The summer after Shannon left, I went to Dungee’s on a night I wasn’t scheduled to play, thinking I could earn a few extra dollars in tips nonetheless. I performed for an hour or so, knocking out a melody of “Cry Baby,” “Satin Doll,” and “Wheatleigh Hall,” and around 11:30 p.m. collected the few bucks I made and went to the bar for something to drink. I had a deck of cards with me and practiced a trick while sipping my whiskey. At last call, I put the deck in my pocket and went off to the bathroom where a woman in a pale blue cotton dress and light leather sandals was talking on one of the pay phones in the hall. Her hair was a thick orange brown hanging just above her shoulders, her cheeks fine and sharply drawn. She stood with her right arm tucked beneath her left, her head tipped to one side. I heard her laugh in response to something said on the other end of the phone and watched her full lips as they parted.
As I came from the bathroom she was just getting off the phone, and wanting to speak with her, I removed the deck of cards from my pocket, turned and showed her the ace of hearts. I then placed the card back in the deck, shuffled and fanned the deck in front of me, and asked her to pick one. She reached with her left hand and pulled out the ace of hearts. “Magic,” I said and introduced myself. She had a long neck, like one of the models painted by Klimt, and extending her right arm toward me the feel of her fingers caught me by surprise. I could see she was waiting for my reaction, and not wanting to disappoint her, I said, “Hands down, your trick is better than mine.”
“It’s an icebreaker.”
I laughed. “Yes, I’m sure it is.”
She settled her right arm back beneath her left, turned and began walking off when I asked if she’d like to have a drink. “Are you alone? Am I keeping you from someone?” She didn’t answer at first, but when I told her that I’d just finished playing piano and was hoping to have a drink, she said, “I know.”
“What?”
“That you were playing,” the green of her eyes caught the light as if she might be teasing me, though I couldn’t quite figure how by what she said, and standing there, unsure what to say next, it was Elizabeth who reminded me, “About that drink.”
We went and sat at a side table near the piano where I got another whiskey and brought Elizabeth a glass of wine. The bar was ready to close though I told her, “If you’re in no hurry, we can stay as long as you like.” She held her wine in her false hand, everything from the creases in the knuckles to the shades of vein in the plastic designed with anatomical exactness. I posed a series of casual questions, curious to know how long she’d been in Renton and if she ever stopped by Dungee’s before. After ten minutes or so, she asked about my piano playing, identified the song I was performing when she came in as Ellington’s “Pie Eye’s Blues” in E and wondered, “Where do you study?”
“I teach Art History at the university.”
“No, I mean your music.”
“I don’t study.”
“I see,” she took a sip from her drink. “You just play?”
“More or less.” I told her about the lessons with my mother and how, “Basically, that’s it. Why?”
“You play like someone self-taught,” she said.
Again I didn’t quite know whether or not she was teasing me, but decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. “You can tell from hearing me play one time?”
“Actually, I’ve heard you play before,” she took another sip from her drink. “Enough to recognize the absence of instruction. Your mechanics are erratic. There’s no consistency in how you perform. Your tone and tempo tend to drift in and out, as if you’re restless and feel a need to tinker with the music,” she mentioned again Ellington’s “Pie Eye’s Blues,” and how I interpreted the twelve-beat formula perfectly at first, only to gravitate toward something ancillary by the start of the second refrain. “You don’t do any exercises either, do you? You’re all gusto and wild performance.”
I was stunned. What was this? What did she mean my mechanics were erratic? I wanted to get up and play “C Jam Blues,” or “In a Mellotone,” or Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude, Op. 23, No. 6 in E-Flat,” and let her tell me then what was wrong with my music. “If there’s a rawness to my playing, it’s because it’s supposed to be there.”
“Ahh.”
“Its true.”
She removed the stem of her wine glass from the space between her right thumb and index finger and set her drink down on the table. The stiffness of her hand made moving the glass look surreal and when she lifted her chin my image appeared in her eyes. I wasn’t used to being criticized this way, and lighting a cigarette, asked, “How is it you think to know so much about my playing?”
“Does it matter?”
“If I’m to take you seriously.”
“So I need credentials to critique you but you don’t need the slightest bit of training to play.”
I couldn’t help but smile at this, and Liz in tum told me, “I teach Performance, Theory, and Composition at the university. Those who can’t,” she tapped the surface of the table with her false hand and went on to explain, “I was at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore through last year and came to Renton because there are other projects I’m working on and I was promised a certain flexibility. Listen,” she said suddenly, “you shouldn’t be offended by my comments. Your playing is actually quite good.” She brushed her hair back behind her ears, her attractiveness unconventional, her features edged sensually, and as I sat and tried to decipher her compliment, she laughed at my apparent confusion and wondered, “What would you have me say? Do women usually tell you that you’re brilliant? Is that what you want to hear?”
I blew smoke high into the air. “I don’t usually talk about my playing.”
“Why?”
“I just don’t,” I said. “I play, that’s all. I don’t even think about it.”
“Bullshit,” it was somehow exciting to hear her swear. “You should think,” she insisted. “Having a love for music doesn’t mean being out of control.”
“So now I’m out of control?”
“You’re too talented to ignore your responsibility.”
“And talented, too?”
“I never said you weren’t.”
“And if I prefer using my talent to play as I like?”
“I’d say that’s fine but rather a waste.”
“Well, then,” I blew more smoke and sipped off the remaining whiskey from my glass while letting Liz know, “as far as I’m concerned, there’s a huge distinction between academic assessment and the actual joy I take from sitting down to perform. You have to realize, I like the way I play. Changing my mechanics won’t improve how I feel and why should I try and fulfill someone else’s expectation of what the music should be? Learning to interpret Liszt’s “Liebestraum” or Beethoven’s “Für Elise” doesn’t make anyone a great musician. There’s much more to it than that, and besides,” I foolishly continued and dared Liz to find anyone in Renton who played better than I.
Three things happened then in quick succession. First, Elizabeth got up from the table and went to the piano where she played a remarkably beautiful piece using only her left hand. I would not have thought it possible had I not been there. The music was transporting. Beginning adagio, the arrangement built its way through an intoxicating lyric, into something bluesy and classical and slightly jazzed. The melody was simple, yet filled with such intricate harmonies and rifts, with hints of arabesques, trills, and tremolos, that no one would have guessed a single hand could produce such a spectacular sound. Elizabeth did not sit down but played while standing and looking out into the empty bar. Her expression made it seem she was doing nothing more than demonstrating scales, yet the corners of her mouth showed the most private start of a smile.
No sooner did she finish then someone knocked on the locked door and a man I didn’t know, older than I with short cropped hair brushed forward, a round head, and wire-framed glasses pushed high up on his nose, stepped inside as Elizabeth undid the lock and greeted him by name. In the next moment she thanked me for the wine and ended our night by inviting me to come see her at the music school sometime. “If you like,” she turned away and disappeared outside.
I waited almost a week before accepting Elizabeth’s invitation, sitting at my piano in the time between, practicing chords and scales and the mind-numbing mechanics of finger exercises. I was determined to impress her and spent hours searching through countless recordings, stacks of sheet music and books, racking my brain for just the right arrangement to perform. I considered hundreds of compositions, from baroque to ragtime to jazz, a dozen obscure masterworks by Dizzy Gillespie, Cootie Williams, and Erroll Garner, torch songs and show tunes, pop hits and classic rock and roll, everything from Clapton’s “Badge” to Debussy’s “Reverie” and Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu, Op. 66.” I’d a very clear sense of what I wanted and still it took forever to find.
Such enterprise was new to me, the motivation behind my industry hard to explain. My affinity for jazz notwithstanding, I decided on Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude, Op. 32, No. 5” in G, convinced this was the music Elizabeth preferred. The composition was not as overpowering as some of Rachmaninoff’s other scores, not as explosive as “Op. 3, No. 2,” nor rousing like “Op. 23, No. 7,” and in this way depended more upon the pianist’s skills to reproduce the inherent awe of the arrangement. Just short of three and a half minutes long, “Op. 32, No. 5” was built upon a lyrical conversation exchanged between the right and left hand. While the right hand was buoyant, flowing from slow to fast and back again, swooping in and out like a clever bird, the left hand provided ballast, was sotto voce, more tempered and exacting in its rhythm. Overlapping, the two voices created a harmony which, if played by a less skilled musician, risked cacophony and disorder.
I practiced the score over and over again, until each note had its own identity and every phrase was worked out, and just after noon that Friday I walked to the music school where a woman in the main office suggested I look for Elizabeth downstairs. I found her in a rehearsal room and slipped inside as one of her students finished Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.” (A boy of maybe twenty, his straight black hair clipped in bangs above the dark frame of his glasses and his crisp short-sleeved dress shirt buttoned all the way up to his neck, he performed while concentrating less on the music than on not making a mistake.) After Liszt, Elizabeth conferred with her student, who left the room with a great sigh of relief.
“Good morning, Mr. Finne,” she spoke formally once we were alone and in such a way that I couldn’t be sure if she was happy to see me. She appeared to know that I was there to play however, and pretending she was my instructor and I’d come for a lesson, she asked if I was ready to begin. I sat at the piano while Elizabeth stood off to the side, and eager to dazzle her, I couldn’t otherwise keep from performing with the same physical animation as my father, squirming about on the bench, hovering in tight above the keys then swaying side to side before leaning far back in order to let the music dance down my arms. When I finished, I folded my hands in my lap and watched Elizabeth stand silent for several seconds before walking back toward the piano.
“Your mechanics are hopeless,” she said. “What is it you’re doing? Your elbows seem to be fighting with your wrists and your wrists with your fingers. As for the music,” this caused a second silence that lasted even longer than the first. I tried to free my mind of all expectation and was rewarded in this way when Elizabeth said, “You are a bastard, aren’t you, Mr. Finne?”
“It’s a beautiful piece,” I told her.
“There’s potential in your playing.”
“There’s always potential, Ms. Rieunne.”
At this she smiled. “I guessed you might choose Rachmaninoff.”
“Does that mean you’ve been thinking of me?”
She pressed her knees against the front of the piano. Her shirt was sleeveless, dark blue with small white threads outlining the shoulders and collar. She had on shorts and no shoes, her sandals tossed to one side of the room, and resting her false arm atop the piano, she said with assurance, “No more it seems than you’ve been thinking of me.”
“It’s true, I have. All week, I confess.”
“And what am I to do with this information?”
“Have dinner with me.”
“All right.”
“Are you free tonight?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“Pick me up at seven.”
Elizabeth’s apartment was on the west side of campus. I don’t drive much in the summer and wound up spending an hour that afternoon cleaning last winter’s trash from the floor of my old car. I showered and put on a blue shirt and sport coat, clean slacks and dark shoes. Elizabeth wore a white dress which hung loosely from her shoulders and was tied at the waist with an orange sash. Her hair was pulled back and set inside Chinese sticks. We went to Lutrane’s and drank wine before dinner. Elizabeth asked about my studies at the university, about my interest in Art History, the subject of my dissertation, and the classes I taught. She wanted to know how long I’d lived in Renton and what precipitated my playing at Dungee’s. We talked about the time she spent teaching in Baltimore, about the trip she took to Italy last year, and the project she was finishing now, an article on Louise Talma, the neoclassical composer and first American to teach at Fontainbleau. We had a second glass of wine at the end of our meal and I asked her then about her hand.
“An accident,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” she looked up and smiled. The story she told began at the Bristeen Academy of Music. “I had shown an early aptitude for piano and my parents were generous in having me trained.” At fifteen she won a national competition, and at twenty was living full-time in France, in a small apartment on the grounds of an old estate donated to the French Academy of the Arts. “I was studying very hard and working with some of the best teachers in the world, including Philipe DarChmonde. Philipe was brilliant,” Elizabeth said, “but we were poorly suited for one another. I was reserved and somewhat timid at the time. I spent my childhood pursuing music, and as a consequence my identity became tangled up in my playing so when I wasn’t practicing or performing I’d no sense of who I was. Philipe on the other hand was all vanity and ego and wanted to instill the same sort of self-possession in me, convinced if I was ever to make the transition from child prodigy to a fully mature musician, I had to broaden my range of experience.”
At forty, DarChmonde’s own career as a solo performer had slowed after a promising beginning due to an onset of arthritis in his fingers that seemed to flair just as his own rehearsals were going well and his agent booked a series of recitals. “I don’t know how he behaved with his other students,” Liz said “but with me, after an hour or so, as I played and we discussed the nuances of one or two particular compositions, Philipe would alter his approach, begin exhorting me to up the ante and turn myself loose in order to get deeper into the score. Such abstract notions were initially little more than fodder for my imagination, but then Philipe began bringing me books with unusual philosophies and provocative themes. He said I had to open myself up fully to experience if my playing was ever to reach its potential. What he meant by this I wasn’t sure, and still, I appreciated his tutelage and waited to see what would happen as he began taking me to parties and after-hours clubs, had me meet people whose attitudes and talents differed from anything I’d ever known.
“The grounds of the estate were bordered by woods and I used to walk before dinner along the path near a small ravine. From time to time a dog would meet up with me, a runaway I assumed from one of the nearby farms, large and dark brown, at least eighty pounds, with thick fur and a huge head dominated by a flat nose and square jaw. I began bringing him scraps of food and several times tried coaxing him from the woods but he never once agreed to leave. My practice sessions with Philipe continued through the summer as I was scheduled to perform in Vienna that August and was learning Chopin’s “Piano Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3” and “Concerto No. 1.” “Philipe’s knowledge of Chopin was extraordinary,” she said, “though his insistence that I continue focusing on personal abandonments in order to establish a true connection with my music was now an obsessive theme of our rehearsals. Once when I was playing he brought a woman to the studio, undressed her in front of me and made love to her right there on the floor, all the while barking at me to play on. I could have refused, I suppose, but I didn’t, and while I noticed no immediate influence on my music, I stored the experience away as something Philipe said I could draw upon in the future.
“Two days later, Philipe suggested I practice for him in the nude. I refused and questioned why he assumed broadening my personal experiences was necessarily tied to sex, to which he said if I could think of another way in which to get my heart to race as fast, by all means, we would try it. I thought for a time, then stood and took off my clothes. We spent much of July this way, with me playing Chopin while Philipe watched and caressed me. We made love often before and after my performance, and while I didn’t think I was falling in love with him, the sex confused me. I was still quite young and shocked when suddenly in early August Philipe came to my apartment for our session and ordered me to not undress and said there would be no more physical contact between us. The arthritis in his hands had returned and he hid them deep in his pockets. I asked if there was something I did to disappoint him, but he replied angrily and told me to just play and otherwise leave him alone. When I faltered over the first movement in Chopin’s “Concerto No. 1,” and surprised myself by weeping, Philipe chided me for being so naive and insisted he was doing me a favor, that the personal experience he alluded to for so long wasn’t limited to our carnal antics—as he called it—but evolved from the ashes now that things between us were over and done.
“I took my walk as usual that night, mad at myself and feeling both confused and foolish, and entering the woods found the dog waiting for me. I was glad to find him, eager for company, but as I waved and walked toward him, he suddenly began to bark. This surprised me, for in all the months before he never made a sound. I assumed he was hungry and excited to see me, and it was only as I came nearer that I noticed blood on his coat, wounds across his neck and hindquarter and a tear in one of his ears. I hurried to him but his barking only grew worse, and as I knelt to set the food I brought down on the ground, I was knocked over and felt a wet explosive heat tear through my right arm. I lost consciousness and didn’t wake until I was at the hospital where the doctors took me into surgery, removed what remained of my arm, cleaned the wound and sewed everything off. I was later told that my screams brought people from the estate into the woods but I can’t remember any of it. A dog was found standing at my side and one of the caretakers came running with his gun and shot him dead. Sometime the next morning the body of a second dog was found in the woods.”
Elizabeth stopped then and finished her wine. The details of her story were still spinning in my head as I stared across the table and tried to think of something appropriate to say. Rather than offer up some needless bit of sympathy, I hoped for a more intelligent reaction, but in the end the best I could think of was a somewhat banal, “Things do come at us from all sides, don’t they?”
“It’s true.”
“Left and right.”
“Very funny,” she laughed, and passing her false hand through the smoke I created with my cigarette, swirled the air with gentie strokes.
We drove out Garber Road after dinner, past where the street lights stopped and the pavement became dirt and the night filled with the sound of my old car moving over ruts and stones. Around midnight we went to Dungee’s for a drink, and later I parked my car near Elizabeth’s apartment and we took a walk along West Washington, beyond the iron gates of the arboretum where Elizabeth spoke aphoristically of deciding to teach after her injury. She described enrolling at the New York Conservatory where she earned her doctorate in music theory and then accepted a professorship in Baltimore. “I miss playing as I once did, but the reality seems pointless to mention. We all miss things don’t we?”
She asked questions of her own, wondering about my past, all of which I answered in a way I hadn’t for a very long time. I told her about my mother, provided anecdotes about Tyler and my father, described all that happened at my aunt’s and the Haptree Theater and the night my father smashed his piano with an ax and danced beside the hissing flame. Elizabeth walked close to me, her left hand in my right, our hips in rhythm and occasionally touching. The strength of my reserve, inviolable and self-protecting for so many years, faltered as we walked back through campus and I briefly suffered a panic. When I tried to pull my hand away however, Elizabeth clung knowingly and refused to release me. The moon was ivory, large and white as Elizabeth stepped around in front and slipped her right hand beneath my left arm. Instead of kissing her lips, I fell gently against her neck while reaching to touch her perfect fingers nestled then against my sleeve.
I called her the next day and invited her to meet me at Dungee’s that evening. She came in the middle of my second set and sat at one of the side tables. I finished playing around eleven-thirty and went to join her, ending the night with “Blue Rondo à la Turk.” (Even the kitchen staff who’d heard me play a thousand times before stopped what they were doing and came out to listen.) On the chance of Elizabeth coming back to my room, I spent the better part of the day reshelving my books, folding my laundry, sweeping the floor, and rehanging the Milton Avery print leaning against the wall. I dusted and carried empty glasses from beneath my chair to the kitchen sink, picked up loose papers, washed dirty dishes, made my bed, set out clean towels in the bathroom, and wiped the grime from around the toilet and bathtub drain.
At six o’clock, I showered and dressed and stood in front of my window examining my handiwork. Everything was absolutely spotless and yet something wasn’t right. The transformation of my room was startling, with even the doorknobs polished and the nicks in the wood floor waxed over twice. Leaving Dungee’s, Elizabeth suggested we go somewhere else. We discussed stopping in at one of the after-hours clubs, walking over to Liberty for coffee, or catching part of the midnight movie at the Main Theater. None of these ideas appealed to us however, and when I suggested going to my place where Liz could see my old piano, she laughed and said, “So you want me to see your instrument, is that it, Professor Finne?”
Upstairs, I watched her walk through my room, examining the space, stopping so we could kiss, my hands undoing the buttons of her shirt which she let slip down her arms. Instead of a bra, she wore a sleeveless white undershirt, the smooth sides of her breasts exposed. I knelt and helped take off her shoes. She peeled her pants down and stepped from them before we kissed again. A moment later she moved away and to my surprise looked back around my room, frowning now as she said, “This isn’t how I pictured it.”
She went to my bookshelf first where she removed a half dozen paperbacks and tossed them out across the floor. She then opened my closet and pulled laundry from a cardboard box, removed dishes from the cabinet in my kitchen and refilled the counter and sink. She scattered the stack of magazines and messed the neat lay of my bedsheet. Each time a part of her task was complete, she came and kissed me and helped me remove an item of clothes. When I was naked, she undid her prosthesis and set it on top of my piano. I moved toward her and cupped her half-arm against my face, kissing the knotted end with my lips, tasting her flesh from just below her elbow on up to her shoulder. Elizabeth stroked my head, stared into the disorder she’d created inside my room, and whispered, “There, Bailey. There. Isn’t that better?”
We spent the rest of the summer together, and when fall semester began, adapted our schedules according to the needs of our affair. We took long walks late at night and went with friends to concerts and movies and parties around town. While I maintained my usual sloth, Elizabeth always had several projects going—teaching and tutorials, composing original arrangements, and writing articles for magazines and journals—her latest on William Schuman, winner of music’s first Pulitzer prize. She read countless books, went to meetings and exercise class, attended conferences and recitals, all in endlessly ambitious waves. Many times I woke in the night to find her up and laboring over one of her new compositions and had all I could do to bring her back to bed.
As for my own less inspired routine, Elizabeth took no note of it and never made my conduct an issue. Despite all she said the first night we met when she challenged me to take responsibility for my music, she spoke little now about my playing, about my dissertation and the prospect of my teaching position being lost, and insisted only, “If you’re happy living as you do, that’s what’s important.” If I stood for hours in front of a painting by Ad Reinhardt or Marc Chagall, or sat home all day rereading essays by Clement Greenberg or Edward Lucie-Smith, Elizabeth would smile and say, “How wonderful for you, Bailey,” as if nothing in the world pleased her more.
Here then was something unexpected, for while my contentment typically came as a consequence of subtraction and learning how to jettison with no appreciable residue everything which drew too near, Liz had me suddenly wanting for more. Our lovemaking was performed with rapture and high spirit as we moved in a fluid tangle of limbs spread out wherever the moment took us and leaving me at times to feel like a man on a highwire who, after years of successfully mastering the feat, inexplicably chose to attempt as much while staring into the sun.
For Liz, believing the universe operated under principles of a delicate confusion did not keep her from finding purpose in the madness, and unable to change what happened to her arm, she reinvented herself by treating the incident as little more than a nuisance best ignored. Initially, I couldn’t imagine how she felt composing music she’d never be able to perform on her own, but as we played her works together I came to appreciate the implication of her effort and how no one in this world was ever more than half of some greater whole. One piece in particular moved me, arranged as both a separate score for the left hand and right, each beautiful on its own yet intended to be played as one, interwoven as it were, transforming the music into a spectacularly imbricated duet; her accomplishment as beautiful as the concertos of William Bolcom and the overlapping quartets of Milhaud, her scores conjoining like two glorious sides of a painting by Duccio, like shadow melting into light.
Early that fall, I went in the middle of an otherwise uneventful afternoon to stand outside Elizabeth’s classroom window, listening as she lectured on Beethoven’s “33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli.” The composition was universally regarded as Beethoven’s most difficult piece. Elizabeth encouraged her students to “Think of the music as a revelry for all that has ever astounded you in life. Concentrate on the division and unison between each variation, and how change occurs unexpectedly and suddenly from one movement to the next.” She described the many intricacies of the composition, how the transformations in tone were rapid and put the pianist at constant risk of destroying the fragile center of the piece. She said the inherent brilliance of the score was that it grew out of a very simple theme and evolved into something enormously complex. “No one has ever actually mastered it,” she said. “Not Emanuel Ax or Horowitz, nor any of the rest, although some have come closer than others. The key is not to think of failing or worrying about going too far wrong. As performers, the trick is just to play,” and then she pressed a button and a recording of “33 Variations” came through the window, as spectacular as any performance I’d ever heard and one which Elizabeth didn’t tell her class was her at twenty, the year before Philipe and the dogs in the woods.
In October, Elizabeth attended a conference in New York. She left on a Thursday and didn’t return until the following Monday night. I played Friday and Saturday at Dungee’s, sleeping both nights alone in my room where I had the same peculiar dream. I was outside in a cold and icy rain, following after a woman who looked a good deal like Elizabeth. I knew it couldn’t be her and yet I continued running after her as she stepped around a corner and disappeared. A gust of icy wind kicked up and I felt a sudden stabbing in my right arm. My heart began to race, and when I awoke Sunday morning my arm was quite numb and remained that way until Monday evening when I went to pick Elizabeth up at the airport. No sooner did she arrive in the terminai, hurrying toward me with a wave of her left hand, than the deadness in my dangling limb gave way and I felt completely fine. I tried not to give the incident too much thought, but the reality made it difficult to ignore the course I was on.
Early that November, Elizabeth’s father flew into town for a day’s visit. Sharply tailored with a patchy head of reddish-white hair, pink cheeks, and coal-dark eyes, Charles Rieunne was a senior vice president for Caldwell Securities, passing through Renton on his way to New York for business. Liz and I took him to dinner and just before ten went back to her apartment for a nightcap where I was persuaded to play a bit of Bellini on Liz’s baby grand and then she joined me for a duet. The conversations between Charles and myself were genial, and as Liz had already told her father much about me, he asked informal questions regarding my teaching, music and art, and only as Liz went to the kitchen for more coffee and to call down for her father’s cab did our exchange become something different.
“About your dissertation,” Charles guided me to the far side of the living room where he inquired in earnest, “When can I expect to see it in print?” He wondered what articles I’d published, where I planned to teach once I finished my doctorate, and if I’d any thoughts of doing more with my music.
I answered as he wanted to hear. I said my dissertation was coming along well and would be finished in the next few weeks. I explained that the University of Renton intended to put me on tenure track once I completed my Ph.D. and mentioned a series of articles published. As for my music, I confided a plan to record Chopin that summer for a small label and that there was the possibility of a short tour. All of this delighted Charles very much. He was eager to approve of me, and before he left in his cab I was given a warm squeeze on the arm and a cheery “So long for now then, son.”
I regretted my dishonesty as I lay in bed that night, confused and afraid Elizabeth would find out, and getting up I went to stand by the window. The streetlight on the curb glowed brightly, and leaning against the cool glass I wondered again what motivated my deception. (“What the fuck, Bailey?”) I remained troubled in the days following Charles’s visit, dissecting again and again the source of my deceit, questioning what exactly I was calling into play, what alterations my prevarication seemed to be suggesting, and why. More and more I felt there was something I should be doing but feared admitting exactly what.
In January Elizabeth began spending a good deal of time preparing for her summer tour. There was a large amount of research and rehearsing to do—she not only planned to play original and traditional arrangements in duet, but to provide a series of lectures on a number of influential composers and musicians—and she was assisted in the process by Eric Stiles, a pianist and graduate instructor at the Music School. The aspiring Mr. Stiles, though a second-rate pianist as high standards went, had studied extensively, spent time in Vienna, and published articles on Mendelssohn, Carl Orff, and Leonard Bernstein. Elizabeth turned to Eric for help gathering material on Beethoven and Schubert as part of her first lecture. She had him play the right hand to her left on “Pathetique” and “Sonata in С Minor,” and grateful for his effort, trumpeted to me each night just how invaluable his service had become.
Notwithstanding the fact that Eric was a dowdy figure with a protuberant chin and round belly, an unkempt mop of black wiry hair, globular nose, and pasty skin, I felt a certain jealousy toward him and couldn’t help but notice Elizabeth’s smile each time she described Eric’s enterprise, how her voice rose and held a note of exhilaration as she rattled off his skills and achievements. Perturbed in this way, convinced I could do everything the efficacious Mr. Stiles was hired for—and better—I suggested to Liz, “Why not let me help you?”
“You?” I fully expected her to appreciate and accept my offer, but was rebuffed instead with kind thanks and firm assurances that my assistance wasn’t needed. “You have your things and I have Eric.”
Annoyed by the insinuation that I somehow couldn’t be trusted with the task, I wondered if this was how Elizabeth felt about me when it came to her work, what did it say of our affair? I imagined what Charles Rieunne would tell me if he knew the truth, how he’d laugh at my ignorance, and in terms of my carefree aesthetic say, “If you prefer to be irresponsible, why should you expect my daughter to take you at all seriously?”
I slept little that night, struggling for answers, and reaching what seemed the best-laid plan, got up early the next morning and began pulling together the existing pages of my dissertation. I went to the library and conducted additional research on Josef Albers and the influence Gestalt psychology had on his art, incorporated the new material into current chapters, and typed everything into my computer. The process was productive, the whole of my effort performed exclusively for Liz’s favor, though I failed to enjoy a single moment of my labor. I cursed throughout, my mood dissolving from idle and calm to temperamental and distant, abrupt and even harsh. The change in my demeanor was obvious the moment I crawled from bed each morning, grousing and grumbling on my way to gathering up all my nесessary notes and books before skulking off to campus. Liz and I quarreled over what was wrong, and when she questioned what I was doing, I snapped, “I’m just trying to finish. I want to get done, that’s all.”
“Since when?”
“Now.”
Who could blame her for being startled by the sudden shift, and yet somehow sensing what I was up to, she stroked the side of my cheek with her false hand and said only, “All right, Bailey, if that will make you happy.”
Clever girl. How I delighted in her company! How much I wanted then to kiss her thighs, to sniff her neck, and lick her face and the back of her knees. The depth of her generosity moved me, her words alone making me glad. After another day of much the same, I put down my book, my pad and pen, and quit my effort with an exhausted “That’s enough for now.”
Elizabeth sat across the room at my piano, working out a new score, and turning to look at me again, she replied, “You will when you want to.” I spent the next four days sitting in my room, reading Chekhov and Richard Ford. Saturday night I played at Dungee’s. Elizabeth came downtown with me, and as I ran through a medley of Brubeck and Bud Powell, she applauded the energy of my performance and smiled at the pleasure I exhibited. We made love that night, and relieved, my dark spirits lifted and I was restored.
Returning to old habits was a comfort, and so inspired, I tried not to dwell on the irony of sustaining love this way.
As reward for coming to my senses—and not that Liz didn’t wish I’d eventually finish my dissertation or one day choose to do something more with my music, but knew such had to happen on my own terms—we entered a period of renewed jubilation. Our affair seemed sweeter after clearing this first awkward hurdle and we enjoyed a time of rediscovery and confirmation. Eager to celebrate our happiness, we decided to consummate the moment by getting a pet. “Something we can share together” we agreed, and went the next day to Chapperman’s Pet Emporium, where we settled on a yellow-green parakeet in a silver cage.
Elizabeth immediately disposed of the cage, allowing Clarence—as she named our bird—to fly about my apartment as he chose. “We need to respect Clarence’s freedom and not confine him against his will,” she said, a view I accepted in theory, though I wondered in secret how Clarence would ever know he was being restrained if we never let him out.
A bird in open flight is a glorious spectacle, graceful in its glide and stretch of wings, but a parakeet darting about in cramped quarters is an altogether different thing. Despite our best intentions, Clarence could not adjust to flying inside, and no sooner did he get going in one direction than he was forced to quickly draw up, his tiny feet thrust in front of him, his wings pumping frantically in a desperate countermotion, straining not to smash into the walls at high speed. After several days of bruising his beak and exhausting his spirit, he abandoned flying altogether and took to walking back and forth across the floor.
I voted for returning the bird to his cage, but Elizabeth said we should learn to be accommodating. This meant keeping a constant eye out as Clarence pranced about the apartment, forcing me to monitor my steps, checking the cushion in the chair before sitting, and watching where I kicked off my shoes or dropped my books. All sudden turns, sideways strides, and backward actions were discontinued as a matter of course. Where Elizabeth had no problem adapting and easily maneuvered about the room with Clarence beneath her feet, I was less disciplined, nervous and uncoordinated. So convinced my own clumsiness would eventually reduce Clarence to a feathery goo, I had no choice but to work with him in an effort to incorporate his habits into mine.
Such enterprise was difficult for me, and still I managed to conduct myself with diligence in arranging drills and practices until bit by bit Clarence and I got used to one another, my once stuttering stride giving way to a more fluid sense of movement about the apartment. My effort thrilled Elizabeth, my ability to develop an awareness of where the bird was at all times. “You see what you can do when you put your mind to it?” she cheered, her smile a mix of gratitude and great relief. I was delighted to please her and have her look at me with such happiness, though in the process I came again to wonder if such ambition was a part of love I was somehow supposed to sustain.
Toward the end of February, Elizabeth invited a group of people to her apartment. (Although we spent most nights together, we still maintained separate addresses, and for the evening we agreed it would be best if Clarence remained at my place.) On hand were Eric Stiles and his date, a willowy clarinetist named Amber Tilman; Dr. Willum Kabermill, the dean of the Music School, and his wife Eunice; a few more of Liz’s colleagues; and Niles for me. Our guest of honor for the evening was the pianist André-Seve Harflec, who came with his girlfriend, Janet Minot. Andy—as Harflec insisted everyone call him—was an old friend of Liz’s, a musician on the verge of real fame and due in four days to perform a recital at the Miller Theater in New York.
I played host, took coats and helped set out the hors d’oeuvres, made drinks, and engaged in conversations while Liz saw to Andy. (Harflec was a slender man with dark brown hair cut about the edges of his pretty face and arms forever bent and reaching forward.) Liz wore a sweater dress that fit her figure snugly, her own hair done in a way I’d not seen before, a single thick tail made on the right side extending in an orange arch. I watched her standing near the piano, Harflec beside her, shoulder to shoulder as others in the room came and spoke with them. They smiled at one another with a familiarity composed of history, and noting the ease with which they carried on, I continued observing them even as I was involved in my own conversations.
I was talking at one point with Eric and Niles when Andy’s girlfriend came over and held her empty glass out in front of me. “Drink,” she said. Dressed in black, with bare shoulders and smooth, creamy-white skin, her body slightly fuller than Liz’s, a provocative face, her attractiveness wielded with aggression, Janet was obviously a girl used to turning heads. Instead of taking her glass I pointed her toward the bar. When she came back a minute later she said dryly, “You might at least have asked what I was drinking before you sent me away.”
“I had a feeling you’d find what you want.”
“I usually do,” she held her glass with two fingers. “Your girlfriend’s lovely. Andre’s been talking about her all day.”
“You mean Andy.”
“Whatever,” there was dissmissiveness in her tone, a worn sound which seemed to arrive from a great distance. I glanced across the room again, at Liz and Andy laughing together over some such thing Dr. Kabermill told them, and looking back at Janet—she’d made herself a whiskey with a single cube of ice—I could imagine without much trouble the whole of our affair; the banter between us performed in prurient waves without future complication, no entanglement or emotional wondering as we enjoyed our sex with ease and a like understanding. Such an uncomplicated arrangement made me laugh to think how fast I would have pounced as recently as last summer. (Janet in her tight-fitted dress and golden hair so thick and long I could imagine clinging to it like reins.) The issue then was not temptation but the reality of its absence, how steadily in the last few months my need for Liz had reached a point beyond anything before. Laying in bed at night, I’d try and pretend she wasn’t there, and occasionally when she was off teaching or working on some other project, I’d tell myself she didn’t exist and that the emotions I felt were a deliberate fiction. The exercise always alarmed me however, and I’d quickly quit the test, though not before the experience took its toll.
I was just about to excuse myself from Janet when Andy and Liz came to join us. Elizabeth slid in next to me and wrapped her left arm around my back as Harflec stood close to her right. “Bailey,” he said my name as if it was for him something of a curiosity. “I was just telling Lizzie that Evgeny Kissin is coming to hear me in New York and she is so jealous. Do you know Kissin?”
“Not personally, André.”
“No, of course not. And Andy, please,” he gave a shameless sort of smile, and after confiding in some detail his friendship with Kissin, looked me up and down and asked about my teaching. “Lizzie tells me you’re an instructor at the university.”
“Art History. I’m an adjunct.”
“Yes, well, I must say it seems quite a coup for your Renton to have landed Elizabeth.” He said no more about me, and touching Liz on the shoulder, went on to say, “When I heard she was leaving Peabody and coming here, of all places, well, frankly, I wasn’t sure what to think. Don’t get me wrong,” he had a way of sublimating his insults behind a wink, “your university has a fine reputation.”
“But it’s not the Peabody.”
“Exactly,” he nodded, satisfied I understood, while Elizabeth spoke in defense of Renton, referring to the excellent faculty Dr. Kabermill had put together and how the autonomy she had here to conduct her work and develop her own curriculum had many advantages over the more established institutions. I appreciated her statement, but the university was not the focal point of Andy’s comments, a truth not lost on Janet who rolled her eyes when our guest of honor said, “Yes, of course, but Renton is so saturnine, is it not? An odd place for music.”
“I would guess Gershwin and Copland would argue otherwise.”
“Ahh, American composers, of course. You do call them composers, don’t you?”
I was once more watching Liz, waiting to see what part of Andy’s criticism registered and which I could ignore as trite party banter, when Andy told a story about a time Liz and he were in France. “The music, my God! Do you remember?” The purpose was as before, to make me understand that Liz’s presence in Renton was an aberration, the insinuation impossible to miss, Harflec driving the point home every chance he could.
“Why don’t we talk about something else,” Janet yawned and André quickly replied, “But sure. Janet hates when I get to rambling about music and I’m certain it must be taxing for you as well, Bailey.”
Again Liz rallied to my defense, mentioned my piano playing, my knowledge and talent which I interrupted to say, “I dabble is all.”
“Yes, well, it must be pleasant for you. Sometimes I wish I could simply—what is the word?—dabble, to relax a bit and enjoy the lighter fare.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, André,” Janet waved her whiskey glass in front of his face and frowned. Andy’s own expression filled with surprise as if to intimate—quite falsely, of course—that he truly didn’t understand. “What did I say? I meant only there’s something to relish in the ability to enjoy a simple tune and play such as a lark. A serious musician doesn’t have that luxury,” he puffed out his narrow chest for Liz’s benefit. “A hobbyist can enjoy whatever he fancies while a real pianist can never be satisfied banging out such a rudimentary repertoire as Beethoven’s Appassionate’ or Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition,’ for example. There is for us always the issue of challenging one’s talent.”
To his credit, André Harflec had, in fact, made his reputation performing the world’s most difficult compositions, works by brilliant yet obscure figures such as Godowsky, Alkan, Medtner, Henselt, Catoire, and Kaputsin, which other musicians avoided as a matter of course. Critics regarded Andy as a technical wizard, whose hands the reviewer Alex Ross referred to as “a wonder and a marvel,” the mastery of his interpretive performance exceeded only by the voodoo of his dispatch. All this aside, I found the man an ass, and when he goaded me further with, “Music is music, don’t you think, Bailey? It’s good to be able to appreciate both the simple tunes and the classics and play each the same way,” I felt Liz’s fingers on my waist go tense and draw me in tighter.
“What I mean,” Andy said while moving toward the piano, “is that all music has a fundamental center. Even the more difficult arrangements I play can be dissected and reduced to where someone such as yourself can figure out their essence and knock them off in a modest fashion. For example,” he sat then and played an elementary send-up of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which he soon transformed into ragtime, classical, and jazz. “You see, it’s all there,” he smiled as everyone in the room turned and listened to what was going on. “As for the more sophisticated works, someone such as yourself needs merely find what notes he’s comfortable with and tease them within your limitations.”
He performed then Nikolai Roslavets’s “Etude No. 1.” The piece was nothing less than a fundamental marvel which no one—save Harflec—dared play anymore. While Roslavets invented his own harmonic system based on altered scales, his “Etude” infused with double sharps and flats creating a glorious white elephant of a knuckle buster, Andy seized control of each note, stared at Elizabeth then glanced at me in order to make sure I understood the depth of his inspiration. So completely mesmerized was Eric Stiles by Andy’s playing that he drifted back and appeared to hide behind his date. Liz was awed as well and the corners of her mouth rose as André turned the air electric. I was envious, worse than before when I tried to impress Liz by finishing my dissertation, and with the manifold of my happiness now forever diverted, removed from the days when sloth and leisure were able to sustain me, I conceded the stakes were infinitely higher and required something more.
I waited for Andy to finish and as he stepped forward to bow while the room burst into applause and cheered his name, I slipped behind and took my seat at the piano. I was out of my league, for sure—but what purpose heaven then?—and sneaking a final peek at Liz, uncertain what I could pull off, I closed my eyes and was back again at my father’s piano, laying down the notes as they came into my head, guiding them through the tips of my fingers like a hot current passing through ten separate wires. Where Andy performed with his upper body stationary and in faultless display of his command, I rocked and swayed as madly as ever, producing grand accompanimental refrains while knocking out Roslavets’s “Etude No. 1” with my own mastery and verve.
Although I never heard the piece before, the notes formed in my head with the unmistakable preciseness of an echo. At some point during my playing, oblivious to everyone but Liz, whom I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at, and with my eyes still closed, I grew frightened by what I was doing and nearly thought to stop, but by then I couldn’t and finished with a flourish. Opening my eyes, I turned first to Liz whose face was fixed in absolute amazement, and then through the silence of the room with everyone in shock and no one quite sure what they just witnessed, I grinned at our astonished guest of honor, and said, “Something like that then, Andy?”
A fluke? Most definitely and not to be repeated. (What did I know about love after all and how to yield what was required?) Liz glowed and brought me a fresh drink. She kissed my cheek and stood close by while everyone congratulated me on my performance. Even Andy gave a begrudging “Good show,” only to leave soon after, excusing himself with the mention of an early flight out in the morning. I acknowledged the response with a diffident shrug of my shoulders, my interest only in Liz, elated to have made her smile the way she did—the expression on her face a mix of revelry, shock, and wonder—and was otherwise clueless at the time about the can of worms I’d opened.
Later that night, after everyone was gone and we’d cleaned up from the party, rinsed the plates, and put away the remaining food, we took a walk across town and wound up back at my apartment. Liz’s mood remained sanguine, and when I asked if she was worried about André who was clearly upset by my performance, she smiled and insisted Andy was a big boy and could take as much as he dished out. “Besides, your playing was remarkable.”
“The others seemed to like it well enough.”
“You think?” she kicked off her shoes. We were upstairs by then, Liz undressing near the closet before disappearing into the bathroom then slipping into bed. I sat on the floor with Clarence, joining Liz after a minute, eager to be praised and even rewarded for my playing, kissing her neck and lower onto her shoulders and the first soft knoll of breast. “What about you?” I asked. “Did you like what you heard?”
“You know I did,” she positioned her left hand beneath my chin, preventing me from exploring further down, drawing my head back from under the sheet and causing me to look at her then. The anticipation in her face, the expectation and hopefulness were different from the gladness I found there earlier as I knocked off Roslavets’s “Etude,” and when she asked, “What about you? What did you think of your playing?” I answered cautiously with, “I was good enough, I suppose.” I tried to resume kissing her then, turning my head so I could get at her fingers still holding my chin, but Liz drew away, sat up on the bed, smoothing her T-shirt down and scolding me slightly. “I’m serious. What happened tonight is significant.”
“For whom?”
“You don’t think it’s worth discussing?”
“There’s nothing to discuss.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Liz’s expression filled with disbelief, her good humor lapsing, and when I shook my head, she raised her half-arm like a broken marker and demurred. “So what are you telling me, that you thought you’d sit down in front of André-Seve Harflec, before Eric and Dr. Kabermill and a half dozen other world-class musicians and bang out Roslavets for them and call it a night?”
“Something like that,” I tried to laugh off the aggravation in Liz’s tone and went so far as to remind her that we had this conversation months ago and she agreed that I was right to do whatever I chose with my music.
“I said the ultimate decision for handling your talent is your responsibility.”
“All right then.”
“And that’s what you did tonight. You accepted the responsibility,” she tried to amend her position, said her support was predicated on the assumption that I was happy playing in relative anonymity while pounding out rock and jazz at Dungee’s, only “You and I both know that’s not true anymore.”
“Do we?” I tried again to throw her off, insisted what happened tonight was no big deal, but my comment only added fuel to Liz’s fire. “Sure, Bailey. Anyone could have sat and played the way you did. Why should your success with Roslavets convince you it’s time to start taking your music seriously?”
“It shouldn’t,” I answered as a matter of fact, and reminded her again, “I was only trying to put your friend in his place when I played tonight.”
“Meaning what? That you think so little of your music now that you’re content using it as a party trick?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s just that Andy pissed me off.”
“So it bothered you that Andy assumed you were a second-rate musician?”
“Sure.”
“Because you know you have talent.”
“It bothers me because André’s an ass.”
“Because you don’t like anyone talking down to you when it comes to music.”
“Because I don’t like anyone who’s a smug son of a bitch.”
“Because you have talent,” she said again, her half-arm atop the sheet, her prosthesis laid out inside its velvet case across the room. She continued to argue, insisting, “You never would have sat down to play if you didn’t think you had something to prove. You know you’re good and you wanted Andy to hear. What you did tonight made everyone sit up and take notice. You can’t just ignore all that now,” her face had gone red with annoyance, and when she said, “They won’t let you ignore it,” the phone rang as if on cue and I went to answer it.
“Mr. Finne? Bailey?” the voice was vaguely familiar, a somewhat formal yet eagerly pitched sound. “Willum Kabermill,” the man said, “Dr. Kabermill from the Music School.”
I looked over at Liz, then turned myself sideways, keeping my face from her though she already seemed to know the nature of the call.
“I hope it isn’t too late. It is late, isn’t it, but I just couldn’t quite wait until morning.”
“It’s all right. We weren’t sleeping.”
“Good. Excellent. About your playing this evening, Mr. Finne,” he went on to compliment my performance saying, “I was most impressed. We all were. The consensus, Bailey—may I call you Bailey?—is that we’d witnessed something extraordinary. A discovery of this kind happens most infrequently.” He asked then about my training, where I might have studied and played professionally, and with each answer I gave he sounded all the more surprised and excited. “I have some people I’d like to hear you perform. A showcase if you’re at all interested, a few colleagues and agents who know how to manage these sort of things. Assuming, of course,” he paused briefly before his own exhilaration got the best of him and he started in again. “A chance like this. A talent like yours. I’d like to help in any way I can,” he spoke in sound bites, in enthusiastic bursts, alternating between further praise and additional questions regarding my playing, stopping only after I promised to call him the next day with my decision.
Liz remained on the bed, listening and watching for my reaction. “The others will call, too,” she said as I shrugged my shoulders and returned to sit beside her. I wasn’t worried about any of the others—“Let them call.” I could only think of how to answer Liz as she asked, “So, now what?”
“Now nothing,” I was unprepared for any of this and told her, “Let’s sleep on it.”
“What’s to sleep on?” she was unwilling to let the matter drop, afraid my ambivalence would only increase by morning. “You should at least be curious.”
“Of what?”
“Where this might lead.”
“I don’t need it,” I scooted back so that I was now across from her on the mattress. “I like things just the way they are,” I smiled tentatively and made an effort to reach for her but she pushed my hands away. “Do you?” she asked. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Then why bother showing Andy you could play?”
“I already told you.”
“And I think it’s more than that.”
“More than what?”
“I think you want something different. I think all these years of avoidance have caught up with you. I think you need more.”
“I do or you?” the question came out before I could stop myself and I wished I could take it back. Liz gave my statement just enough pause to let me know my claim had registered, then said as if I hadn’t spoken at all, “Playing Roslavets. Playing Shostakovich, George Crumb, and Thomas Tallis, it makes you happy. I know it’s true. Playing with the big boys no matter how much you deny it. Living as you have is all well and fine if it’s still what you want, but how can it be now, Bailey? Jesus, what are you so afraid of?”
I crossed my legs and faced Liz who sat with her back against the pillow while Clarence on her shoulder bobbed his tiny head. (“What, Bailey?”) Her question suggested a patience worn thin, and while I wanted to answer with reassurance, I had nothing new to say. I sat in silence looking at her on the bed, the red of her hair in the lamplight, the shape of her cheeks and green of her eyes. After a few seconds I reached out again, my hand falling inside the empty space of her right arm where her fingers should have been. I curled my hand around the void and clung to the absence, and thinking of my mother then and the way love inspired her to sing for my father even as she was otherwise reluctant to perform, I found myself anxious to experience exactly what my mother felt in the time before love seduced her and brought her outside and dropped her into the cold white snow. Inching my fingers up, I said her name, said, “Liz,” and gave her what she wanted.
In the days that followed, as the aftereffect of my playing at Elizabeth’s party acquired a life of its own, we became singularly disciplined in our ambition. Liz was eager to help me pick out the three arrangements I was to perform at my recital. (I had phoned Dr. Kabermill the next day and agreed to play for a select audience, a date was scheduled for late April—I said I needed the time to prepare—and one of the small auditoriums at the Music School was chosen as the site.) Roslavets was a unanimous choice, but while Liz was of the opinion I should keep with the classics, Ornstein’s “Danse Sauvage” or Scriabin’s “Sixth and Seventh Sonatas” for example, in order to give my performance cohesiveness, I was of the opinion that a work of jazz would better exhibit my range and skill and selected an obscure composition by Clark Terry. As for the third and final score, I gave in and settled on Pierre Boulez’s “Second Sonata.”
I undertook a rigid schedule of practice, conducted my rehearsals in secret, thanked Liz for offering to help whip me into shape but said, “I prefer if you were surprised.” The weeks passed more swiftly than I expected, my commitment unprecedented, and while on occasion my mood fell off and I questioned what exactly I was doing, my sense of incertitude never reached the point it did with my dissertation. Here was what Liz wanted, and here in turn was what I needed to give her. If I exhibited anxiousness, if now and again my spirits darkened and I worried about the effect of surrendering myself so completely to anything and the risk my desire created for possible disaster, Liz took my ambivalence in stride, restored my faith while assuring me, “It’s all only natural, Bailey. Don’t worry, I’m here. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
On the evening of my recital, I arrived at the Music School just after seven, decked out in my usual jeans and light cotton shirt, determined to be comfortable. Dr. Kabermill greeted me at the door, reached to shake my hand, then changed his mind—unsure if I was one of those self-absorbed performers resistant to having his fingers touched—and settled for resting his palm beneath my elbow and walking me into the room. (Dr. Kabermill was a short man with thick brown glasses, a puffy pile of dark grey hair, and a mouth somewhat too large for his chin so when he spoke—as he did that evening with great anticipation—the bottom half of his face opened up comically like that of a puppet.) The hall he chose was more intimate than the larger auditorium, with six rows of chairs for an audience of thirty. I was introduced to a group of writers and agents along with a few professors I knew from Liz’s party. Eric Stiles was there, standing with Liz as I entered the room. After chatting with people who’d traveled from as far away as Boston to hear me perform, I settled onto the piano bench while Dr. Kabermill delivered his opening remarks.
Liz smiled at me expectantly from her seat in the front row. (How lovely she looked!) I was not the least bit nervous, my recent rehearsals having gone quite well and whether it was the lighting then, or how the room felt suddenly heated—as if a great vent was sucking out all the air—or if it was fear waiting until the last possible moment to take hold, or the image of my father which came to me as he danced in the yard just after my mother’s death, I’d no idea. Perhaps it was worry for winding up as deranged as he if I exposed my love through this sort of pledge and something unforeseen still happened, but as I began to play and started with the first notes of Roslavets’s “Etude,” the cooperation from my hands turned erratic, the music channeled down intercepted so what came out was an unruly din and clamor.
At first those in the audience were sure I must be joking, but when I didn’t stop and continued with a sway and bounce which made my father’s convulsions look tame, a murmur began to pass through the room, a questioning of whether I realized the dreadfulness of my performance. After a short while, as the notes I struck descended faster and faster into chaos, everyone in the hall turned their heads, dumbstruck and wondering if the person next to them was experiencing the same appalling exhibition. I went on for two minutes or more, banging through the “Etude” before switching gears, plummeting further while breaking into a spastic rendering of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and then “Bad Luck,” and while I can’t be sure when I realized the awfulness of my playing, at some point I got up on my own and walked out the door.
I went directly back to my apartment, where Clarence followed me to the bed as I sat with my head in my hands and tried to make sense of what just happened. I stared out the window, toward my bookshelf, and across the room where a silver-framed print of a painting by Francis Bacon, a Christmas gift from Elizabeth, was displayed exactly where Shannon’s poster of Diebenkorn’s Large Woman once hung. The picture was entitled Self-Portrait and showed the face of a middle-aged man whose features were greatly exaggerated and oddly contorted. An exhausted, day-laborer’s face, both comical and frightening with hair thick and black combed off his forehead, clipped short above an enormous brow, a single strand dangling down between Bacon’s deep-set eyes. A crooked and beastly nose centered the face, created with broad, aggressive strokes, the mouth pulled violently up and sideways across a chin that was split and drooped to the left like a dab of wet putty.
I came from the bed, and standing before the print, recalled how during the early part of his career, Bacon was highly regarded by contemporaries and critics, but attacked in the middle years for using the same narrow group of images and inventions, abstract portraits of distressed and tormented souls, twisted and bent in deliberately shocking ways. Bacon, in turn, insisted that using only a handful of subjects did not restrict the substantive evolution of his art, but rather helped improve his eye and refine his craft. (Of painting, Bacon said such was a way to “challenge the boundaries of my perceptions and conquer my recognition of the world as a meaningless cluster of stars. I am an optimist,” he said, “but about nothing.”) After much debate, in the time before his death, nearly all detractors agreed Bacon’s later works had evolved appreciably, his painting demonstrating a lyrical and incorporeal conceptualization despite the familiarity of themes.
I took two steps closer and compared Bacon’s approach in handling his art to the narrow net I cast over my own life, and despite surface similarities, found our inspiration entirely different. Where Bacon was absorbed in a single-mindedness aimed at an altogether visionary sort of evolution, I was confining as a matter of avoidance, undisciplined and erratic in my projects, drawn to episodes of sloth while refusing to commit to anything long enough to demonstrate actual regard. Even now, when I tried to please Liz, my focus splintered like cold light passing through a cloud. The reality unsettled me, everything that had happened that evening, and struggling to come up with a way I might explain myself to Liz, I wound up unable to think, all paralyzed and addlepated.
Clarence left the bed and hopped onto the piano where he sang, “Twee-twee!,” whistling louder when I failed to respond, bobbing rhythmically, hitting the wood with his tiny beak then jumping onto the keys. He strutted across the ivory, his talonlike feet dancing back and forth as he encouraged me to play.
I shook my head. “You don’t understand.”
“Tweeee!”
“Clarence.”
He glared at me then, as only a bird can do, leaped from the piano and pecked at my leg. I moved away from him, went to sit back on the bed, but he followed after me and resumed gnawing at my ankle. I endured his supplication as best I could, trying once more to explain, saying “I’m sorry, but I can’t,” over and over until finally he seemed to grow tired of me and walked across the floor. The closet was open and he disappeared inside, returning a few seconds later, pulling the miniature bike Liz bought for him several weeks ago. (Purchased as a joke, the bike was of no interest to Clarence until now.) I wasn’t sure at first what he was up to, and watched as he dragged the bike into the center of the room, his yellow and green tail feathers jutting straight up in the air before he stopped and released the cycle, stared at me and gave a commanding whistle.
The bike was six inches high, red with a thin yellow corkscrew stripe painted around the center post and frame. The tires were real rubber, the pedals designed for a birdlike motion and a special handlebar Clarence could operate when perched on the seat. He whistled again and I got down on my knees and balanced the bike while he climbed aboard. The process of learning to ride was difficult and Clarence had trouble with the pedals, with keeping the bike upright and gaining enough momentum to travel in a straight line. He spent ten minutes falling and climbing back on, though eventually he got the hang of it and managed to ride from one wall to the next, pedaling better and better still, his balance improving, becoming secure and unwavering.
After establishing his expertise, he hopped off the bike and walked back to the piano, whistling for me to follow. I hesitated much as I had earlier, unwilling to be inspired by the machinations of a bird. “You don’t understand,” I said again, all of which caused Clarence to shake his head and whistle harshly “Twee-twee!” I grew angry, and scooping up the bike, held it out in front of him. “You think it’s so easy? What do you know about it? Why don’t you try a real trick.”
I went to the closet then and retrieved a stretch of twine that I attached between the bookshelf and the chair, a distance of some six feet and a good thirty-six inches off the floor. Undaunted, Clarence leaped up and stood on the string. I lifted the bike and placed it on the stretch of twine, gripping the rear wheel while Clarence climbed on board. It took a while for him to grasp the difficulty of this new trick, such a fine measure of balance and how the slightest error sent everything crashing. Soon however, I began reducing my assistance and he learned to open his wings just enough to feel steady, monitoring his own momentum, understanding how much speed was required to keep the bike upright, churning the pedals inside his claws and flapping his wings at the end of each ride.
No sooner did he master the stunt than he stopped again and jumped from the bike, went back to the piano where he stood atop the sounding board. I ignored him as best I could, even as his whistle became a screech and he dove toward the keys. Despite his limited weight, he managed to pound hard enough to produce a clear middle C. I turned to face him and told him sternly, “Forget it. I won’t. I can’t,” to which he responded by flying from the piano and crashing hard against my chest.
The force of his velocity jolted me, his trajectory intentional. I couldn’t remember the last time he tried to fly, but as I bent down to make sure he was all right he scooted away and avoided my hand. “Come on, Clarence,” I called after him, imploring him to see things from my perspective, saying, “I get what you’re doing, but it’s more than simple application. If that’s all it was, well, hell. But it isn’t. It’s complicated. Fuck, Clarence. You’re a bird! What do you know about anything?” I almost had him cornered, was about to pick him up and start my excuse all over when Elizabeth set her key in the lock and opened the door.
There’s a point in every piece of music when the melody completes itself and what’s left is a final refrain. Occasionally an aria will vary its rhythms just enough to reinterpret the music through a less predictable finish, and other times an arrangement ends so suddenly the audience isn’t quite sure the music’s over until the last echoing notes have faded and the room falls eerily still. Either way, the song is done. Elizabeth stood just inside the door, staring at the tiny bike and stretch of twine. Her face was wan, more tired than I could ever remember seeing her before, cast over with sobering shades of resignation, and sizing up the situation in the aftermath of what happened at the Music School, she said, “Bird tricks, Bailey?”
“I can explain.”
“That’s all right.”
“About what happened,” I got up from my knees, stood a few feet away on the opposite side of the twine. I wanted to apologize and make sense of what went wrong, but unsure what I could say, I held out the bike like a sacrificial offering, my hands trembling as Liz shook her head and I tossed the toy into the chair. Clarence moved toward Elizabeth, who reached down and scooped him up, setting him on her shoulder. A car honked on the street. A set of tires squealed. I stood in the center of the floor, the space between us only a few feet yet we seemed to be communicating across a broad chasm. “Quite a show,” Liz said.
“I’m truly sorry.”
“For what?”
“Elizabeth.”
“You played exactly as you wanted. Like always.”
“But I didn’t. What happened was a fluke.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It was stage fright, nothing more,” I tried to think of something clever to say, was prepared to go to the piano and perform whatever she wanted to hear, but she was already cutting me off, raising her hand and saying, “Enough.”
“You don’t understand.”
“But that’s just it, I do. I should have paid attention before when you were trying to finish your dissertation. I should have known then what you were telling me.”
“I wasn’t trying to tell you anything.”
“Yes, you were.”
“Liz.”
“And you have. It’s obvious you’re not happy, Bailey.”
“What are you talking about? Of course, I’m happy.”
“No.”
“I’m trying.”
“You shouldn’t have to try so hard.”
“Playing, I mean. It just isn’t coming as easily as I hoped.”
“No, it isn’t,” her tone was barbed. She glanced at her false hand, then back up. “I shouldn’t have put you in a position to disappoint me,” a curious confession. “As for the rest,” she spoke as if she’d thought everything through well in advance, “it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“What is? This? But that’s not true. I didn’t want any of it. That’s crazy.”
“You’re making yourself crazy.”
“But I’m trying to change.”
“Why, if you’re so happy?”
“Wait. You’re confusing what I’m saying,” I paced through the space where the string hung, struggling to make myself clear, only Liz cut me off and said again, “Tonight’s exactly what you wanted. All those people, Bailey. Dr. Kabermill came off looking like an ass. You forced yourself to fail without a thought of what it meant to his reputation, and why? Because you can’t trust yourself to want anything. You chose playing Roslavets because you knew, more than your dissertation, more than anything else, promising to take your music seriously was the surest way to get to me. You knew screwing up would be the perfect way to show me how miserable you are.”
“Elizabeth, no. That’s not it at all,” I argued as best I could, challenged the accuracy of her contention by insisting, “You have it all wrong. I admit I messed up. I know I’ve been driving us both crazy these last few weeks. It’s all my fault but everything’s been such an aberration.”
“What has? How you played? The way you’ve been acting? But there’s no such thing, Bailey. How can anything you do be aberrant? Everything’s real, don’t you get it?”
I watched her walk to the window where the moon outside was silver white, and scared, I whispered, “This isn’t what I want.”
Elizabeth heard and turned around. There was a moment then where I might have salvaged a brief reprieve, a half second when opportunity offered me a way to make amends if I could only answer what Liz asked next. “Tell me then, what do you want?”
How to explain? (I still can’t.) For despite the chance, I failed to say a word.
Elizabeth reacted to my aphonia by taking hold of her right arm with her left, just below the elbow where her prosthesis fit over her stump, and removing her arm she placed it on the floor. Not finished, she pulled off her shirt, framing in full view the absence of her limb. I stared at her nakedness, at her shoulders and belly and breasts, her arms in their eternal state of non-symmetry like two sides of a Picasso painting where the difference in shapes composed a unique harmony of interdependence. Viewing her half arm alone, I felt the insult of her amputation exactly as she intended, the violence of her injury a raw spectacle, her right arm hanging partway down her side, the end rounded off with a patchwork of flesh covering truncated bone, her condition infinite and without cure. By exposing her fractured form to me, the sight of her said, “There, you see, Bailey? Look at me and still I’m able to choose. I still know what I want!”
Here then was the difference between us.
I picked up her prosthesis from the floor, went to the bed, and set it on the pillow. Next I knelt and handed Liz back her shirt. I ached with the need to tell her more, but the moment had passed. Clarence returned to Liz’s shoulder and together they moved to the window where Liz pried away the screen, and cupping the bird against her cheek, she whispered something in his ear. Clarence strutted to the end of her arm which Liz extended out over the street. When she whistled, he took off. I rushed to the window where I looked overhead and up into the trees. Elizabeth whistled again, and from out of nowhere Clarence instantly reappeared. I was astonished. (How was such a thing possible?) Elizabeth stared at me mournfully. “Even a bird knows to do what it wants,” she said, and with her arm still extended outside, she had Clarence perform the trick twice more.
The first cool breeze of night blew against my neck and I trembled as I came from the window. The air in my apartment chilled as Clarence flew to my piano while Liz gathered up her things and walked into the hall. I left the screen out of the window and soon Clarence disappeared as well. After a time, I stumbled back and sat in my chair.