Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Why?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you come to my party? You’re my lover, after all. That is the word.”

“Yes. But I don’t want to go with you.”

“Why?”

“Because of tonight’s concert, that’s why.”

“What about it?”

“It wasn’t very good, was it? I mean, it just wasn’t.”

“I thought it was all right. A few slips. It was pretty much what I was capable of. All those people said they liked it.”

“Those people don’t matter!” I said, my eyes watering with anger. “Only the music matters. Only the music is betrayed, they aren’t. They don’t know about pitch, most of them, I mean, Jesus, they aren’t genuine musicians, so how would they know? Do you really think what we did tonight was good? It wasn’t! It was a travesty! We ruined those songs! How can you stand to do that?”

“I don’t ruin them. I sing them adequately. I project feeling. People get pleasure from them. That’s enough.”

“It’s awful,” I said, feeling the ecstatic liftoff into rage. “You’re so close to being good, but you aren’t good. Who cares what those ignoramuses think? They don’t know what notes you’re supposed to hit. It’s that goddamn slippery pitch of yours. You’re killing those songs. You just drop them like watermelons on the stage! It makes me sick! I couldn’t have gone on for another day listening to you and your warbling! I’d die first.”

She looked at me and nodded, her mouth set in a half-moue, half-smile of non-surprise. There may have been tears in her eyes, but I didn’t see them. She looked at me as if she were listening hard to a long-distance call. “You’re tired of me,” she said.

“I’m not tired of you. I’m tired of hearing you sing! Your voice makes my flesh crawl! Do you know why? Can you tell me why you make me sick? Why do you make me sick? Never mind. I’m just glad this is over.”

“You don’t look glad. You look angry.”

“And you look smug. Listen, why don’t you go off to your party? Maybe there’ll be a talent scout there. Or roses flung riotously at you. But don’t give a recital like this again, please, okay? It’s a public disgrace. It offends music. It offends me .”

I turned my back on her and walked out to my car.

XI

After the failure of Harmony of the World , Hindemith went on a strenuous tour that included Scandinavia. In Oslo, he was rehearsing the Philharmonic when he blinked his bright blue eyes twice, turned to the concertmaster, and said, “I don’t know where I am.” They took him away to a hospital; he had suffered a nervous breakdown.

XII

I slept until noon, having nothing to do at the paper and no reason to get up. At last, unable to sleep longer, I rose and walked to the kitchen to make coffee. I then took my cup to the picture window and looked down the hill to the trees of the conservation area, the view Stecker had once told me I should have.

The figure of a woman was hanging from one of the trees, a noose around her neck. I dropped my coffee cup and the hot coffee spilled out over my feet.

I ran out the back door in my pajamas and sprinted painfully down the hill’s tall grass toward the tree. I was fifty feet away when I saw that it wasn’t Karen, wasn’t in fact a woman at all, but an effigy of sorts, with one of Karen’s hats, a pillow head, and a dress hanging over a broomstick skeleton. Attached to the effigy was a note:

In the old days, this might have been me. Not anymore. Still, I thought it’d make you think. And I’m not giving up singing, either. By the way, what your playing lacks is not fanaticism, but concentration. You can’t seem to keep your mind on one thing for more than a minute at a time. I notice things, too. You aren’t the only reviewer around here. Take good care of this doll, okay?

XXXXX,

Karen

I took the doll up and dropped it in the clothes closet, where it stands to this hour.

Hindemith’s biographer, Geoffrey Skelton, writes, “[On the stage] the episodic scenes from Kepler’s life fail to achieve immediate dramatic coherence, and the basic theme remains obscure…”

She won’t of course see me again. She won’t talk to me on the phone, and she doesn’t answer my letters. I am quite lucidly aware of what I have done. And I go on seeing doubles and reflections and wave motion everywhere. There is symmetry, harmony, after all. I suppose I should have been nice to her. That, too, is a discipline. I always tried to be nice to everyone else.

On his deathbed, Hindemith has Kepler sing:

Und muss sehn am End:

Die grosse Harmonie, das ist der Tod .

Absterben ist, sie zu bewirken, not .

Im Leben hat sie keine Statte .

Now, at the end, I see it:

the great harmony: it is death.

To find it, we must die.

In life it has no place.

XIII

Hindemith’s words may be correct. But Dante says that the residents of limbo, having never been baptized, will not see the face of God. This despite their having committed no sin, no active fault. In their fated locale they sigh, which keeps the air “forever trembling.” No harmony for them, these guiltless souls. Through eternity, the residents of limbo — where one can imagine oneself if one cannot stand to imagine any part of hell — experience one of the most shocking of all the emotions that Dante names: “duol senza martíri,” grief without torment. These sighs are rather like the sounds one hears drifting from front porches in small towns on soft summer nights.

MONA SIMPSON was born in 1957 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and moved to Los Angeles as a young teenager. Her father was a recent immigrant from Syria and her mother the daughter of a mink farmer and the first person in her family to attend college. Simpson earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and published her first stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review , and Mademoiselle. After earning her MFA from Columbia University, she worked as an editor for The Paris Review .

Simpson writes about the American class system through the lens of the family and its changing sociology. Alice Munro has called her families “amazing” and “heartbreaking… the sort who haven’t turned up before in anything else I’ve read.” John Ashberry wrote, “Simpson has a remarkable gift for transforming the homely cadences of plain American speech into something like poetry.”

Simpson won the Whiting Prize for her first novel, Anywhere but Here . In 1992 she published a sequel titled The Lost Father. Off Keck Road won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has also been awarded a Literature Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her most recent books are the novels My Hollywood and Casebook. Simpson lives in Santa Monica, California.

★

I STEAL. I’VE STOLEN books and money and even letters. Letters are great. I can’t tell you the feeling walking down the street with twenty dollars in my purse, stolen earrings in my pocket. I don’t get caught. That’s the amazing thing. You’re out on the sidewalk, other people all around, shopping, walking, and you’ve got it. You’re out of the store, you’ve done this thing you’re not supposed to do, but no one stops you. At first it’s a rush. Like you’re even for everything you didn’t get before. But then you’re left alone, no one even notices you. Nothing changes.

I work in the mailroom of my dormitory, Saturday mornings. I sort mail, put the letters in these long narrow cubbyholes. The insides of mailboxes. It’s cool there when I stick in my arm.