Lost In Place

by Mark Salzman

It’s funny how when you’re a teenager and you’re in the doghouse with your parents, you can’t imagine how you’ll ever get out of it. You try to picture the sorts of things you could do to win favor with them again, but they’d have to be heroic deeds, superhuman feats—things that even Mother Teresa would have to struggle to accomplish. But then one day you do some simple, tiny thing without even thinking about it and all of a sudden you’re out of the doghouse. Parents are strange.

  The car got fixed, I started putting money in the bank again, and my Bach slowly improved. The Winter of Guilt ended at last. Spring and summer passed without any further Incidents, and Mr. Turner warmed up to me slowly. By August I thought my playing had improved dramatically, so I asked him if he thought I had a shot at a career now.

  “Well,” he said, “you have gotten better, but let’s face it, there’s a lot of people out there who are still a lot better than you are. But whether or not you can make a career out of it isn’t everything, Mark. The main thing is, you can get pleasure from it for the rest of your life.”

  Pleasure? I thought. Who said anything about pleasure? If I wanted pleasure, I would have done something fun, for God’s sake, not play the cello. I should have realized right then that something was wrong, but I didn’t. I honestly believed I could tough it out and become a soloist through sheer determination.

  Right around the end of August I decided to treat myself to a little present for having made it to college without a criminal record: I went to hear the cellist Yo-Yo Ma in concert. As he came out onstage and the audience erupted into applause I thought, “Enjoy it now, buddy, because in five years I’m gonna give you a run for your money.” Then he started playing.

  Five minutes into his first piece my heart was already broken, and I left at intermission. I’d heard and seen enough. I vowed not to breathe a word of what had happened to my parents, though; I’d deal with it once I got to New Haven.

  What had happened was that, first of all, his technique was so indescribably flawless that I knew in an instant that I could never, not even in two lifetimes, come close to it. Second, his musicality and musical instincts were so original, so genuine and so many-layered that it revealed most of my musicality to be a clever imitation at best. But the worst part by far was seeing him up there smiling. He was enjoying himself! He loved that music, he loved every phrase of it, and that was the real gulf between him and me.

  The moment Yo Yo Ma began playing I began to see in my mind, like a collage of documentary film clips, the story of my interest in the cello. Beginning with wanting to please my parents, continuing with wanting to please my parents, taking a brief detour into jazz to prove that I was my own man, finding out that being my own man made my parents annoyed with me, then wrapping up with—guess what—wanting to please my parents! It was not that I thought wanting to please my parents was necessarily a bad thing; it was that I realized it wasn’t a sound foundation for a career in classical music. When I looked at a sheet of music, I saw a bunch of symbols that indicated what to do with my fingers and arms when I held a box of wood with strings on it. I was musical enough to know when I was playing the notes wrong, but once they were in tune and in time I figured my job was over, I’d done my bit. When do I get to do this in front of people? For me music was a means of acquiring an identity. I assumed that if I worked hard, put in enough time and effort, it would be like studying for a contractor’s license; eventually I’d pass the test, be allowed to work and make money, and people would have to take me seriously. It honestly had not occurred to me to worry that I never was turned on by the music itself.

  I tried to remember if, in all of my record collection, I had a single classical record. I didn’t. I had never once taken the initiative to listen to one of my mother’s records, either, and between hearing Aldo Parisot play when I was seven and hearing Yo Yo Ma play when I was seventeen, had never gone to any concerts but my mother’s. The conclusion was inescapable: I didn’t like classical music very much.

  God, how it hurt to think this. In particular I felt like a traitor to my mother. This admission also left me suddenly without a clue about what to do with the rest of my life. Worst of all, it made me feel like a jackass. Why had it taken me until now to figure out something as obvious as the necessity of enjoying music if you planned to make a living at it? I didn’t say anything about it to anyone, least of all to my parents. I went to my last cello lesson, thanked Mr. Turner for all his help, and as I drove home that night thought over and over, This is really a bad situation.

  On my last day at work the secretaries treated me to a big lunch, and then threw a surprise party for me at the end of the day. Toasts were made, speeches were given, gifts were presented. When I left the office I had to use one of the canvas mail sacks to carry all my packages to the car. I got in—Dad was on vacation, so I was by myself—pulled out of the parking lot and felt guilty the whole drive home. I felt guilty because I believed that in just one week I was going to go to Yale, announce that I was no longer interested in music, and be sent home in disgrace because I had been accepted as a music major. Then I would have to go right back to the law firm, explain what had happened, and at least make the gesture of offering to give everyone’s presents back. I kept them all in their packages and made sure the name tags were still attached so I wouldn’t embarrass myself later.

  The day came. Mom, Dad, Erich, Rachel, Annette and I piled into the old bus for the drive to New Haven. When we got there we couldn’t find a parking space anywhere near campus (“I hate this shithole of a city,” Dad kept muttering), so we had lunch together in the downtown New Haven McDonald’s. Not wanting to make them drive back into all that traffic, I pulled my suitcase of clothes and my cello out of the car and said my good-byes in front of McDonald’s. The car started to drive away, then stopped and backed up. My dad stuck his head out the window and said, “Don’t come home until you’ve made something of yourself.”

  “He’s only kidding, honey, he’s only kidding!” That was Mom, living proof that irony is not contagious.

  I walked to the campus and found my room. My roommate hadn’t arrived yet, so I spent the rest of the day and the night alone in the empty dorm. I had trouble getting to sleep; for some reason I could only think of all the things I had done that I regretted: how we are given only one childhood, how I had had seventeen years to make mine a good one but instead had turned it into something like a Cheech and Chong movie. Of course at some level I understood that nobody is perfect, that everybody must leave home sometime, and that my parents would certainly not prefer that I stay in their basement and work in the mail room for the rest of my life. But that mature understanding was seriously challenged by my immature sense of overall shame, an emotion that had grown strong with use, particularly in the past year. At ten o’clock I started sniffling, by ten-thirty I was sobbing, and from eleven on I was just plain bawling.

  At two in the morning a deafening roar from the street below interrupted my tearful meditations. I peered down out of my window and saw a whole pack of Hell’s Angels on their choppers sitting at the intersection waiting for the light to turn green. It took a moment to take it all in—a whole tribe of scowling rebels with leather outfits, studs all over the place, Nazi helmets, cobra tattoos, metal-tipped boots, throbbing, screaming, chrome-covered bombs between their legs, biker babes clinging to their backs, sitting at a completely empty intersection at two in the morning waiting obediently for the traffic light to change. I stopped crying and started laughing instead. Maybe I had made a fool of myself as a kid, and maybe I was lost without a compass now, but looking at those guys made me feel better. Maybe my dad was right to believe that we are all pathetically deceived about who we really are and why we really do what we do. It depressed my father to think this way, but on that first night at college the thought that all human beings might be pathetic came as a great relief to me because it got me off the hook. After the light turned green and the Hell’s Angels roared off to their next appointm
ent with danger and anarchy, I wrote my folks a letter thanking them for all they had done on my behalf; I figured that even if I did get sent home soon, they would have some document showing that they had done a good job to get me this far. Once I had done this, I was able to fall asleep.

  My roommate showed up the next day. His name was Holden Young. He was Chinese American, tall, athletic, beautifully dressed, supernaturally handsome, had gone to a high-powered prep school, and was a soccer and tennis star. Apparently in its wisdom the student housing department thought we might have something in common—namely, China. But Holden, an all-American dreamboat who had already aced calculus, organic chemistry and Latin in high school, didn’t seem to know much about China, whereas I, the yokel from Ridgefield who had tried to grow pot in his parents’ house, had never seen a soccer game or a tennis match, so it took some time for us to figure each other out. The first thing he did upon arriving was to tack up a poster of a soccer ball bulging through the net after having streaked past the goalie. It was one of those slightly three-dimensional posters made of thin plastic, so the ball really did stick out a bit. Over my bed I had hung one of my paintings of a guy in a robe with a topknot staring at a waterfall.

  “You play any sports?” Holden asked.

  “No, but I did kung fu for a few years.” Holden looked suspicious. Another white kid who took kung fu lessons; I think he was afraid I was going to ask if his family kept ancestral tablets in their living room.

  “Do you speak Chinese?” I asked him.

  “Only the words for sweet and sour pork,” he answered, and I’m sure that in turn I must have looked disappointed. But within an hour we discovered that in fact we did have something in common: we both couldn’t wait to look at the pictures of our female classmates in the freshman directory.

  For me it was a bit of a theoretical exercise because I was still going out with Annette and only twenty-four hours earlier had pledged eternal fidelity. But for Holden, who was unattached, it was a very real concern, and I enjoyed helping him with his research. Part of my enjoyment, I’m sure, can be explained by analogy: helping Holden find a girlfriend was something like how I imagined it would be to help Neil Armstrong get a job as a commercial pilot—you could brainstorm freely, knowing that your man’s qualifications were beyond dispute.

  We went to all of the orientations together, played Frisbee together out on the lawn (he could throw it with either hand, flick it like a bottle cap, catch it on his raised elbow or pop it up with his heel and make it land on his head like a hat) and accompanied each other to the mixers at night. Those were the days before the nationwide crackdown on students’ consumption of alcohol, so you didn’t have to walk more than a hundred yards before reaching a table set up with free beer, wine, mixed drinks or hard liquor—all served in giant plastic pails. Expensive, powerful stereo systems propped in windows all over campus competed with one another for supremacy, treating us to a never-ending auditory menu of Van Halen, Hendrix, Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Pink Floyd, Kiss and Fleetwood Mac. I was beginning to like college, which made it all the worse, because I assumed I was going to get kicked out for quitting the cello.

  On the fifth day I had to face reality. I had an eleven o’clock appointment with my assigned faculty adviser to discuss my course schedule. His office, I noted grimly, was in the new School of Music building. The moment of truth had arrived.

  Apparently the building had just been completed; it looked brand-new and masking tape was still on some of the windows. As I walked down the echoing hallway toward my adviser’s office, I passed by several practice rooms, all of them occupied by serious-looking young virtuosi. To my relief, I noted that at least one segment of the student body appeared more out of it than me. All the males in the practice rooms had frightful cowlicks and at least one sneaker untied, while the females all seemed to be wearing pillowcases with holes cut out for their arms and heads.

  I entered the professor’s office at the appointed time and he offered me a seat. In contrast to the students in the practice rooms, he was rather dashing; he had silver hair that flowed down almost to his shoulders, a neat silver mustache and a kindly, wise, European-looking face. It was the kind of face you couldn’t lie to, and I didn’t see any point in dragging things out.

  “Sir, I don’t know exactly how to explain this, but I’ve decided that I’m not cut out to be a cellist.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Even the thought of practicing now makes me—”

  “Sick to your stomach?”

  “Yeah …”

  His face broke into a grin. “I think that’s marvelous!” he said cheerily. “What other interests might you have?”

  I was confused. “But, sir, I applied as a music major. Doesn’t that mean that I have to … I don’t know … reapply to one of the other schools and wait till next year?”

  He paused for a beat, then laughed jovially. “Is that why you look so glum? Son, you don’t have to reapply or explain this to anyone! It doesn’t matter at all what you said you wanted to major in when you applied. Once you’re accepted as an undergraduate, you can major in anything you like. When I said that it was marvelous, what I meant was that it’s good that you’ve realized this now, as opposed to two or three years from now, when it would be too late to switch majors and you would have to stick it out just to graduate. Do you have any idea how often that happens, particularly with music? So many kids get pushed into music when they’re young, they do it for all the wrong reasons, then they get to college and keep at it out of a sense of guilt and they hate it. What a waste! There’s no point to music if you don’t love it.”

  Wow. This guy was amazing. “Are you a musician, sir?”

  “Who, me? No, I’m a photographer. They just stuck me in this building because it’s the only one where I could fit my darkroom.”

  A long-haired photographer was my faculty adviser. Wow. I was really starting to like this school.

  “So to go back to my earlier question, Mr. Salzman, do you have any other interests at the moment?”

  I couldn’t think of a thing.

  “Well, then, you should find a nice place on campus to sit, take a good look through the course book and see if anything appeals to you. Visit a few classes, listen to a few lectures. You have a couple of weeks to decide, you know. When you have some ideas, give me a call and we’ll make sure you’re covering the distribution requirements and so on. Enjoy yourself; there’s too much here to not find something that turns you on!”

  Drunk with relief, I stumbled down the hallway and out the main entrance. Taped to one of the window panels of the main door, I saw a piece of paper with a handwritten note announcing, “Welcome to your new practice building! Take good care of it!” I laughed out loud. I’d take good care of it, all right; when I graduated someday, I would probably be the only prospective music major who could honestly say that he had left the building in exactly the same condition that he had found it.

  By the time I had finished reading the course book, I almost wished I had been kicked out. It was the most intimidating document I had ever seen. I asked Holden to help me figure out what classes to visit, and he showed me the schedule he had worked out for himself. He had a biology class, a chemistry class, an English class, a physics class, a U.S. history class and a French class. Using his schedule as a model, I worked out a similar menu of courses. The next day I visited a biology class, a math class and a chemistry class. All of them were listed as introductory. When I got to the lecture halls I picked up copies of the syllabi, and that was when my agony really began. I couldn’t even understand the course descriptions! The lectures were so far over my head that I left each of the classes after ten minutes. Defeated, I went back to my room and told Holden I wasn’t cut out for college.

  “Did you go to any of the Chinese classes?” he asked. “I mean, that’s something you already know about. Why not give that a try?”

  I had briefly thought of that, but whenever I tried t
o think of studying Chinese again I got a stomachache thinking of my earlier foolishness: all those kung fu lessons, eating with chopsticks, walking to school barefoot, the incense—it was too embarrassing to face all over again. But Holden had a point; at least it was a subject I had some chance of being qualified to pursue. Holden found the listing in the course book, but then winced and said, “Oh, no, you’re not going to want to do this.”

  “Why not?”

  He pointed to the course listing. “That building’s in the middle of nowhere,” he said, “at least a half-hour walk from here. And look, first-year Chinese meets from eight-thirty to ten-thirty in the morning! Forget it! Let’s find you something else.”

  I explained to Holden that out of sheer habit I was up by six every morning every day anyway, so the time wasn’t a problem. “Oh,” he said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Is that why you disappear before ten every night? It never occurred to me that you might actually be going to sleep.”

  The next morning I was at the East Asian languages building before eight and got the best chair in the classroom. Gradually other students trickled in, all of them looking bleary-eyed. At eight-twenty-five the instructor arrived, a tall, thin, fine-boned, elegant Chinese woman; she was probably in her sixties, but she moved like a thirty-year-old. All of the students, I noticed, came to life the instant she arrived and started beaming with pleasure. As soon as she began the class I knew why.

  Mrs. Li was hands-down the most charismatic, comic, energetic and enthusiastic language instructor any of us had ever seen. Those first two hours were not so much a class as they were a case of interactive performance art. Introducing the phrase kaiche (to drive a car), she thrust out her arms, grasped an imaginary steering wheel, bent her knees 90 degrees so that her thighs were parallel to the ground, then shuffled between the desks, honking a horn and trying to parallel-park. She finished the demonstration by skidding and crashing into her desk, then shrugging and explaining in a loud stage whisper, “What can I say, dears? Chinese driver!”