The Skin Above My Knee

by Marcia Butler

  “It doesn’t matter. All that. It’s still just shit. You’re a has-been. An enormous recycling bin. Worse! You fucking trash heap!”

  His breathing was shallow and rapid. Too bad. He probably needed a doctor. So what? I wasn’t ready to relieve his physical agony, because I loved watching him squirm. Watching a man suffer—any man—might do the trick for me. Bruce was just in my firing line, one step in front of a string of men in my life.

  “Tell me why you’re sorry.”

  “Okay. Um…it was wrong, and…I was lazy.”

  “Not good enough. Tell me what you’re sorry about.”

  “I’m sorry I sent that poem. I should’ve sat down and written something new.…But I can’t write like that anymore.…It’s all kind of dried up.…”

  “Excuses. Tell me why you’re sorry.”

  He shrugged.

  “All the stuff I just said…what else is there?”

  I gave him a withering stare. “It’s not about the fucking poem, and you know it.”

  Bruce took a long, slow breath, shuddering with the pain of his supposed broken rib.

  “I know, I know.…But can I have a glass of water? I’m parched.”

  “FUCK, NO! Tell me what you’re sorry about. Then you can have a drink.”

  Taking another rasping breath, he seemed to deflate before my eyes.

  “Okay. Okay.”

  He looked at me for several seconds and then closed his eyes.

  “You were the most loving person I ever met. But I couldn’t handle that. Or your talent. So I had to get you down to a level where I felt I was superior to you. I had to wipe you out and your oboe, too. I knew very well what I was doing—breaking you to pieces day after day. And I’ve regretted that since the day you left me. No one deserved it less, and no one could defend herself less. I’m very sorry for those years. I was a bastard.…But I’m here now.”

  I kicked him in the foot; the tremors of pain traveled up to his chest. Opening his eyes, he winced with a shuddering intake of breath.

  “Bruce, you always were a step below a Hallmark card.”

  His eyes widened with resigned recognition. Bruce had always been very quick to disparage other copywriters’ work by characterizing it as “a step above Hallmark.” Now he slowly let his head bang back onto the wall, accepting our secret little joke.

  I sat still, taking in the violence and the words, trying to figure out which was worse.

  “Now let me tell you what you should be sorry about. You just couldn’t follow the fucking rules. And my rules were very simple. I will put up with just about anything. Happy to do it. Happy to oblige. But what I expect is that any man leaves my oboe the hell alone. That’s always been my line in the sand. And you come along with your drugs and your ego and your incessant ranting about your stupid former life in Europe and your ridiculous career that was all shot to shit. But you just couldn’t let me have that one thing. The one thing that was separate from you. And you got me to a state where I went along with you, and I almost lost it all. All my other men, without exception, let me have my oboe. All my men. Including my father. That was the rule. That was the bargain. That was the agreement.”

  He looked at me with newly interested eyes.

  “What in the hell does your father have to do with this? Marcia? Tell me what you mean!”

  He was now screaming and managed to get up off the bed and approach me. I turned my back on him.

  “My father. Okay?”

  I whispered a truth that I’d never uttered. My chin dropped to my chest; I closed my eyes and felt the shame trying to push through my eyelids. I could hear his shallow breath close behind me. When I turned back to face him, our eyes exchanged a deadened look, filled with a new knowledge that couldn’t be forgotten.

  “Get it now?”

  My tone was flippant, mocking.

  “Mother of God. Marcia. My poor Marcia.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t get all sentimental on me.”

  But I was starting to cry, feeling mildly regretful after my book-throwing attack. I nudged him in the foot as I went into the kitchen for his glass of water.

  “Motherfucker.”

  As he sipped his water, Bruce watched me, wary and sad. Tight-lipped, soundless, I wept.

  Eventually I broached the subject of getting him some help.

  The place was in shambles, but I managed to find his car keys and help him to his feet and into sweatpants, a T-shirt, and sandals. I used rough fingers, jostling him when I could under the pretext of helping him with my guiding hands.

  The emergency room admitted him with one bruised rib. An eye slightly blackened; his dental work, just fine. Bruce earnestly explained to the doctors that he had been mugged, and the thugs, a bunch of young boys (ever the copywriter), ran off with some money.

  My muscles remained sore for the next week, having found out firsthand what kind of physical strength it takes to hurt someone. I burned Bruce’s poem, washing it down the drain to the sewers of hell.

  A few months later I received a call from Bruce’s sister. He had taken a gun to his mouth in a suicide attempt but survived. With half his face blown off, he was now a mute vegetable living in a VA hospital in Florida.

  Was I responsible for this? He’d tried to explain himself, yet I was steadfast and harsh in my rejection of his apologies. I felt awful: cruel and cold. But underneath I held tight to a dry sense of detachment. The truth was, I was relieved that my secret about my father was once again a secret—still unknown to anyone but me.

  Designated

  For classical musicians, taking on commercial work, such as subbing on Broadway shows, is motivated by making money. It is one square on the patchwork quilt that defines a freelancer’s musical life. But it is not beneath you. As a matter of fact, it’s some of the most challenging work you do, because the requirements are specialized and exacting. Broadway musicians have a great contract: they can take off up to four shows in an eight-show week and still keep the gig. Most Broadway musicians will accept work outside the show. It helps them keep their playing fresh and gives them the opportunity to have variety in their musical experience. So substitutes are needed from time to time. That’s when you get the call.

  You want to make the big music. But when you play in a Broadway show, you have to nip all your big ideas in the bud. A Broadway show is run with the understanding that eight shows a week must look and sound exactly the same from day to day. The consistency of what an audience sees and hears is extremely important to the creative team. When you stand in for a regular player, your main goal is to play perfectly and sound as much like the regular player as possible. You do not want to be noticed.

  To prepare for your first subbing experience, you first do something called “watching the book.” You show up at the theater at about 7:30 p.m., enter the stage door, and go downstairs into the bowels of the theater: past all the dressing rooms in which the stars are readying, past the dressers preparing the costumes, past the chorines warming up, past the makeup rooms, past the stagehands playing poker while they wait for the curtain to go up. Finally, you get to the area where the musicians hang out, usually a table, some chairs, and a row of lockers, which is typically right by the door to the orchestra pit. The regular oboist, whom you’ll be subbing for, greets you. Bringing a folding chair into the already jam-packed pit, you place it right next to his. Then you just go back to the musicians’ area and chat until they call, “Places.” “Places” means that the show is about to start.

  You just sit there for the next two-plus hours and “watch the music” as he performs the show. Actually you know this oboist very well; you’ve played many concerts together through the years. You know his sound and listen carefully to the way he plays the show, for his specific musical inflections, because you’ll try to imitate these when you actually go in for your first performance.

  You watch the conductor and see what he’s up to. The show may be very straightforward, or it might be extremely
tricky, and how the conductor guides the orchestra is important to notice and remember. The show ends, you take a copy of the music home to practice, and two days later, you show up to play your first performance as a sub.

  Subbing in a Broadway show the first time is particularly nerve-racking because you never actually have the opportunity to rehearse—you just go in and perform. It’s an odd thing and not the normal way that musicians prepare for performances. Normally, you practice at home, you rehearse with the ensemble quite a lot, and then you perform. When you sub for the first time, you’re just thrown to the wolves, sink or swim.

  You want to play everything correctly. You don’t want to sound too different. And most important, you don’t want to step in the cracks—in other words, get a little lost during the show and end up playing in the wrong place. Then things sound strange, and the conductor looks down because he’s startled. You never want the conductor to be startled and look at you. You want the conductor to not even know you are there.

  When it’s over, the conductor might have notes for you or he might not say a word. If he’s silent, you lie awake all night, reliving the show, trying to figure out if you did a good enough job. Then you go in to sub for the second time. This is much harder. You have the false assumption that you actually know the show simply because you played it once, about a week ago. In fact, the second show is where people make the most mistakes.

  After the second time around, the conductor decides whether he will “designate” you. If you are designated, it means that you can sub in an unlimited capacity for this show. If you are not, you can sub only on a limited basis.

  If you are not designated you are demoralized, pummeled. You may fall into a deep depression for weeks. You question everything you do on the oboe. All because of the whim of a Broadway conductor. And by the way, he wasn’t so hot at his job, either. Then the next week you happen to perform the Carter Oboe Concerto.

  A Sister

  THE LAST TIME I’d seen Jinx was years before, during an early morning drug deal at Palsson’s. Once she’d recovered from the stint at Bellevue, she slipped back into her role in my life: the person Bruce and I could call in desperation, at the bottom of a 2:00 a.m. totem pole, when our regular connections didn’t—or couldn’t—answer the phone. The early morning hours tugged us to our knees, and we were more than happy to take her watered-down product. Still, we laughed about our deal of last resort. Cocaine makes both the lowly and the highfalutin feel good about their starting position in a fifty-yard dash. It doesn’t really matter who is first off the block.

  Jinx was a dead ringer for Michelle Pfeiffer: truly a drop-dead stunner. Heads swiveled wherever she went, and a late night at Palsson’s was no different. That last evening, while Bruce and I itched at our drinks, waiting for her delivery, the door finally swung open, and she made her triumphal entrance—all necks craned to see the five-foot-ten goddess dressed in an outfit to beat back the natives, gloriously out of their league. She easily sashayed in four-inch heels. I felt dwarfed and mousy, jealous of her ability to draw an adoring crowd. Bellevue Hospital had receded like a distant tableau on an opera set.

  Now, more than a decade later, I considered Jinx and what our different places in society looked like. My hard-earned reputation as a respected musician surely kept me well perched on rungs much higher than her towering stilettos. But we both swung low, rappelling off a granite cliff at the end of a big, thick, husky rope strung up by my father. He’d chiseled at us both, sculpting our two distinct versions of womanhood: Jinx at the receiving end of his curled knuckles, while his soft, splayed paws deftly, secretly, kneaded at me.

  Bruce was as good as dead. I imagined his head alternately lolling and snapping back and forth, his face vivisected, ghastly in appearance. I was back in New York, sleeping long hours and ruminating on the high, the low, the beautiful, and the newly deformed. Rueful or jaded, maybe that’s why I thought of my sister.

  I sent Jinx a short note, wishing her well. She called immediately.

  “Marcia? It’s Jinx!”

  Her high-pitched, hysterical manner of speech, always just a bit too loud and insistent—a bit too enthusiastic—jarred.

  “I’m really glad you wrote! How are you?!”

  “I’m fine. It’s been a long time.”

  “I know!”

  On it went, as we caught up over a lengthy first phone call. She played the wronged heroine to the hilt; surely a hard-fought role, perfected through her well-documented defiance of our father. I certainly remembered it all, and soft sympathy, perhaps even compassion, quickly welled up in me.

  I couldn’t reciprocate with my own counterpart of such a tragic opera. To the world, and, most deeply, to myself, I was still tightly battened down about my abuse. With the exception of Bruce, no one ever knew about my shameful past with my father. Because I was choked up and stuffed down, my oboe was the only vulnerable voice the world would hear. And I would not perform a confessional quid pro quo with Jinx; I divulged only what was safe, what I felt she needed from me.

  Jinx had a phobia about flying, so I agreed to travel to Miami Beach, where she lived. When we came face-to-face during that first weekend visit, her truly tragic past staggered me while her new sobriety struck me as monumentally impressive. We were sisters yet virtually strangers, filling in the gaping holes of the years of lives hard-lived.

  Delighted with this newly attentive family member, I scheduled trips to see Jinx around my concert schedule and occasionally made the ultimate sacrifice: I turned down jobs to be with her. We were blood, bonding together, now like fired-up aluminum on steel. For many months I hid this sister act—Electra and Iphigenia—from my parents.

  Jinx quickly became the tree trunk of my family. Indeed, this was the first time in my life that I was able to even imagine what a family relationship might resemble, much less actually live it. And I was hungry for it; voracious, really. I began to count on her for real emotional connection, and she reciprocated with an easy disclosure of the minutiae of her life, past and present-day. I felt honored that she thought so highly of me—to trust me with her story. And because I believed that she had had the harder time of it with my father, I wanted to do right by her in every way.

  My naive desire was to be the best little sister imaginable. And as usual, with family and men alike, I put the horse blinders on and staggered blithely forward, jumping to conclusions and actions before, perhaps, the time was right. Speeding along the process of connecting my family together—this was my goal. For Jinx, it was the right thing, the only thing to do: to speak the truth and possibly sacrifice everything to do it.

  Hoping my renewed relationship with Jinx would facilitate a better connection with my mother, I summoned up my courage and made the call, telling myself I owed it to Jinx. My parents and Jinx had not spoken for many years, and although I was afraid, I would try my mother one more time. What did I have to lose, after all?

  The truth does not set you free. It only makes you truthful.

  “Mom, how are you?”

  “Fine, honey. What’s happening down there in New York?”

  “Oh, nothing much, just concerts and stuff.”

  “What about the shows? Are you still doing lots of them?”

  My mother saw Broadway shows as the musical equivalent of secretarial work. She got comfort and reassurance from her impression that the show gigs looked like “steady” work. It wasn’t my month-long European tours with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra she was impressed with but rather the grind-’em-out shows like Beauty and the Beast and Phantom of the Opera that I’d subbed on hundreds of times.

  “Yeah, the shows are fine. Mom, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Okay, honey.”

  “Well…I’ve been in touch with Jinx.”

  That pause. For the ages. I waited.

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. And…um…we’ve seen each other.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “I�
�ve traveled to Florida a few times. She lives in Miami Beach now. She seems to be doing pretty well.…”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. And, um, I was afraid to tell you because I thought you might get mad.”

  “How long has this been going on? I mean, how many trips?”

  “About five months. I’ve gone down three times.”

  “Really.”

  “And she’s changed and all. She’s off drugs now.…”

  “Really? Is that so? Well, I can’t say I’m happy about this, Marcia. I just think it’s wrong to dredge up the past. Your father and I did everything humanly possible for that girl. We bent over backwards to provide for you girls. We treated you exactly the same. Exactly the same. And she was just a disaster: she never appreciated what we did for her, she destroyed the family—what happened is on her back. I wish her well, I truly do, but she made her bed—I tell you, she made her own bed.…”

  That phrase—“made her bed”—rang off-pitch, tinny and strident. Sitting in my apartment on my own bed, I drifted off, half listening to her rant of myriad justifications. The odd thing was, I’d made my bed perfectly for years. My mother held the treatment of beds in high esteem: a neat and clean home, with a bed that was perfectly made up every single morning—that was how you conquered the world, according to my mother.

  Jinx didn’t agree. In fact, while she was growing up, her bedroom had always been a wreck—stuff strewn from here to there. As my mother continued to blather on in the background, I struggled to reconcile how it could possibly be that Jinx had “made her bed,” figuratively and in reality.

  Zoom—I was flat on my back, lying on the carpet of childlike accommodation in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, dodging my mother’s whapping electrical cord. The rug was no longer velvet-cut pile but rather a commercial remnant made of viscose. It scratched, and I jumped. Those primordial fighting hormones were stitched into my sinewy muscles from the time when I pummeled Bruce several months earlier with Roth and Austen. An animal instinct began to rage inside me with an urge to defy this woman—the primal woman of my life. Not Kirsten. My mother. And this time, for my sister.