Lost In Place

by Mark Salzman

  I decided to give it a go. The next day my dad mentioned on our commute that I’d better take the competition seriously; all of the judges knew Mom, so in a way her reputation was at stake. She was the one signing the entry form as my sponsor, saying that she thought I was qualified and wouldn’t be wasting the judges’ time.

  My mother’s reputation! Talk about pressure. I decided to keep my chosen piece a surprise from everyone until the competition. I started practicing steadily at night, but that still didn’t give me enough time, so I took to waking up at five and doing quiet scales before breakfast. There still wasn’t enough time, so I started bringing my cello to work every day. I kept it down in the file basement, and instead of going out for lunch I brought a sandwich down there and practiced.

  My mother tried to help me with the Bach, but the truth was that I didn’t spend nearly enough time on it; I was really focusing on my optional piece. She tried several times to warn me that I would regret not having the Bach in better shape, but I didn’t, or couldn’t, listen. “I just hope you remember that this is a classical music competition,” she said when I insisted on keeping my optional piece a secret. Oh, it’s classical, I assured her.

  Somehow I made it to the finals. That Sunday afternoon we finalists had to play our required and our chosen piece on a stage in front of the judges, and the auditorium was open to the public. Annette and even a bunch of my Laserium buddies—except for Michael—had come to cheer me on. I came out and played the Bach … badly. Then I walked offstage, tore off my jacket and shirt, put on Annette’s Nehrudelic outfit, brought my cello out and laid it across my lap. I could see my mother closing her eyes.

  I’d prepared a morning raga, a piece of classical Indian music. At least I can say that I played it better than I had the Bach. When I finished all my friends started yelling “Encore!” and “Eat a peach for Duane Allman!” and held their pocket lighters up in the air as if it were a rock concert.

  Miraculously, I took second place. The winner was a boy whose eyeline barely reached up to my belt. It was a bit of a letdown having to stand next to this toddler while he got the bigger trophy, but he deserved the prize; that kid was something. That night my parents were actually in a good mood over something I had done, and it came as a gigantic relief to me.

  A few days later my mother handed me an envelope. “It’s the judges’ remarks,” she said. “I always look at them because there’s usually at least one helpful critical comment there.” I didn’t really want to read criticism, but curiosity got the better of me. There were five judges, only one of them a cellist. The four noncellists all had polite things to say about the Bach, but it was obviously the raga that had won them over; in fact, they had given me such high marks for it that it seemed I should have gotten first prize rather than second. When I read the cellist’s sheet, however, my face turned red with shame.

  “The second piece was not cello playing,” he scrawled, “so I can’t comment on it. The Bach was a mess. Dreadful left-hand technique, no bow control at all. Possibly musical, but how can you tell through that disastrous technique? Scratchy sound, squeaks, weak tone, etc.” In each category he had given me the lowest possible numerical score except for “Originality.” He was pretty generous there.

  I showed it to my mother and she froze. At first I didn’t know what was going on, but then I realized that she was furious. “Who is this?” she fumed, her hands shaking with rage. She tore the sheet out of my hand and looked at his name. “William Turner …” she read aloud. “I’ll find out who this is and I’ll write him a letter and tell him exactly what I think of this! Nobody has the right to say such mean things about you! Nobody!” Tears of anger filled her eyes; I don’t think I’d ever seen her so mad. I almost had to wrestle her to the ground to keep her from driving out to the guy’s house and challenging him to a fight. It made a queer kind of sense, though; she’d been so frustrated with me for so many months, and had struggled to keep her temper under control all that time, but now that I had again done something she was proud of she wasn’t about to let some pedant ruin it.

  I managed to convince my mother that my feelings weren’t hurt and that the man’s review hadn’t crushed me; in fact, reading his comments had brought a familiar sensation back to me. It was the same feeling I’d had whenever Sensei O’Keefe yelled at me, the feeling that I must have found a true master at last. If this guy thinks my playing is so bad, I thought, maybe he’s the teacher I need. I called him the next day and made an appointment for a lesson.

  When I showed up for my first lesson Mr. Turner set me up in a music room, sat back in a black leather chair and said, “All right, I’m not sure I remember what your playing was like. Play whatever you want.” He looked like the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and had not smiled once since I arrived.

  The only piece of Western music I knew was the Bach, so I started in on it. After five bars he was wincing; he wasn’t putting it on, either—he was actually in pain.

  “OK, OK,” he said, stopping me. “I remember now. You don’t have to go on.”

  Mr. Turner sat quietly for a moment, as if not sure where to begin. “I have to tell you that I think that was the worst cello playing I’ve ever heard in a competition,” he said. He seemed to be waiting to see if I would get angry and leave. When I didn’t budge he got up, picked up his own cello and said, “Listen for a minute, and watch me closely.”

  He glanced at my copy of the music, frowned, then tossed it on the ground like a pair of filthy underwear. “The first thing I want you to do is to go home and burn that edition,” he said. Then he closed his eyes and played the piece from memory.

  He was great; I hadn’t heard cello playing like that up close since the Parisot concert when I was seven. His body was completely relaxed, as if it took no effort at all for him to play like that.

  When he finished Mr. Turner looked at me and said, “Who are you studying with now?”

  “No one. I haven’t had a lesson since I was thirteen.”

  “Oh! no wonder!” he shouted. “Why didn’t you say so? OK, so maybe you’re not the worst cellist I’ve ever heard! But wait a minute—who sponsored you for the competition?”

  I told him the whole story of how I’d done it so that my parents wouldn’t think I had ruined my life.

  “Ah, ah. I see. OK. Maybe it’s not all that bad after all. If you’d been studying with someone, that would have been bad news because by now you shouldn’t be having all those technical problems. Maybe we can solve them; there’s hope now. But what is it you want out of this? What’s your goal?”

  I really hadn’t given this much thought. I was already starting to get bored with jazz; what was I going to do? It was one of those odd situations where you feel obliged to come up with a life plan in an instant, so I did my best: “I’ll be going to Yale in the fall, and I want to major in music. Ultimately I’d like to perform.”

  “Not as a cellist?” he asked, looking doubtful.

  “Yes. If I work hard starting now, could I get in shape in time?”

  He shook his head, finally smiling. “You know who teaches at Yale, don’t you? Aldo Parisot! I’ll be perfectly honest with you. If he heard you play right now he’d sue for damages. I really don’t know if you’re being realistic here.… I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being a good amateur.”

  Amateur! How I hated that word! “What if I work really, really hard?” I asked.

  “Mm …”

  “I mean really hard,” I repeated, unintentionally gesturing with my hand the way Mr. Rowland had always done.

  He shrugged. “I guess you’ve got to try. But listen, if it doesn’t work out, I don’t want you saying that I led you on or anything. I’ll be straight with you. Every single cellist I know who plans to major in cello at college and go on to a performance career is several long years ahead of you in terms of technique. I’m not saying it’s impossible, exactly, but you should be aware that it would be highly unusual if you pulled it off.” He p
aused. “Highly unusual. Just so you know.”

  If I had been a true pessimist like my dad, I would have taken the man’s cautionary advice to heart. But being a synthetic pessimist, I reacted in precisely the opposite way. His grim prognosis filled me with so much energy that I could barely sit still through the lesson; the thought that proving him wrong and beating the odds would redeem me, wash away my sins and make me a genuine hero made me feel alive in a way I hadn’t felt since getting my white belt from Sensei O’Keefe. Kung fu had been silly, though; this was a serious calling, and this time I was fighting to climb back from a genuine fall. It was uphill this time, my back was against the wall, the chips were down, a lot was at stake, and my reputation—my whole life, actually—depended on it. I got busy starting that very night.

  16

  My fears that The Incident had ruined my relationship with my parents forever proved exaggerated. As soon as I started getting up early in the morning again, my father relaxed, and as long as I practiced Bach every night my mother seemed convinced that I would turn out fine. After ten weeks on the job I’d saved over a thousand dollars, and this time it was going straight into the bank. No more throwing money away on cars, I decided. My dad had just bought my mother a used Karmann Ghia, so now I could pick Annette up in something sportier than a bus and didn’t feel the same need to have my own car.

  Halfway through my eleventh week at work I nullified my wise, money-saving decision by demolishing the Karmann Ghia. I was on my way to see Annette right after dinner one night, I had a green light at a familiar intersection, I was driving within the speed limit, I had signaled my left turn, and I had been straight for two months, but it was dusk and for some reason I didn’t see the full-size American car coming from the opposite direction. We crashed head-on, and the Karmann Ghia got the worst of it by far. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt and my face went right into the pre-safety-glass windshield, but I was saved from serious injury by a stupid hat that I had made myself out of a piece of leather Scott had given me. Inspired by something I’d seen on a poster for the movie Shaft, I had designed it and sewn it together by hand. It looked OK from a distance, but I could never keep it on my head; I had failed to put any sort of elastic band or stiff frame in it, so I had to flop it over the top of my head and let it lie there like a beanbag pillow that had lost most of its beans. I couldn’t wear it outdoors because the normal movement of walking or the slightest breeze made it slide off my head, so I kept it in the car and wore it when I drove. When our cars crashed, it slid down over my face and acted as a shield, so all I got was a bruise on my forehead. Fortunately the other fellow wasn’t hurt at all, and when he saw me climb out of the wreck unscathed, he was too relieved to even be angry. I was very lucky.

  I climbed out and looked at what had once been our sporty Volkswagen. “My dad is going to be real mad about this,” I remember telling the other man, and I started trying to unbend the metal with my hands for some reason that seemed plausible at the time. As a policeman filled out a report, my eighth-grade earth science teacher drove by, stopped to see if anybody needed CPR (he taught the course every year, but never got to use it in real life), then offered to drive me home. “My dad is going to be real mad about this,” I kept saying, but the earth science teacher insisted that my parents would both be glad I was alive.

  The Karmann Ghia was towed away, the flares burned out, the policeman gave me a ticket and then it was time to go home. After reassuring me that my dad probably would not kill me, my former teacher dropped me off and I made the long walk up the driveway. When I went into the house my mother said, “Mark, you’re all pale! Are you all right?”

  “I totaled the car. Nobody was hurt. I’ll pay for it, though—I have over a thousand dollars in the bank.”

  “You’re sure you’re OK? Nobody was hurt?” Dad asked.

  “Yeah. It’s just the car.”

  Dad closed his eyes and exhaled. Other dads threw fits when their kids crashed cars, but mine closed his eyes and sighed. In my mind, I had it worse than those other kids; when he sighed it meant that things were going just as he’d always thought they would, and nothing seemed quite so awful as feeling responsible for helping make things turn out the way he expected them to.

  I went straight down to the basement and began practicing the mantra that I would be reciting constantly for the next ten days and nights:

  Why didn’t I see that car?

  Let’s replay that again. Crash! Shit.

  Why didn’t I stay home to watch those last five minutes of I Love Lucy?

  Why didn’t I see that car?

  It took ten weeks for the car to be fixed, and during that time, since Mom had no car, Dad and I had to do all the grocery shopping on our way home from Greenwich. It was a depressing task; it was still winter, it was pitch-black out on our ride home, Dad was always exhausted, I was always starving, and the last thing either of us wanted to do was push a shopping cart across a dark, slush-covered parking lot and then wander through a glaringly bright supermarket to pick up fish sticks, TV dinners and spaghetti sauce. It was all my fault, but Dad never once gave in to the temptation of saying, “Look what I have to go through because of you!” which almost made it worse, because then I felt obliged to think it for him over and over, incorporating it into my regular mantra.

  “Cheer up, fresh-face, these are the best years of your life,” Ed made the mistake of saying to me one afternoon when I was sitting in the corner of the mail room looking at the accident report form I had to send to the Department of Motor Vehicles. I could stand being called fresh-face, I could put up with doing half of his job for him, but nobody was going to get away with telling me that being seventeen was something I ought to be happy about.

  I whirled around and said through clenched teeth, “Ed, if these are the best years of my life, then would you do me a favor? Instead of giving me rubbers, would you mind picking up a gun and a box of bullets for me? Actually, just one bullet would be fine.”

  He looked confused. “What, you wanna kill me just for saying that? Some sense of humor.”

  Jesus. The guy couldn’t get anything right. I picked up an envelope that had to be hand-delivered and stalked out of the building. I was in one of those moods where you are so frustrated, so angry, and yet so helpless that you forget where you are for long stretches of time, carrying on imaginary conversations in which you try so hard to defend or explain yourself that you even start talking out loud without realizing it. I was doing exactly that when I heard a quiet, firm voice say, “That’s a poor walk, young man.”

  I stopped in my tracks. Was it in my head or did somebody actually talk to me? I turned around and saw an extremely old man wearing a black felt hat, a full-length black wool coat and black shoes polished to a mirror finish. He was standing in front of the library as if waiting for someone to pick him up. He stood ramrod-straight and had his gaze fixed directly in front of him.

  “Did you say something to me?” I asked.

  He turned his head and looked me straight in the eye. “I did. I said, ‘That’s a poor walk, young man.’ ”

  He seemed to expect me to shrug and walk off. But there was something eerily sane about him, and this intrigued me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “What I mean is, you are walking on the balls of your feet and bouncing. It’s not attractive; it’s not the way a man should walk. A man should walk deliberately, first on the heels, then onto the balls of the feet, keeping his back straight, head erect, and moving smoothly.”

  For a second I felt of wave of annoyance pass through me. Old coot, I ought to ask him if he still remembers what it was like to walk on the balls of his feet. Then I thought, Maybe he’s senile. This made me feel sorry for him. But then I looked at him again and saw that clearly he wasn’t saying it to annoy me, and he didn’t seem particularly concerned whether I took him seriously or not. Eerie.

  “Can you show me what you mean?” I asked him.

  “Ye
s.” He demonstrated, first by imitating me, then by walking properly. This fellow had real presence.

  Oh, what the hell. I walked in front of him a few times, trying to imitate his proper walk, until he was satisfied. Then I said, “Can I ask you why you would bother to tell me this, though?”

  “Because you might not realize it if someone didn’t tell you. A man looks more like a man if he holds himself confidently, moves smoothly and acts deliberately. And you’ll find that if you hold yourself that way, you’ll begin to act that way.”

  I must not have looked convinced because finally he grinned and added, “I taught at West Point for over thirty years. There’s my daughter now. Good luck, son. Stay off the balls of your feet.”

  He got into a Mercedes with tinted windows and disappeared. I can’t say that his advice stuck with me for long, but the encounter did lift my spirits for the rest of that day. When I told my dad about it on our drive home that evening, he seemed pleased with me.

  “I’m glad you didn’t brush him off,” he said. “I’ll bet you made that guy’s day. He probably had people snapping to attention and hanging on his every word for most of his life, then one day, poof—Here’s your gold watch, pal, go home and watch TV. And just like that, suddenly the world treats him differently. He’s not a soldier anymore, he’s just another old man who takes forever at the checkout line. Damn, I look forward to retiring, but I sure as hell don’t look forward to becoming a useless old man. That was nice of you to listen to him like that.”