Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Oh, Peter. For a bright boy, you’re so clueless. Come on. Let’s play through it.

He tried to explain the plan to Clara. He could graduate with a guaranteed bench job in industry while still making all the music body and soul needed. But she looked away with her maddening sextant look, out to the horizon and over the curve of the Earth, at a future that she could see and he could not.

They spent their every spare minute together. Clara got them reviewing music for the Daily Student. Under the anagram byline Entresols, they championed dozens of new recordings as if they were Adam and Eve naming the animals. Their friends — those who didn’t throw up their hands in disgust at that breakaway state of two — called them the Zygote. While the best and brightest headed for civil rights sit-ins, Peter and Clara camped out in the music library listening room, following along in the score of Strauss’s Four Last Songs while Schwarzkopf sang “Im Abendrot”: We’ve gone through need and sorrow, hand in hand. .

Clara ran point in their discoveries, reconnoitering. She brought Els prizes for dinner: crazy Gesualdo madrigals or brilliant horn passages from late nineteenth century tone poems. And even as Peter scrambled to master her expanding repertoire, Clara blew on ahead of him and found more.

They sang up close, right into each other’s mouths, bending pitches into near-miss dissonance. The grate of those beats sawed straight into their brains. They had not yet seen each other naked. But that shared resonance in the plates of their skulls was as intimate as any sex.

Clara knew her destiny and never wavered. She studied with the demanding Starker, and although the man made her weep almost every week, he led her to tricks of the mind and the wrist that left her playing like an angel.

Music alone, for Clara, had the power to peel away the lie of daily life. She wasn’t sure who Adenauer was, and she didn’t understand why Glenn deserved a ticker tape parade. But a few measures of the Grosse Fuge held more raw truth than a month’s worth of headlines. The force of her pitch-driven Platonism gave her a power over Peter. He had hunches; she had convictions. It was never much of a contest. She had only to smile at his churchgoing, and from one Sunday to the next, he quit his family’s faith. With little more than a cocked eyebrow, she got him to grow out his flattop and trade in his button-downs for pullovers. And on a late March night near the end of his sophomore year, she took the war for his soul into the heart of the enemy camp.

She asked him to meet her after dark on the bank of the Jordan River. He arrived after a miserable three-hour failed struggle to identify an unknown in his Advanced Organics lab. She lay back on the damp, grassy rise, forever staining the back of her blue pencil skirt. He stretched out with his head in her lap, wrecked. They want me dead.

Her face curdled at the chemical reek of him. She combed back his hair with two fingers. Who does?

All of them. The alkenes, the alkynes, the paraffins. .

Peter? She leaned down over him, and her silver lyre necklace charm grazed his cheek. She tugged on the hint of sideburn she’d gotten him to grow out. Who told you that you were a chemist?

Well, I’m not half bad at it, you know. Tonight’s disaster excepted.

And you’re ready to spend your whole life doing it?

He pressed his fingertips into the cold soil. The idea of spending a whole life doing anything filled him with something between wonder and panic.

Are you trying to please your father?

He rolled away, up onto one elbow. You mean my stepfather? My father’s dead .

I am aware. And you’re aware that no one can satisfy a ghost?

I’m not trying to please anyone. I’m learning chemistry. It’s not a bad way to make a living.

He wanted to add: For two, if that interests you.

Peter, it’s 1961. You’re a white man in college. And you’re worried about making a living? That’s what dance and wedding bands are for. No musician with your talent ever ended up in the gutter.

He tried to tell her: Chemistry made sense. Its problems had clean and repeatable answers. Its puzzles read like cosmic rebuses. Manipulating fundamental stuff, shaping whole new materials with properties that could raise the quality of life. .

But Clara wouldn’t see the splendor in the system. She bent her arm along the crease of his chest. You think the chemistry won’t get done if you don’t do it?

You think no one’s going to play the clarinet if I don’t?

Clarinet? Who said anything about clarinet?

Her whole insane plan for him took shape and buzzed around his head. He swatted it away. She snared his wrists and held them to the chill ground.

Put away the Lincoln logs, Peter. Playtime’s over. Music pours out of you when you snap your fingers. That’s called a vocation. You don’t get a choice.

He sat and tilted his head at the girl Platonist, like he was the RCA dog and she the inscrutable gramophone. Then he started to hear them, those souls lined up in the celestial anteroom, awaiting reincarnation: all the preexisting sounds that only he might bring into being. The deep symmetries, the forms and formulas of chemistry that had so absorbed him for two years, turned into a mere prelude. It was true: he’d been trying to please someone. But that someone called for another pleasure.

He lay back in her lap and looked up at her inverted face. She opened her shawl to settle it again around her shoulders. Her draped arms were wings as wide as the night sky.

These pieces you want me to write, he said, awash on pure possibility. How many do you suppose there are?

She leaned down to answer him. How easy it would be, he thought, to kick out into the center of the lake until he couldn’t kick anymore.

FOR THE NEXT five weeks, when he should have been studying for final exams, he worked in secret. He stole hours from labs, from classes, even from Clara, who turned giddy with concealed suspicion. He took to working in lightning shorthand, sketching out music in quick, clean strokes, the way a child might scribble a crayon moon, a loopy forest, and a gash of campfire, and call it night. There was no time for orchestration. The thing unfolded on the simplest scale, for solo piano and voices. But he heard every line in massed banks of instrumental color. The wayfaring winds, the swelling support of brass, a raft of low strings bearing forward.

He had the perfect text, the end of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Clara had recited the stanza from memory on a freezing picnic in Cascades Park, during winter’s last hurrah. They’d lain wrapped up together in a cotton sleeping bag, cradling a thermos full of hot tomato soup between them, their lashes dusted with fresh snowfall while she spoke:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

He studied the words for days, listening to the sounds contained in them. Then the phonemes and accents led him forward. Note by note, phrase by phrase, he relived that picnic in the snow: the sun low in the sky through the bones of an oak, promising some hidden continuance, and that shivering girl holding a thermos in her mittened cellist’s fingers, challenging him with a few chanted and expanding words, her face hungry, pale, and amused, already knowing what would become of all the young men and daring the old ones to look back. Each measure he wrote changed the ones he’d already written, and he felt them all, already being altered by the unformed noises of the years to come.