Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (4 page)

"There aren't any women composers," she said once. It was Christmas vacation, and we'd been able to see each other several times. We were walking up in the park that day. Its the best thing in our city, a huge park, a forest, with long hiking trails. We were walking the fat off Mrs. Fields dog, a poop a keep named Orville. It was raining.

I know it is supposed to be Peke-A-Poo, but that dog was a poop a keep.

"No women composers? There's got to be some," I said. She said there were, but they didn't amount to very much, or if they did you couldn't find out, because if they wrote operas they didn't get staged, and if they wrote symphonies they didn't get performed. "But if they were good,
really
good," she said, "they would get played, I think. There just haven't been any absolutely first-class ones."

"Why not?" It seemed peculiar when you thought about it. Popular music has a lot of women composers now, and most kinds of singing have always been half women; anyhow music doesn't seem male, it seems human.

"I don't know why not. Maybe I'll find out why not," she said rather grimly. "But I
think
it's prejudice and stuff. Like the self-whatsit-thingo you told me."

"Self-fulfilling prophecy?"

"Yeah. Everybody says you can't, and so you believe it. It was that way in literature, till enough women stopped listening and just wrote enough great novels that the men really looked like idiots if they went on saying women couldn't write novels. The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get. It's weird. I guess it's the same thing as your levelers."

Talking with her, I had worked out this theory, see, about what it was that made me feel so much an outsider. Why it is that people make heroes out of people who are good at sports or politics, but have this scorn and resentment against people who are good at thinking. Unless the ideas they think turn directly into money or power, in which case they're heroes again. Anti-intellectualism seemed to be part of it, but not all of it; it was this sort of pulling things all down to the level where everybody is the same, like ants, that I called "leveling," although these days it gets called by some fancy names like anti-elitism, and some really out of place names like democracy, names you shouldn't even say unless you're willing to think about them.

"Male chauvinist levelers?" I said.

"Yeah, right on," she said. Orville came back down the trail, running like a fourteen-inch-high pregnant cow, and got mud all over my jeans, and then got mud all over her jeans.

"What kind of music do you want to write?" I asked her.

She tried to tell me, but I can't tell you because frankly I understood less than half of it. I mean if you don't know pretty clearly what a tonal row is, you are not going to understand somebody explaining what's wrong with the theories about tonal rows. And I didn't want to interrupt her and make her explain, because it wasn't easy for her to talk about it at all, but she wanted to, very badly. She talked about order and humanity in music, and machine music, and random music, and I sort of understood that, but I didn't know enough about modern music to be sure I understood. But some of it I could make sense of, because it was very close basically to some things I'd been reading by some modern psychologists about identifying with machinery—people thinking of the world, and themselves, as machines. Schizophrenics now often do that literally. They have to be plugged into a power source in order to function, and they receive instructions from a Great Computer. Reading about them I had thought about some of the rock groups with their electronic instruments and mikes and consoles and the stage full of wires, and the auditorium full of people who plug in emotionally with them, all depending on one wire from the power plant. Who says schizophrenics are crazy?

It was something along that line Natalie was after—getting music away from its dependence on machinery, but by machinery she also meant the big symphony orchestra and the big opera production. But she didn't mean going back to "simplicity," the folk singer with a dulcimer and a fake Kentucky accent. She said complexity was essential to high art, but the complexity ought to be in the music, not in the means of production. I said that sounded like Einstein doing it all with a pencil and some paper and his head, instead of a fifty-million-dollar accelerator; accelerators were very neat, but basically Einstein was even neater, and a lot cheaper. She really liked that. We turned back, and the sun came out and made all the wet forest look like crystal, and we went to her place, and she played me one of her compositions on the piano.

She explained that it wasn't for piano but for a string trio, and she sang the violin part in places. It didn't really seem very complex, or anyhow not difficult; there was a beautiful short tune in it that kept coming back, or pieces of it would come back, when things got rough. She was very tense, nervous, playing it; she was high. At the end she slammed the cover over the keys and said, "The end's all wrong." And then she had to go across town to give a lesson.

Natalie Field is very hard to describe. I guess anybody is. But typing up what I said about her into the tape recorder, I'm afraid it makes her sound pompous. I guess when we talked we were both pompous, part of the time.
Because we were talking about things that were very important to us, for the first time—saying stuff we'd never had anybody to say to. So it all sort of poured out unfiltered. And she was definitely a strong-minded person, self-reliant and very decisive. But then, because she'd worked so hard—and she really had, ever since she was six when she had taught herself the piano so that her parents had been sort of forced to start getting her lessons—because she'd worked so long and hard at one thing, music, she was pretty young and green about some other things. For instance she hardly ever went to movies. I took her to a Woody Allen, the one where he throws the cello out the window, and I thought she was going to get sick she laughed so much. And the way she laughed at me when I clowned; she wanted to laugh, she needed to. All I had to do was go into the ape act, and she was helpless. Her father was this grim, fundamentalist type, her mother was always calm and serene, her older sisters had both married and moved away, she worked and taught and practiced and composed and dreamed music. There wasn't anything funny, anything ridiculous in her life, till I showed up. What I realize now is that she needed me just as badly as I needed her.

But I fouled it up. Because I got my priorities wrong.

Before that, though, there was the day at the beach. The good one.

It was the day before New Year's Eve. It had stopped raining, and gotten cold and clear and still. Heart of winter. When I woke up early, the sun was shining the way it does way up high in the mountains, flooding down light out of a dark blue sky. I knew Natalie had the whole day free, because some of her pupils weren't taking lessons during vacation. So I called her up, and we decided to go over to the coast, in the new car.

It was OK with Mrs. Field. She seemed to think I was OK, as far as I could tell. Mr. Field, who I gathered was extremely Biblical about young men who cast their eyes upon his daughters, was working—he was a building contractor—and didn't get home till around six. We'd be back before then, and what he didn't know wouldn't damage him irreparably. It was fine with my parents. All they knew was I was driving over to the coast with a friend. Mother was delighted that I had a friend, any friend, and dad was delighted that I was doing something, anything, with the car. So everybody was happy, and we left at nine with a sack lunch that Natalie had fixed.

It's about ninety miles over to the coast and ten miles south to Jade Beach, where I wanted to go. It's a cove between big headlands, not too windy, and not crowded even in summer. In winter it was completely deserted. Where there was some snow on the road in the Coast Range, I drove pretty slow, so we got there about noon. The sky was completely clear and very bright; the Pacific was dark blue with high white breakers coming in fast. It was cold, but down on the beach the only wind was the wind that came in with the breakers. The spray hit you like fine rock salt. After a while you could take off your coat, if you kept moving. We did. We horsed around in the shallow breakers for a long time, and kept getting a little bit farther out. The water was like ice, but after the first moments of agony, it felt good, in a numbing sort of way. I got wet from the neck down, Natalie got wet from the waist down. We came back up to a dry hollow by a big driftwood log, and built a fire to get dry and eat lunch by. We ate a lot of lunch. I unbelievable amount. When Natalie packed a sack lunch, she didn't cut corners. I don't know how many sandwiches there were to start with, but there were none to end with, and I ate three bananas, an orange, and two apples. I might not have eaten so many bananas except that they became the cause of much youthful mirth and innocent merriment. Honestly, I don't know why a basically sane person like Natalie was such a fall guy for the ape act. But true appreciation is the spur of genius, and the ape act definitely reached its highest moments that afternoon, with the assistance of the bananas.

Then we did some cliff climbing and some rock throwing, and built a sand castle. Then we came back and built up the fire, because it was getting colder, and watched the tide get closer to our sand castle, and talked We didn't talk about problems, or parents, or automobiles, or ambitions. We talked about life. We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer. And the sea was there, forty feet away and coming closer, and the sky over the sea, and the sun going down the sky. And it was cold, and it was the high point of my life.

I'd had high points before. Once at night walking in the park in the rain in autumn. Once out in the desert, under the stars, when I turned into the earth turning on its axis. Sometimes thinking, just thinking things through. But always alone. By myself. This time I was not alone. I was on the high mountain with a friend. There is nothing, there is
nothing
that beats that. If it never happens again in my life, still I can say I was there once.

While we were talking we were sifting through the sand around where we sat for bits of jade and agate. Natalie found a black rock, flat, perfectly oval, and sand-polished. I found a lens-shaped agate, white and yellow; you could see the sun through it. She gave me the black rock, and I gave her the agate.

While we were driving home, she fell asleep. That was neat. That was like coming back down the high mountain quietly in the sunset, I drove well and carefully, quietly.

It was way past seven when we got home. We'd let time go on the beach. She slipped out of the car, still looking sleepy and windburned, and said, "It was beautiful, Owen," and went into her house smiling.

T
HE FIELDS WENT
out of town over New Year's, and I didn't see Natalie till the day started again. I waited for the bus with her. While we were hanging around there, I said I hoped her getting home late hadn't made any trouble with her father. She said, "Oh, well." And we talked about Ornstein's book; she was interested in his explanations about the silent half of the brain, where the music is.

But if I wanted to blame anybody but myself for what went wrong, I guess I would blame Natalies father.

When she said "Oh, well," of course it meant that he had made some kind of stink, and she didn't want to talk about it, she preferred to ignore it or forget it. But what had he made a stink about, anyhow? She goes to the beach and eats lunch and finds an agate and comes home. This is wicked? This is sin? What did Mr. Field have on his mind, anyhow?

It was perfectly obvious what he had on his mind.

That it wasn't what we had on our minds made no difference to him. You know these young people. All they're after is kicks.

So, OK, I wasn't corrupted by Mr. Field's obsessions. I wouldn't even have thought about them, if I hadn't been corrupted already. That's a funny word, isn't it, corrupted? My dictionary says it means "To turn from a sound into an unsound condition...." That's all I mean by it. I just got to thinking unsoundly.

The thing is, the way a lot of people talk, and the way a lot of movies and books and advertising and all the various sexual engineers, whether they're scientists or salesmen, tell you the way it is, is all the same. Man Plus Woman Equals Sex. Nothing else. No unknowns in the equation. Who needs unknowns?

Especially when you haven't had any sex yet at all and so
it
is the unknown, and everybody seems to be telling you that it's the only thing that matters, nothing else counts; and if you don't have sex all the time, you're either impotent or frigid and you'll probably get cancer within the year, too.

So I began thinking, what am I doing. I mean, I see this girl all the time and spend a whole day at the beach with her and somebody says, "Hey man, so what happened?" and I say: "She gave me a black rock and I gave her an agate." Hey, yeah? Wow!

See, I began thinking what the others would think, not what I, myself, thought.

Its hard to explain, because there was more to it than that. Of course there was. Being with a girl, a woman, and Natalie was a woman, was exciting. That sounds dumb, and you can make jokes about it if you want, but its the right word. Physically, and mentally, and spiritually exciting.

But what I thought, because of what everybody, even Freud, says, was that it must be Love. They all say that sex is the real thing, and Love is what you call it when you are slightly more civilized than a gorilla. Sex isn't something you do when you're in love, love is what you call it when you want sex. Just ask the toothpaste commercials and the cigarette ads and the porno movies and the art movies and the pop songs, or Mr. Field. Man, there is one important thing. Just one.

And so the next time we met, it was entirely different, I had decided that I was in love with Natalie. I hadn't fallen in love with her, please notice that I didn't say that; I had
decided
that I was in love with her.