Love and Hydrogen (23 page)

PIANO STARTS HERE

We were trying to see a dog that could've been dead already and we weren't getting anywhere, Susan said. We were standing outside her veterinarian's office in a four A.M. drizzle. My hair felt like wet old clothes on my neck. Susan's breath ghosted the glass. She had asked to be let in, and the boy inside had not yet responded. He gazed at us vacantly, his mop handle teetering, running water shifting and realigning his image on the pane. Susan spread a hand across it, as if to push through. She had twice explained that her dog was in there and that the doctor had given her permission to come down so late. The boy seemed to have trouble focusing.

Doppleresque trucks rushed and whined on the interstate in the distance. The boy palmed the door handle with an appealing gentleness. He puffed his cheeks like a bugler and turned the latch. The door swung outward.

“Audrey,” Susan said, once inside. “A beagle mix. She hasn't come out of the anesthetic.”

The boy did not respond. He led us through a second door. Susan's boots made amphibious sounds on the tile.

Audrey was still on the table. She had been brought in earlier unable to stand on her hind legs. Cortisone had been no help. The decision had been made to operate, and they had found a lesion impinging on the spinal cord. The recommendation was to let her go. That was the veterinarian's phrase. Susan was taking the night to think it over.

Audrey had not revived from the anesthetic and was not a good bet to do so. She lay on her side with her midsection shaved and bandaged. One paw hung from the table.

“I came in and checked earlier,” the boy said. “She hasn't moved.”

Susan gave him a wan smile. “Audie-feeber,” she said. “Old Audrey-feen.” She sounded like the loser on a quiz show. She squatted near the dog and put her fingers against its nose. “Here we got our big numbers tomorrow and where will you be?”

OUR RECITAL in Adult Music was the next afternoon at three.

We had signed up together eleven weeks previous. Susan had kept her distance from me, and that was something I hoped to change. Friends scoffed and remained casual about the possibilities, musical or romantic. They admitted that they themselves rarely did that which was in their best interests, whether because of the kids or work or general laziness. Around me they seemed both distracted and skeptical, as if always aware of neglected parallel tracks of richer possibility.

Susan and I showed zero aptitude for the instrument. I had no ability. Susan flustered and grew frustrated and banged the keys like someone losing an argument. For us the keyboards stretched limitless in each direction, and the keys lay in quiet and narrow rows as individual as grains of rice. We had both, it turned out (Susan saw nothing interesting in the coincidence), abandoned the instrument in childhood, spurning the loneliness of solitary application to music, I theorized, for yet another sort. We had sat imprisoned with stereotypic piano teachers in dark parlors, reinventing simple exercises, sweating and hesitant, imagining a world of joy and laughter beyond our windows while our hands produced a series of remorseless sounds.

The patterns returned to our adult lives in the singsong cadences of nonachievement: Every Good Boy Deserves Favor. All Cows Eat
Grass. Big Dogs Fight All Cats.
We behaved as true believers trusting that refusing to confront the catastrophe might yet reverse it.

Susan and Audrey arrived at the North Adams Congregational Church hall that first day in my company, though she specified for the benefit of our instructor that we were not attached. She taught fourth- and fifth-level high-school history, she said, and for what? Her last group's PSATs were so low, she said, she'd recommended to one kid, when he had asked where he should go to school, the University of Mars. She was getting burned-out, in other words.

“Well, let's see what happens,” she said, and cracked her knuckles theatrically. Audrey laid a chin on the piano bench.

We stood ready at that point to commit ourselves to eleven weeks of Adult Music and become part of a group seemingly already dispirited by a lack of adults. Mrs. Proekopp, our instructor, assured us she'd add younger people if necessary to fill out the class. She gestured as evidence toward a tiny child waiting wide-eyed with her mother by the front door.

The church hall had been rented for the occasion, and Mrs. Proekopp had not put herself out. Upright pianos were arranged back-to-back on the maroon linoleum, and the effect was that of a dismal and half-realized Busby Berkeley number.

Mrs. Proekopp had speculated right off the bat that the dog would naturally be a disruption and in the future would be better off and no doubt happier at home, and Susan had suggested that she would be the judge of that, thank you, and when the dog disturbed anyone they would let her know. Audrey had yawned.

The few other students had looked on with interest. Susan believed in serious rudeness when people in her opinion refused to see or speak clearly.

“We need something, I guess,” she allowed that first day.

“You never know what you can do until you try,” I told her, settling into the piano beside hers. Audrey shot me a look.

“Then you do,” Susan said. “That's the problem.” She lifted the index card with her name penciled on it from the fallboard. “Makes me feel like a kid again,” she said, and played four notes,
plink
plank plonk plunk,
and squinted at the music sheet.

I watched her hands rehearsing and re-rehearsing their intended patterns above the keyboard, her brow furrowed in puzzlement. She stared at the music like someone facing crisis in an exotic land trying to read the instructions on the emergency gear.

Her
problem, she said, was that she didn't like what she'd done with herself and she didn't like what she was doing. “
One
problem, anyway,” she added. The situation demanded change.

There, on the first day of Getting Acquainted with Our Instruments, even basic techniques remained blandly elusive. The exercises drifted serenely around my attempts to order them. Susan at one point compared the effect to that of a system created by random generation. We did not improve. Audrey lay under the piano bench, dreamily twitching.

The second day the tiny girl in the doorway, Mary Alice, was admitted to the group, and Susan told her, by way of explaining me, “He thinks he's in love with me.” Mary Alice looked uncertain as to how to handle the information. After a moment or two she regarded me unsympathetically. I suggested by my expression that I didn't need the sympathy of children.

At the break we sniffed coffee in Styrofoam cups and lingered near the doughnuts. Mrs. Proekopp kept a wary eye on Audrey, who nosed the air around the tray experimentally.

“There's a difference between believing in things and refusing to see,” Susan said. “You've got that love-at-first-sight thing going in your head right now; I can see it. Forget it. You and me, we're not made for each other. We're just not.”

I suggested that it wasn't something that needed deciding right then.

“It's
been
decided,” Susan said. “Smell the coffee, pal.”

“It isn't a wholly rational process,” I said. She made a squeaking noise with her lips.

“You're something,” she said. “Your mouth's writing checks your behind can't cash.” We drifted back to our pianos. I did a little fingering and the doughnut grease left filmy fingerprints on the ebony keys.

BETWEEN SESSIONS we met coincidentally in a garage. Her tired orange Opel hatchback balked in the cold, she reported. Desmond, her mechanic, told her to just leave the checkbook.

I was sitting in a red plastic chair in the waiting room, waiting for my own bad news. In the garage area proper, dog dishes spotted the cement floor.

“For the rats,” Susan explained. “This place is Rat Motel.” I pulled up my feet.

In the Pan Tree across the street we sat in the window so we could watch our cars slowly come apart. Susan slurped her Constant Comment and watched Desmond poke disinterestedly under the Opel's hood. Audrey remained upright and stoic in the backseat, resembling at that distance the mysterious figures in the windows of suspense movies.

“You don't know me,” she said. “We never dated. I have B.O. I'm always pissed off at something. I'm not your dream girl.” She looked away, and I was encouraged. “All this interest is sad, you know?”

I asked about a piece of hers in the Advocate entitled “Jazz Giants Snub the Berkshires.” Her thesis had been that they had no place to play, so it was inevitable. We talked about the older greats: Jelly Roll Morton, Art Tatum, Fatha Hines, Willie the Lion Smith. I was frequently pretending to appreciations I didn't have. She tried to make comprehensible Tatum's sixteenth-note runs at up-tempo. We considered ways of improving articulation. We had very little idea what we were talking about.

The garage lights went on across the street. “There you go, Desmond,” she called to the window. “He's given up going by feel,” she said to me. People in the restaurant were looking.

“Want to go to the Blind Pig?” I asked. “For a drink?”

“I don't know,” Susan sighed. She made binoculars with her hands and looked at me through them. “What am I doing? What are you doing?”

“You're teaching and writing for the Advocate,” I said. “That could be exciting.”

She nodded, her eyes on the garage. “They got me covering a guy who does gun-rack art,” she said.

I folded the paper around my pumpkin muffins. I asked if she remembered the little girl, Amanda, from the last Fourth of July. Once it had gotten dark Amanda had wandered over and stood next to us petting Audrey while the fireworks boomed and popped over our heads. Her mouth had been open and the lights warmed our faces. Susan spoke quietly with her. Someone took us for a family. Amanda leaned back, her palm leaving Audrey and patting air. Look at the noise! she said. Look at the noise! Susan had lifted her up, as if for a closer look. I thought then that we were both happy. I thought,
She's usually unhappy, and I'm usually unhappy.
I called her after that, tried to shop where she shopped.

“I remember her,” Susan said. “Beautiful girl.”

The cars still weren't ready an hour later, so we walked the strip to the Artery Arcade. From the benches in front of the Zayres we could see over the Department of Motor Vehicles to Mount Greylock. Susan rubbed her eyes industrially with her fingertips. She said, “I'm thirty-three already. Billy DeBerg was sixteen years ago.”

“Billy DeBerg?” I asked. She did not elaborate.

There was an immense and distant crash, as though someone had dropped a carton of bedpans.

“Fat,” she said sadly, as if that followed.

“You're very beautiful,” I said. This kind of talk did not come easily to me and I tried to list specifics.

“Right here,” she said. With two fingers and a thumb she pinched her hip and twisted it. “Miss Cushions.”

I had no comeback for that. Audrey deflected some of the awkwardness by scratching herself. Susan told some Audrey stories. The dog ate the spines of books, and at the age of eleven still urinated with joy when Susan came back from school.

“
Don't
you?” she asked. Audrey's tail thumped. We sat with her unperturbed silence as our model. The world seemed to be rewarding restraint only incrementally, but I refused on my part to push things. I had the patience of a coral reef.

MRS. PROEKOPP informed us two weeks later that she wasn't pleased with our progress and could not believe, after hearing my hands skitter like frightened crabs across the keyboard, that I had been diligent in my practicing.

“Come now,” she said, looking over her glasses at me. “Do you think you would sound like that if you practiced?”

I looked helplessly at my hands.

“Listen,” she said. “Mary Alice, play the piece.” Mary Alice straightened up and her tiny frame hunched forward. She peered at the music and began. Her version was not very good, but it was a resounding improvement. She appeared to be five to seven years old.

Mrs. Proekopp was not one to tread lightly on a point. “Did yours sound like that?” she asked, unnecessarily. “Class? Did his sound like that?” Around me neutral murmurs, blank looks. “Susan,” she said, “has he been practicing?”

“It doesn't sound like it,” Susan said.

“Class,” Mrs. Proekopp concluded, with an excess of élan, “we are not going to get anywhere”—she thumped my shoulder for emphasis—“not anywhere, if we do not p-r-a-c-t-i-c-e.”

On the chalkboard, as we entered the hall every afternoon, were separate lists for each student which our instructor had entitled WHAT WE NEED TO WORK ON. By week three Susan and I were not on the board. We attributed this to a lack of space.

“Have you thought there might be other girls out there looking for you?” she said during one session, looking at her hands.

“I like
you,
” I said. She bared her teeth at the music book.

“I DON'T KNOW what to do with you two,” Mrs. Proekopp said. Mrs. Bunteen, an elderly widow from Adams, looked on, the lights glazing her glasses. “Neither of you seem able to accomplish the smallest things with a keyboard.”

“You're being too hard,” I said, in Susan's defense.

“Prove it,” she said. She believed herself to be, she confided, a whiz at motivation.

The room was silent. I realized I had the opportunity at that point to play for the two of us, to redeem weeks of performance with one flourish and show up the instructor. I began without taking a breath and my fingers spilled around with a palsied urgency. Mrs. Proekopp granted me a short grace period and then walked around the piano to bring an ear closer to the atrocities. Slowly and clearly she called out the missed notes like a public autopsy: B flat. G flat. B flat. B flat. At a tricky bridge I stopped, some fingers still trembling. I imagined for my hands the most grotesque punishments.