“No,” I said. “Couldn’t fit it in the schedule.”
“It always seemed like a long shot,” Lena said. “But at least you weren’t alone for the debut.”
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t.”
She asked for more on the performances themselves. What the soloists were like. The orchestra members.
She moved closer. I slid my hand down to her waist, her hips.
“I don’t want to fight again,” she said.
“We won’t,” I answered. “Ever. At least, not about this.”
We kissed again.
A few hours later we got out of bed. I drew the curtains and packed our bags as Lena took a shower. On the train ride to Maastricht, Lena turned to me and in the same confident voice she’d had the night before, said that while I was away she’d often remembered how she used to come home from the office and find me staring out the window. Was she thinking I should move in? I asked. Not thinking, she said. Telling.
As far as I was concerned, that was the story. Dirk came and shortly after he left. A lie that, to me, weighed the same as truth. If, after my first night back, Lena thought about our fight, I didn’t catch a whiff of it. She had moved on. I did too.
As time passed, I heard from Dirk again. Once a year, for the better part of the following ten years, I’d get a postcard from him. The first were forwarded from my dorm, but eventually they came direct. Usually around my birthday, Christmas, or New Year’s. I found the first when I got back from a tour, with Lena, of Moscow and Leningrad. It had a picture with the caption “Sunrise in Lapland”; it looked like a generic mailer, something from a cruise operator. On the back was written “Happy Birthday, Jan. I hope you have an excellent year.” I tore the card in half, but regretted it right away. I taped the halves together and slipped it into the old shoebox, where I kept all the Sint Ansfried things.
The next Christmas I received another postcard. An oil painting of palm trees overlaid by the words “Happy New Year” in loopy script. It arrived shortly after I came back from a recording session in Germany. On the reverse side was the familiar chicken scratch. “Have a good one. Sincerely, D.”
In the shoebox.
The next year was a note extending “Good tidings for the season.” Then came a letter on my grandmother’s passing; I didn’t know how he heard. He sent congratulations when I was profiled in a long article in one of the Sunday magazines, and another when my first credit on a major label, Sony, came out. They were always one-liners. Never any personal information. No requests to write back. Not even a return address. None made much of an impression. All went straight into the shoebox.
At the beginning of my career, I made so little money it was laughable. The first tour, to Japan and Korea, was by far the most lucrative. After that the dates were spread thin and I had to teach at the conservatory, when there was an opening, and give private lessons, mostly to children. Not once during that time, even during our fights, which were rare and usually about housekeeping, did Lena bring up the disparity in our income or complain about my lack of financial success. She took pride in every date I booked, big and small. When her friends from work got engaged to men with professions and regular paycheques, Lena never hinted that she regarded my artistic pursuit as less dignified than any other kind of career, and dismissed the idea any time I brought it up, which was usually out of guilt. When I asked her about children, whether she was holding back because I wasn’t bringing enough in, she reminded me that when we started dating she said she didn’t want children. Had she changed her mind, though?
“It won’t always be this way,” I said. “I might start picking up dates, travelling more often. Won’t you want someone in the house while I’m gone?”
She hadn’t changed her mind, she said.
Among musician friends and acquaintances, I heard stories of long-suffering partners who left after it dawned on them that their other halves were never going to catch that break, and that their life together was not going to turn out as expected. I just listened. That, I knew, was not going to happen me.
In the meantime, Lena worked long hours. She worked on the weekend when the boss asked, and her effort and intelligence gradually gained notice. When she got her first promotion, the year she turned thirty, we left the apartment for the upper two storeys of a house in a more established part of Maastricht. It gave a similar view of the river and the old city with the walls curling around it, but on clear days you could also look south across the border to Belgium and the hills that sprouted from the loosening topography. The new place had three bedrooms, and shortly after moving in, while I was on one of my longer tours, Lena had the third room soundproofed and installed a forty-eight-inch K-400 upright Kawai. I came home to a practice room of my own, which was in itself a great surprise, but what I remember best was Lena’s reaction. As I felt the soundproofing and examined the upright, she stood by the door bouncing on her tiptoes, a kid who found the present she’d wished for under the tree.
It was for the loyalty, generosity, and excitement that Lena gave me, and for all I owed her in return, that I kept to myself the whirr of sounds that were increasingly part of life. The music that came and went while I practised, the unusual sounds I heard while on a walk or during a lesson. Not that they seriously concerned me. I’d heard music playing in my head since I was a student at the conservatory, and I’d accepted and even welcomed these strange sounds as a secondary voice. If they were now amplified pre-concert, which they were, I figured it was a form of stage fright, which was, as far as I could tell, part of being a musician. I had heard stories of hyperventilation, light-headedness, cold hands, tremors, even blackouts. Sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent; all worse, to my mind, than what was happening to me. The experience backstage in Osaka was an extreme case, there were other factors to account for, and even then what I heard hadn’t gotten in the way of my performing.
*
The gift of the Kawai marked the beginning of a new stage in my career. Shortly after I started practising on it, I said to Lena, “Do you remember that time, before the run-up to the showcase concert, when I kept regular hours?”
“Before you decided to disappear into the bunker?”
“I’m going back to keeping those hours,” I said. “I’ve been living off bad student habits too long. I haven’t developed. I’m serious about this. Will you help me?”
“Anything I can do,” she said, more excited than I was.
From then on, while most of my peers went on living the chaotic lives of sessional musicians, staying up all night and sleeping through most of the day, Lena made sure I went to bed and got up at a good time. We talked over breakfast about my goals, short-and long-term. When she left for the office, my clock started. There might be a phone call over lunch, but otherwise I was alone for the day.
A typical practice day began with technical work. Warming the fingers with scales and chords and Hanons. Circulating the blood and loosening the joints. After the fingers, I’d warm up the piano. Run trills and glissandi up and down the keyboard. Crack the lower register as if prodding a beast. Listen for the hum that rises off the cast-iron soundboard, the sign that the instrument’s vocal cords are vibrating on their own.
I’d review notes from the previous day. Transition to new key. Soft staccato in left. Dynamics in the last three bars. I’d add ideas that might have come to me at night or from chatting with Lena. Una corda pedal in the second section. Hold the A minor longer in the left. Last word to the lower chord. But I didn’t dwell on them. When I was a student at the conservatory I could spend hours in front of a keyboard playing out fantasies or days in front of a record player sampling interpretations by past masters. If I wanted to, I could spend three weeks on a passage of Ravel, or engage in a term-long discussion with a tutor about Saint-Saëns’ idiosyncratic phrasing. We could argue about whether the score was sacred or improvisation was allowed. Whether one plays in period or updates for the modern age. But if I was going to be a
professional I would have to keep a professional’s schedule. No more poet waiting for his inspiration. Learn the section, choose an interpretation, stick with it, move to the next section. If I had imposed this routine on my student self, I would have rebelled. But as it became the outline of my daily life, and I added more pieces to my repertoire, and took on more work as a result, I found I liked it.
Lena liked it too. When she’d get home, I’d leave the keyboard behind. I’d have nights free to go to the cinema or on double dates at restaurants with her friends. I’d be available to pick her up from the office if she worked late, or sit and read in the chair across from her desk till she finished a file. She liked it when I showed up there, her man who looked rested and contented, was well travelled and sometimes named in the newspaper or culture magazines. Not a lawyer, like the other office spouses; her musician.
*
To Taub I give credit for the second ingredient of my success.
Back when I was a child starting to learn, I thought of myself as a musician. Then, a pianist. In high school, I daydreamed of recording Pictures at an Exhibition, forming a quintet, and retiring every summer to a cabin in the woods, maybe the Finnish woods, à la Jean Sibelius. Over the years in the conservatory, I became drawn to certain periods and styles, and by the end narrowed my focus to Romantic music, mostly French. And in the early years of my professional career, Taub refashioned me again, this time as an accompanist, specializing in the French Romantic. “Be a big fish in a small pond,” he said at one of the meetings in his office. “It’ll pay off, you’ll see.” I seethed all day till Lena got home. When I told her Taub’s plan, I was sure she would side with me, but she didn’t.
“How can you not see he’s right?” Lena asked.
“But don’t you think this is a step back?” I said.
“From what? Waiting for Taub to call, an opening at the conservatory? Won’t you be onstage more, working more?”
“Yes, but as an accompanist?”
“So what you’re saying is you’ll be part of a jam session every time you show up to work?”
“Not exactly. I’ll be the person in the shadows.”
“Not to me, you won’t. You’ll be the person who played with this famous violist or cellist or other pianist. Who accompanied them. Who was part of their performance as much as they were part of yours.”
“Coming out of the conservatory,” I said, “all I could see was potential. Big stages, bright lights. This is not what I pictured.”
“The reality,” Lena said, “is that you’re young. You’ve been playing professionally, what, five years? You could be playing another forty or fifty. If Taub thinks this is how you’ll make your name, you should trust him. This is what he knows.”
I had no answer.
“Come on, Jan,” she said. “You know I’m right.”
I started to thaw.
“You know I’m right,” she said.
Lena was right. Taub was right. I wasn’t Midori or Evgeny Kissin, prodigies who debuted in their preteens. It was not only that I needed to work harder than others, which I already knew; I needed to find my own route to success.
The surprise was in how naturally the role came to me. Accompaniment is a particular skill. You are the bridge between the audience and the soloist, a lens that magnifies the leading melody, a handler to the outsized personality next to you, one player who sometimes has to be two. While soloist and accompanist are meant to have worked through variations on the piece before a performance, reality is more often a limited number of rehearsals crammed into a half-week before the show. There were even times when I would have to play on the fly, using my knowledge of a soloist’s previous performances and musical proclivities. How strict or flamboyant is the soloist, how technically adept or concerned with atmosphere? Is he or she given to moments of improvisation or devoted to the music as sacred script? Light on the fingers or tending to heavy weather? Showman or cold fish?
This was where the other soundtrack that played in my head came into it. While I practised on my own parts of the piece, I could hear, during breaks and occasionally even while I played, a second voice. It could be the soloist’s part, an alternative take on the entire piece, or a piece I’d played long ago that my mind was telling me had something to do with what I was working on now. I’d been cast as accompanist for as long as I could recall, only I hadn’t known it. The sounds in my head were tutor, bandmate, producer, a studio at work, mixing tracks and adjusting levels. Whether Taub was merely being opportunistic, like any good agent, or saw something in my playing that made me good for the part, I couldn’t say. But he’d been right.
I was in my mid-thirties when Taub started booking me into A-list venues. “You’ve climbed a rung,” he said to me at another meeting in his offices. “It’s hard to know when, these things are a bit of alchemy. But some good advice probably came into it.” He bit at the end of his cigarillo and cocked one of his eyebrows.
As my calendar started filling up, I was being booked months, and soon years, in advance. I was becoming someone. Putting on weight. Getting a little fat. A performance with the Concertgebouw or review in the national paper went from being events worthy of celebration to matters of routine. I had dates to play the second piano with Buchbinder, to accompany Shaham and Honoré, and perform at Wigmore Hall with Fischer-Dieskau. My name graced the marquee at the Salle Pleyel, in Paris, and the Musikverein, in Vienna. I even headlined a series of my own performances and released my own album. What would have been unbelievable to me, just a few years prior, was becoming normal.
At the end of a particularly successful tour with several sold-out audiences in major halls, the year I turned thirty-six, I wanted to do something special with Lena. I felt I was on a mountain peak. Taub kept telling me trajectory was everything in the business, and that I needed to keep climbing. But was there really another flight up?
I had Taub arrange for a week off after the last show, which was in Paris, and for Lena to come and meet me. Ten years before, Lena and I had gone to a small restaurant on the Quai de Conti. Back then, it was a taste of the life that might be. Too extravagant, too expensive, but worth it. Now I made reservations to go back.
In anticipation, Lena had her hair cut at a Paris salon recommended by the company manager, and was wearing a new black dress. Her lips were bright red and her nails polished to match. When she met me in the green room after the curtains, she turned heads, but we barely spoke to others because we were eager to slip away.
It was close to ten when the taxi dropped us on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. I held the car door open while Lena dispensed the francs. We crossed the small street arm in arm. Though my ears were still buzzing from two hours onstage, I could hear her heels clicking along the pavement.
We were fit in with the last seating. The restaurant’s small dining room, packed with tables, was full. Lena ordered drinks. For a long time neither of us spoke, we just took in the scene. Table, room, city, the night that had just passed. How far we’d come.
Last time at the restaurant we’d been cheap. This time we ordered everything. The courses streamed in. Amuses-gueules, soups, salads, meats, sweets. “Exactly as good as last time,” Lena said. “Except with more foam.”
I lost track of time. The tables around us started clearing out. As Lena was watching me polish off the last dessert from a sample plate, an older couple next to us got up to leave. As they passed by, the man put his hand on our table and leaned towards me while looking at Lena.
“You have a beautiful wife,” he said in English.
I looked at the woman who was with him. She smiled and nodded.
The couple left. I suddenly reached for Lena’s hands and pulled them towards me.
“I love you, Lena.”
“I love you, too, Jan de Vries,” she said.
I thought to myself, Where would I be without her? Lena looked at me with what seemed like unlimited tenderness. I intertwined my fingers in hers.
>
Bubbles appeared at the table; I don’t know who ordered them. After that, we were each given a glass of dessert wine on the house. Soon the room emptied out. The staff started cleaning up, switching off lights, overturning chairs. I was wiped. It was a long tour. My ears, ringing earlier, were now barking. Too much to eat. Too much to drink. But there was one thing I wanted to do.
I wanted, in that moment, to preserve what I saw. So I drew myself up in my chair, focused my mind, set a square around Lena, like a frame, and studied everything inside that frame. The background. Dim dining room, chairs on top of tables, low-hanging ceiling lamps. The foreground. Our table, its marked-up tablecloth and napkins, the wineglasses and flutes, Lena’s leather clutch set on the edge. Then Lena. Her skin as smooth and pale as the day I saw her at the bar. Long fingers, with polished nails, half covering her mouth. The unblemished whites of her eyes around the dark irises. Her perfect teeth. The slight rise of her chest with each inhale.
“What are you doing?”
“Shh,” I said. “Nothing.”
I didn’t want her to move, or change. I wanted that exact moment. To keep it with me, take it wherever I went. A kind of talisman. A protection. A light.
Three years later, Lena and I were standing on the small street in front of the house on a cool but sunny morning, watching workmen use a crane to move the body of a baby grand walnut Bechstein, Model A, up the face of the building. A loan from a benefactor. Out of the blue I got a call at the apartment, was asked if I had the space to accommodate a baby grand, and when I said yes, I was told to come to a law office to sign papers, which Lena reviewed. We had the Kawai removed the next day.
After the body of the Bechstein was guided through the third-floor window, workmen came up the stairs with the lid, drop, music shelf, pedal box, legs, and casters. They were followed by the tuner, who worked for the rest of the morning, as I watched and asked questions, thinking one day I might learn to tune myself, although pianists are known among musicians for having the least knowledge of the instruments they play.
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