But when the day had come and gone I hated myself for the extravagance of the gift, the fatuity of it. And I was terribly upset to have received no valentine from her. How ridiculous it seems that I should have expected her to send me one! And yet I did. I was bitterly disappointed.
At my piano lesson a few days later she was wearing the chain and locket, and I kept glancing at them nervously. How could she have failed to guess that they were from me? The bitterness I felt seemed to keep me from focusing on the music. My playing sounded clunky and inept.
She looked at me with genuine concern and said, ”Jerry, what`s wrong?”
I shrugged and looked down at the keyboard. My fingers were poised on the middle C position of the keyboard as though I was just a beginner, as though I was just trying to get up enough nerve to try to push myself through ”Twinkle Twinkle” or ”Lightly Row.”
”Well,” she said at last, ”I guess you just had a bad week, is that it? I know that sometimes happens to me. Everything just seems to pile up, and then suddenly you have a bad day and it seems as though you`ve forgotten everything.”
She waited for me to corroborate this theory, but I still said nothing. I felt as though if I opened my mouth to say anything I would burst into tears. ”Well, why don`t we put off your lesson a couple of days this week?”
she said. ”There`s no point in your being here if you`re having a bad day.” I went to the makeup lesson she had arranged for me on Wednesday, and to my regular lessons the two weeks following; but I had stopped practicing the pieces in my repertoire, and on the Chopin piece, the Polonaise Militaire, on which I was suppo sed to be working, I made only desultory progress. Instead I had begun to waste my time playing around with a few jazz pieces, trying to duplicate Jelly Roll Morton`s style, trying to figure out some of Art Tatum`s tricks. Since I had never been re motely interested in jazz, this was nothing but senseless doodling.
”Jerome,” Mrs. Reynolds said softly after listening to my assault on Chopin that week, ”I`m disappointed in you. Haven`t you practiced this piece at all?”
”Not really.”
”You haven`t?”
”Not a whole lot.”
”That disappoints me more than I can tell you.”
”I don`t know what the point of it is anyway,” I said defensively.
”I`m not learning anything from you.”
She was quiet for a moment. ”Well, that may be, Jerry. But I can`t teach you if you`re not willing to learn. You understand that? I mean, you are so talented-I really believe that-and yet on this piece, well, I just don`t see any evidence that you`ve worked on it at all.”
”What difference does it make?”
”Why are you so angry?”
”I`m not.”
”Now Jerry, you know that isn`t true. You are angry. People just don`t look like that unless they`re angry.”
Too tense to speak, I spread my fingers on the keyboard and looked into space. I guess I expected her somehow to understand everything, to understand more about me than I did myself-because she often had seemed to understand more about me than I did myself-and perhaps to turn to me and cry against my chest, as she had that afternoon so many months before. And to tell me I was mistaken about Professor Cheuse-that she had invited him on Christmas only out of courtesy, only because he had been a friend of Ned`s, but as far as she was concerned, he was nothing but a bore. But of course she said none of those things.
”Will you please tell me why you`re angry?” she said.
”I`m not angry,” I murmured at last, ”I`m disappointed.”
”Disappointed? Disappointed with what?”
”Disappointed that you didn`t send me a valentine.”
The moment those words left my mouth they sounded so idiotic to me that I flinched and looked away, waiting for her laughter. But when I looked at her, her eyes were bright with tears. She touched the locket and chain she was wearing.
”Jerry, this was from you?”
My throat ached; I didn`t trust myself to answer.
”Oh Jerry,” she said ruefully. ”What in the world are we going to do with you? Will you tell me that?”
”I don`t know.”
”I don`t know either, Jerry. You know, Jerry, I like you so much, and I think you`re so very talented-I just don`t want to do anything to hurt you or to hurt your playing.”
I like you so much-what crueler thing could she have said than that? All it translated out to, I thought cynically, was that same old tired phrase that millions of people used each day to break each other`s heart: Can`t we just be friends?
”Maybe I just need another teacher,” I said.
I said that only to hurt her feelings-perhaps to prod her into a declaration of love. Certainly I expected her to deny it vehemently. But she did not. She seemed to accept it as a reasonable suggestion.
”Well,” she said, ”much as I hate to admit it, I think you may be right. At some point, it can be really beneficial to change teachers-it can give you new ideas about how to approach pieces. It may be time for you to do that-to get some other influences on your style.”
And for the remainder of the lesson that was what she talked about. She told me how hard it had been for her to change teachers when she herself had been about my age-how traumatic it had seemed at the time but how productive she believed it had been for her in the long run. She wrote down on a slip of paper the names of two or three other teachers she thought might be good for me at this stage in my career.
As to when this change was going to take place, we left that up in the air. She seemed to assume that I would continue my lessons with her until I changed teachers. But I already knew, walking out of her house that day, that that had been my last lesson with her.
– – –
I did not bother to tell my father or stepmother. I just stopped going to lessons. For a while they knew nothing about it, because I kept practicing as I always had and because every Monday at 4:30 I would still leave the house carrying my music, as though going to my lesson. I would walk to Mrs. Reynolds` house, but instead of turning in I would walk on by and continue to the public library-my heart thudding as I went past, my brain throbbing with the thought that she might be looking out the window as I passed. Not once did I walk past her house without expecting to hear the door open and to hear her call my name. If that had happened, I would have gone in without a second thought; I would have sat down at her baby grand and gone through my lesson as though nothing at all were amiss between us. But it did not happen, not once. My father and stepmother found out I had stopped going to lessons when Mrs. Reynolds sent them a refund check for the times I`d missed.
”I don`t get it,” my father said. ”You mean you`ve quit?”
”Yes,” I said. ”I`ve quit.”
”Without saying anything about it to Lou or me? I don`t understand this. I just don`t quite understand what you`re doing here.”
”I wasn`t learning anything,” I said. ”Anyway, you`re always talking about how expensive it is, aren`t you? And I`m going to have to stop lessons with her in September anyway, aren`t I, so what difference does it make if I stop now or in September?”
I expected him to tell me I was wrong. I wanted him to. Either he himself would tell me I was foolish to stop my lessons now, or else perhaps he would get together with Mrs. Reynolds and have her beg me to come back.
But instead he took my words at their face value. I was quitting, and that was that. My stepmother was unhappy with the decision, and I heard them discussing it together more than once, but they made no real attempt to dissuade me. It was a t ime when we had no extra money anyway, and in September I would be going off to Cornell, and if I really thought it was best to quit my lessons temporarily . . . well, saving a few bucks couldn`t hurt, could it?
So that day, after practicing for three hours, after going through virtually every piece I had ever learned, I closed the piano, and I knew I would never go back to it again. And I never did.
Two weekends ago I was on a flight from Albuquerque to Denver. I had taken a window seat, and a balding man with a briefcase paused in the aisle a moment, looking at me, before sitting down beside me. Even after he had sat down he seemed to be regarding me intently. I gave him a wary smile.
”Am I wrong in thinking I know you from someplace?” he said.
”You don`t look familiar.”
”You certainly do. Unless I`m going bonkers.” He searched my face.
”You live in Denver?”
”Connecticut. Hartford. How about you?”
But now I had begun to wonder if he was right-was it possible that he did look a little familiar? So for a minute or two we played the game of trying to figure where we could have met before. When it turned out that we had both grown up in Washtoteka, Iowa, he snapped his fingers and, grinning exultantly, told me my name.
”You used to take piano lessons from my mother,” he said.
”For God`s sake, what a memory you must have! Remembering my name after 30 years!”
”Well, she used to talk about you sometimes.”
”She did?”
”Actually she would mention you quite often. Wondering how you were doing at college, and so on. She always thought you were one of her most talented students-I guess she kept expecting to hear great things of you. That you were giving a recital at Carnegie Hall or someplace.”
”She thought that?”
”Yes.”
”For God`s sake. Didn`t she know I gave it up?”
”No, I guess not. You gave it up?”
”She`s the only one I ever took lessons from. I stopped playing when I was 17.”
”I guess she didn`t realize that.”
”I thought she knew.”
”Just completely gave it up, huh?”
”Yes.”
”Well, it`s not an easy life,” he said-referring, I understood, to the life of a concert pianist. Even when I was burning with the terrific egotism of youth I had not aspired to become a concert pianist. Had she really believed in me to that extent? I was devastated.
I was silent for a minute. It was not that I had nothing to say to him;
it was that I had far too much. I looked out the plane window and the edge of the wing seemed a piano bench on which I could see a ghostly 17-year-old sitting beside a pale lovely woman, desperately wanting to help her surmount her grief and not having the slightest idea how to do it.
”Does she still give lessons?” I asked at last.
”She did,” he said. He gave a tight, brief smile. ”As a matter of fact she died last year. But she was giving lessons right up till the end.”
The next question is always How?, but I could not seem to get it out. What difference did it make whether it was auto accident or cancer or heart failure? She who had been alive, she who had been beside me, she who had taught me and believed in me-I would never see her again. And only now did I realize that I had always believed that I would see her again. That I would walk into her living- room again one day and sit down at her piano and take up right where I had left off.
In a minute I got up and made my way back to the restroom, where I stayed for some time, just wanting to be alone.
When I returned to the seat we were already beginning the descent to Denver. He was checking his watch anxiously.
”I`ve got two minutes to make my next flight,” he said as we taxied in towards the terminal. ”This is crazy. Good seeing you again, Jerry.”
As soon as the door opened he was through it, the first person to leave the plane. I myself, being in no hurry, stayed in my seat while the plane emptied, and then followed the other passengers out into the crowded concourse-hearing in my mind as I did so, a vague music, the music of a Bach minuet that I had learned at 14. It was not my own fingers I imagined on the keys, but Mrs. Reynolds`.
But in reality there was no music. I looked around me and all I could see was a sea of strangers. Among them I felt vastly out of place and alone, and to them I must have looked like a man wandering in a daze-a man who had only the vaguest idea of where he had come from, and no idea in the world where he was going next.
