The Mozart Season (25 page)

“Lighten up, Landauer,” Ezra said. The laughing changed, got softer.

Steve Landauer looked cornered. He stared at Ezra. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Then he looked at the ceiling again.

Christine said, very gently, “Steve, when did you know you were going to be a concert violinist?” Then she said, fast, “You don't have to answer.…”

Everybody was looking at him. His eyes were moving sideways back and forth. I held my breath again. “I don't know,” he said. He looked down at the floor. Everything was quiet. That was evidently his answer. People started shuffling around a little bit; nobody said anything. Then he opened his mouth again. “It didn't come on me like a flash—from the eye of God or anything. I just—” He moved his weight from one foot to the other again and looked at his feet. I could hear everybody breathing. Steve Landauer took a breath like a gulp, and said, “It's better than being a cucumber.”

Everybody was still looking at him. Suddenly there was a sound of hammering somewhere in the elevator shaft. Everybody looked up. There was a very tiny bit of laughter.

Karen said, “Steve Cucumber, important figure in late-twentieth-century music—Sonata for Tossed Salad in G—”

“Suite for Elevator and Hammer in A Minor, his longest work—” said Ezra. The hammering went on. Everybody wasn't staring at Steve Landauer anymore.

“You haven't heard my greatest piece, ‘Serenade to a Talk Show Jerk,'” said Steve Landauer.

We looked at him. It was an astonishing surprise. We laughed. He pretended for a couple of seconds that he hadn't said it; he tried to look down at the floor as if we weren't even around. There was more hammering. The elevator was full of laughter. Steve Landauer started laughing as if he didn't want to but was doing it anyway.

I looked around. Six people with their private worries, all in competition against each other, people who might be hating each other, all laughing our heads off. Then everybody got quiet.

Myra started clapping her hands. I didn't understand. Then Christine joined her. Then Ezra. Then Karen and I. Steve Landauer looked flustered, as if he didn't get it. But he did get it, he'd have to be a moron not to get it. We weren't clapping because somebody decided to hammer on things in the elevator shaft.

By the time we got out of the elevator, the lobby was full of parents and flashing lights and TV cameras, and the woman in the lace collar tried to make an apology speech while we pushed out past her, and she sort of got shoved out of the way.

I'd decided I could get through the rest of my life very happily without ever being on TV again.

13

I was awake at 4:42
A.M.
, watching the clock. I did some exercises where you listen to the arches of your feet relax, and then you do the same with all the rest of you in small bits, all the way up to your hair. A Yoga lady on TV does them, and she has this very spiritual smile and an extremely superior attitude. Like we're mere earthlings and she's got an advanced spirit and we're all several incarnations behind. I lay in bed and practiced what she says in her perfumy voice, “Focus attention on the very center of your head. Feel yourself breathing in through your ears, out through your ears, in through your ears, out through your ears.” The birds were getting up in the trees outside. She also says to “breathe out through your feet,” but Sarah says we have to draw the line somewhere.

I told Heavenly Days that her name had been said on TV yesterday. She went on licking her thigh.

Pretty soon it would be over. By the time it got dark again I'd be eating dinner, and somebody would have won the Bloch Competition.

What if Myra won first, Ezra won second, and Karen and Christine and Steve Landauer and I were left standing there holding our bows?

Except that if Myra really did have such terrible stage fright, something would probably happen. Her bow might bounce, she might forget something. So she'd be left holding her bow, too.

But Christine was concertmaster of a whole orchestra; she had acres of poise, and she taught violin to little kids. “I'm gonna fwow up E-flats.” I remembered being really little and having Mr. Kaplan play harmony with me when I played scales. Those were our little duets. When I was five years old playing my little screechy scales, Christine was twelve, probably playing Beethoven sonatas. She would logically win.

But then there was Ezra. Never rode in an elevator. Fourteen years old. His favorite composer, or one of them, somebody who died in 1630. Knew about Hercules and the lute. And Larry Ladley was so mean to him. Those things don't automatically make a good violinist, of course.

Myra Nakamura. Her hands were graceful. Not that graceful-looking hands would automatically make anybody a better violinist. But she'd had so much public exposure too. So much mileage. Starting with her stage fright, and going around playing for all those clubs and churches. And she had that kind of exotic air space around her. Playing the koto would develop a whole different part of her brain. Wouldn't it? Maybe she had an advantage over everybody. Except Steve Landauer.

While Steve Landauer was flying all around the country, playing everywhere he went, Myra had been going around Roseburg, Oregon, working on her stage fright.

And Karen Karen. The beauty queen in my dream, the chunky girl in Trout Creek Ridge, and on television practically telling Larry Ladley he was a jerk, and so feisty in the elevator, getting Steve Landauer to stop being a cucumber. She must have been desolate when she couldn't even practice because of her fingers. I think she loved Mozart more than any of the rest of us did. That would mean she'd play the concerto with more something than the rest of us would. What would it be? When you really truly love something—you do it differently. More of your blood beats into it.

But Steve Landauer. Just the thought of him made me turn over in bed with a lurch, it was a reflex. I dumped Heavenly on the floor in my haste.

I had a hunch he was the only one of all of us who really was determined to be a concert violinist. That was going to be his life. And he was good enough to be the “very exciting young player” in a piano quintet. At least for one concert. He probably was a prodigy.

I lay on my stomach and thought about Deirdre. I tried to imagine her being young and in school and being a prodigy. She probably was weird too. Geniuses are. There's a lot more going on inside them. More wires to get crossed. Maybe more blood going to their brains, or going there faster or something. And then I imagined her holding her baby in her arms and then I saw her screaming in our music room and I saw my mother rocking her.

Steve Landauer had four mothers.

I turned my head to the right, and I felt Heavenly settle beside my stomach, and the next thing I knew the alarm clock went off and it was morning.

Bro David was the first person I saw that day. He was standing in my bedroom doorway in pajama bottoms and a Trail Blazers T-shirt. “You know you were on the late news?” he said.

“Get out of here,” I said.

“Everybody tumbling out of the elevator. Your boyfriend Landauer and everybody. They made it look like a party.”

I sat up in bed. “David, is that true?”

He nodded his head. “A different channel had it on. I forget which one.”

I pushed the back of my head into the pillow and closed my eyes. I could hear him walking across the room. He sat on my bed. “You know what you have to do today,” he said.

I didn't open my eyes.

“You have to go for it. You've worked real hard. You deserve to have fun with old Wolfgang.”

I kept my eyes closed and nodded my head.

“And it's not the end of the world.”

I looked at the dress I'd decided to wear hanging on the outside of my closet. It was just a blue dress, medium blue with medium sleeves. I would put it on and go and play the competition and come home again. I looked back at Bro David. “Thanks,” I said. He walked out of my room.

Play for Elter Bubbe Leah. I'd promised her.

Play in my most personal way. Honor the nineteen-year-old boy who gave us this concerto. Let my own angel out. Give 100 percent, not 110 percent. Don't go all the way over the top. Remember everything I've ever learned and simultaneously forget it. The divine inspiration of the NBA.

At breakfast there was a big bouquet in my water glass with a note pinned to a zinnia leaf:

These were handpicked from several people's gardens who don't know they're wishing you good luck in the Great Allegra Shapiro Violin Performance.

Our great passionate love,

Jessica and Sarah

 

P.S. We'd rather do Mr. Trouble's laundry than turn pages for that Landauer.

P.P.S. Ezra is adorable!

I suddenly remembered the piece I'd played in the audition for the Prep Orchestra when I was a little kid. It was the second movement of a Schubert sonatina, and it was in D major. I looked into my glass of orange juice and could almost see the notes. There was a B-flat at the top of the right-hand page. I wore yellow socks that day, and Mary Janes.

Way back in June, I hadn't wanted to know what any of the other players looked like. Now I knew them all. I could picture them in their pajamas, I could imagine them drinking orange juice.

“Morning, everybody.” My dad came walking through the kitchen with grease all over his hands.

Bro David was right behind him, carrying some kind of oily car part. “Buy Oat Floats, kiddies,” he said. He says that nobody ever says “Morning, everybody” except TV dads, so when Daddy says it Bro David does a commercial. They disappeared into the dining room.

“Why do you think they're going to fix the car in the dining room?” my mother asked.

I didn't say anything. I picked a flower out of the glass and moved it to the other side of the bouquet.

If Elter Bubbe Leah hadn't made her only daughter get on a boat and go away forever so she'd never see her again, Daddy wouldn't be walking through his house saying good morning to everybody today. Bubbe Raisa wouldn't have met Zayde Shapiro in the standing-room line at the Metropolitan Opera and they wouldn't have gotten married and had Daddy, and he wouldn't have met Mommy, and Bro David and I wouldn't exist.

Daddy came back through the kitchen carrying the oily thing David had been carrying, on his way outside. He came over to where I was sitting, and he held the oily car part way out away from me, and he bent over and kissed me on my neck, on the chin-rest bruise. “Everybody, good morning,” he said to my neck. I put my arms around his neck. Naturally, he didn't know anything about the private arrangement I had with his grandmother's purse.

Everybody left. My mother went off to water flowers, and I sat at the kitchen table.

The phone rang. “Allegra, sweet one, this is your big day,” said Deirdre, all excited. I'd forgotten that even her speaking voice is so beautiful. It flows out. “Remember, what's down inside you, all covered up—the things of your soul. The important secret things. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“The story of you, all buried, let the music caress it out into the open. Promise?”

I didn't say anything. How could I promise a thing like that?

“You'll know when it happens,” she said. “You can't make it happen. And remember the Celtics. I wish you love today.”

“Thanks, Deirdre. You, too. You want to talk to my mother?”

“No, sillybones. I called to talk to you. Say hi to everybody.”

I ate some breakfast. I stared at the hummingbirds outside the window. I went to the music room.

My mother walked in, sat down, waited for me to finish the Kreutzer Étude no. 39, and said, “Remember all day long today: You need to enjoy this. Enjoy, dear.” And when my parents dropped me off at the building, my dad said, “You're now in a position to take delight in doing this thing, Allegra. The concerto you can play upside down and backward—now go ahead and take delight in it.”

“Wish me love,” I said while I was getting out of the car.

“Love,” said my mother and my father, almost at the same time.

I walked in the door thinking about David warning me not to let it make me a crazoid. I could feel a buzz in the Green Room. And yet nobody was talking. Maybe it was the six violin cases in the room; maybe it was just all those same people who'd been stuck in the elevator together stuck here together again the very next day. Whatever it was, somebody could have plucked the air, the way you'd pluck a string, and it would have twanged.

There was a big bulletin board on the wall with blank white envelopes thumbtacked on it. We were each supposed to take an envelope. It had a number in it, and that was the order of playing. “These are jumbled. There's no order to the way they've been placed on the board,” said a lady who was evidently in charge of us. She had a neck chain attached to her glasses, and she had a violin bruise on her neck. Maybe it was a viola bruise. “And where's Allegra Shapiro?”

“Me,” I said. I whirled around from unzipping my case. That wasn't the answer to her question. But it was what came out.

She looked at me, almost as if she'd expected somebody else, and said, “There's a message for you on the board. Oh—and—everybody? Listen: There's a smaller number on the corner of your card. That's your practice-room number. You'll wait there till you're wanted.”

I took a blank envelope, and on the opposite side of the bulletin board was a smaller one with my name on it in Mr. Kaplan's writing. I think I could get very old and be in a rest home and I'd still know his handwriting. My number was four. In the other envelope was Mr. Kaplan's note:

May you have great, great fun with this beautiful song today.

“One. How could they do that to me?” Myra Nakamura stood at the side of the bulletin board, holding up her number.