Make Me Work (22 page)

Jennifer swung around at the sink. “Are you kidding me? I think
she
should leave
you.”

“You think it was fair to dump this news on me in front of my wife?”

“Karl, don't talk to me like the big father, O.K.?”

He barked a bitter laugh. This was the major theme of their recent fighting—Karl's being the big, controlling father. When she studied with him at the college, his being the big father was the thing she'd loved; he happened to know that, even if she wouldn't admit it now. “All right, Jennifer, fine. But I hope you're planning to be careful what you say. There are people who would assume I took advantage of you.”

She snorted. “Who do you think seduced who, anyway?”

He was going schizo again, hearing things. “What?”

“I said, who do you think started this? I seduced you, not the other way around.”

He must have drunk more wine than he realized. He was going in slow motion and Jennifer was in normal time. He stood there saying nothing.

“I decided to have an affair with you, and I initiated it,” Jennifer went on. “Think back.”

“And now you've initiated another one with some boy in New York.”

“That would be none of your business if I did.”

He looked around the studio for her red milk jugs. “Jennifer, I don't see your blood.”

“It's in the car.”

“Then why don't you go join it?”

When she passed him on her way to the stairs, he said, “You know, something occurred to me tonight. You never did your blood thing until I told you about my heart symphony.”

“You're paranoid, Karl. You're sick. I have my own ideas.”

“Do you? I think I've had a pretty big influence on you.”

“Influence? I
hate
your music.”

On one of his bookshelves he had a few excellent cigars in a humidor, cigars he'd been saving for the right visitor or some special excuse to celebrate. He loved cigars, but he wasn't allowed to smoke them anymore. He snipped one and lit it, and squirted a volume of blue smoke into the air—a textbook example of chaos, swirling smoke, along with the weather and the flight of butterflies.

He was a first-rate composer, the real goddamn lifelong thing, and he was going to put his feelings into his music and have a good night of work, no matter what. He was not throwing away his discipline because he'd crossed paths with a self-deceived suburban girl. He was coming out of this just fine. But first he had to clean the studio kitchen; he couldn't write with Jennifer's bloody mess staring back at him from across the room. He clamped his cigar in his teeth and started washing one of the pans covered with congealed stage gore. It was even more realistic dry than wet, and when it did get wet it dissolved and got all over his hands, and upset him. He started to succumb to nasty Charles Manson imagery and graphic imaginings of the bloody metronome throbbing away behind his breastbone. He threw the saucepan back in the sink and pulled a folding Japanese screen in front of the whole affair.

He paced the floor, hazing the big studio with blue smoke. It came over him, in that sickeningly palpable way you can't endure for more than a second or two, that he was going to die.
What an abomination
, he thought, almost out loud.
That a man like me should return to dust
.

He stood at the piano and looked at his messy score. It didn't tell him anything. Nothing transcendental was clamoring to get out of him at the moment. He sat on the bench, opened a manila folder, and unfurled a length of green paper portraying his monitored heart. He'd gotten some sections of these graphs from the clinic, and he'd been consulting them while composing
Heart Chaos 1
. They'd proven surprisingly inspirational—the physical shapes on the paper suggesting sound and structure to him, telling him what to write. He found a burst of heart-static he liked, and played something on the keys to go with it, but what came out was the most pointlessly ugly music he'd ever heard in his life.

He got up and walked to one of his big picture windows. Beyond his reflection, small lights were flashing like the eyes of night-spirits. It was July, and fireflies were floating around by the hundreds, tails lighting and then fading to black, here and there, you never knew where, all of it looking perfectly random to human beings not privy to the secrets of firefly love. A three-quarters moon washed its ghost light over the mowed meadow beneath the window, and when Karl raised his eyes to look more deeply into the pasture, his heart gave a massive, terrifying pulse. Someone was out there in the meadow, lurking around his secluded house in the middle of the night. He opened his door quietly and stepped out onto the landing. The intruder was hiding something in the underbrush, or looking for something hidden there. After a few seconds, he saw that it was his wife, hovering at the billowing tangle of brambles that lined the edge of the meadow. “Gloria!” he called out to her.

She spun around in the moonlight. “You scared me!” she cried.

“
I
scared
you!
” he answered, and clomped down his staircase, thinking,
I who might never come back from a scare like that
. He walked toward Gloria through the lightning bugs, ducking their lethargic, flashing bodies. “What are you doing?” he said from afar.

“Picking raspberries,” she replied, speaking into the bushes.

“For what?”

“Because they're feeding the birds out here, or just falling on the ground and rotting.”

Deep thickets of raspberries bordered the meadow in back of the house. In years past, Karl and Gloria had made pies from the fruit of these bushes, but they hadn't done it this year or last, or maybe not for a few years. Fresh raspberry pie seemed almost a dream-thing to Karl now, a creation tasted on vacation in some exotic place and not available in ordinary life at home.

He reached his wife beneath the moon. “Are you planning to make a pie?” he asked.

“I don't know what I'm planning to do,” she said. She had a large plastic tub from the kitchen, big enough to hold berries for two pies at least. She had a snifter of brandy, too, glinting on the freshly mown grass, completely out of character for Gloria. Karl was the late-night-brandy type, not her.

“Can I have a sip of your drink?” he asked, and when she didn't answer, he picked it up from the ground and had one.

She took it back from him and had a sip herself. “You smell like a cigar,” she said.

He looked down at his left hand. The cigar was hanging between his fingers. He'd forgotten it was there. “I was in the mood for one.”

“Having a party?”

“No more than you, it seems.”

“We're both having a party,” Gloria said. “But not the same party.”

“You're not really the party type.”

“I'm not a fun person?”

“I meant the type for that kind of party.”

“What kind?”

“Never mind. I'm losing track of this conversation.” He took a puff on the cigar, but it was no longer lit. It seemed that some utterance needed to be made, some accounting of himself to his wife. “Listen,” he said. “I've been wanting to talk to you. I'm sorry I've had to work so hard lately.”

“But you've always worked hard,” Gloria said. “Is there something unusual about your working hard now?”

“I feel especially under pressure. I feel I have a lot of work to do in a limited time.”

“We all have limited time, Karl, including you. But not because there's anything wrong with your heart.” She put down her brandy snifter and continued to pluck the biggest berries out of the tangled, moonlit leaves. “But you
have
been especially passionate about your work this year—sleeping out in the barn all those nights and everything. You've been especially intense about whatever you're doing out there.”

“What I'm doing out there is creating a masterpiece,” Karl said.

“Aren't you always?”

“I don't know what you're saying, Gloria.”

“You told me once that in order to be able to create anything at all, you had to feel you were creating a masterpiece. You said that was the only possible attitude toward work. Didn't you tell me that?”

He had, in fact, told her that, and it was true, but he made a mental note to stop telling people things. “Except that this time I'm really doing that.”

“Really? Does it worry you to be so sure? You told me that artists are never sure it's a masterpiece, but that's a good thing, because being sure is bad. The point is not to be sure and to do it anyway, on faith.”

Life chose this instant to reveal to Karl that the “
I
” in Heart Chaos I would be one of his little jokes, because there would be no Heart
Chaos 2
. After
Heart Chaos 1
, he would write no more music. He would fall silent. He just couldn't take it anymore. He was feeling surprisingly good and righteous about this decision when, out of the blue, he remembered the radical black student from the 1960s who, in some curriculum dispute, had become briefly famous for calling Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms “old dead punks.” Karl hadn't thought about this in years, and the memory of it cheered him out of all proportion to its real significance. He actually broke into a grin. “I guess I've told you just about everything, haven't I?”

Gloria laughed the way people laugh sometimes when the doctor touches a place that hurts. “No, not quite everything,” she said, and held out her plastic tub for the few berries he'd picked.

When he opened his hand above her container, she pulled it away and his berries fell on the ground. He stared at their dark bodies on the matted grass mowings.

“Young Jennifer stopped in to see me as she was leaving,” Gloria said.

Karl stopped breathing and waited for his heart to self-destruct, but the perverse vital organ beat on like a clock. “Oh? And what did she have to say?”

“The part I can't get over,” Gloria continued, “is that you disliked her so much. You thought she was silly. You ridiculed her all the time.”

“I did not ridicule her all the time.”

“Yes, you did, in all sorts of little ways.”

The situation was getting completely out of hand, and he was not going to allow that to happen. No person living on earth understood self-discipline and control better than Karl did. He stood up straight and composed himself. “Did Jennifer tell you how much she hated my work?”

“No.”

“Well, she told me. She didn't spare me one speck of nasty truth tonight. But back when she wanted me to do things for her, my work was the greatest. You want the topper? She shamelessly stole her whole blood idea from the symphony I'm working on.”

“You're writing a symphony about blood?” Gloria said, with a look of disbelief.

“It's not about blood as such.”

“Then how could Jennifer steal it?”

Karl thought back to the experience of waking up this morning, and wondered where he'd missed the sign. There had to have been one. A day like this would not arrive unannounced. “I don't deny that I made a mistake with Jennifer.”

“Really,” said his wife, wafting the brandy snifter beneath her nose.

“I should never have kept her here after she graduated. I thought she was ready for responsibility, but it only prolonged her adolescence. I thought she was a mature person, but you were right, Gloria: she's young. She didn't even show up on campus to do her duties today. She left me to do the things she gets paid to do, but let me ask you this: Who does the things I get paid to do? Jennifer has a serious problem. It's going to hold her back in life.”

“Is it a reality problem, do you think?”

“Yes, it is. She thinks she's the center of the world.”

Gloria sipped her brandy, and when Karl reached for the snifter to have some, too, she pulled it away to keep to herself. “The center of the world,” she said. “That's a crowded place.”

MAKE ME WORK

The pink vanity mirror in Anthony's hand was like the one that enchanted princesses always have, the long-handled oval glass they consult to learn their fortunes. He was supposed to be using it to examine the back of his head; instead, he was tilting it this way and that to get the big picture from the wall mirror behind him. Nuong, the owner of Shear Satisfaction, appeared in this panorama in her blue smock and black leggings, a plummy color on her lips, her own hair a flawless black helmet. Anthony was enthroned in her chair, encased in a floral-printed cone from which his head emerged in ruthless relief. The rest of him seemed not to be there. To his right and left, other people sat beneath similar capes, and their nether parts also seemed to have disappeared. That was the point. The head was what concerned the denizens of this place, only the head, and the reflected scene told you so instantly, the way fairy tales told you things. In Anthony's mind the mirror spoke with Nuong's Vietnamese voice.
Leave heart at home
, it said. Matters
of head handled here
.

“Flying!” said Nuong herself, lifting Anthony's long hair and tossing it into the air. “Poof!” she exclaimed at the penumbra of fluff that floated back to his shoulders.

“Flyaway,” Anthony said, helping her. “I have flyaway hair.”

“Flying away!” Nuong affirmed, making her hands into birds flapping skyward. “Wispy! No good! Must cut!”

It was a time when formidable men wore ponytails—pigtails at the very least—but today, after ministering to Anthony's hair for more than two years, Nuong was saying that his fine-textured tresses had become too thin to be worn in any kind of tail any longer.

She brought her pretty face close to his. “Fact of reality, Anything,” she said in commiseration (that was how she pronounced his name), and then, holding her index fingers apart to show the length, she said, “I cut this much, O.K.?”