The Skin Above My Knee

by Marcia Butler

  The audience starts to clap. You have been announced. You walk out onstage and put the oboe in your mouth. You take that breath, and for the next twenty minutes you concentrate with such ferocity that the audience before you disappears. It’s you, the oboe, the orchestra, and the music. The clapping begins again.

  Don G.

  DON GIOVANNI: THE devil’s earthly alter ego. He’s the man you should hate because he breaks society’s rules and never apologizes or even explains. Steve. My Don G.

  Meeting when I got off work, we would go on “dates” that generally consisted of barhopping. I didn’t even drink much, but Don G. proved to be a falling-down drunk. This regular incapacitation was a welcome relief I came to count on: at the end of the evening I could always throw him in a cab, without an argument, without negotiation. This made me feel immensely powerful, an illusion that I actually controlled him.

  He was ignorant about music but did know a lot about the New York City art world, knowledge that he slipped into conversation from time to time. Steve was a decade older, and I was appropriately impressed with his worldly aura, but that wasn’t what pulled me to him. He could have been the best of friends with Leo Castelli for all I cared. No, I was enamored of his undisciplined manner and his unfiltered Camel cigarettes, including the loose flecks of tobacco he was always spitting off his tongue. The bedroom slippers he’d wear on the street instead of proper shoes. And the glass he continued to chew. I never got enough of those hidden masticated shards.

  So many infinitesimally enormous details didn’t quite add up. He carried a gun. I didn’t know if it was loaded and never asked. I willed myself to go blank on the disturbing parts, like the many creepy men he’d nod to while we were out and about. Who are they, I’d ask occasionally. He remained silent with not even so much as a placating noise. I never got an answer, and it didn’t seem to matter. I was in love and blind and blank and agreeable.

  We had careless sex when he could stand up—or lie down, as the case might require. He would toss the gun next to my oboe on my reed desk, and we’d set to the act in a hasty and perfunctory manner; very soon I found myself pregnant. Now the oboe-playing waitress had really faltered.

  Having such a cordoned-off life made sharing news of the pregnancy with anyone virtually impossible. Mannes, music, the oboe, the bar, Steve. My father. They were all strictly separate categories where the lines of demarcation had to remain sharply drawn. And secret. This compartmentalization was both conscious and unconscious and had served me well from the minute I was born, it seemed.

  Now I would risk mingling my categories. For the first time in my young life, I thought I might not be able to handle things on my own. I was in trouble. Impulsively, I thought of my mother, hoping that this might be the event that would interest her in me. The call was made.

  “Mom? Mom, I’m really, really sorry. I’m pregnant.”

  The who, the what, and the why were trifling trivia. With uncomfortable run-on sentences, I quickly reassured my mother that all was well in New York City.

  “But I already called my gynecologist and I’m taking care of it.…In about two and a half more months…because he says that the fetus has to be formed more completely for the vacuum cleaner to work well.…The vacuum cleaner. That’s the thing that they use to suction it out. It’s like the Hoover, Mom.…Well, that’s what he said to do, so I’ll just wait, I guess. Yes, I can still work and go to school and practice. And everything…”

  My mother was a master at small talk. Somehow she was able to eliminate silence whenever that dead air space might evoke disclosure or lead to understanding and, eventually, closeness. I was used to this tactic by now, and I snapped to like a good little soldier. I knew to talk fast and get all the information out quickly. And she had little to say because I had things well in hand. Of course they weren’t, but within the first few seconds of the call, I’d realized my mistake. My mother, placated with a two-minute phone call, was satisfied with her efficient daughter’s ability to resolve an easily righted gaffe, especially now that I’d been able to summon up the specter of the family Hoover.

  It wasn’t easy to play the oboe while hiding a pregnancy, with a belly that now formed a convex shape rather than the starved concave hollow from the previous Year of Lettuce. The three months I waited for the scheduled procedure dragged on to a miserable funeral cadence. Day after day, nausea roiled up at the most inconvenient times: in orchestra rehearsal, in classes, at work, and even on the subway. My days were spent doing just what I needed to do and no more. As Steve backed off, I remained happiest alone in bed, dead asleep, my only real respite from the scathing shame of my mistake and all my other secrets.

  Yet reality pressed and pressed upon me, because I had managed to win the concerto competition at the Mannes College of Music. I could not avoid being a public spectacle.

  “Congratulations, Marcia! You worked so hard, and it really paid off. The committee was unanimous.”

  Steve Adelweird was very proud of his most diligent of students. If he knew the truth about me, I would surely lose my best Mannes buddy in misanthropy. Feeling unworthy in so many ways, I remained silent, unable to accept his compliment. Adelweird looked at me and paused. Then, accepting my mood, he got right down to business, thankfully.

  “Okay. Let’s hear some long tones and scales.”

  I warmed up on a few notes to see if my reed was working. After a few good old long tones, Adelweird stopped me.

  “Marcia, do you hear that oscillating? Why aren’t you able to keep the sound steady? Try it again.”

  We spent most of the hour-long lesson trying to get my diaphragm to settle down and stop stuttering, just as we did in the very first lessons at the beginning of my studies. I had regressed before his eyes, and he was frustrated. I looked at the clock. Only seven more minutes of the lesson, and I was sounding like a rank beginner. This from the oboist who just won a big conservatory competition. Adelweird stopped me and stared.

  “What the hell is wrong? This isn’t your style.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  “Nothing!”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’m just tired…. And I haven’t been eating well. My stomach’s upset.”

  “The restaurant’s feeding you, right? I see you’ve gained a bit of weight, which is good.”

  “Yeah, they’re feeding me. I’m just having trouble with other classes. I’ve had absences. I’m just really tired and…sleeping a lot.”

  I tried throwing him the right lines. Couldn’t he figure it out? But no, as much as I toyed with teasing it out for him, I couldn’t let this cat out of the bag.

  “But I’m fine. Really. Let’s just finish.”

  “Marcia, that’s bullshit. You can’t hold a straight tone! We’re not leaving this room until you tell me. I know when you’re not right.”

  Not right. How to explain in the four remaining minutes of my lesson all about the awful girl standing in front of him with an oboe in her hand?

  In what felt like slow motion, I pulled my reed out of the oboe, returned it carefully to its small box, and placed the instrument down on the piano—a no-no in this school. Nothing was to be laid on top of pianos. Adelweird backed away from me, understanding the oddness of my behavior, as I walked to the corner of the room and leaned into the right angle. Laying my head heavily against it, I slid down into a crouching position on my haunches, my back to the room. The tears came. I could not look at him as I wailed. Unearthly moans came and came. No wonder the oboe’s sound shook. A roiling hell was in my belly and had been waiting for this exact moment, when it could release its immense, searing pressure.

  Adelweird went to the door of the studio and locked it. Click. I heard him walk back to me. He stood right at my back and did nothing. He was not my father, standing over Jinx in the corner of a stairway landing after delivering a knockout punch. The heat of his body was warm and alive and compassionate. Motionless, he was witne
ssing his brilliant student fall into a billion shards of glass. The oscillating of my shaky diaphragm was the very final outward expression of a wound so deep and so ancient I would never see the first slice. It would never heal, and if it did, the scar would go on forever.

  I never told Adelweird. He never asked again. I didn’t know what real love felt like, but that afternoon I imagined I had gently brushed up against a benign and safe love.

  After three months of intense fatigue and morning sickness, the deed was done in an office with just a Valium to relax me. I was wide awake and afraid. And alone. A kind, well-meaning nurse sat by my head during the procedure and gripped my hand tightly, repeating, “Almost done. Almost done.” For twenty unbearably long minutes I squeezed back, surely hurting her hand, trying to deflect the horrendous pain I was unprepared for. When the din stopped, I sat up and coldly scrutinized the special Hoover the doctor had used.

  Those were the days when you could get an abortion without anesthesia, making it possible to walk straight out of the office onto the streets of New York City alone to stroll down Fifth Avenue. You might turn into a bright and alive Central Park and wander over to Tavern on the Green. A club sandwich with french fries would nicely satisfy your appetite, which had miraculously returned. And finally, you could go home to your apartment and feel such a blissfully welcome surge of energy you would pull your own Hoover out of the closet and clean the hell out of your dirty carpet. Even on a weekday.

  As I vacuumed, I waited. Waited for the call. Waited for my mother to actually be a mother to her just barely twenty-year-old younger daughter. Waited and remembered that I had pretended that the face of the nurse I gazed at throughout the twenty-minute abortion was the face of my mother.

  Kirsten sang:

  Do I alone hear this melody…

  Texas

  Four hundred miles. That is the typical daily distance you drive while you’re on tour with a woodwind quintet. Up at 6:00 a.m., into the car by 7:00 a.m., then driving all day while noshing on the remnants of the food from the reception the night before. (It’s written in your contract that you get to take all the food provided at the concert reception if you want to.) You drive for eight hours, check into the motel, then go directly to the hall for a sound check; you eat a quick dinner, play the concert, go to the reception and meet the audience, get back to the motel at 11:30 p.m.

  This is a glorious grind; a work schedule you treasure and look forward to, because it is rare to have the opportunity to perform the same program over and over—night after night. The first performance is vastly different from the twentieth. That difference is you and how you’ve come to explore and further understand music through repetition. Music, a malleable wonder, needs this evolution.

  Now you’re in Texas, and life on the road, although mostly tedious, can get interesting. Before drifting off to sleep, you notice that your room phone doesn’t work—no worries; you’ll call into your machine at the gas station the next day. John, the French horn player, is in the adjacent room, and he knocks on your wall: a little rhythm you’ve gotten into during the tour—just a good-night tap. But you’re in Texas this particular night, and they like to party there in motel rooms.

  “Kill me; please kill me!” You wake up with a start to hear two guys, drunk, raging, directly outside your door. One person wants to die; the other must be considering granting his wish. Over and over: “Kill me; please kill me.” They weigh the pros and the cons, the whys and the why nots. Who will miss him? Who won’t? Why he’s worthless but who needs him to stay alive—a wife and baby son. His mother. His father is a “son of a bitch motherfucker,” apparently.

  Afraid to move a muscle, you’re sleepless and have no choice but to eavesdrop. Ghoulishly drawn in, you’re mostly scared shitless, because you don’t want to die this particular night from a spray of rogue buckshot. Such anguish is difficult to witness, even siphoned through the goopy gauze of booze or drugs and the thin door of a cheap motel room. For two long hours.

  John taps on the wall. He’s most likely tried calling your room, but to no avail. You tap back, then jam cotton into your ears. Six a.m. comes suddenly, the sun roaring through the stained curtains. You open the door and stick your head out. John walks up, carrying coffee for you. He shrugs—no blood. Seven a.m., bags tucked in the car. Nestled in the backseat, you position your headphones and dial up your Mozart, girding yourself for the eight-hour ride ahead as you munch on room-temperature cold cuts for breakfast. And you wonder how Texas will alter the music at the concert tonight.

  In C

  FIVE O’CLOCK ON a Friday afternoon, and the Mannes Orchestra rehearsal ended with our conductor, Carl Bamberger, a full-fledged living link to Viennese musical tradition, giving the cutoff to the final bar of the fourth movement of the First Symphony of Johannes Brahms. Rupert, my Austrian barfly, knew about Bamberger, the conductor who came to the States just before World War II with all the credentials and gravitas of Georg Solti, but never quite made his mark. We students at Mannes were the lucky recipients of luminous, heavy-accented eccentrics like Carl Bamberger.

  Brahms’s First was solidly in the muscle memory of my fingers. I knew it well from high school youth symphony concerts. That afternoon the symphony’s resolution in C major was fitting, as the first trombonist played his key-defining arpeggio passage at the very end of the last movement. A solid and fixed do: the fundamental, most down-to-earth note of Western music, from the middle of the piano, from which all other tonality is defined. Hammered at, whacked at, until there could be no mistake. C major is the mother of all keys, at times generic but always a welcome landing place. Brahms had been just twenty-one when he began composing his First Symphony, and he took all of twenty-one years to complete it. I was not yet twenty-one.

  On this particular afternoon I couldn’t linger to chat with fellow students as we all packed up our instruments. David, a clarinetist with aspirations of becoming a conductor, tried to get my attention. He was a double major, studying conducting with Bamberger, and wanted to gather a wind group together for later that evening to read through Mozart’s Gran Partita. That would have been lovely.

  But I was in a hurry because I was in the middle of a cluster-noted, atonal, tone-row life, banging on a metaphorical piano like a toddler let loose at Steinway Hall—a child who couldn’t hit middle C to save herself.

  A few years before I met Don G., “someone” had been “hurt”—or so his story went when he’d let the beans out one evening. The time had come for him to explain why I wouldn’t be seeing him quite as often for a while. I’d accepted his cursory explanation on its shiny, hot surface. “Hurt” sounded reasonable: it bounced easily, a dull pain, or a weak throb. Exactly what kind of hurt was information I did not want lingering in my sensitive and attuned ears.

  But on that Friday afternoon as the rehearsal ended, a generic hurt would actually have sufficed, because I was about to spend the next twenty-one Saturdays visiting Don G. at Rikers Island jail, where he was doing time to pay for the hurt he caused.

  I quickly threw my oboe in its case, rushed out of the rehearsal hall, and headed down to Greenwich Village to meet Don G.’s mother, a doyenne of the art world. I slipped into a hard Vienna café chair opposite her in an Italian restaurant called Gene’s on 11th Street just off Sixth Avenue. She’d called the day before to arrange this meeting to discuss the issue of the day—her son’s incarceration. As I sat down I saw her smile, an expression I didn’t understand.

  “Marcia, I know this is all a shock…. We are all terribly shocked. But you have to keep this buttoned up. For Steve. We need you to just wait this out, and then when he gets out, we can discuss the next steps.”

  I took in this refined woman; a pillar of society she was. And also intent on my silence.

  “Okay.”

  I didn’t know her well, having met her only a few times over the past year. She and her husband were art patrons, owning works by Picasso and Klee and Miró and Nevelson, and had donate
d multimillion-dollar works of art to the Met and MoMA. Maybe they’d rubbed elbows with Mrs. S. before she moved to Boston. Her exclusive world was small and closed ranks quickly; she’d made that clear.

  The waiter brought her a white wine and me a Coca-Cola. The sugar immediately eased my headache as she plodded on with her smiling pep talk.

  “Because we know how much you care for him, and he certainly thinks a great deal of you.”

  “I know.”

  “And the last thing Steve needs is for this to get out. It would really spoil things for him…and hurt him. And you, too, of course.”

  That smile again.

  “Okay.”

  “Because this is all so terribly hard on his father and me. You understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, dear, let us know if you need anything at all. And we’ll all just get through this together. It’s what we’d prefer.”

  “Okay.”

  Hunker down and practice the oboe and make visits and keep secrets. That is what any reasonable family, of any station in life, would prefer.

  The waiter dropped the plates on the table. She had fillet of sole. I ate a club sandwich with french fries, for old times’ sake. I didn’t trouble her by asking her to divulge the ugly details of Don G.’s mightily defended incarceration or her son’s penchant for guns.

  When the meal was finished and our woman-to-woman negotiations were concluded, I pulled some money out of my purse.

  “No, no, darling. Please: my treat. I have an account here. It’s nothing to me.”

  “But it’s something to me. I like to keep things even. I pay my own way.”

  “As you wish; whatever you prefer.”