When I stopped playing I put my hands to my ears and listened as a circle of music formed around my head. I listened to this circle as if it were a recording. When the recording ended, I went back to playing, this time louder, more aggressively. I pressed my hands to my ears to test the playback. I played again, longer, louder, and kept testing. I wanted to make a recording that would go on indefinitely, to create a fortress of sound. Whatever it took, I would do it. Outside it was dark. I was still alone. I went back to playing. Held the pedal longer. Played louder. When I paused, I put my hands to my ears. Listened. And started again.
For years after that Christmas I did not once speak to Dirk or hear from him, nor did he hear from me. I turned to other things. Music. I had his number and could have tracked him through his college, but he could have done the same for me.
At the end of my first year at de Groot I looked at what I had done. I was on partial scholarship, meant to be a promising talent, and yet had accomplished nothing since leaving Sint Ansfried except build a repertoire of a few dozen pieces. I had yet to understand music as something beyond a pattern of notes on a grid, or to conceive of a piece as a story, and of composers as storytellers with specific voices, cadences, personalities. I had yet to see that a composition could be an anecdote or comedy or epic, or that you could communicate a piece of music to an audience like the two of you were sitting at a café table, and that all the gesticulations, pauses, and outpourings of sweat that are part of the telling could be included in a performance.
After first year I decided that, while I could not make up for the past, I could make the best of what was still ahead. I spent the summer in Maastricht, practising and practising, speeding up and covering more ground. I started dreaming again, about playing with a quintet in Leipzig, recording a studio album with EMI, attending a masterclass with Colin Davis in Birmingham. All things that would impress Dirk, even if he didn’t know who Colin Davis was.
The practice rooms at the faculty were open twenty-four hours a day and I regularly practised until the early hours of the morning. As soon as I woke up the next day, I started again. I became more clever about how I used my time. I tape-recorded my sessions, met outside class hours with a tutor, and read and researched composers, as opposed to merely staring at their note-filled pages and wondering how this or that famous pianist, Rubinstein or Richter, would play it.
Twelve months on, at the end of my second year, I looked down at my hands while they played the keyboard and saw, for the first time, the tools of a professional. Precise, controlled, fast, delicate. It was like the sound I was producing came from somewhere beyond the combination of my fingers and the piano. It was like the sound that came from the speakers of my stereo. The sound of a concert pianist playing to a sold-out five-thousand-seat auditorium.
In my third year I went from middle of the pack, a competent but easily overlooked student, to head of the class. I won the Sweelinck Scholarship, the school’s premier prize, and performed in solo and group recitals at the faculty and in public. I also focused my repertoire. Chopin, Ravel, Debussy, Fauré, Saint-Saëns, Satie. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers, mostly French.
By now, the music never left me. I no longer had to cover my ears to test if it was still there. The music I played during the day was the last thing I heard before I went to sleep, and the first thing I heard when I woke up.
And outside the room, I got on with life too. I went on my own to London and Paris. Bought clothes without a second thought, and even developed a sense of style. I went out to bars and, once or twice, to restaurants. I went to parties and met girls who knew nothing about me but what they saw. I went down on a girl for the first time. I tried dating. I had a few steadies, though nothing serious. I acted aloof to see what it felt like. I liked being distant, unreceptive, a little mysterious, as if I’d always been head of the class, and I did not talk much about my life before Maastricht.
Then I met Lena.
In August, one week before the start of my final year, the class tutor, Arne, told me I’d been chosen for a solo performance at the conservatory’s annual showcase concert, which was staged for booking agents, professional musicians, and company managers from across Europe. Even though there was a glut of awards for graduating students, the showcase was the biggest of the big deals. When word got around, a couple of classmates organized a small celebration.
Deciding it would be low-key, we headed to our local, across from the Onze Lieve Vrouwe church. Tables were set outside, in the square, but those were for the tourists, and we went inside, to the usual cloud of cigarette smoke, blaring music, and roster of self-involved bartenders. We were on our way to a table in the far corner when I saw a girl, although really she was more a woman, sitting on a bar stool. Perched, with perfect posture and a long neck. She had a round face, a small, sharp chin, dark eyes, and was wearing a thin sweater that clung to her breasts and waist. When she turned to grab the bartender’s attention, I saw she had golden-blond hair, and that it reached down to the small of her back.
In that instant, my classmates disappeared, the noise in the bar quieted to drifts of sound, and I was struck by a need for this girl who was a woman. Unlike anything I’d felt before. It hurt not to have her already.
I don’t know who that person was who walked up to the bar without a single intelligent thought in his head, or who sat on the stool beside her and smiled, or who was going to get the bartender’s attention just to have something to say. I don’t know where I found the guts to be that person, maybe it was from the news Arne had just given me, but there I was. I raised my hand, about to call out an order to the bartender who had his back to us, and this girl, who had barely lifted an eyebrow when I smiled at her, said, “The good ones have radar.” She cleared her throat and the bartender instantly spun around to take her order.
“And what’ll your friend have?” the bartender asked.
I don’t know what I ordered. Whatever she was having? A beer? What mattered is I introduced myself, we started talking, she gave me her number, and when I called it, two days later, she answered. We spoke and, as casually as I could, I asked her on a date.
The very second she said yes, as if it was the obvious answer to the question, I started to sweat. What to wear? What to say? How to act?
But like at the bar, Lena took care of everything. She chose the place to meet and, afterwards, the place to eat. The restaurant was an out-of-the-way Thai or Indonesian or, in any case, Asian place. Lena ordered because nothing on the menu was familiar to me. I don’t remember what we talked about, but all the words came with ease. What I do remember is picking up, and imprinting in my memory, the details I didn’t see the first time. The unblemished white around her dark irises. The dimple above her top lip and shadow of another dimple on her chin. The part on the left side of her head and the hair that swooped across her brow. Her almost swollen lips, which I wanted to feel on mine every time she smiled.
The only lighting in the room came from a wick sunken in a fortress of wax, and in that flickering light, Lena frequently touched her face with her hands when she spoke. She said later that she knew her hands, especially her long fingers, were her most beautiful body part and she had deliberately touched her face as often as possible throughout the dinner.
After the restaurant we went to a bar, then we walked towards her apartment, which she told me was across the river in one of the low-rises near the old ceramic factories. There was an early-fall chill. She placed my arm over her shoulder and smiled. I thought I was going to go home with her but at the bridge she said goodnight and embraced me. No opportunity for a kiss. She just walked away. And as with everything that night, she knew exactly what she was doing because right up till the next time I saw her I was burning to kiss her. And determined to never let her walk away from me again.
Lena killed Lise. She killed Stefa at the height of Stefa, not to mention wiping the floor with Horseface, Beate, and anyone else from my afternoon fantasi
es. Nobody in my past had a stitch on Lena, and the thought of these comparisons, which popped up at the beginning, made me, for the first time in ages, want to somehow contact my old best friend and send him a photograph of my new girlfriend with a note that said, “See?”
But that would have been a short sell, and I knew right away something greater was happening. In what seemed like no time, it was Lena who came to sit invisibly in my classes; Lena to whom I told my stories at the end of the day. I started staying overnight at her apartment, and within a couple of weeks I stored toiletries in her bathroom and a change of clothes in her drawers.
Lena’s place was on the third floor of her building. Through her bedroom window you had a clear view of the Maas and of the old city, which had been my world for the last three years. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I’d stand by the window and look at the sun set over the broadening river, and it was like being on the deck of a boat that was sailing away from a harbour, with the dots moving along the far bank being the crowd seeing me off. As the shadows cut in, the old city would disappear, part by part. Steeples, gabled roofs, street corners, alleyways, riverbanks. Soon after would come the jangle of keys telling me Lena was home.
When we met, Lena, who was two years older than me, was doing her legal apprenticeship with a firm called Herm Frisch. She started work at nine, came home at seven, showered daily, dressed like an adult, collected a cheque once a month. Real life. And she made it clear that if I wanted to spend time with her while she was awake, I’d have to change my daily schedule. So I did. Instead of heading out to the practice rooms mid-afternoon and staying till past midnight, I began early in the day and ended around the time Lena clocked off. I had a proper breakfast before leaving and took a lunch with me, so I wasn’t spending money at the student café. I was becoming domesticated, and I liked it. I liked showing Lena I could accommodate.
But as late October arrived, and the date of the showcase concert approached, I had to go back to the old ways. When Lena saw the hours I spent in the practice rooms, she said it was her turn to adjust, and more often than not, she’d come with me, bringing office work with her. On the way to the rooms, I’d put my arm around her shoulder or she’d run her fingers through my hair, and we’d daydream about what it would be like after the showcase. After graduation. She took it as a given I’d be on tour and she’d be with me.
“I want to go to America first,” she’d say.
“America? First?”
“I’ve never been,” she said.
“Neither have I.”
“I’m thinking New York,” she’d say a little later. “Driving down Broadway.”
I might have added something about a stretch limo with an open sunroof, but didn’t doubt her vision. She spoke about us in terms of years and sometimes even decades, and very quickly, as if I’d been waiting for them without knowing it, these visions worked their way inside me. Marriage. Anniversary parties surrounded by friends we’d yet to make. Famous occasions where we’d meet other musicians, travel to exotic places, cross all the oceans.
Then I’d go into the practice room and she’d sit down by the door, spreading her work around her. It was torture to turn away from her, but I didn’t have to wait for the spark to take over—I had fear working as well. The showcase was coming. The days were flying by and I still had the earth to do. I took out my notebook and music, set specific goals for the session, and got started.
At least once an hour, though, I’d slip off the bench and look out the door at a napping Lena, leaning against the doorframe with head back, lips parted, eyes closed. When I looked at her in these moments I was overcome. The music I had been practising went on playing in my head, but as background.
As softly as possible, I’d walk out and kiss her shadow-dimpled chin, her cheek, her ear. With eyes still closed she’d smile. She did that, smiling when she was neither awake nor asleep. Sometimes she even answered questions, or ran her fingers through my hair. Then the smile would fade, the lips close, and the arm fall slowly to her side. I’d whisper to her about her face or her fingers or her hair to see if I’d get a reaction.
I was performing Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat for the showcase; originally Arne’s idea. He’d overheard me playing it one day and convinced me I had a connection to this piece that I hadn’t shown in others. Now, he said, the job was to reinvent the sonata, bar by bar, note by note. An enormous undertaking, and I don’t know how I would have got on with it if Lena had not been there every day, a reminder that I was no longer on my own. She used to joke that when I didn’t want to run an errand or complete a tedious task, I should think of doing it “for us.” Soon it became part of our normal conversation. Leave work on time for us. Eat this last bit of leftovers for us. When I left Lena with a kiss and went back to the practice room, it was for us.
*
The de Groot Conservatory’s thirty-seventh annual showcase took place on a Thursday in late November, exactly two weeks before my twenty-third birthday. The faculty’s music hall, where the performance would take place, was a room with three hundred and fifty grey felt-covered seats arranged on a slope towards a semi-circular stage. Above the stage was a frescoed half-dome, which hid a bank of stage lights. On either side were heavy curtains brocaded in a modern geometric style.
On the final day of rehearsal I came early, while the conservatory orchestra was finishing a run-through of Die Moldau. To pass time, I sat in the back row and picked out classmates onstage. All were staring intently at their scores, only occasionally breaking their concentration to glance at the conductor. Like drivers checking their mirrors.
As the rehearsal went on, though, I stopped paying close attention and instead mentally cleared the players offstage. In place of their chairs, stands, sheet music, and percussion instruments, I put a solitary Steinway, a Hamburg D. The high altar of concert pianos. In my imagination, I dimmed the house lights and raised the stage lights. Through a thin opening at stage right, I had a pianist walk out from the wings. That pianist was me. He sat on the Hamburg D’s bench, adjusted the height, and straightened his back. Like everyone else in the audience I was watching the pianist closely, waiting for that first note. And in that moment of expectation, as the pianist was lifting his arms and leaning towards the keyboard, my mind flashed to a memory of Dirk: the first time he’d come to one of my shows. It was a “Young Musicians” performance held at Vlijmen town hall. He’d been making fun for weeks leading up to it. “Do you want me to wear my culottes? What do we say when we are greeted by the king? When the harp plays, do we automatically cry? What do you mean, there’s not going to be a harp?” When I tried to remind him about the time and place on the day of the recital to make sure he’d be there, he just repeated “M’lady m’lady m’lady” again and again. On the night of the performance, when I looked over the audience, I saw Dirk sitting in the middle, halfway back, looking unusually reserved. The stage lights went up. I played my piece. And when it ended, I again looked over the audience and saw everyone politely applauding except for Dirk, who was standing on his chair, hooting, waving, pumping his fists, utterly monkey.
The surging and wind-tossed strings in the final section of Die Moldau shook me back to the present. Arne had slipped into the hall while I wasn’t paying attention and sat down next to me. I nodded at him. On the stage, the conductor squeezed the fingers of his right hand, making an end to the piece. Arne applauded, ostensibly congratulating the orchestra but also, it seemed, to usher them offstage. He turned to me.
“Come on,” he said, “work to do.”
We stepped down to the stage, where the chairs and stands were being carried off to make way for the piano.
As I ran over the piece with Arne that afternoon, work went on all around. Lights were adjusted. Curtains tested. I could see, through the open door at the back of the auditorium, the staff filling the ticket office lightbox with headshots of the principal performers, including myself, and raised plastic letters announcing the program.
Bedřich Smetana, Die Moldau. M. O. Pallett, Cloud Cycle. Intermission. Franz Schubert, Sonata in B-flat, performed by Jan de Vries.
As I finished up, someone on the crew was testing the bulb in the lightbox, flashing it on and off. Lightbox on, lightbox off. On. Off. On, staying on. Jan de Vries. Fat.
On the morning of the concert, Lena reminded me she wouldn’t see me till after the performance, and asked if I was sure I knew what I was wearing, where the shoe polish was stored, which necktie to choose. I told her I had no idea where any of these things was but I would be fine.
She left happy, and I spent the rest of the morning padding around the apartment looking for ways to kill time, or bypass it, as the suspense of the performance was building. As morning was turning to afternoon I noticed that, as I listened to passages of the sonata in my head, playing out as I had practised them these past several weeks, I was also catching scraps of an alternate version, and that it sounded the way I’d played it years ago, in my empty house on Christmas Day. It was as if the alternate version were trying to insinuate itself into the ideal one. Several times I “restarted” the piece the correct way, but each time the other, strange way would edge in. As an experiment, I decided to let the sonata play out, and when it did I found the correct version would take over. I wasn’t worried by the confusion, but when it was resolved I felt relief, even a bit of happiness; the two versions could cooperate. Like two plots joining into a storyline.
At six thirty I arrived at the backstage entrance to the faculty music hall and went down to the green room. As it got close to seven, I listened to the bustle of the arriving crowd. I imagined seats filling up, the audience members chatting, and somewhere in the wings the musicians nervously waiting for the chance to strike their first notes. Downstairs, I was fidgeting just the same. First with the clothes I was wearing, then with a particularly interesting light switch, then with my own fingers and fingernails. I thought of Glenn Gould’s pre-performance habits: humming, dancing, bathing his fingers in a basin of warm water. His late-career compulsions, like wearing nonprescription glasses onstage and setting up with a score he didn’t actually use. Before I knew it, I could hear the Cloud Cycle coming to an end. I listened to the applause, the footsteps of a moving herd. Intermission. Stands and chairs being scraped across the boards, a piano being rolled into position.
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