First Person Singular Read online

  * * *

  —

  A friend of mine first introduced me to her. I was just past fifty then, and she was about ten years younger. But for her, age didn’t matter. Her looks surpassed any other personal factors. Age, height, the shape and size of one’s breasts, let alone the shape of big toenails or the length of one’s earlobes, all took a back seat to her spectacular lack of beauty.

  I was at a concert in Suntory Hall when I ran across a male friend of mine having a glass of wine with F* during intermission. One of Mahler’s symphonies was on the program that evening (I forget which one). The first half of the program featured Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. My friend introduced me to F* and the three of us had some wine and talked about Prokofiev’s music. All of us had come alone to the concert and my friend just happened to run across her there too. People who go to concerts by themselves always share a sense of solidarity, albeit a small one.

  Naturally, when I met F* my first thought was that this was one singularly ugly woman. She was so friendly and straightforward, though, that I was embarrassed by my initial reaction. I’m not sure how to put it exactly, but as we chatted, I grew accustomed to her looks. They no longer seemed to matter. She was a pleasant person, and a good talker, able to converse widely. Add to this a quick mind, and good taste in music. When the buzzer sounded ending the intermission, and then when we said goodbye, I thought if only she were good-looking, or at least if her looks were a little better, she’d be a very appealing woman.

  But later on, I learned the hard way how shallow and superficial my thinking had been. It was precisely because of her unusual looks that she was able to effectively engage her powerful personality—her power to draw people in, you might put it. What I mean is, it was precisely the gap between her physical appearance and her refinement that created her own special brand of dynamism. And she was fully aware of that power, and was able to use it as needed.

  It’s next to impossible for me to describe exactly what it was about her looks that was so unappealing. No matter how I try to describe her, I’ll never be able to convey to the reader the idiosyncrasies of her appearance. One thing I can say for sure, though, is this: you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint any functional imperfections. So it wasn’t like—this part’s weird, or fix this part and she’d look a bit better. Yet combine them all and you wound up with an organically comprehensive ugliness. (It’s an odd comparison, but the process reminds me of the birth of Venus.) And it’s impossible for words or logic to explain that composite. Even supposing I could, it wouldn’t mean much anyway. What we have there is a choice between two alternatives, and only two—we either wholly accept it, unconditionally, as something that is what it is, or we completely reject it. Like a take-no-prisoners type of war.

  In the opening of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and I think the same applies to women’s faces in terms of beauty or ugliness. I believe (and please take this for what it is, just my personal view) that beautiful woman can be summed up by simply being “beautiful.” Each one of them is carrying around a single beautiful, golden-haired monkey on her back. There might be a slight difference in the luster and shade of their fur, but the brilliance they share makes them all seem one and the same.

  In contrast, ugly women each carry around their own individual version of a shaggy monkey. There are small, but significant, differences in their monkeys—how worn their fur is, where their fur has thinned out, how dirty they are. There’s no brilliance at all, so unlike the golden-haired monkeys, our eyes are not dazzled by them.

  The monkey that F* carried around on her back had a variety of expressions, and its fur—though never sparkling or shining—was a composite of several colors simultaneously. One’s impression of that monkey changed drastically depending on the angle you viewed it from, as well as by the weather, the wind, direction, the time of day. To put it another way, the ugliness of her features was the result of a unique force that compressed unattractive elements of all shapes and sizes and assembled them together in one place. And her monkey had quietly settled down, very comfortably, and unhesitantly, on her back, as if every possible cause and effect had embraced at the very center of the world.

  I was aware of all this, to some extent, the second time I met F*, though certainly still unable to articulate it. I knew it would take some time to understand her ugliness, and doing so would require intuition, philosophy, morality, and a bit of real-life experience. And that spending time with her would, at a certain point, lead to a sort of feeling of pride. It was pride at the fact that we’d somehow managed to grab hold of the requisite intuition, philosophy, morality, and life experience.

  * * *

  —

  The second time I saw her was also at a concert hall, a smaller venue than Suntory Hall. It was a concert by a French female violinist. As I recall, she played sonatas by Franck and Debussy. She was an amazing musician, and these pieces were part of her favorite repertoire, but on that particular day she wasn’t at her best. The two pieces by Kreisler she played for an encore, though, were quite charming.

  I was outside the concert hall, waiting for a taxi, when she called to me from behind. F* was with a woman friend then, a small, slim, beautiful friend. F* herself was rather tall, just a bit shorter than I am.

  “I know a nice place just down the street,” she said. “Would you care to go have a glass of wine or something?”

  Sounds good, I told her. The night was still young, and I was feeling some lingering frustration over the concert. I felt like having a glass or two of wine and talking with someone about fine music.

  The three of us settled down in a small bistro in a nearby side street, ordered wine and some snacks, but her lovely friend soon got up to take a phone call. A family member had called telling her that her cat was sick. So then it was just F* and me. But I wasn’t especially disappointed, since by this time I was starting to be interested in F*. She had excellent taste in clothes and wore an obviously high-end blue silk dress. The jewelry she wore was perfect, too. Simple, but the kind that caught your eye. It was then that I noticed she was wearing a wedding ring.

  She and I talked about the concert. We agreed that the violinist hadn’t been at her best. Maybe she wasn’t feeling well, or had some pain in her fingers, or maybe she wasn’t happy with the hotel room she’d been provided. But no doubt something was wrong. You’re sure to run across those kinds of things when you attend concerts often enough.

  We moved on to talking about the kinds of music we liked. We agreed that we both liked piano music the best. Of course we listened to opera, symphonies, and chamber music, but what we liked best was solo piano music. And strangely enough, there was a lot of overlap in our favorite pieces. Neither of us could get too enthusiastic for long about Chopin. At least it wasn’t what we wanted to hear first thing in the morning. Mozart’s piano music was beautiful, and charming, for sure, but frankly we’d grown tired of it. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier was amazing, but a bit too long to really focus on. You had to be in good physical shape to properly appreciate it. Beethoven’s piano music sometimes struck us as overly serious, and (we believed) it had been dissected enough already, from every conceivable angle. Brahms’s piano music was lovely to listen to on occasion, but exhausting if heard all the time. Not to mention often boring. And with Debussy and Ravel you had to carefully choose the time and place you heard them in, or else you couldn’t fully appreciate their music.

  Without a doubt, we decided, the pinnacle of the piano repertoire was several Schubert sonatas, and the music of Schumann. Of all those, which one would you choose?

  * * *

  —

  Just one?

  That’s right, F* said, just one. The one piano piece you would take with you to a desert island.

  Not an easy question. I had to give it some s
erious thought.

  Schumann’s Carnaval, I finally declared.

  F* narrowed her eyes and gazed at me for a long time. She then rested her hands on the table, laced them together, and loudly cracked the knuckles. Exactly ten times. So loud that people at nearby tables glanced our way. It was a hard sound, like snapping a three-day-old baguette on your knee. There aren’t that many people—men or women—who can crack their knuckles that loudly. I figured it out later, but loudly cracking her knuckles ten times was her habit when she was excited and enthusiastic. I didn’t know that then, however, and wondered if something had upset her. Probably my choice of Carnaval was inappropriate. But there it was. The fact was, I’ve always loved the piece. Even if it made someone so angry that they wanted to punch me, I still wasn’t going to lie about it.

  “You’re really going to go with Carnaval?” She frowned, raised one long finger, making sure of things. “As the one piece out of all piano pieces you’d take with you to a desert island?”

  I felt unsure, now that she said this. In order to preserve Schumann’s incoherent piano music, beautiful as a kaleidoscope, and somehow beyond the bounds of human intellect, was I really willing to chuck Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Well-Tempered Clavier? Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, and his brave, and charming, Third Concerto?

  A brief, heavy silence followed, while F* pushed her fists together hard a few times, as if checking how her hands were doing.

  “You have wonderful taste,” she finally said. “And I admire your courage. I’m with you. Schumann’s Carnaval would be my choice too.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. I’ve always loved it. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I hear it.”

  We went on for some time discussing the piece. We ordered a bottle of Pinot Noir, and finished it as we talked. We became friends of a sort that evening. Carnaval buddies. Though this relationship only lasted about a half a year.

  * * *

  —

  So we made our own kind of two-member-only, private Carnaval Club. There was no reason that it had to be limited to just two, but it never exceeded that number. Since we never ran across anyone else as crazy about the piece as we were.

  We listened to numerous records and CDs of performances of Carnaval, and if a pianist was including the piece in his concert, we did everything we could to attend together. According to my notebook (I took copious notes on each and every performance), we went to live performances of Carnaval by three separate pianists, and listened together to forty-two CDs and records of the piece. Afterward we’d cozily exchange opinions on them. Turns out that a lot of pianists, in all times and places, have recorded the piece, which seemed to be a popular part of their repertoire. For all that, we only found a handful of performances acceptable.

  A performance could be technically flawless, but if the technique was not completely in sync with the music, Carnaval collapsed into nothing more than a mechanical finger exercise, and its appeal vanished. It was, indeed, very challenging to pull off the expression just right, beyond the abilities of your run-of-the-mill pianist. I won’t name anyone, but not a few major pianists made recordings of fumbled performances, bereft of any charisma. And many other pianists avoided playing it altogether. (At least that’s the only thing I can surmise.) Vladimir Horowitz loved Schumann’s music and performed it throughout his career, but for some reason never made a proper recording of Carnaval. And the same can be said of Sviatoslav Richter. And I can’t be the only person who would one day love to hear Martha Argerich perform the piece.

  * * *

  —

  Incidentally, almost none of Schumann’s contemporaries understood how wonderful his music was. Mendelssohn and Chopin, for instance, didn’t think much of Schumann’s piano music. Even Schumann’s widow, Clara (one of the top pianists of her time), who devotedly played his music, secretly wished that he had focused on more standard-type operas or symphonies rather than this kind of whimsical composition. Basically, Schumann wasn’t fond of classical forms like the sonata, and occasionally his pieces came across as rambling and starry-eyed. He moved away from the existing classical forms, which resulted in the birth of a new type of music, the Romantic school, but most of his contemporaries thought his work was eccentric, lacking a solid foundation and content. It was this bold eccentricity, however, that propelled the rise of Romantic music.

  * * *

  —

  At any rate, during those six months the two of us listened to Carnaval every chance we got. That wasn’t all we listened to, of course—Mozart and Brahms were on our menu from time to time—but whenever we met, we’d end up listening to a version of Carnaval and share our reactions to the performance. I was our little club’s secretary, and noted down summaries of our opinions. She came to my house several times, but more often than not I went to hers, as she lived near the center of the city, while I was out in the suburbs. After hearing forty-two recorded versions of the piece, her number one choice was Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s recording for Angel Records, and mine was Arthur Rubinstein’s RCA recording. We carefully graded each and every disc we listened to, knowing of course that it really didn’t amount to much. It was just an extra bit of fun thrown in. What was most important to us was talking about the music we loved, the feeling of almost aimlessly sharing something we were passionate about.

  You’d think that a man seeing a woman ten years younger this frequently would cause some discord at home, but my wife didn’t worry about her at all. I won’t deny that F*’s unattractive looks played a major role in my wife’s disinterest. She didn’t have a bit of suspicion or doubt that F* and I might fall into a sexual relationship, a major benefit her looks afforded us. My wife just seemed to find us a pair of nerds. She wasn’t into classical music herself, as most concerts bored her. My wife dubbed F* “your girlfriend.” And sometimes, with a hint of sarcasm, “your lovely girlfriend.”

  I never met F*’s husband. (She didn’t have any children). Maybe by coincidence, he was out whenever I visited her place, or else she specifically chose times he wouldn’t be there. Or maybe he was out most of the time. Which it was, I couldn’t say. While we’re on the subject, I couldn’t even tell for sure if she really had a husband. She never said a single thing about him, and as far as I recall, there wasn’t a trace of a man anywhere about the place. That said, she had announced that she had a husband, and wore a sparkling gold wedding ring on the ring finger of her left hand.

  She also never said a word about her past. She never mentioned where she was from, what kind of family she had, which schools she went to, or what kind of jobs she’d had. If I asked her about personal things, all I got back was vague innuendo or a wordless smile. All I did know about her was that she worked in some specialized field and had quite an affluent lifestyle. She lived in the trendy Daikanyama neighborhood in Tokyo, in an elegant three-bedroom condo in a building surrounded by greenery, drove a brand-new BMW sedan, and had an expensive stereo system in her living room. It was a high-end Accuphase pre-main amp and CD player, with large, smart-looking Linn speakers. And she always dressed in attractive, neat outfits. I don’t know that much about women’s clothes, but even I could tell they were pricey, designer items.

  When it came to music, she was eloquent. She had a sharp ear, and quickly chose the most precise way of describing what she’d heard. Her knowledge of music, too, was deep and broad. But when it came to anything other than music, she was pretty much an enigma. I tried my best to draw her out, but she would never open up.

  One time she told me about Schumann.

  “Like Schubert,” she said, “Schumann battled VD when he was young, and the disease gradually affected his mind. Plus, he had schizophrenic tendencies. He regularly suffered from terrible auditory hallucinations, and his body was seized by uncontrollable trembling. He was convinced he was being pursued by evil spirits, a
nd believed in their literal existence. Pursued by endless, horrific nightmares, he tried numerous times to kill himself. Once he even flung himself into the Rhine River. Inner delusions and outer reality were intertwined within him. Carnaval was an early work, so the evil spirits of his weren’t showing their faces clearly yet. Since the piece is about the carnival festival, it’s full of figures wearing cheerful-looking masks, but this was not merely some happy carnival. Ultimately the evil spirits lurking within him do make an appearance in the piece, one after the other, as if introduced for a moment, wearing happy carnival masks. All around them, an ominous early-spring wind is blowing. Meat, dripping with blood, is served to everyone. Carnival is literally the festival of thankfulness for meat, and a farewell to it, as Lent begins. That’s exactly the kind of music it is.”

  “So the performer has to express, musically, both the mask and the face that lies beneath it for all the characters who appear. Is that what you’re saying?” I asked.

  She nodded. “That’s right. That’s exactly right. If you can’t express that sentiment, then what’s the point in performing it? The piece is the ideal of playful music, but within that playfulness, you can catch a glimpse of the specters lurking inside the psyche. The playful sounds lure them out from the darkness.”

  She was silent for a while, and then continued.

  “All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can’t survive in this violent world. Beneath an evil-spirit mask lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel’s mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It’s impossible to have just one or the other. That’s who we are. And that’s Carnaval. Schumann was able to see the many faces of humanity—the masks and the real faces—because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap in between the two.”