#9: When Music Comes Alive
"When love comes, it turns the whole world topsy-turvy."
(Last time, Charlie and his friends arrived in Kentucky to crash a wedding.)
The rosy-fingered sun rekindled the light of morning. The air washed over my face from the open motel window above me. I wondered at how long it had been since the day had promised so much to me. I stretched out in my sleeping bag and listened to the languid strumming of my blood. I had been sleeping on the floor, but my muscles had the smoothness of water. I reached out my hands to the edge of the paint-covered old radiator. I yawned, and tasted the golden mist of the air.
As the others slept, a cloud of wonder unfolded around me. I didn’t want to think too concretely about anything. I just wanted to let the little glinting buds of possibility flower. I would see her again. Maybe we could dance. What would she be wearing? What would I be today, on this holiday from everything—from soot and ash and blackened wasteland? Today, I could live. Was this like what Cinderella felt like as the carriage left to take her to the ball?
Though my sneakers were not exactly glass slippers. I smiled, throat too full with sunlight to laugh.
Taking a shower (the first time in days), I felt like an old skin was peeling off. I put on my new old clothes. I made three attempts at tying the blue-and-gold-striped tie from the church shop. At last, I drew the crumpled knot up to my neck.
Standing outside, I watched the heat bake the packed earth of the parking lot and the air around me, making it harder, grittier, and thicker.
“So who are we going to be?” Ralph asked as he buttoned up the pink shirt. That question seemed both wonderful and scary.
Pat peered at his reflection in the mirror. “We’re dates of the quartet. And it’s true, we are. Even if it’s a little complicated, right Charlie?” His laughter sprayed in bursts.
“Well, we should be going,” I said.
From the instant he stepped out of the car in the First Baptist’s parking lot, Pat seemed to belong. He didn’t seem to be sneaking or watching or trying to hide. Instead, he just looked like some guy happy to go to a wedding. Danny slouched a bit, as though his head were a strange beacon, and looked around suspiciously. I tried to avoid eye contact with anyone. Ralph went forward in his usual haze.
The girls were waiting for us at the church steps. A short black dress clutched Lana’s narrow frame, ornamented by her lilac eye shadow and gold necklace. Her short locks curled like snakes. Sarah’s brown hair still fell across her back like a ponytail, but, this time, the ponytail was braided. Instead of a t-shirt and jeans, she wore a teal-and-green-tiled shirt, dark blue pants, and black orthopedic shoes. Kristy’s outfit seemed a tornado of colors: shades of blue, yellow, and purple fluttered around her in tendrils of diaphanous silk.
The sight of Bonnie caused the nub of my throat to tighten and then swing up, like a high striker when Goliath hits. Her hair had always seemed so straight before, held back by that bandana, but now it unrolled in soft curls around her face. For make-up, I could only see the faint pink of lipstick’s accent. Light pink with etchings of swirling chrysanthemum leaves, her dress was soft and sleek, like a starlet’s nightgown from the 1930s. Though the dress itself was sleeveless, she also wore a meshy white cardigan over it, unbuttoned and running to her mid-forearm. She had tied the blue-teared bandana around her wrist like a bracelet.
“Covert ops, reporting for duty,” Pat said with a mock salute.
“Hi,” I said to Bonnie as everyone began to exchange introductions and (sometimes mocking) compliments. “You look great.”
The lipstick added to the brightness of her teeth when she smiled. “So do you, Charlie.”
“I’m not used to this.” I gestured at the tie around my neck.
“You look very dashing.” She laughed. “It is a little different, though. Usually, when we play in a formal setting, I’m just in black pants and a shirt. And Lana insisted that she had to do my hair.” She batted the curls. “I didn’t even have that done when I went to prom.”
“Well, it’s very nice,” I said. “Not that your hair isn’t...”
She laughed again. “I know what you mean. Hey, let me adjust the knot just a little.” She reached up and massaged the tie knot by my neck. I could suddenly hear the blood in my ears. “There.”
I felt the knot. “Thanks.”
“Hey,” Pat said, “let’s take a picture of all of us—to commemorate the day!”
I had done those cheesy arms-over-shoulders group photos so many times in high school and college, but my heartbeat nevertheless started to pick up as she pressed her body next to me and her hand reached along my back. It was like the rush I got from a girl’s touch at a school dance when I was thirteen.
“Okay, you dears, say cheese,” the pink-clad matron we had hooked into taking our photo said. Click. “And just one more time again. You’ll want to be sure this comes out.” Click.
Sarah looked at her thin steel watch. “It’s quarter of. We should get ready.”
“Good luck,” I said to Bonnie. “Or is it break a string?” She waved with a wry smile as she went with her friends.
“Geez, Charlie,” Pat murmured, “you guys looked like you were in your own world back there.”
The bustle of the wedding party filled the front of the church. A bent elderly woman in a purple dress fumbled at the lapels of young men in tan cotton suits. I assumed one of them was the groom but couldn’t tell which. Groom, best man, groomsman—friend, brother, cousin, father—it was as though a play program were a jumble of titles without a single name. I figured that old woman with the gnarled fingers was somebody’s grandmother. I guessed that Jess’s mother was the skeletally thin woman who hugged many of the entering guests.
An expectant chatter hung like a cloud in the air of the church. Our feet creaking on the old wooden floorboards, we walked to the bride’s side and sat at back pew. Bonnie and the rest of the quartet waited at the front of the church. They talked, looked over the music, and scrutinized their instruments as though they were at perfect ease, as though this were simply an everyday performance. Bonnie looked at me a few times—like the beam of a lighthouse through the fog.
“And how are you folks doing here?” a man said behind us as his hands landed on Danny’s and Ralph’s shoulders. The pace of his voice had the uneven stroll of a drunk trying to cross the street, alternating between drawn-out and clipped syllables. I looked back and saw a man with a mustache like a sandy scrub-brush slouching over us.
“Oh, um,” Danny began.
“Cat got your tongue?” The man laughed. “What you folks doing back here by yourselves?”
“Oh, we’re Jess’s friends,” Ralph ventured.
Before Ralph could continue, the man pounded with both his hands again. “Friends! Well, that’s just dandy. I’m Uncle Billy.”
“Uncle Billy!” Pat swiveled in his seat and stuck out his hand. “So good to meet you!”
“Well, how do you do?”
Uncle Billy tried to persuade us to sit farther up, but Pat demurred. “We don’t want to block out family.”
“That’s decent of you.” Uncle Billy drew his fingers along his mustache, as though he were trying to smooth it out. “Well, nice meeting you gentleman, and we gotta talk later.” He wandered down the aisle, talking to guests as he went.
As Uncle Billy left, Danny exhaled as though he had been holding his breath the whole time. “I don’t know why this makes me so nervous.”
“Because you have no sense of fun,” Pat replied.
A few scattered notes of the quartet’s instruments flashed through the din. A man whose stomach strained against the dark blue wool of his double-breasted suit stood in front of the assembled group. He must have been the minister. One of the men in the tan cotton suits—tall, wide-shouldered, and crowned with a mop of red hair—walked toward the front of the church to join the man. I wondered how he must feel, minutes before he would pledge his life.
Sarah’s cello came slow and heavy and steady at first. Then, Bonnie’s violin joined in, with its reaching clarion notes, like a bird rejoicing at the morning. Then, Lana’s violin added an affirming echo of the fluttering notes, and Kristy enriched the medley with the wine-tinctured register of her viola. The musical canon started like a budding flower, slowly filling with the sun. The petals began to stretch outward like opening hands. And, then, with a flair of the violin, a radiating exuberance crowned the far-reaching petals. The violin danced up and down the scale with sure, daring leaps. Bonnie’s playing ran like a golden braid through the fabric of the song.
I had heard Pachelbel before. I remembered, dimly, the pattern of notes from pasta commercials and mall bookstores. But now, for the first time, it was alive.
Seeing her play deepened the wonder of the music. Her fingers danced like spiders up the strings. From those thin, metallic, lifeless strings, the bow—guided by her butterfly-fluttering wrist—wove a ribboned tune. Spontaneity suffused her playing. Soft and supple and responsive, her hands moved, and notes sprung up at her fingers’ happy press. Every note seemed an enterprise of anticipation and listening. They arced free and wild and incandescent in the air. The violin’s part climbed in pitch, and diminishing volume suggested the preciousness of that auditory cynosure, and then it grew louder, as the polestar rejoices at its parabolic peak in the sky.
The violin’s ecstasy redounded through her whole body. Her right foot stretched out in apparent ease, and her neck curved with the luxuriance of a stretching ballerina. Her whole pose was one of infinite listening and expression. Everything about her playing aspired to the fluidity of water and of the free air, which register every slight perturbation of force. She took the tiniest details and filled them with life.
The golden braid was not a lonely dancing strand. Its fibers spun and wove with those of the other instruments. Every shift in violin, cello, or viola became a new responsive opportunity for her. A wonderful fabric wove itself in front of me: she played, the others responded, she responded to their responses—and the cycle continued on. The quartet suggested that nothing was alone. Everything responded to everything else—note to note, sea to sky, heart to heart.
The music clung to the church like a heavy perfume, lingering on pews and shoulders and ears. The groom stood like a knight with a helmet of mussed red hair. The bride stepped down the aisle with the grace of a fairy princess.
In watching the wedding, I was also watching Bonnie. Maybe I even watched the wedding through her. If I tilted my head just a little, I could see her face through the rows of shoulders and heads in front of me. I heard her laughter ring full-throated through the crowd. I saw her eyes widen and then blink, as though her eyelids would fan away an incipient tear. Our gazes met a few times. Once, she suddenly smiled—an impulsive burst of white teeth—which ignited a smile on my own lips.
I wondered what allowed her to conjure music from the violin, to listen so intently and respond so carefully, and to smile with such an outpouring of joy. I wondered what she thought of me sitting there in an old ashen coat.
“Now love, my friends,” the minister was saying, “is one of the great gifts from God. That love of man and woman, husband and wife, answers to a yearning so deep that it goes all the way back to Genesis. That love that brings Jess and Barney here is that kind of love. Now, just because love is what we want doesn’t mean that love is always easy. Some of the best things in life can be hard at times, right folks? It ain’t easy to be a heart surgeon. It ain’t easy to dream big and realize that dream. But it’s worth it, right? Raising kids is no walk in the park. And being married—don’t get me started. Sorry, Charlene.” He winked at a middle-aged woman sitting in the front. “You want to hear about some tales of difficulty—some days in the desert—ask her what it’s like being married to me.” Chuckles.
“But the point of this, folks, the point of this is that, in love, you share in the sweet and the sour with that other person. When they hurt, you hurt. When they smile, you smile, too. You join your hearts together for worse and for better, and ultimately it is for your better. It shows you something beyond yourself. It gives you something to lean on when life goes all sigogglin. My friends, there’s a mystery to love—to the love of God, the love of marriage, the love of friendship, the love of family, and all the other loves out there.
“When love comes and touches you, as it has touched Jess and Barney, it rewrites the book of our expectations. When love comes, love shakes the heart. When love comes, it turns the whole world topsy-turvy. Love gives the world mountains and canyons, oceans and rolling plains. It shakes us up, and the stars start to spin, and the sun dances in the sky.”
Lightning Tells
Like dewdrops, mystery hangs on my parents’ youth. They were heedless and bold—no, they were courageous, and willing to grab the thorns of life.
I think of them—both twenty. They met at the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament in New Bedford. She had seen him a few times in the crowd. “Your pops was so cute. He wasn’t one of these big puffed-up bodybuilders. But he had this short-sleeved gingham shirt on—and you could just see these toned muscles. I knew that was a man.”
“I was a boy then,” my father would say.
And my mother would lean forward. “You were the man of my heart.”
Somehow, she contrived to spill a soda on his shoes. And then they talked all day long. They watched the parade. They ate pao de queijo and pasteis de nata. By the time the sun set, my father knew he wanted to marry her. By the time he left for Vietnam, they were engaged.
“Lightning tells, Charlie. Lightning tells. The first time your mother held my hand, it was like a firefly had burst into my veins. I couldn’t say no to that.”
So they had run headlong into life—with marriage and children and a home. Death took loved ones. Recessions took jobs. Fate gave them a sickly son. But still they raced and laughed.
In his fifties, my father still had a backbone of steel. My mother’s eyes were as sharp as when she was a teenager. They still carried that spark of lightning between them.
The bride and groom kissed to great acclaim. Pat stood and cheered with his hands above his head. It was almost like he actually knew Barney and Jess.
An avalanche of applause accompanied the couple as they marched out of the church, but over it all, like the flashing sun, came the music of the quartet. The notes of Handel did handsprings and summersaults. Bonnie’s violin wove in and out of the tune like a flashing needle, and every sequence of notes was a new twist.
At the end, when the wedding party had left, the people still in the church applauded in thanks. I clapped, too, as I walked up to see them. The applause echoed the tremoring in my chest, which I tried to smooth out of my voice when I spoke. “You guys are amazing.” Closer, I could see the nimbus of exhilaration around her, a glow intensified both by her smile and by sweat thickening the air.
“We messed up a couple times,” Sarah said, “but I don’t think it went too badly.”
“So you liked it?” Bonnie asked.
“It was magical,” I said.
A woman with a face like a wrinkled apricot handed us each a little plastic bottle as we went outside to the receiving line. When the bride and groom drove away in the limo, we were to blow bubbles after them instead of throwing rice.
Bonnie opened the pink plastic bottle with a smile. “When I was a little girl, I always thought blowing bubbles was so much fun.” She swirled the wand around the bottle and pulled it out. The ring atop that dripping scepter caught the sunlight in a circular, glimmering rainbow. She blew through the ring, and bubbles stumbled out in a short, broken train.
Her laughter coursed with the bubbles. “Oh, I haven’t done that in so long!” A few bubbles popped in the sunshine or landed on the ground. She dipped the wand and blew again, this time with her head tilted upwards. The prismatic spheres rose up in a fountain’s blast. “Here, you try,” she said, holding out the wand.
I bent down and put my lips close to that glistening ring. I blew, and the rainbow harnessed my breath, and the bubbles poured out. It was so smooth, as smooth as I felt the air rising from my lungs. I watched the parade of bubbles float on the air. So fragile—more fragile than any glass—those transparent shells of breath flew for a beautiful moment. Some drifted higher, some lower. They distilled the sun’s light and glinting rode the wind.
Smiling, she turned toward me and put the wand to her lips again. The bubbles poured toward my face. One exploded near my brow, and, in an instant, all the colors of the rainbow streaked past my eye like comets.
Pat slithered from person to person in the receiving line, with a hungry-eyed attention to every social cue. His face a smiling mask of presumed intimacy, he laughed and shook hands and hugged and kissed bridesmaids on cheeks.
Pat’s cheer worried Danny. “I wish he would be a little more forgettable,” he muttered to me after Pat posed for a candid with a couple bridesmaids. “I thought one of the techniques of successful wedding crashing is not being noticed.”
“But Pat hates not being noticed.”
The bride and groom departed in a tempest of bubbles.
By the time we had packed the instruments in the minivan, Lana turned to plotting out the trip to the reception. “The reception is kinda far out in a farm. You’ll need directions.” She spun on the spiky spires of her heels. “And Sarah’s got an excellent sense of direction. She should go along with you guys.” Lana looped her arm around mine and pulled me along. “And you, Charlie, should come with us. You get the shotgun.”
“What?”
She laughed, and its practiced sheen had an eerie resemblance to Pat’s. “I mean, you get to ride shotgun. Right next to me.”
“Lana…” Bonnie began.
“Come along, Bonnie, come along. We can’t be late.”
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To follow up this wedding theme, here’s some vintage footage from one of the big “weddings” of 1999, via the WWF.