Contrary Motion Page 4

  Just inside the door, she turns to me, and we hug. We hold each other. Seconds go by. Each second represents a degree of emotional intensity and support. She’s perfect, I say to myself. She’s perfect. And she is.

  With her cheek against my chest, she says, “Thanks for what you said in the restaurant—about that fucking asshole.” Her words are harsh but her tone is quiet, almost tearful: “I get so mad that I’m on edge with everyone, even sweet guys like you.”

  I kiss the top of her head. I often look down at her like this from my height, and it occurs to me that the top of her head has almost become her second face to me, the part in her hair a crooked smile, and it makes me realize that maybe I, too, have a second face of some kind, to someone else.

  She finally looks up at me, with caring and closeness in her eyes, and I smile, so grateful to be brought back toward her, so eager to be as positive as possible about us, united against Whitaker, and when she smiles, too, I kiss her on the lips. She kisses back.

  And I think, Good. But won’t it be horrible if we keep going and I can’t get hard?

  Then it’s like when the weight of the roller coaster tips downward: our kissing and caressing and undressing gather speed.

  As she unzips my jeans, I brace for her touch, for her seeing me. As I’ve been doing more and more lately at these critical moments, I imagine, of all people, my ex-wife, though not as I’ve come to know her, but as I first experienced her in undergrad, when we’d go jogging together around Northwestern’s Lakefill. Milena’d wear silky running shorts without underwear and midriff-baring T-shirts. Reveling in the anticipation that built during our cool-down stretches in the living room of her apartment on Maple Street was the happiest I’ve ever been. But today using her memory to build excitement strikes me as more wrong than usual.

  Cynthia pulls my pants to my knees to reveal my ambivalent unit. My face heats up like a radiator.

  She expertly addresses my lame erection. A silence descends. We continue to touch and finish undressing. Then it’s as if she’s giving me a fireman’s carry out of a burning building: there’s a sense of mortal danger that leads to quick but controlled acts of lifting, positioning, moving. I break a hot sweat, as if I’m in that burning building; my breaths get short. I’m suddenly aware that this scene is also playing itself out in the mirror on the other side of the harp, then I remember my father expressing his judgment on his prostate cancer: “It’s nothing.” I am on the futon couch poised over her body—which is heartbreakingly attractive and good, though it seems odd that it’s hers or that it’s her—when we both realize that her rescue attempt has been unsuccessful.

  This is different from the other times. No hope. None. Game over.

  When the going gets tough, the tough give head, I think, kissing my way down her torso. It occurs to me that Whitaker, the perv, was probably hard as a coat hook when he was molesting her.

  She grabs my ears and pulls me up to her.

  “You don’t have to,” she says.

  “I want to.”

  “We should talk.”

  “About what?”

  “About what’s going on.”

  Still hovering over her, propped up on my arms, I don’t say anything. We’re both naked, and this is suddenly an excruciating condition. I squeeze myself next to her on the couch, lying on my side to give my arms a rest.

  “Look, I really like you, Matt. I do. And I shouldn’t even say anything right now, I know.” She moves toward the edge of the couch and turns to face me. The endless need to arrange our bodies with respect to each other, on this couch, in this room, in all spaces, for all time, suddenly seems like a death sentence. “It’s just that you’ve been so on your guard—or just kind of weird.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. About sex, but also in general. And I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable with me. And I guess I don’t know how to make you feel more comfortable.”

  “I feel comfortable with you,” I say, though I know that in certain important ways this isn’t true. The fact that she’s not just dismissing this particular failure as a consequence of my grief is a shattering reminder of just how lame I’ve been the last few times. “I’ll get over this,” I assert, but in my chest I sense that something irrevocable has happened. “It’ll just go away by itself.”

  “By itself?” she asks, a little too loudly. Then she lets her shoulders sag. “Oh, Matt, I shouldn’t have said anything. Everything’s been a bit too much lately. I just need you to—” She stops herself.

  “What?”

  “Just be okay. I just want you to feel okay.”

  She stands and follows the trail of her clothing back to where we began what feels like the final sex act of my life. I find her so attractive—something in my engine is revving—but I no longer have a transmission to gear my desire into action. I don’t understand why I can’t just transmit my feelings to her directly, without having to do or say anything.

  “I really care for you,” I say.

  “Oh, I know,” she says quietly. She straightens up, holding her clothes against her bare chest, and we make eye contact. She closes her eyes and smiles wanly, as if she’s remembering some catastrophe that turned funny over time. “It’s fine,” she adds, from another vocal register, something, unfortunately, in the resigned-mother range.

  Once we’re both dressed, she looks through my apartment window toward her car. I brace myself again.

  “I’ve got something to draft,” she finally says.

  “Why don’t you work on it here?” I say. “I can do some practicing.”

  She nods, though her eyes are still focused outside.

  Then she leaves the apartment to get her laptop from her car, and I walk into the kitchen so I won’t be standing in the same spot if and when she returns. I rest my head against a cupboard, telepathically begging her not to drive away. A breeze of dizziness blows through my head.

  Finally, I hear the front doorknob turn. I spring into the dining room and quickly clear a place for her at the table, smiling and gesturing like a QVC product model. She avoids looking at me as she sets up.

  Then I go to the harp. I pick up a tuning fork, rap it against the wooden underside of my seat, place the base of the vibrating fork on the soundboard, and a resonating A blooms forth. The robot in me knows there’s something to be said for such mechanical responsiveness.

  I tune to that, while, upstairs, Charles bursts into loud, easy laughter.

  5

  I NOW HAVE FIFTY-FOUR days to perfect the twenty-five audition pieces for St. Louis, which range from a twenty-three-second cadenza in Ravel’s Tzigane—arguably the most exciting twenty-three seconds in all of harping—to a six-minute excerpt from Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. But size isn’t everything: when I first took on the Tzigane just after undergrad, I worked on it for three years before I could play it without a mistake. I’ve long since figured out happy fingerings and propitious pedal moves for ninety-five percent of the concertos and orchestra excerpts on the list, but as with most auditions, St. Louis is also throwing in one obscure piece, Moncayo’s Huapango. I’ll have to write them for a copy of the music and reserve extra practice time to work that number up from scratch.

  I finish tuning and consider where to start. The score for Symphonie fantastique is still on my music stand. It’s got a speedy tempo and several thorny spots of contrary motion: tricky sequences of notes that trend either up or down the scale but that involve some notes that move in the opposite direction—a “two steps forward, one step back” arrangement that requires acrobatic right-hand fingerings. In rehearsal 22, I’ve got to play seventeen notes of contrary motion in about three seconds—and they’re kicking my ass. One thing I’ve been working on is getting the volume perfectly even when using each finger. Harpists count our thumbs as our number one fingers and our ring fingers as number fours; we never use our pinkies. Despite a fierce exercise regimen, my four has never developed the same strength as the others, making it har
der to play notes with the four as loud, and the contortions required by SF threaten to expose that.

  What I really need to do is set the metronome at a slower tempo and achieve total uniformity first, then gradually increase my pace. But I’m not in the mood to work anything out in front of Cynthia, so I’m tempted to practice the significantly easier Nutcracker cadenza.

  I fiddle with the height of my stand and flatten the pages of Fantastique, which are open to the place where I left off this morning. I’ve already practiced for several hours today, so I pop two Tylenol from a bottle I keep on my windowsill to mitigate shoulder soreness and a post-sangria headache. I futz with my finger hygiene kit, but since this morning’s trim and buff my nails haven’t grown, my calluses haven’t changed; I’m just steeling myself for the plunge. Then I hear someone coming down the back stairs.

  It’s Charles. When he’s visible through the screen door to my kitchen, Cynthia calls, “You’re not driving after all that coconut milk, are you?”

  “I’ve always wanted to be in a car accident,” he says. “But I’m walking, sister.”

  “Bye, Charles,” I say.

  “Ciao,” he says in an amiable tone, and he steps out the back door.

  His departure makes me feel marginally less scrutinized, and there’s no use trying to avoid embarrassment in front of Cynthia now. With my electronic metronome at a less frantic pace than the score demands—though it is still clacking maniacally—I lean the harp on my right shoulder and take a run at the SF passage.

  Even at the slower tempo, two mistakes obtrude in twelve measures. “Fuck,” I say under my breath. Biting a pencil like it’s a bridle bit, Cynthia ticks away on her laptop, seemingly lost in her work, which involves defending corporations against the claims of injured people—sort of the opposite of Erin Brockovich. Maybe she does her pro bono work in the dating realm?

  One of the two overhead bulbs in the dining room light fixture is burned out, so she sits in dim light. I’ve got a goosenecked lamp clamped to my music stand in the otherwise dark living room. On the floor near my feet, at the edge of the spray of light, is the front end of the plastic Barbie adventure van. It’s motionless yet seems to speed out of the darkness toward me.

  “Fuck,” I mutter, and I take another run at it.

  Just how did a half-man/half-robot like me ever come to play the harp?

  I have a heart murmur, apparently benign, and ever since its discovery minutes after I exited the womb, my mother has been plagued by the idea that she gave birth to a fragile child. So I spent most of my early days in a playpen, segregated from my six older siblings. My brothers loved to punch each other, hurl pillows like missiles, and play football in the living room with the couch as the end zone. Meanwhile, mute and staring, I’d gum a plastic hammer or slump with my drooling mouth against the mesh wall of my enclosure. I don’t remember the first time I sat down at the old and neglected upright piano that we inherited from my father’s aunt, whom I never met and no one ever talked about. Though I was disturbingly late to the wonders of speech, cruising past the thirty-month mark with about two dozen words and an aversion to sentences, I’m told that I began playing piano in earnest at age three. I imagine this was a great relief to my mother because it kept me out of harm’s way and also served as an indirect argument against expensive speech therapy.

  Just as I turned thirteen, my first piano teacher retired. Mrs. Kauss was not a very good pianist but she was crazy for proper technique. When she discovered that I was eager to execute her instructions to the smallest detail, she drove me hard and took credit for my playing as if it were her own. Just as I was beginning to consider rebellion, Mrs. Kauss took down her faded shingle and passed me to a new teacher. Ms. Beckwith lived in an off-white, two-story clapboard house in Elm Grove. She had gray hair, cut short like a monk’s, and generally wore jumpers or one of seemingly hundreds of pairs of corduroy pants. Her house had a citrus smell that I loved and which almost masked her occasional cigarette. The lessons took place at the baby grand in her living room, but in her sunroom she had a Lyon & Healy concert grand pedal harp. Harp was her first instrument. She taught piano because Milwaukee didn’t produce enough aspiring harpists to pay her mortgage.

  Around this time seventh grade was ending, most of the girls and some of the boys at school, including myself, were well into puberty, and inklings of unrestricted freestyle humping infused the air like the scent of lilacs. This mass sexual awakening had no practical application for me—I was scared to death of the girls in my class—yet I was starting to dream. One day, Ms. Beckwith demonstrated something for me on her harp. The music was beautiful, but what struck me was the posture of her body, the way the harp nestled between her legs, the way her arms wrapped around it. When she was done, I asked her if I could play her harp, blushing as if I had asked to try on her underpants.

  “Let’s have you try it,” she said.

  She explained that a harp was essentially a piano turned on its side. When I sat down to the instrument, I immediately noticed the four large holes in the back of the rounded sound box. The bottom of the soundboard was broad and slightly curved like a woman’s hips. When I leaned the harp back on my right shoulder to pull the chord as Ms. Beckwith had instructed me, it felt like I was drawing a girl toward me in an intimate embrace. In my thirteen-year-old mind, the instrument was clearly a sex-training apparatus.

  After that, we agreed to tack on fifteen minutes of harp instruction to the end of every lesson.

  Your chest is a soundboard, your mouth is a sound hole, your nerves string you from tip to toe. It’s this way with all of us. I floated through my days with this new knowledge, at least half-erect at all times, and if not fingering notes, then imagining myself fingering notes. At night, I had wet dreams involving Ms. Beckwith’s niece, Claire Houghton, a harpist herself. She was a beautiful Black Irish lass with a beguiling taste for cowboy boots and untucked shirts with pearl buttons. I was completely obsessed and needed my own harp to practice on, though I doubted my parents would approve. Any household expense had to be rigorously justified, and it wasn’t efficient to like two instruments when one was enough for my mother to prove that she could produce a cultured child.

  Luckily, there was a harp at the high school where Ms. Beckwith taught part-time, and when school let out in June, she made arrangements for me to practice there. I still played piano an hour a day, but then I would hop on my bike, a copy of Ms. Beckwith’s key to the music room in my pocket, and practice harp for hours. Word was, Ms. Beckwith was a lesbian, and for my mother, this justified her anxiety about my shifting musical interests. My mother’s way of addressing this was to mention that Ms. Beckwith was “a smoker,” which made her “worried for” me. But in a weird way, Ms. Beckwith’s sexual orientation confirmed my own. We both played the harp. We both loved ladies. She was a bit mannish and I was almost a bit mannish. We were a special team.

  Ms. Beckwith never seemed to over- or underpraise me. Her explanations were always clear, and at the time, I trusted her more than my parents, who disturbingly seemed to have no expertise in the area I now cared about most.

  “Do boys play the harp?” I asked her one afternoon.

  “Yes,” she said, sounding extra casual.

  After I finished the next piece, something shifted in her and she said, “My teacher at Indiana was a man. And the principal harpist of the Chicago Symphony is a man. Would you like to see him play?”

  My mother was dubious until she learned that Ms. Beckwith’s sixteen-year-old niece was also going on my CSO outing. Somehow she believed that Claire would keep Ms. Beckwith from probing me with a dildo—or whatever it was lesbians did when they took straight boys across state lines.

  By the time Ms. Beckwith’s station wagon had merged onto I-94 en route to Chicago, Claire had one slender arm stretched across the front bench seat, her face turned over her shoulder, and she was talking to me.

  The topic of conversation was Claire, her interests, dreams,
and accomplishments. And these were manifold.

  Eventually, out of the blue, she said, “Aunt Kathy tells me you’re an amazing player.”

  Ms. Beckwith shot Claire a look.

  “What?” Claire said. “You said he was good.” Turning back to me, she added, “Which means you’re amazing.”

  “She’s an amazing teacher,” I said, instantly embarrassed by daring to comment on my teacher when she was within earshot.

  “Which do you like better—harp or piano?” Claire asked.

  “Harp,” I said impulsively, trying to please Claire and at the same time realizing it was true.

  “That’s cool,” she said. “I don’t know any guys at my school who would dare to be harpists.”

  A future of wedgies, swirlies, and titty twisters unfurled before my mind’s eye, but no one would touch me, I thought, if I were going out with a girl like Claire.

  Now I saw Ms. Beckwith spying me in the rearview mirror, and I said, “Yeah, I definitely want to keep playing the harp.” Ms. Beckwith’s eyes returned to the road—and I relaxed and looked out the window. Cheese shops lined the frontage roads, the roof of one supporting a huge blue fiberglass mouse with a wedge of cheddar in its paws. I was feeling so in my element that I blurted, “Hey, look at that big rat!”

  Claire responded by withdrawing her arm from the back of the bench seat and facing forward.

  I didn’t begin to recover from that arm removal until after the lights went down in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, Claire to my left, Ms. Beckwith to my right, Also sprach Zarathustra on the program. The CSO’s principal harpist was Eddie Patrinski, who looked like an aging Eddie Munster—saggy-faced with jet-black hair oiled back from his widow’s peak. His harp was black and gold with a blue tassel in the center of the column. I haven’t seen a tassel like that on a harp since. Ms. Beckwith had told us that his harp was nicknamed the Dragon, and I noticed that when he leaned it back just before he began to play, the tassel swayed like a mane and the instrument looked alive and rampant.