I said thanks, but I wasn’t interested.

 

There was a brief pause, like one of those uncanny moments in a storm when the winds cancel themselves and everything holds its breath: then the monologue continued. He said he understood, because life pulls us in all directions. His own daughter Ingeborg was a good example of such an incapacity to reach a clear decision. He explained how she had shown an early penchant for science but had surprised them by announcing she wouldn’t go to university because she’d decided either to be a ballerina or an actress, imagine, Joachim said, a ballerina or an actress, the two most clichéd notions it is possible for a young girl to have, but what can you do? So they praised her, even though they didn’t mean it, but then just when they’d reconciled themselves to supporting an unsuccessful unmarried daughter for an indeterminate number of years while she spiraled into depression and self-loathing, Ingeborg announced she was going to apply to be a retail salesperson at Manor Basel Department Store, even though that store had nothing to recommend it, except apparently a cashier who worked there, who was very handsome and always looked sad when he handed you the receipt; but as soon as she’d announced that, Ingeborg had another idea: she declared her true passion was to be a licensed upholsterer. I have no idea where she got that notion, Joachim said, and in fact it turned out there is no such thing as a licensed upholsterer, but that didn’t matter because then she changed her mind again and said she wanted to be a psychiatric home health worker, whatever that is; and then a few days later she was sure she wanted to be a petroleum engineer, probably because she saw an advertisement on television showing a woman in a yellow hard hat pointing at an oil well; and then she wanted to be an auditor for government agencies, even though she could not specify which government agencies, or even clearly define what an auditor does; and then a nurse anaesthetist, even though she was incapable of describing even the most basic elements of that profession, short of saying anaesthetists use what she called “gas masks”; and each time she announced one of these capricious notions, Irmgard said something like, Oh, that’s a wonderful choice! or, Oh, how interesting, how promising! or, Oh, good idea, Ingy! but still Ingeborg didn’t settle on anything, she just went on and on, announcing more and more ridiculous ideas: she wanted to be a family psychological counselor, she said, and then a police prosecutor assigned to domestic disputes in the St. Alban neighborhood, and that’s where we live, so she was making fun of us, because sometimes Irmgard and I disagree on certain subjects, like for example whether Ingeborg actually ever meant anything she said, or if Ingeborg was ever sincere even once in her life, but Irmgard and I never argue violently, so it is preposterous to think anyone would call the police to stop us from arguing, we are perfectly reasonable people, or at least I am, so Ingeborg was just being malicious, making fun of us, and then she said she wanted to be a protocol enforcer for domestic restraint orders in the St. Alban neighborhood, such unbelievable preposterous rude nonsense, as if the police would ever need to be involved in our domestic issues, and through all this Irmgard kept praising her, Oh, wonderful idea, Ingy! Oh, that would be great, Ingy! although after a while her praise seemed, shall we say, lukewarm, until I finally said, Irmgard, please! It is perfectly clear our daughter is being insincere, she is being fundamentally disrespectful, she is making these things up, she is making fun of us, she is being aggressively dishonest, she is condescending to us, and in fact she is lying at our faces: she is bone idle, she has no intention whatsoever of doing anything except freeloading off us into the hazy future when we will be reduced to signing our pension checks over to her in exchange for our dinners, she’s just pulling our levers, she’s pressing our buttons, she’s pressing on our buttons, she’s pressing on us, she is, wait, Samuel, what is that expression?

 

Pushing your buttons, I offered.

 

That’s stupid, he said, you don’t push a button, you button a button, well, we’re talking about emotional buttons, so maybe you press those, but no, it doesn’t make any sense. It must be wrong: You push on my buttons, he pushes on her buttons, they push on their buttons… It is a typical example of how awful language is.

 

At that moment the waiter reappeared. Joachim didn’t even look at the menu. He told the waiter he wanted sirloin and salad, nothing but sirloin and salad, no sauce on the sirloin, no dressing on the salad, any kind of salad, it didn’t matter, but no dressing, and no side dishes, no vegetables, no appetizer, and above all no garnishes, no cute little sprigs of parsley, no whimsical sprinkle of oregano, and for that he would pay anything they wanted, provided they did not tell him what the price would be, or offer different sizes of sirloin, or other cuts of meat, or ask how he wanted his steak cooked, salt and pepper were okay, but he did not want to be offered parmesan on his salad, the waiter was not to come at him with an enormous pepper grinder, he did not want to be visited halfway through the meal with some awful question like, Is everything okay? and he did not want dessert, and he would not change his mind about not wanting dessert, and he did not want the waiter to slip the dessert menu on the table with a sly smile, he wanted nothing but sirloin steak and salad, and the waiter was not to hover over him as if he was an orchid, and not to watch him discreetly from some corner as if he was a prince. The waiter was to serve him and then go away.

 

Joachim stared at the table with a blank expression. The waiter kept silent, watching him. Irmgard and I ordered, and when the waiter was out of range Joachim resumed. Language, he said, is like when the only suit in your closet is a badly fitted, dumb-looking suit that you should have thrown away years ago. But you have to wear it, you have no choice. Language is like that, he said. It is awful, it’s ridiculous, it makes us all look stupid. But we’re cowards, we don’t speak up, we praise language all the time, Oh, language, we say, It’s so flexible, so beautiful. Ah, the great poets, ooh, Vergil, eee, Milton, aah, Goethe, but if you just stop for a moment, Shakespeare, I forgot him, wow Shakespeare, he is amazing, but if you just stop and consider how shabby language is, Rilke, too, I forgot Rilke, my oh my Rilke, so swoony, so deep and dreamy, so we praise language all the time, but if you stop for just one minute, you see how embarrassing language is. You’re just ashamed to be seen in public using language, but you have no choice, you have to go on saying things like, She pushed on our buttons. It’s horrible, but you struggle on, twisting and turning in your tight, badly tailored Language Suit with its 1970s style super-wide lapels and garish zigzag stripes and big shiny plastic buttons, language buttons, buttons you have to push on. Language is not the beautiful miracle that makes us human, blah blah. Language is ill-suited, there, see? I am forced to make a joke out of my own idea, I have to wear the ill-fitted suit, language has forced me to make fun of myself, my idea is wrapped around me like a bad suit. Clearly, there is nothing elegant about language. If you think language is beautiful and sublime then you are fooling yourself. Sure, yes, a couple of people used language well, but that just proves my point. For everyone else, for the billions of people who have to live with language, it’s like wearing humiliating, grotesque, clown-like clothing. So one day Ingeborg came downstairs for her free breakfast, first of her three free meals of the day, and as she was about to tell us her latest lie, I said, No! This is it, time’s up! No more nonsense! We are your loving parents, yes, but we are not patsies, I am not a buffoon, I am not a waggle doll, do not treat me as a punching bottle, stop pressing onto my buttons! Go back upstairs. You have twenty-four hours to decide what you really want, otherwise no free food. Well, she ran upstairs crying, and then poof! as if by magic, an hour later she came down to breakfast in her business suit and said she was going to get application materials from the Swiss International Law School, she was going to be a lawyer even if law school was, as I immediately pointed out to her, crushingly achingly mind-numbingly boring, even if law was a profession best suited, oh my god, suited again, suited, what can I do, see what I mean? anyway a profession best suited for people with drastically limited mental capacities, still she was going to do it because she would have a stable life, and, as I also immediately pointed out to her, she would be able to attract the affections of the handsome boy who worked as a cashier in the Manor Basel Department Store. That made her especially angry for some reason, but she did go and apply, and she was accepted, of course, because she’s brilliant, and now she’s a typical miserable student in law school. And that is how my daughter resolved the struggle in her life, may we all be so lucky, may we all be so determined, may we all put our noses onto the grindstone of life and grind them down into flat plates of bone.

 

He scratched his nose, pondering what he’d said, and then he launched back in, saying Ingeborg’s struggle to find a profession was similar to my own struggle to decide whether to accept his offer, even though actually, he said, I had been given only two choices, the semester residency and the generous year-long residency, whereas Ingeborg had at least claimed to be pondering many choices, and also the parallel wasn’t exact because I had never, so he assumed, seriously pondered becoming a ballerina or an actress, although he did not mean to presume, because such things happen all the time and are perfectly ordinary, but probably I hadn’t thought of taking up a career in a third-rate department store just to chat up a handsome cashier who seemed sad and lonely but probably just had indigestion, although if I ever had a desire to do such a thing that would be perfectly okay, but he, Joachim, hadn’t really thought I might like boys or even cashiers, at least until just now, and really he hadn’t thought it at all, even just now, because he had only just meant to make a parallel between Ingeborg’s incapacity to choose and my own stubborn, or well, careful lack of commitment. He hadn’t intended to imply anything about me, a person whom he hardly knew, well, actually, didn’t know, but just to say everyone struggles.

 

I told him I hadn’t been struggling, I just wasn’t interested. I glanced at Irmgard, who was eating her soup in that polite way where you dip the spoon away from you and then bring it back to your lips. I thought I saw a trace of a smile. Joachim turned his head in her direction, but once again missed seeing her, his gaze sweeping instead up along the ceiling and then out the window, where it settled slowly on the water like a fly-fisherman’s cast.3

 

Everyone struggles, he said.

 

 

James Elkins,

2020

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Note 3

 

 

In the next measure the music changes. The tempo is so slow it almost doesn’t move, one eighth note every second. The loud chord is gone. There are only a few notes. The music is quiet, almost silent.

 

This is the third measure of Piano Piece 9. It is forty-two beats long. The first C♯ is a dotted quarter note. It lasts three full seconds. The notes from the repeated chord die out. Then there is a whole-note D♯, which lasts eight seconds. A couple of seconds after I strike it, only a trace of sound remains. People who don’t know the piece would be nervous. They would expect the deafening chords to start up again any second. But the notes continue to rise. Slowly and quietly. In the middle of the

 

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measure is an especially long gone, a dotted whole tied to an eighth note. About eight beats into that all the sound dies, and there is absolute silence.

 

At the end of the measure, the notes have climbed almost an octave. The last high C is another whole note, another full eight seconds. It feels like an enormous amount of time. By the barline there is again no sound left. I sit at the piano with one finger held down on the silent key. I keep my hands tensed. At any moment the hammering could begin again.

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