Powers, Richard - Orfeo

She pulled him down into a pew. What are you doing in England? The timbre of her voice said: You found me.

Els felt the strangest impulse to lie. To say he’d sought her out, that she was the reason for this, his first ever trip abroad. But he told her of his mother. She cupped her mouth in pain, although Clara and Carrie Els had never been more than wary rivals.

But how did you know about the concert? she asked, when Els was done.

Pure chance.

Her eyes went wide, as if adulthood had taught her, too, that chance was an order no one could yet see.

They sat in the pew, racing through the last quarter century. Clara had lived three years for each of Els’s one. She’d taken a First at Oxford. A year after their final disastrous phone call, she married a Rhodes Scholar, whom she divorced soon after, when he returned to the States to enter politics. Two years of graduate research at Cambridge; then something happened that she couldn’t talk about, and she took off for the Continent. After a stint in the pit of the Zurich Opera, she bounced around Germany for a decade, playing with various broadcast orchestras. She auditioned for the Baroque ensemble, which had been her family for the last four years. She remarried, a British conductor six years younger than she was, with a growing reputation.

We’re more good friends than. . man and wife, anymore.

Els thrust his juddering hands into his pockets. No children?

She smiled. When was that going to happen? You?

A daughter , he told her. Very bright. Angry at me. Studying computer science at Stanford .

Not chemistry? Clara fixed her eyes on Els’s shoulders.

No. It’s machines, for her. At least they’re predictable.

He looked away, into the cavernous space emptying of people. Up in the galleries and behind the choir, the wide window lancets were sheets of black. Buzz from the departing audience floated up into the flattened barrel vault and echoed off the clouds, shells, and cupids. Els gazed around the frowsty barn — half meeting house, half wedding cake. And he told her of his life.

Twenty-four years, and almost nothing to say. He’d studied composition, taken on the fierce cravings of the avant-garde. He’d worked a dozen jobs of no significance. He’d married, had a family, and abandoned it for a pile of mostly unplayed creations now almost four feet high.

All your fault, he said, warmed by a strange joy. I would have been so much better off playing chamber music with my chemist colleagues on Saturday nights.

Her bow hand found her neck. I shipwrecked you!

For years, all I wanted was to write music that would twist your gut.

You’re doing pretty good now, she said.

But then. . I got caught. You know: a certain rhythm, a sequence of intervals. And something would spring open, like the tumblers of a lock. .

It was, he suddenly felt, as good a life as any. Spin the wheel, roll the twelve-sided dice, push them around, hoping to find the future. Even a three-minute piece could run to more permutations than there were atoms in the universe. And you got three-score years and ten, to find one that was sublime.

He heard himself bungling this, the explanation he thought he’d never get a chance to give. But Clara nodded; she’d always had a good ear. She stared off into the bare, paneled aisles. A laugh tore out of her, and she stood. She took him in one arm and her cello in the other, and hustled them from the church through the admiring thank-yous of the thinning crowd.

They wound up in a subterranean restaurant in St. Martin’s Lane. It was dark, noisy, and indifferent, with candles and a tiny Persian carpet on the table. Clara managed to be both measured and giddy. She ordered an expensive Bordeaux and offered a toast: To unearned forgiveness. I was a monster, Peter. One confused little shit of a girl. Forgive me?

Nothing to forgive, he said, but clinked her glass anyway.

They tried to talk music, but their worlds were separated by three centuries. They had no more common cause now than cannibals and missionaries. It stunned him; he’d misread her love of music from the start. Not revolutionary: recuperative. He’d gotten the whole game wrong. Still, her eyes were soft over the rim of her glass as he spoke of their old discoveries. Her mouth curled up with happy embarrassment.

What are you thinking? he demanded. Where are you?

At my house. Summer before college. Two babies! Listening to those Strauss songs.

He cringed in the dark, but corrected nothing. I remember.

Tell me about your music. I want to hear everything.

There wasn’t a single score or recording on this island he could show her. At best, he could whistle her bits of tune — like selling your car by scratching off a few flecks of paint to show prospective buyers.

Funny, he said. Right before I made this trip? I was just beginning to learn how music really worked.

Clara’s eyes widened. She pressed two fingers against her lips. You have to come home with me! Oh, not. . There’s something I need to show you.

She wouldn’t tell him. They settled up and left the restaurant like runaways. Els sat on the wrong side of her Ford, driving with no steering wheel. He leaned back in the tunnel of London lights. Soon enough, she pulled up in front of a row of Georgian terraced houses. The inside felt like one of those London pocket museums. Old engravings covered the walls and the heavy furniture sprouted festoons. Even the foyer was a wonder cabinet. She’d stepped from their shared Levittown childhood into the highborn eighteenth century.

She nudged him into the sitting room and sat him in stuffed leather. Then she addressed a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The thing she sought lay on an upper ledge, in a system of labeled cardboard coffers. She had to climb up a trolley ladder to reach it. The sight of her legs from under her concert black, ascending the rungs, threatened to kill him.

At last she waved something aloft, singing the first few notes of Bach’s Et Resurrexit. She descended triumphant, crossed the room, and put the prize in his hands.

The sheets were a letter he’d posted to himself, into a distant future. His adolescent musical penmanship ambushed him. 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. But somewhere was an awfully big place.

He followed the staves of his first apprentice piece, laughing at all the car wrecks and crazy inspirations. Every choice seemed tender green and bumbling. But how much life the music had! How much hunger to give and excite. All his adult sophistication would never get it back.

All he could do was stare and grin. Young Turk, full of groundless optimism. Every single element of his style had changed. Music had been ground up in the mangle of years. And still he studied the notes, and learned.

He looked up, incredulous. You kept this?

Her head bobbed like a teenage girl’s. Behind her, her shelves sagged under the legacies of a life richer than he could grasp. And yet, she’d saved this student sketch.

Why?

She took the score back and tugged him to the baby grand that dominated the adjacent room. She slipped off her concert heels and sat him on the piano bench.

Come on. Let’s try it.

Clara laughed her way through the upper lines, leaning into the turns with gusto. Their hands collided as they staked out the keys, struggling to catch the boy’s buckshot notes. Their shoulders pressed together, as if this four-hands act were their standard Saturday night ritual. They resumed the little phrase that they’d had to set aside for a moment, a quarter century before. All went onward and outward; nothing at all important had collapsed.