The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

A Little Nightmare Music

Previously: "Fugue for Two Minds" 

The phone in your pocket vibrates on your way back to the piano room. It's Nathan Cruz: call? He knows better than to just interrupt you.

k, you reply once you're back in the practice room. You sit at the piano and balance the phone on the rack next to a fat music book: Chopin's Etudes.

You open and slowly flip through it. You are still drinking it in with rapt wonder—at the way the dots and blurts and scratches on the page transparently organize themselves into comprehensible musical phrases, just as letters of the alphabet turn into words and sentences—when the phone again vibrates. You tap the screen. "Yeah."

"Jesus!" Nathan exclaims.

Your lips twitch. "How was dinner with the cheerleaders?"

"Pfah!" The exclamation almost jolts the phone off the music rack. "Chelsea brought her rhinoceros boyfriend with her," he continues in a low, strangled snarl. "He had his arm around her the whole time, glaring at me like he was a dog and she was a bone and I was thinking of taking her away from him."

"Football player?"

"Basketball. Gordon Black! You know who he is!"

That small smile sticks to your lips. "Oh him. Basketball player, right? Looks like a rhinoceros, is dating the head cheerleader?"

"I know you're trying to be funny but you're not."

Your smile widens as the pages of the Etudes continue to fall away under your thumb. "Did Madison have fun? I thought that was the point of it."

"Oh sure," he grunts. "She and Chelsea talked gymnastics the whole time. Meantime, I'm trying to look anywhere except at the other side of the table. Okay, some of the time I was picturing Madison doing all that tumbling and bending but, you know, while not wearing any panties. Maybe that's why Gordon got mad, he thought it was his girlfriend I was fantasizing about."

"You sure you weren't?" You stop and hold the Etudes open to the No. 5 (Opus 25), and grin at the slapstick dissonances.

"Well, okay, in the fantasies, Chelsea was there and naked and doing it right alongside Madison."

You glance at the door, to make sure it's closed. "Didn't Kendra do any of that kind of tumbling for you?"

That provokes a long pause, and you resume flipping through the Etudes. "No, and Madison's not doing anything like that for me either." Nathan's voice tightens. "And if she doesn't start soon I'm gonna start looking for somebody who will."

"You're a pervert."

"Then so's every other guy who wants it! Jesus! What about you?" he asks after a pause. "Or are you still living off that girl you met in Hawaii?"

Lani. A girl at the conservatory where Preston studied for three months over the summer. A wonderful present, and one more than a little beyond his family's means. (The three months at the conservatory, not the girl.) "I guess so."

"You thinking about Susie, maybe asking her out?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't know, Nathan," you sigh, and let the Chopin flop shut.

"You at the piano?" he asks. "You looking at the quintet?"

"Sort of," you say. You cast a guilty glance at the far corner of the room, where the discarded score of the Wuorinen piano quintet lies. Preston kicked it there in a moment of exuberant frustration.

"So can we do it?"

You rub the side of your temple. "Can you even read the damn thing? Even if we can play the notes in the right order, we're none of us going to keep together."

"That's what makes it perfect," he chortles. "As if a bunch of drunks at an arts slam are gonna be able to tell if we're playing it wrong."

A hot feeling, like the head of a burning match, runs up the side of your face. "I'm not going to do a thing with you if you're going to treat it like a joke."

"Come on, Pres'n! Kirkham says he'll bite the head off a live chicken at the top of the fourth movement if we do it."

You stiffen all over. "I'll do the Amy Beach quintet with you."

Another suppressed gasp. "That's nursing home music! We can't play that at an arts marathon!"

All the muscles along your jaw tighten. "She's an overlooked female composer. It'll be a statement."

"Fine," he growls. "At least it's not the Schumann again. But if the organizers give us a second slot, can we at least do the first movement of the Wuorinen?"

"No, but maybe you can get Kirkham to set his cello on fire onstage."

Nathan makes a kind of choked, snorting noise. "He might do it. But can we get together tomorrow? All of us?"

"To look at the Beach? Sure, I'm free all day." So Nathan says he'll text you when he's gotten a time commitment from the other three members of the Wendigo String Quartet.

You notice that he didn't ask you about Preston's appointment with Yumi, which he was supposed to join.

After checking to see if any other texts have come in, and straightening up the studio a little, you shake yourself inside the already loose shirt and pull down the knot of your tie a little more. Then you open the Chopin back up.

It should be a guilt-free relief to play through a few of them, now that you don't have the Wuorinen hanging over your head. You actually felt a shameful glee at Nathan's tasteless crack about no one knowing if it's played right, for it gave you the opening to trash it and substitute—

* * * * *

Okay, all this guilt and second-guessing? It's pure Preston Spinks. You're just along for the ride. You're sitting somewhere inside his skull, letting all these words and thoughts and emotions come popping out as your new body glides along on automatic.

No, that's not true. Those thoughts and feelings are all racing through you, like an electric current through a coil, and you are bending to them by fiddling with your clothes and glancing in a sweaty kind of way around the room. But you barely understand what you're saying and why you're saying it.

But no, even that's not true. Because every time you say something, there comes with it, like a bright, lingering flash of sheet lightning, all the explanations and associations. They don't fade either, but become a familiar and faintly glowing part of your mental landscape. You know what Preston knows and feels, and why, and you know and feel those things too. Intimately.


Like the knowledge that Charles Wuorinen is a twentieth-century American composer of serial music—the sort of plonking, jangling, jerry-built stuff that sounds to most people like a piano falling down a stairwell and hitting every step on its way down—and that Amy Beach was an early twentieth-century female composer in the late Romantic tradition.

Like the fact that the Wuorinen quintet, though intellectually fascinating, has been giving Preston a low-grade migraine—and a very bad conscience—as he dodges his promises to study and maybe perform it with the Wendigo String Quartet at the Keyserling Arts & Sciences Winter Arts Marathon in two months.

Like the firm conviction Preston has that it is important to rediscover and represent the work of female composers, and that even if the Beach is ...

Okay, Nathan went too far in calling it "nursing home music." But yes, at a college arts marathon the Amy Beach piano quintet would smell just a little too much of lavender and old lace. It has too much the roundly padded shape of a grand dame in a bustle and floor-length brocaded skirt.

Now, all of this you know and you feel, and you know and feel it as certainly as Preston Spinks does.

But you also feel that it's one thing to understand Preston Spinks from the inside as he carries you along—

Because there's more to being Preston Spinks than thinking and acting for him. To really BE Preston Spinks—

You tense.

You can't know unless you try.

Slowly you flip through the Etudes again. It's just like reading a book. The chord progressions and melodic layers are as transparently intelligible as the tempo instructions. And you savor the associations that come with each piece. Winter Wind. Butterfly. Thirds. The Horseman. Bees.

Aeolian Harp. Your right hand drops to the keyboard and caresses the shape of the arpeggios. The tendons in your hand tighten.

You slap the book shut.

Like every performer, Preston has suffered performance anxiety, but never with such good reason. Usually when it happens, it happens before an actual performance, when the ass is on the bench but the fingers have yet to engage. That harrowing moment of hesitation never lasts long, though, because the performance has to start eventually and soon, and once you pierce the surf it's a brutal matter of swimming or sinking. (That analogy occurred to him while on Maui.)

But private anxiety attacks, like now? Well, those happen too. The dreadful premonition that today the fingers won't work; the loathsome conviction that the piano looks too much like a dead walrus, and will be just as responsive under prodding. Sometimes there will be a run of such days, and a burning haze will hover in the practice room, leaching away all love and life and ambition, leaving Preston a rattling husk, too drained to be even mechanically proficient.

Then the haze will lift and the talent will return and all will be as if it had ever been.

You lightly rub the sensitive underside of your forearm, where Dr. Giers once traced the golden cord that connects fingers to mind. You trace it now to the pit of your elbow, then leap to rub at your temple, where maybe it plugs in.

But if so, what to? To the mind of Will Prescott, who has no talent to pour into the hands?

Or to the mind of Preston Spinks?

Next: "The Right Key" 

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 3)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)"