The River in Winter, Page 6

  The salt spray of passing cars had splotched and spotted the Chevette on the street side. As I walked around it from the back, keys jangling, I again saw the GAF on the windshield, and I noticed something new-someone had tucked a sheet of paper under the left-hand windshield wiper. A Sam Stinson leaflet, pink instead of yellow, but otherwise exactly like the one the gap-toothed teenager had handed me earlier. Melting snowflakes had pocked and puckered the surface of the paper. On the back someone had written in a rounded hand, "Homosexuality is an abomination before the Lord."

  The leaflet lay in tiny flecks in the mud-choked gutter by the time I sat at the Chevette's wheel. I slid the key home, turned it. My foot was heavy on the accelerator-I fully expected this to be an exercise in futile optimism, after all-and the engine roared to life. Startled, I pulled my hands and feet away. The engine dropped its voice.

  So it wasn't the battery. The starter? The distributor cap? The dual overhead cam, perhaps? What was a dual overhead cam, and did I have one, and why was I pretending, even to myself, that I knew the first thing about cars?

  I sprayed the windshield with washer fluid and let the wipers scrape away the soapy GAF. The word smeared and dissolved into sudsy white streaks.

  I switched on the radio. It was tuned to Minnesota Public Radio. A string quartet I dimly recognized, one of Beethoven's late quartets, perhaps. Serioso? Certainly it sounded quite serious. Or perhaps it was the sixteenth quartet.

  Traffic on University Avenue moved sluggishly. I passed the familiar landmarks: the Target at Hamline, an abandoned furniture store and the Frank's Nursery on either side of Lexington, the second-hand store with six rooms' worth of furniture on the sidewalk, the Vietnamese restaurants and groceries of Frogtown.

  Yes, it was Beethoven's sixteenth quartet. The finale. I recognized it, now, from a report I'd written in Form and Analysis in my junior year. No, that wasn't right. I'd chosen it, enamored with its German subtitle-Der Schwer ? something. Translated, it meant "The Difficult Decision," or more exactly and more meaningfully, I'd thought, "The Hard-Won Decision." I'd imagined Beethoven on his deathbed, parchment staff paper strewn across the coverlet, expressing acceptance of his imminent mortality in the language he knew best. I'd soon rejected the piece, though, finding that its many eccentric key changes boded poorly for an easy A.

  A halting, then flowing, series of imitative sequences gave way to pulsing chords high on the violins. Beneath these the viola and cello sang mournfully, then venomously: "Muss es sein? Muss es sein?" I remembered seeing the figure in the score, remembered reading its final interval as a tritone, an augmented fourth or diminished fifth, an awkward interval, in Bach's day considered a sign of the devil in music. But then I'd played parts of the score on a piano. The "tritone" was, after all, a garden-variety major third. Only Beethoven could, with a single accidental, transform the simple, euphonious interval at the core of all Western music into something bitter and sullen.

  In front of the Wendy's restaurant at Dale, two cars had collided. A bottleneck had formed around the accident. Traffic crept around it. I cursed and pumped the brake and glanced at the dashboard clock every six seconds.

  The violins sawed away in double-stopped chords. The cello and viola answered, booming like bullfrogs. And then a sudden cantabile passage gave way to dance, which gave way to stridency, followed again by cantabile. Cantabile-singable or singingly. Indeed, I found myself singing along. Fugato flowed effortlessly, water over rock.

  One of the cars, a tugboat in champagne and gold, sat with its nose in the street, its hind wheels in the Wendy's parking lot. The driver had tried to turn into the nearest lane of traffic, but instead had struck and crumpled the second car, a white Cabriolet.

  A white Cabriolet. Christa drove a white Cabriolet.

  "Es muss sein!" the second violin said, the three-note motif simple, exultant, reassuringly diatonic. "Es muss sein!" the first violin answered, an octave above. It must be.

  I bullied my way between a matched set of Nissan Pathfinders into the right turn lane. Fudging the red light, I turned onto Dale and swerved without signaling into the parking lot. A knot of people stood gesturing and shouting-a pair of Latino men in gray coveralls, a black couple flanked by two bored-looking teenaged girls. Christa was not among them. The teenagers stared wretchedly toward the Wendy's, as if a bowl of chili were all they desired in the world. The adults turned and looked at me. I shrugged, smiled, and backed away.

  And now the going was easy. I sped through the empty parking lot of the Unidale Mall and onto University through the far entrance. The street was nearly clear of traffic now.

  The quartet played, arco against pizzicato, each instrument dancing lightly, high in its register. And then, just when it seemed a whole new section had begun, the entire movement ended in three booming chords-second-inversion tonic, dominant, tonic-simple, uncomplicated, expected, deeply traditional, as if Beethoven hadn't just dragged the listener through four remote keys.

  A hushed female voice confirmed what I had guessed. "That was Beethoven's sixteenth and last string quartet, Opus one-thirty-five," she said. "In Beethoven's own hand, we find the words 'Muss es sein?' 'Must it be?' Under the faster main theme, Beethoven wrote, 'Es muss sein.' 'It must be.' Since the composer was suffering in ill health at the time, legend has grown up around these words, but apparently in truth it all stemmed from a dispute over money with his housekeeper. Interesting trivia for your next cocktail party."

  I stared at the radio, blinking. Dispute over money? With his housekeeper?

  The announcer promised another quartet, Dvor??k's "American." But first the news. More newspapers had endorsed Clinton than Bush; not since nineteen sixty-four had a majority-or even a plurality-of newspapers endorsed the Democratic candidate. A former client of Dave Durenberger had claimed that, decades ago, he'd raped her. More than three centuries after the fact, and after a dozen years of study, the Pope had at last conceded that Galileo was right. I switched off the radio.

  At Rice Street, I turned right, then left into the State Office Building parking lot. The granite parking structure rose in two levels. The leggy skeletons of last summer's nasturtiums fainted at its foot.

  My assigned spot was in the farthest corner of the ramp's ground level. Martin rarely drove to work, but today his rattletrap Volkswagen bus stood in his space, angled to accommodate the right rear fender of Christa's white Cabriolet. Here it was, intact, if crookedly parked.

  * * *

  People thronged the first floor lobby of the State Office Building, stamping the black marble with muddy boot prints. They carried signs. Their voices tangled and thrummed. Compared to the average class of protestor, they seemed quite placid. One of the signs read-what else?-"Love Is All Around." Another was angled away from me and was difficult to read, but it seemed to say "A Vote For Slick Willy Is A Vote For Satan."

  The elevator could not come fast enough. I punched the button forty times before the cantankerous elevator on the northernmost end of the bank rumbled up from the ground floor.

  When I opened the door to the office, I found Christa sitting at her desk. She sat with her hands flat on the desktop in front of her, staring ahead as though she'd been doing nothing at all except watching the door. I feared a catatonic state.

  "Are you all right?" I said. Something occurred to me: "We haven't been abolished or something, have we?"

  Rousing herself from her trance, she waved away the suggestion. "Nothing like that. I've just been waiting for you." She lowered her voice to a portentous whisper. "And so has Martin."

  I threw up my hands. "I know, I know. He called."

  On a legal pad set before her, she'd scrawled a short list:

  Eat a Bowl of Tea

  My Dinner with Andre

  Surviving Desire

  "That's an interesting to-do list," I said.

  She sighed. "I was just trying to think of movies where nothing happens."

  "I'd have thought you'd rather h
ave your toenails painted pink than see My Dinner with Andre."

  "It's true, I like a movie with a few good explosions, or at least a car chase. But Tory likes movies where nothing happens." She wrinkled her nose. "And subtitles."

  And perhaps movies where middle-aged men wear letterman jackets, I thought. I bit my tongue.

  A false wall separated our cubicles. I rounded it. I hung my jacket over the back of my chair. From my desk I grabbed a pen and my Day Runner; I promised myself I'd never again let it out of my hands. I peeked into Martin's office. He wasn't there. "He's up there already?"

  "You bet."

  "Where's Thorstensen's office again?"

  I heard pages rustling. When I returned from my cubicle, she was consulting the big calendar on her desk. "Two-sixty-three," she said. "If it's any consolation, Martin's been torturing me, too. He wants to cut our budget by reducing every number to the tune of-get this-one nickel. Literally. I have to figure out how many paper clips we get for five cents. Can a person die from pure annoyance?"

  I let my shoulders slump. "If don't come back, that'll be your answer."

  In the elevator lobby, I stopped for a long drink from the water fountain. The tunnel to the Capitol curved away out of sight. From its ceramic and stone depths issued the reverberant voice of a crowd. The Sam Stinson folk, no doubt. Love Is All Around, I thought.

  * * *

  Each floor of the State Office Building had a color theme. The second floor was blue. I followed a strip of navy carpet past robin's-egg walls to Thorstensen's corner office. A fortress of navel-high cubicles-the workspaces of pages, legislative aides, and lackeys, all empty now, all the surfaces clear-surrounded the Minority Leader's office. Thorstensen's door was closed. Muriel, his administrative assistant, was away from her desk. A mug of tea steamed on a tiny hot plate.

  In an alcove behind Muriel's cubicle I waited beside brass-framed windows. Patches of sun mottled the wet streets. In the distance, past the Department of Transportation and the Kelly Inn, the cathedral stood on its hill, wrapped half in cloud. To its left, downtown Saint Paul filled the hollow between Summit Avenue and the river. Red and black towers huddled together like parents gathering in their children.

  "Jonah?" It was Martin. He stood at Thorstensen's open door. He wore a Twins sweatshirt, faded blue jeans smeared with greenish dirt, and his battered canvas bicycling shoes. "What are you doing?"

  I shook myself awake. "No one was here. I didn't think-."

  "You could have knocked." He lowered his voice. "You should have knocked."

  I followed him into the office. How strange that Thorstensen's desk, though surely smaller than Eliot's, seemed so outlandishly out of scale by comparison. Jokes about the size of this slab of dark-stained cherry-bigger than either the Speaker's or the Majority Leader's, so big that it scarcely left room for the Minority Leader himself-were rife throughout the Capitol Complex. Thorstensen sat in a chair of dark blue suede so tall that it eclipsed all but the topmost foot of the office's only window. Martin and I sat facing him in matching vinyl chairs as narrow as airline seats.

  Thorstensen leaned back in his chair, coaxing a complaint from its springs. Smoothing his puckered red vest over his round belly, he said, "Martin has been telling me that you've been out of sorts the past couple of days."

  I looked at Martin. He'd had his hair cut to a yarmulke of white bristles. Long yellowish-white whiskers formed a crescent-shaped beard. Steadfastly he kept his eyes on the Minority Leader.

  I cleared my throat. For Martin's benefit, I said, "I guess I'm just weak."

  Now Martin was looking at me. But I watched Thorstensen. He wheeled back his chair. Elfin eyebrows climbed the craggy cliff of his forehead. He said nothing.

  "I thought we were here to talk about the forums," I said. I looked back and forth between them. "Is that not the case?"

  Martin said to Thorstensen, "We've planned a series of discussions with staff-we're calling them forums-designed to gather facts about the kinds of harassment-."

  Thorstensen held up his left hand. With his right, he rummaged in a desk drawer. He plopped a book, a thick hardcover in a bright red dust jacket, onto his desk. It slid toward us. Onslaught: How Political Correctness Erodes Our Culture and Belittles Our Values, by Sam Stinson.

  My face burned. If I heard, read, or saw that name one more time today-.

  "Everything I need to say on the subject is contained in this book," Thorstensen said. "I will not stand by while excellence takes a back seat to some liberal idea of diversity." He spat the word as if it impugned the virtue of someone's mother.

  "Representative Thorstensen," I said, "were you aware that in a survey conducted in nineteen-ninety, a mere six percent of university faculty identified themselves as holding leftist-."

  Martin touched my arm. "I think what Jonah is trying to say is that that is not our goal. We have been charged with the task of creating a policy that deals with forms of harassment-."

  Thorstensen held up his hand again. "I've read the law, Martin. I know what your charter is. And I can read between the lines. I am not going to idly sit by while you draft a policy that prohibits my staff from complimenting one another on their clothing, for fear that someone who has an inferior fashion sense-who's not even in the room, mind you-would be offended if they were present-."

  I said, "That's so beyond the realm of what we can possibly accomplish-."

  "I think what Jonah is trying to say is-."

  "Martin, I know what I'm trying to say. You don't have to-."

  Thorstenson shook his head. He pushed the book toward us. "Read the book and you'll know where I stand. I can't forbid my staff from participating in your forms, but you should know I'm not kindly disposed to what you're doing."

  The meeting was over. I half-expected Thorstesen to spin in his chair in a dismissive gesture, but there was no room for the chair to spin.

  * * *

  In the elevator, I said to Martin, "Forms?"

  He was holding the Stinson book, ruffling its pages. "I suppose we'd better find out where he stands, so to speak." He closed the book and handed it to me.

  "You're joking."

  He shook his head. "I doubt there are Cliff's Notes. Best get cracking."

  I flipped to the end of the book. Six hundred, forty-nine pages, not counting the index. The elevator doors slid open. Engrossed in the book, I blindly followed Martin. On a hunch, I checked the index for "excellence." Page thirteen, in the preface.

  "Listen to this," I said, and read from page thirteen:

  This is a movement so bent upon erasing the natural order of things that they want to make it a crime for us to compliment one another on our clothing. Their wrong-headed idea is that they are protecting someone, some theoretical person with an inferior fashion sense (someone who's not even in the room, mind you), who might be offended if they were present.

  "Almost exactly the words Thorstensen used," I said. "Did you notice? 'Mind you.' Didn't he even say the 'mind you'?"

  I looked up. I was alone in the ground floor elevator lobby. Martin had vanished. The tunnels to the Capitol and to the Department of Transportation were empty, still as a church. Reading, I wandered toward the Capitol.

  "Es muss sein! Es muss sein," I sang. The ceramic brick walls sang back.

  * * *

  5 - Popular Indicators

  On Tuesday morning I drove to work through flurries of fat snowflakes. Snow swirled across University Avenue. The Chevette felt inclined to fishtail, a little unruly, like a skittish pony on a rocky, unfamiliar trail.

  KSJN was playing Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, the first movement. It was a little too early in the day for such ebullience, too wintry for such sunny, shimmering music. I switched off the radio.

  At every intersection-or at least every traffic light-some stalwart stood holding a Clinton-Gore sign. Most of the signs were tabloid-sized, but some were as big as sails. Passing motorists honked and waved.

  I blinked
, rubbed sleep from my eyes. Oh, yes. Election Day. After the previous day's Stinson saturation, the Clinton-Gore signs were a relief, a balm.

  What would the little gray-haired man who lived across from the beach be doing now? Marching up and down among his yard signs, shouting, "Bush-Quayle, Bush-Quayle"? Plucking placards from the earth, shaking them menacingly at passing motorists? Perhaps simply standing at the edge of his lawn, leaning on his cane, glowering at passersby, daring them to vote incorrectly?

  On second thought, I switched the radio back on. The violins played the jubilant main theme against an accompaniment in the cellos and violas that sounded like a diminution of the melody. So radiant, so celebratory, so recklessly exuberant. All the strings took up the diminution, and the horns broke in with the theme. I found myself humming along, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel.

  After the music, election news. The announcer, the same woman who'd told the tale of Beethoven's housekeeper, said, "In a presidential race that has grown more and more heated, and with pollsters predicting a close election, the faithful among both parties are looking backward in order to predict the future. Over the years, would-be prognosticators have made use of a number of popular indicators that have been surprisingly-one might say inexplicably-accurate in predicting election results. Bill Harmon has more."

  Bill Harmon's voice was reedy, phlegmy, unpleasantly like an oboe played in its lowest range. He said, "Thank you, Susan. There are indeed several popular indicators which may seem random and which are certainly not statistically valid, but which nevertheless have an excellent track record. For example, since nineteen-fifty-two, no candidate has taken the White House without winning his party's New Hampshire primary."

  Susan said, "And as we know, Bill Clinton came in second place in New Hampshire."