William Gass - Middle C

Joey imagined that if old — when he would be old, if he could be old, because in his dream he was always dressed the way he was dressed when he dreamed — he’d wonder what his death would be: when it would arrive, how it would do him in, what he would be wearing: during the early hours of the morning? while sporting his only suit? lost in the ruins of the city? would he die from bawling through tired eyes? go like a bathtub blown through a once-fine view from an upper floor? fall from a break of a board? because death is nothing but detail — a little cough that causes your ribs pain — a siren that stirs you to sit up on your deathbed and regurgitate a ricocheting nail.

So much time lost in thought …

Maurice was Joey’s equal in suspicion. He realized at once that Joey’s sudden interest was a ploy, and he wasn’t particularly pleased to be in someone’s self-help program. Even standing stock-still, Maurice sidled — sidled in a circle — as if searching for the center of the sky. Did Maurice remember, for example, the assignment for Friday? Indeed, it would turn out, he did, but for another class. Was Maurice living in the dorm or did he commute? He didn’t live in the dorm, but he did sleep there sometimes. If you were waiting for the worm to turn, Maurice would keep you waiting until you walked off arm in arm with your impatience, whereupon, leaves eaten, the twig to which his freshly finished cocoon was fastened would sway a little in the wind. Joey completed his scrutiny of Maurice with grudging admiration, yet he didn’t mind he’d been outwitted — he didn’t care. Maurice’s motives were much like his own — not to be caught, not to be known, not to be disclosed.

Joey asked himself whether he hadn’t cared for Mr. Hirk and found out that although he was grateful to Mr. Hirk, he was only connected to his ailing teacher through music, and that what he really cared for were some mythical singers with magical names and the thin long-ago sounds Joey could, with voice or fingers, never revolve so well around, though they were the center about which he turned, because he did so at a different speed.

Madame Mieux — there! he’d invoked her — name, naughty thoughts, and all — now he’d brought the weird one into view — what were you up to when you asked me over to listen to a piece by Berlioz you knew he’d never written? why didn’t you pick up your pillows, they make a sorry scene, quite tasteless and unsettling? and to come to the door in a drug-induced daze to greet a young and simple pupil? in billowy belongings that didn’t seem quite fastened on you? Seeing you in school standing in front of us in your tight hips and tall shoes; hearing you shout French as if you were on an unreliable telephone … well, Madame, seeing you, hearing you, did not entice any of us to touch or smell or taste Mieux, too; no, did not tempt us to come closer than we had to, loll on one of your souvenir pillows, our noses full of pot smoke, and — who knows? after music, after chocolates — to be done to.

On gray days, when the light was soft and the grass was greener than seemed possible, Joey would often see Professor Pastor Ludens crossing the quad in his customary black suit, stiff-legged, too, like a crow, a bit pompous, bearing two dark books, each held against his chest into which they disappeared — a Bible and the hymnal, Joey guessed. He appeared especially often on autumn evenings when the sun was low and hid behind the treetops as well as in the clouds, possessing so little strength it could not lend the pastor a shadow to precede him on the path to the chapel from whose loft windows Joey would observe him approaching so that, suitably warned, he might slip swiftly from the choir himself, as if his practice were concluded, to sit in his basement room sheltered by the sort of careful silence that signified he wasn’t there even when he was.

After a canny edit of the details, Joey told Miriam about his interview with Rector Luthardt. She was ready to hit the rector with her purse. How could that man and his renegade church possibly object to Joey’s playing for Saint Agatha? Joey had found a word for Luthardt’s complaint — miscegenation — and Miriam embraced it. It was better, both thought, than “syncretism,” which sounded barbarous. In her eyes, nothing could have justified Joey’s suggestion that he leave Augs more readily than his account of the moon-faced rector’s remonstrances and the suspicion that spying had to be their cause; however, if he were to decamp (as he subjunctively put it to her, though he had made up his mind already), he would need to find work, since her income scarcely kept her afloat; she didn’t need his weight in the boat. In the settlement’s infrequent newspaper, the Woodbine Twines (a name of uncustomary originality unsupported by its content), Joey read that a librarian was wanted in Urichstown, a community squatting nearby that was slightly larger than Woodbine and had a distant view of the river. Posting the opening in the Woodbine Times (he was disappointed to learn he’d misread its name) was a little like nailing a note to a tree to advertise your lost dog. There was a Greyhound, and he boarded it for what was an annoyingly slow ride, since it seemed to stop like a school bus at every mailbox along the way. When the windows began to move, Joey remembered without nostalgia his long railroad journeys and the sense he had of falling through farther and farther patches of foreign country. It was late spring, and fields and forests were a wet raw green. Tree leaves had reached their fullness for the first time, and Ohio’s low easy hills lulled the eye. The road made slow undulating music all the way to the river.

Just off the customary courthouse square, which told Joseph that Urichstown was a county seat, he found a small tidy stone library funded by the bobbin boy Andrew Carnegie, bless his generous Scot’s heart. At a large semicircular desk sat a woman wearing a huge head of gray hair that the wooden triangle lying there said was the hair of Marjorie Bruss. She raised her head from her reading, and her hair flew as though quail had suddenly taken flight from a hidden nest.

You’re not from around here.

No, ma’am. I’m from Woodbine.

We beat you in basketball.

I wasn’t aware.

That’s a good sign.

Gee. How did you know I’m here about the job?

You don’t have a card. No one comes in here without a card.

How did you know I don’t have a card?

I know the face of everyone who has one, and the hand that holds it out to me. Except for the too-olds and too-ills who can no longer climb the steps.

Well, whom do I see about it?

Indefinite reference.

The job.

You see me. You said “whom.” “Whom” is also a good sign. Miss Bruss paused. It was apparent she was questioning herself. We did put an ad in Woodbine’s fish wrap. She caught his look … read it … revised her remark … Its newspaper.

I went to Augsburg Academy. I live in Woodbine.

That’s a long commute.

I live with my mother, but if I had this job I’d come over here to room.

The way you do at Augsburg?

Yes, ma’am. I played the organ at the school, but now I’m through.

What was your major? For the first time, Miss Bruss picked up a pencil. Her fingers were unmodified.

Um … Music. Um … English.

Music. Good.

The piano is my real instrument.

Are you …? I hear something.

I’m Austrian. My father was. My mother is. She brought me over ahead of the Nazis.

What’s your name?

Joseph Skizzen.

Two z ’s? She wrote.

Yes, ma’am.

You graduate this spring?

Um.

This job doesn’t pay much. What do you want it for?

My present job doesn’t pay much either. The college covers my board and room.