Robert Silverberg - Going

“The copter went down so suddenly, Mr. Staunt. They had it on the stabilizer beam all through the storm, but you know it isn’t always possible—”

“And my wife? And my wife?”

“We’re so sorry, Mr. Staunt.”

He sits at the keyboard fretting over the theory and harmony. His legs are not yet long enough to reach the piano’s pedals: a nuisance, but temporary. He closes his eyes and strikes the keyboard. This is the key of C major, the easy one. The tonic chord. The dominant. Why did they wait so long to tell him about these things? He builds chord after chord. I will now moderate into the key of D minor. Modulate. I do this and this and this. He is nine years old. All this long hot Sunday afternoon he has explored this wondrous other language of sounds. While his family sits frozen by the television set. “Henry? Henry, they’re going to be coming out of the module any minute!” He shrugs. What does the moonwalk matter to him? The moon is dead and far away. And this is the world of D minor. He has his own exploring to do today. “Henry, he’s out! He came down the ladder!” Fine. Tonic. Dominant. And the diminished seventh. The words are strange. But how easy it is to go deeper and deeper into the maze of sound.

“The faculty and students take great pleasure, Mr. Staunt, to present you on the occasion of your one-hundredth birthday with this memorial of a composer who shared your divine productivity if not your blessed longevity: the original manuscript of Mozart’s ‘Divertimento in B,’ Köchel number—”

“A boy, yes. We’re calling him Paul, after Edith’s father. And what an odd feeling it is to tell myself I have a son. You know, I’m forty-five years old. More than half my life gone, I suppose. And now a son.”

The sun is huge in the sky, and the beach is ablaze with shimmering heat-furies, and beyond the crescent of pink sand the green Caribbean rests against its bed like water in a quiet tub. These are the hours when he remains under cover, in some shady hammock, reading, perhaps making notes for an essay or his next composition. But there is the girl again, crouched by the shore, gently poking at the creatures of the tidal pool, the shy anemones and the little sea-slugs and the busy hermit crabs. So he must expose his vulnerable skin, for tomorrow he will fly back to New York, and this may be his last chance to introduce himself to her. He has watched her through this whole week of vacation. Not a girl, exactly. Surely at least twenty-five years old. Very much her own person: self-contained, coolly precise, alert, elegant. Tempting. He has rarely felt so drawn toward anyone. Preserving his bachelorhood has been no chore for him; he glides as easily from woman to woman as he does from city to city. But there is something about the eyes of this Edith, something about her smile, that pulls him. He knows he is being foolish. All this is pure fantasy: he has no idea what she is like, where her interests lie. That look of intelligence and sympathy may be all his own invention; the girl inside the face may in truth be drab and empty, some programmer on holiday, her soul a dull haze of daydreams about glamorous holovision stars. Yet he must approach. The sun pounds his sensitive skin. She looks up, smiling, from the tidal pool. A purple sea-slug crawls lightly across her palm. He kneels beside her. She offers him the sea-slug, and he lets it crawl on his hand, and they laugh, and she points out limpets and periwinkles and barnacles for him, until there is a kind of contact between them through the creatures of this salty pond, and at last he says, feeling clumsy about it, “We haven’t even introduced ourselves. I’m Henry Staunt.”

“I know,” Edith says. “The composer.”

And it all becomes so much easier.

“—and the gold medal for the outstanding work in extended symphonic form by a student under sixteen years of age goes, as I’m sure everyone has already realized, to Henry Staunt, who—”

“And my wife? And my wife?”

“We’re so sorry, Mr. Staunt.”

“As long as we’re getting into that end of the evening, Henry, I’ll allow myself the privilege of delivering a little analysis, too. Do you know what the real trouble with you is? With your music, with your soul, with everything? You don’t suffer. You’ve never been touched by pain, or, if you have, it doesn’t sink in. Look, you’re forty years old, and you’ve never known anything but success, and your music is played everywhere, an incredible achievement for a living composer, and you could pass for thirty. Or even twenty-seven. Time doesn’t claw you. I don’t recommend suffering, mind you, but I do say it tempers an artist’s soul; it adds a richness of texture that—forgive me—you lack, Henry. You know, you could live to be a very old man, considering the way you don’t seem to age, and someday, when you’re ninety-seven or one hundred five or something like that, you may realize that you’ve never really intersected reality, that you’ve kept yourself insulated, and that in a sense you haven’t really lived at all or created anything at all or—forgive me, Henry. I take it all back, even if you are still smiling. Not even a friend should say things like that. Not even a friend.”

“The Pulitzer Prize for Music for the year 2002—”

“I Edith do take thee Henry to be my lawful wedded husband—”

“It isn’t as if she was a bride, Henry. God knows it’s terrible to lose her that way, but she was yours for fifty years, Henry, fifty years, the kind of marriage most people hardly dare to dream of having, and if she’s gone, well, be content that you had the fifty, at least.”

“I wish we had crashed together, though.”

“Don’t be childish. You’re—what?—eighty-five, eighty-seven years old? You’ve got fifteen or twenty healthy and productive years ahead of you. More, if you’re lucky. People live to fantastic ages nowadays. You might see one hundred ten or one hundred fifteen.”

“Without Edith, what good is that?”

“Put your hands in the middle of the keyboard. Spread the fingers out as wide as you can. Wider. Wider. That’s the boy! Now, Henry, this is what we call middle C—”

In haste, stumbling, he goes on into his studio. The big room holds the tangible residue of his long career. Over here, the music itself, in recorded performance: disks and cassettes for the early works, sparkling playback cubes for the later ones. Here are the manuscripts, uniformly bound in red half-morocco, one of his little vanities. Here are the scrapbooks of reviews and the programs of concerts. Here are the trophies. Here are the volumes of his critical writings. Staunt has been a busy man. He looks at the titles stamped on the bindings of the manuscripts: the symphonies, the string quartets, the concerti, the miscellaneous chamber works, the songs, the sonatas, the cantatas, the operas. So much. So much. Staunt feels no sense of having wasted his time, though, filling this room with what it holds. Never in the past hundred years has a week gone by without a performance of one of his compositions somewhere. That is sufficient justification for having written, for having lived. And yet, one hundred thirty-six years is such a long time.

He pushes cubes into playback slots, getting three of his works going at once, bringing wild skeins of sound out of the room’s assortment of speakers, and stands in the middle, trembling a little, accepting the sonic barrage. After perhaps four minutes he cuts off the sound and orders his telephone to ring up the Office of Fulfillment.