Powers, Richard - Orfeo

They crossed the finish line together in a rough approximation of what the boy might once have had in mind. Clara, gleeful, shook her head and patted the pages. Great, isn’t it? For a first go?

Els shrugged. He needed to show her a quarter century of work that could vindicate this first attempt. She had shipwrecked him. But he wanted to prove that shipwreck might still be luckier than anyone could suppose.

Again! Clara insisted. And the second time through, the thing breathed.

She grabbed his wrist when they finished. Peter! I’m so happy. I feel. . retrieved. She fell into a cloudy silence, head bowed, stroking the keys. I’m surprised you’d even say boo to me.

She took him into her tiny galley kitchen and opened a Château Margaux. Wine in hand, they toured her collection. Her walls were crowded with Renaissance woodcut processions and copperplate Baroque fêtes. Four small oils depicted saints in a rainbow of surprise. But the photos were what grabbed Els. He couldn’t stop looking: Clara from every missing year. At twenty-five, in a sleeveless black dress, ridiculously confident and free. At thirty-two, in front of the castle in Prague, gemütlich but wary. A woman of thirty-nine, kissing the hand of Arvo Pärt, before anyone knew the man’s name.

She returned to the kitchen and retrieved the bottle. Come on, she said, taking him by two fingers. Something else to show you . And she led him up the half-width staircase toward another forgotten thing, put on pause awhile, a lifetime back.

She sat him on her four-poster. They lay back, on top of the nineteenth century eiderdown. She kept his fingers. Els felt the wine, the distance of the past, this woman as familiar as breathing. He bought time, entertaining her with accounts of SoHo spectacles, Richard Bonner’s paranoid flamboyance, the Brooke sonnet to safety that would never be heard. When he ran out of material he made things up, almost like a real composer. She laughed and drew his hand up underneath her concert shirtwaist.

They fell silent in the woozy warmth. Sobered, she took his hand away and studied it. You could stay a bit , she said. She flinched as she spoke, waiting to be berated.

Els steadied his glass and leaned against her. Alertness coursed through him. She was right: He could. There was nowhere in the world he had to get to. His passport was in his inside jacket pocket. No one waited for him anywhere. Home was a technicality, and the future held no real obligations aside from filing taxes and dying. The one inexplicable wound of his past had spontaneously healed. Nothing left to prove, and no one to impress or punish.

He felt impossibly cold. He heard her say, You’re shaking.

Yes, he said. His arms and legs convulsed and wouldn’t stop. Clara bent forward, then lowered herself to him. They clung without thought. She shifted to fit, and he matched her — a minimalist ballet. Both were where they had to get, and they stayed in that place, free from time, until the doorbell rang.

Clara leapt up and smoothed down her silk wrinkles to no effect. It was well after midnight. Her face flushed with apology. She pulled back her hair, pleaded with her eyes, and padded down the narrow stairwell in her stockings.

Els lay alone in the bedroom of a woman he didn’t know from Eve. He looked up: triglyphs and metopes ringed the room, and below them, a light floral frieze. The cultivated serenity resembled something he might have guarded once, in his museum days. This was the room of the fearless girl of sixteen who’d taught him how to prize the new above all things. He rose from the bed and straightened the eiderdown. On the Belle Époque nightstand next to her pillow was a set of silver hairbrushes and an old edition of Jowett’s Plato. Something clicked, and Els saw what he hadn’t, all those years ago. Even as a girl, Clara Reston had hated the real world.

Voices issued from downstairs: two people, speaking low. Els heard only the cadence, but that was enough: a short comic opera of chirrups and murmurs. Warmth turned to confusion, then furtive explanation, then annoyance, wheedling standoff, and a tense good night. The door shut. Feet padded up the stairs, and Clara eased back into the room.

Her eyebrows rose as she crossed to him. Sorry about that. Where were we?

She took his fingers, the same fingers that had once frozen to the faceplate of a public phone, feeding it quarters on an arctic night weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, through the walls of her Georgian terrace house, came elevated doses of radiation from Chernobyl, thirteen hundred miles away.

That was nothing, she told his hands.

He held still and supposed she was right.

This matters more.

For years, he’d tried to write music that would make this woman say those words. Now he didn’t believe them. They were no better than that boy’s apprentice piece — passionate but clumsy. The Clara he’d imagined for decades would have laughed at them.

Peter. You looked me up. Despite everything. It’s astonishing.

He freed his hands. Hers patted the air between them.

I want you to know that nothing is off the table. Nothing is impossible.

I should go, he said.

Later, he couldn’t remember getting downstairs. He did retain an image of her standing in the foyer saying, Peter. This is wrong. Something brought you here. Don’t throw this away.

But he’d thrown away much worse already in his life, and the real cleaning hadn’t even started. He scribbled his New Hampshire address on the back of his ticket stub. She didn’t want to take it. He left it on the Empire guéridon at the foot of the stairs.

Thank you , he said. For everything .

He had a thought bordering on elation: even death was lucky, and no real loss. But nothing short of music could explain that thought to her. She was still shaking her head, unbelieving, when he pulled the door shut behind him.

. . .

HE NEVER SAW her again — not in this life, nor in any other, except on those nights when he lay awake sensing the piece he was supposed to write but had so far failed to find. But he did hear from her one more time. A package reached him in New Hampshire two years later, covered in Her Majesty’s pastel silhouettes. In it was his apprentice piece, the song from “Song of Myself,” the dare he’d taken from her once, at twenty-one. With it came a card, a picture of Mahler’s composing hut at Maiernigg. Inside the card was a signed blank check drawn on an English bank. The note read, “This is a formal commission. I want you to set the next stanza. For clarinet, cello, voice, and whatever else you need. Three minutes minimum, please.”

He’d known the poem by heart once but now had to look it up. The lines jumped off the page, setting themselves to a preexisting music. I depart as air. I bequeath myself to the dirt. If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

He filled in the check for forty pounds, which he figured would cover the frozen phone call, twenty-five years of compounding interest, and international transfer fees. But he didn’t cash it. He put it in a manila envelope along with his apprentice piece, Clara’s card, her letter of commission, the Whitman lines, and a few quick sketches. He carried the packet around with him over the next twenty-five years, and it was sitting at peace in a four-drawer steel filing cabinet in Naxkohoman when the FBI raided his house in search of dangerous materials.

I hoped my nonsense pattern would have no effect at all.

It wasn’t possible — getting lost in a simple grid where he’d lived for almost a decade. Like fumbling the notes to “Happy Birthday.”