The smile had evaporated.
Walking the ten blocks uptown to my apartment on Seventh Avenue, fresh from dinner, I knew I would sleep a hard-fought slumber. My headphones were ready to assume the position, delivering the “Liebestod” to bolster my courageous silence.
I dropped to my bed. Suddenly my entire body hurt with a pain I’d not remembered for a long while. It was a memory of a coughing-up, searing agony that spiked from my toes through my pelvis to the very ends of my hair. The memory of slashing smiles and my father’s grinding lessons on how his family prefers to maintain silence. Pushing Kirsten aside, I grabbed Brahms’s First from my stack of records and dropped the needle at the end. I hastily downed four aspirins, chewing the last one, which got caught in my throat, and slept to the simplicity of C major.
The Q100
MOTHERS—MOSTLY MOTHERS—WIVES, children, and various other relations accompanied me to Rikers Island the next day. I woke earlier than I needed to and was raw with a buzzed and jagged fatigue. Sitting near the front of a packed Q100 bus, I kept to myself, aware that the other passengers might be ruminating on what had brought me on this bus. Or perhaps that was just my privileged musing. I dared to look around and quickly averted my eyes when I caught a glance or two.
I saw large extended families determined to make an outing of the day, maintaining festivity for the sake of the kids, young ones and teens who might be visiting an uncle, a brother, a father. A boyfriend. Sound waves of emotions rose and fell—laughing followed by the swift, sobering quiet that descended when, I imagined, our destination was suddenly remembered. These sound amplitudes riding on wild emotions created a strange and angular melody, like a newly conceived musical genre composed by the justice system just for our bus, the Q100. For everyone, the trip was baldly public and yet heartbreakingly private.
Being made to wait at Rikers felt abusive and punitive, as if we visitors were as guilty as the incarcerated. I was searched twice for contraband. Female guards pulled at my arms to twist me around during their search, and I remembered Whitney and David and how I had tugged at them just a year before, when I needed to get their attention, or just to be mean. My breath remained shallow throughout the day; I couldn’t get a full lung of air. Breathing felt sharp, my lungs poked by the new spoke on my wheel.
He was sober. That is the clearest tiny detail I remember of the first visit. We took our sixty minutes greedily, talked very little, cried often. Then it was over, and I reversed the process, almost as if playing a tape backwards, with sounds resembling strange, up-inflected whooping. The security checks, then to the Q100 bus, to the subway, to my apartment, to my Kirsten. To sleep.
I had a church job to play the next morning.
That was the thing about being a girl who played the oboe and had a boyfriend in the clink. It was easy for me to separate the two realities and carry on as if all were harmoniously blended. This particular job felt like a gift: a Sunday morning service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem at 138th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, the Reverend Dr. Calvin O. Butts III at the pulpit. A violinist I knew hired a small orchestra, on occasion, to accompany the choir on hymns and to perform light classical pieces. This was becoming a regular gig.
The next morning, the 1 train emerged from the uptown tunnel and elevated itself at 122nd Street, where Manhattan dipped down and exposed its innards temporarily. Every single car was tagged by massive, puffy graffiti, not yet appreciated as the important art movement and political statement it would become. It was a crime of beauty.
The subway doors opened at 137th Street and Broadway, splitting someone’s tag in two, and let me out into a very different, somehow less bright, world. Rikers had not yet left my bloodstream; I still ached from all the hours of sitting the previous day, on the bus and then on the chairs at the jail. Now I walked the few blocks to the church, stiffly, slowly; a white girl getting a few stares from astonished, well-meaning folks.
The church was always festive, and I needed a big crowd scene this particular Sunday, one like Aida’s “Triumphal March,” where all the senses are stimulated: color and high drama. The hats worn by the ladies were almost as elaborate as a Carmen Miranda cornucopia, but instead of fruits they had flowers and wisteria cascading down to their shoulders.
Over the past Sundays, the Reverend Butts had impressed me. His sermons were a mixture of good solid advice with some brimstone thrown in. Although I didn’t believe in God, when the Reverend Butts put his sermon solidly on the pulpit, I was converted. There was even something for the nose. The smells coming from the basement of the church pervaded the entire sermon: lots of coffee and soul food for the social gathering afterward. By the end of the two-hour service, a strong body odor pushed through as well. Soul and body were involved if you wanted to worship the Lord properly.
As the sermon began, the Reverend Butts gradually delivered his A game. I settled back in my chair within the orchestra, listened to the smoldering embers in his voice, and for the first time in about forty-eight hours, since the downbeat of the Brahms symphony at Mannes, I took a deep breath. The sermon, the music, the hymns in C major with godlike plagal cadences, and the few hours of distance from Rikers finally allowed me to release some tension.
There came a point in the Baptist service when the Reverend Butts asked the worshippers to take a moment to wish peace to those around them. Voices bubbled up with peppered p’s from the repeated word: Peace. I figured I’d jump on the bandwagon, inspired by my gradually lifting mood. Now the church jostled with a few minutes of quiet activity, our rapt attention temporarily broken with the reverend’s blessings. We were grateful to get up and move and wish each other peace.
A woman made her way up from the back of the church. She was fanning herself. Her lavender chiffon dress blew back as she walked, and a modest hat of flowers was perched at a stylish angle, hiding her face. A bosom of pearls. In her arms clung a small girl, about three years old, similarly dressed to the nines. I noticed the woman weaving her way down the aisle, deftly dodging the other peace-wishing parishioners who had spilled out into the aisles.
As if pushed by an invisible and breezy locomotion, the string players parted to let her through the orchestra. She was bound my way. And she took my hand.
“Peace to you, my sister.”
I reeled back on my heels and sat down heavily. Busted. From Brahms to Rikers to the Lord. She, too, had been on the Q100 bus the day before.
Steve came home from jail, twenty-one Saturdays in, a docile man. Sobriety lasted just two weeks. With a belly full of ouzo and drug-induced pep, he arrived at the apartment and set to vacuuming my carpet with earnest intention. As he rocked the Hoover about, I lay on the sofa, pointing to the areas he’d missed. If he was going to be my mother, at least he could do her bang-up job. Fresh from jail, he was now, it seemed, a stickler for housekeeping.
A few days after he pulled the Hoover out of my closet, I decided I was tired of Don Giovanni’s composite burlesque of my mother and my father. I called a friend and asked him to help me box up all Don G.’s stuff in my apartment and bring it to the 11th Street family town house. We hailed a cab I could not afford, loaded up the trunk, and sped down Seventh Avenue. The maid answered the door. We shoved the boxes, clinking with glass pieces, over the threshold. Steve could chew it all in hell.
23rd Street
THE SUN WAS bright, too bright to look at, so I kept my head down and stared at the uneven, pebbled sidewalk. Cigarette butts, a Dunkin’ Donuts wrapper, a well-flattened coffee container. My bare neck absorbed the August sun’s rays: maybe I would be found with a badly sunburned and slightly mangled neck.
That day in late August, after my graduation from the Mannes College of Music, I felt the cars whiz by me; sensing their speed, I wondered which would be the one. Standing still just outside the Angry Squire restaurant at the corner of 23rd Street and Seventh Avenue, I set my legs slightly apart, as Kirsten might have stood onstage singing the “Liebesto
d.” And I observed and calculated. It was broad daylight, about noon. I mused about the perfect car. Just one seemed easy and reasonable, not too messy.
My parents attended exactly two concerts in my entire career as a musician. The first of these bookends was my senior graduation recital at Mannes two months before. After that concert, Adelweird had birthed me out to the New York City freelance scene, and throughout the summer after graduation, I began to get some work. Still, to keep body and soul together, I held down the financial fort at the restaurant, working five nights a week. I put up a good front. But underneath I was listless and aimless, missing Don G., sleeping a lot, always practicing and questioning everything. There were no answers…but there was a solution.
My mental checklist was now exhaustive and complete. There would be me, the car, the person in the car, and debris from the crash. I imagined that not too much damage would be done to the driver, who might suffer only bruises or a broken bone at the most. But I didn’t want to dwell on that, selfish victim that I was. I just needed to ensure my own death. As I stood at the curb, weighing every last note of the final act of my Chelsea opera, I figured that when the right car sped along, I would know it instinctively.
The cars passed by, the pedestrians dodged me, and some sent me a sidelong irritated look, because I was standing right in their way. Clearly hindering the progress of the world at that point, I resolved to get on with it.
Just as I was revving up to leap, I sensed a woman watching just offstage, at the edge of my sight line. Oh, who cares? I thought. Let her gawk at the car wreck on Seventh Avenue. I quickly stepped off the curb toward my intended car, and simultaneously she rushed over and pushed me down hard onto the street. My arms splayed as an instinctive protection (funny, that); I skittered about five feet forward on my stomach, with my limbs spread-eagled. My eyes got a close-up focus shot of a half-full box of Camels.
Strangers rushed to the woman, trying to contain her, thinking that she had attacked me. Actually, she had. She screamed, behaving more like a lunatic than even the suicidal girl now lying in the middle of the street.
“Don’t you DARE do that again! Don’t even think of it. I’ll be watching you!”
People quickly backed away, assuming we must have known each other, and in about fifteen seconds it was all over. In dirty Chelsea, no one wanted to be involved in personal scuffles.
It was not personal. It was about as anonymous as it could be. I rose up off the ground and picked some cigarette butts off the sticky blood still sluicing down my gouged palms. We warily eyed each other for a few seconds. Then just as quickly, dismissing me as an unimportant nuisance, she turned on her heel and walked away. I retreated, furious that a total stranger had thwarted my well-considered attempt.
As I walked the few blocks downtown toward my apartment, pedestrians streamed past me. Now feeling exposed, I was careful not to make eye contact, imagining that people knew what I had just done. Before the pratfall, I felt so courageous and dead certain. Now I cringed at my weakness and my utter failure. And my shuddering sense of shame.
Bed, my old friend, beckoned. Wrung out, I headed for it, praying for some sleep. I was about to drift off when I heard the guy on the first floor screaming at his dog in their backyard garden. The whaps, as the guy hit the dog, jolted me awake. Quickly, I ran to my window and climbed out onto my fire escape. He and his belt were really going at it.
“You fucker! Get off that dog! I’m calling the cops right now.”
“Mind your own business, you stinking bitch.” That word.
The dog was now sitting quietly, docile, not even noticing the verbal sparring, and for a second I wondered whether I had dreamed the beating. The guy ran into his apartment, and in a few minutes I heard his rapid tat-tat steps up the stairs. He began pounding on my door with a hammer.
“I’m gonna fucking kill you, you bitch. I know this is your apartment. You’re the one who plays that instrument!”
Sitting silently on my bed, I remained still as he continued to slam at my door. I had just tried to kill myself not an hour before, and now this guy was promising to finish me off. I considered letting him in just so he could give me the beating I surely deserved. I’d sit, docile, and take it, just like his dog.
My trusty headphones were sitting on the bed, and I stealthily wrapped them around my ears, dropped the needle, and turned up the volume. Lying down, with the hammer still beating away at my door, I listened and tried to synchronize the jolt of the punching hammer to the pulse of the music. It almost matched up, like two clocks ticking loudly and hitting the same tick every thirteen seconds or so. I was used to slapping sounds and an out-of-sync life. Now the music in my ears would mix it up and dissipate the rhythm. I managed to slip off to sleep in spite of the racket.
I woke up to some timid rapping on my door. The music had long since stopped, and my headphones had fallen off my head, landing on the carpet.
Walking to the door, I quietly tested my voice.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s Isabella, from the first floor. I want to explain. Please open up.”
Having never spoken to this couple, I was surprised to hear a foreign accent. Maybe Italian. I cracked the door open and saw a very small blond woman standing there in her pajamas. This seemed safe. As I opened up, the first thing I looked at was the other side of my metal door. It was riddled with deep dings from his hammer. There must have been hundreds of them.
“Please. You must forgive my boyfriend. You see, the dog. He is the puppy. And he chewed up all Nathan’s records. He has many of the LPs, and he came home and found they were destroyed. By the dog. You see. So he went a little crazy.”
Sleep was mixing me up. The woman was so tiny and thin. An urgent thought sliced across my head—I had to get her and the dog away from that guy. But it subsided quickly.
Instead, I hissed: “Just tell that fucking maniac you call your boyfriend that if I ever hear one sound against that dog ever again, I’ll call every agency in the city. And get yourself a new boyfriend. How can you be with someone like that?”
“He has his good points.…”
“Right. I’m sure. Don’t they all?”
I nodded at the hammered door, as if to press my case. My fingers went to the surface to feel the divots, and she saw my henna-colored, blood-caked hands, which I’d never bothered to wash when I walked in off the street a few hours before. In the garish light of the fluorescent-lit hallway, I must have looked like a ghoul from hell. Her eyes widened, then she turned and started down the stairs, her slippers flopping in rhythm.
Moments later, in the bathroom, I saw that my face was also streaked with blood, probably from restless sleep. Who was the real monster? Me, the bitch? Or that maniac on the first floor?
Big Boys
Fresh out of college, you get a call out of the blue from a big music contractor in the city who asks you to play second oboe for an orchestra concert. He had come to the end of his regular list of oboists and got your name from a violinist friend from Mannes. You’d auditioned for permanent positions in a few orchestras over the last year but had not done particularly well, and you’re discouraged. But now you feel like jumping out of your skin. This is how they say it starts: a contractor gets your name, he calls you—taking a chance; you play well, you get called again for other jobs, and your career is launched, little by little, job by job. In a way, you feel like freelancing has picked you—an inevitable fate—and, happily, you go along for the ride.
But there’s a catch: you need to join the union in order to be able to accept the job.
With money earmarked for your electric bill, you pay your very first union dues. A sickening feeling comes with handing over the money, but now you’re guaranteed union-scale rates. Con Edison will just have to wait.
Arriving at Carroll’s on West 41st Street—an iconic rehearsal studio where all the big freelance orchestras rehearse—you see that it’s actually fairly shabby-looking: just a big, cav
ernous room with low ceilings. But wonderful playing fills it as musicians warm up. You walk in, mousy, young, and possibly not up to the task, making your way to the first row of the wind section. Everybody else, familiar with each other, is chatting up a storm. Shy and a little sad, you realize this is a club you’re not a member of yet. The men look old, maybe fifty; the women look like they’re your mother’s age. But when you observe more closely, younger faces appear around shoulders and instruments, and inwardly this lifts your morale just a bit.
You sit in the second oboe chair, next to the guy playing first oboe. He’s a god in the freelance industry: serious idol territory. You’ve met before through friends but have never played together. His sound is pointed, brighter and different from yours—but this is immaterial. He is simply a phenomenal musician. Just by sitting next to him, you will surely learn something pivotal.
Almost nonstop throughout the rehearsals, the principal oboist makes witty, sardonic jokes about the conductor and other colleagues. You feel immediately welcomed, in his corner. And he’s so funny you can hardly play at times from laughing so much. But when it comes to the music, he is deadly serious, and this also puts you at ease. You are more alike than dissimilar.
On the day of the concert, as you’re warming up, the principal oboist asks if you could take over a job for him that he needs to get out of. He just got called for a better gig. This happens a lot among freelancers—jockeying for position and jobs—and it’s another way a career in music gets started or propelled along. Of course you accept, which results in playing your very first performance at Carnegie Hall.
Clint
I WAS WIDE awake and particularly hell-bent. Still thinking of the compliant, tiny blond Italian girl in pajamas and floppy slippers, her beaten dog, cigarette butts, my newly scabbed palms, and the head of a hammer, much later in the evening I made my way down Seventh Avenue into the Village toward a bar called “The Local, Formerly the Locale.”
The Skin Above My Knee Page 9
