SUPPERBURGER
377
what good is that! My meanings indulge my own feelings. The music
is still there, meaningless. A lot of notes, no objectivity, no architec–
ture, just copy and my indulgences. But anyway, you have felt it.
You hope the Ninth will be like that second movement?
P. I liked that part best.
Now he is sitting down again, under the painting, and his eyes
are really tearful. I am surprised at myself because I do not feel
funny about moving over and putting my arm on his shoulder and
trying to make him feel better, though I do not keep it there long.
After a while he looks up and starts to tell me a story.
S. You noticed the painting? I did it twenty-five years ago. You
heard my wife talking about our summer together and how she left
with her family in August. On the fifth of August, I was relaxing
from my Suite by painting a motor yacht anchored out beyond my
beach that day. A dark-haired boy came walking along the sand. He
liked the painting, which so far was very brightly colored and not as
misty as it has turned out, and he said it was his father's boat.
Furthermore, his family was on shore then and had given him the
yacht to use by himself for a month. His name was Paul, but I have
forgotten his last name. Well, to put it shortly, I went with him, and
we sailed free ... up and down the coast, in the cockpit with the
wind blowing, drifting in the sun a lot, out of sight of land, for a
month. Then on a misty night, on the pier at the resort town where
his parents stayed, they rejoined the ship. And I went ashore. I stood
on the pier as servants carried trunks and boxes aboard. Paul helped.
He was eighteen. Imagine the freedom of a boy at eighteen, already
competent enough to sail off into the Atlantic alone, or not really
alone, but his parents thought he was. He had been sailing boats
since he was small. His parents, two of their elegant friends, and his
little brother, and a maid, they all went on board, and finally Paul,
after saying good-bye. I never saw him after that, just a boy standing
on the deck of his father's yacht, blowing a trumpet maybe as my
musical indulgence told it, while the boat became more and more
cloudy with mist and I blew one back to him.
Now my eyes are watery too, and that is strange for me.
I hear the door opening and quickly get back all the wayan the
bed and wipe my eyes, but Supperburger does not change his attitude
at all.
It
is his wife, and she is holding a cocktail glass which she puts
