Then—boom! The fugue returns, still strange, and as it did in the beginning of the movement, it insists on getting stranger. But—and here’s the point—it never gets as strange. It sounds like a version of the fugue that’s trying to accommodate, at least a little, the plea for order that preceded it. More weaving happens, and there’s a dance-like bit that comes in a couple of times, but the basic idea is the same: unruliness contained, just barely, by order. And when the serpentine theme comes back fortissimo unison for the final time, something wonderful happens (listen!): it’s the same chromatic tune, seemingly unmoored from any key, but it sails past its previous ending and somehow, still sounding like itself, it lands clearly in B-flat major, the key of trumpet fanfares, the home key of the whole quartet. And the coda takes the B-flat ball and runs for the end zone, dodging and weaving past weird arabesques and trills and ending on an exuberant succession of dominant and tonic chords like any normal nineteenth-century piece. Voilà!
Vernon leans back, eyes on the ceiling, exalted.
The tone arm swings, the turntable shuts off.
Silence.
He contemplates the ceiling for a long while.
And then Beethoven died.
And the Cavatina passed Neptune seven years ago.
Vernon levers himself up, aching in his lower back. Puts the record away, turns out the light. Climbs up from the underworld. “Vargas? Oh, there you are.” He lets the cat brush past him, closes the basement door.
Past eleven, and no sign of Imogen. He hovers for a minute in the hallway off the kitchen. Then goes and opens the front door. Stands inside the screen door, listening. (Oops. He forgot to put on the storm door here.) The wind has died down. He hears water dripping from the gutters, the eaves, the silver maple tree. He hears the granular hiss of a passing car’s tires on the wet pavement. He hears the hum of the transformer on the telephone pole across the street. He isolates the sound of one drip from the eaves and another drip from a tree branch and listens to their interference pattern. Six to five. If they were sound waves, they would make a minor third.
He wishes he could have prayed for his sister.
He remembers a discussion in the fifties among civil defense planners, about how to solve the problem of identifying dead schoolchildren after a nuclear attack. One suggestion was to tattoo serial numbers on them ahead of time, but that recalled the Holocaust, and anyway, no one would be able to read tattoos on charred skin. Another was to have mothers sew their names into school clothing. But the clothes would burn right off the bodies, everyone knew that. They eventually settled on metal tags that the kids would wear around their necks. Sure, some of them would turn white hot for a while, sizzle down through flesh, others would melt. But most would remain readable. They ran ads in magazines, picturing a boy holding his tag up to a soldier who might be his dad: “See? It’s just like yours.” All society an armed camp, like the Spartans.
There’s a dreadful law here.
He listens for a while longer to water falling on everything.
All his life, Charles Ives dreamed about composing what he conceived as his most important piece. He envisioned immense orchestras and choirs arrayed on mountaintops and in valleys, thundering out something magical and ineffable that would somehow capture, or maybe reawaken, the music of the world, the music of the spheres. He planned to call it The Universe Symphony. When he was old and suffering from dementia, and knew he would never write it, he said to his wife, “It’s all there—the mountains and the fields. If only I could have done it.”
It’s time to look away. For Ives’s sake, Vernon is weeping.
2006
He called it giving him the runaround. Meaning what you were saying had no merit as an argument, but was merely pointless obstinacy.
She said to him once, “You can argue better than I can.”
To which he replied, “No, I can think better than you can.”
He always won. And when you tried to walk away, because you knew that no matter what you said, he’d win, he would follow you from room to room. When you screamed at him, he’d look shocked and he would retreat, he would wait, he might even apologize for making you angry, then he’d assume a mild tone and start up again. He didn’t just want to win, he wanted you to acknowledge that he’d won. It wasn’t enough to surrender, you had to join his side. And if you said, “You’re right, you win,” he’d say, “You’re just saying that to shut me up,” and if you said, “You’re right again,” he accused you of being frivolous. It wasn’t enough to join his side, you had to do it sincerely. You had to really lose.
Susan couldn’t bear him. The moment she realized a conversation had turned into an argument, and therefore all paths through the maze led to his victory, she’d say, “Fuck you, Dad.” No matter how he responded, she would again say, “Fuck you, Dad.” It was kind of beautiful. It was like the soldier under torture who keeps repeating name, rank, and serial number. It made him so apoplectic, he was the one who finally had to give up.
Imogen wonders if she got married just so that she could have children.
She wonders if she got married because Mac got
