Perfect Pitch

by Amy Lapwing

“Exalted scum,” he pronounced.

  “Just like you.”

  “Oh, no. Not like me.”

  “Why not?”

  “No Ph.D.” He took a drink of his wine and looked out at the room. “M.A. only.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s okay, I’ll still speak to you.”

  He nearly spewed out his wine.

  “What do you do,” she continued, feeling more confident, “with your M.A.?”

  “He wipes his nose with it,” Charles butted in, “when he’s not wiping his a—”

  “Charles, too, is exalted scum,” said Michael.

  “Most Exalted to you, pal.”

  Michael introduced Charles to Justina.

  “What do you do?” Justina persisted to Michael.

  “I’m a musician.”

  “Sounds so medieval, doesn’t it?” said Charles. “Musicians’ guild, blacksmiths’ guild. Everybody with a label.”

  “What’s your label, Charles?” asked Justina.

  “There is no label for me.”

  “Oh, yes, there is,” said Justina and she turned again to Michael. “What do you do with music?”

  “Everything. Not enough. Whatever I can.”

  “Then you’re not only a musician.”

  “I’m not?”

  She was smiling at him, buying herself time with a drink of her juice.

  “Then what I am?”

  She looked him over. He was perhaps a head taller than she, lightly-muscled; she wondered if his belly was taut. He wore charcoal gray slacks, a striped shirt with a blue tie and a gray tweed sport coat: that New England academic look she found so thrilling. His hair was black with curly wisps of gray. His face showed its first lines. He must be forty, at least. Emboldened and excited, she looked in his eyes, at their bright darkness looking back at her, and she felt a sudden sharpness that ebbed, leaving a warm trickling. “There’s no label for it, just, more.”

  “What department did you say you were in?” Charles interjected.

  “French,” Michael and Justina answered together.

  “Ah, la France!” Charles intoned. “Keeper of the flame of rationality. And crummy poetry.”

  Michael stepped closer to Justina. “What do they make you teach this semester?”

  Charles held up his empty glass and said, “I’ll just— Anybody need a refill?”

  “We’re all set,” said Michael over his shoulder, walking away with Justina.

  “Did you really scare away that Georgia girl?” she asked, not looking at him.

  “Moi?”

  She stopped and propped her hands on her hips.

  “She was engaged. She went home to be married, and—” He took a sip of his wine.

  “And?”

  “She never came back.”

  “Maybe she was afraid, to come back, as a married woman.”

  “I don’t know why she may be afraid. Why do you look at me like that?”

  “Because,” she said, “because Diane said I should be careful around you.”

  “I don’t know why she said that. Unless you’re not married?”

  “No.”

  “Or engaged?”

  She tried to keep a smile from spreading her lips. “Unh-unh.”

  “Then maybe she’s right.”

  Justina looked away and frowned.

  “Tell me about all your plans for the semester,” he started over. “All new courses, or things you’ve done in the past?”

  “A conversation course, a survey course, and— Oh!” She looked around. “That reminds me, I need to find Richelieu and beg for a French One.”

  “You want to teach freshmen?”

  “I love that they know nothing. And I’m their first taste of French.”

  His eyes ran down her figure again as she craned her neck around, his face bore no masking smile this time. The color of honey she was, sweet balm to a singer’s throat.

  “I’ll— um, I see him over there,” she said.

  She was running off. “Justina!” She turned back to him. What should he say? “Nice to meet you.” She smiled and hurried away. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he thought, son of a dog!

  Charles came up to his side and together they watched Justina go across the foyer into another room and up to a group of men which included Richelieu. “I love the fall!” sighed Charles.

  “¡Ssssst!” hissed Michael, his eyes on her.

  “If I were you, Mitch, I’d sit down at that piano and start belting out Jacques Brel with everything I got.”

  “¡Ay, Dios! I don’t know nothing of Jacques Brel!”

  Justina stood waiting for an opportunity to speak to her department chief. She saw Michael watching her. Let’s review: did he say anything significant, really? She smiled to him. He slapped a grin over his look of under-educated chagrin. No, nothing significant, but still, something.

  “All the French chicks are crazy about Brel,” Charles went on.

  “She’s not French, she’s Illinoisian.”

  “Self-styled French, then. Close enough.”

  Michael made the rounds, glad to see his music colleagues, but now there was a heightened wit in his conversation, and he knew its inspiration was not anticipation of the coming semester’s work. He caught several glimpses of the honey-girl who was likewise making the rounds of the literature-loving set. He was pretty sure she looked for him a couple of times, and at least twice her eyes found his. This was fun. And to think she lived here, like him. I bet I could touch my fingers around her waist. I bet she has beautiful breasts.

  Justina had to remind herself that the people she was meeting at the party were peers. There would be no mistaking her interest for brown-nosing. Her mind hop-scotched from one idea to the next: translating an obscure Old French romance, rethinking the Enlightenment, comparing Romanticism to late twentieth sentimentalism. She would write to the biggest hotshots in her field and shoot the breeze with them. Everything shed light on everything else. And she was linked to it all. And that dark man over there is out of this world sexy.

  Chapter Two

  In the Air

  The town of Kennemac, New Hampshire, grew up around apple orchards, six in agriculture’s glory days, down to four by 1989. There were of course the obligatory shopping centers now, but the town planners had wisely required wide green swaths between the town’s main road and the parking lots. A pretty town to drive in, it was a destination in the fall for Bostonians sick of their stinking sidewalks. Let’s go to the country! Let’s go apple-picking in Kennemac!

  The college had started as a boys’ prep school in the early nineteen hundreds. It lost out to the competition after ten years and its buildings stood empty for another decade. In the twenties, a philanthropist from Connecticut came to Kennemac to see the foliage, found the abandoned school and had a great idea. He bought the place and hired Miss Marcy Beaumarchais, a retired librarian, to start a two-year college there for him. Marcy took to bringing a packet of soda crackers to work with her every morning to help pass the long hours researching names and addresses of teachers all over the country. She wrote letters she hoped were businesslike but enticing, describing the charms of the area and the opportunities to be had at a brand-new college. By 1952, Kennemac was a degree-granting four-year institution of higher learning. In 1988 Money magazine declared the school a best buy, enrollment soared to seventeen hundred and forty-eight and the student body became international. Marcy Beaumarchais died in 1945. Her name is inscribed on a tombstone in the old cemetery nestled among the trees in the Abbey Orchard. That is the closest her name has gotten to the campus and its thirty-seven buildings.

  In the nineteen-seventies, Kennemac was implementing a plan to expand its programs of study. Included in the target list was a music major. To accomplish this required coalescing the piano teacher and the bandleader into a department of music, and hiring several new instructors so that they could knock together a creditable music major, with core requirements and electives and everything. T
he piano teacher received a letter from a Michael Calderón, Juilliard ‘71, an interview was set up, and an offer was made. Michael felt an all-but-forgotten calmness as he walked through the apple orchards after the interview. He thought of his childhood in his father’s sugarcane fields. He wondered why he had stayed eight years in New York; four would have been enough of stink, grime, and avoiding strangers’ eyes. This was a nice place. And it had been here all along. He accepted the offer.

  Michael was thirty-one years old, and he was beginning his first real job. The hodgepodge of part-time restaurant and clerical work peppered with the occasional music gig had never felt like real work. Certainly not a life’s work, not his life’s. This job as choral director at Kennemac brought him to a place that other people respected and that therefore he could respect. He also taught music theory and composition, which elevated him among his colleagues. He felt good about himself, for a change. He had prospects, and he was still pretty young.

  Michael started his academic career with enthusiasm, cajoling students to join his choruses and having quite good luck at enlisting men to sing, of all things. He taught his choruses the discipline that allowed them to tackle the more difficult pieces in the choral repertoire. He was doing the Mozart Requiem in his fourth year at Kennemac, and he had attempted some of Debussy’s most impressionistic songs in subsequent years. And he had still loftier goals, particularly Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, but that would have to wait, perhaps a few more years.

  He was happier now than he had been since leaving Costa Rica for New York. If only he had done this earlier. But he knew what the obstacle had been. There inevitably came the days when nothing was good. He awoke with thoughts of Teresa. He wanted her with an insistence that his hand could not beat away. He felt tempted to go down to Boston and visit the Combat Zone and let one of the gum-popping ladies with sore feet and strong backs befriend him. He pushed the thoughts away, but they crept back, an expanding pool with no discernible source though he searched for it. Why had she left him when they were still in Costa Rica? Why had she come back to him that last year in New York? And why had she left again without a word after just a week? Even when he had been with her, he had felt he had no hold on her; he was constantly fearful that what he was feeling would find no echo in her, that she would disappear at any moment. How could he love someone like that? But he did, and he hated it. And he hated that he hoped she would find him again, up here in Kennemac. This hope sounded over and over in his mind, undermining his vitality until he fell into a melancholy that resonated like a plucked bass string, its dreary vibrating endless until he would realize it had finally gone silent. He would recover after a few weeks, his natural spirituality taking the upper hand over his wounded sensibility.

  As time passed, the periodically returning bad love struck more softly than on the previous visit, making a shallower and shallower bruise, and the recovery time shortened. Michael celebrated his fortieth birthday with a small party Charles threw for him, and he marveled that nine years had passed with no word from Teresa. He could even think of her now without pain, almost wistfully. She was like the friends one never sees again when the family moves away. You exist in the new place, but they cease to exist, having no place in your new idea of reality. She was a pretty woman, I certainly did love her, didn’t I? But there was no basis for human feeling there. It was all too celestial. That’s what first loves are, aren’t they? A declaration of intention, not a discovery of manifestation. I wanted to love her, so I did. Now I just want to love. Someday I will. He met a woman later that year and dated her for several months before deciding it was time to try again. He was disappointed that he had not fallen in love with her. But he was proud of himself, like a boy on his first fishing trip who catches just one tiny fish, not a keeper; he had done everything right, he just hadn’t had the luck. Maybe next time.

  Michael believed unequivocally that love was a human thing that he would someday experience, when his mind was no longer confused with notions of what love was, when he had lived enough to know what it was not. He knew this in his brain. His body did not yet know the feel of loving, and so his soul was still asleep to love. His body might become hard with unfocused desiring, but the soul slept on.

  He awoke hard, his mind full of those eyes with the something, that girl’s eyes, above that surprising body. Justina. He worked the hardness away, it did not take long. He wanted to see her again. There was a good chance he would. What luck! How should he proceed? Should he call her now? Probably better to just see her around. He did not want to seem too eager. But why not? Might scare her off. She’s bold, but she’s timid, too. No hurry, anyway. Oh, God, what if she’s married? No, she said she wasn’t. Seems right; she didn’t act like a married woman. Married women flirt without fear, with nothing at stake. She had seemed afraid of screwing up.

  It was Sunday. He read the paper and indulged in an extra two cups of coffee— the good stuff brought from his last trip home and kept in the freezer— glancing at the sports section for the meager soccer news, lingering over the opinion pages and the arts section. Some bold group was going to do the Missa Solemnis in Boston. This spring, should I try it this spring? Have to hire soloists. No, what the hell, D’Annunzio can lead the way, it’ll be a stretch for him, but that’s what college is for. His thoughts carried on this way, interrupted every so often with the lazy pondering of whether he would play any student compositions today, or save them for the coming week. He eyed the stack he had brought home, sitting high on his three-quarter grand. The sinking feeling. Monday, tomorrow, will be soon enough for those.

  He went into the kitchen to check supplies for dinner. It was his turn to cook for the bi-weekly Charles visit. Charles was the closest thing he had to family here, and Michael kept the tradition of reserving Sunday for family. They would have roast pork with tortillas of potatoes and onions. He took some potatoes from their basket.

  I wonder where she lives, he thought, as he peeled the potatoes. Probably has an apartment. Roommate? Probably. Shall I go by her office, just wander into the French department tomorrow? Hi, I was trying to remember who wrote Candide, so I thought, Justina will know, so here I am. Great idea. Or I can wait outside her classroom and when she comes out, I’ll say, Hi, remember me? Wanna fuck? What would Charles do?

  These thoughts tumbled over and over in his mind, with variations, each one more exciting and unlikely than the last. After lunch he took a walk through the orchard across from his condo. He strolled from the front to the back, up one aisle and down the next, the air cloyingly sweet with the ripening apples, the breeze ruffling the laboring branches. He felt a lightness coming into him, and an ache, and a desire to do something about it, and an instinct to forget all about it. He kicked a groundhog-gnawed apple out of his way.

  Charles arrived at six o’clock with a bag of Cortlands. “I was going to bake a pie but I misplaced the recipe,” he pleaded. Michael handed him a glass of wine and Charles stood by the counter savoring the pork and potatoes aroma while Michael finished fixing their dinner.

  “This a Bordeaux?” asked Charles.

  “Beaujolais.”

  “Since when do you drink red?”

  “We’re eating pork.”

  Charles read the label. “Nineteen-eighty-three. La Vigne Thélème. Produit de France. Couldn’t have got this at the grocery store.”

  “Wine shop. That one in Shanham.”

  “You never used to drink red,” remarked Charles, his eyes narrowing.

  “Now, I like red.”

  “Now, you say. Some change I need to be aware of?”

  Michael bowed his head to his task.

  “Let me guess,” said Charles. “You whacked off to the corn princess last night.”

  Michael put down his knife and looked at the ceiling. “Jesus.”

  “So did I.”

  Michael shot him a glance, and resumed slicing the pork. He loaded the serving dishes and took them to the table. Charles sat in his custom
ary place at the highly polished, round formal dining table, to the left of Michael who sat before the undraped window.

  “So, what’s your plan?” continued Charles.

  “I’m going to take her out on a date.” Michael took a slice of meat.

  “Good,” said Charles, eating a piece of potato. “Then what?”

  “I’m going to buy dinner for her.” He took a bite of the pork.

  “Right, so far so good. And then?”

  “I’m going to fuck her brains her out,” said Michael, pig grease trickling down his chin.

  “Brilliant, superb plan.”

  “I thought it so.”

  “Now, here’s what I’d do. I would wait.”

  Michael waited for his explanation. Charles kept on eating, looking at his food.

  “Wait,” repeated Michael.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “For what?”

  “Wait until she’s positively, unquestionably dying for you to take her out, et cetera.”

  “Ah. Why?”

  Charles sighed. “I’m assuming you want more than a one-night stand?”

  “Possibly. Probably,” said Michael between bites.

  “Then, you got to work her up to the point that a mere one night of having her brains fucked out is not enough. You got to build up her desire. It’s like a muscle, once it’s built up, it aches if you don’t use it.” Indulging these stupid attacks with Michael was a favorite pastime of Charles’; his Tico friend seemed to have a limited knowledge of English clichés.

  “Desire is a muscle,” mused Michael.

  “Right. Build it up, make it strong.” Charles drove his fist into the air. “Then, it won’t let you down.”

  “This has worked for you, I suppose?”

  “Orla was very strong in the desire department. Before the sad demise of our perfect union.”

  “She was a lusty lady.” At Charles’ look, he said, “I only quote you.”

  They ate in silence. Charles and Orla were still together when Michael first knew them. Charles was overbearing, but so was Orla, sometimes. He was himself, he assumed. Or some other flaw that made it hard to deal with him day after day. Everyone was. Yet, sometimes, it worked. Perfection was not required. But something else was, something was needed for love to stay part of the experience. Maybe it was a physical thing, a capacity to thrive on very short glimpses of the big, dazzling something. Hell, at least Charles had tried. I’ve never had even a chance at divorce. I envy Charles his divorce. Could I be a bigger donkey hole?