Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Richard kept a bed for Els in a third-floor studio above a junk shop on the Lower East Side. So long as you came and went in sunlight and kept the lock bar wedged against the front door, the place was as safe as houses. Els squatted there when he came to town to hammer out his cosmic collages with his collaborators. He could have stayed anywhere; he lived, in those days, inside his swirling Fyodorovian choruses, with their vision of an evolved future that would come to know all things, control all atoms, perfect the body, stop death, and revive every person who ever lived. The mad Russian’s Common Cause spelled out everything Els had once wanted from music: the restoration of everything lost and the final defeat of time.

But immortality proved lethal. Maddy met every new announcement of another New York trip with stoic and pleasant nods. He’d spend the train ride down in awe of her, of her growing, no-nonsense poise. Her self-possession seemed the equal to every upheaval. She’d given him years to make his mark — so many of them — and he hadn’t delivered. And yet there was nothing, absolutely nothing at all he could gift her back, except this holdout search for what the world wouldn’t give.

One evening back in Brookline, Peter looked up from his score-in-progress to see New Morning’s new principal across the room in a baggy cardigan, at work at her own desk on urgencies he knew nothing about. Camped at his feet, which she clung to these days, his third-grader was busy drawing maps of Umber, an invented world that Sara spent all her free time populating. Umber had races and nationalities, politics and languages, catastrophic wars and great eras of peace. It survived contagious pandemics and man-made depressions. It had folk songs for every race and an anthem for every nation. Maddy worried about the girl’s obsession with the place. But Peter wanted to tell his daughter: Yes: make something good. Live there .

And sitting at his desk, scoring his systems for half a handful of listeners, Peter realized that he lived on the very best planet available. Music was pouring out of him, music that danced and throbbed and shouted down every objection. Composing was all he wanted to do, all he could do, and he would do it now with all he had.

Maddy? he said.

She looked up, alerted by his gentleness.

We could live there. Start new. Just like —

Where? Sara asked, excited. New York?

Maddy’s mouth twitched, ready to smile at the punch line. She didn’t say: Don’t be ridiculous, Peter. She didn’t say: You know I can’t leave my job. She didn’t ask what the hell he was thinking. She just stared at him, incredulous and very, very tired.

The way he’d remembered it, everything happened in that shared glance. On that downbeat, he left a wife who’d given him a decade of unearned patience, abandoned a daughter who wanted only to make things with him, and stepped out into free fall. For nothing, for music, for a chance to make a little noise in this world. A noise that no one needed to hear.

For years, he blamed Fyodorov, those choruses from the growing oratorio, with their slow, progressing ecstasies as inevitable as death. Whatever we love will live again. Every disastrous adventure in this life would be cloned and resurrected. Everyone who ever lived would get a better second act. All his vanished lake-splashing cousins, his loner father and lonely mother, the teachers he needed to impress, the friends he never dared open to, the endless parade of museum visitors, mute and motionless as the paintings he guarded: all would be brought back to life and made whole. Countless failed hopes, forever redeemed by the right sequence of notes.

The way he saw it, Els was leaving nothing; there was nothing in life he could leave. He and his daughter would walk once more through the Victory Gardens, giving all the rose varieties ridiculous theme songs. He and his wife would sing together again, old inventions from student days. Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.

All dead wrong, of course. Life turned out to be one shot, stray and mistaken, a single burst scattered on the air.

He held his wife’s eyes, waiting for her to see.

Yes! his daughter shouted, from her pads full of scribbles on the floor. Let’s go someplace. Someplace good.

But Maddy heard another tune, nearer and louder. No , she said. Not me. I live here.

HE TOOK HIS girl to her favorite soda fountain to tell her. He ordered her a Black Cow: a work of art that demanded every atom of her eight-year-old attention. He told her, Your mother and I still love each other. And we both love you more than ever. It’s just. She has work she has to do. And so do I.

Hold it, the girl said.

Nothing’s going to change. We’ll still make things together. Still be like we always were.

Wait, Sara shouted. Soon the shout was full-voice shrieking. He couldn’t make her stop, and when she did, the silence was worse. It said, as clear as silence ever said anything: Never ask me to make things with you again.

A grammar but no dictionary, sense but no meaning, urgency without need: music and the chemisty of cells.

Richard consoled Els, when he got the news. Sorry, Maestro. I truly am. We loved that woman. I thought the three of us would be together forever.

Thought wrong, Els told him.

Lost the one with the vagina, Richard said.

Looks that way.

And the kid. Oh, geez.

Bonner palmed his face and pressed long and hard. At last he said, Well, you have your work. Maybe she’ll come around.

Peter Els joined the community of souls in orbit around Richard Bonner. He surrendered to a collaborative excitement not altogether distinguishable from panic. Inspiration came at him from the strangest places, and there were days when he could pull marvelous sequences of notes out of a subway conversation. He had his work, and there was no end of work, work so good that it felt, sometimes, like death.

ELS STILL SAW them often, his wife and daughter. But Maddy was no longer his wife, and six months on, Sara had fled to some farther, imaginary planet. Maddy wouldn’t take the girl to New York. Els had to come up to Boston, staying in rentals in Somerville and Jamaica Plain. On his third visit after the separation, he asked the sullen child for the latest news from Umber. He always did. It was like asking how things were with her friends.

The girl gave a pragmatic shrug. Bingo and Felicita went to war .

Yes? Els said. That’s happened before, right?

She shook her head. They didn’t stop, this time.

By autumn, Sara asked to quit piano. Maddy, enlightened educator, didn’t resist. She and Peter fought about the decision over the phone.

What a waste , he said. She’s twice as musical as I was at her age.

And. .?

And she’ll kick herself later, when she grows up.

His ex-wife said, You want to give her adulthood without regret?

Soon other crises made the piano seem child’s play. The girl swallowed a fistful of aspirin— to see how it would feel —and wound up in the ER. She poured fingernail polish on a friend’s new platform shoes and called another girl she knew a limp dildo.

A what? Peter asked his ex-wife. Does she even know—

I asked, Maddy interrupted. She was a little hazy on the details.

Peter’s suggestions for how to handle the girl no longer counted. He’d thrown away his vote the day he packed up his four crates of salvage from the Brookline apartment. He was the cause, and never again a cure.