John Gardner - October Light

Margie, too, had been uncomfortable in the car. All at once she’d said, practically a whisper, “I think I’ll get out and walk a little, if you don’t mind. I love walking in the rain. Do you mind?” His aunt had said, “Why, child, you’ll catch your death!” But her attention was elsewhere, eyes straining toward the lighted upstairs window. “I’m used to it, really,” Margie had said, and though her smile and the tilt of her head were meek, she was already opening the door. His aunt could say only, “Really? In this weather?” “I’ll keep her company,” Terence had said, making it sound half reluctant, a duty.

The thought, or memory, of walking through darkness, holding her hand, was pleasant beyond comparison, and he was fully aware that his pleasure last night had been intensified by the horror earlier — the old man waving his shotgun, his mad eyes darting, mouth shaking, and then Ed Thomas’s heart attack, Aunt Estelle’s strange behavior in the car. He thought again of Margie’s voice, the smell of her hair. He’d wanted to ask her for a picture — it had seemed important, mysteriously so — a way of keeping clear, as if by voodoo, her exact quality and, in a way, his own — a way of welding both their natures firmly to the urgent, as if timeless quality of that moment: the alarming darkness of trees, the groan of wind.

He closed his eyes, listening to the Tippett and summoning up her image, a light, still core in a swirl of change, chaos and dissonance, leaping darkness. When her hair had come a little loose under the rainhat she wore and she’d reached up to slide out the bobby pins, pushing her hair back to fall under her collar, he had almost asked her for one of the bobby pins, but he couldn’t find the nerve. He’d have been glad to get anything at all that was hers (he smiled at himself, thinking of it) — a bit of wood, an old bone, a dead chicken’s foot …

He scroonched lower in the chair, until his head was just above the level of his knees, his large hands in his lap, folded. His father, who was for the most part a wise and gentle man, a psychiatrist, sat on the couch across the room from him, leafing without interest through a magazine. His mother was in the room off the kitchen sorting laundry. Terence could just hear her singing, a sign that she was cross.

Terence had listened to the Tippett often. In the beginning he couldn’t have said why except, of course, that it was for horns, and he was a hornist. It was not “thrilling” or in the usual sense “beautiful” or any of the things that make particular pieces “universally appealing,” as his teacher at school would say. The Sonata was simply something that — knowing really nothing about music except what he knew about playing French horn — he had “taken a shine to,” as his mother would put it — an Alabamian. It was a piece to daydream by — or to remember by, as he was remembering now (but with unusual intensity), his consciousness closed like a fist around last night. And also the music had been for him a kind of puzzle, one he was reworking now, this moment.

When he had first begun to listen to it, once having gotten past his interest in the tone, the hurry of sixteenth notes, he had asked himself what it was that the music reminded him of — the first movement, for instance, with its medieval opening and surprisingly quick flight from any trace of the medieval, a hustle-bustle of sweetly dissonant liquid sounds, sometimes such a flurry that you’d swear there were dozens of horns, not just four — and he’d tried various ideas: the idea that the image was of threatening apes, harmless ones, small ones, chittering and flapping unbelligerent arms in a brightly lit jungle; the idea that the picture was of children at the beach in sped-up motion …

Then it had come to him as a startling revelation — though he couldn’t explain even to his horn teacher Andre Speyer why it was that he found the discovery startling — that the music meant nothing at all but what it was: panting, puffing, comically hurrying French horns. That had been, ever since — until tonight — what he saw when he closed his eyes and listened: horns, sometimes horn players, but mainly horn sounds, the very nature of horn sounds, puffing, hurrying, getting in each other’s way yet in wonderful agreement finally, as if by accident. Sometimes, listening, he would smile, and his father would say quizzically, “What’s with you?” It was the same when he listened to the other movements: What he saw was French horns, that is, the music. The moods changed, things happened, but only to French horns, French horn sounds. There was a four-note theme in the second movement that sounded like “Oh When the Saints,” a theme that shifted from key to key, sung with great confidence by a solo horn, answered by a kind of scornful gibberish from the second, third, and fourth, as if the first horn’s opinion was ridiculous and they knew what they knew. Or the slow movement: As if they’d finally stopped and thought it out, the horns played together, a three-note broken chord several times repeated, and then the first horn taking off as if at the suggestion of the broken chord and flying like a gull — except not like a gull, nothing like that, flying like only a solo French horn. Now the flying solo became the others’ suggestion and the chord began to undulate, and all four horns together were saying something, almost words, first a mournful sound like Maybe and then later a desperate Oh yes I think so, except to give it words was to change it utterly: it was exactly what it was, as clear as day — or a moonlit lake where strange creatures lurk — and nothing could describe it but itself. It wasn’t sad, the slow movement; only troubled, hesitant, exactly as he often felt himself. Then came — and he would sometimes laugh aloud — the final, fast movement. Though the slow movement’s question had never quite been answered, all the threat was still there, the fast movement started with absurd self-confidence, with some huffings and puffings, and then the first horn set off with delightful bravado, like a fat man on skates who hadn’t skated in years (but not like a fat man on skates, like nothing but itself), Woo-woo-woo-woops! and the spectator horns laughed tiggledy-tiggledy-tiggledy! or that was vaguely the idea — every slightly wrong chord, every swoop, every hand-stop changed everything completely … It was impossible to say what, precisely, he meant.

He had been told in school that Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony made you think of the country. It wasn’t true — or else his mind worked differently from the minds of other people. It was itself, or anyway that was all he’d cared for it to be, its note-by-note self, not sunrises or storms, though it was true that, when told to, he could imagine a storm for the storm passage, though also when listening to a real storm he could imagine a train. It was no doubt true that Beethoven had meant it to remind you of a storm, just as, of course, he intended his setting of the “Ode to Joy” to sound joyful. Beethoven’s intention was a matter of record, and Beethoven was the one great master, everyone agreed. Well …

Perhaps, he’d decided, it would all come clearer to him later, as people were always telling you things would. But if what he’d discovered was misinformation, the fact was — had been — that he preferred it to the truth. There were in this world, he’d gradually discerned, two kinds of music: real music and work music. The setting of poems, even the best poems, was work music. What the music might have done if it followed its own will was prohibited, the music was enslaved. Ballet was work music, violins trapped inside the narrow limits of swans, though ballet dancers could of course — and sometimes did — interpret real music with their bodies. And then there was the worst work music of all, picture music, the kind they kept having to play at school, The Pines of Rome, Pictures at an Exhibition. Real music, on the other hand, was music liberated, free to be itself. For these theories he’d had proofs.