Here's another short story that I wrote during the Putney trip-- specifically while I was in Florence. It's called Piano. It's kind of dark and not as much my favorite as Jonah, but anyways....
Piano.
I don't really want to talk about it.
"Please Jay, its the first step."
Haha, first step towards what? Forgetting?
"Maybe. It depends."
...
I guess you could say I was happy when he died-- I've always hated my rotten old dad. You know what it was? It's because he always had to get his way. That's probably why she- my mom- left right after I was born. Since he was always overseas in Italy or France giving concerts and shit, it was probably pretty easy for her to get away. She left the useless baby for him, not that I wouldn't have done the same, you know? Still, that must've really pissed him off. What kind of concert pianist can drag a baby around while on tour? So he retired early, and in his frustration, dedicated 24 frickin' hours of every day to raising a prodigy-- me. He was always with me, pushing me... I'm not sure you can imagine the kind of 'childhood' I had. There were weeks where I practiced piano with him more than I slept. I wasn't aware that a life without piano existed. I was the best... I'm still the best...(laugh at the irony)... well.
That's besides the point. He died. But even as a corpse decomposing in a casket under several feet of dirt and rock, he still got his way in the end. The only way I'd ever get any money was after graduating from the conservatory for music. Trust me, if I could have made a living any other way, I would have...but piano was all I knew how to do. That's how I ended up continuing the life my dad had imposed on me even after he was dead and gone.
In some ways, I guess that was okay, since I ended up meeting her. As I expected, the old fools at the conservatory didn't even know half of what they babbled about. There was one geezer in particular that just got on my nerves. He was one of those soul-less "musicians" whose performance of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata sounded like an opera about the time he ate spicy ramen for lunch instead of the usual mild chicken-flavored ones. I told him that to his face. He "asked" in a rage that I demonstrate what the piece was supposed to sound like. Fortunately, it was a piece I'd read many times before, and I'd always wanted to play it-- just never got around to doing it until then.
That sure shut him up. (Laughs) It looked like he was choking on the same spicy ramen he had for lunch. I mean it was totally worth it, but after that rumours got circulated-- that I was the son of piano genius Christian Delfavaro. By the afternoon, craploads of students were following me around asking if I wanted to play little duets with them, or join their mediocre chamber groups, and just being plain annoying. By night time, I was done with it. I had another class taught by Professor spicy-ramen, so I thought I'd be considerate of him and give myself a free period.
In need of a little relaxing, I found the perfect place to just drink and wind down for a while. There was a deserted attic at the top of one of the older buildings on campus. I swung the creaking trap door shut as quietly as possible-- even so, it was still really loud. If the building wasn't almost always deserted, I would have been more worried. Anyways, it must have taken me a while to get my eyes adjusted to the shadyness of the attic because it wasn't until I was pretty drunk that I noticed an antique piano. For a forgotten piano, it was actually quite beautiful-- the little bit of light that shone through illuminated the ivory black and white keys.
It was weird. Probably just the wrong combination of alcohol and pent up sentimental crap, but in some sort of frenzy, I scrambled to the old piano to play my dad's waltz. I guess it's the one piece different from all the others I know. It's the only piece, if you can call it that, that my old man ever composed. It has no sheet music because he never wrote it down. He recorded it and made me listen to it more than a hundred thousand times, I swear. Until I could replicate his waltz perfectly, he wouldn't unlock the door to the practice room.
Back then I hardly heard anything I played-- reading music was easier than reading words to me. As such, learning it by ear was excrutiatingly painful. But music became better after that. After I started hearing really, piano was fun when I played for me only.
Anyways, I played his waltz, the only thing my dad ever left for me really, and it felt good to infuse my hatred for that man, for my life, and for the world that screwed me over into the piece.
(Pause, dry laugh)
'That sucked.'
Those were her first words to me. Yeah, I guess my performance probably did, but I didn't think anyone was listening. I asked her who the hell she was. She told me her name was Julie Roslin. She looked like a Julie-- kinda sweet-pretty, and real simple.
'Why aren't you in class' I asked. She told me that she was 'just looking around', so I said 'me too.'
She was weird, you know? Didn't even really think about why there was a guy in the attic of an abandoned building playing some crappy piece on a shitty out of tune piano. She just sat down next to me on the bench, looked at the keys for a good solid minute before she started to play his piece. My dad's waltz.
I mean, my specialty isn't playing by ear, but that piece took me a good week to learn perfectly. It's not a slow or predictable waltz-the opposite really, and here was this chick playing a piece that she could only have heard once.
'Its not as crappy a piece as you make it sound,' she told me when she finished playing it not only perfectly, but much better than I had ever played it.
I asked her how the hell she was doing that.
She grinned the smuggest grin, I swear. Then she said that 'Playing by ear was her specialty'. Hell. I was so excited that I started playing the most complex lines of my favorite pieces. Stravinsky's colorful Petroushka, Rachmaninoff's cold-winter concertos, Liszt's bell-like Campanella, she played them all--not just note for note, but with the same kind of articulation and phrasing that had taken me hours of studying to come up with. Listening to her play was unlike any other experience. There was nothing to critique. It was beyond that, it was perfect; her music made me happy in a way not even my own did. We didn't talk much... I would play a piece, then she would play it better. I must have dozed off to her playing Debussy because that was about all I could think about when I woke up leaned up against the wall. I thought of Debussy and about where Julie had gone.
She's the only pianist I've ever acknowledged to be better than me, you know, besides my dad.
That was the first time we met. When I woke up, I wondered if I had dreamt it up, but I knew she was real. I knew it.
The second time was two weeks later, after my first concert at the conservatory. I had never prepared for a performance with so much passion. Every waking moment my fingers felt like they were alive-- they had a heart that ached to touch the keys of a piano. During classes, all I could think about were new ways to craft my concert pieces-- how she would play them. I was posessed by a passion for piano I'd never had before. Going to the attic at night became routine, and even though Julie never came again, I would practice for hours and hours. I had to bring a flashlight with me because I would I stay in the old attic through the night, not moving until I passed out exhausted or played through to the morning. After I had learned the pieces in my mind and muscles so well I could play in the dark, there were times I couldn't tell if I was awake practicing, or dreaming music.
That concert was my best, but I've never cared for large audiences. I searched through their faces during the applause, hoping that Julie would somehow be there. I didn't see her. I thought maybe I didn't recognize her face-- I hadn't really seen her clearly in the darkness of the attic.
I hate receptions, so I usually never show up for them. When I did for the first time in a while, I was reminded why.
'That was marvelous, splendid, fan-didly-tastic!' people shouted at me. They shook my hand, and told me about their son or daughter, asked me stuff about myself, and threw generally shitty conversation my way. So I sat down at the bar and got a glass of champagne-- a private toast to myself for the end of the best two weeks I'd ever had.
That's when I saw her. She was sitting there at the bar a few seats away. I must not have recognized her from the back, but I knew it was her when I saw her face becuase she looked like a Julie, with her sweet kind of pretty and simple-minded look.
'That didn't suck did it?' I asked her, hoping that she'd remember me. She smiled because she did and said,
'Not at all, I really enjoyed it-- Last time I met you I thought you were going to give up on piano."
I said, 'What, was I really that bad?'
She laughed, 'I didn't mean it that way. Just, last time I didn't think you even liked piano.'
I told her that I was only doing it because of my dad. Thats when she got pretty serious.
'You don't like it?'
'Why should I? After the hellish experience I've had with it I would have quit piano and forgotten music if my dad hadn't reached out from the grave and forced me to come here.'
I felt like an idiot. She went quiet for a long time-- long enough for me to feel really guilty.
'I'm going now.' she said.
I reached out to grab her hand, to say I was sorry, but she moved her hand away before I even got to it.
I was going to stop her, but my 'piano teacher' that was assigned to me by the school came behind and clasped me on the shoulder; he distracted me. I turned around and was met with a fat, obnoxious "That was fantiddlytastic!" Now I was pissed- couldn't he see that I was in the middle of a freakin' conversation? ... but when I looked back to where Julie was sitting, she was already gone.
'Is everything alright?' my teacher asked me. I was annoyed, so I left him, the stupid party, and my pointless concert behind.
I went to the attic, annoyed as hell. I wondered, 'Who the hell did she think she was, ditching me in the middle of everything? How could she? I waited and practiced for two weeks thinking about her, and she just left?' Yeah, you bet I was pretty pissed.
I got pretty drunk that night... mad and all. I went and sat on the old piano bench. Seeing the four-hand pieces I had found in case I met up with Julie again just made my anger even worse. In a rage, I grabbed them, and ripped them up-- I got up and kicked what was left as pieces music flew like ugly yellow flies around the dark attic.
'I'm done with piano!' I screamed.
'Do you mean that?'
She appeared out of nowhere, just sitting there by the piano. I sweared at her-- I asked, 'What the hell are you doing here? You think you can come and go whenever you want!?' But I was drunk. I know I was.
'Are you done with music?'
I shouted it... I shouted, "He's dead! He's fucking dead, so just screw my DAD, screw school, screw piano, and screw you!'
I lost it. I was drunk, and I lost it. I picked up... I picked up the bottle of whatever stuff I was drinking and I threw it with all the force of my rage straight at her-- straight at Julie. The moment the bottle left my hand though, my horror at what I had just done shocked my entire body in a thoughtless emotional torrent of conciousness.
The bottle was flying straight at her. Even drunk, I knew I saw her about to get hit. That's when my world got really fucked up though. The bottle shattered....but she was gone. It collided against the keys of the antique piano, and the glass flew in all directions and the alcohol splashed everywhere. The delicate ivory keys were ruined, broken and drenched because I had thrown my hate at it.
I looked again, and again--I rubbed my eyes till they were raw. She wasn't there. She left me again. I feel like a huge chunk of my soul dissapeared with her that night. Crying was painful-- the salty tears from my bloodshot eyes stung like winter winds. I probably looked like a man from hell. I backed up until I hit the wall, and slid to sitting against the rough, dirty wood. I waited in that spot for probably more than a day, marinating in my misery, and waiting for her to come back.
She never did, but that doesn't mean she's not real. She is. She is why I want to play again, I think. I have a drinking problem, and that's why I'm here, but you can't tell me that she was my hallucination, because she was there, and I saw her. Everyone saw her... that night at the concert! My teacher was there.
...
"I asked him. There is no Julie Roslin at your school. He said all you did at the reception was drink."
...
No comments:
Post a Comment