Make Me Work (20 page)

Then the front door of the house opened on the level above them. A woman and a boy stepped onto the balcony and stood there, as if waiting to be asked to come all the way in.

“Joan, what's wrong?” Mary called up. “Did you have trouble in the fog?”

“It's foggy out there,” said Joan.

“We had a neat wreck,” the boy said. It had been dark for hours, but he was wearing surfer sunglasses connected to a satin cord around his neck.

“No,” Joan said. “I just couldn't see.”

Raymond followed Mary to the top of the stairs. Joan held out her car keys for him to take. He put on his jacket and groped along the wooden walkway until he could see that Joan had run her car off the road and into a tree at the top of her steep front lawn. The left front fender was dented and the headlight was broken, but that was all. If she hadn't hit the tree, she would have come all the way down the slope and through the foggy balcony windows above the living room. He climbed up to the car and started it, and backed it up onto the level part of the road. When he looked down, he couldn't even see the house.

“Everything's O.K.,” he told Joan when he returned her keys. She seemed to know that already, or to have something else on her mind. She and her son were still standing aimlessly in the balcony-foyer with their jackets on. “All you have to do is get somebody to bend your fender back. It scrapes the tire a little bit.”

“You could do that for me,” Joan said.

“No, I'm sorry, I can't. I'd need a crowbar or something, and I can hardly see out there.”

“You could do it in the morning,” Joan said.

“I won't be here in the morning. I have to leave tonight, soon. You can find somebody else to do it.”

“You can't drive tonight,” Joan said. “You don't want to go out there now.”

“Joan, don't start scaring people,” Mary broke in. “Jimmy,” she said, “is it clear downtown?”

“Downtown is cool,” Jimmy said from behind his shades. He scuffed his checkerboard sneakers on the balcony and plucked at the rubberized printing of his black heavy-metal T-shirt.

“The fog's just up here,” Mary said. “Happens all the time. Suddenly you drop out of it and it's crystal clear.”

Joan was staring at a place about a foot below Raymond's face. When he looked down he saw the wilted dandelion in his jacket lapel. “We were at People's Park today,” he explained to Joan. “We were reminiscing about it. Remember Flower Power?”

Joan looked at him uncomprehendingly. Finally she said, “There was a big earthquake in L.A. tonight.”

“There was?” Mary said. “Then why didn't we hear about it? We've had the radio on, they would have talked about that.”

“It was a big one,” Joan said. “They said it could travel up here.”

“Joan,” Mary said. “Earthquakes don't
travel
. They happen where they happen. If there was an earthquake in L.A., that's where it was—L.A.”

Joan rubbed her car keys between her hands and breathed deeply. “It's doing something to the weather up here already,” she said. “Like what a volcano does. Can't you smell it? Something's wrong with the weather.”

“Joan, I think you're really tired,” Mary said. “I think driving in the fog upset you. You need to get some rest. Jimmy, doesn't your mother seem really tired to you?”

“How would I know?” Jimmy said.

“Well, would you at least try to convince her that everything's all right?”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Joan, everything's all right,” Mary said. “Go to bed now, O.K.? Go to bed.” She pulled Raymond's arm until he followed her downstairs. They collected the dinner dishes from the dining room and stacked them in the kitchen. “Did she freak you out?” Mary asked.

Raymond took his sunglasses from his jacket pocket and put them on. “Yeah, but everything's cool now,” he said. They giggled.

“California kids are unbelievable,” Mary said. “They're much worse than we ever were.” She counted the empty beer bottles. “You O.K. to drive?”

“Sure, I'm fine.” He looked at his watch. “It's later than I thought, though. I better get going. She'll be worried.”

“You could call her and tell her you have to stay,” Mary said. She put her arms around him. “If you told her the fog was really bad, that would be the truth. Or your car might not start. This kind of moisture makes a lot of cars not start. It's really common around here.” She pulled the limp dandelion from his lapel and tossed it on the counter. “But I'll bet your car is real reliable.”

“Surprisingly so, for such an old one.”

“Just a thought.”

“No harm.”

She put on her slippers and walked him outside to the staircase leading up to the road. His car was barely perceptible up there.

“Can you find your way out of the hills?” she asked.

“How would I know?” Raymond said, bouncing his shoulders and snapping his fingers.

“I can't let you drive.” Mary laughed. “Get back in my house.”

He looked out at the fog. It wasn't any better. It might have gotten worse. He tried to think his way back to the highway, but he couldn't. He decided that driving downhill on any street would eventually get him there. He wouldn't be able to remember any instructions Mary gave him anyway.

“There's something wrong with the weather,” he said, and he started to chuckle again. But he wasn't thinking about the people in this house. He was thinking about music, about how much he used to love to play the saxophone. Tomorrow, he thought, he would start looking for some people to jam with in San Jose.

“It's so sad,” Mary said. “We shouldn't be laughing at them. She sort of scared me tonight. Do you really think there was a quake in L.A.?”

“Let me check,” Raymond said. He got down on his hands and knees and put the side of his head against the redwood boardwalk. He stayed like that for a full half-minute or more. He was trying to listen to the earth, to see if today was the day it would shake the humans off its back like a beast they'd provoked. He couldn't hear anything at all.

He stood up, laughing, and kissed Mary goodbye. “We're safe for one more night,” he said. “I can't guarantee anything after that.”

EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOR

If you wanted the book on Karl, the official version of his creative life, it went something like this: As a very young man he'd achieved minor fame by writing a suite of chamber works that bounded harmoniously away from the atonal bog where serious music was shrieking and splashing like a sinking dinosaur. Karl's sunny compositions had the new sound of a time beyond great world wars—the innocent, optimistic 1950s. They won a major prize, got recorded by a first-rate quartet, and for music from the hand of a boy they were surprisingly influential: most experts still listed Karl among the originators of the epochal return to consonance. But Karl himself, it was said, seduced by false muses and beatnik foolishness, had abandoned his original inspirations to devote the rest of his career to inferior experiments in chance and randomness worthy of no greater fame than he already possessed.

The critics who made these judgments had no talent or imagination, and no respect, and they had utterly missed the significance of Karl's later work. They didn't even know what
chance
and
randomness
meant. Nevertheless, their opinions had shaped his destiny. He was fifty-eight years old, and those precocious chamber pieces were still his only regularly performed compositions. When he wrote them, only a few players in the world could do them right; conservatory students played them passably well today—students who were often surprised to learn that Karl was still alive.

One of his own former students was in his studio as Karl's car crunched down the long, graveled driveway through the woods; lights were burning in the barn's second story, and Jennifer's beat-up Japanese sedan was parked in the cul-de-sac. Karl had been on campus the entire day, teaching in the flourishing summer arts program invented by his wife, and he hadn't seen Jennifer since their fight the night before—their third or fourth fight in a week. Jennifer was now Karl's assistant at school, though she hadn't bothered showing up today. She copied parts for him at his studio, too, and in her free time she did her own work up there. He pulled his Land Rover into the spot between her car and his wife's Volvo wagon. It amazed him that he'd been famous when he was not much older than this young woman in his workspace right now. He had been the youngest professor ever to hold an endowed chair at the college, back when the trustees were convinced they had the next Charles Ives on their hands.

Lights were burning in the house as well. He saw the shadows that Gloria cast on the walls as she moved around, preparing dinner. When he stepped out of his vehicle, he caught the rich scent of a roast coming through the kitchen's screened windows. He smelled freshly mown grass, too, and looked through the barn doorway to see it on the rubber tires of the tractor. On its ground level, the barn still housed heavy equipment for the farmer who worked some of Karl's land and mowed the meadows. The vast former hayloft was Karl's music studio. He climbed the stairway up to it. “And what's this my nose detects?” he called out in his fairy-tale woodsman's voice, flaring his nostrils and sniffing loudly as he entered the cavernous place. “Methinks my nose smells blood.”

“Boil and bubble,” Jennifer said, her back to him at the distant kitchen counter. “Toil and trouble.”

Karl's studio was bigger and better-appointed than the homes of most professors at the college, though he'd kept it, except for the bathroom, one large, unbroken space. He stood in front, where picture windows looked into the woods from the walls framing his grand piano poised on glossy floorboards beneath the skylight-studded ceiling. In the year since he'd begun his masterpiece, Karl had worked in the barn much of every night, sleeping on the sofa-bed for a few hours before dawn. He needed very little sleep these days.

“More blood, my darling?” he said, switching to the voice of a soap-opera husband. “But, sweetheart, you've made so much blood already.”

“
I need more blood,”
Jennifer replied, doing the vampire voice.

He strode across the gleaming floor to join her at the stove. Three large pots of blood were simmering there, Jennifer stirring them with a wooden spoon. Karl tried to bite her neck like Dracula, but she wouldn't let him. He used to bite her neck all the time. In the blood's bubbling turbulence, he saw the chaos that wasn't chaotic, the randomness that wasn't chance. But he saw that in almost everything. Jennifer liked her blood fairly thick, with plenty of clots. She seemed especially pleased with this batch. She had discovered recently that if she reserved some cornstarch until the blood was good and hot, it produced numerous misshapen lumps that looked grotesque sliding down her arms and face.

Jennifer was a performance artist. The blood was a prop in her act. There were many props in Jennifer's act, but blood was the unifying device. She concealed plastic sacs of the homemade blood in various articles she had with her onstage—a child's fluffy teddy bear, her pearl-encrusted evening bag, the bodice of her white bridal gown. For an hour she paraded about to her own synthesizer score, acting out dysfunctional family relationships and decrying bankrupt, oppressive governments, while the Barbie-doll world hemorrhaged around her. Everything she touched turned to blood. For her finale, she decorated a wedding cake with a bleeding pastry bag.

In Karl's opinion, her act was an embarrassing, juvenile cliché. It was also a fraud. Jennifer did not genuinely have the elemental fixation upon blood that she portrayed herself as having. An obsession with blood was a serious thing. No, it was merely that bodily fluids were good for one's career in the performance game—itself the most depraved development Karl had witnessed in his many years in the arts. He had assumed she'd grow out of it, but she was doing quite the reverse, and now people in New York City were participating in her delusion.

“Why don't you stay for dinner?” Karl said. “Gloria's making a roast. Rare, the way you like it.”

Jennifer deigned to chuckle over this, and then turned off the burners on the stove. Her blood was finished boiling. “I was going to clean up in here.”

“You can do it later.” He pinched her waist. “I'll help.”

She created her blood in his studio because her own apartment had a useless kitchenette, whereas Karl, in his prosperity, had a full set of professional pots and pans, not to mention a six-burner Viking restaurant range, and that was just the barn.

“Karl, I don't really feel like having dinner with you and Gloria.”

“You've had dinner with me and Gloria before.”

“I'm trying to concentrate. I don't feel like feeling stress.”

This batch of blood was for Jennifer's biggest engagement to date—opening for some famous fake in a New York performance space this weekend. She'd written new material for this occasion, and she was nervous about it. Karl blamed their fighting on this.

“I didn't get to see you at all today. I'd like you to stay.”

She sighed. “Fine, if you insist. Let me change.”

He came down the barn stairs into the late New Hampshire day and smelled again his wife's cookery emanating from the house.
A man enjoys a nice roast in the evening
, he thought, to cheer himself up, and at that instant his heart thing happened again—starting like a bird trying to fly in his chest and then escalating into a punching bag that made him sit on the steps, holding the railing and panting to ride it out. This happened to him two or three times a week, yet his doctors maintained that nothing was seriously wrong with him. Their diagnosis was garden-variety arrhythmia—an irregular heartbeat—and they weren't inclined to do much about it. At Karl's insistence, they'd rigged wires all over his chest for twenty-four hours at a time, the surveillance of his quavering ham hock pouring into a recorder clipped to a canvas belt. Later, they plotted his data on long paper scrolls. The black bursts on the green graph paper looked like the Reaper's palm prints to Karl, the Reaper advancing on hands and knees like a cannibal, yet one doctor after another said it was a well-known, non-fatal phenomenon. They told him to cut out coffee and booze, and stop worrying.