Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

“Get your water and go back to bed.”

If she’d wanted water, she would have gotten it in the bathroom. She was out here for a midnight soda or something else off limits. Giving her an out for her indiscretion sped her along. These girls, like me, like the wife I chose, all calculate, plot, and plan, however benignly. When Rick was born he took the good looks and left all the forethought for me.

By the time Chelsea had disappeared back into the dark hallway, I could feel Rick shouting against my pajama shirt. When I put the phone back to my ear, I could hear it was just my name. “Sorry, sorry,” I said. I explained about Chelsea.

“We’re here. We’re going in.”

“How is she?”

“The same.”

“Rick,” I said. “Good luck.”

“Hey. Thank you . Thanks for staying with me.”

When the line went dead, I lost the picture. Once he was off the phone taking Shasta in, it was as though my knowledge of their lives, of everything that had happened in the last forty-five minutes, was contained within parentheses, and I couldn’t see anything before or after. Their lives were a fog to me, wholly in shadow. I sat there for a while wondering if I would get a call in the morning, connecting me to an image of Shasta recovering in a hospital bed, her gauze-wrapped legs under a medical gown and a linen blanket, sipping a boxed apple juice. Or perhaps, God forbid, I’d get a darker picture. But no, I thought: if I wanted an update, I would have to be the one to call him. Though I could get the same information from the website of the Tahoe Daily Tribune .

It occurred to me that I could drive up to Barton Memorial in two hours, might even be there before she was out of surgery. This was what a brother would do. The idea was intoxicating—driving those dark curving roads in the night, guided by instincts so old they felt like genetic memory. I imagined myself there in the recovery room, explaining to him what happens as anesthesia wears off. I imagined him taking me up in a bear hug, her clasping my hand in thanks. After a while of imagining this, I walked back down the hallway in my pajamas.

In bed, I nestled up to Denise. We hadn’t slept this close in years. All the usual complaints: my temperature, her loud breathing, my restlessness, her insomnia. If we aligned ourselves at opposite poles of the mattress, we could each get something akin to a decent night’s rest. I remembered how, in the early years, the nightly contact with her had been the deepest salve. The loneliness of solitary sleeping takes years to accrete to the point that another person’s sounds and movements are a comfort instead of a curse. But as I curled around Denise that night, she curled into me. I draped my arm across her ribs, and a deep, satisfied breath swelled in her chest.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“No one,” I said. “I’ll tell you in the morning.”

THE FIRST OF THEM

The first of the études always reminds her of a day when she was thirteen, though there’s no reason to remember this one day over so many others like it, while things were still good and summer meant beautiful blue skies with her parents lazing on chaise longues near the docks, her mother sipping Coca-Cola and her father a ginger ale whiskey. Her mother was reading Under the Sign of Saturn that month. Occasionally her father would use a copy of a magazine to block the sun from his face, but usually he just turned his head to the side, ambiguously dozing while he baked himself golden. She would have been in the ocher-yellow fiberglass kayak, and her brother, who had the lung capacity, would have been swimming out to the island. This was not the only perfect day, but like any piece of music, she thinks, you can only hear one moment of it at a time.

The first of them does not sound impossible. It sounds, simply, like two distinct pieces of music being played simultaneously, perhaps in adjoining rooms. On the top is a lilting, Mozarty pastoral. She plays it and thinks of the gentle wind rolling on the water and the green coast in the distance, freckled with white cottages. Underneath is a gentle thumping march, someone rapping quietly on an old door. That’s the tune of her brother’s breaststrokes, powerful enough to cradle-rock the kayak when he passes close by. Here’s the difficulty: it’s not two pieces for two hands; it’s not two separate staves. Some notes for the upper melody come from the left hand, and some from the right. Sometimes it’s the right hand knocking, and sometimes it’s the left. Playing the pastoral and the march together requires a forced schizophrenia, and at the same time a unity. The impossibility of this first one isn’t in the hands. It’s in the mind.

How can opposite things exist at once, even in memory? The perfection of that day, then everything after. It took her a long time to be able to play this piece without crying. She plays it and she sees the eleven o’clock sun hanging at a hawk’s angle of descent, and her brother’s arms crashing through the small swells the breeze made. He was such a strong swimmer.

BAIRD ON LIGETI

She had listened to an interview in which Baird said that the first time he heard Ligeti’s Invention , it gave him the image of the devil tumbling down an infinite staircase. It was perfectly chaotic, everything out of place just enough to be noticed. It was music that never went where the heart willed it. Calling it Kafka music, as some people did, was reductive. Baird was twenty-three when he heard it. He’d hated avant-garde until then, and he continued to disdain most of the ambitious composers. But he loved the Ligeti. He bought them all, the recordings and the sheet music, and sat at his piano banging away at them, particularly those études known for their difficulty. Étude no. 14a had been deemed impossible for a human player, but Baird threw himself at it nonetheless, over and over. He didn’t know if it was too difficult for any human, and he might not be the one to pull the sword from the stone, but he poured his hours into it anyway. It wasn’t practice, he said. It was play.

He wanted to take it further. Any fool could write something well beyond the possible. The next art of the piano would be in creating work that teased you into believing it was within your reach, music that seemed to be right there in front of you. Tantalus, he called the collection of études. As he was composing, he thought often of that lonely demigod: the fruit always rising, the water always receding. All these remarks were on the record. Was she naïve to angle her neck upward? Clearly, that was what Baird wanted. He didn’t write the damn things for player piano. Still, was the music a grail or a mousetrap? Perhaps Baird was simply graying the space between the two. He never said much about the études—only his one declaration, so simple you’d think English was his second language: “Art should be more difficult.” More difficult than what?

CANDELABRUM

Someone has lit a candelabrum on the practice piano backstage. A candelabrum! Is she Liberace? It’s Darin who’s done it, of course. He’s the sweetest man. The sweetest men could also be dolts. Some might suggest a certain doltishness was required. She’s never counted the years it took her to realize the Sweetest Man was not what she wanted: it would have been too depressing. One couldn’t call oneself a good judge of her own character after that.

How many of the people who dream of having a butler would, if granted one, be constantly mortified in front of him?

Darin had seemed the perfect antidote, though that interpretation came only in retrospect. You cannot see the movement of a symphony from within it. She’s never told him about Layla. She knows the worries men get, and how quickly they sink the buoyant fantasies. Men cannot provide everything, nor can they be at peace with not providing everything. She won’t give him that dark corner of her mind. It is not his to plumb.