Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Maddy stayed perfectly pleasant over the phone, and, in person, the most cheerful of distant acquaintances. The posture, impeccable: Here’s your daughter; have her back by dinner. Graceful, stately. Maddy, too, had missed her calling. She should never have left the stage.

She broke the news to Els long-distance, with the studied levelheadedness that was now her art. She’d married Charlie Pennel, the longtime superintendent of New Morning. Peter knew the man. His wife had worked for him for years.

The ink on their divorce papers was still wet. You might have told me in advance.

Really, Peter? Why is that?

How long has this been in the works?

He could hear Maddy’s amusement in her mouth’s small muscles. Peter! What are you suggesting?

Not suggesting anything. You do what you need to.

I thought I might.

Every playful thing in her now disgusted him. He hung up. Ten minutes later he called her back to wish her well. He got her machine, and left no message.

He spent a week humiliating himself, calling old friends and neighbors, pretending to be catching up after years of neglect. Then he’d ask, stony-casual: Did you make it to the wedding? When at last he found a guest, he insisted on being tortured with a full description. The music was straight-up Mendelssohn, played by a small ensemble of gifted students from New Morning.

IMMORTALITY FOR BEGINNERS came to life, a vigorous corpse flower. Twelve hours of music was an eternity. Els wrote long, slowly mutating, terraced fantasias that pulsed and sighed and exploded. He scattered the peaks and valleys. He borrowed from voices dead for centuries and made them chatter posthumously. And he repeated, recombined, and looped everything until the whole was wide enough to stretch from dawn to dusk.

Bonner loved the finished score. He pointed to a favorite extended passage. It’s hilarious, Peter. I didn’t know you were so nasty.

What are you talking about? Els asked.

The question surprised Richard. I thought. . you mean this part isn’t a parody of reactionary crap?

No, Els told him. It is reactionary crap.

But Richard adored the eclectic score. His choreography was in-your-face, rancid, and divine: slung hips and puzzled arms, heads twisting in synchrony, glances raised and lowered like divine lunatics reading a celestial tabloid. He had to cycle the performers, who spelled each other out, relay-style, over the course of the monster marathon.

The piece took most of a year to put together, and it was over in a day. From sunrise to sunset on a Saturday in July, bewildered listeners filtered through a renovated warehouse loft in the old butter and eggs district, watching crazies proclaim the coming reconstruction, from pure information, of everyone who ever lived. Most stayed for a while and left shrugging, but a few souls camped out, lost in the endless middle of things. The Times review ran five hundred words. It admired the choreography’s giddy novelty and called the music of thirty-nine-year-old Peter Els evasive, anachronistic, and at times oddly bracing. But this reviewer admits to leaving after an hour and fifty-three minutes.

The party afterward, in the gutted loft, lasted almost as long as the performance. Everyone was spent. Els pushed his way into the drained celebration. The Velvet Underground growled out of someone’s cheap boom box, homesick and way too loud. Richard started throwing stuffed grape leaves at the bottles of wine lined up on a long sideboard across the room. Each time he knocked one down, he’d do a little Martian hornpipe and spout obscene rhymed couplets. The cast stood by, watching the show. Two male dancers started a color commentary.

That’s what happens when you stop sleeping for two weeks .

And add some creative pharmacology.

Bonner heard the pair and began pelting them with crudités. A young, splay-toothed oboist named Penny came up to Richard, touched his elbow, and asked if he was okay. Bonner flipped the back of his hand as if to return a Ping-Pong ball and slapped the girl across her face. The room went dead, and Els, who’d known the man longest of anyone, stepped up to Richard and took his arm. The choreographer reeled on him.

Oh, fuck me with a rubber mallet! Look who’s here. If it isn’t the morals police.

Come on, Richard, Els said, working an arm around Bonner’s shoulder. Closing time.

Bonner shoved him. Don’t touch me! Get your little chickenshit hands off. .

Els recoiled.

Richard pointed at him, his thumb a gun site. You, my friend, will never be more than a polite mediocrity.

The whole ensemble froze in a ring around the two men. Stunned dancers with daubs of face paint still rimming their eyes looked on as Lou Reed purred, “Shiny, shiny, shiny,” into the echoing air. It might have been a coda to the Bonner staging that had just played for the last twelve hours.

Have I done something to you? Els asked. Hurt you in some way?

Someone said, Finally lost it. Someone said, Make him puke; he’ll be fine.

Bonner aimed at Els and clicked off a shot with his finger. Then another.

Els said, You didn’t like the score? You should have told me months ago, when I could have done something about it.

Bonner reeled on him. You, my friend, will never make anything but steamy, creamy, lovely shit. Know why? You need to be loved too much. He turned on the tittering audience: Who wants to give Tune Boy here a little love? Somebody? Anybody? Come on! He’ll trade you pretty things for it.

Els held up his palms, like some medieval Jesus stepping from the tomb. He turned and threaded his way out of the room, pulling free of the few pairs of hands that tried to stop him. And so beginner’s immortality came to an end.

A WEEK LATER, Bonner traced Els through mutual friends to the tenth floor of a Brutalist apartment block in Long Island City and sent him a singing telegram: four white suburban kids in tuxes crooning “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” Els didn’t bother to reply.

He got a job working nights as a cake decorator for a bakery in Queens. By day, he apprenticed as an unlicensed plumber’s assistant, knocking around in a blasted van through the Upper East Side, repairing the fixtures of the rich and famous. Once he helped rebuild a shower stall for James Levine, who looked frailer in person. He fraternized with no one but his two plumber bosses, his geriatric neighbors, and the Dominican grocery cashiers who rang up his cold cuts and cereal. On bad nights, when his body demanded release, he used the past: Maddy as she was the night she sang his Borges songs.

From time to time, melodies occurred to him, broad melancholy phrases from places he’d forgotten — listening with Clara, lessons with Kopacz, those years of war with Mattison, the songs he and Sara used to improvise. He never bothered to write the phrases down.

He did write one piece in those months, an odd, glinting setting of Pound’s “An Immortality.” On the day they met, Maddy had coached Els on what a soprano could and couldn’t do. Now he took everything she’d told him and threw it away. He wrote for a voice that could reach any note, one that might levitate the Pentagon if it wanted. He added two parts for unspecified instruments, lines that billowed like ribbons on the page. The harmonic language was a wash of things old, new, borrowed, and blue. It sounded like a troubadour song come loose in time. It sang of love and idleness; nothing else was worth the having.

He copied the chanson on cream-colored parchment and mailed it to his ex-wife. He dedicated it “To Madolyn Corr, on the occasion of her marriage. May the future change the past for the better.” She never acknowledged receipt. Not long after Els sent the gift, he learned that Maddy, Sara, and Charlie Pennel were moving to the western suburbs of St. Louis to start an alternative school.