Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Sometimes parents jerked when they met the man behind the ad. They let their child take a token lesson. Then they apologized, explaining that their child really wanted to study the cornet. It never bothered me. I wouldn’t have studied piano with me, either. I couldn’t see why anyone wanted to study piano anymore anyway. In another few years, we’d all be replaced with Moog synthesizers. To the electronic future, the best musicians already proclaimed, Those of us already dead salute you.

But somehow, I managed to draw students. Some of them even seemed to enjoy playing. I got eight-year-old working-class kids who hummed over the keys. I got middle-aged recidivists who simply wanted to play the “Minute Waltz” again in something under a hundred seconds, before they died. I taught natural talents who got by on an hour of practice a week and earnest acolytes who’d go to their graves trying to play those lines that taunted them in their sleep, floating just out of reach of their fingers. Not one of my students would end up onstage except at their school’s talent show. They or their parents were still victims of that discredited belief that equated playing a little piano with being a little more free. I tried to fit the student to the path, to have each one pick his or her own way through the centuries of overflowing repertoire. One little middle-class Mayflower descendant caught fire with his father’s old John Thompson method, striving to play every poky folk tune at flat-out prestissimo. The daughter of two Hungarian escapees who came over in the wake of ’56 giggled her way through Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, screwing up her face at the gentle dissonances in the contrary motion, hearing some dim echo that wasn’t, any longer, even racial memory. I had no blacks. The black students of Atlantic City studied in some other classroom.

I worked to make the dying notes come alive. I had my students play at glacial speeds, doubling the tempo every four bars. I sat next to them on the piano bench, playing the left hand while they played the right. Then we switched and started over again. I told them this was an exercise in developing two brains, the clean split of thought needed for independent equal-handedness. I tried to make them see that every piece of music was an infant uprising that stumbled onto democracy or died on the page.

I taught one girl, a high school junior, named Cindy Hang. She wouldn’t tell me her real first name, her birth name, although I asked her several times. She said she was Chinese — the answer of easiest resort. Her father, a loan officer from Trenton who’d adopted her, along with a younger Cambodian boy, said Hmong. Her English was a soft-pedaled mezzo piano, although her grammar already ran rings around her native-born classmates. She spoke as little as possible, and when she could get away with it, not at all. She’d come to the piano late, starting only four years before, at thirteen. But she played like a crippled cherub.

Something in her technique startled me. Out of pure greed, I gave her ridiculous pieces — Busoni, Rubenstein — show pieces and schmaltz I had no stomach for. I knew they’d come back in a few weeks, pulsing as I’d never heard them. Like the Bible translated into the clicks and hums of whales: incomprehensible, alien, but still recognizable. Her fingers invented from scratch the idea of harmonic structure. She listened with them, a safecracker feeling the tumblers through gloves. She stroked the keys as if apologizing to them in advance. But even her lightest touch had the force of a refugee displaced by organized violence.

Every lesson with Cindy Hang left me feeling criminal. “I’ve got nothing to teach her,” I told Teresa. Saying even that much was a mistake.

“Oh, I bet there’s all sorts of things you can teach her.”

Her voice fell into a note it never sounded. But I refused to be baited. “Anything I teach her will destroy what she does. She has the most amazing touch.”

“Touch?” Like I’d hit her.

“Ter. Sweetie. The girl is only seventeen.”

“Exactly.” Her voice clutched tight to nothing.

Things got worse. After Cindy’s lessons, I felt Teresa straining for the ordinary. She’d ask, “How’d it go?” And I’d answer just as casually, “Not bad.” I had a lengthy mental list of pieces I couldn’t assign the girl— Liebesträume, the Moonlight, “Prelude to a Kiss,” any Fantasie. All the while, Cindy Hang worked harder and played more dazedly, no doubt wondering why the better she performed, the more remote her teacher became.

I had felt no desire for the child until Teresa suggested it. Then, in the smallest, deniable increments, she grew to consume me. I’d meet her nightly in my dreams, the two of us thrown together in some mass wartime deportation, reading each other’s needs without the weight of earthbound speech. I dressed her in navy blue, a midcalf dress with wide shoulders, now four decades out of date. Everything was right, except the hair, which curled in my dreams. I’d put my ear to that brown ravine beneath her clavicle, the one I saw in waking, while she sat upright on the bench, playing for me. When I touched my ear to her skin, the blood coursing underneath it sounded like chant.

Cindy Hang’s skin was perfect — that nonaligned brown belonging to half the human race. I loved the girl for her vulnerability, her total bewilderment at where she’d landed, the tentative attempts at recovery in her fingers’ every probe. I loved how she sounded, as if she’d come from another planet — something this planet would never house. I told myself for weeks there was no problem. But I wanted something from Cindy Hang, something I didn’t even know I wanted until Teresa’s jealousy pointed it out to me.

We played together, Mozart’s D Major Sonata for piano four hands, Köchel 381. I assigned the piece just to allow me to sit by her on the piano bench. There are only four profound measures in the piece; the rest is mostly note spinning. But I looked forward to it as to nothing else in my life. It brought me back da capo, to where I’d started. We played the middle movement together, a little slower than it should go. She took the upper part and I supported her. My lines were full and broad. Hers were the lightest exploration, like a bird foraging. I felt I was striding through a crowded fairgrounds with a happy child on my shoulders.

One lesson, we played it perfectly. Under our fingers, the modest little piece completed what it was meant to do in this life. We finished playing, my pupil and I both aware of what we’d just done. Cindy kept still on the bench next to me, head down, looking at the keys, waiting for me to touch her. When I didn’t, she looked up, her mouth a crooked smile, desperate to please. “We can try it again? From the beginning?”

I called her father. I told him that Cindy was extremely talented, “a real musician,” but that she’d outgrown everything I was able to teach her. I could help him find someone who’d move her forward. In fact, I felt secretly sure any other teacher would kill all that was strangest and most luminous in her playing. That scumbled virtuosity of the nonnative speaker wouldn’t survive her first real lesson. But whatever another teacher might do to her was better than what I would, if she studied with me another week.

Cindy’s father was too confused to object. “Would you like to talk to her? Explain this to her yourself?”

I must have said something absurd, because I can’t remember it. I got off the line without talking to her. For months afterward, I said nothing to Teresa. My telling her would only confirm her fears. When I told her at last, she was truly miserable, all the misery that only truth can bring. She dragged around for two weeks, trying to fix things. “Maybe you should give up teaching, Joseph. You haven’t worked on your own music since you started.”