The Soloist (8 page)

“Uh.”

“Well … I suppose everyone should have a pet, shouldn’t they? I read in a magazine that just touching a cat or dog lowers your blood pressure and makes you feel more relaxed. Which sort of returns us to what we were talking about before, doesn’t it?”

“My mom won’t let me have a cat,” Kyung-hee said. Before he could explain further, his mother, who was sitting only a few yards away on the sofa, spoke to him firmly in Korean. Kyung-hee lowered his head and fell silent again. He didn’t look contrite or bitter when she scolded him; he just seemed to withdraw. I decided to save the Socratic method for another day and explained that in order to play the most difficult works with apparent ease, one must work very hard at the beginning to develop a precise, smooth technique that wastes no movement or energy. I told him that both Yehudi Menuhin and Arthur Rubinstein ignored technique early in their careers because they felt that sheer talent would carry them, but had to undergo years of painful retraining later in their careers to undo their sloppy habits. After this cautionary advice, I told him that although he might think me cruel to give him all these exercises, he’d certainly be grateful later.

“Now, Kyung-hee, let’s start with scales. You know your scales, don’t you?”

Silence.

“Kyung-hee, do you know what scales are?”

Another long silence, then at last he nodded.

“Why don’t you tell me what you know about scales, Kyung-hee.”

He fidgeted in his chair, then at last said in a tiny voice, “They’re all over fish.”

Evidently he had not been taught scales. Incredible! No wonder his parents didn’t think to find him another teacher; he’d obviously been teaching himself by sight-reading, and Mr. Douglas had probably just been sitting back amazed and taking credit for it. I set a book of scales on the stand, explained how they worked and had him run through a few. As I expected, he had an extremely hard time, not only because his technique was improper but because they weren’t melodic; there wasn’t anything for him to hang on to. It seemed to take all the power out of him. As painful as it was for him, though, it would have been crueler for me to indulge him and let him go on playing instinctively. Better to get the basics straight now. I showed Kyung-hee how to finger the scales, and told him that for the next week he should do nothing else but them and the bowing exercises I gave him.

“What about this?” he asked, pointing to the Bach I’d given him last time. I sympathized because I could well understand how he must feel right now after discovering Bach only a week before. But if he gave in to this temptation, as soon as he started playing he’d fall right into his old habits: his bowing would get inconsistent, his left hand would clench up and his whole body would go tense again. So I repeated that he wasn’t to play any music until he had mastered these exercises.

I stood up as a signal that the lesson was over, but Mrs. Kim cleared her throat. I turned to her and she said, “Last time you give him that.” She was pointing to the Bach. “He playing that every day, all week. You should hear.”

I really didn’t want to set a precedent of letting her decide the content of our lessons, but at the same time I didn’t want
to alienate her, especially so early on. “All right,” I said, sitting back down and looking at Kyung-hee. “Would you like to play some of it for me?”

I can’t say that Kyung-hee showed signs of wanting to play anything, but he picked up the Bach gingerly and opened it up to page one. I should have known! Children always start at the beginning. He looked at it for a moment, then started the prelude to the G major suite. I noticed that this time he was more engaged in the music from the beginning than he had been the first time I saw him. Maybe it was just that he was relieved to be done with scales for the day.

As I predicted, his bad habits all came back in an instant—but the music! Just like the first time I heard him I had to close my eyes to really hear him, and it was something. That prelude, divine in its simplicity, is really just a series of arpeggios, which may help explain why the Bach suites were mistaken for exercises, and went virtually unplayed for nearly two centuries. Fortunately Pablo Casals stumbled upon a copy of them in a tiny music shop in Barcelona when he was thirteen years old. It was the discovery of his life; they were to become his favorite music. For twelve years he studied and worked every day at them, and was nearly twenty-five before he first played one of them in public. Casals often said that he felt that Bach was the Shakespeare and Rembrandt of music rolled into one, and that Bach’s music expressed every nuance of the human experience. Von Kempen went even further, believing that Bach’s musical inspiration was divine in origin, and that to play Bach properly was an act of religious devotion.

Kyung-hee made the arpeggios sound like waves out in mid-ocean, gentle in appearance but with enormous power under the surface. He gave the piece just the right balance of
agitation and calm. He wanted to go on and play the Allemande, but I asked him to stop for the day. I was anxious to have some privacy after a very long hour with him; I had never had to teach anyone such basic technique before. After he and his mother left I sat by myself in the studio for a long time, feeling exhausted.

The voir dire continued for a whole second day. This part of the selection process took me by surprise. I always thought a jury was supposed to be a randomly selected group of law-abiding taxpayers. Anyone can see how the courts would want to sift out the obvious misfits, but allowing lawyers to try to stack the jury in their favor seemed odd to me.

After lunch on this second day of jury selection I was feeling drowsy; by now we had ten confirmed jurors, including me. Six were women: a widow whose husband had worked for the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, a retired Jewish lady who used to work as a practical nurse at an old folks’ home, a large black woman who did secretarial work in the file room of an office building, an older Hispanic woman who worked as a nurse’s aide at a hospital, a housewife whose husband was a pharmacist and another housewife whose husband worked “in sales.” For men we had a leathery-skinned fellow who worked outdoors reading gas meters, a retired janitor from a high school in Eagle Rock and another retired man who used to be a plant manager at GM, a huge complex where they build cars. I was struggling to keep my
eyes open when the judge called for someone to replace the latest dismissal, a man sitting next to me who was a biologist and who insisted that psychiatry was “not a real science,” and that he could not take psychiatric testimony seriously.

The new prospective juror, I noticed as she made her way across the courtroom, had an excellent figure. She had a dark complexion and shadows under her eyes—something I’ve always found attractive. She looked Hispanic, or perhaps Middle Eastern, and appeared to be around my age. She wore a bloodred sweater. The clerk led her to the empty seat next to mine, and I felt myself blush as she sat down.

How many times I’ve wished I could suppress that reaction! When I was sixteen I soloed with the Seattle Symphony and, as usual, everything went beautifully. I received a standing ovation and was called back onstage for an encore. After I took my final bow—one aspect of performance that I’d never had a gift for; in fact, I’d had to take lessons from a dance teacher to learn how to bow without looking like a broken electric toy—just as I straightened up, the concertmaster congratulated me by kissing me on the cheek. If she had been older or uglier it might have gone without a hitch, but this particular concertmaster was young and very attractive, especially in her black velvet evening dress. When she kissed me, my face, illuminated by a row of powerful stage lights, turned such an intense shade of crimson that the audience acted as if it was the most endearing thing they had ever seen and cheered me for it. It was the only time in my life I did not enjoy the sound of applause.

The judge asked the new juror to state her name for the court.

“Maria-Teresa Reiter.”

I didn’t want to be rude by turning and watching her
during her interview, especially since we were sitting only a foot apart, so I fixed my eyes on a point on the wall in the back of the courtroom and tried to look impassive.

Maria-Teresa explained that she was an ambulance dispatcher, was married with one child, and had never done jury duty before. From her exchange with the defense attorney we learned that she was a lapsed Catholic who knew nothing about Asian religions and had been the victim of a crime only once, when her car was broken into. She had not been in the car at the time, and lost only a tape player, a pair of sunglasses and her husband’s basketball.

The prosecutor educed that no one in her immediate family suffered from mental illness, that she had worked for the ambulance company since finishing high school, and that she and her husband, who worked for the railroad as an engineer, were both politically moderate. She stayed poised throughout the questioning, and answered in a masculine, whiskey-flavored voice. During one of the breaks I discovered why: she was an unabashed chain-smoker.

Ms. Reiter made it through her voir dire, leaving only one more juror to be confirmed. After two dismissals—a woman whose cousin had died in the Guyana tragedy and did not want to hear testimony about cults, and a man who had been badly frightened recently by a “crazy” homeless person—the two lawyers focused their attention on a black man, Mr. Dwight Anderson, an ex-Marine who worked as an industrial investigator at a defense plant. Toward the end of his interview, at about four-thirty, a patch of sunlight that had been gradually making its way across the floor of the courtroom reached the jury box. As the sun fell the patch of light crept up our legs, then spilled onto our laps, and eventually reached chest level. The brilliant red fabric of Ms. Reiter’s
sweater drew my attention. The afternoon sunlight illuminated the soft wool and, from where I was sitting, made her sweater partially transparent, giving me a clear view of her breasts in three-quarter profile. They were at the very beginning of exquisite decline. It dismayed and embarrassed me that I could feel this sort of longing so suddenly and so strongly, and in such an inappropriate setting.

When I could stand it no longer I shifted my attention back toward the courtroom. To my amusement I noticed that almost all in my field of view, male and female, had their eyes on Ms. Reiter’s chest. I looked around at the rest of the room and saw that only two people seemed oblivious to the spectacle: the court stenographer, who was facing directly away from us as she typed, and the defendant, who was looking right at me. He had a bland smile on his face, as if he knew exactly what was going through my mind. I shuddered and looked away; when I glanced back a few moments later, he was staring out the window where the sunlight was coming from. For the first time I comprehended the reality that this was a murder trial, I was a juror chosen to decide a man’s guilt or innocence, and now that man knew my name and quite a bit else about me.

The panel was sworn in, two alternates were chosen and the trial finally got under way. At last we were going to find out what the pale young man had done. I’d been especially curious after hearing about the tabloid article referring to the defendant as “the Zen monster.” I had tried to track the article even though this was against the rules, but when I mentioned the name of the magazine to a librarian friend on campus, she stifled a laugh and suggested I try checking the dumpsters behind supermarkets.

Judge Davis began by telling us that since the defendant was pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, the trial had to be divided into two parts. First was the “guilt phase,” where we had to determine whether or not the defendant actually committed the crime. If we found him guilty, we would then move to the “sanity phase,” in which the defendant would try to prove that although he did commit the crime, he was insane at the time. The judge did not explain why we couldn’t do these two things simultaneously; it seemed like an inefficient way to go about it, and I began to wonder how long I was going to be stuck in this courtroom.

The prosecutor gave his opening arguments first. In his gentle drawl, with almost a hint of sadness in his voice, he told us that the defendant, Philip Weber, was a college dropout who felt bored and unsatisfied with his life. He wandered for several years trying to “find himself” with drugs and mysticism, eventually joining the Los Angeles Zen Foundation, a Buddhist church in Pacific Palisades. He was attracted to this religion because it offered “enlightenment,” a blinding flash of insight that turns anyone who has it into a spiritual master.

“Mr. Weber believed,” the prosecutor said, making a noticeable effort to sound matter-of-fact rather than sarcastic, “that if he was an enlightened Zen master, he would no longer have any nagging doubts or insecurities about anything, and spiritually advanced people would respect him and seek his advice and wisdom. In January of this year, during the foundation’s annual intensive meditation retreat, Mr. Weber apparently decided his time had arrived. On the afternoon of January fourth, he suddenly started shouting that he was enlightened and that he had become a Buddha. When
Mr. Kazuo Okakura, the Zen master leading the retreat, asked Mr. Weber to demonstrate his ‘enlightenment,’ the young man jumped up, grabbed a stick out of the Zen master’s hands and savagely beat him with it. There were eleven people in the church at the time, not counting Mr. Weber or Mr. Okakura, and all of them witnessed the assault. The blows crushed Mr. Okakura’s skull and broke his neck, and he died several hours later in a hospital.”