The Music Teacher

by Barbara Hall

  “Right.”

  He looks over at me. “Did you always know that?”

  “Not always,” I admit.

  “You play in bands?”

  “Not in a long time. Have you?”

  “Not in years,” he admits. “I’ve been focusing on other things.”

  “Like session work.”

  “Other things,” he says deliberately. He doesn’t want me to identify what those other things are. “What have you been doing instead?”

  “Well, I was married for a long time.”

  “And that kept you from playing in bands?”

  “Not in the beginning.”

  “He started to complain?”

  He started to complain. I wasn’t sure when it happened. It wasn’t overnight. It was a gradual tension in the house when I practiced, and a sour mood when I came home from a gig. Later, he would be asleep with a note on the door for me not to wake him, to sleep downstairs. Eventually it became a fight. Like the one about my not taking his name. Evidence that I didn’t love him enough, that I wasn’t committed, that I wasn’t putting the marriage first.

  I believed him. I loved him. He thought that if I put the music down, I could love him more. As if it were another man diluting my attention. I didn’t know what to think. Toward the end, I was just trying to prove something.

  “When you did play, what kind of music was it?” he asks.

  “All kinds. Mostly bluegrass.”

  “So you’re not kidding about that.”

  “No.”

  “Do you like it?” he asks. “Playing in a group?”

  “When it’s going well, there’s nothing like it.”

  “And when it’s not going well?”

  “There’s something in that, too. But come on. You know all this.”

  “I have a Kryptonite,” he says.

  I nod. Most musicians are comic-book nerds.

  “I hate messing up,” he says.

  “Everybody hates that.”

  “You ever mess up?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Come on,” I say, feeling a little impatient. “You know the rule. People listen with their eyes. When you mess up, you just keep smiling and they never know.”

  “But you know,” he says.

  “Sure, I know.”

  “How do you live with it?”

  I laugh.

  “Isn’t it humiliating?” he asks.

  “I don’t let humiliation in. Anymore.”

  “How did you get past it?”

  “I just figure I’m trying something. I’m making an effort. It’s easy to scoff when you aren’t trying. The way I see it, the world is divided into two parts. People who do stuff, and people who mock the people who do stuff. I’d rather be a doer.”

  “I’ve never gotten past it,” he says.

  I nod, smoking my cigarette and inspecting him as I squint. He stares at me, waiting.

  I say, “Music is like Communion or something. You don’t do it because you’re perfect. You do it because you glimpse perfection. You realize it can take you a step closer. You move toward it because you’re hoping it can make you better.”

  Franklin nods and stares into the foam of his beer.

  “Do you ever regret it? Regret the first time you heard a song you loved and wanted to make that sound? Be a part of it?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t? You don’t wish you had been good at something else, like science or math?”

  “Oh, that isn’t scary? Calling Albert Einstein. Calling J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

  “Or cooking,” he says, as if expecting that retort. “Or having babies.”

  “Botulism,” I say. “Placental abruption. Being alive is scary, Franklin.”

  He takes a long, satisfied sip from his beer, as if this is exactly the conversation he wanted to have. I can see that I haven’t disappointed him, and that makes me nervous, as if I have something to lose.

  “I want to start a band,” he says, coming full circle. “I want you to be in it.”

  “Okay,” I answer.

  “Just like that?”

  “What else am I doing?”

  He smiles. “A bluegrass band, I’m thinking. Well, more like a duo,”

  “Okay, a bluegrass duo. You on guitar, me on fiddle. Who sings?”

  “Me, probably,” he says.

  “Sure, why not.”

  “That’s a real thing, a bluegrass duo, right?”

  “Real as anything.”

  He laughs and says, “What will we call ourselves?”

  “The Rogues,” I suggest.

  He shakes his head. “Too simple.”

  “The Trailer Park Rogues.”

  His smile is slow and long. Our eyes meet.

  “Is that why you got divorced? Because of your music?” he asks.

  “There’s never one reason. So they tell you in counseling.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “On my good days I think that. I chose it over the other thing. I couldn’t live without it. I committed to the life of an artist.”

  “And the bad days?”

  “He just fell out of love with me.”

  “Does that really happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So this isn’t a bad day.”

  “It’s a neutral day. On the neutral days I try to think of something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Starting a bluegrass duo.”

  I stub my cigarette out and stand.

  He stands, too. I know perfectly well that we could sleep together. I could move closer to him, I could let him kiss me. I could show him how the couch folds out. I could put some music on the stereo and light some candles. I could tell him to keep the noise down, and I could remind him that it doesn’t mean he’s obligated to me in any way. But I don’t do that because I’ve done it before, and there is always the morning to contend with. The morning is an instrument out of tune, reminding you that it only sounds good if you pay attention to it.

  Franklin pats me on the shoulder and leaves.

  HALLIE’S ADOPTED MOTHER, Dorothy, started out hating music and soon came to love it. She found her place at McCoy’s. She found an audience. She bonded with Franklin and Ernest, and even with Declan, who bonded with no one who didn’t understand the basic construction of a stringed instrument. (She never really bonded with Patrick, but then, who does?) Dorothy always came in looking gloomy, but left with a kind of manic energy, which caused her to talk to me about things. I didn’t want to talk about things, other than Hallie’s progress. Hallie didn’t know much about the mechanics of the violin when I first started teaching her, but she absorbed the information quickly, and I never had to nag her about how to hold the bow or about how to hit a note on the fingerboard. She played by ear, in the best possible way. The sounds circled around her, and she pulled them out of the air and brought them down. Then she lifted them on her strings and sent them back out into the atmosphere. This is how it happens. But it is hard to explain, and most students never really get it.

  When Dorothy wrote me a check at the end of each month, she always said, “The money comes in from the state. My husband, Earl, deposits it. Sometimes I tell him, ‘Look, if we could find a cheaper teacher, we could put some of that money in the bank.’ But Earl, he’s so honest. He’s a deacon in the church. He doesn’t want to know about cheating.”

  “Well, that’s good. Government fraud isn’t really the way to go.”

  “He lives for our boys. We have two boys. One, Hallie’s age. Another two years older. We never expected to inherit another child.”

  Once, she leaned closer to me and said, “Do you think she’s all right?”

  “Hallie? She’s fine. She’s more than fine. She’s very talented.”

  Dorothy nodded and said, “My sister made a big deal out of talent. She thought it was important. Is it?”

  “Depends on
who you ask,” I told her.

  But I knew what was going on. I saw that gleam starting in her eye, the same gleam that all the other parents who are pushing their children have, wanting to know if their child has “it.” They aren’t entirely sure what “it” is. Maybe it’s a psychic ability. A supernatural gift. It can make a person crazy or it can make a person rich. It needs harnessing; it needs to be tamed. Ultimately, the question isn’t what “it” is, but where it is leading. And if it is leading to something good, the important thing, for the parents, once the gleam starts in their eye, is how to get some credit. Should they be hard or encouraging? Should they push or hang back? What gets their name in the liner notes or the memoirs?

  The one thing I knew about talent was that it stirred people up. It threw them off balance. They wanted to shut it down or steal it. No one could look the other way in its presence. Dorothy was becoming no exception.

  “What do you think?” Dorothy asked again.

  “About talent? I don’t entirely understand it myself. I just know that when you have it, there’s a kind of moral obligation to own it and do something with it.”

  “And Hallie really has it?”

  It. The stash of gold hidden in the mine, disguised as a surly adolescent.

  “She has it,” I admitted, though I immediately wished I hadn’t. I knew it changed the way Dorothy saw her inherited daughter, and I knew it wasn’t necessarily a good thing, for all the reasons I’d already considered. But since Dorothy treated Hallie as if she were worthless, I figured there might be an upside to giving the girl a face value.

  Then I watched how Dorothy walked out with Hallie, a hand on her shoulder, as if she couldn’t afford to let go of her, knowing what she knew now.

  Hallie glanced back at me, I remember, with a look of accusation and dread. Thanks a lot, her expression said. The secret is out.

  The secret is something that only musicians understand. Music does not come from us. It comes through us. It is a voice from beyond. It is the bridge between the logical world and whatever else exists. Of course, if you want to get scientific about it, it’s nothing more than physics. A finite amount of energy, being pulled from the air and processed. When you play a musical instrument, you are simply converting energy from one form to another. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels as if you are picking up the voices of the ages, the screams or the prayers of the dying, the joy of the triumphant.

  It’s you and it isn’t you. But how can that be? How can there be something greater than you and the instrument working together? How can there be a third thing that comes to life just because you’ve drawn a bow across some strings? It’s the mystery of the Trinity. How can there be three Gods and only one?

  How it can be ceases to matter at some point. It only is, and that is the secret. That is the “it.” Alchemy. Spinning all the parts into gold. This is what makes an artist run to church or into a bottle or a river. It was what made Michelangelo pound the knee of his Moses and demand it to speak. It cannot be, but it is, and there is so much more of it than we can understand. And then, once we’ve glimpsed it, they expect us to walk around in the world with everyone else. Go to the car wash and the grocery store and sign up for normal, for the mundane ugliness of the world in front of our eyes.

  This is the thing you stop talking about early on, but it haunts you, this knowing that there is something beyond you and your hapless plans and that it has picked you out as its messenger. Like Mary in the manger, you keep all these things and ponder them in your heart. Mary said yes to her assignment. But most of us say maybe. Which is worse than no.

  I certainly never told Hallie any of this. Not because she wouldn’t have understood. But because she would have understood completely.

  That was the last normal session with Hallie, the last time before I started to know other things. Once you learn something, you can’t unlearn it. Once you hear a tune, you are stuck with it forever.

  6

  FRANKLIN PUTS A SIGN up on the wall inside McCoy’s. It says, THE TRAILER PARK ROGUES— A BLUEGRASS DUO. AVAILABLE FOR BOOKING. He takes an enormous amount of teasing about it, but Franklin is strangely unaffected by the comments of his peers at work. He resists telling them I’m in the band, too. He says, “Look, we’re a duo and we’re available for booking.” Clive wants in, but Franklin says no. “Stand-up bass only,” Franklin says. “We’re bluegrass and that means pure instruments.” Clive says he can do that. Franklin just keeps saying no.

  A day later, another sign goes up next to that one. It says, YES, WE HAVE SITARS! I stare at it for a long time, as if it were a puzzle, until I realize who put it there. The Puzzle himself.

  “People like sitars,” Patrick tells me.

  “But they’re like guns,” I say. “Nobody should get near one unless they know how to use it.”

  “George Harrison knew how to use it,” he tells me. For the first time, I’m surprised to admit, I realize that Patrick has a slight lisp. It’s not so much a lisp as an inability to pronounce s’s. They collect in the back of his throat and hiss, emerging as a kind of sh sound. “George Harrishon knew how to ushe it.” How did I miss this about Patrick? Because he doesn’t talk much, I figure.

  “Is that your instrument?” I ask him. “The sitar?”

  “I don’t have an instrument, Pearl,” he says. “Which is to say, I don’t attempt to claim one.”

  I don’t push it again, but he has to have an instrument. Franklin insists on knowing a person’s instrument before he hires him. Maybe Patrick lied on his application. Which has to be around somewhere, in our files. I tell myself to do some research on Patrick’s day off. I’m not sure why I want to know. I just want to know.

  At the end of several days, there still aren’t any takers for our duo. Franklin comes to me with the sad news. He wants to disband already. I say to him, “Franklin, give it more than a month. Are you so afraid of failure you can’t even try?”

  “Yes!” he says emphatically. “I’m that afraid of failure. Why aren’t you?”

  “Failure has just never impressed me. That’s all. It seems like a temporary condition.”

  Franklin leaves the sign up on the wall.

  At the end of the week, there are still no takers, and Franklin is truly despondent. He has also called every booker in town, and while they know him and respect him, they say that a bluegrass duo simply isn’t a draw these days.

  “What are we going to do?” he asks me one night as he’s counting the money in the cash register and I’m filing receipts. “I thought it was the answer to my restlessness. I thought it was going to cure me.”

  “Well, we could play an open mic somewhere.”

  “You’re kidding,” he says with a look of disgust. For him, for most serious musicians, this is like a Shakespearean actor consenting to do a diarrhea commercial.

  “Well, think about it. I mean, what if someone hired us? We don’t know any songs. We’ve never played together,” I say.

  “If someone hired us, we’d learn some. We’d throw something together.”

  “So let’s throw something together and play an open mic. Let’s do some Ralph Stanley songs. Or the Carter Family. I could teach you.”

  He smirks. “I know those songs.”

  “So let’s play an open mic, just for practice. There’s a good one in Venice, a place called the Cow’s End.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Is it a bar?”

  “Coffeeshop.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” He looks as if he might vomit. “Trying to play over the sound of a cappuccino machine?”

  “Starting at the bottom is half the fun,” I tell him.

  “Yeah? What’s the other half?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  He sighs, blowing the beleaguered breath through his lips. “All right. You do the research. Tell me when and where.”

  I say, “While we’re at it, doing research, what instrument does Patrick play?”

  He looks at m
e. “You don’t know?”

  “No. Do you?”

  He thinks about it, his eyes roaming across the cork ceiling. “Horns?”

  I shrug. “That could be it.”

  We don’t have any horns to speak of at McCoy’s, unless you count recorders, so he could keep that particular talent hidden well enough.

  But then Franklin says, “I don’t think it’s horns.”

  “Piano?”

  “God, no,” Franklin says. He has an irrational distrust of the piano, for reasons he can’t sufficiently explain.

  “If he’s good at something, he could be in our band,” I suggest.

  “No,” he says emphatically. “The band is you and me. Period. The whole point is that I can only start small. Two people is all I can handle right now. If it works, we can build.”

  “Okay.” I relent, a little flattered by his insistence. “But he does play an instrument? You’re the one who thinks he’s a theory nerd.”

  “I do think he’s a theory nerd, but he has to play something. I’m sure he told me when I hired him. I can’t remember.”

  He continues to count the money, his guitar-callused fingers flipping through the bills. After a moment he looks up and says, “I’m still thinking about dumping Clive.”

  “Still? Why?”

  “I don’t know why. I don’t trust him.”

  “Is he stealing?”

  “No, of course not,” he says, finishing up with his efforts and putting the money into a locked safe. “I just don’t trust bass players.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  He shrugs. “They aren’t trustworthy.”

  “They hold the beat,” I say.

  He rolls his eyes. “They think they do.”

  “But they do. They are the last line of communication between the guitar and the drums. Singers rely on them. They are important.”

  “They have an elevated sense of themselves.”

  “Maybe they’re right to.”

  “They are always trying to take over the universe,” he tells me.

  “Well, the bottom end is the spine of music.”

  “Spine my ass,” he says, and I laugh, knowing full well that he misses the humor.

  He says, “Where’s the bottom end in bluegrass? I’ll tell you where. In the guitar. It’s the only place they use the guitar as a percussion instrument, which is what it is.”