I sat on the examination table, shivering in the white paper gown. I had strep throat again, I knew it, even without the throat culture. One of the things I liked about our family doctor was that he listened when you told him these things. He was tall and stooped and handsome, in a quiet way, and if you weren’t feeling well, he looked genuinely sorry to hear it.
There was a knock on the door. “Oh, no,” Dr. Melchek said, coming into the room. “Not you again.”
“Oh, yes.”
I’d had strep throat off and on for over a year. I hadn’t really minded it because it meant that I could stay home from school. But this was different. It was August; I’d graduated from high school in June. I’d been accepted at the Peabody Conservatory, and I was supposed to leave for Baltimore in just a few more days.
“How’s the piano-playing?” Dr. Melchek said, as he swabbed out my throat.
“Fine,” I said, trying not to gag.
My Peabody audition had been a series of firsts: my first time seeing the Atlantic Ocean, my first time in a taxicab, my first time exposed to people my age who were as focused on their music as I was. Students came to Peabody from all over the world, and I listened to the jostle of languages in the corridors—Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese—the way I might have listened to a twentieth-century composer, alternately wincing and wondering at the unexpected sounds. Even English sounded different here, seasoned with Spanish, Yiddish, Korean. Outside the Conservatory walls, in the streets, I heard native Baltimore voices, liquid sounds and singing tones. I luxuriated in new diphthongs, in fresh highs and lows, marveled at the way people called to each other, multisyllabic names ringing out like bells. I saw yarmulkes and dreadlocks; I saw saris and African robes. I ate grape leaves and gyros, curries and egg rolls, steaming platters of crab legs, bagels encrusted with poppy seeds and salt. Three weeks later, when the acceptance letter came, I’d canceled my remaining auditions and started to pack right then and there. Much to my mother’s amusement, I kept the open suitcase at the foot of my bed, and this is what I lived out of—leaving my dresser drawers empty—until it was time to leave for Maryland.
“How are your arms holding up?” Dr. Melchek asked.
I held them out. He pressed his thumbs up and down the length of my forearms.
“Any tenderness?”
I shrugged. “A little.”
“Do the ice baths help?”
I nodded. Twice a day, I emptied the ice tray into the kitchen sink, then filled the basin and submerged my arms. After recitals, when no ice was handy, I did my soda pop routine, buying a couple of cold cans and stuffing them down my sleeves. My arms were fine. Or, at least, they weren’t any different than they always were. Sometimes they burned. Sometimes they buzzed. Other times they were silent.
“Anything else?” Dr. Melchek said.
I hesitated. My mother had wanted me to mention my legs, but I felt stupid bringing it up. It wasn’t something that happened very often. Just once in a while, like after I went jogging two days in a row, or climbed the steep hill that led from the downtown to Saint Mary’s Church. A few hours later, my legs would start to burn. Just like my arms, when I practiced too much. It didn’t always happen, and it never lasted more than a day or so. It always went away.
Dr. Melchek waited.
“My legs hurt sometimes after I run,” I said.
He pressed his thumbs along my shins, the way he’d done with my arms. “Anything?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said.
Dr. Melrose raised his eyebrows. “Try more walking and less running,” he said.
“OK.”
I was eager to get the prescription and go. I didn’t want him to think I was one of those people who was always sick, always convinced that something was wrong, someone like Grandma Ansay. Of course, something was wrong with my grandmother—she’d never regained full use of her right side after the stroke, and her speech was garbled, exhausting—but everyone seemed to think she might have overcome these things, if she’d done her physical therapy, if she’d tried a little harder. At any rate, she only made things harder on herself, shutting herself away. People felt sorry for her, but they got annoyed with her, too. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t do anything. She could watch television, for Pete’s sake. She could read. She could go out onto the patio, take in a little sunshine, instead of sitting indoors all the time.
On my way home from Dr. Melchek’s, I stopped in to see her one last time, careful to conceal my prescription deep inside my backpack. No one in my family had ever caught one of my strep infections, but I knew that if my grandmother found out I was sick, she’d develop a sore throat on the spot.
The house was dark, the curtains drawn. I rang the bell, waited, rang the bell again. My grandfather answered the door when he was home, but he spent as much time as he could out of the house, playing cards at the senior citizens’ center. Guiltily, I hoped that my grandmother would decide it wasn’t worth the bother of getting up, but after several minutes, she appeared at the door.
“Come, come,” she said, motioning me to follow her through the foyer into dark, stale air. When I snapped on the lamp beside her parlor chair, I saw that she was crying, had been crying, perhaps, for most of the day. This was not unusual. My grandmother’s grief was endless. Now she continued to weep, her rosary pooled in her lap, as I chattered about the courses I expected to take at Peabody, the letter I’d gotten from the girl who would be my roommate, steadfastly ignoring her tears the same way that my grandfather and parents did. If you asked her what was wrong, it only made her cry harder, and what was the point of that? If you asked her where it hurt, she’d say, “Hurt! Hurt!” and wave her good hand up and down the length of her body—an accusation, a strange benediction, I did not want to know which.
The Peabody Conservatory stood directly across from the George Washington Monument in Charles Square, a once-grand historic neighborhood that had been swallowed up into Baltimore’s sprawling red light district. The Conservatory itself was a physical haven—nicknamed, affectionately, the cloister—enclosed by gates and a high stone wall surrounding a private courtyard. The entrance was monitored by security guards and video cameras but, from time to time, an intruder still managed to slip through. Whenever this happened, the resident assistant, a dark-eyed flutist nearly as slender as her instrument, ran up and down the halls telling us to stay in our rooms with the doors locked. Outside, drug dealers lounged on the bus stop benches; panhandlers stood on the corners, rattling cups. If they didn’t like the looks of you, they’d follow you for blocks, alternately wheedling and cursing.
My first week at the Conservatory, a man offered me money for sex. I’d been returning from the Korean market a block away from campus. It was midmorning; the streets were filled with people. When he said hello, I did what I would have done in Port Washington: I smiled, returned his greeting. The next thing I knew, he was pressing a wad of bills into my palm, trying to steer me toward the open car door where two of his friends sat waiting. His touch wasn’t rough, but brotherly, cajoling, as if we were playing a game. “Sir?” I said, not wanting to be rude, worried that I might be overreacting. “Excuse me, sir?”
Then I woke up. I dropped the money and took off running and I didn’t stop until I’d dashed through the gates of the Conservatory, where the security guard dozed over his gun, across the main courtyard and through the cafeteria and up the back stairs to the third floor of the women’s dorm. There, I burst into my room and gasped, “A man offered me money to get in his car!”
My roommate, Leigh, looked up with interest. “How much?”
“That’s not the point,” I said.
“Did you keep it?”
“Of course not!”
Leigh sighed dramatically. Her face assumed the expression of a world-weary parent. “You spoke to him, right?” she said.
I could not deny it. “He spoke to me first.”
Another sigh. “What did I tell you about making eye contact? Do we have to go over this again?”
Leigh was a soprano. She’d already found a boyfriend, a bass player who liked to walk on the furniture in the dormitory lounge, pretending he was the Pink Panther. They’d met at a party during the first week of classes. “You look like a television,” he’d told Leigh, “the way you turn on and off.” That was it, they had fallen in love—despite the general disapproval of everyone in the women’s dorm. How could Leigh make time for a relationship without cutting into her singing? What would happen down the road, when their careers pulled them different ways? We were all, I think, a little in love with Leigh ourselves. She had long dark hair and button-black eyes, perfect pitch and an impressive Grateful Dead collection. Her hobbies included riding motorcycles and dressing up in period costumes to attend Revolutionary War reenactments. And me? I had no hobbies. Sunday mornings, I went to Mass at Saint Ignatius, the little church around the corner and, during the week, I lit candles at the grand Basilica across from the city library. Every morning, I rolled out of bed and onto my knees, where I made the sign of the cross and said an Our Father and a Hail Mary. I did these things automatically, unselfconsciously, the way I brushed my teeth and combed my short, overpermed hair. Why they’d paired the two of us as roommates was beyond me, but I was endlessly grateful. Leigh looked out for me, and I clung to her as if she were a Sherpa guide.
Now she put up one graceful finger, warning me to wait, and left the room. Within a minute, she was back with Susan, the third spoke in our snug little wheel. Together, she and Leigh gave me yet another lecture on city etiquette: if you must carry a purse, wear the strap across your chest, don’t just loop it over your shoulder; keep your cash separate from your credit cards and ID; keep a spare ten in your shoe so that even if a mugger gets your cash, you can still grab a taxi home; don’t give change to panhandlers; don’t talk to strangers; don’t look at strangers; if somebody starts to follow you, make a scene, don’t worry about embarrassing yourself.
“For Pete’s sake, I’m not stupid,” I said, but my long Midwestern vowels only caused them to collapse into fits of giggles. “Say, ‘Jeez!’” they begged me. “Say, ‘Goh hohme.’ Say, ‘Parrk the carr!’”
Now I was laughing, too. What had happened five minutes earlier seemed every bit as unreal, as unrelated to my life, as everything else that happened out there in what we called the real world, the world that did not revolve around music, the world we had voluntarily left behind.
As a child, I’d daydreamed about becoming a nun, alternately tantalizing and terrifying myself with the thought that I might have a vocation, a calling from God. The Conservatory was very much like what I’d imagined then, a clear-cut, stripped-down little world that simplified your choices, retooled your life around one single, burning thing. We studied music theory, music history, music composition, and conducting. We declared both a major and minor instrument, and prepared recitals in both. We took private lessons, group lessons, master classes, ensemble; we hired ourselves out as ringers in church choirs and local orchestras, gigged at restaurants and coffee shops and bars. Few of us went out on dates, and if we did, we dated other music majors. Some of us held part-time jobs—I ushered at the nearby Morris Mechanic Theater—and if somebody wanted a nonmusic course in math or science or literature, they could always ride a shuttle bus to Johns Hopkins University, with which the Conservatory was affiliated. But mostly, we stayed on campus, in the cloister. Set apart from the distractions of daily life.
Occasionally, a group of us ventured out for breakfast at Sam’s, a diner across the street where cockroaches raced up and down the walls. Less frequently, we’d walk down Charles Street to the harbor, where we shopped and watched the street performers. Saturday nights, we might put on our Peabody Conservatory sweatshirts and skulk around outside the Joseph Myerhoff Symphony Hall, alert for someone with an extra ticket: the man whose baby-sitter had canceled and whose wife insisted he come alone; the woman whose friend had the flu; the widow whose husband had died at the beginning of the concert season. When people saw we were Conservatory students, they often gave up their extra ticket for a token amount, if anything at all. “And what instrument do you play?” they’d ask, sweeping us inside, one by one. “And what do you think of tonight’s program?”
Afterward, we’d meet in the lobby, then walk back to campus in a large, loose group. The streets always seemed to be shining from rain or, in summer, from the humidity; the sky overhead was a luminous orange. I didn’t know anything about light pollution, and for a long time I thought that the Baltimore sky changed color every night for some mysterious reason no one could explain. I loved that sky, that color. I loved the cobblestone streets, the thin sad faces of the row houses, the porches where families sat in hot weather, watching the world pass by. I loved the stink of the buses, the blast of air conditioning that ballooned in front of the banks and public buildings, the drawn, wary faces of men selling jewelry out of slender briefcases.
I loved the Conservatory itself, the sweeping marble stairway that led up toward the teaching studios, the shining black-and-white tiles in the lobby, the extraordinary architecture of the library. I loved the listening lab, the rows of headsets and record players, the tall shelves packed with thousands of recordings. I loved the student body, its range of eccentricities; the particularly robust soprano who’d come to breakfast in a pink, taffeta gown; the drag queens, who arrived for classes transformed by makeup and beautiful shoes; the punk rock trumpet player, who tied shut her broken instrument case with a padlock and chain. The practice rooms stayed open from six in the morning until two A.M. and the collision of so many instruments—an edgy, otherworldly sound—played in the background of every meal, every class, every conversation. It created a kind of living pedal point, a long, held note so constant I almost forgot to hear it, like the church bell at Saint Mary’s back home, ringing at intervals throughout the day. I could go for hours without noticing it, and then, for no particular reason, the sound would come clear: a reminder, a reference point, the tonic key. Home.
Our days began and ended with practice, a routine, a habit, that was very much like prayer. When we weren’t actually practicing, we were talking about it: how much we had left to do that day, the room we’d signed up for, the chances of finding extra time in a room nobody had claimed. Practice rooms were chosen every morning though what had come to be known as The Lottery. Promptly at six, a senior RA arrived with the sign-up sheets and a top hat filled with numbered pieces. One by one, we drew the number that determined the order in which we got to reserve the room we’d practice in that day. Drawing a low number meant an acoustically pleasant room with an excellent piano during prime hours. Drawing a high number meant you’d wouldn’t get to practice until the wee hours of the morning—unless you were willing to settle for a windowless studio with barely enough room to push back the piano bench, waves of sound thundering from wall to wall like the retort of a howitzer. These were the studios that housed the worst pianos, the crippled and infirm, the geriatric warhorses put out to pasture. Many had fallen victim to composition majors, who’d riddled the strings with paper clips and rubberbands, burned the hammer pads with cigarette lighters, and generally transformed what had been a passable instrument into an atonal misery.
My favorite room, when I could get it, was my piano teacher’s studio. It had two good pianos, each with a different action, and tall, west-facing windows that overlooked Charles Square. At night, resting my arms, I’d sit on the window ledge with my feet dangling over the three-story drop, watching the parade of expensive cars trolling up and down Charles Street, circling the Monument, coasting to a stop. Prostitutes stepped forward from the shadows then, silent as deer, and like deer they were long-legged and watchful, gangly in their teetering heels. They bent forward at the waist, pushed back their hair; they seemed to be waiting for something. At last, one would break from the rest to approach the idling car, and now a man’s hand would emerge, the glint of a wedding band, a languid elbow resting on the door frame.
My first year at Peabody, I was studying Brahms to my heart’s content, working my way through the intermezzi, and there were nights I could almost imagine I was conjuring scenes from the composer’s childhood, the seedy Hamburg district where he’d been raised. I loved to imagine him as an adolescent, walking home past the women on the corners, past the bars and beggars, a lonely figure made lonelier still by his talent, his singular, private vision. I loved to imagine his unreturned passion for Clara Schumann, how he’d lived his life alone—without lover or child—until it ended, one year after her death. I believed that the soul of an artist could only be wrought by such personal suffering, could only be redeemed by offering oneself up to Art and Art alone. By fulfilling every sacrifice it demanded. By remaking oneself as an empty vessel to be filled, and filled again.
As a child, I’d read and reread the Lives of the Saints, studying the martyrs as if their lives were a map I longed to follow: Saint Martina, who bled milk after the emperor cut off her breasts; Saint Fausta, who endured one thousand nails hammered into her skull; Saint Euphemia, whose limbs were ripped from her body. Now it was the lives of dead composers and living virtuosi I emulated, lingering over their hardships, their sacrifices, their pain. Practice and prayer, music and God, the discipline of the Conservatory and the discipline of the Church—over time, the two had become inextricably intertwined, for the truth was that I needed the first to maintain the second. Music was the purest language I knew, the bridge between what I was supposed to believe and what I knew in my heart to be true. And that truth, too frightening for me to fully acknowledge, was this: I was falling away from the Church. I was losing my faith.
Sunday after Sunday, I sat at the back of Saint Ignatius Church, trying my best not to argue with the gospel, with the priest’s homily, with the Bible’s glorification of violence, bigotry, intolerance. Little things irked me. I had not yet read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, but I, too, couldn’t understand why Christ would drive demons out of a man, only to inflict them on a herd of pigs. Why didn’t Christ just kill the demons, for Pete’s sake? I’d grown up with pigs. I liked pigs. Weren’t they God’s creatures, too? Then there was the story of Job, a good man tortured by God, just because He feels the testosterone urge to show off for the devil. And what about Martha’s sister, Mary, sitting at Christ’s feet? Mary, rubbing those feet with expensive oil and drying them with her hair? Clearly, Christ is enjoying himself like any other red-blooded man, for when Mary’s sister, Martha, points out that the oil might have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor, Christ tells her, in effect, to butt out. “The poor will always be with us,” he says, “but the son of man comes only once.”
Yeah, grumbled my brain, my old grandfather would come, if some babe sat between his knees that way, rubbing her hair between his toes.
Then I’d recollect myself. I was thinking about Christ, the Son of God. God, who could strike me dead if He felt like it. Shut up, shut up, I’d tell my brain, and when it rebelled, I flooded it with Hail Marys. I pinched my thigh beneath my Sunday skirt. I tried to prepare myself to take Communion, the actual body and blood of Christ, into the temple of the Holy Ghost that was my body.
So you’re a cannibal, is that it? jeered my brain.
It was hopeless. I fled the church in despair, returned to the practice rooms.
It was words, I finally decided, that were at the root of my trouble. How could you worship something as infinite as God with something as finite as language? No wonder I was tormented by doubts, contradictions, oxymorons that couldn’t be reconciled. Faith had to rise above all that while words, born of reason, pulled you down into the muck, rubbed your face in your own human quirks and questionings. I hated words, their gradations and shadings, the way a thing could be argued one way, slanted another, depending on who was using it. I’d left my required freshman comp course with a gentlewoman’s C, delighted by the thought that I’d never again have to analyze another poem, or story, or essay.
So then why couldn’t I stop analyzing my faith?
I made an appointment with the sweet old priest at Saint Ignatius, and together, we arrived at this analogy. The world was very much like a complicated piece of music. When you first saw the score, you couldn’t make sense of anything right away. It seemed chaotic, random, out of control. But if you broke everything down, page by page, stanza by stanza, over time you came to understand what sounds went where and why. You saw that the notes were a kind of path leading to a place you’d never seen before, and yet, had always been there, waiting for you to notice. The fault had been in the limitation of the beholder, not the breadth and scope of the view. That’s why it was important to trust God, who had a better view of things, a more complete picture, than you alone ever could.
I thanked the old priest gratefully. I wanted so desperately to believe what he was saying—for the sake of my soul, but also for the sake of my physical self. I wanted to believe that the same truth could apply to what was happening to me. My arms were growing more and more painful, and yet I forced myself to the practice rooms, where I put in four and five hours of practice each day. If it were God’s will for me to hurt this way, I would have to accept it as part of His plan. This, like all things, was happening for a reason, and all these reasons were born like seeds within the infinite mind of God.
The thought of ceasing to believe in such logic, of stepping away from it, of embracing my life as an open-ended mystery left me feeling as if I was falling, falling, like one of those dreams in which you wake up just before you land. How could you live in the world if you didn’t believe in cause and effect, in a greater pattern and purpose? If you didn’t trust that the trials you faced were designed for you specifically by a loving and all-knowing God? This idea got complicated whenever I thought about things like droughts and plagues and genocide, so, well, I simply didn’t think about those things. No, I believed in my own self-importance; I believed in the sparrow’s fall. If I tripped walking out of music theory, there must be a reason beyond my own embarrassment: a lesson to be learned, a purposeful delay that would keep me from arriving in the next moment ahead of schedule. I thanked God for allowing me to trip. I put myself fully into His hands. Everything was a sign of his favor or, at least, His recognition, and if I wasn’t able to interpret these signs, the fault could be only my own.
“Can I ask you something?” Susan said one day as we came back from the showers. “Why do you keep a penny pinned to your underwear?”
A penny? Could she mean my old Saint Benedict medal, which I still wore, hanging it from a little gold pin? Each pair of underwear I owned had a series of pinprick holes around the waistband; when I showered, I held the medal in my mouth, so that I wouldn’t be parted from it even for a moment. I tried to explain about Saint Benedict, about the vow I’d taken when I was a child, about protection from Satan. I tried, and then I stopped. It all sounded ridiculous. It was ridiculous and, yet, I couldn’t let it go.
“I wear it,” I told her honestly, fighting tears, “because I am afraid to take it off.”
Susan nodded kindly, diplomatically. She was, by her own definition, ‘culturally Jewish.’ “You want me to sit with you while you try?”
We went to her room, still in our robes, and sat down on her bed. I unpinned my Saint Benedict medal and handed it to her. By now I was sobbing. I knew the devil was going to get me. I knew my arms were hurting as punishment for my doubts. I also knew that such thoughts were absolute nonsense. At last, I understood the Holy Trinity: three states of mind in one.
“Do you want it back?” Susan asked, but I shook my head. What I wanted was the smug security of my childhood faith, everything divided into rules and rows laid out as clearly as a cornfield. Ask and ye shall receive. Faith the size of a mustard seed grain. What I wanted was to return to the deep sleep of that faith. What I wanted was my arms to feel better.
Even in the fall of my sophomore year, when I had to start wearing night splints, I did not cut back on my practicing. Conservatory students thought of themselves as athletes; no pain, no gain. I was careful to remove the splints before I left my room, so nobody would find out. Leigh knew about them, of course, the way she knew I’d been going to a sports medicine specialist at Johns Hopkins for ultrasound therapy and shots of cortisone. Susan knew about the splints, too, but nobody else did—not even my piano teacher. An actual injury was serious, but rumors of an injury could be equally damaging. When chamber music groups were assembled, when nominations for awards were announced, when lists declared which of us were eligible for scholarships and competitions, the names of the injured—those who were inconsistent, unreliable—were conspicuously absent.
Yet, injuries were commonplace, particularly among pianists, particularly among female pianists. A girl one floor down from me fractured her arm landing a Beethoven chord. Another suffered permanent nerve damage in her right fourth finger. Nearly everyone, regardless of their instrument, went to the practice rooms armed with a variety of compresses, wraps and Ace bandages, sports creams, and anti-inflammatories. The air reeked of Tiger Balm and Ben-Gay and Aspercreme. In the dorms, there was always someone lying on a heating pad. We scheduled appointments for vitamin shots and physical therapy and Swedish massage, and when these treatments failed, we caught the train to D.C. where there was an acupuncturist—his telephone number was passed hand to hand—who gave discounts to Conservatory students. And if Dr. Xu couldn’t help you, well, then you gritted your teeth and played through. Now and then, somebody else would pack up their dorm room and head back home, ostensibly to return after a semester of “rest,” which meant we would never see them again. We mourned them, of course, but recovered soon enough to squabble over the gigs they’d abandoned, the seats they’d vacated in the various ensembles. There was always a sense that the people who left were the ones who hadn’t wanted it enough, the ones who hadn’t been hungry. We, the survivors, were the hungry ones. We were eager to be tested, to prove ourselves. We were in our teens and early twenties, the age when you believe you control your own life like a beautiful kite on the end of a string.
My hero that fall was one of the master instructors, an internationally renowned pianist who’d been unable to perform for a decade until, thanks to est and lecithin, the tendinitis in his hands began to heal. A comeback performance had already been scheduled with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for the spring. It was to be a gala event, and everybody talked about the way a lesser man would have given up, packed in the towel, settled into an honorable teaching career. Whenever the burning in my forearms and wrists forced me to pause during a lesson, my own instructor reminded me of the master instructor’s difficulties—and his upcoming triumph.
“It takes heart,” my instructor would say, spraying my outstretched arms with a topical analgesic she ordered from Germany. It came in a slender, silver can, and it felt like ice when it hit your skin. She kept a second can by the door so you could blast yourself when you first came in. “Do you have heart? Because if you don’t, get the hell off the Good Ship Lollipop.”
She had two stock lectures she administered to students in her studio, reinoculating us throughout the semester. The first, and most frequent, was Never End Up a Teacher. The second was Never Marry for Love. “Marry for love,” she’d say, “and you’ll spend your life raising puppies.”
They didn’t make women like that in Wisconsin. I adored her. If she’d told me to practice with thumbtacks pushed into my fingertips, I’d probably have obeyed.
She was somewhere in her thirties and dramatically beautiful, and when I looked at the man she’d married—a bulbous old fool of a violinist who spent most of his energy attempting to seduce his undergraduates—it was clear she was in no danger of falling victim to anybody’s charms. Her career as a performer had come to an end because of chronic back pain; she often walked with a cane. On particularly bad days, she stood through the lesson. On worse days still, she paced, her breath coming in hard little puffs. I left the studio feeling as if my own pain was nothing but an excuse, a symptom of my own lack of focus. I resolved to work harder. I ate lecithin like gumdrops. I got another round of cortisone shots, swallowed aspirin until my ears rang, renewed my prescriptions for anti-inflammatories and then lied to the doctor about the side effects: abdominal pain, diarrhea, weight loss. I even visited the acupuncturist, but by the end of my third semester, I couldn’t shampoo my hair properly because I couldn’t keep my arms raised above my head that long. Instead, I slapped the shampoo on my head, then stood directly under the shower stream, hoping the force of the water would drill the soap into my hair.
Fortunately, I could keep my arms at waist level while I was playing the piano, but other problems were cropping up: holding a pencil to take notes, gripping a knife to cut meat, lowering something down from my high closet shelf. Trying to run scales, I slurred notes hopelessly, and there were times my hands grew so numb I had to look to see where they were. When I spoke to my parents on the phone, the receiver kept slipping out of my grasp.
“Fine, everything’s fine,” I said. “Just dropped the phone.”
And then there were the problems I was having with, well, my legs. Who had ever heard of such a thing? My legs weren’t nearly as bad as my arms, but if I walked too far too fast, they’d start to burn, and when I jogged, it took several days to recover. Pain up and down my shins, along the insides of my legs from ankle to knee, sometimes across the top of my feet, particularly my right foot. Sometimes, this foot didn’t quite want to pull up after I’d take a step, and this mystified and embarrassed me.
Now I was truly frightened. Was I psychosomatically ill? I made another appointment with the sports medicine specialist I’d been seeing at Johns Hopkins. He injected my wrists and elbows with more cortisone and had me fitted with new wrist braces I was supposed to wear while I was practicing, writing, cutting up food. Then he sent me to another specialist, a neurologist, who had me walk around the exam room so that he could evaluate my gait. He asked me to close my eyes and touch my nose. He pricked my feet with pins and asked if it felt dull or sharp.
“Your right foot gets tired?” he said. He thought about it for a moment. “Which foot do you use to work the pedals on the piano?”
“The right, mostly,” I said.
“Try using your left foot instead.”
I felt stupid for bringing it up.
In December 1983, I headed home to Wisconsin for winter break. There, for the next three weeks, I took my health seriously. I forced myself to take a break from the piano—no cheating, no short sessions, nothing. I wore my wrist braces every day. I washed down the anti-inflammatories with milkshakes and big, starchy meals, trying to console my stomach. Mornings, I slept late; afternoons, I visited relatives; nights, I watched videos with friends. I spent a week out at Grandma Krier’s farm, sleeping beside her in the old double bed just as I had when I was younger. She had sent a check to Rome in November, after my mother had first told her about the problems I was having. Any day now, she assured me, a Mass would be said for my intentions. Any day now, I should be feeling better.
And by the end of my vacation, I could report, truthfully, that I did feel much better than I had. I was sleeping through the night again; my arms and legs no longer woke me with their buzz and burn. I could walk all the way from her house to Great Uncle Joe and Aunt Eleanor’s, a quarter mile down the road, and sit in their living room quite comfortably, admiring their Christmas tree.
“Take it easy,” my mother pleaded with me as she drove me back to the airport. I promised I would, and I kept that promise. Back in Baltimore, I took the bus to my part-time job at the theater. I practiced no more than two hours a day. But within a few weeks, all my symptoms had returned. I couldn’t keep up with my piano lesson preps, and in March, I withdrew from ensemble. I relied on the braces more and more, not only at the piano, but taking notes, raising and lowering my cereal spoon, anything that required repetitive motion. By now, my injuries were common knowledge, impossible to conceal, and when midsemester grades came due, my teacher told me that the time had come to stop making excuses.
“I understand,” I said, forcing myself to look unconcerned. We’d just spent yet another lesson on music theory, because I hadn’t been able to prepare that week’s assignment.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “I’m giving the A you would have had, if it weren’t for all this.” She waved her hands at my braces.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “Listen to me. If this doesn’t resolve itself soon, you’ll need to rethink your major.” She gave me a hard, keen look that wasn’t without sympathy. “There’s a good music therapy program at Hopkins,” she said. “I had a student several years back who transferred, graduated on schedule, got a job working at a clinic somewhere. A good job. Something with autistic children. I could make a few calls.”
It had been a long time since she’d talked to me about the master instructor, held up his difficulties as an example, reminded me that all it took was heart—an omission that seemed particularly telling, for his comeback performance was only a week away. You couldn’t open up the local paper without seeing something about it. There were posters up on every bulletin board. There’d been an interview on public radio. Did she think I’d lost my drive? Did she think I wanted to settle down and raise puppies? I couldn’t believe that she, of all people, was suggesting I become a teacher.
“That will not be necessary,” I said. I spoke as firmly as I could. “I’m going to get better.”
“Of course you’re going to get better,” she snapped. “But when? Because you don’t have two, three, five years to wait. If you’re going to have a career, things need to happen for you now. You’ve already lost a semester, and frankly, I don’t foresee any improvement.”
I left the studio furious, determined to show my teacher she was wrong. Who was to say I wouldn’t recover? Who was to say this wouldn’t be just one of many marvelous anecdotes I’d tell some day, after I became successful, after I’d demonstrated the power of positive thinking? The master instructor’s public radio interview had been filled with such marvelous anecdotes. He was practicing hard these days, getting ready; I sometimes sat outside his practice room door to listen. I figured that if I couldn’t practice myself, the next best thing was hearing somebody else at work, following along with the score. I got permission to sit in on friends’ lessons. I spent hours in the listening lab, memorizing concertos and symphonies.
Susan offered to teach me how to hypnotize myself. Her father, a psychiatrist, had taught her how to do it, and she hypnotized herself before performances so that she wouldn’t feel nervous. First thing in the morning and last thing at night, I sat with my eyes rolled back in my head, suggesting affirmations to my subconscious. My wrists feel warm and good. My hands are powerful and strong.
On the night of the master instructor’s comeback performance, I walked to the symphony hall alone. Months earlier, I’d splurged on a single orchestra seat, and now I kept my hand in my pocket so I could feel the ticket between my fingers. For once, I wouldn’t be scrounging for a ticket, worrying about whether or not I’d get in and where, if I did, I would sit. It was a warm April night, and I wore only my Peabody sweatshirt over a loose, flowing skirt, cotton tights, and lace-up boots, a dozen cloth bracelets on my wrists. My hair had grown long and, since leaving home, I’d learned to wear it straight. Tonight, I’d pulled it back with a ribbon. I wore earrings and perfume. I’d fussed in a way that I almost never fussed, and I’d left early so I could be there to watch the concert hall fill up.
All day, my mouth had been dry, the way it always got before my own performances. In a sense, this was my own performance; at least, this is what I had come to believe. For if everything went well, I would understand that my own pain had been but a momentary setback, something that would pass. I had prayed over this and fasted over this and now I believed it with all my heart. I wasn’t expecting a miracle—no. Just a wing-brush of God’s compassion, an easing of this terrible uncertainty I felt I could no longer bear. Tonight, I would finally have an answer to the question I’d been asking for months: do I still have a future in music? And so I was going to the concert. I would listen with an open heart. I would drink the notes into my aching arms like medicine.
“If a child asks his father for bread,” I reminded myself, “will he hand him a scorpion?”
I arrived just as the doors were opening. The crowd pressed forward, catching me with it, sweeping me inside on a wave of bow ties and black dresses and pearls. By the time I found my seat, the orchestra was already half full, and when I turned around, I saw the crowds surging into the balconies. Good concerts give you chills; great concerts give you chills before they even begin. It was clear that this was going to be one of the greats, a night to remember. When the lights came down and the master instructor stepped onto the stage, a collective ah! rose from the audience, a single exhalation of joy. The applause didn’t build; it simply arrived like a good, hard rain, continued as if it could go on all night. A few people shouted Bravo! but the master instructor lifted his hands a little—please, please, he seemed to be saying—and then seated himself at the piano, where he waited for the crowd to settle down. Still, the applause drummed the air. The conductor grinned like a schoolboy. People all around me, strangers, were exchanging nods and smiles. See, we all were saying to each other, there he is, he’s back. I reminded myself of the old priest’s analogy. Even I could see, now, that all those years of misery had had their purpose Without them a moment this sweet, this grand, could never have existed.
At last, the conductor raised his baton. We all leaned forward. The concerto began. But ten minutes into the first movement, the clean lines of the master instructor’s melodies started to blur. People behind me murmured uneasily; heads moved side to side. The conductor gradually slowed the tempo, but by the time the master instructor had arrived at the cadenza, I could see very clearly how his right hand was refusing to articulate, how the fourth and fifth fingers kept knuckling under. Still, he lumbered along, a Herculean effort, until he reached the bitter end only slightly behind the orchestra. His face was slick with sweat as he rose, clutching his right hand with his left, as if to wring out the pain. The applause sounded different than it had before. It rose into shrillness and kept on rising, an unpleasant, pitying sound. Again and again, the master instructor bowed—helplessly, automatically, unable to creep away—and I saw in his rigid expression something of my own face, my own determination, my own belief that, with enough will, enough faith, anything was possible. Here, standing before me, was a ghost of the best future I might hope for, an endless cycle of hope and despair, false starts, comebacks that were never fully realized. And even that, I knew, was far more than would be my portion. The master instructor had been trained by other master instructors since his childhood; he’d developed his injuries at the height of a young, but brilliant, career. My own career had barely begun and, to be fair, I had never been any kind of genius. I was yet another talented student, one of hundreds, full of heart.
I stood up and began climbing over people’s knees, desperate to escape. Outside, the air had cooled; the streets were steaming, surreal. I walked like somebody in a dream, not heading anywhere in particular. Men called to me, a nagging fugue that waxed and waned: Hey baby, hey sweetheart, nice legs, like to see what’s between ’em. For the past two years, day or night, alone or with other women, I had not once stepped out from behind the Conservatory walls and not heard that same ugly music, a variation on the same theme I’d heard from the wrestlers in high school. An embellishment of what I saw on TV, in movies, in slick magazines. The flip side of the Church’s focus on female virginity, chastity, purity. In the past, I’d always assured myself that I was above all such imagery. Church or street, Madonna or whore, I was, after all, an artist. It had nothing to do with me.
Except that it did. Or at least, from now on, it would.
Hey baby, hey sweetheart. Show us your tits.
Who would I be without the piano? Legs and arms, a body, a face—all of it without meaning beyond the dull physical facts? Your body is God’s temple floated into my head, a reflex like a sob, but the words meant nothing. They rattled inside my emptiness like stones dropped into a can. I would have to stop playing the piano, I understood that now. I would leave the Conservatory at the end of the school year. As for the Catholic Church, I realized I’d left that long ago; I’d merely been clinging to the shreds out of fear, obligation, habit. Let it go, I told myself and, amazingly, I did. The whole anxiety-ridden knot of it floated up out of my hands and into the sky, carrying my music along with it.
For the first time in my life, there was nothing but silence in my head. No thoughts of music. No thoughts of God. How would I ever fill such a space? Who would I become? I was falling through the streets of Baltimore, falling through the surface of the earth. Only this time I wasn’t dreaming, I wasn’t sleeping, I was waking up and, try as I might, I would never go back to sleep again. Even my name, Ann, Ann Manette, tasted unfamiliar in my mouth.
A man had been trailing me in his car; now he rolled down his window, offered me fifty bucks to get in. Sixty dollars. Seventy-five. “That would pay for a whole lot of music books,” he said, and I spun around to look at him before I remembered I was wearing my Peabody sweatshirt.
“Made you look,” the man said, laughing. He was white, middle-aged, handsome. He wore a light coat open over his business suit and tie. A fat gold wedding band. He could have been my father. He could have been someone who cared about me. He was somebody’s husband, somebody’s child, and I wanted to get in his car, to sit beside him, to tell him everything. He must have seen that in my face and misunderstood.
“One hundred dollars,” he said. “C’mon, that’s more than you’re worth.”
I believed him. I burst into tears, startling us both.
“Hey,” he began, but I was already running, and I ran until I got to Charles Street, where it was crowded and bright and safe. I went into a coffee bar where I tried to collect myself, while the waiters—beautiful and muscled and gay—brought me water and tissues, a glass of wine, rubbed my shoulders and called me honey and promised to seriously mess up whoever it was who had hurt me.
But no, I wasn’t hurt. No, there wasn’t anything anybody could do. When no one was looking, I left money on the table and hurried outside onto Charles Street. Then I headed back toward the Conservatory, legs aching from the running I’d done, swinging my right foot a little to keep from tripping on the toe.