by Ted Michael
Being alone down here is fine—more than fine—by me.
“I’m ready,” I say.
Mr. Sandburg isn’t listening. He knows I’m ready. I’m always ready.
He gives me a nod and I launch into the overture. It’s supposed to start with a virtuosic violin solo, so I improv that. Then I improv the rest of the orchestra.
Davis Lee, the only freshman in the show, wobbles onstage on a bicycle. He needs to nail his entrance or the rest of the cast will follow him off a cliff. “Good Morning, Good Day” has a tick-tock rhythm that right now mirrors the beating of my heart. Tick-tock, tick-tock, come on Davis, and NOW!
“Good morning!” he sings, right on cue. Good man, Davis.
Next I help Sophie, who plays Ilona the salesgirl, with timing. I accent the downbeats so she can find them.
The joke for the audience is that Ilona is complaining about being totally exhausted because she’s been up all night romping with Kodaly. The joke for the cast is that Henry/Kodaly was actually up all night romping with Chloe/Amalia.
Henry makes his entrance without any extra help from me, and my pulse tick-tocks along with my heart and the song. He is, literally, tall, dark and handsome, like a poster boy for a Greek escort service, but his usual swagger does seem to be off a few degrees. I suppose thanks to last night with Chloe. Who has come down from the wings and is now sharing my piano bench.
“Andie,” she whispers, turning a page for me. “Can I ask you something? I want you to be really, really honest. Totally honest. Don’t be afraid of hurting my feelings.”
I feed Ben his note so he’ll be in the same key as everyone else.
“Do you think I’m getting . . . boring.?”
How would I know? We’ve never shared a lunch table. You’ve never invited me to any of your parties. In fact, the only reason I know where you live is because everyone knows where you live. Because of all the parties you’ve never invited me to.
“No,” I whisper. It’s hard to count and massage Chloe’s ego at the same time. Why hasn’t Mr. Sandburg noticed her and sent her backstage to wait for her entrance?
“Are you sure? Don’t say that just to be nice. I want the absolute truth.”
I play louder and the cast follows. “Good Morning, Good Day” has turned into a round. Ben’s timing is off but not enough to stop the song.
“You’re not boring, Chloe. If you don’t believe me, ask Henry.”
“I can’t ask Henry. We broke up.”
Oh.
“Oh,” I say out loud.
I look away from the music and risk a quick glance at Chloe. Her round brown eyes are even more luminous than usual.
“I mean I broke up with him.”
Meaning that he broke up with her. And why is she telling me this?
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.” She squeezes my right arm so I have to cue with my left hand and half the cast misses it. “You’re the best. You never get caught up in all the drama. God, I swear, I’m so sick of all the drama” Chloe actually has her hands threaded in her hair, like she’s about to tear it out in frustration over the drama. The song ends and now I can give my full attention to Chloe and her monologue.
“I mean, we’re all leaving for college in six months. Or at least you and I and Ben and Henry are. Can’t we leave with our dignity intact? Can’t we leave like adults?” Before I can inject an “um-hm” or a “yeah,” Chloe continues and I realize she wasn’t waiting for me to respond, she was just taking a beat. “It’s all so meaningless! Like any of it really matters. Who dates who. Or who stars in what show. A year from now, who will remember any of it? Any of us?”
Is this another beat or am I supposed to answer?
“That’s why Ben and I came up with a thing. A plan. For tonight. So we won’t all fade away to nothing the minute we’re out the door.”
“Quiet in the pit!”
“Sorry, Mr. Sandberg.” Only Chloe doesn’t say the words—she sings them.
“Come backstage with me so I can tell you about the plan,” Chloe says.
“I can’t,” I say. “It’s almost time for ‘Thank You, Madam.’ And you have to go on in about three minutes.”
“Fine, then let’s hide down here.”
She drags me under the piano. Except since it’s an upright “under” just means crouching on the floor between the bench and the keyboard.
“We’re going to make our mark on the school tonight. In a prominent, permanent, personal way.”
“That sounds really great for you.”
“Oh, um, no, I mean, you should totally do it with us if you want to.” Chloe beams at me. “All you have to do is come up with something to do, something that will be here forever that shows the world who you really are.”
“Thanks, b—”
Chloe lets out a little gasp. “I’ve got to go! Remember, don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. Not anyone!” She kisses my cheek. “You’re the best .”
And so concludes the only conversation I’ve ever had with Chloe Pavone.
. . . . . . . . . .
I don’t need to show the world who I really am. The idea of playing Beethoven for a thousand people just so they can applaud when I’m done makes me want to crawl inside a drycleaner bag and knot the bottom end. Which is a problem because my first college audition is in two weeks. In two weeks I have to go down to Philadelphia to the Curtis Institute of Music and play fifty minutes of classical music on a stage in a concert hall full of strangers so I can get accepted into their accompanist program. Then I have to do it three more times at Yale, Juilliard, and Peabody.
Just thinking about it makes me want to smash all my fingers with a meat mallet.
Despite my “performance anxiety,” I’d never give up piano. I love the music too much. After Mrs. Komar’s recital, my mother and I negotiated a truce: I’d keep studying as long as I never had to perform alone in front of an audience. Which meant I became Westview’s go-to accompanist. I do all the Music Society’s musicales, the community theater shows, and the school shows. I draw the line at churches and temples, though. I find God in music, not the other way around.
Accompanying is different from solo performing. When I accompany, the audience thinks I’m just there for background. Sometimes the singer thinks so, too. They don’t know that the notes I play to mark their entrance or find the right octave aren’t written in the sheet music. Most of the time they don’t realize they’re following my lead, getting louder and softer with the piano or stretching a phrase to give it more impact. We’re collaborating, even if I’m the only person who knows it.
. . . . . . . . . .
This morning I got up at 5:24, my internal clock being programmed to wake me exactly one minute before my alarm goes off. I shuffled down to the living room and sat down at the piano, a massive Steinway B that fills half the room. Black, curvaceous, alive. Not a thing, a being.
I don’t square my shoulders or let out a deep breath or anything. I just start. With scales, octaves, arpeggios, fast as I can, super slow, putting the accent on different beats, never missing a note or breaking rhythm. I’ve done these warm-ups almost every day of my piano playing life, which is to say for the last ten years. I don’t have to think about what I’m doing. I just do it.
Right now I’m working on four pieces for my auditions. Funny how the number four keeps popping up. Four pieces of music, four auditions, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The music isn’t the problem. I love the music. My favorite is Kreisleriana by Robert Schumann. It’s a monster of a piece, the hardest thing I’ve ever played. Schumann wrote it for his wife, Clara, in 1838. They had this incredible, tumultuous love affair. They fell in love when she was fifteen and he was twenty-five, but her father hated him and refused to let them marry for six years.
Schumann named Kreisleriana for this fictional character, Kreisler, who was a crazy manic-depressive musician. That’s why it has so many highs and lows. But really, it’s everything h
e felt for Clara. The fourth movement is the most beautiful. It’s marked sehr langsam, which means “very slow.” It’s deep and peaceful. Like Robert and Clara talking to each other, just the two of them all alone.
I wonder what that feels like, being loved the way Robert loved Clara. For a while now, my romantic life has been mostly aspirational.
. . . . . . . . . .
“Hold please!”
Mr. Sandberg calls a quick conference with Walter the Sound Guy. For some reason, all the body mics have stopped working. It’s a problem because out of the entire cast, Chloe is the only person who can be heard past the tenth row without one.
“Take five, everyone,” Mr. Sandberg says. “And I mean five .”
I get up to go to the bathroom and run into Ben on the way there. He’s in his Georg costume, a close-cut, gray three-piece suit. It looks good on him.
“Andie, com’ere.” He drags me down the hall to the school lobby. “Chloe said you’re going to leave your mark with us tonight. Here’s mine.”
I look at the glass display case he’s pointing to, one filled with countless photographs of Westview, Connecticut, athletes and all their trophies.
“What am I missing?” I say. “I don’t see anything.”
“Look closer,” Ben says, a big, satisfied smile on his face.
It’s a picture of some kid who won the state championship in tennis in 1977. I’ve walked past it a thousand times on my way in and out of school. Only now he has Ben’s head.
“Check out this one.”
Ben leads me down the hall and shows me the 1985 football team with him as quarterback. And the swimmer who went to the 2000 Olympics after high school has Ben’s head, too. Even some of the girls are now Ben-headed.
“Is Ben showing you his mark?”
Henry has come up behind me and is looking over my shoulder. He’s half a head taller than me and I’m pretty tall. I catch Ben looking at Henry, and then Ben catches me catching him and we both half smile. Like me, Ben has spent a fair amount of high school dreaming about Henry’s bedroom.
“Gotta love Photoshop,” Henry says, bending over for a closer look. He’s wearing the same gray suit as Ben, and it looks even better on him.
“Do you think anyone will notice?” I ask.
“Not for years and years. That’s the whole point.” Chloe has joined our little group. She’s standing between me and Ben with her back to Henry so he’s kind of excluded from the circle. “Meine damen und herren, mesdames et messieurs . . . La Sandburg is ready for us.” Chloe links elbows with Ben and sweeps him down the hall.
“Ouch,” I say to Henry.
He shrugs. “It’s fine.” We start back toward the auditorium and I realize I never made it to the bathroom. “So, have you decided what your mark on our future alma mater is going to be?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m happy to leave as I entered, in total obscurity. How about you?”
“Chloe had a few ideas for me,” Henry says, “but I think I’m gonna pass.”
“You’re happy just to live on in the memory of those you leave behind?”
Henry shakes his head. “God, I hope not.”
I want to ask Henry what he means, why the star of every show, the object of envy or desire of most of the student body, wants to be forgotten, but we’re inside the auditorium now and Mr. Sandberg is waving at me.
We’re picking up at Chloe’s big entrance scene. Walter the Sound Guy is still working on the body mics, but it doesn’t matter to Chloe. You can hear every word, catch every gesture, every bat of an eyelash. She’s dazzling. For the first time, I wonder what it’s like to be Chloe Pavone. To come alive in front of a crowd, instead of withering. To want to be seen.
She’s not dazzling to Henry, though. His character is supposed to lust after Chloe’s, but instead he’s squeezing the puffy ball of a perfume sprayer like it’s one of those lung inflator bags you see on TV medical shows. As ever, Henry DeRuyter is playing Henry DeRuyter.
“Hold!” Mr. Sandburg shouts. “Where’s the spotlight on Chloe? Why is she standing in the dark!”
Jenny Jackson in the lighting booth has been having an off night. She gets into a back-and-forth with Mr. Sandberg about how it’s not her fault, the computer’s not working, and a Bach partita churns in my head, soprano and tenor weaving over, under and around each other, tick-tick-tick-tick . . .
“Okay, let’s take it from ‘Thank You, Madam.’” Mr. Sandberg and Jenny have agreed to disagree, and I give the cast their opening chord.
. . . . .
At nine o’clock we still haven’t even finished the first act. So much for my first period history test tomorrow. Walter the Sound Guy left for coffee half an hour ago, Jenny Jackson is in tears, and Mr. Sandberg just called Ben an asshole for dropping a line and then threw everybody out of the auditorium for twenty minutes so he can scrape together a few shreds of sanity.
It’s counterintuitive, I know, given the manual juice press around my temples, but I escape to the practice room. I take Kreisleriana out of my bag even though I know it by heart. Seeing the dove gray cover of the manuscript with its old-fashioned font grounds me.
I start with my favorite movement. The music is unhurried and gentle, a murmured conversation between two intimate lovers that I’ve imagined a thousand times. I hear the man’s voice, deep and bold, full of stops and starts like he’s holding back the full intensity of his feelings. The woman’s answer is lyric and lovely, with no reservations whatsoever. The lovers’ songs echo and sway, their music soothing and generous. A minute or so into it, the juice press around my head is gone and so am I. My eyes are open. I see the keyboard and the manuscript on the music stand, but I also see a drawing room in nineteenth-century Leipzig. I see women in empire waist dresses and men in gray waistcoats perched on settees and straight-back chairs. I see vases of white peonies, honeyed by candlelight.
I see Henry DeRuyter.
I yank my hands away from the piano.
“Holy cow, what was that?” he says.
“Um, Kreisleriana.”
“Chrysler—what? No, I mean, I had no idea you could play the piano like that.”
Henry is looking at me like you’d look at a centaur in your backyard. Or maybe a cyclops, I can’t tell which.
“I usually only play classical for myself.”
Henry leaves the doorway and stands in the crook of the piano. “Well, you shouldn’t. You’re incredible. That was the most incredible piece of music I’ve ever heard.”
“Better than the Rolling Stones?” My face burns. Did I really say that out loud? Why did I say that? Maybe because the Rolling Stones are pretty much the only rock band I can name off the top of my head because my dad listens to them all the time and that’s how big a loser I am.
But Henry laughs. “Way better. Nobody in the Rolling Stones could play—what’s it called again?”
“Kreisleriana.”
“Krice-leer-ee-ana,” he says slowly, trying to get it right and succeeding. “Is it hard?”
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever played.”
“Really?” Henry walks around the piano to stand next to me. “Why?”
I’m overly conscious of Henry, standing inches from my arm, which makes it difficult to answer his question.
“Technically it’s incredibly challenging. Can you read music?” I ask. Henry shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. Just look at it.” I flip through the pages of the manuscript and show him an ocean of black notes surging over the paper. He leans down next to me and a soft curl of black hair brushes my cheek. I swallow hard. “The rhythms, the speed, the contrasts. It took me a really long time to get it down.”
Henry is shaking his head again. “Why don’t you ever play for anyone? You should be giving whole concerts by yourself, not just sitting under the stage spoon-feeding the unmusical our notes.”
He noticed the spoon-feeding? Although, truth be told, Henry doesn’t need much.
&nbs
p; “I like accompanying. It’s a collaboration.”
“You like accompanying, but you love Kreisleriana. Don’t deny it. Nobody plays music like that when they don’t care about it.”
I cross my arms in front of my chest. “I’m not denying anything. I freely admit I love classical music. I just don’t like performing it.”
“Bullshit. You’re hiding your light under a bushel.”
“What are you, my grandmother? And why do you care anyway?”
I scrutinize Henry’s face. He looks really upset.
“Let’s just say I’ve reached a point in my life where I’ve lost patience with people who pretend to be something they’re not.”
“Is this about Chloe?”
“Chloe?” he says, surprised. “Not at all. Chloe is a perfect example of someone who’s exactly what she seems. Shallow, self-centered—”
“And hugely talented.”
“And hugely talented,” he agrees. “No, I was talking about myself.”
“You?”
Henry DeRuyter who always plays Henry DeRuyter is telling me he’s not Henry DeRuyter.
“Did you know I’ve got a brother?” I didn’t. “James. He’s nine years old and incredibly annoying. Anyway, a few weeks ago, James was bugging me about looking at his stamp collection, which is a lot less weird than the soda can pull-top collection that he’s amassing to donate to the Shriners or his deep knowledge of monkdom across the centuries.
“Anyway, James wants me to look at his stamps, and I’m asking him why I have to deal with his hobbies, and suddenly it occurs to me that I’ve got no hobbies of my own. None. I haven’t got one single personal interest. I read books I have to read for school; I see whatever movies happen to be out. Football is boring. I don’t care about cars. You’re going to say, what about theater? It’s true, I like doing theater, but I don’t like theater people, and this is probably going to be the last show I ever do. I keep asking myself how I made it to senior year of high school this way.”
While he’s been talking, Henry has been pacing back and forth, and while he was pacing, he loosened his tie and then unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. Now he’s rubbing the back of his neck. He stops and points at me.
