2. APPLAUSE
I AM FIFTEEN — FOR A CHILD PRODIGY, something of a late bloomer. It’s Saturday. I am standing on the platform at Christopher Street Station waiting for the Uptown local. This is the age of the brass token, before the hipster renaissance in Brooklyn and Queens, before If You See Something Say Something. You might encounter any number of things on the platform in those days. This morning: a blood-soaked sock and a paper cup filled with quarters, on the cup’s side scrawled TAKE ONE I DAIR YOU. As I wait for the train, I try to imagine the scenario in which these two props intersected. The head and rear cars are usually empty at this hour, and I have been warned against boarding either. Safety in numbers, which will be made pointedly clear later that same year when a kid not that much older than myself will enter and sit down beside me in a cleared-out car. He will put a knife to my groin and demand twenty dollars, and after I hand him a wallet with only a few singles in it, he will punch me in the face and take off at the next stop through the ding-dong closing doors.
I board somewhere toward the middle and find a seat. Between my knees, my cello in its pleather case, on my lap my pleather valise. It is a forty-five-minute ride, time enough for music-theory homework — coordinating bouts of scribbling to the periodic moment of stillness at a station. Each stop accumulates and rotates out passengers, and once we pass 86th Street it’s mostly us, instrument cases between our legs, working out difficult fingerings on an arm or a knee. A curious look from a paint-splattered construction worker, from a Hispanic mother with a bag of groceries. The subways shriek and buck, dying with a shudder between stations. Sitting in the dark is like floating, the scraping squeal of a passing train a flicker of blue sparks against the scratched windows. Then it wakes and drags itself along to the next stop.
From the exit at 116th and Broadway it’s a six-block walk. We fan out, trudging our instruments past the gated Ivy League community, the dozen or so of us on a dozen separate journeys up this hill; after all, it’s not as though we’re friends. We recognize one another: co-principals in a chamber ensemble or the person whose ear-training homework you might once have copied from. We nod, say hey — once a week isn’t enough to learn names. This isn’t summer camp; there are no blood-sworn bonds. We dress differently here, in our holiday best, button-down collars, black lace-up shoes, as though we are attending the presence of God.
The conservatory occupies two square blocks, and during the week it is home to grown-ups from around the world who possess the dedication to roam its hallowed halls but not the connections to get them into Julliard, our city rival; Juilliard students will tell you it is merely skill they lack. Either way, on Saturdays the place is ours. In its arched ceilings and marble staircases is the grandeur of a Gothic boarding school. I try always to arrive at least an hour before my first class: winter months I am encumbered with as many as twenty pounds of stuff, and the lockers along the southern corridor are only for the college students; if I don’t want to be stuck carting this load from class to class, I’ll need to find someplace to stow it.
On the second and third floors, a hive of windowless chambers. The plum carpeting, threadbare and pocked with cigarette burns, gives off the salty reek of an old overcoat. It’s a ghostly cacophony here — looped phrases of familiar pieces, muffled arpeggios, down the hall a teenage mezzo calling me! me! me! me! me! A declaration of self among all this disembodied noise. I am looking for an empty room. The place is packed. I should have come earlier; today is, after all, Competition Day.
The first Saturday in March, same weekend as the Oscars, it is the public face to all the private striving that goes on behind these closed doors. The Concerto Competition is juried by six members of the senior faculty and chaired by Mr. Strasser, conductor of our top-tier symphony. Auditions are held on the same stage on which the winner will perform. To win is to become a celebrity, implicitly declared the school’s finest musician, and debut as featured soloist in the Spring Concert, a sold-out audience of parents and professionals looking for the latest talent.
My cello teacher harbored no ambitions for me in this arena, but for three years my piano teacher has urged me to learn a concerto; until now I’ve refused. I already knew I wasn’t the school’s finest player; I didn’t need a panel of judges confirming it publicly. But this fall, the fall of my sophomore year, I have been learning Liszt’s Totentanz, a showy one-movement fantasia for piano and orchestra. I picked it up one afternoon after hearing it on the radio. It’s too hard for me; getting my performance to tempo is like trying to push a stalled truck uphill, and I have yet to run through the piece from memory without having to stop and retrace my steps; undoubtedly, I will lose the competition, but commanding that dark whirlwind, an entire battalion of players in support, with a packed house bearing witness to my greatness: it is an image too tempting not to pursue.
I find an empty room with a piano on its last legs. Its candle board has been scarred by several generations of frustrated hands, its keys drummed on so often and continuously that there are divots in the ivory, some worn through to the wooden key block. I take off my coat and pace the room. My audition is at ten forty-five. I have some time yet. After a vertiginous, heart-pounding run through the piece, I head off to visit my piano teacher, making sure on my way out to set my coat conspicuously on the piano bench and open several scores on the stand so that anyone peering in will have the impression of my imminent return. It will be necessary, however, to visit my stuff frequently, today of all days, or I might come back to find it in a pile in the hall.
On my way from the room I pass a kid I’ve gotten to know this semester — gangly, hands swinging at his sides — lost in thought.
Arthur, I say as our paths cross.
Hey, Arthur says. You go yet?
Not yet. You?
Heading down now.
Earlier that year up in the conservatory library. Trying to find a willing accomplice from whom to copy ear-training homework. Class in an hour. Arthur, set up at a table alone. In front of him a spread of pages. I asked him what he was doing.
Writing, he said.
I examined the pages, which were peppered with eraser debris. A handwritten score to some sort of chamber piece, at least a dozen parts, all marked out in a careful, childlike hand.
Composing? But you’re at the library. You need a piano, don’t you?
I have absolute pitch, he said, so no. I don’t need a piano. Besides, it’s so noisy down there I can hardly think.
Ear training must be a piece of cake for you then.
You could say that.
Got the homework handy, by any chance?
After my encounter with Arthur in the library, I began noticing him around. He played violin, though I only knew this from the case he toted and the callus on his neck; if we’d shared billing in any of the monthly group recitals, I wasn’t aware. He rode the subway, too, and on the few mornings I’d seen him, he was already aboard, which I assumed meant he lived on Staten Island: the subway line terminated at Battery Park, where the ferry docked on the Manhattan side. He was, like me here, something of a loner, which led me to think of him as an only child of divorced parents. On a nice day, I’d see him on the front steps or during the winter cross-legged in the hallway, reading some old paperback. When looking for a free room, I’d occasionally stumble in on someone I knew in the throes of a particularly passionate phrase; practice is a private activity, and having someone witness it an odd sort of embarrassment, not unlike walking in on someone, pants down, in a bathroom stall. I had never walked in on Mr. Too Good for a Piano.