It was almost dark enough not to be able to tell a white thread from a black thread, and Claude threw a switch in the gatehouse that sparked on the lights illuminating the compound. Though normally the curse of billionaires, the security lighting now caught and exaggerated the snow, making each gyrating flake glow against the black sky and thickening the snowfall so that it appeared twice as dense as it really was. Student and teacher stared at the storm shining beyond the windows as snow fell almost silently, muffling sound. Because he wanted to love her and knew he could not, there was nothing left to do but begin the lesson.
“I THINK I CAN now afford to be direct. If not in absolutely everything, certainly in this. I have nothing to lose, nowhere to go, and I’m just about finished.”
She heard in his tone and saw in his expression that this was something, if tinged with regret, that was pleasurable in the freedom it bestowed.
“My duties have been lightened, and are probably in the midst of being lightened further as we speak. I’m not … not so much in demand. I was never much in demand, but now there’s almost nothing. That’s why I don’t even check the schedule.
“What I’m supposed to be able to give you is, first, a moderate amount of musicianship, the equivalent of explication de texte, say forty percent; then a huge dose of theory, fifty percent; and ten percent of vagary about the philosophy and spirit of music. That is, about the ineffable, of which the moderns think even one percent is too much.
“But I’m deficient according to present beliefs. I give seventy percent to musicianship, ten percent to theory, and twenty percent to the ineffable. That’s what makes me vulnerable, because, obviously, the ineffable is ineffable, so it’s not as if I can punch a clock and claim a salary for doing what by definition is invisible. But if my teaching and your learning are successful, they’ll have effortlessly and undetectably strengthened and purified your musicianship, mating with it so that they’ll be indistinguishable both to the audience and to you. That is, together they’ll be ninety percent. But, enough, I’m not a statistician. I short-change theory, which is what the leaders in the field crave, because I don’t like it. I’ve never brought myself to assimilate it and I have no patience with it. The language and syntax of music, like the language and syntax of all art, is as imperfect as our bodies. And its relation to mortality is the same as our own. Though the music of language can do this almost as well, nothing expresses so closely human sorrow, joy, and love – in its rhythms, its changes of tone, and changes of tempo – as music. People say God didn’t speak directly to us. Maybe He didn’t, but He’s granted us a powerful part of His language, with which, at the highest, we can come close to dialogue.
“You know Levin of course.” Jules had never experienced heroin, but had read that in coursing through the arteries and veins it brought a burst of love and pleasure. He tried not to look at élodi, but felt intense love and pleasure when he did, so much so that he was unable not to look at her.
“Yes. Who doesn’t?”
“You’ll have to take his course. He plays like a machine. Never a mistake, never a variation. Have you heard his cadenzas?”
“I haven’t.”
“And you never will, because he can’t do them. The imperfections in how music is played – the small, sometimes microscopic variations in tempo, in pressure on a string, in emphasis – are what give us even in the midst of its perfections the pathos we need so that we can truly love it. It’s like a person, whom, though so many of us do not know it, we love as much on account of imperfection as anything else. That’s what’s so stupid and wasteful about people who pride themselves on their standing, their appearance, their achievements. Love is the great complement to imperfection, its faithful partner.”
“What about God?” élodi asked. “Who’s perfect, and yet loved?”
“For Jews God is perfect but imperfect. The God of Israel is jealous, demanding, and sometimes cruel. We argue with Him. It’s like a goddamn wrestling match, and exhausting. If you’re a Christian – I say ‘if’ because these days people your age all seem to be proud atheists – your God is split into three parts. He suffered as a man, He was tempted, He even died, just like the rest of us. The more perfect something is, the less it can be loved – like a face, a body, voice, tone, color, or music itself. In playing a piece, don’t strive for perfection: it will kill the piece in that it will prevent it from entering the emotions. That’s the kind of advice you can’t do anything with except perhaps later, when you don’t even know you’re doing it. It’s part of the freeze of counterpoint.”
“I’ve never heard that expression,” she said.
“Stasis may be a better word – the liberation of the space between two contradictions. Let me explain if I can. If two waves of equal but opposite amplitude meet in water, what do you get?”
“Flat water.”
“In sound?”
“Silence.”
“Right. From agitation, peace, a perfection that you might have thought unobtainable from the clash of contradictory elements.”
“I think you’ve explained the magic of counterpoint very well.”
“Not really. It’s inexplicable. I’ve noted it, that’s all. Half of humanity’s troubles arise from the inability to see that contradictory propositions can be valid simultaneously. Certainly in music, where the product, in the emotions and in understanding, is superior to the elements that produce it, and has no sound.
“This is nothing new. We have Yang and Yin, Keats resting within the riddle, the Hegelian Dialectic, the whole story of the sexes – and even Versailles.”
“Versailles?” she asked.
“Yes. You take it from there.”
élodi felt not only excitement but that she was embraced, loved. She looked up, as if to receive an answer. She always did this upon solving a problem that took some thought. She had done it so often in exams that she was an expert in gymnasium ceilings – their beams, ropes, protected lamps, pulleys, and nets. “I see,” she said. “Versailles is simultaneously a crime against humanity in that it was possible only because of the virtual enslavement of a whole nation for centuries, and a tribute to humanity in its occasional beauty.”
“What do you mean occasional?”
“The buildings, at least, and most of the interiors, are pretty horrible in their excess, but if you focus on the details – much like the abstractions you can produce by enlarging great paintings – there is often consummate beauty, lots of it, hidden in the whole, where the work of the craftsman as artist is sheltered from, in the case of Versailles, the monstrous overall conception.
“And the gardens,” she went on, enthusiastically and entirely on her own steam, “though a contradiction of nature because they were dictated by an overly vain human design, nonetheless are saved by nature. They’re the real beauty. Versailles would be impossibly nauseating were it not saved by them, wouldn’t it? Nature has the talent to soften, forgive, and remake, to create something beautiful out of our mistakes, paradoxes, and counterpoints – even when it comes to you invisibly.”
“Exact!” Jules exclaimed, approvingly and to compliment her.
She leaned forward, modestly looking down, pleased with herself, and asked, “What shall we play?”
“Any piece you know well and would like to play.”