Christopher Hacker - The Morels

But while I might have been entertained here of the occasional weekday afternoon, on the weekends — every weekend — I was making my pilgrimage on the Uptown local, plus the six uphill blocks farther by foot, to lock myself away in a practice room in the service of great art. By the time I was able to thunder through a Brahms rhapsody on the keyboard, I had left my father behind. Through my teens, my mentor was my piano teacher, an enormous man, six six easily, as round as he was tall. He had an enormous bald head and enormous hands. To see those fingers move across the keyboard was to understand why people use athletic terms to describe some classical musicians. His fingers were galloping horses, running wild and yet nailing every single note. Mr. Masi. His tastes became my tastes. Fred Astaire, Arthur Rubenstein. These were the greats. I diligently collected all the classic recordings and every old musical he praised with the same feverishness of my days collecting stamps and cards with my father. At the same time, Mr. Masi taught me a sensitivity to grace and beauty — and that such a sensitivity could be a masculine trait. To speak with confidence about how gorgeous a particular passage was and to, upon hearing it, close one’s eyes in submission to it. Artur Schnabel playing Kreisleriana , Maurizio Pollini rolling through a Chopin étude. Some lessons would begin this way, him putting on a recording and letting it fill the room. I would watch him go limp at these climactic moments and then, snapping out of it, turn to me and shout, “See? Good God! Do you see what this is all about?” And I did. He taught me to seek out these moments, to feel the shiver down the spine.

But then I went off to college and left Mr. Masi behind as well.

In my twenties, I was adrift, in search of a new mentor — someone who could help me make sense of this new territory I found myself in, disillusioned with university-level music making but still desperate to do something with my life, make something of myself. But how? For a while, it seemed that Suriyaarachchi had the answer: even though he was young, younger than me, his sheer enthusiasm made him a candidate. To him, creativity was an entrepreneurial endeavor, imbued with the possibilities of great profit and renown. I was drawn to his confidence but saw also that much of that confidence was based on wishful thinking. Which is when Arthur showed up, with his astonishing feat of language , his uptown professorship, his sexy wife and precocious son, and I saw that maybe, just maybe, I had been too hasty in my dismissal of art. Here was a man who seemed to have it all: prestigious job, family — and an audience. What more could one want?

And then there was the business of that cadenza. In the middle of my formative stages as a young artist, to witness that act on that stage. It was so shocking, so out of the realm of what I knew art to be — even compared with those sixties experiments involving pianos rolled off stages. Thinking back on it, I can see that it was both the catalyst that propelled me onward, down the path toward a bachelor’s degree, as well as the poison pill that had slowly, over the course of my four years at conservatory, forced me back off that path, dissatisfied with the smaller and smaller territories academic composers were mapping out for themselves. Nothing I had experienced in those four years lived up to the sheer enormity of that act. But what did it mean? The memory of that incident had troubled me — for years afterward — remaining a knotted question in my brain that I didn’t even realize was there until bumping into him again after more than a decade. And here he was; it was an opportunity to work out that knot. I was happy to have been given a second chance with him.

So then: A mentor. And answers.

I arrived at Dave’s exhausted. Strange dreams involving Arthur and a shotgun. The gun would go off, and I’d wake up. This happened several times. Finally, I gave up and turned on the light. It was three in the morning.

Suriyaarachchi was on the phone with his father, a one-sided conversation in which he stared down at his feet and plucked at his eyebrows, grunting occasionally. After he got off, he was in a foul temper. Dave, too, was in a mood, which had to do with losing a big contract he’d been counting on. We sat around the suite barely speaking. Interestingly, neither of them seemed upset at each other.

At this point, we had a rough cut that was too long — two hours and twenty minutes — and were looking for places to trim. Dave suggested we watch it from the beginning and, after a few clicks of the mouse, shut off the desk lamp and sat down between us.

Halfway through, Suriyaarachchi said, “What else do you have to watch around here. This movie sucks!” He leaned forward and used the remote on the coffee table to mute the sound and turn up the lights. He put his head in his hands and groaned. “God! What am I going to do?”

Dave got up. “I think I have just the thing for today. I’ll be right back.”

After he left I said, “So what did your father say?”

“That it would have been better if I’d spent four years in an insane asylum, rather than film school. At least, he said, they teach you practical skills like basket weaving. He’d be half a million dollars richer by now and have some place to put his dirty laundry.”

Dave came back with a VHS and popped it into one of the decks. He said, “How do you feel about baseball?” As it happened, Suriyaarachchi loved baseball. “World Series, game three,” Dave said. He had set it to record before going to sleep and made a concerted effort to avoid learning the outcome this morning. Suriyaarachchi had learned the final score but hadn’t seen the game; he promised not to tell.

I left the two of them to their mutual interest while I went downstairs for another coffee and a copy of the Village Voice . When I returned, I spread the rental listings out on the kitchen counter. It was time for a change. I needed a place of my own — spending time at Dave’s and Arthur’s helped me realize that it was more than just a thousand-dollar-a-month hole in your pocket. It was where you could, if you so desired on a Saturday afternoon, pop the cap off a cold beer to be savored with a smoke in the wide-open comfort of your own living room. Where you could entertain a certain lovely tall girl with alien amber eyes and appealingly crooked teeth.

I made some calls with the wall-mounted phone, sipping my scalding coffee through the sharp snapped-off hole in the cup’s lid. On the face of it, hundreds of landlords around the city were vying to rent their cozy studios to me; however, all calls led to the same three brokerages, none of whom would get specific until I had filled out an application. Today was one of my two days off at the theater. I had been hoping to explore a lead or two during the late afternoon, but it wasn’t looking good. I popped my head into the editing suite and caught the roar of the crowd.

“You don’t have a fax machine, do you?”

The editor came out in his bare feet to microwave some popcorn and revealed it hiding in plain sight under a stack of books. I sat cross-legged on the floor, using the receiver to communicate with the realtors. The application was a joke. It asked for my occupation and income but for no other information that might tie me to these answers. I could have put down anything, and did, and by three thirty I was lined up to see half-a-dozen places. The broker asked me how soon I could get downtown. I told him to give me an hour.

I pulled out my wallet and removed the slip of paper that Viktoria had given me that day, the words call me in her loopy schoolgirl hand. I dialed the number. When she answered, I said, “How would you like to go apartment hunting with me?”