White Man's Problems (11 page)

Emily had offered to pick Ann up, hinting, not in a nice way, that Collier would prefer skipping the concert, as though the pressure of the show combined with the weight of having him along, bored and crotchety, was too much for her. He couldn't be too angry. Truth be told, he had a long record of avoiding this type of thing. While he had always had a feel for music—with a bit of gin, he could move away from any day with Sinatra—he just couldn't appreciate classical music. It had nothing to do with being unbending. He had done that bit, obligingly playing the part for two generations of the square old guy who didn't have the capacity for Bruce Springsteen or Eminem. His lack of feeling for refined music, like symphonies and string quartets and so forth—this was different. It was a door he could never open. Collier remembered trying over the years, remembered wanting to get what all the interest in Van Cliburn was over or what it was that made people cry at operas. He had never found a way to be inside the pounding chords of Beethoven, had felt doubly insensitive agonizing at the flinty twinkling high notes of Chopin that Emily had played at her recitals. He'd gone with Ann to the symphony in Philadelphia—gone to the trouble of putting in for the corporate tickets—and watched the devoting heads and tuxedoed torsos of a visiting European orchestra. Like a Picasso—or mesclun salad—he just didn't get it and felt like it was wasted on him. He wondered if it was genetic in nature or if it had to do with his engineer's training or if maybe he had just had some level of sensitivity beaten out of him in the army and over thirty years at GE.

One of the burning fires he had with Emily was how narrow-minded she thought he was. He didn't bother to tell her that when he went to school, even if it was for engineering in the fifties, they studied the classics a lot more than her crowd of competitive art-community types did. The generation in the middle—that era of people Emily's age—was so self-righteous about their schooling, as though the bright-line wrongs, the Jim Crow laws, and the pigeonholing of women in the house disqualified the entire edifice of their parents' education. Yet Collier was sure he'd learned more in college about concertos and intermezzos and Wagner and Liszt—or at least it had certainly been stressed more—than she had picked up in the spaces between gender studies, Native American history, and all the boyfriends.

***

Interviewer:

You've been performing since you were a very small girl. Do you still get nervous?

Interpreter:

(There is a pause while the interpreter listens to Nyoto speak in Japanese.) She says that when she was a young child, she was very frightened. Also she says that the first time she was away from her parents—it was on a trip to Europe when she was nine years old—she was very anxious each time she went to the stage. It was especially scary in Vienna, she says. Because the music is of so many composers of that place.

Interviewer:

Is she…Nyoto, are you enjoying your time in the United States?

Interpreter:

(Pause.) Yes, very much. (Pause.) She says she feels very happy to be able to bring her music to this place.

Interviewer:

How do you feel when you go on stage before a big crowd? And is it different for her when the audiences vary in musical knowledge?

Interpreter:

(Pause.) Could you repeat the question?

Interviewer:

Yes. I'm sorry. I guess what I'm asking is if she knows the difference between a crowd at the Philharmonic, for example, and an audience that may not be familiar with the music she plays?

Interpreter:

(There is a long delay while Nyoto speaks this time.)

She says there is a sound that a crowd makes when it shifts to quiet. It is like the hum of minds overtaking the noise of bodies. It is into this sound that musicians play. It may seem in this way that the music is like water filling an empty cup. Only this picture is wrong—the emptiness of the cup is an illusion. A cup is never empty. It is full of the air; other times it may be full of water, but it is not full of nothingness. Even the air is something. The air may be pushed out by the water—and it will appear like something is replacing nothing. But it is not that way. The cup, which seemed empty, in truth had air all around, inside and out. When I begin to play for an audience, I think I am adding to the air. Nothing more. (Pause, while Nyoto says one last thing.) And, of course, I am hoping it will be beautiful.

Interviewer:

Well, it is quite a treat for us to have you here. Thank you very much.

***

The lights, which had been intended for the recital's conclusion at twilight but were turned on early because of the darkness of the storm, came down. Emily shook her head in mock disbelief. “Everyone has worked so hard,” she whispered to Ann. “I'm just so proud of them.” It felt great to say the sweet things, to fill up the spaces between moments with happy, positive small talk, as her mother had always been the first to do. And she knew they were being watched by all of them, all the busybodies who had nothing better to do but gauge how bad Ann was since they'd seen her last. Emily looked at her father, who stared at the stage, abdicating the role of custodian now that he was not the only one to whom Ann was entrusted. It was just like him to beg off and go into a cocoon as soon as Emily arrived. He couldn't dump Ann quickly enough and get back to his subterranean preoccupations, whatever they were.

Emily had long since stopped feeling sorry for Collier, but she did get wistful for them both. When she was a girl, he was so distinct and memorable, telling her elephants were blue and going into great detail about a special planet just for alligators. She remembered the mornings when Ann's job at the hospital required her to leave before breakfast so her dad would sneak out and bring home a half dozen Dunkin' Donuts and they would try to eat three each. He came to Emily's room every night at bedtime and read a story, often shutting the book to talk about the events of the day and then waiting for her to fall asleep. But that man had not been around for a very long time.

It was not that he had changed suddenly; he had never been carefree or light. That was Ann. But he had worsened; after he retired it was as though his excitement to
do
things—to go to the park, to drive to the shore, or to go to the movies—had drained away. Where her mother would take a watercolor class or announce that she was going to make tacos, her father shrank into a smaller and smaller set of patterns, not telling stories or gossiping about corporate shuttling at GE and giving up golf. He was like a painting that became less interesting and more faded as it aged. Her father was the one person she could think of who became more of a type and less of a distinct character as time wore on, disappearing into a cheap brown sport coat and withdrawing into an ever less interesting and reductive world.

It was against this backdrop of Collier's fading distinctness, four years before Ann's stroke, that Emily decided to leave her husband, Phil. “Men are just built that way,” Ann had said in a last-ditch effort to talk Emily out of it. The way her mother's lower lip had quivered—just for a fraction of an instant—was enough for Emily to know there had been some tough water somewhere in her parents' marriage that had not leaked out to her. The divorce with Phil was brutal, especially with three little kids involved, but Emily was determined not to leave her life to hope.

Once it was clear her daughter would not change her mind about the breakup, Ann, in classic Ann fashion, simply showed up for her grandkids more often, making it a custom to stop by every day with such a supply of calm, direct, predictable affection that Emily was able to take the time—moments, days, weekends—needed to mourn her marriage and heal. Yet no matter how amazing Ann proved to be, Emily knew she didn't want her mother's life: putting up with a distant man falling further down a hole as the years went by.

There was a murmur at the left of the stage, and the tiniest little thing in a black fitted dress entered Emily's depth of field. Nyoto Kanata walked to the piano and sat down at the bench. Catching herself, like an actor who had forgotten a line, Nyoto stood back up and took a step toward the crowd. She bent her head and gave a quick wave, head and hand going in opposite directions. Then she smiled, and several pops of light went off. Emily growled to herself, angry that a few bad apples had ignored the rule against flash photography.

“
Rolla alla turtunda
,” said Nyoto, and she turned back to the piano.

Just as Emily feared, her father leaned across her mother and said, too loudly, “What'd she say?”

***

Would ya feel the queer browning light under this bigtop sky there is still sunlight from the openings and peeking in under the sides where the straps haven't held the canvas down hope we don't blow away I say I tell them I don't need water. There she is Emily points and a teeny tiny little girl, a little oriental girl walks up to the piano they have sitting in the front of the folding chairs and the people start clapping and the claps thud into the sides of the folding walls and it goes hush just as fast John squeezes my hand and sits up straight like he does when he pays attention and his mind clears from all side cloudy points and gets about thinking of that only one thing.

***

When Nyoto touched the piano for the first time, nothing happened. Collier looked at Emily, who tensed up like a bird dog. Both relaxed as a sound came though the tent. It was a simple musical phrase, to be sure, but unlike anything Collier had heard before. It was a curved noise without edges; it was not the sharp and disinviting tincture he associated with the angry piano of classical concerts. His range of vision narrowed to the one focal point the stage allowed: a pink rose next to the root of Nyoto's column of hair. It formed the top of a right triangle, with her waist and the keyboard sitting at the other points. For an instant, Nyoto withdrew her hands as though they'd almost been snatched by a closing jewelry box, and this time Collier's worry was not just that the WCPAC crew had small-timed it but also that something profound was in motion that he did not want to stop. Nyoto's pullback was just a flourish, and for a second time her fingers made contact with the keys to issue a soothing and dulcet combination of notes. Everything—every thought and every light—began to vanish, like the moment of anesthesia when anxieties begin to melt away.

Collier's engineer's mind pushed back. What the little girl was playing couldn't have been a high-quality piece: it was too accessible to him. Maybe this was a B version of classical music. Emily had said it was going to be Mozart, and he suddenly wondered if Mozart had become too popularized and—with things like the
Baby Mozart
books and DVDs—the music had become commoditized such that the great heights of intelligence one had to possess to appreciate it had been reduced. Quickly, though, his mind's eye closed down and the rest of him gave over to the emotion of the sound, the way random thoughts about the level of the light or the need for mood or more wine recede as lovemaking begins. He looked at Ann, who stared straight ahead. Nyoto's shoulders swayed as her hands glided over the keys. Ann squeezed Collier's hand much the way she might have twenty years before. He bit his lip lightly—his way of fending off emotion. Ann could not hear the music—he knew that. She was going on things unheard: instinct, the feeling of the crowd, and the spirit of the faces. Her smile widened as she looked back at him now and picked up on his gaze. She was the most kind, the most happy, the most steadily happy girl in the world.

The first canvasy tap from above hit unmistakably, and his heart dipped. He tried to ignore it, the way a six-year-old left fielder ignores the first raindrop at a Saturday ball game. The afternoon's storm was back. He knew it would now hit them hard, and he knew it with the same surety that he knew his beautiful, thinning, deteriorating, and nearly deaf wife was dying. The big top popped with noise now, and the crowd could be felt resisting the urge to look up. Its kindly effort—not that of the big city—to suspend disbelief and forestall the storm gave way as the rattle became louder and louder yet, until it was all the assembly could hear. Wind from outside blew the plastic tarp doors against their zippers and away from their ties. Collier saw Emily put her hands on her knees and look to the left and right, searching for other committee members with whom she could make eye contact, telegraphing the question of whether something had to be done and whether someone had to call off the fun.

Nyoto continued playing undaunted. Collier felt her interweaving the different storylines of the piece, momentum building. Her head rose and her eyes closed with the movement of the arrangement; just as quickly she brought her forehead back down, and her gaze returned to the keys. To his amazement, the chaotic and insistent noise of the rain was countermanded by a new surge of harmony. Ann, the gathering's other undisturbed soul, was beaming now, still staring straight ahead. The rain and the notes fused together in a blend of color and vibration and light.

Emily began to make her way toward the aisle in the other direction, leaving them alone. Soon others, bent politely at the waist, started heading to the exits, thinking about shuttle buses and traffic and getting out of the lot, of postponements and theater series make-goods, of what a bad idea it was to throw this tent up in the first place, especially this early in the year. And, still, Ann looked forward, connected to Nyoto, who played on. Collier focused on his wife's eyes. The rain was unstoppable, not slowing enough even to divide into drops. Nyoto swayed more heavily. Collier believed for the first time since Ann had left him that he was with her: in her thoughts, her feelings, her interpretation of this world and the next. It was all wrapped together. He heard nothing and everything all at once. Whatever he had failed to understand before—stupidly and selfishly—he understood now.