Something Is Out There (2 page)

“I might come in a cab,” he said about the party. “And if I do, it means I’m planning on getting really drunk.”

“That would be the mature thing to do. Soak yourself in alcohol.”

“Go down blazing,” he said.

“Live like a song lyric, huh? I used to know high school boys who talked like that.”

“In your long-ago youth. What was it, six years ago?”

“The point is, it’s immature talk, Stan.”

“Well, I’m a bit past immature, wouldn’t you say?”

“It’s infantile, nevertheless.”

“Are you preaching at me?”

“I hope you’ll come to Ruthie’s party. Really. And I’m not preaching. Really.” She hung up, and heard the click on his end as she did.

He taught music at the university for thirty-five years before retiring last May. He has emeritus status, and still teaches a class there—a Saturday-morning community seminar in composition. Because his hands are arthritic he can’t play very well anymore, but he can still write. Lately, he doesn’t like much of what he has written, and she believes that this has weighed on his mind along with the other matter. His discouragement about the music is all wrong as far as she’s concerned: his new music is wonderful; it is some of the best he has ever written. It has passion, a richer vein of it; the whole feel of it is less intellectual.

Most of the musical instruments in the house belong to him, though it’s true that she’s the one who mostly plays them now. This has been so since they first bought the house together, four years ago, deciding to live together. She was once his most gifted student. They’ve been married now for a year and nine months.

He’s sleeping on the daybed in the little studio downtown.

Josephine told Ruthie about his doubts concerning his music, but kept the rest to herself. Ruthie’s a good listener, the kind of friend whose hopes and concerns seem completely transparent in their simplicity, and whose instincts are all predicated on the assumption that the people around her are mutually interested in keeping to the principles of considerate and
loving behavior. She has a way of blocking out everything else. It’s what John Stanislowski calls her wall of sweetness. He wondered aloud about Andrew in the first weeks of their acquaintance, because Andrew is often wild and unruly, and he drinks too much. “They’re not slightly compatible,” he said.

“I think compatibility’s always a mystery, though, don’t you?” Josephine said.

“You’re talking about us.”

“Oh, God, sweetie,” she said. “No.”

Now she sits at the window and picks a little soft melody on the mandolin. “Hickory Wind.” It makes her feel like crying again, so she stops. This is her favorite spot in the house, and she often sat here while Stan worked in the other room. Here is her neighborhood, like a tranquil scene from memory—as if he were indeed still in the next room, in that brooding but happy silence of his striving—such an agreeable, peaceful street, a shaded row of houses, each of them alike without exact duplication. There are brick fronts, clapboard sides, little porches, awnings, green shutters, tall black wooden fences and short metal ones, storm doors—those wonderful black wrought-iron doors of Memphis—and storm windows, slanted roofs and angled ones with cupolas; perfectly kept lawns with fat shrubs and long hedges trimmed flat as little walls, and charming flower beds—a lovely residential avenue in the city, not far from the university. Even now, it calms her, gazing out. It’s the place she used to dream about, growing up. The only thing that announces it as part of the city is the bus that pulls by now and then, not even often enough for her to have figured out what its schedule might be.

She can’t understand how she could’ve let Bradford Smith get so close. And perhaps it was no more complex than that
there was something thrilling about being admired that way. And something alluring about the ease of it, since he was so undemanding. “I’m human,” she told Stanislowski, “and I didn’t do anything wrong.” And the part about being human was the worst thing she could’ve said. Stanislowski seized on it: “Of course. There it is. You’re human. You’re young, he’s young. You desire life, right?”

She puts the mandolin down now and picks up a guitar. She can also play the piano, the bongos, the drums, the flute, and all the woodwinds—though those instruments don’t interest her as much, and since Stanislowski doesn’t play them, there are none at the house. She prefers the guitar, the mandolin, the banjo, and the fiddle. She almost never plays the harp, and it sits there in the dining room looking like a small sculpture by Picasso. She expressed this once to Stanislowski, who was amused by it and took to showing the harp to people as a piece by the artist. And it made him laugh out loud when she was asked, a year ago, to teach something about the instrument to a group of visiting Japanese students, and she introduced herself as the university’s Harp Department. It became a standing joke between them. “The Harp Department wishes to have dinner,” she would say. And he would answer: “Is the Harp Department hungry?”

“Oh very.”

“May I ask if the Harp Department has any plans on doing the cooking?”

“No, I believe the Harp Department is too tired for that and would like instead to be spoiled by her husband.”

“Well,” Stanislowski would say, “whatever the Harp Department wants.”

Sometimes prone to theatrics—he once stood in a restaurant and demanded quiet in order to report that Josephine had
written a beautiful piece of music that day, and he wanted everyone to toast her—Stanislowski is a man of prodigious learning with an ability to quote from all of it, and he’s more entertaining, more involving, than anybody she has known in her life. He makes her laugh, and fills her head with ideas, musical and otherwise. She has endured his temperamental fits as people endure weather, because when things have been right she has felt so happy. Bradford Smith, she sometimes thinks now, was like the letdown that follows long concentration, like drinks and talk on a sunny patio after work on something you love, deeply. He made her feel drowsily at ease, at least until he started getting strange; Stanislowski makes her feel alive, and alert. He has said she makes him feel that, too.

His intellectual gifts are in fact matched by her own. And nobody thinks in these terms anymore—it’s only something she’s aware of in his company. She has felt her own powers when with him, and this is sustaining in its way, when it isn’t intoxicating. It has helped her with her music, helped her see into it more confidently.

But he can be difficult when the mood is on him.

He knows where all her tender places are, and hasn’t shied away from using the knowledge on certain occasions. He knows, for instance, that her first fifteen years were spent traveling from city to city in the deep South with her mother, who was an exotic dancer. She never knew her father, never even knew who he was. There were sojourns here in Memphis, and in places like Tupelo, Jackson, Corpus Christi, Galveston, Biloxi, Mobile, and New Orleans. Hotel rooms, trailers, flophouses, motels, late-night buses from one town to another, night rooms with discarded clothes on the bed and the blinking of a neon sign out the window; meals in diners, fast-food joints, cafeterias (once in a cafeteria when she was eight, she
saw an old man die while trying to finish a bowl of chicken soup as if gulping it from a mug; the soup ran down either side of his mouth and his eyes did something funny and in the next instant he put the bowl down with a clatter, in a tremendous hurry, clearly trying not to let it fall and make a mess, and then sat forcefully back in his chair and was dead)—there were hired tutors, mostly people who put her to work doing something rote and left her to her own devices; and there were babysitters who taught her to smoke and to cuss, and one had showed her the guitar, and helped her learn “Tom Dooley.” Two chords, C and G7. The start of everything else. She took to plaguing her mother about the instrument, and finally her mother got her a used Gibson concert guitar. She spent hour upon hour, blistering her fingers, learning to play it, and she discovered that she could hear things others couldn’t. She haunted the music stores, and offered to work for lessons. She found that she possessed this ability to hear her way inside the notes of songs, and to pick up the instruments that fell into her hands, and play them. This began her journey away from her mother. By the time she was sixteen she was elsewhere, far from the dancer, living with a jazz drummer, on the road, trying all the drugs and all the other things, too, including the sexual explorations of the kind she had come to understand were her mother’s own province.

In Stanislowski’s mind, now, she’s still journeying. The Bradford Smith business has confirmed his perception of himself as one of the stops along her way. He used to joke about this in the first months they were together.

It used to be a joke.

And apart from their respective ages, they do have very different backgrounds. He grew up with doting parents who recognized his gifts and who sheltered and supported him
accordingly, sending him to private schools in Philadelphia and Boston. He was one of the youngest people who ever attended Harvard, and then he went on to Juilliard. He spent two years in France studying with a man who had been a late protégé and friend of Copland, and, earlier, of Satie. It’s the kind of lofty education that makes him ill-equipped to deal with life at the level of dirty dishes piling up in the kitchen sink or trouble with the heat pump in the middle of winter. She understands this. His whole existence has been the studio or the concert hall with one orchestra or another, several of which performed music he composed; but aside from a year with the Berlin Philharmonic, he has spent the bulk of his career hidden away in this old Southern town, at this college, as a teacher. He’s had three previous marriages, all to women with no musical gifts and no musical ambitions either, and all ending in divorce. The wives are prospering in other lives far away, with other husbands, and children.

Now, clouds shift over the houses and moving treetops. But wide clear blue spaces show, too. The clouds themselves are lined with that ashen color of rain squalls. Josephine rattles a little on the mandolin and tries to think of a pretense to delay Ruthie’s husband, something other than the box of clothes for the attic.

The thought of the clothes brings her playing to a halt.

She puts the mandolin down. The box of clothes won’t take ten minutes. She thinks of bringing up her trouble, asking Andrew’s advice as a man, but Andrew is decidedly not someone you ask for advice and indeed he won’t believe she’s the sort who might seriously ask for it. With Andrew, you are always trying to think up something amusing to report. He likes stories and thrives on them: whenever he’s present the
talk becomes narrative; he tells stories and he elicits them—he makes Ruthie tell them, even through her natural reluctance to be the center of attention—and the stories are always funny; it’s always about the laughs with Andrew.

And here he is, strolling a little unsteadily along the sidewalk with his paper bag–wrapped bottle of beer and his black-leather briefcase, looking completely carefree. He wears loose denims, and a gray button-down shirt with one side missing the button, so the collar sticks out a little. She steps out onto her front stoop and crosses the small space of grass to the edge of the sidewalk.

“You look like a street person with a portfolio,” she says.

He sips from the bottle and smiles. “Want a taste?”

“I never drink before dark.” She’s managing it, showing him nothing.

“Well, it’s dark up under the house.” His smile widens. “I had a couple glasses of champagne at the school. My boss, because I’m a graduated guy now.” He stands there. A stranger might consider him a bit of a simpleton. He has one of those faces—the little boy that he was has never quite left the features of the grown man. There are the round cheeks, and the wide grin, the eyes that turn to little dark half-moons when he’s amused.

“Come on,” he says, offering it. “It’s so cold.”

To her own surprise, she takes it, and holds it to her mouth. It is, as he said, quite wonderfully cold. It’s also dry and tastes very good.

“Hey, save me some of it,” he says.

She decides that they can stand here and talk for a time; it’s something she can do for Ruthie. Handing back the bottle in its tight brown wrap, she watches him take another long pull of it. Across the street, a couple walks with a baby in a stroller.
They’re talking quietly—a big, heavyset, balding blond man and a slender, dark-haired woman taller than he. She’s pushing the stroller. They cross at the end of the block and walk on under the shade of the big sycamore there. Mottled shade from the tree moves over them.

“Imagine a street just like this in 1896,” Andrew says. “This kind of light. And a couple with a baby in a stroller, walking along. It would’ve looked about like this. The stroller would be a pram or whatever you call it, and the clothes wouldn’t be spandex, but essentially it would look the same. It
was
the same, of course. A young family out walking the baby.”

“Yes,” she says, a little impatiently, remembering that she always liked his odd way of seeing things.

“But, then, think of this—those people walking the baby in 1896,
and the baby
they were walking in the pretty sunlight—
all
of them are dead now.”

“Yes?” she says. “What’s your point?”

“I don’t know—graduation’s got me thinking about things.” He takes another pull from the bottle and offers it to her. “Well, it’s Truth. Right?”

She waves the beer away. “It’s meaningless because it’s not worth saying. Everybody knows about it, without the indulgence of reminding themselves.”

“Indulgence.” He smiles. “I guess you told me.”

“Well, right?”

He shrugs. “Ruthie says I’m morbid, anyway. But I bet your husband would agree.”

She wants something else to talk about. He drinks more of the beer, and they both watch a car go by—two elderly people in a long tan Lincoln, the woman wearing a white baseball cap and staring straight ahead, her lips an unimaginably dark red, and the man looking at the house numbers, craning his deeply
lined neck. Josephine stares after them. The sight sinks into her, and she experiences a sensation like ice water pouring down the inside of her spine. She doesn’t want to be alone; it terrifies her to think of it. She puts one hand to the side of her face, and then lets it drop to her side.