Lost In Place (25 page)

“I totaled the car. Nobody was hurt. I’ll pay for it, though—I have over a thousand dollars in the bank.”

“You’re sure you’re OK? Nobody was hurt?” Dad asked.

“Yeah. It’s just the car.”

Dad closed his eyes and exhaled. Other dads threw fits when their kids crashed cars, but mine closed his eyes and sighed. In my mind, I had it worse than those other kids; when he sighed it meant that things were going just as he’d always thought they would, and nothing seemed quite so awful as feeling responsible for helping make things turn out the way he expected them to.

I went straight down to the basement and began practicing the mantra that I would be reciting constantly for the next ten days and nights:

Why didn’t I see that car?

Let’s replay that again. Crash! Shit
.

Why didn’t I stay home to watch those last five minutes of
I Love Lucy?

Why didn’t I see that car?

It took ten weeks for the car to be fixed, and during that time, since Mom had no car, Dad and I had to do all the grocery shopping on our way home from Greenwich. It was a depressing task; it was still winter, it was pitch-black
out on our ride home, Dad was always exhausted, I was always starving, and the last thing either of us wanted to do was push a shopping cart across a dark, slush-covered parking lot and then wander through a glaringly bright supermarket to pick up fish sticks, TV dinners and spaghetti sauce. It was all my fault, but Dad never once gave in to the temptation of saying, “Look what I have to go through because of you!” which almost made it worse, because then I felt obliged to think it for him over and over, incorporating it into my regular mantra.

“Cheer up, fresh-face, these are the best years of your life,” Ed made the mistake of saying to me one afternoon when I was sitting in the corner of the mail room looking at the accident report form I had to send to the Department of Motor Vehicles. I could stand being called fresh-face, I could put up with doing half of his job for him, but nobody was going to get away with telling me that being seventeen was something I ought to be happy about.

I whirled around and said through clenched teeth, “Ed, if these are the best years of my life, then would you do me a favor? Instead of giving me rubbers, would you mind picking up a gun and a box of bullets for me? Actually, just one bullet would be fine.”

He looked confused. “What, you wanna kill me just for saying that? Some sense of humor.”

Jesus. The guy couldn’t get anything right. I picked up an envelope that had to be hand-delivered and stalked out of the building. I was in one of those moods where you are so frustrated, so angry, and yet so helpless that you forget where you are for long stretches of time, carrying on imaginary conversations in which you try so hard to defend or explain yourself that you even start talking out
loud without realizing it. I was doing exactly that when I heard a quiet, firm voice say, “That’s a poor walk, young man.”

I stopped in my tracks. Was it in my head or did somebody actually talk to me? I turned around and saw an extremely old man wearing a black felt hat, a full-length black wool coat and black shoes polished to a mirror finish. He was standing in front of the library as if waiting for someone to pick him up. He stood ramrod-straight and had his gaze fixed directly in front of him.

“Did you say something to me?” I asked.

He turned his head and looked me straight in the eye. “I did. I said, ‘That’s a poor walk, young man.’ ”

He seemed to expect me to shrug and walk off. But there was something eerily sane about him, and this intrigued me.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What I mean is, you are walking on the balls of your feet and bouncing. It’s not attractive; it’s not the way a man should walk. A man should walk deliberately, first on the heels, then onto the balls of the feet, keeping his back straight, head erect, and moving smoothly.”

For a second I felt of wave of annoyance pass through me. Old coot, I ought to ask him if he still remembers what it was like to walk on the balls of his feet. Then I thought, Maybe he’s senile. This made me feel sorry for him. But then I looked at him again and saw that clearly he wasn’t saying it to annoy me, and he didn’t seem particularly concerned whether I took him seriously or not. Eerie.

“Can you show me what you mean?” I asked him.

“Yes.” He demonstrated, first by imitating me, then by walking properly. This fellow had real presence.

Oh, what the hell. I walked in front of him a few times, trying to imitate his proper walk, until he was satisfied. Then I said, “Can I ask you why you would bother to tell me this, though?”

“Because you might not realize it if someone didn’t tell you. A man looks more like a man if he holds himself confidently, moves smoothly and acts deliberately. And you’ll find that if you hold yourself that way, you’ll begin to act that way.”

I must not have looked convinced because finally he grinned and added, “I taught at West Point for over thirty years. There’s my daughter now. Good luck, son. Stay off the balls of your feet.”

He got into a Mercedes with tinted windows and disappeared. I can’t say that his advice stuck with me for long, but the encounter did lift my spirits for the rest of that day. When I told my dad about it on our drive home that evening, he seemed pleased with me.

“I’m glad you didn’t brush him off,” he said. “I’ll bet you made that guy’s day. He probably had people snapping to attention and hanging on his every word for most of his life, then one day, poof—Here’s your gold watch, pal, go home and watch TV. And just like that, suddenly the world treats him differently. He’s not a soldier anymore, he’s just another old man who takes forever at the checkout line. Damn, I look forward to retiring, but I sure as hell don’t look forward to becoming a useless old man. That was nice of you to listen to him like that.”

It’s funny how when you’re a teenager and you’re in the doghouse with your parents, you can’t imagine how you’ll ever get out of it. You try to picture the sorts of things you could do to win favor with them again, but they’d have to be heroic deeds, superhuman feats—things
that even Mother Teresa would have to struggle to accomplish. But then one day you do some simple, tiny thing without even thinking about it and all of a sudden you’re out of the doghouse. Parents are strange.

The car got fixed, I started putting money in the bank again, and my Bach slowly improved. The Winter of Guilt ended at last. Spring and summer passed without any further Incidents, and Mr. Turner warmed up to me slowly. By August I thought my playing had improved dramatically, so I asked him if he thought I had a shot at a career now.

“Well,” he said, “you have gotten better, but let’s face it, there’s a lot of people out there who are still a lot better than you are. But whether or not you can make a career out of it isn’t everything, Mark. The main thing is, you can get pleasure from it for the rest of your life.”

Pleasure? I thought. Who said anything about
pleasure?
If I wanted pleasure, I would have done something
fun
, for God’s sake, not play the cello. I should have realized right then that something was wrong, but I didn’t. I honestly believed I could tough it out and become a soloist through sheer determination.

Right around the end of August I decided to treat myself to a little present for having made it to college without a criminal record: I went to hear the cellist Yo-Yo Ma in concert. As he came out onstage and the audience erupted into applause I thought, “Enjoy it now, buddy, because in five years I’m gonna give you a run for your money.” Then he started playing.

Five minutes into his first piece my heart was already broken, and I left at intermission. I’d heard and seen enough. I vowed not to breathe a word of what had happened
to my parents, though; I’d deal with it once I got to New Haven.

What had happened was that, first of all, his technique was so indescribably flawless that I knew in an instant that I could never, not even in two lifetimes, come close to it. Second, his musicality and musical instincts were so original, so genuine and so many-layered that it revealed most of my musicality to be a clever imitation at best. But the worst part by far was seeing him up there smiling. He was enjoying himself! He loved that music, he loved every phrase of it, and that was the real gulf between him and me.

The moment Yo Yo Ma began playing I began to see in my mind, like a collage of documentary film clips, the story of my interest in the cello. Beginning with wanting to please my parents, continuing with wanting to please my parents, taking a brief detour into jazz to prove that I was my own man, finding out that being my own man made my parents annoyed with me, then wrapping up with—guess what—wanting to please my parents! It was not that I thought wanting to please my parents was necessarily a bad thing; it was that I realized it wasn’t a sound foundation for a career in classical music. When I looked at a sheet of music, I saw a bunch of symbols that indicated what to do with my fingers and arms when I held a box of wood with strings on it. I was musical enough to know when I was playing the notes wrong, but once they were in tune and in time I figured my job was over, I’d done my bit. When do I get to do this in front of people? For me music was a means of acquiring an identity. I assumed that if I worked hard, put in enough time and effort, it would be like studying for a contractor’s license; eventually I’d pass the test, be allowed to work and make
money, and people would have to take me seriously. It honestly had not occurred to me to worry that I never was turned on by the music itself.

I tried to remember if, in all of my record collection, I had a single classical record. I didn’t. I had never once taken the initiative to listen to one of my mother’s records, either, and between hearing Aldo Parisot play when I was seven and hearing Yo Yo Ma play when I was seventeen, had never gone to any concerts but my mother’s. The conclusion was inescapable: I didn’t like classical music very much.

God, how it hurt to think this. In particular I felt like a traitor to my mother. This admission also left me suddenly without a clue about what to do with the rest of my life. Worst of all, it made me feel like a jackass. Why had it taken me until now to figure out something as obvious as the necessity of enjoying music if you planned to make a living at it? I didn’t say anything about it to anyone, least of all to my parents. I went to my last cello lesson, thanked Mr. Turner for all his help, and as I drove home that night thought over and over, This is really a bad situation.

On my last day at work the secretaries treated me to a big lunch, and then threw a surprise party for me at the end of the day. Toasts were made, speeches were given, gifts were presented. When I left the office I had to use one of the canvas mail sacks to carry all my packages to the car. I got in—Dad was on vacation, so I was by myself—pulled out of the parking lot and felt guilty the whole drive home. I felt guilty because I believed that in just one week I was going to go to Yale, announce that I was no longer interested in music, and be sent home in disgrace because I had been accepted as a music major. Then I
would have to go right back to the law firm, explain what had happened, and at least make the gesture of offering to give everyone’s presents back. I kept them all in their packages and made sure the name tags were still attached so I wouldn’t embarrass myself later.

The day came. Mom, Dad, Erich, Rachel, Annette and I piled into the old bus for the drive to New Haven. When we got there we couldn’t find a parking space anywhere near campus (“I hate this shithole of a city,” Dad kept muttering), so we had lunch together in the downtown New Haven McDonald’s. Not wanting to make them drive back into all that traffic, I pulled my suitcase of clothes and my cello out of the car and said my good-byes in front of McDonald’s. The car started to drive away, then stopped and backed up. My dad stuck his head out the window and said, “Don’t come home until you’ve made something of yourself.”

“He’s only kidding, honey, he’s only kidding!” That was Mom, living proof that irony is not contagious.

I walked to the campus and found my room. My roommate hadn’t arrived yet, so I spent the rest of the day and the night alone in the empty dorm. I had trouble getting to sleep; for some reason I could only think of all the things I had done that I regretted: how we are given only one childhood, how I had had seventeen years to make mine a good one but instead had turned it into something like a Cheech and Chong movie. Of course at some level I understood that nobody is perfect, that everybody must leave home sometime, and that my parents would certainly not prefer that I stay in their basement and work in the mail room for the rest of my life. But that mature understanding was seriously challenged by my immature sense of overall shame, an emotion that had grown strong
with use, particularly in the past year. At ten o’clock I started sniffling, by ten-thirty I was sobbing, and from eleven on I was just plain bawling.

At two in the morning a deafening roar from the street below interrupted my tearful meditations. I peered down out of my window and saw a whole pack of Hell’s Angels on their choppers sitting at the intersection waiting for the light to turn green. It took a moment to take it all in—a whole tribe of scowling rebels with leather outfits, studs all over the place, Nazi helmets, cobra tattoos, metal-tipped boots, throbbing, screaming, chrome-covered bombs between their legs, biker babes clinging to their backs, sitting at a completely empty intersection at two in the morning waiting obediently for the traffic light to change. I stopped crying and started laughing instead. Maybe I
had
made a fool of myself as a kid, and maybe I
was
lost without a compass now, but looking at those guys made me feel better. Maybe my dad was right to believe that we are all pathetically deceived about who we really are and why we really do what we do. It depressed my father to think this way, but on that first night at college the thought that all human beings might be pathetic came as a great relief to me because it got me off the hook. After the light turned green and the Hell’s Angels roared off to their next appointment with danger and anarchy, I wrote my folks a letter thanking them for all they had done on my behalf; I figured that even if I did get sent home soon, they would have some document showing that they had done a good job to get me this far. Once I had done this, I was able to fall asleep.