William Gass - Middle C

His mother — was she the leak? — was she the dripping tap? First, to a friend of hers at work. Drip. That friend, then, to a friend who happens to char at Augsburg or whose child is also a student at Augs. Drip. There must be a path of transit. Mother (with pride) to Friend: My son Joey is now the organist at Saint Agatha; then that Friend (idly) to Son or Daughter: Isn’t Joey Skizzen the organist at Augsburg? I hear he’s playing at Saint Agatha as well; next, that same Son or Daughter (without malice) to Pastor Ludens: I understand Saint Agatha is enjoying Joey Skizzen as much as we are; Pastor Ludens, finally (motive unascribed), to Rector Luthardt: drip ditto to downfall.

THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

What does this mean?

We should fear and love God that we may not deceitfully belie, betray, slander, nor defame our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and put the best construction on everything.

Clarice Rumble: she wasn’t uptight, not nearly stiff or stern or dogmatic enough. That was it: he should look for an arrogant, no-nonsense stickler. Chris Knox had a lean look, but it was from playing tennis. Becky Wilhelm was a pudding, puddings were often resentful and malicious, but she was too stupid to understand how to spell “theology.” Who …?

Hey, this is only Joey, who sits in the back of the room with his mouth shut mostly, you are picking on …

… maybe the guy with the green teeth and glasses, the double dork whose pencilitis drove everybody crazy: tap tap here, tip tip there, cleaning his nails with the sharpened end, chewing the eraser, rolling its yellow length between his palms as if he were an Indian making fire with a pointed stick. If not him, then …?

It’s true, I make fun of other people, but only in my head, to keep my spirits up …

… maybe Jackson Leroy. One of Joey’s stereotypes about Negroes was that they didn’t stoop, fink, snitch, or tattle. Or was it Leroy Jackson?

Seek and ye shall find, but only in my mind … suppose the tattletale was me …

Ah … Maurice. Maurice. Shorter than Joey. Nearsighted. Like Joey — little-nosed. Eyes that, when you looked at him, shifted into low. Picked his dinky. Seemed constantly uncomfortable. Sat in last rows. Near me. Maurice … something. A distinct possibility. Probably preferred Wagner to Berlioz. But he acted like a little sneak, not like an arrogant toe-the-marker.

Clarice Rumble. Joey’s trouble was, Joey slowly realized, Joey’s trouble was that he was too busy dodging people to see them except as obstacles.

He caught glimpses the way some people caught fireflies. When he recollected them their image relit for a moment. Clara. Clara Rumble. She wore pins: little pins celebrating Olympic sports, her father’s membership in the American Legion and the FOE, a yellow ribbon commemorating … who knew? reminding her of whom? When Joey, feigning admiration, or at least interest, asked her what loss the little ribbon stood for, she said she didn’t know, it was just part of her collection, except that right now it was for her dog … well, had been for her dog, who had wandered off, but, only the other day, had wandered home again. You don’t need to wear it, then, Joey said, sporting his own smile of sympathy a bit unnecessarily.

They don’t let me wear jewelry, said she.

The last months of Joey’s stay at Augsburg were ordinary and awful. Despite his fearful expectations, nothing happened. He heard and learned diddly, as if his fingers were always idle at the piano. The plans he had made, and was making, seemed unnecessary now that the campus had become rumorless and routine as drill. Two years at Augs were too many, although the availabilty of a piano and an organ had been a plus. Still, all he had discovered in that time was that he needed to master what might best protect him; he needed to have learning to hide behind; he needed to know a great many different things to shield his soul from Paul and Pauline Pry; particularly he needed to be conversant with various eras in history, periods of literature, and schools of music, because those subjects seemed to be within his grasp; and he had found out he was not going to fish anything basically beneficial from Augs’s comfortable little pool of banality and superstition. In fact, the place wasn’t even as restrictive and intractable as it should have been … in order to be genuine. As for achieving a reasonable level of religious fanaticism, neither students nor faculty were even fans of God; they just tuned in when a good game was on. They were too smug to be defensive or suspicious. The librarian cut dirty passages out of Chaucer with a razor and kept Rabelais, Baudelaire, and Lawrence locked up. That was the extent of it.

Oh yes … there was the rector and his network of spies …

But if Paul Pry were to open him like a tin, what sort of selves packed so closely would he see? The tin would be empty, not even oily, it would have a tinny sheen, and light would fly from it as a fly flies from disappointment — that was what he’d see. Not a single self or sardine. Well … not exactly. There had been an unprotected period … Joey had had quite a checkered past, a quite romantic former life in fact: an escape over many borders hidden in a womb, survival of the Blitz, ocean voyage, slow trains, bad buses … charity … dinky gifts … humiliation … ah … piano lessons. A tiptoe through the tulips. With Mom. During that time, he’d simply been who he was. Hadn’t he been? Hadn’t he been a habit hard to break?

Becky Wilhelm was a whiz at checkers. She was studying how to be unattractive, so she went to a lot of socials where she played checkers with old men when no one else would, not even other old men. In that way the skill surfaced. She was mistress of the multiple jump, she told Joey proudly. Hey. Wow. He said. Nevertheless, she was a whiz. That she was a whiz was a surprise. Joey beat his soul up about that. Could he call his playing the playing of a whiz? Skizz izz not a whiz, he imagined he heard Chris Knox scoff. Knox had gone out for track — a hurdler, he claimed to be — but twisted his knee at a meet and had to give it up. It took him so long to rehab he lost his tennis stroke. At Augs, this was a serious loss, because a long time ago someone had decided that tennis was to be the college sport. They recruited tennis players who were all tall blond slim kids from Florida and California who looked good in shorts and their tanned cancer-inclining skin. God was a tennis pro, at least that was the suggestion of one Sunday sermon titled, he remembered, “Thirty Love.” Many mornings the thonk of tennis balls could be heard even in the quad, and the high mesh fences around the courts could be seen shining in the sun even some way off. Joey found the sport an anomaly at Augs until he learned that community colleges all over the country, most named honestly enough for their communities, were infamous for supplying prospective standouts in various sports with the decent scholastic records they didn’t have coming out of high school, so that after a couple of years they could enter the colleges and universities that had recruited them in the first place. Augsburg, through the coincidence of its name, became a feeder — as the word was. So Knox might be — might have been — a whiz, Joey didn’t know … didn’t want to know … and therefore Joey would continue to live in the dark and see folks as flickers of phosphorescence — alluring, amusing, whizzes — but briefly.

When you’re young, time is a puzzle, like interlocking nails. You wonder what you ought to be doing or what the future holds or how things that don’t seem to have worked out will work out; and in such a mood, even when you are focused on the future because you are yet to get laid, to bloom, to beget, to find your way, to win a tournament, you nevertheless don’t detail far-off somedays in your head; you don’t feel your future as you feel a thigh … because the present is too intense, too sunny, brief as a sneeze, too higgledy-piggledy, too complete, too total a drag already, whereas there is simply so much future, the future is flat as the sea three miles from your eye while the beach you are sitting on is aboil with sunshine and nakedness. The future is constantly killing off the present by becoming it. The future is too — thank God — vague to deal with. The future may not arrive. Yet that is all you value, all you hope for: fine future things; so you think, I’m not here at present; I’m just a movie made of slow-motion dreams; haven’t I always been, then and now? wondering about when: when the dust will settle and the sky clear, when I will hear cheers and I’m handed my trophy.