Later by Paul Lisicky

Author:Paul Lisicky [Lisicky, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64445-115-1
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2019-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Musicale 2

Billy is too sure of himself, of his jokes. Or it could be that the reception of his performance is beyond concern at this point. It’s the second Café Musicale, one year after the first, and in the interim it’s become a legend. Billy presides over the Common Room as if it’s his living room, certain, but maybe too certain, that he is loved by us. He doesn’t seem to apprehend whether we get his inside jokes or not. He doesn’t see that some wince when he starts in on his imitations, embarrassing imitations, of the people closest to him, some of whom are sitting in the front row. There’s nervousness in the air, stale. People tap their feet, shift, cough, yawn, scratch their ears, rub their nostrils, adjust their posture in their chairs. Faces are frozen with smiles of support, eyes emptied of inner feeling. Some look out the window in the hope a storm could shut the whole night down. There’s still definite love for Billy, but it’s a challenge to love someone who is fucking up to the point where he is not noticing the reactions of his audience. The night is in service of a cause, but Billy has inadvertently turned the evening into a celebration of him, or at least his circle of accomplished friends. For a minute he seems to have forgotten that people are suffering and dying, including some people in this room. If only we were able to admit to ourselves that Billy, too, is on the way to dying, we might have real compassion.

Painters show slides. Poets read poems written especially for the night. Fiction writers read excerpts from novels in progress. The performances are just as animated as last year’s musicale, if determinedly more so, but they’re overshadowed by Billy’s elaborate commentaries, which sometimes go on for minutes. We are waiting for logs to catch fire and flare. Billy is speaking in fondness and admiration, but his interpretations are twisted, broken by non sequiturs. He makes us all extensions of him, we’re his minions. Here I’d thought he was our biggest fan and now it turns out he contains multitudes.

But perhaps a more morbid story is at work here, and it’s taken me this long to see: Is Billy losing it? Is his breakdown happening right in front of our eyes? Maybe his verbal wandering is simply the first sign of dementia and we’re all gathered inside the edge of the world. And we can’t walk out, the way one might want to walk out of a John Cassavetes film when Mabel’s disintegration at the dinner table might be too much to take. We’re hostages of a film, of one another, this illness, this chaos.

At intermission, I walk up to Polly. “They shoot horses, don’t they?” she says, referring to another director’s film. And neither of us smiles. The joke isn’t easy to make as she loves Billy, loves him as she would her brother.

When it’s my turn to read, a mysterious, unexpected anger surges through me.

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