The Morels Read online

  From the exit at 116th and Broadway it’s a six-block walk. We fan out, trudging our instruments past the gated Ivy League community, the dozen or so of us on a dozen separate journeys up this hill; after all, it’s not as though we’re friends. We recognize one another: co-principals in a chamber ensemble or the person whose ear-training homework you might once have copied from. We nod, say hey—once a week isn’t enough to learn names. This isn’t summer camp; there are no blood-sworn bonds. We dress differently here, in our holiday best, button-down collars, black lace-up shoes, as though we are attending the presence of God.

  The conservatory occupies two square blocks, and during the week it is home to grown-ups from around the world who possess the dedication to roam its hallowed halls but not the connections to get them into Julliard, our city rival; Juilliard students will tell you it is merely skill they lack. Either way, on Saturdays the place is ours. In its arched ceilings and marble staircases is the grandeur of a Gothic boarding school. I try always to arrive at least an hour before my first class: winter months I am encumbered with as many as twenty pounds of stuff, and the lockers along the southern corridor are only for the college students; if I don’t want to be stuck carting this load from class to class, I’ll need to find someplace to stow it.

  On the second and third floors, a hive of windowless chambers. The plum carpeting, threadbare and pocked with cigarette burns, gives off the salty reek of an old overcoat. It’s a ghostly cacophony here—looped phrases of familiar pieces, muffled arpeggios, down the hall a teenage mezzo calling me! me! me! me! me! A declaration of self among all this disembodied noise. I am looking for an empty room. The place is packed. I should have come earlier; today is, after all, Competition Day.

  The first Saturday in March, same weekend as the Oscars, it is the public face to all the private striving that goes on behind these closed doors. The Concerto Competition is juried by six members of the senior faculty and chaired by Mr. Strasser, conductor of our top-tier symphony. Auditions are held on the same stage on which the winner will perform. To win is to become a celebrity, implicitly declared the school’s finest musician, and debut as featured soloist in the Spring Concert, a sold-out audience of parents and professionals looking for the latest talent.

  My cello teacher harbored no ambitions for me in this arena, but for three years my piano teacher has urged me to learn a concerto; until now I’ve refused. I already knew I wasn’t the school’s finest player; I didn’t need a panel of judges confirming it publicly. But this fall, the fall of my sophomore year, I have been learning Liszt’s Totentanz, a showy one-movement fantasia for piano and orchestra. I picked it up one afternoon after hearing it on the radio. It’s too hard for me; getting my performance to tempo is like trying to push a stalled truck uphill, and I have yet to run through the piece from memory without having to stop and retrace my steps; undoubtedly, I will lose the competition, but commanding that dark whirlwind, an entire battalion of players in support, with a packed house bearing witness to my greatness: it is an image too tempting not to pursue.

  I find an empty room with a piano on its last legs. Its candle board has been scarred by several generations of frustrated hands, its keys drummed on so often and continuously that there are divots in the ivory, some worn through to the wooden key block. I take off my coat and pace the room. My audition is at ten forty-five. I have some time yet. After a vertiginous, heart-pounding run through the piece, I head off to visit my piano teacher, making sure on my way out to set my coat conspicuously on the piano bench and open several scores on the stand so that anyone peering in will have the impression of my imminent return. It will be necessary, however, to visit my stuff frequently, today of all days, or I might come back to find it in a pile in the hall.

  On my way from the room I pass a kid I’ve gotten to know this semester—gangly, hands swinging at his sides—lost in thought.

  Arthur, I say as our paths cross.

  Hey, Arthur says. You go yet?

  Not yet. You?

  Heading down now.

  Earlier that year up in the conservatory library. Trying to find a willing accomplice from whom to copy ear-training homework. Class in an hour. Arthur, set up at a table alone. In front of him a spread of pages. I asked him what he was doing.

  Writing, he said.

  I examined the pages, which were peppered with eraser debris. A handwritten score to some sort of chamber piece, at least a dozen parts, all marked out in a careful, childlike hand.

  Composing? But you’re at the library. You need a piano, don’t you?

  I have absolute pitch, he said, so no. I don’t need a piano. Besides, it’s so noisy down there I can hardly think.

  Ear training must be a piece of cake for you then.

  You could say that.

  Got the homework handy, by any chance?

  After my encounter with Arthur in the library, I began noticing him around. He played violin, though I only knew this from the case he toted and the callus on his neck; if we’d shared billing in any of the monthly group recitals, I wasn’t aware. He rode the subway, too, and on the few mornings I’d seen him, he was already aboard, which I assumed meant he lived on Staten Island: the subway line terminated at Battery Park, where the ferry docked on the Manhattan side. He was, like me here, something of a loner, which led me to think of him as an only child of divorced parents. On a nice day, I’d see him on the front steps or during the winter cross-legged in the hallway, reading some old paperback. When looking for a free room, I’d occasionally stumble in on someone I knew in the throes of a particularly passionate phrase; practice is a private activity, and having someone witness it an odd sort of embarrassment, not unlike walking in on someone, pants down, in a bathroom stall. I had never walked in on Mr. Too Good for a Piano.

  This semester I’d signed up for a late-afternoon elective: Compositional Technique. Something about that image of the young composer in the library, laboring over his handcrafted score; it was impressive, and around here—among an entire schoolful of child musicians who were younger and more advanced than me—I longed to be someone impressive. Maybe this would help. I could cultivate a scarf, a pencil behind the ear. There were fewer than a dozen of us in this class, including Arthur.

  Every week our teacher brought under his arm a small stack of records. After selecting one and placing it onto the turntable, he turned up the volume so high that the pops between tracks could be felt as thuds in the rib cage: a drumbeat to usher in the agony of the Postwar Era. He called these listening sessions ear calisthenics. We were stretching our ears, he said. Listening to each piece at full volume was intended to wake us up. Tonality’s a drug, he shouted over the music, that lulls you into a complacent stupor! Each piece was a new shock to the system. Each had the quality of spectacle.

  Ligeti: the white-knuckle dissonance of a horror movie.

  Xenakis: musical instruments performing roadwork construction.

  Penderecki: the chaos of an emergency room after a nuclear blast.

  Arthur was the only one here who seemed genuinely engaged, who didn’t wince through the pieces or laugh at the more over-the-top pratfalls of sound, who didn’t look every week as though he’d signed up for the wrong class. Arthur listened rapt, eyes closed, flaring his nostrils as though he were trying to pick up the music’s scent. His face recorded the subtlest changes in tone—now hopeful, now restless, now burning with rage!—and through his expressions it seemed clear he got the music in a way that the rest of us did not. Although I thought he was a brownnosing phony, another part of me believed in his understanding enough to take cues for what I should be hearing in these impenetrable walls of sound.

  We were given writing assignments that came out less like music than the solution to a puzzle: Compose a piano étude that will pose a significant challenge to the performer—with only four notes. If one half of the class was spent at the turntable, the other half was spent around the class upright, the teacher sight-reading our piece
s unless we decided to volunteer. As a result of the tight constraints, everyone’s assignments sounded interchangeably similar. After one was performed, Arthur was often first to comment, often in the form of a question: Is that phrase even possible on the clarinet? Won’t that be lost if you give it to the viola? Questions addressed to the student but seemed meant for the teacher. This confusion often provoked a standoff, a kind of stumped silence that grew hostile and that the teacher finally had to break by rephrasing Arthur’s question to all of us: Well? Who can tell me if this note is playable on a B-flat clarinet? I imagined that the teacher found Arthur as irritating as the rest of us did. When Arthur spoke, we gave each other looks. What is this guy’s problem?

  On my morning subway ride uptown the week before the Concerto Competition, I was jolted awake by Arthur, suddenly beside me. Well, he said, what did you think about it? As if resuming some conversation momentarily interrupted. How long had he been here? Had he come over from another seat, or had he been sitting here all along?

  I assumed he was referring to the recording we had listened to the week prior, one of the more outrageous experiments from the sixties.

  A bootleg tape of the performance:

  Under the surf-like ambient noise, a man’s voice murmuring, the creaking of someone walking around on a stage, an incoherent shout, a lull into which comes some coughing, the audience shifting in their seats—then piano sounds, pounding note clusters (fists on keys?), followed by the tinkling refrain of a familiar piece (Schubert?)—pause—a tremendous clap! (the piano’s lid being dropped)—the reverberations of piano strings—then a shuffle, grunting, some creaking, several gasps (the audience), shouts (Hey! What!)—and a thunderous crash that overloads the microphone. Stop tape.

  The teacher passed around an oversize mimeographed “score” afterward, which was merely a sheet of paper with a list of instructions:

  Recite the Declaration of Independence;

  Play “incredulously”;

  Picture Dresden after the bombing;

  Perform the first piece that comes to mind;

  Roll the piano off the stage.

  Interestingly, those students who had been quick to guffaw at the slightest musical provocation sat stony; the score passing hands might as well have been a crime-scene photo. It was Arthur who laughed. At the sound of the piano crashing, he whooped with laughter. He laughed for so long that he got out of breath and had to wipe his eyes. It was the sound of someone coming unhinged. And when the score came around to him, it sent him on another peal. Even our teacher looked concerned.

  But sitting beside me now, he tried to explain. The guy pushed the piano off the stage! I mean, come on: boom! The audience, jumping out of the seats? Watch it, this guy’s nuts! And the stage manager: You fool, do you have any idea how much that Bösendorfer is worth? The performer: But it was in the score! The composer: I meant offstage, not off the stage! Can’t you just picture it?

  The problem was, I could picture it: the growing alarm, the performer’s pounding fists, the incoherent bits of schoolboy lessons. You don’t know how far this guy is going to go. Someone whispers, We should get out of here. Something dangerous about his prowl about the stage. You yourself want to leave—your nape hairs are tingling—but you’re fighting with your impulse not to be rude. And then he’s rolling that piano toward the edge, toward you, and you’re thinking all the way up to the moment it topples off: He’s bluffing. He won’t do it. And as loud as the recording seemed, to be there in person for the crash, two thousand pounds of hardwood and iron? And not just any hunk of furniture: a piano, the very embodiment of grace. To see it toppled like that. It must have been ghastly, like watching an elephant felled.

  Exactly! Arthur said. Great art should be dangerous. It should make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up! We neuter music the way we listen to it, culturing it up. It’s polite chitchat, it’s the required two encores, then off for cocktails where a string quartet plays quote ‘classics’ end quote in the background. Next time you’re at a recital look around at your neighbor. Reading the program, dozing off, anything but actually listening! There but not really there. He’s wondering how many more movements before he can clap, how many minutes before intermission. Biding time between breaks in the music. This is what’s become of the art we practice: an excuse to be seen, a cultural equivalent to eating your spinach. Now, put that same man in the audience of that piano recital we listened to last week and woo-boy! You can bet he’s going to sit up and listen.

  Since our introduction at the library, my interactions with Arthur had been marginal, brief. This kind of talk was new.

  Odd thing I noticed: Arthur’s hands were dirty. Green-black under the nails, grime in the crevices of his fingers. And although his clothes seemed fresh enough—hair fluffy from a morning washing—he gave off the sharp whiff of cat pee. He spoke as though he weren’t used to speaking his thoughts out loud. And in the strange paradox of the very shy, he had a candor that bordered on rude.

  But is it worth listening to, I said. That’s the question. I’d rather be asleep through a Brahms piano sonata than awake for a piano being rolled off the stage. I mean, what is that? It’s nothing.

  What’s the purpose of music?

  You’re asking me?

  I’m asking you to think about it. To edify? To please?

  To cause a shiver of pleasure.

  To cause an emotional response, right. To evoke a mood. Nobody’s arguing that this piece is in the same league as a Brahms sonata, as quote ‘good’ end quote. You give people a choice of recital fare, and they choose Brahms, no question. But which program in the end will fulfill these most basic of musical goals? The one you end up sleeping through or the one that causes you to nearly wet your pants as you run blindly for the exit?

  Things I find out about Arthur on our ride up: parents not divorced, not living in Staten Island. I was also technically wrong about his being an only child—he had two older half siblings, his father’s by another marriage.

  Where did he go to school, I wondered.

  No school, he said. The plus side of eccentric parents. He chuckled. The homeschool advantage, you might call it.

  So your parents are your teachers?

  Not really.

  I emerged with Arthur from the station into the crisp light of a New York winter morning feeling as though we had sorted out something essential on this ride, untangled some mystery about music, about our futures. Arthur’s violin case, held by its side handle, swung in time to his step. He had a bounding gait that sprung from the balls of his sneakered feet and left me scrambling to keep up, cello’s wide hip thumping my side, a reluctant partner in a three-legged race.

  Don’t you need to take the Regents, I asked. Or, I don’t know, a diploma?

  For what?

  You’re not planning on going to college?

  You mean conservatory? Do you think they care about SAT scores or whether I failed biology? Have you seen the guys who take over our practice rooms at the end of the day? Half of them don’t speak a word of English. The only thing the admissions committee cares about? He holds out his violin case and shakes it. Many of the serious string players carried their instruments around in fancy bulletproof luggage. Not Arthur. Arthur’s case was standard issue: violin shaped, leatherette coming up in places. The kind of case that makes you think machine gun.

  Besides, he says, once I win this competition, I’ll be a shoo-in for wherever.

  What are you playing?

  Haven’t decided yet.

  But the competition’s next week!

  I leave my piano teacher’s room feeling short of breath and make the long slow march to the auditorium with five minutes to spare. Although I managed to get through the piece for my teacher without stopping, however timidly, I am not confident that I’ll be able to repeat the success up there in front of the judges. Many instructors have canceled class today, and in the hallways there is a feeling of celebration. It must be the s
urplus adrenaline in the air. On the tongue the taste of ozone and Band-Aids.

  The back doors to the auditorium are open. I take a seat in the last row, in the shadow of the overhang. Some are picnicking, others napping or fingering their instruments. To one side of me is Diane Flagello’s studio, her half-dozen students leaning in for a whispered pep talk. To the other side of me a girl with a shock of red hair is on the brink of hyperventilating. Her mother is rubbing her back and offering her a juice box. Onstage, a violinist works his way through a Mozart violin concerto. His playing is polite, respectable; you could take it home to meet your parents. I have left my score with my teacher as a way of insisting that I’ve memorized this piece, as a way perhaps of persuading myself into a certain degree of courage, but I see right away what a foolish move this is. I feel naked without my score. Others are clutching theirs like prayer books, eyes closed, moving their lips while rocking back and forth in their seats. I consider going back to my teacher’s studio but am stopped by the sound of my name being stage-whispered.

  It’s a girl in my teacher’s studio whose name I forget. She scoots into an empty seat beside me and says, Have you gone yet? Oh, I can tell you haven’t. She’s a year younger than me, chubby, Chinese American. You look nervous, she says. So am I. Look at my hands, they’re actually shaking. And damp—feel.

  Two years ago, this girl and I kissed. That’s the wrong word. Made out is what we did. I was thirteen. We were, for some reason, in an empty classroom on the top floor. It was late afternoon, and most everyone had cleared the building. She asked me to be her audience while she played through a recital program she was due to perform the following afternoon at her church. Something like that. She played it through, and afterward we sat together, improvising clunky duets at the classroom upright. The dust-glittery light through the window went amber, and then it went violet, and then we were sitting in the dark. And as the quality of light changed, so did the atmosphere. The notion of this person next to me as a member of the opposite sex hit me like a revelation. We stopped talking. I turned, slowly, so as not to break whatever this absence of light had cast, and found the wide outline of her upturned face. She was chewing mint gum, and I tasted that contradiction—warm tongue and cool mint—for hours afterward.