Greg Baxter - Munich Airport

On the way home, in a taxi, Trish admitted she much preferred the first half to the second. She didn’t like the Stravinsky but she especially didn’t like the Berg. My father told her I was a big fan of Berg, and asked me to defend him. It was raining, and there were sounds of thunder. The traffic moved slowly. I turned around and said, Do you go to the Philharmonic a lot?

Trish said, We used to get season tickets, but not this year.

Were they expensive?

Not really, said Trish.

Do you know much, technically, about music?

Nothing.

Then I fear you’d find an explanation of why I like Berg a little exasperating.

I just don’t find the music pleasurable.

Berg is a genius, said my father.

I’m sure he is, said Trish, but I cannot like what I don’t like.

My father said nothing, but he had lured me in — I wasn’t sure if he was interested in what I had to say, or if he wanted to see if I could persuade Trish to reconsider Berg, or if he merely wished to have a little fun at my expense.

First I have to talk about Schoenberg, I said, and twelve-tone music.

Briefly, said my father, and without the technical stuff.

I looked through the rearview mirror to find Trish’s eyes looking at mine. I said, Schoenberg found a new direction for music at a time that music was in crisis.

Explain the crisis, said my father.

Well, I only have a general sense of the crisis as Schoenberg perceived it, I am not a musical historian.

We have no interest in disclaimers, said my father, we want to know about the crisis.

The taxi driver drove excruciatingly slowly. He was a young man with a thin beard along his chin line, and he had a diamond earring, and a white zip jacket, and a couple of mobile phones. He seemed like the kind of guy who would drive really fast, and this made the slowness doubly excruciating. He looked at me as if to say, What was the crisis?

I said, Well, music had nowhere to go. It was trapped in tonality.

Nothing technical, said my father.

I said, Twelve-tone music was Schoenberg’s response to the dead end music had arrived at. Music had become, to him, something like a dumping ground of human emotion, and each new wrinkle was a movement toward the accessible. Trish said, Did you say accessible? I said, Yes, accessible — how do we make harmonious music more harmonious? How do we make heartbreak more heartbreaking? How do we make happiness happier? How do we make ambiguity more ambiguous? How do we make adventure more thrilling? How do we make art more artful? These are the questions you ask yourself when you have nowhere new to go, when there are no new ideas that aren’t just upside-down old ideas, or old ideas dressed up like new ideas.

And Berg was Schoenberg’s most famous student, said my father.

We drove over the Spree. Now there was distant sheet lightning on the horizon, which made a rumbling several seconds after it appeared. The music on the radio was bland and energetic, and it was one of the songs we would hear a thousand times on our trip to the Rhineland.

I said, Yes, Berg was Schoenberg’s most famous student, but a very different composer. Like Schoenberg, Berg made music that shattered emotional expectations. But where Schoenberg’s music was full of dramatic highs and lows, sounds and silences, Berg’s music was a music of dissolution, profound indistinctness, and of restraint and of melancholy. And Berg makes you wait. He makes you wait until you think you cannot wait any longer, and just when you think the waiting is about to be over, the music vanishes. His music leaves you unfulfilled.

And you like it, said Trish.

We dropped into a short and orange-tiled and dimly lit tunnel, and on the other side of that tunnel was our part of town, and I thought, I can think of nothing less interesting than Berg’s likability. What interests me is the calm he inspires in me, a calm that arises from a sense of equilibrium and dread.

The first destination of our road trip was the city of Mainz, where my father’s mother was born. She emigrated with my father after her husband, my father’s father, was killed in the war. I wish I knew more about her life before she left Germany. I wish I’d asked her more questions. But by the time I was old enough to be curious about her past, which was also my past, she’d had a stroke that paralyzed one side of her body completely and made her suddenly hideous and unapproachable to me. My father moved her to a nursing home. He came home, took one look at her, and decided. My mother tried to convince him that she should be moved into the house and they would get nursing assistance. But he said he didn’t want that kind of life around us. He didn’t want the house to become sick. Once my grandmother was in the nursing home, I saw her very seldom. Only my mother visited regularly.

Before the stroke, my grandmother was quite fashionable. She wore gigantic sunglasses that people in my town didn’t really understand. She was always well dressed. She wore headscarves on windy days. She was quite athletic, and threw baseballs with me, and played soccer. She taught me how to dive in swimming pools. Even though she lived a couple of miles away, in a boxy little apartment in a building full of elderly people, she was at our house constantly. I assume my father chose her apartment building, and that he wanted something so uncomfortable that she would not want to spend any time there, or make any friends. She and my mother shared a lot of the driving, cooking, cleaning. Miriam was her favorite, but she was kind to me, too. In California, she’d played golf, went on vacations to Mexico and South America, played bridge, and went out with her friends to lunches and dinners, concerts, theater, and so on. I don’t remember her ever being frustrated with us, or sick of me and Miriam, or visibly disenchanted by the pit in which she’d landed for the rest of her life. Her stroke was very bad, and her left side was completely paralyzed. She couldn’t speak, or at least we couldn’t understand her. My mother sometimes could. But I was slightly terrified of her new voice, and of her paralysis. I wanted her to recover, of course, but I also understood what permanency was. By the time she died, I hadn’t seen her in six months. Neither had Miriam, but Miriam was younger, and she was following my lead. If only, I think now, she would have lost her memory instead, if only she had spent those final years trapped inside an ever-diminishing loop of discontinuous images, if only I could, now, hide behind the irrelevant defense of her not knowing I abandoned her. But those years must have been very dark years for her. My father, when he was in town, went to see her often, but most of the time he was away in California, working, and he wasn’t there when she died. I wasn’t there, either. We weren’t even told about her death until my father came back from California two days later and he and my mother could give the news together. On the way to Mainz, in the Toyota, my father said he regretted not taking the term off and coming home to be with her, and to have Miriam and me around her more often, because he felt, now, all these years later, that he had introduced death as a triviality to us both. I said, Well, you couldn’t have known when she was going to die, exactly. He was beside me in the car, looking out the window at the rolling countryside. He said, No, you’re wrong, when she started to deteriorate the doctors said she had very little time. I went back to California anyway. I had such a lot of work to do.

I asked him to tell me what happened. I felt it might unburden him a little, and to my surprise he gave me more than just a glancing reply, which suggested he thought it might unburden him a little, as well. He said, It started with a second broken hip. From there, it took just a few weeks. She lost a huge amount of weight. She was very sick and couldn’t eat. One morning, I got a call. They told me she’d awoken in very bad shape. She had an extremely high fever and was vomiting, confused, in and out of consciousness. This is probably it, they said. I told them, I’m in California, even if I left now I couldn’t get there. They said she might last until the evening, if I could get a flight straightaway. I called your mother, of course, because obviously I could not get a flight straightaway. Your mother was working in a town about two hours away. By the time she arrived, my mother had died. It took me that whole day and the next to get squared away, then I came home and we told you and Miriam.