Story Week 1

Dr. Freyn—this is where we begin, huh? Meeting the interior people. This may sound mundane, cliché even, but I was thinking about this project. I need to tell you, my insides feel sort of like an unassembled jigsaw puzzle—a jumble of pieces all topsy-turvy in a cardboard box. Still, this is where I am this morning. You have just removed the lid by showing me this picture. Now you want me to start assembling the pieces. You're smiling. Am I on to something? I pull at my hair.

You always start with the outside pieces first. The straight edges of the border pieces set them apart from the knobs and notches of the interior pieces. Putting the frame together at least clears out a few pieces. Other clues, like color and shape, are used to construct the interior. The logic that goes into constructing a jigsaw puzzle is so unlike the logic that goes into constructing a real life. Boundaries only come after there is a sense of interiority. Stories are formed through the telling, aren't they?

All right, you want me to start with this picture, this photograph of a child. No straight edges here. Homer got it right. We start in media res. All that stuff from high-school English about narrative and protagonist sand antagonists is coming back. We start in action. We start at a point preceded by many points, so we—you and me, that's why I am here—will do this together. You said it yourself last week when you proposed this little experiment of telling stories; you called it "ambling together," which is better than "head shrinking." In media res. Eliot touched on it when he said time past and time present are both perhaps contained in time future, and time future contained in time past—not exact words, but something like that. I can never remember if past is first or if future is first. Maybe present is first and contained in past and future. All time is eternally present is the gist of it, I think. Whatever. I'm sitting in this comfy chair facing you, and you note that I haven't even picked at the loose ends covering the arm yet today. It seems like the trees guard the room from too much sunlight. I sigh. You listen. This moment has been preceded by all moments composing my life. Like all those jigsaw puzzle pieces, each its own gestalt. Each contributes to the greater picture, right? Such a mundane image—that fits. You notice the anger returning to my voice. I don't want a mundane life, and if the best image I can come up with is an ephemeral jigsaw puzzle. What am I saying about myself? Am I trite?

The decision to come here this morning, to sit in this chair, to look at you, to listen to you and look out this window, to see these slivers of blue sky cut up by blades of leaves, did not happen without precedent. So here I am, at a beginning. Look at this child. You push the picture a little closer to me. Who is he? He is given a gift. I think that is the place to start.

The Gift

1996

The cold seemed not so cold that afternoon. Drops of would-be frost caught in the light from the metal posts glistened on bark, rails, and posts. The four-o'clock shadows lay like long fingers smoothing the blankets of afternoon across the city. His car sat wedged among the countless others inching their way out of the heart of London. An hour before, he had responded to impulse. Now he sat in the frustration of traffic.

Earlier in his suite, he had toyed with a glass of scotch, tapping simple rhythms on the glass, and then lifting it for a deliberate swallow. Bright balloons, leftovers from his birthday breakfast, floated above and behind him, seeking out the high corners of his sitting room. The mirror over the mantle reflected a man with gunmetal-gray hair, long enough to stain the starched, white collar of his shirt. He knew better than to drink when drowning in a funk.

A clipping from the London Times lay on the table. "John R. Mannering Returns to London This Christmas Season." He had skimmed the well-rehearsed litany of events and accomplishments and stared long at the old photos, the reprint, and tried to identify the faces. Violinists stood with their instruments in front of them like proud parents. A couple had died, a few retired, some simply vanished from the world of professional music. The twenty-five-year-old image had spurred him out of his tails and to don jeans and a black turtleneck—spurred him out of a warm Grosvenor suite and into wintry London. Before he left, he had even gone so far as to pick up the phone to call Elaine, a friend in the truest sense of the word, a first-rate flutist and the organizer of his birthday breakfast. He had thought to meet up with her after the noon performance; maybe they could share a drink at a pub—or in his suite, and who knows what. Go for a walk and watch the city close up for Christmas Eve. He let his thoughts stop there. Second thoughts would have settled in with a second glass of wine. He knew better than to offer himself to a woman, a friend, who might want what he was temperamentally unable to give and thus ruin the friendship. He needed his own company.

He sat alone, caught in the holiday pageantry of headlights, torches shining through darkness. In the privacy of his car, he imagined himself a minstrel chatting to a fellow traveler, a stranger, Sylvester, who joined him on his pilgrimage to pay homage to a saint. Who was the saint of music anyway?

"Cecelia."

"Huh?" John looked over at his companion, a smelly, skinny man holding a fiddle on his lap. He looked like he belonged to another century.

"St. Cecelia—the patron saint of musicians."

"Oh, right."

"Who the—"

"I was a happy-go-lucky kid back in the day," Sylvester said. "All right, maybe I was stealing a goat—I didn't know it belonged to anyone. It was just standing there on the hillside, bleating away. That's when I felt a boot in my back and my sides and in the pit of my stomach. My bones snapped. I spent a year crawling while they knitted. Very humbling. Must have prayed a lot to St. Cecelia, since I was already on my knees on the ground. A year later, right in the same place, I watched as lightning struck that farmer's house, burned it to the ground. Poking through the ashes, I found this fiddle—whole—fit as a fiddle, I'd say."

Sylvester laughed at his own joke.

"I picked it up and rose up on my knees—staggered to my knees, more like it; I couldn't yet stand from the beating that farmer gave me—and started playing. As I played, the angels came down from heaven and wrapped me in their arms like Mother Love, like the Virgin Mary herself was holding me. But I think it was really St. Cecelia. I could stand straight up for the first time in a year—so when I felt unsteady and my legs started to buckle under me, I'd start to play—and play—and play."

A car horn blasted through his revelry. The funk returned: the drizzle, the solitude, and the time of year. Self-reliance was overdone. He wondered if Mr. Bryton, his first teacher, would think him a failure if he saw him tonight listening to the tinny sound of Christmas carols on the car radio. He had failed to bring his CDs along.

Earlier that day, he had played for the countless time "The Gift of the Magi," a piece he had composed and recorded more than ten years before. It was chosen as best Christmas music of 1985. Its Christmastime popularity had not faded. Mr. Bryton, who once told...