Museum of the Weird (14 page)

“What a day,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t really want to meet your mother.” Alex tended to be more candid since he had gotten into the suitcase.

“I figured.”

“Had to do it sometime though, babe. You’re real important to me.”

Claire ran her index finger down the handle of the suitcase. “I know it,” she said.

The porch light went dark with a mighty pop that sounded like a kid had shot it with a pellet gun. She thought herself a relatively self-sufficient woman, all things concerned, but she hadn’t yet mustered the organizational skills required to change a light bulb.

“The light,” she said. “I’ll pick another up from the store tomorrow.”

“Plus two sixty-watt candelabra bulbs for the foyer,” Ted said. He knew everything about lights. “Plus, three mini halogens for the dining room.”

“Candelabra.”

“A hundred-watt halogen for the kitchen.”

She rested the sole of her bare foot on the suitcase. “One hundred watts,” she said.

* * *

Ted’s apartment was well-appointed with items from around the world. He told Claire they were gifts from people visiting the chapel. The most extravagant gifts usually came from some poor guy’s family members after Ted administered last rites. People had heart attacks on airplanes all the time, apparently. Ted offered Claire a whiskey with two healthy ice cubes. It was barely noon but she accepted it.

“I didn’t know priests were allowed to drink,” she said.

Ted raised his own glass. “Wouldn’t know either way,” he said. “I’m not ordained.”

“But you gave last rites? That seems illegal.”

“I’m not sure about discussing legalities with a woman who tried to smuggle a man through security.”

“He insisted.”

“And where is he now?” Ted asked. “Hopefully you didn’t leave him in the car.”

Claire swirled her drink. “He likes to stay home. Anyway, he didn’t like you very much.”

“Does he ever come out of the luggage?”

“He sticks his legs out to stretch them sometimes,” she said. “He likes to avoid cramping his legs.”

“Well then, perhaps he is just a man after all.”

“I know he is a man.”

“You haven’t touched your drink.” Ted had mastered the sustained eye contact of the overtly religious.

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well then, perhaps you are just a woman.”

“Really,” Claire said. “Maybe you are on to something.”

He watched her like a dog watches the door. She stared at him until he looked away. He picked up a jewel-encrusted skull and held it at eye level, ostensibly pondering. “I am interested in the journey towards the Spirit,” he said.

“Are you coming on to me?”

Ted smiled. He made sustained eye contact with the jewel-encrusted skull. “The case of your man, your man in the case. Does he pray or does he meditate? Does he lose the element of his corporeal form, or does his body follow him into the darkness?”

“He does just fine,” Claire said. “He is a fully realized man.”

“I am interested in this man Alex and his journey towards the Spirit.”

“Listen, Ted. Alex lives in a suitcase. Sometimes he sticks his legs out to stretch them. Inside the suitcase, he is nude. He has a fear of commitment.” She tipped back the glass of whiskey. “Honestly, I thought this meeting was going to have a different tone.”

Ted turned to look at her again. “Did you think I was going to make love to you?” he asked. “You have in your possession a fully realized man.”

Claire held her hand over her eyes. “No,” she said. “Jesus. I have to leave, actually. I did not think you were going to do anything like that. Thank you for your time.” She put down her glass and stood to leave.

Ted slipped one coaster under her glass and another under the jewel-encrusted skull. “Heaven with you,” he said.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “That skull is what’s strange, if you were curious.”

She stopped at the hardware store on the way home. She had forgotten which light bulbs to buy and bought one of everything, and fixtures to match. She bought electric candelabras and heat lamps and mounted sconces and stand-up fixtures. She bought nightlights and Christmas lights and lamps in the Tiffany style.

At home, the suitcase snored. Claire slipped a lock on the zipper and clicked it closed. She surrounded the suitcase with lights, plugged them all into three power strips, and switched them all on at once. The suitcase made a sweet little seed pod under all that hot light. Claire wondered how it felt.

THE MOVEMENT

The end of an

As they played, the quartet at Joseph Stalin’s funeral wept for another man. The tyrant lay in state, surrounded by thousands of his closest oppressed, and the greatest string quartet in Russia sat beside his casket and played beautiful music, crying for a dear friend who had died within an hour of Stalin.

The quartet, overbooked, couldn’t make it to Prokofiev’s funeral. Not many could, as it happened at the same time as The Great State Funeral of Joseph Stalin. It must have been harder to believe that Stalin was actually dead. This is a sign of a great man.

There were few flowers for Prokofiev’s funeral, because the flower shops catered to Stalin. All Prokofiev had left in the world was thirty friends and a solo violin. Some of his friends brought flowers from home.

What they provide and how they function (present day)

The university’s hall is packed, fifty more people than were at the man’s own funeral. They are required to be there for credit as music majors. They try to leave at intermission but the ushers won’t give them the programs they’ll need as proof. They put their programs over their faces and sleep. Madeline takes her place on stage.

One little life

Madeline lives her life with the violin. She has been the concertmaster of small orchestras around the world. With her quartet, she once toured China playing Mozart, Bach, and Rolla.

Biographical note

Alessandro Rolla, teacher of Niccolò Paganini; the latter eventually would be known as one of the greatest violin players ever to have lived; cancer of the larynx would take Paganini’s ability to speak, but he was heard improvising frantically on the violin on the last night of his life.

The strings no longer gut

On stage, she arranges her cropped hair, touching the frame of her glasses with a practiced hand, and raises the instrument to her neck. The strings resonate like animal gut, in a round, mellow way that any strings will sound when a master draws the bow. Her hair falls over her face as she plays the opening memorized notes of Prokofiev’s last masterpiece.

Connections

1. artistic difficulty

2. distracted audience

Music theory

Playing the violin is reading and writing at once. You’re given a piece in all its brilliance and insanity, ink from the same press that printed
Lolita
. The task is interpretation; it comes from the mind as easily as words.

The story is forced

Madeline left the quartet the previous summer. These days, she keeps busy by traveling too much and eating dinner at other people’s houses. During private lessons, she asks her students to make up a story about the music they play. They look at the page and see the rise and fall of dynamics, the difficult fingerings and bowings,
marcato
,
pizzicato
. They say it’s about clouds changing into different clouds, or quiet water in a well, or a boy clutching the back of a trolley car as it rumbles over the hill and off its track and plunges, out of control, into a valley. She nods, bored.

Connections (cont.)

3. representing specific emotion doesn’t work in English

4. representing any emotion doesn’t work in any language

General disgust

Composers show their distaste for the oppressive regime by bitching through art. In Prokofiev’s case, it was twisted march songs and dissonant chords. He wrote at the physical limit of the instrument, to the upper end of the fingerboard, double trills,
sul ponticello
, muted to suffocate the solo, an accompanist jerking his head to keep time, a repeating three-bar time signature that cannot be counted and must be felt. Because of the high difficulty and low payoff, few bother to learn all four movements of his first sonata for violin.

Particular truth regarding music, life

It’s an ugly, ugly piece

Little life (organization)

First movement: faux triumph

Second movement: thinly veiled mockery of Joseph Stalin

Third movement: dissonance (intentional)

Fourth movement: well,

Focused disgust

The kids in the audience don’t like it. You can’t blame them, really; they’ve been raised on the Romantics, the Baroque, the Bachs and Beethovens. Sousa never wrote an ironic note in his life. They don’t understand it. They’re not old enough to know the first instinct of irritation should be avoided in order to keep an open mind. The violin strikes warring chords against the piano. The close listener spends most of the second movement trying to contextualize.

How to play an ugly piece

1. Change rhythms

2. Work backwards

3. Leave offerings

Context

forced marches bread lines hard winters panicked emigration mistrust genocide finger-pointing corruption occasional springtimes fire unspeakable cruelties historical insignificance wood floors broken bones icepicks dirty snow laughing women serbia the soul arthritis one tiny cold little life

How selfish of us (funerals)

The body (seen) and the person (imagined), the two reconciled into something we call an angel, a glowing light, a cool or warm breeze (depending on climate). The soul, for some reason still concerned with us, happy or appreciative at the attendance, the proper amount of tears and flowers, the quality of the entertainment and food afterwards.

Words rarely used in conversation by nineteen-year-olds

contextualize, tyrant, shudder, motif, wastrel, guttural, partition, baroque, muddy, intent, octave, cruelty

Programme

1. Attempted Explanation

2. Company of Friends

3. Sonata for Violin

At one time, Prokofiev had to have been alive

He walked through a public park. He felt snow and saw the three shades of the color grey. He took his glove off and looped his fingers around the links of a chain link fence. His hand warmed the metal and the metal chilled his hand and he thought, if the metal could feel, it would feel warm.

He thought, if the metal could feel

What if the metal could feel

It could feel warm

He thought, I wonder what Stalin is doing today. Perhaps he is having eggs, and mint tea. He thought his thoughts in Russian, which made things pleasantly guttural. He thought often of music.

Action

Madeline shudders with the final notes of the third movement. Her heavy dress is very Russian, very winter-coat. The fourth movement features runs from the opening, the theme repeated, not uncommon, but Prokofiev keeps pushing the envelope, the runs higher, confounding the lower register. The scale pattern is foreign. The upper notes approach resolution at the octave but but never arrive.

This was the piece played at Prokofiev’s funeral.

Connections (cont)

5. no satisfying ending

The tyrant speaks

Perhaps I was having eggs, and mint tea. I tried to read the papers every morning, to be a lover of language and knowledge, but it was very tiring. I couldn’t control anything outside of Russia which, if you think about it, is quite a large space outside my control. From the point of view of a man of my ambition, it is quite a large space, indeed. It is quite a large space from the point of view of any man. Anyway, I prefer coffee, and not to be recalled as a tyrant.