“I’ve never heard that expression,” she said.
“Stasis may be a better word – the liberation of the space between two contradictions. Let me explain if I can. If two waves of equal but opposite amplitude meet in water, what do you get?”
“Flat water.”
“In sound?”
“Silence.”
“Right. From agitation, peace, a perfection that you might have thought unobtainable from the clash of contradictory elements.”
“I think you’ve explained the magic of counterpoint very well.”
“Not really. It’s inexplicable. I’ve noted it, that’s all. Half of humanity’s troubles arise from the inability to see that contradictory propositions can be valid simultaneously. Certainly in music, where the product, in the emotions and in understanding, is superior to the elements that produce it, and has no sound.
“This is nothing new. We have Yang and Yin, Keats resting within the riddle, the Hegelian Dialectic, the whole story of the sexes – and even Versailles.”
“Versailles?” she asked.
“Yes. You take it from there.”
Élodi felt not only excitement but that she was embraced, loved. She looked up, as if to receive an answer. She always did this upon solving a problem that took some thought. She had done it so often in exams that she was an expert in gymnasium ceilings – their beams, ropes, protected lamps, pulleys, and nets. “I see,” she said. “Versailles is simultaneously a crime against humanity in that it was possible only because of the virtual enslavement of a whole nation for centuries, and a tribute to humanity in its occasional beauty.”
“What do you mean occasional?”
“The buildings, at least, and most of the interiors, are pretty horrible in their excess, but if you focus on the details – much like the abstractions you can produce by enlarging great paintings – there is often consummate beauty, lots of it, hidden in the whole, where the work of the craftsman as artist is sheltered from, in the case of Versailles, the monstrous overall conception.
“And the gardens,” she went on, enthusiastically and entirely on her own steam, “though a contradiction of nature because they were dictated by an overly vain human design, nonetheless are saved by nature. They’re the real beauty. Versailles would be impossibly nauseating were it not saved by them, wouldn’t it? Nature has the talent to soften, forgive, and remake, to create something beautiful out of our mistakes, paradoxes, and counterpoints – even when it comes to you invisibly.”
“Exact!” Jules exclaimed, approvingly and to compliment her.
She leaned forward, modestly looking down, pleased with herself, and asked, “What shall we play?”
“Any piece you know well and would like to play.”
“I’ve been working on Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren.”
Jules was astounded that she picked this, the signature and emblem of his life. But he tried to check his astonishment, for it was a very well known piece and now quite popular. “Good,” he said, “I’ll fill in the second part.”
“There is no second part.” You could see in her face that she thought, how can he think there’s a second part?
“I’ll make one – following, echoing, reinforcing. After all, what we’re dealing with is a transcription. We have a lot of latitude. And don’t worry, I’ll watch you. I’ve been doing this a long time.”
She lifted her bow and, after counting to four, began to play. He joined in after the first phrases, offering a respectful but almost playful counterpoint. She was fully taken up by the music, and when they finished she had the satisfaction of having followed it beyond its explicable bounds.
“Beautifully done,” he said, “with technical virtuosity, love, and – let’s call it – lift off. But let me ask you this: when you held the bow, did you know that you were holding it?”
“Yes.”
“And when you fingered, did you know that that’s what you were doing?”
“Of course.”
“Lastly, did you feel the cello against you?”
“How could I not?”
“Then here’s part of my twenty percent and their not-even-one percent. Ideally, and it might take years – who knows? – you should be totally unaware that you’re holding the bow, fingering the strings, that the cello is against you. You shouldn’t be pushing the sound, it should be pulling you. That is, although you’re the agency producing it, you should feel only that you’re riding upon and within it as it carries you.”
“And how do I achieve that?” she asked somewhat skeptically.
“By understanding but then forgetting it – after a billion hours of practice. If you think about how you walk or how you speak normally, you’ll stumble. If you trust that the world has its own grace and that sound has its own life, you can enter into both. And only then will musicianship, theory, and the ineffable combine into something greater than the sum of its parts. For this I frequently use an analogy that, however, I feel uncomfortable about using now.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s about sex.”
“Try it.”
“Sex? I’ve already tried it.”
She smiled, slightly. “I mean the analogy. I’m not going to scream as if I’d seen a mouse. I’ve seen plenty of mice and I never screamed.”
“I haven’t ever mentioned this except in a class full of people, and even then I cautiously introduce it.”
“Well you didn’t cautiously introduce it now. I’m twenty-five years old,” she said, as if that actually meant something. Immediately upon saying it, she felt keen embarrassment for trying to impress that her twenty-five years had conferred upon her a weighty maturity. She saw a faint and compassionate expression that he kindly tried to keep to himself.
“All right. But don’t take it wrongly.”
“I won’t.”
“First, wait. There are a few things I forgot to mention.” He then referred her to the center of the piece by playing it himself. She was almost exasperated by his diversion, and yet fascinated by half a dozen points of musicianship that he conveyed as effortlessly as if he had done so thousand times before, which he had.
“I see, I see,” she would say, and then play a few bars, repeating them until she got it. “That’s interesting. That’s good.”
This lasted for about half an hour during which they both were fully absorbed. Then, thinking he had escaped, he said, “Now, to get the particulars right, you have to paint at first with a very broad brush. Technicians like Levin have no idea of what that means. The broad brush in this case, for this piece and for the classical era from Bach through Mozart, and partly into Beethoven although he marked the transition from classical to modern, is the spirit of the age. Human nature was the same, eternal and universal truths were the same, but conditions other than those of the natural world were different, and the difference must be understood.”
“What does that have to do with sex?” she asked. “You want to skip it, don’t you? All right, skip it.”
“No. That’s not so. It’s just that when I say it in class people twitter and smile stupidly. I hate the coyness.”
“I don’t twitter, I don’t smile stupidly, and I’m not coy,” she said, with an almost royal severity.
He loved it. “I’m not saying you would, or are. Clearly you aren’t. All right. I’ll go there. The layers I spoke of – musicianship, theory, and spirit – have equivalents of a sort in sex. From top to bottom, first you have just love, transcending mortality, when the physical is elevated paradoxically because it becomes unnecessary and pales in the presence of love. It’s a perfect and rare experience, as fleeting and insubstantial as evidences of the soul. I would risk saying that both parties become, as much as is possible in this world, agencies of the divine.
“The next layer down is earthbound and more erotic, and yet not entirely so. Through eros, the other person is central and always in mind. The overwhelming feeling is one of truth and discovery, of knowing someo
ne else intimately and beautifully. Though this is less refined and more common than the first layer, it’s by no means accessible to everyone. It’s pure love but without a connection to the divine.
“At the bottom layer you have independent eros, in which – somewhat like the highest manifestation but in an entirely opposite way – the particularity of the partners disappears. The sex runs itself and feeds upon itself, which takes you out of yourself in a different way than the other two ways, but it certainly does.
“Most of us stay mainly in one area, which might encompass, for example, the top half of the bottom band and a bit of the middle band. And the range oscillates north or south as slowly as a storm front. In music it’s the same. You have the same progression from the base, which is rhythm more or less, through the middle, which is all those things of musicianship and even theory, that make one delight in knowing and feeling it. The highest level is ineffable, so refined that it cannot be captured.
“But ideally, and rarely, in both music and in love, there’s a fourth layer, which is when one can exist in the three layers simultaneously – driven, orgasmic, automatic; then, more gently, simultaneously knowing, loving, discovering, sharing, holding back nothing; then, again simultaneously, spiritually, ineffably, even religiously. When all combine, you ascend to another band, whether in music or in love, and you’re in heaven.”
“Is that all?” she said, meaning the opposite, and, frankly, wanting to try it.
“Yes.”
“It’s not a line you say to a dressed-up girl in a hotel bar in Davos?” She didn’t mean this at all, but she had to take the charge out of the atmosphere.
“I’ve never been to Davos,” Jules said, blushing unnecessarily, “and besides, it’s too long to be a line. It’s something true that I said to a beautiful girl in my house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but at my age you can say such things without being suggestive.”
“Really?” she said. “You think so?”
“I hope so. I hope I haven’t offended you. I apologize if I have. I look upon such things like someone who’s pulling away from them. The fact of departure is now so strong that I no longer fear it. You can look upon them as someone who’s arriving.”
“Theoretically, and I’m not much one for theory myself,” she said, “would it not be possible to meet in the middle?”
“Nature punishes the effort. December/May makes for a great story as long as you can skip the end. It’s maybe what stimulated Goethe to write Faust. It’s not that it’s inherently evil, but that the way things are renders it impossible – except perhaps for a few bright moments contrasting with a sad decline.”
Élodi took this as a rejection of an advance she was not sure she had either made or wanted to make, because like him she moved between strong attraction and a kind of repulsion that was, in fact, an artifact of attraction. It was confusing to both of them. His love for her was benevolent and giving, as it would be for someone much younger. At the same time it was a desire for her as a woman, pulsingly sexual, intolerant of anything standing between them, even the thinnest silk, or air. Like two positive charges, the magnetic attractions flared in alternation and were not compatible or even present at one and the same time. As one rose on the horizon, the other declined, but only to return and drive out what had driven it out before.
So teacher and student maintained their distance, each thinking that they would do so forever. This became so highly charged that, to escape, Jules took the lead and returned to the matter of music. “The difference in the spirit of one age with the spirit of another,” he said, “despite the constancy of both nature and human nature, is legible in music. Death, pain, and tragedy still rule the world, though in the rich countries of the West we insulate ourselves from them as never before in history. But when death, pain, and tragedy were as immediate as they were to everyone, even the privileged, in the time of Bach and Mozart, you have darkness and light coexisting with almost unbearable intensity. Which is why in all of these great pieces – although neither in dirges, which I cannot stomach, nor in silly, triumphal marches – you have the tension between the most glorious, sunny exultation, and the saddest and most beautiful mourning.
“The Bach we did today is just that. It was my father’s favorite piece, on this very instrument.” He held it out, and brought it back. “He knew how joyful it was, and yet how sad. It was the first piece I heard him play, and the last.”
“I do love it,” Élodi said, after which followed, to their surprise, their satisfaction, and even to their excitement, a perfect, contented, extended silence.
III.
Loyal à Mort
The Sun Comes Out for Armand Marteau
EDGAR AUBAN HAD been kind enough to extend the probation of Armand Marteau to March the first. This was because although Armand had failed miserably during the fall – moving not a single policy from mid-October until Christmas – in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve he had sold a half-million-Euro policy to someone old enough and in ill-enough health to generate a decent premium.
But as the new year crept forward and he moved not a single contract, he began to talk to himself a lot. Although he disguised it by pretending he was on the phone, you could tell by his expression and the fear in his eyes, as well as the fact that he had no earpiece, that he wasn’t selling anything but rather making imagined exhortations and asking imaginary questions.
As he went, the way his insurance colleagues across the Channel might have put it, ’round the twist, he became even more isolated and reviled, which is what happens to herd animals when they limp, suffer, and cannot keep up. That no one looked at him gave him the kind of privacy no one wants, every second of which is shame and torment. The worse it got, the worse it got. They still called him hippo, elephantus, le Titanique, butter blob, and other such names – Cherbourg in pants, wonder whale (they thought they were creative) – but now it was less with amusement than with hatred, as if each insult, whether to his face or behind his back, was intended to cut a piece off him and batter him down until there was nothing left and, to their intended relief, he was gone.
In February, when in France there is not a single holiday to relieve the gray weeks, long nights, and wet cold, some genius had hypnotized the office staff into believing that the eighteenth was a semi-holiday because it was the feast day of St. Colman of Lindisfarne. Although no one had ever heard of St. Colman of Lindisfarne, everyone took a long lunch with a lot of drinking in an ugly restaurant in La Défense: that is, everyone but Armand Marteau. He was the only person left in the office, charged with taking messages for three hours, in the time slot when new business seldom came in, because people went home to eat. Four to six were the hot hours, as were ten to eleven forty-five in the morning.
In twelve days he would be gone. The Marteaux were practically starving. He had a toothache and could not afford to go to the dentist. His wife cried at night. The children cried during the day. They acted up in school. That morning, as he slept on the way in, someone getting off the train at a stop somewhere where it was drizzling in the dark had slapped him hard on the side of his face, either just for fun or out of hatred. He hadn’t been able to see who it was except that when the train started up again some excited youths on the platform were laughing and sticking their tongues out at him as the train pulled from the station.
Then, at the office, they had all slipped away. Everyone. Armand had just unwrapped his sandwich and flattened out the wax paper around it when the phone rang. Assuming that it was someone else’s client, for whom he would only relay a message, he wouldn’t have answered – out of spite, fastidiousness, and misery. But he hadn’t begun his sandwich, so, expecting yet another blow to his pride, he picked up, announcing the name of the subsidiary.
“You’re a subsidiary of Acorn?” asked the voice on the other end of the line.
“Yes, we are Acorn.”
“Am I in the right place for term life insurance?”
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“Yes,” Armand replied, cautiously tensing the way a fisherman stays still as he sees a fish approaching his baited hook. The fish hadn’t asked specifically for anyone, which meant that Armand was free to take the call. “I’d be happy to serve you. We’re the division that deals with policies of a minimum value of five hundred thousand Euros.” He expected that to be the end of it.
“I’d like to buy a policy.”
“May I ask in what range?”
“Ten million Euros.”
Armand’s heart thumped in his chest as if it were a cat frantically trying to escape from a cat carrier, but he strained to be nonchalant. “Your age, sir?”
“Seventy-five in June.”
The premium would be beyond anything anyone in the office had ever snagged, and the commission would be life saving. As far as Armand knew, although nothing would prevent writing a policy of that magnitude, there was no such policy in effect not only in his location but in any of the others throughout France. If he could do it, he would outshine everyone, he would save his family, get revenge, and secure his position. Outwardly, he remained magically calm. “I’d be happy to discuss this with you at your convenience. Where are you located?”
“Saint-Germain-en-Laye.”
“We’re in La Défense.”
“I know. It’s convenient, part of the reason I called you.”
“Would you like to come in, or shall I come to you?”
“Why don’t you come here?” Jules asked.
“Are you free this afternoon? I can suit your convenience.”
“What about now?” Jules proposed.
“Your address?”
Jules recited it.
“I can reach you in less than an hour, certainly. The weather was so bad I didn’t take my car,” Armand lied. “I’ll have to use the train.”