Composing a Life

By Tim McCracken

Christopher Hartley is the chair of the English department at the North Campus of Garden State Universitya place he refers to as a minimum intellectual facility. Recently returned from a medical leave begun after the death of his wife, Holly, sixteen months earlier, he is seeking some measure of peace.

As Chris prepares a brand-new course called Music in Literature, he hopes the combination of the two disciplinesa pairing that has always fascinated himwill help him overcome his grief and deal with the estrangement of his daughter, Ivy. Peace, however, is as elusive as music itself. As he deals with his own health problems and the possibility of a new relationship with a much younger colleague, Chris moves through a chaotic and occasionally amusing fugue in which lust, love, self-worth, redemption, and meaning interweave.

This complex novel explores how music and literature aid one man as he deals with grief, considers the meaning of life and death, and struggles to come to terms with his own mortality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491751107

Tim McCracken

Tim McCracken, professor emeritus of English, has published and presented widely on literature and music. He holds a doctorate from New York University and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Rochester and Princeton University. This is his first novel.

Book preview

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1. It’s Not Dark Yet

Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear. It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there …

—Bob Dylan

Dying for a book—what a moron!

That’s what some might say. But when it happened I thought of nothing; I didn’t float or hear a sound or see a sign and certainly not a light. Just pure nothing. Nothing. The silence before we are born and after we go.

Then I was back, getting off my knees, and my secretary was breathlessly asking, Dr. Hartley, what happened?

I slipped, that’s all, I said rather too breathlessly.

At your age, climbing up there! she huffed, taking delight in her role as mother hen and a woman who has watched so very many men do so many stupid things. I wonder how great our civilization might have been if our women didn’t spend so much time tsking over their feeble lovers, foolish brothers, and dubious husbands.

But my age, I told her, "is not all that. I mean, isn’t sixty the new forty? Or is sixty the new black?" Black. As with my wife Holly’s death almost sixteen months ago, this was a moment when I felt an epiphanic certainty that even I was on the road to extinction.

I was now on my ancient, worn-out couch, forbidden by an administrative mandate that demanded all faculty offices have identical furniture. However, with my status as senior faculty and chair of the English Department, my cracked leather couch was cloaked in invisibility. Those few administrators who got lost and actually came near my office refused to look at this perversion of personality. They hung in the doorway, made small talk, silently prayed for my retirement, and glanced at their watches, all the time preparing for flight.

Now my secretary, Mrs. Rose Morrison (never Rose), made a call to security, which meant soon I would be surrounded by those professionals—security, secretarial, and custodial—hired to protect faculty from troublesome students, to get us a parking space, and to ease us into the afterlife.

I was dazed but aware. I tried to say something humorous, though I sounded like an old enfeebled man who was whistling in a very uncool graveyard. I wondered if perhaps she wasn’t slightly disappointed I had lived and had thus robbed her of a great story. She wanted to be the one who retold how I had met my death.

He fell with this look on his face. He was happy; he died putting his favorite T. S. Eliot back on the shelf. He literally gave his life to teaching might be Mrs. Morrison’s variation.

No, thanks. Not now. Not here in this minimum intellectual facility, the North Campus of Garden State University, where I had almost given my life. I had done my time. I had performed the almost-thankless task of teaching not the impoverished inner-city youth, nor the bored privileged Ivy Leaguer, but the genuinely nice middle-class college students beaming blank and distracted looks at the world of ideas.

Those few students who saw the world’s complications usually were A students who either dropped out or had a breakdown or simply disappeared in a whiff of potential. Occasionally I got mail, and more recently e-mails, from these ex-students, saying how much they remembered my classes and how I was a blast or you really got me thinking or I enabled them to see the world in a new way. When and if I responded, I found they were living unremarkable lives lit by an almost totally false remembrance of me. I’ll always remember when you told our class that life is despair but you have to go on anyway.

Not quite, I thought, quoting, as teachers are condemned to do, the great words of others that life begins on the other side of despair, and thus I despaired of ever having made the slightest bit of difference in this part of ex-urban New Jersey.

Mrs. Morrison, though a little younger, was much more reserved than me, and for such a small and petite woman, she had sizable breasts that she’d done her best not so much to hide but to ignore. If I mentioned her breasts, which her prim demeanor and college policy forbid, I could imagine her saying, Oh, these old things? I just wear them when I don’t care what I wear, though not with Gloria Grahame’s toss of a blonde head.

Right now, her breasts hovered over my head as she pushed me back down on the couch, insisting I rest. When I looked up, I saw two security guards entering with enough resuscitation equipment for a student riot. They seemed disappointed I wasn’t seriously injured, though Mike Lake, the older of the two, was less disappointed. It must be tough, though, going home and telling your family day after day about working for people who, although called Doctor or Professor, were the stupidest motherfuckers on the planet. Watching me die could make for years of great storytelling. Yeah, when I worked at Garden State there was this one asshole professor who died putting away a book, bits of his skull stuck to the corner of some desk. And the gathered would wait for the right moment to tell their cracked skulls stories.

You all right, Doc? Mike Lake asked. You need 911?

I don’t think so, I said, but I wasn’t so sure, so I asked, How’s Bobby doing?

Still ‘doing great at state,’ he said, lightly riffing on the college’s most recent ad campaign. I still think your class saved his life.

Oh, how I wanted to believe that, but by the time his son, Bobby, showed up in my class, drugs were no longer his thing. He had found religion in the form of the Beat writers whose basic motto Do anything but let it produce ecstasy seemed to him a license not to do drugs but to read as much as possible while inhaling as much coffee his nerves would allow. He got sucked into the miracle of how words shaped the world, almost but never exactly as you experienced it, the slippage between the words and your life always shimmering chords of knowing and being, and that words could shape being in such a way that for very brief moments everything made sense or was tolerably beautiful. Of course this meant that even though I had saved his life, I would probably never hear from him again. He was one of our few North Campus students who were accepted into Main Campus’s graduate English program.

Just as they were assuring themselves I was okay, a walkie-talkie crackled, and they picked up their equipment and sprinted for the door, as people so inured to exercise could be said to sprint out of anywhere. But loyal Mike gave me a last look and at least one thumbs-up. Some kid is probably having a panic attack over his dead cell phone in the parking lot, Mike threw back as a good-bye.

The phone on my desk rang, and Mrs. Morrison answered it, with her back to me, whispering and peering around, obviously talking about me. She pressed some magic button on the very high-tech (and, to me, incomprehensible) phone and went into the reception office to continue the talk. Even if I wanted to eavesdrop on a call meant for me, I knew that she knew these gadgets where beyond me, which was a great solace to her, and I knew that she had pressed some button that forbade my listening in.

I was less dizzy now, though I remained seated and hid my unstable state by looking at The Complete Works of T. S. Eliot, as if I was going to read something. I fell into the open spaces between Eliot’s words. We all go into the dark, but the dark lettering shimmered with a white halo.

Since my office was off the main stairwell on the third floor of Barber Hall, and the sign above the alcove said English Department, the area around the office was always busy. Inside, Mrs. Morrison’s massive desk was to the right of my sometimes open door, one good-sized window, while the two other walls were lined with mailboxes for full- and part-time members of the English Department. So my office and its reception area was a hub for all manner of faculty, looking for their mail and maybe a word with me; or students who didn’t realize that the entire department was not in these two rooms; or lost students who wanted to know what room their Ornithology class was in. Since department chairs were picked by department members, not the administration, I think chair offices were so centrally located to make sure we would earn our reduced teaching loads by being pestered to death. The one thing such a central location guaranteed was that news traveled fast. And now a crowd was gathering in the alcove after the security people pushed through, perhaps hoping for, if not a disaster, then at least a distraction.

I was relieved when Harmony Hanson came into the room. She was our house hippie, with frizzy, almost blonde hair with a green sheen and very round eyeglasses that made her small face seem larger. She always smelled of patchouli, and she bangled like a gypsy bazaar. She would be the cliché of the aging hippie if somehow I was not wearing my preppy uniform: white shirt under a black cotton polo sweater, with expensive jeans and even more expensive tennis shoes. So long a time together, we now all steered a delicate course between having character or being one.

She came in, hands held out, but when I tried to rise, she gently pushed me back, tut-tutting me back into victimhood.

Poor Chris, she breathed into me. I came as soon as I heard. Her cell phone beeped Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now.

Hello, yes? Change the meeting to after four, and call the dean and tell him dinner is still at seven. Okay? What? No, thirty copies, not twenty. It is a big meeting. One-sided, too hard to read … In Chris Hartley’s office, yes, he still looks so boyishly handsome. Okay, bye. She picked up the other hand she had dropped. Maggie says hi, she lied. Maggie Sessions, secretary to the assistant academic VP at the main campus, Len Markoff, hated me with the white-hot joy of an older woman who had been dumped for a younger woman, and thus it proved with absolute certainty that all men were … well, you fill in the blank. Why Harmony insisted that all was fine between us was part of her worldview that if you wished everyone were friends, they became friends. Also, she really didn’t want one of her best friends to be an occasional asshole. Split as she was between total loyalty to a male friend and a feminist’s sympathies, she chose to echo Vonnegut’s Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

So, tell me what happened.

Please, I just slipped.

So why the parade?

I don’t know—

"He fainted," Mrs. Morrison interrupted, and if I hadn’t been delivering his mail, who knows how long he would have been laying there. I don’t know how long he was there. So I called security just in case. I think he came back from his medical leave too soon.

A year off was enough. And Jesus, I just slipped. Thanks for the concern, but really—

And what happened at Charlie’s the other night? Slipped again? Harmony interrogated.

No, I had too much to drink. This was the only time I could remember that being drunk was a good excuse. I did send Charlie some money for the frame I broke.

She won’t take it, though it was a photo of her dead son! Harmony’s reminder was enough for Mrs. Morrison’s swift exit.

Hey, Harm, hey, Christopher, what’s happening? Perched in the doorway was philosophy professor Dieter Winterhoffer. The tension in the room immediately went up to a yellow alert. I was in between two people who inhabited emotionally, physically, and, most critically, intellectually hostile galaxies. Dieter’s Harm was a not-very-delicate pun on her name and what he thought of her postmodern leanings. He never called them beliefs or most certainly not philosophy, just leanings, like someone window-shopping, leaning in to check out items behind the glass: flirting with flashy, flimsy, and dangerous consumables.

Alas, I loved them both because Harmony was, as this moment proved again, always there when I needed her, and Dieter was a first-rate scholar with a wry and dark sense of humor, a tennis buddy, and a man I could talk to. Their enmity, however, caused me considerable pain.

I saw Harmony as someone who was deeply spiritual, if occasionally a little too New Age, but her critical readings of Dickinson and Anne Carson were first-rate, and I thought her small book Because They Could Not Stop for Death was brilliant, though one prestigious journal review dismissed it as theoretically untethered. The review stung more than any other, because a well-reviewed book was one way for her to leave North Campus for, if not our prestigious Main Campus, then some college where she could sit in a paneled room and talk to seven students about poetry and go home and write for the rest of the week. She was stuck here teaching only one poetry course per semester and the rest survey courses, because major universities wanted either stars whom they would flaunt and pay extravagantly, or slaves, a role that graduate assistants played so miserably well. Universities had little use for a middle-age professor whose students loved her and who was a fine writer, but who really had no name and thus was worth nothing except to the lucky students in her class.

Students in Dieter’s class were not so lucky. He was by all reports tyrannical, impatient, bullying, and, yes, tyrannical. In his office he had a small framed sign that read, "‘Now it is not difficult to see that one must not make amusement the object of education of the young; for amusement does not go with learning—learning is a painful process.’ Aristotle, Politics."

On more than one occasion, I had to comfort some poor student who caught Dieter’s wrath by interrupting him with a question. He should be fired, complained Rachel Eastman, who had been in my Contemporary Literature class the spring that Holly died and who was now in my new Music in Literature class. I had to tell her of the mixed blessings of tenure. That intellectual freedom was precious; indeed the college classroom might be one of the few places it still thrived. So firing faculty always ran the risk of looking like and often being censorship. We may not need to spill the blood of tyrants for intellectual freedom, but sacrosanct ideas, no matter what the source, needed to be routinely punctured. Thus, it was hard to get rid of the lazy or the incompetent or the rude, because the ideal of intellectual freedom was greater than quieting the occasional freak asshole, to use Rachel’s phrase.

Besides, I said to her, he is our best mind here. You think Eliot or Bach or Kierkegaard was fun to hang around with?

He isn’t a genius! she said, regaining her pride and unfortunately raising her cleavage in full measure. What’s with all the breasts? Yikes, do these young students know what they are doing to old guys like me? Or perhaps we are part of the score they keep. Ten drooling old guys equals one young, hot, flat-bellied, and perhaps flat earth, young man.

Actually, though, she always seemed reluctant to leave my office; she always lingered even after her questions were answered, her complaints attended to, her grief about dating commiserated with. As she got to the door, she shone like only a beautiful twenty-year-old girl with a nimbus of red hair could, and I thought she said, I am here to make your passing easier.

What?

I hope I can pass his course, she said.

Time will tell, I said, not mentioning that I had some other very bright students who didn’t fare well in Dieter’s classes, their B minuses looking like a refutation of the As I had given them. I knew that you would have to be a genius to tell whether Dieter was a genius.

What? She stopped at the door.

Oh, what? I meant about Dr. Winterhoffer, not your grade. As far as I am concerned, you are an A student. But I thought he was the best mind I had ever encountered outside of books. Besides, he had taken an early interest in me when I joined the faculty, and although we had the usual thaw and freeze cycles of any professional relationship, he was a friend.

Well, are we still on for tennis? Dieter asked with two purposes: to piss off Harmony, who would want me to rest and recover, and to see if he really could get a game in.

No, said Mrs. Morrison as she passed Dieter on her way into the room. From behind her, Dieter’s eyebrows arched, but he was interrupted from saying anything because Harmony’s phone rang again. This time she rose and went to the window, whispering.

Dieter said very loudly, What is that ringtone? Is it ‘I Love the Nightlife, I Love to Boogie’? No? Well, maybe, let’s see—‘I Am Woman, Hear Me Snore’?

Harmony maintained a disciplined distraction about Dieter’s comments. My already-small office felt claustrophobic. I got up to usher the volatile Dieter out of the room, when I fell into what was an eternal nanosecond: I had been wrong. I had heard and seen so many things as I was falling, reaching for the Eliot, but they seemed a dream that lasted for hours yet took less than the time it took to overreach the shelf. I felt the pull of the thick Eliot book and saw the black carpet below me. There was humming, and a light filtered through ice, a cold glowing that went on like the song of forever; the white light and the humming were not distinct. It was the light that came out of the heart of the music, and the music that came from the light.

Oh God, oh God, oh God. Mrs. Morrison again was above me, and like a twelve-year-old I briefly wondered why her large breasts didn’t drag her to the ground or, please Lord, on top of me. Harmony had actually dropped her cell phone, and Dieter turned white but helped me back on the couch. Jesus, man, if you don’t want to play tennis, just say so.

This time Mrs. Morrison called my doctor. After a few minutes, Dr. Berg himself called back. He wasn’t exactly a friend, but I had been seeing him the thirty years I had been here, and he had helped me through Holly’s dying. His professional manner was comforting or at least calm. His tone said, You are not going to die right now. But if you do die, I want you to hear that I wasn’t afraid of your death. He told me I was probably under too much stress but I should come in just in case. Just in case of what? What case? I was to be there at five, and he said he would hang around for me. He was old-fashioned that way.

Mrs. Morrison shooed some students away from the reception area, but bulky Tommy Ackerman asked jokingly, Is there a test on Tuesday, Prof?

Before I could stop Dieter, whose muscular speed always amazed me on the tennis court, he went up to the student, who was a head taller, and said, "Yes, there is a test, but since you are so very special you don’t have to take it, Pupe." Ackerman looked delighted at first, but his face clouded over as he suspected foul play and Dieter rushed passed him through the door.

I was happy that he didn’t say fuck you to Ackerman, but even Dieter was wary of Mrs. Morrison. Then again, I didn’t care that much for Ackerman, who had been one semester’s designated pain in the ass (there was always one every semester). So he got his, but my fingerprints were not on the weapon.

As she left, Harmony said, I will call you later, after my dinner with the dean and his wife. Dieter had already gone to get his car, so he could drive me to the doctor’s office later.

Finally, I was alone in the office and suddenly missed the crowd and maybe the attention. This is what your dying will be like: everyone will gather around you, the beaming center of their concern, and once the flame dies, they will go to other places. But everyone carries a bit of who you were with them, just as Holly seemed still here, though I couldn’t say where. This would be my first autumn in twenty-three years without my wife.

It was getting on to four, and the sky was turning gray. The trees had a silvered look of pearl with slow-moving darkness coming in behind. The light was leaving earlier and earlier, happy hour starting perilously close to the death of daylight. It wasn’t dark yet, but it would be getting there.

I needed a soundtrack to give shape or solace to whatever this moment was. The Largo from Dvořák’s ninth The New World was already in the Window Player’s queue, so I hit play. Bruno Walter’s version was the first classical LP I had ever gotten, a Christmas present from my father right before we moved from crowded Queens to these New Jersey hills: a bigger sky, surrounded by three lakes, and it was a very new world to me.

The hushed strings underneath the plaintive cor anglais echoed, as one writer noted, a lonesome voice echoing across the prairie, with its Goin’ Home theme that brought back not the open plains but the still dreamlike move to the moving waters that reflected the autumn leaves, and after Christmas we waited for the ice to freeze, praying we could get some hockey in before the snows came and gritted and pitted the smooth surface. In spring I learned to hate fishing, while in summer the frigid lake evolved into ever-warming water and then, in late summer, the temperature of a bath. We swam in it all.

The growing darkness, silence, and the Largo gathered into glowing sadness. I love the dark and cold of fall and winter, but the end of summer’s lease is not without heartbreak, especially as I get older among these vibrating young masses. I guess that’s why I had a crush on Rachel Eastman. Maybe she could help me over that bridge into the dark.

From my third-floor window I could see some of Garden State University, North Campus, at least the part that faced the lake. The long and slender lake that separated New Jersey from New York was called Lake Wanaque in honor of the small, vanished tribe whose flint tools were featured in a glass case in the college’s main lobby. We were the smaller campus of the much larger and more prestigious Main Campus some fifty miles to the southeast located in a mass of urban and suburban sprawl.

North Campus officially opened thirty years ago to usurp and fulfill Washington County’s state-mandated establishment of a community college. The then-president of Garden State seized the moment by proposing to the state that, instead of a community college, GSU should put a satellite campus up here. To serve in a community college’s stead and thus to get a lot of state money, North Campus, unlike Main, had to have an open-door policy, which meant that anyone who could sign their name, and some who couldn’t, had to be accepted. Thus, most of our teaching was in either developmental, introductory courses or the occasional pet project like my Music in Literature course.

We had none of the prestige or the handpicked students or the academic and sport stars or the Ivy-draped and soot-stained walls of Main Campus. A further slight was that when we published, the Board of Regents mandated to list our affiliation as GSUNC, not just Garden State University.

We might have an inferiority complex. We were, however, located in the high, rolling hills of North Jersey, so while Main Campus was the prestigious book, North was the beautiful cover. Up here, especially on this glorious September day, we were that ideal American campus: water, trees, grass, and a converted mall. North Campus was the phoenix that arose over a supposedly small, chic, and thus abandoned Lakeshore Mall. For some misguided reason, investors thought that putting the mall in the hills near but not too close to nearby, booming suburban developments would produce a mad rush for country shopping with a modern touch. What developers tried to set up as this faux country village near the lakeshore had two tragic flaws: first, it was not enclosed but open to the weather, which was a horror for those suburban mothers who wanted to walk their children in strollers and did not want to navigate curbs and sidewalks while battling the elements; and second, its anchor store was not an ultrachic version of Bloomingdale’s or Neiman Marcus, but a Sears store. Lakeshore Mall struggled for about seven years, and its final death blow was the departure of Sears, which in fact was the only store making money.

Then the president of Garden State, Sidney Barber, seized the moment by asking the state to buy the mall for a song, plus some surrounding homes for offices, and to build one three-story classroom building on the carcass of the moribund mall. The mall developers had no choice, the locals split on Garden State coming to town, but those who saw their home values triple broke ranks as they sold to the university very quickly. By the seventies, the classroom building Barber Hall named for the prescient ex-president (who refused to retire until the building was named for him) was built as the suburbs boomed and bloomed years too late for the mall but just right for North Campus.

This day, I felt myself lucky to have been on Main Campus for only three years and was temporarily flattered when the academic vice president wanted me to be temporary coordinator and build a first-rate English department North could be proud of. Later, it was rumored that the now long-dead vice president, Guy Smith, really made the invitation to save me from not getting tenure at Main, where my work in literature and music was treated the way transvestites are: a little of both but not really either.

George Zimmerman, my first chair and Shakespearean scholar, warned me of what he called my melopoetic mistake and told me that Walter Pater’s famous All art constantly aspires to the condition of music was absolutely wrong. I didn’t heed George’s warning and published a few articles like Bach Fugues and Cubist Painting and Eliot’s Postmodern Music, and I was even knighted by giving a paper at a relatively young age at an MLA conference.

I was publishing but perishing, and I was saved from ignominy because both George and the academic VP liked me and my enthusiasm. They didn’t want to fire me, but they didn’t want to grant me tenure either in their star-centered faculty, so they kicked me up North to the ex-mall, made me acting coordinator with the hiring mandate to find faculty who would work well with the less prepared student. I was exiled from Main Campus but did get tenure at a very young age in the department I basically built.

What had helped me build a pretty good department was that once the Main faculty saw North’s picture-perfect campus, the inexpensive houses no longer needed by the administration and once the mall was fully camouflaged as a university, they granted us little people the pleasure of their part-time company. Indeed, except for Harmony, my other good friends Dieter and Charlie Henri were North part-timers who had second homes in bucolic splendor. I still lived in the house I had bought some thirty years ago, not far from the campus in a very unhip neighborhood a few miles away.

The Largo started to repeat for a fourth time, and even the most beautiful things cannot bear very much repetition. So I logged off, walked through the deserted outer office, and descended to the first floor and out to the front of the building, looking for Dieter and his fire-engine red Porsche. Near the entrance of Barber Hall was a life-size bronze statue of a lonely Siren silently singing out toward the lake to some unknowing wayfarer. Clearly the artist had not in mind the part-mermaid part-hag of mythology, a thing with feathers, but more like a prepubescent hottie who was longing for, say, a sculptor to notice her. The sculpture’s education in mythology went back no further than Disney’s sanitized Hans Christian Andersen. For all that, the statue was both quite touching and inappropriate. Apparently some college supporter gave—dumped, some say, as a tax dodge—the little lady to North Campus. And so there she sat, little breasts unsuccessfully covered by a lyre, achingly looking toward the lake, hoping someone might come and be doomed by her unheard music.

Then Dieter drove up, naturally stopping in front of the NO STOPPING NO STANDING NO PARKING sign outside Barber Hall’s sloping drive. Dieter described the color of his Porsche as impossibly red; it was probably paid for by the continuing royalties from his first book, which was a variation of his dissertation called Three Common Dreams: Music and the Structuring of Human Experience. This massive work got him a doctorate from Berkley (where his famous father taught), then a quick book deal, early tenure at GSU (Main Campus, of course), and a decade later a PBS series with Bill Moyers as the narrator. It was recently rereleased on DVD, so I guess the money kept rolling in.

The stream of his 720 pages began with Pater’s famous dictum. Then he charted how three musical forms—the chant, the fugue, and finally the sonata—represented how music composed human experience, gave form to feeling, and was our deepest reality.

I remember, as an undergraduate, my first experience with Bach merging with this line from Three Common Dreams: "The fugue is the form that is the dialectical opposite of the chant. The fugue exploits multiplicity, relativity, and unceasing motion; so much so that when viewed by modern thinkers, it would seem that Bach’s fugues were the pattern for a relativistic, ever-flowing universe. What is Virginia Woolf’s The Waves but a fugue in words or the cubists’ fractured perspectives but a fugue in the eye?"

What all such grand and ultimately simplistic designs do is to give the acolyte, the terrorist, and the sinner a way to make sense of the world, to give form to chaos. Although I was an English professor who couldn’t read music, Three Common Dreams gave my deep, if chaotic, love for literature and music a focus and opened up the interrelationships that I remixed into countless conference papers and a few publications. Its final outcome was my brand-new and still-evolving, still-troubling course: Music in Literature.

While his design became my template to marry the arts, Dieter later dismissed his book as juvenilia and reductionist, which did wonders for my sense of self-worth. He described the work as some bastard child, the offspring of a Summer of Love fling between an uptight philosophy major and his hippy girlfriend.

As I folded myself with some loss of breath into the hot black leather seat, I said, Ah, Dieter, I see your Porsche is the Limited Edition. Next time, why not spring for the unlimited one, you know, one with everything?

Oh, Christopher, when you’re at the doctor’s, please have them do some work on what you think is your sense of humor.

The temperature was dropping with the sun’s disappearance into gray clouds, though the seats held their warmth. So your guy is over by the lake? Dieter asked with a surprising lack of sarcasm.

Yeah, it’s Arnold Berg. He’s okay. I like him because he’s old-fashioned.

Oh, oh, that means no drugs?

No, it means that he actually stops peering into my chart and looks me in the face. Holly’s doctor—and here my voice caught just a moment—was always typing into a laptop, nodding, though really not answering Holly’s desperate questions. Both Holly and the doctor, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, were young and inexperienced in this new painful world. I think she hid behind the laptop so she would not have to face, as I had found it increasingly harder to do, my very fierce and frightened wife.

What kind of music shall I play? Dieter asked as he carefully avoided running over students on the long arching drive out of the college, fleeing from the classroom, relieved that no professor had yet seen them for the impostors they felt they were, with Dieter’s unwavering agreement. Schoenberg or the melismatic monster Mariah Carey? While I was surprised he even knew who Mariah Carey was, this was an old barb of Dieter’s. For him there was something really wrong with anyone who even listened to pop music, much less bought it, which of course I did. But, as I said, in spite of that he was a friend, and today I needed that.

‘Transfigured Night’? I asked.

Verklärte Nacht, he corrected with his perfect German. "Ah no, how about Pierrot Lunaire?"

How about something New Age? I really like George Winston.

Dieter smiled. Ah, that’s the old Christopher I know and hate, he said as he merged without yielding onto the interstate that saved ten minutes to the Lakeshore Medical Associates building next to the hospital where Holly had died. Dieter’s smile was warm, and there was a flicker that he might be a little worried about losing, if nothing else, his tennis buddy.

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As I approached from the office building to Dieter’s car, he put down Adorno on Music, with Schoenberg humming just this side of audible, and asked, So what did he say? Dieter never went to doctors’ offices but would suffer to have his fabulous smile tended to regularly.

Dr. Berg held my head in his hands and shook it. He then asked, ‘Does it hurt when I do this?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘So don’t do that.’

An especially deadly screech came from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire as Dieter amped the volume. I guess you didn’t mention the problem with your humor.

Okay, I capitulated, he scheduled me for some tests at the hospital on Monday.

The fabulous Lakeshore Hospital known to many as the underworld and whose motto is ‘We’ve never lost a nurse,’ Dieter said rather insensitively, I thought.