Within his bending sickle’s compass come
Victor Barall
On the last day of his life, Marty Haberman got out of bed a little late. He was ninety-three years old, and it had been quite some time since he had been able to sleep through the night, although he drank nothing after nine p.m. and emptied his bladder immediately before getting into bed and extinguishing the light at about eleven. It was always at about one-thirty that his body demanded that he pull his feet over the side and rise and make another set of urinations, following which he was generally able without difficulty to go back to sleep. But when, at about four, his body implored him to rise again, he would produce just a few dribbled drops, and then he would sleep no more. Returning to bed, he would briefly attempt to bore himself to sleep, counting backward in random leaps from the number two hundred, or stringing together the names of famous composers whose dates aligned, the death year of one matching the birth year of another. It was no use, and so he would try then to fill his sleeplessness productively, by going over in his mind a memory of his younger days or a melody that during the day he had been in the middle of formulating. As the darkness began to lift and the dawn began to spread her rosy fingers over the East River, the residua of a series of vivid dreams would convince him that he must have slept after all, if only briefly. Then, for another hour, sometimes two, he would remain supine, his eyes closed, because the pillow was soft and the
mattress was firm, and even if it was not sleep, nevertheless it was refreshing.
Usually he managed to be up and about by nine or ninethirty, but today it was almost ten-thirty by the time he freed himself from the blanket and sheets. By now, Hilda would have been at her job in lower Manhattan for more than two hours, and would have already made a number of carefully arrived-at and potentially momentous decisions, which, no doubt he would hear all about tonight, along, perhaps, with others made later in the day (although, he had surmised, her most significant ideas seemed to come to her early in the day, before the arrival of her many subordinates and their incessant demands for her attention).
She was no spring chicken herself; in a year she would be eighty, but, to her, the thought of retirement was unthinkable. She still had too much to contribute, she believed, and indeed, she believed, her contributions were too crucial to the well-being of her ostensible client, the residents of the State of New York (she worked in the state’s Attorney General’s Office) for her to think only of herself. Maybe she was right. Probably she was right.
He, by contrast, had retired as soon as he could, at sixty-five. He did not undervalue himself, either; he had been a full professor of literature and theater, the occupant of an endowed chair, no less, and he knew he had made a difference in the lives of a considerable number of his students, who had told him so. But he did not place so high a value on himself as to believe that no one else could possibly fill his chair, and he had, in any event, gotten tired of the thrice-weekly commute from Brooklyn, where he and Hilda resided, up to Boston, and there had been so many projects he’d had to put off or put aside that, once he was no longer working, he would be able to pursue full-time. Since obtaining his Masters degree in composition ten years ago, it was music that he had especially thrown himself into.
On the last day of his life, September 20, 2023, Marty made himself a small pot of coffee and a soft-boiled egg, which he spooned from a small bowl onto a darkly-toasted English Muffin. As he breakfasted, he picked his way through the Times, which Hilda had left for him, spotted with yellow and brown stains, which she, a lusty and sometimes messy eater, had left for him as well. Among the paid notices was a name he recognized, which always sent his heart racing, but reading the account of the man’s life, he was relieved to discover that it was not the man he knew, who, come to think of it, had died a few years before. It looked, through the window, like a glorious day, blue sky with just a few white, cottony clouds; mid-September, it would still be warm enough to sit out on a bench on Cadman Plaza, across from the building in which Hilda had worked at her previous, also high-powered job, at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. There were certain morning activities that, however, could not be rushed, and by the time Marty had put on a light sweater and stepped off the elevator and kibbitzed with the doorman, it was close to noon.
Although he was perfectly steady on his feet, he never left home now without his walking stick—a gift from Hilda—a beautiful length of ebony incised at intervals with vertical and horizontal parallel lines, to the sidewalk-meeting end of which he had glued a discreet wafer of rubber. In the lightweight cloth bag hanging by two loops from his right shoulder was the iPad that weighed practically nothing, a gift from his son, who had also patiently shown him how to turn the thing on and perform all the tasks he might want it to do. Best of all, Robbie had loaded into it the software which, with a touch of the finger, would cause to appear on the screen, the musical composition program, which was as easy to navigate as Robbie had promised it would be.
He strode carefully up Pierrepont Street, past the appellate courthouse, crossed Court Street, and found his favorite bench,
unoccupied as usual. He was working on a one-act opera, because, although his health was still quite good, at his age, he figured, two acts, let alone three, just might be too tempting to Fate. It was to be an adaptation of a play he’d written twenty-five years before, which he and Robbie, then fourteen, had performed together several times before a small but highly appreciative audience. The play was made up of three scenes from his own childhood, and it was the first one that he was re-working now. It dramatized an incident from when he was eight years old, and it was a great day, because he was wearing a brand-new pair of shoes that his mother had actually allowed him to choose for himself from the offerings in the Thom McAn on Fordham Road. They had real style, those shoes, they were a little flashy, even, with their slender footprint, their tapered length culminating in a skinny point that extended an inch or even a little more past his toes, and the color was not the usual black or dull brown, but a richer, redder shade of brown, verging on burgundy. Throughout the morning, he had sensed the other boys eyeing them covetously, and the shoes must have made an impression, too, on Mrs. Benjamin because after the lunch break, she had called him to the front of the classroom, handed him a folded note, and instructed him to deliver it to the main office, two floors below. It was both a great honor to be summoned and a great responsibility, because hidden somewhere within the main office was the school principal’s own office, and quite possibly the note was for him. And even if it was not, it still must have conveyed some important information or question or request, because he could not recall a single previous instance when Mrs. Benjamin had sent anyone down with a note. He gripped the note tightly in his left hand and rapidly descended the four flights of stairs, his right hand lightly holding the bannisters.
Later, he would grow tall, but at eight, his head barely exceeding the height of the counter, he offered the note, which
the secretary took from him, offering him a thank you and a smile before retreating and entering a mystery room, a room Marty had never been invited or summoned into. And then he hurried back, keen to show off his mastery of the multiplication tables, on which Mrs. Benjamin lately almost always drilled the class at the beginning of the afternoon session.
“You were supposed to wait,” she said, as he stood in front of all his classmates. “Why didn’t you wait for them to write the reply?” she asked, her tone peeved, almost angry, and he, all redfaced with shame in front of the entire class, rushed back down to the main office, where he had to wait, because they were still formulating their response to whatever Mrs. Benjamin needed to know, and so there was no harm done, and, after all, she hadn’t told him he needed to wait (or perhaps he hadn’t listened when she’d said so, so excited had he been to be chosen), but it was all ruined regardless. He had let them down, he had let his new shoes down, he had disgraced them. And on a day that had begun so auspiciously, who could have imagined it would end so badly?
During their limited off-off-off Broadway run, Robbie had played the eight-year-old Marty recounting the events of the day as they were occurring, wearing a pair of oversized red, patentleather shoes, and moving confidently over the small stage with its rudimentary set. Sixty-eight-year-old Marty, sitting on a high stool at stage-left, played the eight-year-old’s successor, the man he had been in his mid-fifties, ruminating on the events from the distance of more than four decades, events he remembered a little differently from his eight-year-old predecessor, but which, after all those years, he still found the recollection of a little painful.
But now, another four decades on from the man he had portrayed in middle age, the pain is all gone. In his old age Marty has discovered that his memory is a vast resource, like a bottomless savings account endlessly generating new interest,
VICTOR BARALL
and a great source of comfort, like the soft, baggy sweater with holes at both elbows he has for many years worn, although only in the apartment. And the memories are no less comforting, he has discovered, even when the events being recalled were, in their day and for hundreds or thousands of days thereafter, painful. In his old age he has discovered that even the unpleasant incidents of his life are now somehow pleasant to recall, and he wonders if only he, so late in the day of his life, feels that way, or whether everyone who has attained a great age shares that feeling, and if so, whether that constitutes one of the great laws and mysteries of human existence.
And possibly because in recent months Hilda has been badgering him in that blunt, matter-of-fact way she has, that he really ought to begin contemplating more systematically his mortality, now he contemplates sorrowfully that this vast storehouse of memory and cogitation, unique to him, will disappear when he goes, and he wonders, too, about his considerable body of writing—his theatrical works, his chamber music, his libretti, his one completed opera—and whether he should try to find a place for them while he still has the time, and whether, if he continues to procrastinate until it is too late, Hilda or Robbie will succeed in finding an appropriate repository for them, or if they will go en masse into the recycling bin.
But there is an opera to write, he tells himself, and he is right, he tells himself, I better get back to it. He has already revised the text of the play, devising shorter, less convoluted lines, so it can more easily be sung, and what remains now is to find for the scene a musical language to reflect the eight-year-old’s emotional volatility and the middle-aged man’s more even-keeled, philosophical outlook.
A shadow falls on the part of the bench he is not occupying and looking up to his right, he sees a man whom he recognizes
but cannot quite place. “Marty,” the man says, hands stuffed in the front pockets of his trousers. “Dan Hammett,” he says, now holding out his right hand for Marty to shake. “I used to work for Hilda. In the D.A.’s Office. How is she?”
He must have met the man at one of those many functions honoring Hilda for some stupendous achievement, or bidding her farewell as she moved on to a bigger and better position. It’s coming back to him now: Irish guy, friendly guy, lives in the neighborhood, maybe that’s how they met. Used to run into him now and then. Must be retired now himself, obviously not in a rush to get anywhere. And now Marty is remembering the going-away party the D.A.’s Office had given for Hilda. This Dan Hammett must have been there, along with all the judges Hilda herself had invited, some of them making speeches, some of them poking a little fun, and the not-quite-doddering-yet District Attorney, already fifteen years into a tenure that would last another twenty years, dropping in briefly to blow his own horn and give a boilerplate tribute to Hilda. And finally came the plaque presentation and the accompanying remarks, delivered by one of Hilda’s fellow muckety-mucks at the D.A.’s Office, characterizing her with outlandish, celestial metaphors: “the sun around which my moon revolves . . . the golden chariot I ride across the heavens . . . the Venus in my firmament.” And all these scores of intelligent people, all too smart not to understand, looking around, looking at each other in amazement, and Marty is surprised to discover that although it happened some thirty-five years ago, it still stings.
“What are you working on these days?” Dan Hammett asks, and it occurs to Marty that perhaps the man, either out of genuine interest or out of some lingering feeling for Hilda, is one of the ones who had actually attended one of his plays, perhaps the very one he is re-working now. And Marty begins telling him about his turn to opera-writing, and Dan says that he himself has quite
unexpectedly developed a passion for opera. “Marty,” he says, “how about I buy you a cup of coffee.”
During the day, he almost always is alone, having outlived just about everyone, and the solitude is certainly conducive to his writing, but he’s gotten off to a late start today, it’s already onethirty, and here’s a man eager to talk, eager to listen. “How about that little wine bar on Henry Street,” Marty says. “They’ll give you a beer, if you’d rather, and they’ll give us a little something to nibble on.”
Off they go, and two hours later they’re still going, Marty on his second glass, Dan on his third pint, and he’s told this man something about his opera-in-progress, and they’ve compared notes on the sopranos they love the most, for Dan it’s Anna Netrebko, and Marty tells him of the thrill of seeing Leontyne Price, for him, far and away the greatest, and she’s still alive, ninety-six years old! And Dan, seemingly without prodding him at all, has somehow drawn from him the story of his life, the nutshell version—his working-class Bronx childhood, his life-trajectoryaltering college scholarship, his too-early, difficult marriage and his strained relationship with his daughters, his many years alone, and his meeting Hilda in 1983 at a summer retreat for accomplished amateur musicians—she, a pianist, he, a violinist. And music had been for them the food of love, he says, although Hilda—until just recently a professor at Yale Law and about to start her first government job—Hilda must also have been impressed by his Harvard Ph.D. About a year into their marriage, when Hilda had informed him, somewhat to his surprise, considering how ambitious she was for her career, that she wanted a child, he’d asked himself whether that was truly the reason she’d been so ready to offer herself to him, and he’d wondered, too, whether, after his previous failure as a father, he really wanted to try again. He’d concluded that he did, that here was a chance to do better,
and Robbie had proved to be the last and the greatest love of his life. And although Hilda certainly would have been pleased if their son had followed her into the legal profession, she’d left it up to him, she’d never put any pressure on him, and he had, instead, gone his father’s way and become an actor, a good one, and he was actually making a go of it, even if, sometimes, it required him do his acting on cruise ships. The marriage had lasted, and if she did not arrive home too late, they were still, when the mood struck, making pretty good music together.
He’d gotten a kick out of the unexpected outing with Dan, but now he’d better get on with it, he needed to get to the butcher’s on Atlantic and then to the Key Food on Montague. Hilda loved to eat, and she knew what was good, but, she’d confessed not long after they’d met, she’d never prepared a meal for herself in her entire life, apart from the coffee and boiled egg that were her breakfast staple. His attempt, when they were newly married, to teach her some rudimentary techniques and recipes, had come to nothing, because, he’d concluded, cooking was not something she’d ever wished to learn. Perhaps, growing up in a well-to-do household— Jews of German descent they were, highfalutin, more WASP than Jew—she’d gotten used to having people do things for her. Or her mind was too occupied with other things, or she considered cooking an insufficiently intellectually challenging activity.
No matter. He enjoyed her detailed nightly reports on the principles, the politics, and the personalities involved in her cases —lately dominated by the Second Amendment battles and the Trump circus—and she enjoyed his cooking. And he took pleasure in the chopping and the scooping-out and the stirring and the trimming, in all these manual activities which, even as he was performing them, allowed his mind to roam freely.
For tonight, he was preparing for Hilda something simple, but one of her favorite meals, steak au poivre, with haricots verts and
potatoes au gratin, and he thought he might, in a little while, open a bottle of St. Emilion, something special, and give it a chance to breathe before they sat down to eat at around seven-thirty or eight. Patting the medallions with the crushed peppercorns, he found himself thinking on the intimacy of the act, his laying on of hands, caressing the flesh, consoling the tenderloin, and he thought of the awful lives of these animals whose bodies provided us such nourishment and pleasure, and their awful deaths, lined up and prodded with batons and marched inexorably forward. If they were the lucky ones, if they were humanely slaughtered (if there could be such a thing), they would receive a massive electric shock, which would render them unconscious, unaware of their demise, that shock their one consolation for a luckless life, and he thought now on how it would be for him—would he die awake, capable of participating in his last moments, or would he die asleep, or if not asleep, then too out-of-it, too far gone to be able to meaningfully experience his death? And which way would he want it?
He had missed out on his birth; his death, he felt, he would want to be there for, he would want to be alive when he died. He would want to see his entire life appear before him in his mind’s eye, as some people claimed would occur, or, as others attested, to be enveloped by the warm light and the soft, high-pitched tone indicating the way forward. Undoubtedly, he thought, it would be something else entirely, or something similar, and yet feeling very different. Maybe something like what his father had perceived, not long before he died, when he said he saw a blindingly bright light and heard what sounded like a marching band, booming drums and blaring brass, and it was so loud, it was intolerably loud, and he had begged Marty to go talk to someone and see if the musicians could be made to stop.
But there would be the fear. He’d never believed it, when people claimed they had no fear of death, people who were not VICTOR
yet in the vicinity of their own death, and could not know. He imagined there would be fear, which, of course, he would avoid if he were to die in his sleep. But he’d always wanted, he’d always told himself, to meet death with courage, which, whatever else that might have meant when he’d formulated and renewed that resolution, meant dying awake.
Now, he found, he lacked the courage to go on with this consideration of his mortality, and he turned on the C.D. player and inserted the Sonata for Violin and Piano, Opus 24, called “Spring” (although not by the composer). His dinner preparations were on schedule. He could afford to take a pause and sit down and listen. It was a relatively early composition, written when Beethoven had only just begun to lose his hearing. It was a sprightly work, and he must have been in a good mood when he’d penned it. He and Hilda had performed the sonata at their summer retreat’s closing recital, with Henry and Sally, the friends they’d made there, turning the pages, and they’d performed it with brio, and, their friends said, just about perfectly.
The “Spring” was over and Marty was back in the kitchen, slicing the potatoes and grating the Gruyère and the phone was ringing and it was Robbie, it was his unfailingly daily call, and he was telling Marty about an audition today at which he’d been dinged before he’d gotten out even a single word, which as they both knew, was not all that rare, although, for Robbie, it was his first time. It was a tough business, lawyering would have been an easier way to make a living, and he needed a bit of hand-holding, and Marty, after saying goodbye, recalled a time well before Robbie had been bitten by the acting bug, when he had taken him one afternoon to a showing of a real swashbuckler of a movie, full of swordsmanship and other derring-do. Robbie had been captivated, and Marty had gone out and bought a pair of plastic play-swords, blunt-edged and flexible. He was already past sixty and no match
for Robbie’s endless energy, but for a number of weeks, until Robbie had gotten obsessed with something else, he’d rolled from the study into the living room a swivel chair that could make a full rotation, and with Marty sitting, he and Robbie were more or less the same height, and Robbie would circle him, clockwise and counter-clockwise, and they’d knock their weapons against each other until one of them, charging forward, was able to make a palpable hit, a fatal thrust, or until Marty ran out of steam and had to sue for peace.
The phone rang again, and Marty thought it would be Robbie again, who, having put the futile audition behind him, would want to tell Marty about a woman with whom he’d struck up a conversation while they were waiting their turns to be called up, a woman in her late forties or early fifties, very attractive, still hoping to get some occasional acting work, and small world that it was, it turned out she had been one of Marty’s students, and of course she’d loved and been inspired by his class. But it was Hilda, and she was calling to say that there was a deadline, and she’d been sidetracked all afternoon with something else that was also an emergency, and so she’d have to stay very late to edit a set of papers that was due in court tomorrow, so she’d send someone out to get her a sandwich and he shouldn’t wait up for her. “All right,” he said. “Good luck.”
The meat would keep until tomorrow, or Friday, and after all the wine he’d already had today, maybe it was just as well, but still, he was disappointed, he’d looked forward to the pleasure of enjoying her pleasure as she told him with her mouth half-full how flavorful it was, and what a nice surprise it was, and what her boss, the Attorney General, had thought about some bold legal argument Hilda wanted to make in the Court of Appeals.
He spent his days alone, and although today was something of an exception, he found himself feeling lonely nonetheless. He
missed their breakfasts together, which were now a thing of the past, and lately, her job, even more time-consuming than the one before, had begun to encroach on their dinners as well. In a while, he thought, he’d make himself an omelet with the potatoes and Gruyère, but first, he’d put on the Beethoven Violin Concerto, the Anne-Sophie Mutter recording with the Berliner Philharmoniker, with the Kreisler cadenza and the great, slow second movement with that upwardly-rising phrase, yearning toward the light, transitioning without a pause into the upbeat, optimistic finale. He turned it up loud, and settled into their most comfortable padded armchair, and his thoughts drifted to the days not so long ago when they’d still been reading aloud together from the plays he’d taught in college, scenes of ghosts and fools and women disguised as men, days when they’d sat together on the sofa and told each other sad stories of the death of kings, and the absurd story of two men waiting endlessly for the someone who would never come. And he thought of all the hours over the last few years he’d spent trying to help Hilda to comprehend the rules of baseball, which ought to have been so easy for a lawyer like her, and her claim that she wouldn’t enjoy the game half as much if she understood all of what was going on, and the many thousands of hours they’d spent over the decades enjoying trashy television shows, because, after all, there comes a point when all minds, no matter their stamina, need a rest. And he thought of the Hilda he’d first met, and her compelling, if unconventional, beauty, her considerable height and large dark eyes, and her small beak of a nose and magnificently unruly hair, and her incipient second chin and her strangely stiff-legged gait, as if she had no knees. And he thought of how much he’d admired the courage it must have required for her to leave her tenured professorship, which she was doing, she said, because she wanted, finally, to live in the world, and think up arguments that helped, and make mistakes that made
things worse, and sometimes have to advocate positions she found repugnant. And he thought of her exquisite belly-button and, all aflame, her enthusiasm in the bedroom.
He was feeling a bit at a loss about what to do with these hours he’d expected to be spending otherwise, and he went to the piano, which was easier on his joints than the violin, and he pushed back on his fingers with the opposite hand to stretch out his wrists, and tugged on each finger until he heard the lower-most knuckle click. He thought he’d work on Opus 49, Number Two, the easiest of Beethoven’s sonatas, he’d play it very slowly, and then try to play it a little faster, but once he’d stood the pages up against the piano’s ledge and played the opening chord, he found that he didn’t really feel like it, and he went into the kitchen and prepared his supper, which he didn’t really feel like eating. But he persevered, although it was cold by the time he finished it, and then he lingered over the washing and drying of the plate and the skillet.
The Yankees, the team he’d grown up with and followed through so many seasons, were having a miserable year, out of the running and limping toward the finish line, and tonight, he found, when he turned on the TV, they were being embarrassed, but he stuck with it, curious to see if Judge would homer and how many times Stanton would fan.
And then, although it was a little earlier than usual, he performed his ablutions and got into bed. He had trouble falling asleep, and while lying awake, he pondered a question which he remembered Proust had posed in his enormous novel: whether, when we wake up, we are the same person who the previous night had gone to sleep, and if we were, then how, after the disintegration of sleep, did we go about reconstituting the self of the previous day, and could we ever be certain that indeed we had succeeded. And after chewing on that for a while, he remembered something Freud had written: that it was impossible truly to believe in the
possibility of one’s own death, because our unconscious resolutely believes we are immortal. And after thinking about that for some time, he wondered, right before falling asleep, whether those two questions were actually one and the same.
He awoke a little earlier than usual, around twelve-thirty. It was, he thought, owing to the key in the lock and the opening and closing of the door, and he lay there awake, trying to hold onto the dream that he was pretty sure he’d just about reached the end of. It was a dream about his grandmother, his mother’s mother, whom he’d always been a little afraid of, because her husband, Marty’s grandfather, always seemed a little afraid of her, because every time she entered the room, he would, whatever he was doing, sort of snap to attention. His grandfather spoke a little English from the years he’d spent alone here, traveling the U.S. raising money for yeshivas back home, and after his family had arrived, he’d worked as a slaughterhouse rabbi, whose job it was to cull the unkosher, the unfit, from the kosher. Marty and he didn’t have a lot to say to each other, but every time they visited, his grandfather, sitting in his chair and smoking his Pall Malls and reading, would arrest him in his passage across the room and say, “Please, could you pull my fingers.” And Marty would stand in front of him and set his feet wide apart, and one at a time, he would grasp and draw a finger to him, and the fingers were very soft, and his grandfather would let out a satisfied “Ah!”, and he’d move on to the next one. But his grandmother spoke no English, and anyhow, she was always very busy, standing over a pot, or working the foot treadle on her ancient sewing machine, or knitting another sweater for another new grandchild, because Marty’s cousins from the Orthodox wing of the family were constantly churning them out. He himself had had one of those woolen sweaters, it was a gray button-down with a collar like a dress-shirt and scarlet polka-dots on the chest panels, and he’d been sad when he’d outgrown it and had to pass it on to his younger brother.
In the dream, Marty’s mother and her two sisters were in and out of the bedroom where his grandmother was lying, and they were speaking in whispers and raising their voices and getting into little arguments because Aunt Enna, the eldest, always presumed to be the decider. But Marty’s mother was no pushover, either, and she would try to make common cause with Aunt Esther, the youngest, who was the only one born here, but Esther, who was also the nicest one, didn’t want to take sides. And now they were coming out for a breather, and Marty was about twelve years old, and his mother said, “Why don’t you go in and sit with her,” and he was frightened, but he went in. He sat in the chair close by her bed, and her eyes were closed and she was barely breathing and she had cancer, and maybe she was sleeping, but he thought it was probably not just sleep, but some sort of a coma she was in. And although he was frightened, and although no one had told him to, he had an impulse to reach out to her, and very gently he took her hand, which was rough from the decades of non-stop labor; he took her hand in his, and immediately her hand responded with a strong grip, a grip of iron, and he thought his heart would give out, it was beating so rapidly, but after a few moments her grip loosened, and he continued to sit there like that, holding her hand, until the women came back to resume their vigil and their bickering. And then he’d woken up, probably from hearing Hilda coming in, and he could not for the life of him decide whether that thing with the hands had actually happened or only in his dream. Now he was awake, and as he lay there, it seemed to him that in the dream, he had somehow, by reaching out to her, succeeded in conferring upon whatever still remained of his grandmother some small consolation. And he felt certain that if that barelyalive state were to be how he would meet his own death, then Robbie would be there at his bedside to impart to him that same sort of solace.
He got out of bed, and went to make his first set of urinations, and without too much difficulty resumed his sleep. At three, according to the clock on the bedside table, he woke again, although he felt no urge to pee. He did feel, however, something in his head, something like a twinge, and he wondered if that was what it felt like to be having a stroke. It occurred to him that he ought to investigate whether he could move his limbs, and giving each of them an opportunity, he found that he could. His brain seemed still to be functioning, he thought, but did he, he wondered, still have the ability to speak? He would try.
“Hilda, Hilda,” he called out.
With all of the snoring, the gagging, the coughing, their bathroom peregrinations, and Hilda’s ineradicable practice of turning on the light to write down tonight some simple, brilliant solution to tomorrow’s complicated legal problem, they had agreed, a few years back, that it would be better for them both to sleep separately, and Marty had moved from the marital bedroom to the room at the other end of the hallway that until about fifteen years ago had belonged to Robbie.
As he waited for Hilda to put on her glasses and her robe, it seemed to him that whatever it was that had happened in his head, whatever it was that had worried him enough to impel him to test his capacity to speak, had begun to recede, and by the time she appeared in the doorway, backlit by the hall light, he wondered whether it was possible that he had merely imagined the thing in his head.
So that when Hilda, standing at the threshold, queried “Marty?”, he responded, “I’m all right.”
“Then why did you call me?” she asked.
“Okay, never mind. I’ll be quiet,” he hastily replied, and she turned ninety degrees, and the hall light went out and he heard her stiff-legged walk, and then it was silent in the apartment.
Her tone, when she asked why he’d called out to her, betrayed, he thought, some irritation, some annoyance, possibly some anger, and if she was angry, he thought, maybe she had the right to be. She must have been exhausted when she got home, and she needed her sleep, because, as ever, she’d need to be out the door early, and he chastised himself for waking her, because he could have discovered whether he could still speak by speaking softly to himself. “Marty, Marty,” he might have said, or better, he might have seen if he could recite something, a favorite line from one of the sonnets. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Although maybe he had misunderstood. Maybe it was just Hilda being Hilda, always the lawyer, even at three a.m., matter-offactly, methodically seeking to elicit the relevant information. And if he had said, instead of “I’m all right,” that he was worried about a certain sensation he had experienced, she might have come and sat on the side of the bed and asked a series of follow-up questions in order to determine whether it was necessary or prudent to call 911.
He couldn’t decide which it was, or if there were other possibilities which he would eventually hit on if he continued thinking about it, but he wanted to stop thinking about it and go back to sleep, if he could, and he began counting backward in random leaps from the number two hundred, and, reaching zero, he continued onward in negative territory until he reached minus two hundred. From there, he went to the composers: Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Salieri, who died and were born, respectively, in 1750. And Josef Haydn and Felix Mendelssohn, died and born in 1809. And W.A. Mozart, dead in 1791, and Giacomo Meyerbeer, the Jewish opera composer, born that same year. And Beethoven, dead in 1827, and.