Another great truth was that Skizzen’s sniggering pupils became alumni despite his low regard for them. They would be sure to remember the time Skizzen brought Saint-Saëns down a peg by quoting Berlioz about the precocious genius, namely that “he knows everything but lacks inexperience,” and it won’t matter much if they get it wrong or its point is lost during recollection. When the little game of reminiscence was played with alumni friends, they would still have a few high cards. Really? you don’t say? a white line like the equator around his rump? Sure, as big as the track of a sailing ship. Actually, for a music teacher, old Skizz wasn’t half bad. Yup … jeez … those were the days.
Even Skizzen thought the classroom seemed a strange choice to represent his professorial career, for he had never been comfortable in one, and certainly wasn’t now, even after many years of playing the part of an offbeat prof renowned for his sharp ear, his clever tongue, his demanding standards, and, with regard to practical everyday matters, habitually bumbling. He could remember in terrible detail how he had taken his first step in local collegiate history. That step had to do with chalk, too, and taught him an important lesson even if his students had learned nothing from it. He could clearly recall the scene and situation, but they were likely to remember only the cloudy outline of an image they now prized like one of those brooches with the faded picture of a parent, girl, or boyfriend closed up inside like a corpse in a casket. Such mementos were occasionally to be peekabooed, and then passed along from one generation to another in place of an honest heirloom.
It was taken — the first step — during Skizzen’s third year as an instructor. He had by this time learned academic routine as well as his ABC’s; that is, he could recite them but do little else but spell out a few elementary admonitions. One was, unfortunately, that his students should listen with their third ear. Among the lads this had somehow become an obscene joke Skizzen otherwise refused to understand. Moreover, he had advised his few piano pupils to “make love to their instrument” when he knew nothing about that either.
It was spring term, and he had eight students in his Introduction to Music class. This was the department’s bread-and-butter course, yet enrollments had declined from the thirty he had on his baptismal day, a number that had leaked like a rowboat until now, his sixth go-round. At the department’s last meeting, held at the Mullins Hall urinals during a break in the student recitals, Professor Carfagno had called it their bread-and-water course, and then did so. Skizzen had responded, last into action because he wore buttons, by describing it as one of bread and wine, but Morton Rinse had trumped that with tea and biscuit, just before releasing a stream that outlasted the others, at least in noise.
Skizzen’s career hung in the balance. He thought he had lost some students because of an obsessive use of clichés, common sayings that he adopted to hide what he knew was incompetence. And he stole opinions from any book that lay open. He really had to stop describing music as food for the gods or boasting, on Mozart’s behalf, that the little brat was penning symphonies at the age at which the rest of us were struggling to learn our sums. His point was: music is easy; see, a three-year-old can play, a five-year-old compose; but his pupils thought what the hell they had no chance. Then, instead of trying to encourage them to admire nobler things, Skizzen would scoff at genius. After all, what else could Bach do beside fugues?
The young professor never took the right tone with his material because he didn’t know the right tone to take. You have no tone, he scolded himself. You have no real beliefs. Of what, about your subject, could you say you were sure? if you were put to the lie-detect? if you had to swear before a court? Perhaps you could believe with some confidence that, although Saint-Saëns and Mendelssohn were both more prodigious talents than even Mozart or maybe John Stuart Mill, their careers were made of promises they didn’t wholly fulfill. But what sort of promises did the cliché require? that they would surpass Liszt. In what? In his sum of seductions? In the length of his trills? Skizzen’s native skepticism was no help either. His students simply were discouraged by it. They couldn’t handle opposing points of view or any war of wills. All the same, Skizzen did believe music was easy. He had learned to play the piano by ear, and that showed he had promise, didn’t it? but he could only play honky-tonk and pretend it was Chopin. Though he had skills, these tiddlywink abilities would never pay the bills.
If you are terrified of being a bore you probably are a bore and terror should be on its way. But Skizzen had become bored by himself, even alone in the urinal, so what must he be to others? Was terror transferable? He believed it was — contagious, like panic. There were books that argued for it. If you could not hear what you were about to play before you played it; if you could not measure the intervals to come, had no grasp of the constellations that notes and not-notes formed; then fear would fill your fingers as though they were sucking straws. When he faced his first class, he heard his words toddle from his mouth, their sense of conviction tied to a string for handy retraction. He would look in wonder at his notes, notes both musical and expository, that suddenly meant nothing to him. Now, of course, he could pronounce his judgments with the bully’s bluster—“Wagner has taught the tuba’s pomposity to the flute”—and he could formulate intimidating opinions—“Late Liszt is as atonal as autumn”—that meant nothing whatever; but it took Skizzen five years to get glib. He had to forget how he mucked about at the keyboard, didn’t have his material in hand, couldn’t teach the sea to roil or trees to leaf. He had to believe in his brilliance, he told himself with some sternness: Be proud of your knowledge, and confident about your mastery. Let superior assurance win the day. Ah, he immediately thought, there you go, winning the day. You must stop seizing or winning or greeting or wasting the day. You must be original even while sucking on an orange. But, when he tried to hear in his head the sound of a conch shell blown like Poseidon might toot it on a stony beach, the best he could do was imagine a whistle that signified to a grateful group that gym was over. Everybody got to shower.
He took hold of a stick of chalk, pulled it from the pack, and held it like a cigarette to steady his nerve. “I’ll smoke it later.” The chalk absorbed the sweat of his palms and then emitted a terrible squeak when rubbed across the slate. Did he remember how to spell “Tchaikovsky”? Tchaikovsky, he said, steadied his head with one hand when he conducted so it wouldn’t fly off. His head, not his hand. Skizzen knew how the conductor felt. The conductor felt his head was a hat. Maybe it was the composer who worried about brisk winds and the conductor who kept a tight hold on the brim. Skizzen heard some signs of amusement from the boys in the back. In fact Tchaikovsky gripped his chin and waited for wobble. Sometimes, when Horowitz played, members of the audience climbed up on their chairs to watch his fingers run an octave like a deer. Skizzen found he felt better if he turned his back to the students and spoke to the board. Well, what was he going to say about Tchaikovsky beyond that joke? That his symphonies were soap operas?