Contrary Motion

by Andy Mozina

  It’s almost 1:00 a.m. when the nurse comes in and takes Michael’s pulse. Something makes her stay and stand there for a bit. A deep rattling, gurgling breath rises. “This is it,” she says abruptly, almost excited, it seems. I play a fourth-octave G. She sits on the bed, exactly where she was when I came in, and watches Michael’s face. A C-sharp and Michael breathes. Another note; another, softer, breath. A note and I listen. A note. A note. A note. A note. I stop playing.

  “Second one tonight,” the nurse says. She pats his hand where it lies on the sheet, picks it up, shakes it between her two hands—almost like shaking a dog’s paw—then she sighs and leaves the room.

  I lean the harp forward and rest my head against the sound box. I stand up, my aching torso stiff. I step awkwardly to Michael’s bedside, watching myself try to do what the unscored moment demands. I should touch him somehow, I think, to say good-bye. Marcia once told me that dying people crave touch. I stand over him, staring at his face, hung up, like a child staring down from the lip of the high dive. I lean over, and kiss his warm forehead.

  24

  IT’S A STRAIGHT shot on I-55 to St. Louis. Sprouting green cornfields unzip under a wide, blue sky. I’m blasting my audition tape on the Volvo’s old stereo as wind whips through the barely open backseat windows. The temperature and humidity have risen as I’ve plummeted downstate, but the car’s air conditioner is feeble. I can’t hear the tape with the front windows down, so I’m stuck venting out the worst of the heat through the back.

  There’s a sudden pop-ping! from the backseat. One of the harp’s strings has broken—something in the second octave, by the sound of it. I’ll have to retune that string more frequently once I replace it, and God help me if it starts to slide out of tune in the middle of the audition. This is why I left for St. Louis two days early, to give my harp a chance to acclimate.

  Since my vigil with Michael, my concentration has been sharp and my immersion in audition prep has been total. I canceled my appointments with students for the week, and Marcia suggested I take a break from playing at the hospice. Besides my Tuesday evening with Audrey, there’s been nothing else in my life but audition repertoire.

  Now, through the dashboard speaker, Slatkin conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra doing Ein Heldenleben, and I listen intently, honing my feel for the dynamic of the whole ensemble (which of course I’ll have to imagine when I audition). Suggesting the rest of the piece through your part alone is the sort of prestidigitation that wins auditions.

  I couldn’t find a recording of EH with Uchimura, the current SLSO maestro, though the scuttlebutt is that he is more about volume and articulation than setting speed records, so there’s no fear his tempos will be unusually fast. Tatiana Zikorsky, on the harp, sounds colorful, moody, precise; she’s finally retiring after thirty years and is a tough act to follow. I’m sure she’ll be on the panel along with four or five other musicians elected by the orchestra—plus Uchimura will sit in most likely from the semis onward. And now I can’t avoid thinking more about the great Salzedo-Grandjany feud, which is a destabilizing subtext at every harp audition. Even mild Salzedo partisans like Zikorsky care about how the arms look, especially the elbows, which must be well up and off the harp. Eddie (a Grandjany disciple) taught me to strive for a big clear sound even at quick tempos—it helps to have strong man hands!—which fits well with Uchimura’s reputed outlook. Luckily, the prelims and the semis will be behind a screen, though the finals usually are not. Of course, Salzedo people claim they can hear the difference regardless. The bottom line is that some people think there’s only one way to slice an apple, and if Zikorsky is partisan enough, I could be screwed before I’ve played a note.

  The other big danger at an audition like this is that they’ve had a replacement in mind for years, someone the conductor has been drooling over, even openly wooing, while waiting for the aging prima donna to pack it in. Zikorsky could actually be irrelevant here, while Uchimura gets his pick. And this is one of the top ten U.S. orchestras. Stellar players are going to be coming from all over the world.

  Just as I think myself into a downward spiral, on my right, past a stand of trees, I glimpse the St. Louis Arch, sticking up like a roller coaster over a distant amusement park. Soon I’m careening through the interchange and taking a huge black metal bridge over the Mighty Mississippi, tasting my destiny like river mud under my tongue.

  St. Louis reminds me of Milwaukee, with its modest concentration of downtown office towers and the same low-rise mix of bungalows and two-flats and industrial remnants flanking the midtown freeway. Maybe this bodes well. I get off at Kingshighway and find my way over to the Best Western.

  The street feels a bit deserted at four in the afternoon. A lot of the parking meters are unused and weedy grass creeps across the edges of the broken sidewalk. There’s a twelve-story, old-fashioned stone apartment building down the street, the sort you’d see cheek by jowl with similar buildings in Manhattan or near the lake in Chicago, but here it stands alone.

  The Best Western is a sixties-era motor lodge. Sweating, I enter the low-ceilinged lobby with my pulse beating as fast as a chipmunk’s; in a sense, the audition begins now. Rolling my instrument down the third-floor hallway, I pass two doors behind which competitors play harp licks. I’d like to pause and evaluate their playing, but just hearing them is like an electric cattle prod to the kidney. I have to get set up and start practicing.

  After making two more trips to get my luggage and all my gear, I replace the string without unpacking a single item or even taking a much-needed whiz, so the new string will have the maximum amount of time to settle down before I need it on Friday. The climate disparity between Chicago and St. Louis is serious: about ten degrees higher at around eighty and what feels like thirty more points of humidity. The air-conditioning is on. I can only hope the shift from hot car to cool room doesn’t cost me more strings. There are two days of prelims, and I’m lucky to be slotted on the second day.

  After finally using the bathroom, I determine that the best place for the harp is at the right foot of the king-sized bed, the spot where I’ve been camping for my dying clientele. There’s a tall and fairly wide mirror on the wall between the bathroom and the short corridor leading to the door, and from this position I can see my full reflection.

  My posture is beyond Frankensteinesque: the curtain rod of my spine seems to travel straight to the top of my skull, pitching my head slightly downward. My lips are thick, my mouth is too wide, and my furrowed brow seems strangely distended, suggesting my brain has herniated slightly from the strain of worrying. Suddenly I can’t bear to see myself.

  I’ve trained myself for all sorts of situations—distracting noises, darkness, no warm-up time, requests for radically different tempos. I’ve prided myself on my efforts to become unflappable, but right now I’m flapped. Telling myself there’s no need to be prepared for mirrors onstage—it’s likely no one will actually see me play unless I make the finals—I take practical steps: I try to turn the wall mirror around. But the mirror is well bolted, and the bath towel I drape over it keeps slipping. I’m on the brink of calling the front desk to have the thing removed, when I realize I can jab a few pens through the nap, pinning the towel between the top edge of the mirror and the wall.

  Finally, I sit down and try to focus on the music.

  —

  After two days of productive practicing, Friday arrives. Everything is in my fingers, it seems. On my way to my prelim round, I spot my first nemesis in the Best Western lobby, a small-featured young woman with long flowing blonde-brown hair, wearing a floor-length black dress and accompanied by, I’m guessing, her heavyset mother in a black pantsuit. Their outfits seem coordinated, and I can picture the girl having to talk her mother out of being her page-turner. There’s a brand-new brown padded polyester cover on her harp, which is being wheeled out the door by one of the bellhops. Her mother’s carrying a clear plastic bag of bananas, which many harpists believe to have nerve-
calming qualities. Then again I know several harpists who have such strong associations between bananas and audition jitters that whenever they encounter bananas, they experience stomach-twisting anxiety. I stop my harp at the restaurant end of the lobby, to give the pair a chance to clear out and avoid any contact or small talk.

  Crossing the parking lot outside Powell Symphony Hall, the St. Louis Symphony’s home, I see Gracie Hoffman walking with her longtime partner, Alicia. Gracie placed second at the USA International Harp Competition in Bloomington last year, a competition I was too divorce-wracked to enter. If gamblers cared about auditions, she’d be an odds-on favorite. She’s wearing a blue tank top and a long, flowing colorful skirt with sandals. This could mean that Gracie had her prelim round yesterday, but my guess is that she’s gotten a pass to the semis and is just swinging by to scare whoever might see her.

  I wave and say, “Hi, Gracie.”

  Gracie does a double take from across the parking aisle. “Is that you, Matt?”

  “It is.”

  “I didn’t know you were still out there,” she says, walking over with her odd hip-sprung stride.

  “Can’t stop believing,” I say. “Hey, Alicia.”

  “Hey, Matt,” Alicia says without quite making eye contact. She’s wearing a black sundress with a swirling, flowers-and-paisley tattoo sleeving her upper right arm. She couldn’t seem less interested in talking with me, but that actually relaxes me; I don’t want to be seen.

  “The field is incredible,” Gracie says loudly. “Way better than I expected.” She stands with her hands turned on her hips so her elbows nearly point backwards. I’ve never been able to decide whether her idiosyncratic way of moving is a corollary of her dexterity as a harpist or a grandiose affectation. While Alicia repeatedly swings her arms to tap her fingers together, Gracie rattles off the names and most recent achievements of four or five harpists taking the audition.

  “Those accomplished bastards,” I say with a grin.

  “Hey, are you thinking about the NIU job?” she asks.

  “What NIU job?”

  “You don’t know Lynne LaBelle’s retiring? They’re doing a search in the fall.”

  For over twenty years Lynne’s been teaching at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, which is west of Chicago, maybe a forty-five-minute drive from my apartment. I’ve run into Lynne numerous times, but I’m not plugged into the academic scene. I remember hearing somewhere that DeKalb is where barbed wire was invented and first manufactured, and I wish I knew why this fact exerts a pull on me.

  “I mean,” Gracie adds, fighting off a smile, “if you don’t win here.”

  “Are you thinking of it?” I ask.

  “God, no! Plus you have to teach theory.”

  “Ah, probably not me, either,” I say politely. “But thanks for letting me know.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Well, it’s good seeing you. Good luck.”

  “Likewise,” I say. “See you two.”

  —

  The check-in table stands in the Grand Foyer of Powell Hall, which is decked out with gold fixtures and crimson carpets and shiny marble floors. Two-story cream pillars stand against a balcony and rise to a high arched ceiling with ornately painted moldings and double-decker crystal chandeliers. All the respect money can buy for music has been poured into this lobby, which is supposedly styled after Versailles.

  An alarmingly attractive black-haired woman awaits in a chair behind the registration table.

  “Hi, I’m Matt Grzbc?” I say, my hands clasped over my unreliable penis.

  “Is that…?”

  “G-R-Z-B-C.”

  “All right,” she says, checking me off. “Sorry about that. Okay, Candidate Thirty-Seven, you’re at two-thirty, on the stage. You have dressing room C starting at one-thirty. Best way to get there is through the stage door. You know where that is?”

  I shake my head. She directs me back outside and around the building.

  As I head off, she says, “And here’s the prelim repertoire. You’ll want a copy of that.” She laughs. “And official scores here, too,” she says, gesturing to a spread at the end of the table. “And a list of things to see in St. Louis, if that interests you.”

  I give the repertoire sheet a quick look, but register nothing. My heart is pounding violently. It’s useless to try to gather myself in front of her, so I murmur, “Thanks,” pick up another sheet of paper and a packet of scores, and walk outside before I get dizzy.

  What am I doing here? I think. I take a few deep breaths like a weight lifter before a clean and jerk, then hustle back across the parking lot to fetch the harp.

  I roll my instrument to the stage door, where the proctor, Ty—a soft, slightly swollen man—hovers. With a finger to his lips, he leads me down a backstage corridor to a long row of guest-artist dressing rooms. I can hear someone auditioning on the stage. Sounds like Rimsky-Korsakov. Now my whole body seems to be beating as if I’m a walking heart. I sense the outlandishness of the backwash of my heart murmur. A sheet of legal paper with a “C” scribbled on it is taped to a door.

  “I’ll come by at two twenty-five sharp,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I say, and I roll my instrument in. There’s another huge mirror in this room, rimmed with Hollywood-dressing-room lightbulbs, above a sink and a counter in front of which is an old wooden chair with a heart-shaped back. Through the wall, I can hear someone else warming up with the Ravel. I see myself in the mirror and absently touch my cheek with ice-cold fingers. I destroyed my marriage for this fucking charade!

  I finally look at the prelim sheet:

  Solo of Choice The committee will stop you.

  Tchaikovsky The Nutcracker: Waltz of the Flowers Intro. & Cadenza

  Britten Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra Cadenza (Variation I)

  Ravel Tzigane Cadenza ([4]-[5])

  Rimsky-Korsakov Capriccio Espagnol Cadenza (4th movement)

  Verdi La Forza del Destino Overture [G]-[H]; [M]

  I know these pieces, I think, and I take the cover off the harp and tune. The new string is holding up. The buzz is still in abeyance. These facts calm me momentarily, and then I sit down to my solo, the Debussy “Danses.” My pulse drops below 200.

  —

  Someone knocks. “Mr. Grzbc?” Ty’s tone evokes the jailer-inmate relationship. He pronounces the “z,” which reinforces my sense that I’m on no one’s radar.

  I’ve already put my harp on the dolly. Ty stuffs my sheaf of scores under his arm, grabs my music stand and my stool. We proceed down a poorly lit black-walled hallway to a wooden door wide enough to drive a car (or a piano) through. It’s ajar and leaking whitish light. He pushes the door open, space blooms, and we’re onstage, facing the towering tiers of red velvet seats. Adam’s world and my world, too. They’ve got most of the lights on.

  The judges are sitting fifth row center, behind a black, cloth-covered screen about eight feet high, which stands in the row in front of them. The screen plays right into my psyche’s hands. As Ty points where to put my harp, he announces, “Candidate Thirty-Seven.” I position everything, and he takes away my dolly.

  My last stool adjustment makes a loud scrape on the wood floor, and I grin.

  “You may begin your solo, Thirty-Seven,” a female voice behind the screen announces.

  I take a deep breath, then another from my toes, meditation-style, and on the exhale I imagine blowing all loathing and loathsomeness out of my body. There. I’m choosing confidence.

  I play the first part of the Debussy just fine, and as soon as I pass through a well-known trouble spot, the female voice, probably Zikorsky, says, “Yes, thanks,” and calls out the next piece, “The Nutcracker,” which comes off nice and liquidy.

  And it goes on like this.

  The Verdi opera excerpt is last. After Zikorsky asks for it “as marked,” which means the tempo on the official score, I flatten the page and lean the harp back. I played this for Michael at the hospice, I realize, bo
th the first and last time I saw him. I don’t tell myself to play it for him now but I sense him like he’s in his bed onstage with me, right where he would be if I were in his room at Golden Prairie. The excerpt is fast and accompanies a clarinet solo. I hear the clarinet in my head, then my right hand darts into quick, flying airy eighths, while my left hand lobs bass notes that land like brief reminders of the heavy earth. I maintain the pulse through an awkward right-hand move, catching a G note that I’d put dollars to doughnuts some of my peers will edit out to keep pace. I finish rehearsal H, then pause and switch gears for rehearsal M, which minces dryly, then crescendos—I let emotion swell there—before ending short and precise.

  I lean the harp forward.

  “Thank you very much,” the Zikorsky voice says.

  —

  As soon as I make it back to the motor lodge, I cross what I’ve already played off the main repertoire list and focus on the rest, trying to keep it together. I always prepare as much as I can for the next round, even before I know whether I’m moving on.

  I’ve practiced well past dinnertime, when a call comes from Ty.

  “Congratulations,” he says. “Tomorrow, eleven a.m., onstage. You’ll have dressing room C starting at ten.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I say. I hang up the phone and hop up and down like a boxing kangaroo. “Fuck, yeah!” I say under my breath, working hard not to yell.

  Just passing out of prelims sets my mind to fantasy and speculation. No one can laugh at me now. I’m one of ten semifinalists for St. Louis! Sure, the likes of Gracie are about to enter the fray, but I remind myself that the big competition winners are often oriented toward the solo repertoire. They sometimes don’t have the best feel for orchestra teamwork, for how to fit in, which one learns quickly as the youngest of seven.

  The front desk’s advice on restaurants involves exploring nearby Euclid. The street’s wine bars and indie bookstore and hip-looking restaurants remind me of Damen in Bucktown, where I last met Cynthia for drinks and strategy a few long weeks ago. But I try not to think about actually living here, because that makes me think of how things will be with Audrey if I win. I have to suspend all that to concentrate on the audition. I eat outside at a bistro, at a small square table against the sidewalk railing. A man walking by makes what seems to be extra eye contact. I toast him with a goofy smile. He smiles to himself as he walks on.