Perfect Pitch

by Amy Lapwing

  “Okay, okay.” The tenors stopped singing. “‘Dolce.’ Sweetly. You’re pushing. You don’t have to push. You’re the only ones to sing. Everyone will hear you. They’re dying to hear you, it’s the Fauré Requiem and you’re the tenors! Lighten up. From letter A.” He raised his hands, waited for their eyes to be on him, and started the tenors again.

  The tenors sang with a freer tone this time. Michael interrupted them again. “You sound beautiful. Now sound beautiful softer. Letter A.” He started them again. They sang a little softer. “Yes!” He made his movements smaller, the tenors responded by going softer. “Good.” Their line ended and the accompanist continued alone.

  Michael gave a warning look to the sopranos. He brought them in with their line, then stopped them. “You are ‘dolce,’ but you’re too much. Again, right on it, letter C.” He raised his hands, kept his movements small, and the women were quieter this time. They finished their line and Michael turned to the rest of the chorus, eyebrows high for their attention, gestures wide for greater volume. The chorus came in, forte as marked, but ignored the diminuendo.

  “No! It’s piano there! You are a field of grain, waving, up then down, gently. You’re at the edge of death, then you’re back among the living again. Letter D.”

  Michael played the four instruments, sopranos, altos, tenors, basses, with gestures and expressions, a commander exhorting the basses to be louder, a lover caressing the altos softer. Justina wondered if he realized how seductive he looked to the young women. She regretted never having been in a chorus.

  Michael let the chorus continue to the end of the movement. He gave them a warning look as he held each downbeat a fraction of a second. “Watch!” The chorus rushed the timing. “I’m going to play with the tempo there. I’m permitted to do it. So watch.” The choristers’ pencils scratched across their scores. “All right, we’ll come back to it. Take out the Debussy.”

  There were groans.

  “And what do you think Debussy is doing when he hears his creation battered and kicked? Why should he write if the ones he writes for only greet him with cries and moans?”

  Justina heard the voice behind her whispering again. “He expects us to do everything, without showing us!” Minnie turned around and gave the speaker the hairy eyeball. The girl pouted and shut up. “She was a soprano last year,” explained Minnie to Justina.

  “We are a complete chorus!” Michael exhorted. “We do Debussy, Mesdames et Messieurs! It is one of the many fine points for which the Kennemac Concert Chorus is known. Not to mention our fine diction.”

  “Our v-v-very f-f-fi-n-n-ne d-d-dic-c-tion-n-n!” echoed the chorus, accentuating the consonants.

  “All right, now I will ask Professor Trimble to speak the text, and you will repeat, over and over again, until it is French.” He beckoned to Justina and she came to the music stand. He showed her the music, then stepped back behind her.

  Justina sauntered up to the front of the class. “Bonjour, tout le monde!”

  A few voices responded “Bonjour!” but not enough to satisfy her. She tried again and this time the entire chorus responded.

  “Bien. Alors, maintenant pour le texte. Ecoutez—” she put her hand to her ear— “et répétez.” Justina recited the lines to Debussy’s “Beau Soir,” urging the students to take love when it is found, for life is over all too soon. She paused thoughtfully. “‘Tiède frisson.’” The students’ expressions were simple and open, waiting to hear the reason for the interruption.

  “Means, ‘warm shiver.’ ‘As a warm shiver runs across the fields of wheat.’” Meditatively she read them the French lyric. “Répétez.”

  Michael watched her as she read and walked up and down the aisles, listening, correcting, encouraging, praising. “C’est bien, ça! Vous êtes des prodiges! You are prodigies!” When she was not satisfied, she had a single section speak alone, then a single row, then half the row, and finally found the person having trouble with a vowel. She offered tips on producing the difficult sounds, gave the rules for making the liaison between words. She has a good ear, he thought, and a friendly way with them. He caught sight of Lawson, the picture of concentration as he recited, his eyes on Justina. Justina finished the text and came back to the music stand.

  “There you go!” She handed him the music. “They’re pretty good at this.”

  “Now. Then you will go and they’ll only have me.”

  “Private lessons!” shouted Lawson.

  “Private lessons, Lawson?” Justina turned to the wise guy. “And what is your area of expertise?”

  The boy was speechless a moment while those around him oohed.

  “I don’t know,” said Lawson, recovering his cool, “I was hoping you’d help me find out.”

  Wild laughter. Justina chuckled, and glanced at Michael. “Don’t look at me!” he whispered. “You started this!”

  “Oh, I’m sure I could help you, Lawson,” rejoined Justina as the chorus tittered. “Only,” she shook her head, “I’m not sure you could afford my fee.” She smiled with satisfaction as the room rumbled appreciatively, then turned for Michael’s reaction. He was shaking his hand as though it were burnt. Justina whispered, “‘Bye,” to Michael and left. The chorus called after her, “Goodbye, Professor Trimble!”

  As the door closed behind her, Justina heard Michael say something and then the chorus’ oohed response, ending in laughter. She smiled to herself as she left the old building and went back into the gray day. He was her kind of teacher, she was certain he’d be memorable to her. The kind of teacher she would like to be. She thought about her victorious exit and felt hopeful about this career she had chosen. She checked her watch and stepped up her pace. She would ask Michael for a copy of the music to show to her class. ‘Tiède frisson.’ He had not asked her again about going out. Maybe she had discouraged him, before? The late afternoon light had brightened just enough to redden the few turning leaves, burning coals amidst the cool gray-greens. He had not seem discouraged.

  After dinner she went straight into her room, to give Kim and his new friend Donna some privacy in the living room. she read about the election in Algeria in L’Express, rereading almost every paragraph as she struggled to understand the context of the events, and who the heck these people were, Ministre d’Affaires Etrangères or Fiscales or nom de Dieu! She was apolitical, that’s all there was to it, she was missing that part of her brain.

  The phone rang in the living room, and rang, and rang again. Justina took her magazine and ran to get it before the answering machine kicked in. Kim’s recorded voice answered, “Hey, we’re busy here, okay? So leave a message if you want. ‘Bye.” She listened as the caller hesitated, then hung up. She heard Leonard Cohen music coming from Kim’s room. Interesting choice for make-out music, she thought, and went to make a cup of tea. The phone rang again and she got it after the second ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Justina?” said a man’s voice.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, it’s Michael.”

  She felt a shiver out to her fingertips. She gripped the phone more tightly. “Hi. Did you call before?”

  “I got some guy’s answering machine.”

  “That was Kim. You hung up.”

  “I thought I had the wrong number. Kim?”

  “Yeah, my roommate.”

  “A man Kim?”

  “Yeah. So, what’s up?” With a softer tone, she began again, “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. I am calling to thank you for helping my class.” He sounded suddenly formal.

  “Oh, it was fun!” She wanted to loosen up, be more warm, if that was possible over the phone. “You have a wonderful way with them.”

  “You were a big hit.” He sounded friendlier now.

  “I like them, too.” She paused, he did not fill the gap. “So, what are you doing?”

  “What I am doing? Let’s see, I’m trying to keep that yuge stack of compositions that’s been sitting on my piano not to f
ind me.”

  “The old bound-and-gagged-and-kicked-down-the-stairs feeling, huh?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, that’s it exactly. How did you know?”

  “Are you kidding? I used to be grad student scum, remember? ‘Here you go, correct the same mistakes every day for the next year and we’ll let you give a lesson on prepositions. The many meanings of “duh.”’ I called it my ‘The absolute unteachability of “duh”’ lecture. Or, ‘“Duh:” the Pedagogical Implications,’ if there were any ed school kids in the class I wanted to blow away.”

  “I bet you were brilliant.”

  She could see his smile coming through the wire.

  “Justina?”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you had the time to think about what I was asking of you before?”

  “You mean, have I checked you out?”

  He laughed. “Yeah.”

  “No. Not completely.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I had an idea.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. What I need to know now I got to get straight from the source.” God, what the hell am I saying!

  “Okay. Justina, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know, I’m being stupid.” She paused. “Michael, why don’t you just ask me out again?”

  There was a silence.

  “Then you’ll go out with me?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  She heard him let out his breath. “This Saturday?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. I’ll come to get you at six. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She gave him her address.

  “Got it. See you Saturday, then. Or at the fac, before then.”

  “Right. I’m glad you called again.”

  He said, “Me, too,” and “‘Bye.”

  She sat looking at the room, not seeing anything. She heard the microwave beep and went into the kitchen and took the mug out of the oven. She looked at the L’Express on the counter and suddenly she knew that Agoubaffe was the Ministre D’Affaires Culturelles, not Etrangères, and that he was the son-in-law of the president’s cousin.

  Chapter Seven

  Ringing Bell

  On Thursday Michael and Charles went to lunch at eleven-thirty, their usual time. Justina arrived at eleven-forty-two, by Michael’s watch, her silhouette in the sandwich line like a ringing bell declaring a call to order to his brain. She sat on the other side of the long, crowded table from Michael and down a few places, and the conversation jumped like popcorn for the hour so that the two of them said hardly anything to each other. When he looked at her she responded with a small smile, all of which was complicated by the ever-watchful Pascale needlessly prodding her under the table whenever Michael looked her way.

  A look, a line of cheek and jaw. So familiar. No!

  No, not like his.

  She looked again at Michael, hoping she was wrong. There it was, the same roundness of jaw.

  So what? A lot of people have that same shape, it’s called being a human being.

  “You slut!” Her lover’s hand slapped the table and he jumped to his feet. He walked in a circle, his face pinched, sharpening his rage. He stopped in front of her. “You fucking cunt! You want him, don’t you!”

  “No!”

  He circled her and went into the kitchen. He slammed his fist on the counter. “Go ahead! Fuck him, you have my blessing.”

  She followed him into the kitchen. “No, Rourke!”

  Rourke took a knife from the drawer. “I knew it,” he said in a low voice.

  Her eyes widened.

  He turned to her, the knifepoint inches from her. “You’re a nymphomaniac. As long as it’s somebody else.”

  “I love you!”

  He took a slice of bread and spread it with peanut butter. “Fri-gid bit-sh-ch,” he hissed.

  “Ah!” Michael erupted, a deep, warm sound. He was laughing at something Pascale had said.

  It had started differently, in a dark room, a low-key college party. A dim sheen surrounded Rourke when he had made that poetic banter with her. There had been something in the eyes, though, she remembered now, even then, something mean and annihilating, that made her think of cockroaches. Rourke with the cockroach brown eyes. He had seemed wholesome at first, and such a nice laugh. But the first time she had seen that body with the white, almost transparent skin covered with a weedy mat of hair, the roots visible beneath the surface, and smelled his bedroom stinking of unwashed sheets. Why she had not run, run for light and freshness and optimism, she would never know. Sitting in a chair in the living room, a pad of paper on his lap, Rourke would smile at her, the meanness seeping out through the premature crow’s feet like squished bugs, shaking his head and returning to his poetry composition, accompanied by foot-wagging and hand-dancing, marks of neurosis of which he was so, so proud.

  How she despised him.

  The memory of him withdrew from her staring sight.

  “Tomorrow.”

  She blinked and looked over her shoulder at a belt, and up into Michael's face.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said quickly, startled. “‘Bye, Michael.”

  That night she lay on her side in bed, staring at the words in her novel, seeing Michael’s face at the fac, smiling as he listened to the others talk, warmth radiating through the cheerful laugh lines, the gray hair entwined with the black, the waves caressing his ears, his handsomeness nailing her in place. She sighed and put away the book, and lay on her back and felt a heavy blanket of compassion settle on top of her, like the weight of a beloved man.

  On Saturday, Michael busied himself with errands: slacks, shirts and sport coat from the cleaners; slogging through the grocery store’s packed aisles for the week’s supplies and a bottle of wine, just in case; to the Pay-Mart for light bulbs to replace the long-dead ones he had been ignoring. He looked at the gray-away products at the drugstore, but decided against it, fearing catastrophic results; he got some teeth whitener instead. He actually thought about love appliances, but then laughed at himself. Sure not! You’re being ridiculous, boy! Then he remembered he probably still had a few in the nightstand drawer. Good.

  At six o’clock Justina’s doorbell rang. Kim opened to Michael who looked surprised a moment, then smiled blandly at the roommate. After introductions, Kim cast his eyes about and laughed at himself, then asked Michael to sit, Justina would be just a second.

  “Hey, Gidget! Your boyfriend’s here!”

  Justina called back that she’d be just a second. "Offer him a drink."

  Michael declined and sat on the old tan corduroy couch, a red and brown afghan spread over its back. He looked at the homemade bookcases of bare wood, loaded with books, mostly paperback, with a few hardback textbooks standing lordly over the others. Atop the windows hung light cotton curtains in a floral print trimmed with lace. The artwork on the walls was sparse: a print of a Gothic church, a print of a still life of flowers, a couple of sketches of heads in charcoal, a framed sign which read “La vie t’attend, saisis-la donc!” “Life awaits you, seize it,” he mentally translated, and smiled at the naïveté. On a cheap TV cart of processed wood and plastic was a stereo set, CDs sprinkled around it. He spotted the Jacques Brel and smiled. God, that was an intense afternoon, he thought. Can we go on being intense all the time?

  Kim got a beer from the fridge and decided not to go to his room with it, but be sociable with this guy. He went into the living room and fell into a chair across from Michael. “Justina tells me you’re quite the ringleader with your chorus.” He hoped it sounded complimentary.

  Michael appreciated the boy’s staying to talk with him. “It does seem like a circus in there sometimes,” he said. His turn. He looked Kim over while he took a slug of his beer. He was gangly in his too large workman’s pants and white shirt, the chin-length hair neatly tucked behind his ears. He had a pleasant face. A very young-looking face with swimming pool blue eyes. Pr
obably a very handsome face, to women. “Are you a grad student?”

  “Yup.”

  “Scum!” called Justina from her room.

  Kim poked his chin in her direction. “Her fault. She talked me into coming here.”

  “Did you know Justina before?”

  “Yeah, I took a French course and she was the grad assistant.”

  “And it was love at first sight!” called Justina.

  “Yeah, well, I think it was my cute accent,” Kim laughed. “No, I’ve known Justina, forever. We were kids together.”

  “We took baths together,” called Justina.

  “Hey!” Kim called, “I thought we weren’t going to tell him about that.”

  Michael laughed to cover feeling left out. “So, how’d you decide you would come together to Kennemac?”

  “I applied, you know, they decided I was excellent scum material, sweetened the deal with a fellowship, and here I am.”

  “My roommate is a Kennemac Fellow,” called Justina, coming out of her room. “Aren’t you impressed?”

  Michael stood and looked her over. She wore a plum-colored knit dress that accentuated her babe’s figure and stopped just above the knee. Lovely, he thought, and then, what is she doing with me?

  She tried to rein in her smile and keep it welcoming but not giddy. He wore tan slacks, a striped shirt and a red tie with those little diamond shapes, and a navy blue double-breasted sport coat: a rather moneyed look that made her feel glamorous. His eyes are actually sparkling, she thought. She got her purse.