by Barbara Hall
But I didn’t say any of that. I just said, “See you next week.”
I listened to her tromp downstairs, and then I waited for my new student, who had signed up only a week ago. I wasn’t sure she’d show. New students mostly didn’t show. Ten minutes past her appointment time, I was packing up my things. Then I heard the footsteps on the stairs.
She came into my room upstairs, carrying a battered violin case. She was a young-looking fourteen, with chopped-off black hair and pale skin and a pierced eyebrow. She wore jeans and a faded black T-shirt and Doc Martens. An older woman was with her, and I assumed this to be her mother. The mother was not at all West Side glamorous. She was downtown frumpy in a floral rayon shirt and black sweatpants. The older woman said to me, “This is Hallie Bolaris. She wants to take violin lessons.”
“Well, she’s come to the right place.”
“We can’t really afford it, but we’re getting a grant from the state. It seems she has some kind of talent,” the woman said, as if Hallie had an incurable disease.
“Well, I’m sure we can work with that, Mrs. Bolaris,” I said.
The woman bristled. “My name is not Bolaris,” she said with some degree of urgency. “She is my dead sister’s daughter. My sister married a Greek. My name is Mrs. Edwards. Dorothy Edwards.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Edwards.”
“Hallie is an orphan. We had to take her in when my sister died a few months ago. My sister was living in Sierra Madre.”
Sierra Madre is a small town near Pasadena, known for nothing more than being a small town near Pasadena. But the way Dorothy said it, one might have assumed it was a hotbed of illicit activity.
Hallie had no reaction, as if she’d heard this story one too many times.
“Oh. Well, that is a noble thing to do. Adopting your niece.”
“I’m not adopted,” Hallie said flatly.
“It seems pointless to adopt her,” Dorothy explained. “A nightmare of paperwork and legal fees. Plus, she doesn’t want to change her name.”
“I don’t want to be adopted,” Hallie said.
“She doesn’t want it. That’s fine. My husband and I have children. Two boys. They don’t play instruments. They play sports.”
“Yes, well, sports are good.”
“So how long is this lesson going to be?”
“Our sessions are half an hour, unless you want more . . .”
“That sounds fine.” Turning to her niece, she said, “I’ll be downstairs, waiting.”
She said the word “waiting” as if it were more like giving blood.
When Mrs. Edwards was gone, I turned to Hallie. She was still clutching her battered case.
“Is there an instrument in there?”
Hallie said, “Yeah, it’s my father’s.”
“Your father . . . who is no longer with us?”
“He died when I was seven.”
“But he taught you how to play?”
“No, he just gave it to me and told me I could do whatever I wanted to with it.”
“So you don’t know how to play.”
She shrugged. “I play all right.”
“Well, take it out and let’s see.”
Hallie removed an equally battered violin from her case. It was made of cheap wood and had seen happier days, but I could tell it had been played. And if a wood instrument has been played, that’s half the battle.
I will tell you why, though you might not care. A musician is used to that—caring to an outrageous degree about something everyone else ignores. For the average guy, music is simply there. Available every time he hits a button. But before it hits these frequencies, music travels on another frequency altogether— that is, the friction created by strings against wood, air against brass, wood against wood, and so on. Waves. Vibrations. Vibrations are good for any organic thing. Wood comes to life when it is vibrated, dies when it isn’t. I love this about musical instruments. They have lives. They have moods. They are at risk. They want to be played.
“Do you know how to hold it?” I asked her.
She raised her pierced eyebrow at me, then tucked the instrument directly under her chin, as bluegrass fiddlers do.
I said, “Play me what you know.”
She sighed and played a bored version of “Amazing Grace.” She hit the notes perfectly, indicating a good ear, and she moved the bow with a great deal of promise.
“Very nice,” I said. “How many lessons have you had?”
“None.”
“None?”
“Right.”
“But who taught you that? Your father?”
“Nope.”
“Then who?”
“Nobody.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just figured it out.”
Now my heart started to race. If my guess was right, I had encountered one of those rare students who has a genuine ear for music. She didn’t need to do the math. This is different from a student who has a knack, a proclivity, or even a talent. A student with a natural ear is what you need to create a star. We all secretly want to create a star. We all want Jacqueline du Pré to walk into our office. We want to bend her and shape her and stretch her and maybe, down the road, get a little credit.
I never liked to admit that about myself as a teacher. But at least I wasn’t one of those teachers who tries to kill talent. Those exist in large numbers, and not unlike Scientologists or Freemasons, it would frighten you to know how many there are.
Me, I just wanted to run along next to the promise and the glory, get sucked into its force, feel the wind of someone else’s accomplishment on my face. These are the dark, ugly secrets of teaching I am telling you. Pay attention.
“Can you read music?” I asked.
Again she shrugged. “Yeah, but it slows me down.”
My heart raced faster.
I said, “Who are your heroes?”
“My what?” she asked impatiently.
“The people you attempt to emulate on your instrument.”
She shrugged. “I don’t have any heroes.”
“None at all?”
“No.”
“Joshua Bell? Itzhak Perlman?”
“Who?”
I smiled. “Tell me one person whose violin playing has inspired you.”
She thought about it for a moment, and I watched her. Her face seemed malleable, as if it were made of clay. Young people often seem that way to me. Unfinished, undefined, hard to recognize in a crowd. Facial features could take a wrong turn any minute, or a right one, rendering the pretty face ugly or the ugly face pretty, without warning, without logic.
“I like Bruce Springsteen.”
I nodded. Then I said, “Well, Bruce doesn’t really play the violin.”
“Yeah, but like on that song, ‘Jungleland.’ He has a violinist on that number. I like how she sounds.”
“Yes. I do, too.”
“And then there’s the Charlie Daniels Band. That song, ‘The Devil Went Down to Memphis.’ ”
I said, “Yes, I know that song. But I think it’s Georgia.”
“What’s Georgia?”
“Georgia is the place the devil went down to.”
She tucked the instrument under her arm and said, “To tell you the truth, I hate playing this thing. I wish I could put it in a trash can. You know? Like a dead baby. I never want to see it again.”
I nodded. “Yes, I know how that feels, too.”
She twirled her bow between her fingers, like a baton, wary of the possibility that I might understand her.
And I didn’t understand her all that well, because I wanted to say, No, don’t do that. You’re not supposed to touch the hairs on a violin bow. You’re supposed to treat the bow like a sacred artifact. Partly because it’s expensive to have the bow restrung (or, more accurately, rehaired). But mainly because the bow holds all the mysteries. The bow is the thing. It’s the Eucharist. It can work miracles.
I stopped myself
from correcting her, but she saw the stress on my face.
“Why should I play this thing?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. What else are you going to do? Get stoned? Get laid?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I might rather do both of those things.”
Her defiant stance told me that she had never come close to doing either of those things. But this is an area you are not allowed to comment on while teaching an instrument.
“I might rather, too,” I said. “But it all ends up in the same place. You wake up in the morning knowing how to do something that a billion other people know how to do. But if you wake up knowing a new song on the violin, then you’re different.”
“I’m different enough,” she informed me.
“You have a gift,” I said, trying not to oversell it. Teachers learn that nothing alienates certain teenagers like encouragement and enthusiasm.
She stared at me a long time, then tucked the instrument under her chin again. She said, “Every half hour I spend here is a half hour I don’t have to spend at home. So let’s go.”
2
FRANKLIN WALKS ME to my car. It is a November evening and the sun is going down at a ridiculous hour. Franklin has decided I am not safe. I don’t know if he thinks I’m going to be attacked and raped or stopped on the street and asked to prove myself as a musician. He is carrying his Taylor guitar in a gig bag, slung over his shoulder. I have my violin in a hard case, carrying it by the handle. If a poet were to drive by on Pico Boulevard, he would dream up this title: “Two Musicians, Walking Home, Disappointed.”
Franklin says, “I think I am going to reconfigure the sales people.”
I say, “Oh? You’re going to fire someone?”
Franklin says, “Ernest is good on the floor, and so is Patrick, but Clive is a problem.”
“Why is he a problem?”
“He talks people out of sales.”
“Everybody at McCoy’s does that.”
Franklin frowns. He knows what I think of his sales technique. He thinks people should have to audition to shop there. They aren’t good enough to take these instruments home, and they would mistreat them.
“Okay,” he says, “then he aggressively does it. He succeeds more than the rest of us, how’s that?”
“So he’s getting fired for being better than us?”
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
“I’m listening.”
“He chases them away by lecturing them on the rhythm section. You know him and the rhythm section.”
“It’s what he believes in. Let him have it. He’s patient behind the cash register and he probably knows more about music than either one of us.”
“He’s a kid,” Franklin says.
It’s true. He is a kid. He is literally wide eyed and handsome in a raw and disorienting way. Like most young men, he is more head than body. He wears torn T-shirts and torn jeans and he pretends to forget to comb his hair. He comes across all loose and jagged, but he is a rule follower, as if he’s scared of being kicked out of school. His time card is always neatly punched and his lessons are all accounted for. He never borrows anything from the store (though the rest of us do), and he tells us weeks ahead when he wants to take a day off. He’s the model employee.
“He works hard. He’s a good teacher,” I say.
Franklin sighs and asks, “Why do you defend him?”
We are at my car now, a block away from the store on noisy Pico Boulevard, where people drive angrily and fast and will hit you for a doughnut. I unlock the door and put my violin in the back. We talk in raised voices over the din of traffic. “Because I like him,” I say.
Franklin smirks. “You only like him because he likes you.”
“I can’t imagine a better reason.”
Franklin’s face goes red again, and he says, “You fall for his crap.”
“I listen to what he says. Some of it I agree with, some of it I don’t. That’s all. But it’s worth asking yourself why you dislike him so much.”
“I just think he’s bad at his job.”
“He isn’t. You think he’s a bad musician.”
“Isn’t it the same thing?”
I smile, leaning against my worn-out Honda. “No, Franklin, it’s not. We aren’t professional musicians. We work in a music store. And Clive has more students than all of us.”
He runs that through his head, doing the figures. He says, “He has fourteen. Same as you.”
“I have thirteen.”
“Since when?”
“I don’t teach Hallie Bolaris anymore.”
He seems surprised by this information. He knew Hallie, as all the people in McCoy’s did, because she came in so often (never missed a lesson, and sometimes took extras), and because her unofficially adopted mother, Mrs. Edwards, used to amuse the people in the store while she waited for Hallie to finish. Mrs. Edwards hated music and wasted no time in telling everyone that. Sometimes she would hover over Declan as he repaired instruments. She’d say to him, “Let me ask you something. Why do you have such a long beard?”
Declan, easily the most even tempered and well adjusted of the McCoy’s employees, said, “Because I don’t like to shave.”
Mrs. Edwards said, “I don’t like to clean the toilet, but it has to be done.”
Declan said, “I like to clean the toilet. I do it with my beard.”
That pretty much finished their relationship. She moved on to Ernest, who often played guitar on the floor when business was slow. She’d watch him, unable to stop herself from being drawn in by his playing, which was quite impressive.
She’d say to him, “You look like a smart young man. Why are you wasting your time in a music store?”
Ernest said, “I tried wasting it in other places, but I usually got arrested.”
This was true of Ernest. He was a real musician, which meant that he had encountered (and overcome) serious substance-abuse problems. Most real musicians don’t overcome them, or didn’t in my day. No one of my generation ever expected to see Keith Richards or Eric Clapton welcome in the new millennium. We are all still a bit thrown by that, which is why we sometimes refer to them as sellouts.
Pretty soon, Hallie and Dorothy had become the stuff of legend at McCoy’s. People looked forward to Wednesdays, when Hallie came, because they were certain to be entertained. It was Hallie who indirectly instituted the Wednesday night discussion group, wherein all the employees of McCoy’s would hang around telling funny stories about our exploits, and then we’d move on to talk of music, and eventually we would play instruments and wouldn’t end up leaving the shop until around midnight.
We no longer had the Wednesday night discussion group because it went away when Hallie did. I’m the only one at McCoy’s who makes that connection. Everyone else thinks we all just got busy, even though nobody’s any busier.
“What happened to Hallie?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“She just disappeared?”
“Something like that.”
“Did she say why?”
Did she say why? She did and she didn’t.
Did I know why?
I did and I didn’t.
“No, she never told me. Directly. Her mother said something. Her foster mother. It was complicated.”
Franklin’s face registers a modicum of concern for me. In the old days, I would have mistaken it for love. But the reason I am alone now is that I’ve learned to tell the difference.
“You said she was your best student.”
“She was more than that. She had the potential to be great. The way she understood the instrument.”
“Better than you?”
“Yes, much better than me. Maybe that’s why she stopped coming. Because I had nothing left to teach her.”
Franklin doesn’t want to hear this. He shakes his head and shifts his guitar up on his shoulder. He clings to that guitar as if it were a security blanket. It is a security blanket. T
hat is what all our instruments are to us. The difference between me and Franklin is that I know it.
“She was just a kid,” he says. “I’m sure she just got bored.”
Franklin appears to be stuck in this place where youth is the enemy. Maybe it’s resentment; maybe it’s envy. Maybe he thinks that young people have the gift of opportunity awaiting them, while the truth is that like anyone else, they have to wade through the mud of confusion before they can confront the landscape of possibility.
But I let him think it was her youth that led her down the sinkhole, because the truth is too hard. There are two possible scenarios. In one, I am crazy. In the other, I am cruel. Time does not smooth out the edges of those choices.
I stare at the cars moving past in erratic colors like pills. The colors don’t mean anything. It’s just how you tell one from the other.
I say, “What do you think it means when the scriptures say unless you’re like a child you can’t enter the kingdom of heaven? Jesus couldn’t have been talking about innocence or happiness or painlessness.”
Franklin looks at me as if I’m not well.
“I don’t think about the scriptures, Pearl. Why do you?”
“I don’t know. Because I’m from the South. I was raised with it.”
“I was raised with a lot of crazy ideas I’ve left behind,” he says.
“It doesn’t seem like a crazy idea. It seems like a mysterious one.”
“You’re not from the South. You’re from Virginia.”
“Last capital of the Confederacy. Danville, Virginia. My hometown. That’s not the South? I will drop them a note.”
Franklin is almost done with me now. He doesn’t like to talk about the South. He doesn’t want too much truth at once. Who does? The fact is, I am from a real place, with a real musical heritage. He is from a land that someone dreamed, and the dream is not complete. California is still entirely open to interpretation. The South has been defined. It has gone to war. California has gone to skirmish. It is still looking for a war. In the interim, its contradictions are played out on the battlegrounds of music and art and status. Los Angeles is swollen with hope and infected with aspiration. But there are good places to eat and an ocean.