Powers, Richard - Orfeo

They sit down to leftovers. Richard never stops chattering, even to breathe. He brings the New England hicks up to date on every fad that has fluttered through Manhattan in the last few years. Stunned Sara can’t even eat. She sits with fork halfway to open mouth, gazing at this trumpet-lipped, tangled-hair messenger who fills their dowdy apartment with news of a world so much wilder than hers.

Maddy suggests an after-dinner walk, but Richard waves her off. He produces a backpack full of other seductions — reel tapes, half-finished scripts, sketches, notations like secret code. He pulls Els to the corner desk and commences the composer’s reeducation.

He plays the spawn of Terry Riley’s bit of West Coast craziness, In C. Gibson, Glass, Reich, Young: a whole school has formed while Els wasn’t looking. Sara spins around giggling with her eyes closed in the middle of the living room, trancing out to the trippy hypnosis. Maddy, cleaning the dishes, stops long enough to cock an eyebrow at the proceedings: Relentless, no? Her look is schoolmarmish. But schoolmarming is what she does for a living. The former soprano, once game for any tune, now grins and shakes her head.

Richard lies back on the sofa, shifting in ecstasies. You hear what this is, don’t you?

Boring? Els ventures. Banal arpeggios of little harmonic interest, looping over and over. Czerny on acid.

The first real revolution in music for fifty years.

Els tips his head and shrugs. But he keeps listening. If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If four, try eight. Music was never what he thought it was. Why should it start behaving now?

They listen as if the world is lost. They’re back in school again, with all life’s root discoveries still before them. The music makes time wax and wane like a fickle moon.

Maddy sweeps through the room, scooping up her daughter from her listening post on the rug. Sorry, gentlemen, we need to sleep.

No, gentlemen, Sara shouts. We need more!

Go ahead, Richard tells the ladies. His hand traces obeisant rococo curls. Sleep away! You won’t bother us a bit.

Maddy kicks his shins, and the men kill the music. Mother whisks her daughter off to her bedroom and the night’s last story. But the men don’t budge from their improvised atelier. The scores come out, and the two old collaborators go on murmuring by lamplight, long after both girls are safely asleep.

Bonner says: There’s something going on in New York. The city is headed to hell. Homeless everywhere. Basic social fabric, unraveling. But the downtown performance scene has never been stronger. It’s sprouting like toadstools on a grave.

Richard’s sales pitch unfolds like one of those minimalist glaciers. The director has found a fairy godmother, appearing from an aerie in the upper altitudes of Central Park West to throw him some cash. She was waylaid by a piece of Bonner street theater involving one hundred volunteer dancers dressed in ordinary work clothes, planted throughout a square-block area of Midtown, who, at synchronized intervals during rush hour, turned to stone, as in a child’s game of statue maker. The guerrilla ballet played for three straight days and ended without explanations just as word of the performance began to spread around town.

From the tenth-story window of her foundation’s office on West Fifty-seventh, the fairy godmother chanced to glance down on dozens of sudden fossils. They gave her that gooseflesh feel of shared doom she looked for in art. She was moved, not so much by the freeze-ups themselves, but by the logistics that had gone into assembling so anonymous, ephemeral, and near-invisible a work. It took her three dozen phone calls to trace the insurgent dance back to its demented maker.

Now she’s throwing money at me to turn it into a film!

Els shakes his head. A film? Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose?

But Bonner has no purpose. Bonner is pure energy, a taste for prankish novelty, and a sense of bottomless despair when he isn’t, as he still insists on calling it, working.

The two men take the crackpot notion out onto Beacon Street. They walk inbound, back toward the Fens. Bonner maps out a plan involving video cameras with long-focus lenses dangled out of forty-story windows, zooming in and out on the street below. He needs a musical score that can also zoom in and out on demand. He wants cycles within cycles, intricate, interlocking instrumental figurations, each recorded on separate tracks so the whole piece can materialize and dematerialize at will, the parts fading and surging, splitting off, then swelling again into a churning whole.

Sounds brilliant, Els says. But why not get one of those New York minimalist guys to write it for you?

Bonner freezes on the bridge over the MassPike, a sudden statue.

Well, fuck you, too.

Els recoils, stunned. It has taken him years to grasp the obvious: Richard Bonner is as thin-skinned as a child. The critics are powerless to harm him; he thrives on their attacks — the more vicious, the better. But a friend might scar the man for life without even knowing he’d drawn blood.

I happen to have , Els says, improvising, several beautiful ideas that might work.

Bonner starts up the parade again. We don’t need beauty, Maestro. We need music.

Package deal. Just to be safe.

Safety will kill you, you know.

I’m aware. Creation’s Rule Number Three.

They make their way home an hour before dawn. Els fashions a little nest for Richard on the sofa. The impresario sleeps through the family’s morning rituals and the departure for school. And he’s gone, on a train back to the city, by the time Maddy returns home.

Does it help to know that any large number, however random, hides a masterpiece? All you need is the right player.

What can Els remember about that night’s duet?

It’s a real commission, he tells his wife, over the remains of a curt ratatouille. They sit at that rickety green-painted table with the Dover Thrift Edition of Emerson’s Nature shimming up the short leg. A thousand bucks. Can you believe it?

She looks at him over her drained wine glass, a nick in its cheap rim. The look says: Really? The look says: Don’t bullshit me.

Of course, I’ll have to spend a little time down there. Rehearsing and recording.

Peter, she says. The word is ancient. Weary.

Peter turns to his daughter. Hey, Bear? Want to play something? Maybe your new Mikrokosmos piece? Sara pokes off to the other room and its little upright piano, in that slurry of bliss and caginess, the prelude to youth.

Maddy holds his gaze. We can’t live like this. You need to find a job.

A job? I’ve had six jobs in four years. I’ve been earning. .

Something full-time, Peter. A career.

He looks through the window on the twilight neighborhood, as if the threat emanated from outside. I have a career.

Maddy inspects her hands. You have a daughter .

The words enrage him. I am a good father.

Her fingers go up into her hair, rooting. She doesn’t want to do this, either. It strikes Els then, or somewhere near then, that he hasn’t heard her hum for more than a year.

She goes to the sink and fills it with pots and pans scavenged from a trio of thrift shops.

Look , Els says . It’s real money. A high-profile project in New York.

Maddy sighs in the rising steam. You could make more per hour by tuning pianos.

He tries to remember when he last saw her quilting. A Romanian folk tune, harmonized in modal contrary motion, issues from the other room. The tune sounds to Peter like the final word on longing. Maybe he should make a living tuning pianos.