by James Rhodes
And within an hour she gets back to me. With x’s and everything (not even the slightly lazy ‘
TRACK FOURTEEN
Chopin, Fantasie in F minor, Op. 49
Krystian Zimerman, Piano
Chopin wrote his F minor Fantasie when he was on holiday in Spain with his girlfriend, the writer George Sand. It was a dysfunctional, fucked-up, turd of a relationship that pretty much finished him off.. This piece, apocryphally at least, opens with Sand knocking at the door and Chopin answering with all the ensuing love, madness, chaos and (occasional) poetry that summed up their fucked-up relationship.
One of my early birthday presents from Hattie was a giant canvas upon which she had transcribed, by hand, the opening couple of pages of this piece, surrounded by beautiful illustrations of flowers and patterns, framed and on the wall.
Cringe all you want.
We’re doing so much better than Chopin and Sand ever did.
SHE CAME ROUND TO MY flat the next day. I’d suggested hanging out. She was off out somewhere and was driving right past mine, so she said she could swing by for an hour. I was like a fucking fourteen year-old, rushing around tidying, checking my hair, my breath, my clothes. And then I stopped and just decided to calm the fuck down, do something crazy like simply be myself, and see what happened. Which lasted all of three minutes before I started rushing around again like an insecure asshole desperate for her to like me. Stupid love. Makes us all act like dickheads.
She came round and we sat on my sofa and smoked and talked, and holy shit it was the best thing ever. I’d never been in awe of someone like this before, at least not someone who seemed to want to hang out with me and wasn’t some character on a TV screen. Never been so close to someone who seemed to have this kind of halo of loveliness around them. There was this thing between us. Something almost tangible, something I could feel deep down that wasn’t lust or obsession or awkwardness or neediness. It was new and unfamiliar and electric. I see now that I had found someone who fit me perfectly, and even more amazingly, whom I fit too. Her crazy and my crazy seemed to meet in the ether between us and form a solid shape that was unbreakable. It was some kind of fucked-up sexual, spiritual alchemy that neither of us could understand or even identify, but it was there, it was powerful and it was deep enough to make me sound like a massive prick when writing about it.
We started dating. I bought her flowers. It was beautiful, exciting, terrifying, electric, exhausting. Over the first few weeks, the realities of being in a new relationship revealed both of our respective kinks. Funnily enough, she had her own past, as I had mine. She was in many ways the most fragile thing I’d ever met, in other ways the strongest. And that only made me love her more. We were, with our respective weirdness and baggage, like two developmentally stunted kids creating a safe place to get to know one another in a world that still felt slightly overwhelming to both of us. And it was lovely.
And yet . . . The thought that I would be able to function responsibly in a relationship was, in retrospect, pretty laughable. I so did not want to fuck this up. I knew how big a deal it was. Women like this do not come around often. Rushdie said something brilliant about women always choosing, and men, if they’re lucky, getting chosen. Oh how I wanted to be chosen. And she did choose me. She chose me every day in every way and I couldn’t quite believe it.
I would get deeply insecure and freak out, I’d interpret her desire for closeness and ‘talking about feelings’ as ambushes and shut down, disappearing if not physically then at least emotionally. I’d push her away, realise that it was nothing to do with her and was simply my shit, beg her to take me back after a week and then start the whole process again, until a few months later when I’d repeat the cycle. I don’t know if it’s because I was scared of getting close to someone for the first time in my life, or if I was still grieving the breakdown of my family unit and simply could not make room for an intimate relationship. But I do know that I loved her. There was this amazing bond connecting us that never weakened. I wanted her so much, and I knew, for the first time ever and despite knowing what a stupid cliché it is, that this was real love.
We were, however spastically, starting to build our little life together. Jack was coming over every weekend, and he and Hattie clicked into place effortlessly and easily. Perhaps it was because of her own childlike sense of awe (a genuine delight at bright colours, healthy appreciation of fart jokes, a penchant for pulling funny faces and idiotic dancing), but he adored her from the get-go and she him. If you ever need a foolproof test for predicting the longevity of a relationship, see how your lover acts around children. And notice how kids act around him or her – they’re smart fuckers and usually there’s a good reason if they don’t want to go near a certain adult. Jack walked right into her open arms and heart, happily and safely.
As the weeks passed, Jack shuttling back and forth between my home and his mum’s, I started becoming concerned about the way our break-up and communication failure would affect Jack. This was one of the worst aspects of the break-up for me – the way that our failure to operate as a functional ex-family would inevitably distress him. We had once had, on paper at least, a picture-perfect family with money, a cute kid, a lovely house, nice things. Then I got sick, broke down, destroyed it all. There was just too much destruction. Should we have stayed together anyway for Jack? Fuck, no, what sort of a message would that have sent him?
I, naively, thought we’d have one of those great divorced-couple relationships where we’re buddies, talking about each other’s new dates, catching up over coffee once a fortnight. I so desperately hoped she’d find a decent guy, have more career success, live happily. But she wasn’t having any of it. She had, understandably and justifiably, had enough. There had been so much destruction, so much uncertainty and pain, and clearly Jane had decided that Jack’s needs had to come first. She was a mother first and foremost and not some patron saint of lost causes.
And soon after Hattie and I started dating I got an email from Jane telling me she was going to move to America with Jack.
I spoke to my lawyer. On paper I had no income, no career, no properties, securities, cash or assets. I’d had a chequered mental and emotional history and my son lived 80 per cent of the time with his mother. There was no chance at all I could convince the courts to rule in my favour. At best I could drag things out for a few months, force us both into court and myself into debt and postpone the inevitable. I couldn’t see the point.
And so they left to go live in Pittsburgh where they found a home and an amazing school that suited Jack brilliantly. And I was OK for a while. I sold myself the idea that it was for the best, especially for him. I did what I could to get photos, updates, be involved in decisions regarding his schooling and health, regular Skype sessions and visits. It didn’t occur to me that once they got there and got settled there would be no photos, barely any updates of any kind. Access would be allowed, but as for the details of his life and upbringing, I felt like I was going to be cut out of the loop. I had pushed her so far for so long that I guess she needed a fresh start and the last thing she wanted to think about was ensuring I was kept up to date with their news,
I am just so grateful she still allowed me access to Jack – many women would not have. He and I Skyped twice a week and I would make the 25-hour door-to-door trip as often as I could, staying in a hotel and trying my best to be solid for him in a very unsolid situation.
I’d leave home, fly out to New York or Boston, wait around for four hours until my connection to Pittsburgh, go straight from the airport in a cab to their house, pick him up, go on to the hotel and spend four or
five days with him. The first time I did it was just before Christmas.
Hattie and I were having a break – I’d freaked out and felt, wrongly, that I simply could not deal with acting like an adult in our relationship. I felt smothered, overwhelmed, terrified and immensely sad that my son was 5,000 miles away. And so, of course, my solution was to make sure I was alone. That is my default answer to everything overwhelming – move away from, not towards, those who love me. My sadness would drown her, it would push her away, and so I had to pre-empt that by doing it first. Such stupid fucking arrogance on my part.
I got to Pittsburgh, picked Jack up and off we went to my hotel. It was freezing cold, snowing, miserable. He was now seven years old.
How can anyone find the words to explain to a young child why he lives the other side of the world, away from his father, his friends, his old life? How does one explain that love between adults can sometimes lessen over time but love for a child only grows? How the fuck can someone meet the unassailable, desolate logic of a seven-year-old who cannot fathom why Mum and Dad, even when divorced, can’t still live next door to one another with a child-friendly explanation?
It was an unforgettable moment when, at 4 a.m., I was jetlagged and realised I was responsible for everything bad in my son’s world.
And then I thought of Hattie back in London, probably dressing up and going out with friends, no doubt getting hit on by guys, maybe even hitting on guys herself, thinking I’d lost her for good, too. And I fell even further down the hole.
I called her. I couldn’t not – she was the first, the only, woman who has really seen me. She’d met me after I’d uncovered and worked through all of my shit and so she met the real me, not the set of symptoms or the mask or the carefully crafted lie. I think that’s why I was finding the relationship so challenging – I was a total novice at living like this, a beginner at being me, working hard to not slip into a misleading and misguided version of me. And she still loved me, despite seeing what was underneath.
And again, kindness. Her voice was full of reassurance, love, compassion. She told me she would be waiting at Heathrow when I got back. That I just had to get through the next forty-eight hours, take a few cabs, visit a few museums and pizza places, help make some lovely memories for Jack. And I did all of that. And when I got back to England, there she was, waiting at the arrivals gate at six in the morning. With the kindest, gentlest fucking smile I’d ever seen.
We went home, we made tea, we had sex, she let the past go and once again jumped back into our relationship, her heart a little more shaken and a little more fragile as a result of my instability.
I got into some kind of routine with Jack. I’d go over there twice a year, his mum would bring him over here while on business twice a year, we’d Skype twice a week and I’d do my best to focus on other things like Hattie and playing the piano when the pain of his not being here got too much.
Being broke was becoming more and more frustrating. There is little enough money in classical music at the best of times, but there is nothing when starting out from scratch. And transatlantic airfares, divorce lawyers, shrinks and rent all added up to something nausea-inducing. I’d quite randomly met a guy called David Tang a few years previously when I was considering becoming an agent. He is a loud, frightening, brilliant, astonishingly kind Hong-Kong-born gazillionaire. We’d met because I’d heard he was a fan of Sokolov, and I figured he’d potentially be a good guy to know should I want to start my own agency up. So I found his address and dropped off a bunch of private recordings of Sokolov I’d got from his manager that I knew he wouldn’t have. He called the next day, sent his Bentley and driver round to pick me up and take me round to his house for tea, and then a few days later flew me to Venice with him to see Sokolov play at La Fenice as a thank you.
Most people send a card.
I called him and met him for coffee and, in my typically manipulative way, let him know I was struggling, that I didn’t want to throw in the towel and return to the City just yet, and could he help. And he did. Without even really discussing it, he simply called his personal banker then and there and set up a monthly standing order into my account. Like he was ordering a coffee at Starbucks.
I wouldn’t be here were it not for him. And even if by some miracle I were still here, I most certainly would not be playing the piano. His cash paid for medical bills, Billy and other shrinks, a better piano, it bought me time and space to practise, kept my head vaguely gentle and allowed me to focus on what I needed to. It was a rare, incredible thing to have done for me. He thought I played well, wanted to help out, did not ask for anything in return, and for that difficult first eighteen months post-divorce made everything possible. Some things can never be repaid, at least not quickly. There will come a time when I pay him back every dime. There will, I hope, come a time when I perform the same act of kindness for someone else. Right now though I can only think about what he has done for me, slack-jawed with disbelief at his generosity, and try my hardest not to let him down. Sometimes I feel like I am the luckiest man I know.
TRACK FIFTEEN
Ravel, Piano Concerto in G, Second Movement
Krystian Zimerman, Piano
Ravel composed two piano concertos. One of them was written for the left hand alone (it was commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, an Austrian pianist who lost his right arm during the First World War) and the other one was written after a tour of America where he had encountered the world of jazz the whole work is heavily influenced by swing and smoke-infested Harlem jazz clubs.
It took him two years to complete and contains arguably the most beautiful slow movement of any concerto ever written. I remember as a kid reading an interview with someone (frustratingly I don’t remember who, only that he was a vicar or something similar) who was asked the question: if the end of the world were coming and you were given a ten-minute warning, what would you do? He replied that he’d pour a glass of very expensive scotch and listen to this piece of music.
Ravel sweated blood working on each note of this concerto. (To a friend he wrote, ‘The G-major Concerto took two years of work, you know. The opening theme came to me on a train between Oxford and London. But the initial idea is nothing. The work of chiselling then began. We’ve gone past the days when the composer was thought of as being struck by inspiration, feverishly scribbling down his thoughts on a scrap of paper. Writing music is seventy-five per cent an intellectual activity.’ And of the second movement he said, ‘That flowing phrase! How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!’
It contains everything that cements his reputation as one of France’s supreme musical geniuses – extraordinary melodies, flawless orchestration, a depth of feeling that beggars belief.
I WAS BUILDING SOMETHING THRILLING, if as yet indefinable, with Hattie, learning the hard way that life without self-destructing is difficult, long-distance fatherhood is not a walk in the park, and for the first time in my life, daring to dream that a career doing what I’d always loved more than anything else was, at least potentially, workable.
I threw myself even more deeply into the piano, learning new pieces, honing my technique, preparing, preparing, preparing. The first album was ready, having gone through the editing process. We decided to call it Razor Blades, Little Pills and Big Pianos. It was autobiographical enough to define most of my life in seven words and hopefully sounded different enough to get noticed by the music press. Ditto for the artwork — if I see another fucking eighteenth-century French watercolour or a photo of some awkward, gurning pianist on a classical album cover I’ll eat my own face. We managed to convince Dennis Morris, who had been for a time Bob Marley’s official photographer and worked with the Sex Pistols, to take the snaps, and the finished album looked so far removed from the typical classical album that a few classical reviewers thought it had landed on the wrong desk. One journalist from the US even said there were so many pictures of me in my Ray-Bans that he thought I was blind. Which I was quite proud o
f. Again, why the fuck not? Why not have some album art that stands out, looks vaguely current, has a greater chance of appealing to first-time classical listeners, and wouldn’t automatically stop a girl from making out with you if she saw it on your coffee table?
So I had my very own CD out in the shops. And it didn’t involve me recording myself on a shitty MP3 player, burning it to disc and printing out a wanky homemade cover using my computer as I’d done somewhat shamefully in the past. Ego aside, it was a big moment for me and felt like a huge first step in a career I’d been dreaming about since I was a kid.
In 2010, a few months after Razor Blades came out, the BBC approached Denis and me to do a documentary about Chopin for his bicentenary. It was my first TV gig, and a genuinely thrilling experience. I travelled to Poland, saw Chopin’s birthplace, the house where he spent his teenage years, the tomb where they keep his heart, the piano he used to compose on. We went to Paris and did midnight shoots in the Place Vendome, improvising pieces to camera. I interviewed legendary pianists Emanuel Ax and Garrick Ohlsson at the piano and got all excited. We filmed a couple of concerts of mine where I was playing Chopin and the whole thing was pretty much the most fun I could have had without involving narcotics. I knew then that TV was something I really wanted to focus on. Of course it was. Editing could make me sound semi-articulate, I was being paid to talk about things I couldn’t shut up about in the first place, and I got to meet my heroes and travel around the world.
By now Denis had started to get some bigger concerts lined up: one at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where I’d seen most of my childhood heroes play, from Sokolov to Zimerman to Brendel, and one at the Roundhouse, where everyone from Pink Floyd to Jimi Hendrix had played.
He and I were chatting over coffee one morning about these concerts. Piano recitals followed a hallowed and strict format. White tie and tails for the performer (or at the very least a suit/tuxedo). No talking. Walk on stage, play, leave. The audience had programme notes, the hall lights were up pretty high so they could read them during the performance, no drinks were allowed, clapping between movements of pieces was frowned upon, the audience was expected to know enough about the music to ‘get it’.