A Wonderful Encounter

Though our friendship had begun when we were twelve, I hadn't even talked on the phone with Rob for nine years. There was a sad parting of our ways which occurred after I had come back from Cuba in 1970. Save for about a week, I had spent two months on a plantation near Havana cutting sugar cane as a member of a Cuban-American friendship group (the Venceremos Brigade). The week we spent touring the island. I returned to the States a rabid advocate of the revolutionary ferment which, in my view, was occurring in many places all over the world and as well an advocate of most of the governments behind the ferment. My effort to recruit Rob to the cause was more than he could tolerate even in me. We had some words, and I stormed out of his apartment in disgust.

But when I got to Houston to do some work there for my employer in New York, I called Rob the night I arrived, hoping that he would let bygones be bygones. Indeed he did and was joyous in his response when he heard my voice. We agreed to meet the next evening at one of his favorite restaurants. "I'll pay!" he said as we ended the phone conversation.

At the restaurant, we began talking eagerly and earnestly and at times deeply of our lives. Rob had come to Houston to study the law and after passing his bar exam had begun work in a general practice with one of the patriarchs of the town whom he referred to as "The Creaker" because the very elderly man's joints literally creaked when he walked. Making people laugh was one of Rob's major occupations and thinking up such names for people was one way he did it. Another invention was "The Big Head," a name which he had pinned on a man with an oversized cranium and who was the boyfriend of a woman he had once lived with and still very much wanted. Yes, Bob reserved the invention of names for those towards whom he harbored at least a bit of antipathy.

"By the way, I've got a boat, a Flying Dutchman," he said at one point in our conversation. I was enormously glad of this news; I had sailed the type back in Washington, DC, and liked it very much. I followed this news by telling him that I had taken up windsurfing and had a rig even then on the top of my car.

On and on it went. Each of us had had many adventures since college and each of us was intensely interested in them and in each other. Thus I had little awareness of my surroundings except to notice now and then that the noise was almost deafening and where the noise was coming from. This was a swanky Texas restaurant with the men dressed to the nines in cowboy hats and boots and well-tailored suits and the women dressed to match and everyone not talking but shouting at each other. But these impressions only flitted now and then through my consciousness, so intense was my involvement in our conversation. Suddenly my focus was interrupted as there loomed between us an enormous face donned with well-oiled and abundant black hair. Its owner, dressed in an immaculate tuxedo, said suddenly, "What would you like to hear?" 

 "Like to hear? What do you ..." Before I got "mean" out of my mouth, it came to me what was going on. Coming into the place I had noticed the man in a structure which was kind of a kidney-shaped wading pool. Only there was no water in it, only a carpet, a fig tree in a large planter, and a very-expensive looking Steinway with this man playing show tunes on it. But you could hardly hear the tunes unless you were close to it because of the noise in the place. And now the musician was going table to table and asking people what they wanted to hear.

"Well," I said to myself, "you have annoyed me and that gives me the right to suggest what I am sure you will find preposterous." Then, shouting in order to be heard over the din, I blurted out to him, "Moonlight Sonata!" I expected the man to slink away in disgust with me. Instead, his face lit up. "Certainly!" he said and left us. For a bit my attention was divided between our conversation and the pianist until, instead of playing my request, the man played a show tune, at which point I forgot him and again was lost to everything but Rob and our conversation.

Then a bit later, in spite of the uproar, they came to me: the first three notes of the sonata. Abruptly the uproar began to wane. By the fifth note there was complete silence, complete calm in the place. 

I've listened to all of Beethoven's piano sonatas many times. For me, the Moonlight Sonata is the easiest to relate to and, when I hear it, often the world does indeed go away. So it was that night. Almost, because I could not help looking at the people around me. Some had their mouths wide open in what I hoped was amazement. A woman was looking at what I guessed was her husband, seeing in him perhaps something she never knew was there. At the bar, I noticed a cowboy wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. I was myself crying by the end, partly because of the music but mostly because of what I felt was a miracle.

I was thinking too of how it was when Amadeus came to Washington, DC. For over a year there was always a theater somewhere which was showing it. Our controllers try to keep us away from genius out of fear that it will rub off and create more trouble for them. Now and then something slips by them. Amadeus was one of the escapees. And so was Beethoven that night in Houston.

At the end of the piece, the place erupted in applause and even some yelling. Then the uproar washed back over us. Immediately Rob returned to the story he had been telling me about one of his trips to Mexico and that woman he still loved. I tried to listen but couldn't and finally interrupted with, "One of these days our species is either going to wake up or be destroyed," or something like it in an effort to express what I was connecting with.

We had many more adventures in Houston, Rob and I, many of them memorable, but none so memorable as that night with those cowboys and their ladies and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.