Middle C (11 page)

Joey was not so pleased with himself or his place. He was uneasy with everybody but Mr. Hirk, who had also made him uncomfortable at first. Perhaps it was because Joey fancied himself an Austrian of aristocratic lineage. Or because he began a grade behind and never got over the shame, though the normalcy of it all was explained to him countless times—wartime risks, irregularity of life, uprootedness of family, loss of father, poverty, the rest of it. The fact remained that he had been put back and was regarded as a stupe on that account. What he didn’t like was standing out, being noticed, for whatever reason. He felt endangered by attention. During the rest of his schoolboy days he settled for Cs and gradually found a spot in the back row.

From the back row he never asked a question or answered one, if he could help it. He never took chances, shuffled his feet, whispered or passed notes, or surreptitiously read an illicit book while it hid inside the assigned one. He dressed as plainly as possible, stayed awake in study hall, didn’t join, date, suck up, or hang around. He was resolutely friendly but had no chums. He owned nothing so valuable he felt responsible for it.

With Mr. Hirk out of the picture, Joey had no piano to play and no place to practice; however, he remembered that there was an old upright in his former grade school gym, so he went there after classes had let out, walked boldly in—such was the laxity of that peaceful place and those peaceful times—and played honky-tonks with its sticky keys. The tunes echoed from the vast expanse of wooden floor as though it were a sounding board. He found he could reproduce the little marches his fifth grade had been made to parade to, so he began with those, and no one still left in the building minded; perhaps the janitor thought Joey was working on a project or preparing for a pageant … as, it would turn out, he was.

Joey would find that, in America, at least, if you turned out a tune when you played the piano, then you played the piano; the skill was given you as easily as a second cup; appearances were better than reality; and the sight of someone slightly inept was immensely reassuring to those woefully without ability. As had to happen, teachers remaining after hours for a meeting heard the racket and a few came to the gym door to investigate. Joey was playing the “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” something they recognized, so they went away again without a question. However, the teacher, into whose hands and hoarse voice the children’s instruction in music had fallen, sought Joey out and asked him to play a few times after school for ceremonies and such things. Joey said he would be happy to, on one occasion playing his own variations on “Three Blind Mice” to childish laughter and parental applause.

In this way Joey learned that music is an enemy of isolation. People gather for it as if it could not be heard without help; it certainly could not be enjoyed without all those whom it employed: the place, the performer, the piano, the passive rows of people in chairs, devoted to their own silence, all ears.

The music teacher—who often rented instruments for this or that child in her charge from a sheet-music and record store in town that had such a sideline—recommended Joey when she learned that a clerk-of-all-work was needed there, and so, after relatives and friends of the owners were found to be uninterested or unavailable, Joey was approached. Through such a turn of fortune, Joey found himself with a real piano to play on and in his mother’s grateful good graces at the same time. He began working after school and on weekends, but when he graduated he was taken on full-time at the High Note, so named because it was on High Street, a street so named because it lay across the edge of a ridge and looked down on Main, though only by a little. Through two small bleary windows at the rear of the shop Joey could look out over a small valley toward the low hills on which Whittlebauer College was perched, since every college in Ohio, maybe every college ever built, had to have a hill and be said to be “on the hill” and therefore come to be called, not the college, but the Hill. In short, he could see from High to Hill, although he could not know then that it would be his life’s ironic trajectory.

Who was it? ah yes, the father of Marcella Sembrich. That gift-giving father, Joey remembered, learned to play many of the instruments of the orchestra without any formal training. At the store Joey blew into everything that had a mouthpiece and soon was able to do party, wedding, or retirement tunes on a lot of them, which pleased Emil and Millicent Kazan, his employers, since he could thus provide customers with demonstrations. He handled the rental business and then sales of sheet music as well, an addition to his work that increased his musical knowledge, too, because Joey devoured the liner notes, and his score-reading markedly improved, though, of course, it was for catchy melodies that were not long on difficulty or merit.

His fellow clerk was a kid called Castle Cairfill. At first, Joey felt sorry for him. Apparently, all through Woodbine High, he had been called Airful or Careful or, with another kind of scornful irony, Sir Castle, not Caz as he had hoped, and Joey was by his plight reminded how happy he was to be a Skizzen (odd as the name was) and not a Yussel—Yussel Fixel, what a burden!—even though he was called Skizz, because Skizz wasn’t so bad. But Airful was an asshole. He was Joey’s first asshole, though a regiment would follow. Airful had a head of stiff red hair the color of brick that he wore unevenly short so it resembled the bristles of a military brush that has been through many enlistments. You saw a lot of that head because Castle was noticeably tall as well as thin and, apparently embarrassed by his height, went about as if under arrest and concealing his face from the press. The belt he wore—there seemed to be two that worked each week—had so much tongue, when cinched, it fell from his waist like a panting dog’s. Caz’s complexion was both pale and flushed—that is, it was splotchy—and the splotches appeared to pulse when Airful was himself hot about something, whereas when he was frightened or anxious, his skin grew whiter than a fish’s belly, so he looked sickly, tubercular, Joey imagined, like a male Mimi.

The seamstress but not the singer. Singers, he’d learned, were plump as geese, even when the character they sang was poor, overworked, and ill. Ill, overworked, and poor was as Caz seemed, but there was nary a song to suit the pallor of his personality or the blood-pink splotches on it either, nor was Joey the fat guy hired to sing it for him. Castle’s long fingers were good for forking through sheets of music or stacks of records; he was even rather nimble at it; and these same straw-thin
fingers strummed the guitar and the banjo fairly well except that they played nothing on these instruments that interested Joey’s ear now that his taste was turned toward finer kinds—the most sentimental of operatic arias, he would later realize. He had recently come across the tenor of tenors, Beniamino Gigli, and “Una Furtiva Lagrima” was, at the moment, the apex of all art.

Castle wanted but wasn’t granted amplification because Mr. Emil forbade the sale of noise cannons, as he called them, since they were instrumental in making much of the music Mr. Emil hated (a hatred, fortunately for profits, the parents of his principal patrons shared); however, his store did stock records by metal, cotton and earcandy rock groups, both hard and soft, as well as country-western naselizers and Broadway belters, because, otherwise, Mr. and Mrs. Kazan would have had no customers. Semirural Ohio was no place for blues, rap, hip-hop, jazz, or rag. But in the High Note store you could mosey a long while on the nostalgia trail from Kay Kyser or Guy Lombardo to Wayne “the Waltz” King or go as far as Benny Goodman and the big bands.

Joey’s education was advancing by octaves. He already sensed the importance of airs, which, just before he went to work, he put on as regularly as his shirt. With a smile of condescension, Caz watched Joey gobble up the classical music section, such as it was; but it wasn’t long before he could see the entire floor coming under Joey’s reign, because kids who’d known and teased Airfill at school didn’t have to ask him where a certain album was now or even pay him for it but could deal with Joey, who was a sort of cipher, and ignore the Castle where Sir Skinny lived.

Joey sensed the social meanings inherent in each sort of music: the old folks’ need for a lullaby lady, the frat boys’ for a glamour-puss, or that of a lamenting wife for a lamenting wife, as well as the value to obnoxious youths of eardrum-bruising yowls. The world-weary were soothed by sighing strings and entranced by Hawaiian hammock music. In addition there was a general though unacknowledged affection for ironically romantic baby talk:
whose yr lit-till whozzis? whoze yr turtle dove?
Crooners were well named, making sounds like soft stools. The honky kids he knew loved ghetto music. They felt it suited their mood when, for instance, they couldn’t have the car. Volume alone was medicine, a defense against the world, or a cry of protest. Trips down memory lane
were exclusively for the old folks; young folks like to think they have nothing to remember, so they have little patience with hoedowns and disdain for turkeys in the straw, no matter how noisy and frantic the violins get. In every case, for every age, whether loud, soft, rough, or gentle, music was used to obscure reality. Even if rural Ohio didn’t have much.

Nevertheless Joey forced himself to become familiar with this oddly assorted sonic material in order to better serve his clientele—as he wished his patrons would learn to be. Pop buyers preferred singers who couldn’t sing and musicians who couldn’t play because these performers were—as they rose out of sight in their idolaters’ eyes—like pop people themselves, their incompetence was the common touch and made them seem more sincere. Folk music, for instance, had to seem simple, uncouth, and untutored, or it wasn’t folk. Joey thought it might be a good tactic to hum in the neighborhood of the customer. He rather liked “Moonlight in Vermont,” but he didn’t remember if any words went with—who was it?—Glenn Miller’s version. It was the words the fan wanted to hear, interpreted and heightened—the message, the story—thus allowing opinions to be expressed and verified while feelings were shared and legitimized. Whereas, for his favorite aria, Joey knew only that it was about a furtive tear, and that the tear was as foreign as its language. For him it was the music—the music in the voice—the voice—smooth, sweet, easy, athletic, soaring above this poor earth—its sounds said all that needed to be said—
un ah furr teev ah la gree ma
. They went where the world wanted to go: out … outside itself … out of the ugly and painful and tawdry and cheap, out of the reach of reality just like everyone else, even in disdain of tears, to the place of beauty, its serenity, and its certainties.

In short, beauty was protection against the ordinary way of being. And rural Ohio had a lot of ordinary.

By present taste, the more difficult and sophisticated instruments—the violin, the clarinet—were avoided in favor of anything you could hammer or strum—the piano, alas, the drums, the guitar—and wiggles replaced real rhythm. Pop stars played the microphone like masters because electronics could turn bad breath into big-time bucks. They knew what their listeners wanted—what they themselves loved and served—substitute feeling and the pointless energies of borrowed life.
Joey had to admit that like the others he had his head hid, but their heads were buried in the sand while his was immersed in the clouds.

In a rare moment of frankness, Joey had to ask Joseph whether
un ah furr teev ah la gree ma
didn’t do the same thing with the same success as “Red Sails in the Sunset.”

Joey harbored these thoughts only in a hidden cove, but he recognized very early the importance of snobbery as a support for principles. Snobs never sold out their class. However, that unlikely loyalty may have been because their class was all they had. Steady on. Hold course, he’d learned to say from a seafaring novel. Had he wished to, and there were moments when he wished to, hear what other kids heard and share their certainties, it would have been denied him, for he was as odd as an oyster. Later, Joey would exhibit, as if for a textbook, the progression to the higher stations of appreciation: he’d begin by extolling Puccini and Tchaikovsky and pouring scorn on Ponchielli while admitting that the London recording of
La Gioconda
, with Zinka Milanov, was a splendid one; after that he’d advance to middle Verdi and
The Ring
, bringing with him only
Turandot
as a kind of mangled hostage, in the company of
Gianni Schicchi
, of course; then he’d continue on to Mozart, preferring
The Magic Flute
, annexing late Verdi, and adding Berlioz, with rare daring, on account of
Les Troyens
: meanwhile Joey would have been shifting his interest from opera altogether, especially anything that was popular in Italy, in order to embrace the chamber music genre and particularly those composers with the genius to predate Bach and Handel (some of whose immense oeuvres it was still permitted to admire), especially Palestrina, Purcell, and Monteverdi; but these enthusiasms would be swept away by the inevitable but notorious Schoenberg phase, which would naturally include the fanatical Anton von Webern and Alban Berg orthodoxy; the entire progression would culminate in Joey’s ultimate sidestep to the Bartók Quartets and the
Transcendental Études
along with some Bach unaccompanied partitas and certain of Beethoven’s late opus numbers, almost the only music left worth listening to, unless it was some pieces by Aleksandr Skryabin (especially when so spelled).

The snob in motion is hard to head off. But the seventh sense the snob attains is most dearly prized: that of a superior taste. And the smug possession of taste is far more infuriating to the wide world (which is,
of course, lamentably without it) than any offensive lyrics or annoying noise.

The fact was that the true snob, even if he wielded his taste like a stick, cared about the quality he kept waxed in his garage and did know at least enough to make an effective show of superiority, which, for the most part, was all that was needed.