, he told Marjorie. This library is like the Savior, the whole dead world has risen and stands here as on the Last Day. Marjorie’s smile was chaperoned by a pair of moist eyes.

Sometimes the library would grow unaccountably busy, and these “new found friends” were forced to break off their conversation to take up routine duties. The pair virtuously suppressed their resentment of this, though it was strong. Joseph would smile across the room at Marjorie as he passed her desk with some requested books, and both recognized that these periods, when they had to be apart, made them appreciate their conversations all the more.

Now and then, when he returned to his garage, he’d find a plate of cookies had been put beside his bed.

Marjorie recommended to Joseph the novels of Dorothy Richardson, none of which the library held, but volumes she owned if he wished to borrow them. Joseph was agreeably grateful, and their conversations continued over weeks and into months, Joseph regaling her with anecdotes, not only those dealing with his own past, but many taken from the lives of his new masters: authors and artists and composers he was reading about in various biographies. What remained amazing for him was the simple availability of everything: that he could reach out and pull from a shelf as he passed a mind—a mind—not merely a source of information as in an almanac, but someone’s actual thinking, someone’s real imagining, their honest feeling. Were Joseph to climb to a hilltop, innocent of any intent, and suddenly face a vast ocean about which the world was unaware, would his amazement be equal to that of Cortez? Joseph wondered whether any historical stranger’s reflection and responsiveness were as nearby or as far away as his quirky selection determined; and whether there might be in any random volume pages that would hold his attention, almost painfully, as if his head were in the mask of iron, or possibly in a vise as the torture books recounted, where his gaze was fastened on a poker heated hot, or on iron pliers held in a gloved hand. With that sort of horror, that kind of delight, he read—he conceived—he envisioned a large lake … an island … a bastion rising through the mist … the slender wake from a boatload of plumed men …

19

When Professor Joseph Skizzen walked into his first class at Whittlebauer College—seventeen students had signed up for Trends in Modern Music, and they were all there—his chest could scarcely hold his heart, and he heard its throb as if each beat were being made by menacing native feet for a jungle movie. Your job, he said to himself, is to make them choke on their own snores. He had been an indifferent student himself. The memory was before him like a billboard. Only Mr. Hirk had made his blood come alive in his heart. Others of his teachers had pretended to a passion for Martin Luther or for French or for the early American novel, but they hadn’t any enthusiasm really; they hadn’t any feeling for anything; they just declaimed and paced or intoned and shuffled or mumbled or droned; and they believed they entertained properly by pouring tepid water into tiny cups. As a young newcomer to the faculty he was last in line for perks and had been given an 8:00 a.m. schedule to prove his unimportance. Early morning—what a moment for music. So Joseph assumed his students had sleepwalked from their dorms and zombied into back-row seats where they sat like the seats sat. He vowed. He vowed he would unsettle their sleep at least, but before him was the memory of his own bad attitude, now multiplied seventeen times, yet made odd by being featured in strange faces.

Professor Skizzen … of course he was not a professor yet, but what did they know …? Professor Skizzen—trying to stride—went straight to the piano that sat athwart a front corner of the classroom directly opposite the door. This arrangement permitted him to walk directly to it, looking neither to right nor left, then slide smoothly upon the piano seat and sit with definition the way the piano seat sat, his hand poised without further preamble to play twenty seconds of “The Minute Waltz” (Joseph thought they might recognize that). This is classic, he said, turning slightly around. And this—he touched the few quiet widely separated notes of Bartók’s 1926 sonata—is modern.

A moment later he stood with burning face before the class, his feet, legs, and waist sheltered by his desk, in traditional schoolmasterly position, hoping they would think he was naturally rosy; and with the furniture’s
protection he tried to greet the class, to introduce himself and their subject, to get the course going, to commence his first lecture, aware the while that he had blundered badly right from the beginning, for Joseph had meant to play the Minuet in G—that was the classic—
la dee dah dee dah dee dah dee dah, la dee dah, lah dee dah
, perhaps they would get the joke, if they had seen the right movie—next the Chopin was to follow as … well … the classic romantic—and then, only then, were those lonely notes of Bartók’s to be struck.

Because he had been hired as a specialist in contemporary music, Joseph thought it prudent to find out what his subject took in—from whom to whom was the principal question, since, although the course was called “contemporary,” its composers were obliged to be dead. He had been told to teach two sections of an introduction to music as well, one later in the day, the other on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday mornings, likewise held before reveille’s own notes had died away. His head felt like a fine apple, as crisp as the autumn air as he crossed the quad. In addition, he was to instruct half-a-dozen kids in piano, times that might nibble at the edges of his evenings. Joseph already dreaded the winter; he had felt the wind sweep across the hilltop, and he knew that, throughout the fall, it would rain the entire distance from his mother’s house to the office; the office he shared with someone he hadn’t seen, though they had briefly met, but whose papers covered the only desk, whose books filled the solitary bookcase, whose photo holding a fish crookedly graced the wall, and whose lumber jacket hung on the single hook like another trophy. There were, however, two chairs, the second, Joseph supposed, for a suppliant, as well as an empty corner where the petitioner might stand.

The students’ faces were expectantly directed but uniformly empty. Joseph would discover that throughout the semester the surfaces of these faces would shift mechanically: they would show curiosity yet remain blank, look puzzled though blank, annoyed but blank, and bored and blank. They had probably enrolled because the course was rumored to be easy. Well, it would not be a breeze where he blew. They would like nothing more than an ear-long year of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Well, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern would not be easy. Milhaud would not be easy (he had died just in time to become relevant), though they might have coasted through Debussy and Ravel if Debussy and Ravel
had remained contemporary; there were, of course, Holst the programmatic, Delius the soporific, and Elgar the Edward to delight their tastes—Elgar was the Kipling of English music, he’d heard—however, the course could not include Aram Khachaturian, who was hanging on to life, nor Aaron Copland, the American mountaineer and jingoist. Oh yes, Messiaen—the Composer’s Claudel, as he was understood to have been, although Milhaud had given sail to a bark called
Christopher Columbus
—this radical composer of conservative thoughts would not be easy either. His name had too many vowels.

How might Herr Fraudulent Prof survive his second class? These were not merely strange names he was threatening his poor pupils with; they represented his areas of ignorance, too: a vast bleak plain empty of all experience. He could not spell a signature, not to say sing a note, from one of their compositions. He could not crowd them all into the last weeks of the semester and then hope not to get there. Though he had experienced that strategy.

Two students dropped during the first week. Another after the first quiz. Latitudes of this kind were recent. Whittlebauer College had been traumatized during the Vietnam protests of the sixties despite the fact that not a voice had been raised or a placard waved on its campus during society’s confusing hostilities. Its students were the children of Presbyterians, and although the doctrines of the UP were a definite improvement over the frightened sectarianism of Augsburg Community College, the school administration always acted to serve its church and keep its charges in line. After all, the servants of the Word were elected by the laity—in this case those who paid the bills—so its organization was more democratic than most. Nevertheless, a decayed Calvinism lay just under the school’s fluster like a concealed corpse beneath the floor.

Joseph realized that religion went for a liberal education like an assassin for the jugular. If it weren’t for righteous families, with their revered authoritarian ways, and schools like Whittlebauer that kept kids penned within the faith until they graduated, the sect would sicken if not die. However, on account of a declining enrollment, an increasing dropout rate, and the horrid headlines in the newspapers concerning the pot-smoking, free-loving hippies, those violent Students for Democratic Action, Gangs of Gay Bikers, or marauding Black Panthers, uncivil
as the banks they robbed and fires they set, as well as the erosions of the war on everybody’s patience, the college relaxed its requirement of regular attendance at church, allowed a student council to be elected, actually to convene, and even permitted it to rule in carefully circumscribed and unimportant circumstances. Three African Americans were captured in an admission’s raid, while an Asian, without solicitation, enrolled. Diversity had been achieved. There were more dances than there had been, though the campus remained dry, and academic standards were so relaxed as to seem asleep. So students could drop a course at any time during the first three weeks. By the end of taste-and-decide time, Joseph had retained ten, one of them a boy … two others maybe were almost men.

How to proceed? His course had no prerequisite. Rock and rollers would naturally want to know what was happening in their world, but neither their minds nor their world were musical, a fact they would not understand, and one that would rile them. It would be like trying to instruct his sister. And, just as it was for his sister, their reality would be filled by a local future—nothing else: the next game, the next party, the next dance, the next dress, the next date, the next hot song, the next new movies, even the next exam. Finally … happy graduation day … money well spent, folks. Then there would be the wedding to think of, the couple’s income to worry about, consequently the next raise, therefore the first house, a kid, soon kids, until their lives would no longer recognize anything novel and have run out of expectations like a keg that foams air; their present tense would slowly turn toward the very past they had once so carefully packed like a hope chest with their youthful future: the old games and their dead great players, the once-upon-a-time BYO parties, dances they had danced, gowns they had worn, the golden oldies, grade school friends, high school chums, and college buddies, first loves, wild drives, frat drunks, make-outs that were now adulteries.

Where to begin? how could he cut into a continuum and honestly say, “From this point on all that was cotton is now silk”? While he had been, as his CV supportively said, a librarian, initially reading at random and with intemperate glee, Joseph had begun to pursue subjects beyond the beauties they publically offered. He was dissatisfied with any account of things that assumed some fresh art or new sound had been spontaneously
born and didn’t know or need to acknowledge its parents. He had come to feel, with an ease he almost recognized, that events and their inhabitants had a source from which they’d sprung; and he needed to know how they had become the way they presently were; where their actual causes lay; why turns had been taken and choices made; the true parents of things set at odds, split and gone; so he was now at a loss because he had no beginning he could offer to his students. Even illness had its onset. Yet the modern movement in all the arts, as far as he could see, was partly defined by its hatred of history, by the intemperate rejection of a nineteenth century that had deified history’s explanatory power, its moody course, its laws, its chosen heroes. What did you do when received opinion went so categorically against your own? Back down like the weenie you were? Or remain faithful to your ignorance, curled like a cat in its chair? Or one day, like the mysterious stranger in Western movies, get gone.