CHAPTER TWENTY
The first half of every piano lesson is devoted to technique—scales in four octaves, Schmitt exercises, chords, and arpeggios—training fingers and ears. The second half is focused on playing the piece of music assigned to the student the previous week. Ideally, the student has practiced twenty minutes a day at home.
This student has not.
Now that he’s finished the technique part of his lesson, Karina waits for Dylan to begin playing, and every minute of waiting increases the temperature of her exasperation. Dylan is thirteen and has probably grown six inches since last year. He’s got long arms and fingers, knobby shoulders and knees, and appears uncomfortable in his own body, as if he hasn’t quite moved into all that new space. Pink, inflamed acne covers his otherwise pale face. A whisper of fuzzy brown hair has sprouted above his lip. He’s wearing bright golden yellow shorts and a matching sweatshirt. His mother will shuttle him to basketball practice immediately after his piano lesson. Every few seconds, he snorts phlegm from somewhere in his throat up into his brain.
“Would you like a tissue?” asks Karina.
“Huh? No, I’m good.”
No, you are not good, she wants to say.
He studies the sheet music in front of him as if reading Greek for the first time. Maybe he has a learning disability or some kind of musical dyslexia or amnesia and she shouldn’t judge him. Or maybe, he simply doesn’t want to be here. That makes both of them. She was up half the night, and sitting on this bench in silence is draining the last drops of her depleted energy. Her eyelids rest shut for a second or two with each blink. She’s desperate for a nap.
Dylan lifts his left hand, but then retreats, placing it back onto his lap. He can’t decide where to put his fingers. He won’t even sample a note unless he’s sure he’s got it right. Millennials. They’re all afraid to make a mistake. Dylan would rather sit on this bench, paralyzed in fear and indecision, than play the wrong note.
If she just tells him, she can end this infuriating stalemate. But she’s not going to. Not today. She provides the answers for this kid every week, and he never learns. She blames his mother. She probably sits next to him while he does his homework and checks his answers, irons his clothes, wakes him up in the morning. The boy is helpless. Well, Karina is done coddling him. She sits and waits and says nothing, letting him sweat it out.
He snorts again as he squints at the music, leaning closer to the sheet of paper, searching for where to put his left hand. She’s given him many bass-clef mnemonics. All Cows Eat Grass, for the spaces. Good Boys Deserve Fudge Always, for the lines. Or, Grizzly Bears Don’t Fly Airplanes. No matter how it’s packaged, he can’t retain it and is forever perplexed by the arrangement of black dots on the five lines and four spaces of the bass clef.
She wishes he’d quit. She’s tired of teaching students who don’t want to play piano. She wishes all of them would quit. Aghast by this reckless thought, by the misfortune she just invited into her life, she crosses her fingers in her lap. How would she keep this roof over her head if that happened? She needs to be more careful about what she thinks.
Dylan snorts again. He shouldn’t be here with a chest cold. If Richard catches it, it could easily lead to pneumonia, and with ALS, that could be the end of him. She thinks about telling Dylan that they need to end the lesson early, but he doesn’t have his license. They’d have to wait for his mother to pick him up, and his half-hour lesson would be done by the time she returns anyway.
The indecipherable music in front of him is Prelude in C by Johann Sebastian Bach. No sharps. No flats. It’s as simple a piece of music as she can imagine that is still lovely to play and hear. The first note is middle C. Granted, the note is written for the left hand, and so it’s on the ledger line above the bass staff and not on the ledger line below the treble staff, as he’s used to seeing it. But still. It’s middle fucking C.
His awkward presence and the even more awkward silence continue to provoke her, itching her hot, weary nerves, making her crazy. She grinds her teeth and breathes impatiently through her nose, suffering in her resistance. She will not tell him what to do. Not one little hint. These kids are handed everything with a pretty little gold bow tied around it. Everyone’s a winner. Everyone gets a trophy. Not on this bench. Welcome to real life, Dylan.
He snorts again, and she wants to scream. Play a note! Blow your nose! Do SOMETHING! On another day, she might blame herself. If only she were a better teacher, more inspiring and encouraging, he’d know how to play this piece. Today, she’s letting him own the blame. They’ll both sit here for the remaining ten minutes in silence if they have to.
She gazes vaguely out the living-room window and notices three birds in the distance, possibly doves, sitting on electrical wires, two on the top line, the third on the wire below them. These round, black birds blur into treble-clef notes that she plays in her desperately bored mind. G-G-E. G-G-E. She begins to compose a piece of music prompted by these avian notes, and her foul mood is somewhat lifted by the sweet melody when Richard’s coughing intrudes. Not the sound she was hoping for.
She listens for the shape and meaning of it and hopes that, like young Dylan here, Richard will work it out on his own. The cough is wet and gurgling, unrelenting. Richard’s abdominal muscles have weakened considerably in the past month, and he often can’t produce a cough effective enough to simply clear his throat. To Dylan, it probably sounds as if someone were drowning in his own spit in the next room, but Karina has grown hardened to these now-familiar noises.
Richard suddenly goes quiet, and it’s the silence between the bursts of choking that she never gets used to, that fill her with dread. She can picture him straining, his body shaking and taut with effort as if he were trying to pull the cough up from his toes, the stringy vessels swelling in his neck, frothy spittle dripping over his mouth. She waits, listening, and she’s reminded of years ago, lying awake in bed, waiting to hear the sound of the front door creaking open after midnight, the sound of Richard’s heavy footsteps in the foyer, the wheels of his carry-on rolling across the hardwood floors. She resented him for being away, and then she immediately hated him for being home. Here he is, back home. And she still hates him.
If the situation were reversed, if she was sick, and Richard was stuck tending to her, everyone would canonize him. No one makes her feel like a saint for doing this. She feels pathetic, foolish, resentful, and stupid, probably how Dylan feels sitting at her piano for thirty minutes once a week.
Richard coughs again, breaking the silence. He hacks and sputters, obviously fighting for air, and the sound of his failing to clear his throat crawls up Karina’s spine and screeches in her ear. That’s it. She’s had enough.
She stands abruptly, leaving Dylan in his endless confusion over Bach’s impossible notes, and rages into the den. For the briefest moment, she considers the cough-assist machine. But her heart and mind are saturated in a burning-hot soup of hatred, and she can’t take one more minute of any of this. She pulls out one of the two pillows from behind Richard’s head and registers the split-second, wide-eyed recognition in his eyes before she covers them and his entire face. His head moves side to side beneath the pillow but not violently so. Paralyzed, his hands lie still by his side, unable to resist. She presses down harder.
It takes only about a minute for his head to go still. She waits a bit longer before lifting the pillow. His eyes are open, his pupils fixed in place, uninhabited.
She hears the sound of middle C.
“Is that right?” Dylan asks.
Karina blinks. The doves have taken flight from the electrical wires outside. She turns her head to see Bach’s Prelude in C on the rack and pulls herself fully back into the living room, releasing that sinful, warm chocolate torte of a daydream. She listens as the pleasing tone of middle C fades, and Richard begins coughing in the den.
“Yes, Dylan. That’s right. Congratulations.”
She checks the time on her watch: 4:00. Lesson’s over.