Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

It’s a clear, freezing night in the minutes after a long snow has ceased, deep in the bowels of an upstate New York winter. I have wandered into the darkened shadows of the old abandoned buildings on the far side of the river that halves my campus. I am twenty years old; I will graduate on my twenty-first birthday. I have come from a party where I spent an hour watching a young female poet attempt to snort the dust of a pulverized pharmaceutical from the rug where it spilled off a hand mirror. I’ve spent the last twenty minutes standing on the riverbank, thinking about the conversation I had with my mother on the dorm phone that afternoon, looking out the lounge’s window down at the nearly iced-over river and telling her I was lonely, admitting it to her, even though her blunt concern felt worse than the loneliness.

These buildings are the old, abandoned incarnation of the university whose lights now twinkle with modern life on the rival bank of the river. The university and the university. The past little city ghosting itself uselessly onto the future one.

Usually there are a few small groups of shadows smoking pot behind the crumbling brick in the openings here and there. Tonight, though, there seems to be no one; the old campus is silent, dark, the half-glow of the snow and the washed-out sky reflecting each other.

What draws me to the old auditorium is the muted light rippling out from its high, thin windows — a kind of colorless aurora over the snow. One of the side doors is unlocked and I slip inside to see what where it comes from but as I do the light, whatever it was, abruptly flips off. There is the spooling sound of a movie reel flapping at its end, then resetting itself. I notice, breathing in the dark, that the old whooshing furnace is blasting the room with an extreme heat.

When the light flashes on again I can see that it’s the ambient glow of a black-and-white movie being projected onto a ratty, hanging sheet of muslin at the back of the stage. From the throw of the projector’s beam, someone must have situated it on one of the seats in the tiny balcony behind and above me. Its illumination is so striking in the dark that at first I don’t even notice the girl at the center of the stage.

She is standing, head down, arms stiff and flat at her sides, feet together, as if waiting for a dance to begin. She is almost naked, wearing only her underwear: a matching, simple white bra and briefs. Just as I’m about to say something, the first tripping, swooning notes of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue fill the room, emanating from two dark shapes in the balcony that look to be speakers. Against the muslin, I can make out the skyline of a black-and-white New York City, which soon switches to shots of blinking neon parking garage signs and markets. It’s Manhattan , or at least the first reel of it, which, as I will find out later, has gone missing from the campus student theater’s collection.

As Woody Allen’s voiceover sounds, the girl’s head snaps up; her entire body changes, comes alive. On screen the shots of the city are still playing out, but here is the girl, opening and closing her mouth, miming the film’s narration so perfectly it is like the voice is coming from somewhere inside her, a funny, entrancing ventriloquism no less real for its perfect memorization than for the deft bodily mimesis, the ticks and expressions and gestures all spot on. I’m sitting down, about halfway to the stage, without even realizing it. It is almost a dream.

“He adored New York City,” Woody Allen and the girl say with one voice. “He idolized it all out of proportion. Uh, no. Make that ‘He, he romanticized it all out of proportion.’ To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white, and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Uh. . no. Let me start this over. Chapter One. He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else.”

As the light from the scenes, shifting faster and faster now, plays over her body and there is only the bombastic surfacing of the Gershwin, she turns her face out into the audience that isn’t, the torn rows of seats missing covers, and looks right at me, holding my gaze perfectly steady, though I know in the darkness I must only be a shadow, a shape. She does this until the movie proper starts and she begins parroting Woody Allen’s character’s movements and lines without a single mistake, with impossible ease, until it seems that the figures flickering on the rotting muslin are being led by her body.

Later, I will find out many things about her: that she stole that reel, fixed the auditorium’s ancient furnace herself, and learned Rhapsody in Blue by heart at ten years old and loved it so much she played it nonstop every minute she was home until her mother threatened to sell the piano, which didn’t matter because by then the music had, in her words, passed into her entirely, until she could reenter the composition at any moment, on any note, and play it through in that mental theater all the way to the end, for instance. I will learn that she loves Woody Allen, both Gershwins, and Buster Keaton movies, and that somehow, in her solitary, culturally sentimental self-education she picked up several outdated idioms (like saying “I’m all wet as a science major”) that still slipped out occasionally, helplessly, or that she’d once slept with one of her professors and that this professor had one night described her as “a girl lost in space and time” with a glazed look in his eyes that she had not liked at all. I will learn that she was once, in the sciences, mathematics, and musicianship, somewhat of a child prodigy, and that by the time I met her she’d had enough of describing the world in impossible equations, Schumann overtures, or predictive theoretical physics models, and was now beset on all sides by a terrifying aimlessness, a suspicion of the lack of primary meaning and genuine experience in this world. And I will learn her name, Charlemagne Rosen, the girl I can never keep out of the present tense.

But for now there is the movie proper, with its better lighting, and, offered up by this, the revelation of her body.

There is a thin luster of sweat on her skin, and her near-nakedness is explained. The old boiler heater’s gusts have forced me myself, even with my coat shrugged off, to sweat through an under-shirt and sweatshirt, and for a moment, watching the suite of human motion that is laid bare by the sheer fact of her skin, of her flesh, pale and taut, it seems we are sweating together, connected in our agitation.

She is short, with chin-length blond hair pulled austerely back away from her face. Her shoulders are sturdy and square, but her torso tapers down away from them shyly, into an impossibly delicate waist. There are the legs all out of proportion; the long, slick thighs; the abbreviated curves of the calves. Her silhouette seems to belong in a ballet. I am transfixed by a large freckle hovering catty-corner to her bellybutton, which itself sits strangely high on her stomach, as if to accentuate the faintest glance of tiny, downy blond hairs on the stretch of skin held taut between her hips.

There is also, of course, her underwear, the way the briefs seem to almost float on her up there on the stage, as she turns this way and that. They are not loose enough to be unsexual and not form-fitting enough to be a thrill, exactly. She is not quite vulnerable in this state of undress, but yet there she is, mid-performance, reenacting perfectly, without ever turning to look, the screen behind her, and there will be nothing more intimate in our life together than her body in this stretch of minutes, than the discovery of the way she unconsciously stands with one foot turned outward like she might plié at any moment, just for me.