One Sunday afternoon in the winter, when no one was home but us, we opened the living-room window wide so the air blasted a clear current from his house to ours, then cranked up the hi-fi so it filled the sub-zero wind with the latest Rolling Stones—and he knew we were hip. We were in this together, Colette, not a dime’s worth of separate thought between us as our eyes gleamed anticipation. We plotted to meet him.
“Let’s bake a cake!” I cried in a moment of inspiration.
“We can take it over as a welcoming gift.”
“What kind of cake?” Colette eyed the pantry shelf.
Gripped by a sudden, delicious image I scooped out two boxes of Betty Crocker mix and dropped them on the counter.
“A piano cake!”
It took hours mixing and baking, then cutting one layer of Devil’s Food cake into ladyfingers for the black keys. The other layer we shaped into the piano body - baby grand, aerial view. White cake became the white keys, and everything was glued and glazed with icing.
“It’s beautiful!” we sang, staring at our shiny sculptured feat, a Liberace-lush edible piano. Yet when it came time to wrap it in foil and hunt up an Eaton’s box the proper size, I was suddenly seized with terror. Who were we after all? Twelve and thirteen years old, ungainly adolescents with a pagan offering to our chosen god. Colette urged us on, seeing no obstruction to the unfolding drama. He’ll slam the door in our faces, I imagined. Or laugh. Or bow politely, then press the door shut in our faces. Oh, Colette. Oh, Jean. We hugged each other breathlessly before setting out to the cool cement walk.
He wasn’t home.
Funny, the car was there. Perhaps he was working. We didn’t quite know what to do, though I was vastly relieved. Colette wanted to take the box home and go back later, but no, I said, let’s just leave it on the doorstep with a note. Okay, what shall we write? I pulled out a piece of paper, flattened it against Colette’s back, and printed: “PLEASE EAT THE PIANO. Jean & Colette (your neighbours).”
Was that good enough? All right, Colette said, and we stuck it under the box and left it on the mat. Later in the afternoon we looked over and the box was gone.
“He’s taken it!”
“Maybe he’s eating it right now!”
The thought of him at that moment crunching down on our home-baked cake incited giggling, a fit that lasted on and off till bed-time. We knew we were stepping into the shallow water of a miracle.
Later, another evening, we had tickets to his concert with the symphony. Tickets that came from a benevolent relative, pleased to see our excitement for the “classics”. The music we half listened to; it was the spare shape of him there, balanced against the gleaming black Steinway with his dark eyes focused artfully inward that we clung to, our heads pressed against the brass rail of the second balcony. Each time he tossed his head or plunged his arms into the black-and-white nest of keyboard, Colette jiggled my elbow.
“Look at him!” we squealed, sometimes so noisily that our neighbours, serious music students following scores, scowled, even put their fingers against pinched lips. What did we care!
When it was over and he had bowed, accepting with gracious humility the shouted “Bravos” and accompanying ovation (in which we participated lustily and I felt hot tears, leakage from my inner self, brush down my face), we headed for the greenroom. We were determined to meet the Dream head on. In the corridor, our heads bobbed up and down in the sea of adults.
“I see him!”
“He’s coming out of the room!”
“His hair’s drenched in sweat!”
We watched as, one by one, he shook hands with friends, vague acquaintances, strangers. Up close his face was large, moonlike, and dark. We could see grey hammocks of fatigue slung under his eyes. It was our turn. With red, beaming faces we introduced outselves.
“We live across the street from you. Remember the box of cake . . . ?”
Then there was the explosion, and Colette and I were at the centre. His strained face broke into a delighted smile as he gathered us into his kimonoed arms.
“Ahhh. The piano cake girls.”
What a beginning! Our smiles stretched to breaking and rocketed off our faces into the world. He told us to stay back so he could drive us to the party at his house. Moments later we were there, dropped from the everyday blandness of our household into the exotic temple of his world, a house paved in white carpets, with huge pillows on the floor like beds, wine and cigarettes, the laughter of musicians, the heady smell of success-and us. We were whisked to the middle of it, as if he’d been waiting all along.
What colour is betrayal? muses Jean. Purple?
She packs her suitcase, tossing in underwear, a toothbrush, a change of jeans.
She passes again Colette’s short note fluttering on the table, ghost of Okakura, the handwriting spidery and familiar. And passes, too, inevitably, the cello standing in the corner, its side swung toward her.
“Off again in such a hurry?” it mutters.
When she doesn’t reply, it adds, “The humidity’s terrible. Can’t you hear my pegs creak in the night?”
“Yeah, I hear them,” says Jean, stuffing a handful of socks in her suitcase and looking around for her toilet kit.
“It’s been over a month.” A sigh. “I’m nothing like this. A sculpture? You could at least dust me from time to time.”
“Shut up!” says Jean.
She could lock it in the case and shove it in the closet. That might shut it up.
“Poor old neglected thing,” she says, with a hint of bitterness. Has she ever gone six weeks without picking up the bow?
She folds a blouse into the suitcase, pats it down, then sighs heavily. Grabbing the chamois that drapes off a tuning peg, she wipes it over the rosewood soundboard. Hardly dusty at all. She can almost hear the purr of contentment. This annoys her. She feels slightly queasy, almost motionsick, as she flips the instrument around to swipe its underside. She shakes the chamois and tosses it into the open case. Before she knows it, she’s tightening the bow and passing the horsehair over a knob of resin. She unscrews the endpin and sticks it into a crack in the floorboards. Then she drops the bow on the string and draws it across tentatively.
A muted sound, like an infant crying two floors away.
She cocks her head, listens, and does it again. Then her left hand springs to the fingerboard, and the sounds turn into a familiar transcription: a Bach partita. Her fingers nimbly follow the old pattern, and the bow stabs at the proper angles.
She plays ten or twelve bars before stopping in disgust.
“What crap!” She glares at the instrument before propping it up against the wall again.
Her fingers work by habit: might as well be raking leaves. How long since she’s actually listened? Might as well be a civil servant plowing through scores of documents and procedurals.
She slides the suitcase toward the door, ready for a hasty exit in the morning.