Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (6 page)

Like many musicians, I cannot remember ever playing badly, in the sense of not knowing what I was doing. In high school, my identity was being sealed shut: my classmates called me “el señor longhair,” even though I wore a crew cut, this being the 1950s. Whenever the town needed a demonstration of local genius, it called upon me. There were newspaper articles detailing my accomplishments, and I must have heard the phrase “future concert career” at least two hundred times. My parents smiled and smiled as I collected applause. My senior year I gave a solo recital and was hired for umpteen weddings and funerals. I was good luck. On the Fourth of July the townspeople brought a piano out to the city square so that I could improvise music between explosions at the fireworks display. Just before I left for college, I noticed that our neighbors wanted to come up to me, ostensibly for small talk, but actually to touch me.

In college I made a shocking discovery: other people existed in the world who were as talented as I was. If I sat down to play a Debussy étude, they would sit down and play Beethoven, only faster and louder than I had. I felt their breath on my neck. Apparently there were other small towns. In each one of these small towns there was a genius. Perhaps some geniuses were not actually geniuses. I practiced constantly and began to specialize in the non-Germanic piano repertoire. I kept my eye out for students younger than I was, who might have flashier technique. At my senior recital I played Mozart, Chopin, Ravel, and Debussy, with encore pieces by Scriabin. I managed to get the audience to stand up for the last time.

I was accepted into a large midwestern music school, famous for its high standards. Once there, I discovered that genius, to say nothing of talent, was a common commodity. Since I was only a middling composer, with no interesting musical ideas as such, I would have to make my career as a performer or teacher. But I didn’t want to teach, and as a performer I lacked pizzazz. For the first time, it occurred to me that my life might be evolving into something unpleasant, something with the taste of stale bread.

I was beginning to meet performers with more confidence than I had, young musicians to whom doubt was as alien as proper etiquette. Often these people dressed like tramps, smelled, smoked constantly, were gay
or sadistic. Whatever their imbalances, they were not genteel.
They did not represent small towns
. I was struck by their eyes. Their eyes seemed to proclaim, “The universe believes in me. It always has.”

My piano teacher was a man I will call Luther Stecker. Every year he taught at the music school for six months. For the following six months he toured. He turned me away from the repertoire with which I was familiar and demanded that I learn several pieces by composers whom I had not often played, including Bach, Brahms, and Liszt. Each one of these composers discovered a weak point in me: I had trouble keeping up the consistent frenzy required by Liszt, the mathematical precision required by Bach, the unpianistic fingerings of Brahms.

I saw Stecker every week. While I played, he would doze off. When he woke, he would mumble some inaudible comment. He also coached a trio I participated in, and he spoke no more audibly then than he did during my private lessons.

I couldn’t understand why, apart from his reputation, the school had hired him. Then I learned that in every Stecker-student’s life, the time came when the Master collected his thoughts, became blunt, and told the student exactly what his future would be. For me, the moment arrived on the third of November 1966. I was playing sections of the Brahms Paganini Variations, a fiendish piece on which I had spent many hours. When I finished, I saw him sit up.

“Very good,” he said, squinting at me. “You have talents.”

There was a pause. I waited. “Thank you,” I said.

“You have a nice house?” he asked.

“A nice house? No.”

“You should get a nice house somewhere,” he said, taking his handkerchief out of his pocket and waving it at me. “With windows. Windows with a view.”

I didn’t like the drift of his remarks. “I can’t afford a house,” I said.

“You will. A nice house. For you and your family.”

I resolved to get to the heart of this. “Professor,” I asked, “what did you think of my playing?”

“Excellent,” he said. “That piece is very difficult.”

“Thank you.”

“Yes, technically excellent,” he said, and my heart began to pound. “Intelligent phrasing. Not much for me to say. Yes. That piece has many notes,” he added, enjoying the non sequitur.

I nodded. “Many notes.”

“And you hit all of them accurately. Good pedal and good discipline. I like how you hit the notes.”

I was dangling on his string, a little puppet.

“Thousands of notes, I suppose,” he said, staring at my forehead, which was beginning to get damp, “and you hit all of them. You only forgot one thing.”

“What?”

“The passion!” he roared. “You forgot the passion! You always forget it! Where is it? Did you leave it at home? You never bring it with you! Never! I listen to you and think of a robot playing! A smart robot, but a robot! No passion! Never ever ever!” He stopped shouting long enough to sneeze. “You
should
buy a house. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because the only way you will ever praise God is with a family, that’s why! Not with this piano! You are a fine student,” he wound up, “but you make me sick! Why do you make me sick?”

He waited for me to answer.

“
Why do you make me sick?
” he shouted. “Answer me!”

“How can I possibly answer you?”

“By articulating words in English! Be courageous! Offer a suggestion! Why do you make me sick?”

I waited for a minute, the longest minute of my life. “Passion,” I said at last. “You said there wasn’t enough passion. I thought there was. Perhaps not.”

He nodded. “No. You are right. No passion. A corruption of music itself. Your playing is gentle, too much good taste. To play the piano like a genius, you must have a bit of the fanatic. Just a bit. But it is essential. You have stubbornness and talent but no fanaticism. You don’t have the salt on the rice. Without salt, the rice is inedible, no matter what its quality otherwise.” He stood up. “I tell you this because sooner or later someone else will. You will have a life of disappointments if you stay in music. You may find a teacher who likes you. Good, good.
But you will never be taken up! Never!
You should buy a house, young man. With a beautiful view. Move to it. Don’t stay here. You are close to success, but it is the difference between leaping the chasm and falling into it, one inch short. You are an inch short. You could come back for more lessons. You
could
graduate from here. But if you are truly intelligent, you will
say good-bye. Good-bye.” He looked down at the floor and did not offer me his hand.

I stood up and walked out of the room.

Becalmed, I drifted up and down the hallways of the building for half an hour. Then a friend of mine, a student of conducting from Bolivia, a Marxist named Juan Valparaiso, approached and, ignoring my shallow breathing and cold sweat, started talking at once.

“Terrible, furious day!” he said.

“Yes.”

“I am conducting
Benvenuto Cellini
overture this morning! All is going well until difficult flute entry. I instruct, with force, flutists. Soon all woodwinds are ignoring me.” He raised his eyebrows and stroked his huge gaucho mustache. “Always! Always there are fascists in the woodwinds!”

“Fascists everywhere,” I said.

“Horns bad, woodwinds worse. Demands of breath make for insanes. Pedro,” he said, “you are appearing irresoluted. Sick?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “Sick. I just came from Stecker. My playing makes
him
sick.”

“He said that? That you are making him sick?”

“That’s right. I play like a robot, he says.”

“What will you do?” Juan asked me. “Kill him?”

“No.” And then I knew. “I’m leaving the school.”

“What? Is impossible!” Tears leaped instantly into Juan’s eyes. “Cannot, Pedro. After one whipping? No! Must stick to it.” He grabbed me by the shoulders. “Fascists put here on Earth to break our hearts! Must live through. You cannot go.” He looked around wildly. “Where could you go anyway?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “He told me I would never amount to anything. I think he’s right. But I could do something else.” To prove that I could imagine options, I said, “I could work for a newspaper. You know, music criticism.”

“Caterpillars!” Juan shouted, his tears falling onto my shirt. “Failures! Pathetic lives! Cannot, cannot! Who would hire you?”

I couldn’t tell him for six months, until I was given a job in Knoxville on a part-time trial basis. But by then I was no longer writing letters to my musician friends. I had become anonymous. I worked in Knoxville for two years, then in Louisville—a great city for music—until I moved
here, to this city I shall never name, in the middle of New York State, where I bought a house with a beautiful view.

In my hometown, they still wonder what happened to me, but my smiling parents refuse to reveal my whereabouts.

Every newspaper has a command structure. Within that command structure, editors assign certain stories, but the writers must be given some freedom to snoop around and discover newsworthy material themselves. In this anonymous city, I was hired to review all the concerts of the symphony orchestra and to provide some hype articles during the week to boost the ticket sales for Friday’s program. Since the owner of the paper was on the symphony board of trustees, writing about the orchestra and its programs was necessarily part of good journalistic citizenship. On my own, though, I initiated certain projects, wrote book reviews for the Sunday section, interviewed famous visiting musicians—some of them my ex-classmates—and during the summer I could fill in on all sorts of assignments, as long as I cleared what I did with the feature editor, Morris Cascadilla.

“You’re the first serious musician we’ve ever had on the staff here,” he announced to me when I arrived, suspicion and hope fighting for control on his face. “Just remember this: be clear and concise. Assume they’ve got intelligence but no information. After that, you’re on your own, except that you should clear dicey stuff with me. And never forget the Maple Street angle.”

The Maple Street angle was Cascadilla’s equivalent to the Nixon administration’s “How will it play in Peoria?” No matter what subject I wrote about, I was expected to make it relevant to Maple Street, the newspaper’s mythical locus of middle-class values. I could write about electronic, aleatory, or post-Boulez music
if
I suggested that the city’s daughters might be corrupted by it. Sometimes I found the Maple Street angle, and sometimes I couldn’t. When I failed, Cascadilla would call me in, scowl at my copy, and mutter, “All the Juilliard graduates in town will love this.” Nevertheless, the Maple Street angle was a spiritual exercise in humility, and I did my best to find it week after week.

When I first learned that the orchestra was scheduled to play Paul Hindemith’s
Harmony of the World
symphony, I didn’t think of Hindemith,
but of Maple Street, that mythically harmonious place where I actually grew up.

Working on the paper left me some time for other activities. Unfortunately, there was nothing I knew how to do except play the piano and write reviews.

Certain musicians are very practical. Trumpet players (who love valves) tend to be good mechanics, and I have met a few composers who fly airplanes and can restore automobiles. Most performing violinists and pianists, however, are drained by the demands of their instruments and seldom learn how to do anything besides play. In daily life they are helpless and stricken. In midlife the smart ones force themselves to find hobbies. But the less fortunate come home to solitary apartments without pictures or other decorations, warm up their dinners in silence, read whatever books happen to be on the dinner table, and then go to bed.

I am speaking of myself here, of course. As time passed, and the vacuum of my life made it harder to breathe, I required more work. I fancied that I was a tree, putting out additional leaves. I let it be known that I would play as an accompanist for voice students and other recitalists, if their schedules didn’t interfere with my commitments for the paper.

One day I received a call at my desk. A quietly controlled female voice asked, “Is this Peter Jenkins?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” she said, as if she’d forgotten what she meant to tell me, “this is Karen Jensen. That’s almost like Jenkins, isn’t it?” I waited. “I’m a singer,” she said, after a moment. “A soprano. I’ve just lost my accompanist and I’m planning on giving a recital in three months. They said you were available. Are you? And what do you charge?”

I told her.

“Isn’t that kind of steep? That’s kind of steep. Well, I suppose … I can use somebody else until just before, and then I can use you. They say you’re good. And I’ve read your reviews. I really admire the way you write!”

I thanked her.

“You get so much information into your reviews! Sometimes, when I read you, I imagine what you look like. Sometimes a person can make a
mental picture. I just wish the paper would publish a photo or something of you.”

“They want to,” I said, “but I asked them not to.”

“Even your voice sounds like your writing!” she said excitedly. “I can see you in front of me now. Can you play Fauré and Schubert? I mean, is there any composer or style you don’t like and won’t play?”

“No,” I said. “I play anything.”

“That’s
wonderful
!” she said, as if I had confessed to a remarkable tolerance. “Some accompanists are so picky. ‘I won’t do this, I won’t do that.’ Well,
one
I know is like that. Anyhow, could we meet soon? Do you sight-read? Can we meet at the music school downtown? In a practice room? When are you free?”

I set up an appointment.

She was almost beautiful. Her deep eyes were accented by depressed bowls in quarter-moon shadows under them. Though she was only in her late twenties, she seemed slightly scorched by anxiety. She couldn’t keep still. Her hands fluttered as they fixed her hair; she scratched nervously at her cheeks, and her eyes jumped every few seconds. Soon, however, she calmed down and began to look me in the eye, evaluating me. Then
I
turned away.