We made love — copulated — at my apartment repeatedly over the nights that followed. I never recaptured that total diffusion, that month Of later. I did catch brief bits and pieces before his body became more almond-familiar. That sustained current never reappeared, and I came in time to wonder if it had been somatic after all. The work we lavished on each other, hungry and needy, received reinforcement, often and diffuse and strange. More than enough to keep us coming back. Todd came frequently to my apartment, sometimes with more old clothes.
But it was some time before I ever set foot in his place. True, he lived in Lower Manhattan, while I lived in the neighborhood where we both worked. At last I invited myself. He was to cook for me, on a weekend we both had off. He agreed to the conditions, with whispered additional terms.
He lived in an attic—"loft" is the current euphemism — on a street straight out of "Bartleby." The corbled eccentricity of the place made him give up nicer rooms uptown, going from a relatively safe neighborhood into the heart of the urban experience. He greeted me at the street, walked me down the hall, parodying bachelor brazenness as soon as the apartment door closed. "Well. Here we are. Just throw that dress anywhere."
He took me on the lightning tour. His makeshift sitting room lay angled oddly against the back corner's fire escape. He had pitched a double bed in an old storage room and turned a large walk-in closet into a study. "Not much, but we call it home. All right: abode. Let's not niggle over terms." Museum-clutter suffused the place, somewhere between a Sotheby's halfway house and Turkish bazaar. A dumbwaiter, now dysfunctional, toted a Howdy Doody in pince-nez. Furnishings included a table made from a lobster pot, chairs made from conveyor belts, and a lilac-colored upright piano. Here and there were scattered convenience-store samplers of instant coffee, lip balm, shoe-odor pads: CARE packages dropped for a shipwreck who'd forgotten how to use them.
Art treasures — Brueghel's wheatfields and Vermeer's Head of a Girl prominent among them — covered every inch of his walls, and a few Tiepolo-type trompe l'oeils even encroached on the ceiling. That popular seventeenth- and eighteenth-century genre, the picture gallery: one canvas crammed recursively with as many different miniature art masterpieces as could fit in the space allotted.
Not only prints: incomplete sets of Conrad and Scott, African kalimbas, a glass harmonica assembled from kit, dancing bears and Uncle Sams that swallowed dimes. Among the larger bric-a-brac was a seamstress's costume dummy from the 1920s, adjustable along all major axes. "Meet Theda Bara. I inherited her after the breakup of a college experiment in idealistic living." She had os-motically acquired a wardrobe: flapper skirt, feather boa, worn-out sneakers, a cocky hat fashioned from a post-office mailer, a brightly painted papier-mâché toucan nose, and a breastplate of buttons reading, among other things. "Liquid Courage, Not Liquid Paper." Against a wall of raw brick lay a hundred-gallon aquarium divided between soil and water. The dry land was given over to mosses, beetles, and skinks. Below lake line, turtles and eels swam oblivious of captivity. "I tried salt water once," he explained, "but it's more difficult to balance than you think."
I watched as he prepared a skillful dinner — Indonesian chicken, so he said, although it could easily have been ad lib. He chattered the while, not even stopping to answer the phone. "They'll call back. Do you think I could pass for an eighties man? The eighties man is sensitive. He wins women's hearts by saying such things as 'I feel a deep sadness welling up in me.' Do you think I'm in any position to win women's hearts?" He was nervous, profuse. I was happy, feeling how little I knew him.
We ate epically — two hours over dinner. He made me try three cabernets blindfold. We talked about his dissertation, long delinquent, and about how I had ended up in library science. When at last nothing graced the table but scraped dishes, he reached over, felt my belly, and nodded, satisfied. "All right then," he said, withdrawing his hand after only a modest amount of further exploration. "We have to talk about music now. You start." I could think of nothing but his violent reaction, on that first business dinner of ours so many months before, when the piped tape of Bach's little keyboard exercise had hurt his face so spontaneously. I wondered if it weren't music he wanted to talk about, but that taboo neither of us had raised since he first hired me to find Dr. Ressler in the historical register.
I shrugged. "I played the piano once. As you know."
Franklin smiled. "I played the accordion. I could make 'Five Hundred Miles' sound as if it had been transposed into kilometers. At eighteen, I applied to music conservatory. Chopin etudes on the squeeze box for my audition. Went to art school."
He looked at me, decided to get the worst out of the way. "You know, the professor came to music late in life. He says the whole enterprise caught him by surprise. Other noises, other tunes. Said he spent years committing to memory the entire repertoire. But somewhere along the way, he's pared Western music down to just what he can carry." His voice fell, forced-cheery. Todd shook his head.
But this time, we didn't stop at Dr. Ressler's collapse into the microcosm of those few dozen measures. He became animated, demanding to know my favorite pieces. I gave over a couple hostages. He accused me of being hopelessly stuck on mainstream war-horses. He challenged me with a dozen composers, none of whom were more than names to me. "These are the folks who are writing music right now. Your contemporaries. But who bothers listening? We're reduced to the three-minute unison synthesizer banks while an electronic drum loop programmed to bash out every other beat mercifully drowns out the hermaphrodite wailing about how it feels good to feel bad. It's a war zone out there. Lose-lose situation. Another concert hall rendition of Finlandia for folks with the heavy jewelry on the one hand, and three anemic teenagers called "The Styro Detritus' on the other."
In a minute, he recovered. "The trick to listening," he said, lifting me by the hand, "is to hear the pieces speaking to one another. To treat each one as part of an enormous anatomy still carrying the traces of everything that ever worked, seemed beautiful awhile, became too obvious, and had to be replaced. Music can only mean anything through other music. You have to be able to hear in Stockhausen that homage to the second Viennese school, in Schönberg the rearrangement of sweet Uncle Claude. And every new sleeper that Glass welds together gives new breath to that rococo clockmaker Haydn, as if only now, in 1980, can we at last hear what pleasing the Esterhazys is all about."
He was performing for me. By then we were in the bedroom, but for a wholly different seduction than we'd explored at my place. Franklin's dirty clothes were stacked into prim piles, interleaved with notebooks. He cleared away a state-of-the-art turntable, expensive but not well cared for. He went to the top shelf of his closet. There, stretching from end to end where the sweaters usually went, was a wall of records, arranged by spine color in rainbow spectrum. He dug out a disk, mumbling, "Have a seat. No. Take the bed. Lie down and close your eyes."
I did as instructed. Eyes closed, I heard everything: Todd shuffling the record jacket, the domestic argument in the flat downstairs, the sound of breaking bottles, someone being sick in the street below, Dr. Resslcr putting up a disk pack on a spindle across town, the first snow of the year falling on my mother's Midwest grave. I heard the hollow of high-fidelity speakers, the muffled pop of needle touching, and the sandy scuttling of crabs across the worn record surface.