Warnings from the Future Read online

  She wonders if she could tell, had she more time to scrutinize them, which have come to see her play and which have come to see her fail. Probably not. It’s always hard to tell a wolf. Havelin is out there. She can hear his haughty voice surfing the top of the hush. They wear tuxedos and gowns, armor against being interesting.

  She pumps the pedals a few times, loosening her feet, and puts one atom of each fingertip against the flat plane of white keys, and listens to the silence become absolute. The last utterances of conversation carom from wall to wall until the curtains soak them up. There is always something dumb about an audience—dumb in the old sense: mute and staring. The opposite of deaf, not just by convention, but by design, by definition. Listening only. Seeing pictures of old gramophones, she always imagines the horn of the player to be a receiver, an ear, when that is the opposite of its purpose. Why is it so comforting, this idea that she could be wrong about everything?

  The first étude is already playing. She is glad to be thinking of something else. The undistracted mind creates its own ripples. Still, she tries to listen for a moment, to see if she is keeping Schrödinger’s cat both properly alive and properly dead.

  HOW HER FATHER TOOK IT

  He cried and he didn’t at properly surprising times: at breakfast three days later, but not at the wake; at the viewing, but not at the funeral; not at the pool where he went to swim his laps, or anytime he walked down by the docks, but, for reasons no one understood, every time he went to the grocery store. It petered out: a slow curved line that never quite reached its asymptote.

  Sometimes it could be years between little meltdowns. Sometimes they seemed to have gone away forever.

  Charlie grew mythic, just a touch, in her father’s discussions of him. He would have gotten those swim scholarships to Michigan and Stanford. His height chart had never flattened out: Charlie might have spurted past both him and Marie and been the next Michael Phelps. You should have seen him after a meet. He’d put down four cheeseburgers and a bucket of fries. Did you know he wrote poetry? We didn’t, but we found it in his journal. Beautiful stuff, truly. It sounded like Yeats.

  The next summer he was back in his chaise longue, though now he did read, and what he read was appropriately affirming and humanistic: Man’s Search for Meaning, The Long Goodbye, Tuesdays with Morrie. “Pablum,” Marie said when she was feeling generous. “Dreck,” she said when she was not. In this way he became golden again, while his wife turned to salt. He became better in conversation, more philosophical and circumspect. His laugh was less frequent, but it now had an anchor. Though she tries not to, she sometimes resents him for being improved by tragedy.

  Some have said he grieved perfectly.

  PERFORMANCE

  She sweats. It is not a sexy, shimmery sweat. It is not a surprise. She made the strategic choice not to wear white. Regardless, she feels it highlighting the hotspots of her body in scalloped penumbras of wet cloth. She remembers Billie Jean King running Bobby Riggs around the court on the marionette strings of her angle-work. She imagines the cockpit chair of Sally Ride vibrating into space strapped to a million pounds of rocket thrust.

  The room is quiet. She knows only that she is playing, that she is creeping along the staff four beats at a time. In the moment there is no telling if she’s also rising up into the ether. But she divides her mind properly for the first étude, and that allows her a foothold, a first step up onto the impossible road. Midway through, her fingers feel like boiled hot dogs. The heat radiating from them warms her face. In the last études, which become more mazelike and branch in many paths, her vision blurs and her brain aches. The air is always thin, she thinks, in the rarefied frontiers of the atmosphere. At this point only memory and dull habit guide her through the woods.

  She’s gasping for breath when she finishes. Sweat drips from her elbows to the piano bench in quick little plop plop plops that land in 3/2 time. She should stand and offer some pageantry: a bow, a sweep of the arm. Forget that, she thinks. She’s not going to stand up until she has to. She stares instead at the ring finger of her left hand. At the top left corner, where the nail meets the skin, is a tiny drop of frank red blood. Each of her fingertips is underlaid with a light purple bruise. Only she knows whether or not she has brought it off, but if the audience stands, if they applaud, how much does it matter?

  TONAL VS. ATONAL

  The argument has been put forward that atonal music has a lower bar of difficulty than tonal music because in tonal music an audience can tell when a note is out of place. The argument is that atonality is a veil. If the devil is tumbling down a staircase, will an audience take note of how many steps he misses? She thinks this is an evasion. She knows Ligeti well enough that she can hear when someone fumbles.

  The two styles present divergent philosophies. Music should comfort. Music should discomfit. People should be comforted. People should be jarred from comfort. Binaries again. Gaspard de la Nuit is rapid and bustling but still founded upon a resonation with the expectations of the mind. Invention is like going mad. Like being driven mad.

  Atonality may offer the veil, but tonality provides a blanket. Atonal: like being pinned mute and naked to the piano in front of all those people. Tonal: buoyed by the music, which has its own soul.

  Tantalus is mostly tonal. Some études are rousing, some sweeping, some surprisingly gentle given the difficulty. Even an untrained listener will have the sense of where a piece is going. But tucked in the score are chords and notes and phrases that are paths to nowhere. Anyone who knows his or her theory will pick up the cues, and even as the tenth étude ends will be left waiting for those phrases to resolve. Anyone who can’t help but wait for resolution risks waiting forever.

  QUESTIONS

  How can opposite things exist at once, even in memory? Grief and persistence. Retreat and embrace. Music and silence. With the averages tipped so far toward silence it’s a wonder a single sound can catch. Art should be more difficult. More difficult than what? Is she Liberace? She sweats enough without fur coats, but is it there, in the announcements, the challenges, the gauntlets thrown? Grief and persistence. Retreat and embrace. What could she do but alternate? There is no going forward past a certain bond of caretaking and niceties, no going back to the terrible days she misses more than anything. Sometimes she feels there is nothing more ahead. Is that why it is so comforting, this idea that she could be wrong about everything? She reminds herself there is no forward or back, only ever the one moment: now, the standing, sweat-soaked; the bow. She has pulled it off. She hasn’t. Only she knows whether or not she has brought it off, but if the audience stands, if they applaud, how much does it matter? Some will say she played perfectly.

  Oh, Charlie—what would you say? A question too foolish to even ask, but that’s exactly what she’s done.

  AS LONG AS THE LAUGHTER

  Dov is already sweating when he takes the stage. It’s not nerves, not after all these years. Adrenaline, he calls it. Or just fat, sweaty middle age. “Omaha,” he says. He shakes his head dismissively. Their response is warm enough. “Usually I say something good about the city I’m in. You’ll give me a pass on that, right?” Laughter throughout. This opener plays well everywhere but the major metros and the South. His first hard lesson learned when he started touring years ago: make fun of the South, but never in the South. Midwesterners, at least the kind that come to comedy shows, won’t trust you unless you insult them. “I mean, you guys understand. You live here. You didn’t pay me to blow sunshine up your ass.” Then into the bit suggesting if anyone ever did offer, in the literal sense, to blow sunshine up his ass, he’d do it in a heartbeat. “Really? You’re going to pass on that? It sounds fantastic.” They like the ass humor. Good thing. Plenty more of it to come.

  “Kind of a college town, Omaha. Young crowd? Young people, make some noise.”

  He holds out his microphone and the auditorium fills up with howling. He brings it back to his face to quiet them.

  “Old
people, go ‘Ah, fuck it.’”

  Laughter. He leaves a little pause. Lets them wonder what’s next.

  “You guys think sex is fun?”

  The roar this time is even louder. His ears go tinny. He quiets them again.

  “Yep,” he says. “Definitely a young crowd.”

  “Enjoy it while it lasts, kids. You’ve got maybe five years.”

  “People my age, we don’t have sex for fun. We just have sex because, I don’t know, it’s just something we’re supposed to do, like going into work, except with a much greater chance of humiliation.” He describes how he looks naked: like an unbaked loaf of sourdough. Smells like it too, he says. The latter is untrue, but the former accurate: he stood naked in front of his full-length mirror for forty-five minutes one day, brainstorming similes on a yellow legal pad. Not the most fun day, scrutinizing his terrible body, hunting for language vivid enough to convey just how ugly it was. The runner-up is that his belly looks like a bunch of pugs taped together. Too surreal, he thinks, so he’s only testing it in smaller venues.

  He’s known for this: the self-scrutiny, the guilt, the shame. His persona—a failure, an out-of-shape, hypocritical, amoral, sexually deviant divorcée—is seeded in truth, and the rest of the jokes flow forth from it, carrying the weight that makes it convincing. Because he’s laughing along, because he makes it effortless, because it’s not about them. People think it’s easy standing up there deconstructing himself for an hour. They’re right only to the extent that comedy is like a sport, no time to dwell on anything while the clock runs, just enough mindspace free to do quick assessments and make minor adjustments. When you walk off the stage it feels like you just went on a minute earlier. What gets him is the rest of the night, the bar or the hotel, where he replays the jokes in his mind and is now just the butt of them, rather than the teller. His second hard lesson: the thrill of the laughter lasts only as long as the laughter.

  “My back looks like a big cheese pizza. You know the cheap kind, with all the brown bubbles? A woman I hooked up with a few months back asked if I wanted to videotape it so we could watch it later. What? It’s going to look like two pig carcasses slapping together. Of course I don’t watch to watch it.”

  “Why would we make a record of this?”

  They’ve got the lights a little too bright on him. The sweat is coming through, though that’s normal enough. Every set has some jokes about the sweating, a preemptive strike. The auditorium out in front of him is black, except for the twilit faces in the first two rows.

  He can’t see her, the girl who will approach him that night at the bar. She’ll wait by the venue’s side door and follow his cab to TGI Friday’s. Before she heads in, she’ll sit in her car for fifteen minutes to give him some time to settle in, to text her friends about what she’s going to do, and to work up the courage she pretends to never need. He’ll notice her fashionable outfit first, just black tights and a belt around a low-cut purple blouse. And the boots, of course. She knows no man can resist expensive boots. When he sees her he’ll set eyes on her face, the youthful glow and the evocative makeup, the pageant smile, and then, not knowing she will be coming toward him, that he will soon be interacting with her, his gaze will drift downward to admire the way those tights reveal the body underneath. When she perches on the next stool over and turns that smile like a spotlight on him, he’ll think: trap set, trap sprung.

  “Buy me a drink?” she’ll say.

  “I’m the famous one,” he’ll reply. “You buy me a drink.”

  So she’ll wave the bartender over and ask for a whiskey sour for herself and a cosmopolitan for her friend. When he asks for ID she’ll shrug in feigned embarrassment: “I forgot it.” Well, go get it is the only response she’ll get.

  “Oh, hell no,” Dov will say, trap unsprung. But then she’ll smile at the bartender, take some long blinks, and ply him with a voice growing more girlish by the moment, and soon the trap is resprung, though he’s considering the metaphor of chewing his own leg off and how it would apply in this situation. Punching himself in the nuts?

  “You should just leave. I don’t like you,” he’ll say, and she’ll laugh.

  “I’m not over twenty-one,” she’ll say, leaning toward him, “but I am over eighteen.”

  Since the show went on air, there have been run-ins like this, though never one so blatant. When she puts her driver’s license down on the bar in front of him—her birth date is in 1993, making her twenty—he’s going to want to tell her this isn’t fair, what she’s doing. She’s in that tiny sliver of life where her body is like a miracle, the limbs so slender, the breasts so perky, the waist so small and perfectly shaped that her figure’s like an ultramodern work of architecture that, sculpted from some futuristic polymer, doesn’t look like it should be able to hold itself up. He’ll want to say that because she hasn’t reached the age where fat starts depositing itself like bad debt all over the body, she has power. That she’s abusing it by sitting here next to him.

  He’ll know how to take himself out of the equation: all he has to do is say no and maintain it. But he’ll also be aware of the sharkish thoughts his balls are sending to his brain: never before in his life has he had someone so young and beautiful; if she’s offering, is it wrong to take? Thousands of years of human evolution have been training him to say yes to this exact proposition.

  And there it will be on a platter, as she interrupts his thoughts by leaning forward to whisper in his ear: “I want you to fuck me.” She will get an unexpected thrill from saying this so directly. With boys from her college she lets her interest remain unsaid, lets the context ferret it out, and she’ll start to wonder if that isn’t because their desire is so overt, compared to Dov’s, whose hesitation she can sense. It’s something she will want to use in the future, this statement, as direct as knocking on a door. That is the feeling she is hunting tonight, the feeling that there are things to learn about herself that the boys at U Nebraska just can’t teach her.

  She’ll look at him. He’ll look at her, and then at his hands on the bar.

  But all that’s later. During his set the girl sits somewhere in the dark of the middle-back-left with strangers on either side of her, one hand resting a little too high to be proper on the inside of her upper thigh. She knew what she wanted to do as soon as tickets went on sale. She’s watched the first season and has what she thinks is a sense of his life. His attempts at dating: bizarre, quixotic, embarrassing. One-night stands with women who snore during sex or turn out to be truck drivers. To her, these are dispatches from the field, warnings from the future. It’s sexy to her when he derides his body, when he talks about how abject middle-aged sex is. Not one man has ever said these things to her. More so, there are hints of the truths he’s telling already creeping into her experience. When the boys she’s had, both the boyfriends and the one-offs, roll off her after five minutes of robotic hammering, she never feels exultant like women on TV, never rolls her eyes back into her head and smiles at the ceiling. She just looks up, hands crossed over her sternum, wondering what more it takes to be happy.

  He’s got her answer.

  “The closest most of us get to happiness is getting used to unhappiness.”

  “I’m unhappy all the time, but it doesn’t really bother me anymore. I’m so used to unhappiness I kind of think happiness would ruin my life. I’d be like, do you have any idea how long it took me to build that mountain of misery and self-loathing? Now I have to start over.”

  “Couldn’t be a comedian anymore. Know what kind of gigs a happy comic gets? Birthday clown.”

  “Since I turned forty my knee just hurts. Hurts to walk on it, hurts to stand on it. It’s not a medical condition—my doctor just said, ‘it happens’—and I’m used to it now. If the pain went away, here’s how it would change my life: now when I was sitting on my couch at home, I’d feel bad that I wasn’t doing any exercise. I wouldn’t go out jogging because my knee works again, but I’d know that I could. My g
uilt would increase. That’s the end result if my health improves. More guilt.”

  True about his knee, mostly. His doctor didn’t seem to care much, but he did identify the problem: Dov’s used up all the cartilage on his right side. Dov doesn’t really know how that happened: he’s never been a hiker, never played sports. He’s done plenty of walking around the city, climbed the stairs to lots of walkups. That must be enough, he supposes. He has an alternate set of jokes about the knee: How did he wear out the cartilage on one side but not the other? Has he been taking more steps with the right leg? Did he play too much hopscotch as a kid? The physical part of that joke is what sells it, hopping on one leg across the stage, but the pain is too severe to do it on the right leg anymore, and he’s started to worry about expending the last of his cartilage on the left. When that goes, he’ll walk like an old man. Then he’ll be the old dog, dragging its back legs, that needs to be put down.

  His assessment of his happiness is also not far off the mark. He wouldn’t mind being happier, but he really is used to life as is. Truth is, he only feels at ease these days around other comedians, sitting around a table at a pub, joking not about himself but about life in general. Busting someone else’s balls for a change. At this point in the tour, he and his two openers are tired of each other’s company. The road is draining. Ben heads to his room early after shows to Skype with his family. Dennis goes to trendy bars to get free drinks and pick up young women. Women have always been difficult to be around for Dov: too much grappling for control, too much deciphering of coded messages. And now with the show, the tour, and an HBO special coming up, the pressure for new material is so pressing that any time he gets to himself he spends tirelessly dissecting his own mistakes and failures, sifting out the ones that can be made funny from the ones that can’t.