The Player and the Listener

With her uncle’s blessing, Gloria continues her lessons. For the remainder of the winter she follows the dreary rhythms her teacher points out with her slender wooden baton, and her life becomes an undivided circle of listening and practicing. She finally gets a grip with her left hand that can play chords as well as notes, and she manages to pull all the stops out of her stop-and-go triplets. The progress she makes warrants her increasing her lessons to four times a week. She spends all the time she’s not at school in the back parlor, playing. Laudette grants she’s becoming a passable pianist, but thinks there’s more to life than music. It makes the fretful sitter sick at heart that her Gloria is a social retard, a self-made outcast. What is a person without friends?

With Sugar already gone mentally as she has, hearing voices that give her license to kill, somebody’s got to try to stop Baby from following the same morbid bent for being alone.

“Baby, now that you’re going on thirteen,” she nags, “you’d think you’d have a girlfriend or two, and, with your gift of good looks, a whole herd of boyfriends. It isn’t normal for someone to want to spend so much time alone. You don’t even want to talk to me anymore! It’s not healthy not to need other people.”

Gloria takes her sitter’s harangues in stride. She breaks into The Down-Home Ramble. Partial to the tune, the sitter hums along.

For all the time she puts in on the piano, the Bee takes special, extra-curricular music tests. She sits under Saint Bernard’s proverb and plays the Kreuszer theme like a moderately gifted amateur, well-roundedly, and certainly with quite a bit more heart than when it comes from the teacher’s own hands. Melanzano overall is quite pleased.

“Bravo, Miss Black, not half-bad. Oh, yes, I think your interest could actually amount to something. Time off undoes progress. I expect to see you here next week even though it is spring break, and, of course, we will continue all summer.”

Praise from an obstinate teacher might motivate the average child, but Glory is not average. She has heard it said, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” She knows Irene Melanzano is right, talent is not enough, but she knows she is wrong too, discipline and talent are not enough either. To Gloria, real music is not the same as playing the instrument well or getting the part down perfectly. She knows there is something else to it. Before it can really go around, music needs to be needed. Her listening experience tells her that great music is made in a void, and both the player and the listener need to hear that void, and dig it, a goldmine together. She is certain she has no aspiration to be “perfect” in the different ways her mother, Emanual X, or the Kirschelmeister exemplify. Imitation is the sincerest form of mourning. She is more than content to take after her stepfather, the dabbler, the dilettante, the lover at large, the amateur. To play is the thing. She is satisfied to make “not half-bad”, and leave it at that, tinkering at her leisure. By not being too polished herself, she leaves herself open to the possibility of taking pleasure in the more exacting efforts of someone else. Longing is the way to go, she figures, being just over halfway to paradise.

The muse never looks up when she tells her teacher. “I’m sorry, Mrs Melanzano, I’m not going to be coming for lessons any more. Yes, I think I’d like to stop them for a while.”

“Staying the same is the same as going backwards,” Melanzano warns. “If you don’t practice all your skills more and more, you’ll cease to improve, and, my dear, for a true musician not to improve is to get worse.”

“Yes, Ma’am, thank you. I’m prepared for that.”

Gloria is not afraid she’ll be missing something. On the inside the cool kitten knows what a real connoisseur is.