Longing (30 page)

“Have you not flown far enough already?” he asked.

“I'm better off here.” Ludwig grasped Robert's hand as if to disenact his defection.

Robert nodded. “You must promise to return to me when you are better.”

Ludwig smiled. “I shall fly to you upon this very rug.”

“Beware the lightning.”

“A flash for us.” Ludwig gazed upward, as he had the summer night four months ago, when they were walking arm in arm beneath the beautiful forebodings of a storm, and there was a sudden flare of lightning, illuminating Ludwig's splendid face, and he whispered then what he had now: “A flash for us.”

Robert pressed their clasped hands against Ludwig's flesh beneath the rug. “You seem light enough.”

“Not as light as soon I'll be.”

“The lighter you get, the heavier is my heart.”

Tears came to Ludwig's eyes. “Will you remember me?”

Robert shook his head. “I need not bother to remember whom I can never forget.”

He could bear no more. He took back his hand and used it to find his hat in the pocket of his coat. He wished to put it, instead of on his head, over the face of Ludwig. Instead, he bent to kiss him. It was the most frightful kind of kiss he could imagine. It was Judas kissing Jonathan.

Ludwig whispered, “Will you come back to see me?”

“I cannot speak,” said Robert, leaving.

He found Henriette approaching Ludwig's door.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To Asch.”

“Did you not just come from there?”

“No. From there.” He pointed back at the door.

“You cannot bear to be away from Ernestine?”

“I cannot bear to be here.”

“But all your friends are here. She is merely your betrothed.” Henriette smiled. “What pleasure is there in the chase once the quarry's on her knees?”

“You're my only friend here, Henriette. The magazine is all business now. Knorr is a maniac. And the Wiecks are gone for months, to the north, I understand.”

“To keep her far from you,” she said. “He makes a match.”

“Wieck?”

“Clara and Karl Banck. A good match, wouldn't you say?”

“He has a fine voice.”

“I've never yet met a woman who measures a man by his voice.” Henriette laughed at her little joke.

“You seem in strangely fine spirits.”

“I'm at peace,” she said. “He will die soon.”

“Doesn't that make you sad?”

“It makes me inconsolably sad. But I've never been sad before. He's opened me up like a flower to the moon.”

“Flowers don't open to the moon.”

“I'm not a flower. I'm a woman. The moon makes me bleed.”

“I've bled enough.” Robert hoisted his coat over his shoulders. “For God's sake, don't write me when he dies.”

She put her arms around him and pulled him to her. His coat fell to the floor. He could feel her as he'd dreamed so many times of feeling her, pressed into him. But she was light. Light like Ludwig. It was as if the two of them, Henriette and Ludwig, had been absorbed into one another and were disappearing from the earth together.

Releasing him, she opened the door to Ludwig's room and stepped inside. Robert stood at the closed door for some time but heard nothing.

Magdeburg

DECEMBER 4, 1834

Two men are fighting over me
.

Clara Wieck

When she had played in Brunswick, Clara might have fallen in love with any of the four Müller brothers—Ferdinand, Theodor, August, or Franz—who formed (she told them the name was tedious) the Müller String Quartet. But it was Ferdinand who had fallen in love with her, much to her father's delight, not that he favored Ferdinand over any of his brothers or, for that matter, over Karl Banck. Karl had joined up with them here not only as her itinerant voice teacher, not only as a native Magdeburger, but in particular as her escort and her potential lover, which was to say, from her father's point of view, potential husband. It was as inconceivable to her father as it was not only conceivable but inevitable to Clara that she take a lover, and take him in the full sense of the term, the sooner the better, if only she could manage to choose one and then find some way to disappear with him (not easy when you were famous) into whatever sort of dark and private room lovers disappear into to do whatever lovers do.

Her father was happy that one of the Müllers—it didn't matter which—had fallen in love with her because it allowed him to reduce their usual appearance fee down to nothing, zero, what Robert would have called an absolute cipher of recompense.

Clara had not been present when her father conducted these negotiations. But since all four brothers had agreed to it, she could not help imagining that he had pledged her to all four of them. Otherwise, would not the other three have protested the bartering of their time and talent—and they were one of the most renowned string quartets in Germany—for so paltry a reward, unless, of course, her father had actually offered her
body
to them. But that was inconceivable. Not unimaginable. Merely inconceivable. Unless all four of them were in love with her. But whether they were or not, it had been Ferdinand, the cellist (oh, well), who had followed her to Magdeburg.

She had been more taken with the first violinist who gave his name to the equally renowned Karl Möser Quartet in Berlin. But if Karl Möser was in love with her, his love had surely been diminished if not completely devastated by her father's insistence that
his
quartet play free because the
Müller
Quartet had played free in Brunswick. Karl Möser's refusal, as evidence he did not truly, wholly love her, tempered Clara's love for him, though when he finally agreed to allow the quartet to play for fifteen free tickets to the concert in lieu of money, she found her love for him grow stronger than ever, particularly when he graciously explained, as if to pique her father, that fifteen such tickets were worth more than the quartet's usual fee anyway because all of Berlin wanted to hear the young genius, Clara Wieck. She was convinced such overpraise of herself was evidence of his love for her—did not doting husbands even proclaim their ugly wives beautiful? But whatever love he may have felt was surely destroyed forever when her father said, “It's no secret you're a Jew, Herr Möser, and even were it a secret, it would be a secret no longer after your disgraceful insistence that you be given tickets to a concert in which you are performing yourself. We don't need you. We have our own quartet—no Jews allowed.” Of course they didn't have their own quartet. Or if they did, it was named the Clara Wieck Quartet, and it consisted of Clara Wieck, not on the violin, not on the viola, not on the cello, but alone on the piano, doubled not once but doubled twice, four of her that did not exist and only one of her that did, and it was that one who had to play alone in Berlin and fill the entire musical program by herself, all because a violinist didn't love her enough to play free.

But wasn't it nice that a cellist loved her enough not only to play for nothing but to travel to Magdeburg on the Elbe, equidistant between the man she loved in Leipzig and the man who didn't love her in Berlin, and straight into the lap of the man who did love her in Magdeburg; Karl Banck himself, so blond, so suave, so handsome, so much the tight German tenor that when Ferdinand Müller met him, Ferdinand Müller seemed about to turn right around and go back to Brunswick when Clara said, “Your being here is a dream come true.”

She didn't mean she had dreamed of his coming, or had dreamed of him at all. What she had dreamed of was that there would be two men in one place who would be in love with her, it didn't really matter who they were (unless she happened to be in love with one or both of them, which she was not).

But Ferdinand Müller didn't know this. He knew only what he wanted to know, heard only what he wanted to hear. Thus, far from turning around and going back to Brunswick, he attached himself to one side of Clara with just as much tenacity and devotion as Karl Banck attached himself to the other.

So it was that the three of them—absent even Papa for once, who seemed to believe that a girl with two men could get in no more than half the trouble she could get in with one—went everywhere together, Clara on one arm of each, while with their other arms the two of them might have pulverized one another had they not been such polite artists that instead they vied for her favors with candy and fanfaronade and flattery.

They took her to dinner and competed over who could spread her Leberpastete most thickly on a triangle of black bread and who might most elegantly place upon her bottom lip the most scrumptious dab of marzipan from the tip of a tiny fork.

They danced with her, first one, then the other. Enjoying neither of them fully when his hand cupped her waist and his other hand her hand, she dreamed of dancing with the two of them at once, one arm around the neck of each, perhaps on the top of a table with her dress flying high and her petticoats flown off and her hair for once as loose as when she went to sleep.

They attempted kisses, not always unsuccessfully and fortunately not together. Once she had yielded a single kiss to each of them, she got more pleasure from observing their attempts to maneuver her into privacy than from the kisses themselves. Having kissed you, men seemed to want to set their seal upon the deed, make a contract, sign a pact: Kiss them again, whenever they might desire; kiss no one else and at the same time praise their kisses above all others'; understand the kiss as prelude rather than as coda, the first step toward the body there below, as if a woman were a mountain to be climbed from the top down. But as interested as she was in making love, she was not interested in making love with either of these men and therefore found it curious how the desire for the act itself could be so wholly separated from the man attempting it. Men were not the same, she suspected: The act supersedes the actors, so a man might touch a woman whom his eyes had otherwise rejected, devour her for whom he had no taste.

Which is not to say she didn't care for either of them. Karl had a lovely voice; Ferdinand drew great sweetness from his cello. Karl was so handsome that he took her breath away (but, alas, did not replace it with any air of passion); Ferdinand was homely, gawky, and like many cellists moved his body tentatively, yet he brought out more arousal in her, perhaps because he wore a mustache and it warmed his face and thus her eyes. Karl protected her from everyone but himself; Ferdinand the same.

Before and after each of her concerts they stood beside her like guards hired by her father, who was therefore free to circulate among the crowd, passing out her picture, seeking out engagements, negotiating on their joint behalf. Karl and Ferdinand appeared to take some sustenance from this proximity to her and to her fame. Self-conscious with reflected pride, they held their chins high, cast their glances toward the ceilings of whatever bedizened room they happened to be in, as if it were beneath them actually to look at the people who were looking at Clara so fervently, and left her to answer the questions that were not so ridiculous that Karl and Ferdinand didn't wish these same questions might be asked of them one day.

Immediately before her final appearance in Magdeburg, at which she would play Chopin's E-Minor Concerto—the same piece she had heard Chopin himself play at Abbé Bertin's in Paris—Clara attended a small party. As was customary at such functions, she found the town's leading citizens, and as many of their children as they could manage to convince to dress up for the occasion, pressing in upon her from all sides. She did not like to take hold of the arms of Karl and Ferdinand under such public circumstances, as much to avoid the inevitable gossip as to maintain the image of her growing independence. But every once in a while she moved her own arms out to the sides just to assure herself of their near presence, as she talked to these people and tried to tell them what they asked of her.

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“How old were you when you began to play the piano?”

“Five.”

“Do you still practice?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“More than I should and less than I like.”

“Do your fingers ever hurt?”

“Only when I don't play enough.”

“What do you think about when you play?”

“Nothing.”

“Does your mind wander?”

“Sometimes my thoughts do, but my mind, never.”

“Do you ever make mistakes when you're playing?”

“All the time.”

“Wrong notes?”

“Never wrong notes.”

“Who is your favorite composer?”

“Robert Schumann.”

“Who is that?”

“My favorite composer.”

“What is your most private thought?”

“I have no privacy.”

“What is it like to be famous?”

“Like this.”

“Will you sign my program?”

“If you like.”

“Do you have a pen?”

“Karl,” she said. “Ferdinand.”

Each produced for her a pen.

It was as if the pens were magic lamps, drawing to them, and so to her, everyone in the room. Program after program was thrust into her hands, and she signed each, Clara Wieck, Clara Wieck, Clara Wieck. She noticed now, as she always did when in the midst of this ritual, that people would touch her hand as they gave her their programs and as they retrieved them. But whatever they got from touching her—whatever joy, whatever strength, whatever confirmation—she never got from touching herself.

“I must play now,” she said.

“Are you nervous?” asked a girl who was about her own age.

“My heart won't stop beating,” she answered.

It was during the finale of the Chopin that the keys began to stick on the square piano recently imported from Alpheus Babcock of Boston, Massachusetts, with whose boldly stamped name Clara's father became infuriatingly intimate when, in the intermission, he found himself virtually embracing the piano as he struggled to remove the keyboard, which, in full sight of the audience—most of whom had remained behind in the hall to watch him as if he were some sort of mad laborer dressed in velvet with a starched collar that threatened to emasculate his sideburns—he massaged and plucked back into suppleness. He came off the stage dripping with perspiration and muttering about foreign pianos and the income he had lost by not having put laborer's wages into their contract.