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On the way out he manages not to shake her hand, merely says: Well, be seeing you.
They walk out onto the street together, then he nods to her, turns, and walks off. She walks off the other way, but only as far as the lights. Where she stops. She knows his surname. It won’t be hard to find his address. Drop a note in his mailbox or wait outside his door. The streetcar jingles its bell, cars splash through puddles, the lights change for pedestrians, change back. She feels pain to the tips of her fingers. She’s still standing there, change, change back. She hears the hissing of wet tires on asphalt. She doesn’t want to go anywhere without him. Be seeing you, he said. Be seeing you. Didn’t even take her hand. Could she have been so utterly mistaken? But just then he says, behind her: Or shall we spend the evening together after all? His wife and son were in the country, with friends.
After that he plays the Impromptu in A-flat Major by Schubert, and Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy, the Partita in E Minor, and the third movement of Mozart’s B-flat Piano Concerto. Sometimes he nods his head in time, sometimes he says: Isn’t that extraordinary? Sometimes it’s she who says: This is beautiful. Sometimes she asks: Who is playing now? And he answers: Artur Rubinstein, Glenn Gould, Clara Haskil, as the case might be. Between the Bach and the Mozart, she had to go out to pee and in the bathroom, she saw his son’s cord jeans hanging up to dry. In front of the mirror is the little bottle with the perfume that makes the apartment smell so nice, Chanel No. 5. And three toothbrushes in one mug. And the wife’s nightie dropped on a stool and — why not — left there. Come, darling May, and put the buds back on the trees, the piano wishes at the end, but it’s July now, the summer evening outside has turned into a summer night, the bottle of wine is empty. Do you feel hungry? Sure. Then let’s go eat. Sure.
ugh so evocative
And now all the crypts are become transparent, and he and she are standing directly in the graveyard, and the island of the living is no bigger than the tiny patch of ground under their feet. While she takes off his glasses and lays them aside, and he for the first time enfolds her in his arms, humankind begs for peace and everlasting light. She takes his face in both hands and kisses him very gently. Then a lone young voice sounds and praises God, because if she praises Him, He will perhaps spare her. The way her bare shoulder feels in his cupping hand during the prayer, the one curve under the other, is something he won’t forget as long as he lives. To thee comes all flesh, yes, that’s how it is, he thinks, and then he stops thinking. The kisses, the choir, her hair, the moment just before the end of the Introit, the insistent and repeated demands of the living on behalf of their dead: Lead them to everlasting light! that echo away in the empty church. Human beings have to come up with the reply themselves, they are in darkness, their wish has no authority. He is breathing hard, and she too, with her head against him, is breathing hard.
We will only see each other occasionally, he says, but each time will be like our first time — a celebration. She listens to him attentively and nods. I can only be a luxury for you, because I am a married man. I know, she says. Perhaps that won’t be enough for you, he says. I understand that. She looks him straight in the face, there is a ring of yellow around her pupils, he now sees. I’m not just married, I’m also in a relationship with a woman who works in radio. If you had a thousand women, she says, all that matters is the time that we get to spend together. How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything? The black velvet ribbon moves him, it makes her look like a schoolgirl. If he doesn’t manage to say quickly what he needs to say, it’ll be too late. And you can’t expect any sort of public acknowledgment — I know, and you know, and that will have to do. That’s fine, she says, and smiles. Where terms and conditions are set, there is a future. All yesterday and today she was afraid he would just toss her out.
One day, he says, one day you will marry a young man — and I’ll give you a bunch of roses for the wedding. He sees her smile and shake her head, just as he expected. He was saying it more to himself than to her. He mustn’t forget that one day he will have to hand her on. He mustn’t forget that he knows this better than she does, she who smiles to hear such a thing. But if he wants to survive the crash, then the certain prospect of it must be kept at the forefront of his mind the whole time that he spends with her, be it short or long. This jagged thought must obtrude through all other thoughts of happiness, love, and desire, through all their shared experiences and any memories they may have, and he must endure it, if the crash, as and when it happens, isn’t to destroy him. Is that right, destroy him? The waiter clears away their plates. The pianist strikes up, the shift begins at six, a Mozart medley. His wife, when he was here with her not long ago, claimed the piano player looked like Heiner Müller. And she’s right, the piano player really does look like his fellow writer Heiner Müller. Probably it was the steel-rimmed spectacles. In May, not so long ago, Hans actually wrote his wife a love letter.
We can be as long as you want us to be, he says.
She nods. So long as she can see him. As long and as often as possible. She doesn’t mind about anything else.
From now on, he thinks, the responsibility for their existence is entirely hers. He has to protect himself from himself. Maybe she’s a monster?
She thinks, he wants to prepare me for difficult times ahead. He wants to protect me. Protect me from myself, and so he gives me the power of decision over us.
He thinks, as long as she wants us, it won’t be wrong.
She thinks, if he leaves everything to me, then he’ll see what love means.
He thinks, she won’t understand what she’s agreed to until much later.
And she, he’s putting himself in my hands.
All these things are thought on this evening, and all together they make up a many-faceted truth.
<3
My brother dies several times a month.
It’s always my mother who phones to inform me of his passing.
“Your brother’s not answering my calls,” she says in a whisper.
To her, the telephone bears witness to our permanence on Earth, so if there’s no answer, the only possible explanation is the cessation of all vital functions.
When she calls to tell me my brother is gone, she’s not looking for reassurance. Instead she wants me to share in her grief. Suffering together is her form of happiness; misery shared is misery relished.
Sometimes the cause of death is banal: a gas leak, a head-on collision, a broken neck from a bad fall.
honestly top-tier opening
After ascertaining that her son is still alive, my mother always feels mortified. She pouts like a 12-year-old girl. Her voice even turns into a 12-year-old girl’s. How can you get angry at a little girl?
“You think I should bring the carabinieri some pastries?” she asks in that little voice.
Come to think of it, who knows why she called the carabinieri and not the regular police? I don’t dare pose the question, since it risks doubling the number of calls she’ll make next time. The fire department, for example, or civil protection. She’s never thought of them before.
I am born in one place, spend half of grade school in another, attend the other half in a third country. I go to high school in a fourth city. I am forever the superminority. As much as I hate the cliché, it’s true — I am too “this” for “that” and too “that” for “this.” But in Wizkid’s music, I’m given the choice to not make a choice. “My music travel no visa” he declares confidently on Superstar. His world is one not of binaries but of bonds between Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean. And though he was not raised in the diaspora, it feels like he makes music exclusively for us: the lost and confused trying to find ourselves in clunky hyphens and numerical ordering, struggling to determine if our culture is first generation, second, or even third. He is not the first to tell me who I am, but he is the first I believe.
i like the last line
Even when the songs are emulating an American pop formula, they still feel stubbornly African, which is to say they buck against the niceties of said formula, opting for vim over veneer, playfulness over perfection. The production is gritty, percussion chaotic, auto-tune abused, lyrics disregarded, and melodies embarrassingly saccharine. And it is all held together by the faith that it will accomplish its only goal: to make people dance.
In this mélange, more than anything else, I find my rhythm. Wizkid’s music is elastic enough to leave room for the movement I inherit from my early youth while also accommodating everything else. It’s hard to explain how intuitive it all feels, but when his music comes on, I just know what to do and I know I am doing it right.