Swan of Tuonela

by Charles Wyatt

Overview

Fiction. This collection of stories revolving around the world of classical music is the second collection of short stories from this well-known flutist and award-winning writer. Charles Wyatt was principal flutist for the Nashville Symphony for 25 years. Along the way, he also began writing poems and stories, frequently utilizing his musical background in the process. He earned an MFA degree at Warren Wilson College and published a novel and a short story collection to great acclaim. He has taught writing and literature at, among others, Oberlin College, Purdue University, and Denison University. Nashville remains his home between teaching assignments. "Now we play Hindemith. Mathis der maler. The orchestration is inspired, leaving a sing flute note to fill the hall after a tumultuous passage. I wonder at it. A single note. But the hall filled with it. We must all breathe it in, swim through it. It is a chilling, invisible thing."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781931236669
Publisher:	Hanging Loose Press
Publication date:	05/31/2006
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

Read an Excerpt

Swan of Tuonela

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By Charles Wyatt Hanging Loose Press

Copyright © 2006 Charles Wyatt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781931236669

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Chapter One Rembrandt's Nose Philadelphia, 1975, 2002

I

One thing led to another. I was looking in the back of the closet for an old pair of running shoes to wear in the garden, and I came across two framed drawings that Anna had done of Mary-they don't especially look like any particular person-Anna's style was spare and stylized, and they're just torsos, but they are drawings of a very naked lady-erotic to any viewer, I'd guess. Mary's dead these twenty-five years and Anna-I don't know. Maybe she's still out there, alone and gardening like me. I decided I'd hang the drawings again, and then I dropped one-the glass broke and I cut myself badly trying to clean up. It took only five stitches at the Doc-in-a-Box, but I bled handsomely. Even after may cleanup the carpet looked like a crime scene and the drawing was ruined. I decided against hanging the other. Let's say I can take a hint.

* * *

Anna and I were living in Philadelphia; it was the early seventies and we lived in two little (make that tiny) three-story houses that were almost back to back in a glorious slum just off South Street. The area is pretty swell now, I understand-an annex of Society Hill-but then it wasthe refuge of the desperately poor. One house rented for $30 a month, the other $35. The extra five bucks was for sunlight. We lived in the dark one (its front door faced the blank wall of a deserted elementary school at a distance of about five feet), and Anna used the other for her art studio and to store the things she would find on the street and bring home. She couldn't leave any useless object alone on the street, no matter how hopelessly broken or disgustingly soiled. The large pieces of junk went on the first floor of the studio. It always smelled bad-like an outhouse, I insisted. Anna said she liked the way outhouses smelled. The neighbors were noisy and dangerous, and we didn't stand out.

Anna's teaching was mostly in Germantown, at the YWCA, but she liked this neighborhood because there was a community of people like us who painted and sculpted and had shows in little galleries on South Street. The area had once been a bridal district, but all those stores were gone, moved or disappeared forever; I never thought to ask. Not many of my friends were interested in marriage in those days. We lived together and felt artistic, bohemian. The disapproval of our parents, somewhere in Ohio or Nebraska, was enough to keep us inspired and dedicated to our art. Anna taught two ceramics classes in Germantown, hand-building and wheel throwing. The hand-building class, which she insisted on, was always undersubscribed. The wheel throwing class had a waiting list.

Sometimes she taught painting and drawing in West Philly, at a community center not too far from the University of Pennsylvania. I taught flute and recorder students in Germantown, too; and in any other place I could cobble together a few lessons. For almost a year, I took the Broad Street subway to its last stop, Olney Avenue, at Girls' High, and then the bus for another thirty or forty blocks to teach two students who lived in the same neighborhood-the commute took longer than the lessons. Sometimes I'd get a playing job. I practiced. Anna painted and sold teapots in the little stores on South Street. We got by.

It's not surprising that I had a lot of free time. Anna showed me how to throw pots on the wheel she kept in the basement of the studio, and I made a few teapots that were so ugly and inept they seemed to have character and actually sold. But the work was too messy-and I figured that I might eventually get good at it and then my stuff would become bland and competent. I couldn't bear the thought of being overtaken by competence-I decided I wanted to paint. But it became immediately clear that I couldn't draw. Anna said I could take her drawing class in West Philly. But first I should learn something about drawing.

"You listen to music all the time," she said, as I pulled her hair back over her shoulders. She was stir-frying zucchini and her hair always hung in front of her face. I liked her hair. She hid behind it, but it was pretty-glossy and dark and long enough for me to gather it into a rope against her back. Sometimes she let me braid it. She handed me the wooden spoon.

"Don't let anything burn." In a few minutes she came back from the studio with her book bag.

"Look at these drawings the way you listen. And be careful with it-it's special." She gave me a little book with a rubber band holding the broken bindings. I had been listening to Bach flute sonatas over and over, but mostly, stoned, to stuff like Jefferson Airplane. I wondered if I should get high to look at Anna's little book.

I spread out its pages on the table. Rembrandt drawings. I wasn't surprised that Rembrandt could draw: Camels, lions, beggars, elephants, portraits of wealthy burghers, windmills and farm houses under clumps of trees. I shuffled through the semi-detached pages thinking vaguely of the baseball cards I collected when I was a kid.

"Stop." Anna pinned my hand on a page with a drawing titled "Saskia Sitting Up in Bed."

"Look at the lines around her hands." There was a little nest there where Remmy's pen had been busy. It was a place for Br'er Rabbit to hide. I turned the page upside down. Now there was a different nest. I could tell that Anna approved. I put the little book back together. We ate the stir-fry. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon finding those magical little nests (we were always a little stoned in those days), in the crook of a beggar's arm, the corner of a building, an elephant's tail. I saw the jagged lines a goose quill made and the warm smudging flow of black chalk. Anna hovered but left me alone. It was better than the baseball cards, almost as satisfying as listening to Grace Slick.

That night I went to West Philly with Anna and spent an excruciating hour trying to draw a vase with some weeds in it. I was supposed to look at the weeds, not the page, and to keep my pen in constant contact with my tablet. I was of little faith. I cheated constantly. My weed was soggy, slovenly, and ultimately did not resemble a weed. Anna was as kind to me as she was to her other students. This I found refreshing. She suggested I draw with my left hand-the weeds sneered at me from their table in the center of the room. I undertook to stare them down, pen gripped in left hand, teeth clenched. I began to draw, stranger to myself, to the room-I glared at those things, somehow composed of the stuff lines could represent. And then, when I realized I had been holding my breath, and let the air in (or out, it can't matter)-I had drawn something very like a weed. I was astonished.

At the end of class, I met Mary, who was an old friend of Anna's, from other classes, I supposed. She was taking this class for free in exchange for modeling-I didn't think much about it at the time. Mary had a car, an old Plymouth, and drove us home, across the Schuylkill and down South Street-it turned out she lived in our neighborhood, across Lombard Street from the beer distributor. She and Anna yakked in the front seat and I dozed in the back, still glowing with my recent triumph. Several of my fellow students had commented favorably on my left-handed weed, especially Mary. She was obviously a discerning artist. What were they talking about? Her boyfriend, Stan, wasn't around. He had gotten into trouble with some people he did business with-she was giving up on him. Anna was giving her some new age ballast-I knew Stan. He had sold me some crappy hash. I could never figure out what Mary saw in him.

Some old guys were in a screaming fight at the corner of 4th and South. Mary ran the light. I thought it was probably a good move. A siren behind us but we were cool. We got out and waved. Home. You almost didn't notice the smell-new garbage and something like old basement-the elementary school next door had been boarded up for a thousand years. There were dead animals in it-probably cats. Our neighborhood couldn't support rats. Not many, anyway.

That night Anna asked me if I thought Mary was pretty. I said I guessed she was, and then Anna slipped down under the covers and began to fondle me. After a while I tried to pull her up, but she wouldn't budge. And even afterward, she wouldn't budge, burrowing against me when I tried to tug at her. We fell asleep that way and in the morning when I remembered it, I realized it wasn't the sort of thing we could talk about.

I worked at my drawing every day, and every day I leafed through the little book, even copying some of the drawings, although Anna hadn't suggested I try. There was one called "The Naughty Child" that I tried several times. It's a woman trying to hold on to a toddler who's having a screaming fit. You can see him slipping out of her hands. My toddlers were invertebrates. I did better with landscapes but I couldn't get the trees. In the Rembrandt drawings, they seem to hold the wind. And then there was one special drawing, the "Portrait of Saskia in a Straw Hat." It was inscribed by Rembrandt: "This is drawn after my wife, when she was 21 years old, the third day after our betrothal, the 8th of June 1633." Saskia is wistful and lovely, with her left hand lightly touching the side of her face, elbow resting on the table where she is sitting, flowers twined around the crown of the hat and in her other hand.

The portrait was silverpoint on white prepared vellum and was sold at auction, along with most of his other possessions, by the Insolvency Court in 1656. I read about it in one of Anna's big art books. The guy had gone broke-he could have been one of our South Street neighbors. He had seen the same kind of shit my neighbors had. But Saskia at twenty-one hadn't seen shit yet. She wasn't a worker like Anna. At least in the drawings. He drew her gazing out a window or in bed with a toothache. You don't ever see her pushing a broom. She was from a wealthy family and when she died, things got complicated. I was just beginning to see that the life you plan doesn't always work out. Mozart had been buried in a pauper's grave-I read about that, too.

* * *

Two more classes in West Philly and I was beginning to swagger home with my portfolio. I even had some fanciful self-portraits which made me look like a Picasso character-but make no mistake, I still couldn't draw. It was before the fourth class, the one after the self-portrait exercise, when Anna said we'd be drawing from life. We were riding the streetcar and it was noisy and crowded and I didn't ask what that meant. When class started, Mary came out of a side room wearing a robe, walked to a chair in the center of the room and then dropped the robe. We were going to draw Mary naked.

I couldn't get over my instinct to avert my eyes and for a while my drawing involved elaborate preparation of the wash and a general splashing and spilling and dropping of pens and brushes and other essential and nonessential articles. After a while curiosity took over. Mary was very smooth and her skin glowed pink. Anna had once observed to me that old people are much more interesting to draw because of their wrinkles and folds. Mary could assume many interesting positions, however. She was very flexible and resourceful. She didn't seem to mind all those eyes on her. I knew I had blushed when she dropped the robe, and I soon discovered I couldn't draw her. I couldn't even get an outline. And I was aroused. It was awful. Anna didn't say anything when she glanced at my procrastinations. Perhaps she thought I had converted to abstraction.

On the way home, in Mary's car, the two chatted about ordinary things, the clay supply at Germantown where Mary was also newly involved, teaching a yoga class.

"How did it go, James, drawing from the model?" Anna asked me this as if Mary weren't driving the car.

I couldn't think of a suitable reply-something about the Emperor's new clothes?

"Was it hard?" Mary asked, and then giggled.

Anna reached back and stroked my leg, and for the rest of the drive, nobody had anything else to say. At least there weren't any fistfights on South Street that night. Mary waved to us when she let us out at South American Street. She was a pretty girl. Anna burrowed her nose into my armpit as I was unlocking the door. I knew what was going to happen when we got to bed.

I woke up about three a.m. and went to the bathroom on the top floor, carefully climbing back down the spiral stairs-they weren't level and on more than one occasion had pitched me into the bedroom. Down in the kitchen I brewed tea. Mice rustled in the walls. There was one which seemed to live in the little gas range, dodging about the burners, only taking a powder when we cooked. There were no sounds louder than the ticking clock. Anna had left some of her art books on the kitchen table. Rembrandt's nudes didn't seem especially erotic to me-they were too Dutch, too overly plump. Mary was not plump.

I flipped the pages to the self-portraits. He would dress up for them in turbans or funny hats, but he was painting himself honestly as he aged. At the end, his nose had become a potato. I climbed back up to the bathroom so I could look in the mirror-I was wide awake, but Anna seemed to be sleeping soundly. I looked myself in the eyes until there was a stranger across from me in the little room. I could imagine him aging-his nose would be easier to draw when it became misshapen. And the wrinkles would supply character.

After Saskia died, Rembrandt took up with his child's nurse, Geertje Dircx, a bugler's widow. But six or seven years later, he decided he liked his housekeeper, Hendrickje Stoffels, better. Geertje made trouble. Rembrandt had her committed. See it all in the sad eyes, the sagging nose. I took myself to bed and closed my eyes. I would draw my self-portrait with closed eyes, I decided. Mine or the portrait's, I wasn't sure.

* * *

The next morning Anna went to Germantown. I had the day off until some students came by in the late afternoon. I was restless. By ten o'clock, I was in front of the beer distributor's building, dodging insouciant forklift drivers. Looking up to the second-story window across the street, I saw someone beckoning to me. It was Mary. She had to come down to let me in-buzzer technology hadn't reached Lombard Street in those days.

She didn't say anything, just turned and walked up the stairs, giving me the one camera angle I didn't need. But perhaps there were others.

"You want a cup of tea?"

"Sure."

"Would you rather smoke a joint?"

"I'm easy."

We ended up having both. Ginseng tea and a joint already rolled that tasted like hash. Just a couple of dainty tokes before Mary put it out. I have recorded here all we said, leaving out the ambient kitchen noises involving cups and spoons, turning the water tap and the like. When Mary had taken the last toke, and carefully extinguished the joint, she walked over to me, and, taking my face in her two hands, drew me to her and expelled the smoke into my mouth. I figured out what she was doing eventually (dope makes you patient), and inhaled some of the last of it. Then I caught her and kissed her. The rest was very nice, a little exuberant, but nothing broke, and then we might have dozed a little, there on the floor, among our clothes, in patches of late morning light. After a while, I dressed and, feeling a bit at a loss and a little stoned, sat down at the table where we had had our tea. Mary still lay on the floor, stretching occasionally, relaxed, but not smiling.

"Do you want to draw me now?" she asked.

I did. I really wanted to draw-there was something I already imagined I could feel, something languid and wonderful. What happened then was that Mary got me a large tablet and some chalk and settled herself back artfully into the pose which had inspired me, and I worked with the chalk industriously-then found her drawing pens and India ink-and after more time than it had taken us to make love, I stopped. It was noon and the street was quieter because the guys with the forklifts were having lunch. My drawing was awful. Stoned or not, I still couldn't draw-this was just busier than the rest.

"Let me see it." She got up and began to dress.

"Don't do that," I almost said, but I caught myself. I felt as if I had said it, and that now I shouldn't watch her. But she was graceful doing it, and I told myself it was something I'd likely never see again. Eventually she looked over my shoulder at my drawing-which at the moment seemed to me a fine likeness of a plate of spaghetti.

"That's wonderful," she said, her hands on my shoulders, staring at the carnage I had made with my own hands. I felt like the five-year-old who has learned to draw a house with a chimney and a squiggle of smoke.

"Would you like to have it?" I asked.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Swan of Tuonela by Charles Wyatt Copyright © 2006 by Charles Wyatt. Excerpted by permission.
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