Edgar Allan Poe watched his mother bleed from the mouth as she died from consumption, as he and his two siblings lay in bed beside her. Hemingway committed suicide with the same gun his father had used to kill himself. Lord Byron’s father had an incestuous relationship with his own sister, and his mother’s relatives were a toxic mix of the depressed and suicidal. When you look at the families of crazy geniuses, you start to understand where their pain comes from. You start to get their need to paint it away, write it away, compose it away.
But Dino Cavalli’s childhood in Sabbotino Grappa (population 53) sounded like one of those lush movies filmed in hazy golden-yellows with a sappy soundtrack that makes you cry even though you know it’s just music manipulation. It sounded close to perfect. Reading The Early Years snapped me right up from Seabeck, the island where we live, just a ferryboat ride from Seattle. It lifted me from the salty, wet air and the evergreens and the cold waters of the Puget Sound, and landed me in the warm orange tones of a Tuscan hill town. I would open the shutters in the morning, said Antonia Gillette, wife of town baker Peter Gillette. And I would see little Dino walking to school in his white shirt, holding his mother’s hand. I remember the smell of the lemon trees, and the smell of the baking just done, coming up warm through the floorboards. Peter would hurry out to give a frittelle to Dino, and one to his mother, no charge. Always no charge. He should have charged the mother, but she was too pretty. And the father—ah. Handsome, like from a magazine. And a beautiful voice. Dino, we all knew he was special. His hair shined; his fingers were magic on his little violin. We knew he would bring us fame. I heard him from the open window, Grazie, Zio. That’s what he called Peter. Uncle.5
“It’s too good to be true,” my father said once. “You mark my words. If it sounds like a duck and looks like a duck and smells like a duck, it is a duck.”
“Quack,” I said.
The stories of Dino’s childhood glowed like firelight or radiation, one or the other. You could see those townspeople sitting at their kitchen tables, remembering a time past, smelling of wine and salami, a thick, wrinkled hand grabbing the air to emphasize a point. You grew to love those old Italians, and that ragged town with its winding streets and good intentions, more than you liked Dino himself. I did anyway. The only real nasty thing that was said came from Karl Lager, Sabbotino Grappa grocer. The child was a monster. Spoiled and sneaky. He stole candy from me. Later, cigarettes. Slipped them up the sleeve of his jacket as he looked at me and smiled. I tried to grab him, took off that jacket, but nothing was there. Born of the devil, and any idiot could see it.
Karl Lager is a drunk and a bastard, Antonia Gillete said. He’d accuse the pope of stealing.
Karl Lager had no business in Sabbotino Grappa, Peter Gillette agreed. He is a German, after all.6
You imagined a childhood like that creating a genius. You did not imagine those two beautiful and perfect parents and the adoration of a village creating a Prozac-ed pit bull.
“Is Mr. Cavalli home?” Siang Chibo said the day that I first saw Ian Waters. She was whispering, following me around the house as I dropped my backpack on a kitchen chair and looked around in the fridge for something that might change my life. If you want a good picture of Siang Chibo, imagine that little boy in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that kid that rides around with him in the runaway mine car. She’s not much taller, and has that same squeaky voice—“Indy, Indyl” But Siang’s surprised me a few times. For example, she and her father love to watch monster trucks on the weekends. For another example, she’s a fierce flag football player. I once saw her nearly knock out Zane Thompson’s perfect teeth as she reached up to catch a pass in tenth-grade PE. Zane had to rush to a mirror to see if he was still beautiful. Go Siang.
“Dino’s at the symphony offices,” I said. I didn’t want to let Siang down, but the truth was, I had no idea where Dino could be. He might have been at Safeway, for all I knew. Being a violinist was not a regular nine-to-five job, I guess—in fact, lately he didn’t seem to have any job at all except for being famous and giving interviews about his past glory days. He gave one concert that I knew of, traveled to Chicago for it with Mom. I stayed with Dad a few extra days, days that were mostly spent trying to talk him out of searching the Web for every nasty comment or review about the event. He even printed out one Chicago Tribune article and posted it to the fridge with this glittery macaroni magnet I made in preschool. RERUN PERFORMANCE BY MASTER DISAPPOINTS.
What Dino spent most of his time doing was hiring and firing new managers. Since he ditched William Tiero three-plus years ago, he just went through these poor guys like you go through a bag of M&M’s when you’ve got your period. Consume, and on to the next. One of the first exposures I had to Dino’s temper was when we had all just moved in together and this manager got booted. I heard only a part of the enraged conversation before I left and walked down toward the water, went far enough so that the cries of the seagulls and gentle voices on the beach—Olivia! Roll up your pants so they don’t get wet— replaced Dino’s shouts. The few pathetic imaginings I was trying to hold onto about a stepfather—new beginnings, new adventures, new life—were instantly shot to shit and replaced with a deep distrust of the word new. It is bad enough to be suddenly (even if it is not so sudden, it feels sudden) living with a male stranger who sleeps in bed with your mother and eats off of your forks and who farts with an unearned degree of familiarity. But when the male stranger yells loud enough to shake your baby pictures in their frames, too, then, God, where have all the boarding schools gone?
Anyway, almost six months before Ian Waters first came, Dino got this new manager, Andrew Wilkowski, this skinny guy with music notes on his tie. It was practically a long-term relationship. Andrew Wilkowski flattered Dino’s ego, talked to him about writing again. I heard them when Andrew came over for dinner. They could take it slowly, he told Dino. But the world was ready. Dino was ready. I’m sure Andrew Wilkowski only had staying power because his ass-kissing skills were so perfected, his lips were chapped.
If I had to create a job description based on Dino’s behavior before he really went nuts, I’d say being a violinist and a composer meant spending some days in bed, some holed up in your office, occasionally playing music and stopping over and over again, and storming around the house as your wife walked on eggshells. Oh, and seeing your psychiatrist. Mom said this was necessary for Dino to deal with the stresses of his work, but to keep that information private for the sake of Dino’s reputation. It was okay to look like a tyrant, I guess, but not to talk with Freud about what your id did. Basically, a genius composer/violinist meant being a tantrum-throwing toddler with an expensive musical instrument. My mother should have given him the spaghetti pot to pound on with a wooden spoon instead.
I wouldn’t tell Siang any of those things, though. I could have destroyed him in an instant for her, but it seemed too cruel. To her, not to him. “Apple?” I offered. Mom was on a diet kick. I hated when the adults in my life went on a diet kick. There was never anything good to eat in the house. I hoped Dino was at Safeway.
“Okay,” Siang said. She took the apple, but didn’t eat it. She put it in her sweatshirt pocket. I imagined a Cavalli Collection—empty TP rolls from our bathroom, pebbles from the insides of Dino’s shoes left by the front door, William’s squeaky rubber hamburger dog toy that had vanished without a trace. “Can we go in his office?”
“I worry about you, Siang, I really do.”
I took the key to Dino’s office out of the sugar canister that was empty of sugar. Mom put it there because she was sure that Dino, in a distracted state, was going to one day lock himself out. That there was a key at all should tell you that Dino would have gotten furious had he known we were in his study, but I couldn’t let Siang down. I had a little problem saying no to people with eyes as pleading as in those ads FEED A STARVING CHILD FOR AS LITTLE AS ONE DOLLAR A DAY. She practically left offerings on his desk blotter.
The room always felt cool when you first opened the door, cool and musty There was a fireplace in that room, though it was never lit except when guests came over. The fire showed off the room for what it was—one of the best in the house, with big windows that had a peek of the waters of the sound, if you stood on your toes and looked high over the neighbor’s hydrangea bush. His desk was dark walnut, and a mess—papers and books, mail and clippings, piles of sheet music. There were three clocks on it, only one which you could hear ticking, sounding like a metronome, and an old coffee mug with a ring of dried brown on the bottom. Assorted objects lay among the clutter—a robin’s egg, a golf tee (Dino was not a sportsman), a cigar box (Dino did not smoke cigars). There was a paperweight with a white dandelion puff saved perfectly in glass, and a spare pair of Dino’s glasses worn sometime in the seventies, if you judged by their size and thick black frames. Above the desk was a painting of white flowers against a dreary green background, and in the corner of the room sat a globe that always settled toward the side revealing the African continent. An antique music stand, ornate silver, delicately curved, stood in another corner, and there was a bookcase, too, filled with Cavalli biographies, volumes of music theory, history, and art, and one of those enormous dictionaries.
Siang strolled by the desk, her fingertips lightly touching the edge. She looked up at the painting, tilted her head to the side and examined it for a moment. Her eyes moved away to a frame facedown on the desk. She took hold of the velvety frame leg, rubbed her thumb along it. “What’s this?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
Siang raised the picture carefully, the way you lift a rock when you’re not sure what’s underneath. It was an old black-and-white photo of a young man. He was standing in front of a building, a theater, maybe, as you could see a portion of a poster in glass behind him. He was beaming, hands in his pockets.
“That’s William Tiero,” I said. “At least I think it is.” I squinched my eyes, looked closer. “Same beaky nose. A much younger William Tiero. He still had hair. I never knew the guy ever had hair.” I chuckled.
“William Tiero became Dino Cavalli’s agent shortly after Cavalli won the Tchaikovsky competition in Russia when he was nineteen,” Siang said.
“Jesus, you give me the creeps sometimes,” I said. “Put that back down.”
“They say it was a partnership made in heaven.” Siang set the photo on the desk the way it was.
According to Mom, William Tiero had been dismissed no fewer than five times before the final break a little more than three years ago. I could only imagine what that firing must have been like. Before Andrew W. came on the scene, the last poor manager that was booted got a wineglass thrown in the direction of his head. I saw the delicate pieces of it, sitting on top of the garbage can, and felt the silence that lay heavy as a warning in the house. I remember the drops of red wine on the wall, looking as if a crime had been committed there. If being fired five times by Dino was a partnership made in heaven, I wondered what a bumpy working relationship would look like.
“Siang, really. You need a hobby or something. Crochet a beer-can hat. Learn fly-fishing. Whatever.”
“The pursuit of understanding genius is always a worthwhile endeavor,” Siang squeaked in her Temple of Doom voice.
“Did some famous person say that?”
“No. I just did.”
“Shit, deprogramming necessary. We are going to walk down to 7-Eleven. We are going to have a Slurpee. Corn Nuts. Or one of those scary revolving hot dogs. We are going to take an Auto Trader magazine, just because they’re free.”
“I hear the door,” Siang said.
I froze. Listened. “You’re right. Damn it, get out of here.”
We hurried out. My heart was pounding like crazy, and my hand was shaky on the key as I locked the door again.
“Cassie!”
“It’s just Mom,” I said.
My chest actually hurt from the relief. We walked casually into the kitchen. At least I did. God knows what Siang was doing behind me—probably putting her hands up in the air like a captured criminal in a cop show. Mom was filling a glass of water. Wisps of her hair were coming loose from her braid. “What are you doing here?” I asked. Mom was in a rehearsal period with the theater company of her current job. By the time she took the ferry home from Seattle afterward, she didn’t usually arrive until dinnertime.
“Hello, my wonderful mother. How was your day?” she said.
“That too,” I said.
“I got off early,” she said. It seemed like a lie, but I let it pass. “What are you two up to?”
“I was just heading home,” Siang said. “Chemistry test to study for.”
Mom shuddered. “God, I’m glad I’m done with school.”
“Then she’s starting a new hobby,” I said.
“Crafts,” Siang said. I smiled. It was pretty close to a joke.
“Puff paint. Shrinky Dinks,” I said.
“Cool,” Mom said. She took a long drink of water. You could usually count on her to make her best effort to one-up your jokes. Obviously she was distracted.
Siang left, and I went up to my room, turned on a few of my lamps. My head was achy and tired—I’d slept like shit for the past few nights. Dino kept turning down the heat below zero to save money, and in a few days my nose and toes were going to turn black and fall off from frostbite. Far as I knew, Dino had a lot of money, but he was really attached to it. Any time he had to spend any, he acted like he was parting with his cardiovascular system.
I looked at my homework and it looked back at me, flat and uninspiring, growing to impossible proportions right in front of my eyes. Sometimes a little math and science is as easy as tying your shoes, and other times, it feels like an Everest expedition, requiring hired Sherpas and ropes, oxygen bottles, and crampons, which always seemed like an especially unfortunately named word—a mix between cramps and tampons. I picked up a book of poetry beside my bed instead, thumbed through e.e. cummings, my favorite poet for probably the same reason he was other people’s favorite poet—he chucked grammar and got away with it. It was like thumbing your nose at every one of those tests where you had to underline once the main clause, and underline twice the prepositional phrase. I stank at those. Grammar words were so unlikable—conjunctive, some eye disease you need goopy medicine for; gerund, an uptight British guy Gerund would like his tea now!
I amused myself with these inane thoughts until I heard Dino’s car pull up. He had a Renault, and it made a particular clacka-clacka-clacka sound so that you always knew it was him (okay, he, for the above-mentioned grammar neurotics, although no one really talks like that). The engine was still on when he came through the front door. Then he went back out again and shut it off. It was entirely possible that he forgot that he’d left the engine running, as this was pure Dino, distracted to the point of barely functioning in the real world. Mom sent him to the store once for dinner rolls for a small party they were giving, and he came back two hours later with a glazed expression and a pack of hot dog buns. Another time, he tried to catch a bus from one part of Seattle to another, and ended up across the lake, calling my mother for rescue from a phone booth. He can play the first page of any major concerto off the top of his head, but doesn’t understand that it’s time to cross the street when you see the sign change to the little walking guy.
I heard my mother and Dino talking downstairs, which for some reason actually spurred my sudden desire to do my homework after all. We were maybe a month into the school year, and every teacher was beginning to pile homework on as if they had sole responsibility for keeping you busy after school and therefore out of jail and drug-free. My head was really hurting now. I worked for a while, then I heard the crunch of bike wheels down our road. This was not an uncommon sound, as Dino also often rode his bike; we Americans drove our cars too much, he said. Growing up in Italy, it was the only way people got around, he said. It was no wonder Americans had such fat asses, he said. You could often see him pedaling to town and back with a few grocery items in his basket. Yes, he had a basket on his bike. It wasn’t a tacky one with plastic flowers or anything (thank God), but a real metal basket. The whole bike itself, old and quaint and squeaky, looked snitched from some clichéd French postcard, or stolen from some History of Bikes museum.
The sound of bike wheels on gravel might not have been out of the ordinary, but Dog William (versus Human William) barking crazily at the sound was unusual. I pulled up my blinds and here is what I saw: the curve of our gravel road, and the line of maple trees on each side framing the figure in the center. I saw a boy about my age, in a long black coat, the tails flapping out behind him, with a violin in a black case in a side compartment. I saw a yellow dog running alongside him grinning, his tongue hanging out in a display of dog joy.
I cannot tell you what that moment did to me. That boy’s face—it just looked so open. It was as if I recognized it, that sense he had—expectation and vulnerability. He looked so hopeful, so full of all of the possibilities of a perfect day where a yellow dog runs beside you. The boy’s black hair was shining in the sun and his hands gripped the handlebars against the unsteadiness of the bike on the dirt road. Are there ever adequate words for this experience? When you are suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of feeling, a knowing, when you are drawn to someone in this way? With the strength of the unavoidable? I don’t know what it was about him and not someone else. I really don’t know, because I’m sure a thousand people could have ridden up that road and I would not be abruptly consumed with a longing that felt less like seeing someone for the first time than it did meeting once more after a long time apart.
I watched him as he veered into our driveway, causing a snoozing Otis to bolt awake and flee maniacally across the lawn. What was he doing here? He was about my age, but I’d never seen him before. Was this a Dino pilgrimage? A fan wanting his violin signed? He parked his bike, set it on its side on the ground. He said something to his dog, who looked up at him as if they’d just agreed about something. The boy lifted his violin case. He ran his fingertips along it, as if making sure it was okay—a gentle touch, a caring that made me rattle the blind back down and sit on the floor suddenly like the wind had been knocked out of me.
Here is something you need to know about me. I am not a Hallmark card, ooh-ah romance, Valentine-y love kind of person. My parents’ divorce and my one other experience of love (Adam Peterson, who I really cared about. Okay, I told him I loved him. We hugged, held hands. He told me I was beautiful. He told half the school we had sex.) has knocked the white-lace-veil vision right out of me. Love seems to be something to approach with caution, as if you’d come across a wrapped box in the middle of the street and have no idea what it contains. A bomb, maybe. Or a million dollars. I wasn’t even sure what the meaning of the word was. Love? I loved my telescope. I loved looking out at the depth of the universe and contemplating its whys. But love with someone else, an actual person, was another matter. People got hurt doing that. People cried and wrapped their arms around themselves and rocked with loss. Loving words got turned to fierce, sharp, whip-cracks of anger that left permanent marks. At the least, it disappointed you. At most, it damaged you. No, thank you.
So I sat down on that floor and grabbed my snow globe, the one that had a bear inside. I have no idea where I got it; it’s just something I’ve always liked and have had forever. Just a single bear in the snow. He used to be anchored to the bottom, but now he just floated aimlessly around, and maybe that’s why I liked him so much. I related. I turned it upside down, let him float and drift as the snow came down, down. Oh shit, I thought. Holy shit. My heart was actually thumping around in some kind of heaving-bosom movie-version of love. I could actually hear it. God, I never even came close to experiencing anything like this for Adam Peterson, and look where that got me. I breathed deeply, but it was like a magnet had been instantly surgically implanted in my body, drawing everything inside of me toward that person out there.
My headache had hit the road, replaced with some super energy surge. I told myself I was insane and an idiot and a complete embarrassment to my own self. The snow settled down around the bottom of the globe as the poor bear just floated, his head hitting the top of the glass as if in heartfelt but hopeless desire to rise above his limited world. I got back up and peeked out the blinds. The yellow dog sat on the sidewalk with the most patient expression I’d ever seen on animal or human—just peace and acceptance with his waiting, appreciating the chance to enjoy what might pass his way. The boy had come inside, I guess. And then it finally occurred to me—he’d come inside. True enough, there were voices downstairs. I opened my door a crack, heard Dog William being forcibly removed from the house, his toenails sliding against the wood floor.
“We’ll work in my study.” Dino.
“Can I get you or your dog something to drink?” Mom asked.
“That’d be great—my dog would love some water,” the boy said.
“He’s a she. Rocket.”
“Shall we not waste valuable time?” Dino said. You should have heard his tone of voice. That’s what could really piss you off. I sent a silent curse his way, that his tongue would turn black and fall out. I heard my mother fish around in the cupboard, probably for a bowl for the water. My heart was doing a happy leap, prancing around in a meadow of flowers, tra la la, without my permission. His dog’s name was Rocket. I liked astronomy. It was that thing you do when you first fall in love. Where you think you must be soul mates because you each get hungry at lunch time and both blink when a large object is thrown your way.
I started to put the pieces together. Boy with violin, Dino and his study. Maybe Dino was giving him some kind of lesson. But Dino wasn’t a teacher. First, the best music teachers weren’t necessarily virtuoso players. I knew that. Teachers are usually teachers and players are players. As far as I knew, Dino had never taken a student before. But more importantly, Dino didn’t have the patience instructing would require. He would get irritated when he couldn’t figure out how to turn on the television, for God’s sake. You’d think he of all people could locate a power button.
I got a little worried for that boy now, alone with Dino in his office. I went downstairs, caught Mom coming back inside from giving Rocket her water. She had little gold dog hairs on her black skirt.
“What’s going on?”
“Dino’s taking a student,” she said to me.
A student. He was going to be Dino’s student. I thought about what this would mean. He’d be coming back. And back again. I swallowed. Wished my jeans were a size smaller. Wished my hair was something other than brown, that I had a better haircut. Shorter, longer. Anything other than medium length. I forced the casual back into my voice. “Why’s he taking a student? He’s not a teacher.”
“Well, one, because the opportunity came up, and two, the boy needed someone.”
“Dino’s not exactly patient,” I said.
“He’s a master. The boy’s lucky to have him. And Dino’s not charging a cent. A friend of Dr. Milton’s set him up.” Dr. Milton was Dino’s psychiatrist. “God, I’m starving. It’s a good thing I’m not home during the day. I’d weigh three hundred pounds.” Mom rooted around in the cupboards.
Dino teaching for free surprised me. I knew how he glared when I threw away a bread crust. “That’s generous of Dino,” I said.
“Well, they both get something out of it. Andrew Wilkowski’s got this deal in the works with Dino’s old record company and the Seattle Symphony. He’s got to have three pieces ready to perform for a taped concert to be held in March. He’s got two that he started a long while back, but they need more work. I guess the composing has been torture in the past and he’s only got six months.”
“So, what, the student helps him?”
“Aha!” she said, and held up the last Pop-Tart she found. She removed it from the foil, threw away the empty box, and took a bite without bothering to warm it up. “No, the student doesn’t help literally. The lessons just provide a structured environment—another focus, a place he’s got to be. They’re trying to avoid all of this open time spent obsessing about creating and not creating.”
“Maybe he should pay the student, then.”
Mom devoured the Pop-Tart like Dog William devours a … well, anything. “Ian needs Dino. That’s his name. Ian Waters. He’s preparing for an audition that’s coming a couple of weeks before Dino’s concert. Sometime in March, too, I think. You know who he really should have? Someone like Ginny Briggs. He’s that good, from what I hear. But you’ve got to mortgage your house to get her.”
“What’s he auditioning for? The youth symphony?” I asked. It was a hopeful question. If he was that good the answer could be Julliard, which meant he was heading to New York.
“No. Curtis.”
“Wow,” I said. My heart sank. It more than sank; it seemed to clutch up and evaporate. The Curtis Institute of Music. Only the best of the best went there. Better than Julliard, lots of people thought. Every student was on full scholarship. He was heading to Philadelphia.
“Yeah. Ian was asked to perform at the Spoleto Festival in Italy last year. He was only sixteen. You know who else performed there at that age.”
“Clifford, the Big Red Dog?” I guessed. “No, wait. Donny Osmond.”
“Is it George Jetson?” I’m sorry, but it just always bugged me how everyone was supposed to know Dino’s entire history. Dino composed his first piece of music at twelve. Dino made his first armpit fart on June 12, 1958.
“Okay. Never mind,” Mom said. “You asked.”
“No, I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry.”
“Anyway,” Mom said. She paused for a moment, deciding whether to forgive my brattiness. “That’s why he’s taking Ian on. He and his mother moved here when she lost her job. From California. You know that little house by the ferry terminal? Shingles? The one that used to put the sleigh in the yard at Christmas?”
“And keep it there until spring? Yeah.”
“They moved in there. Whitney Bell taught him in California. For little or nothing.”
“He’ll be going to my school.”
“Kids like that don’t go to school. They have tutors. They learn at home. He’s probably working on his GED now. They get into college early. More time for the music. I think the plan is, he applies in March and if all goes well, he moves to Philadelphia in June.”
“Lucky,” I said. Nine months. That’s as long as he was going to be here.
“I don’t know. This prodigy business … look at Dino. The ultimate love-hate relationship with that violin. I hope this teaching really does help. He’ll have to start writing, and he hasn’t picked up his instrument in weeks.”
“Or his socks,” I said. Lately, whenever Dino arrived in the front door, his shoes and socks would come off immediately. They lay in the entryway like they’d just had a thoroughly exhausting experience.
“He always went barefoot growing up. It’s hot in Italy.”
Italy, Italy That was another thing you got sick of hearing about in our house. How much better it was than evil and endlessly annoying America. How Italy had per capita more beautiful and intelligent people than here, how they invented the human brain, how they could take over the world using fettuccine noodles as weapons if they wanted to.
“Well, I hope Dino’s nice to him,” I said.
“I know”
“So that’s why you’re home early”
“Just keeping an eye on things.”
It was my personal opinion that my mother didn’t have a relationship as much as she had a babysitting job.
Mom went upstairs, probably reading my mind and trying to prove me wrong. From the kitchen I couldn’t hear anything coming from Dino’s office. I lingered outside the door for a while, listening to the rumbles of conversation without the definition of actual words, and then I heard the tuning of a violin. I did something I shouldn’t have. I sat down right there with my back against the door so that I could hear better. They discussed music, what piece the boy should begin with, and then he began to play.
I can tell you that I have heard Dino play many times, and have heard the best of his performances on his recordings. As I’ve said, they send chills down your spine, even for someone like me who still chuckles when some musician mentions the G string or the A hole. Dino’s playing was a storm thrashing waves against rocks; all of the earth’s emotion jammed into a cloth bag, then suddenly released.
But Ian Waters’s playing was different. It was tender as that hand brushing the violin case, as open as his face as he rode down that road with the maple trees on either side. There was a clarity, a newness. A hopefulness that made your throat get tight with what could be tears.
From what I have learned from my mother all of these years, no one pretends to understand musicality, that certain something that a human being brings to the playing of his instrument. A machine can play an instrument, but it is that something of yourself that you bring to it that makes a player really good. That piece of your soul that you reveal as the music comes through you. I know nothing of this personally—I played the tissue paper comb in the kindergarten band—but you can hear it. You may not have words for it, but you can hear it. Maybe feel it is more accurate. There is a communication going on at some ancient and primitive level when music is played from somewhere else other than simply the fingers. This playing—it was his energy and heart rising from the notes. His dreams lifted from the instrument and carried out to where I heard them.
I don’t even know what he was playing, and that’s not even the important thing to this story anyway. I shut my eyes; it was as if he was painting with sound. I saw tender, vulnerable pictures. I was a child in a village, a child who’d just plucked a tangerine from a tree. Around me were the sounds of a town, Sabbotino Grappa maybe, voices speaking in Italian. I watched other children playing under a fig tree, and because it was so orange and shiny, put my teeth into the tangerine peel before remembering that this is not a good thing to do; it tasted terrible.
“Stop, stop, stop.” This I heard loud and clear. Dino’s authoritative voice could be heard two states away.
“Technically nearly perfect. But purpose. There is feeling, yes. But no purpose. You must have it. Without direction, you will drown. You may be young, but you don’t need to hesitate. If you don’t give everything to your playing, Ian, you will go hungry.”
“I know.”
“Hungry.”
“All right.”
“You know what I am talking about.”
“Yes, I do.”
Ian started to play again. The paintbrush stroked the canvas. I peeled that tangerine, broke off a sticky segment and popped it into my mouth. It was juicy and warm. The juice trickled into the tiny hammock between my fingers. I watched two old Italian women cross the street while arguing. One wore kneesocks that had given up on the job and gathered in clumps at her ankles. The other had a bad dye job—her hair was blacker than a briquette while her face was older than time. Everyone knew her hair hadn’t seen that color since dinosaurs roamed the earth.
The music filled me with vivid-dream drowsiness. I watched two teenagers snitch a bicycle from the street, running like anything to the canal where they would toss it. Just like Dino’s stories. When it was summer and the boys had too much time on their hands, the canal was filled with bicycles. A grandfather leaned down to speak to me. His breath smelled of a wine-soaked cork, his chin had a dent in it that split it right in half….
I fell backward suddenly, jolting before my head hit the ground. Shit, I had fallen asleep, right there against the door, and Dino and Ian came out of the office and nearly stepped over my tumbling body. Oh, God, I could be such an idiot. I had fallen asleep, right there, and the first impression I left with Ian Waters was my body rolling into the room like the corpse in some Agatha Christie novel.
“What have we here?” Dino said. “Either a very bad Romanian gymnast or a spy.”
Oh, the humiliation. I gave him the black-tongue curse again, added an essential part of the male anatomy.
“Guilty on the spy thing,” I said. I hoped to sound casual, which is tough to do when you are reclining on one elbow and your face is hot enough to ignite a Bunsen burner. I struggled to stand. “Actually I was listening. I’m sorry. It was really beautiful. I must have fallen asleep.”
“Rule one. Keep your audience awake,” Dino said.
Ian grinned. I wondered if I should hate him for colluding with Dino. Then he said, “Classical music can do that. Someone ought to put lyrics to it.” He smiled.
“Ah!” Dino said in mock horror, and pretended to strangle Ian. “This is Cassie Morgan, astronomer. Ian Waters, talented, struggling musician. And heretic.” All right. Since Dino attempted to restore some of my dignity, he could have his penis back.
“Astronomer,” Ian said. “Wow.” His eyes were a very gentle brown; his black hair threatened to swing over them. An angular face, long legs. He was tall and thin. In spite of performing before what must have been hundreds of people, he seemed shy, poetic.
“Still learning,” I said.
“Tuesday, then?” Dino said.
“Tuesday,” Ian said. “Thanks for listening,” he said to me.
“Next time I’ll stay awake,” I said.
“No problem.”
God, I was still kicking myself. That feeling of something being done wrongly, left unfinished, needing to be recaptured and played again, started churning inside as they headed out. Jesus, I should be put on some island for the terminally socially inept. Fuck-Up Island. It could be another perverse reality TV show. Mom came down the stairs, called a good-bye, and checked them both surreptitiously for blood and scratches.
Dino clapped Ian on the shoulder three times at the door before Ian left. Dino shut the door behind him, looked up at my mother, and smiled. “His mother is Italian,” Dino beamed.
I went out to let Dog William back in. He was peering through the slats in the fence, no doubt watching as the figure of Rocket got smaller and smaller in the distance. I took a spot next to him, and through the narrow slat watched the black speck of Ian until he was gone. Dog William sighed through his nose as if saying farewell to the most interesting day of his life. I patted the top of his ugly head.
“I know it,” I said to Dog William.