Read A Round-Heeled Woman Online

Authors: Jane Juska

Tags: #Fiction

A Round-Heeled Woman (22 page)

BOOK: A Round-Heeled Woman
2.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

SIXTEEN

Kyrie Eleison

Many music lovers are apt to get Bach mixed up with God.

—JAN SWAFFORD, in
The Vintage Guide to Classical Music

Matt's phone calls made being away from New York more bearable; our conversations about theater and poetry and sex made New York seem closer, put it right on the other end of the phone, all the way from far-off Wisconsin. However, a phone call, no matter its length or intensity, is not New York. And, I have found, being away from the city for too long puts me in a dismal state of mind; it is as if back home in California, I run on fumes and eventually must go back to New York to refuel. None of this is comprehensible to Andy.

Andy has supported my teaching in the prison and my volunteer efforts as an abortion escort. Still, he worries a bit: “Why do
you
have to do it?” He agrees with me that it is important for a woman about to get an abortion to make her way to the doctor's office unmolested by jeers and obscene placards. He agrees that everyone, in prison and out, needs an education. But, while he would like to worry less about me and while I have worried a lifetime about him, we are passionate in our support for each other.

So I did not worry that he would turn away from me, divorce me, when I told him about the ad. I told him about what it said. I told him that I got sixty-three responses and that I was going to New York to meet some of these men. I even told him about the fiasco with Danny Boy that had happened only a few weeks before, which I expected would reassure him I had not lost all of my reason. He was mildly amused, silently worried, and in the end, he said, “Go get 'em, Mom. It's your turn.”

But, naturally, he was and is puzzled by me and the things I have done. Why does it have to be
his
mother who goes off and does nutty things? “I'll just never understand you,” my father confessed once to me. I wonder at what point he gave up trying. My son doesn't need to understand me, and he knows that. He needs to be available for In Case of Emergency; he needs to let me put his name on that line. He needs to be the one to whom I leave all my worldly goods, even though they aren't many and may not, by the time I die, be any at all. And he is all those necessary things without question or complaint. So when I e-mail him that I'm off to New York again, will return end of May, he writes back, “Have fun.” And shortly after, “Again? Weren't you just there?”

Well, yes, I was, but this time I am going to sleep with Sidney, though I don't mention this to my son, his need to know extending just so far. Now, I could wait to sleep with Sidney, I suppose, but once again New York has worked its magic. The final presentation, in early May, of the Encores! series at City Center is
Wonderful Town.
In his youth, Sidney sang and danced in
Wonderful Town.
And now, in this revival, Ruth and Eileen will once again sing and dance their way out of Ohio and into the heart of New York City. Just like me. We make plans to go. We will have a date.

Still, there are three events happening in May that I must attend to before I fly off to New York. They are endings for projects I began the previous January: the final ceremony for my student teachers, all of them waving job offers as they parade down the aisle; my final class at the prison, where Frederick will hold us spellbound with his rendition of “Eensy Beensy Spider”; and my chorale. I am passionate about them all.

When I was young, I had no use for Bach. I could never get his Two-Part Inventions right enough for my father or for my piano teacher; although, against my will and better judgment, she entered me in a juried recital in Toledo, the big city fifty miles away, where I blew up in front of the jury before I even got to the middle of the first invention. I left the room much dejected but nothing like my piano teacher, who, in the hallway outside the performance room, sat sprawled in a chair, eyes glassy, mouth agape. Guess I showed her. Bach and Haydn and those Czerny pieces, all that music in those Schirmer editions, were tasks I undertook because girls did that; girls learned to play the piano the same as they learned the piano a hundred years earlier and for the same purpose: to make themselves more suitable companions to men who were suitable right off because they were men. I didn't know about this then, of course; all I knew was that I was supposed to practice and didn't, and that my thirty minutes at my teacher's spinet demonstrated, week after week, a succession of errors almost more in number and kind than either of us could bear. Every so often my teacher would take over; she would play the Bach I was supposed to know by now. She showed me how it should sound; she showed me how badly I was failing. I dropped out at fifteen after nine years of trying not very hard at something I wasn't especially interested in. She retired not long after.

But something must have crept into my unconscious, something must have taken, because late one cold winter night, when I was sixteen, as I sat in the corner bedroom of my house staring into the darkness, at the frost on the windowpane, snow on the ground below, listening to the crackle and hum of the radio next to my bed, suddenly, the air cleared and out of my little radio came the sweep of the strings of the Philadelphia Orchestra playing Rachmaninoff's First Symphony. My first orgasm, I just didn't know the word; I had never heard a whole symphony before. My dad's taste ran to Benny Goodman—gauche, I would stupidly have said if I had known the word. Across the street, in my grandmother's house, my great-uncle collected red vinyl records. They were beautiful—if you held them up to the light, you could see through them—and every so often I would creep over there when I knew my grandmother was off quilting or out back wringing the neck of a chicken for Sunday, and I would sneak Rossini's overture to The Thieving Magpie onto his big Stromberg-Carlson hi-fi record player, lie down on the floor, and wait till near the end of the overture, when the rhythm changes; it is so sexy how he does it, brave even, definitely jazzy. But no one in my family—not even my great-uncle, who seemed to collect but never listen to his records—no one I knew in my little town or on the farms outside it listened to music. Church was where the music was and Bach had not found his way into the churches of Archbold; hymns like “He Walks with Me and He Talks with Me,” a soppily sexual love song to Jesus, had, and so had “The Old Rugged Cross,” which exhorts us all to cling to it. Bach? Never heard of him.

Of course, I played in my high school band. Everybody who wasn't the strictest Mennonite played in the band and sang in the chorus and, if you were a boy, played on the basketball, football, and baseball teams, too. This was a town where the boys on the football team huddled at the sidelines at the end of the first half, changed into their band uniforms, picked up their cornets and trombones and drums, and performed the halftime show. There just weren't enough of us to go around. I played flute, which wasn't loud enough for the outdoors; there, I was supposed to play the piccolo, but I quit when we got to “Stars and Stripes Forever,” where the piccolo solo always brings down the house. We'd get to that part, and the whole band plus the director would pause, look at me, and play softer so that the tricky obbligato of the piccolo could soar the way John P. Sousa had meant it to. I never did it, I hardly ever even practiced to do it. Once, I started out, but before we got to the middle, I blew up. The director was tougher than my piano teacher, maybe because he had a lot more kids to support, but he made it clear that I had disappointed a lot of people and not just Sousa. The boys on the football team were especially irritated.

In college, I joined the university chorus for about five minutes. The music was hard and the director made us rehearse till all hours, and even suggested that there were those of us who would benefit from practicing at home. See ya. At the other end of the musical spectrum, I spurned Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford and Peggy Lee. I mean, “I'd like to get you on a slow boat to China.” Really.

I was close to sixty when I let Bach into my life. Over the years, I had been warmed by Mendelssohn and charmed by Schubert. But Bach, especially Bach for voices, left me cold: his vocal music in particular seemed starchy and unnecessarily complicated and long. I didn't have time. But my neighbor in Orinda did. Every Monday she drove off into the night for rehearsal with her choral group. One September Laura said, “Why don't you come along; I think you'd enjoy it.” “Are there auditions?” I asked. “Yes,” said Laura, “but you don't have to worry, everybody gets in.”

What could happen but that I would blow up and humiliate myself again. But then my analyst, Dr. V, the object of my affection at the time, was a fan of Bach. I suspected he was, he never actually said he was, but then he never actually said anything that might reveal a personhood; however, I had read enough about psychoanalysis to know that analysts, especially older analysts, were Bach fans. So I began to pay attention to the Gold-berg Variations and the Brandenburg Concertos, and I liked them more with every listen. This was a sign. Surely, my growing appreciation for Bach's music meant that I was becoming the woman for him—my analyst. If I talked thrillingly about this music, not long from now he would realize that we were meant for each other. Alas, while my love for Bach—and my analyst—continued to grow, my analyst's adoration of me never surfaced. Bach, on the other hand, returned my passion tenfold.

Laura at my side, in the rehearsal room I filled out a card listing all my musical experience. Filling out one entire side of a three-by-five-inch card, I put down everything I could think of, including my participation in the University of Michigan mixed chorus. The form didn't ask how long, just what.

The last time I had sung a note was in 1970, driving across the country in flight from my marriage. After that, I sang the outlandish songs I made up for Andy. Before 1970, my last note had been sung in 1955. It was now 1997, twenty-two years later, and I was ready to sing again.

The director sat at the piano and played a list of notes that went all over the scale. I was supposed to sing them. “Can't I sing the Doxology?” I asked. “I do a mean Doxology.” The Doxology, as you may know, is composed of about seven notes, all of them in mid-range. He nodded, puzzled into acquiescence. I sang away. At the end, he said, “You don't have much range, your tone is jarring, you don't sight-read at all. Let me see your card.” He looked at the card. “You went to the University of Michigan?” I nodded. “When?” “Graduated in 1955,” I answered. “You must have sung under Maynard Klein.” I nodded. So that was his name. The director beamed up at me from his piano stool: “So did I. You're in.” Some things hold true: It's not what you know, it's who.

According to people who know, one of whom is now me, Bach's B Minor Mass is the greatest mass ever composed; lots of us would go on to say it is the crowning achievement of all Western music. And I'm going to sing it. In May of the year 2000.

The words of a mass are easy. They're usually in Latin, which is pretty easy to pronounce since nobody really knows how it's supposed to sound. In the B Minor Mass (and lots of other masses and requiems) you just go “kyrie” a lot, as in “kir-ee-ay,” “kyrie.” There's always a “gloria,” often “in excelsis,” which anybody can pronounce once the director tells you if it's
ex
ch
elsis
or
ex
s
elsis,
which he will. He will not put it to a vote, I can tell you that, choruses and probably orchestras, too, being the least democratic organizations this side of the Kissinger family. Musicians put up with this dictatorship because we and they and the conductors and the directors all agree that we are in the service of the same master, in this case Bach. Anyway, the
gloria
is where you get to sing loud and fast and where, even if you get lost in the fugue, you can figure, since it's a
gloria,
it will end on a major chord, so if all else fails, don't blow up, don't quit, just wait for the last chord and belt out your note. Feels good. Near the end is the
hosanna.
Boy, is this fun! You sing only those three words—“hosanna in excelsis”—the whole way through, so you can concentrate on all the sixteenth notes that practically obliterate the page and that you're supposed to sing along with the other singers in your section, and not ever without them. I lipsynched right up to and through the performance. Not all the time, but man, Bach expects a lot, not to mention the director, who never quite forgave me for not being up to Maynard Klein.

The B Minor Mass is a transcendent experience for both atheist and believer, and I was grateful to Bach and the director for letting me in, novice that I was. Most of the singers had been singing regularly all their lives, just as I suppose they had been having sex regularly all their lives and I hadn't. As new to singing Bach as I was at having sex, I wasn't sure at first what to do in this chorale or how to do it, like who was running the show, who should be on top, and was it okay to
pretend
to be singing when I got tired and lost and things just got beyond me? So the Alto II's, my section, were nice to me; they sang loudly into my ear, pointed to the part in the score where everybody but me was, and encouraged me to try again, just like the men in my new life. In Philip Roth's
The Dying Animal,
David Kepesh in his later years plays Bach on his piano. He uses the music and his knowledge of music to seduce a young woman. He uses music to seduce himself; he masturbates to Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn (Bach does not make this list), Schumann, and Schubert, which has got to be kind of hard if you think about it: playing music like that requires both hands. About sex, he says, “only when you fuck is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily, revenged. . . . Only then are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself.” I would argue that in singing the B Minor Mass “everything you dislike in life . . . is revenged.” When, in the Sanctus, the basses descend the scale in octaves singing “Sanctus Dominus” as they go, now, that is sexual music. I submit that participating in art and in sex allows us to transcend the certainty of our own death and the destruction of all that is beautiful and good. Art compensates for life.

BOOK: A Round-Heeled Woman
2.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Spider Inside by Elias Anderson
The Ravishing One by Connie Brockway
Cold Coffin by Nancy Buckingham
Rory's Mate by J. S. Scott
I Owe You One by Natalie Hyde
One Night With You by Candace Schuler
Deadly Charm by Claudia Mair Burney
The Sister Season by Jennifer Scott