The Soloist (33 page)

She took charge of the house almost immediately. When Kyung-hee and his mother walked in the door five days later, Smoky (I didn’t like the name but couldn’t get her attention with any of the new ones I came up with) meandered into the studio and gazed, unimpressed, at the intruders. She gave me a harsh look, as if to ask why I wasn’t chasing them out.

“Is that yours?” Kyung-hee asked me, pushing his glasses closer to his eyes as if to make sure he wasn’t just looking at a cat-shaped smudge on the lenses.

“Yes. Her name is Smoky.”

“Could I touch her?”

“Sure. Just take it slow, so she can get used to you.”

He inched toward the old cat, stuck out his hand uncertainly, as if afraid she might bite, then touched her head with his fingertips.

“Wow,” he said, his voice suffused with awe, and then started sneezing.

Sadly, it turns out that Kyung-hee is mildly allergic to cats. This doesn’t seem to discourage him at all, however; he has already fallen in love with Smoky and isn’t about to forsake her just to keep his nose from running. It only means that now he has to wait until the end of his lessons to play with her. One unexpected benefit of giving him this playmate has been that it gives me a chance to talk with his mother. We’ve
been discussing having Kyung-hee give a small recital at the university, which I think would be a good warm-up before making a professional appearance. Also we would be assured of a supportive audience there; a good response will be crucial for the shy boy, and might also have a positive effect on his father.

The real surprise with Smoky, however, has been my reaction to her. I adopted her primarily as a way to improve my relationship with Kyung-hee, and assumed that beyond feeding her and cleaning the litter box, I wouldn’t have to think about her much. It appears, however, that this cat was accustomed to sitting in someone’s lap for several hours a day, and within a few days of moving into my apartment she began demanding the same arrangement with me. Wherever I would move in the apartment she would follow, waiting for me to sit down. The moment I sank down into a chair she would look at me and wait for five or ten seconds, as if making sure it wasn’t a false alarm and that I wasn’t going to pop right back up again. But if I stayed put she would bob her head, contemplate the exhausting leap from the floor and then jump. The poor animal was so old and needed to make such an effort to reach my lap that I would force myself to sit still for at least twenty minutes before getting up. When I’d finally try to lift her, her ears would flick back and she would look up at me with an expression of such confusion and disappointment that more often than not I would set her back down on my lap and sit for another half hour, scratching her behind the ears and under the chin.

I discovered that I enjoyed touching Smoky at least as much as she enjoyed being touched by me. Just to stroke her fur made me breathe a little deeper and feel oddly content. Still, I began to feel manipulated by her, so I had to set
ground rules. We have established a pattern now: every morning she sits on my lap for an hour while I have my coffee and read, and every night she sits there for another hour or two while I listen to recordings. Other opportunities during the day are strictly optional, and I don’t let myself feel guilty for shooing her away if I feel like it. I realize that my negotiations with Smoky are almost comically simplistic when compared with what married couples or families undergo every day, but I still take pride in my relationship with her.

When it came time to choose a veterinarian for Smoky, I asked around the department and got a few recommendations from people who already have pets. I didn’t want to just choose a name out of the phone book. Gwen, the pianist who shares an office with Martin, gave the strongest and most unusual recommendation; she told me that if she could only find an obstetrician as good as her veterinarian, she might think about having children. I made an appointment right away and brought Smoky in, carrying her in a box that I’d lined with thick towels and furnished with toy mice and dried snacks. An assistant led me into an office and told me that the doctor was finishing up a surgical emergency and would be ready in just a moment. As I waited I noticed with pleasure that taped classical music was playing in the background.

Dr. Polk slid open the door and apologized for the delay. She was younger than I had expected; the way Gwen had talked about her I had expected a Jane Goodall figure: tall and thin, with graying hair and plenty of creases etched in her forehead from years of compassionate worry on behalf of animals. Instead she was short and appeared to be closer to my age, with dark hair and smooth, pale skin. She wasn’t pretty in the ordinary sense, but as soon as she began examining Smoky I understood why Gwen was so enthusiastic about
her. My poor cat, who probably thought she was back at the pound, was trembling with fear when I first took her out of the box, but in a remarkably short time Dr. Polk had her purring and sitting comfortably on her lap. Her voice seemed to have an especially soothing effect. Toward the end of the examination, when I complimented her on her choice of office music, her eyes lit up; “Do you like classical music?” she asked.

I ended up making an appointment to bring Smoky in the following week for a tooth cleaning, and during that visit I invited the doctor to be my guest at a recital of baroque chamber music next month, the main event of an early music festival I helped to organize. She seemed genuinely excited about it.

I don’t really practice anymore, but I have established a little cellistic ritual I go through every day, and it makes me happy. It started when I finally took the cello out of its case a few months ago to make sure the strings still had some tension in them. If they get too slack the sound post can fall out of place, and in an older instrument this can cause serious problems. When I pulled it out I saw that it was covered with dust, so I lay it on its back across my knees to clean it off.

Smoky was fascinated by the cello. She hopped onto the sofa and sniffed the length of the instrument; realizing that no one could see me in the apartment, I tried sniffing it too. I couldn’t detect much of an odor, but in bringing my face that close to the instrument I saw it in a way I never had before. It’s odd that I’ve owned this cello for twenty years and had never really looked at it closely before; I had only used it. It was a gift to me from a wealthy patroness of the arts who heard one of my recitals and decided it was time I
had an adequate instrument. My parents could never have afforded a good cello on their own.

The patroness invited my parents and me to her home for tea, along with a dealer in fine instruments. He brought six cellos, all of them magnificent. I played them all, then chose this one. I felt obliged to explain my choice, so I spoke at great length, extolling the virtues of the different instruments, coming around at last to why the virtues of this one in particular suited me. However, the truth was that I’d fallen in love with the color of the varnish. I was only thirteen.

The dealer, who was forever cleaning his teeth with an ivory pick, complimented me effusively on my fine ear. Thinking about it now, I suspect I chose the most expensive instrument, to his great delight. I never found out how much the old woman paid for it. My mother sat me down that night and made me write her a thank-you letter. I’m ashamed to admit that I found writing that letter to be just as tedious a responsibility as writing the annual thank-you letter to my grandmother for her traditional birthday gift of a new dollar bill. It’s just one more of the many things I wish I could do over again.

Now, twenty years later, I was looking closely at the cello for the first time, discovering minute knots in the patterns of wood grain on the front, and seeing for the first time that the ebony fingerboard was not pitch-black as I’d always thought but had nearly invisible streaks of rich chestnut brown running down its length. You had to look very closely in strong light to see them. I ran my hands all over the instrument, and noted a difference in texture between the glassy varnish on the body and the duller but smoother surface of the neck, brought to a different sort of polish from three hundred years of thumbs sliding up and down it. How many left hands
besides my own, I wondered, had gone about the consuming task of searching for the right notes?

An idea came to me, and I turned off the lights in the studio. In the darkness I put the cello’s spike into a loose spot in the carpet, tightened the bow and drew it across the open strings. I took off my shirt and tried it again; it was the first time in my life I’d felt the instrument against my bare chest. I could feel the vibration of the strings travel through the body of the instrument to my own body. I’d never thought about that; music scholars always talk about the resonating properties of various instruments, but surely the performer’s own body must have some effect on the sound. As I dug into the notes I imagined that my own chest and lungs were extensions of the sound box; I seemed to be able to alter the sound by changing the way I sat, and by varying the muscular tension in my upper body.

After improvising for a while, I started playing the D minor Bach suite, still in the darkness. Strangely freed of the task of finding the right phrasing, the right intonation, the right bowing, I heard the music through my skin. For the first time I didn’t think about how it would sound to anyone else, and slowly, joyfully, gratefully, I started to hear again. The notes sang out, first like a trickle, then like a fountain of cool water bubbling up from a hole in the middle of a desert. After an hour or so I looked up, and in the darkness saw the outline of the cat sitting on the floor in front of me, cleaning her paws and purring loudly. I had an audience again, humble as it was.

So that’s what I do now with my cello. At least once a day I find time to tune it, close my eyes and listen. It’s probably not going to lead to the kind of comeback I’d fantasized about for so long—years of playing badly has left scars on my
technique, and, practically speaking, classical musicians returning from obscurity are almost impossible to promote—but I might eventually try giving a recital if I feel up to it. Or better yet, I may play for Dr. Polk if our date at the concert goes well. Occasionally I feel a stab of longing, and wish I could give just one more concert on a great stage before my light blinks off, but that longing passes more quickly now. I take solace in the fact that, unlike the way I felt before, I can enjoy playing for myself now. I feel relaxed and expansive when I play, as if I could stretch out my arms and reach from one end of the apartment to the other. A feeling of completeness and dignity surrounds me and lifts me up. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and I’ve decided that we all crave a sense of dignity in our lives, but most of us find it an elusive goal. For so long I’d tried to generate it by thinking of who I once was, what I used to be able to do or what I could be doing if certain things changed. Now I think there’s something ugly about someone who thinks well of who he was, or of who he might be. (At the same time, there’s something equally unpleasant about someone who thinks poorly of who he once was, or of who he will probably become.)

Maybe I’ve become like my father; maybe I just can’t stand contemplating the larger picture, so I’ve taught myself to keep my eyes focused on the tips of my shoes. For my father it was caulking the tiles at home, cleaning the gutters, changing the oil in the car. For me it’s drawing sound out of a wooden box, and teaching other people how to do it. I don’t think about the past as much as I used to, and I hardly ever think further than a semester ahead. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, though. I’m starting to think that the larger picture is overrated.

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