Every Note Played(58)
She’s Elise’s sad, pathetic neighbor. She’s an old, suburban piano teacher, a has-been, a never-was. Once upon a time, an almost-was.
She wants to be home, in her flannel pajamas, reading a book in her living room. But as soon as she imagines being on her couch, she hears Richard calling her from the den. She drags a long sip from her martini and pulls another olive into her mouth with her teeth. It’s an enormous relief to be away from him, to have a break from the distressing sound of his struggling to clear a cough, from having to tend to him all day and night. She blinked her eyes open this morning in her hotel bed and felt almost giddy, realizing that she had just slept through the night undisturbed.
And then Guilt came marching in, stomping with its monster feet and pounding its drum, scaring any nascent feelings of relief and lightness back into their holes. She shouldn’t have stuck Grace with him for four days. Grace shouldn’t have to clean up her father’s piss and be up all hours of the night while Karina is well rested and wearing a poorly fitting black dress, drinking a dirty martini, and listening to jazz with a bunch of kids. What if something goes wrong?
“I can’t wait for you to hear this guy,” says Elise, leaning back over to Karina. “Abby just called him the Mozart of jazz.”
Karina nods. It’s been so long since she’s been to any kind of live musical performance, years since she’s been to Symphony Hall, the Hatch Shell, Jordan Hall. The last time might’ve been to see Richard at Tanglewood. He played The Marriage of Figaro overture. Eight years ago? Can it really be that long?
She wouldn’t feel so uneasy if they were at a concert hall, if she were tucked somewhere safe and civilized in the orchestra or mezzanine section, waiting to hear a recital or concerto. Classical music has always been her home base, her comfort food, her security blanket. At Curtis, she started as a classical pianist, and by third year, her career looked more promising than Richard’s. They never acknowledged this aloud, but they both knew it. Her teachers praised her and gave her opportunities normally reserved for seniors or graduates. They did not offer these opportunities to Richard.
He congratulated her whenever this happened, but his words were rigid and cold, spoken through his teeth, and would leave her feeling insulted instead of championed. Whenever she privately or publically surpassed his playing, he’d grow distant and critical of her in other ways. He didn’t like her hair. He ridiculed her grammar. He withheld affection, refused sex, and pouted. She craved nothing more than to be loved by him when he felt self-confident and admired in the spotlight. Ironically, the biggest obstacle to his center-stage bravado seemed to be her.
When they were students, their technical skills were similarly matched, but her playing was emotionally connected and far more mature. While Richard could master the technical complexity of any piece, listening to him play often made her picture the notes on the page, the chords, the key, intellectually appreciating his athleticism, hearing the music as dissected elements rather than a whole. Not until after graduation, when they lived in New York, did something click in him, and he began to play the emotion of a piece and not simply the notes.
She remembers Professor Cohen and the Test. Each student was asked to play a piece but not until Professor Cohen left the classroom. The Test was simple. Could the student make the teacher cry in the hallway?
The first time Karina took the Test, she played Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, op. 12, no. 1. She played the closing gesture, tender and quiet, and waited, breath held, for Professor Cohen to return. The door opened, and Professor Cohen was smiling with clasped hands and wet eyes. She made him cry several times that semester. Richard never did.
She discovered jazz first semester of her senior year. She breezed into the campus coffeehouse for a quick espresso, on her way to something else, and stayed for two hours, mesmerized by three of her classmates, a trio of piano, drums, and trumpet playing Miles Davis. This music was so different from the sacred, rigid exactness of Mozart or Chopin. It had an exhilarating freedom, a playful exploration outside the structure of the melody. She watched the three improvise, detour, collaborate, creating something original, discovering the music as they played it, following a free association, a harmony, an embellishment, wherever it led them. They generated a momentum, a magical chemistry, a river that flowed through everyone there. Her heart was captivated, dizzy, spellbound.
She doesn’t think her relationship with Richard would’ve lasted beyond graduation if she hadn’t discovered jazz. In abandoning classical piano for jazz, she ensured that they would never compete, that the classical spotlight would be his to shine in. But switching from classical piano to jazz wasn’t an easy transition. Jazz is complex and in many ways technically more difficult than classical piano. And her decision was at best frowned upon, more often snubbed and mocked. Although neither genres are mainstream music, the world of classical piano is privileged and white, played in grand symphony halls to audiences who sip champagne. The jazz world is historically poor and black, played in hole-in-the-wall nightclubs for patrons drunk on bourbon.
Alexander, the drummer, and the bassist take the stage, and the audience applauds while the musicians ready themselves at their instruments. Alexander is slender, about Karina’s age, with a mop of glossy black hair and fingers that extend for miles, poised on the keys like a sprinter in the blocks, ready to explode into action, holding for the gun to fire. Alexander nods, and the three begin.