How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? Read online

  “Li Bai.”

  “I should read his poetry.” I add him to my list.

  “Einstein.”

  “I’d feel stupid.”

  Then we’re silent. It seems wrong to make specific demands of dead men when I’m not perfect myself. All I want is someone similar to me in taste and temperament, but who is a better person than me in every way.

  “I was never good at history in school,” Nina says. “Forget I said anything.”

  That night, as I scan through my bookcases, I think about the pianist Glenn Gould, who was as strange as he was talented: first he was young and played Bach so quickly people had to reconsider Bach. Later, when he was older and played Bach more carefully, people had to reconsider Gould.

  I start reading about Gould and discover that most texts focus on a few key personal traits. Often, he thought he was succumbing to illness. He had an aversion to human contact—he especially disliked having his hands touched. Near the end of his life, his hypochondria exceeded even his genius. He lined his bathroom cabinet with row upon row of prescription medication. Many of the pills were incompatible. Nine days after his fiftieth birthday, he died from complications arising from a stroke.

  Nina approves of Glenn Gould, though she calls him an eccentric. She cannot understand why, at age thirty-two—the height of his career as a concert pianist—he gave up performing to concentrate solely on recording. At first the recording sessions took place in New York, but later Gould preferred to use the Eaton Auditorium in Toronto.

  “He was always cold, even in hottest summer,” she tells me. “He soaked his hands in scalding water before playing. And he recommended dipping the hands into hot paraffin to relieve bursitis.”

  This revelation makes me feel closer to Gould. Although it is not genius, we have something in common. “I often soak my arms in hot and cold water to help my poor circulation,” I say. I have a repetitive stress injury in both arms, but not from being a famous pianist. I did play once, but not well. I spent too much time typing and now it hurts to shake hands when meeting new people. When the pain was at its worst, I couldn’t open doors or read heavy books. All I wanted to do was watch television and withdraw from any activity that involved using my hands. I sold my piano.

  Nina sends me a crate of Glenn Gould records and a copy of Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser. I lie on my couch and listen to each record twice. Every note is an analog wonder. I do not leave my apartment for two days and read The Loser out loud to myself.

  I call Nina to thank her.

  “When I listen to Glenn Gould play, I feel young again,” she says.

  She has said the same thing of Paul Anka, George Gershwin, Tom Jones and the soundtrack for The Sound of Music.

  I am unsure whether my search for a dead man is over.

  Andrew Kazdin, Gould’s producer from 1965 to 1979, wrote the biography Glenn Gould at Work: Creative Lying. The book is as much about Kazdin as it is about Gould. This is okay. When I think about Gould, I start thinking about myself as well.

  My favourite anecdote from the biography is about coffee rather than music. During a recording session in Toronto, Gould requested a coffee with two sugars and two creams. More specifically, he asked for a double double, a phrase commonly used in eastern Canada. One can also order a triple triple or four by four. Kazdin, an American, had never heard the term before and thought it yet another of the pianist’s eccentricities. Even when he heard the words double double on television years later, he still thought that Gould had coined the phrase.

  The day after I finish reading Glenn Gould at Work: Creative Lying, Nina calls me even though it isn’t Sunday.

  “I guess you’re not as lonely now,” she says.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re not watching porn.”

  I ignore this statement. “I just finished reading another book about Gould.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one by Andrew Kazdin.”

  “It’s filled with firsthand information, but it lacks a certain something, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t quite figure out what it is,” I say. “Perhaps I want only fictions and fakery.” I think for a moment. “But I like knowing that Gould wanted the wires in his Steinway so tight that sometimes the hammers in the piano fired twice, causing ghost notes.”

  The next week I read a story by John Haskell, which begins: “Glenn Gould had a thing about microphones. Not a bad thing; he loved them and loved using them, as long as they weren’t in front of people.” Although I like these sentences, from what I understand Gould didn’t so much dislike performing in front of people as he wanted every audience member to have a similar experience of his playing. In an auditorium, this was out of his control. Some seats are better than others, near to the stage, or in the row where sound is as close to perfection as a room can allow. But in a recording studio, he could spend days on the same piece, creating a performance that could be experienced repeatedly and in a similar fashion by many people. He may have felt as a pianist he was playing for the audience, but as a recording artist he was playing for himself.

  Lydia Davis wrote my favourite of all lines about Gould: “He sometimes practised with the vacuum cleaner on because that way, he said, he could hear the skeleton of the music.” The essence of his strangeness and genius are revealed in this line; Davis has gotten at who Gould is in a single sentence, while several writers have filled pages and still cannot wholly describe what separated him from other virtuoso musicians.

  I run my vacuum and listen to Gould’s 1981 interpretation of the Goldberg Variations, hoping that the skeleton of the music will appear to me as obvious as a dinosaur fossil display in a museum of natural history.

  I think of date possibilities. Perhaps he can give me a piano lesson.

  I imagine this: I am seated at a piano, on a bench, while Gould is in a comfortable chair that’s quite low to the ground. During this first lesson he doesn’t let me touch the piano, nor does he touch it himself. We listen to recordings of his work and I sit with the scores before me, taking notes. Gould tells me that he doesn’t want me to interpret the work in the same way. We are two different people. Plus, I do not possess the level of virtuosity necessary to mimic his playing style.

  We spend the lesson talking about everything but music. He wants to know what I think about reality television, a concept he doesn’t quite understand but finds fascinating.

  I tell him about what he’s missed since October 4, 1982.

  “And people have chunks of the wall in their homes, as souvenirs?” he asks.

  So much time has passed between his death and our date that I imagine I cannot fail to be interesting, if not charming.

  II

  I get up the nerve to contact Glenn Gould to ask him if he would like to meet. I seek help from a famous medium; she charges me double the going rate because she feels I am degrading her profession by asking her to act as a glorified matchmaker.

  To my surprise, Gould says yes. He is difficult even in death, refusing to meet me in Vancouver even though he could arrive by blinking or humming a few bars of a Schoenberg opera.

  I agree to fly to Toronto. Gould doesn’t want to dine in the city, for fear of being recognized. So we settle on a truck-stop diner forty-five minutes east of the city. I rent a car and navigate the expansive highway system with a map I purchased at the airport.

  When I arrive at the restaurant, he is already seated at a booth. The heat is up high, yet he’s got a long scarf wrapped thrice round his neck.

  “Hello,” I say, as he rises to greet me.

  “Have a seat,” he says.

  I sit across from him. “You look just like the inside photograph in the booklet for A State of Wonder, the pinkish-toned one.” I can tell that I am on the verge of incoherent rambling.

  “I hate that picture. I look old there.”
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  “You look like you’re concentrating on something important.”

  “How was your trip here?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t bad. The flight wasn’t full. I had three seats to myself.” I am nervous. Due to my nerves, I am being boring. If I am not careful, I will start repeating what I have already said, something that happens to me when I’m nervous and cannot think of what to say.

  Gould’s menu is closed. He has already decided what he wants. I open my menu and order a hamburger and fries because it is a familiar meal and I am in an unfamiliar situation.

  We do not speak. Until the food arrives, Gould hums a tune I don’t recognize.

  I start salting my food and say, “You were right to choose recording over performing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. With the recordings, it seems as though you are not dead. You are alive, again and again. On repeat. On the radio. In my apartment.”

  “A haunting?”

  “You’re there like the ghost notes Andrew Kazdin describes removing from your recordings.”

  “Interesting,” he says. I don’t know how to interpret this single word. There is no word more uninteresting than interesting. I’m anxious about the fact that he is answering with one or two words. I had read that he would talk for hours on end, without pausing to let the other person speak. And I know that he has a tendency to drop people from his life without explanation. Yet, I still want to connect to him as a person, rather than as an iconic figure.

  “I gave it a lot of thought and I know why Bach of all the composers fits you best,” I say.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, it strikes me that you have a tiring internal struggle, a war between not wanting to encounter people, to stay reclusive, but also wanting everyone’s full attention. In Bach there’s the contrapuntal constructions, notes that go in contrast without clashing, that hold together within the piece. His work exists because of contraries, as do you.” I take a big bite of my hamburger and chew with purpose.

  Gould has stopped eating and is looking at me. He starts humming the opening aria from the Goldberg Variations, at the tempo of his 1955 recording, quick.

  When I put the burger down, and before I can reach for the napkin to remove the grease from my hands, Gould reaches his left hand out and clasps my right hand tightly. The gesture feels like ten hours of conversation, years of friendship. I remain still, even though it hurts.

  Days of Being Wild

  That fall in New York, most of my thoughts had to do with pain or grief. I was not suicidal. Rather, my grandmother had died a few months earlier and I was slowly recovering from the loss. I did not know how to talk about my pain, so I often drank until I could no longer feel my hands or feet. Insomnia took hold of me. I lay in bed and watched movies until 5 or 6 a.m., taking careful notes for the screenplay I was supposed to complete to attain my master’s degree. Although four months had passed since the end of coursework, I was still working on the first act. No matter how many hours I sat in front of my computer, I could not advance the plot of the film. My characters were flat. Each line of dialogue I wrote felt like an affront to the English language.

  Everyone I attracted during this time was equally preoccupied with various miseries. A Ph.D. history student who lived in my building, Kenichi Kingsley, considered me his only friend in the city. I am not sure what qualified me for this honour. I had not sought out his friendship, nor had I been particularly kind to him when we first met. To be honest, I had been wary of him because he was attractive in a movie-star sort of way. My mother had often warned me that beautiful men lacked a conscience.

  Kenichi was on antidepressants, which made him an undesirable drinking companion—he was incomprehensibly drunk after only two beers. Yet, he insisted upon drinking with me on Thursday nights, after his course on the modern history of Japan. It was one of the few fixed appointments on my calendar. We always went to the same restaurant, and we always sat at the bar. Our friendship was a habit, like smoking or biting one’s nails to the quick.

  “I hate the guys in my class,” Kenichi said, after a large gulp of beer. “Most of them have or want Japanese wives or girlfriends.”

  “Isn’t that what you want, too? A girl like your mother?” It was easy for me to rile him because his fears were so similar to my own—we thought that we were doomed to become the sort of people we most despised.

  “Shut up.” He smacked my arm, hard.

  “Is the seating in your class segregated? Does it feel like the South that Flannery O’Connor depicts in her stories, except with Asian protagonists?”

  “If you’re asking me where I sit—I sit with the Japanese kids.” Kenichi scowled at me. He considered himself one hundred percent Japanese, though he had a British father whom he barely remembered. Kenichi had lived with his mother in Japan for most of his life and had attended boarding school in England. A few weeks after I met him, I entered the bathroom in his apartment and noticed that he had covered all the mirrors with vintage wallpaper. He later confessed that he couldn’t bear to look at his reflection because he strongly resembled his father, whom he hated.

  “I bet all the women in your class love you,” I said. “You look like Daniel Henney or Dennis Oh.”

  “You watch too many Korean dramas.”

  “I’m attracted to tragedy.”

  “This is why we’re friends.”

  I raised my shot of bourbon. “To tragedy.”

  We drained our glasses. Then we had another. As usual, Kenichi became a slurring mess once he finished his second beer.

  “You have to catch up,” he said, pushing my drink towards me. “Drink faster.”

  I was on my fourth bourbon. “Catch up? You’re the one who’s behind.”

  “You’re not on meds.” He began to slide down in his seat. “Because of the meds, I’m way ahead of you.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t drink.”

  He tried to sit up. He began staring at my face as if there was an answer to an important question on it. “You’re the only person I know who isn’t afraid to be unhappy.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Wasn’t unhappiness something sensible people avoided? Before I could answer, a woman leaned in between us, facing Kenichi, and asked, “What time is it?”

  “Ask her,” he said, pointing to me. “I’m not wearing a watch.”

  This was a lie. Kenichi was wearing a watch. I could see this, and so could the woman.

  The woman didn’t turn. She stepped closer to him; it was clear that she didn’t care what time it was. Strange women approached Kenichi all the time. They seemed to think that he might be a cure for their loneliness.

  “It’s time for us to go home,” I said, standing. Kenichi stumbled as he stood, and took hold of my arm.

  I gestured towards the bar. “There’s a clock over there.”

  We walked to our building. The sky was clear, and the air was crisp in that perfect autumn way.

  “Why are you still in New York?” Kenichi’s voice was steady. He sounded sober.

  “I’m working on my screenplay.”

  “If it was done, would you stay?”

  “Sometimes when I’m walking down the street, it still feels like I’m watching the city on tv.”

  “It’s not home.”

  “No,” I said. I had been in New York for over two years. I couldn’t pass for a New Yorker, but to most people, I appeared to be an American from the west coast unless I said “about” or “sorry.” In those days, I said sorry as often as I said please or thank you. I have since broken that Canadian habit of apologizing for minor mishaps such as accidentally brushing against someone on a crowded subway train, but my accent remains the same.

  “So, why are you still here?”

  “I need to finish the screenplay.”

  “You could write it from anywhere.”
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br />   “I guess so. I like living here. Every day feels new and strange.” In many ways, the United States remained a mystery to me despite a childhood informed with American television, movies and books. Although we had lived in New York for several years, Kenichi and I were unable to form an opinion about Americans or their culture. The only Americans with whom we had meaningful interactions came from a certain class. The Americans we knew had attended private schools and liberal arts colleges, if not Ivy League universities. Many spoke of summers at the Cape as if it were the only such land formation in the world. The future held promise for all of them; when they spoke of being broke, it was only a transitory state. For most, money loomed in their futures, whether through job prospects, inheritances or marriage. Once, while drinking overpriced cocktails at a bar not fancy enough to warrant the outrageous cost, a classmate spoke at length about how she “could not afford anything” because of tuition and I could not keep my eyes off her thirty-thousand-dollar engagement ring.

  “Good night,” said Kenichi in a sleepy tone.

  “Night.”

  We parted ways.

  The first time we met, we were standing in the lobby checking our respective mailboxes when he asked me if I was the tenant who watched Wong Kar-wai films late at night. I apologized (“I’m sorry”) but he said, “Oh, no, I don’t mind. I live in the apartment next to yours.”

  “Kingsley?” I asked, remembering the name on the intercom outside the building.

  “Yes. My first name is Kenichi.”

  “Sophie,” I said.

  “Sophie, do you want to go see 2046?”

  “With you?” I said.

  He ignored my question. “There’s an advance screening tomorrow. I have two tickets.”

  We went. We were ambivalent about the movie, but we liked each other’s company.