Longing (31 page)

Knowing no one else could soothe him, Clara told Karl and Ferdinand to remain where they were and took her father aside. “Thank you so much for fixing my piano, Papa. Only you could have done it. You are not only an artist but also a veritable Hercules. I thought you were going to lift that entire piano above your head and smash it to the stage.”

“Next time I shall,” he averred.

Next time, alas, arrived more quickly than either had anticipated. Soon after the interval, when Clara had returned and was playing the kind of staccato variations that were guaranteed to make audiences experience a pianist's fingers tapping upon their very scalps, not only did the keys begin to stick again but the damper as well, so that her father was forced to return to the stage and in the very midst of her playing stick his velveted derrière toward the paying customers and push the damper down by hand, time after time after time, a hundred times at least, while Clara tapped on and experienced the strange sensation that she was playing her father instead of the piano, that he was her instrument, doing her will, and she whispered as she nodded her head so he might know exactly when to dampen and be encouraged at the same time to continue to dampen, “Oh, good! Oh, good! Oh, good!”

The ovation she received at the end of the piece was the most tumultuous she could remember in all her life. She would not let her father leave the stage but took his hand in hers and pulled him down to join her bows until the two of them rose and fell together and the petals of some flowers somehow brought to life on this December day and thrown at them in celebration settled in their hair.

“Is this not wonderful?” she said to him.

“What is wonderful is you,” he answered.

That evening, Ferdinand Müller was required to return to Brunswick, where his best cello and his brothers awaited him. Having kissed him several times previously, Clara found herself unable to kiss him goodbye. She could not understand this in herself but felt it right nonetheless that she withhold her lips and hoped her gloved hand in his bare hand would prove sufficient to inform him that their love affair was done.

Once Ferdinand was gone, her affection for Karl Banck she discovered was not doubled but halved at least, if not entirely diminished. This she could not understand either. Neither could she kiss him, though he seemed to be going nowhere.

Asch

DECEMBER 7, 1834

He wrote that I should save myself while I was able
,

since he ruined everything he touched
.

Ernestine von Fricken

At the moment of Ludwig Schunke's death, Robert felt he was dying himself; not because of the demise of his best friend, of which he was not yet aware, having escaped from the jaws of death in Leipzig to the arms of his affianced in Asch, but because that very same affianced was telling him something that he knew, even as the words were struggling to find their reluctant way out of her kiss-weary mouth, would change his life forever.

As for Ludwig, he did not die alone, as Robert would one day. He was attended by Dr. Reuter and by Henriette Voigt and by Karl Voigt as well, whose presence should be of no surprise since he too had come to love Ludwig Schunke, not so much for himself as for the quiet fervor he had inspired in Henriette. It is a generous man who will rejoice in his wife's love for another and a wise man who will let the passion of this love profit himself. Henriette had become, to put it discreetly, considerably more invigorated with the arrival of Ludwig into her life. Passion, like paint, may seep with benefit into its surroundings. Karl could only imagine to what sublimity of yearning she would be inspired by Ludwig's actual departure. Indeed, so involved had Karl become in preparing Ludwig for the most appropriate journey from this world into the total absence of a next that he had hung upon the walls of the poor man's bare little room such inspiring illustrations as Johann Serge's depicting the embrace of Venus and Anchises and Henry Fuseli's
Wolfram Looking at His Wife, Whom He Has Imprisoned with the Corpse of Her Lover
, which perplexed Ludwig in the haze that a consumptive death breathes over the mind to the extent that he sometimes lay in bed staring at the picture trying to determine whether the Wolfram in question might be Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose great hero, Parzival, was not unlike Herr Voigt in that the latter never once mentioned Ludwig's illness, or perhaps a cruel parody of Saint Wulfram, whose life's work consisted of a vain attempt to end human sacrifice—precisely what Ludwig felt himself to have become.

It was a sacrifice he was prepared to make. His body was no longer in its customary balance between pleasure and pain; when all you're left with is the taste of blood and all you desire is the hardly ambrosial taste of air, the glorious sensuousness of existence is liquidated. As for his mind, it was confused where it should have been emancipated. He had come to Leipzig an infected but free itinerant musician, happiest at the piano like any other vain and lonely man. But he was leaving Leipzig, and the world, both loved and loving, as throttled by the threads of human entanglement as by his disease.

Dr. Reuter approached him with yet another spoonful of calomel, which heretofore had prompted him to empty only his bladder, not his lungs, though it did manage to produce such vast quantities of spit that his gums had stopped aching and his bedclothes had been stained pink from the blood-soused runoff. The doctor appeared even smaller than he had before, as he closed in upon himself with death's approach to one of his patients, shrunken in the sight of God at his failure to prolong a life that God begat.

Ludwig shook his head. “No more.” His voice sounded even to himself as if it had traveled from afar to reach his throat.

Dr. Reuter, like all doctors, considered himself immune to the refusal of medication, so he allowed the spoon to continue on its journey to the blood-rouged lips, only to find there the back of Frau Voigt's hand, the bones of which, he noticed, were plicated like the joints of a fan, quite sensuous and causing him the unwelcome arousal he experienced whenever he stared at the hand of a woman.

“No more,” she repeated Herr Schunke's words.

“But…,” said Dr. Reuter, neither advancing nor withdrawing the spoon. “But…,” he said again.

But what? It was a terrible word. It was all that medicine was, in the end: but. But we suffer. But we die. But the doctor loses all his patients but for those he leaves behind when he but dies himself.

He turned the spoon around and thrust it in his mouth and drank the calomel himself.

“Good God!” said Herr Voigt. “Why did you do that?”

“It's quite dreadful,” he said, “isn't it?”

Henriette could feel Ludwig's breath upon her palm, with no more force than if wafted by an eyelash. His lips were pink and full, in contrast to the pallid gauntness of his face. She longed to kiss him. She had always longed to kiss him, from the moment he had appeared at her door in what would be exactly one-half year ago tomorrow. But there had been no kisses. He was, she thought, in love with Robert, who was in love with her, of course, which made him, Ludwig, all the more desirable, for Robert also was forbidden to her. But kisses were a husband's, and hers of late had been of a heat and frequency she had not known before with Karl, who in turn was aroused to such a pitch and yet such great endurance that she sometimes felt as Ludwig looked, wasted and serene. Why, then, did she feel she was married to Ludwig and no longer to her husband? She was possessed by both of them, but to only one of them did she belong. She might never lie with Ludwig, but he had entered her and lived within her so deeply and completely that as long as she might live, so would he.

He watched her hand before his eyes. If only she would lower it upon his face, grasp his suffocation and in so doing provide it. But no, she took her hand away, carried it quite beyond the field of his diminished vision, the world obscured and growing dim. He raised his head to follow it, her hand, and when he did he felt his lungs explode and blood come spraying through his teeth.

Dr. Reuter wiped away the blood, secretly clenching his nose against a smell he knew existed only in his imagination and yet a smell that quite upset his tummy. Then, with his giant physician's handkerchief between his hand and his patient's skin, he felt for the pulse in the neck.

“Dead,” he pronounced.

Karl Voigt immediately put his arm around his wife's waist for comfort, but she left his embrace even as he closed his hand around the sweet flesh where her waist joined her hip. She approached Ludwig on his bed and bent over him and lowered her face to his and placed her mouth over his and opened his lips with her lips and held her breath so she might feel as he felt, floating off to Paradise. But he could feel nothing, which was a feeling in itself and one so pleasant that he fought against it for its vacancy. In the moment of his death—for, truly, he died now—he felt his spirit yield to her as he disappeared into her mind.

Robert was sitting with Ernestine upon his favorite of all the baron's canapés, a great velvety expanse of Louis XVI giltwood whose oval backrest forced the two of them thigh to thigh. Had they separated even modestly, the twisted ribbon carved into the backrest would have massaged their spines quite irritatingly. Had they sat wholly separated, at either end of the canapé, the acanthus leaves sprouting off the armrests might very well have drawn blood. As it was, they were not particularly comfortable. But it was not comfort that inspired Robert's admiration for this rosette-elevated monstrosity. It was the rarity of the piece, its almost stifling self-centeredness, as it sat growing increasingly ill at ease within a baronial home that seemed gradually to fill with the latest examples of the new Biedermeier style, from pedestals to beds to secretaires, as if the baron felt he might impress his prospective son-in-law, whose music was so modern, with furniture he imagined to be the same. But the baron missed the point: Biedermeier was furniture for the masses, and Robert's music emerged from him in forms and rhythms that appeared to irritate nearly everyone who heard it. Much as this canapé went unsat upon, for all its value and insolent beauty.

It was his and Ernestine's favorite place to huddle, at least publicly, thigh to thigh, often holding hands, her left in his right, so that the ring he had given her, when she clenched him tightly, dug into the finger he had injured when he had attempted either to destroy or enhance his career as a pianist, he still didn't know which, though he knew the happy outcome: He lived for one musical purpose only, and that was to write it.

When he had given her the ring, as soon after her hasty departure from Leipzig as he could catch her, she had almost fainted with delight. The engagement they had hidden—much as they had hidden their gradual explorations of one another's flesh, which by then had progressed to that part of the body bordered by the navel in the north and what Ernestine liked to call Robert's dudelsack in the south—could be secret no longer, not with her diamond putting out, as was every girl's design, the eyes of any other girl who might look at it too closely.

But while she had exulted over the sudden appearance of the ring, with tears in her eyes and passionately short-winded breaths in her throat, he seemed intent on something either just over her head or perhaps having simultaneously landed upon it. She wanted him to look into her eyes, with tears in his own, and then to embrace her to seal this moment with the hot wax of their impending matrimony, but he observed her not like her husband-to-be and thus her inevitable deflowerer but like a hairdresser!

As he wrote that evening to Clara Wieck:

Ernestine's hair did indeed stand on end. The moment I gave her the ring, each golden tress rose from off her neck and ears and forehead like an hommage to marriage itself, so that soon she stood before me looking as if she'd seen a ghost, yours truly, I fear, who am of course your very own favorite ghost, should you recall the evenings of your childhood when I would haunt your room.

In truth, Ernestine's hair remained as placid as her heart did not. But even in her excitement, the first words she said to Robert upon her possession of his ring were, “Is there something the matter with my hair?”

He laughed and said, “It is risen,” which made her laugh too, because that phrase was their private code for quite another part of the body, not hers but his. She had no idea what this had to do with her hair, or why he might have spoken in code since there were no other people present at this moment when he had given her the ring, but she was delighted to learn she was not alone in her arousal.

Her father was the first to see the ring, after herself. While he was delighted with her delight and even more with this solid evidence that Herr Schumann was dallying with his daughter for a purpose more serious than the liberties the baron was convinced he had taken with her, his pleasure was balanced by a certain gravity that darkened his smiles and caused him to say to her at the first opportunity, “You must tell him the truth.”

It was the truth that Ernestine, after several weeks of enjoying the ring with the truth still withheld, was finally prepared (after many horrid rehearsals before her mirror and upon paper at night when she could not sleep for fear of what the truth might do) to tell Robert as they sat thigh to thigh upon the baron's canapé.

“I am not,” she said, “who you think I am.”

“Thank goodness,” said Robert.

“‘Thank goodness'! What is that supposed to mean? Do you not think highly of me?”

He squeezed her hand to reassure her and to punish himself for having said the first thing that had come into his mind. Her ring dug agonizingly into his bad finger.

“Quite the opposite,” he equivocated. “I think so highly of you that I have longed for you not to be who I think you are, for I want nothing so much as to be worthy of you, and I could never be worthy of who I think you are.” He pressed his leg against hers. There was nothing quite so distractingly sensuous as pressure upon the leg. It was like riding a horse. “So who are you, my sweet?”