The Soloist (25 page)

“What?”

“What did you think of the Japanese guy this afternoon?”

I told her that I had enjoyed his testimony, but once it was over it left me feeling slightly depressed.

“Depressed? How come?”

“Oh, because he reminded me of my cello teacher, and I always get a little sad when I think about him. It makes me wish I could have known him when I was a little older. It’s stupid to think like that, I know, but …”

“I guess so,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know … It sure related to me, what he said about people who think their lives are boring, and think that there’s nothing
they can do about it? God, that describes me perfectly. That’s what my life has been since high school—boring, more boring, and then on weekends a little less boring. Go to work, come home, cook food, clean house. I’m like that fish he was talking about, only I’m not stuck in the ocean, I’m stuck in somebody’s toilet.… Sometimes I wonder, Is this all there is? Why can’t I have a more interesting life? Maybe I oughta become a Buddhist, huh? Would I look good bald?”

She finished her beer and I ordered a bottle of wine for the two of us. I didn’t want to get drunk, but I did want to become less sober.

“You know what?” she asked, practically cooking me with her gaze. My whole body felt warm when she had her eyes on me. “It almost seems like fate that all this happened today, you know? I was starting to worry the last few days, thinking that maybe I shouldn’t be having this friendship with you. I was thinking, Is this wrong? Should I feel guilty? Even this afternoon, after we said we’d have this dinner, I was thinking OK, we’ll have dinner, but we should leave it at that. But listening to that guy talk this afternoon made me think, Why shouldn’t I? You’re probably the most interesting person I ever met—certainly the nicest man. I was thinking that even if I can only know you for as long as the trial goes on, I should make the most of it, right? Why not?”

I was ecstatic. “Maria-Teresa, what you just said makes me feel so relieved.…”

“Why?”

“Because I’m terribly attracted to you, but I’ve been … I’ve been …”

Suddenly I started to laugh. What was I saying to her? I decided to stop before I ruined the whole evening. I’d already been through all this in my mind at least a hundred
times, and I’d decided to play everything by ear and not try to work out any plans. “Forget what I just said!” I blurted out. “I’m having a wonderful time, and that’s all I’m going to think about. Here’s to Mr. Hayashi and his enlightened fish.” We toasted the old man, then ordered dinner.

I had mussels in broth to start with, then soft-shell crabs. Maria-Teresa tried the carpaccio—it was the first time she’d had it—and then salmon baked in paper. Every mouthful of that dinner, every sip of wine seemed like the best I’d ever tasted. We hardly talked; our waiter must have thought we looked ridiculous. When he asked if we would like dessert or coffee, Maria-Teresa said, no, she had good coffee and some dessert at home. That settled it. I asked if it would really be all right for me to go there and she told me not to worry; besides, her place was much closer. I followed her in my car.

As soon as we got through the door to her messy house, she turned to face me. She stood completely still and closed her eyes. A thought bubbled up out of all the chaos. It was such a simple, fragile thought that I could almost see it as words flashed on a screen: “Don’t ask.” It summed up everything—this situation, this overwhelming sensation, this loss of control. I was aware of everything; I was making it happen, but as far as I could tell without ever having decided it was a good idea.

That thought dissolved; I kissed her, and we both melted. There was no thought of anything, no talking, no resistance.

I unbuttoned her blouse right there in the living room. Watching it slide over her shoulders gave me such a jolt that I actually shook. When I put my hands on her breasts and felt their weight and heard her sigh, I thought I might cry for sheer joy. So this is what it’s like, I thought. This is what everybody’s been talking about, this is why so much happens,
so much that you hear about and read about. This is what having a body is really like; this is how every living thing feels when it finally gets to mate.

I felt as if I were making love to her just by looking at her. Every curve was a gift, every strand of hair, every fold, sent chills through me and made me wonder how I could ever have gone so long without knowing.

Once we reached the bedroom, though, it was less easy. I noticed a photograph in a plastic frame on the bureau near her bed. It must have been Maria-Teresa’s mother. She had a puffy, bloated figure stuffed into a gaudy blouse and polyester shorts; she was wearing sandals and holding a can of beer. She had the same dark circles under her eyes that Maria-Teresa did, except that on the mother they made her look dull and exhausted. The picture had been taken at a picnic; in the background I could see a throng of people sitting around a fold-out table. My imagination provided the sounds of competing portable radios and crying children.

All of a sudden my nakedness embarrassed me, and when I looked at Maria-Teresa I realized she excited me less than when she’d had her clothes on. Instead of being overwhelmed by the sight of her beautiful nude body—and she was beautiful—I found myself noticing little flaws in her skin, bulges that marred her perfection. I began to look at her body too closely, the way I listened to my own playing. I rapidly became self-conscious, and then I wondered if I was going to be able to go through with it.

As soon as that thought appeared in my mind, I was finished. I tried with all my strength to concentrate, I pleaded with myself, I cursed myself, I tried everything I could to make myself excited again, but it was useless.

Maria-Teresa was kind about it; she said it was no big deal and I shouldn’t worry about it, but I was devastated. She asked if it had ever happened to me before, and I said no. Something in my voice must have tipped her off, because suddenly she pulled back and asked, “Have you ever been with a woman before?”

I confessed that I hadn’t.

She made the coffee she’d promised and we drank it in bed. She lay with her head resting on my chest and at times, as when I felt one of her eyelashes brush against my nipple, or when a knot of her chestnut-brown hair slid down across my neck and tumbled onto the pillow, I was able to forget for a moment how dismayed and ashamed I felt. Those moments faded quickly, however, and were immediately replaced by a growing sense of strangeness and deep anxiety. Everything started to look wrong; the jars of facial cream on the nightstand, her shoes strewn chaotically in one corner of the room, her ashtray in the shape of a frog, the slightly faded curtains, a trace of cobweb swaying from the far corner of the ceiling. The objects in the room started to loom in my mind, and even seemed to emit a kind of sound, an increasingly dissonant hum. Everything around me, including Maria-Teresa, became gratingly, fiercely wrong.

This sensation became more and more acute as time went on, until it was almost unbearable. I was smiling and chatting with her, but felt like screaming. At last I was able to put on my clothes, with my hands shaking from the tension. We kissed good-bye and I left, making a conscious effort not to appear to be hurrying. But I was so relieved to be out of her house that I wanted to break into a run. I could hear several of her neighbors arguing loudly in Spanish. Across the street
a dog with a splint on its leg barked loudly at me when I opened my car door. I nearly caused an accident driving back to my apartment; I was in such a hurry to get home that I went through a red light without even seeing it and barely missed another car.

A contemporary of Bach’s described attending a large party at which the host, a musical amateur, entertained his guests by playing the harpsichord. Arriving late, Bach entered the room during one of the player’s improvisations. When the amateur became aware of the presence of the great master, he sprang up and left off with a dissonant chord. Bach found this so intolerable that he rushed by the man to the harpsichord to resolve the chord. Only then did he approach his host and make his bow of greeting.

Bach had the good sense to limit himself to resolving musical dissonances with his art, but I, foolishly thinking I could impose harmony on the emotional dissonance that had started in Maria-Teresa’s bedroom, went straight to my practice room to play. I felt an unfamiliar twinge of dread as I tuned the instrument, then started with a few scales and arpeggios to warm up. I had to stop after only a few minutes. It wasn’t just the intonation this time—there was something new. Playing the cello at this moment seemed an utterly trivial and wrongheaded thing to do. I went into the kitchen and made coffee; I read the paper; I turned on the radio. I
would have tried anything to keep at bay the terrifying, painful thoughts that were running over and over in my head. All of them bore the same message; I would be alone all my life.

After a sleepless night I returned to the studio, and this time recoiled just at the sight of the cello. Suddenly I felt violently angry, and I knew I had to get out of the apartment. I didn’t even want to listen to music.

I panicked. I’d never felt this way before, not even after the worst moments I’d had onstage. Even then I’d still wanted to play; in fact, the day after that last concert in Chicago I went right back to the practice room because I believed that practicing was my only hope. Whatever my problem was, neurological or psychological, I vowed to compensate for it with more practice. I would get to the point where I could play well regardless of whether I heard the music properly or not.

When asked how he became so proficient in the art of music, Bach would only say, “I have had to work hard; anyone who works as hard will get just as far.” Von Kempen likewise believed that music was a craft as much as an art, and frequently warned me not to allow my talent to seduce me into thinking that I could eliminate rigorous, unglamorous technical studies from my daily practice. He especially loved to quote the passage from Bach’s biography in which Forkel addresses those wishing to follow in the great composer’s footsteps: “The greatest genius, with the most unconquerable propensity to an art, is in its original nature never more than a disposition, or a fruitful soil upon which an art can never properly thrive except it be cultivated with indefatigable pains.… Bach’s ardent genius was attended by an equally ardent industry, which incessantly impelled him, when he
could not yet succeed by his own strength, to seek aid from the models existing in his time.” The model existing in my time was von Kempen, who still practiced every day beyond his ninetieth year, in spite of the certainty that he would never perform again.

That explains part of my discipline, but not all of it. It wasn’t just a matter of training and willpower that kept me practicing for so many years after my career had exhausted itself; it was also a matter of there being no alternative. I had been labeled from childhood as an extraordinary artist, I had developed a musical technique that allowed me to communicate at a world-class level, and communicating at that level was both euphoric and self-defining. That state of musical emotion was the me that virtually everyone I had contact with thought of, spoke about or spoke to. I had little experience communicating in other ways, or in having any identity beyond my musical self. When I lost my ability to perform, regaining it became a matter of life and death. What was my life, after all, without music?

For most of my adult life I had wondered every single day: Who am I if I am not a musician? After my experience with Maria-Teresa, I began projecting that question backward in time: if my musical voice and identity, which had been so clear, so unwavering and pure, was really mine to begin with, then how could the voice that was reflected in my personal life possibly be so feeble and inarticulate in comparison? Since I had proven myself unable to participate in even that most fundamental of human dialogues, didn’t this suggest that perhaps I had been deceived, along with everyone else, into thinking I was a genuine artist rather than just a precocious imitator? How much of my musical voice, my musical identity, actually reflected me, and how much of it was merely the
composer’s and my teacher’s voices channeled through a remarkable childhood gift for mimicry?

While I debated these awful questions, Mrs. Kim left a conspiratorial message on my answering machine saying that Mr. Kim had decided to let Kyung-hee go to the symphony, and that she hoped it wasn’t ‘too-late notice.’ Struggling through her fractured English, she said that “Kyung-hee, he so sad” when initially told he could not go that his father evidently had to change his mind. I gathered from her subdued voice that it had been an unpleasant family matter. Why? I wondered. If the man was so obsessed with having his son make money, why wouldn’t he want the boy to have every possible chance to develop into a stellar performer? I was in no mood to be philosophical about it; I was disgusted. Cursing the Kims and their grotesque values, I decided not even to bother to return their call and stormed out of the apartment to take a walk. Three blocks from my building it sank in that, knowing what I did about his family, Kyung-hee must have been very upset to have changed his father’s mind. He obviously wanted to go to the concert. Immediately I pictured him sitting at home in his little sport jacket waiting for me in vain. Stung with frustration and self-loathing, I rushed back to the house, called his mother and said I would pick him up at four-thirty.