And Arthur? What kept me returning to his end of the hall?
Years later, long after it was all over, people — those who remembered Arthur’s brief moment of fame — would ask me that same question, how it was I could stand to be around that guy. What did I see in a man who could do what he did? In my defense, his second book had not yet come out, so all I knew of the depths of Arthur’s — let’s call it creative stuntsmanship—was still the comparatively minor stuff of that cadenza. Still, it’s true I remained friends with him even after the second book and kept steadfast through it all, following him down into the abyss — so I suppose this deserves a preemptory explanation.
Back in those days, I was searching for the answer, capital A. I didn’t have it and looked to everybody else for clues. My mother didn’t seem to have the answer: as a poet, she dwelled in the humdrum; her insights were the insights of a different generation — using the shock of fresh language to wake people up to the daily beauty of a dog’s bark, a sinkful of dirty dishes. This wasn’t what I was after. These weren’t my concerns. Almost a generation older than flower power, my mother watched that short era of hope bloom and die its cynical death from a relatively safe soul-preserving remove and was able to adopt the discoveries worth adopting — namely a sense of liberal self-expression, the only good thing to come of those times besides Abbey Road, she thought: a quality she hoped to instill in me, all too eager to encourage my slightest creative inclinations.
My father was an early mentor, a man who held sacred his own childhood and through me was able to recapture some of its magic. He taught me a love of collecting — stamps, baseball cards, little-known facts — and fed my interest in science fiction. At the age of nine and ten I was thrilled to spend those rare school-free weekdays at his office on Fifth Avenue, only a dozen blocks south from where I now spent my days with Suriyaarachchi and Dave. He was a draftsman by trade, my father — one of those trades that simply vanished with the advancement of computers. He toiled away at a steeply angled table, tracing intricate ductwork and wiring onto sheets of vellum with a special metal pencil whose soft graphite set down marks as dark as ink. The windows — the office was on the top floor of an eighteen-story building — looked out onto a scale model of a busy street scene: toy cars and buses inching along the replica avenue, complete with tiny streetlamps and blinking crosswalk signs. I can still feel the simple pleasure of sitting near him as he worked, taking up the adjacent table. The person who sat at this desk was invariably in a meeting in the conference room whenever I was around. It only occurs to me now that this man was probably not in a meeting but rather vacating his normal post to allow me to sit beside my father, bringing his work to the big conference table for the day as a favor to us. In my room, next to my piano, is a large cardboard tube, the kind used for architectural drawings. It is filled with poster-sized vellum plans for intergalactic cruisers, light-duty zero-gravity suits, and lethal dense-particle plasma rifles. If you look closely at my 2s, you can see how I tried to undo the loop in them so that they would be more like my father’s 2s, a practical and efficient arrowhead V pointing down at the base of a curve. Next to his, mine looked dopey, the 2s of a student puzzling at the sum of a pair of them. And in the bottom right corner of each of my plans, copying his sturdy caps, I put the name of the project, the name of the draftsman (myself), and the project’s lead architect (my father).
But while I might have been entertained here of the occasional weekday afternoon, on the weekends — every weekend — I was making my pilgrimage on the Uptown local, plus the six uphill blocks farther by foot, to lock myself away in a practice room in the service of great art. By the time I was able to thunder through a Brahms rhapsody on the keyboard, I had left my father behind. Through my teens, my mentor was my piano teacher, an enormous man, six six easily, as round as he was tall. He had an enormous bald head and enormous hands. To see those fingers move across the keyboard was to understand why people use athletic terms to describe some classical musicians. His fingers were galloping horses, running wild and yet nailing every single note. Mr. Masi. His tastes became my tastes. Fred Astaire, Arthur Rubenstein. These were the greats. I diligently collected all the classic recordings and every old musical he praised with the same feverishness of my days collecting stamps and cards with my father. At the same time, Mr. Masi taught me a sensitivity to grace and beauty — and that such a sensitivity could be a masculine trait. To speak with confidence about how gorgeous a particular passage was and to, upon hearing it, close one’s eyes in submission to it. Artur Schnabel playing Kreisleriana, Maurizio Pollini rolling through a Chopin étude. Some lessons would begin this way, him putting on a recording and letting it fill the room. I would watch him go limp at these climactic moments and then, snapping out of it, turn to me and shout, “See? Good God! Do you see what this is all about?” And I did. He taught me to seek out these moments, to feel the shiver down the spine.
But then I went off to college and left Mr. Masi behind as well.
In my twenties, I was adrift, in search of a new mentor — someone who could help me make sense of this new territory I found myself in, disillusioned with university-level music making but still desperate to do something with my life, make something of myself. But how? For a while, it seemed that Suriyaarachchi had the answer: even though he was young, younger than me, his sheer enthusiasm made him a candidate. To him, creativity was an entrepreneurial endeavor, imbued with the possibilities of great profit and renown. I was drawn to his confidence but saw also that much of that confidence was based on wishful thinking. Which is when Arthur showed up, with his astonishing feat of language, his uptown professorship, his sexy wife and precocious son, and I saw that maybe, just maybe, I had been too hasty in my dismissal of art. Here was a man who seemed to have it alclass="underline" prestigious job, family — and an audience. What more could one want?
And then there was the business of that cadenza. In the middle of my formative stages as a young artist, to witness that act on that stage. It was so shocking, so out of the realm of what I knew art to be — even compared with those sixties experiments involving pianos rolled off stages. Thinking back on it, I can see that it was both the catalyst that propelled me onward, down the path toward a bachelor’s degree, as well as the poison pill that had slowly, over the course of my four years at conservatory, forced me back off that path, dissatisfied with the smaller and smaller territories academic composers were mapping out for themselves. Nothing I had experienced in those four years lived up to the sheer enormity of that act. But what did it mean? The memory of that incident had troubled me — for years afterward — remaining a knotted question in my brain that I didn’t even realize was there until bumping into him again after more than a decade. And here he was; it was an opportunity to work out that knot. I was happy to have been given a second chance with him.