The Risk of His Music
Peter Weltner
In his fourth book, The Risk of His Music, Peter Weltner offers many moments of perfect pitch, capturing the emotive tones gay characters from youth to old age.
In "My Faithful, Faithless Friend," he presents two boyfriends' sweetly natural interplay with gentle bell-like clarity. As they drive, Todd and Jay play a clever, childlike game trying to top each other at precisely naming the colors of passing cars:
"Toasted almond."
"Maybe. More like butterscotch."
As well as he captures youthful zest, Weltner can convey a more mature perspective. In "The Greek Head," which previously appeared in the Men on Men 4 anthology, a gay man in his sixties whose lover has just died, offers angry and essential advice to his uneccesarily restless thirtysomething neighbor couple, seemingly poised for a break-up:
"...neither of us ever expected more from life than what it gave us...We made it work...Is my message clear?
"It just makes you all so angry, thinking you can't have everything and everyone, because you can't. You never could. It's such an elementary truth."
"The Greek Head" also boasts a craftily twisted surprise near its end. It's a nuance-rich revelation worthy of O. Henry that packs a good old-fashioned storytelling wallop, the likes of which are rarely found in gay domestic short fiction.
Hearing Voices, the book's third story, is a stunning piece of work, one of the finest short stories this reviewer has ever enjoyed. Kevin and Joe attune their ears to the inevitable creaks of their long, steady and truly loving relationship while, next door, AIDS roars at their neighbors, Jerry and Jorge. A mysterious phone caller—rendered hauntingly sensual, not obscene—begins drawing Kevin, who works at home as an editor, into a web of sexual fantasy, as fraught with guilt as it is with release. It's rewarding and relieving to find a writer who—without endorsing rampant neurosis—doesn't think it's silly to feel bad for cheating, even out in the telephonic ether. That conscientious ache of guilt, which arises in story after story here, is one of the consistent glories of Weltner's work. The author's voice is that of a responsible, romantic grown-up, not another self-protectively cynical, post-modern boy writer.
In Hearing Voices, Weltner gorgeously daubs from a palette of auditory metaphors with poetic control that is rich but never stilted, blending not only spoken voices, but inner voices of memory and emotion. Written voices, too, come to play on the canvas of this small masterwork; serious readers will instantly recognize the mingling of text and audience that goes on in Kevin's head as he immerses himself in editing a text: "He resumes his work, deleting words, changing sentences, shifting...that leaves plenty of room for other words, ones he doesn't mean to hear but can't prevent." Kevin's mind is then flooded with words from his childhood, from his life with Joe and even with descriptions of subconscious scenarios. Weltner is catching a genie in a bottle here, beautifully conveying the sensation of unleashed inner-language that, while familiar to us all, is virtually impossibly to pin down in prose without sliding into a neo-Joycean muck.
Such acute portrayal of mental states is enough to sustain many a fine short story, so it is all the more remarkable that Weltner deftly works in the phone sex 'plot' element, which adds the extra pleasure of suspense to the piece. Now that cybersex has arrived as the clunky fictional gimmick du jour, Weltner's phone scenes are not a bit jarring. Who knew that masturbating with Ma Bell would ever become the quaint stuff of literary tradition?
Some of the pieces here are inevitably weak in comparison to "Hearing Voices." "Self Portrait With Cecil and Larry" has a memorable midget wrestler at its center, but seems ultimately more sketch than story. "Buddy Loves Jo-Ann" feels more tentative than the rest of Weltner's efforts. The title story bursts at the seams with a Mahler-loving auto mechanic, awkward rural teenagers, real estate speculators and violent sexual undertones; over-packed for its length, it tantalizes with the prospect of novel-length expansion.
Weltner is at his most gamesome in the collection's final piece, Unlike Himself. He wags a shaggy dog tale that nicely enlivens the hoary conceit of supernatural doppelgangers. For the reader who absorbs this collection as a whole, rather than returning to the work story by story, this closing gambit will, at first, seem peculiar. After all of Weltner's subtle limning of realistic subject matter, here's a good old macabre body-switching story. Pudgy, puritanical academic Arthur Loudermilk—whose repressed sexuality is about as attractive as an ingrown toenail—and handsome, arrogant hustler Brice Landry—whose own repressed sexuality beams as luridly as his cocky come-on grin—suffer the old switcheroo in a New Orleans hotel room. There are big difficulties in the Big Easy as each of these self-absorbed, self-loathing little gargoyles comes to realize that it's as troublesome living in his own mind and body as it is to live in the other's. It's almost disappointing when the author winds things up with a characteristically generous touch of empathy for these wretches, but, in spite of its unexpected—and perfectly moderated—veer toward genre parody, Unlike Himself, ultimately, is quite like all of Weltner's strong work here. It blends fine literary traditions with bracingly contemporary psychology and situations.
