Syncopation
A Monologue by Ella Veres
1.
About ten days ago I fell sick with the flu. First I had a dream: I was accompanied by a Spanish poet who didn't look anything like a poet or my type. He was a version of The Rock on the Walking Tall posters I saw around town. Muscular neck, arms, suntanned bulky man, though fine bones under smooth skin, noble warrior face.
He was gesticulating, "Oh, man, going to your home, what for? What? Your brother has problems? What a bummer! Oh, man, this is such a lame idea!"
From within my parents' house, from its shady porch, Mihai, my younger brother came towards me; but he looked like Jason, the son of some friends. His parents complain he smokes weed, he lost his driver's license and is messing up his life, a high school kid. But he was my brother, though he was shy Jason, blushing. [Surprised, moved.] He came towards me and hugged me, asking for advice, hopeful that I'd say the right things and he'd figure his life out. He hugged me! My brother never hugged me; he was always posing, a sleek guy he was, and always made bad jokes and played power games. I was indeed the older sister as he quietly hugged me, my head on his shoulder, his arm around me.
"Sell the house," the Spaniard decreed. I was smiling. What does he know about us? Nothing! How can he be so preposterous, giving advice to unknown people! Okay, he had the hots for me and I for him, but preposterous! Though it was great advice: sell the house and everything will be solved. The root of all evils was this house we grew up in, we were beaten in this house as kids, we watched our parents shout at each other, hate each other, drunk father, shouting mother, we never had a corner of our own. I wanted badly to have my room. I turned the laundry room with its stove and cauldron for boiling the laundry into my room, but my mother shouted at me, "It's unhealthy! It has a cement floor! You'll catch pneumonia, rheumatism, like aunt Iulia! It's a cold room for a child!" And now the Spaniard says I should sell the house! I smiled. The house is huge, has large rooms that under communism were divided in separate apartments and rented out, until my father, against my mother's wish, bought the whole house with its tenants. My mother got the tenants out, she struggled until she got apartment flats from the municipality for them. We could sell the house by the room. But the Spaniard said, "Sell it brick by brick." Brick by brick! There is an enormous amount of bricks in that house! Profitable. The walls are thick like a fortress, double row of bricks, to keep it cool in the summer and warm in the winter. A lot of bricks in that house. “Tear it down brick by brick.” [Curses.] May death tear apart this house we grew up in! May it turn into nothing! Flat land, no grass on its gray flatness, no dandelions, nothing, barren like the skin of an elephant, nothing, clear the earth from that house!
Then a new beginning, let the grass grow over it. Driving thru the neighborhood there will be no, "Here is the house I grew up in." No. Silence. Annihilation. Swallowed by the earth. Silence. Nothingness.
My brother Jason smiled as if that was the solution to all our troubles, start all over again! He hugged me and he was crying, or I was crying, shaking, his shoulders convulsing, or we were both crying.
I woke up asking myself, What date is today? When is Easter coming? Isn't this the time when my brother died last year? A luminous day. The first day of spring.
I don't remember numbers, years, dates, but my body remembers for me.
Wake up, time to mourn.
2.
About the same time, the news came they found Spalding Gray, the monologuist of Swimming to Cambodia, floating down the river in his corduroys; his brother recognized his clothing. As you may know, he, disappeared in winter around Christmas or so, and well, they found him now in early March. When he disappeared it was all over the media but I don't watch TV. My host watches TV all the time, the quiz shows, the murder series she watches, and Oprah. I watch a bit on my way to the kitchen, but I don't sit. She finds the cosmetic surgery, the makeovers fabulous.
I was on my way to the studio, to watch a composer write one more song for my show, a musical I'm working on. I stopped in the drug store to buy sanitary pads, it was that time, and I saw Spalding Gray's face on a magazine cover. I thought, Oh, his new monologue is out. Publicity. Scoundrel. Then I caught a glimpse of the title: Disappeared In The Cold Winter Night. I got closer,--I don't care about magazines, they make me unhappy reminding me that my glamorous success is nowhere in sight, on the contrary the bleak misery chokes us,--so I got closer and I read how indeed this was his last, successful, suicide attempt. He was for the last two years in a pitfall of depression. He had a car accident in Ireland in the summer of 2001, then September 11 happened, then he couldn't recover from the accident. His hip broken, his forehead caved in, they put him on the wrong medication. Spalding was jumping in the river all the time from ferry boats but didn't manage to enter the silent water bed. A policeman here, a fellow traveler there would rescue him. From ferryboats, bridges, he tried to reunite with the water.
He just went into the black cold night and did not come back. His fans hoped he was still out there, gathering material.
I was in the drug store wailing, scaring the shop attendant, as I was paying for the magazine.
I met Spalding Gray in the spring of 2001. He came down to Louisiana where I was in graduate school. He talked in his monologue about his family life and then he taught a workshop to wanna-be Spaldings. I distinguished myself with a story about doing the laundry at the campus Laundromat and a macho guy swindling me of my few coins and how I got back to him. He was impressed, Spalding Gray. We went for a beer and we talked about accepting the increasing loneliness that comes together with personal story telling. He gave me his phone number and his agent's e-mail address, and whatnot, so that when I come to the big city I come to his workshops and whatnot. Well, when I arrived in NYC, fall 2001, I contacted his agent, but his workshop was over-booked, she said, and then she said she'd forward my e-mail to him—I was asking for a recommendation letter for INS to attach to my green card application. Could he write on paper as to how impressed he was with my storytelling ability. He never responded. I read in the papers that he had an accident, but I thought it was nothing major, just him being paranoid as usual, and I said oh, well, just another hypocrite scoundrel. He gives his phone number around when on tour, but doesn't really mean to help, which is fine. If he doesn't want to help an orphan, that means I can handle it myself. I'll show him! Indeed I got my green card approved without his help.
Well, this last fall I saw an announcement that he was developing his new monologue at PS 122. I meant to go, just to say, Hello, how are you? I'm still here. But I never made it.
Now he disappeared. All these three years I was pissed off at him, and I was calling him a scumbag, while the poor guy was going nuts.
To me Spalding Gray is family. I say monologues, he says monologues, so we are family. Please! I'm not one of those who want to share his fame.
Anyway, I couldn’t control myself when I went to the music studio. My ex-husband also committed suicide. Once he too went in the black dark cold winter night, right before Christmas, and was away for awhile until I found him and bathed him and fed him and medicated him and after awhile, I left him. I couldn't stand anymore such variety of suicide attempts.
About four springs ago I received a phone call saying he finally managed to die, gassed himself, been in a coma for eight days and died on Easter.
I was embarrassed to be upset in the music studio. I was supposed to work, but I told him about Spalding and my ex-, and the musician told me, "I know what you mean. I was married to three women who often committed suicide. Not my fault." "But why, Martin, why are you punishing yourself?" He shrugged his shoulders, and we wrote a melody for me.
I am the happiest when he writes melodies to my lyrics. I enjoy seeing him bang the piano, and the melody coming out of him. He asks me if I like it; I do. It's erotic. It's erotic and harmony and ideal. It's like Spalding who was looking for the perfect moment while he was Swimming to Cambodia. Being bathed in music is a perfect moment. It goes back decades ago. I am not a musician, but I've always loved music, and I've listened to music, and I was reading Maria Magdalena Bach's memories, or my ex- was reading them,--have I said he was a musician? Yes…--and in the book Bach's wife was in the bedroom with the children sleeping, many children, and Bach, under the moonlight, was playing the piano. He wanted to be with God and that's how he was with God, by playing the piano he was with God and she felt embraced, happy, blissfully happy.
I understood.
I don't remember if such episode occurred in my life too, with my ex-, but I know that later on, after he died, as if it had happen to me too, as if I was mythically happy only at the times he played the piano under the moonlight while I was slumbering in bed.
So I write musicals now.
I want to make it up, maybe. Imagine I write it with him, maybe he is Martin. He aged and had a successful career and he is Martin and he’s with me. I didn’t leave him behind. He’s Martin.
3.
A week ago it was the first perfect spring day, sunny, breezy. I was cooped in the writers' lab on the third floor at the theater.
Downstairs in the auditorium a cast party was going on. My friend, the composer, was alertly looking for THE PARTY. It was not happening though; it was a cheap pasta and chips party, people trying too hard to have fun to really have it. He left in the middle of it. I was glad it didn't work out for him.
We had a smaller birthday party up on the third floor. We had cake and wine and well, the writers left but I stayed behind, working with the actors on one of my plays. David, a fellow writer who knows I'm broke, took me aside before leaving, and asked me if I wanted to join him at a piano recital, and I said sure. I'll go to any shows in NYC. I'm starving to go to shows in NYC.
So he told me where the recital was and when to be there, and I went on with my rehearsal. When we were done I cleared the room from the party leftovers. There was a bottle of white wine, still 1/3 full, on the shelf. I had this thought, I won't leave the bottle behind. I'll take it with me and put it in my fridge. So I duct taped it, and I went to the recital, which was in a near by church. Well, when I arrived at the church the wine was dripping thru the bag. I went to the bathroom, dried my bag with paper towels, worried that it would be smelly in the concert hall. I put the wine bottle on the floor, to make the cleaning crew happy.
In the hallway. David was not there yet. Awkward. On the wall the musician's pictures. A smiling man at different ages. Dark suit, playing the piano.
They had wine for sale there, but no one sold it, so I grabbed an empty plastic cup and went back into the bathroom. I poured a glass for myself and drank a bit, then waited for David, still nowhere in sight. I looked at the walls some more at the smiling face of a happy musician with a life in music. Mine is dead. Kaput. When he had his first recital he hid in the bathroom to avoid people congratulating him. His mother scolded him that ever since he was with me, his musicianship deteriorated. She was no musician herself, but hated me. Well, he's dead now. Today she behaves as if I'm still married to him.
Anyway, I asked the box office guy if my friend called, he said not yet, but he could give me a comp ticket and I could go in and not miss a beat. Sure, great.
Ticket in hand I'm about to enter the hall, but the ticket inspector says she can't let me in with the cup. I haven't drunk a glass of wine in a decade, or it feels like it, but I go to the bathroom and in an anti-waste swig the rest of the bottle, and drink the cup, and it's quite an amount.
Ever since my brother died I refuse to drink. But today it felt like party time spring, and here is the man in black giving a concert! I drank the whole wine and entered the music hall, seated myself in the last row and liked what I saw. A man playing the piano delicately and intelligently, wise, cracking jokes.
He made me finally understand musicians: he said when you are a pianist, you don't get into fistfights, oh, no! You run! Bye! No, thank you! I've got to practice! Resilience. No provocations.
He lived a long, rich life with ups and downs, talked about poverty during the Depression era, about ragtime, and I was getting tipsy like a sailor.
David came and we moved to the front row. More tipsy.
What was the matter? The music hall? The man playing the piano? The patent leather shoes he had, his face, lively and clever? His gestures? The life I left behind, the theater halls in Bucharest, the shows I went to there? The audience was responsive, but these were not folks who would shout Bravissimo, or Encore! These were folks that have been civilized/tamed and feared their own feelings.
I was tipsier and tipsier. I was crying, shouting when I felt like it. I had a ball. At break I told David I was tipsy and he said he figured that out for himself. He then got busy looking for his wallet, was positive he'd lost it thru his torn jacket pocket, he showed me. Leaning on the walls, I crawled to the bathroom, had enough of his drama queen antics.
Then more concert, more intense emotion, more crying. Why is it that some can live until old age and be happy with their lives and bodies, thinning hair and sagging cheeks and wrinkles, while others commit suicide? Why is it that I am here while they are in the ground? They should be on stage. Final applause. The victory of human spirit.
The music man invited us to chat in the lobby, and I said a loud, enthusiastic, Yes, you betcha! I want to march with men like you. You make me look forward to old age. You are a miracle and this is how it should be. I'm proud of being an artist when I watch you at work!
In the foyer I sat on a sofa, careful not to embarrass David, fearing I'd vomit. They entertained about songs and celebrities and whatnot, unheart-felt conversation, so I kept to myself. Well, maybe we'll get to talk, maybe not. I want to badly, but I am not to be trusted. I am tipsy. And often things that I want badly don't seem worth it after awhile. Stay put!
But in the end the musician was running out of admirers, so I waved my hand and he came towards me and I stood up and I was crying and apologizing I was tipsy like a bum, I drank two glasses and I don't usually drink. “Advise me, please, on how to make my composer happy, not to look for the perfect party somewhere else, but find it within his soul. How to teach him to be like you, enjoy life? Oh, your rag time show is so Americana. I'm doing my best to fit in here. I don't know where I go wrong and why I have such a miserable time…" He was squeezing my hands and I was crying and he said I'm doing very well, I was there, I fit in, and squeezed more.
He had to go and dress; his make up was red like brick-dust red to counteract the lime light, his collar a bit dirty from it.
I was glad I met him. I made a fool of myself, but then this is how it was meant to be, what's to fuss about? I'm not David, who fusses about everything.
We left. He was in a hurry to go to the subway because his suede jacket was sensitive to the raindrops, he fussed. It was his daddy's probably. The raindrops but freckled its sleeve, that's all. I had on me a suede jacket too, but didn't get all agitated. Harmless raindrops!
"You scared the guy with your strong emotions," he nagged me. I apologized, and didn't, at the same time. “You wanted him to solve your existential problem, how to fit in here! And your other nebulous wishes scared him! Luckily my presence reassured him." I felt awful and felt not. I said “Well, I'm sorry, and I'm sorry not.”
"You were like those beggars in the street asking for help. Will you help a beggar on the street or will you run away?"
"But I don't have money. Those who have and ignore them, are not good Christians. They are not at all good Christians," I waged my head so very very tipsy and cried. "They are not good Christians; they shouldn't think they are good Christians."
David left me behind, ran away to his train as I was scrambling the coins for a token out of my pocket.
So very very tipsy in the rain.
4.
That night the flu spread in me. I had a terrible sore throat. Nothing damning, but it was horrible pain. Iron grip pain. I could not speak, I was shivering with cold and hot, I could not swallow my spit, I was about to die. I feared I'd die suffocated by my own spit. Many people choke in their sleep with their own tongue.
I woke up in the night, Think of it, if this is just a mere flu, think of it, from now on arthritis kicks in, and hip replacements, think of it! A life of pain. Better shoot me dead, honey, I don't want a life of misery. I want to die if I'll be in continuous pain.
Then, for the first time, I finally understood why they kill themselves. My mind was not racing anymore to find a reasonable answer to Why? Why is he killing himself? He says he loves us. What have I done wrong? Why? I'm doing my best! Why are you such a coward? Fight for your life! You life just once! And the child, what about the child? I hate you. How can you do this to my child and to me? Why do you kill yourself when we love you?
They were in awful pain. In dark hopelessness. Just finish it! I'm no use to anyone in this pain.
They jumped into the water to end it all. I'd do it myself for sure. My shoulder bones ache lately. Maybe cancer? Torture. Better finish it all.
I hang in just for my son, who tucked me in, brought me hot tea, suffered my coughing and sneezing. Smiled.
Just for my son.
They couldn't bare it anymore. They drank themselves to death, they jumped into the river, gassed themselves. Didn't get into fistfights with life.
It's fine with me.
Fine with me.
[Blackout.]