Various Miracles (14 page)

“Furthermore,” trumpeted the cagey professor, warming to his thesis and drumming on the lectern, “the dogged metaphor, that scurfy escort vehicle of crystalline simplicity, has been royally indicted as the true enemy of meaning, a virus introduced into a healthy bloodstream and maintained by the lordly shrewdness of convention. Oh, it was born innocently
enough with Homer and his wine-dark sea (a timid offering perhaps but one that dropped a velvet curtain between what
was
and what
almost
was). Then came Beowulf stirring the pot with his cunning kennings, and before you could count to sixteen, the insidious creature had wiggled through the window and taken over the house. Soon it became a private addiction, a pipe full of opium taken behind a screen—but the wavelet graduated to turbulent ocean, and the sinews of metaphor became, finally, the button and braces that held up the pants of poesy. The commonest object was yoked by adulterous communion with unlike object (bread and wine, as it were, touching the salty lips of unreason like a capricious child who insists on placing a token toe in every puddle).

“Initially a toy of the literati,” the fiery professor cried, “the metaphor grew like a polyp on the clean chamber of poetry whose friendly narrative lines had previously lain as simply as knives and forks in a kitchen drawer and whose slender, un jointed nouns, colloquial as onions, became puffed up like affected dowagers, swaying, pelvis forward, into a Victorian parlor of cluttered predicates where they took to sitting about on the embroidered cushions of metonymy and resting their metered feet on quirky mean-spirited oxymorons.

“Once established they acquired an air of entitlement, the swag and flounce and glitter of the image boxed within another image, one bleating clause mounting another, sometimes marinated in irony, other times drenched in the tea cup of whimsy. Grown fat with simile and the lace of self-indulgence, the embryo sentence sprouted useless tentacles and became an incomprehensible polyhedron, a glassine envelope enclosing multiple darting allusions that gave off the perfume of apples slowly rotting in a hermit’s cryptic cellar.
There followed signs of severe hypochondria as these verbal clotheshorses stood contemplating one another and noting the inspired imbroglio lodged beneath each painted fingernail. The bell had clearly sounded. It was time to retreat.

“And now,” the professor essayed, stabbing the listening air, “like light glancing off a bowling ball, the peeled, scrubbed and eviscerated simplicity of language is reborn. Out onto the rubbish heap goes the fisherman’s net of foxy allusions. A lifeboat has been assigned to every passenger—and just in time, too—and we are once again afloat on the simple raft of the declarative sentence (that lapsed Catholic of the accessible forms) and sent, shriven and humble, into orbit, unencumbered by the debris of dusty satellites, no longer pretending every object is
life
another; instead every object
is (is
, that frosty little pellet of assertion which sleeps in the folds of the newly minted, nip-wasted sentence, simple as a slug bolt and, like a single hand clapping, requiring neither nursemaid to lean upon nor the succor of moth-eaten mythology to prop it up). With watercolor purity, with soldierly persistence and workmanlike lack of pretence, the newly pruned utterance appears to roll onto the snowy page with not a single troubling cul-de-sac or detour into the inky besmudged midnight of imagery.

“But, alas,” the ashen professor hollowly concluded, “These newly resurrected texts, for all their lean muscularity (the cleanly gnawed bones of
noun
, the powerful hamstrings of
verb)
carry still the faulty chromosome, the trace element, of metaphor—since language itself is but a metaphoric expression of human experience. It is the punishing silence around the word that must now be claimed for literature, the pure uncobbled stillness of the caesura whose unknowingness throws arrows of meaning (palpable as summer fruit
approaching ripeness) at the hem of that stitched under-skirt of affirmation /negation, and plants a stout flag once and forever in the unweeded, unchoreographed vacant lot of being.

“And now, gentle people, the chair will field questions.”

THE OTHER EVENING
Ross and Stanley arrived at the rehearsal hall in time to see Elke go through her violin concert to be performed at the end of the month. It has taken all these years for recognition to come, though she began composing when she was sixteen. How serene she looked in the middle of the bare stage. But she was wearing that damned peasant skirt; Ross had begged her not to dress like that. It made her look like a twelve-tone type. It made her look less than serious.

“Isn’t she magnificent!” Stanley said, breathless. “The coloring! The expression! Like little gold threads pouring out.”

“She’ll never be ready,” Ross said. “She should have been working all summer.”

“You’re hard on her. Don’t be hard on her. She’s human. She needed to get away.”

“We’re all hard on each other, all the Woods are hard on each other. Papa used to say, ‘A Wood will only settle for standards of excellence. A Wood asks more of himself than he asks of others.’“

Stanley hadn’t thought of poor Papa for some months, and now he joined in. “A Wood knows that work is the least despised of human activities.”

“Shhhh,” Ross said. “She’s starting her
Chanson des Fleurs.”

“A Wood values accomplishment above all,” said Stanley who, now that he had started, couldn’t stop.

“Shhhh.”

The first searching notes of the song were spirited from the instrument. Elke heard each note as a reproach. She hadn’t yet seen her two brothers in the back row; the lights at the top of the stage were on, blinding her. The song was coarse and coppery, not as it sounded when she wrote it. Why did she write it? How could she expect substance to come out of nothing?

The violin dug uncompromisingly into the soft flesh of her neck and chin. Today the bow seemed malicious and sharp. These benign forms—she had let them take her over and become something else. The song, mercifully, ended, and so did her dark thoughts.

“Bravo, Encore.” Stanley’s voice rang out. Was he here then? If only they’d shut off the lights. Why would they need them on so long before the actual concert? Today wasn’t even a real rehearsal. How has Stanley tracked her down? If only it could be hoped that he hadn’t brought Ross.

“Stanley?” Her wavery voice. It was a good thing she hadn’t been trained as an actress. “Was that you, love?”

At the restaurant Elke was drinking red wine instead of white because Ross said it was more calming for her; she could scarcely afford to have one of her spells with the concert so near at hand. And only one glass, said Ross, then she must go home and get a good night’s sleep.

Stanley watched her closely, thinking how regal she was. The long Wood nose. The Wood eyes. An almost Wood chin, but less resolute than his or Ross’s, which was perhaps a good thing.

“Well, of course I’m glad you came,” she was saying to Stanley. “But who told you where the rehearsal hall was? Ross, I suppose.”

“When you played the
Danse de Feu
I had tears in my eyes,” Stanley said. “Even now, two hours later, just thinking about it brings back tears.”

Ross said, “But you always cry at concerts.”

“And at art galleries,” said Elke. “I remember taking you to the Picasso retrospective at the Art Gallery when you were fifteen and you got weepy and had to go to the men’s room.”

“Papa cried when he heard Callas,” Ross said. “You could hear him sniffling all over the balcony.”

Elke turned to Stanley and touched the top of his wrist. “Promise me you won’t cry at the concert. I don’t know what I’d do if I heard someone blowing into a handkerchief from the third row. I’d lose my place. I’d lose my sense of balance.”

“I can’t promise,” Stanley said, his eyes filling with tears.

Elke found it hard to breathe. She was overwhelmed the way she had been with Papa before the accident. There was Ross, so brusque and demanding. And Stanley, too sweet, too sweet. The two were inseparable and, it seemed lately, inescapable. She would have to invent strategies to keep them out.

“Do you believe,” she asked them, “do you believe that there is hidden meaning in what we dream?”

“Oh, yes,” said Stanley at once.

Ross poured himself another glass of his chilled, ivory-colored wine.

“Well,” Elke began, “I’ll tell you my dream then, and you must interpret it for me.” The only question in her mind was which dream to describe. She chose the one that they might be most likely to understand.

“Papa gave me, in this dream, a set of heavy, leather-bound books. They were encyclopedia, very old and very valuable. They filled the long shelf above my desk. One day, as I sat looking through volume R to S, I noticed that the binding, under the leather, was made of old sheet music. I was certain that this was one of Schiffmann’s lost symphonies, although I don’t know why I was so sure of this. So, of course, I ripped apart every book and peeled away the pages of the symphony. And just as I became aware that I was mistaken, that the music was only a series of piano exercises, I also became aware that you and Papa had come into the room and were looking at me with expressions of enormous reproach.”

“She made it up,” Ross said later when he and Stanley had turned out the light and were about to go to sleep. “She made up the whole dream.”

From the other side of the room Stanley’s voice was muffled. He liked to pull the blanket up so that it reached his lips. “How do you know it wasn’t a real dream?”

“Woods don’t dream, at least not dreams as vivid or as detailed as that. Besides, I talked to her psychiatrist after the last episode, and he told me she made up dreams all the time.”

“I have dreams,” said Stanley.

“She makes up dreams in order to reinforce her image of herself as a victim. In her made-up dreams there is always someone shouting at her or scolding her or pointing out her faults. In one of the dreams Papa was telling her she’d ruined her career because she’d cut her hair. It took all the creative force out of her.”

“Like Sampson,” Stanley said.

“There was another dream, more extreme, when Papa was accusing her of causing his accident. She invited him to supper, and then she phoned and told him not to come after all; she was too tired even to make him an omelet. That was how he happened to be wandering down Sherbrooke on his way to the delicatessen when the motorbike knocked him down. Of course, it was all invented. She prefers to think she’s the guilty cause of disaster. You might say she’s greedy for guilt. But she didn’t fool the psychiatrist at all. Real dreams have a different texture, and he’s convinced Elke never really dreamed these dreams.”

“I have dreams,” Stanley said.

Elke started awake so suddenly her left leg cramped beneath her. Gently she kneaded at the hard knot in her calf. The window was open and the moon floated full and fat as though for her inspection. Last summer she’d been sent to study in Paris, and in the bank where she’d gone to change her grant checks there had been a sign:
DEMANDEZ-VOUS DE LA LUNE
. Of course she never did. Instead, she’d spent the tissuey franc notes and the long August afternoons in the café nearest her hotel.

She was seized, as always, in the middle of the night by regrets. She’d been so close to something original; it had flickered at the edge of her vision, in one of the darker corners of the café.

She must try to sleep. She would have to focus her energy and try to concentrate, if only for their sake. At least they found her worth their trouble. That was something.

“Too much, too much.” She whispered these words out loud.

Then she slept, and her head again filled with dreams.
Despite being a Wood, Stanley had at least one vivid little dream every night. In the morning, as soon as he woke, he wrote a summary in a spiral-bound notebook. Sometimes he dreamed of food, chiefly artichokes, which he loved immoderately; sometimes he dreamed of music; and very frequently he dreamed of wandering down corridors with labyrinthine rooms going off to the left and right. He never dreamed about Papa. In fact, he seldom thought about him for weeks at a time, and he was naturally a little ashamed of this.

But he excused himself; he was busy. He woke early every day, drank a glass of hot tea and was in his workroom by eight-thirty. He had a great many orders—everyone seemed suddenly to want a handmade guitar. A student from a technical school helped him in the afternoons. They talked as they worked, which Stanley found charming. At 4:45, he locked the door and walked the mile and a half to the concert hall in order to catch the end of Elke’s rehearsal. Usually, Ross was there when he arrived, sitting with a copy of the score on his lap and holding a little penlight so he could see in the dark.

One day after the rehearsal, a week before the performance, Stanley slipped Elke a note. “Dear Elke,” it read. “The night before Papa’s accident I forgot to remind him to take his heart pill. You remember how forgetful he was. I am certain that he had a heart attack on the way to the delicatessen and collapsed just as the motorbike came around the corner. Love, Stanley.”