The Literary Review: Issue 9
Fiction Page 3
Mahler
by Tim Tomlinson
- Scherzo
I’m in Carnegie Hall where the Berlin Philharmonic perform the Mahler 5. You know the work—hugely orchestrated, maybe a hundred players onstage. The sound is huge. Even the octogenarians are awake. I’m in the low balcony, great sightlines, crisp clean sound. And the band is majestic, the bows of the fiddlers in full flight, the basses rumbling up from the bowels of the subway, and Claudio Abbado conducting like a buddha from within the storm. Rapturous, I think the word is. Sublime. In some zone that usually requires drugs to enter. I’m there with them.
Abbado guides the orchestra through the first movement and the second with such mastery, such finesse, that you get that delicious aesthetic anxiety of: can this level possibly sustain? Can the band maintain a miracle for a full hour? With the Berlin, which seems to have outlawed flaws, that’s entirely possible and so the miraculous pace continues when, at maybe five minutes into the third movement, I start to feel this itch on my cheek. A minor itch. I hadn’t shaved that day and so the beard was just poking through, and the itch begins to distract me. Gently, I apply a finger to the spot, I can feel the bristles under my finger, I start scratching, and I can feel the itch yielding, withdrawing, retreating. That’s when I get this poke in my arm.
It’s the guy alongside me. “Will you stop doing that?” he hisses.
Nonplussed, I say, “Doing what?”
He makes like a monkey scratching and says, “Making all that noise with the scratching. For christ’s sake sit still.”
I can tell you, that pissed me off. I mean like blood-boiling pissed, like the mercury-is-rising-in-the-thermometer-and-it’s-about-to-blow-the-scalp-right-off-my-head pissed. It’s the Scherzo, the music nearly the volume of a Who concert, no way this clown could “hear” a thing through the racket of the percussion and the fury of forty-something violins and cellos and the bleating of a dozen brass. And so my rage remains, lingering right through the Scherzo and fucking up the entire Adagietto, that pinnacle of the classical canon, those miraculously beautiful paragraphs of music—the only part the punters know—ten-plus minutes of diminuendo bliss, all churned into a cauldron of bile by this overly sensitive fuck. I can’t refocus my shit until halfway through the Rondo. Then, of course, seconds before the final fade, and many notes before Abbado brings the baton down, the jerk’s out of his seat shouting “bravo” like he knows the symphony better than everyone else. Abbado’s shoulders tense, then drop, and the jerk is racing for the exit before the maestro turns to take his first bow.
On the long walk home, I’m thinking, why didn’t I just smack the shit out of that son of a bitch? He wasn’t some big prick of an NFL lineman with the commando shoulders and the biceps bursting out of the sleeves. No, he was a nebbish, maybe the guidance counselor at some charter school.
And that reminds me of Ray Schimmel, this kid I knew back in junior high, the guidance counselor’s son. A dork but a smart one. And because this Schimmel kid was smart, we wound up in a lot of the same classes. He knew everything, but he’d never raise his hand. When called on, though, he’d give an answer they could publish in academic journals. In English, History, even French. You name it, this kid knew it. Naturally, I tormented him. Who knows what I said, about what, but one day, whack, right across my kisser this spaz cracks me a stinger. Felt like my entire left cheek had been pressed onto a stove. I looked at him astonished, more stunned than hurt. I could have crushed him like an egg, but instead I just walked away holding my cheek, thinking: Holy shit, I just got clapped in the puss by a nerd, and I’m walking away. I’m like, what’s up with that? Of course, you don’t smack the shit out of a kid whose father is your guidance counselor, but I think it had more to do with his older sister, who’d grown the first serious tits in the high school. The issues might seem disconnected but you don’t smack the shit out of the little brother of the girl whose tits animate your dreams. To me, that made more sense—Schimmel had a get-out-of-jail-free card made out of his sister’s tits, and I had a cheek on fire. The family moved not long after. I never did settle the score. What’s he up to now, I wonder? What’s his sister up to? Do they like Mahler? Kind of kid he was, he’s probably writing his own symphonies.
- Dr. Something
Next day, I’m in Tower Records on Broadway. I hang out in the Classical Music section. I know all the clerks. They see me, they know I’m leaving with an armful. I have multiples of everything, even the shit I’ll never listen to. For instance: Stockhausen, Early Percussion Works. Want a copy? Message me—I have three, two still in the cellophane. Anyway, it’s a quiet afternoon, only a few of us noodling the bins. They’re playing the Hilliard Ensemble with Jan Garbek, which has an ethereal beauty that just touches the border of syrup. I like syrup, but mostly on pancakes, and I never eat pancakes because when I do I spill out over my BVDs. I make my way into the orchestral section. I’m interested in new accounts of the Mahler 5. I own a half-dozen, going back to a Bruno Walter on Sony with the New York Phil, on up to Rattle with the Berlin. I’m wondering if there’s something fresh, something new that might slice through the rage I still feel over losing that Adagietto and letting Mr. Guidance Counselor slip away, when across the bins, in the area of the Mahler 9 and Das Lied von der Erde, I spot a dead ringer for that Ray Schimmel kid. Reflexively I touch my cheek. OK, better late than never, I’m thinking. Providence has provided an opportunity to settle an old score, get the sting off my cheek, as it were, and even if I’m wrong, even if I deck this putz because I’m angry at the concert putz, and even if he turns out not to be Ray Schimmel—and he can’t be because life doesn’t work that way, only stories—even if he’s completely the wrong guy, an innocent guy, even a guy I’d like, one who might be able to help me locate the ideal Mahler 5 that I need to clear my head, even with all that I think, so what? Fuck him. Ten years from now, he might see a guy who looks like me and run him over with his Humvee. It’s always the wrong guy who gets the malaria, always the wrong guy who gets the girl, and that’s life. No one knew this better than Mahler, whose final years were lived in torment while his ticker unticked and his proteges put the stones to his fetching young wife Alma. So I sidle over to the 9 and the Lied bins and before I can speak this Schimmel ringer holds up a disc of Alma Mahler songs. Why, this Schimmel guy wonders, why do they insist on offering the “work” of this little whore?
He says, “Do you know exactly what a little whore she was? Jerking off Zemlinsky at the piano, sucking off Gropius in his ridiculous chair, posing for Klimt…. Did you know Schiele made a twelve-panel study of her asshole?”
I begin to respond but before I get past “I’m not” he’s back on.
“Her asshole!” he shouts. “Nothing else—twelve panels. And this,” he says, shaking the compact disc, “this bit of crumpet they put alongside Herr Mahler?”
People are looking now, whispering.
Quietly, I say, “Well, you know they were married.”
He explodes. “Of course they were married, that’s the whole point. Who cares she’s a slut she’s single? But she was a whore! An untalented whore, and she drove Mahler mad, killed him!” And with that he slams the disc’s case on the patchwood bins. Plastic shards go flying. “She blew Schoenberg! She blew Stravinsky!”
He reaches for another disc, presumably to shatter, when security arrives, two beefy chaps with yellow armbands, who take him by the arms and lead him toward the exit, his Hush Puppies swinging a foot above the floor. A store manager speaks to him in whispers. Over his shoulder he continues to shout.
“Kokoschka she blew! Alban Berg!”
When calm resumes and once again the Hilliards with Jan Garbek floats from the PA system, a Tower clerk apologizes for the disturbance. “He taught theory at Julliard,” she explains, “but they had to let him go.”
Did she happen to know his name, I inquire.
She says, “I don’t know. Dr. Something. But you could ask at Julliard. It’s just right over there.”
I thank her and cross the street to the Barnes & Noble Bookstore. I take the elevator up to its art section. I’m hoping they stock a volume with reproductions of those Schiele panels.
Mahler
by Tim Tomlinson
- Ich bin der Welt abahnden gekommen
I’m up on the roof of my Riverside Drive apartment. I’m with Renée, Mendelssohn’s sister. Mendelssohn’s my roomate. He thinks I should talk to Renée. He’s worried I’m quitting film school with less than three months to go. He’s worried about my drinking and Renée’s in AA. She’s also in Julliard, third year, studying voice. She’s classically trained, but she sings jazz, too. I’ve met her before, couple of times, at cafés where she sings with a little combo. She could do everything well, except scat. I could do better scat.
“What makes you think you’re an alcoholic?” I ask her.
She says, “What makes you think you’re not?”
“Ah,” I say, “one of those flip-the-question answers.”
“Well?” she says. “Do you ever think about it?”
I say, “Doesn’t AA say that if I think about it I am one, because people who aren’t don’t?”
She says, “Oh, so you know about AA?”
“I know enough.”
“You know that you’re not an alcoholic?”
“I know that I don’t care if I am.”
“That’s a glib answer.”
I shrug.
“I’m trying to be serious.”
I say, “I have a hard time taking serious people seriously.”
She says, “Do you ever drink alone?”
I hold up my bottle of Guinness. “I’m drinking alone right now, aren’t I?”
We’re fifteen floors above the street. There’s traffic on Riverside Drive, most of it heading north. It’s a little after seven, the sun going down, people heading home. The lights are just coming on in cars and in buildings across the river in New Jersey.
Renée says, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you drinking alone?”
“Because you’re in AA.”
“And if I weren’t here?”
“Because I like the taste.”
“That’s another glib answer.”
“Are you saying I don’t like the taste?”
“I think you know what I’m saying.”
“I do. You’re saying you know the answer to everything because you don’t drink, and I don’t know the answer to anything because I do.”
- • •
I started drinking in the 5th grade, a cause-and-effect initiation. In homeroom Martine Meyer tells me she isn’t my girlfriend anymore, and by morning recess she’s on the playground holding hands with Greg Furst. In front of everyone.
School lets out, and I rush home to the liquor cabinet. I don’t know why I equate emotional distress with alcohol, or I didn’t then. Years later I’d think about all the Frank Sinatra album covers: Sinatra against a lamppost, or alone among couples, seated at the bar, his chin in one hand, a drink in the other, an ashtray at his elbow bulging with cigarette butts. Those sent a message, but I wasn’t thinking about them that afternoon. In fact, I never think about Sinatra. I think about the Beatles. I turn on the phonograph and drop “Nowhere Man” on the spindle. That’s how losing Martine Meyer makes me feel.
Among the many bottles I find a pint of Hiram Walker Blackberry Brandy. I unscrew the cap—it smells awful, like medicine I’d resist taking no matter how sick I might be. I take a long pull, and it tastes as bad as it smells. It tastes so bad, I realize somewhat vaguely, that I’m no longer thinking about Martine Meyer and Greg Furst holding hands at recess, a realization that brings them back to the front of my mind, enough so that I take another long pull, then two short, and I put the bottle back. What am I supposed to feel, I wonder. I have no idea. Outside kids from the block play a game of kick soccer. I wander into their makeshift field, trying to perform “drunk.” I want to provoke a response. They play around me, as if I’m not there. I’m reminded of “Nowhere Man.”
- • •
“Tell me about classical music training.”
Renée says, “Please.”
I say, “Really. I’m interested. I’m trying to be serious.”
“What do you want to know?”
I say, “I don’t know. How about what you’re learning?”
And then she does something I’ve never forgotten. She starts singing, the most beautiful song, a slow, languorous dreamy song in a language that sounds vaguely German but the syllables stretch out like loops in a necklace and I have no way of telling. Everything slows down, everything elongates, and the lights across the river turn to gelatin filters and what was ordinarily dead gray space is suffused with a golden glow. I feel like I’m inside a Klimt. When she stops, the silence hovers for a very long time.
“That’s probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,” I say.
She thanks me.
I ask her about it and she tells me the story of Mahler and his beautiful wife, Alma, how Mahler wrote it well before he’d met her, but then how it perfectly anticipates the despair she’d cause him.
“It means I am lost to the world. The world thinks me dead and I can’t deny it because I truly am dead to the world.”
I say it’s hard to be glib after something like that. Renée says that’s exactly the point.
But it didn’t stop me.
- Adagietto
Renée gives me a recording of the Mahler 5, Herbert Von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. It includes a bonus track, the lost-to-the-world song sung by Christa Ludwig. Then she commits suicide by walking the tracks into an uptown express. It’s too much for Mendelssohn. He quits film school.
I finish.