THE PIANO TEACHER
She had suffered a failure of courage in the only moment of her life when courage had been called for. She had stopped the boy from playing and no one knew it. They thought he’d stopped on his own because that’s what she’d told them back when she was telling anybody anything. She’d done something wrong and then she’d lied about it. And so no one faulted her. Not her daughter. Not the boy’s father.
The boy, that day, had listened almost too patiently, alert and without a word to say, while the piano teacher pointed out the parts of the piano and explained their functions. She’d sat him down on the bench and they’d flipped through the primer, a resource more for study at home than for lessons, and then she went over and pulled the curtains because the sun was angling in at eye level and she grabbed a pecan cookie to bring over to the boy, a trick she always employed with new students, a simple way to start on good terms. He was toying around on the keys, hitting them at random, softly at first and then surer. The piano teacher gently set the lid of the cookie jar back in place. She stood a moment and listened to the boy’s tinkering, envying him the experience of sitting at a piano for the first time. She could almost hear something organized in what the boy was banging out, an accident of the keys. She made her way across the room to him and when she was a step from the boy, holding out the cookie and reaching with her other hand to tap his shoulder, five gallant notes cut purposefully through the air and then were trampled under by a slow cavalry of low, weighted notes. The piano teacher lost herself. She couldn’t tell if the music she was hearing was fast or slow, angry or sad. She’d never heard this piece of music. There was surrender in it. Surrender to forces the boy knew nothing about. She couldn’t move again until the boy’s hands rested, a fraught pause in the song, and it was all she could do not to slam the fall down on the boy’s fingers. A breath rushed in through her nose and she smelled the pecan cookie, she smelled the boy’s hair which smelled of a clean attic, she smelled the hot dust on the windowsill cooling along with the ocean of sand outside. She lurched forward, her knee on the bench beside the boy, and pressed her palms onto the backs of his hands. The piano released a startled croak, and with that croak ringing on the air the piano teacher found herself catching the boy so he wouldn’t topple straight back off the bench and bust his head.
She had not asked for this type of student. She hadn’t even asked to have a good student. She’d been perfectly pleased with regular children who learned slowly and sensibly at thirty dollars per seventy-minute session until their parents decided they’d given piano a good enough try and let them take up high-diving or painting. She had not asked to hear music like that, the notes dragging with impotent hope. She had not asked to live in Albuquerque. She was never supposed to be in this damn desert and it wasn’t her that should’ve been the boy’s teacher. She had not asked for her gas-guzzling car. She had not asked to grow old.
In her wood-floored den, the room she’d been using for lessons, she approached the piano from a wary angle and sat on the bench without surrendering her full weight. She didn’t want to press the soles of her bare feet against the pedals, and so she kept on an old pair of sandals she wore around the house. The piano teacher turned her head and gazed out the big window that looked out into the backyard. There was an orange tree that had come with the house and that had its own private sprinkler that flipped on for twenty minutes each night. The tree kept getting bigger, but the fruits it produced were tiny and sour.
Twice in her life a piano had been taken from her. This one, though she was sitting at it, had been stolen from her by the incident with the boy, and long ago her childhood piano had been sold. The piano teacher’s father had once had money but then the piano teacher’s stepmother had come along and spent it. Her father had allowed this to happen, had downsized their house twice and given up his hunting trips. Eventually her father had to move them to Albuquerque and come out of retirement, and that was when the piano, a lovingly maintained Bösendorfer, had been liquidated. There was still a lake in Oklahoma that bore the piano teacher’s maiden name, but she had no claim to it.
She had never decided anything for herself. She’d been handed off from her father to her daughter. She wasn’t from this desert. She belonged in this desert as much as the orange tree in the yard. She’d once had piano, at least. Now she had the vigils but the vigils were not hers. She didn’t belong. The vigilers were more of these lost desert people, trying not to be lost. As long as you were in the desert, you were lost. You could forget for a time, but you were still lost. The piano teacher felt the same at the vigils as anyplace else. She felt separate always. She had a stale secret, she had stopped the boy playing, a secret she would never tell and was already tired of keeping.
DANNIE
She was up early, making breakfast for Arn, frying a pound of bacon and cutting up fruit. She had coffee brewing and she was going to put out an expensive bar of chocolate. The sliding door stood wide open, dry air washing in. Soon light would pour over the horizon and find Dannie’s balcony. The sun would arrive after the dawn was long done, dopey, drifting upward like a child’s balloon.
Dannie had moved to New Mexico about a year ago. She had lived in Los Angeles and now she lived in a town called Lofte in the middle of a desert basin, on a road once known as the Turquoise Trail, in the condo of a trucker. The condo was full of the trucker’s belongings — books about addiction, auto racing memorabilia. The trucker was around fifty, Dannie gathered from the pictures on the walls. The condo had a bunch of magnifying glasses and pairs of binoculars and a telescope. The telescope had been out on the balcony when dannie had moved in and she’d left it out there, slumping toward the scruffy fairways of the golf course that bordered the condo complex. The course was out of business and full of rabbit holes. Dannie sometimes gazed at the sky, but often she zeroed in on abandoned golf balls and read the tiny print on them, the handwritten initials.
Dannie had come to New Mexico after her divorce was final. She didn’t know whether to feel sensible or insane. She’d come to the desert planning to stay a month and return to California recharged, but a month had passed and then eleven more had slipped away and Dannie couldn’t bring herself to go back to her old life. Her old life wasn’t there anymore. She had a job she could do anywhere and a balcony to linger on and she was getting enough sleep, which all seemed sensible, but she was doing one thing in particular that a sensible woman did not do: she was trying to get impregnated by some young kid she barely knew. She’d gone off the pill and she hadn’t told Arn. She’d met this guy two months ago and he was practically a teenager and now they were living together and she was trying to conceive his child. Of course, it didn’t ever have to be his child. If Dannie got pregnant and didn’t want Arn to know anything about it, she could always break up with him and leave the area. She doubted Arn was attached to her. He was dazzled because she was older, but he wasn’t attached. He did whatever Dannie told him to do, but there wasn’t much he’d do without being told. He would rub her feet for a full hour if she told him to. He was attending a vigil with Dannie for a boy genius who’d fallen into a coma, spending one of the two nights off work he had each week in a parking lot because Dannie had told him she wanted company, because she couldn’t stand to lose a night with him. Dannie couldn’t tell what Arn thought of the vigils and she wasn’t going to ask. There was no talking at the vigils, and talking about them on some mundane Thursday afternoon wasn’t something Dannie was going to do. Arn didn’t like for anyone to be upset, and if he quit, he knew, Dannie would be upset. He would probably attend every vigil till kingdom come rather than get into an argument.