Some have said he grieved perfectly.
PERFORMANCE
She sweats. It is not a sexy, shimmery sweat. It is not a surprise. She made the strategic choice not to wear white. Regardless, she feels it highlighting the hotspots of her body in scalloped penumbras of wet cloth. She remembers Billie Jean King running Bobby Riggs around the court on the marionette strings of her angle-work. She imagines the cockpit chair of Sally Ride vibrating into space strapped to a million pounds of rocket thrust.
The room is quiet. She knows only that she is playing, that she is creeping along the staff four beats at a time. In the moment there is no telling if she’s also rising up into the ether. But she divides her mind properly for the first étude, and that allows her a foothold, a first step up onto the impossible road. Midway through, her fingers feel like boiled hot dogs. The heat radiating from them warms her face. In the last études, which become more mazelike and branch in many paths, her vision blurs and her brain aches. The air is always thin, she thinks, in the rarefied frontiers of the atmosphere. At this point only memory and dull habit guide her through the woods.
She’s gasping for breath when she finishes. Sweat drips from her elbows to the piano bench in quick little plop plop plops that land in 3/2 time. She should stand and offer some pageantry: a bow, a sweep of the arm. Forget that, she thinks. She’s not going to stand up until she has to. She stares instead at the ring finger of her left hand. At the top left corner, where the nail meets the skin, is a tiny drop of frank red blood. Each of her fingertips is underlaid with a light purple bruise. Only she knows whether or not she has brought it off, but if the audience stands, if they applaud, how much does it matter?
TONAL VS. ATONAL
The argument has been put forward that atonal music has a lower bar of difficulty than tonal music because in tonal music an audience can tell when a note is out of place. The argument is that atonality is a veil. If the devil is tumbling down a staircase, will an audience take note of how many steps he misses? She thinks this is an evasion. She knows Ligeti well enough that she can hear when someone fumbles.
The two styles present divergent philosophies. Music should comfort. Music should discomfit. People should be comforted. People should be jarred from comfort. Binaries again. Gaspard de la Nuit is rapid and bustling but still founded upon a resonation with the expectations of the mind. Invention is like going mad. Like being driven mad.
Atonality may offer the veil, but tonality provides a blanket. Atonaclass="underline" like being pinned mute and naked to the piano in front of all those people. Tonaclass="underline" buoyed by the music, which has its own soul.
Tantalus is mostly tonal. Some études are rousing, some sweeping, some surprisingly gentle given the difficulty. Even an untrained listener will have the sense of where a piece is going. But tucked in the score are chords and notes and phrases that are paths to nowhere. Anyone who knows his or her theory will pick up the cues, and even as the tenth étude ends will be left waiting for those phrases to resolve. Anyone who can’t help but wait for resolution risks waiting forever.
QUESTIONS
How can opposite things exist at once, even in memory? Grief and persistence. Retreat and embrace. Music and silence. With the averages tipped so far toward silence it’s a wonder a single sound can catch. Art should be more difficult. More difficult than what? Is she Liberace? She sweats enough without fur coats, but is it there, in the announcements, the challenges, the gauntlets thrown? Grief and persistence. Retreat and embrace. What could she do but alternate? There is no going forward past a certain bond of caretaking and niceties, no going back to the terrible days she misses more than anything. Sometimes she feels there is nothing more ahead. Is that why it is so comforting, this idea that she could be wrong about everything? She reminds herself there is no forward or back, only ever the one moment: now, the standing, sweat-soaked; the bow. She has pulled it off. She hasn’t. Only she knows whether or not she has brought it off, but if the audience stands, if they applaud, how much does it matter? Some will say she played perfectly.
Oh, Charlie—what would you say? A question too foolish to even ask, but that’s exactly what she’s done.
AS LONG AS THE LAUGHTER
Dov is already sweating when he takes the stage. It’s not nerves, not after all these years. Adrenaline, he calls it. Or just fat, sweaty middle age. “Omaha,” he says. He shakes his head dismissively. Their response is warm enough. “Usually I say something good about the city I’m in. You’ll give me a pass on that, right?” Laughter throughout. This opener plays well everywhere but the major metros and the South. His first hard lesson learned when he started touring years ago: make fun of the South, but never in the South. Midwesterners, at least the kind that come to comedy shows, won’t trust you unless you insult them. “I mean, you guys understand. You live here. You didn’t pay me to blow sunshine up your ass.” Then into the bit suggesting if anyone ever did offer, in the literal sense, to blow sunshine up his ass, he’d do it in a heartbeat. “Really? You’re going to pass on that? It sounds fantastic.” They like the ass humor. Good thing. Plenty more of it to come.
“Kind of a college town, Omaha. Young crowd? Young people, make some noise.”
He holds out his microphone and the auditorium fills up with howling. He brings it back to his face to quiet them.
“Old people, go ‘Ah, fuck it.’”
Laughter. He leaves a little pause. Lets them wonder what’s next.
“You guys think sex is fun?”
The roar this time is even louder. His ears go tinny. He quiets them again.
“Yep,” he says. “Definitely a young crowd.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts, kids. You’ve got maybe five years.”
“People my age, we don’t have sex for fun. We just have sex because, I don’t know, it’s just something we’re supposed to do, like going into work, except with a much greater chance of humiliation.” He describes how he looks naked: like an unbaked loaf of sourdough. Smells like it too, he says. The latter is untrue, but the former accurate: he stood naked in front of his full-length mirror for forty-five minutes one day, brainstorming similes on a yellow legal pad. Not the most fun day, scrutinizing his terrible body, hunting for language vivid enough to convey just how ugly it was. The runner-up is that his belly looks like a bunch of pugs taped together. Too surreal, he thinks, so he’s only testing it in smaller venues.
He’s known for this: the self-scrutiny, the guilt, the shame. His persona—a failure, an out-of-shape, hypocritical, amoral, sexually deviant divorcée—is seeded in truth, and the rest of the jokes flow forth from it, carrying the weight that makes it convincing. Because he’s laughing along, because he makes it effortless, because it’s not about them. People think it’s easy standing up there deconstructing himself for an hour. They’re right only to the extent that comedy is like a sport, no time to dwell on anything while the clock runs, just enough mindspace free to do quick assessments and make minor adjustments. When you walk off the stage it feels like you just went on a minute earlier. What gets him is the rest of the night, the bar or the hotel, where he replays the jokes in his mind and is now just the butt of them, rather than the teller. His second hard lesson: the thrill of the laughter lasts only as long as the laughter.