Читать книгу The Snow Queen - Michael Cunningham - Страница 17

Tyler sits in the kitchen, sipping coffee and doing one last line. He’s still wearing the boxer shorts, and has put on Barrett’s old Yale sweatshirt, its grimacing bulldog faded, by now, from red to a faint, candyish pink. Tyler sits at the table Beth found on the street, cloudy gray Formica that’s chipped away in one corner, a ragged-edged gap the shape of the state of Idaho. When this table was new, people expected domed cities to rise on the ocean floor. They believed that they lived on the brink of a holy and ecstatic conjuring of metal and glass and silent, rubberized speed.

The world is older now. It can, at times, seem very old indeed.

They will not reelect George Bush. They cannot reelect George Bush.

Tyler pushes the thought out of his mind. It would be foolish to spend this lambent early hour obsessing. He’s got a song to finish.

So as not to awaken Beth, he leaves his guitar in the corner. He whisper-sings, a cappella, the verse he wrote last night.

To walk the frozen halls at night

To find you on your throne of ice

To melt this sliver in my heart

Oh, that’s not what I came for

No, that’s not what I came for.

Hmm. It’s crap, is it?

The trouble is …

The trouble is he’s determined to write a wedding song that won’t be all treacle and devotion, but won’t be cool or calm, either. How, exactly, do you write a song for a dying bride? How do you account for love and mortality (the real thing, not some till-death-do-us-part throwaway) without morbidity?

It needs to be a serious song. Or, rather, it needs not to be a frivolous song.

The melody will help. Please, let the melody help. This time, though, the lyrics need to come first. Once the lyrics feel right (once they feel less wrong), he’ll lay them over … a minimal tune, something simple and direct, not childish of course but possessed of a childlike, beginner’s earnestness, a beginner’s innocence of tricks. It should be all major chords, with one minor, at the end of the bridge—that single jolt of gravitas; that moment when the lyrics’ romantic solemnity departs from the contrast of its upbeat chords and matches—fleetingly—a darkness in the music itself. The song should reside in the general vicinity of Dylan, of the Velvet Underground. It should not be faux-Dylan, not fake Lou Reed; it should be original (original, naturally; preferably unprecedented; preferably tinged with genius), but it helps, it helps a little, to aim in a general direction. Dylan’s righteous banishment of sentimentality, Reed’s ability to mingle passion with irony.

The melody should have … a shimmering honesty, it should be egoless, no Hey, I can really play this guitar, do you get that? Because the song is an unvarnished love-shout, an implorement tinged with … anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosopher, the anger of a poet, an anger directed at the transience of the world, at its heartbreaking beauty that collides constantly with our awareness of the fact that everything gets taken away; that we’re being shown marvels but reminded, always, that they don’t belong to us, they’re sultan’s treasures, we’re lucky (we’re expected to feel lucky) to have been invited to see them at all.

And there’s this, as well. The song has to be infused with … if not anything as banal as hope, an assertion of an ardency that can, if this is humanly possible (and the song must insist that it is), follow the bride in her journey to the netherworld, abide there with her. It has to be a song in which a husband and singer declares himself to be not only a woman’s life-mate, but her death-mate as well, although he, helpless, unconsulted, will keep on living.

Good luck with that one.

He pours himself more coffee, draws out a final, really final, line on the tabletop. Maybe he’s just not … awake enough to be gifted. Maybe one day, why not today, he’ll bust out of his lifelong drowse.

Would “shiver” be better than “sliver”? To melt this shiver in my heart?

No. It wouldn’t.

That repetition at the end—is it forceful or cheap?

Should he try for a half-rhyme with “heart”? Is it too sentimental to use the word “heart” at all?

He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who’s learned to love the sensation of being pierced.

To walk the frozen halls at night

To find you on your throne of ice

Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds this early in the morning. That’s a possibility.

But still. If Tyler were the real thing, if he were meant to do this, wouldn’t he have more confidence? Wouldn’t he feel … guided, somehow?

Never mind that he’s forty-three, and still playing in a bar.

He will not come to his senses. That’s the siren song of advancing age. He can’t, he won’t, deny the snag in his heart (there’s that word again). He can feel it, an undercurrent in his bloodstream, this urge that’s utterly his own. No one ever said to him, why don’t you use your degree in political science to write songs, why don’t you blow the modest inheritance your mother left by sitting in ever-smaller rooms, strumming a guitar. It’s his open secret, the self inside the self, secret because he believes he knows within himself a brilliance, or at least a penetrating clarity, that hasn’t come out yet. He’s still producing approximations, and it vexes him that most people (not Beth, not Barrett, just everybody else) see him as a sad case, a middle-aged bar singer (no, make that a middle-aged bartender, who’s permitted by the owner to sing on Friday and Saturday nights), when he knows (he knows) that he’s still nascent, no prodigy of course, but the music and poetry move slowly in him, great songs hover over his head, and there are moments, real moments, when he feels so certain he can reach them, he can almost literally pull them out of the air, and he tries, lord how he tries, but what he grabs hold of is never quite it.

Fail. Try again. Fail better. Right?

He sings the first two lines again, softly, to himself. He hopes they’ll open into … something. Something magical, and obscurely on target, and … good.

To walk the frozen halls at night

To find you on your throne of ice

He sings quietly in the kitchen, with its faint gassy smell and its pale blue walls (they must, once, have been aquamarine), its tacked-up photographs of Burroughs and Bowie and Dylan, and (Beth’s) Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. If he can write a beautiful song for Beth, if he can sing it to her at their wedding and know that it’s a proper testament—a true gift, not just another near miss, another nice try, but a song that lands, that lances, that’s gentle but faceted, gleaming, gem-hard …

Give it one more go, then.

He starts singing again, as Beth dreams in the next room. He sings quietly to his lover, his bride to be, his dying girl, the girl for whom this song and, probably, really, all the songs are meant. He sings into the brightening air of the room.