Make Me Work (21 page)

But Karl was more up on these things than the doctors were. For years he'd been studying the phenomenon of chaos, of which heartbeat arrhythmia was a perfect example. Chaos was not nothing. It was not the absence of purpose and structure. Chaos might even
be
structure—what human beings called structure—or maybe it was structure seen from the other side. It was reality's essential ingredient. Everything had chaos in it. But chaos could amplify and feed back, propagating until it destroyed any system it was in. Scientists had lately discovered these things about chaos, but Karl had intuited the truth decades ago. Had he been a scientist, he'd have the Nobel Prize by now. In his music, he'd explored chaos when it was ridiculed and reviled. Now chaos was respectable, but Karl wasn't. Most of the fundamental properties of reality that Karl believed in—mind over matter, to take an obvious example—would eventually be discovered, too, and presented to the world on television shows, but Karl wouldn't be around to see them.

The devils stopped playing their bongos in his rib cage; they were finished laughing at him for the moment. He looked up the steps, half expecting to find Jennifer staring down at him, but the landing was empty. He rose and walked gingerly across the graveled drive as though in his stocking feet. No one except Jennifer knew this, but the masterpiece he was composing was about his erratic heart. That was the genius of it, its beauty and raw, flawed life. That was even its title, Heart
Chaos
I
. It literally began with the anti-rhythms of his own mortal pump going berserk, captured one day when he held a tape recorder to his chest despite his mortal terror. Later, he transcribed it verbatim into his overture. When it was done,
Heart Chaos
I was going to express perfectly what chaos really was—the music of the world.

His attack left him shaky and weak and craving a slice of roast. He entered the kitchen and joined Gloria at the range, where she was stirring a broad sauté pan of creamy sauce with vegetables in it. A large pot of water boiled on a back burner.

“This isn't a roast,” he said.

“Who said it was?” Gloria replied.

“It smelled exactly like a roast. I smelled it.”

She turned to face him. “Karl, this smells like a roast to you?”

He bent over the sauce and inhaled. “No, it doesn't. Not anymore.” The aroma dispelled most of his disappointment. He loved creamy sauces for pasta, though they were too rich and he had no business eating them. He'd brought home bad cholesterol numbers a year before. He had no business eating roasts, either, but a person tired of broiled eggplant slices with lemon juice. “Trying to kill me again,” he said.

“Out to get you,” said Gloria, stirring green peas into the simmering cream.

She was twelve years younger than Karl, his first student-affair from his first year at the college. It was thanks largely to her that the small, pretty campus of brownstone buildings was still a college at all, and not some ashram or corporate retreat. The place had been in serious trouble when Gloria left Admissions six years ago to take over the Development Office. Now the college had the beginnings of a well-invested endowment, the hiring freeze was lifted, applications were up. In meetings with the trustees, the provost tried to take credit for the school's salvation, but everybody knew Gloria was the brains behind it.

“Jennifer would like to stay for dinner,” Karl said.

“Fine. There's plenty to go around.”

A bottle of white wine was already standing open on the kitchen island. He poured himself some and refreshed Gloria's glass. “Fair warning, though. She's in a stinker of a mood. I think she's terrified she doesn't have her new lines memorized or something, that her big act isn't going to go over in New York. She's been quite unpleasant lately.”

“Well, we'll have to stay off that subject, then.”

“Or we could get on that subject. We could quiz her. Give her a test, try to trip her up.”

“Karl.”

He looked out the window to see Jennifer crossing the cul-de-sac between the barn and the house. She'd changed out of her blood-spattered clothes into clean jeans and a T-shirt that said
AMERICA HAS A REALITY PROBLEM
.

She pushed open the kitchen's screen door and stuck her head inside. “Hi. It's me.”

“Hello, Jennifer,” Gloria said.

“We're not having a roast after all,” Karl said, sipping his wine beneath the massive oval rack of hanging pots. “We're having fettuccine Alfredo.”

“Primavera,” Gloria said.

“Excuse me, primavera.”

“Great,” Jennifer said.

“Karl was positive he smelled a roast,” Gloria told Jennifer.

“It was uncanny,” Karl said.

“Maybe you were smelling a roast in your brain,” Jennifer said. “A roast from your past that once made you happy.”

Gloria laughed. “That's very funny,” she said.

Karl didn't think it was all that funny. It was exactly the kind of thing Jennifer was always saying, the prototypical Jennifer statement. She would float around New York City saying things like this, and soon some people would be having a lot of fun with her. “You could put that in your skit,” Karl said. She disliked having her act called a skit. She didn't care for “act” either.

“Maybe I will,” Jennifer said. “A roast in the brain. I like it.”

Karl caught Gloria glaring at him over her shoulder. “Wine?” he asked Jennifer. “Or would it fog your mind?”

Jennifer laughed. “Nothing could fog my mind more than it is already.”

The girl was the most amazing fount of truth sometimes. Karl poured a glass and handed it to her.

Gloria slid coiled noodles into the boiling kettle and stirred them around, then turned to bestow a gracious smile upon Jennifer. “What's your mind so fogged about?” she asked.

Whenever Karl watched Gloria socialize, he understood how she could put on her handsome tailored lady's suits, fly around the country with her computer, and come home with her briefcase full of money for the college. Karl couldn't get a Rotary Club to give him twenty cents. Gloria had “people skills” in spades. She made people feel good about themselves. Somebody had to do it.

“I'm fogged from working on my show,” Jennifer said. “I've been rewriting my script and rewriting my music and trying to memorize everything and stay calm about it.”

“Plus doing your work for Karl.”

“Yeah, that, too.”

“Plus making lots of blood,” Karl added.

“Right, let's not forget the blood,” Jennifer laughed.

“Are you excited about performing in New York?” asked Gloria.

“Of course! I'm psyched. I'm nervous, too.”

“It's really important to work there, I guess? As opposed to other cities?”

“Oh, totally,” Jennifer said. “I mean, people do performance in, like, Seattle and
Minneapolis
and stuff, but it's not the same thing. People in New York recognize two or three area codes, and if you don't have one, they don't even call you. To tell you the truth, even living up here is becoming an impediment to me.”

“I'm not surprised,” Gloria said. “We're sort of in the middle of nowhere here. Aren't we?”

“Living here is an impediment?” Karl said. “Since when?”

“Maybe Jennifer is just realizing it,” Gloria said.

“That's it exactly,” Jennifer said. “It's just dawning on me. All the work for this show has made me realize how much harder it is not to be there.”

“Makes perfect sense,” Gloria said.

“Are you saying you're thinking about moving to New York?” said Karl.

“I've thought about it, yeah.”

He stepped out from behind the kitchen island. Gloria had her eye on him. “When?”

“If I did it, I'd probably do it pretty soon.”

“Jennifer, school starts in two months. You're supposed to teach sections of the intro course. You wanted an Instructor appointment. I got you one.”

The blood had rushed to Jennifer's face. She stood looking mortified, her wineglass trembling and her free hand stuck in a back pocket of her jeans.

“Karl,” Gloria said, “they can easily find a replacement for Survey of Western Music.”

“That's not the point, Gloria.”

“Then what's the point?”

He looked at Jennifer and squeezed an exasperated laugh out of himself. “I guess the point is, when were you planning to tell the department?”

“I wanted to get this performance behind me and then figure it out.”

Gloria put her hand on Jennifer's shoulder. “I know more about this college than he does. Take your opportunities. Somebody else will cover the course.” Suddenly, the noodles foamed and boiled over on the stove. “You two are making me forget what I'm doing! Go sit down! Both of you!”

When they were all at the table with portions of dinner before them, Gloria poured more wine and proposed a toast. “To Jennifer's success in New York. I'm sure you'll be great.”

“Thank you,” Jennifer said.

Karl was fuming in his chair. “Here's wishing you minor fame,” he said, and smiled witheringly before sipping his wine.

“Thanks, but I think I already have that,” Jennifer said.

Karl heard this like a schizophrenic hearing voices. He looked to see if Gloria had heard it, too, but he couldn't tell. “You don't say,” he said.

“Yeah, I think you could say I'm kind of minor famous.” She turned to Gloria. “Some pretty important critics in New York are talking about my work.”

“Karl's been telling me,” Gloria said. “Congratulations.”

Jennifer shrugged her shoulders. “I mean, you know it's not real,” she added. “You don't let yourself believe in it. You don't think about it when you're working. But as long as you don't, it's not a bad thing. It helps.”

“That sounds like a very wise attitude,” Gloria said, smiling and touching Jennifer's arm. “For someone so wonderfully young.”

Karl sat like a man turned to stone. “Indeed,” he said. He had told Jennifer those very things, in those words exactly.

He didn't pretend to be jolly at dinner, though Jennifer and Gloria did, and when dinner was over, Jennifer announced that she was going out to the barn to clean up her blood, and then she was going home to get ready for her trip to New York. Karl remained at the table with the second bottle of wine, while Gloria cleaned the kitchen. For some time, he'd felt that he was living in a bad knock-off of the world, or that the world itself had taken a bad fall on the head and suffered from amnesia now. Nobody remembered anything. Everything Karl saw in the arts was a watery reflection of something he'd seen firsthand decades before, but nobody was saying that. Nobody seemed to recall that all the currently fashionable gestures had been made before, and made better, by better people in a better time. But the most galling thing was that Karl felt, without being able to prove it, that Jennifer had stolen her whole blood business from him.

Gloria finished in the kitchen and came into the dining room. “How about that America with that reality problem,” she said and laughed, but Karl didn't laugh back. “Oh, Karl, cheer up, will you?”

Karl poured the last of the wine into his glass. Cheering up, promoting good cheer, was actually Gloria's profession, for what was fund-raising if not leading the crowd in a cheer? Institutional endowment people were really brilliant con artists, but he didn't see how she could stand the life. Once in a while, he attended some college event with her, and watched in horror as hundreds of people cheered each other. “I'm disappointed to see how little I taught someone who seemed to be a gifted student. It's a common syndrome we professors suffer from. Jennifer turns out to believe that if she doesn't get opportunities for exhibitionism in New York, her creative life isn't worth living.”

“Well, for what she wants to do, that's true, isn't it?”

“And what's that? What she wants to do?”

“Her theater stuff. Whatever it is.”

“She's not doing theater stuff, Gloria. She's perpetrating a hoax on the public. It's the same thing in music and painting—kids getting lionized for discovering their belly buttons.”

“You were lionized as a kid,” she said.

“For discovering my belly button?” he cried out.

“For having something new to say.”

“These kids do not have something new to say. But that's not even the point. The point is, she'll be eaten alive down there. Devoured like prey.”

“Lots of kids go to New York to do art and don't get devoured like prey.”

“Jennifer will be devoured. She puts out a certain vibration. She invites it.” And then, as though one thing followed from the other, he said, “I don't like helping people and then being treated with disrespect.”

“She's young, Karl.”

“I wasn't like that when
I
was young. Were you like that?”

“I don't know. You tell me. You knew me then.”

“No, you were not like that. You were infinitely better than that. Kids today are off the map. This whole fucking civilization is out the window.” He stood up from the table. “I'm asking her to leave right now. I'll clean up her mess myself. I have work to do tonight.”

He kicked across the driveway, splashing gravel against the cars. In his twenty-five years at the college, plenty of pretty girls had thrown themselves at him, and he'd slept with a number of them. True, girls threw themselves at other professors, too, and some of those professors practiced restraint. But none of those professors had lived through the experience of minor fame.

He stomped up the studio stairs, stood beside his grand piano, and called across the high-ceilinged space, “You expected me to leave her for you, didn't you? That's what this is all about.”