Imogen thinks his neurologist is an idiot. I can’t believe you’re still seeing that incompetent fool. Maybe that counts as caring for him. But it sounds like anger at his stubbornness. Maybe it’s an excuse to blame him for his disease. Get your fat, diseased self out of here.
It’s true that he slept soundly when Susan, during her wild teenage years, was out late with the car. Talk about stubborn. She was so bullheaded, he couldn’t imagine anything as mundane as a car accident changing her trajectory.
You called Susan a whore.
Well, no, not technically. He remembers the evening perfectly well, probably a hell of a lot better than Imogen does. Susan was fourteen or fifteen, headed out with friends. She had only recently begun applying makeup, and like lots of inexperienced girls she had put on too much. He was only trying to shield her from embarrassment. He was her father. And since he knew she rarely listened to him, he wanted to say something that would catch her attention. A rhetorical ploy. He said, “With all that makeup, you know, you look like a streetwalker.”
Yes of course, now he sees, he concedes, he surrenders, his hands are up, his throat is bared—he shouldn’t have used that word.
It’s called a mistake.
Gen twists things. She hated her mother. Maybe it’s a compliment to him, maybe it indicates his importance to her, that she’s furious with him most of the time.
He hears the car in the driveway. The back door opening, the cats converging in the kitchen, the affectionate voice she reserves for them. She will linger downstairs. She’s hoping he’s asleep. He tells himself he wants to oblige her. But he’s waiting. He wants the tiniest bit of normal conversation between a man and his wife. How was your evening? Go to sleep, dear. To be honest, maybe he also wants to find out if she is too drunk to have driven safely, so he can score some points.
He struggles to stay awake while she waits downstairs for him to fall asleep.
As usual, she wins.
• • •
There’s an episode of The Twilight Zone in which Burgess Meredith plays a myopic milquetoast with an awful wife. He loves to read and she mocks him for it, tearing up his books in front of him. Each lunch hour at the bank where he works, he closes himself in the vault, so that he can read in peace. One day, while he’s in there, a nuclear war occurs. He emerges to find himself alone. He wanders the city ruins, disconsolate, until he happens upon the grand stone steps of the library. (Vernon suspects that Rod Serling also saw the 1945 Life magazine sketch of the New York Public Library set amid Hiroshima-style desolation.) Books are spilled everywhere. Now our hero is happy. Maybe the world has been destroyed, but he can read all the Dickens, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Shakespeare he wants. Plus, his wife has been vaporized. In his excitement, he drops his glasses on the stone steps and they shatter. Now he’s blind. End of story.
Vernon sits looking at his Beethoven quartets.
The Pascal kept him satisfied for seven years, the Budapest for five. He doesn’t have to remember the dates, he has a note inserted in every record stating when he acquired it. In 1967 he bought another box of the lates performed by the Hungarian Quartet, on Seraphim. They played squarer and sparer than the Budapest. Another step away from Pascal-style lyricism to something more “classical.” The cellist, Gábor Magyar, tended to play too quietly. Vernon missed Budapest’s Schneider. And the paper sleeves had no cutouts for the labels, which was intensely annoying. Like every other customer on Earth, Vernon had to write on the outside of each sleeve which quartet it contained.
For the Beethoven Bicentennial in 1970 new recordings sprang up like mushrooms. Vernon bought the Yale Quartet on Vanguard in 1971. Again, no label cutouts! What could they be thinking? (The trouble is, they don’t think.) The acoustics were a tad cavernous, but Yale was technically the most proficient Vernon had heard. They were the first to get the crazily fast Presto in Opus 131 to hang together, and their piano-forte contrasts throughout were more pronounced. Vernon finds the correct Yale disk, slides it out against his palm—the A minor Opus 132. Runs his damp cloth over it. You can feel how, by 1971, the vinyl is getting thinner. By the mid-seventies, LPs were almost floppy. He places it on the turntable. Padded chair, headphones, score. God’s in his heaven.
He’s struck again by how similar the opening measures sound to the Grosse Fuge theme. Those rising and falling half-steps haunted Beethoven throughout the late quartets. Why? Does the chromaticism uncenter the key? Vernon should ask Mark.
He remembers years ago, looking out through the screen door at Mark playing in the basement. Mark used to sit at the wooden table—now holding laundry supplies—building model cars, planes, spaceships. Cheap plastic parts with translucent flash, which Vernon showed Mark how to shave off with a penknife. Sensitive, shy kid. Worrisomely girly when young, like his uncle Julian. Hopeless at touch football or catch. Susan was the talented one there. Vernon would engage the three of them in a ball game out in the yard, to get Mark out of the house and let Susan work off nervous energy. This was before Susan turned into a juvenile delinquent, so she’d have been thirteen or so. Since Mark was five years younger, and not naturally gifted, he’d usually end up crying. He had this way of collapsing into a damp heap. Vernon knew his son would get into endless trouble at school, so he urged him to butch it up a little. Later, in his
