CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Karina, Elise, and her students are early, sitting at a cluster of four round tables, three chairs at each huddled in a half-moon facing the stage. They’re at Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro on Frenchmen Street, just outside the French Quarter, tucked away in a windowless, candlelit, cozy room behind the dive bar out front, waiting for the show to start. Tonight features up-and-coming jazz pianist Alexander Lynch, accompanied by drums and a bass, a simple trio. With a background in classical piano and then Broadway, Alexander is new to the jazz scene. Elise saw him in New York at Blue Note in October and can’t stop raving about him, says he reminds her of Oscar Peterson.
The room hasn’t filled in yet. Karina counts fifteen tables plus a balcony above them. Their seats are right up front, inches from the stage, which feels intimidating, threatening even, as if she were sitting too close to an open flame, as if being here could be dangerous.
She pulls at her lavender silk scarf, spreading it across her front like a bib, covering her cleavage as much as possible. After much angst, she decided to wear her best black dress, spaghetti strapped and tight around the bust, flaring and flowy from the waist to the knees, probably too short and too revealing for her age. She bought it over a decade ago. It fit her better then. She fears she looks like ten pounds of potatoes in a five-pound bag. Elise is in jeans and black suede ankle boots, a black velvet blazer over a graphic T-shirt, laughing and chatting with her students, totally at ease, as if she were a regular, as if this were her seat and the club was expecting her. She fits into everything.
The students are also in black and jeans, edgy and casual and cool. They belong here, too. They’re all in their early twenties, about where Karina left off before giving up, still believing it’s all possible.
Karina slides the bottom olive off the plastic skewer in her martini and chews on it while Elise leans over to the table to their right. As Elise’s back is now to her, Karina can’t hear the conversation and feels excluded, out of place, conspicuous. She doesn’t deserve to be on this field trip. She’s not a teacher at Berklee. She’s not a student. She’s not even a real musician.
She’s Elise’s sad, pathetic neighbor. She’s an old, suburban piano teacher, a has-been, a never-was. Once upon a time, an almost-was.
She wants to be home, in her flannel pajamas, reading a book in her living room. But as soon as she imagines being on her couch, she hears Richard calling her from the den. She drags a long sip from her martini and pulls another olive into her mouth with her teeth. It’s an enormous relief to be away from him, to have a break from the distressing sound of his struggling to clear a cough, from having to tend to him all day and night. She blinked her eyes open this morning in her hotel bed and felt almost giddy, realizing that she had just slept through the night undisturbed.
And then Guilt came marching in, stomping with its monster feet and pounding its drum, scaring any nascent feelings of relief and lightness back into their holes. She shouldn’t have stuck Grace with him for four days. Grace shouldn’t have to clean up her father’s piss and be up all hours of the night while Karina is well rested and wearing a poorly fitting black dress, drinking a dirty martini, and listening to jazz with a bunch of kids. What if something goes wrong?
“I can’t wait for you to hear this guy,” says Elise, leaning back over to Karina. “Abby just called him the Mozart of jazz.”
Karina nods. It’s been so long since she’s been to any kind of live musical performance, years since she’s been to Symphony Hall, the Hatch Shell, Jordan Hall. The last time might’ve been to see Richard at Tanglewood. He played The Marriage of Figaro overture. Eight years ago? Can it really be that long?
She wouldn’t feel so uneasy if they were at a concert hall, if she were tucked somewhere safe and civilized in the orchestra or mezzanine section, waiting to hear a recital or concerto. Classical music has always been her home base, her comfort food, her security blanket. At Curtis, she started as a classical pianist, and by third year, her career looked more promising than Richard’s. They never acknowledged this aloud, but they both knew it. Her teachers praised her and gave her opportunities normally reserved for seniors or graduates. They did not offer these opportunities to Richard.
He congratulated her whenever this happened, but his words were rigid and cold, spoken through his teeth, and would leave her feeling insulted instead of championed. Whenever she privately or publically surpassed his playing, he’d grow distant and critical of her in other ways. He didn’t like her hair. He ridiculed her grammar. He withheld affection, refused sex, and pouted. She craved nothing more than to be loved by him when he felt self-confident and admired in the spotlight. Ironically, the biggest obstacle to his center-stage bravado seemed to be her.
When they were students, their technical skills were similarly matched, but her playing was emotionally connected and far more mature. While Richard could master the technical complexity of any piece, listening to him play often made her picture the notes on the page, the chords, the key, intellectually appreciating his athleticism, hearing the music as dissected elements rather than a whole. Not until after graduation, when they lived in New York, did something click in him, and he began to play the emotion of a piece and not simply the notes.
She remembers Professor Cohen and the Test. Each student was asked to play a piece but not until Professor Cohen left the classroom. The Test was simple. Could the student make the teacher cry in the hallway?
The first time Karina took the Test, she played Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, op. 12, no. 1. She played the closing gesture, tender and quiet, and waited, breath held, for Professor Cohen to return. The door opened, and Professor Cohen was smiling with clasped hands and wet eyes. She made him cry several times that semester. Richard never did.
She discovered jazz first semester of her senior year. She breezed into the campus coffeehouse for a quick espresso, on her way to something else, and stayed for two hours, mesmerized by three of her classmates, a trio of piano, drums, and trumpet playing Miles Davis. This music was so different from the sacred, rigid exactness of Mozart or Chopin. It had an exhilarating freedom, a playful exploration outside the structure of the melody. She watched the three improvise, detour, collaborate, creating something original, discovering the music as they played it, following a free association, a harmony, an embellishment, wherever it led them. They generated a momentum, a magical chemistry, a river that flowed through everyone there. Her heart was captivated, dizzy, spellbound.
She doesn’t think her relationship with Richard would’ve lasted beyond graduation if she hadn’t discovered jazz. In abandoning classical piano for jazz, she ensured that they would never compete, that the classical spotlight would be his to shine in. But switching from classical piano to jazz wasn’t an easy transition. Jazz is complex and in many ways technically more difficult than classical piano. And her decision was at best frowned upon, more often snubbed and mocked. Although neither genres are mainstream music, the world of classical piano is privileged and white, played in grand symphony halls to audiences who sip champagne. The jazz world is historically poor and black, played in hole-in-the-wall nightclubs for patrons drunk on bourbon.
Alexander, the drummer, and the bassist take the stage, and the audience applauds while the musicians ready themselves at their instruments. Alexander is slender, about Karina’s age, with a mop of glossy black hair and fingers that extend for miles, poised on the keys like a sprinter in the blocks, ready to explode into action, holding for the gun to fire. Alexander nods, and the three begin.
The melody is a simple repetition, a catchy, easy-breezy tune, but soon breaks into improvised solos. As Alexander plays, Karina closes her eyes, and the notes become a summer-evening stroll down a country road drenched in moonlight, more of a mood than a melody, sultry and slow, in no hurry at all. Softened by vodka, she rides the notes, allowing herself to be carried, and her blood is flowing hotter. She’s turned on.
Karina remembers living on East Sixth Street in New York City, hanging around the Village Vanguard, listening to Branford Marsalis, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, and Brad Mehldau, learning through listening, watching, asking, performing, and improvising. Learning jazz was a three-dimensional experience of unique expressive discovery, lived and breathed on the fly in spontaneous jam sessions. Learning classical piano had been an academic exercise in practiced techniques, adherence to strict rules, memorizing the notes on the page, practicing alone. She never felt more challenged, more alive, than when she was playing jazz.
The next two pieces are high energy, a call to action and a celebration. Alexander’s fingers are a fiddler crab running from a seagull’s pursuing shadow; a hummingbird drinking nectar from the keys, trilling arpeggios inhabited by God.
He’s traveling low to high on the keyboard, coloring outside the lines, hitting notes that land just shy of displeasing. This is renegade music, exciting, provocative.
“Holy shit, right?” says Elise.
Karina nods. She closes her eyes again during the fourth piece, entranced by Alexander’s riffs, the way his chord extensions wander from the head. He’s playing outside now, and the song becomes about the journey, not the destination, about getting lost along the way and what he might discover, an embellished grace note, an ascending harmonic progression, a meandering Sunday drive. He varies the phrasing, changing the shape and texture, inserting blue notes and trills that sound like children laughing. He dances across the keys, courting the notes, loving them, and the music is a gentle morning rain playing on a windowpane, delicate, lonely, longing for a lover, a childhood friend, a mother.
The song ends, and the audience applauds. Karina opens her eyes and tears spill down her face. She is enraptured, changed, remembering who she is.
She is a jazz pianist.
With stunning clarity, she suddenly sees the role she’s been playing, the costume and mask she chose and has been wearing for twenty years. She’s been hiding, an impostor, unable to give herself permission to do this, to play jazz, to be who she is, shackled inside a prison of blame and excuses.
At first it was all Richard’s fault for moving them to Boston. Jazz pianists live in New York, not Boston. Then Richard started traveling. He was hardly ever home. They rarely had sex anymore. She needed to refill her birth control pill prescription, but it was February and so cold outside, and she didn’t feel like walking to the pharmacy.
She was lazy. She was stupid. She was pregnant.
Her excuse then chasséd over to Grace and motherhood. Now she couldn’t be a jazz pianist because her baby needed her. Richard still spent much of the year touring. She was essentially a single mother. She was consumed and devastatingly lonely in the demands of young motherhood. There was often no room for a shower, never mind for getting back to playing jazz. So she tended to Grace full-time, creating a safe nest where Karina could hide. She promised herself it would be a temporary shelter.
Karina remembers her mother, born in an oppressed country, stuck in an economically depressed town by her husband’s meager coal-mining wages, trapped in a bad marriage by her religion, confined within the dirty beige walls of her small home, raising five children. Every day, she wore a dingy white apron, her prematurely gray hair pulled into a bun, resignation in her eyes, and her arthritic hands to the bone cooking and cleaning and tending to the needs of her children, whose singular dreams were to leave that house, that town, that country, as soon as they could. They all left her.
Karina swore she wouldn’t repeat her mother’s life. As much as Karina loved being Grace’s mother, she would not bear child after child, adding brick after brick to the wall of her maternal prison. Grace would be her only child. One and done. But Richard wanted many children, a big family.
Her carefully buried deception peeks out from its hiding space for the briefest moment, long enough for shame to seep through the walls of her stomach, sickening her. She drains her martini, distracting her tortured, guilty mind with the cozy warmth of booze.
When Grace turned five and went to kindergarten, Karina would have the time to pursue jazz. That was the plan. But then Grace went to school, and Karina’s excuse migrated back to Richard. She discovered charges for an expensive dinner and drinks for two on his credit-card bill; salacious text messages from some woman named Rosa on his phone; a pair of black lace panties in his suitcase, not a gift for her. At first, these betrayals shattered Karina’s heart. She felt stunned, gutted, humiliated, dishonored. She wept and raged and threatened divorce. And then, after a few days of wild emotion, she would feel wrung out, calm and strangely satisfied. Over time, her heart hardened to it all. She almost craved the detective work, the thrill of finding the next damning text message, the momentary drama it awakened in her and ultimately, the narrative it supplied.
Grace was in first grade, eighth grade, a sophomore in high school, and Karina painted herself the victim, trapped in a bad marriage by the rules of a church she no longer believed in but still obeyed and the barbed-wire reasons of her own making. She carefully constructed her life, creating a predictable stability in her safe career as a teacher, teaching students to play classical piano in the private confines of her suburban living room, where her students have always been too young, unformed, and musically naïve to question her, stretch her, or push her outside her comfort zone.
And she could blame Richard and his affairs for holding her back. He was wrong and bad, and she was right and good, and she could resent him for her unfulfilled dreams of playing jazz, and this was the perfect excuse, the brilliant smoke screen deflecting anyone who might inspect the situation for the truth. The truth is, she was terrified of failing, of not making it, of never being as recognized and loved as an artist as Richard is.
But then she got divorced and Grace went to college, her excuses literally out the door. With seemingly no one left to blame, she pointed her finger at the hands of time. Too much had passed. Her chance had passed. It was too late.
She watches Alexander on the stage, new to the jazz scene, about her age, and that last pin falls. She can now see that every collapsed excuse she abided to like God’s commandments existed only in her mind. Her unfulfilled life has always been a prison of her own making, the thoughts she chose and believed, the fear and blame, paralyzing her in her unhappiness, telling her that her dreams were too big, too impractical, too unlikely, too hard to achieve, that she didn’t deserve them, that she shouldn’t want them, that she didn’t need them. These dreams of playing jazz piano were for someone else, someone like Alexander Lynch. Not for her.
As she listens to Alexander play, she steps out of the carefully constructed, now-unlocked cage in her mind. She hears him messing with the melody, accenting the ascending chords and varying the phrasing, and she feels the exuberant curiosity in his improvisation, searching for something new, unafraid, and his freedom becomes hers. She sees what’s possible for her if she dares to claim it.
The trio finish their final piece of the night, stand, and bow. The audience is on its feet, applauding, begging for more as the musicians humbly exit the stage. Karina wipes the tears from her eyes in between claps, feeling breathless, cracked open, pulsing with desire, and, although she’s not quite sure how, ready to live.