THE MUSIC TEACHER
a NovelBy BARBARA HALLAlgonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Copyright © 2009 Barbara Hall
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-56512-463-9Chapter One
I am the mean music teacher. I am that cranky woman you remember from your youth, the one whose face you dreaded seeing, whose breath you dreaded smelling as I leaned over you, tugging at your fingers. You made jokes about me, drew caricatures of me in your notebooks, made puns out of my name, swore never to be me.
Well, listen. I swore never to be me, too.
My name is Pearl Swain. It is my real name. I didn't make it up to give you something to laugh about. My mother chose it for noble reasons. I was named after her mother, a woman she alternately revered and despised. My mother's stories changed with her moods. I tried to stay away from both.
I started playing the violin when I was ten. Two years too late, I was eventually told, to become a great violinist. So I became a very good violinist, which is about like being a very good mathematician. It means you cannot actually make your living at your chosen profession. It means you have to teach others how to surpass you.
Here is why your music teacher was so mean: She didn't want to teach. She wanted to be a musician. She wanted to be first chair in some respectable philharmonic, or onstage with some famous rock band or jazz quartet. She wanted to compose her own pieces and have them published and admired. She wanted an audience for her music, not a succession of surly children being forced to memorize folk tunes and watered-down pop and gospel songs so that their parents could sit through endless recitals and brag about these accomplishments as if they were their own.
Like your music teacher, I am not as old as I appear. I am only forty, and I have aspirations still, circling the drain, but there, nagging and growing louder as they fade. I also have a sex life, or did. Something no one likes to imagine. I have been married and divorced and have been rejected countless other times, and I have even done my share of rejecting. I have bought silly lingerie and cooked impossibly difficult meals and lit candles in the bedroom and used chocolate syrup on things other than ice cream. But don't think about that. Just know that it's true.
I work in a precious little music shop on the West Side of Los Angeles called McCoy's, named after a Scottish guitar maker, who opened up the place to sell his own handmade guitars and violins, only to be put out of business by the larger chains. He sold the store, and the new management turned the place into a kind of haven for displaced would-be members of Fairport convention, people who play quaint instruments that no one wants to hear. We sell acoustic guitars, mandolins, violins, cellos, accordions, bongos, recorders, harmonicas, and honest-to-God lutes. The manager, Franklin, tries to pretend that we provide a much-needed service to the area, and he affects an air of disdain for anyone who can't see that, anyone who aspires to play something beyond glorified campfire music.
There is a repair shop, run by Declan McCoy, grandson of the original owner. He rides his bike to work and has a beard down to his diaphragm. There is a back room, where we host small concerts, and there are rooms upstairs where we teach lessons. If you teach, you have to put some hours into working in the shop, selling guitar strings and tuners and sheet music and shakers.
So in between lessons, I hang out in the store and argue with the other clerks and teachers. I argue the most with Franklin, a decent guitar player who dreams of being a session musician (which is not unlike dreaming of being a ghost writer), and who believes that there are only two guitarists on earth who can even rival him - Alvin Lee and Richard Thompson. Jimmy Page, he says, was only complex, and anybody can be complex if it's the only thing that matters to him. Jimi Hendrix, he says (though he refers to him only as Hendrix), simply reinvented the instrument to suit his purposes. Don't even talk to him about Keith Richards. (I don't know why. I don't care enough.) Eric Clapton is a sellout, chuck Berry treated his guitar like a car engine (that's a criticism, he swears), and Segovia turned his guitar into a piano, so why the hell didn't he just play the piano?
This is what I listen to all day long. Him arguing with Ernest and Patrick and Clive. They all have rules like this. His are just the stupidest and most cryptic. Ernest hyperventilates over Stevie Ray Vaughan and can't discuss Lynyrd Skynyrd without crying. Patrick says he'd marry Paul Simon if he weren't straight. (I suppose he means if he, Patrick, weren't straight - another lively topic of debate.) Clive, at twenty-eight, is the youngest member of the group, since Franklin won't hire anyone under twenty-five. Clive is a bass player who says that there is no such thing as a great band without a great rhythm section. He says that out loud, whenever Franklin walks by, and if Franklin is in a pleasant mood, he actually pauses to say, "Well, show me the all-rhythm-section band." "The Police," Clive quips, and Franklin holds a hand to his heart, as if he's been shot.
It's all very sad. They are like chess players, arguing over the most valuable piece on the board rather than the beauty of strategy. They are missing the big picture. Musicians often do that. Sometimes I do it, too. We all defend our instruments as if they were extensions of our personalities, which maybe they are, but should we admit it in public? I don't.
Of all the people employed at McCoy's, I make Franklin the craziest. He does not understand me. Mainly because I am a woman. Franklin's musical politics are not unlike those of the Taliban. He probably thinks we should be arrested for playing instruments in public. We're allowed to sing because singers are the lowest of the low. We're occasionally relegated to the piano ghetto because the piano, as Franklin puts it, is the dime-store novel of popular music. But when we try to make pleasant sounds come from anything else, we're playing with fire, encroaching on sacred territory.
"Why do you want to play that whiny little thing?" Franklin sometimes asks when he wanders past as I'm warming up before a lesson.
"I didn't choose it," I tell him. "It chose me."
"Only a woman could say that," he replies.
"I am a woman. Where's your argument?"
This actually makes the blood drain from his face, and then he says something like, "Your time card is a mess. Make sure you check your hours," and moves on.
I am in love with Franklin, probably. My fantasy is that he falls in love with me, and I tell him that he should get a real job (he has an MBA from Stanford), and we move to Northern California, play our instruments for fun, and raise five children. This, of course, will never happen. And Franklin has just enough disdain for me that it's safe to fantasize about him. He is not handsome. His hair is deserting him and he's put on ten pounds since I started working here three years ago, right after my divorce. I focused my attention on him as the perfect solution to my problems, since he was so different from my ex-husband, Mark Hooper, a charismatic history professor at UCLA, who eventually gave in to the demands of some lost and weepy coed and tried to blame me for his wanderings. He said it was my desire to be a musician and my refusal to match his salary that created so much stress that he had to look elsewhere for relief. I think he never recovered from the fact that I didn't take his last name. Why would...
