“How long are the intermissions at the Richard M. Nixon Center for the Performing Arts?” asked Beatrice.
“I don’t know,” said Susan, “But I know a man who would know exactly – Fritjof Roper-Schell. Have I ever told you about Fritjof Roper-Schell?”
“I don’t think so,” said Beatrice.
Beatrice began to smile. She knew a story was coming.
“Then,” said Susan, “I will have to tell you the strange and wonderful story of Mr. Fritjof Roper-Schell, who was an acquaintance of mine when I was a young woman and moved in different circles.
“Now, Fritjof was a man who went to the opera often, but – you see – only for the intermissions. Of course, he used to go to the opera like anyone else, but he said he realized one day that he really got all he needed from the intermissions. At an intermission, he explained early on, one could hear about the highlights from the preceding acts, the costumes, whether a new soprano acquitted herself well, and so on.
“However, after he had been doing this for a year or so, he began telling me and his other friends that what people said during an intermission about an opera was far less important than what they did not say – or what they said besides. He could, he claimed, sense the quality and general nature of an opera simply from people’s casual remarks to one another, the tone of their breathing, and beyond that, the expressions on their faces and their deportment. Even the character and pallor of the people in the room were apparently very telling.
“After a period of three years, he began announcing that he had honed his craft even further. He could tell what opera was playing solely by the intermission and to that end he had even stopped buying tickets. You see – one of the charms of the Richard M. Nixon Center for the Performing Arts is that one need not have a ticket to attend an intermission. One can just stroll on in. There are always multiple performances going on in the center’s different halls and the lobby of the opera hall is not cordoned off from the network of corridors connecting the various entrances and other lobbies.
“So, he would just stroll on in without a ticket on days he knew an opera would be playing. And at the time intermissions usually were, he would wade through the intermission, make his judgement as to what opera was playing, write it down on a slip of paper, and when he got home, he would check his judgement against the calendar that the center used to send out to its donors in advance of every season.
“After three seasons, by means of this exercise, he claimed he no longer made mistakes concerning any of the operas in the standard repertoire. Concerning less well-known operas, he was at least always able to guess the composer. Wagner intermissions, he would say, often had purple-shadowed rooms with a metallic scent. Mozart intermissions skewed younger. Old men always chuckled more by the bar during performances of The Magic Flute, and so on. Indeed, he was so taken with his insights that he began to propagate a theory among his circle of friends.
“The theory was this: It is in the breaks we learn the most. No part of school, he would say, is more formative than recess. No parts of our days are so colorful as the dreams we have in the night, which tell us the real truth of our waking hours. The breaks yield the form of a thing. In one sense, he would explain, they border it. They stand outside of it. And from the outside we see a thing in full. In another sense, he would also explain, it is the breaks on which a thing is molded. What defines the shape of a pot is the cavity: the emptiness within. The ring of a bell comes from the hollow.
“He would say, in fact – and I think when he said it, he was mostly joking – that the eschaton will not come at the logical end of the human story, not at a time or moment that could be predicted by human faculties, but – as it were – in a sort of intermission. We all thought that bit was particularly brilliant. One of our friends at the time, a grad student at the Roman Catholic University of America even used it as the basis of an enigmatic conference paper, which according to a rumor secured his future in adjunct-professorship.
“One day, however, I heard that Fritjof was planning on attending the intermission of an opera being performed, for which, as fortune would have it – I had a ticket. You can imagine how keen I was to hear his analysis. And amazingly, incredibly – I was at a party that very night, late in the evening, when who but Mr. Fritjof Roper-Schell burst through the front door and immediately commanded the attention of everyone looking his way. He had the flashing eyes, the floating hair, and the unbuttoned blazer of one who had just come from somewhere else and had word of it to tell.
“His story, which he delivered with an air befitting his prophetic appearance, went like this: Earlier that evening, he had gone to the Richard M. Nixon Center for the Performing Arts at the appointed time for opera intermissions. At first, he said, he thought that he had arrived early. There was no one in the lobby. But then, he noticed, there was no sound coming from inside the opera hall.
“He wondered whom the composer might be – what this opera was that had left its audience so stupefied that no one had risen from their seats, that no one was stirring. He readied himself. He knew that this would be an intermission that would put him to the test. He began mentally preparing his inventory of tools and measures. He would look at the expressions on the old men’s faces. He would check to see if any collars had been unbuttoned. He would sniff the perfumes that the ladies had worn and note to what extent they had degraded to their base notes.
“But minute after minute passed. And there was nothing – nothing for him to go on. There was no one in the hall. Never had an opera left its whole audience so stunned. Never had there been such silence. Never had he been so alone. It felt like an eternity and, he said, it was.
“It must have been the greatest opera, he said in a whisper, for indeed, this was the greatest intermission. This was a break of breaks: a silence of silences. He had been alone. With great solemnity – in a tone that would make a Wagnerian blush – he announced to everyone listening that this silence was the Silence of God. When the greatest drama of creation played out, when Our Lord was crucified and shouted to his father and there was no answer but the hollow ring of Golgotha, that silence was kin to the silence he heard in the lobby of the Richard M. Nixon Center for the Performing Arts.
“But unlike Our Lord, he said, he had not cried out. He said he had wanted to. He had wanted to make some sort of noise. He had felt tempted to find a staff member and ask what had happened. But, he said, he knew that would be cheating, as it were. Indeed, he announced that he had been given a gift. He embraced the silence. He let it wash over him, baptize him. Without saying anything further, he turned and left the party and it was all anyone talked about for the rest of the night.
“As fortune would have it again, however, I ran into him a month later at a dinner party and I asked him about that intermission. He said that when he had got home that night, he checked his calendar from the center and that the opera was Jean-Benjamin de La Borde’s Pandore. He said, truly, it must be the best opera ever written. Or, he noted, it was at least a very good opera that had been performed perfectly that night.
“I asked him whether he would consider attending a performance, but he said that though the idea had occurred to him and that he was tempted, he did not want in any way to taint the intermission he had experienced. He intended to keep it within himself. He had built a reservoir for it in his heart of hearts. He would return to it as needed when the noise of the world did not make sense. He would keep that silence within himself till he reached the grave and there be at one with it.”
Beatrice was in awe. She sat quietly for a while and looked at Susan, who was sitting across from her calmly. Then she asked, “You said you had a ticket to that performance – was it as good as that?”
Susan smiled. “I never had the heart to tell him,” she said, “the performance had been canceled.”
Michael Shindler is a writer living in Washington, DC. His work has been published in outlets including The American Spectator, The American Conservative, Church Life, University Bookman, North American Anglican and New English Review. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelShindler.
Begin 'in media res'; end with 'a sting in the tail'; that's the way to do it!