The Morels (2 page)

“The right one’s out of order,” he said. As if to corroborate, the alarm began clanging.

The editor walked over to the stairway exit. Sri Lanka followed and on the threshold shot me a look that said,
Now
.

I apologized and shook the man’s hand again. I wished him luck, a wish he returned with an ironic smile. Was it really so obvious?

On the jog down, Sri Lanka aborted our mission. The timing was all off, he whispered, and so was the power dynamic. We would have to wait until next week to fire the editor. I didn’t get it but whispered back that I agreed wholeheartedly. We called it a day after lunch at a deli with upscale steam tables and plastic-utensil seating, which left me with some time to kill before my shift.

At Tower Records I gave over a solid hour to the various listening stations. Under the greasy clamp of those headphones, eyes closed, I tried to lose myself to the music. Instead, I pictured my long-lost friend’s odd face. It
was
familiar. But from where? With thirty minutes to spare before my shift, I stopped in at Shakespeare Books.

He’d mentioned the title in the course of our chat, and at lunch I scribbled it down on a napkin. I approached a kid in pajama bottoms, staff tag around his neck, and handed him the napkin. I had been expecting a blank stare, but was led without hesitation to an island display in the middle of the store. Judging by the assured path he traced through the maze of shelves, this was not an uncommon request. He disappeared and left me to sort through
the paperbacks on display. The sign overhead designated them as
STAFF RECOMMENDED
.

I found the book, partially hidden by a new translation of Borges’s
Collected Fictions
. Literature? I had been expecting something more, I don’t know, academic: philosophy, some proof disproving some other proof. I picked it up. It was a slim volume entitled
Goldmine/Landmine
. On the cover, in bold, was the name:

Arthur Morel.

My job at the theater wasn’t the worst thing in the world. There was a kind of glee to our aisle frolic around the emptied auditorium, screen blank, lights up. A perverse pleasure taking in our janitorial duty. Impatient for our rightful place on the red carpet, we ushers spent our downtime debating which actors might play parts in our unsold scripts, dateless schoolgirls planning outfits to the junior prom.

I took my fifteen in the cement break pit with a cup of root beer and a bag of popcorn, then made my way to the ticket booth with Arthur’s slim book for the rest of what I hoped would be a slow evening. From behind the bulletproof face of the theater, the booth contained an earplugged rush of silence. The flutter of money being counted, the pebble clatter of change in the pan—these were the only sounds inside. An entire marching band on parade down the street would register as a polite and twinkling spectacle—and, if you were reading a book, not even that. When the shadow of a customer would darken your page, you’d flip on the thin otherworldly chatter of the squawk box. “Two adults,” they’d say, as though they were announcing themselves to you generically, in the third person. The machine would clunk up two tickets that you’d slide through the change pan. It was a welcome isolation from the crowd control the other positions required. You relaxed into a crouch on your stool until your butt got sore, just in time for the manager to come count you out.

To my frustration, however, it was not a slow night. Everyone was here to see the new Almodóvar, which had probably just been
nominated for something because until now the screen it flickered on played to a virtually empty theater. I read the dedication page four times before giving in to the demands of the throng. It would just have to wait. The late show got out at 11:17. After closing, and if I walked briskly enough, I could make it through the front door by midnight.

Home, I stripped off my tie and had a seat at the upright piano parked under my bedroom window, a mid-century Baldwin that hadn’t been tuned since before I left for college. It was a sad old horse. Its uneven keys had the look of nicotine-stained fingernails. The mahogany veneer was splintering off in places; along the side that faced the bare radiator pipe, its finish was blistering like a ripe sunburn. I switched on the small gooseneck lamp on the stand and got out Arthur’s book. According to the preliminary pages, it had appeared in hardcover a year prior. There was no author photo, and the About-the-Author, which I was hoping might offer a clue, was not helpful. “Arthur Morel lives in New York City with his wife and son.” On the back were several blurbs. Russell Banks and Martin Amis both effused about this debut talent. The
New Yorker
: “…  an astonishing feat of language.” The
New York Times Book Review
: “…  unflinching eye for difficult truths; one trembles to think where that eye will turn next.”

Astonishing. Unflinching
. I formed a silent chord with my right hand, bringing each key down slowly, to the bump of the key bed.

It seemed that Arthur hadn’t changed a bit.

I
AM FIFTEEN—FOR A CHILD PRODIGY
, something of a late bloomer. It’s Saturday. I am standing on the platform at Christopher Street Station waiting for the Uptown local. This is the age of the brass token, before the hipster renaissance in Brooklyn and Queens, before If You See Something Say Something. You might encounter any number of things on the platform in those days. This morning: a blood-soaked sock and a paper cup filled with quarters, on the cup’s side scrawled
TAKE ONE I DAIR YOU
. As I wait for the train, I try to imagine the scenario in which these two props intersected. The head and rear cars are usually empty at this hour, and I have been warned against boarding either. Safety in numbers, which will be made pointedly clear later that same year when a kid not that much older than myself will enter and sit down beside me in a cleared-out car. He will put a knife to my groin and demand twenty dollars, and after I hand him a wallet with only a few singles in it, he will punch me in the face and take off at the next stop through the ding-dong closing doors.

I board somewhere toward the middle and find a seat. Between my knees, my cello in its pleather case, on my lap my pleather valise. It is a forty-five-minute ride, time enough for music-theory homework—coordinating bouts of scribbling to the periodic moment of stillness at a station. Each stop accumulates and rotates out passengers, and
once we pass 86th Street it’s mostly us, instrument cases between our legs, working out difficult fingerings on an arm or a knee. A curious look from a paint-splattered construction worker, from a Hispanic mother with a bag of groceries. The subways shriek and buck, dying with a shudder between stations. Sitting in the dark is like floating, the scraping squeal of a passing train a flicker of blue sparks against the scratched windows. Then it wakes and drags itself along to the next stop.

From the exit at 116th and Broadway it’s a six-block walk. We fan out, trudging our instruments past the gated Ivy League community, the dozen or so of us on a dozen separate journeys up this hill; after all, it’s not as though we’re friends. We recognize one another: co-principals in a chamber ensemble or the person whose ear-training homework you might once have copied from. We nod, say hey—once a week isn’t enough to learn names. This isn’t summer camp; there are no blood-sworn bonds. We dress differently here, in our holiday best, button-down collars, black lace-up shoes, as though we are attending the presence of God.

The conservatory occupies two square blocks, and during the week it is home to grown-ups from around the world who possess the dedication to roam its hallowed halls but not the connections to get them into Julliard, our city rival; Juilliard students will tell you it is merely skill they lack. Either way, on Saturdays the place is ours. In its arched ceilings and marble staircases is the grandeur of a Gothic boarding school. I try always to arrive at least an hour before my first class: winter months I am encumbered with as many as twenty pounds of stuff, and the lockers along the southern corridor are only for the college students; if I don’t want to be stuck carting this load from class to class, I’ll need to find someplace to stow it.

On the second and third floors, a hive of windowless chambers. The plum carpeting, threadbare and pocked with cigarette burns, gives off the salty reek of an old overcoat. It’s a ghostly cacophony here—looped phrases of familiar pieces, muffled arpeggios, down the hall a teenage mezzo calling
me! me! me! me! me!
A declaration
of self among all this disembodied noise. I am looking for an empty room. The place is packed. I should have come earlier; today is, after all, Competition Day.

The first Saturday in March, same weekend as the Oscars, it is the public face to all the private striving that goes on behind these closed doors. The Concerto Competition is juried by six members of the senior faculty and chaired by Mr. Strasser, conductor of our top-tier symphony. Auditions are held on the same stage on which the winner will perform. To win is to become a celebrity, implicitly declared the school’s finest musician, and debut as featured soloist in the Spring Concert, a sold-out audience of parents and professionals looking for the latest talent.

My cello teacher harbored no ambitions for me in this arena, but for three years my piano teacher has urged me to learn a concerto; until now I’ve refused. I already knew I wasn’t the school’s finest player; I didn’t need a panel of judges confirming it publicly. But this fall, the fall of my sophomore year, I have been learning Liszt’s
Totentanz
, a showy one-movement fantasia for piano and orchestra. I picked it up one afternoon after hearing it on the radio. It’s too hard for me; getting my performance to tempo is like trying to push a stalled truck uphill, and I have yet to run through the piece from memory without having to stop and retrace my steps; undoubtedly, I will lose the competition, but commanding that dark whirlwind, an entire battalion of players in support, with a packed house bearing witness to my greatness: it is an image too tempting not to pursue.

I find an empty room with a piano on its last legs. Its candle board has been scarred by several generations of frustrated hands, its keys drummed on so often and continuously that there are divots in the ivory, some worn through to the wooden key block. I take off my coat and pace the room. My audition is at ten forty-five. I have some time yet. After a vertiginous, heart-pounding run through the piece, I head off to visit my piano teacher, making sure on my way out to set my coat conspicuously on the piano bench and open several scores on the stand so that anyone peering in will
have the impression of my imminent return. It will be necessary, however, to visit my stuff frequently, today of all days, or I might come back to find it in a pile in the hall.

On my way from the room I pass a kid I’ve gotten to know this semester—gangly, hands swinging at his sides—lost in thought.

Arthur, I say as our paths cross.

Hey, Arthur says. You go yet?

Not yet. You?

Heading down now.

Earlier that year up in the conservatory library. Trying to find a willing accomplice from whom to copy ear-training homework. Class in an hour. Arthur, set up at a table alone. In front of him a spread of pages. I asked him what he was doing.

Writing, he said.

I examined the pages, which were peppered with eraser debris. A handwritten score to some sort of chamber piece, at least a dozen parts, all marked out in a careful, childlike hand.

Composing? But you’re at the library. You need a piano, don’t you?

I have absolute pitch, he said, so no. I don’t need a piano. Besides, it’s so noisy down there I can hardly think.

Ear training must be a piece of cake for you then.

You could say that.

Got the homework handy, by any chance?

After my encounter with Arthur in the library, I began noticing him around. He played violin, though I only knew this from the case he toted and the callus on his neck; if we’d shared billing in any of the monthly group recitals, I wasn’t aware. He rode the subway, too, and on the few mornings I’d seen him, he was already aboard, which I assumed meant he lived on Staten Island: the subway line terminated at Battery Park, where the ferry docked on the Manhattan side. He was, like me here, something of a loner, which led me to think of him as an only child of divorced parents. On a nice day,
I’d see him on the front steps or during the winter cross-legged in the hallway, reading some old paperback. When looking for a free room, I’d occasionally stumble in on someone I knew in the throes of a particularly passionate phrase; practice is a private activity, and having someone witness it an odd sort of embarrassment, not unlike walking in on someone, pants down, in a bathroom stall. I had never walked in on Mr. Too Good for a Piano.

This semester I’d signed up for a late-afternoon elective: Compositional Technique. Something about that image of the young composer in the library, laboring over his handcrafted score; it was impressive, and around here—among an entire schoolful of child musicians who were younger and more advanced than me—I longed to be someone impressive. Maybe this would help. I could cultivate a scarf, a pencil behind the ear. There were fewer than a dozen of us in this class, including Arthur.

Every week our teacher brought under his arm a small stack of records. After selecting one and placing it onto the turntable, he turned up the volume so high that the pops between tracks could be felt as thuds in the rib cage: a drumbeat to usher in the agony of the Postwar Era. He called these listening sessions
ear calisthenics
. We were stretching our ears, he said. Listening to each piece at full volume was intended to wake us up. Tonality’s a drug, he shouted over the music, that lulls you into a complacent stupor! Each piece was a new shock to the system. Each had the quality of spectacle.

Ligeti: the white-knuckle dissonance of a horror movie.