Free The Living End by Stanley Elkin Page B

scherzo, rondo, jig and reel. He had forgotten the civilized sound of a cello, or that violins indeed sounded like the woe of gypsies. He had not remembered the guitar, lost the sound of flutes, had no recall for the stirring, percussive thump in melody-all the gay kindling points of blood, the incredible flexibility of a piano.
    What he had for eyes wept what he had for tears.
    A child played “Lightly Row.” He wept. They had Waxman’s “The Puzzle,” Gesanbuch’s “Sun of My Soul.” He wept. Bartok’s “Maypole Dance” was played, Lully’s Gavotte. There was Bach’s Prelude in F, Chopin’s Mazurka in B flat Major, Bohm’s “Gypsy” and Copland’s “The Cat and the Mouse.” He wept for all of them. One of the advanced students-he knew they were students now; professionals would have played better, actors not as well-gave them-for it was “them” now too, the dead man subsumed with the living -Brower Is Three Etudes, and Ladlehaus: sighed, his moods flagrant, ventriloquized by the homeopathic instance of the music, the dead man made generous, tolerant, supportive of all life’s magnificent displacements. Why, I myself am a musician, he thought, my sighs music, my small luxurious whimpers, my soul’s high tempo, its brisk tattoo and call to colors. There is a God, the man who had spoken to Him thought, and murmured, “It’s beautiful. The Lord is with me.”
    And He was. He lay over Ladlehaus’s spirit like a flag on a casket.
    “I was drawn by the music,” God said.
    “I come to all the recitals. I’m going to take Dorset. I like what she did with Bach’s Fantasy in C Minor.”
    “Hush, no talking,” said the boy who had identified Quiz.
    “That one too,” God said more softly.
    “His “Sheep May Safely Graze’ made me all smarmy.”
    “No,” Ladlehaus said.
    “I give him six months,” He said confidently.
    “No,” Ladlehaus pleaded, “it’s Flanoy. Flanoy’s only a child.”
    “Oh, please,” said God, “it’s not that I hate children but that I love music.”
    Quiz had stationed himself on the bench where he had taken his low-fat, gluten-free, orthomolecular lunches. This was where he heard the disturbance. He rose from the bench and moved beside Ladlehaus’s grave. There, in plain view of the crowd, he began to stomp on Jay Ladlehaus’s marker.
    “Hold it down, hold it down, you!”
    “Quiz!” Ladlehaus shouted.
    The caretaker blenebed. He tried to explain to Mazlish, the principal.
    “He knows,” he cried, “he knows who I am.” On his knees he pounded with his fists on Ladlebaus’s grave. He grabbed divots of hallowed ground, sanctified earth, and smeared them across his stone. They tried to drag him away. Quiz wrapped his arms about the dead man’s marker.

    “What are you doing?” he screamed, “I’ve got hypertension. I take low-cal minerals, I’m strictly salt-free.
    I eat corrective lunch!” “Get him!” Ladlehaus hissed.
    “Get him. He’s a composer!”
    And God, who knew nothing of their quarrel but owed Ladlebaus a favor, struck Quiz dead.
    It would not be so bad, he thought in the momentary shock wave of silence that followed the commotion.
    It would not be so bad at all. He would exist in nexus to track meets, to games, to practices and graduations, and spend his death like a man in a prompter’s box beneath all the ceremonies of innocence the St. Paul Board of Education could dream up, spending it as he had spent his life, accomplice to all the lives that were not his own, accessory to them, accomplice and accessory as God.
    A composer, he thought, I told Him he was a composer. Well, He makes mistakes, Ladlebaus thought fondly. Ladlehaus sighed and hoped for good weather.
    But he did not know that the caretaker’s death had come at a point in the recital when God knew that those children who had already performed would be getting restless, beloved.

    PART III The State of the Art
    Quiz, in Hell, was making the point that he had been