The Music Teacher Part 22

See, here it comes. He denies that our night together ever happened. I am stranded with my perception of reality.

"You said that you play every instrument."

He remains calm, though I've blurted out his secret. He says, "No. I said I can play any instrument. If I choose. Because I know the math."

Franklin has had enough. He goes to the wall of guitars and grabs one. He thrusts it at Patrick and says, "Play."

Patrick just grins. Franklin thrusts the guitar again, as if it is a gun. And Patrick, for some reason, backs up. As if he, too, is convinced that it is a lethal weapon.

"Play, G.o.dd.a.m.n it. Let's have this out, once and for all."

Patrick laughs. "Is this a duel?"

"Yeah, it sure as h.e.l.l is. Play."

The chimes on the door jangle, and then Lance and his mother are standing in the room, looking at this curious configuration of people and events.

"Are we early?" Lance's mother asks.

"No," I say. "Right on time."

She nods to Lance, who goes up the stairs. Franklin puts the guitar back on the wall. Patrick sighs and walks over to the cash register as though to hide behind it. Josie and Ernest scatter to different ends of the room.

"I feel like I interrupted something," Lance's mother says.

"Nothing important," I say.

LANCE IS CRYING when I come into the lesson room.

He looks up at me, his pale face blotchy, tears streaking his cheeks.

"What in the world?" I say.

He sniffs and holds the violin toward me. A string is broken.

"Oh, Lance," I say, fighting the urge to laugh. "You broke a string. It's no big deal."

"I was trying to tune it," he explains.

"Well, you shouldn't do that. I haven't taught you how yet. It's very tricky."

"They're expensive," he tells me.

"Yes, they are," I admit. And I know he is scared because he realizes his parents can't afford it. I think of Hallie and her unholy exchange for the cost of music lessons. I won't let that happen to anyone else. And I am momentarily filled with rage that music costs money. It should be free, available to everyone.

"I've got some strings in my case," I tell him. "I'll give you one. But you should be more careful."

He sucks in a breath and says, "My parents don't know. They'd get really mad."

"They'd get mad at you for breaking a string?"

He shakes his head.

"Then what?" I ask.

"The voices," he says quietly.

"What voices?"

He suddenly sits up, looking strong and eager. It's my willingness to hear him that is giving him strength. He says, "I hear the voices. They tell me what to play. They told me to tune the D string. I do what they tell me. That's how I learn."

My throat feels dry and I sit back in my chair, trying to disguise my alarm. I want to hear this, but it suddenly feels as if everything that happens in my lesson room ends in a bizarre kind of disaster. Every student I touch goes a little bit crazy.

"What kind of voices?" I ask.

"They sound like people voices. I used to think it was just me talking to myself. But now they have started telling me to do things I don't want to do. I didn't want to tune the string. But I listened, and it went bad. I don't think they are on my side anymore. I used to think they were angels, but angels wouldn't make me break a string, would they?"

I am thoroughly unqualified for this, just as I was unqualified to handle Hallie's problems. I made the mistake of overstepping the bounds with her. I am not going to do it with Lance.

And yet, I do. I say, "Sometimes I hear voices, too. Not voices so much, but a kind of instruction, telling me what notes to hit. I call it intuition. I think that always happens in music. You don't have to be afraid of it."

"It makes me nervous," he admits. "I like to tell my parents about the stuff that happens to me, but I can't tell them this."

"Tell me. I'll listen."

He wipes his face with his sleeve. He is starting to calm down.

I'm still a little worried about the voices, so I say, "They don't tell you to do anything else, do they?" I'm thinking of Son of Sam.

He shakes his head. "They only start when I pick up the violin."

"I just think that is inner guidance. It's not bad or evil. It's not even strange. Just learn to make friends with the voices."

"But why would the voices tell me to do something wrong?" he asks, his own voice still laced with childish pain.

"Maybe they didn't. Maybe they told you the D string needed tuning. Maybe you took the next step and tried to do it yourself."

He nods slowly, as if this makes a certain kind of sense.

Even as I'm talking, I realize I sound a little crazy. The thing is, I believe him, and I believe myself. I know. I have known for a long time that music has its own secret language. I know that if you don't hear the secret language of guidance, you probably aren't a musician.

What I'm not sure of is whether it is appropriate to say this to an eleven-year-old boy. But I can see the sadness lifting from his face, like fog lifting from the ground, and after a few moments we are sailing through the scales and everything is back to normal.

17.

I AM SITTING in my car on a dark street in Mar Vista, looking at the power lines weaving through the limbs of some unidentifiable tree, wondering why the tree limbs don't catch fire, wondering why I don't know the answer to that, marveling at how nature and technology have adapted to each other, relatively speaking, and trying to imagine what the world must have been like before Isaac Newton.

It is hard to imagine, for example, that for a very long time, people did not understand about gravity. It is even harder to imagine that people still don't understand about gravity and that gravity is just a theory, a pretty good one until something else comes along. The way bleeding people was state-of-the-art medicine till antibiotics came along. It makes me wonder this: If someone disproved the theory of gravity, would we all go floating off into s.p.a.ce? Do we cling to the earth because we believe we should? Impossible, you say, because people stuck to the earth before Isaac Newton, but that was because they believed something else, such as that the earth was flat. My point is, how much of how we live is predicated on and dependent upon our collective consent, a mutual belief system, a vision we're all having, a tune we are all hearing in somewhat the same way?

When Isaac Newton first started talking about optics, people were so shaken, I've heard, that they began committing suicide en ma.s.se. I've heard that about other great discoveries, too. It sounds completely irrational, but I'm afraid to admit I understand it a little. When I read about string theory and time travel and cloning and nuclear fusion and the phasing out of the post office and gene therapy and on and on, it makes me glad I am not going to live forever. I feel relieved. I'd rather not know. This must be how those people felt in Newton's time. Everything was changing too fast. The printing press was enough of a shock. Then the planets moving around the sun, then the Cartesian split, then gravity, then all of color actually being derived from white light. I'd rather not know, they must have said.

Think how it must have felt to be Newton. Every new idea in his head-and the ideas must have been coming at him like a swarm of bees- changing the basic structure of science and the very foundation of the collective belief system. Every time he opened his mouth, someone either praised him to heaven or jumped off a building. No wonder he finally stopped talking about his discoveries. He burned his most extensive writings on optics. The smartest thinking anyone has ever done on the subject, ashes at the bottom of his fireplace. It wasn't that it scared him. It was that he must have known, on some level, that no one else could follow it. So what was the point?

Newton burned his knowledge because he didn't want to be a freak. He wanted to belong. We all want to belong. But when we are cursed with knowledge, we start looking for an exit.

I don't know what I'm doing here, parked on this street, thinking of Isaac Newton, until the front door of the familiar house opens and Hallie comes out. Then I know. I have to see her. I wasn't sure I would, but here she is, just as I remember her, only a little older. Her hair is longer, but other than that, she is exactly the same. She doesn't look like the girl I accosted on the street in Venice, so that really was a departure from reality. Okay, I say to myself, I own that. I was just trying.

It could have been her. She could have changed herself and changed back. I don't know anymore.

It is too dark to see if she is wearing an eyebrow stud, or if she is smiling, or if she is miserable. She is wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and is lugging a Hefty bag full of garbage. She is staring at the ground as she walks toward the big brown garbage bin parked at the curb. I watch her as she struggles with the lid of the garbage bin, then shoves the Hefty bag into it. She wipes her hands on her jeans, then looks straight up at the sky. I look, too. There is nothing up there but a pale half-moon and some asthmatic stars struggling to be recognized. I wonder what she thinks of them. I wonder if she is dreaming about something. I wonder if she has anything left to wish for.

Then she looks in my direction, though it is impossible to tell if she's seeing me. I freeze, as if I have just been caught at something degrading, even illegal. Whatever the illegal thing was that she almost accused me of. Was she right and I wrong? It was a long time ago, but did I really just hunt her down to prove or disprove my own sanity?

My heart begins to race as she walks in my direction. Fool, I think, fumbling for the keys in the ignition. But I can't start the car because that would draw further attention to me, and anyway, I don't want to go. I want to wait right here as she moves closer and closer.

She stops a few feet from my window. She is definitely looking at me now, but without a hint of recognition in her eyes. The eyebrow stud is still there. But her face is a blank. I don't know what I am going to say to her. I realize, to my horror, that all this time that I've been agonizing about her, I could easily have found her. It wasn't even a matter of looking. I knew where she lived. I knew her phone number. I could have followed up. I could have written her a note. I could have done a lot of things. But like those people who jumped off the roof in Newton's time, I would rather not know.

She taps on the pa.s.senger-side window with her knuckle. I roll the window down and we look at each other, there under the shadow of the unidentifiable tree and the distant hum of the power line.

"Hey," she says.

"Hey," I say. We are forcedly casual and awkward, like teenagers, which only one of us can legitimately claim to be.

"What are you doing here?" she asks.

"Looking for you," I answer honestly.

"What for?"

"I just wanted to know . . ."

I hesitate, unsure of how to finish the sentence, until I realize that it is finished.

She smirks. She understands. I want to know, and that might be my curse. If it is, then it is a curse I share with much of humanity. Imagine that. I'm just like other people. At least, I am like those people who choose not to jump off a building, who choose instead to wait around and see what will happen.

Isaac Newton was from a poor family. His mother abandoned him. He was basically a welfare kid. He was a second-cla.s.s citizen at Cambridge, earning his keep by waiting on other students. He listened to his teachers. He allowed himself to be taught. But the ideas he came up with, which would change the world forever, simply came to him, as if whispered in his dreams.

"Are you all right?" I ask her.

She shrugs, then spreads out her arms, as if to exhibit her wholeness, the fact that her limbs are still attached to her body and everything is in working order.

"You see me?" she asks. "You see that I'm okay?"

I don't take that bait.

"What about Earl? Is he still around?" I ask. I don't know how else to put it.

"He still lives here, if that's what you mean."

"But is he . . . are you . . ."

"He leaves me alone," she says.

"But he didn't always?"

"It wasn't like you imagined."

"Hallie, I don't think I imagined anything."

"You never did understand," she says.

"I tried. I think you wanted me to try."

She shrugs.

"How could you have said those things about me?"

She shrugs again. "There are flaws in the system."

"You could have gotten me in real trouble. And it wasn't true."

"It wasn't entirely untrue. I mean, you did care about me more than you needed to. It freaked me out."

"How can you put a value on caring? I cared."

"Well, I just wasn't used to that."

We are silent for a moment. Finally I look up at her.

"How about your music?"

"I don't play music," she says. "I don't need it anymore."

I have no response to that. She shoves her hands in the pockets of her jeans. She is hiding her hands from me. She doesn't want me to look at her wrists. It is a hold I have over her, this knowledge of her talent. It is something that cannot be forgotten. But to remind her of it is an abuse of power. This is what she is saying to me.

She says, "Look, I've got another year here. I can stand it. Then I'll get a job. Or I'll go to Europe. Something like that."

"Hallie," I say quietly.

"Look," she says again, her voice shifting up this time. She is angry or frustrated or scared. It all looks the same in the dark, and I have never been able to read voices the way I can read notes. People confuse me. Their sounds are complex and conflicting. They always seem out of tune. I hear people's sounds, but I can't interpret them.