Good Things I Wish You (2 page)

And that was where it happened. When he opened the door to greet me, I recognized the antiseptic smell of the air, the tint of the linoleum covering the foyer, the blue chintz curtains in the living room windows, even though I’d never been there before. I knew exactly how he’d mispronounce my name (
Jean
-ette instead of Jean-
ette,
he’d say), and that when he did, he would continue to do so for the next four years, making it a little joke between us.

“Go ahead, Jeanie,” my mother said—I was fourteen at the time, so Mom still drove me to lessons—and with
that, I stepped forward into his house, into his life. What else could I have done? Inside, we passed his very young wife, who nodded and smiled unhappily.

Perhaps she’d already recognized me, too.

Most days, she’d be cleaning when I arrived: mopping floors with Mop & Glo, wiping countertops with Windex, dusting the furniture with lemon-scented Pledge. Erasing the evidence of their lives. There was also a child, a boy with a temper.

He stared at me with shining eyes until I looked away.

Sometimes, during my lessons, which were held in a studio at the back of the house, this boy would start to scream. He could project into every room, even through the thick studio walls, cries that stained the air like smoke, pooled between the pianos’ dark legs. I played Chopin, Beethoven, Bartók, Prokofiev. I played Brahms and Scarlatti and Bach. Music was the only light by which I could imagine any future, and by the time I was sixteen, I was coming three times a week to sit at one of the two grand Steinways. Sometimes the piano teacher sat on the opposite bench. Sometimes he sat beside me. I never knew which it would be. He charged ninety dollars for a two-hour lesson, but for me, the cost was twenty dollars a week, what my parents could afford. From time to time, he’d assure them he’d reduce his fees even more if necessary, that he’d always make room for talented young students, that he’d never be accused of turning away the next Clara Schumann because she couldn’t give him what he asked for.

It was this teacher who’d first told me Clara’s story. How Clara’s mother, Marianne, left Clara’s tyrannical father, Friedrick Wieck, after falling in love with another man. How, from that moment on, Wieck claimed Clara as his own, determined to create a child protégée who would become not only a world-class performer (a so-called
reproduction artist
) but a world-class composer, the first woman to join the ranks of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. How Goethe immortalized her, at nine, by claiming,
She plays with the strength of six boys
. How she’d debuted at the Gewandhaus before she’d turned ten, soloed at the age of eleven, been named Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuosa by the emperor of Austria at the age of eighteen. Poems were written in honor of her fingers. Cafés served torte à la Wieck, so named for its texture, which was said to be as airy, as light, as the young Fräulein’s touch.

My Clara,
Friedrich Wieck liked to say,
wasn’t raised to waste her life on domestic bliss.
^*

There were times when the boy’s screams became apocalyptic. Eventually, the piano teacher would place a swollen hand on my shoulder, push himself to his feet. There was always a moment when I’d doubt I could bear, this time, the full weight of his rising, but then he’d be walking away from me, unlocking the studio door. This was my
cue to stop playing—for all this time I’d have been drilling a cadenza, reworking tricky fingerings—then release my own pent-up breath, rub my shoulders, roll my neck. Perhaps I’d stand, retuck my shirt into my jeans. Perhaps I’d examine the framed prints on the walls: Canaletto’s Dresden; the piano teacher, as a young man, competing at the Van Cliburn, portraits of Clara as a heart-faced preteen, as a twenty-year-old celebrity, at the piano with Robert Schumann, whom she married, at last, over her father’s objections, warnings, outright threats. Longing for exactly what Friedrich scorned:
domestic bliss
. Longing to escape the same unhappiness her mother, Marianne, had left behind. I thought it was romantic, those years of separation in which she and Robert were forced to see each other only briefly and in secret, corresponding under false names through the help of sympathetic friends.

The screams increased and then abruptly ceased.

In the silence, I thought of my teacher’s hands, the fingers splayed, extended, as if he were trying to touch something just out of reach. He’d consulted with a number of surgeons, trying to find someone who’d agree to break his fingers, reset them into the curve he cupped whenever he shaped my touch to the keys.

Protect your hands
, he’d say.
Your hands are everything.

He gave me original compositions to play, lamenting his own inability to perform them. They were layered with long, lyrical passages gliding like oil over hard, dissonant beats. He liked to stand behind me as I played, resting his chin on the top of my head as the three Claras—
budding girl brilliant artist Schumann’s fiancée—watched us, in triptych, from their frames.

I love you like a father
, he’d say,
but you won’t listen to me
.

4.

B
Y THE TIME THE
waiter returned with more bread, calamari, two steaming bowls of soup, Hart was talking eagerly, bubbling like a pot. His company, it seemed, developed some kind of vision-enhancing technology, but he waved away my questions and told me, instead, about growing up in East Germany. About being selected, at fourteen, to train as a swimmer at a state-run boarding school. About the years he’d spent in the military before finding himself, as an untrained nurse, in charge of a local ER. About medical school in East Berlin. About lying in bed in ’89, just after the wall came down, thinking,
I must pinch myself, this cannot possibly be true.
About traveling to Stockholm, Osaka, Miami on a series of research grants. About experiments he’d conducted on Müller cells, a type of glial cell—had I heard of such a thing? Describing these cells, he spoke for ten minutes without apology or self-consciousness. It was not enough for me to say I understood. He batted at my arm: did I
see
? His face was alert now, lit with bright angles. All signs of exhaustion had vanished. America was wrong; he was anything
but cute. He was a strikingly handsome man. At the university, I worked each day with writers, scholars, thinkers. But I couldn’t recall when I’d last spoken to anyone who had wanted, so deliberately, to teach me something new. Someone who chose his words with such precision, with such passion. With the absolute attention of prayer.

And yet, as I blew on my steaming soup, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d met him before. Of course, it might just have been the accent. Like my parents, my father in particular, he spoke with the corner of each sentence turning down. Or perhaps we were related somehow. Things like this did happen.

“Where in East Germany did you grow up?” I asked, but even as I did, I suddenly knew the answer.

“In Leipzig. It’s—”

“I know Leipzig. It’s the birthplace of Clara Schumann.”

“Who?”

“Clara Wieck,” I said, reverting to Clara’s unmarried name on the off chance that he’d heard it. “She married the composer Robert Schumann in 1840. I am writing a book about her lifelong friendship with his young protégé, Johannes Brahms.”

“You have been to Leipzig, then? For research?”

“I’m going in July.”

Hart gave me an odd, quizzical look. “When in July?”

Below, in the courtyard, the water show started again. Red and green lights traveled up and down our water glasses, flashed inside the bellies of our spoons. Hart would be traveling to Leipzig, too, a few days earlier
than I. Of course our visits would overlap. Together we examined our empty soup bowls.

“Funny coincidence,” I finally said.

“If you believe in such things. In their significance.”

“Actually, I don’t.”

Hart looked relieved. “I don’t believe in them either.”

“I
wish
I could believe.”

“But you can’t.” He speared the last calamari.

“Yes and no,” I said. “It’s hard to explain.”

But he’d been talking so sincerely, so intensely, that I felt obliged to try. “Mostly I think it’s just a matter of paying attention. Everything is significant, but when you take note of something in a particular way, it winds up changing how you react, how you feel. Maybe just a little, but there it is. Over time, it starts to make a difference.”

His expression was impossible to read.

“So if I decide to consider this significant, it could become significant. But I don’t believe there is any intrinsic”—I paused, feeling stupid now—“well, significance. Am I making sense?”

Apparently not.

“I am a rational person,” he said. “I cannot believe in such things.”

I’d been looking into his face; now I looked away. This was something Cal used to say. One cannot exchange ideas with a
rational person
any more than one can argue with a religious fanatic. The night before, I’d sat up rereading the diary Robert began for himself and Clara on the first day of their marriage. Robert’s scant observations present
his own point of view as the reasonable one, the rational one, and Clara must have believed this was true, for she overwhelmingly supports his assertions, corrections, ideas. Robert was eleven years older, more educated, more entitled—one could argue—to opinions of his own. Yet he could also be blindingly jealous. Childishly petulant. Possessive. He suffered chronic depression, bouts of paranoia, and eventually, auditory hallucinations. He raged and wept and retreated to his piano, where he composed in manic bursts. He recorded compulsively, in his personal diary, details that included how often he and his wife had sexual relations.

And what about those relations? What about that sad, sick man who came to her with reeking breath, unwashed and wild eyed, muttering about angels? The last years of that marriage must have been simply unbearable. Still, she defended him, protected him. She tried to conceal what was happening, even from their closest friends. Even, at first, from Johannes Brahms, who arrived at their door in September 1853, just a few months before Robert, plagued by the voices of spirits, attempted suicide by throwing first his wedding ring and then himself into the Rhine.

Brahms, fifteen years Clara’s junior, who would eventually become privy to every family secret.

Brahms, who—according to rumor, then and now—would eventually become Clara’s lover.

“No one can be rational about everything,” I said to Hart, becoming aware of the silence between us. “Especially when it comes to relationships.”

To my surprise, he nodded. “You are speaking of love at first sight, I suppose.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never felt anything like that.”

“That’s because you, too, are a rational person.”

I thought of the new, fearful voice in my head. “Oh, is that what I am?”

Again, that sudden smile. “More rational than I. The first time I married, it was love at first sight. At least I thought it was love.”

What I thought: “The
first
time?”

What I said: “So was it? Love, I mean?”

“Sure, sure. It could have been love. Why not?”

“Could have been,” I repeated.

I felt as if I were on the edge of learning something significant: about life, about love, about my own future. In the courtyard, a band was setting up beside the fountain. In the sky: a hard slice of moon.

Hart took a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose.

“Or maybe it was just the hormones,” he said. “Who can really say?”

I have such an urgent desire to see you, to press you to my heart, that I am sad—and sick as well. I don’t know what is absent in my life, and yet I do know: you are absent. I see you everywhere, you walk up and down with me in my room, you live in my arms and nothing, nothing is real.

—Robert, in a letter to Clara, 1838
^*