The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (30 page)

One autumn afternoon he was walking home, mentally humming something that he would
translate into sounds as soon as he sat down at the piano (he paid by the hour for
the use of a Steinway upright in a music school, after the lessons), when he ran
into an ex-classmate from the New England Conservatory. As soon as he saw and
recognized him, the music in his head fell silent. The reality of that
individual—son of Norwegian immigrants, big nose, little
ears—contaminated the street, the cars, even Cecil himself with empirical
details. They started chatting; they hadn’t seen each other for eight years. Neither
had betrayed his calling as an avant-garde musician: the Norwegian was making ends
meet by giving lessons to children; his constructivist pieces for chamber orchestra
hadn’t been performed, even privately; he was still playing the cello; and he had
spoken with Stravinsky. Cecil let him talk, nodding sympathetically, though he made
fun of Stravinsky in private. He paid more attention when the cellist said, in
conclusion, that the career of the innovative musician was difficult because, as
opposed to the conventional musician, who had only to please an audience, the
innovator had to create a new one from scratch, like someone taking a red blood cell
and shaping it with patience and love until it’s nice and round, then doing the same
with another, and attaching it to the first, and so on until he has made a heart,
and then all the other organs and bones and muscles and skin and hair, leaving the
delicate tunnel of the ear with its anvils and miniature hammers till last . . .
That was how he might produce the first listener for his music, the origin of his
audience, and he would have to repeat the operation hundreds and thousands of times
if he wanted to be recognized as a name in the history of music, with the same care
every time, because if he got a single cell wrong, a fatal domino effect would bring
the whole thing crashing down . . . The metaphor struck his drowsy interlocutor as
suggestive, if a little extreme, and provoked a vague reply. The constructivist was
impressed by Cecil’s sibylline presence, his whispering, his woolen cap. Had he made
something of his life, instead of being a nonentity, he would have recorded the
meeting in his memoirs, many years later.

A year earlier, Cecil had done some arrangements for the famous jazzman Johnny
Hodges, who, in return, had offered him a contract for five nights at a hotel,
playing piano in his band (which didn’t usually include a piano). The first four
nights he didn’t even touch the instrument. The only one who noticed the silence
was the trombone player, Lawrence Brown, who, before the start of the fifth
performance, smiled at him and said: Hey, Cecil, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but
that piano has eighty-eight keys. How about you hit one?

The story came up late one night, at a table in the Five Spot, and though it wasn’t
exactly proof of his credentials, and had to be explained, the upshot was an offer
to play there one night during the week, as support for an avant-garde group. It was
a heaven-sent opportunity, and he treated it as such. He gave up his job at the dry
cleaner, bought a piano with a providential loan, and practiced almost nonstop, only
breaking off to reply to his neighbors’ complaints with polite explanations. He had
moved from the rundown tenement on the Lower East Side to a poky room on Bleecker
Street.

The cream of the jazz world went to the Five Spot, so he would have an audience of
connoisseurs. He convinced himself that the jolt of his playing could transform that
audience and produce the applause that he had been denied until then. The theory of
cumulative units that his ex-classmate had propounded was precisely that: a theory,
an abstraction, nothing more. In reality, there was something magical about an
audience, like a genie appearing from a lamp.

The night in question arrived; he climbed onto the stage, sat at the piano, and
began. The amplifier died almost straightaway—a technical fault, supposedly.
It didn’t matter to him. But his performance was cut short by condescending
applause. When he looked up, disconcerted, he saw the avant-garde musicians coming
forward with their instruments and their simian smiles. He went to sit at a table
where there were some people he knew; they were talking about something else. One
took hold of his elbow and, leaning toward him, slowly shook his head. Laughing
cheerfully, another came out with a supposedly apt remark: “It’s okay, it’s over
now.” And that was all; they stopped talking to listen to the next number.

Someone came up to him and said: “I’m a poor black autodidact, but I have a right to
express my opinion, and in my opinion what you do isn’t music.” Cecil just nodded
and shrugged, as if to say, What can you do? But the self-proclaimed autodidact
wasn’t content to leave it at that. “Don’t you want to know the reasons for my
opinion? Are you so vain, do you really think being an artist makes you so superior
that you don’t care what a fellow human being thinks?” “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask
because I didn’t realize there were any reasons, but if there are, I’d be interested
to hear them.” A satisfied smile from the autodidact, as if he had scored a point.
He explained: “It’s very simple: music is a whole made up of parts that are also
musical. If the part isn’t musical, the whole isn’t either.”

The argument didn’t seem irrefutable, but it wasn’t the time or the place to go into
it. And there was a more general problem too. Cecil kept thinking about this
experience over the following days, as he went distractedly about his business; he
replayed what had happened step by step and tried to find an explanation. He thought
perhaps the explanation would occur to him once he’d forgotten what had happened,
but in the meantime he couldn’t help remembering. He mentally reconstructed the
club, the movements of his fingers on the keyboard, the words and reactions of the
others . . . and the reconstruction was accompanied by a slight sense of
incredulity, the feeling inevitably provoked by whatever has, in fact, occurred.

Like a naughty child caught in the act, he confessed that he’d been hoping for a
response from the musicians. The way he played might have sounded strange.
Hyperharmonic piano percussion, spatial intentions translated into time, sound
sculpture . . . (there are always plenty of formulae to account for an extraordinary
phenomenon), and someone who wasn’t working in the field could well have been
disconcerted. But the professional musicians who went to the Five Spot to keep
up-to-date were aware of Schoenberg and Varèse, and they used formulae themselves,
all the time! The only explanation he could come up with, borrowing an argument from
the crazy autodidact who had accosted him (maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all), was
that “musicians are part of music”: because they couldn’t get outside it, they
couldn’t offer any explicit recognition.

Actually, he wasn’t so sure that any of the musicians he thought he’d noticed had
really been there, because he was very short-sighted and wore dark glasses, which,
combined with the subdued lighting, made it just about impossible to see. He
promised himself, as he usually did, to come back later and assess the situation
more objectively. He usually failed to keep those promises, and this time,
preoccupied by other things, he let several weeks go by. He took a job as a night
watchman at a supermarket and then as a cleaner in a bank, and both changes obliged
him to rearrange his routine and his habits. Finally he went back to the Five Spot,
to hear a singer he passionately admired, and was surprised to find a job offer
waiting for him.

It turned out that a rich lady who lived on Fifth Avenue was hiring pianists for her
bohemian dinner parties, and recruiting them from the Five Spot, as a kind of
guarantee of quality. He never found out if they did it on purpose, to him or to
her. In any case, she was paying a hundred dollars, up front. Cecil prepared some
lyrical improvisations (he recorded his ideas in a little notebook, using a personal
system of dots). He walked in the park until the sun went down, in a state of mind
hovering between “What do I care?” and a detached optimism. Squirrels were running
about in the trees, as if the law of gravity had not yet come into effect. The sky
suddenly turned an intense turquoise, the breeze died away, and there was a silence
in which a plane could be heard flying over the city. He crossed the street and told
the doorman who he was.

He entered the penthouse through the servants’ quarters, where he spent the best part
of an hour drinking coffee with the staff. Finally, a valet dressed in black came to
tell him it was time, then took him across the salon to the piano, a full-size
grand, already open. He barely glanced at the guests, who were drinking and
chatting, light years away from any conceivable music. He looked down at the
keyboard and peered at the strings, shining like gold. It was a first-class piano,
and seemed to be brand-new.

He played a note with his left hand, a deep B-flat, which reverberated with slow
submarine convulsions . . . And that was all, because the lady of the house was
standing beside him, closing the lid over the keys with a movement so smooth and
effective it seemed to have been rehearsed.

“We’ll do without your company for today,” she said, looking around the salon. There
was applause and laughter, but only from the guests who happened to be nearby. The
room was very large.

Cecil was still perplexed hours later, talking it over with his lover. How could a
single note possibly have such an effect? But had it been just a single note? He
honestly couldn’t remember. He could have sworn it had been just the one, but
perhaps within the dream of that note, he had played one or several of his famous
“tone clusters,” or launched into some scales, or put his hands into the entrails of
the piano.

No matter what exactly had happened, he should have expected some such reaction, from
snobs like that with no knowledge of music. But he might have expected the opposite
too, because his music, unable to break through their shell of ignorance, could have
spread over its surface like Vaseline and facilitated a superficial penetration.

Time went by, but brought no changes. That winter there were a number of notable
opportunities. A bar with a bad reputation took him on for a week to provide some
late-night variety (he was to start at two a.m.). The bad reputation was due to the
dealing done in the back room. The owner, who was also the dealer, was Irish; he
went to see Cecil personally and explained what he wanted: real, innovative music,
not just wallpaper. Cecil asked if he’d heard about his playing. He didn’t quite
dare ask if he’d actually heard him play. The Irishman nodded without elaborating
and offered him twenty dollars a night.

The place was seedy. The clientele was made up of black drug addicts, and a
significant number of old ladies with resigned expressions, waiting in the corners.
Two cobwebby pianos were standing guard at the back of the room. No one was paying
any attention to the banjo trio and its messy chords. Paradoxically, there was a
good ambience, a certain excitement in the air, almost like a prior music.

He sat down at one of the pianos . . . He wasn’t sure which one, he wasn’t there long
enough be sure, because he’d only played a pair of chords or bursts of notes when
the owner of the bar tapped him on the shoulder and, with a worried look on his
face, told him to wrap it up. Cecil took his hands off the keys and the downward
pressure on his shoulder became an upward-pulling grip that lifted him to his feet.
One of the old black ladies had appeared on the other side of him, and, as if she’d
been waiting for a sign, slid into his place on the stool and began to play “Body
and Soul.”

The Irishman showed him the way out, still looking worried. The speechless pianist
was wondering what there could possibly be in his music to worry a man who dealt
every day with the dangerous suppliers and buyers of hard drugs. The dealer held out
a ten-dollar bill but, just as Cecil was about to take it, pulled his hand away.

“You weren’t playing some kind of joke, were you?”

There was a menacing gleam in his squinty eyes. Cecil wondered whether there had
really been two pianos. That character had been dealing in danger so long, he had
absorbed it and become danger in person. He would have weighed two hundred pounds,
more than twice as much as the pianist, who didn’t wait around for further
denigration.

Cecil was a kind of sprite, always stylish in spite of his limited means, wearing
velvet and white leather, and pointed shoes that complemented his compact, muscular
physique. He didn’t exercise, but the way he played the piano engaged every movable
molecule in his body. Sweating had become second nature to him. He could lose as
much as ten pounds in an afternoon of improvising at his old piano. Extraordinarily
absentminded, whimsical, and volatile, when he sat down and crossed his legs (in his
loose pants, immaculate shirt, and knitted waistcoat) he was as ornamental as a
bibelot. His continual changes of address protected him; they were the little
genie’s suspended dwellings, and there he slept on a bed of chrysanthemums, under
the shade of a droplet-laden spiderweb.

That night he walked the deep streets of the island’s south, thinking. There was
something odd: the attitude of the voluminous Irish heroin dealer was not
substantially different from that of the lady who lived on Fifth Avenue, except that
she didn’t seem worried, though perhaps she was just hiding it. And yet the two
individuals were not at all alike. Except in that one respect. Could it be that the
propensity to interrupt him was the common denominator of the human race? And he
discovered something more in the Irishman’s final words, something he began to
reconstruct from the memories of all his ill-fated performances. People always asked
him if he was doing it as a joke. Some people, of course, the rich lady for example,
didn’t deign to ask, but their behavior presupposed the question. And he wondered
why the question applied to him, but not to others. For example, he would never have
asked the lady, or the Irishman, if they did what they did (whatever it was)
seriously or as a joke. There was something inherent in his work that raised the
question.