Every Note Played(59)
The melody is a simple repetition, a catchy, easy-breezy tune, but soon breaks into improvised solos. As Alexander plays, Karina closes her eyes, and the notes become a summer-evening stroll down a country road drenched in moonlight, more of a mood than a melody, sultry and slow, in no hurry at all. Softened by vodka, she rides the notes, allowing herself to be carried, and her blood is flowing hotter. She’s turned on.
Karina remembers living on East Sixth Street in New York City, hanging around the Village Vanguard, listening to Branford Marsalis, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, and Brad Mehldau, learning through listening, watching, asking, performing, and improvising. Learning jazz was a three-dimensional experience of unique expressive discovery, lived and breathed on the fly in spontaneous jam sessions. Learning classical piano had been an academic exercise in practiced techniques, adherence to strict rules, memorizing the notes on the page, practicing alone. She never felt more challenged, more alive, than when she was playing jazz.
The next two pieces are high energy, a call to action and a celebration. Alexander’s fingers are a fiddler crab running from a seagull’s pursuing shadow; a hummingbird drinking nectar from the keys, trilling arpeggios inhabited by God.
He’s traveling low to high on the keyboard, coloring outside the lines, hitting notes that land just shy of displeasing. This is renegade music, exciting, provocative.
“Holy shit, right?” says Elise.
Karina nods. She closes her eyes again during the fourth piece, entranced by Alexander’s riffs, the way his chord extensions wander from the head. He’s playing outside now, and the song becomes about the journey, not the destination, about getting lost along the way and what he might discover, an embellished grace note, an ascending harmonic progression, a meandering Sunday drive. He varies the phrasing, changing the shape and texture, inserting blue notes and trills that sound like children laughing. He dances across the keys, courting the notes, loving them, and the music is a gentle morning rain playing on a windowpane, delicate, lonely, longing for a lover, a childhood friend, a mother.
The song ends, and the audience applauds. Karina opens her eyes and tears spill down her face. She is enraptured, changed, remembering who she is.
She is a jazz pianist.
With stunning clarity, she suddenly sees the role she’s been playing, the costume and mask she chose and has been wearing for twenty years. She’s been hiding, an impostor, unable to give herself permission to do this, to play jazz, to be who she is, shackled inside a prison of blame and excuses.
At first it was all Richard’s fault for moving them to Boston. Jazz pianists live in New York, not Boston. Then Richard started traveling. He was hardly ever home. They rarely had sex anymore. She needed to refill her birth control pill prescription, but it was February and so cold outside, and she didn’t feel like walking to the pharmacy.
She was lazy. She was stupid. She was pregnant.
Her excuse then chasséd over to Grace and motherhood. Now she couldn’t be a jazz pianist because her baby needed her. Richard still spent much of the year touring. She was essentially a single mother. She was consumed and devastatingly lonely in the demands of young motherhood. There was often no room for a shower, never mind for getting back to playing jazz. So she tended to Grace full-time, creating a safe nest where Karina could hide. She promised herself it would be a temporary shelter.
Karina remembers her mother, born in an oppressed country, stuck in an economically depressed town by her husband’s meager coal-mining wages, trapped in a bad marriage by her religion, confined within the dirty beige walls of her small home, raising five children. Every day, she wore a dingy white apron, her prematurely gray hair pulled into a bun, resignation in her eyes, and her arthritic hands to the bone cooking and cleaning and tending to the needs of her children, whose singular dreams were to leave that house, that town, that country, as soon as they could. They all left her.
Karina swore she wouldn’t repeat her mother’s life. As much as Karina loved being Grace’s mother, she would not bear child after child, adding brick after brick to the wall of her maternal prison. Grace would be her only child. One and done. But Richard wanted many children, a big family.
Her carefully buried deception peeks out from its hiding space for the briefest moment, long enough for shame to seep through the walls of her stomach, sickening her. She drains her martini, distracting her tortured, guilty mind with the cozy warmth of booze.
When Grace turned five and went to kindergarten, Karina would have the time to pursue jazz. That was the plan. But then Grace went to school, and Karina’s excuse migrated back to Richard. She discovered charges for an expensive dinner and drinks for two on his credit-card bill; salacious text messages from some woman named Rosa on his phone; a pair of black lace panties in his suitcase, not a gift for her. At first, these betrayals shattered Karina’s heart. She felt stunned, gutted, humiliated, dishonored. She wept and raged and threatened divorce. And then, after a few days of wild emotion, she would feel wrung out, calm and strangely satisfied. Over time, her heart hardened to it all. She almost craved the detective work, the thrill of finding the next damning text message, the momentary drama it awakened in her and ultimately, the narrative it supplied.
Grace was in first grade, eighth grade, a sophomore in high school, and Karina painted herself the victim, trapped in a bad marriage by the rules of a church she no longer believed in but still obeyed and the barbed-wire reasons of her own making. She carefully constructed her life, creating a predictable stability in her safe career as a teacher, teaching students to play classical piano in the private confines of her suburban living room, where her students have always been too young, unformed, and musically na?ve to question her, stretch her, or push her outside her comfort zone.