Key change. Second movement. Fingers dance like fireflies.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if I simply stopped playing between movements and never started again. How long would it take the audience to grow restless, to start whispering, to throw me offstage? I don’t know. It’s a funny thought.
Movements two and three bypass my conscious mind, straight to my fingertips. I sway on my stool to the very last coda, at which I let the last chord ring out with the damper pedal down until it comes to its natural conclusion. Beautiful. The audience stands to applaud.
The moment I’ve stepped down from my stage, chatter breaks out. The wait staff pile into the room with fresh drinks and breakfast on platters, and I’m left to prowl the tables, collecting compliments like stamps. Mum always tells me it’s good form to interact with my audience after a performance. It makes them feel important, which means they will remember me.
The clatter of cutlery, the murmur of voices. Someone is already scrubbing my sweat from the piano up on the stage. That’s funny. Soon it will be like I never existed.
I am intrigued by a solitary woman sitting at a table near the ballroom exit. She has no silver plate before her; no mimosa, tea or coffee. Only a single glass of water. She must be in her late forties or early fifties. A high bun of red hair tugs at her scalp. Her eyes follow me as I approach.
“You play well,” she tells me. A sip of water. “Very well for someone so young.”
I stop on the other side of her table. “Thank you. I enjoy it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Hadn’t you heard, I’m the prodigy?”
The woman nods once, then twice. Her eyes are scrunched at their corners. She takes a long swig of water, sets the glass down, and slides it slowly across the table cloth towards me. I expected her fingers to be skeletal, but they’re not. They are well-built, their nails long.
“Have a drink, son,” she says.
“I’m not thirsty.”
“I’m a pharmacist. I’m prescribing you a drink.”
I pick up the glass and rotate it to find an area untouched by her mouth. The woman’s hands snake back to her body as though they’re her offspring. She waits. I put the glass to my lips and take a swig, and feel fire in my throat. Goosebumps down my arms.
I cough. “Fucking—”
“Yes. Vodka.” The woman takes the glass back and drains the rest of the liquor in one. “Good for the soul at the best of times. A necessity when that soul is artistic.”
I stare at her.
“Just…” The woman leans in. A thick silver necklace hangs from her neck. “Don’t tell the staff, eh? Mr. Canossa would have a fit, but his hotel liquor is priced like fucking diamonds.”
She takes the empty glass in one hand and hides it under the table. I hear the clink of a bottle, then she puts the glass back on the table, full to the brim with more transparent liquid. She takes a swig.
I am still recovering from the unexpected alcohol. Vodka takes me back to my teenage years, when necessity lay not in whatever artistic souls wanted, but in whatever gave me the most alcohol for the best price. When I was stressed over a performance, spirits guided me to sunrise.
The woman offers the glass to me again, and to my own surprise, I take it with a mumble of thanks. I have a draft of the vodka, and another. My fingers leave prints on the glass. The woman refills it again.
“Now—your performance,” she says. Her jaw works as though she’s chewing the words. “Shibuya’s sonata, eh? That’s brave. It takes guts to perform Shibuya’s sonata.”
“Thank you.”
“Yes, movements one and two—superb, of course. But it was the third, son. Oh, the third.” The woman’s mouth quivers. She throws her head back and stares at the ceiling. “Such a raw, simple little ballad, the third is. And yet your interpretation took my breath away.”
I find myself hanging on to this woman’s praise. Why her off all people? My audience is always keen to catch my eye after a performance, to offer compliments, but I never seem to care very much. This strange woman is different. Bizarre as it is, I feel as though her praise or disdain will mark the difference between my ultimate success or failure as a musician.
“You truly respect the third movement’s identity,” she goes on. “You respect its… well, its—”
“Simplicity?”
“Yes, simplicity. Some would call the third movement easiest, for its slow and simple tempo. But we know that’s bullshit. The musician is tasked with elevating what an amateur could play. That’s not easy.”
“No, it’s not.” I drink some more as I consider this. There’s a pleasant hum to the ballroom now. “Though in some ways it’s easier, or at least more interesting. Shibuya leaves so much empty in the third movement. So much for me to interpret compared to the others.”
The woman refills the vodka again. We are burning through it like oil on an ocean surface. The rich guests are throwing us curious looks from all their tables. I imagine what it looks like to them: the two of us, one young and one oldr, passing a singular glass back and forth as though in ritual.
“You play like an angel. And yet you called yourself a prodigy.”
“Should those things be mutually exclusive?”
“No real prodigy refers to themself as a prodigy unless they are sarcastic.” The woman sloshes the vodka around in her glass. “And no real prodigy can afford to be sarcastic about their work.”
“Canossa called me a prodigy.”
“Canossa is a skunk.” The woman inhales deep through her nose, and shudders. “I was a prodigy once too, you know?”
“Of what sort?”
“I was a prostitute.”
I stare. My teeth feel fragile from all the alcohol.
“That’s right. Look at me now. I’m getting old. The world won’t jump into bed with me these days.” She leans over the table, dangling that necklace again. “We all get spat out in the end, son. Will you perform till arthritis takes your fingers? One by one, like frostbite.”
I’m starting to feel a little sick. The woman bends her fingers back one after the other, pretending to snap them off like twigs. She never blinks. I excuse myself and hurry out of the ballroom to the snaking hotel halls, my stomach churning with her curdled words. The bathroom is just down the hall. It seems to grow farther away the longer I walk towards it, until all at once I stumble through the door and keel over a sink and throw up. My knuckles are white on the sink.
When I return to the ballroom, the woman is gone. I look around for her to no avail. In fact, I feel now that the charm I weaved with my music broke the moment I left for the bathroom, and now nobody even remembers who I am. None of the guests make eye contact. No one offers their compliments. A waiter passes me by as though I’m a vacant chair.
The woman’s glass still sits half-empty on the tablecloth. I raise it to my lips and down the liquid in one, but I find that it’s no longer vodka at all. It’s just water.
———
Mr. Shibuya’s third movement is slow and melancholic. It brings all the complexity and spectacle of the first two movements to a boil, concentrating the essence of the composition down into a sparse chord progression and melody. A note, a pause, a breath… another note. Shibuya’s third movement creeps forward with such delicacy that I can sometimes hear the damper pedal creaking underneath my foot as I play.
It was Mum’s interpretation of the third movement which failed to impress Shibuya all those years ago. Her third movement sealed her fate as nothing more than an almost-prospect. This was presented to me during my childhood as a fact, as sure as two plus two equals four.
“It had to be the third movement,” Mum always said. Often she said it to herself as she sat vacantly on the piano stool, while other times she would frighten guests or customers with random interjections: “It just had to be the third.”
“I beg your pardon?” said old Mrs. Kember, on a particularly cold morning. All she wanted was to order her usual eggs on toast. “The third?”
“Yes,” Mum said. “It had to be. ’Cause I never put a note wrong through all the chaos of the first two. Not one fucking note, I’d bet my life and my child on it.”
One day she dropped any pretence of enjoying our quaint family life.
Shibuya’s third movement became her second, badly-behaved child. It got all the attention. It could not be ignored, for it would keep her up at night with its constant presence, or lure her from the cafe up to the piano with its drawn cries. Mum took up the unfortunate habit of erupting into her sonata at every hour of the night, as if two in the morning would be more illuminating than one, and three more illuminating than two. Shibuya’s third movement ran through our walls like asbestos.
Dad suggested we get rid of the piano. He suggested we ban anything with Shibuya’s brilliant name on it from being played. Mum reacted as though he’d tried to have her child put down. I’d never heard her scream like that before, and never have since. It was scary. School became my refuge. I’d come home to find the boxy TV beside the piano, the floor strewn with Shibuya’s every documented performance in every form she could find: VHS tapes, DVDs, old newspaper clippings from when the sonata first released.
Piece by piece, my mother hollowed herself out.
Her portions became smaller at dinnertime, and she stopped having breakfast all together. She bit her fingernails down to their roots. We started finding loose hair in the shower plug and blood on the piano keys. The ridges of bones jutted against her skin. I spent longer and longer away from home each day, at school or at a friend’s or wandering the empty streets of my small hometown till the sun dipped behind the hills. I’d dread the moment I had to go home and hear that sonata drifting from the windows. It was a vulture circling my corpse. Waiting for me to teeter.
Dad shouldered every responsibility at work and at home. He died shortly after, when I was eight years old. He’d been battling something sinister for years, but I think it was the stress that killed him in the end. In his final days he was like a percussionist, one hand stirring a pot and the other flipping a pan, one hand helping me with my homework while the other cleaned the dishes.
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