William Gass - Middle C

Marjorie and Joseph also discussed music and books. Schenker, Joseph kept to himself. He didn’t know enough to discuss him in any case. But he was quite taken with the ideas of scale-step and voice-leading, which he understood as constituting the x and y axes of musical space. Tonal color, he thought, ought to serve as the third. However, he knew he hadn’t grasped what the introduction called “Rameau’s great error” concerning the figured bass. It would become clear, he hoped, in time, or as the pages turned. There were personages, like Joseph Fux (or Rameau, for that matter) who had not previously been in his landscape, and whose acquaintance he had to make. For the first time, Joseph’s greed for knowledge might be satisfied. The many books that were at his arm’s length made him giddy, anxious, hasty as a glutton who fears competition from a multitude of other mouths.

Time, too, became real, and its paradoxes fascinating. He had in hand, for instance, a book of Ruskin’s originally issued in the 1850s; meanwhile Shaw and Shakespeare sat close by, with volumes about them from every ensuing decade. Yet all of these works were here in the sight of his eye, so that he — Joseph Skizzen — might read Shaw before Shakespeare, Piñero before Sophocles, the little or the late before the long ago and very great; because, for him, the past, which he surely recognized and honored as historical, was as real right now as it once had been; the past was present in an altered form, of course, but Ruskin’s words on Ruskin’s page were the same as the day Ruskin wrote them, as was his dislike of geometric form, expressed by him with such conviction. In these fulminations, Euclid’s tidy squares, his pretty rounds and triangles, were set against the exfoliate nature and shape of plants, animals, and even men, as if the two realms were enemies — the abstract versus the organic for the title in fifteen rounds. This bout was as present to Joseph’s mind as it might have been to one of Ruskin’s immediate readers. The past is present on the page, he told Marjorie. This library is like the Savior, the whole dead world has risen and stands here as on the Last Day. Marjorie’s smile was chaperoned by a pair of moist eyes.

Sometimes the library would grow unaccountably busy, and these “new found friends” were forced to break off their conversation to take up routine duties. The pair virtuously suppressed their resentment of this, though it was strong. Joseph would smile across the room at Marjorie as he passed her desk with some requested books, and both recognized that these periods, when they had to be apart, made them appreciate their conversations all the more.

Now and then, when he returned to his garage, he’d find a plate of cookies had been put beside his bed.

Marjorie recommended to Joseph the novels of Dorothy Richardson, none of which the library held, but volumes she owned if he wished to borrow them. Joseph was agreeably grateful, and their conversations continued over weeks and into months, Joseph regaling her with anecdotes, not only those dealing with his own past, but many taken from the lives of his new masters: authors and artists and composers he was reading about in various biographies. What remained amazing for him was the simple availability of everything: that he could reach out and pull from a shelf as he passed a mind — a mind — not merely a source of information as in an almanac, but someone’s actual thinking, someone’s real imagining, their honest feeling. Were Joseph to climb to a hilltop, innocent of any intent, and suddenly face a vast ocean about which the world was unaware, would his amazement be equal to that of Cortez? Joseph wondered whether any historical stranger’s reflection and responsiveness were as nearby or as far away as his quirky selection determined; and whether there might be in any random volume pages that would hold his attention, almost painfully, as if his head were in the mask of iron, or possibly in a vise as the torture books recounted, where his gaze was fastened on a poker heated hot, or on iron pliers held in a gloved hand. With that sort of horror, that kind of delight, he read — he conceived — he envisioned a large lake … an island … a bastion rising through the mist … the slender wake from a boatload of plumed men …

When Professor Joseph Skizzen walked into his first class at Whittlebauer College — seventeen students had signed up for Trends in Modern Music, and they were all there — his chest could scarcely hold his heart, and he heard its throb as if each beat were being made by menacing native feet for a jungle movie. Your job, he said to himself, is to make them choke on their own snores. He had been an indifferent student himself. The memory was before him like a billboard. Only Mr. Hirk had made his blood come alive in his heart. Others of his teachers had pretended to a passion for Martin Luther or for French or for the early American novel, but they hadn’t any enthusiasm really; they hadn’t any feeling for anything; they just declaimed and paced or intoned and shuffled or mumbled or droned; and they believed they entertained properly by pouring tepid water into tiny cups. As a young newcomer to the faculty he was last in line for perks and had been given an 8:00 a.m. schedule to prove his unimportance. Early morning — what a moment for music. So Joseph assumed his students had sleepwalked from their dorms and zombied into back-row seats where they sat like the seats sat. He vowed. He vowed he would unsettle their sleep at least, but before him was the memory of his own bad attitude, now multiplied seventeen times, yet made odd by being featured in strange faces.

Professor Skizzen … of course he was not a professor yet, but what did they know …? Professor Skizzen — trying to stride — went straight to the piano that sat athwart a front corner of the classroom directly opposite the door. This arrangement permitted him to walk directly to it, looking neither to right nor left, then slide smoothly upon the piano seat and sit with definition the way the piano seat sat, his hand poised without further preamble to play twenty seconds of “The Minute Waltz” (Joseph thought they might recognize that). This is classic, he said, turning slightly around. And this — he touched the few quiet widely separated notes of Bartók’s 1926 sonata — is modern.

A moment later he stood with burning face before the class, his feet, legs, and waist sheltered by his desk, in traditional schoolmasterly position, hoping they would think he was naturally rosy; and with the furniture’s protection he tried to greet the class, to introduce himself and their subject, to get the course going, to commence his first lecture, aware the while that he had blundered badly right from the beginning, for Joseph had meant to play the Minuet in G — that was the classic— la dee dah dee dah dee dah dee dah, la dee dah, lah dee dah , perhaps they would get the joke, if they had seen the right movie — next the Chopin was to follow as … well … the classic romantic — and then, only then, were those lonely notes of Bartók’s to be struck.

Because he had been hired as a specialist in contemporary music, Joseph thought it prudent to find out what his subject took in — from whom to whom was the principal question, since, although the course was called “contemporary,” its composers were obliged to be dead. He had been told to teach two sections of an introduction to music as well, one later in the day, the other on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday mornings, likewise held before reveille’s own notes had died away. His head felt like a fine apple, as crisp as the autumn air as he crossed the quad. In addition, he was to instruct half-a-dozen kids in piano, times that might nibble at the edges of his evenings. Joseph already dreaded the winter; he had felt the wind sweep across the hilltop, and he knew that, throughout the fall, it would rain the entire distance from his mother’s house to the office; the office he shared with someone he hadn’t seen, though they had briefly met, but whose papers covered the only desk, whose books filled the solitary bookcase, whose photo holding a fish crookedly graced the wall, and whose lumber jacket hung on the single hook like another trophy. There were, however, two chairs, the second, Joseph supposed, for a suppliant, as well as an empty corner where the petitioner might stand.