As it turned out, this nice young man did very well by her. “Jeez,” Uncle Steve had said, sipping beer in Dave’s parents’ tiny kitchen, two weeks after the funeral. “Who knew Mom was loaded? Those twenty-five-dollar checks. God.” Dave’s father nodded sympathetically. He was a lawyer, too, but did labor work, having met Dave’s mom when they were both canvassing for the AFL-CIO after college. Dave’s mom made documentaries about migrant workers and African wars. They didn’t think about money much. Or rather, they thought about it all the time, having rarely had enough of it, but—as they explained to Dave when he was old enough to understand—they’d decided to make compromises. They could have the life they wanted—working for the common good and so on—and live in a small apartment, with carefully chosen luxuries (his father had an overhealthy and, Dave thought, clichéd interest in wine); or they could live a different sort of life—devoted to the acquisition of goods and property—and be less happy in their work. Dave’s father, at various points, had considered going corporate. And Dave’s mom had, on several occasions, been offered jobs at commercial production companies (particularly after a documentary she produced won an Emmy). But they’d stuck to their guns—scrambling and scraping to send Dave to St. Ann’s with Evelyn—and now, in their middle years, they were doing rather well. Their small apartment—one floor of a Baltic Street brownstone that went co-op in the eighties—was now worth twenty times what they’d paid for it. And thanks to that Emmy, Dave’s mom now ran her own production company, out of a little town house on West Ninety-third, with an endless succession of contracts from PBS. The previous year, after she’d finished a six-part series on DNA, they’d bought a small house up near Woodstock, then flown off to Paris and Provence. Next year, they’d go to Italy. And now that they had this surprising influx of cash, from Dave’s grandmother, they could do so in a bit more style.
Dave and Evelyn’s share of the money was small in comparison to the sums received by their parents, but large by their own meager standards, as both had been impoverished since leaving college. Evelyn, who was always making Dave look bad, had handed the entire sum over to her father to invest. Dave had originally assumed he’d just live off the money, seeing as he was barely employed at the time of his grandmother’s death, having just dropped out of Eastman. But then his father sat him down after dinner one night and suggested that the cash would disappear pretty quickly, much more quickly than Dave could imagine, and Dave should think seriously about making some big, practical sort of purchase, like an apartment. Since moving back to the city from Rochester, Dave had been sharing a place down the block from his parents, on an unsavory stretch of Baltic, across from a loud, crime-riddled school, with an actor named Jake Martin—one of Tal’s less fortunate friends—whom he rarely saw in person but caught glimpses of on Law & Order, on which he’d played an organic fruit vendor, a stabbing victim, and a distraught single dad. Dave didn’t love cohabitation, but buying a place seemed so grown-up. He hadn’t the slightest idea how one might go about completing such a task. He was afraid, however, to display his ignorance in front of his father and mother and Uncle Steve (who was, again, drinking beer at his parents’ kitchen table when this suggestion was made), and so he said, “Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll think about it.”
A few weeks later, he paused outside the window of a Court Street Realtor, studying the photographs of available apartments. He recalled the phrase “twenty percent down”—or was it “twenty-five percent down”?—and suddenly realized what this formerly nonsensical term meant: You paid twenty percent of the price of the apartment in cash. Then you took out a mortgage for the rest. Armed with this rudimentary knowledge, he calculated that he could afford to spend about $200,000—that was, presuming he could pay the mortgage and maintenance—and scanned the posted photos for properties within his budget. The next day, he was filling out piles of paperwork—mortgage preapproval and so on—and before he knew it, he’d made a bid on this apartment, the first he saw, with its little garden and strange, dark middle room. It was, the Realtor told him, “priced to sell,” because the owners had already bought a new place, a loft space in a newly renovated building two doors down, and needed the cash.
He’d been back in New York for ten months now, cobbling together his mortgage payments from teaching piano (which he hated), accompanying (which he hated even more), copying scores for composers (which he vacillated between hating and loving), and various sorts of menial labor, like temping or waiting tables (which, strangely, he enjoyed). The trouble was that while he had very strong feelings about what he didn’t want to do, he possessed only an extremely vague idea of what he did want to do. This being that he would like to work on music that people actually listened to, rather than classical music, which, really, no one cared about anymore. Or only the people who played it and wrote it and taught it. Normal people simply weren’t interested. Maybe they listened to the Brandenburg Concertos or “Appalachian Spring” or kept WNYC on as background music or attended a concert once a year so they could feel cultured, but that was it. This was exactly why he’d given up piano. Or this was what he’d told himself when he decided to drop out of Eastman: that he didn’t want to be part of the absurd, archaic institution that classical music had become. He wanted to make real music, music that possessed some sort of relevance to the dominant culture, music that meant something.
But the truth was that over four unhappy years of grad school, he’d come to the sad realization that he was not a genius or a prodigy, as he’d been told throughout his life, and that he would not have a career as a soloist, but would be lucky to get a seat with a second- or third-tier orchestra in a provincial city or a teaching post at a Bible college, also in some unappealing place like Kansas or Missouri, teaching talentless undergrads. Both possibilities fell into the don’t-want-to-do category. In theory, he wanted (he thought) to compose music, to do something really revolutionary, something that would garner the respect of critics and a popular audience, something that would transcend current notions of genre. In practice, however, he was only just now figuring out what such music would be, now that he was in this band, this kind of good band, and there was the remote chance of people playing it. Very remote, though, as the band was really a one-man outfit: the lead singer, Curtis, wrote all the songs and refused to entertain the notion of any other members contributing, though the other guys didn’t seem to care at all. It was just Dave who minded, who would have liked to write his own songs, with a lead piano line, and maybe even sing lead vocals from time to time (he had, he thought, a pleasant tenor).
Lying in his bed, mornings, on Bergen Street—thinking he should really get up and write down the snippet of melody drifting in and out of his brain—he comforted himself with the thought that he was destined for higher sorts of things than pop songs, for this hybrid music he imagined, this relevant classical music. But there wasn’t really any such thing. He would have to invent it. Otherwise, what were his non-pop options? Scoring films (romantic swell as the spaceship hurtles into the dark heart of the unknown galaxy)? Drafting minimalist pieces that called for the players to bang on sheets of metal or pluck violin strings with their teeth? Or shuffling together neoromantic motifs from the pantheon of canonical symphonies, like all the bright-eyed composers at Oberlin, with their tweed jackets and college scarves? He’d hated them all. What would they do, anyway? Get Ph.D.’s at Berkeley or Stanford. (The money was all out west, for reasons he didn’t understand. It wasn’t like people on the far coast listened to classical music any more than people in New York or Boston.) Live off grants and sad little commissions from Bang on a Can or Kronos? Yes, that’s exactly what they’d do. Then settle into dull teaching gigs and fuck the cute violinists. A life of perpetual irrelevance, like a character in a Philip Roth novel or a Woody Allen movie. Or Herzog, fucking Herzog. No way. No, fucking way.