This Is Where We Came In

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  One day after class Etienne approached me and said that his regular students could pay him directly. I was surprised that he called me one of the regulars. I didn’t feel like one of them yet. I could see that drumming and the drum school were part of the weave of their lives. They huddled together, talking about drumming sessions and performances, gossip and shop talk from a world remote from the one I knew. I came just once a week and still felt like an outsider as I stepped off the elevator; I felt the excitement and shyness of venturing into another country. Then I would retreat to my ordinary life that had nothing to do with drumming. Still, if Etienne considered me one of the regulars, I was pleased: the day couldn’t be far off when I’d be playing the more complicated rhythms. Maybe I’d even start to come more often. Suddenly I was fantasizing, as I tend to do, about moving into an entirely new life: I could buy a drum, the other drummers would become my friends, I’d be part of their chatter, I’d go wherever they went after class and drum with them far into the night.

  As I was taking up imaginary residence in the world of drumming, Etienne was explaining something about the class fees and seemed to be having trouble saying what he meant in English. I suggested that he speak French; this would be easier for him, but mostly I suggested it out of vanity. I wanted him to know I could understand and speak French, at least simple French if not the colloquial version the teachers spoke among themselves. In French, I gathered he was asking me to pay him for several classes in advance. An uneasy suspicion invaded my fantasies. His request was unusual, unbusinesslike. Then again, the school itself was not very businesslike. So unbusinesslike that I tended to forget it was a commercial enterprise, that Etienne was earning a living and I was purchasing his talent. If anything, I rather thought of myself as an initiate into an aesthetic discipline, at least for that weekly hour and a half—which might soon become more.

  How come? I asked. Weren’t we supposed to pay at the front desk? He mumbled that Christmas was coming and also he needed money to fix the cords on his drum. Those words struck my heart: his drum was a part of him, like a vital organ. They overrode my suspicion, made it seem stodgy and petty. If I truly was in another country, maybe things were done differently here. When in Rome . . . Besides, Etienne looked embarrassed to be telling me this, and I wanted to relieve him. He was the teacher, the gifted master; I didn’t like seeing him humbled by need. It made him ordinary.

  Yet even masters must have daily concerns, I thought. He was a young immigrant from Senegal making his way in a new country. He needed to fix the cords on his drum. My grandparents and my father had been immigrants and must have been in the same position, needing help. Of course I’d help him. But I had only about twenty-five dollars on me. I offered to give him a check. He said no, no check, but downstairs, in a convenience store a few doors away, was an ATM. We went together to find the ATM, I took out sixty dollars, enough for four classes, and Etienne thanked me. I asked whether I should still sign up at the desk next week and he said no, just come to class, everything would be fine.

  The next week I realized that even though I’d paid for the class I still had to pay to rent the drum. When I explained this at the desk I was sharply rebuked; I shouldn’t have paid Etienne directly, the woman said—that was not how things worked. Later, when she came around with her list, she had a nasty dispute with Etienne. We were drumming so I couldn’t concentrate on all they said, but I knew I was the subject of this public dispute and I flushed, as if I’d been caught out in some shady dealing. Especially as I was still an outsider, not yet a true initiate, I felt ashamed. And then immediately irritated, both with the woman and with myself: I’d done nothing at all to be ashamed of. The woman’s intrusion in our dim room was an affront, a harsh shaft of light from the practical world.

  What was the problem? I asked Etienne after class. No problem, he said, everything would be fine. Next time I shouldn’t sign in at the desk. I couldn’t summon the French to explain about renting a drum, a banal technicality compared with the glories of drumming. Etienne played with such fierce integrity. The minor integrity of my paying three dollars to rent a drum shrank in comparison.

  The next week I missed class. A compelling reason or just an excuse? I can’t remember. I do remember that I anticipated—dreaded—another scene. Would I have to face disputes from now on? And why feel dread? Surely I was making too much of a trivial matter. Dread was, or should be, too strong a word for the situation. I thought of asking the regular students how they handled the fees, but I didn’t know them well enough and didn’t want to cause more trouble for Etienne. What was not trivial was that the spell of enchantment had been pierced.

  The following week I didn’t sign in at the front desk; I took a drum from the cabinet without paying. I didn’t like doing that, but it seemed the simplest way. The class began and my hands quickly found the patterns. Etienne crooned. His hands flew. Another teacher ambled in with his drum and joined us. Amid the rapturous sounds of the drums, the world of commercial transactions shrank and fell away. I was a drummer, among other drummers.

  But then the woman came around with her class list, tallying us up, and again there was a scene. This time I paid closer attention. Etienne was saying that these were his regular students, while the woman insisted that he must be paid through the school. I am so lacking in business sense that it hadn’t occurred to me that the school, however informal it appeared, must have taken a sizable cut of the fifteen dollars. To Etienne this must have seemed unfair; it seemed unfair to me too, even if that was how things were done in my country.

  Clearly I needed to straighten this out. I tried after class, but couldn’t get my point across, in English or French. No, no, Etienne interrupted, there’s no problem, you’ve already paid. He was packing up his drum for the day and seemed to be dismissing me. Other students were crowding around to speak to him. Daunted, I moved away.

  I left, tangled in anger, guilt and impotence, a deadly brew. If only he had asked me for a loan to fix his drum—I would have given that willingly. But to avoid any such awkwardness, he had put me in the awkward position. I was angry too at the noisy woman with the list—the intruder—and at myself for failing to know how to settle the matter. Settling it should have been simple, and yet it was not. Worst of all, how banal the whole predicament was, compared with the drumming that filled the dark little room.

  I tried to disentangle myself. Was this really worth fretting over? Why not pay at the desk as before, pretend I’d given him a gift to fix his drum? It wasn’t the money, though; it was the injustice—and injustice is the same in any country. However helpless I felt, I wasn’t willing to put up with it. Etienne had assured me there would be no problem, yet there was a problem. That was careless. And carelessness is vitiating in an artist—that was the same in any country too. It was unraveling the spell of the dim room.

  Still, I thought, what I called careless was really a survival strategy: Etienne had done what immigrants have to do. I understood that. His life was no enchanted bubble. I might be the outsider in the drum class but I was at ease in my country. He was the outsider who had to make ends meet. Fix the cords on his drum. And to do so, on his territory he had made me the one called to account.

  The next week, I didn’t go to class, nor the weeks after that. It was winter now, cold and snowy; the subway trip was long. I couldn’t muster the will. And for reasons I didn’t fully understand, I didn’t feel able to resolve this trivial issue, the kind of issue that outside the drum class, on my own territory, I could have handled easily. I felt excluded from the country that appeared when the elevator doors opened, as surely as if I’d been stopped at the border, my identity papers called into question.

  Months later, one night on the subway, I found myself sitting next to a large, oval-shaped man in a dashiki and kofia. He was looking at me longer than one looks at strangers on the subway—the look of a man on the verge of striking up a conversation. I was amused: for a young African I’d be an unlikely choice f
or a subway pickup. Then I realized he was one of the teachers I’d seen so often in the lobby. I was the one who spoke first. Aren’t you from the dance and drum school? I said. We greeted each other like old friends and he gave me news of the school. Why hadn’t he seen me around lately? he wanted to know. So I’d been noticed. Maybe I might have become one of the regulars after all. I’d been very busy, I said. And how was Etienne? He was fine. Soon it was my stop. We shook hands warmly and I got off.

  That made me think of returning to the class. By now the intensity had drained out of the incident. I’d forgotten about the money, never important anyway, and the injustice . . . well, it was too long ago to matter. I’d be glad to drum again in the dim little room and hear Etienne’s fantastic riffs, watch his fingers fly till they blurred like the blades of a propeller. I could picture my return: the creaky elevator, the crowded lobby—a mini-Senegal—the sweating dancers through the wall of glass. The circle of chairs awaiting the drummers. Etienne would welcome me with a hug and exclamations and ask where I’d been for so long. I’d hug him back, but with a minuscule reservation—nothing he could detect, just a lingering grain of discomfort, like a stone in the shoe. A tiny, nagging pain, because I hadn’t managed to set things right. Out of some diffidence I harbored, I had chosen to remain a tourist, an outsider. Or, more than diffidence, it was a stubborn knot in me—an exaggerated reverence for art tied up with guilt over race and privilege. So I had excluded myself from the other country. The other country, crowded, chaotic, relentlessly practical, couldn’t afford such purity or soul-searching. It cut corners. Sometimes people got scraped in the process.

  Of course you can walk even with a stone in your shoe, if you can’t remove it and you really want or need to keep going. But I didn’t keep going.

  At least not then. A few years later—the whole incident nearly forgotten—I found another drum class, in a less exotic setting, where I don’t feel like an outsider but like a student among other students. The teacher is quite as dazzling a performer as Etienne and, a native English speaker, explains the technique more clearly. From him I discovered how much more I still had to learn before I could become a true drummer: Etienne, I realized, had been too tolerant of my fumbling beginners’ efforts. The new teacher is rigorous and demanding. But that is another story.

  Maybe what I wanted back then was not so much the drumming, but an adventure, an adventure that, as it turned out, faltered at the first intrusion of troublesome reality, the first demand that I exert myself and claim my rights. Maybe I had gotten what I wanted, not a vocation but a vacation. A brief fantasy, a guided tour. Now I simply want to learn to play the drum.

  Alone with the Cat

  The cat was of no interest to me—I am not now and never was a cat lover. When cat lovers’ cats made their advances, I sat in frozen courtesy. But for reasons also of no interest, I had to spend four months with the cat and I determined, on principle, to make something interesting out of our enforced sojourn. I studied the features of catness that cat lovers go on about with such ardor: the rippling undulations of flesh and fur, the ingenious forays into high and low places, the fabled inscrutabilities. I was impressed. The cat lovers were right about all that. On the other hand, the cat was not aloof, as cat lovers had led me to expect, but affectionate: like an infant, he craved attention.

  I studied catness in stages, and soon I felt I had thoroughly witnessed its famous mysteries. Which is not to say that I plumbed those mysteries or that they were not worth plumbing, only that I had had enough: they were familiar now, and they were finite.

  I might have passed the remaining time indifferent to the cat, but there came upon me an unfamiliar sense of freedom and power in his presence. Alone with the cat in this singular situation—not quite solitary, not quite social—I was free to do anything at all. He would never tell. The cat would not reveal any bursts of temper, peculiar lapses, eccentric habits or rituals, vexing flaws. If by any chance it judged, it would keep those judgments to itself and soon forget, or so I assumed; it would not bring old grudges to the next encounter as a person might.

  Alone, we know who we are. In company our certainty is blurred. Other presences, like surgical lasers, penetrate and work subtle changes and adjustments on our innards. Also, in the company of others, we hide our faults as best we can or, failing that, tinge them with a whimsical, quasi-charming light, often deluding ourselves in the process. There is no need to hide our failings with a cat: the cat will never tell. With the cat I was not accountable, or not to anyone but myself. How I behaved with the cat would be a uniquely accurate reflection of character. Rather than penetrating and altering me, the cat would serve as my mirror.

  Being with a baby comes to mind. Babies cannot tell, either. But with a baby we are constrained to behave decently since, after all, it is a baby and, more often than not, our own; moreover, if we behave badly with the baby, we may suffer the ill effects later on. We need not bear the ill effects of our behavior with a cat: if it becomes unmanageable or neurotic as a result of mistreatment, we can give it away, which is not ordinarily the case with a baby. So with a cat we see ourselves not through a gloss of social behavior but face to face, mirrored: who we really are in relation to the Other, who we might be in a situation of impossible freedom.

  Under the unexpected aspect of mirror, the cat became infinitely fascinating, and my stay with him became an exercise in self-scrutiny—part of my routine in any event, and now accomplished while I cared for the cat. Killing two birds with one stone, as they say, only nothing like killing was involved. I was kind to the cat, for the most part; I had little urge to be cruel, even when he was intrusive or irritating. That was a happy discovery. I was willing to stroke and give the affection he craved, even willing to play a bit. But only when I was in the mood. I was utterly free, with the cat, to indulge my moods, which were many and various, a freedom I had not felt with babies. You cannot ignore babies when you are not in the mood, or rather, you can but you will suffer guilt or worse. You can ignore cats without suffering guilt, or at least I could. Did I hold myself to a higher standard of behavior with babies because babies are the same species and thus compel allegiance? Or was it simply greater love for the babies? I do not think greater love, though it surely existed, is the answer. Great love has never held anyone to a high standard of behavior; quite the contrary. At any rate, I was kind to the cat when I felt like it and ignored him when I felt no kindness, and these alternations were arbitrary.

  Maybe not totally arbitrary. The moods of moody people do have causes, knotty but not beyond unraveling, should we care to unravel. Mine, at this stage, had nothing to do with the cat. They were strangely arbitrary. And when the cat seemed puzzled or dismayed at my arbitrariness I didn’t care, as I would have with a baby; I would have cared what a baby thought of me, aside from caring for the baby itself. Faced with a baby’s dismay I would have mustered a show of congeniality. With the cat I rarely made such efforts.

  At first I was playful with the cat, and it loved to play. After a while I noticed that while I didn’t mind having him curl up warm against my body, I no longer was inclined to play. I ought to play, I thought: the cat needed, or was entitled to, or at least would have enjoyed, play. But for various reasons, I no longer felt playful, and after some moral struggle, I decided I need not force myself to play with the cat as I surely would have done with a baby, who needs play for its civilized future.

  So this cat would have to do without much play. He would be an infrequently played-with cat, and if his mood became somber in consequence, like mine, so be it. Failure to play was not mistreatment. Anyway, the cat would never tell.

  If I was not obliged to play with him, I was even less obliged to sleep with him. Yet when he took to sleeping in my bed at night I liked feeling his ripply warmth nearby. I could even imagine myself a great-hearted cat lover, which I knew I was not. When he walked up my back and pawed at my face, though, I had no qualms about pushing him away. Qualms arose when
he settled in the precise place at the end of the bed where I wanted to move my feet. The cat could not be faulted, yet my feet longed for that very spot. Why not just shove him over? The cat was sleeping. I have a keen reverence for sleepers; they seem so trusting and vulnerable, so touchingly benign in a near-sacred way, that I hate to disturb them. Still, it seemed overly scrupulous to sacrifice the comfort of my feet merely to avoid disturbing a cat, especially when in all likelihood he would promptly fall back asleep. On the other hand, who was I in the hierarchy of creatures, and of what importance were my feet, that this minuscule comfort should take precedence over the cat’s sacred sleep? Wakeful and distracted, I pondered whether the need to move my feet might be born of a perverse, unconscious urge to cross the cat. No, I thought not. At last, overcome by the absurdity of self-denial, I would nudge him over. He looked innocently aggrieved and sometimes went away altogether. I wished I could explain and persuade him to return, only not to that precise spot. And his catty inability to grasp this explanation was frustrating and came between us.

  Cat lovers say cats are a comfort, but I rarely found this to be so. Though his warmth at my side was pleasant, like a living pillow, the cat did not relieve loneliness or grief or frustration. Nor was he company; his cat silence, his very inability to tell, which conferred such freedom, was a drawback when it came to being company. The cat was more a burden than a comfort. As cat lovers are always saying, cats require little in the way of physical care, far less than infants. The burden was not physical care. The burden of the cat was its presence. It was there, inexorably, and as such demanded a response, whether attention or indifference. Even ignoring a fellow creature requires effort, and for the conscientious and scrupulous, possibly more effort than attention. But I made this effort. Now and then I regretted my inattentiveness and tried to make amends, treating the cat as I treat people, following the moral imperative that the needs of others have some claim on us, as we strive to believe. But only now and then, in an arbitrary way.