So I made a decision: treat Maastricht like my new home. This would be my base, my foundation. The launching pad, as Dirk had described it. And yet I couldn’t shake the habit of comparing the new to the old. Some laneway in Maastricht would remind me of one in Den Bosch. A new bar I’d visit was compared to an old one around the corner. The Maas river to the Den Bosch canals. New squares to old squares. Markets to markets, buildings to buildings, classrooms to classrooms. Same with the friends I was making. I opened myself up, but kept measuring new personalities against what I’d known, the regular crowd at Sint Ansfried. For the first time I had my days and nights to myself; no meals waiting for me at set places, no obligation to answer or need to explain myself to anyone. An open road ahead. Undefined and limitless. But any time I started to follow it, while taking a break from the keyboard or assigned reading, or lying in bed trying to fall asleep, it led me to a familiar place, as if on its own. Den Bosch. The end of the Grafstraat. Dirk’s house. The morning after the big party.
It had started with Dirk shouting from downstairs. “Get up get up getup getup get on up!”
I sat up, my entire head feeling like a giant bruise. I remembered the previous night’s drinking, the medication.
“It’s a fucking dump site down here,” Dirk went on, “and I didn’t tell my parents I was having a party!”
Eventually I got up, and Dirk and I spent that morning cleaning, but not very quickly and probably not very well. Every time we stopped to survey the scene it was demoralizing. Clothes snagged on lights, glass shards caught in the carpet, wine-stained napkins and tablecloths spread around the kitchen, bits of food smeared across walls and on light switches. Dirk played The Beatnik Years quietly on the stereo while we did the scrubbing and wiping. We took turns using the vacuum, shutting it off every few minutes because it was loud. When we figured the main floor was clean enough we went upstairs to shave and shower. I spent more time brushing my teeth that day than I have any day since.
Dirk’s parents came home in the middle of the afternoon with presents for him. Flannel and worsted pants, a blue blazer and sweaters for the “East Coast winter.” Food for the flight over that included a box of chocolate-covered stroopwafeln. If they noticed lingering smells or the disinterested job we had done of tidying the house, they held their tongues. Dirk brought the goods upstairs and cracked open the box of stroopwafeln. As we ate them I asked him what the score was, after last night.
“Ahh, Anna,” he said. “I remember two beautiful nipples and … it goes black.” He pulled at his earlobe. “I know she wasn’t wearing any panties. My head hurts.”
The whole family had an early dinner in the dining room like old times, under the Scholte dog, and as Cornelia cleaned up I brought my overnight bag down, and shortly after we packed into the Noosens’ car for the drive to Vlijmen, Dirk and I in the back. As the car left Den Bosch for the countryside Dirk began singing, “Arrrgh, me shanty,” and belching. Wim, smirking in the rear-view mirror, lowered the windows a crack to clear the smell. Fresh air whistled in. Dirk tilted his head in thanks, “Arigato, Father-san, air and wind, Father.”
I looked through the windshield to the road ahead. Arrow straight and perfectly flat. An ideal stretch of asphalt. I thought of all the days I’d biked along this stretch of road with my eyes closed. I had been back and forth to Dirk’s so often, I’d memorized every dip and rise of the A2, every bridge and cross street. I had gotten so good I could sense my proximity to the shoulder. When I started on an especially straight stretch, like the one we were on now, I would shut my eyes and play a tune in my head, something I was working on at the time. A climb of octaves in a steady rhythm, the bottom note just touching the ground, music to distract myself from the fact I was riding blind. I’d start the count. Two, three, four. Seven, eight, nine. And just as I could see thirteen around the bend, the inside of my eyelids would glow from the headlights of an approaching car, real or imagined, and I’d snap my eyes wide open. I had been so close. And now I was leaving. When would I get another chance to top the record? I remembered telling Dirk I was getting close. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. He answered by mocking me. “You still play that silly game, Old Man?” But I could see he was impressed, maybe even jealous. “You’ll never make it to thirteen, though. It’s impossible.”
“Wake up, Old Man!” Dirk snapped his fingers next to my ear. “We’re nearly there.”
The car passed the Vlijmen roundabout and was cruising down the main road. Dirk started shantying again, swinging his body left and right, his arm resting on my shoulder. At the playground the car made a left, then slowed as it snaked to the house. When it pulled up at the drive, Dirk jumped out and he and I walked to the front door.
“Fatness,” Dirk said. “Corpulence. Total, all-consuming, diabetes-guaranteeing obesity.” He gave me his chip-toothed grin. We hugged for a long time. “Onwards and upwards,” he said into my ear. “And outwards. All at the same time.”
I played that day back to myself dozens of times during my first term in Maastricht, a piece of music next to the ones I was meant to be practising. Then I’d snap back to the present. An uneven cobblestone street, the chatter of students picking up mail at the porter’s desk, someone’s door being closed across the dormitory hallway. Things that were gradually, despite some resistance, becoming familiar. But this still wasn’t my real home. And while I stopped expecting Dirk to pop up at the desk beside me, or be at the bottom of the stairs in my dorm, he was still the best friend I had in Maastricht. I was anxious to go back and see him.
*
Like everyone else on campus I left Maastricht on December twenty-third. I took the late-afternoon Intercity train, direction Amsterdam Centraal. It was the local, and more people were getting out than coming in. Soon I was the last person in my car. I moved next to the window and started searching the night sky for the vapour trails left by passing airplanes. As the train made its way into the familiar flat countryside, I followed the double lines as they lit up and faded in the large black bowl above. It was possible Dirk was on one of those planes. Gliding over the fingers of land that stretched into the sea, heading towards the banks of cloud that hover permanently above Amsterdam.
As soon as I could see Den Bosch, the nearest station to Vlijmen, my head began cycling through two pieces. Schubert’s Sonata no. 21 in B-flat and Rachmaninoff’s prelude in C-sharp Minor. I had started practising them at the beginning of the month and had played them so often they were lodged in my brain, playing themselves regardless of whether or not I was in front of a keyboard. The two pieces were natural opposites. The Schubert had the most beautiful opening of any piece I had played. As if the notes were balanced on the thinnest, most fragile wire. They ascend and descend, but every time you think the melody will break away, it returns to level. A buildup to forte, a return to mezzo. The introspective passages of pianissimo never dwelling long enough to grow melancholy. Underneath all that, a regular pulse of octaves in the bass clef gives the piece a steady and abiding feeling of hope.
The Rachmaninoff C-sharp, on the other hand, is a pack of limbs falling spectacularly down a flight of stairs. A tumbling that builds up to an explosion of chords, broken and solid, shooting up and sliding down octaves. The final section repeats the opening by doubling up the chords. Left and right hand cross over each other, the tempo increases until runs of notes crash in waves running crosswise. Dirk would like the Rachmaninoff. If he came to the house, to pick me up or drop me off, I would definitely play it for him.
The train got in around eight. The taxi quickly slipped out of Den Bosch and onto the quiet A2. A lining of hoarfrost covered the land, starting from the tall plants and reeds on the banks of the canal and spreading past the fields into the forests. Root, trunk, branch, needle. Soil, furrow, blade. All of it, from Den Bosch to Vlijmen, skinned in ice. One push, I imagined, and I could skate from one to the other.
In the morning I practised on the old Grotrian upright, mostly to impress my parents. My fathe
r sat on the couch next to the piano and, for old time’s sake, brought his work with him and made passing comments on my playing.
When I took a break from my pieces, I stretched my fingers with technical exercises. Scales and formulas. Chords, broken and solid. Arpeggios, major, minor, harmonic, melodic. When I ran out of permutations I took out Czerny’s School of Velocity and opened to a random page. I used the metronome to work my way through the tempi. Andante, moderato, allegro, presto, prestissimo. Faster and faster, turning the drizzle of notes into thunderstorms. A spastically bravura performance. With nothing more to show, and believing the Czerny might be irritating my father, I spent the afternoon fitting puzzle pieces with my mother and cracking the spine of the Glenn Gould biography that had been assigned reading. After that I looked through the syllabus for the upcoming term. Ives’ tone pieces, Galina Ustvolskaya’s forceful, blocky preludes.
Towards evening I allowed myself to look at my watch. Christmas dinner was twenty-four hours away. Less, if you counted aperitifs and truffle rolling. The obvious course of action would have been to pick up the phone and dial Dirk’s number, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Between the two of us, Dirk had always been the one to pick up the phone, initiate the plan. I thought that maybe this was a kind of test. Who could hold out longer. If so, I’d spent a term waiting. I could last another day.
To pass time I bundled myself up and went for a walk. Instead of turning towards the main road, which was my first inclination, I headed the other way, and followed a side road I hadn’t been down in years. I’d remembered the side road as a crescent that met up with the main road, but it turned out I was wrong. The lamps became sparser, the houses grew smaller, and the street curled into a cul-de-sac, surrounded by woods. I hesitated, then kept going. The trees were dispersed in such a way that I could pass between the trunks, but only by contorting myself. The ground was covered in thick and gnarled roots. Between some of the roots were semi-frozen puddles, and when I tapped the surface with the soles of my boots the layer of ice cracked into shards and sank into the marshy liquid beneath. The farther in I went, the darker and thicker the woods grew. Just as I was wondering whether I should, or even could, find my way back, I heard cars gliding over asphalt. Headlights sliced through the branches. A few more steps and I was standing on the side of the main road. Two minutes from my street.
Back at my house I checked with my parents, to see if I’d missed any calls, then went to my room and pulled out my record collection. The first record I picked was the Hungarian Dances, conducted by Toscanini. After going through all twenty-one, I replayed the fifth a few more times. Next I listened to Pini di Roma and Fontane di Roma. Moving from full orchestra to solo instrumentalist, I put on the Casals version of Bach’s capacious Cello Suites. I listened to Liszt’s teardrop “Consolations,” as performed by Rubinstein. After that I went to Chopin’s preludes, also Rubinstein’s recording. I listened to Walter Gieseking’s Bergamasque Suite against Van Cliburn’s version. It had been years since I’d played some of these records, but they sounded exactly as I remembered. I knew each performer’s idiosyncrasies, statements, hesitations. The moments of counterintuitive boldness that were the marks of personality. I must have listened to over four hours of music, because by the time I got to bed it was well after midnight.
*
On Christmas morning I was woken twice. At seven I heard the garage door open, a motor start, and tires crunch down the driveway. I fell back to sleep. At ten o’clock it was a clash of baking trays, the buzz of an oven timer, and my mother knocking on my bedroom door.
“Yes?” I said.
She opened it a crack, letting in the buttery smell of rising pie crust. “Heading off shortly. Sure you won’t come?”
I rubbed my eyes and sat up in bed. “Thanks, but I’d probably be leaving halfway through for Dirk’s, so I’d prefer not.”
“Always welcome if you change your mind.”
When I heard the front door close I got out of bed and, through the bedroom window, watched my mother cross the street holding a foil-covered ceramic tray. It had snowed through the night. Light, dry snow. It was piled up on bare branches, eavestroughs, mailboxes, doorsteps, curbs, side-view mirrors, windshields, and bumpers. The lawns and roads were transformed into woolly white carpets.
I couldn’t just wait in bed, so I got up and walked around the house, tapping my fingers along the counters, cupboards, fridge door, the lid of the piano. At noon, I went back upstairs, stripped off my pyjamas, and rinsed myself in the shower. I thought of putting together a lunch from last night’s leftovers but ate a bowl of cereal instead. The next time I looked at the clock it was half past one. I figured I had a couple hours to kill. If I didn’t hear from Dirk by three thirty, I would call him, to see if everything was all right.
In the meantime, I did the usual thing. Practise. Schubert and Rachmaninoff and back to the top. Again and again or I’d never make it to Carnegie Hall. Around three o’clock, it began to snow again. Fat flakes, singles and pairs that rotated on shared axes, bedding lightly on the ground. The next time I looked it was a solid curtain, opening and closing in a mesmerizing whiteout.
Three thirty. Four o’clock. Four fifteen. I was anxious. I wondered if something had happened to his flight. A delay or cancellation, a missed connection? Something on the drive home from Schiphol?
I inhaled and exhaled. Just call, Jan.
Just call.
The phone in the kitchen started ringing. I let it ring three times before picking it up. I cleared my throat.
“Jan speaking,” I said.
“Dirk speaking,” he said, deadpan.
“Motherfucker,” I said, feeling a flush of relief. “You left it late.”
Dirk ignored this. Without prompting, he unleashed a monologue about the last four months. Classes, the campus at large, trips to the city, all the friends he was making, his roommate from California, Drew. Everything going swimmingly.
“That’s good,” I said. “Really. I’m glad I could get all this information in one handy package, but have you saved me any truffles?”
“Whoa, whoa, Old Man in a hurry. What about you? What’s up with you?”
Everything he told me, I repeated back to him in some way. How I had made a few friends myself, what their names were, how a few of us were planning our own trip to some city, which was an idea that someone had floated and nobody had followed up on.
“That’s good, Jan,” he said. “That’s good.”
For a second the line went quiet. I felt he was going to say something, but he didn’t.
“Dirk?”
“Yes?”
“So what time should I come over?”
Again the line went quiet. I heard voices on Dirk’s end. “Is that the fam?” I said.
“No,” Dirk said. “My parents are on vacation this year. Belize. Apparently my mother had always wanted to go.”
“So if they’re not in Den Bosch …”
“Neither am I.”
“No?” I frowned. I wasn’t getting it.
“No, I’m calling from my girlfriend’s, Donna’s, fam. The Koches.”
I took a second.
“Are the Koches like the Zoetmulders, Dirk? Are you at the Zoetmulders’? If you are I can probably see you through the window.”
“No,” Dirk said. “I’m at the Koches’. In Annapolis, Maryland, the U.S.A.”
“You’re serious?” I said, unable to stop myself. Obviously Dirk was serious. He’d been serious from our hellos.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t call earlier.”
“Well,” I said, trying to recover, “it’s no problem. It’s pretty hectic being home, actually. I’ve barely had time to see my parents with all this work and practising to get through, so …”
“That’s good,” Dirk said. “Good to be busy.”
“Yeah, absolutely.”
Another drop in the line. I heard raised voices on his end, a harsh dissonance, fol
lowed by a group of people laughing.
“Okay,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “So, are you coming back this break at all?”
“Well, actually, my parents will be coming to see me after New Year’s. We’ll be spending a few days in New York City to round things off.”
“Wow,” I said. “Amazing.”
“Yeah. I haven’t told my parents but Donna’s probably going to come along.”
Dirk’s hand muffled the receiver. Then he was back.
“Yeah, anyways, this is long distance, so …”
“Right. Of course. Can I give you a ring this term?”
“At my dorm?”
He recited the digits. I wrote them down.
“Cool, great. Merry Christmas, Jan.”
“You too, Dirk.”
He hung up. I listened to the dial tone for a while, then hung up too. I walked back to the living room, hunched onto the sofa, and for what seemed like ages I did not move. I held my head in my hands. I felt my stomach turn. “Donna.” “Annapolis.” “New York City.” I didn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe it. But what did it matter what I believed?
I became furious. Furious at Dirk, but more at myself. I had been weak on the phone. Pathetic. I thought of calling him back. I wanted to call him back. But what would I say?
I stood up. Still not thinking, not feeling, I headed to the piano, squeezing my hands into fists then stretching my fingers backwards, till they hurt.
I started with the Rachmaninoff, the piece Dirk would have liked. I went straight to my favourite section, the tumbling four-note chords, and played it repeatedly. Each time I inverted the tempo a little, so largo was eventually played presto and vice versa. I moved to the Schubert, where I changed the major chords to minor and made suspended seconds into sharp sevenths, turning the piece’s hesitations and expectations into ugliness and violence. Where I read pianissimo, I played forte. Staccato passages were suppressed by the damper pedal. Brightness smothered at the bottom of a black well.
School of Velocity Page 6