HERE’S THIS UNHAPPY NOISE that upsets Zora.
She had once been Sarah. Dworkin, when he married her not long after the death of Ella, his first wife, had talked her into changing her name. She eventually forgave him. Now she felt she had always been Zora.
“Zora, we have to hurry.”
“I’m coming, for godsake. I am looking for my brown gloves.”
He was fifty-one, she ten years younger, an energetic, plump person with an engaging laugh and a tendency to diet unsuccessfully. She called him Dworky: an animated, reflective man, impassioned cellist—and, on inspiration, composer—with an arthritic left shoulder. He referred to it as “the shoulder I hurt when I fell in the cellar.” When she was angry with him, or feeling insecure, she called him Zworkin.
I hear something, whatever do I hear? Zora blew her nose and listened to her ear. Is my bad ear worse? If it isn’t, what are those nagging noises I’ve been hearing all spring? Because I listen, I hear. But what makes me listen?
The really bothersome noise had begun in April when the storm windows came off and the screens went up; yet it seemed to Zora she hadn’t become conscious of its relentless quality until June, after being two months on a diet that didn’t work. She was heavier
than she cared to be. She had never had children and held that against herself too.
Zora settled on the day after her forty-first birthday, at the end of June, as the time when the noise began seriously to affect her. Maybe I wasn’t listening with both my ears up to then. I had my mind elsewhere. They say the universe exploded and we still hear the roar and hiss of all that gas. She asked Dworky about that, forgetting to notice—Oh, my God—that he was practicing his cello, a darkly varnished, mellow Montagnana, “the best thing that ever happened to me,” he had once said.
No response from him but an expression of despair: as though he had said, “I practice in the living room to keep you company, and the next thing I know you’re interfering with my music.” “Please pardon me,” Zora said.
“The cello,” he had defined it shortly after they met, “is an independent small Jewish animal.” And Zora had laughed as though her heart were broken. There were two streams to her laughter—a full-blown humorous response, plus something reserved. You expected one and maybe got the other. Sometimes you weren’t sure what she was laughing at, if laughing. Dworkin, as he seesawed his rosin-scented bow across the four steel strings, sometimes sang to his cello, and the cello throatily responded. Zora and Dworkin had met many years ago after a concert in L.A., the night he was the guest of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
“My cello deepens me,” he had told her.
“In that case I’ll marry you both.”
That was how she had proposed, he told friends at their dinner table, and everyone laughed.
“Do you hear that grating, sickening sound?” she had asked as they were undressing late one summer’s night in their high-ceilinged bedroom. The wallpaper was Zora’s, spread through with white cosmos pasted over the thickly woven cerise paper selected by Ella many years ago when she and Dworkin had first moved
into this spacious, comfortable house. “Do you like it?” he had asked Zora. “Love it.” She immediately had the upstairs sun deck built, and the French doors leading to it, giving her, she said, “access to the sky.”
“What sickening sound?” he asked.
“You don’t hear it?”
“Not as of right now.”
“Well, it isn’t exactly the music of the spheres,” Zora responded. She had in her twenties worked in a chemistry laboratory, though her other interests tended to be artistic.
Zora was plump, in high heels about Dworkin’s height; she had firm features and almost a contralto speaking voice. She had once, at his suggestion, taken singing lessons that hadn’t come to much. She was not very musical, though she loved to listen and had her own record collection. When they were first married she had worked in an art gallery in Stockbridge. They lived in Elmsville, a nearby town, in a clapboard house painted iron-gray, with marine-blue shutters. The colors were Zora’s own good colors. For Ella it had been a white house with black shutters. They were both effective with their colors.
Dworkin taught the cello to students in the vicinity and at a master class in the New England Conservatory of Music at Lenox. He had stopped concertizing a year after his fall in the cellar. Zora, who was not much tempted by travel, liked to have him home regularly. “It’s better for your arthritis. It’s better for me.”
She said, referring to the noise, “I would describe it as absolutely ongoing, with a wobbly, enervating, stinky kind of whine.”
That was in July. He honestly couldn’t hear it.
At night she woke in slow fear, intently listening.
“Suppose it goes on forever?” She felt herself shudder. It was an ugly thrumming sound shot through with a sickly whine. She listened into the distance, where it seemed to begin, and then slowly drew in her listening as though it were a line she had cast out; and now she listened closer to shore. Far or near, it amounted to the same thing. The invasive noise seemed to enter the house
by way of their bedroom, even when the windows were tightly shut, as if it had seeped through the clapboard and the walls, and once or twice frighteningly seemed to metamorphose into a stranger sitting in the dark, breathing audibly and evenly, pausing between breaths.
In the near distance there was a rumble of light traffic, though she knew no traffic was going through town at this time of night. Maybe an occasional truck, changing gears. The nearer sound was Dworkin sleeping, breathing heavily, sometimes shifting into a snore.
“Dworky,” she said patiently, “snoring.” And Dworkin, with a rasping sigh of contrition, subsided. When she had first taken to waking him out of a sound sleep to break his snoring, he had resented it. “But your snore woke
me
out of sound sleep,” Zora said. “It isn’t as though I had
planned
to wake you up.” He saw the justice of her remark and permitted her to wake him if he was snoring. He would stir for a minute, break his galloping rumble, then more quietly slumber.
Anyway, if someone sat there, it wasn’t Dworkin making dream noises. This was a quiet presence, perhaps somebody in the Queen Anne chair by the long stained-glass window in their bedroom, Ella’s invention. Someone contemplating them as they slept? Zora rose on her elbow and peered in the dark. Nothing glowed or stank, laughed madly or assaulted her. And she was once more conscious of the unhappy sound she was contending with, a vibrato hum touched with a complaining, drawn-out wail that frightened her because it made her think of the past, perhaps her childhood oozing out of the dark. Zora felt she had had such a childhood.
“Zworkin,” she said in a tense whisper, “do you hear this wretched noise I’ve been referring to?”
“Is that a reason to wake me again, Zora, to ask such a goddamn question? Is that what we’ve come to at this time in our lives? Let me sleep, I beg you. I have my arthritis to think of.”
“You’re my husband—who else will I ask? I’ve already spoken to the people next door. Mrs. Duvivier says the noise originates in a paint factory across town, but of that I’m not so sure.”
She spoke in hesitation and doubt. She had been an uncertain
young woman when he met her. She wasn’t heavy then but had always been solid, she called it, yet with a figure and a lovely face, not fat. Ella, on the other hand, who could be a restless type, was always on the slim side of slender. Both had been good wives, yet neither would have guessed the other as his wife. As Zora gained weight her uneasiness seemed to grow. Sometimes she aroused in Dworkin an anguished affection.
He leaned on his arm and strained to listen, wanting to hear what she heard. The Milky Way crackling? A great wash of cosmic static filled his ears and diminished to a hush of silence. As he listened the hum renewed itself, seeming to become an earthly buzz—a bouquet of mosquitoes and grasshoppers on the lawn, rasping away. Occasionally he heard the call of a night bird. Then the insects vanished, and he heard nothing: no more than the sound of both ears listening.
That was all, though Dworkin sometimes heard music when he woke at night—the music woke him. Lately he had heard Rostropovich, as though he were a living element of a ghostly constellation in the sky, sawing away on the D-major Haydn cello concerto. His rich cello sound might be conceived of as a pineapple, if fruit was your metaphor. Dworkin lived on fruit, but his own playing sounded more like small bittersweet apples. Listening now, he only heard the town asleep.
“I don’t hear anything that could be characterized as the whining or wailing you mention,” he said. “Nothing of that particular quality.”
“No steady, prolonged, hateful, complaining noise?”
He listened until his ears ached. “Nothing that I hear or have heard,” he confessed.
“Thank you, and good night, my dear.”
“Good night,” Dworkin said. “I hope we both sleep now.”
“I hope so.” She was still assiduously listening.
One night she rose out of dizzying sleep, seemed to contemplate her blanket in the dark, and then hopped out of bed and ran to
the bathroom, where she threw up. Dworkin heard her crying as she stepped into the shower.
“Anything wrong?” he asked, popping his head into the steaming room.
“I’ll be all right.”
“Something I can do for you?”
“Not just now.”
He returned to bed and after a few troubled minutes drew on his trousers and a shirt, and in sneakers descended into the street. Except for a barking dog at the end of the block he heard only summer night sounds, and in the distance a rumble that sounded like traffic and might be. But if he concentrated, he could make out the whomp-whomp of machinery, indeed from the direction of the paint factory on the eastern edge of town. Zora and Dworkin hadn’t been inconvenienced by the factory or its legendary smells until she began to hear her noise. Still, what she said she heard she no doubt heard, though it was hard to explain anything like a whine.
He circled the house to hear if one or another noise, by some freak of acoustics, was louder on the back lawn, but it wasn’t. In the rear he saw Zora on the upstairs deck, pudgy in her short nightdress, staring into the moonlit distance.
“What are you doing outside in a nightgown at this time of night, Zora?” Dworkin asked in a loud whisper.
“Listening,” she said vaguely.
“At least why don’t you put on a robe after your hot shower? The night air is chilly.”
“Dworkin, do you hear the awful whining that I do? That’s what made me puke.”
“It’s not whining I hear, Zora. What I hear is more like a rumble that could be originating in the paint factory. Sometimes it throbs, or whomps, or clanks a little. Maybe there’s a kind of a hum, but I can’t make out anything else or anything more unusual.”
“No, I’m talking about a Different sound than you mention. How I hate factories in neighborhoods that should be residential.”
Dworkin trotted up the stairs to bed. “It would be interesting
to know what some of the other people on this street besides the Duviviers have to say about the sounds you are hearing.”
“I’ve talked to them all,” said Zora, “and also to the Cunliffes and the Spinkers.”
Dworkin hadn’t known. “What did they say?”
“Some hear something”—she hesitated—“but different things than I do. Mrs. Spinker hears a sort of drone. Mrs. Cunliffe hears something else, but not what I hear.”
“I wish I did.”
“I wouldn’t want to afflict you.”
“Just to hear it,” he said.
“Don’t you believe me, Dworky?”
He nodded seriously.
“It might have to come to our moving someday,” Zora reflected. “Not only is there that zonky noise I have to contend with, which made me throw up, but the price of heating oil is way up. On the other hand, the real estate market is good, and maybe we ought to put the house up for sale.”
“To live where?” Dworkin asked.
She said she might like to get back to city life sometime.
“That’s news to me. I assumed you didn’t care for city life anymore.”
“I do and I don’t. I’m forty-one and have been thinking I ought to be making changes. I think I’d like to get back into the art world. I’d like to be near a neighborhood of museums and galleries. That appalling noise all summer has made me honestly wonder if we shouldn’t seriously be looking into the possibility of selling this house.”
“Over my dead body. I love this house,” Dworkin shouted.
As she was preparing a salmon soufflé for supper, the newsboy came to collect for the paper. After she had glanced at the first page, Zora uttered a short cry of surprise and sat down. Dworkin, who had been practicing in the living room, quickly laid down his cello and went to her.