I sat in my chair and remembered how funny Lois had been about the William Tell, which she’d called “the Billy Tell.” There’s a section in it where the strings sound like buzzing insects, and she said we were the flies buzzing around the apple on Billy’s son’s head.
I looked at my new stand partner. He was obviously in high school. I’ve never gotten to sit beside anybody my own age in an orchestra. Somebody had to start the conversation. “Hi,” I said.
He said hi. Under the curly hair he had a sort of roundish face, with a mole on the right side, below his mouth. And very long fingers. He looked at the music and said, “Do you always play this easy stuff?”
“No,” I said. “Just for a park concert.” This music wasn’t necessarily easy stuff. And in March we’d played a Shostakovich symphony; it was very hard. It was the one where Lois and I’d played the wrong note together. She’d said the Wrong Note Police were going to come and get us. I didn’t mention it to my new stand partner.
He was very good-looking. We still had a few minutes before rehearsal began, and he said to me, “Put the Fountains up, will you?” I shuffled the music and put it in front. He found a place he wanted, and played it a couple of times. He played very, very well. He rested his violin on his left leg and looked at me sideways. “What’s your name?” he said.
I said Allegra.
“Allegra what?”
“Allegra Shapiro.”
He looked back at the music and worked on tuning his D string. “My parents know your parents. I mean my dad. I’m Landauer. Steve.” That was all he said.
Little Stevie Landauer with the Lego blocks and the sixteenth-size violin and the phenomenal concentration.
“I’ve heard of you,” I said.
“Yeah, I was at Aspen.”
I didn’t say that wasn’t where I’d heard of him. Rehearsal began.
I love playing in the Youth Orchestra. It’s more fun than the softball team, although they’re both hard work. In softball there’s a lot of waiting around for the fun parts. In the orchestra the fun parts come more often. It also has more different kinds of people, more different ages. The little kids usually have tense mouths, and they move their eyes in quick sideways looks to see if anybody’s watching them. On almost everybody in the whole band you can see a combination of the urge to play and the fear of playing badly. In the older kids, the fear isn’t so obvious, of course. Christine, the concertmaster, has this little speech she makes sometimes. She says, “Make your fear work for you, not against you. Let it push those fingers into place; think of it as just one part of what you do. Let it be part of the force of your music. May the force be with you.” It cracks people up, the first time they hear it.
But in both music and softball you work to be as good as you can, you get breathless with effort, you surprise yourself sometimes, and you know everybody in the whole bunch is feeling sort of the same way.
Lois and I’d been like teammates. We’d had a rhythm of sitting together: I knew just when to turn the page, and once she’d shown me a whole new way to braid my hair.
I was definitely not Steve Landauer’s Little Buddy.
At intermission, I was standing with some of the wind players, listening to a girl tell about getting her driver’s license and getting the braces off her teeth on the same day, and in the middle of it I heard somebody playing part of the first movement of Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto very fast. I had a momentary shiver. My reflexes turned me around to see where it was coming from, even though I didn’t want to find out. It was coming from a corner of the rehearsal hall, and it was as if a thread was pulling my ears to it. I saw Christine whirling around to look, too. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her puff her cheeks out and blow hard out of her mouth. Steve Landauer was in the corner with his back turned to everybody, and I watched his bowing, not wanting to watch at all. His arm moved smoothly and hard; the notes were perfect. I caught Christine’s face watching him closely.
Christine and Steve Landauer would both be playing the Bloch finals.
I closed my face and turned back around, and everybody was laughing at the driver’s license and orthodontist story. I didn’t let my face show anything. I tucked my shirt into my jeans and scratched my chin. We all went back to our places. I looked between the heads of the second-stand players at Christine’s back. Christine is in college, a nice girl with very fast fingers. I knew her mainly from when she turned around to tell the section a different bowing; that’s part of her job. She was listening to the conductor tell her something.
Steve Landauer came back to his chair. I didn’t look at him. I got out the next music, the Sibelius, and put it in front of everything else.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” the conductor said, “we remember, don’t we, that in this piece the happiness of the dance is only one side of the music. The music ends in death. We play it knowing that. It has a double meaning, perfect for the kind of piece it is.” He looked over the orchestra, stopping his eyes at some of the little kids. “We all understand ‘double meaning,’ don’t we?” he said, and some of the big kids laughed. I noticed a little boy in the cello section looking scared; he only joined last year. “This music has a profound yearning and a profound lament—at the same time. Like life. Let’s play.” He raised his baton. “Be ominous,” he said.
I heard Steve Landauer mutter, “… waste of time.” We began.
We stopped just after letter C. “I’ll remind you,” the conductor said to everybody. “Remember—when we played this before? The pause between the second and third beats in this section—that’s where the question of great happiness or great sadness of the heart arises. The audience doesn’t have to know what you know. But they deserve to hear that pause in all its silence. We suspend everything for that moment. That means we have to get off the second beat precisely and together. No split-second errors. In this case, the precision of the silence will equal poetry.” He raised his baton again.
Steve Landauer let out his breath in a whispered way that he maybe meant for me to hear. It was a whispered Aaawwwffffffff.
We began again.
At the end of rehearsal, Steve Landauer said to me, without exactly looking at me, “You’re the best page turner I’ve ever had.” And he walked off to put his violin away while I was feeling three things. One, I was a professional—a paid page turner—so I ought to be good. Two, that was a nice compliment. Three, he said it as if that was my job in the orchestra, to be his page turner.
When David picked me up from rehearsal, I said to him, “Don’t ask.” He hadn’t even said anything yet.
“Hello, grump,” he said. I put my violin case upright between my knees and we started home. “Look, Legs, I’m not gonna ask what’s wrong. But just maybe you’re taking yourself too seriously. Maybe.”
I watched cars going past, traffic lights changing, Bro David shifting gears, a dog running along the sidewalk. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Take yourself seriously? How else do you get anything done? “If I didn’t take myself seriously, wouldn’t I be just a joke?” I said.
“Everybody’s a joke,” he said.
When we got home, Daddy and Mommy were in the music room playing duets. I had another memory: being a little tiny kid, walking in the door and hearing Mommy and Daddy playing together. All of a sudden it was a feeling of safety, with the smell of hot chocolate and marshmallows in a little yellow mug I used to have.
The mug had gotten broken years ago.
David and I went up the stairs together. At the top, I whispered to him, “That’s not a joke, is it? Mommy and Daddy playing duets after they got so upset this morning?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “No. Not really. Borderline.”
I couldn’t go bike riding, of course. I sat in my room and played with Heavenly Days. I went over my list of words, with “pernicious” and “flippant” and “ominous” added. I kept seeing violinists lined up at the competition. Steve Landauer, Christine the concertmaster,
probably Karen Karen, if her hand was healed. Me. That made four. Some others, and I didn’t want to know who they were. I just saw violins and hands, all lined up.
I put on my pajamas and brushed my hair.
Steve Landauer was very good-looking. And he played very, very well. And he’d given me that compliment. I didn’t want to like him. But I did. Even his neck was good-looking. He had four mothers, one real and three step. He had good-looking eyes, too. But I didn’t see them much; he didn’t look straight at me. They were brown, and he had long eyelashes.
“Put up the Fountains, will you?” Lois never ordered me around that way. And she was probably older than Steve Landauer.
How could anybody have four mothers?
Waltz and Three. Why couldn’t the music librarian find it at the college? Waltz Tree. Probably because there were so many pieces listed under just plain Waltz. There must be thousands. And I didn’t know the exact name of it. Maybe she’d call back the next day and say she’d found it.
I wondered what had happened to the husband Deirdre used to have.
I remembered the clinking of her earring going into Daddy’s cello. And how she got so delirious. It must have been because she wasn’t paying attention and suddenly things went wrong. Poor Deirdre.
Abruptly I realized something: It was almost like Daddy. His thing about Vigilance and Peace of Mind. Daddy and Deirdre were exactly alike in that way and they didn’t even know it.
It was almost midnight. I pulled Heavenly’s ear and woke her up. “Hey, Heavenly, it’s midnight and I need someone to talk to.” She stretched.
Why are you yelling at me? Because I love you! Maybe David was right. The world is crazy, and they were terrified.
Mall Babies from the black lagoon. I wanted to call Sarah and Jessica and tell them both. I put Miles Davis on the turntable and listened to “All Blues.”
10
I was in the music room the next morning practicing the first movement before I was even very much awake. The sun was just coming up, and I still had my pajamas on. My lesson wasn’t for three hours yet.
I even hit two wrong notes. And the actual notes in this concerto aren’t even hard ones. When you hit a wrong note, you’re likely to hit another one pretty soon because your concentration is interrupted: You can’t help hearing the wrong note you’ve just played. It echoes in your head, and it jostles things around inside you.
ME: Allegra Shapiro. I’M playing this concerto. Maybe it was watching Steve Landauer’s arm that pushed me out of bed so abnormally early in the morning. Or maybe it was that I was so glad to see yesterday end.
No matter what I did with the concerto that morning, no matter where I was in it or what kind of bowing I was using or anything, there was Steve Landauer right in my way, with his perfect bowing arm and his notes:
When I walked into the Kaplans’ house, Mrs. Kaplan gave me popovers and peach jam. “We had a kitchen full of peaches from my brother, and the only thing to do was make jam. Take some home with you, Allegra. Sit down for a minute and eat one, won’t you, dear?”
I like her double-chin look. I may be way off in my judgment, but I never met a double-chinned person I didn’t like. I put my violin case and music case on one chair and sat on another one. She pushed everything about an inch closer to me than it already was: popovers on a plate, jam, butter knife, napkin. I spread jam on one of the popovers.
“Well, I’m on my way to work. Have a good lesson, Allegra,” she said. “Oh, and by the way, dear. Remember the French composer Chausson? Your friend Deirdre sang such a lovely song of his at the concert.… He died of a skull fracture from riding his bicycle into a stone wall, poor man.” And she walked out of the room.
Their kitchen has wallpaper on the ceiling with grapes and leaves. I ate two popovers and jam and looked up at it. It’s as if the Kaplans have a permanent harvest canopy like the one religious Jews build for Succoth. I couldn’t make my mother and Mrs. Kaplan not be friends, and I couldn’t make them not talk about me when I wasn’t looking, but I could be Very Irritated when they did. Chausson probably died way back in the nineteenth century when they hadn’t invented bicycle lights yet.
I got my hands washed and went to the music room. Mr. Kaplan’s sweatshirt was a really old one, and the words on it were almost faded away. They said “The What Quintet?”
He wanted to hear some scales first, the ones with seven sharps and seven flats. And Kreutzer no. 40, a whole page of trills. Then the concerto, start to finish. As usual, he played the piano version of the orchestra part. During the cadenzas, he turned around and watched me.
Like skiing, you’re doing two things at once: the thing you’re doing right that instant and the thing you’ll be doing in the next instant. You look at the face of somebody who’s just finished a ski race and you can see how all those instant events have been going on, overlapping each other. It’s adrenaline. And other things.
It’s a kind of alertness that comes on you, as if somebody has turned on all your lights inside. Sometimes it can get almost too bright in there.
At the end, he turned sideways on the piano bench. “Allegra, I’m concerned,” he said. He folded his hands in his lap. Then he unfolded them and spread them on his legs. Then he scratched the back of his head where he still has lots of curly blondish-grayish hair, then he put his hand back on his knee. He was silent long enough to give me time to think, and I didn’t know what to think about. I didn’t know any question to ask in my mind, so I didn’t know what answer I was supposed to be looking for. I’d just played the concerto without a kink, without missing a note, and I had the good tired feeling of finishing it well, and he was concerned.
“Have you any idea what I’m concerned about?” he asked, looking up at me. And not smiling. He evidently meant he was Concerned.
I hung my violin and bow down straight in my hands. “No.”
“I’m wondering if you’re remembering whose concerto this is,” he said, and looked at the piano keyboard, then back at me. He took a deep breath. “I’m wondering if you remember that a young boy— a teenager—in 1775 … Allegra, I’m wondering if you—I sense an aggressiveness—” He stopped. “Not that we don’t want any aggressiveness—” He stopped again. “It’s a fine line, Allegra, you know that. But I think I hear coming into your performance a spirit more of attack than— You’re beginning to sound like a string tuned too tightly.…” He looked straight up in the air. “What is it I mean?” he asked the ceiling. He looked back at me for a long time. “The word is ‘embrace,’” he said, finally. “In moving ever closer to Mozart—which you’re doing very well—very well, Allegra— In moving closer, you’re beginning to—I don’t like saying this—” He stopped again. “You’re almost on top of him.” He looked at my feet, and then said in a very soft voice, almost hard to hear, “Don’t upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto.”
He leaned his elbow on the keyboard, on G and A and B above middle C, forcing them to play together, and leaned his forehead on his hand. As if somebody’d hurt him. G and A and B hummed.
I was worse than afraid. Worse than shocked. Worse than horrified. What must Mozart have felt? There was some terrible thing I couldn’t name whistling inside me. I felt my eyes bug out, and I tried to look at nothing but air in the room. I saw rosin dust in it. The tip of my bow was on the floor, holding me still.
Upstage the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto.
“Look at me, Allegra,” Mr. Kaplan said.
I didn’t even try to. I looked at the edge of a music stand across the room. Things that had been so arranged in me a minute ago were clashing into each other. I suddenly understood what Deirdre meant—the floor sliding out from under you without warning.
“Allegra, I think this is the first time I’ve ever hurt you?”
I didn’t know the answer. It didn’t matter.
“Come here,” he said.
I stood with my eyes on the corner of the music stan
d. Stainless steel. There are millions like it. In China they wouldn’t let anyone play Mozart or Beethoven for years when the government changed; they put people in closets and took away their instruments.
“Please come here, Allegra.”
I lifted my bow tip and took two steps forward.
He took hold of my right hand, around the frog of the bow. He held it loosely. Over the top of his glasses his blue eyes were steady and serious, as if they wanted to keep me company. “The heart of the matter is…” He looked down at his hand around mine and the frog of my bow. “Is … is tenacity. We’ll change our direction slightly, take what might be called a detour. We’ll move in on the center of this concerto … in a slightly different way.”
His eyes were very middle-aged. Sometimes I just trust him because he’s old. “Brahms’s ‘Lullaby.’ Any key you like. Just play it for me. Play it exactly the way you feel right now.”
I backed away from him. I closed my eyes and looked at what I saw inside my eyelids. What I saw was a little baby, sick and terrified and whimpering. It was in a corner of a room, wrapped in a dirty little blanket in a box or a basket, and the paint was chipped off the walls. I played the “Lullaby” with my eyes closed.
When I opened my eyes, Mr. Kaplan had his closed. He was nodding his head slowly. “Yes,” he said. “There it is. There is what you can do when you are inside your instrument, Allegra. Indeed.”
I didn’t say anything. I wondered who the baby was. I was perplexed and ashamed. Doing something good with Brahms and doing something so horrible with Mozart was closing my head in. A question kept putting itself in me: How? Just that one word. How?
The Mozart Season Page 14