Jennifer

"I know it did, you made that pretty clear. And I was so happy you felt that way. So, so happy." She sighed then. "And that led me to think about how you can't really have that same experience with me, because your great passion is music."

I had that same thought as well. "And you're indifferent to it."

"Right," she agreed. "So, maybe I can't really share your passion, but I can at least try to understand what it means to you." She sat up again.

"Put some music on. Not this easy-listening dinner music," she said, waving her hand to indicate the rotating mix of light jazz, slow trance, ambient, and new age that played quietly in the background now, as it did whenever he hosted her, and was inoffensive enough that this was the first time Jennifer had ever mentioned it. "Play me something amazing. Something that makes you say 'wow.' Sagan wrote about listening to music while high, I thought it might help. That's why I wanted to smoke with you."

So now Jennifer wanted to listen to music. Wonder what's the temperature in Hell right now? This was unexpected, and exciting. What to play for her? His favorite band, Deerhoof? No, he doubted he could get her to hear what he did in their work, not this early in her musical education anyway. He ruled out any other rock and roll for the same reason. Most of the jazz he listened to was focused more on the technical skills of the players than on any compositional genius. There might not be another opportunity for this. He had to go big.

Classical music it would be, then. One of Beethoven's later symphonies? The eighth, or the second movement from either the seventh or the ninth? Maybe later, if she gave him a second chance. He reminded himself that her great passion was astronomy and space exploration. Was there a way to combine her passion with his?

He believed there was: Bach, the prolific master composer of the Baroque period. His second "Brandenburg" concerto was the very first sound that would be heard if extraterrestrials ever found and played the golden platter on the Voyager space probe. Carl Sagan had chaired the committee that chose what went onto that record.

Once he'd settled on Bach, he knew what record to play. He went to the shelf of vinyl LPs and brought out the copy of Switched-On Bach that had been his father's. "This is an important record for a number of reasons," he told her. "It's probably the first release to feature the synthesizer as a real musical instrument, not just to make sci-fi bloop-bleep sounds. And it brought classical music to a new young audience. It's still the best-selling classical album of all time. It inspired lots of imitators in its wake. And it's Wendy Carlos' first album.

"Wendy Carlos was a real visionary, a true pioneer in electronic music," he continued as he slid the disc out of the sleeve and put it on the turntable. He handed the empty sleeve to Jennifer, who examined it. "She worked closely with Bob Moog, the guy who built the synth she played on this album. She practically co-designed it with him. Like for example, making the keyboard touch-sensitive was her idea. She was a sound engineer as well as a musician, and she had an early interest in physics that probably informed the technical side of her musicianship." He paused, remembering a detail he was sure would interest her. "Oh, and bringing it back around to your passion, she also photographed eclipses. In fact I'd bet money that you've seen some of her pictures in your astronomy studies."

"This album cover says it's by Walter Carlos," Jennifer observed.

"Yeah, so does my CD of the Clockwork Orange soundtrack album," he said. "She transitioned in the seventies, and came out in seventy-nine, but older copies of her records still have her deadname on them."

"When did she die?"

"She's still alive, last I heard. By 'deadname' I meant-"

"I know what 'deadname' means, you mansplainer," she interrupted. "I thought she was dead because you keep saying 'she was,' not 'she is.'"

"Oh, yeah... sorry. Well, she went dark some years ago. Just..." He paused and, realizing how stoned he was, carefully spoke the next word, "un-ce-re-moniously dropped out of public view. Even her website stopped updating in 2009. So I tend to think of her in the past tense, even though she's technically still with us.

"Anyway, she made this record way back a long time ago, in 1968 before either of us were born," he finished. "It's all music by Johann Sebastian Bach, probably the best composer of the Baroque period." A blank stare from her. "At risk of further 'mansplaining,' Baroque is the beginning of what most people call 'classical music.' It includes Vivaldi and Handel as well as Bach and others. The actual Classical period, the time of Beethoven and Mozart, came next. After that, the Romantic period, and then the twentieth century.

"But that doesn't matter now," he amended. "All I want you to listen for is the way the melodies work together in the piece. It's called 'counterpoint,' and Bach was a master of it. We'll start simple - this piece has only two parts to follow."

He cued the stylus over the track "2-Part Invention in F Major" and lowered it onto the platter.

. . .

He let the rest of the record play out from the needle drop: two more short Inventions and "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring". Jennifer had listened without speaking for the whole six minutes, then when the last track ended in prolonged silence, she said, "I think I get it, but those pieces are so short... especially the first one, it seemed like it had barely started, and then suddenly it was over."

"Let me play you one of his longer works then," he said, picking up the remote for the media center. He changed the source to the internal storage and navigated to his digital copy of Carlos' Switched-On Brandenburgs. "This is a concerto, that basically means it's a piece for a solo instrument accompanied by an orchestra. This particular concerto is actually for four different soloists, though of course this version is all still Wendy Carlos playing different sounds on the synthesizer." He grinned. "And it might interest you to know that a more traditional recording of this is also the first piece on the Voyager Golden Record."

Her eyes widened in surprise. "Nice callback! Okay, maestro, bring it on."

. . .

"I get kind of a... feeling? Thingy? When I hear that music," she said after the track had played. "Like when I consider the way the moons orbit the planets, and the planets orbit the sun, and the sun orbits the galactic center, and the galaxies orbit... you know. To the degree of regularity that we can predict the positions of things thousands or even millions of years into the future - even though I understand the physics involved, it still blows my mind sometimes. That's the sort of thing this music makes me feel."

"So you like it, then?"

She smiled. "I kind of do, yes."

"You might be ready for Beethoven, then." He picked up the remote again and selected another track. "This is the second movment of the Ninth Symphony. Most people know part of the fourth movement." He whistled four measures of the "Ode to Joy" melody.

"I've heard it," she said.

"This is the second movement of that symphony, and one of my favorite pieces of music ever. Now that I think of it, it is kinda like a conter...connn-" he spoke slowly again: "con-tra-puntal fugue, like so much Bach music. I have a feeling you'll like it."

. . .

"Wow," she said, her face a study in shock and awe. "I'm... I... I just... Fuck, where are even the words for that?"

"Let me know if you find them before I do. I'll do the same for you."

"That was incredible. It can't be just because I'm high, right?"

"It could be, but in this case it isn't. It's really that good. You might not react quite as strongly if you weren't high, but I'm sure you would still notice the interplay of the instruments, and the way the parts work together to make the whole."

"The way it all fits together, yes," she said, nodding. "The high and low parts, and the high and low parts in between them-"

"They're called 'voices.' Soprano, alto, tenor, and bass from highest to lowest, and you're very perceptive to have picked up on that in your first listen. Then again I did start you with Bach." He paused and shook his head. "I'm sorry, I interrupted you. Please go on?"

"Like I was saying, the way all the voices work together with such mathematical precision, and move along to a conclusion that feels like it couldn't possibly be any way other than what it is."

"Ooh, you're not going to like jazz. Probably won't like a lot of rock and roll either. Or does the idea of improvisation not offend your musical sense of perfect order?"

"I'll have to hear it to say for certain. What else have you got?"

"Well, you seem to get classical music, more thoroughly than I ever did before taking two years of music theory in college. I want to try you on something different."

With the remote he turned on the television and brought up the King Crimson concert video Déjà VROOOM, featuring the 1990s "double trio" lineup of two guitarists, two bassists, and two drummers. "We're moving along to rock music now," he said. "Sort of. It's not most people's idea of rock and roll. There's a lot of pre-composed music but there's also some improvisation. And the two basses and two drummers are an unusual... in-stru-men-tation, most bands don't need or even want more than one of each. Anyway...." He started the video playing.

. . .

"You know what I'm enjoying most about this?" he asked her.

"Tell me."

"You're listening to this. I mean really listening, with your full attention."

"Except when you talk over it, like now," she replied with a smirk.

"It's okay, this isn't one of the important songs." He had been skipping all tracks that were from albums other than THRAK, the double trio's only studio LP, because they hadn't been written for this ensemble. "I just wanted to say that whether you end up liking or hating this, I'll know you gave it a fair chance to win you over."

"I'm leaning toward like. It's interesting. The way the two drum parts and the two bass parts play with and against each other. The two guitar players, too."

He nodded. "Fripp and Belew do love to do that 'interlocking guitars' thing."

"And it's especially interesting when they sound... I'm not sure what the right word is. Harsh?"

"If I understand what you mean, in music it's called dissonance. It's the opposite of consonance, that's a combination of notes that's pleasing to the ear."

"And the rhythms, the way they count," she continued. "Like in the Bach and Beethoven music, I could count that mostly like 'one, two, three, four,' although some of it counted in threes, but this band plays some different counts... I mean, still lots of fours and threes, but also some fives and sevens and such."

"That's called meter," he told her. "Or 'time signature.' It's odd that you were never interested in music. You really have an ear for it, and an intuitive grasp of the theory behind it. Counterpoint, voice leading, harmony, dissonance, meter...." He shook his head. "In another timeline, you could have been a musician. A great player, maybe even a composer."

"It's the pot, I think," she said. "I've heard music all my life but I never listened to it before tonight. I wonder how I'll hear it when I'm not high?"

"What you're hearing won't just go away when you're sober. I think you'll still like it."

"Why is this song not important, again?"

"Like those other ones that I skipped, it's from an earlier album, when they only had that bald bass player and the curly-haired drummer. It was never meant for this band, they just played older songs because the fans at concerts want to hear old favorites."

This was going much better than anticipated. He had expected she would simply listen, maybe even enjoy a little of the Bach and Beethoven, but now here she was almost appreciating some of King Crimson's more challenging repertoire. He decided to push it all the way. It was time for the master class.

He stopped the video and began browsing through audio files again. "What's up next?" she asked.

"I might be overreaching," he answered, "but the way tonight has been progressing, I have a good feeling about this." He found the first album by U Totem and cued the first track "One Nail Draws Another."

"This is also rock music, technically, though even less so than King Crimson," he explained. "It's more like modern chamber music with rock instruments. In the twentieth century, composers started to flout the standards and traditions of the Classical and Romantic periods, like the established norms of melody, harmony, and rhythm. There's even a legend that the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet Rite of Spring provoked a riot in the audience.

"This record you're about to hear, my last girlfriend hated it," he continued. "She liked rock and roll, but this was just noise to her. But while it sounds dissonant and chaotic and random sometimes, it's through-composed. Every note is planned and intended, I know because I've seen video of this piece performed live."

His high had faded somewhat, he noticed. "I'm taking another toke. You want some more?"

"A little bit," she said. He loaded the bong and passed it to her. "Again, you don't have to finish the hit," he said. "Take what you think you can handle, and I'll finish it off."

This time she took a sip of smoke, still holding it in for more than a few seconds. He accepted the bong back from her and sank what remained.

. . .

A crash of piano, bass, and percussion: one short sharp unison hit. Then a few seconds of silence, and a couple of notes from the piano again, with drum strikes. Another crash like the first. Winds entered then, a flute sounding long notes as a bassoon played in quick little bursts. More of the same over a couple of minutes, gradually building and developing until the drummer began a slow, steady beat, three voices spoke briefly together in three different languages, and Emily Hay's beautiful operatic voice sang the ominous Orwellian lyrics: Something's weighing you down, Isabel / Your eyes trace your steps in advance / Virgil tells me they've taken Tran away / We'll all miss his cruel humor and cigarettes / One nail draws another / We have always been allied with Oceania.

Another rapid build, and suddenly the music was unquestionably rock, the drums pounding out a steady driving beat under a rhythmically disjointed electric guitar lead doubled by the bass guitar, the flute picking up the melody as well the second time through, the meter defying easy counting. Soon this heavy rock section ended.

The track proceeded along through its different sections. He paid particular attention to her reaction during the trilingual passages, where Hay and two other vocalists sang the same lyrics but in German and Japanese as well as English, all at the same time and each in its own melodic line that entwined with the other two. Her face told him everything. A lesser person would say she's having a religious experience. Clearly she was enraptured by what she heard; unlike Callie, his last girlfriend, who had said that U Totem sounded like instruments being abused by untrained toddlers.

As before, Jennifer listened attentively for the track's entire fifteen minutes. When it finished she looked at him, eyes shining. She didn't speak, so he didn't either; he just smiled warmly and waited for her.

It was over half a minute before she broke the silence. "I think I like that better than the Beethoven. Is that wrong? It feels wrong somehow."

"Not at all," he assured her. "Music's not like science, there really isn't any right or wrong. Even the principles of music theory aren't hard rules, they're more like an after-the-fact analysis of how music was composed in the time of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. And as brilliant as they were, they were writing for their patrons - kings, princes, nobles, and other rich assholes of the time. They had to tailor their work to that audience, keep it accessible to them."

He chuckled. "That reminds me, we should watch the movie Amadeus sometime. Anyway, I think it was probably a vicious cycle - the more they wrote music the way they did, the more their patrons expected that was how music sounded, and so that's what the composers were expected to write more of. Despite what my music theory professor liked to say about "art music" versus "pop music," the classical era wasn't any more elevated, or artistically pure, than music today.

"James Grigsby didn't have anyone paying him to write that track you just heard," he continued. "He just wrote it, and got some like-minded musicians to help him record it. I'm pretty sure the end result is close to what he intended."

"And it's fucking astonishing music," she added. "I've never heard anything like it."

"I'm absolutely tickled that you like it. Your reaction tonight exceeded my most optimistic hopes. I honestly didn't expect any of this to move you."

"Oh, I'm moved, believe it."

"I'll have to play you the rest of this album some other night," he said. "Right now though, I think it's time for a cool-down." He put on The Alien Jams, Ajja and Cosmosis' album of electric guitar solos over slow trance beats. As the first track began, she said "This sounds like your dinner music again."

"This record has been in the dinner rotation, and I'm playing it now for much the same reasons: it's pleasant to listen to, but doesn't demand much from the listener."

She leaned into him and laid her head on his shoulder. He put his arm around her. They sat that way for a while as the music played, and enjoyed being high together.

* * *

More months passed as they continued in their comfortable rut. Jennifer met some of his guy friends on his birthday, and he met a handful of her girlfriends on hers. Both groups of friends had thought they were dating, but they maintained that their friendship was "platonic" - they considered the "with benefits" situation their own private affair that their other friends didn't need to know about.

They weren't having sex every time they got together, but more than half the time, they were. Though he would always be down to fuck Jennifer whenever she asked, and always hoped she would ask, he always left the asking to her. When sex didn't happen, he wasn't really disappointed; having Jennifer as a friend was far more important than having sex with her.

* * *

It was a warm night in mid-September. They were atop Stargazer Hill, as he had taken to calling it, and they had been looking at stars and other cosmic bodies for about half an hour. The moon was a waning crescent low in the sky, casting minimal illumination on the site. They were both a little high, having taken light tokes on a pipe he had brought along.

"Ever had sex outdoors?" Jennifer asked him suddenly.

"Never have," he replied.

"Neither have I," she said, "but I'm willing to try it if you are."

"I don't have a condom with me."

"I do."

He grinned. "Then yes, I'm in." Of course he was in. If Jennifer wanted him to fuck her, he wouldn't say no.

He quickly peeled down and put his clothes at one corner of the spread blanket, then watched her removing her own clothes. He had stripped himself in under half a minute but she moved more slowly and deliberately, knowing he was looking and putting on a show for him. His penis was already beginning to swell as he took in the sight of her curves in the dim moonlight.

They met in the center of the blanket and went to their knees together, embracing and kissing. His hands found her breasts, and hers found his cock. They stayed that way for a minute or so, touching each other as her nipples and his cock got harder.