Orfeo (26 page)

He took the melody home with him, planed and trued it, fitted it up with irresistible harmonies, and played it for his wife. He had no words: only scat, on a melody that sounded more discovered than invented. By the end, he had his two girls singing descant on the chorus and laughing out loud.

Sara couldn’t get enough of the trivial tune. Even Maddy was caught humming the hook around the apartment. The earworm was as brutal as a bad case of flu. Maddy shook her head at the song’s total delight.
Oh, you missed your calling!

So he had. A dozen such tunes over the course of a career, and he might even have saved lives.

The realization softened and saddened them both
. It’s good, Peter
, Maddy admitted
. It’s really good.
And for the first time in months, so were they.

Two days later, Peter told his wife that he needed to head down to New York again for a few days, to talk with Richard about a new ambitious work. Maddy recoiled from the announcement. She looked like he’d French-kissed her, only to bite through her tongue. But she recovered quickly enough.

Do what you like,
she told him. But be ready to like whatever you do for a very long time.

Richard had secured funds from his fairy godmother to put together a chamber ballet oratorio based on the transhumanist Fyodorov. The plan called for five veterans from the Judson Dance Theater, eight Tribeca new music militants, and four singers—SATB—performing in shifts over the course of twelve hours. Els would do the music, of course: he was now part of the Bonner package deal. They called the project
Immortality for Beginners.

Some new, brutal urgency was taking shape in a Lower Manhattan slammed by an oil crisis, mugged by inflation, tattooed with Day-Glo tags, whacked out on blow, buried under uncollected trash, and sliding into bankruptcy. Punk had blown the top of pop’s skull off, and downtown concert music was on high alert. The scene was stripping down—postminimal, pulsed, machinic. The music grew a skin of brushed steel and smoky glass. It sounded to Els almost nostalgic, like a holy cantillation for a city slipping down into the East River ooze.

Richard kept a bed for Els in a third-floor studio above a junk shop on the Lower East Side. So long as you came and went in sunlight and kept the lock bar wedged against the front door, the place was as safe as houses. Els squatted there when he came to town to hammer out his cosmic collages with his collaborators. He could have stayed anywhere; he lived, in those days, inside his swirling Fyodorovian choruses, with their vision of an evolved future that would come to know all things, control all atoms, perfect the body, stop death, and revive every person who ever lived. The mad Russian’s Common Cause spelled out everything Els had once wanted from music: the restoration of everything lost and the final defeat of time.

But immortality proved lethal. Maddy met every new announcement of another New York trip with stoic and pleasant nods. He’d spend the train ride down in awe of her, of her growing, no-nonsense poise. Her self-possession seemed the equal to every upheaval. She’d given him years to make his mark—so many of them—and he hadn’t delivered. And yet there was nothing, absolutely nothing at all he could gift her back, except this holdout search for what the world wouldn’t give.

One evening back in Brookline, Peter looked up from his score-in-progress to see New Morning’s new principal across the room in a baggy cardigan, at work at her own desk on urgencies he knew nothing about. Camped at his feet, which she clung to these days, his third-grader was busy drawing maps of Umber, an invented world that Sara spent all her free time populating. Umber had races and nationalities, politics and languages, catastrophic wars and great eras of peace. It survived contagious pandemics and man-made depressions. It had folk songs for every race and an anthem for every nation. Maddy worried about the girl’s obsession with the place. But Peter wanted to tell his daughter: Yes: make something good. Live
there
.

And sitting at his desk, scoring his systems for half a handful of listeners, Peter realized that he lived on the very best planet available. Music was pouring out of him, music that danced and throbbed and shouted down every objection. Composing was all he wanted to do, all he
could
do, and he would do it now with all he had.

Maddy?
he said.

She looked up, alerted by his gentleness.

We could live there. Start new. Just like
—

Where?
Sara asked, excited.
New York?

Maddy’s mouth twitched, ready to smile at the punch line. She didn’t say: Don’t be ridiculous, Peter
.
She didn’t say: You know I can’t leave my job.
She didn’t ask what the hell he was thinking. She just stared at him, incredulous and very, very tired.

The way he’d remembered it, everything happened in that shared glance. On that downbeat, he left a wife who’d given him a decade of unearned patience, abandoned a daughter who wanted only to make things with him, and stepped out into free fall. For nothing, for music, for a chance to make a little noise in this world. A noise that no one needed to hear.

For years, he blamed Fyodorov, those choruses from the growing oratorio, with their slow, progressing ecstasies as inevitable as death. Whatever we love will live again. Every disastrous adventure in this life would be cloned and resurrected. Everyone who ever lived would get a better second act. All his vanished lake-splashing cousins, his loner father and lonely mother, the teachers he needed to impress, the friends he never dared open to, the endless parade of museum visitors, mute and motionless as the paintings he guarded: all would be brought back to life and made whole. Countless failed hopes, forever redeemed by the right sequence of notes.

The way he saw it, Els was leaving nothing; there was nothing in life he
could
leave. He and his daughter would walk once more through the Victory Gardens, giving all the rose varieties ridiculous theme songs. He and his wife would sing together again, old inventions from student days.
Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.

All dead wrong, of course. Life turned out to be one shot, stray and mistaken, a single burst scattered on the air.

He held his wife’s eyes, waiting for her to see.

Yes!
his daughter shouted, from her pads full of scribbles on the floor.
Let’s go someplace. Someplace good.

But Maddy heard another tune, nearer and louder.
No
, she said.
Not me. I live here.

HE TOOK HIS girl to her favorite soda fountain to tell her. He ordered her a Black Cow: a work of art that demanded every atom of her eight-year-old attention. He told her,
Your mother and I still love each other. And we both love you more than ever. It’s just. She has work she has to do. And so do I.

Hold it,
the girl said.

Nothing’s going to change. We’ll still make things together. Still be like we always were.

Wait,
Sara shouted. Soon the shout was full-voice shrieking. He couldn’t make her stop, and when she did, the silence was worse. It said, as clear as silence ever said anything: Never ask me to make things with you again.

A grammar but no dictionary, sense but no meaning, urgency without need: music and the chemisty of cells.

Richard consoled Els, when he got the news.
Sorry, Maestro. I truly am. We loved that woman. I thought the three of us would be together forever.

Thought wrong,
Els told him.

Lost the one with the vagina,
Richard said.

Looks that way.

And the kid. Oh, geez.

Bonner palmed his face and pressed long and hard. At last he said,
Well, you have your work. Maybe she’ll come around.

Peter Els joined the community of souls in orbit around Richard Bonner. He surrendered to a collaborative excitement not altogether distinguishable from panic. Inspiration came at him from the strangest places, and there were days when he could pull marvelous sequences of notes out of a subway conversation. He had his work, and there was no end of work, work so good that it felt, sometimes, like death.

ELS STILL SAW them often, his wife and daughter. But Maddy was no longer his wife, and six months on, Sara had fled to some farther, imaginary planet. Maddy wouldn’t take the girl to New York. Els had to come up to Boston, staying in rentals in Somerville and Jamaica Plain. On his third visit after the separation, he asked the sullen child for the latest news from Umber. He always did. It was like asking how things were with her friends.

The girl gave a pragmatic shrug.
Bingo and Felicita went to war
.

Yes?
Els said.
That’s happened before, right?

She shook her head.
They didn’t stop, this time.

By autumn, Sara asked to quit piano. Maddy, enlightened educator, didn’t resist. She and Peter fought about the decision over the phone.

What a waste
, he said.
She’s twice as musical as I was at her age.

And . . . ?

And she’ll kick herself later, when she grows up.

His ex-wife said,
You want to give her adulthood without regret?

Soon other crises made the piano seem child’s play. The girl swallowed a fistful of aspirin—
to see how it would feel
—and wound up in the ER
.
She poured fingernail polish on a friend’s new platform shoes and called another girl she knew a limp dildo.

A what?
Peter asked his ex-wife.
Does she even know—

I asked,
Maddy interrupted.
She was a little hazy on the details.

Peter’s suggestions for how to handle the girl no longer counted. He’d thrown away his vote the day he packed up his four crates of salvage from the Brookline apartment. He was the cause, and never again a cure.

Maddy stayed perfectly pleasant over the phone, and, in person, the most cheerful of distant acquaintances. The posture, impeccable: Here’s your daughter; have her back by dinner. Graceful, stately. Maddy, too, had missed her calling. She should never have left the stage.

She broke the news to Els long-distance, with the studied levelheadedness that was now her art. She’d married Charlie Pennel, the longtime superintendent of New Morning. Peter knew the man. His wife had worked for him for years.

The ink on their divorce papers was still wet.
You might have told me in advance.

Really, Peter? Why is that?

How long has this been in the works?

He could hear Maddy’s amusement in her mouth’s small muscles.
Peter! What are you suggesting?

Not suggesting anything. You do what you need to.

I thought I might.

Every playful thing in her now disgusted him. He hung up. Ten minutes later he called her back to wish her well. He got her machine, and left no message.

He spent a week humiliating himself, calling old friends and neighbors, pretending to be catching up after years of neglect. Then he’d ask, stony-casual:
Did you make it to the wedding?
When at last he found a guest, he insisted on being tortured with a full description. The music was straight-up Mendelssohn
,
played by a small ensemble of gifted students from New Morning.

IMMORTALITY FOR BEGINNERS
came to life, a vigorous corpse flower
.
Twelve hours of music was an eternity. Els wrote long, slowly mutating, terraced fantasias that pulsed and sighed and exploded. He scattered the peaks and valleys. He borrowed from voices dead for centuries and made them chatter posthumously. And he repeated, recombined, and looped everything until the whole was wide enough to stretch from dawn to dusk.

Bonner loved the finished score. He pointed to a favorite extended passage.
It’s hilarious, Peter. I didn’t know you were so nasty.

What are you talking about?
Els asked.

The question surprised Richard.
I thought . . . you mean this part isn’t a parody of reactionary crap?

No,
Els told him.
It
is
reactionary crap.

But Richard adored the eclectic score. His choreography was in-your-face, rancid, and divine: slung hips and puzzled arms, heads twisting in synchrony, glances raised and lowered like divine lunatics reading a celestial tabloid. He had to cycle the performers, who spelled each other out, relay-style, over the course of the monster marathon.

The piece took most of a year to put together, and it was over in a day. From sunrise to sunset on a Saturday in July, bewildered listeners filtered through a renovated warehouse loft in the old butter and eggs district, watching crazies proclaim the coming reconstruction, from pure information, of everyone who ever lived. Most stayed for a while and left shrugging, but a few souls camped out, lost in the endless middle of things. The
Times
review ran five hundred words. It admired the choreography’s giddy novelty and called the music of thirty-nine-year-old Peter Els evasive, anachronistic, and at times oddly bracing. But this reviewer admits to leaving after an hour and fifty-three minutes.

The party afterward, in the gutted loft, lasted almost as long as the performance. Everyone was spent. Els pushed his way into the drained celebration. The Velvet Underground growled out of someone’s cheap boom box, homesick and way too loud. Richard started throwing stuffed grape leaves at the bottles of wine lined up on a long sideboard across the room. Each time he knocked one down, he’d do a little Martian hornpipe and spout obscene rhymed couplets. The cast stood by, watching the show. Two male dancers started a color commentary.