On the day of the first lesson Kevin wore a blue sweater and brown cords and smoothed his hair across his forehead with his fingers. He was excited. Bright images flickered through his mind, just out of visible reach: a grand piano, a stone castle, people dancing.
Rachel called, “Are you ready?”
“Coming.” He walked out of his room, hearing the beats of his own tread, his socks hitting the carpet, dum dum dum dum. His mother stood in the hallway with her boots on, holding his coat. When he put it on, she handed him his hat, then picked up her coat.
“I want to go alone,” he said.
She put her hands on her hips. “Well, you can't.”
“Why?”
She ticked off the reasons on her hand. “Because it's the first day. Because you don't know where it is. Because I need to meet the teacher.” The teacher was a friend of a friend of a friend. She'd just moved into the neighborhood and was charging low rates.
“Tell me where it is,” Kevin said, “and I'll find it. You told Dad I could walk there.”
“I meant later.”
“Now,” he said.
“Kevin, come on.”
“I'll only go if I can go alone,” he said.
“You have to go. I made the appointment.”
“I know,” he said, and held up his hands for his mitts.
Rachel gave them to him and they stared at each other for a long moment. Their eyes were the same color, very pale blue, although what was watery in Kevin's face looked tired and opaque in Rachel's. Then Rachel sighed and he knew that he'd won. She bent down, told him carefully how to go, and watched him walk down the street, his arms sticking stiffly out from the coat, his mitts drooping down from the wrists.
They lived in an apartment building next to a small park with brown grass splotched with snow. He was supposed to go halfway around the park to the exact other side from home. Then left, then right on Oakhill. The house where he was going was 1330 Oakhill. He had to look for the left part of it, which would say A, for Anita. The teacher's name was Anita Tanizaki. In his mind's eye his mother's handwriting rose up from a piece of paper: Mrs. Anita Tanizaki. A-ni-ta. I-need-a Tanizaki, he said to himself. Get me a Tanizaki this instant! I will now perform the famous Tanizaki maneuver. It has never been done in this country before.
He skirted the park, kicking the iced crusts of snow with his boots. From the big street a few blocks away he could hear a siren, maybe a fire engine's, bubbling and boiling. It came closer. He closed his eyes and listened: a note falling through the air like skiing downhill. With his eyelids shut, the sound was the color red splashed over the sky. Next it faded to pink, and then was gone.
He opened his eyes and started walking again. A car passed by, but nobody else was walking around. It was Saturday morning. He went left, then right. Inside his mitts his fingers closed against his palms, making warm sweat. He found the house without any problem. There was ice on the steps, and he slipped a little and almost lost his balance. He stamped his feet on the ice to steady himself, then pressed his finger against the doorbell, dingdong. No sound came from the house, no music, no movement, and for a moment the world wavered and threatened to collapse. Nothing was the way he planned it. Then he heard a rustle behind the door, and it opened.
“Come in,” said Mrs. Anita Tanizaki.
He stepped inside and took his boots off on the mat and hung up his coat. She waited for him at the end of the hallway, not smiling. Her short dark hair had waves all over her head, like frosting on a cake. The house seemed very dark and its smell reminded him of a restaurant, with all the food cooked and eaten hours before.
“So, come in,” she said again.
He followed her into the living room, where she gestured to the piano. He had never seen one up close before. It was smaller than he had thought it would be, and blacker. All of a sudden he was frightened: it just stood there, its wood body staunch and foreign, looking back at him like an animal. Mrs. Tanizaki sat down on the bench and patted the spot next to her and he joined her. They both looked down at the piano's keys as if the thing might start playing itself. Then Mrs. Tanizaki reached down and stroked a white key with her finger, from the top to the bottom, holding it down. The note resounded, pure and direct, resembling nothing except itself. She hit another key, then a black one, then another white.
“I'm going to be honest with you, Kevin,” Mrs. Tanizaki said. “This is my first lesson. Your first lesson, and mine too. We're going to be learning together. Here's what I can tell you right away. I love the piano. I love the touch of it”—here she made more strokes with the one finger, from the top to the bottom, the pad of her fingertip sliding—“and the sound”—adding another note, with the left hand, and Kevin flinched when her elbow touched him, but she either didn't notice or pretended not to— “and the way it looks. I can't teach you to love the piano, but I can teach you some basic things about it. So, now we'll start.”
She took his finger and pressed it down on a key. “C,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Not like, Do you see. I mean middle C. This note is the middle of everything. It's the center of the piano. Look down, don't look at me, it doesn't matter what I look like. Press it again.”
“C,” he said.
When Kevin got home he was in a daze. He waited at the table without speaking while Rachel heated up some vegetable soup and cheese toast. His eyes were misted as if he were staring into the distance, even though he wasn't. Actually, he looked stoned. That's what my son looks like when he's happy, she thought, with a glow like pride.
To pay for the lessons, they gave up cable TV. But then Brian started watching hockey and basketball games in bars, drinking with his friend Steve, so it wasn't clear how well this worked out, budget-wise.
Mrs. Tanizaki had a son named Lawrence. He was fifteen. The next time Kevin had a piano lesson, Lawrence crept into the room behind them. Kevin could feel him there.
Mrs. Tanizaki, who was guiding the fingers of Kevin's right hand up a scale from middle C, stopped at the top. “This is Lawrence,” she said. “Lawrence, this is Kevin.”
Lawrence didn't nod or anything. His black hair flopped over his glasses. He was gangly in the arms and legs and fat in the middle. “I'm hungry, Mom,” he said.
She sighed. “Excuse me, Kevin. Lawrence, make yourself a sandwich.”
“Don't want a sandwich.”
“Then you can wait until we're done here, and I'll make lunch. There will be no lunch until I'm done teaching. Do you understand?”
Lawrence left the room. Kevin and Mrs. Tanizaki returned intently to the scale, and the song they were singing with it: do re mi fa sol la ti do. C D E F G A B C. After E you tucked your thumb under the rest of your hand and started over. Kevin didn't understand why the notes of the song had different names from the notes, but maybe one was for singing and one was for playing. When Mrs. Tanizaki sang, her voice was hollow and slightly rough. It was not at all clear like the piano. She made him sing too, and his voice was so ugly and unrecognizable that he tried to sing as softly as possible, hearing one set of notes but not the other, while his fingers moved thickly up the keys.
“Now you do it by yourself,” she told him.
Kevin swallowed. “Do re mi fa,” he sang, trailing off. Behind him he could hear a wet, chewing sound. Lawrence was back in the room, eating a sandwich.
“Excuse me, Kevin,” Mrs. Tanizaki said. “Lawrence, either close your mouth when you chew or leave the room. Or maybe you could do both.”
Kevin looked down at the keyboard while Lawrence shuffled out of the room. He was learning to memorize the shape of the keys, their color and configuration, the scuffmarks on some of them, the way they added up to a whole entity like a person's face. In his bedroom now, or at school, his fingers skimmed along surfaces, over the blanket or the desk, as if divining for sound. Inseparable from the keys was the smell of Mrs. Tanizaki's house, a spicy, sour smell of leftover dinner, and her smell too, different from his mother's but distantly related to it, an older-woman smell, and the darkness of the room, and the one lamp that pooled light over the piano. He was drawn inside all of this. Still, at times, he woke up at night and remembered the visions he'd had about the dancing and the castle, a piece of color at the edge of his sight like a scarf fluttering in the wind, and he knew that as piercing as the notes were, as clearly as they answered to his fingers on the white and black keys, still they were only notes, they weren't the music.