The Soloist (3 page)

Yo-Yo must have been telling funny stories the whole time because his table never stopped laughing. I looked over a few times and caught glimpses of him gesturing with his hands as he talked. At one point I think he was imitating Arthur Rubinstein. Whatever he was doing was obviously funny, and he was laughing just as loudly as everyone else at his antics. His sense of humor was so contagious that, I heard later, it even inspired Larry Axelrod, a notoriously serious bassoonist, to tell a joke.

After the drinks we said our good-byes and I joined the others to thank Yo-Yo and see him off. When it came my turn to shake his hand he surprised me by calling me Renne, the familiar version of my name. He remembered it from the only other time we’d met, sixteen years before, after one of my recitals in New York. That night he had come backstage to compliment me and we had a brief conversation before my mother pulled me away to meet a conductor. I remember liking him instantly, especially since we were the same age,
and I hoped we could build a friendship, but my mother purposely kept me away from him. This was just after he had chosen to attend Harvard rather than one of the famous music schools in order to get an all-around education. It turned out to be a very wise decision, but at the time some people grumbled that he wasn’t being serious enough, and that his music would suffer for it. I think my mother was afraid that if I spent too much time with him some of his rebelliousness might rub off on me and I would do something rash, like ask to live on my own or choose my own friends.

After seeing Yo-Yo off I went back to my apartment to get in some practice before dinner. On my way inside I checked the mailbox and found the usual pile of junk mail and a letter from the Superior Court of Los Angeles County. Even though I had no reason to worry, my heart started pounding as I opened it. It turned out to be a trial jury summons, requiring me to appear for a period of at least ten days starting the second week in May, just around graduation time. My relief that it was only jury duty quickly turned to annoyance. I’d assumed that teachers were exempt from the process.

The thought of having to sit in a stuffy courtroom for days, listening to evidence and legal mumbo jumbo, watching people get upset or perjure themselves, then debating a verdict with a bunch of strangers filled me with anxiety. Just watching coverage of trials on the news made me tense.

I poured myself a drink and put the summons aside. I had to practice. I got tuned up, ran through a few bowing exercises to get my shoulders loose, then jumped right into some music. I had hoped that Yo-Yo’s surprise performance would
have some residual effect on my playing, but this was not the case. The pattern was the same. The first few minutes I played were my best; I felt relaxed and largely unaware of my fingers on the strings, the way we are unaware of our feet when we walk. But then, a few bars into the piece, I heard myself come in flat on a note. All of a sudden I became aware of my fingers as they struggled to find the exact center of the note. This little distraction was enough to cause me to come in sharp on the next note, which made me even more conscious of my fingers. They started to feel cold and numb on the strings, and I had to stop. When I tried to do a simple scale to get my intonation back, I could hear the flaws in pitch so acutely that it became hopeless; only a machine could produce notes pure enough to satisfy my ear. Trying to find the right pitch with my fingertips, which now felt like giant frozen sausages, became like trying to guide a badly frayed shoelace through the eye of a needle. Only force of habit kept me at it until dinner.

For probably the thousandth time, I wondered what advice Professor von Kempen would have given me if he were still alive. I remembered that once, when I became frustrated that my fingers were not long enough to reach a certain extension, my frail teacher edged forward on his hard pine chair until I was afraid he would slide right off. “Every musician,” he said as if reciting a prayer, “discovers that God has given him faulty equipment. That’s where the difference between an ordinary musician and a great artist lies—how they face their shortcomings.” As always, he spoke to me in his archaic Bavarian dialect, with his eyes fixed on mine, and tapped my knee with his cello bow for emphasis. “The common man is shackled by them, Herr Sundheimer, but not the great artist! He finds creative ways to make use of his flaws,
and thus he transcends them.” He closed his eyes then, nodding slowly and pursing his lips in thought.

I was barely ten when he gave me this lesson, so unfortunately the greater part of his advice went over my head. When he offered these obscure lectures, which was fairly often, I would make an effort to seem interested, but I was really only waiting for him to give me concrete suggestions. I wanted solutions to the musical problems, not observations about spiritual poise. Eventually he showed me that I could make the extension if I released my thumb from behind the neck of the cello at just the right moment—a simple adjustment.

I have been trying to find creative ways to make use of my hearing problem ever since it began, but without any signs of transcending it. Maybe von Kempen was only talking about certain kinds of shortcomings. Perhaps if he had lived a little longer he would have recommended I stop playing the cello and find another outlet for my creative energies.

I spoke to Martin, our senior violin instructor, to see if he knew how I could get out of jury duty. We have a money pool going in the department that will be won by the first person who can, without purposely trying to do so, bring up a subject in conversation that Martin isn’t shockingly informed about. I’ve heard him give advice about living wills, tax-free investments, computer software and new types of surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome, which is the bane of so many pianists and string musicians; once, when I told him I was thinking about buying a new car, he remembered how
Consumer Reports
rated the model I was interested in. Sure enough, when I mentioned jury duty his eyes lit up.

The only drawback to asking for Martin’s advice is that he
doesn’t quite stop at the answer to your question. If you ask what
Consumer Reports
thought of the Ford Probe he’ll tell you, but not without also telling you how it rated every other car in that price range, mentioning along the way that
Car and Driver
came to entirely different conclusions. True to form, he managed to launch himself from my problem with jury duty into a vigorous critique of the jury system itself. The gist of his commentary was that while the original concept of being judged by one’s peers had been a nice idea, it clearly wasn’t designed with today’s society in mind. “In the eighteenth century,” he explained, “this country had a small population of highly educated people. Now we have a huge population, and most of them are poorly educated and don’t know how to think for themselves.”

I asked if he didn’t think that having ordinary citizens sit on juries helps keep the law in touch with common sense and with the community’s sense of justice, but he asked me right back who I thought ordinary citizens were. “Look at how many people vote Republican,” he lamented, “or how many picket abortion clinics, or how many read
USA Today
! There’s ordinary citizens for you, Reinhart. You want their brand of common sense? I’d rather have a judge settle my case, I can tell you that.”

As a rule, I try to avoid talking with anyone about the collapse of society. My own view is that apathy is an acceptable, if not admirable, stance because it actively reduces frustration and despair and to that extent makes the world a better place. As soon as I could get a word in I told Martin that in spite of my feeble defense of the jury system I wanted to avoid participating in it and wondered if he knew how I could avoid serving. He said that it would be easy for me to
get out of it; all I had to do was say that a graduate student of mine was giving a thesis recital and that he would be severely inconvenienced if I was pulled away for any length of time. I merely had to go to the courthouse the first day of my summons, Martin assured me, state my excuse to the clerk and they would let me go.

A few weeks after Yo-Yo Ma’s visit to the university, and just before my appointment for jury duty began, I received a letter from an elementary-school music teacher down in Long Beach. Mr. Ralph Douglas wrote to inform me that “… because of your stature, I feel you are the right person to contact with regard to a musical genius I have discovered.”

I got a perverse kick out of the reference to my stature, since I’m five-six.

“Kyung-hee Kim is only nine years old, but he is nothing less than a giant,” Mr. Douglas gushed, pursuing the size theme. “He is musical, he can sight-read any piece of music you give him regardless of the difficulty, and he has a huge sound! I discovered him two years ago by accident. I needed members for the school orchestra, so I passed out a few instruments in my regular music class to see if anybody would get interested. Kyung-hee was last in line, and all I had left were a triangle and a cello. How lucky for us that he did not choose the triangle! I have been giving him lessons for only two years, but already he sounds like a professional! Even
though I’m not a cellist myself, I confidently predict that Kyung-hee will be the next Rostopovitch [
sic
].”

Well.

Right away I suspected that this was a mildly talented boy judged through the ears of a wildly enthusiastic school-band instructor. If the boy had a real gift, it would almost certainly have been recognized by someone other than Ralph by now. Why hadn’t the boy’s parents—or Mr. Douglas, for that matter—found a real cello teacher for him by this time? And finally, though it was a small point, I wondered how seriously we could take Mr. Douglas’s prediction with regard to Rostropovitch if he couldn’t even spell the cellist’s name properly.

I wrote Mr. Douglas back and thanked him for his letter, but explained that I taught only through the university, except for master classes every other summer at Tanglewood. A few days later, however, I received a telephone call from a woman who identified herself as Kyung-hee’s mother. Her English was extremely limited, but she managed to say—loudly—that I was the only teacher she wanted for her son, and that once I heard him play I would change my mind.

I politely explained to her that my schedule would not permit it, but either she was not to be discouraged or she didn’t understand what I said. “What time Kyung-hee come your house?” When I said that I simply wasn’t interested in teaching children, she didn’t say anything.

“Hello?” I asked, wondering if we had been disconnected.

“Yes?” she asked. “What time?”

Annoyed as I was, I remembered hearing my mother plead over the phone with a conductor to grant me an audition in his hotel room. It had embarrassed me terribly, but it had worked; he eventually gave in. I played while he ate his
room-service breakfast and I went on to solo with his orchestra. That concert turned out to be the one that really got my career started. Thinking about this weakened my resistance, so I told Mrs. Kim I would hear her son, but with the understanding that it would be just for a few minutes. I really don’t know why I gave in, for I felt that even if he was talented, I wouldn’t be the right person for him anyway. I just hoped he wouldn’t be an absolute disaster. My nightmare was that not only would he be a perfectly ordinary nine-year-old cellist, but when I had to say I couldn’t teach him the mother wouldn’t take no for an answer. If the boy did have something, I planned to send him on to Laura Kantor. She’d been working with several young cellists and I’d heard they were coming along well. I couldn’t imagine how she did it, though; I felt uncomfortable around children even under the best of conditions. I could never figure out how to talk to them without either seeming condescending or hurting their feelings by talking over their heads. When I was a kid I used to despise it when adults would patronize me, but as soon as I grew up I found myself doing the same thing and feeling guilty about it.

The weekend before graduation I celebrated my thirty-fourth birthday alone, as I had nearly every year since moving away from home. I didn’t want to just stay in the apartment, so I drove up to Santa Barbara and stayed at a bed-and-breakfast place my mother had particularly enjoyed the last time she and my father visited. It’s right on the water, with red fuchsia growing all over its white stucco walls. In full sun it almost hurts your eyes to look at it. I made sure to get a room facing the ocean.