I try not to talk on the phone in front of him, since he can’t understand I’m not talking to him. He’ll laugh when I laugh, try to stand in front of me, nod when he thinks I’m asking a question.
When I got in the cab the morning after our first night together, I turned on my cell for the first time in two days and found a message from Larry. “It’s me,” he said. I could picture him standing with the phone, his back to the smudgy window of his efficiency. “Wondering if my shoe polish is still there. In the hall closet. Call me.” I haven’t known Larry to polish his shoes in the past ten years, so this meant he had a date. Or wanted me to think so.
I called his land line, since he’d be at work. I talked to his voicemail. “Me,” I said. “Wednesday morning. If you left any polish, it’s probably gone. My friend moved some things in, so I had to make space. My friend John. Nothing too serious, but he’s staying awhile.”
When I finished, a prerecorded woman asked if I’d like to review my message. I did. Then I taped over it. “Me. Sorry I took so long. Can’t find the polish. It was old anyway, wasn’t it? You should just buy some new. So. Good luck with whatever the shiny shoes are for.”
The cabbie smiled in the rearview. If he understood my English, he probably approved of my benevolence.
Johann is obsessed now with jazz, especially blues. Funny, I’d have pegged him for a Charlie Parker fan, something more complex. He still speaks only a few words of English—coffee, eat, pajamas, no—but he’s memorized a number of blues lyrics. Across the table most nights, between dinner and ice cream, he’ll start into something like “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?” and he even does that low, gravelly Satchmo voice.
“No joys for me
no company
even ze mouse
ren from my house
all my life srough
I’ve been soooooo
bleck and blue.”
Only he’s grinning when he sings it. I think he’s proud of himself.
When he plays from the Chopin book I got him, it sounds different than it should — sharper, less Romantic, I suppose — but then there’s something wonderful about the way he plays fantastical music in this normal, rhythmic way as if it weren’t Chopin at all, just Hanon warm-up exercises. It reminds me of a Chagall painting: Here are some people, floating above a town. Here is a cow on the roof. Here is the blanket sky, poked through with blinding stars. But this is just the way my town looks at night! I took my easel into the street to paint my flying neighbors, to get the purple starlight right. Normal, normal. Nothing Romantic going on here.
I gave him some staff paper the other day, thinking maybe he’d write something while he’s here, but he just looked at it, said, “Nein, nein,” shook his head sadly. Maybe it’s against the rules to compose here, to leave parts of his genius as evidence. Maybe he can leave his sperm, but not his handwriting.
My father used to make me and my brother try to compose. He’d sit us down, have us close our eyes, tell us if we cleared our minds of every noise and picture, something would come. It never did. I feared it was because of my cheating, my inability to filter out random images. I’d almost be clear, and then: Gorilla! Airplane! Christmas! I want to ask Johann how he does it, how he can sit and just concentrate. How he can keep out everything that isn’t sound — the fifty thousand colors of the world, the smell of something burning four stories below.
The longer he’s here, the more I think I should learn German. We could piece together a conversation then, between us.
My Brahms-bearded art professor, the one who introduced me to Chagall in the first place, would use a piano during lectures. The class met in the small recital theater at the back of the fine arts building, and there was a Steinway on the stage, and somehow he’d gotten a key to the lid. He loved to run from his projection screen to that piano, talking about “Colors are like notes; together they make chords.” He probably thought he was being quirky.
“This is blue and green,” he said, playing C and D together. “Analogous. So similar they create tension. Now blue and yellow.” A third. “Now blue and orange.” A fourth.
Another time, he ran to the piano to explain a terrible Rococo painting, something with clouds and bosoms. “The whites in the Fragonard are like this,” he said, and trilled high up, delicate and saccharine.
But I was never sure he knew what he was talking about. He lost my faith when we studied Guernica and he said there would never be a war on American soil in our lifetime. (No canvas of mangled, color-void bodies. No slaughtered bull, no spears, no pale-eyed crucifixion.) It struck me as shockingly naive for a smart man, very bag-over-the-head.
And he was wrong about colors, too. “They have no innate meaning,” he said the second week of class, “but they have connotations we all share, as a society and as humans, yes? Green tunes us in to nature, life, so we feel soothed. Blue is sky, so we think dreamy, ethereal, and the same with white. Black is fear. For three million years we lived without electricity, no? There are good reasons we’re afraid of the dark. Red, we see blood. So violence, drama, excitement, passion.” That’s where I took exception, where I still do. For men, yes, maybe. But for any woman since the dawn of time, red means no baby this month. It means, for better or worse, the staining and unignorable absence of a baby.
I lied before. The sex isn’t that good. I had low expectations, so I was thrilled he knew anything. But actually he’s pretty stiff, noncreative. I’ve tried things a couple of times, normal things for our society, and he’s pulled away from me, started talking fast in German, turned bright pink.
The last time he did it, I put my clothes back on and decided to ignore him for the rest of the day. I went to the window and opened the curtains. I wasn’t thinking about it, but maybe on some level I did it to scare him. He stood staring down at the cars, saw all the buildings, saw for the first time how high we were. He didn’t cry, but he looked like he wanted to. He stayed there a long time, shaking and mumbling. Then he closed the curtains and ran to the couch, ran bent over at the waist as if he were scared of falling. I’m surprised he never opened the curtains himself while I was at work. You’d think a genius would be more curious than that.
To calm him down, I got my big music encyclopedia off the shelf and showed him all the pictures in the Bach section. The house where he was born, the church in Leipzig, a portrait of his oldest son. He pointed at each and said things I couldn’t understand, but they seemed to make him happy. He flipped back a page to the Vivaldi section and made some kind of joke. He giggled and giggled, so I just laughed along with him.
“Yep, that Vivaldi,” I said. “One funny guy.”
After I put the encyclopedia back on the shelf, I got out the little Chagall book I’d bought at MOMA.
“Here,” I said, and I opened it to The Fiddler. “This is what I think of when you play Chopin. See how he’s making music, floating there above the town? That’s what you sound like, like there’s nothing under your feet but you don’t even notice.”