The Soloist (5 page)

“Thank you, Mother, I—”

“So did you enjoy yourself up in Santa Barbara? At that nice place? I wish I could go there again.”

“Why don’t you, Mother? You and Dad could come out to visit for a week. And get out of the humidity.”

“Are you kidding? Your father’s going to retire soon—we have to start saving now. We’ve already waited too long. But you’re so young, you should be doing that every weekend! Renne—”

“Mother, I have to get to dinner. Thanks again for the champagne. It was very sweet of you.”

“We think about you all the time, Renne. Happy birthday—I know this year it’s going to happen for you. I just know it.”

That Sunday afternoon the Kims showed up twenty minutes before their appointment, and sat out in their car, a filthy station wagon camouflaged with rust and primer, until exactly five o’clock. Since I wasn’t busy I thought about going out and inviting them in early, but decided not to; if they were the sort of people who took pride in such matters, I didn’t want to spoil their gesture of arriving precisely on time. My university students sometimes show up for lessons ten minutes late without any apology at all, or arrive early and ask to use my phone.

At last the family got out of the car and hurried up the sidewalk to the apartment. They rang the doorbell, and, after a pause of two or three seconds, rang again. Clearly they were anxious for me to hear their little boy. When I opened the door, Mr. and Mrs. Kim stood with their tiny son in front of them. An older sister, who looked twelve or thirteen, stood a few feet behind them all and stared at her shoes. Mrs. Kim poked her son sharply, and he said, without a trace of emotion in his face or voice, “Hello.”

He had his thin arms wrapped around the neck of his cello case. Even the quarter-size cello was as tall as he was. He
wore a brand-new suit and tie, but his shoes were badly scuffed. He appeared sorely in need of good food, fresh air and some exercise; he looked terribly small, even for a nine-year-old. He had a pitifully uneven haircut, and wore a pair of unattractive glasses that did not quite sit level on his face. One didn’t have to strain to imagine the sort of teasing a child like this must receive from his classmates. He didn’t look at me, but instead focused his eyes on a point a few yards behind me, at about the level of my knees.

Mr. Kim looked apologetic for intruding on my schedule. He wrung his hands in front of him and bowed his head several times. I extended my hand to shake his, and he seemed momentarily surprised, or perhaps embarrassed. When he did shake my hand, his palm felt as if it were made of wood. Both his hands were heavily callused. While he cut a trim, athletic figure and had handsome, masculine features, Mrs. Kim’s appearance made a less positive impression. She had a thick body and a round, bland face. Her eyes were tiny slits above her cheeks, and she trained them on me as if I, not her son, were the one being auditioned. She clutched her purse in front of her with hands that were also badly weathered. Meanwhile, Kyung-hee’s sister hung back and made no attempt to draw attention to herself.

I invited them all in and led them to the studio, where I had set up the smallest chair I could find next to the piano. Even that was too high for the boy, however. When he sat in it his feet dangled helplessly toward the floor. When I said I would try to find something more suitable, his sister said in an unpleasant monotone, “He doesn’t care what kind of chair.”

Kyung-hee took out the quarter-size cello and the little
bow, tightened the hairs, then shyly held the cello out toward me.

“His hands aren’t strong enough to tune it,” his sister declared—with some satisfaction, I noticed—but Kyung-hee showed no signs of embarrassment.

The tuning pegs were so poorly fitted that the cello was in fact almost impossible to tune. When I handed it back, he managed to avoid making any eye contact with me. I sat down and waited, but he just stared at the floor with his mouth slightly open. His appearance was so pathetic that I actually felt irritated looking at him. I was angry at his parents for giving him such an execrable haircut, and I was angry at him for not making the slightest effort to treat the occasion with some dignity. I couldn’t wait to get him out of my house.

At last his mother said something to him in Korean, and without any sort of mental or physical preparation that I could detect he raised his bow and started sawing awkwardly at the first notes of a transcribed Mozart sonata.

The first few notes only confirmed my suspicions. He played the cheerful little piece without any signs of cheer at all—just what you might expect from a child with quick fingers but a deaf musical ear. Why the cello? Why me? That was what I was thinking when an extraordinary thing happened. Suddenly the music seemed to hit him from behind, from
outside
him rather than from his own body. By the tenth or fifteenth bar of music, even on that dreadful cello he played with such authority that I had to close my eyes; I couldn’t bear to desecrate the music with the sight of that expressionless little boy.

Most of the child prodigies you read about in the paper or
see onstage are gifted mimics rather than artists, and the ability to imitate wears thin pretty quickly. A true prodigy—someone in whom the emotions of music actually resonate and find expression at a very young age—is rare. Many people think it is an impossibility. They assume that with so little life experience, no child could possibly comprehend the complex emotions of a piece of real music. When they hear about a Yehudi Menuhin or a Mozart they assume it must be a trick, a subtle deception of some kind. Nevertheless I know from my own experience that the emotions in music are musical emotions, and develop according to their own rules of chemistry and experience. They resemble and can strongly evoke the emotions we associate with profound life experiences, like sexual love or the death of a parent, but you don’t need to have those experiences to “feel” music properly.

I could tell immediately and beyond any doubt that this boy felt the music. His interpretation was simply too fresh, too original to be explained by imitation. It had to come from some inner source, even though I had the impression that the music came from all around him.

When he finished the piece, he immediately fell limp again. His shoulders drooped and his mouth hung open again. I glanced at his parents to see their reaction to all of this. Mr. Kim was looking at me with a worried expression; he seemed unsure about how to judge his son’s talent. Mrs. Kim, not wanting to take any chances, said something to Kyung-hee in Korean and the boy started a new piece.

The same thing happened as before: he began dreadfully—it was another light piece, the sort favored by elementary-school instrument teachers—but within a few bars managed to connect with whatever source he had drawn upon before, and positively soared. Mr. Douglas was wrong, of course; the
boy was no Rostropovitch yet. He needed to learn technique from a real cellist, and simply had to undo whatever it was that made him look and play like an imbecile at the beginning of his pieces. There was plenty of room for exploration and growth, but it was obvious that the boy possessed a talent of incredible proportions.

Unable to contain my curiosity, I asked him if he had ever played any Bach. When he shook his head, I played Pierre Fournier’s recording of the Bach unaccompanied cello suite in D minor on the stereo for him. I wondered how he would react to profound music, as opposed to the pieces Mr. Douglas had been teaching him.

When it ended I looked closely at Kyung-hee to see his reaction. His eyes were as round as saucers. I found a clean edition of the piece, set it up on a stand for him and asked him to try to sight-read it. The result was awesome. Some of the passages were technically beyond him, but without missing a beat he improvised solutions that were remarkably successful. When confronted with triple stops that he could not reach, he followed the melody, choosing the key note rather than the harmony. It was a spectacle that any musician would have cherished; he was getting his first taste of Bach, and it was transforming him right in front of my eyes!

I had strangely mixed feelings. When he finished I said that hearing him play had been an unforgettable and delightful experience. I know that when I was his age I would have been overcome with joy if my teacher had talked to me like that, instead of his usual habit, which was to pat me on the head or bow stiffly in my direction, but Kyung-hee’s face registered neither pleasure nor embarrassment.

I didn’t know what to do. I had planned, if he was indeed talented, to give his parents Laura Kantor’s number, but I
couldn’t do it. After an awkward silence I turned to the Kims and heard myself say, almost as if in a dream, that I would be happy to teach Kyung-hee, and that I would charge them fifteen dollars for each lesson. I did not say that my usual fee for private lessons started at one hundred dollars. Mr. Kim said something, and then he and his wife had a lively discussion in Korean; from their gestures and so forth I got the impression that Mr. Kim thought fifteen dollars was way too much to spend on music, while Mrs. Kim seemed to be telling him he was being unreasonable.

She apparently won the argument, because at a certain point he just shook his head and looked at the floor angrily, and Mrs. Kim turned to me and asked when I would be available. I felt it was crucial that we get Kyung-hee’s basic technique cleaned up immediately, so I suggested that at the beginning we meet twice a week, Sunday mornings and a weekday afternoon. Later, when I was sure that the worst of his habits had been corrected, we could reduce it to once a week. Mrs. Kim shook her head and told me that Kyung-hee and his sister were needed at the family dry cleaners on Saturday and Sunday, and both parents worked all day on weekdays, so what about weekday evenings? I wanted to wring their necks for making a child with a gift like this provide cheap labor, but decided to keep my mouth shut, at least at this early stage. We agreed on Monday and Thursday evenings. I gave Kyung-hee the Bach suites and told him that for the next few days he could poke around in them as he liked, and that we would start serious work after the first lesson. Then Mr. Kim said something to his wife. She nodded, then said she and her husband had a question for me. Pointing to her son, she asked, “When he can make concert?”

Only with great effort did I manage to keep a pleasant smile on my face. “You and Kyung-hee will have to make that decision,” I said. “My recommendation, though, is that you move slowly. Talent like his can be ruined if you push it too fast.”

Mrs. Kim nodded, but I thought I saw a hint of disapproval cross her face, though it may just have been that she didn’t understand me. They left, and from my living-room window I watched them go out to the car. Mr. and Mrs. Kim appeared to be arguing again about something, and their daughter pulled one of those hand-sized video games out of her pocket and started playing with it. I watched until their car disappeared down the block, but as far as I could tell, none of them had said anything or paid any attention to Kyung-hee. He appeared to be in his own little world.

I had to get up well before dawn the next morning to practice before leaving for the courthouse. This spring I was focusing my efforts on chromatic scales, hoping to get my intervals so true that even my hearing couldn’t detect faults there. Chromatic scales are notoriously difficult, and even when you do them properly you feel you may go insane from listening to them. After an hour of torture I had breakfast, then followed the map on the back of my summons to the court parking lot, where jurors board a shuttle for the downtown courthouse.

I’d walked or driven past the Criminal Courts Building probably a hundred times since moving to Los Angeles, but I’d never paid any attention to it until that morning. It’s a square building that looks like a giant beehive; one could imagine behind each of its tiny windows a larval bureaucrat, feeding on carbon paper and waiting to mature into a clerk, a paralegal or a judge.

I passed through the security check along with a Spanish-speaking family that looked as if they had all been crying, then joined over two hundred other prospective jurors in a huge, dimly lit room where we had to check in at the clerk’s desk.