There is a smattering of applause when the kid finishes, then Conti launches in, first by acknowledging the student’s phrasing and dynamic range. “But left hand is so tight, like a claw. You must be strong, yet one hundred percent flexible, like the octopus.”
He demonstrates a relaxation exercise, first clutching a ball, then letting it drop without changing position of the hand.
The next performer is built like a football player, muscles popping under his shirt. He lowers himself stiffly onto the chair as if still smarting from last night’s workout and announces that he will perform Conti’s own transcription of a Granados piano work.
The maestro smiles, enjoying this display of flattery.
The youth plays with his sausage fingers, mouth twisting into tortured expressions as he moves through the tricky piece, his body at odds with the delicate, even nuanced sounds that rise from his instrument.
Pretty damn good, Toby thinks, but not scary good. What he is — what they all are — is very young.
Conti says, “You must isolate the difficult sections.”
The performer nods his shaved head; he’s heard this advice a thousand times.
Conti gets the boy to try the opening section over and over, focusing on the syncopated rhythm while Conti taps out the beat. When the kid fouls up, the teacher reaches over and raps his muscled thigh. “Feel it in your body!”
The boy reddens, loses track of where he is, his old way of playing not yet subsumed to the new. Conti drags his chair even closer so that the two men brush knees, and then, on the seventh or eighth try, the kid nails it.
Relieved applause. Any one of them could be up there.
“Toby Hausner, you’re next,” Tess announces, peering at him over the top of her glasses.
He picks up his guitar and makes his way to the front of the room.
I don’t have to do this, he reminds himself. He could blow them all off and head for the pub across the street, afternoon jazz and a banquet burger. When he was a teenager, he didn’t understand this. He didn’t know there was a choice.
Conti clasps hands over head and yawns loudly. “What will you play for us?”
“Paganini.” Toby passes over the weathered score, an accordion fold-out, six pages long. He will play by memory, as is the custom.
The maestro smiles, lowering his arms. There are deep shadows under his eyes after a sleepless night in an unfamiliar hotel room. “I perform this on my new CD. It is all about touch, yes?” He turns to the audience, making a lesson of the remark. “Your fingers must go like the wind, maybe good wind, maybe bad.”
A sprinkle of nervous laughter greets this witticism; if a person plays exceptionally well here, he might be invited to the guitar festival in Milan where Conti presides as artistic director.
Conti flutters his fingers poetically and adds, “Paganini composes this as a challenge to perform at an important concert. You know he was fantastic guitarist besides fiddle player, and a wild man.”
Toby chooses his moment and takes charge of the stage, waiting for the rustles and throat clearings to subside. Time slows, divides into cells. Toby maps out the first dozen bars in his head, hearing each note ring with precision before he sets hand to fretboard.
Silence.
Now.
No, not yet. Someone is whispering, then a pencil drops and rolls across the floor.
He places his hands over the frets and sound hole, when someone screeches a chair leg.
Toby lowers his hands, flexes, takes another breath, hears nothing but the purr of ventilation, then begins to play.
The piece paws open and it’s alive or dead from the first note. Pure sensation — think of uncircumcised skin or newborn rabbits. Toby snorts at such images. He sneers at any image whatsoever; there can be nothing besides the movement of sound through space and time. Soft and velvety turns brittle with a tilt of the wrist; command of tone has always been his forte. Coming up is the presto section, which must go as fast as humanly possible: hold on to your hat. Paganini was a born show-off. Toby stays inside the silky legato until the last possible moment, then lifts his right hand, making the audience wait until he is good and ready. Pause, then fingers snap across the fretboard, nailing chords and runs. Clear sailing from here to the end of the section, then retrace back to the opening theme.
Except he falters.
His fingers speed on, working via muscle memory, but they have a mind of their own. His actual mind scrambles as it chases his darting hands. Cheekbones tighten, sweat strokes his brow: maestro have pity.
Breathe.
Finally, Conti starts to sing and conduct with one hand, working Toby back into the piece, and within a few seconds he’s found his way and presses on to the end.
But focus lifted for a microsecond, floated overhead, untethered, mind searching for the recognizable world.
Conti asks, “Your name is Hausner?”
“Yes.”
“So hard for German people to achieve true bel canto.”
Toby’s head jerks up. “Is that all you have to tell me?”
The man smiles evenly. He is used to a certain deference. “No,” he says, then adds, “I believe you are really an artist, but —” He holds up a hand. “You are not a hundred percent prepared today.”
Tess chirps from her front row seat. “You should have heard him play when he was a kid.”
Conti studies Toby. “But you are not such a kid now.”
Pry open the lid of his coffee cup and let out a yelp: slashed finger from the ragged edge of plastic. Toby watches with dismay as a sizz of blood appears on the tip of his index finger where skin squeezes frets. Race to the bathroom of Tim Hortons and run cold water over the injured finger for a full ten minutes, the ganglia of nerve endings tying off, retreating. Blood colours the water crimson, then pink, then less pink, until finally it runs clear.
Conti said, “You must over-prepare, then set the piece aside for a week or two.” But who has the luxury of time?
At home Jasper presses the wounded finger to his lips. “Will you still be able to play?”
“Sure,” Toby says.
“Things are moving very quickly with you.”
Toby tugs his finger away. “After years of slow.”
Pained look. “Is that what you call our lives together, Toby? Slow?”
To a romantic there might be something ecstatic in the idea of a breakdown. Toby knows that his shipwreck caused only pain, though he’ll point out that he never heard voices that were not his own, nothing borrowed from radio waves. It was a function of overwork, ecstasy minus key proteins and water.
After the Paris episode, where he was rescued by his worried father, Klaus, and taken home, Toby landed in the halfway house where a man called Jasper worked. Every Monday, Jasper corralled Toby to fill out his PAS, personalized activity schedule, the chart that broke down each day into segments: brush teeth, dress, make bed, attend day program. Toby would grumble at the tedium of it all, yet it was reassuring to tick off tasks of normalcy. The schedule saved him, he will admit on certain days, for it turned out that life skills were just what he was missing. It was the lack of such skills that had landed him in hot water, forgetting to eat, wash, take a crap. He’d fallen into abstraction.
Six