Musical echoes... and a poem from the edge of the Roskilde Fjord
Owning my story: the whole thing (even the parts of it that make me cringe)
The Afterlife of Music: The musical echo after the soul receives the notes purling into the ears. Hearing by heart the musical quotes after the night at the opera is over and the body sleeps with those voices still pulsating inside its treasure-room. Voices trained to tunnel through the rock of resistance, to find the soft veins of gold threaded between the ribs of strangers. Make them feel what they usually bury safely inside. The barrel-chested tenor and the pudgy baritone creating a paradise of sound with their blended voices, a silken web. I carry the music home with me into my bed, the entire opera production playing on a loop inside my head. Verdi, that magician, still casting his spell from across the chasm of time.
Scribbled in my notebook after a performance last Thursday of La Forza del Destino at the Metropolitan Opera—oh how sublime!
***
Time’s linearity, I truly believe, is only a convention. Music tells us this, as does our sense of smell.
We can be transported through time. But mostly we resist—we plant our heels and resist, because we are afraid of feeling overwhelmed.
We allow ourselves moments of mystic transport, of timelessness. Orgasm does this for all humankind. Music can, to those who allow themselves to be susceptible. Or a madeleine. Or a certain smell or combination of smells, hurtling us back through time into a moment we seem to have preserved, without even knowing we had, with so much depth and complexity that the other person (usually it’s another person) is suddenly there before us and we are as we were then. We smell the pipe smoke or the turpentine or the flowery perfume or the stale spittle that will make that person spring to life in our consciousness with all the overwhelming reality of a tender dream or a terrible nightmare. And time, in these moments, melts away and becomes meaningless.
Writing fiction and poetry does this for me—and I’m sure that artists are, in this way, more passive and even promiscuous than most other people: they allow themselves to be lifted out of the present moment and tumbled into the realm of timelessness, because that is the place where their best work is done.
Is it any wonder, then, that true art—what artists create while in that realm—is also timeless? And is in itself a doorway to timelessness through which others—upon listening, looking, reading, tasting—can fly?
Maybe the notion of resurrection is simply a misinterpretation—but still a glimpse—of this über-reality: we live again, ever and always. Death of the body is simply our death in the here-and-now. But we live on in that soup of life that surrounds this one slice of reality we choose to call our mortal selves.
***
My boyfriend in college was a graduate student who was a kind and careful and altogether lovely person who allowed me to play at being a grownup long before I was really ready. We got married a few months after I found myself pregnant, despite all sorts of precautions, when I was 19 and he was 23. Neither of us questioned the wisdom of getting an abortion. Neither of us understood how traumatic the experience would be, nor to what extent it would influence the course of our lives from then on.
Of course a choice to have that baby would have had an even greater and more indelible influence, not only on us but on that now-unknowable person Tommy and I would have brought into this world.
Getting married was all my idea, a sort of shotgun wedding without a baby. A way to soothe the guilt and sorrow I felt after lying on that table in the doctor’s office, my feet hiked up in stirrups while the attending nurse blotted at the tears that pooled in my ears until that little collection of cells was vacuumed out of me.
Using all my savings, I bought eight yards of white velvet and made a dress and veil for myself that made me look like a French nun. A rather melancholy French nun. Tommy looks much happier in the pictures than I do. I was in a daze all that summer, and can’t remember making any of the arrangements—and yet it seems miraculous to me that, in that case, my mother must have. I can’t imagine her planning a menu for over a hundred people, renting the park near my old nursery school, calling the judge (who lived in the neighborhood and was an old acquaintance), obtaining and signing the necessary forms, sending out invitations. Did she have a friend who helped her? Did my grandmother help? Or did Tom and I do it all, and I simply can’t remember now, looking back?
I have a vague memory of us being late, and the judge getting angry because he had a boat to catch to Catalina Island that weekend. I don’t remember what anyone wore, or who my father was married to at the time. The most fun was afterwards, when the inner circle retired to my mother’s house, and we sat around and ate the leftovers and opened wedding presents.
We gave away a few of the blenders to my mother and other relatives, took my sister with us on our honeymoon to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, then returned with a lot of new dishes to our cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I was fond of my wedding ring and, for a while at least, I felt that a great gaping rift in the world had been healed.
But between the birth control pills and the pregnancy, I had never been with Tommy in my right hormonal mind. I realized how much more physical a person I was than he was—how I wanted and needed so much more closeness and physical contact than he did. I respected his needs for separateness. And I began to grow restless.
***
I was the undergraduate teaching assistant for my classics professor, a man who looked like he’d stepped from the pages of heroic Celtic literature, with a wild mop of black hair and a passion for etymologies. We did a lot of looking at each other during and after class, when we went over papers and he briefed me about upcoming texts we were going to read. Or, at least, I stared at him and imagined that he was staring at me. I thought with equal intensity about the Porsche mechanic in my pre-law class who sounded so refreshingly un-intellectual when he spoke and was burning holes through me at the library, where I found myself reading the same paragraphs over and over and over again.
It was late fall. I drove out to the professor’s house. If he was alone, I decided with all the foolish certainty of youth, I would begin an affair with him. I was actually relieved when his wife answered the door. I saw how startled the professor looked, gazing out from his study. I handed him some graded papers, choked down a cup of tea, and drove out to Felton, where the mechanic lived in his childhood home on several acres of land.
He was just as surprised to see me as the professor had been, but there wasn’t a hint of confusion about his reaction. He led me through the house, showing me around; then walked me over some rocks onto an island in the middle of the creek that ran through the property. There, with the water cascading and purling around us, he kissed me with all the hard, insistent passion that I’d missed in my relationship with Tom. To this day I can feel the softness of his much-washed, worn-out cotton tee-shirt across the muscles of his back as we stood there, as hot as two pistols steaming and smoking in the cold autumn air. Bosc pears in the leafless orchard swung to and fro on their branches.
We made love in his little room, on his hard boyhood bed. He kissed my fingertips when it was over, and I couldn’t possibly have felt happier or more relieved. As I got back into my car, he handed me three ripe golden pears through the window, and I drove home with the sunroof open, letting the cold wind blow over me. I realized that I’d have to get rid of the pears then, and I ate them down to the core, one by sugary one, and tossed the carcasses out the window into the forest while I roared up Highway 9.
It might have gone on like that for months instead of weeks if I hadn’t spilled the beans to Tom. It was sex, not love, with the mechanic, although I was very fond of him, and felt a depth of gratitude for the delicacy and thoughtfulness of his initiation. “There are other things we could do—” he once told me with deep mysteriousness, “but Tom should be the one to do them with you first.” Jolly decent of him, I thought—although I was highly curious, and couldn’t imagine that there was anything more heavenly than what we were doing already. I promised Tom that I would end the affair; and then we started counseling with Helen.
***
Neither of us had ever been in therapy before. Helen saw us separately and together, as is often done. But soon our joint sessions petered out, and Helen and I embarked on what amounted to a romantic adventure—not between the two of us, but experienced by each of us in relationship to the raw components of my life.
The summer before, my friend Brook and I worked as landscape gardeners for Helen and her husband, another of my favorite professors, planting a lawn, flowering borders and a plum tree in their back yard. I must have done some cooking for them as well, because I can remember chopping parsley in their kitchen and can see Helen’s face and hear her words as she commented self-deprecatingly on my skill with a knife.
Brook and I were by no means expert or even knowledgeable in the area of suburban landscaping. I had nurtured that parking strip full of vegetables and flowers at my mother’s house on the long afternoons when I played hooky from high school. Tom and I grew some vegetables and herbs. As a long-time subscriber to Organic Gardening magazine, I was able to pepper my talk with such phrases as “companion planting,” and “the French intensive method.” Brook, who was a full head taller than I am and utterly gorgeous (although she didn’t at all know it), characterized herself as the brawn of the operation.
The wife of one of Tom’s colleagues in the graduate program, Brook had pale blue denim eyes, translucent skin and a mop of honey-colored hair that she wore in the style of a medieval page boy. She was as brilliant and restless as she was handsome, obtaining a nursing degree, writing exquisite poetry, learning Russian and taking up drawing (she went on to become an accomplished painter) during her husband’s first three years of graduate school. They lived on-campus in the Spartan quarters offered by married student housing, and I was agog at the economies I saw practiced in their household—the soups made of boiled chicken necks, the chicken necks dutifully gnawed on at dinnertime.
There was only abundance, though, in my friendship with Brook. We went on sketching expeditions together wearing broad-brimmed straw hats. We spent hours at the nursery, taking long breaks for bagels and coffee with cream at a café called Sweet Adeline’s. We discovered a tree nursery in the mountains above Highway 17 owned by an emigrée Swiss German who managed to run her business despite the fact that she knew not a single word of English. She and her husband lived in what appeared to be a one-room shack on the premises, with a pot-bellied stove and several bare-bottomed blond children running amok among milking stools and other rustic furnishings out of an illustrated edition of Heidi.
Frau Schweitzer was delighted with Brook and me, as we both spoke enough German to get at least the drift of what she told us about all the growing things around her. In one afternoon we learned that bacon rind was the best chewing toy for a teething baby, and saw our first mulberry tree, a huge potted specimen laden with ripe fruit. Frau Schweitzer grasped one of the upper branches and bent the tree down to us, gesturing with her other hand. “Ess! Ess mal!” she told us, grabbing berries by the fistful and indicating that we should do the same. The children gathered round then, and we all stuffed our faces with berries until our teeth were purple and our faces were dripping and our hands were blood red.
And this was basically Helen’s counsel to me. Here is life—look how abundant it is! How ripe and bursting and ready and sweet—how the fruit is dropping from the branches. Eat! Feed yourself with all this sweetness!
***
At the Edge of the Roskilde Fjord
The best bench, at the end of the dock—
my special place to feel the breeze
and watch the wavelets, likewise moved
by the wind, racing toward me.
As if flocks of birds were migrating just below
the surface of the fjord, their wing-tips
making little peaks and valleys.
Such worlds contained outside
what I can perceive.
Unmapped depths and mysteries.
The velvet scoter dives into that darkness
invisible to me, surfacing
with a shining little fish in its beak,
a life-sustaining gift from the gods that give
and take as they please,
to these hungry birds with their oiled plumes
that protect them from the cold and the dark to come.
To this writer and runaway wife,
still in search of the road she’s meant to take
to the rest of her life.
Copyright ©️ 2024 by Barbara Quick