Body & Soul (4 page)

One night his mother surprised him by coming into the room. "No, no, no," she said. "It's supposed to go dada-dada dum dum." She loomed over his shoulder and raised her thick arm. "Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques," she sang in a clear, beautiful voice, "dormez-vous, dormez-vous." She pointed at the notes. "Dada-dada dum dum. Dada-dada dum dum." Claude was so stunned by the unexpected loveliness of her voice it took him a moment to understand what she was saying. "Dada-dada dum dum," she repeated. "You've got to count. Do you count?"

"Yes, but sometimes I—"

"When you count," she interrupted, "go one
and
two
and
three
and
four." She tapped the music with the accents. "One
and
two
and
three. Like that." She turned and left the room.

When he'd recovered from his surprise he turned to the music and began to count in the way she had suggested. It did make things easier, and he spent the next couple of hours going over old material that he had been playing, correctly, but without really knowing what he was doing. There was always the temptation to follow his ear, but now he was proving what his ear had told him, and he found it exhilarating.

Later, lying on his cot with the lights out, the music danced in his head. It was almost like listening to the radio, except better, because he could control the sounds—add strings or horns, or take them away. He could listen to two lines at once, put them in harmony, hear things backwards or upside down. He could create simple canons out of phrases from the
Blue Book
and hear them as clearly as if someone were in the room playing them. His mind was hot with music, and he did not think at all until it began to cool down.

Sliding into sleep, he pondered the mysterious beauty of her voice. It seemed to come from somewhere else and simply go through her, like the Mozart he heard through his cardboard radio. And how did she know about counting? It had been a useful tip, but it worried him. The music was his. He touched the
Blue Book
under his head. He didn't want her somehow taking it away from him. Under the covers his knees gradually worked their way up to his chest, and he fell asleep.

At Weisfeld's Music Store he put a dime on the counter and held up the
Blue Book.
"I'm finished," he said.

"It takes patience," Weisfeld said, looking up from some paperwork. "You should have told me. Show me where you got stuck."

"I didn't get stuck. I learned it all."

Weisfeld gently put down his pen. He took the dime and dropped it into the open drawer of the cash register. "I hope you will not take umbrage if I say that's a little hard to believe."

"What's'umbrage'?"

"Offense. I hope you don't take offense. I hope you don't get mad."

"Can I show you?"

Weisfeld got off his stool, came around the display case, and led the way to the piano. "Be my guest," he said with a wave.

Claude put the
Blue Book
up, opened to the first lesson, and laid his fingers on the keys. "I'm not completely sure, but I think I did everything right." He began to play, moving quickly through the early lessons and exercises, turning the pages with his left hand. When he
began to play with both hands Weisfeld stepped forward and turned pages for him. He watched Claude's fingers intently, occasionally taking a quick glance at the music. His face was expressionless. Somewhere in the middle of the book Claude asked, "Is it right? Am I doing it right?"

"Yes," Weisfeld said. "Keep going."

The last piece in the book was counterpoint, twenty-five bars from Bach's Two Part Inventions. Claude paused for a moment. The music had been hard to read. Tricky in terms of meter, and he'd played it wrong for a couple of days, feeling uneasy. Eventually he had forced himself to count everything out without touching the piano. One
and
two
and
three
and
four, until everything seemed to fall into place. Only then did he allow himself to play it, over and over again, and he hoped now that his counting had been correct. He set the beat in his head and began to play.

"Hold it, hold it," Weisfeld interrupted. "That's much too fast. Play it slower."

Again Claude silently counted, at a slower tempo, and began to play. It was harder, somehow, to keep track of everything at the slow beat, and about halfway through he made a mistake. He took his hands off the keys.

"I'll start again."

"No, no, keep going," Weisfeld said quickly. "When you're playing a piece straight through and know you've made a mistake, keep on going. Don't start all over again. You can correct it the next time." He tapped the page with a finger. "Start here and keep going no matter what happens."

Claude did as he was told and played through to the end without any errors that he was aware of. Claude closed the book and stared at it in the silence.

"Was it right?" he asked, turning.

Weisfeld seemed to be absorbed in thought, his round face tilted upward, staring at the wall.

"Was it right?" Claude asked again.

"Yes," Weisfeld answered.

The icy bell announced the arrival of a customer. Weisfeld muttered a foreign word under his breath, rubbed his cheeks with his hands, and turned.

"One minute," he said to Claude as he moved away.

Claude took the
Blue Book
from the piano and went back to the counter. In the front of the shop Weisfeld conferred with a large woman who pointed at something in the window display. After a few moments the woman left and Weisfeld returned. He stepped behind the counter and arranged the papers on which he had been working into a neat pile, papers covered with handwritten music.

"What's that?" Claude asked, peering.

"Parts to a string quartet I'm copying out for a customer."

"The notes are awfully small." Claude put the
Blue Book
on the counter.

"I owe you an apology," Weisfeld said, and stroked his mustache with thumb and middle finger. "I'm very surprised you could do that by yourself, and even more surprised you could do it so quickly. You must have worked hard."

"Oh, it was fun. I like it." Claude opened the
Blue Book
and flipped to the end of the first lesson. "You said I did it right."

"That's correct. You did."

"You see here at the end of every lesson there's a place where the teacher is supposed to sign it."

"Yes."

"I don't have a teacher, but you could sign, maybe."

"I'd be delighted." Weisfeld reached for his fountain pen.

"And there's a place for a star. It says you can get a blue star, a silver star, or a gold star. Have you got those? Then everything would be filled in, I mean it would all be finished and filled in." He looked up, and once again Weisfeld felt a slight frisson at the intensity of the brown eyes. "I know I made a mistake on the last one," Claude said.

Weisfeld paused for a moment. He pulled out a couple of drawers until he found the little boxes of paste-on stars, which he placed on the counter. A box each of blue, silver, and gold. "All right," he said, taking the book and signing the first lesson. He carefully pasted in a gold star where indicated. While Claude watched, he turned the pages and signed, reaching for a gold star each time. At the last lesson he signed and looked at the box. "You mentioned the mistake."

"It was hard to do it that slow."

"I understand." Weisfeld's hand hovered over the boxes. "Ordinarily it would be a silver star, but I'm making an exception because you did it without a teacher. You definitely deserve a gold star." He removed one from the box and pasted it in. He closed the book and handed it over. "Good work."

"Thank you," Claude said.

From his side of the counter Weisfeld reached down for a wooden stool, passed it high in the air to the boy, and motioned for him to be seated. Late afternoon light streamed through the front windows, amber shafts over the gleaming instruments. The entire shop trembled infinitesimally from the el train rushing past overhead. Weisfeld folded his hands on the counter.

"Tell me all about yourself," he said, his voice calm and even. "Take your time and tell me all about yourself."

And Claude did.

I
T WAS WINTER
and Claude was halfway through the John Thompson piano method. He emerged from the back room one morning and was surprised to find his mother sitting in the big chair, drinking a cup of coffee.

"What are you doing here?" He rubbed his eyes. There was something wrong with the light—a weak paleness in the room, an underwater feeling—and he glanced at the front window. A translucent, pearly gray effect, as if someone had painted it during the night.

"Two feet of snow, that's what I'm doing here," she said. "Have to dig out the cab Eat something and let's get going."

He fixed a bowl of cornflakes moving slowly. In general he slept very deeply, and was slow to wake up. The mild sense of unreality he felt this morning was no more than a variation on what he usually felt anyway. Midway through the cornflakes he spoke up.

"Why not just leave it?"

"That's what everybody else is doing. I put the chains on yesterday. Make money today."

He heard the low murmur of voices from the cathedral radio on the table beside her. He could tell from the position or the dial that it was tuned to WEAF.

"The rich are usually stingy," she said. "I don't know why, since they live off other people's labor." She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. The chair creaked as she put down her coffee cup. "But when cabs are scarce they,ll wave dollar bills in the air. Ha!"

"We don't have a shovel," he said.

"I got a couple from the boiler room." She put her hands on the armrests and pushed herself up. She wore high-top army-surplus boots, work pants, a sweater, and an Eisenhower jacket. Claude finished eating and went back into his room. He got dressed and then put on a second pair of pants, and a second shirt. He had two pairs of sneakers and chose the older pair. He buttoned his coat all the way to his neck.

He followed his mother through the front door, grabbed the short coal shovel leaning against the wall, and climbed the iron stairs in her footsteps. The air was hazy but very bright. He was struck by the almost perfect silence and the impossible whiteness of the snow where it lay unbroken against the buildings, or drifted up in smooth curves over the parked cars. When they got to the cab he stood for a moment, turning his head, taking it all in.

"This is wonderful," he said.

She fell to immediately with the long-handled shovel, working with a steady rhythm, throwing the snow in large chunks onto the plowed street. Claude stood on the sidewalk, uncertain where to begin.

"The front wheel, there. Right in front of you," she said, her breath visible in the air.

It was quite easy at first. The snow was light and powdery, and it was fun to get great piles of it on the blade of the shovel and toss them aside. But very quickly the shovel grew heavy, and he began to sweat. He kept on, aware that his mother was going three times faster. He would slip when he lost his stance and adjusted to another, his feet already so cold and wet he could barely feel them. As he paused to catch his breath, he watched her. Bend, dig, up, and toss. Bend, dig, up, and toss. Her big body was planted firmly, arms swinging evenly while behind her more and more snow spread out fan-like over the plowed part of the street. She moved from the front of the cab to the rear, steady, inexorable, as if she could continue forever. She did not look up until her side was clear. Her round cheeks were aglow and her eyes sparkled.

"Now the front," she said.

They were working directly across from each other in the space between the front of the cab and the next car. The contrast between her strength and his weakness was particularly obvious now, and as cold, wet, and miserable as he was, he began to get mad—furious at his puny body, at his helplessness, at the whole situation. Disregarding
his dry mouth and his pounding heart he worked furiously, hissing through his clenched teeth, trying to match her rhythm even though the shaft of the shovel turned in his hands. She seemed to notice nothing. At the end, their blades clanking together, his feet went out from under him and he fell into the snow. He scrambled up quickly, numb with shame.

"That ought to do it." She swept the hood with the handle of the shovel and cleared the windshield with her forearm. She opened the door, got behind the wheel, and after a couple of tries, started the engine.

"C'mere!" she shouted.

He came around to the driver's side.

"Just keep your foot on the accelerator while it warms up." She got out and he got in, the engine almost dying in the process. He revved it way up. "Not so hard," she said. "Not so hard!" He let up on the gas and she went back to the stairs and down to the apartment with the shovels.

He sat on the edge of the seat, his toe on the accelerator and his hands on the wheel. The cab smelled musty, something like the odor from the subway grate. Behind him, the back of the seat was bowed, pushed back as if from some enormous blow. The cumulative effect of the weight of her body had molded it thus.

She reappeared with her clipboard and change maker, and they switched places once again. As he stepped away, she put the cab into gear, rocked it a couple of times, lurched out into the street, and kept on going. She rode off in a cloud of exhaust.

He got sick that afternoon. First nausea and a feeling of weakness. He was too dizzy to sit at the piano, his arms and hands like a rag doll's—a sensation so novel it might have been interesting if he hadn't been preoccupied with vomiting into the toilet bowl—and he finally took to his bed. For several hours he fluttered between sleep and wakefulness, his mind drifting in and out of self-awareness, until the fever struck with the suddenness of a thunderclap. Alternating chills and sweats took him over as he turned and twisted in the cot, now throwing the covers off, now pulling them up. The light bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling seemed too bright, and the whole room with its familiar objects was both innocuous and weirdly threatening. The chair with the radio was clearly the chair with the radio, but as he
stared at it he felt the sensation of someone looking at a fantastic prehistoric bird about to strike. The piano was the piano, but it was also the three-dimensional projection of an unseen four-dimensional torture machine of unimaginable complexity and depth, capable of sucking him right out of the cot into its maw. Everywhere he looked something was wrong. A water glass seemed enormous, much too big, or then too small, or paradoxically too big and too small at the same time. Everything was split somehow, everything doubled into its opposite. He passed out, his body rigid as a board.