Shabbos Mozart

Yesterday was Shabbos. I went over to Joel’s apartment. I always go over to Joel’s apartment on Shabbos. Not because either of us is religious, or at least not in the sense of minding the P’s and Q’s of Jewish observance. What do we do on Shabbos? What we’ve always done on Shabbos for the past forty years since graduating law school. We play duets: Joel on the piano, I on the clarinet. Music is our Shabbos prayer to God, who may or may not be listening, who may or may not exist.

I walked in, put down my case. I gave Joel a hug. He told me to get rid of my paunch (what else is new?) and then we got down to business. Joel moved from his walker to the piano bench and we started to play. But after about ten minutes, he said, “Jack, much as I love this Mozart piece—”

“You’d rather talk, right?” Joel nodded.

That’s the other thing we do on Shabbos, we talk—endlessly, effortlessly. We talk about anything and everything, including stupid and trivial stuff. Our marital lives, our kids, our music, politics of course, sometimes the God-thing—we talk about all of it. And it never goes stale. I mean there are off days. After all, we’re only human, not above getting ticked off at one another on occasion. I figure we’re like Antony and Cleopatra with a mutual craving that doesn’t involve sex. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? That a bond so strong doesn’t include the physical or at least nothing beyond an occasional hug or slap on the back. Yet our friendship almost always gets back to that fresh feeling, like it only just started the day before. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but not too far from the truth. Apart from my wife and my dead parents (may they rest in peace), no one—absolutely no one—has ever listened to me the way Joel has listened to me over the years. Makes we want to weep. If we were writers and intellectual superstars, we would be Montaigne and La Boétie to one another, although I’m not sure who would be which.

Joel got off the piano bench and, with the help of his walker, finally landed in the spot on the couch where he always sits. I always sit on the armchair opposite him. Our interactions vary and change all the time, but where each of us sits does not. Before Joel opened his mouth, I read his mind (he reads mine as well) and I’d already decided that this particular Shabbos schmooze was going to be the God-thing. But instead he veered slightly and said, “Jack, do you think there are Eternal Truths?”

“You mean Natural Law stuff?”

“We could start there, sure, Natural Law.”

My first thought, based on nothing in particular except for a vague and probably inaccurate memory from law school, was that Natural Law was the sort of thing Supreme Court justices cited when they couldn’t think of anything else to support their conclusions. I said as much to Joel.

“Forget Supreme Court justices. When we try to do the right thing, are we doing it because there’s something indisputable, like Greenwich Mean Time, like a heavenly ruler that measures—”

“You mean, as in, no inches equals bad; one inch equals okay; two inches equals getting better. . .”

Joel smiled. Of the two of us, I’m the smart aleck, or I try to be, not always at the right moment. Joel slumped into the couch. He looked exhausted.

“But Joel, you’re not serious about this ruler-metaphor thing. Wait—are you being serious?”

“I’m floundering, Jack.”

And I was desperate for him.

“Okay, okay—Joel, let’s try this. . .” I offered up my Mother’s Knee theory which, surprisingly, I had never mentioned to him before. “Call it the theory of the Mother’s Knee. What we know and feel about love, honesty, fairness, and justice, all of it comes to us in our mother’s milk.” Joel rolled his eyes. “Well, of course, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a mother or mother’s milk, although—” Joel put his hand up to stop me. Just as well. I caught the sound of my own words. They were ridiculous. I was at a loss for coming up with any other explanation for why good people are good. “Maybe,” I continued lamely, “good people are good because they are the kind of people who like people and therefore want to do right by people.”

“Well, Jack, that’s a lot of people going round and round in circular reasoning. But don’t you see the problem? How a person gets to be good is different from what it is to be good. How do we know—how do I know. . .?”

“Joel, you are a good person. Whatever good means, you’re it.”

Joel looked at me wide-eyed as if all the years, all the talk and music, all the friendship between us had just flashed through the back of his mind.

“Jack, I’m going to miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too.”

“I don’t look great right now; soon I’ll look worse.”

“I know, Joel.”

“And I want to thank you—”

“Joel, you don’t have to thank me for anything.”

“I want to thank you for never saying, ‘Joel, you’ll fight this.’ And if you ever say that I don’t look so bad—”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.” I tried to smile. I got teary instead. I so wanted the smart aleck part of me to be able to make a joke, to give Joel something to laugh about. Couldn’t do it.

“And, Jack, as I deteriorate, when I’m stuck with bedpans and tubes and god-knows-what else going in and out of me, there are only four people I want around me. Maisie, my two boys, and you. At the end, that’s what I want.”

“I’ll be there.”

“I know.” And just as he said that, I heard something outside, not from the street, but a sound on the other side of the window above the couch where Joel was sitting. It was a tapping sound, a repeating sound. My still-desperate brain took it to be a beckoning, a summoning to come somewhere—where I didn’t know and to whom I could only guess. The sound of it—was it wind on a branch?—flipped my imagination out of Joel’s apartment and it was then that I remembered. It was the tapping that I never actually heard but might just as well have. It was the tapping in Joyce’s The Dead when, in the night, snow pelts the window of the hotel room where Gabriel and Greta are lodging. Gabriel looks at his sleeping wife and thinks about the lover who died for her long ago. He thinks about a journey that it was now time for him to make. I thought about the journey Joel would make. I studied the map of his face, his every line and feature. So familiar yet now so transformed. He had already begun his journey. I wanted to feel what he was feeling. Oh yes, I know. Past a certain age everyone realizes the end will come, but what is it like to know that the time until the end is now measurable, more or less? That was the awesome and dreadful imagining I wanted to share with Joel. And then, I didn’t want to share it with him, at all or with anyone. I was too scared.

Joel was now studying my face. We’ve always had that kind of reciprocity. And then he said:

“You know, Jack, I may seem calm now, even in control. I’m not. I’m scared. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I’ve had a happy life. That should be a comfort, I know, but it’s this thought I have, particularly when I wake up in the middle of the night and the medication isn’t working—it’s this thought I have. But, no, it’s not a thought. It’s a picture, a picture that I can’t see, but it’s in my brain—”

“Jack, tell me—what?”

“That death will be a dark void. I’ll see nothing, feel nothing except for the motion of my own body hurtling endlessly through an awful emptiness. I’ll be tossed and lost for eternity with not so much as a hand to hold my own.”

I reached over and put his hand in mine.  

Then I reached for the tissue box (there’s always one on the side table next to the couch). I took one tissue for Joel, one for me. We both blew our noses and wiped our tears. I got up and fetched a wastepaper basket to throw the used tissues into. Doing something minutely useful was comforting.

Finally, I said to him, “If death is a reflection of life, you won’t be tossed and lost.”

“And what if it’s not a reflection of life?”

Instead of responding, I got lost in the notion that after a history of fifty-seven hundred years plus, Judaism still isn’t too clear about what happens after death. Although, at a funeral I had recently attended, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi said with complete certainty that the dead would be restored whole and happy. I wanted to shout at the rabbi, “Oh, yeah? How do you know that?” I didn’t. God, how I dislike people who are certain about the very things that are hardest to be certain about. Then I realized I had to stop my mind. I was not present, not for Joel, not for my own grief. I needed to start mourning him.

“Joel, you want an Eternal Truth? I’ll give you a quasi-Eternal Truth.”

“You’re on. I’ll take quasi.”

“Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. What could be more eternal than that? Particularly the second movement.”

Joel’s expression at that moment took on a hint—just a hint—of peace. At least, I flatter myself to think so.

“Jack, play for me,” he said. “Even without my accompaniment, play for me our Shabbos Mozart.”