“PLEASE, PLEASE—I’D LIKE TO HEAR SOME nuance,” Hopper said, cutting me off in mid-measure of a Mozart scherzo. He stood staring out the window of the practice room. “You do know what nuance means, don’t you, Jack?”
Where was the kindly old guy from registration day? I guess now that they had us trapped up here, they could all summon the dark side.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.” Terrific. Music is the one thing that cools me out, and this dude was already warping it.
This is how the piano thing happened: My thumbs and pinkies can span nine notes, which is one more than an octave, which is unusual. Also for some reason, I can listen to a keyboard solo from the Old Days, like Steve Winwood or Stevie Wonder, just once, and play it back note for note within a couple of seconds. Some people are good at languages or building seawalls made of garbage. I’m good at parroting notes.
I hadn’t found any modern music I really liked, because it all just sounded like the songs they play at the beginning or the end of cable TV shows, and those usually don’t have keyboard parts anyway. I liked jam bands because they went in all kinds of directions, so they were bound to hit on original-sounding stuff, but there are only so many thirteen-minute Trey Anastasio solos you can listen to.
Anyway, in sixth grade, my piano teacher had said that I showed “unusual promise,” and two days later, I was taking private lessons from a “top-top” Juilliard faculty guy, but all he taught me were these songs from three hundred years ago that seemed like the music was written for the kind of dances you see in those movies where everyone has wigs and Keira Knightley wears gowns. They sounded like they’d been written by a math software program. You could predict every measure.
Then one day a piano showed up in our living room—not that any of our rooms ever looked lived in—and that was kind of the game changer. It was a pretty old secondhand Steinway, but it made me feel like I had new hands or something. If I pressed the keys one way, the sound came back one way. If I pressed differently, the sound came back different. It was kind of like the keys and I were talking. They were ivory, which wasn’t cool, but I’d never actually seen an elephant’s tusks, so it didn’t bother me a lot.
I just couldn’t find anything I wanted to play on it. Anything that was my own.
So I practiced songs written by a lot of really, really, really old guys, pieces with names like “Moonlight Sonata,” and half the time, I was glad to get to the end. I liked the blues best. Well, I liked the sound of them. But the blues of a rich kid from Park Avenue aren’t, like, really all that . . . blue.
• • •
This time I made it through about five measures before the voice sliced through the music. “I want to hear some articulation,” the guy said, turning slowly, for effect. “Lefferts, let’s get something straight here. I don’t care about your technique. Technique is a given at Oakhurst Hall. But soul? Soul is not a given. I’d like to hear some soul. You do have a soul, don’t you, Lefferts?”
What was this, a cult? Break the kid down until he’s a robot? If this guy was so good, what was he doing at a prep school? And taking out the frustrations of his stupid life on me?
Although, at the moment, he did have a point: I was playing badly. I was nervous. Walking down the carpeted hall lined with photographs of kids from the past, none smiling, had sort of freaked me out. Classical musical riffs—brass, string, winds—were leaking out from behind every heavy door, each with a small, thick-glassed square window. Kind of like death row cells, only in a luxury prison.
And in Hopper’s studio, it didn’t help that I could hear someone perfectly playing all those crazy hammering chords from Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, even through the supposedly soundproofed wall.
“Lefferts?” Hopper said, bringing me back to the moment. “Are you with us?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just listening to that Tchaikovsky. Pretty good, huh?”
“Yes,” said Hopper. “Mario Miles is quite technically proficient. Now, please resume.”
This time I hit the keys too hard, like I was pushing a goddamned doorbell. Hopper let me finish the piece as he stared out the window.
“We can call it a day,” he said. “Or”—he turned around, took off his glasses, and wiped them with the broad end of his tie—“we can call it a year. We can terminate this relationship right now. It doesn’t feel to me like you’re putting any joy into this.”
Well, where, exactly, was I supposed to find it?
He put his glasses on again, and all I could see were the gray caterpillars of his eyebrows. “I will say this once. I do not give lessons at Oakhurst Hall because I need the work. I give lessons in the hope that my students will take their music as seriously as their predecessors did. You do know who has sat on that bench before you, I trust?”
Yeah, those stiffs out in the photographs. “Yes, I do. Believe me, sir. I do. I want to get better. I really do. I mean, find joy.”
“Then next week,” said Hopper, “when we begin to prepare your audition piece, we will both be on the same page, so to speak. I trust that you will have chosen your piece by next week?”
“Yessir. You trust right.” My audition piece? Jesus. What was this Thanksgiving concert? The Grammys? The Super Bowl?
I shot out into the hallway just as the door opened across the hall. The Tchaikovsky kid had a mop of seventies hair and an intense-looking face. He was wearing a black T-shirt with the Anarchy symbol on the front in white, black pants, black high-tops, and a black backpack slung over his shoulder. He was thin, without any muscles. “You must be Lefferts. I’ve got Latin. Let’s walk.” We started down the hall. “They’ve probably told you about me,” said Mario Miles. He had the feel of a kid who knew that the best way to deal with being on Oakhurst Hall’s social fringe was to pretend to not give a shit.
“Yeah, some,” I said.
“All bad, I hope?” Mario laughed. “I’m not as weird as they told you. Just a little . . . competitive. But then, you’d better be competitive in this place, right? As if Mikhail Tamarovich would have won at Leeds in ’99 if he’d gone to Choate or Groton.”
All I knew about Leeds was it was the Who’s best live album. “I don’t know if I’m really in it for prizes,” I said.
“Well, you are. You know McGregor? The admissions guy? His wife’s family helps endow the Van Cliburn. They invented, like, the paper clip or something. So Carlton’s going to get Oakhurst Hall a VC if it kills him. Can’t have a wife on campus who founded the Van Cliburn without winning one of your own. That’s why I got a full ride three years ago. Haven’t been First Piano at Thanksgiving yet. It’s make-or-break for this sicko.”
He smiled. I couldn’t tell what kind of smile it was. Then he said, “May the best man win.” We’d reached the heavy glass entrance doors to the building. Mario stepped ahead, opened the door like a comic doorman: “Maestro.” Then he skipped down the first few granite steps, stopped, and looked back. “So what’re you gonna play for your audition piece? Hopper thinks I’m gonna try the Rach 3 and make a fool of myself, so he can gloat and give it to you or some Korean enfant terrible who studied under whoever Korea’s Glenn Gould is. He thinks I’m addicted to the Russkies. But hell, how could you not be?”
“Sure,” I said. “Right.”
“But I’m gonna trip him up and go modern: Prokofiev’s second piano concerto, the third movement. Early twentieth-century classical—that’s where the money is, right? So what’s yours?”
I tried to be cool. “Maybe Beethoven’s seventh, second movement.”
• • •
“The infamous Mario Miles.” Caroline had come out of the music building behind us, carrying a flute case. “What were you guys talking about?”
“My ‘audition piece,’” I said. “So I guess this concert is big, huh?”
She sat down on the staircase. I was right next to her a second later.
“First Piano tours with the symphony over spring break in Europe,” she said. “My flute teacher said last year a kid named Ji-Hoon got it because Hopper taught him, and Mario doesn’t need a teacher. Everyone here is so scary good, right? We’re doing this thing Mendelssohn wrote when he was sixteen. You would not believe the other kids. I don’t think they get it, but they play it.” She checked her watch. “Oh, jeez. I’m late for Spanish.” She jumped to her feet.
I loved that: Oh, jeez.
“So how was your first lesson with Hopper?” she asked as we started to walk.
“Way intense,” I said. “I guess they forgot to tell me I was at Juilliard, and we’re playing Carnegie Hall at Thanksgiving. He didn’t like my ‘articulation.’ And I didn’t like the way he talked.”
We’d reached the languages building. “So, have you read Gatsby yet?” she said.
“Yeah. I finished it last night.” I actually had, sort of. At least, I’d read all the sentences she’d purpled, and her notes in the margins. She had that girl handwriting where you can read everything really clearly, and all the letters look like little happy cartoon characters.
“See ya,” she said, disappearing into the language building.
“Hope so,” I said.
Lame.