The Soloist (4 page)

I spent the day shopping for a suit. I like new clothes, but I dislike having to shop for them. I hate spending money on things like clothes or furniture—practical things. I get that, I’m sure, from watching my parents despair over the monthly bills when I was very young. There was a time when we lived well, but that was when I was being paraded around Europe, and it was all other people’s money anyway. As soon as my career slowed down, my patrons withdrew from sight.

In the end I didn’t find a suit that I liked enough to buy, but I did find, in a used bookstore guarded by a sleepy miniature dachshund, a beautiful volume of photographs taken in space accompanied by quotes from astronauts describing
their experiences. One quote in particular, from a Russian cosmonaut, caught my attention. He said that what struck him most about being outside the atmosphere was the silence. “It was a great silence,” he wrote, “unlike any I have encountered on Earth, so vast and deep that I began to hear my own body: my heart beating, my blood vessels pulsing, even the rustle of my muscles moving over each other seemed audible.…”

This immediately made me think of the kind of silence I used to love, the instant before I would start a piece and the audience would quiet down to absolute stillness. I always held the bow over the strings for a few seconds too long, just to relish that incredible vacuum, when a hall filled with hundreds of people could become so quiet. No one ever, ever sneezed, coughed or budged until I offered release with the first note.

The astronauts careen through infinity at five miles a second, moving, working and even floating outside the capsule, but always surrounded by absolute silence. What does that do to someone? I wonder. To stare into all that velvety blackness and see the earth hanging in the middle of it, a sparkling, round ball floating in near-perfect emptiness, where sound has no meaning at all.

The book reminded me of the period in my childhood when the race to put men on the moon was at its highest pitch, and like most young boys, I dreamed of being an astronaut. Unlike most young boys, though, I actually trained for it. I asked my father to bring home a wooden crate from the warehouse just large enough for me to fit into, but not too large—I wanted to get used to being cramped. I appointed the crate with cushions, a blanket, a clock, snacks, a water bottle, a thermometer and a homemade periscope,
and “trained” by setting the crate in front of the television set and watching my favorite programs through the periscope, which extended upward through a small hole in the top of my “capsule.” I began by sitting in the crate through an entire half-hour program, and decided to increase my sitting time by five minutes each day.

As with my cello practice, I approached this astronaut training with purposeful intensity. At the end of a month I was up to three hours a day and still going strong. Understandably, my mother was deeply concerned. She tried to talk me out of doing it, but with no success; the idea of piloting a sleek bullet through the dark vastness of space fascinated me to the point of obsession. I was determined to increase dramatically my tolerance for sitting in cramped spaces, so that word of my training would reach the directors at NASA and inspire them to grant me early acceptance into the space program.

My training came to an abrupt end when my father happened to say at the breakfast table, “Reinhart, vat you are doing in that box all day? You don’t got to practice sitting still, you sit still plenty once you get up there in space, you don’t got to practice that. If you want to be astronaut, what you got to do is learn how to fly airplane. You do that when you grow up, not eight-years-old boy.”

My mother chimed in, “That’s right, Renne, you don’t have to torture yourself sitting in that little box for hours! You could hurt your eyes looking through that tube! Please, Renne! Besides,” she added, leaning toward me and speaking quietly, “they may not ever let Jews be astronauts, you know. It’s sad, but with music at least you know you’ll have a future.”

“Oh, they’ll send Jews into space, all right,” my father muttered. “They just won’t let them back down.”

I’m sure that my father, who could find a way to be pessimistic or cynical about nearly anything, did not intend to frighten me when he said that, but when I climbed into my box and closed the lid later on that day, I began to imagine what it would be like if the rocket went off course, or if NASA decided that in fact they didn’t need me to return, and I had to gradually suffocate in complete darkness. This thought disturbed me so much that I not only discontinued my training, but could not sleep at night for months afterward unless all the lights in my bedroom were on and the door was wide open.

After dinner in Santa Barbara I watched a movie, then took a short walk along the beach on my way back to the hotel. It was chilly but calm by the water. The gibbous moon, low in the western sky, cast a perfect column of reflected light on the ocean from the horizon to my feet. I was lost in thought until a rogue wave, with a heroic dying effort, made it farther up the beach than any of its predecessors and soaked my shoes.

Back in the room I found a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket waiting for me. An attached card said, “Happy Birthday to our dearest Reinhart, love Mother and Dad.” The first time I played at Carnegie Hall, when I was fifteen, the conductor let me have a sip of champagne that night at dinner. It was Moët et Chandon, and my mother never forgot that I liked it. Every year she makes sure I get a bottle for my birthday. I had told them I would be at the bed-and-breakfast place over the weekend, but I didn’t think she’d go
to the trouble of having a bottle sent to my room. I should have known better, I suppose.

I wasn’t really in the mood for champagne, but I couldn’t very well leave it sitting there overnight. It would have been depressing to wake up the next morning and pack, all the time having to stare at the unopened bottle floating in its bucket of water. I drank as much of it as I could, opened one of the windows and tried to listen to the ocean. But I couldn’t keep my attention on the sound for long. I kept thinking how much I wished I could quit my teaching job without having to worry about money. In a way it was odd that I was so determined to give concerts again, because a lot of active performers would have envied my life now; I didn’t have to travel, struggle to maintain a grueling repertoire, deal with booking agents or publicists, or sweat out reviews. I taught three days a week and could have played the cello all day long on the other four for my own enjoyment if I liked. Unfortunately, playing onstage for an audience was the only kind of enjoyment I wanted.

I longed to concertize again—I’d longed for it every single day of the sixteen years since I’d had to stop—and occasionally I thought I was ready to try, but at the same time I was terrified of repeating what had happened at my last concert. It was at a tiny recital hall in Chicago, where I was scheduled to play three of the Bach unaccompanied suites. I hit the first chord of the fifth suite, in C minor, but it sounded so out of tune that, furious with myself, I stopped and started again. The second time was even worse, so I checked the tuning of the instrument and started again, only to stop a third time. The audience became restless and started murmuring, and then I realized what I had done. Who in the history of professional music had started a piece three times? No one
that I’d heard of; it was an almost unthinkable failure. I managed to stay composed long enough to put my cello down on the stage. My hands and knees shook terribly as I bent down to place the bow across the cello. I walked across the stage, got through the stage door and then felt myself slowly shatter into a million pieces.

After I returned to Los Angeles I called home to thank my parents for the champagne. My father answered, catching me by surprise because my mother almost always answered the phone. My father didn’t like speaking when he couldn’t see whom he was talking to; it made him fidgety, he said, and it was true. Whenever I saw him having to talk on the phone he would pace, play with the cord or doodle on the backs of envelopes. The phone was in the kitchen, and my mother, who was fanatically conscientious, always stacked the bills on the kitchen table so that she would be forced to take care of them immediately. This led to another reason why my father didn’t like talking on the phone: my mother would get unreasonably angry and scold him because marking up the envelopes made her nervous—she felt you must never scribble on official papers. Maybe it had something to do with getting out of Germany as a young woman, when documents were all-important. Some of this must have rubbed off on me, because to this day I have to photocopy all my music and pencil in my notes on the copies. I have never been able to bring myself to write on a published sheet of music or in a book.

“Hello, Dad. It’s Reinhart.”

“Ah … happy birthday.”

“Thank you. How are you, Dad?”

“Ach, same tings. You?”

“Fine. The semester’s over. It was quiet this year.”

“Good, good … Momma’s upstairs. Hold on.”

My mother got on and immediately apologized for not being closer to the phone when I called. “But your father, he’s stripping the wax in the kitchen, and the smell! I don’t even know why he’s doing it; the floor was fine before. You got your champagne? Those people—they acted like they were doing me such a big favor, but that’s what they’re in business for. You don’t know what they wanted to charge me for—”

“It worked out fine, Mother. It was in my room when I came back from taking a walk by the ocean. It was perfect; thank you so much.”

“You think I’m gonna forget my only boy’s birthday? Imagine, thirty-four years already! It seems just a few days ago we were traveling around so much, yes?”

“Yes, it—”

“Remember London that time it snowed? And that cab-driver who says we never make it to the hall on time? You were so cute, Renne, with that little black hat and the coat on! You were just like a little old man. Here I was, I was going to kill that driver, and you were so quiet! And you were the one giving the concert, yeah?”

“Yes, I remember that.”

“And how were the students at the end of the year? Good ones this time?”

“No, not this year.”

“Ah, Renne … you remember Mrs. Sprenkle, yes? She
sent us an invitation this year. All her students had a recital, but you know your father, he wouldn’t go. Last week I had them over for dinner and your father wouldn’t say a word the whole night. He can’t stand them.… Ach! Did you hear what he just said?”

“No.”

“He says he can’t stand anybody! You see? He never wants to have any fun.”

“He’s always been quiet, Mother.”

“Reinhart! He’s not a quiet man, he’s just acting old, that’s what. What’s he gonna do when he’s
really
old, huh?”

She told me what she had cooked that night, what Mrs. Sprenkle said about the Finkelsteins’ daughter, who is supposed to be showing a lot of talent with the piano, and how Rabbi Siegel asked all about me when she bumped into him in town. He still remembered how, when I was only four years old, I was able to hear the chants only once and then sing them from memory.

As always, as soon as she mentioned my childhood her voice became almost reverential. “So, Reinhart,” she asked, and I could have finished the sentence for her, “how is your music? You practicing hard still? Practicing too hard, I think, yes?”

“There isn’t much to tell you, Mother. It’s about the same.”

There was a pause at the other end, then a sigh. “Ach, Renne … you work so hard. I just know God must be testing you. You working so hard like that, believe me, it will change for you. I know it will! God tests us to make us stronger, Renne. Maybe you should take a vacation, hm? Maybe someplace warm, or back to Europe somewhere?”

“We’ll see. Mother, did you find out about Dad’s pension plan yet?”

“Ah, you know your father, every day I’m asking him, every day he’s putting it off. He’s afraid to ask. Don’t worry about that, Renne. What we care about is, are you happy? That’s what matters most, Renne. When you have kids, you’ll know. Believe me.”

I was afraid that she might start asking if I was dating anyone, so I told her I had to hurry out for a dinner engagement, thanked her again for the champagne and tried to sign off.

“Wait a minute, Renne, I want to check … did you get your plane tickets yet?”

“Mother! It’s only May! There’s still half a year left, I have plenty of time.”

“You don’t know with these airlines, Renne! Things get crazy before you know it, and remember what happened to us in San Francisco. You don’t want something like that to happen for Yom Kippur, do you? You haven’t been here in three years, Reinhart. Is it asking too much that you get your tickets early so I can—”

“All right, Mother, all right. I’ll make the reservation this week.”

“Don’t forget, Renne. That’s all your father and I look forward to these days. We haven’t seen you in so long.…”

“I promise—this week.”

“We miss you, Renne. Happy birthday! Don’t work too hard. You were always so serious, you should try to enjoy yourself more, yeah?”