The Music Teacher Part 7

"I don't have an instrument, Pearl," he says. "Which is to say, I don't attempt to claim one."

I don't push it again, but he has to have an instrument. Franklin insists on knowing a person's instrument before he hires him. Maybe Patrick lied on his application. Which has to be around somewhere, in our files. I tell myself to do some research on Patrick's day off. I'm not sure why I want to know. I just want to know.

At the end of several days, there still aren't any takers for our duo. Franklin comes to me with the sad news. He wants to disband already. I say to him, "Franklin, give it more than a month. Are you so afraid of failure you can't even try?"

"Yes!" he says emphatically. "I'm that afraid of failure. Why aren't you?"

"Failure has just never impressed me. That's all. It seems like a temporary condition."

Franklin leaves the sign up on the wall.

At the end of the week, there are still no takers, and Franklin is truly despondent. He has also called every booker in town, and while they know him and respect him, they say that a bluegra.s.s duo simply isn't a draw these days.

"What are we going to do?" he asks me one night as he's counting the money in the cash register and I'm filing receipts. "I thought it was the answer to my restlessness. I thought it was going to cure me."

"Well, we could play an open mic somewhere."

"You're kidding," he says with a look of disgust. For him, for most serious musicians, this is like a Shakespearean actor consenting to do a diarrhea commercial.

"Well, think about it. I mean, what if someone hired us? We don't know any songs. We've never played together," I say.

"If someone hired us, we'd learn some. We'd throw something together."

"So let's throw something together and play an open mic. Let's do some Ralph Stanley songs. Or the Carter Family. I could teach you."

He smirks. "I know those songs."

"So let's play an open mic, just for practice. There's a good one in Venice, a place called the Cow's End."

He raises an eyebrow. "Is it a bar?"

"Coffeeshop."

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake." He looks as if he might vomit. "Trying to play over the sound of a cappuccino machine?"

"Starting at the bottom is half the fun," I tell him.

"Yeah? What's the other half?"

"I don't know yet."

He sighs, blowing the beleaguered breath through his lips. "All right. You do the research. Tell me when and where."

I say, "While we're at it, doing research, what instrument does Patrick play?"

He looks at me. "You don't know?"

"No. Do you?"

He thinks about it, his eyes roaming across the cork ceiling. "Horns?"

I shrug. "That could be it."

We don't have any horns to speak of at McCoy's, unless you count recorders, so he could keep that particular talent hidden well enough.

But then Franklin says, "I don't think it's horns."

"Piano?"

"G.o.d, no," Franklin says. He has an irrational distrust of the piano, for reasons he can't sufficiently explain.

"If he's good at something, he could be in our band," I suggest.

"No," he says emphatically. "The band is you and me. Period. The whole point is that I can only start small. Two people is all I can handle right now. If it works, we can build."

"Okay." I relent, a little flattered by his insistence. "But he does play an instrument? You're the one who thinks he's a theory nerd."

"I do think he's a theory nerd, but he has to play something. I'm sure he told me when I hired him. I can't remember."

He continues to count the money, his guitar-callused fingers flipping through the bills. After a moment he looks up and says, "I'm still thinking about dumping Clive."

"Still? Why?"

"I don't know why. I don't trust him."

"Is he stealing?"

"No, of course not," he says, finishing up with his efforts and putting the money into a locked safe. "I just don't trust ba.s.s players."

"Why the h.e.l.l not?"

He shrugs. "They aren't trustworthy."

"They hold the beat," I say.

He rolls his eyes. "They think they do."

"But they do. They are the last line of communication between the guitar and the drums. Singers rely on them. They are important."

"They have an elevated sense of themselves."

"Maybe they're right to."

"They are always trying to take over the universe," he tells me.

"Well, the bottom end is the spine of music."

"Spine my a.s.s," he says, and I laugh, knowing full well that he misses the humor.

He says, "Where's the bottom end in bluegra.s.s? I'll tell you where. In the guitar. It's the only place they use the guitar as a percussion instrument, which is what it is."

I smile. "Why all this sudden pa.s.sion for bluegra.s.s, Franklin?"

"It's not sudden. You know that. You know it's my discipline. It's the purest kind of music," he says. "Outside of the blues. You know that."

"It's the hardest kind of music," I say. "Outside of cla.s.sical and jazz. To you, music is an intellectual pursuit."

"What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing. Except that music isn't really a thinking game. It's a feeling game."

"It's not a game at all," he says. "It's a profession."

"Fine," I say, surrendering.

He stares at the stained industrial carpet for a moment, then says, "You're the one who says bluegra.s.s is about G.o.d."

"Yes, that's my argument. What's yours?"

Franklin looks at me until he can't. Then he stares at the wall, where dozens of beautiful guitars hang like icons. He says, "I'm pretty sure Patrick plays a horn. Saxophone, maybe. Or trumpet."

"Trumpet? Really?"

The trumpet, in my book, may be the only truly impossible instrument to play. Franklin must think so, too, or he wouldn't suddenly look so lonely and afraid. To be anything but the best is Franklin's gravest fear. I think I've always known that about him. I think I've always loved it, too.

I LOOK AT PEOPLE'S WRISTS. I do it out of habit. The wrist is all-important in violin playing, in any kind of stringed instrument, I suppose. But in violin, it is the foundation of the vibrato, which is the highest skill you can acquire. The right wrist has one function: to remain supple. But the left wrist, the one in charge of the fingerboard, has to be in equal parts strong and flexible. It's like yoga, I'm told. (In California, you are exposed to yoga against your will. It's everywhere, like smog. Even my fat, drunken neighbor Ralph does yoga. He says it keeps him aware. Aware of what? I want to ask. But I don't.) The left wrist has to be strong enough to hold the note but flexible enough to vibrate it. It's not for sissies. In fact, this is the point where most of my students drop out-when I start examining the spirituality of their wrists.

Most people's wrists are wasted aspects of their anatomy. I see it all the time. People (women especially) adorn their wrists with stupid things. Bracelets full of sparkling c.r.a.p, or expensive watches that, because of their magnetic nature, actually inhibit the ability of the wrist to do its job. What is the job of the wrist? To bend and flex, then hold steady, then bend and flex again. Think of life without your wrist. You couldn't open a jar, turn on a bath tap, steer a car, turn up the volume. You couldn't wipe the sweat from your brow, or fan yourself, or type, or turn on the stove, or build a sandcastle, or tousle someone's hair. You couldn't throw a punch or shoot a gun. You couldn't blow a kiss. All this fuss is made over the opposable thumb. But really, it's the flexible wrist that makes human existence bearable.

Get me started on bracelets and watches, why don't you. I will identify them as man's last attempt to keep women down. (Long fingernails were a nice try, too. You can't do anything with long fingernails except paint them.) I discourage any sort of adornment there. I give my students wrist exercises. I make them walk around the house, holding their wrists limp, then flexing them at a ninety-degree angle. Strong wrist, strong future. Weak wrist, weak future. I say these things without irony.

You see, in violin playing, as I think I've mentioned, it's all about the bow. Just as with a stove, the gas might be turned on for hours, but until you light a match, nothing happens. The bow is the match. It ignites the sound. Sometimes-often, in fact-the student gets all hung up about the fingerboard, finding the note, finding the vibrato. But the bow is the living part of the instrument. The bow unleashes all the secrets. If the bow is stifled, music simply cannot be found. And bowing is all in the wrist.

So I saw the marks that day, when I was teaching Hallie. We were four months into lessons, and she was doing quite well. I had her playing some Bach concertos. She breezed through the notation as if it were written in baby language. Her left hand moved effortlessly through the motions, her wrist curling and extending, finding the vibrato. But her right wrist, which controlled the bow, was stiff and frightened. I touched her there, to make a point. She screamed.

"What?" I asked as she backed away from me, tucking her instrument under her arm.

"You scared me," was all she said.

"I just want you to loosen your right wrist," I told her.

"I will," she said. "Just don't touch me."

"It would help if you would take off that bracelet," I informed her.

She just looked at me, and in that moment I realized that she wasn't wearing a bracelet. She realized that I had realized it. She backed away from me.

"Let me see it," I said.

She hesitated for a moment, but when she saw I was going to reach for her wrist, she offered it to me. I sucked in a breath as it came into focus. The whole thing was purple. But there were specific indentations, the size of fingertips, going all the way around it.

"What happened?" I asked.

"I caught it in the car door," she said evenly.

I lifted her arm into the light. This was not a car door injury. Her wrist had been grabbed and squeezed. The marks were as clear as a tattoo.

"Who did this?" I asked her.

She avoided my eyes.

"Hallie, tell me. I'm just going to ask your mother."

"She's not my mother," Hallie quickly informed me.

"All right. But who did this? Dorothy?"

She shook her head, then lifted her sad, doelike eyes to me. "I have brothers."

"Which brother did this?"

"Brian," she said. "He's almost sixteen. He's very strong."

"Why did he grab your wrist?"

"He didn't. That is, he didn't mean to. We were wrestling."

I tried to think of what to say. Finally I came up with this: "Doesn't he understand how important your wrists are?"

"He's a man. He doesn't understand anything," she told me.

I sat down in my metal folding chair and contemplated her life. She saw me doing it and sat down as well.

"It's not Christopher. He's only my age. He doesn't even talk to me. He thinks I'm weird."

"If you're getting hurt," I said slowly, "I have to tell someone."

"I'm not getting hurt," she a.s.sured me.

"But look at your wrist!"

"We were wrestling!"

I looked at her. I thought of her house. Her strange, angry adopted parents and their strange, confused boys, trying to adjust to an unwanted, unexpected girl. Someone was grabbing her around the wrist and bruising it. I didn't really care who it was or why.

"I think I'll have to talk to Dorothy," I said.

"No," she said, quickly, desperately. "You can't tell her."