He wanted to take it further. Any fool could write something well beyond the possible. The next art of the piano would be in creating work that teased you into believing it was within your reach, music that seemed to be right there in front of you. Tantalus, he called the collection of études. As he was composing, he thought often of that lonely demigod: the fruit always rising, the water always receding. All these remarks were on the record. Was she naïve to angle her neck upward? Clearly, that was what Baird wanted. He didn’t write the damn things for player piano. Still, was the music a grail or a mousetrap? Perhaps Baird was simply graying the space between the two. He never said much about the études—only his one declaration, so simple you’d think English was his second language: “Art should be more difficult.” More difficult than what?
CANDELABRUM
Someone has lit a candelabrum on the practice piano backstage. A candelabrum! Is she Liberace? It’s Darin who’s done it, of course. He’s the sweetest man. The sweetest men could also be dolts. Some might suggest a certain doltishness was required. She’s never counted the years it took her to realize the Sweetest Man was not what she wanted: it would have been too depressing. One couldn’t call oneself a good judge of her own character after that.
How many of the people who dream of having a butler would, if granted one, be constantly mortified in front of him?
Darin had seemed the perfect antidote, though that interpretation came only in retrospect. You cannot see the movement of a symphony from within it. She’s never told him about Layla. She knows the worries men get, and how quickly they sink the buoyant fantasies. Men cannot provide everything, nor can they be at peace with not providing everything. She won’t give him that dark corner of her mind. It is not his to plumb.
All those beautiful brunches: the berries he bought, buckwheat waffles, hand-whipped cream, light-filled Sunday mornings with the most obvious Sunday morning music. It was a heaping half of the life she wanted. He had never made her lie naked, facedown, on the top of her piano. He had never pricked her skin with the long tines of a fondue fork. He did puppy-dumb things like drip wax on ten thousand dollars of piano. She blew out all the candles and touched a knuckle, not a fingertip, to a little gleam at the top of one of them, and she felt it turn into a thicker second skin inside the little folds. The antidote. The antidote to the antidote. What could she do but alternate? She did not want sweetness only. She did not want roughness only. She especially did not want anything in the middle.
HOW HER MOTHER TOOK IT
Like a shattered windshield. Her mother did not fall apart, but she collapsed into a web of opaque pebbles. For the rest of her life she projected an imminent disintegration that never came. She wept for years, of course, at church services and TV commercials and offhand comments and at nothing, but those outbursts were only the surface of her mourning. Exhibit A: days after what would have been his twenty-third birthday, at a dinner in the city with the Patels and the Rosmunds, she improvised a speech about what an asshole Charlie had been sometimes.
“Such an asshole,” she said. “I’d tell him to get his dirty shoes off the coffee table, and he’d say, ‘Get a life, Mom.’ When I told him once how high my expectations were for him, he said it was because I’d given up on myself. You can’t say something like that and not be an asshole.”
“Marie,” her father had said, “he was fourteen.”
“Do you mean to suggest, Ben,” she replied, “that being a teenager and being an asshole are mutually exclusive?”
Exhibit B: at a church brunch, years after that, she was on her way to cut pound cake, and she froze, standing there with an eightinch kitchen knife held upright in her hand. At first she seemed to have zoned out, but after two-and-a-half minutes, it looked more like catalepsy. Failed interventions included a soft and then firm calling of her name, a hand on her elbow, snapping in front of her eyes (which did induce blinking), and gentle slaps on the top of her wrist. Only after her father delicately peeled back each finger from the handle and slipped the knife from his wife’s hand did she return to life. “Have you ever gotten lost in a train of thought?” she asked.
Exhibit C: a longitudinal study of her conversations. Her mother had always made her and Charlie laugh with adult laughter, and the adults around her laugh with childish laughter. In the early years afterward, her mother’s humor was bitter and sometimes elicited smirks but never anything audible. But by the time she was an adult, her mother made no jokes, only smiled with a waspy politeness. As she progressed into her fifties, her mother failed to even recognize jokes.
She remembers dubbing her father, dressed one day in a steelgray double-breasted suit and a matching vest, the USS Monitor, and her mother’s dry response: “Why, that’s a boat, dear.”
She imagines that behind the grim, pale person who keeps the curtains closed and prefers only white flowers, her old mother is tumbling down an infinite staircase, that the notes of life all sound out of place just so. There’s the Ligeti again. Another metaphor. It’s not a good sign, she knows, when you think about someone you love primarily in metaphors.
THE GENDER OF THE PIANO
In the Spanish it is masculine. In the French it is masculine. In the Italian it is even more masculine: il pianoforte. Latin came and went too early. The Germans have come the closest: an upright piano is neuter. A grand, however, is still masculine. Bless the neutered language English: a grand piano can be what it wants—or, some would say, what one wants it to be.
After she announced her program, that old wreck Havelin devoted his column in Pianist to a technical analysis of why a woman would never manage Baird’s études, let alone be the first. The average man’s hand, at 8.9 inches, could not manage the gaps that several of the pieces required, nor could that of a woman in the 99th percentile for hand width (here he made some facile joke about courting a gorilla). He cited a questionable study from the state university of Moldova about the relative speed of synapses in men and women. He cited lore about higher-order thinking.
She let the crowds shout him down for her. She thought about sending him pictures of herself hanging weights from her fingers every day in the kitchen: stretching, stretching. She had taken the pictures. She decided she would send them after the fact.
DIFFERENT IMPOSSIBILITIES
Difficulties of the mind, like those in the first of the Tantalus études, some claim, cannot be classified as impossible. The mind is only about as well-mapped as the ocean, they say. Its depths are not known. Besides some apophatic arguments about God, its limits are not circumscribed. She thinks the lack of a map does not erase the territory.
Impossibilities for the hand are the easiest to outline. Some spans are just too wide for a hand that tops out at five fingers. Baird has claimed, somewhat coyly, that his pieces contain no six-fingered chords: “Not if you’re clever.” But it’s not just about sprawling chords. Some call for clusters of four fingers near the top or bottom, with a pinky that has to reach for the ninth above the octave. She’s found that in Baird’s music there is a quantum uncertainty to the impossibility of reaching any particular note: On a given attempt, your finger might or might not make the stretch. Probability has to be on your side. But in all of the pieces, there are many such stretches. Probability must remain on your side more times than probability can possibly remain on your side.