SLEEPWALKER FUGUE
Albertine Todd. Pianist manquée. Young, none too wise, but inculcated well, inoculated sparingly. Though she relishes not in sunshine, daquiris, croquet, bronzed pool boys, Tuscan kitchens, reading. Though she’s badly pitted by her recent competitive upset at the prestigious Rabling Tournament, zillions lost, career down the drain, scouts mutinied, Mums taken off to some white-sand hideaway. She has exacting manners, eats only the finest foods, but has, since the age of six (that which marked her first run in with feta cheese) sneakily drank a nightcap of brine, every night. Is this why she lost? She asks herself, racks her lesser habits for the killer flaw. The official write-up remarks:
First place: Sheila Babbitt
Miss Sheila Babbitt is the Mrs. Babbitt redux, if not the more, a lush new talent whose airy rendition of “Paris 1919” was soft in the right places and toned where it ought to be toned. Miss Babbitt wore a white Moschino sweater, Mary Janes and a gold necklet to the competition. She was seen thereafter consorting with a flushed Tex von Württemberg, brother to the runner-up, in the green room. Oh, the places she’ll go!
Second place: Bon von Württemberg
Miss Bonita von Württemberg wowed our judges with an inimitable performance of Fauré’s Dolly suite. Bizarrely yet brilliantly chosen was the unstoppably sudden and wonderfully irreverent switch to a somehow nearby glockenspiel for the berceuse. Miss von Württemberg has the spasmodic elan of an innovator, whom we believe will cleave a recess all to herself in the faraway realm of musique concrète.
Third place: Albertine Todd
Miss Albertine Todd seems drowned in her own abundant talent. A frenzied rendition of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue drew fervor and left our Director Oliver Rake pallid and breathless. This pallor found its counterpart in Miss Todd’s countenance, white as sheet throughout. The troubled talent smote the keys so hard it was as though she sought to lop her own arms off. This young lady has some ill will. We say, rethink your animus, Miss Todd. And get some sun.
No draft of brine, desalinated or not, can numb away the pain of third place. Literally: it’s a dull metacarpal throb from how hard she welted the keys. No one’s heard an aria da capo like that before. No one else could muster that force, she thinks, in their lifetime, nor the next. Then why’d she lose? A poorly rated analyst hired by Mums thinks the question is stupid. He says that resolutely, looks her levelly in the eye, jowls, flaps, sideburns, pockmarks, festoons all ablaze in the harsh blue fluorescence of his dingy office. Nothing doing for Albertine if he can’t answer it. She refuses to go again after that. Besides, no Lacanian hand has ever made its way to the small of a back with paternal benevolence. She wallows in unproductive dictums, poses unproductive questions. Who would fardels bear? Nothing lasts. Life is pointless, nasty, brutish and short. Even beeswax candles gutter, she tells herself. You are a third placer, pat and unimpressive.
This was when the somnambulism began. Every few nights she winds up in the streets. Mums went larping in the Antilles, left her in the beautiful brownstone with just the help. Still plays tack piano well and often. All she can play now. She still has the longest fingers in her preppy cadre, and they still lend her ragtime an eminence that the Astoria girls cannot surpass. On the least severe nights Albertine wakes Doris the Maid with a slurred Joseph Lamb number. Doris could never brook that junk. Like Josephine Baker, says Doris, then makes a spitting noise into her hand, pretends to fling the spit. Puts one hand on Albertine’s shoulder. Moonlight puddles in the Steinway sheen. Doris, gently shaking Albertine, can’t resist the urge to inveigh aloud against That Nasty Work. Albertine comes awake slowly. Doris’ gentle shakes break the skim of sleep, and the forlorn protégée slips into a contrapuntal melody, long thin arms cascading down the keyboard, brown-haired head downward hung. “It’s a process,” she sleepily mumbles. “It’s like Steve—Steve—Steve—at the Reichstag——"
Doris wants her to take a shot of limoncello on the hour, every hour, before bed. Clinicians are touchy, she says. Literally. Albertine proffers a solemn nod. But Mrs. Todd insists on her daughter, perfect, never to wilt, seeing someone. Sleep is foundational to success. One goddamn third place hasn’t ruined her rep. But Mrs. Todd knows that’s not true. That’s why she’s prone beneath a cabana, right now. Gimcrack remedies are just that, says Mrs. Todd. Why’d we send you to an analyst? Pass me another mudslide, Renaldo, she says through the phone. My daughter? She needs to see an expert. Then describes Renaldo’s pecks, his ceceo, mistakes “aquiline” for a recondite variant of “aquamarine.” All this in her gossipy tenor strained to withhold its tremolo, lest she corroborate that her daughter is on the brink of an irrecoverable spiral.
“She has a fine disposition,” says Doris into the next phone call, this one to the sleep doctor’s office, “and a lively elan. She is—um—ergh—she was, for a long time—the best young lady pianist in the borough, technically at least. Then she went off on this—this—this tawdry bender. Ragtime gup all day long. I mean, how do you handle musical minds?”
“Why do I need to know this?” a forthright secretary asks back. “Ted is the best there ever was. He will fix your charge.”
Theodore “Ted” Truman. Accredited somnologist, early fifties. Pioneered a new type of polysomnography, overnight tests, where he sleeps, too. Excellent zygomatic structure, high and tight. Hunter eyes, they’re called, set in dark sockets. Speech impediment, withered frame, flannel shirts. Writes in a little black book while Albertine waxes on about her sickness:
Patient Log: Albertine Todd
Somnambulism begun after so-called terrible loss at prestigious piano competition. No insomnia. Skittish but commands herself with an actively subdued excellence. Describes horrible sleepwalking, bad dreams that wake her, foreign languages, surmises Hebrew, freckled like a pinto bean. Speaks tersely and favors Saxon cognates. I see a meanness in her eyes and her phrases, simple astute clauses, punctuated with pithy discourse markers, no in-betweenness, no equivocation, as it were. She tells me about Bach, about her mom in a voice clear and dewy like early April. Says she’s afraid of hypertension but not showing symptoms. Asks do women her age usually sleepwalk? How long have I had a private practice? Do I long for a look of recognition, one great crash out in a clapboard motel? Violent tendencies, self-reported. No bedwetting. Obviously sadist. I think I love her. This is January. Imogen comes in to top off the girl’s water. Albertine? Name meaningless. Poem unlimited. Imogen has lost her luster against this new one’s charme. I give her the usual platitudes and she parries them with poise. Has hardly drank alcohol. Septa capacious. I tell her we have a player piano at home. She shifts in her seat, makes to pluck the very pen from—
Imogen is used to these antics. They’re rote. Calls the house, no one picks up. Calls again, Doris says hi. Imogen says they’re doing the polysomnography tonight, no actigraphy, your daughter will be home for church. We send a car. “I’m the maid,” says Doris. They hang up.
The phone rings again. “—She doesn’t want her brine?”
He breaks it down to her in his Buick, floors it. He’s keyed up, always is, wants to show her a theremin. She could care less for it, she says, the mere ancillary impedimenta. She could stop time on a fortepiano. She has theories about music. Her dreams are mostly formless, sightless, set in empty lots with low and dark skies. But she hears them. She hears music played in ways that waking life has just not yet breached. Something closest to the chorale, she says, then laughs. I have books, he says, agape. I know what you mean. Auditory dreams. His furtive masterwork, more an art than science, formulates sonic sleep beyond the hypnagogic.
They fly down the freeway as the day darkens, break out of the city, toward his bedroom town. It’s a Victory house, he says, stark yet nubile, simple, unpretentious décor. You’re frenetic, she says. You’re a kook. You have no idea what these dreams are like. I mean alterations to the ursatz. She glares dreamily at Ted in the rearview. His knuckles are white on the wheel. To put it simply for you, she says, my dreams present, for the first time, a genuine theory of tonal language. Music as organic coherence, pah. She makes the same spitting move that Doris makes. I do agree with Schenker about the masses, about people. Eternally disordered, unwinding chaotically in empty, animal fashion. My words, said first by him. I have a lot of ill will, she adds, but not for you. He just smiles, starts to stutter, cannot look her levelly in the eye. They arrive at his place, pull up the gravel driveway.
He wants to know why she’s so bummed about that competition. They’re sitting on a corduroy sofa, the color of zucchini, thighs apart, tube TV off, radio dimmed, examining the wall. It’s not a heritage home. The bathroom is the color of celadon. Albertine finds a pumice stone in the sink. She come back to Ted, and he’s got his socks off, preening his sweater snags like a big mantis, ready with that question. “Why do you care so much about Rabling?” He’s right to ask it, she feels. There are textbooks piled up against one wall, on sleep. Awards here and there allege his genius. She answers. Rabling was The Event of my life so far, my lived life, all our lives, the piano girls. Not an annual thing. Held once each year for the seventeen-year-old women’s set, only that set, internationally scouted. I wanted them to say that I was truly gifted. Not just technically good. All I care about is being gifted. Since the age of four or five at least, when I first dreamt of music. Nothing else interests me. I wanted to win because in my dreams, in my formless, sounding dreams, the unplayable fantasias that I heard nonstop always echoed amid the unmistakeable acoustics of the Edmond Concert Hall, crescendo into the standing ovation that crowns Rabling’s first place. I’ve sat in there for seventeen years, listened to the dross, dreamt every night of perfect music. So what my shrewdest peers parsed Fux before me? I had the key. It was a long gesticulation, but it would come to fruition at Rabling. When I slid into the development of that Bach fugue, I almost thought I had it. The dream sound was right around the corner. I launched into my own counter-exposition extempore, unhallowed ground. But it didn’t come. Augmentations conformed. New methods collapsed into histrionics, specious displays of irreverence. It was cute at best. Yes, Ted, if music is language, it was like I tried to describe the tenor of a dream. Something I had to get out of me on that stage that I could not. Now you see, I dream of drab fughettas, ricercars, nothing near extraordinary. No wonder I sleepwalk. You’ll see it tonight, when you put those see-through suction cups on my temples. Maybe, if you had a stethoscope, you’d hear it, too.
Ted tells her he does. He has a laboratory in his bedroom. Speaks to her in a language she understands. You have a subtle glamor, he says, and reaches for a tress. You have a lunar allure. She tries to fall into him, the tufts of his Woolrich, but he won’t allow it, holds her back with one bony hand. You’re right, she says, and stands up to pace. I’ve never done anything like this before, you know. Girls come and go here, huh? He nods, helpless. She picks up Sleep Medicine Review 4 from the floor, thumbs it. I’ll chart everything, he says. I could look at your GABAA receptors with a quick MRS, run everything ventrolateral. It’s cool. I’ll see the electricity in your brain. I want, he adds, to hear the music.
Patient Log: Albertine Todd
Somnambulism begun after so-called terrible loss at prestigious piano competition. No insomnia. Skittish but commands herself with an actively subdued excellence. Describes horrible sleepwalking, bad dreams that wake her, foreign languages, surmises Hebrew, freckled like a pinto bean. Speaks tersely and favors Saxon cognates. I see a meanness in her eyes and her phrases, simple astute clauses, punctuated with pithy discourse markers, no in-betweenness, no equivocation, as it were. She tells me about Bach, about her mom in a voice clear and dewy like early April. Says she’s afraid of hypertension but not showing symptoms. Asks do women her age usually sleepwalk? How long have I had a private practice? Do I long for a look of recognition, one great crash out in a clapboard motel? Violent tendencies, self-reported. No bedwetting. Obviously sadist. I think I love her. This is January. Imogen comes in to top off the girl’s water. Albertine? Name meaningless. Poem unlimited. Imogen has lost her luster against this new one’s charme. I give her the usual platitudes and she parries them with poise. Has hardly drank alcohol. Septa capacious. I tell her we have a player piano at home. She shifts in her seat, makes to pluck the very pen from—
It's not neurological, so to speak, he tells her. It has to do with her blood. Cardiovascular. The sleep switch, that works fine. Her limbic system is sharp, her breathwork is like art. It’s in her heart, he says, the wakefulness. “That rules out hypermotor epilepsy. It’s the hypothalamus, I mean. It’s mere stress. You walked a long way. Do you remember any of it? I trailed you for a few miles in the car. You took off the suction cups, tied your shoes, coat, hat, struggled with the screen door but solved it in the end. Your eyes were open. Your lips were shut. Faintly yes you were humming. I had a melodion hooked up just for fun but did not hear a peep. If you want, I could feed an EKG of yours into some software. But that would be mere rhythm. The heart’s ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk-ka-thunk-ka-thunk, yada yada, you get what I mean. The workaday pulse. Of course it’s these phantasmagoric fantasias of yours that aberrate it, but those don’t compute to the waking mind. I mean, yes, you’re right, you can’t describe the tenor of a dream, its condensations and collisions, vectors overlain, through the one-by-one brick-a-brac of everyday words, subjects verbs and objects sliding into tidy place. We’re confined. You can’t describe a dream. You can get close, like you did on stage at Rabling, but after all, well. Of course you can’t put it to notation.”
“Why do you think I choose Joseph Lamb?” she asks. You know r-a-g-t-i-m-e is anagram for m-i-g-r-a-t-e. My mind tells me to flee, and I confuse the signal. Scott Joplin, Euday Bowman, Pee Wee Hunt? These are easy pieces. I can handle Bach, Schubert, whomever. I’m a violinist, too, you know. Vivaldi. I don’t think rags are profound,” she says, “or very elegant. In fact, I think they’re facile. I think my brain is telling me one thing, get out of here, and I’m misunderstanding it all, putting it together in the wrong order. Like the tournament. Rabling Tournament. I play one thing but mean something else entirely. EKGs like sentences, pum-pum-pum. Rightward on an idiot wind.”
He corrects her when they’re talking over coffee, later. EKGs go leftward. She’s wearing his shorts. “I’m not going home,” she says. Don’t take me home. He won’t, though they’re soon back in the Buick. When questioned later, Ted will rightly allege that they had no real destination in mind. Yes, aside from a motel, but that’s not really a destination, is it?
IMOGEN: He is the spitting image of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Halcyon on a highway. It’s always been. She wasn’t going home. They end up at a dive, straddling the city and the country. He’s never done this before, he says. His turn. They dance in their room, number twenty-nine. Albertine contents herself with a buggy bobbing of the legs, a pendular swaying of the hips, those iconic arms held resolutely behind her back. Ted is sort of insectoid shirtless, goosesteps up and down the carpet aisle, flaunts thin white scars, cigarette burn insignia on his shirtless torso. “Beast of Burden” playing from his shitty speaker. Goosesteps back into the bathroom, returns pantsless, mouths along to pretty—pretty—pretty—girls, pretty—pretty—pretty—pretty—pretty—pretty—girl, pretty—pretty, such a pretty—pretty—pretty—girl. I put my whole soul in sleep science, he says. Ever since I was six. I had very vivid dreams. You are Albertine, a swift muddy river. The first rush of spring thaw water therein, harbinger of new methods. They kiss, enraptured, and the spot between Albertine’s shoulder-blades shivers. Ted tastes like smoke, frozen vales and suede coats. When they fall asleep tonight in yellowed sheets, his toes will keep a tempo lost to time. Stretto. This Schenker quote: in nature, sound is a vertical phenomenon. Metaphor, paradigm. Words collapse in one. For him? Albertine. For her? Modal mutation. Unrenderable in script. Just like love. They mount up together, cliquish and uncompromising. All night Mick Jagger coos the album’s coda. Their dreams are two halves of the same symphony. Dovetailed and breathless, Albertine sighs. Sub specie aeternitatis, she feels this fugue is right.
Illustrations by Max Shoham.
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