by Matt Dean
Chapter 4
For the third time in thirty minutes, John Carter knocked on the door of Dr. Cable’s studio. No one had answered the first two times, and no one answered now. Looking left, looking right, making sure he had the hallway to himself, John Carter pressed his ear to the door. He heard no music, no talk, no movement.
It was clear, then: The studio was empty. Dr. Cable wasn’t in there, even though John Carter’s piano lesson had been set for three, and even though, according to both his watch and his cell phone, it was now 3:19.
Someone was whistling. John Carter cocked his head. The sound came from the other end of the hall, from the windowless north stairwell. It was strange, probably, to have a favorite stairwell, but John Carter did have one, and that was it. With its walls of dimpled plaster and its high-gloss paint and its treads of concrete and clanging steel, the whole space hummed with echoes and overtones. It was, in a sense, a semi-tuned instrument—E-flats and B-flats resonated more richly than any other notes. The whistler’s tune meandered around the E-flat an octave above middle C—he seemed to be trying out the acoustics, actually, rather than aiming for any particular melody—and whenever he hit the note and held it, the stairwell rang like a chime.
Turning and stepping away from Dr. Cable’s door, John Carter watched the head of the stairs. A topknot appeared first—a fat bundle of black hair bound up untidily at the crown of the man’s head, where it bobbed like a tassel on a cornstalk. And then more hair, a mad mess of it that hadn’t gotten gathered up into the topknot with the rest. And then a crazy black beard and a face that, in all that shag, seemed beside the point.
The bearded man stopped whistling. He looked almost, but not quite, young enough to be a student. He was dressed like a student, too, in a rumpled pink button-down shirt with the sleeves turned up and the tails untucked over knee-length khaki shorts. He strode surely and nimbly down the hall, his flip-flops thwacking against his heels as he walked, his hand already extended for a handshake.
“You must be my three o’clock,” he said, grinning merrily. He grabbed John Carter’s hand in both of his. Not much of a shake, really—just a single motion, quickly up and firmly down, like a brick-smashing karate chop—but the professor’s grip was crushingly strong. “I’m Scott Cable.”
As he let go of John Carter’s hand, the professor turned and glared at the nameplate on his door. SCOTT A CABLE PHD. Grunting, he bent down and snatched up a yellow Post-It note that had fallen to the floor. The tacky strip on its back had collected grime and strands of hair and a tiny constellation of bright red lint.
“I’ve been sending memos,” he said. “I’ve been calling. I have no clue whether they’re ever planning to…”
With his index finger Dr. Cable touched the Post-It’s glue strip, as if to gauge its remaining stickiness. It had little or none, surely, but he pressed it to the nameplate anyway, covering the squat PHD. The square of paper immediately fell. In one deft motion Dr. Cable—or Professor Cable, rather—caught it and crumpled it.
He shook himself off and smiled. “Anyway.” Throwing open the door, he waved John Carter through. “Let’s…”
Just inside the threshold, John Carter stopped and stared at the piano. It was a Steinway, a fat-legged parlor grand in dark walnut, obviously old but utterly pristine. As far as John Carter knew, it was one of only two Steinways in the Department of Music, and the other was an upright. This—this was a treasure. John Carter’s fingertips itched at the sight of it.
Under the window on the far side of the room, there was a plain formica-topped table with a padded piano bench underneath it. Except for a pen and a notebook lying at its center, the tabletop was bare. Professor Cable’s other belongings were still boxed up, the boxes piled in a corner in stacks of three.
The professor closed the door. Holding the crumpled Post-It note, he spun around—looking for a wastebasket, probably, and finding none. Stuffing the twist of paper into his pocket, he stepped to the table, where he picked up the notebook, cracked its spine, and laid it down again. “I’m semi-terrible with names,” he said. “Littlefield is easy, given that—you know—your mom…”
Given that John Carter’s mom taught voice here, he meant, with a studio across the hall and three doors down. John Carter’s shoulders slumped. On the first day of classes, his theory professor, Dr. Archambault, had spoken more sternly to John Carter than to anyone else, as if to foil any hope or claim of favoritism. On the second day of classes, John Carter’s voice teacher, Ms. Treat, had cooed and clucked at him as if he were a dear little pet. On the third day of classes, he’d spotted two of his fellow freshmen, both piano majors, talking quietly and cutting their eyes at him, as if they suspected him of double agency. On the fourth day of classes, Kaitlin, a sophomore soprano who studied with his mother, had fawned over him, as if he were a long-awaited celebrity and she’d been dying to collect his autograph. Now, on the fifth day of classes, in spite of it all, it still somehow surprised him that his mother’s name loomed over him the way it did.
Professor Cable said, “No prejudice on my part, one way or the other, I promise. If it helps, I’ll forget your last name and pretend you’re an Grosvenor or a Finkelstein or a Pinkwater. Fair enough?”
“Um. Sure. Okay.”
Brushing a fleck of something from the page of his notebook, Professor Cable tapped a spot near its middle. “John. Right.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “Right?”
“John Carter.”
“Carter? I think I’d go for Pinkwater myself, but to each their own.”
“No, sir, that’s actually my name. John Carter Littlefield, and I go by John Carter.”
“Like the guy from Mars?”
“John Rutter plus Elliott Carter.”
“That could’ve gone wrong in so many ways. You could’ve been Milton Crumb Littlefield or Luciano Ives Littlefield, and then where would you be?”
“Is that a rhetorical question? Sometimes I can’t tell.”
“Yes, don’t worry, it’s rhetorical. Got it in one.” Closing his notebook, the professor turned and leaned back against the table. “Tell me about yourself. What do you do for fun?”
John Carter blinked at him. “Fun?”
Professor Cable touched his topknot, as if just remembering it was there. “Fun is a thing people have when they’re not working or studying or suffering.”
“It’s just— It’s unexpected. I wasn’t prepared—”
“Running? Biking? Long walks along the beach? Domestic terrorism?”
John Carter swallowed hard. “I don’t do any of that, no.”
“Skating? World of Warcraft? Encaustic painting? Armed robbery?”
After a moment, John Carter said, “I like to browse random stuff on Spotify, to see if I can play whatever I’m hearing.” The professor frowned and bit the corner of his lip and said nothing. John Carter pressed on. “I like it best when I come across some blues or jazz or something like that. Pop music’s pretty simple, really—one, four, five, one, one, four, five, one—but blues is trickier.” He cleared his throat. “Blues are trickier?”
“In other words, your respite from playing the piano is…playing the piano.”
“I— Yes, I guess so.”
“Do you have a second major or a minor in something else?”
John Carter shook his head.
“Does the phrase ‘well-rounded’ ring a bell?”
John Carter stood dumbfounded, his lips moving but refusing to form words.
“Well. Let’s just… Let’s move on.” One end of the table slid backward an inch or two, and Professor Cable—Scott—jostled it until one corner came to rest against the wall. “Let’s hear something.”
John Carter tugged at the collar of his shirt. His neck was suddenly hot and itchy. “Was I supposed to prepare something? Did I miss an e-mail?”
“No, you didn’t miss anything. And I don’t really do e-mail, by the way, so…”
“So?”
“So don’t e-mail me.” The professor shoved the piano bench toward John Carter. “I figure you must have something or other by memory. After all, if you eat, sleep, and breathe the eighty-eights…”
John Carter dragged the bench to the piano and sat and lifted the fallboard. One of the white keys, the F two octaves above middle C, had a lengthwise hairline crack, blackened where countless fingers had struck it. He stroked the cracked key but didn’t press it. In a small voice, he said, “I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure if you have something by memory, or you’re not sure what to play?”
“Both?”
“Then how about a little sight-reading?” Professor Cable went to the stacks of boxes in the corner. Humming something, he opened a box and dug around in it. He pulled out an old folio-sized book. It had shed its covers, and its yellowed, foxed signatures were held together by a fringe of unraveling thread. Professor Cable flipped through the pages and laid it open on the piano rack.
Intermezzo. Andante teneramente.
“Brahms. Give it a try.” Scott scratched the nape of his neck, and his topknot wiggled. “Teneramente means ‘tenderly,’ by the way.”
John Carter nodded, as if the professor had just confirmed something he’d already known. In fact, he’d taken teneramente to mean either tentative or tenuous, and he’d worried that he wasn’t exactly sure what tenuous meant.
The piece looked simple enough at the beginning. Halfway down the page the staves became thorny with sharps and naturals, and groups of eighth notes began to stretch their beams across the bar lines. Slightly scary. He took a deep breath and started.
As he’d suspected, the first few lines were nearly effortless, and then the syncopations and accidentals started to make him nervous. His heart thumped, but he kept playing. On this piano, even a thrashing slog through an unfamiliar piece sounded like a festival overture, a fanfare, a Christmas oratorio.
Professor Cable was tapping the top of his table—how long had he been doing that?—at a tempo that spectacularly mismatched John Carter’s. It was faster, maybe twice as fast. John Carter willed his fingers to move more and more quickly, until at last he fell into line.
“Teneramente,” Professor Cable said. “Tenderly, tenderly.” He moved to the piano, clapping his hands to keep time. Coming up behind John Carter, he dropped his voice to a murmur. “Tenderly.”
A glance up and down the page told John Carter that, other than one long crescendo to forte, the music was never supposed to raise its voice above a whisper. John Carter was playing more loudly than before. It was hard—so hard—not to push the dynamics along with the tempo. He felt like a sideshow plate spinner. If he thought about playing softly, he started to play more slowly. If he thought about phrasing, he missed some of the accidentals. But somehow, somehow, he drove through, until at the top of the next page, he reached a couple of bars of ritardando. Yes, he probably slowed a little too much, but he was grateful for the chance to catch his breath.
His heartbeat thumped in his ears. He’d been playing for all of three minutes, but he felt as if he’d run a marathon. His wrists felt wobbly. Soon he’d need to turn the page, and if he had to turn it himself, he’d have to stop playing. He knew this as well as he knew his own name.
“Professor—”
Before he could say more, Professor Cable was there, turning the page.
The last section of the piece repeated the first, and it lay easily under John Carter’s hands. When he came to a spot marked espressivo, he did his best to make it expressive. He played with all the tenderness he could muster. He came, finally, to the end. When he softly played the final chord, it sounded, on this piano, this gorgeous old instrument, like a lullaby.
Professor Cable had never left his side after turning the page. He closed the tattered old book and nodded and said, “Beautiful.”
He was hard to read, Professor Cable. He said the word beautiful the way another man might say cream-colored or battery-operated, as if it referred to any mundane object or appliance. His face seemed almost like a postscript to his beard and hair. The black shrubbery was a mask, a barrier, a prop.
“Thanks. That’ll do for this week.”
As if John Carter had already left, Scott went back to his makeshift desk. Bending over to rest his elbows and forearms on the tabletop, he pored over his notebook. His fingers pantomimed the playing of some piece, a rhythmic figure in the left hand, a series of arpeggiated chords in the right. Abruptly he popped up again and returned to the piano.
“Hey,” he said. He tipped the Brahms book off the piano rack and handed it to John Carter. “Take this. Look at three, four, and six.”
The book lay flat across both of John Carter’s outstretched hands. He stared down at it. It had been published in Berlin in 1893, if the front page were to be trusted. A long leafy vine decorated the title itself.
“Three, five, and six,” John Carter said.
“Three, four, and six.” Scott opened the door and guided John Carter toward it. “Just do whatever you would’ve done for your last teacher. We’ll start with that. See how much damage there is to undo.” He grinned.
After the studio door had closed behind him, John Carter stood staring at the nameplate. SCOTT A CABLE PHD. A strange name, Cable. Strange name, strange man.
Walking away, walking down the hall, John Carter opened the Brahms to the third piece, a ballade. Allegro energico. He looked it over. B-flat. No, not B-flat—of course not. G minor. It was strange, probably, to have a favorite key, but John Carter did have one, and it happened to be G minor.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and the unexpectedness of it nearly made him drop the Brahms. Closing it and tucking it under one arm, he fished out his phone. He had a text message from his sister: Daddy in hospital. Collapsed. Where are you?
And now John Carter did drop the Brahms. It hit the linoleum with a hearty splat. He snatched up the book and ran down the hall. As he hurried down the musical stairwell, his swift footfalls bonged like church bells.
