(And now for a piece of memory from the author, titled)
(Violin Strings, Blonde)
She doesn’t want to be called Lauren
I didn’t know how I felt about her then, and I don’t know much more now. I thought she was glamorous, worldly, another of the free spirited and country-hopping girls who can’t understand why you haven’t been outside your local in the last two years. I can’t remember how we met, only the night at the underground Moroccan lounge where she was dressed like she had just quit the corral: cowboy boots, tight jeans and a cotton shirt that hinted at her shape. And her blonde hair. She was one of those that can make you decide to not make an attempt, that it’s better to have the dream and not ruin it. To just shut-up, stay back, watch.
. . .
Mom, Dad, Ms. Johnson, I’m sorry
I used to play classical piano. Brahms, Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Clementi. I had little plaques with their faces bronzed into them, peripherals of genius whose accomplishments would let them live on forever in the left side of my sock drawer, beneath the underwear and beside the Tae Kwon Do belts. Every two weeks from when I was five until fourteen I would be driven to my lesson, sitting perfectly still, inwardly rehearsing all the scales and songs I didn’t know. The lesson would start with my mother pretending to read on the couch, my teacher and I bowing to show our respect, after which I would lie my face off about how I had practiced to keep my mother from scolding me. Not that the lying really mattered, because as soon as I’d start to play it became evident how little practice I’d done. It took nine years for my parents to let me quit.
We’re a collective, the piano-lesson quitters. We sit around our houses trying to make it up to our parents that we didn’t continue, feeling sorry for everyone involved—the brothers, sisters, the piano instructors, the other children and parents who politely sat through our songs so brutally misrepresented—who had to put up with the half-assed practicing, the Christmas concerts, really, the whole ordeal. Not that it was easy for our parents who went to the same church as the piano instructor and were socially bound to not quit unless the family was moving at the very least to a different province. But I did eventually quit and did other things with my life. Like playing video games. I still like playing video games.
It even smells the same
When you walk into the University of Alberta’s Convocation Hall after stalking through the tree and snow lined pathway to the heavy oak doors while your shoulders haunch your jacket up to your ears to give them the warmth of your neck, the tight and cloistered feeling of the cold evaporates almost as quickly as the snow. Quick steps are amplified by the high stone ceilings and tiled floors, and any hope you could have of showing up late and unnoticed is made as slim as the hallway you walk to enter the concert hall. A grinning man handing out programmes and two more doors lead you into a room three stories tall with a ceiling lined by brass organ pipes. They’re just as bronze and impressive as I thought they were when I was six. The stage is adorned in a long curtain, red as supermarket steak, bleeding to the stage floor.
This last night that I went the start of the show had been pushed back, and the hall was semi-full of people standing while some sat with their feet on top of the movie-theater-fold-out-seats in front of them, while two children ran around up and down the center aisle. I found a spot in the front row on the far left side and tried to order the memories now mingling with the conversations happening behind me.
How many times had I played here? There were the Christmas concerts, the spring graduation ceremonies, that one night of jazz in college. I had a bit of a history with this room, mostly of sheer fright, the kind that comes from having to play a song you only half know that a six-year-old Chinese girl played better than its composer at the last concert and being sure that everyone in the audience knows what the song is supposed to sound like and the inevitable look you’re going to get from your mother and father for having embarrassed them so very thoroughly. It took as much time for the experience to come back as it did for my ass to find the groove in the seat, and this time I couldn’t fall asleep with my head in my mother’s lap. But maybe I would still buy myself a Happy Meal afterwards.
The musicians, University students, all of them, began to file out from behind the red curtain, dressed in black pants and skirts, argyle socks and stockings. Each sat, unfurling long sheets of music on their music stands and began to tune. The violins squealed, the cellos moaned, and I sat trying to find one violin in particular among the crowd, one sitting on a shoulder, caressed by blonde hair.
A whisk of the curtain’s corner caught my attention. The conductor walked out in rigid strides, his arms never more than an inch from his pockets. He was tall, composed—even for a conductor; he wore a tweed jacket and his face was as smooth as a window. When he arrived at the front of stage he bowed and the crowd gave a smattering of applause. He said a joke that hinted at a veiled accent, something Eastern European. I laughed with the audience like we could all afford to be polite. He talked about the program, his decisions and arrangements, while the musicians were as silent and still as the chairs they sat on. They looked like dolls, each looking forward blankly, instruments resting across their thighs, each thinking about the part they would probably screw up, what they would do when they got there, how little they practiced, that they should have done more. One of the male cellists was quite visibly sweating. The conductor introduced the first song, turned to the musicians and lifted his baton. Knees straddled cellos, croaking as they shifted, and necks and shoulders crooked to accommodate violins. Saluting the curtain, pausing long enough for someone to cough, the conductor began to slash the air, and from each cut bled music.
That sounds ritarded
The song began rubato, the baton sliding through the air. The point would flip and skewer the dust loosened from the curtain. The violinists drew their bows, and the strings hmmmm’d a soft affannato. The side of the conductor’s face, his sloping eyebrows, his tense cheekbones, relaxed while the band played sognando. He turned to the cellos, poking at them with the baton. Each began to softly saw, fingers tense along the neck of the cellos, hands wagging to create an operatic vibrato. The conductor pumped the baton in his fist, and with a punch, a sforzando shook the building, while the baton went back to twirling tight circles. Another punch, another sforzando which reverberated, bouncing back and forth between the walls and windows. The conductor walked backwards. He thrusted the violins into irato. The musicians pulled their bows in unison like marionettes caught in each other’s strings. The conductor lifted his knees and stomped with each new sforzando that flew against the walls. Bows greasily swayed back and forth with the glissando. The conductor seemed to tear with the lugubre, and smile with every gustoso, while each musician’s face was like blank marble. Eventually, their shoulders relaxed, the conductor stood upright, the cello’s released their grip, and the violinists began to sweep their bows like smoke along the strings. Adagio, adagio, and the music returned to the somber tone. As all sound slowly died, the conductor’s hands fell limply at his sides, and the musicians once again became part of the backdrop, like the curtain. The crowd’s applause swallowed what was left of the echo.
Feigning distress
It was very, very good.
The conductor bowed to show his respect, and informed the audience there would be a twenty-minute intermission before they finished the program. While he talked about a show that was going to happen in the spring, I found Renne. I couldn’t see her face, or her hair, but in the second row of violins I found a wide red leather belt, and I knew. I hadn’t seen her wear it before; I just knew it was her. People stood, and we saw each other and she tossed her blonde hair out of her eyes. She waved, I reciprocated, she left the stage, I crossed my legs and waited. I looked at a cut on my hand from washing a broken dish that was beginning to heal.
What would we talk about? The music? Her playing? My cut? The miracle of the human body and the careful ratio of blood to oxygen that keeps it from scabbing inside our body? I didn’t know anything about violin, and I didn’t listen to classical music. How cold it was outside? What was she doing? How was school? What did we talk about last time?
I turned around in my seat and watched the crowd. The hall was little over half-full, with the musicians talking with their parents and friends, cellos laying beside the chairs, and the violins being held by the neck like cats, hanging limply. Sitting directly behind me, several rows back I noticed Renne’s roommate. She waved, I reciprocated, she kept waving, and I turned around to see who she was waving at. And Renne was walking towards us in those heels, in a black skirt and top, with her blond hair, and her bright red belt sitting atop her hips.
How cold it was outside?
Whatever you call her it’s not important
Renne’s roommate’s name is Janya, very Ukrainian, but I don’t remember names. I only remember it now because we saw each other recently on a trip to Canmore. I played with a band in a lodge; she was rafting with her medical student friends. They came to the lodge one night and the band went back to their cabin, filled with food and alcohol and boys’ dreams. At four in the morning I hoped I wouldn’t have to walk back to the lodge. I walked back.
Renne sits on my right. Janya sits on my left. I have my hand in my pocket to keep it from becoming a conversation piece (it’s also slightly gruesome) and I stare at the novelty-sized organ pipes running the length of the ceiling and all over the place because I’m not really involved in the conversation and they keep resorting to inside jokes because they’re roommates. I’m happy enough sitting beside them. I mostly sit at home and think about sitting with women somewhere, with little opportunity to ever actually do it.
Renne wraps up the conversation because the band is going back on and she takes off down the narrow hallway beside the stage. I watch her walk the entire length of the hallway. I sit with Janya, who’s brought her guitar because she happens to play classical, but is learning flamenco, love music. I’m suddenly trapped in some kind of Baroque revision of an Archie comic, unsure whether to go for the blonde playing Stravinsky or the dark brunette that can summon gypsy nights with her dark eyes and wide-fretted guitar.
There’s a point when the room gets louder, when the people are telling stories, when Janya is reading the program, when all I can do is look at the warped floorboards at my feet and a certain old smell hits me and I realize I wouldn’t be here if not for piano. If my childish whims would have had anything to do with it at all I could’ve been halfway to being a paleontologist, learning how to properly brush dust off of rocks and things that resembled rocks. Instead I’m able to have some rudimentary understanding of music that makes me interesting to what I would think is a relatively closed off circle of women who might find me talented or more importantly attractive. I prayed a blessing for my parents and my piano teachers and every bronze peripheral in my sock drawer as the conductor again comes out, his face less shiny, his pocket-handkerchief possibly oilier. The lights dimmed and the crowd quieted. He gave no jokes, he offered no explanation of song choice or historical context at the time or writing or what he thought the composer was writing about. He bowed to the audience. He turned to the orchestra. He raised his hands and again began to weave a musical tapestry that hung in mid-air while he stitched the colours and shapes together.
I see foggy streets,
with hazy lamplight.
A cobblestone boardwalk where demons trap seductive women.
I see clouds that hang over lakes,
drifting limply,
tired of being clouds and becoming fog through the evergreen trees,
melting into lakes and drifting to the basin floor to mix with the mud and earth.
I see birds and lizards that shuffling over gravel paths,
delegates waving from the stairs of planes,
filthy and haunted ballrooms,
the tile shifting into sand,
showing the muted steps of ancient waltzes,
I see stars that hate how they appeared in the photograph of our oxygen.
I can see the solidness of the walls and chairs and floor around me.
But I can’t see the reason that I quit.
Amidst all these things I look up, and for a moment, in and amongst all these dreams and hallucinations, and I thought to myself that there could be nothing more beautiful than a woman, reclining, naked, playing the violin.
