Mark de Silva - Square Wave

“Did you write today?”

“Yeah. Just before I came.”

“The Dutch stuff?”

He nodded. By her face, he couldn’t tell if she believed he’d done anything but drink. Anyway, if she didn’t, she would never say so, even if nothing could help him more than to be called out. That would mean tension. Nothing was worth that.

Larent set his bow down against the amplifier and started in on a delicate pizzicato line, his right hand snaking over the fingerboard as his left pinched the strings. For a moment it took Stagg away from her, put him in mind of Bartók’s strings. It was a mutual respite.

He and Renna sat at the table. “Another sherry?” he asked without raising his eyes from the empty copita in front of her.

“Sure, yes,” she said.

He lifted his hand in the light of the hanging brass lamp, signaling for the waitress. “And the writer, how was he?” he asked.

“He was good.”

Stagg waited for more but she was absorbed with Larent’s hands now. “Very nice.” He felt his mouth tightening into a smile but conquered the urge.

The waitress, dressed crisply in black, crossed into the yellow cone of light.

“Another sherry for her,” he said, leaning close to her ear. “And I’ll have, what, an Ardbeg? If that’s something you’ve got.” She gave a sharp nod, all surface, and withdrew.

The room clouded over in the harmonics Larent drew from his bass. The music’s complexion had changed. It seemed beyond comparison now. Perhaps that only underlined Stagg’s ignorance.

As the piece wound down in intricate double-stopped glissandi, he took in Larent’s face: the long jaw, the very short, very brown hair, the eyes of the same color, and the delicately freighted expression — with what exactly Stagg couldn’t tell — on which applause, twice now, had no effect.

Renna and Larent had been great friends in prep school, then something more afterward, though at a distance. He was in a conservatory in New Hampshire, and she was in grad school abroad.

Now they were something less, though exactly what Stagg felt it hard to know, given how little she volunteered. The two kept up, that much was clear. There were his performances and her readings and panels. Renna’s silence about Larent annoyed Stagg, but prying was just the sort of indignity he wouldn’t bear. Perhaps she thought she was saving him from more mulling. Of course it could only have the opposite effect.

Larent’s manner was a challenge. The literary set might be nauseating, yes, but it was possible to feel that way only because reading them—“marking the axes of their being,” another phrase he’d run into that Renna had seized on — was not very difficult. It was a nausea born mostly of boredom.

Larent was different, opaque, and even that without making a show of it. Translucent. It wasn’t just that he was a musician, although that wasn’t irrelevant. Notes could give away less than words. It was that he didn’t flaunt who or what he knew, or what he was or thought he was, or what he thought you ought to think he was. Maybe he didn’t have strong ideas about any of this, though there was plenty to have ideas about. He was interesting. That was just a fact about him, like height or weight. Partly this was because he seemed less interested in himself than in whatever he found himself doing. If only Stagg’s own engagement with his work might be so natural.

There was none of the theater, then, the performance of character, that could give away the shape of your soul — a shape, incidentally, almost always distinct from the one you were trying to project.

In one sense you could say he was without charm, but in a way that had an abiding pull on Renna, it seemed, and, grudgingly, on Stagg too. It’s what set him apart from the people in her world. Charm, after all, was always a bit of a racket. And he wasn’t a racket, though he wasn’t exactly earnest in the ordinary sense of the word. He didn’t appear earnest, not consistently. But that might be what it was to be earnest, in the same way that the truest gentlemen have no truck with etiquette. Only imposters do. Gentility was in the bones — there was nothing to be done about it — and not being regulated by a concern for appearances, it could surface in ways that looked distinctly ungentlemanly to those who didn’t know better. It wasn’t merely sprezzatura either. There was nothing studied about it. It was the thing itself. Larent’s artlessness might be of the same order.

There was silence. Larent leaned the bass against the speaker cabinet and joined the table of musicians. Five minutes later he saw them off.

“So?” he said, looking at Stagg and tapping Renna’s shoulder. He was brighter now.

“That was weird!” she said.

“This is your group?” Stagg asked.

“No, no, just people I know from school,” Larent said. “Sick of their orchestra gigs, for the night, anyway. It’s the only time I can get them to play my stuff.”

“They don’t like what you write?”

“Well, they like me . The music, well, they’d play it either way. Do you like it?”

“I think I do.”

“Interesting,” he said. “It’s not Bach, though — any of the Bachs — is it?” he said to Renna, the tiniest smile cresting on his lips. “Or Brahms.”

“No, I liked it!”

“The distorted parts too?”

“Yes… but the last thing was more me.”

“I know,” Larent said. He turned to Stagg. “I think the straighter pieces reassure them I haven’t lost my mind. But actually I want to send that one through the effects board — infinite delays, chorusing, pink noise — just to see. Make it unbelievably loud too.”

“You’d see them in pain,” Stagg said, gesturing at the tables around them.

“Well, as long as they clap.”

“Why shouldn’t they.”

Larent shifted in his chair. He set his hands on the edge of the table, his long fingers arched as if at a keyboard. “So what, drinks?” He caught the waitress’s eye and ordered the house red.

Stagg woke Renna’s phone, which lay on the table, and checked the time. In truth it was a pantomime. He already knew he had to go. He lifted the tumbler to his lips and claimed the last briny drops. “I should go,” he said as he put the glass down.

“Work,” Renna said without looking at him.

“Sure,” he said.

Larent seemed puzzled but before he could say anything Stagg got to his feet and bent over the table toward him. “I’ve thought about it. I did like it. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Larent said, almost to himself.

Stagg took Renna’s arm brusquely in his hand. “So I’ll see you around, I’m sure.” She gave him a look of exasperation, real or faux, and was about to speak, but before she got anything out, he was away from the table and through the smudged glass doors into the bracing night.

Larent’s bass lingered in his ears as he cut across two narrow lanes, down the sloping avenue leading to Halsley’s longest canal. The moon had turned the water a viscous black. A stiff breeze rippled its surface, drawing shallow crests toward the banks. The flow was always slight, and in the summertime the canal spawned great swarms of vermin. Now, though, entering fall, the waters were colder, the winds were brisker, and the canal was clear of rot.

Tall streetlamps fluorescing blue unevenly lighted the asphalt path along the water. Stagg paused in a long unlighted stretch and watched. On the other side of the canal, their bikes laid in a pile, several boys passed a pipe. One moved off to the side and seemed to do an impression. He paced with an exaggerated pigeon toe and swung his arms in eccentric ways that had no meaning to Stagg. But as the smoke swirled, and heaving coughs drifted across the water, long laughs did too, showing it meant something to them. He could see the impressionist’s lips moving, hear a softly articulated garble coming from them. But his words never made it across, not as words, and the scene remained unreadable. At least in its details. The larger picture was clear enough. There was no larger picture. Knowledge lost any further purpose here.