“What exactly do you
do
with yourself here?” he asks after concluding his inspection.
“Isn’t it you who told me that no one does anything exactly anymore?” she counters.
“Ah yes,” he says. “But you’ve been one of the honest exceptions, didn’t we agree on that? That’s what is admirable about your profession. You have your exact, honest craft.”
“That sounds nice and humble,” she observes. He gives a little shrug, as if to say he can’t help that.
“Nothing humble about what you got mixed up in, though,” he picks up. “I didn’t know you were a woman of such … romantic extremes.” It’s her turn to shrug.
Marcel insists on walking down Sunset Strip before dinner. He finds the idea of Hollywood fantastically amusing, fantastically
mythique
. He finds the reality perhaps a little disappointing; but in a way that has mythical connotations too. “Ah, I am so reminded of Gertrude Stein,” he says, as they walk down the Boulevard, among its low, provisional-looking structures. “There’s no there there. She was so right, was she not? There is not, now that we are here.” His soft voice is seductively unhurried, his intonations amused and precise. “I suppose this is what there is,” she says. “Ah, now you are getting properly philosophical, my dear Isabel,” he says approvingly. “Now you’re catching the drift.”
They pause in front of a shop displaying a haphazard assortment of Western clothes. “You know,” Marcel continues, looking at the ramshackle goods, the low, tacky buildings around them, “sometimes it’s hard to know whether this country is the center of world power, or a banana republic.” “Which is preferable?” she asks. “Neither, of course,” he answers amiably. “But look, that’s a very nice item.” He points out a denim blouse with some red embroidery. “From cowboy films. It would suit you very well, don’t you think? You’d be a sort of cowboy moll, isn’t that what they call them? Ah, how I used to love those movies.”
They decide to have dinner at a tacky-chic restaurant that Marcel believes he also recognizes from a movie. Its interior is deliberately plain, but not beyond his powers of interpretation. “Ah, this is so … unpretentious. So West Coast. I find it positively exotic,” he avers, as they sit down. He scans the menu and allows himself to raise his eyebrows at the prices. “Yes, that’s exactly what I find so interesting about being here,” he goes on, mildly. “This … special kind of decadence. Kind of voice-of-the-people decadence, don’t you think?” She takes it in too, the
faux-naïf
interior, the sauce of crushed raspberries with goat’s cheese being offered with the beef carpaccio on the menu, the very tall woman at the next table putting on lipstick with an expression of high anxiety on her high-gloss face, the group of deeply tanned men at another table, shouting over each other
with aggressive conviviality. She looks back at Marcel.
“You know,” she says, “sometimes I think we’re in an endgame. That we’ve blown it. To quote a famous line from a famous movie.”
He looks up from the menu with quick, bemused interest. “
Easy Rider
, is it not?” She confirms and he looks pleased with himself. “But of course, there is no doubt,” he continues, “that we’re living in a declining empire. We’re not ascending anymore. Of course, you Americans … well, you may be a little behind us in that respect. You can still do some harm. A considerable amount, I’d say. But perhaps you can also do some good. Though that, of course, is much more difficult.”
“Does nothing matter to you?” she asks, as she did once before. But now she’s asking the question through Anzor. She’s still looking for ways to answer him.
“You know, when things begin to matter too much,” Marcel says, “then we begin to kill each other. That’s one thing I believe I have learned from studying our, shall we say, very long history. That’s why I prefer to stay a little bit neutral.”
“You think one shouldn’t care,” she states, half reproachfully. Marcel’s eyes fill with a fine mischief. “Only as much as necessary,” he says. “Only as much as cannot be avoided.” He attends to the wine list, quite intensely. “Also, one should remain flexible in what one cares about,” he resumes, having made his decision. “One should avoid too much … dedication. Because, you know, once you are in this game of power, things change very quickly. The cowboys and the Indians just don’t stay in character, like they do in the movies. They exchange places all the time. So you have to be very supple. You have to adjust.”
“So you think it’s pointless to take sides,” she states.
“Ah, sides,” he repeats mildly. “There’re so many of them nowadays. Now that we’ve had our end of history, I believe we are once again in a Great Game. No sides, just lots of players. And probably lots of mayhem. That’s exactly why it’s important
to stay flexible,” he concludes with satisfaction, “and to enjoy yourself.”
The waiter brings their first course, and Marcel gives a prolonged moment to the contemplation of his exquisite piece of flaky cod, adorned with a cream sauce and a whole fennel. He raises his wine glass to her. “Now, the wine treaty,” he declares gravely, “that’s very serious. Wine is extremely important in times of decline. Wine and music, you will be glad to know. At least such is my theory.”
“Should I be glad?” she inquires.
“Of course,” he assures her. “We should take our pleasures where we can.”
The waiter has brought their dessert, a small marvel of creamy vertical balance, which Marcel savors with appreciative noises. “Well, you can gag me with a spoon,” he pronounces, with languid precision. “Isn’t that how you say it?”
Isabel laughs. “It’s not when you’d say it,” she tells him. “It’s not quite the context. But your English is certainly becoming very colloquial.”
“Well, you know, I want to communicate with my American hosts,” he says amiably. “Or at least, I don’t want to be misunderstood by them. Officially, they’re still the center of world power.”
“But not for long?”
“Ah, I’m not a soothsayer, dear Isabel,” he says. “I’m just having a nice time talking to you. But perhaps you would like to go to a disco? I think there is a famous one near here … you know, from that movie about Hollywood.” For some reason—maybe it’s Marcel’s accent—they get past the bouncer without being quizzed. Once inside, she yields briefly to the music’s insistent, repetitive, simplistic beat. She watches Marcel’s precise and cool maneuvers with some amusement. They seem a bit out of context too.
“Ah well, enough,” he says after a while. “I have seen it. Been there, done that, got that T-shirt.”
As they part, he takes her hand in his, with some of their old camaraderie. “The thing about living in a declining empire,” he says, “is that you can have a lot of fun. Is that not so?”
“As long as you don’t care too much, is that it?”
“Exactly,” he says. “I think you are understanding my wisdom. Finally.”
On television, some end-of-century, this-is-your-history footage of the first moon walk, and she remembers seeing it the first time, remembers the bulky television set from which the images were emitted, at somebody’s country house in Italy, where Lena had wandered with her and Kolya that summer. The children were allowed to stay up late for the occasion, and she remembers the inflated figures of the astronauts and the incongruous bounciness of their walk. Kolya was momentarily diverted, in a boy-child way, into utter enthusiasm and curiosity. How did they get there?! he shouted in his high voice, pointing his finger at the television screen. And, Can I go there? Can I walk like that?! The memory of his childish joyfulness no less a shroud on her soul than of his childish grief. The insufficiency of love … such an ordinary suffering, and his child self wanted so much to feel pleasure instead. After his death, she found a note in his desk drawer, scrawled in his jagged hand. It said, “
I’ve reached the end of pretend, and it is a dead end. Reality is not on TV. Too bad
.” A more innocent time, the commentator on the program is saying, but then they’ve been saying that for a long time. She suddenly hates the notion, the conversion of the past into something wan and lyrical, almost as soon as it has happened. As if someone, somewhere were not suffering ordinary pain, or having their body pierced with bullets that day, as if armies somewhere were not forming their ranks in preparation for a just or unjust
war, as if we were ever allowed not to know that, or not to choose. No, she thinks, she no longer wants to disappear into the past, or the future. She no longer wants to leap outside herself and to be held ecstatically within perfect forms. She feels a gathering of her own forces, an ingathering. Whatever she gives forth from now on, will be from within. She suddenly feels the return of an appetite, the need to move through her time, whatever it is; to come up against the unpredictable, edgy sharpness of the present.
And then the hunger for beauty comes upon her again, a need that’s as tangible as the need for food. She listens to Beethoven’s late quartets, and she hears them this time as a form of defiance. Defiance of the hard mercilessness of the world, the stony hate, the hurling of stones. Not solace, but antidote. Here’s mercy which comes after anger, here’s tenderness which transforms rage. Here is human force, contained in patterns so intricate and at the same time pure that they intimate a knowledge yet unknown. She spends whole days now listening, and sometimes letting herself cry, from the sheer wonderment of what she hears, or from the tension of trying to grasp, to contain, so much complexity. At other times, she makes clear or elliptical notes on various pieces, catching bits of insight on the fly, as they come. The music within comes back, in response and counterpoint; in phrases and rhythmic gestures, sharp fragments, melodic motifs. They’re surprising, these snatches; odd turns of rhythm, timbers coalescing into chords, jagged progressions implying some irregular structure. She hears gorgeous cascades of Liszt’s
Transcendental Études
, but also sounds of Jimi Hendrix and the blues, rumbles that may be of ocean water; or maybe of soldier-laden trucks … Different from Wolfe’s singular, hypercondensed Sound. But then, she comes after the After. She buys some score paper and begins to make
jottings of these phrases, as best she can; she needs a piano on which to try them out.
She rents a practice room and begins the laborious process of transcribing the emergent sounds in her head into marks and signs. She makes a mental gesture of gratitude to Wolfe, who taught her this. She tries to catch the faint, unearthly motif which first announced itself to her as an oscillating timbre, a summons from afar. But simultaneously, she senses, more than hears, a compressed mass of multilayered sounds, pressing in on her with an urgency that is almost libidinal. That
is
libidinal. No beauty without the libido, without desire. The sounds must out, they must get disentangled, must be transposed into intelligible music. She’ll pull out the lines from the clustered aural masses and follow them as they unfold themselves, accumulating into larger sonorities, into groups of instruments and angled pitches. As she tries to write down the first motif for the appropriate instrument (clarinet, which is not quite right; but then nothing would be quite right), she already feels the intimations of hurtling, expanding forces behind it, jangling with imperious dissonance, building into tiered masses. Sometimes she hears herself groan with the effort of it. All art is in the resistance, and the resistance is mostly in the self. Can she sustain the musical materials she intuits, can she contain them, can she make sense of them? She doesn’t know where this composition is going, how the aural pressures within her will range themselves into intelligible formations; but she hears beginnings of long sinuous lines, and the micro-rhythms of speeded-up time, passages of tender fragility, and of fierce, dancelike affirmation. She senses that this will be a large composition, and that it will contain instruments filled with the moistness of the human voice, and the hard sexual pounding of drums, and electronic sounds without any human breath at all. It will be her “Appassionata.” She cannot burst the
limits of her skin nor the bounds of time; but she can give herself forth, use herself as an instrument for what has passed and is passing through her. That is what will make it new. A difficult beauty is being born, she thinks, with a kind of wonder. She is being neither modest nor immodest; she simply wants to do justice to her task. For all the clamor and rush of its life within her, it will take time and strength to complete the piece; and she will know its meaning only when it will have emerged fully; when it is done.
She calls Peter, and tells him she’s ready to come back.
“I’ll pick you up at the airport,” he says simply.
“Thank you,” she says. She feels grateful for his not saying, or asking, more.
She tells him she has begun composing, and he’s curious, wants to know what it is about. But of course, there is almost nothing she can say. It is really not about anything, and she hopes it will contain … as much as she truly knows. She says she’ll play him bits of it when she gets home. She’ll need some time to live with it, could she possibly use her old piano room …
“Sure,” he says, and this time, she feels no chafing impatience at his tolerance. She hears a largess in it, a kind of strength. He has a very long fuse, Peter; but only because he knows his limits. He knows he will not, ultimately, betray himself.
She takes a brisk walk along the beach after they hang up, feeling a new sense of lightness. She hasn’t realized how unhappy she has been, ordinarily unhappy as well as extraordinarily so. And how she wants an ordinary happiness, or at least contentment. She wants to lay her head on Peter’s chest, and stay silent for a while. She wants to go to the Fairway, whatever may have happened there, and cook a simple dinner for herself and some friends, after emerging from her cave. She wants a pause from questions, and from having to know answers. Peter will let
her have it, she can trust him for that; he won’t ask anything, until she’s ready to speak. She is deeply glad she can count on that. Eventually, they’ll talk and talk.