The Music Teacher

by Barbara Hall

  “You hate women, don’t you?” he finally asks.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think I know any.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there aren’t any women in Los Angeles. There are only little girls.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Women have breasts and hips. Have you met anyone like that in L.A.?”

  Smirking, he says, “I’ve met plenty of women with breasts.”

  “I mean real ones. You know how to tell the difference? Your breasts lie down when you do.”

  Franklin, who is smart, mulls this over, then says, “Do you know any men in Los Angeles?”

  “There aren’t many,” I admit. “They’re mostly girls in disguise.”

  “What am I, then?”

  I think about that for a moment before I decide to answer honestly.

  “You’re a confused man.”

  “Oh, really?” he says, leaning away from me. “And what am I confused about?”

  “Whether or not you are a man.”

  “And what’s your definition of a man?”

  I think about that for a moment. “Men fight,” I say.

  “Oh, you want me to join the army?”

  “I don’t want you to do anything. But that is my definition of men. They are willing to fight.”

  “What is it you want me to fight?” he asks.

  “Jenny,” I say.

  We don’t speak again until the check comes. When it does, we decide to divide it.

  He’s not a man, I realize to my dismay.

  Men pay.

  WE ARE STANDING in front of the restaurant, waiting for the parking valets to bring our car around, when I catch a glimpse of her. It’s not a mistake. I’d know her anywhere. Our eyes connect, on this crowded street. She is in her late teens now. Either she’s pursuing her path to greatness or she has given up. Her clothes tell me she’s chosen the latter. She’s dirty and distracted. She’s not carrying a violin.

  Franklin is yammering about how he could have played the last solo better. It was good, but it could have been better. I feel trapped by his narcissism, and I’m not listening anymore because I have seen her and I want to follow her. She is walking away from me, walking alone, moving rather blindly down the empty sidewalk.

  I say, “Hallie!”

  The body freezes, then, without looking back, starts to move faster.

  “Hallie, is that you?” I call out.

  She walks even faster.

  Then I abandon Franklin and start to run down the sidewalk. I am gaining on her when she spins around and looks at me. It’s her and it isn’t her. Her hair is red now. Her skin is the same amount of pale. Her eyes connect with mine, and they say, Don’t come any closer.

  “It’s me,” I say. “Your music teacher.”

  This person, who looks so much like Hallie but might not be, says, “I don’t have a music teacher.”

  Our eyes connect.

  She says, “Look, just leave me alone.”

  I move closer to her. It’s as if she’s a ghost and I’m afraid she’ll go back to some other dimension.

  I say, “Hallie, I know I screwed everything up. I didn’t want to hurt you. I just wanted to save you.”

  “Save me?” Her expression is one of genuine bewilderment. “Who are you, thinking you can save people?”

  I have no answer to that. “Just stay. Stay and talk to me.”

  “You are scary,” she says to me.

  “No, I’m really not.”

  Then she disappears around the corner.

  I watch her walk away, and I’m not sure. I thought it was her— I would have bet my life on it—but as I see her disappearing into the shadows, I start to doubt. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know anything.

  She moves into darkness, and I stand there. Finally I move back to where Franklin is waiting.

  He says, “What was that all about?”

  “I thought I knew her.”

  He rolls his eyes, then looks up to heaven, as if he’s seen the light.

  He says, “Jesus, Pearl, if you’re gay, just say so.”

  “I’m not gay. I thought I knew her.”

  He just looks at me.

  “I thought it was Hallie,” I tell him.

  He sighs. “Your student? That Hallie?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was months ago. Aren’t you over that?”

  No, I am not over that. I will never be over that.

  But I don’t trust him enough to say it.

  “Tell me what went on there. A student left you? Is that the big deal?”

  “No, it was more.”

  “What?”

  I can’t look at him.

  His car arrives, he tips the valet, and as he’s climbing in, he calls out to me, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  “Maybe,” I respond, watching him get in the car and drive off.

  I don’t say, First you have to believe in those things.

  IT WASN’T JUST that she was good. I won’t bore you with the details of how good she was. Musicians can be so tedious about details. And the truth is, it’s never about details or technicalities. It’s always about feel. When a musician is truly gifted, it is because she has tapped into something entirely beyond definition. She hears the music. She captures it. She processes her own emotions through it. She explains it, without defining it. Sometimes I wish God would give me the words to describe it; other times, I’m grateful that he doesn’t. She was good, all right? She was blessed.

  And sometimes I think that what happened to her had everything to do with my own pride, my own expectations. I had already started to brag about her. I couldn’t resist telling Franklin and Ernest (the two most arrogant musicians) that I had struck gold with this student, that I had found the person who would put all of us on the map. I pictured us going to see her at the philharmonic, taking up an entire reserved row. I pictured her announcing to the audience that we were there, giving us credit for her accomplishment. Truth be told, I pictured her singling me out and asking me to take a bow.

  But that was just an indulgence on my part. Mainly I focused on teaching her, drawing those sounds from her, luxuriating in the perfection of her playing.

  So you can imagine how I felt when, seven or eight months in, she told me she was quitting.

  I told her she couldn’t.

  She said, “We’re out of money. We can’t pay anymore.”

  “What about the state grant?”

  “It ran out.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I told her. “Dorothy hasn’t said anything.”

  “Earl knows,” she said. “He told me last night. The money has stopped coming in.”

  I sighed, resting in my metal chair, taking a moment to stare at her and devise a plan. I didn’t know Earl at all, but I pictured him as this big, mean, opposing man who commanded the obedience of all the women in his life. I saw Dorothy cowering in his presence, letting the gleam in her eye leak out and drift down the drain. They had boys who were into sports. Earl was probably the commander. He understood men competing with one another and nothing else. He was eager to give up on her.

  “Then you have to find the money somewhere else,” I told her.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “There are all kinds of ways. You can’t just give up. You’re truly gifted.”

  She shrugged, putting her instrument away long before we were finished.

  “He doesn’t want me playing anymore,” she told me.

  Earl. The cold-eyed commander.

  I sat forward in my seat and reached out for her hand. She allowed me to take it. There were no marks on her wrist. It was as if I had dreamed it. Now I was only trying to reach my best student, trying to persuade her to realize my dreams along with hers.

  I knew, even as I did it, that this was a shortcoming of my profession. Wanting to achieve through your students is the strongest drug any teacher can ever confr
ont. I wanted to be above that, but I wasn’t.

  I said, “Hallie, listen to me. I know you’ve had a hard life, but music is the way out. You can’t just abandon it. It’s showing you how to live.”

  She looked down at her scuffed Doc Martens. “I don’t care about how to live.”

  I squeezed her hand, but her expression did not change. She stared at the ground as if she expected nothing from it, which was why she longed for it.

  “You don’t know how hard it is,” she finally said.

  “I think I know a little about it,” I told her. And then I told her the whole story of my own abandoned violin, melting among the leaves, and how I finally made it to college and found the music again. I had always thought my story was pretty impressive, but Hallie did not seem swayed by it. Eventually she looked up at me.

  “There comes a point,” she said, “where it’s no longer worth it.”

  There was something mature in her tone of voice, but I chose to ignore it.

  Still stuck in teacher mode, I said, “Don’t you dare say that. Music is always worth it. It’s worth everything and anything. I’ll talk to Dorothy. I’ll make it work.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “No, don’t do that.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said, allowing some of my own desperation to creep through. “When you are good, when you have real talent, you also have a moral obligation to develop it, to see where it intends to take you.”

  She lifted her eyes to me, at the same time withdrawing her hand from mine. She chewed on a hangnail, her eyes trained on my face.

  “I have a moral obligation?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Like God? He’s going to punish me if I stop?”

  Had I not been so desperate in that moment, I would have told the truth. I would have said, Oh, Hallie, who the hell knows about God or his intentions? I only know that I would do almost anything to possess your talent, so I’m willing to do almost anything to make sure that, at least in you, it is realized. That is a teacher’s obligation, is it not? A teacher shows her student how to do what she herself is not capable of, not courageous enough to pursue.

  Instead, because I was on a roll, I said, “It’s not the kind of punishment you’re thinking of. If you give up, your punishment will be to walk around in this world, a true musician without an instrument. A player without a place to play.”

  She stared at the ground, maybe at her feet, maybe at something I could not see.

  “You don’t want to give up, do you?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s part of my father, part of my mother. It’s the only thing I love.”

  “Well, there you go,” I said, feeling a tenuous victory.

  She sighed a long sigh and lifted the instrument to her chin. She raised the bow shoulder-high and looked at me again.

  “So anything is worth it?” she asked.

  “Anything,” I told her.

  As if I knew. As if I had a fucking clue.

  The money, somehow, did not give out. She kept coming in for lessons. Dorothy kept writing checks. The world kept turning; it didn’t end. And Hallie kept making beautiful sounds.

  I held on to my dreams, and to hers, locking them both away in a safe place. A place of isolation, devoid of conscience, devoid of regret. I pondered it in my heart.

  ALL CRIMINALS HAVE a deep need to confess.

  My father, the carpenter, confessed to me by taking me to see fires being put out.

  He loved fire the way I love music, and he could not keep it to himself. He told me how fires started. He told me how they were extinguished.

  All criminals confess to their crimes through their obsessions. Sex addicts pretend to be celibate. Thieves pretend to admire cops. Arsonists pretend to worship firefighters.

  There was a tradition in my house, in my lonely house in Virginia, with my two angry parents, who mostly hated life and refused to participate in it until the fire alarm went off. Then my father would wake me up, regardless of the hour, and load me into the car, and we would chase the fire.

  My father loved wood, and he equally and curiously loved the thing that could destroy it.

  It was up to him which entity he preferred over the other. Creation or destruction is always the choice. He worried over both. I sat still and waited to learn.

  I think, in some part of my brain, that I committed to birth rather than death. Which didn’t make me weak. It just made me, as I see it, a woman.

  Much later, when he saw me falling in love with an instrument, he wanted to say, Yes, I’ve known a love like that, quite apart from what you feel for another person. The love you feel for a force, for the evidence of God on earth. He loved fire, but he had no real place to worship it. He loved fire too much to kill it. Much as I ultimately loved music too much to kill it.

  We are, of course, destroyed by what we love.

  9

  WHO WAS THE GREATEST lyricist who ever lived?

  Patrick says, “Paul Simon.”

  Ernest says, “Steve Earle.”

  Clive says, “Bruce Springsteen. No, John Lennon. No, Elvis Costello. No, Bruce.”

  I say, “Woody Guthrie.”

  Franklin says, “Who the hell cares about lyrics?”

  It is a Wednesday night. We are closing up shop, and we’re all somewhat behind, since the holidays are closing in and the store has been very busy. I am cranky, mainly because it is December and I have no one to celebrate with, but also because, generally speaking, I need to get laid, and not getting laid really does make a woman cranky.

  Music almost does the trick, but eventually it doesn’t. Eventually the keeper of the music realizes that it isn’t quite the same as sex, and then the keeper of the music gets a little agitated, knowing that sex would actually help her sleep. But she doesn’t know where to get it. No, that’s not entirely true. She could get it from the twenty-eight-year-old bass player, but she doesn’t want to do that. She wants to get it from the store manager, the only real man in evidence, but he’s so obsessed with music, which he thinks is better than getting laid, that he can’t imagine the real thing anymore.

  The bottom line is this: life is about people interacting with one another. When people resist doing that, they go a little crazy. They start demanding more than can reasonably be expected from things like musical instruments or pets or houseplants or hobbies. Or students.

  The fact that none of us, the lost souls at McCoy’s, have any real receptacle for our physical passions explains why we hang around talking about who was the greatest lyricist. It’s fine to talk about those things. It’s really not fine to pretend that it matters in any kind of picture, let alone the big one.

  It is because of this essential spiritual deficiency that I became overly involved with Hallie. It is fair to say that her talent attracted me. It is fair to say that I wanted her to realize her potential and that I, as her teacher, felt obligated to do my best to make that happen. It is fine and admirable to want to do your job well. When you want your job to define you, fill up all your holes, make up for what is missing, justify your existence, and serve as a stand-in for your own lost ambitions . . . well, this is when you get into trouble.

  That is what happened when I made the decision to visit Hallie’s home.

  About a month after I saw the bruising on her wrists, a few weeks after she’d told me the money had run out, I noticed that she showed up at our lessons looking depressed and withdrawn. She practiced her scales without complaining. From a technical standpoint, she played all her exercises with perfect precision. But her heart was not in it. The music itself, which is connected to something much deeper than finger and wrist movements, had gone away. It was dying, if not dead. When you see that happen, you know that the student has reached the end of her journey. In most cases, you simply let the lack of interest run its course. The student starts showing up late, starts complaining, stops practicing, stops caring. I had always accepted that with my students. Maybe I would h
ave a couple of concerned discussions with the frustrated parents, but I didn’t have much to offer once the interest started bleeding out of the student. It was an exercise, telling everyone to stay the course. I really knew that the course was over, and I simply waited for it to become apparent to all concerned.

  I refused to do that with Hallie. When I saw her going through the motions, I decided to do a thing that I never did. I called Dorothy and asked if I could come out for a visit. She didn’t resist me. She was eager for it. It was clear to me that Hallie’s proficiency in violin was the only thing that kept her interested in this sullen child.

  The home was in a pleasant little pocket of Mar Vista, which literally means “view of the sea.” The sea was close enough to be a rumor in that part of town, but the community was tucked away behind the airport, closer to large warehouse stores and fast-food chains and enormous prefabricated apartment buildings. The ugliness of the landscape had earned this part of town the nickname Marred Vista. I kind of respected that.

  It was an ordinary weekday evening when I showed up at their house in my exhausted Honda. My backseat was full of sheet music and accoutrements for my violin, but I left the car unlocked, knowing that no one is in the business of stealing actual music. They only steal radios and CDs. They steal technology. I learned this when my car was broken into in front of my house. I had gotten lazy and left my violin in the backseat. The thieves left it and took, instead, forty dollars’ worth of CDs. I suppose it’s the good news that no one knows where music really comes from or how much it is really worth.

  Dorothy let me into the house, which was small but clean and well kept in the way that poor people’s houses are. Everything was cheap, but it gleamed. Just like the house I grew up in. I can remember my mother saying, “We don’t have much, but you can eat off it.” She thought that only rich people had the luxury of being dirty. She might have remembered that from when her family had money. The Millners’ house had been messier than ours, but the mess seemed grand somehow. Books scattered, clothes left on the floor, jewelry tossed on countertops. As if there were more where that came from. In a certain kind of poor people’s house, everything always matches. Those are the poor people with aspirations. Trying to step up and blend in with the class hovering just above them. Matching sets of furniture, and rugs that match the upholstery, and gewgaws and color schemes that tie everything together. As if symmetry begets beauty.