The Mozart Season (14 page)

“I don't know. I mean—I don't know.…”

“You played it really well. Nice meeting you, Allegra.” She walked off. I stood there in my flowered dress holding my violin case in one hand and the bright bouquet of flowers in the other, and watched her big hips waddle away, bumping into people. She was holding her right hand up out of the way.

“Nice meeting you,” I called to her, but I don't think she heard me.

I felt selfish. I wanted to erase the last three minutes from my life. I looked down at the flowers and their big yellow ribbon. Karen should have had the bouquet. I felt guilty holding it in my hand. I felt guilty about my dream. I felt guilty that people had clapped when I played. I even felt guilty for not being fat.

Jessica came scooting through the crowd. “I looked all over for him. He's vanished,” she said. “That girl—the chunky one in the jeans. The one you were talking to? She's the one that said, ‘Oh,
Moz
art!'”

“That's Karen Karen,” I said.

Jessica made a silent O with her mouth. She said, “Broken Fingers Karen Karen.”

“Right,” I said.

“I wonder where the dancing man went,” she said. “He dematerialized. How can somebody do that?”

“Allegra,” somebody said, a man's voice. I turned around. It was the concertmaster of the orchestra. “We liked playing the concerto with you,” he said. “You kind of inspired us.” He had two little kids with him, a boy and a girl. They stared at me, and the little girl put her hand on the big yellow ribbon on the bouquet and stroked it.

“Oh, I liked it, too. It was scary. But fun.” He was wearing one of those hats people wear when they drive tractors. It said, “If you ate today, thank a farmer.” “Thank you,” I said. I meant his hat. “I mean, I ate today. Are you a farmer?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Part-time apple farmer, part-time fiddler. I bet you'll be a full-time fiddler someday. You really made us practice.” He laughed and took the little girl's hand off the ribbon.

“Really?” I watched the little girl's hand make a fist and go behind her back.

“You sure did. Most of us went home Tuesday night and did some woodshedding.”

Woodshedding is hard practicing. “I did, too,” I said. The little girl hooked her hand in his pants pocket and started swinging back and forth in an arc.

“Well, thanks for coming. We were kind of up a creek.…”

“I know,” I said. “Unlucky for Karen, lucky for me.”

“Yeah. She'll be okay, though. She's tough. She'll play again, better than ever.” The little boy tugged on the man's violin case. “Well, these kids oughta be home in bed. So long, Allegra.”

“So long,” I said.

The crowd was separating. People were getting little kids off the slides and pulling them along down the slope and into cars. Our bunch broke into two groups, part of us to ride back with my parents and Jessica to ride with Mr. and Mrs. Kaplan because she lives near them and Daddy's car was crowded. “I just don't know where he went,” Jessica said to me.

“I don't even know where he came from,” I said.

“Miss Shapiro?” somebody said. I looked. It was the old lady who'd cried at rehearsal. She was very short, and her violin case looked too heavy for her. In the white blouse and long black skirt she looked sort of like a rabbit. “It was wonderful, Miss Shapiro,” she said in a quaky voice. She reached her hand up to her collar. It was shaking. An elderly shaking hand.

“So were you,” I said. “The orchestra was fun to play with.”

“
I
like it,” she said. “It's my home away from home. We're amateurs.”

“So am I,” I said.

For a little moment it was just the little old white-haired lady and me both bursting out laughing. Maybe she knew what we were laughing at, but I didn't. Her laughing was old and crackly and mine was probably childish. There was just a set of sounds coming out of both of us, and we stood there looking straight at each other and laughed and laughed. What was strange about it was that I didn't feel weird laughing with a total stranger probably six times my age. In fact, it felt wonderful. Then we both stopped laughing, almost at the same time.

“Go well, my dear,” she said, and she put her hand on my arm. I looked at her hand. It was veiny and spotty and it had gullies along the back between the bones. I looked at my arm and her hand together, at the place where her hand stopped and my arm began, and I felt the borderline, the little gaps of air under her fingers. I thought of all the notes she'd played with that hand and all the notes I'd played with that arm. I was still looking at my arm and her hand together when she lifted her hand away and turned around and walked off across the grass.

Night was coming. People were hustling instruments and picnics into cars and turning on headlights.

Mr. Kaplan hadn't said anything to me. Now he said, “See you tomorrow, Allegra,” and got into his car with his wife and Jessica. I put my bouquet in the back of the car where Daddy's cello rides, and kept my violin between my legs. David was driving, and if we made a sudden stop my violin would get broken. Daddy was beside him, and my mother and I were in the back.

“Well, one down,” Daddy said.

“And goal to go,” David said.

We drove past three churches and a service station on our way out of Trout Creek Ridge and onto the freeway.

“How did you really like it?” my mother asked me.

“Very strange,” I said. I wished Jessica was riding with us.

“How strange?” she asked.

“Strange from beginning to end,” I said.

“All that sound,” Mommy said.

“Right,” I said. “It just kept jumping out at me. Like pushing me from behind.”

She nodded her head and said, “Right.”

“Everybody has a first time,” Daddy said.

“I guess so,” I said.

“And those rushed sixteenth-notes. You stayed steady, that was great,” Mommy said.

“My brain didn't,” I said.

Daddy said, “I couldn't tell that from listening.”

I don't remember the rest of the trip home. Daddy and Bro David were arguing over whether the horizon is 2.8 or 2.6 miles away if you're standing on flatland and your eyes are five feet above the ground, and I fell asleep. I woke up with my head on my mother's lap and David was driving into the garage.

But when I got into bed I couldn't sleep. I played with Heavenly Days for a while, swinging the end of the sash from my nightgown back and forth like a pendulum for her to catch. She moves her head like a metronome when you do that, and you can change the tempo whenever you want. Cats don't get tired of doing the same thing over and over again. They have a good attention span.

I tried going to sleep. It was a hot night. Portland has a few of those in the summer, not too many. I kicked all the covers off. Heavenly went to the foot of the bed and started to study the wall. Usually she sleeps curled against me. I turned over. And over. And over.

It's always hard to sleep after a concert, or even after a big rehearsal. Your adrenaline is going too fast. You have all these tunes going around in your ears. I don't know why I slept in the car.

Did I play well? Or were those people just saying those things? The four wrong notes—didn't anybody notice them? Well, what would people say—“You played really well, except for that part in the first movement, which was awful”? If I'd known Karen Karen was in the audience, would I have played differently? I wondered what her last name was. I didn't want to know.

I looked at the bouquet, in a pitcher on my desk. If only she hadn't turned out to look that way. I wouldn't have felt so bad. I turned over and tried not to look at the flowers. And she could stand there and say Mozart makes you forget your problems. I put my head under my pillow. It was too hot under there. I kept listening to my own breath. I sat up.

The clock said 12:22
A.M.
I didn't want to read. I didn't want to go over my list of words, starting with “tenacity,” all over again. Heavenly and I were tired of playing. What do people do? Jessica knits. She's knitted six sweaters in her life. And Sarah gets up and does exercises beside her bed.

I put on some shorts and sneaked down into the garage and got my bike and went out bike riding.

I hadn't ridden my bike for a long time. I couldn't ride to my lessons because I might drop the violin case; Jessica and I hadn't had time that one afternoon; and I'd been busy practicing; and I don't know what the other reasons were. I rode down our street to the corner and took a left turn. The streetlights were on, but I used my bike light anyway. I rode around three blocks twice. The air felt so good, just nice air. Nice air, I kept saying to myself, in rhythm with the pedals. I stopped and unbraided my hair.

I felt my hair blowing straight back. I felt bugs hitting my legs and bouncing off; the handlebars were shiny under the streetlights and then gray and then shiny again. I rode past an all-night doughnut shop and saw three men laughing inside. One of them was holding a doughnut high in the air and they were all shaking with laughter.

I went into the dark again and rode in a straight line for a while. A bat or something swooped down in front of me. Maybe it was a swallow. We had a nest of swallows once when I was a little kid, and I saw the babies getting fed when they were brand new. I think seven or eight years had passed. Where would those baby birds be now?

I rode into Laurelhurst Park, where I'd turned pages for Charley Horner. The bushes were shadowy, clustered in bunches, and the air was cooler. Some kids were sitting on a bench, smoking cigarettes. I had a tune in my head: I tried to remember what it was; it was from somebody I'd turned pages for. It kept on playing in my head and it was so beautiful and sad; it's a tune about love. I mean it's about love for everything: stars, hills, bushes, trees, and it was about being in love, too. It kept going around in my head, as if it were on a tape, just that one part of something I'd turned pages for. It's a melody that makes your stomach and brain and everything get all melty. I slowed down and pedaled in time to it.

Joel Smirnoff was much too old for me, and I kept hearing the tune anyway.

When I rode out of the park the tune was still in my head. I rode straight home, not around any extra blocks. I put my bike away in almost silence, not to wake anybody up. I walked around to the back door and stood between two rosebushes smelling them and hearing that melody for a couple of minutes. Then I got inside without making anything click noisily, went up the stairs very carefully, skipping the sixth step because it creaks, and I went to bed.

Exercise is good for you. It helps you sleep better. It makes peace.

8

Mr. Kaplan was wearing a sweatshirt that said, like a
National Enquirer
headline, “Dvořák alive! Terrorizes couple in Tampa!” The first thing he wanted to do was listen to the concert tape. We both sat in chairs in his studio and closed our eyes.

“Intonation problem … dragging on that shift … sixteenth-notes are beautiful.… Too soft right here, I can't even hear you … nice descending trills.… You landed on that second G like a dive bomber.… Where's the fortissimo? I thought you were supposed to be fortissimo there.… Mozart thought so, too.… Take longer on that low A.… Your timing here needs to be more assertive—remember, it's
your
cadenza … again, trills quite strong and good here.… Second movement wants somewhat more, I don't know, it wants some, some, some kind of quiet elegance … not that there isn't
any,
but.… Here—right here—hear that pleading tone? That's wonderful, Allegra … and here, where he answers the questions he's just asked in the previous section.… This cadenza isn't quite liquid enough.… Again, fine, fine trills here … you lost the
grazioso
a bit there, didn't you? Nice bright tone here, good for you.… Margaret's band sounds like a flock of geese.… Good fluid grace notes, they're like birdcalls ascending, aren't they?”

At the end, I opened my eyes and he said, “In short, Allegra, your violin invites you to do more with this concerto. Mozart does, too. Listen to your instrument more, hear what it's capable of doing. More, much more.” He looked at me, then away, out the window. “Indeed.”

He looked back at me. “I'm proud of your work last night. But. But. In the first movement, you can run like an athlete. In the second, you're capable of melting snow. In the third, everyone should feel like dancing.” He smiled. “But it's not happening yet. Are we ready to go to work?”

“Yes,” I said, and opened my violin case. There's a music teacher saying: Did you come here to be praised or appraised? I thought of the voice my softball coach used when she said, “Pretty good isn't good enough. Let's go to work.” While I was rubbing rosin on my bow, I glanced at the
A teacher is someone who makes you believe you can do it
pillow. We went to work. I hadn't had much sleep, and there was a lot to remember, everything he'd said about the tape. It wasn't very much fun at times that morning, but I didn't say so. And I didn't ask how many minutes and seconds the performance had been. It didn't seem so important anymore.

As we played that morning, in the first movement my sixteenth-notes were too muddy; in the second movement, I wasn't melting any snow; and in the third, I didn't feel anyone dancing.

“If you can do in performance what you did with the second-movement cadenza the first time in rehearsal with Margaret's group—ah, Allegra.…” he said. “Isn't it strange—how difficult it is to do the perfectly natural thing?”

I nodded my head. “Something got into me and made me forget people were listening,” I said.

“Almost but not quite, Allegra.
Let
you forget, not made you. Shall I tell you a funny story about Menuhin? A genius at relaxation. He once woke up in a concert in Boston and realized he'd played an entire movement asleep. And he'd played it beautifully. The Beethoven concerto. Koussevitzky was conducting. This is a true story, Allegra.”