Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

I smiled professionally and went to her piano.

Beneath the high-culture atmosphere that surrounds them, art songs have one subject: love. The permutations of love (lust, solitude, and loss) are present in abundance, of course, but for the most part they are simple vehicles for the expression of that one emotion. I was reminded of this as I played through the piano parts. As much as I concentrated on the music in front of me, I couldn’t help but notice that my employer stood next to the piano, singing the words sometimes toward me, sometimes away. She was rather courageously forcing eye contact on me. She kept this up for an hour and a half until we came to the Chanler settings, when at last she turned slightly, singing to the walls.

As before, her voice broke out of control every five seconds, giving isolated words all the wrong shadings. The only way to endure it, I discovered, was to think of her singing as a postmodern phenomenon with its own conventions and rules. As the victim of necessity rather than accident, Karen Jensen was tolerable.

Here sleep I ,

Susannah Fry ,

No one near me ,

No one nigh:

Alone, alone

Under my stone ,

Dreaming on ,

Still dreaming on:

Grass for my valance

And coverlid ,

Dreaming on

As I always did .

“Weak in the head?”

Maybe. Who knows?

Susannah Fry

Under the rose .

There she was, facing away from me, burying Susannah Fry, and probably her own past and career into the bargain.

When we were done, she asked, “Sure you won’t stay?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You really haven’t another engagement, do you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“I didn’t think so. You were scared of me the moment you walked in the door. You thought I’d be crazy.” She waited. “After all, only ugly girls live alone, right? And I’m not ugly.”

“No, you aren’t,” I said. “You’re quite attractive.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, brightening. “It’s so nice to hear that from you, even if you’re just paying a compliment. I mean, it still means something .” Then she surprised me. As I stood in the doorway, she got down on her knees in front of me and bowed her head in the style of one of her songs. “Please stay,” she asked. Immediately she stood up and laughed. “But don’t feel obliged to.”

“Oh, no,” I said, returning to her living room. “I’ve just changed my mind. Dinner sounds like a good idea.”

After she had served and we had started to eat, she looked up at me and said, “You know, I’m not completely good.” She paused. “At singing.”

“What?” I stopped chewing. “Yes, you are. You’re all right.”

“Don’t lie. I know I’m not. You know I’m not. Come on: Let’s at least be honest. I think I have certain qualities of musicality, but my pitch is… you know. Uneven. You probably think it’s awfully vain of me to put on these recitals like this. With nobody but friends and family coming.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, I don’t care what you say. It’s… hmm, I don’t know. People encourage me. And it’s a discipline. Music’s finally a discipline that rewards you. Privately, though. Well, that’s what my mother says.”

Carefully I said, “She may be right.”

“Who cares if she is?” She laughed, her mouth full of food. “I enjoy doing it. Like I enjoy doing this. Listen, I don’t want to seem forward or anything, but are you married?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” She picked up a string bean and eyed it suspiciously. “Why aren’t you? You’re not ugly. In fact you’re all right looking. You obviously haven’t been crazy. Are you gay or something?”

“No.”

“No,” she agreed, “you don’t look gay. You don’t even look very happy. You don’t look very anything. Why is that?”

“I should be offended by this line of questioning.”

“But you’re not. You know why? Because I’m interested in you. I hardly know you, but I like you, what I can see. Don’t you have any trust?”

“Yes,” I said, finally.

“So answer my question. Why don’t you look very anything?”

“Do you want to hear what my piano teacher once said?” I asked. “He said I wasn’t enough of a fanatic. He said that to be one of the great ones you have to be a tiny bit crazy. Touched. And he said I wasn’t. And when he said it, I knew all along he was right. I was waiting for someone to say what I already knew, and he was the one. I was too much a good citizen, he said. I wasn’t possessed.”

She rose, walked around the table to where I was sitting, and stood in front of me, looking down at my face. I knew that whatever she was going to do had been picked up, in attitude, from one of her songs. She touched the back of my arm with two fingers on her right hand. “Well,” she said, “maybe you aren’t possessed, but what would you think of me as another possession?”

VI

In 1618 at the age of seventy, Katherine Kepler, the mother of Johannes Kepler, was put on trial for witchcraft. The records indicate that her personality was so deranged, so deeply offensive to all, that if she were alive today she would still be called a witch. One of Kepler’s biographers, Angus Armitage, notes that she was “evil-tempered” and possessed an interest in unnamed “outlandish things.” Her trial lasted, on and off, for three years; by 1621, when she was acquitted, her personality had disintegrated completely. She died the following year.

At the age of six, Kepler’s son Frederick died of smallpox. A few months later, Kepler’s wife, Barbara, died of typhus. Two other children, Henry and Susanna, had died in infancy.

Like many another of his age, Kepler spent much of his adult life cultivating favor from the nobility. He was habitually penniless and was often reduced, as his correspondence shows, to begging for handouts. He was the victim of religious persecution, though luckier in this regard than some.

After he married for a second time, three more children died in infancy, a statistic that in theory carries less emotional weight than one might think, given the accepted levels of infant mortality for that era.

In 1619, despite the facts cited above, Kepler published De Harmonice Mundi , a text in which he set out to establish the correspondence between the laws of harmony and the disposition of planets in motion. In brief, Kepler argued that certain intervals, such as the octave, major and minor sixths, and major and minor thirds, were pleasurable, while other intervals were not. History indicated that mankind had always regarded certain intervals as unpleasant. Feeling that this set of universal tastes pointed to immutable laws, Kepler sought to map out the pleasurable intervals geometrically, and then to transfer that geometrical pattern to the order of the planets. The velocity of the planets, rather than their strict placement, constituted the harmony of the spheres. This velocity provided each planet with a note, what Armitage calls a “term in a mathematically determined relation.”

In fact, each planet performed a short musical scale, set down by Kepler in staff notation. The length of the scale depended upon the eccentricity of the orbit; and its limiting notes could generally be shown to form a concord (except for Venus and the Earth with their nearly circular orbits, whose scales were of very constricted range)… At the Creation… complete concord prevailed and the morning stars sang together.

VII

We began to eat dinner together. Accustomed to solitude, we did not always engage in conversation. I would read the newspaper or ink in letters on my geometrically patterned crossword puzzles at my end of the table, while Karen would read detective novels or Time at hers. If she had cooked, I would clear and wash the dishes: if I had cooked, she did the cleaning. Experience and disappointments had made us methodical. She told me that she had once despised structured experiences governed by timetables, but that after several manic-depressive episodes she had learned to love regularity. This regularity included taking lithium at the same time — to the minute — each day.