“I’m worried about the recital tomorrow.”
“Aw, don’t worry. Here, kiss me. Right here.”
“Aren’t you listening? I’m worried.”
“I’m singing. You’re just accompanying me. Nobody’s going to notice you. Move over a little, would you? Yeah, there. That pillow was forcing my head against the wall.”
“Why aren’t you worried?”
“Why should I be worried? I don’t want to worry. I want to make love. Isn’t that better than worrying?”
“Not if I’m worried.”
“People won’t notice you. By the way, have you paid attention to the fact that when I kiss you on the stomach, you get goose bumps?”
“Yes. I think you’re taking this pretty lightly. I mean, it’s almost unprofessional.”
“That’s because I’m an amateur. A one hundred percent amateur. Always and totally. Even at this. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have my moments. Mmmmmm. That’s better.”
“I thought it would maybe help. But listen. I’m still worried.”
“Uhhhh. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Oh, I get it.”
“What?”
“I get it. You aren’t worried about yourself. You’re worried about me.”
Forty people attended her recital, which was sponsored by the city university’s music school, in which Karen was a sometime student. Somehow we made our way through the program, but when we came to the Chanler settings, I suddenly wanted Karen to sing them perfectly. I wanted an angel to descend and to take away the Gypsy’s curse. But she sang as she always had — off pitch — and when she came to “Ann Poverty,” I found myself in that odd region between rage and pity.
Stranger, here lies
Ann Poverty;
Such was her name
And such was she.
May Jesu pity
Poverty.
But I was losing my capacity for pity.
In the green room, her forty friends came back to congratulate her. I met them. They were all very nice. She smiled and laughed: there would be a party in an hour. Would I go? I declined. When we were alone, I said I was going back to my place.
“Why?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you come to my party? You’re my lover after all. That is the word.”
“Yes. But I don’t want to go with you.”
“Why?”
“Because of tonight’s concert, that’s why.”
“What about it?”
“It wasn’t very good, was it? I mean, it just wasn’t.”
“I thought it was all right. A few slips. It was pretty much what I was capable of. All those people said they liked it.”
“Those people don’t matter!” I said, my eyes watering with anger. “Only the music matters. Only the music is betrayed; they aren’t. They don’t know about pitch, most of them. I mean, Jesus, they aren’t genuine musicians, so how would they know? Do you really think what we did tonight was good? It wasn’t! It was a travesty! We ruined those songs! How can you stand to do that?”
“I don’t ruin them. I sing them adequately. I project feeling. People get pleasure from them. That’s enough.”
“It’s awful,” I said, feeling the ecstatic liftoff into rage. “You’re so close to being good, but you aren’t good. Who cares what those ignoramuses think? They don’t know what notes you’re supposed to hit. It’s that goddamn slippery pitch of yours. You’re killing those songs. You just drop them like watermelons on the stage! It makes me sick! I couldn’t have gone on for another day listening to you and your warbling! I’d die first.”
She looked at me and nodded, her mouth set in a half moue, half smile of nonsurprise. There may have been tears in her eyes, but I didn’t see them. She looked at me as if she were listening hard to a long-distance call. “You’re tired of me,” she said.
“I’m not tired of you. I’m tired of hearing you sing! Your voice makes my flesh crawl! Do you know why? Can you tell me why you make me sick? Why do you make me sick? Never mind. I’m just glad this is over.”
“You don’t look glad. You look angry.”
“And you look smug. Listen, why don’t you go off to your party? Maybe there’ll be a talent scout there. Or roses flung riotously at you. But don’t give a recital like this again, please, okay? It’s a public disgrace. It offends music. It offends me.”
I turned my back on her and walked out to my car.
After the failure of Harmony of the World, Hindemith went on a strenuous tour that included Scandinavia. In Oslo, he was rehearsing the Philharmonic when he blinked his bright blue eyes twice, turned to the concertmaster, and said, “I don’t know where I am.” They took him away to a hospital; he had suffered a nervous breakdown.
I slept until noon, having nothing to do at the paper and no reason to get up. At last, unable to sleep longer, I rose and walked to the kitchen to make coffee. I then took my cup to the picture window and looked down the hill to the trees of the conservation area, the view Stecker had once told me I should have.
The figure of a woman was hanging from one of the trees, a noose around her neck. I dropped my coffee cup and the liquid spilled out over my feet.
I ran out the back door in my pajamas and sprinted painfully down the hill’s tall grass toward the tree. I was fifty feet away when I saw that it wasn’t Karen, wasn’t in fact a woman at all, but an effigy of sorts, with one of Karen’s hats, a pillow head, and a dress hanging over a broomstick skeleton. Attached to the effigy was a note:
In the old days, this might have been me. Not anymore. Still, I thought it’d make you think. And I’m not giving up singing, either. By the way, what your playing lacks is not fanaticism, but concentration. You can’t seem to keep your mind on one thing for more than a minute at a time. I notice things, too. You aren’t the only reviewer around here. Take good care of this doll, okay?
XXXXXXX,
Karen
I took the doll up and dropped it in the clothes closet, where it has remained to this hour.
Hindemith’s biographer, Geoffrey Skelton, writes, “[On the stage] the episodic scenes from Kepler’s life fail to achieve immediate dramatic coherence, and the basic theme remains obscure …”
She won’t, of course, see me again. She won’t talk to me on the phone, and she doesn’t answer my letters. I am quite lucidly aware of what I have done. And I go on seeing doubles and reflections and wave motion everywhere. There is symmetry, harmony, after all. I suppose I should have been nice to her. That, too, is a discipline. I always tried to be nice to everyone else.
On Kepler’s deathbed, Hindemith has him sing:
Und muss sehn am End:
Die grosse Harmonie, das is der Tod.
Absterben is, sie zu bewirken, not.
Im Leben hat sie keine Statte.
Now, at the end, I see it:
The great harmony, it is death.
To find it, we must die.