They spend a useless moment staring at the room, looking at everything but each other. Panic surges up in Samuel—have they already run out of things to say? But then Bethany breaks the silence: “I’ve always wondered how much joy all this stuff really brought him.”
“What do you mean?”
“He has the big names—Mozart, Milton, Keats. But there’s no evidence of real fire. It’s always struck me as an investor’s collection. He’s building a diverse portfolio. It doesn’t say love.”
“Maybe there were a few pieces he loved. He hid them from everyone else. They were only his.”
“Maybe. Or maybe that’s even sadder, that he couldn’t share them.”
“You wanted to show me something?”
“This way.”
She leads him to a corner where, displayed under glass, are several handwritten musical scores. Bethany points to one: the Violin Concerto no. 1, by Max Bruch, written in 1866.
“The first concert you heard me play, I played this,” Bethany says. “Do you remember?”
“Of course.”
The yellowed manuscript pages look like chaos to Samuel, and not because he doesn’t read music. Words have been written and then scribbled over, notes have been erased or x-ed out, there seems to be a first layer of pencil under the ink, and stains on the pages from what might be coffee or paint. The composer had written allegro molto at the top, but then crossed out molto and replaced it with moderato. The title of the first movement, Vorspiel, is followed by a lengthy subtitle that extends more than half the page and is completely obscured by squiggles and lines and doodles.
“That’s my part,” Bethany says, pointing at a clump of notes that seem barely contained by the five-line staff underneath. How this mess could turn into the music Samuel heard that night seems like a miracle.
“Did you know he was never paid for this?” Samuel says. “He sold the score to a couple of Americans, but they never paid him. He died poor, I think.”
“How do you know that?”
“Something my mother told me. At your concert, actually.”
“You remember that?”
“Very well.”
Bethany nods. She doesn’t press.
“So,” she says, “what’s new with you?”
“I’m about to be fired,” he says. “What’s new with you?”
“Divorced,” she says, and they both smile at this. And the smile grows into a laugh. And the laughing seems to melt something between them, a formality, a guardedness. They are together with their disasters, it turns out, and over lunch at the museum’s restaurant she tells him about her four-year marriage to Peter Atchison, how by year two she’d begun saying yes to every international gig offered to her so she wouldn’t be in the same country as Peter and therefore did not have to acknowledge what had been plain to her from the beginning: that she was very fond of him but did not love him, or if she did love him she did not love him in that particular way that sustains the years. They were good to each other, but they were never passionate. In their final year of marriage she was finishing a monthlong tour of China and dreaded going home.
“That’s when I finally had to end it,” she says. “I should have done it much earlier.” She points her fork at him. “If only you hadn’t left that night.”
“I’m sorry,” Samuel says. “I should have stayed.”
“No, it’s good you left. That night, I was looking for an easy way out. But the hard way out was better, ultimately, for me, I think.”
And he tells her all about his recent upheaval, beginning with his mother’s odd reappearance—“The Packer Attacker is your mom?” Bethany says, which draws looks from other tables—and the police and the judge, all the way up to today’s meeting with Periwinkle and Samuel’s current dilemma involving the ghostwritten book.
“Listen,” he says, “I think I want to start over.”
“With what?”
“With my life. My career. I think I want to burn it all down. Reset it completely. The thought of going back to Chicago is unbearable. These last few years have been one long rut I need to get out of.”
“Good,” Bethany says. “I think that’s good.”
“And I know it’s forward of me and presumptuous and really unexpected and all, but I was hoping you could help. I was hoping to ask you a favor.”
“Of course. What do you need?”
“A place to stay.”
She smiles.
“Just for a little while,” he adds. “Till I figure a few things out.”
“Conveniently,” she says, “my apartment has eight bedrooms.”
“I’ll stay out of your hair. You won’t even notice me. I promise.”
“Peter and I lived there and never saw each other. It is definitely possible.”
“Are you sure?”
“Stay as long as you need.”
“Thank you.”
They finish lunch and Bethany has to leave for her second rehearsal of the day. They hug again, this time tightly, as intimates, as friends. Samuel lingers for a while at the Bruch manuscript, studying its messy pages. It makes him happy that even the masters have false starts, even the greats must sometimes double back. He imagines the composer after he’d sent this manuscript abroad, imagines how it must have felt when he no longer had the music but only had his memory of it. The memory of making it, and the way it would sound when it was played. His money would have been drying up, and war was breaking out, and all he had at the end was his imagination and maybe a fantasy of what his life would have been like had things turned out differently, how his music would have filled the spaces of cathedrals on brighter days.
5
THE HEADLINE APPEARS one morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: UNEMPLOYMENT UNCHANGED.
Television news picks it up moments later, cutting into programming to deliver the startling report: Over the last month, the economy has added no new jobs.
It’s the biggest story of the day. It is hard data that seems to crystallize this ambiguous, uncomfortable feeling people are having in the autumn of 2011, which is that the world is galloping toward ruin. Whole island nations are going bankrupt. The European Union is pretty much insolvent. Brand-name banks have been suddenly liquidated. The stock market crashed this summer, and most experts say it’ll continue tumbling well into winter. The word on the street is “deleveraging”—everyone owes too much. The world, it turns out, has way more stuff than the world has the money to own. Austerity is very hip right now. So is gold. Money pours into the gold markets because things have gotten so bad people are questioning the very philosophical legitimacy of paper money. Certain views that paper money is a hoax propped up by a collective fantasy move from the fringes and gain traction in mainstream conversation. The economy has turned medieval, the only treasure now being actual treasure—gold, silver, copper, bronze.
It is a massive, unprecedented global contraction, but it’s almost too large to grasp, too complicated to fathom. It’s hard to step back far enough to fully see it, and so the news engages with its manifold parts—labor data, market trends, balance sheets—smaller episodes in the larger story, places where the phenomenon pokes out and can be measured.
Which is why the unemployment story gets so much attention. There is integrity in a solid number that an abstract idea like “deleveraging” does not have.
So a logo is made: BIG FAT ZERO! Elaborate and colorful graphs and charts are prepared mapping recent terrible employment trends. Anchors ask probing questions of experts, pundits, and politicians, who all yell at each other from their separate TV boxes. The networks gather “Americans off the street” to engage in “roundtable discussions” about the country’s jobs crisis. It feels like a flying avalanche of coverage.
Samuel sits in front of the television flipping between the news networks. He’s curious to see what they’re talking about today and feels relief that it is this. Because the more the news obsesses on the unemployment numbers, the less time there is to discuss the day’s other potentially big story, which is the release of a new book: The Packer Attacker, a scandalous biography of Faye Andresen-Anderson, written by her own son.
Samuel had stopped by the launch party the night before. It was part of the deal he’d made with Periwinkle.
“Don’t feel bad about this,” Periwinkle said after the requisite photographs were taken. “Smartest move you’ve ever made.”
“I trust this will settle the matter with the judge?”
“I’ve already taken care of that.”
Turns out, the same day Judge Brown discovered Faye Andresen-Anderson had escaped to Norway—which meant he was looking at an extradition trial that could last years—he got a phone call from the Packer for President campaign offering him a job: crime czar. The only catch was that he had to make the case go away. And so because the case against her had no hope of wrapping up anytime soon, and because the job of crime czar for a presidential candidate who carried around a gun seemed unturndownable, the judge agreed to these terms. He quietly slipped the case down some bureaucratic, jurisdictional, legal black hole and officially retired from his judgeship. His first policy proposal at his new job involved a serious curtailing of First Amendment rights for leftist protestors, a proposal enthusiastically endorsed by Governor Packer, who was hoping to score some easy points among conservatives who just loathe what’s happening with this whole Occupy Wall Street thing.
Samuel can hear them every day, the Wall Street protestors. He wakes up and has his coffee and writes well into the afternoon in a big leather chair next to a window that looks down at Zuccotti Park, where the protest seems to have real staying power. They’re going to be sleeping there until winter, obviously. Bethany had given him his choice of room, and he had chosen this one, on the west side, with a view of the protest and, in the evening, the sun setting over the country. He’s grown to enjoy the drumming, especially now that the drummers have agreed to drum only during reasonable daylight hours. He’s fond of their rhythms, their ceaseless forward momentum, the way they can go for hours without a single pause. He tries to match their discipline, for he has a new project, a new book. He’d told Periwinkle about it after he was free of his contractual obligations.
“I’m writing my mother’s story,” Samuel said. “But I’m writing the true story. The actual events.”
“Which events in particular, I’m curious to know,” Periwinkle asked.
“All of them. It’s going to include everything. The whole story. From her childhood to the present day.”
“So it’s going to be like six hundred pages and ten people will read it? Congratulations.”
“That’s not why I’m writing.”
“Oh, you’re doing it for the art. You’re one of those now.”
“Something like that.”
“Names will have to be changed, you know. Essential identifying facts altered. I wouldn’t want to have to sue you again.”
“Would it be for libel or slander? I can never remember the difference.”
“It would be for libel and slander, plus defamation, invasion of privacy, scurrilous statements, loss of reputation, loss of business, personal anguish, and violating the competitive works clause in your contract with us. Plus lawyer fees, plus damages.”
“I’ll call it fiction,” Samuel said. “I’ll change the names. I’ll be sure to give you a really silly one.”
“How’s your mother?” Periwinkle asked.