by Barbara Hall
He starts away, then turns back. He says, “Hey, Pearl, it’s eleven hours before the world ends. What kind of music do you play on the violin?”
“Bluegrass,” I tell him.
This surprises him. Franklin fancies himself a bluegrass guitar player. He thinks I fancy myself a classical musician. But I am curiously devoid of knowledge in that area. I present the music to my students— the cold, complicated sheets of notation required to emulate the greats. But I cleave to the mountain music, the made-up stuff, the accident of passion converging on intellectual restriction. The marriage of ignorance and ideals. This is where music is really found.
Franklin doesn’t accept that being born in the wrong place is keeping him from making truly beautiful sounds come out of his guitar. That’s why he wants to be a session musician. That’s what you do when you give up.
“You? Bluegrass?” he asks, his face an open question mark.
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“Because eleven hours before the world ends, I’d want to be close to God.”
He has nothing to say to that. He turns on his heel and walks away. I watch him go, his guitar bumping against his hip, nagging him, as a good woman might do.
THERE IS NOTHING in my place when I get home. I used to have a cat, but it scared me too much to be a single music teacher with a cat. The cat’s name was Roy. Roy used to mock me. I can’t explain how. He just did. I had named him after Roy Orbison, which was probably my first mistake. I love Roy Orbison, but he was a tragic figure. His wife died in a motorcycle accident, and two of his children died in a house fire. He never got over their loss. It was why he made such beautiful music. It was why he died in his fifties, just as his career was taking off again. His heart was worn out; he couldn’t take it anymore. When that happens, we call it a heart attack. But the heart never attacks. It simply breaks.
One day, back when I was teaching Hallie and obsessed with her progress, I went to work without closing the patio door in my apartment. Roy ran away. Can you blame him? I couldn’t. But I did attempt to look for him, put up flyers, the whole thing. My landlord, a disheveled old hippie alcoholic named Steve, approached me in the lobby one day and said, “Pearl, I know you want to find your cat, but the truth is, you aren’t supposed to have pets in this building. It’s, like, policy.”
“You don’t have to worry, Steve. Roy isn’t coming back. I just had to make an effort to find him.”
“If I’d known you had a pet, I wouldn’t have leased the apartment.”
I said, “If I’d known you were an alcoholic, I wouldn’t have signed the lease.”
Steve left me alone after that. Sometimes you have to use the truth in that way. God forgives it.
Shortly after that, I moved. I like to think it was because I needed a change. I prefer not to think that I was running from the ghost of Roy. But my new home is a dead and lonely place where I still think of Roy. Just as my job feels like a dead and lonely place where I still think of Hallie. I do my level best not to obsess about her. I usually have several glasses of wine when I come home, and eventually I get drunk enough and bored enough with what’s on television to put a frozen dinner in the microwave. I usually overcook it, then I eat it, and then I scrape up the burned bits with a fork and eat that, too.
This takes up a lot of energy, so I eventually get into the bathtub and I go to bed. When I fall asleep, things get weird. Because I dream. It’s the only time I allow myself to dream, and I wouldn’t even allow it then if I could help it. But as a student of mine once said, “My brain has a mind of its own.” I dream of my past, in Danville, Virginia, and I dream of my future, in Los Angeles, California, and the two worlds don’t like each other much. I toss and turn and grind my teeth. I broke a molar once. Sometimes I even sleepwalk. Or sleep-run. I woke up, just a few weeks ago, running around my living room. When I came to, I felt foolish. I was wearing sweatpants and a tank top. I was saying out loud, “There is no such thing as fire. There is no such thing as fire.”
It’s funny, at least to me, that I woke up saying, “There is no such thing as fire.”
My father, a carpenter by trade, knew all about fire. He knew about it because he knew about wood. He knew which kind would burn under what conditions. He even knew that if you vacuumed sawdust the vacuum cleaner would catch fire, something to do with the sparks in the motor creating combustion in the wood. He knew what would start a fire and what would stop it. He knew how fire behaved, how it moved, what made it advance and turn back. And once a fire got big enough, he cautioned me, “Don’t try to fight it. It’s going to win.”
It created confusion, his stories about wood and fire. You’d think a friend of the wood would hate the fire, but he didn’t. He respected it. He saw beauty in it. Not in the aesthetic, I imagine, because he never cared for colors that I could tell. But in its powers of destruction, which I suppose he saw as a creative act.
Maybe people in his generation had been told the stories of Sherman’s March to the Sea and had never recovered. Maybe he knew a thousand things I couldn’t know because of his strange, sad past full of poverty and scandal and things he had done to pull himself out and still couldn’t talk about to the day he died.
I wondered what he would think if I told him there was no such thing as fire.
Before he died, when we used to talk about politics in quick, painful bursts, he tried to tell me there were no homeless people in America. And if there were, they had done something to deserve it. Not like his people. They had done nothing to deserve poverty, but this generation was different. His generation had had wars and depressions and all. We had no such legacy.
Hallie was homeless. Not in the traditional sense, of course. She was being taken care of by Aunt Dorothy, but she had not really known what a home felt like. Her parents had died too young. Because they had lived too hard. Her father was a gifted musician, and he checked out when she was seven. Her mother had hung in there for as long as possible, but she was a struggling singer-turnedartist. She sang like an angel, Hallie told me. After her husband died, she stopped singing and started to paint. Because Hallie’s mother had gotten so close to God, as singers and artists often do, she had elected to check out. Hallie’s mother was a heroin addict. Hallie didn’t tell me that. Her adopted mother did.
She told me one Wednesday when Hallie showed up for a lesson. Unpacking her violin, Hallie realized she had left her rosin for the bow in the car. She excused herself and went out to get it.
Dorothy said to me, “The child has seen hard times, you know.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Her mother was a drug addict.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. I didn’t really think it was so terrible. I thought it was simply a choice. But I said that in order to get Dorothy to talk. It worked.
“Heroin,” Dorothy whispered to me. Sitting up straight, she said, “And there was no excuse for it. My sister was a brilliant artist.”
“A violinist?” I asked.
“No, an artist. Like with paint. She painted beautiful pictures. But art is expensive, you know? She married a horrible man, thinking he would support her, but all he did was drink himself to death.”
“He was a musician?”
“He was a scoundrel. Cheated on my sister and bled her dry.”
I nodded. I understood. I said, “What happened to her art?”
Dorothy took a breath and said, “She had just painted a series of pictures that were getting a lot of attention. She painted musicians. She went out into the streets of Sierra Madre and she painted people playing their guitars. Then she just started painting guitars. They were beautiful, brightly colored things. Celebrities started to buy them. They did a piece on her for a news show. She was making money and she was starting to get famous . . .”
Dorothy stopped. But I wasn’t ready to quit.
“What happened?”
Dorothy shrugged. “What happens with all you people? She started using drugs,
and one day they found her. Curled up in a ball in the bathroom. Dead from an overdose.”
“Who found her?” I asked.
Dorothy knew what I was asking.
“Hallie found her.”
Then we heard Hallie’s footsteps on the stairs, and we both sat in silence as Hallie emerged, holding nothing in her hands.
“I left my rosin at home,” she said.
“That’s all right,” I told her. “I can rosin your bow. Let’s just get started.”
Dorothy looked at me, connecting, and then said in that long-suffering way, “I’ll be downstairs.”
And so she was. Always waiting.
I POUR MYSELF another glass of wine and turn on the news and stare at it for a long time before turning it off again.
It is quiet and I’m listening for instruction.
I hear a voice somewhere. It says, Account for Hallie.
And I say to the voice, Give me an easier task.
The voice says no.
3
WHEN YOU GET a student like Hallie, you have to make a decision.
Will you make her great?
Actually, that comes at the end of several small decisions, the first of which is, Will I teach her at all? Will I invest myself? Will I put in all the work and the hope? Once you have made the decision, nothing can stop you. Because it is no longer about the student. Now it is about the teacher. The teacher makes a choice to live her ambitions through a person other than herself. To invest in your student is in many ways to let go of your own dream.
Parents do this all the time with their children. And it fucks them up. I know, because I teach those kids. And when I made the decision to teach Hallie, I suddenly understood the ambitious parents. It’s far too hard to let a dream die completely. Before you do that, you will pass it on to another person, whether she wants it or not.
Hallie wanted it. She would come into the lesson room looking like something that cat dragged in, pale with red-rimmed eyes and matted hair. Her expression was a kaleidoscope of anger, indifference, resignation, and desire. She would argue with me for the first ten minutes of the lesson. About anything and everything. Sometimes she would announce, “I didn’t practice. I hate practicing.” When I said that was fine, she’d come up with something else. She’d say, “I hate this fucking instrument, and the only reason I’m playing it is to piss off my so-called parents.”
I’d say, “Well, that’s as good a reason as any to play music. What do you think got Bruce Springsteen started? You think his parents were pleased as punch to have a rock musician in the family?”
Once, she considered this and smiled. “I’ll bet they’re happy to have a rock star in the family now.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “And that’s one reason he did it. To show them.”
Her face deflated, and she said, “I don’t want to show them anything.”
“Not now. Maybe later.”
And then we got down to studying.
Sometimes she’d tell me about her family. Once, in between songs, she said, “You have no idea what it’s like to live in my house.”
I smiled and said, “Bet I do.”
“Did you like your parents?”
“Sometimes. I like them now because they are dead.”
Her face came alive with interest.
“How’d they die?” she asked.
“My mother died of a stroke just a few years ago. My father died ten years ago, from cancer. But he had been dying a long time.”
“How?” she asked.
“I don’t think he ever really liked being alive.”
“Why?”
“Because he’d given up on so many things.”
“What things?”
I didn’t know how to tell her what things. My father’s past was a mystery to me. But he was angry, and most of that rage flew in circles and swooped like a bat toward anything beautiful. Music in particular. He didn’t want anyone to have it, which I figured meant he must have wanted it at some time and was forced away from it. By what? Overly religious parents or some ambitions he didn’t even possess? The woman he married? I remembered him talking, too, about being good at art when he was in school. But then he went into the army. And then it all dropped off into the confusion of my own existence.
I didn’t say any of this to her because no matter how tempting it might become, you do not use your students as therapists.
I did say something like this: “I think he had a talent of some kind and he misplaced it.”
“How do you do that?” she asked.
“So many ways, Hallie. So many.”
But she just rolled her eyes at me and started in on her scales. She thought I was talking about practicing.
PATRICK IS THE ONLY person in the store when I come in. Patrick is mostly quiet, doing his bit in the store and recording music (he says) in his spare time. He has an interesting history, we’ve all decided, though we don’t know what it is. He doesn’t play in a band. He doesn’t come from money. (He’s from the Midwest, we think, the son of a farmer.) Maybe he has a second job, but if he does, he doesn’t talk about it. Patrick doesn’t talk about anything. When he does talk, he speaks in a slow twang, and his long eyelashes flutter. This is why everyone speculates as to his sexual preference. That and the Hawaiian shirts he insists on wearing nearly every day. Franklin and Ernest brag about their exploits with women, and Clive gets his heart broken about once a week by the same woman, who simply will not commit to being with a poor musician. So they feel they are safe. Another thing they don’t trust about Patrick is that he won’t identify what instrument he plays. We know he plays something because he talks so knowledgeably about music and can sight-read, but he doesn’t teach lessons, and no one has ever seen him pick up an instrument.
“It’s just theory,” Franklin sometimes speculates. “He’s just a music-theory nerd. He doesn’t play anything. He’s one of those weirdos who reads music but can’t do anything with it.”
“So why do you keep him on?” asks Ernest, who feels that everyone should justify their existence at McCoy’s, as if we were all working at NASA. Ernest, as a Texan, somehow equates playing an instrument with fist fighting. Not for the soft or cowardly. He doesn’t trust anyone who uses a capo on a guitar—a fact that he once whispered to me when Franklin was across the room, showing off on a Martin signature series of some kind. Franklin loved the capo. He had dissertations about the importance of the capo. Ernest said, “If your hand can’t grab the chord, then walk the fuck away from it.”
Do you see what I’m saying? Do you see?
Back when we had the Wednesday night discussion group, Patrick always stayed but never discussed anything. He simply hung around to listen. He leaned against the counter and smiled at our impassioned debates, rarely offering an opinion. Sometimes he laughed when things got particularly heated, and this would make Franklin angry.
“You think music is funny? Is that what you think?”
“Well, a little bit,” Patrick would say in his deliberate, nasally tone. “But I think most things are funny.”
“Maybe if you actually played an instrument, you’d understand how serious it is.”
“Maybe so,” Patrick would say. He knew the rule. If you want to drive someone crazy, just keep agreeing with him. Franklin would give up on arguing with him, and then the playing would start. When Ernest and Clive and Franklin and I played, Patrick would get a sad, dreamy, faraway look in his eyes, as if he were remembering a better time. Had he once known how to play an instrument? Had he lost that ability, like someone who had lost the ability to walk or speak?
When he lets me in, Patrick says, “Hey, Pearl. How’s it going?”
“Pretty good. How’s it going with you?”
“Not bad,” he says.
We’re like some Protestant family that has learned not to discuss anything substantial.
Patrick is my age, with hair down to his shoulders, which he sometimes pulls back into a ponyta
il. He has a nice white trash kind of face and scary blue eyes. My own eyes are green, but I feel like I can’t trust anyone with light-colored eyes. It’s as if we aren’t finished.
He reminds me of Townes Van Zandt. I say to him, this particular morning, “You remind me of Townes Van Zandt.”
Townes Van Zandt is a martyr for anyone who appreciates music in the country / bluegrass / alternative rock realm. He was a poet who wrote and recorded songs that made you want to open a vein. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, and a lifelong alcoholic, he died suddenly following hip surgery. When he died, his daughter is purported to have said, “Daddy had an argument with his heart.” He would have liked that description.
Patrick smirks and says, “Thanks.”
“What? You don’t like Townes Van Zandt?”
He says, “Well, yeah. I kind of like the dentist, too, because I’m mildly attracted to pain. But you can’t take it every day.”
“So you listen to him every six months?”
“About like that.”
I move to the cash register and start counting the private lesson tickets that have not been incorporated into the financial well. Patrick stands next to me, watching.
Patrick says, “If you’re keeping score, you still have the most private lessons.”
“It’s not a competition. But Clive is ahead of me.”
“It’s not a competition? Around here? Don’t tell anybody.”
I lose count, then start again. As I near the end, I turn to him and say, “Why don’t you have any students?”
Patrick shrugs and says, “I hate teaching. Why do you have so many students?”
“Because I don’t hate teaching.”
He laughs. I don’t know how to respond to that. So I say, “You could make more money if you taught lessons.”
“I don’t care much about money.”
“Don’t you have to worry about rent?”
“No. I don’t have to worry about that. I don’t have to worry about anything. Neither do you.”