by Barbara Hall
“Tell me again.”
“I play them all,” he says quietly. As if he wants it to remain a secret.
“What do you mean?” I ask, feeling a little desperate.
“Just that, Pearl. I hear them all, I play them all. I can pick up any instrument and play it. I don’t know why or how. I’ve never had a lesson. I look at musical notation, and it makes sense to me. It’s just math. Easy math, at that. In fact, music was one of the earliest scientific experiments— the realization that the length of a string determines its pitch. As far as the sounds are concerned, they are just waves, you know? They exist in certain frequencies, on certain planes. They are already out there. All you do on your violin is pull the waves out of the air and transform them from one dimension to another.”
As Patrick is saying this, I’ve noticed that his strange lisp has gone away. He is speaking normally.
I say, “I think I do more than that when I play the violin.”
“Of course you think so. But you’re wrong. It’s not magic. It’s science.”
I have no argument, so he goes on speaking. He says, “In quantum physics, there is this notion— this belief, I suppose— that we are all connected by a kind of ether. We’re all in the same soup. There is a finite amount of energy on earth. We tap into it or we reject it. If you choose to reject it, you’re like a free radical, bouncing off the walls, dividing and subdividing at will, creating illness and chaos. But if you accept the ether, if you accept that energy is finite, while still holding the paradoxical belief that space itself is infinite, then you are in striking distance of the truth. You can get a glimpse of the keys to the kingdom. You can’t own the keys to the kingdom, but knowing they exist is almost the same. Do you understand?”
I say, “Wait a minute. Does the physics prove chaos or does it prove order?”
“It suggests both.”
“It can’t be both, Patrick. You have to pick.”
“We can’t prove either one. Einstein set out to prove the unified field theory. Order. His efforts to prove it resulted in the atom bomb. Chaos.”
“All that means is that the answer hasn’t been found. It doesn’t mean there’s no answer.”
He looks at me, raising his chin in an authoritative gesture. “You tell me. Does your life have meaning?”
“That’s a horrible question.”
“Why? Don’t you ever ask yourself that?”
“Sure.”
“And the answer is?”
“Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.”
“No. All or nothing. Now you have to pick.”
I can’t pick. I’m too drunk. “Can’t we just talk about the weather?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says, smiling. “That’s physics, too.”
PATRICK TAKES ME BACK to my trailer. I am sitting close to the door in his car, a Volkswagen something, and I am staring out the window, wondering how I ended up here. I feel as if I’ve been abducted by an alien and taken to a place in another dimension. Tomorrow, when I tell people about this, they won’t believe it. And Patrick will deny it.
Like Clive and Franklin, he has no real reaction to the fact that I live here. He walks me to the door. I fumble with my keys and open it. I wait for him to follow me in, but he doesn’t.
I suppose I am feeling brave, because not long ago I had sex with a twenty-eight-year-old. Or maybe I am just feeling drunk, which I am. But I realize, standing there with Patrick, that it is going to be easy to have sex with him, because once you start, what’s to stop you? Once you prove that sex has no real meaning, can’t you just take it from anywhere? Isn’t it all the same—a level playing field?
“Come in for a drink,” I say.
He smiles. “I don’t want a drink. Thanks.”
“But can’t you just . . . come in?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t want to do that.”
“Why?” I ask defiantly. I can feel an anger bubbling up inside me, and it gives me comfort, as if I’m being reminded of who I am.
Patrick leans against the doorframe, looking quite harmless with his ponytail and his long, girly eyelashes. He says, “You’re asking me to sleep with you.”
“I’m not asking. I’m just saying, why don’t you come in?”
He laughs because he knows there’s no difference.
He is going to deny me, and because of this, I suddenly find him ridiculously attractive. I never noticed how straight his posture is, or how square his jaw, or how clean and flawless his skin. I never noticed that he has muscles and big hands.
Maybe that’s why he’s annoyed with me. Because I never noticed.
He doesn’t move. He’s waiting for me to say something.
I say, “Look, here we are, both alone on Christmas Eve. What difference does it make? Where’s the harm in it?”
Staring at me with his clear blue eyes, not a hint of anything in them, like rancor or suspicion or interest, he says, “I’m not sure I like you.”
This shocks me. I cannot speak for a second, and yet he waits. It would have been a perfect exit line, and yet he waits.
I say, “What do you mean, you don’t like me? We just spent the evening together. We work together.” When he has no reaction to this, I become a little desperate. I say, “Who are you kidding? I see the way you look at me.”
“When?” he asks.
“At the shop,” I answer.
“Oh, well. That’s just admiration.”
“Admiration?”
“Or maybe attraction?”
“You’re attracted to me, you admire me, but you don’t like me?”
“That happens,” he says.
And I know it’s true, so I want to say, in my defense, or in the defense of something abstract, some truism or philosophy, Since when does a man have to like a woman to sleep with her?
But I don’t say that because I am far too hung up on this notion of not being liked by him.
So I say, “You’re telling me that . . . what? I’m not likable?”
“Maybe,” he admits.
“What does it take?” I ask, hearing my voice rising an octave. “How does a person become likable?”
Now he straightens up, backing down my steps in the dark.
He thinks about it for what feels like a full minute.
“A person extends herself,” he says.
“What? I’m not extended?”
“Good night, Pearl,” he says, and walks toward his car.
“I extend myself all the time,” I say weakly after him.
He gets into his car and slams the door. I watch the car backing out of the trailer park. I yell out, “At least I know what instrument I play!”
I watch his red taillights, still yelling after him: “Pick an instrument already, Patrick! Pick one and play it!”
There is nothing left but the dull sound of his car retreating, and the dust settling in front of my trailer, like tainted snow.
13
I TURNED ON HALLIE.
It hurts to admit it.
After the pregnancy, I turned on her.
I wasn’t so obvious about it at first. It took the form of being hypercritical of her playing. She was hooked into the instrument by then, so I knew I could get away with it. Whenever she pointed out that I was being too hard on her, I fell back on the weak and tired explanation that I expected more from her. I did expect more from her. But not for her. I expected more for me. I was putting in the time. I was expending the energy. I wanted something back.
Then she started to miss some lessons. Not often, but it happened. It happens with all students. They have other events at school, or they have tests to study for, or they have family occasions. I usually make allowances. I made allowances for Hallie, too, in that I didn’t fire her. But whenever she missed a lesson, I made her pay.
I liked making her pay. I was angry.
We fought often. I always won. She would try to tell me that it was hard getting time to play at her house, which I
knew perfectly well it must be, but I said, “Look, if you want to be great, you can’t keep throwing excuses at me.” So she stopped throwing the excuses. Her heart was less and less in it. The music was leaking out of her, like air from a worn tire.
I was killing her. I had the power to do that. I felt the way my father must have felt, watching the flames engulf the only thing that I loved. It was captivating. The sense of power created a feeling of delirium. She needed me, but she did not respect me, so I could make her pay.
God, I hope that wasn’t how it went, but I think it was. We could no longer connect. Once, when she was playing particularly well, she paused, put her instrument aside, and said, “Do you ever think of adopting anyone?”
I knew she meant herself.
I said, “I live alone. I don’t have any money.”
“So the answer is no.”
I looked at her. She seemed so small, even in her dangerous black clothes, even with her eyebrow stud.
“Even if I were willing, I don’t have any legal grounds.”
“It’s just bad there,” she said to me, in a rare moment of confession. She usually kept things to herself. And I didn’t mind. Part of me, the selfish part, didn’t want to hear about her dire circumstances. I had seen them for myself. It was too painful to contemplate.
On the other hand, I told myself, it wasn’t that bad. People had endured worse, I figured. And Hallie had talent, which was something she could lean on in times of distress. Some kids have nothing at all to hope for.
I said, “Hallie, we all have a cross to bear. My parents didn’t want me, either. And they were my real parents. Your decision to move on and succeed is up to you. You can’t ride the wave of your bad fortune forever.”
She had no reaction to that. She just picked up her instrument and started playing again.
Meanwhile, I felt terrible about the way I was treating her. I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t recover from the perceived slight I had felt. So the kid got herself knocked up. Was she the first fourteen-year-old to do that? And was I responsible for it? Was I her surrogate mother?
I did extend myself to her. No matter what Patrick says, I am capable of extending myself. I tried to help her. She rejected my wisdom and my guidance. She just wanted the quick fix. This was why I resented her.
My relationship with her was becoming torturous. I dreaded her lessons and looked forward to them; I loved her and despised her. We were entwined in some disturbing paradox, and it was in our sessions that the darkness and the light met in the middle and blotted each other out.
Like fire on fire.
It was the first week in September, a little less than a year after we’d met, when everything came to a head.
The Santa Ana winds were blowing, which made the air around us unseasonably hot and dry. The Santa Anas were known as the devil winds. Raymond Chandler wrote about them. He claimed they caused people to kill one another. Everyone grew restless; the air was so dry and full of static, you had the sense that one lone match could set the world ablaze.
My allergies were acting up, and I was cranky. Hallie was cranky, too. We attempted the first piece of sheet music, and when she messed it up, I told her to play the scales. She did it, almost out of habit. Her right wrist was stiff, and she was screeching the notes, which hurt my ears. I grabbed her wrist to loosen it, but she must have thought I was going to hit her, so she threw down the instrument and backed into a corner, screaming, “Leave me alone!”
Her voice must have been exceptionally loud, because Franklin tapped on the door and said, “Everything all right in there?”
I cracked it and said, “Everything is fine.”
He raised an eyebrow at me, and I smiled. He went away.
After I closed the door, I turned back to Hallie and said, “What is wrong with you?”
She stood up straight, looked me in the eye, and said, “I want to quit.”
I had been waiting for those words. I had been expecting them, maybe even forcing them. Here they were, and I had no idea what to do with them.
The Santa Anas were howling. A window blew open and banged hard against the wall. Hallie jumped and shrank deeper into herself and into her corner. I crossed the room and closed the window, suddenly feeling calm and cold. It was only wind. It was only a child. It was only music.
I walked back toward her without speaking. I sat down in my metal folding chair and said, “Well, what are we going to do about that?”
She shrugged and embarked on biting her hangnails.
“I can’t stop you, of course,” I said.
She remained silent.
“I think you’d be throwing away an immense amount of talent.”
“What do you care?” she responded.
“I hate to see talent go to waste.”
“So if I weren’t talented, you wouldn’t care?” she said. “If I weren’t talented, you’d be fine with seeing me go to waste?”
I wasn’t sure how to reply. I hadn’t thought about it. But I took a moment to do just that, and it worried me when I realized it might actually be true. I had never seen Hallie as a person apart from her talent. It was possible I had never truly cared about her.
I shook my head, looking at the stained carpet. No, that couldn’t be the case. I had other talented kids. Rosamund, for example. She was probably just as talented and had more time to develop the talent. She had an equally disturbed home life, on an entirely different scale, but I didn’t spend much free time thinking about her. Hallie filled my thoughts all the time. I even dreamed about her. I was connected to her in a way that frightened me. But the incident with the pregnancy had caused me to distance myself. I was afraid of getting hurt.
And that is pathetic, I remember thinking. You are protecting yourself from getting involved with a child. As if that kind of hurt could equal what you felt when Mark left. As if there were no hierarchy of pain.
I felt humbled in that moment, so I looked up at her and said, “I just think you should keep playing, Hallie.”
Some element of defiance, or hope, then leaked out of her face, and she walked back to her chair and sat down. She looked at her knees; one of them was peeking out of a hole in her jeans.
“I won’t quit playing,” she said. “But I don’t want to take lessons from you anymore.”
Not long before Mark left me for Stephanie, he stopped having sex with me. I didn’t know about Stephanie then. I thought I was doing something wrong. So I tried to be sexy. I made trips to Victoria’s Secret. I had more black lace than a Portuguese widow. One night I told Mark I was going to bed, and that I would wait up for him. This was our code. I put on something from the call-girl collection and waited. An hour went by. I dozed off and woke up again. I got up to see what Mark was doing, and I found him in the den, watching a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on TV. Not so much watching it as staring blankly. He was avoiding coming to bed. He was avoiding having sex with me. And I realized in that moment, Oh, it’s not that he doesn’t want me. It’s that he doesn’t want me.
Hallie still wanted music. She just didn’t want it from me.
Anger crept up from wherever it lived inside me and settled in my face. I was sure it was bright red. I was sure Hallie could see it.
“Well, then you should go find another teacher,” I said.
She nodded and started packing up her instrument.
“I don’t know where you’re going to find someone,” I said.
“Lots of people teach violin.”
“Not for these prices,” I told her. “McCoy’s is as cheap as you’ll find. I’m the best you can get for this money.”
She shrugged. “So I’ll pay more.”
“You will?”
“Yeah.”
“Your father doesn’t even want to pay my fee.”
She said nothing.
“You had to fight to keep coming here. Do you really think they are going to go to the trouble of finding another teacher, and pay more?”
&
nbsp; “I’ll get him to pay,” she said.
“How?” I asked, feeling mean.
“I just will.”
She grabbed her violin case and walked out. I should have left it at that. I should have stayed in the musty little room and waited for my next student. But I couldn’t. I followed her.
She had stormed out of McCoy’s without warning her mother. Dorothy had remained behind, no doubt engaging Ernest or Franklin in some discussion of guitars or money. Hallie was hurrying down the sidewalk, the hot wind whipping through her short black hair. Trash was gusting around in the gutters. There was an eerie sort of moan on the street. It felt like the end of the world.
“Hallie, be reasonable,” I said. “You won’t get him to pay. If you leave me, music will be over for you.”
“I’ll get him to pay,” she said, not looking back at me.
“How?”
“I know how.”
“What will you do? Say please? He doesn’t like music.”
It was a cheap shot, but I felt desperate. She stopped and turned to me, clutching her violin case next to her chest.
“Yeah, but he likes me,” she said.
The world around us suddenly turned silent. Or maybe it just turned silent for me. I couldn’t hear the cars on Pico. I couldn’t hear the wind. My ears just quit working, which is what happens, I’m told, when you hear something you don’t want to hear.
She said, “We have a deal, him and me.”
“Hallie,” I said quietly. Or I thought I said it. I could no longer hear my own voice. All I could hear was the relentless devil wind, like a thousand wailing souls in purgatory.
“You’re the one who said it was worth anything,” she reminded me.
And she left me with that to think about for a while. Days, months, or the rest of my life.
It was easy, really, what came next. I wondered why I had made it so hard.
From Franklin’s office I called Leah at work and asked for that name. The name of the social worker. She said, “Are you sure?” and I was sure.
I called the social worker. She listened. She asked questions. She said they would look into it.
I hung up the phone and I felt it rise up, terrible and real, that feeling I’d had when I saw the violin burning on the leaves and I knew something deep inside me had changed and it would take a long time to know what.
