‘HELLO, RICHARD, COME ON IN,’ I said to the head of fair hair bent over his satchel at my front door. He gripped the leather bag to his chest as if it were a Homeric shield. I couldn’t imagine what he carried inside it. To get to my house, he had only to descend the driveway from his own home, which perched on the steep hill on the north side of sleepy George Street, and cross to its south side. An odyssey of less than one minute.
‘Hello,’ Richard mumbled, his eyes darting in every direction except my face. He stood with his shoulders hunched, as if expecting someone more important to sneak up behind him at any minute. My first task would be trying to get him to relax. I closed the door behind him and set off up the stairs to the piano room, which was still Sitting Quietly after all these years.
Richard looked so grown up. Though it had been two or three years since I had been this close to him in person, we’d been neighbours all our lives. Most of our recent communication had been conducted in sedan semaphore, hands waving inside the windows of passing cars. He was taller than I’d expected: I was used to seeing him sitting inside a car rather than standing up, and he was only thirteen. Even so, he already dressed like a suburban dad. His sports jacket was ubiquitous among men who looked as though their only relation to physical activity had been to observe it from distant sidelines—men like his father, one of the wealthiest property developers in Sydney. I was unsure whether our mothers’ agreement that I would teach Richard in half-hour increments once a week reflected my mother’s marketing chops, his mother’s faith in my untested teaching ability, or the serendipitous intersection of frugality and geographical convenience.
Although I had drawn the obvious conclusion that teaching beginners from the comfort of my home was better than any other part-time paying job I could get, Richard was my first student. Like my father, I had a knack for mining endless seams of volunteer work. During high school there had been my work experience stints at two different radio stations and one local newspaper. During the first year of my degree, in the fullest phase of my anxiousness to be useful in the world, I rose willingly at four in the morning in order to drive to the headquarters of a community radio station, where I paraphrased items from the local paper and read them on air every half an hour between 5 and 9 a.m. I had scored this dubious work experience myself. Among my father’s Rotary coterie there were no contacts in the world of magazines and newspapers, where I sometimes fancied myself a budding Lois Lane.
My mobility at that moonlit hour had been due to my parents’ generous gift of a second-hand Nissan Pulsar hatchback. Having to pay for my own petrol, insurance and registration was a key factor in my capitulation to the idea of teaching beginners. So was my mother’s insistence that I pay her a weekly board now that I had left school. She was unapologetic in viewing my continuing to live under her roof, as she had begun referring to the house I’d grown up in, as an economic transaction. Like the women in the novels I was reading, my mother did not generate an income. Despite advocating my financial independence, she never seemed concerned that she depended entirely on the man she married, as Earth does the sun. The economic exchange they had entered upon marriage was the crucial but invisible element of their ecosystem, rather like oxygen to the survival of the species. My mother’s insistence on my financial contribution to the household—which I thought fair enough—meant I’d have to rustle up a few piano students. That wouldn’t mean that I was, you know, becoming a piano teacher.
Richard slumped at the piano stool and looked directly ahead, as if waiting for take-off. I sat down behind him and to his right like a copilot. It then occurred to me that I had placed my chair in relation to the piano exactly where Mr McFarlane used to sit in relation to me. It was uncanny to be sitting in the teacher’s seat, watching someone else—my student, no less—play my own piano. Instead of a mirror, it was like a window on an earlier self.
It was difficult to believe that Mr McFarlane made a satisfying life’s work out of staring at the backs of adolescents, and unimaginable that my stint as a teacher was anything other than temporary. I hadn’t a clue about what I’d eventually do for a living, but the thought of repeating myself was intolerable. Despite my observations of Mrs Dalton’s older ballet students, the idea of doing the same thing year in year out—which is how I thought about everything from gaining a Law degree to raising children—still induced paralysis. If I chose not to think about the future, then it might just fail to show up.
‘It might be a bit easier for you to play if you sat up straight, Richard.’
He pulled himself upright but kept his hands hanging at his sides like levers waiting to be pulled.
‘Now, take your right hand and press this note here with your thumb.’
Richard touched the white note gently, as if it might set off an alarm.
‘Do you see how that note is in the middle of the keyboard? We call that note Middle C.’
He remained silent.
‘Try placing your second finger on the note to the right of Middle C—yes, good—and your third finger on the note to its right. Great!’
Richard stretched his fingers over the notes so tautly that the tips were almost raised off the tarmac, but it didn’t matter. First contact had been made. The correct hand position would come. The piano police would have admonished me for this introduction of hand to keyboard, but Richard was at least five years too old for any passionate dedication to the instrument to stick.
I experienced a surprising sense of dominion over my student. As the piano teacher I assumed a position of authority that I felt I hadn’t earned but would savour anyway. At least I was earning money. For an eighteen-year-old my habits were expensive, though I didn’t buy illegal drugs or even cigarettes. After my car expenses, my spare change went on live performances by Vince Jones, special-import jazz CDs, and a subscription to The New Yorker. Each issue arrived by boat several weeks after publication, reinforcing my conviction that life was taking place elsewhere, a party to which I not only hadn’t been invited, but which was over before I’d even heard about it. The magazines piled up on the carpet by my bed in a bonsai skyscraper as I dreamed of real ones: the Chrysler Building and Empire State.
Richard pressed Middle C again and kept his hand hovering over it while the sound died.
‘Just like the alphabet has letters, the piano has notes,’ I said. ‘There are seven notes that repeat at different pitches, or levels, up and down the keyboard.’
Richard said nothing, but bent forward over his hand. It was amazing how he just sat there, listening to everything I said. The authority was intoxicating.
‘I think you’re a little close to the piano, Richard. Try moving the seat back a bit. And remember to sit up str—’
He raised his hands as if to grab the edge of the piano stool, then they paused midair and shivered. At first I took this for an expression of rebellion, a refusal to accept either the form or the content of my instruction. But I concluded it was anxiety—I’d had no idea he would be so nervous.
He gave no response, but jerked his head in a precise flicking motion a lawn-watering system might make. I leaned forward to catch his eye, but he was somewhere else. Wherever he had gone, there was no music.
Prior to the lesson, Richard’s mother had explained they were trialling new epilepsy medication that could have the paradoxical side effect of increasing the frequency of his seizures. Behind his twitching head I glanced at my watch. The lesson was fast disappearing. I had taught him nothing. Richard cradled his head in his hands. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. I let out the breath I’d been holding for the duration of his epileptic fit, somewhere between twenty seconds and two minutes. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked again, for something to say. Thankfully he nodded, keeping his head down as if he wished he could plunge nose-first into the shag pile.
When Richard politely declined my offer of a glass of water, I decided to proceed as if every student had a seizure during a lesson with me. I got up from my chair and propped open a beginner’s book on the piano’s music shelf. It seemed too much for me to ask Richard’s brain to process new information, but I didn’t know what else to do. He looked up.
‘Have you seen music written down before?’ I asked.
He shook his head. I worried the action might trigger another fit, but the electrical storm in his head seemed to have passed. The rest of his body was eerily still.
‘Well, this is what it looks like,’ I continued. ‘These five black lines, we call that a stave.’
‘Why?’ he said, not moving a muscle. I couldn’t tell whether his rigidity was from fear of prompting another seizure, or sheer anxiety.
‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted. ‘That’s just what it’s called. The notes you play correspond to the black circles on or between the lines. For example, the bottom line on this stave is E, here,’ I said, pressing the note above Middle C. I had gotten ahead of myself, and way ahead of any beginner’s first lesson, let alone someone who had just experienced a seizure. But in a kind of immunisation theory of teaching the instrument, I believed Richard deserved maximum value for his minimal exposure to the piano.
Richard shifted in his seat and frowned. ‘But why?’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Who says that line means E?’
I was stumped. Not once had it occurred to me to question the basis of Western music notation.
‘Well, this system came into use hundreds of years ago,’ I began, struggling for an answer. Now I felt like a chump for never having wondered about it myself.
‘But why should it?’
If I were a better teacher—or any kind of teacher, really—I would have anticipated my student’s resistance and prepared a response to it. And I don’t know if anyone can learn anything while being under fire from one’s own brain. But Richard had started to irritate me.
How could I explain that we were stuck with the five-line staves as much as we were with the alphabet? Nothing can be altered in the ‘notation of music by dead masters’, Elfriede Jelinek wrote in her 1983 novel Die Klavierspielerin, which appeared in English five years later as The Piano Teacher. Her protagonist Erika Kohut, a failed concert performer, has shifted like the translated title from player to teacher, scaring the bejesus out of most of her students. Part of me wanted to believe Richard’s inference that an alternative system of notation might be possible. Who was I to dismiss the idea? I had learned the system in the traditional way and swallowed its prescriptions like medicine—reading black and white marks on staves of black lines, connecting them to the black and white notes on the keyboard. Now I was perpetuating the transfer of knowledge by teaching it without question to my own student. But Erika Kohut—living with her mother, tormented by sadomasochism and her artistic failure—is trapped by more than the notes:
Erika has been harnessed in this notation system since earliest childhood. Those five lines have been controlling her ever since she first began to think. She mustn’t think of anything but those five black lines. This grid system, together with her mother, has hamstrung her in an untearable net of directions, directives, precise commandments, like a rosy ham on a butcher’s hook. This provides security, and security creates fear of uncertainty. Erika is afraid that everything will remain as it is, and she is afraid that someday something could change.
Fearful of change, and terrified of things staying the same: that was me all over.
I looked at Richard. ‘Do you have an idea for how else we could notate music?’ I said. I wasn’t being facetious—part of me wondered if he had something of what was then called the idiot savant about him. Perhaps the peculiar wiring of his brain facilitated musical insights unavailable to those of us limited by more conventional neural pathways. If anyone could devise an alternative system, maybe it was him.
‘Not yet,’ he said, with no trace of irony.
Before I could embarrass myself further, Richard had two mini-fits in quick succession. ‘Let’s leave it for today,’ I said when he came to, relieved for an excuse to conclude the lesson.
I sent him back across the street with two pieces of homework: the first, to spend five minutes each day placing his right thumb on Middle C and stepping higher, note by note, using each finger of the right hand so as to familiarise himself with C, D, E, F and G; the second, to devise a new system of music notation. From behind the glass-panelled front door I watched him trudge up our short driveway to street level, cross the street and lean into the much steeper incline of the driveway to his home, which towered over ours. I’m not sure how his head felt, but mine was spinning.
Glancing out the kitchen window a few days later, I was astonished to spy Moby Dick through the floor-to-ceiling glass of Richard’s living room window. An enormous white grand piano sat becalmed on what I knew to be an ocean of thick pea-green carpet, its gleaming lid open in full sail. I had worried that Richard’s first lesson with me would also prove to be his last. Now, witnessing his parents’ extravagance, I knew my fears were unfounded.
I would never be a piano teacher.