Home from the Vinyl Cafe (11 page)

To help pay for the lessons in New York, Annie got a job playing at Radio City Music Hall. She did the Liza Minnelli show. She had to wear a sequined gown even though the orchestra was in the pit, because at every show, there was a moment when the pit was raised. The orchestra would play a number as they hovered in the air, and then they would drop out of sight again.

Some of the people had been in the pit for over a decade. They hated what they were doing, but they didn’t leave, because it was a good job and steady. One night Annie watched the trombone player filling out his income-tax form during the show—putting down his pen and picking up his trombone without missing a cue.

Stovman had an apartment on Riverside Drive, in the same building as Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman. Perlman lived on the top floor in the apartment where Babe Ruth used to live.

Once, while Annie was warming up, she played a reel, and Stovman screamed at her. “Don’t play like that in here,” he said. The accompanist told Annie that Stovman was harder on her than any of his other pupils. That made her happy. She stayed two years.

When she left, she was offered a job with the Boston Symphony. She got married six months later. She thought she had everything she ever wanted.

But life with the orchestra didn’t suit Annie. She found the program repetitive, and when the conductor did choose new pieces to perform, they were seldom things Annie wanted to play. After rehearsals and performances, the younger members would sometimes gather at one another’s apartments for a glass of wine, but invariably, the talk would return to the same tired complaints—the lousy salaries, the long hours, the lack of opportunity. Annie had the job she’d always wanted, but she couldn’t find any joy in it.

Then the first violinist left the orchestra, and the undercurrent of rivalry that Annie had always suspected was there burst into the open. The woman in the chair beside Annie suddenly stopped talking to her, and it didn’t take long for Annie to learn that the woman had tried to undercut her—had actually complained to the conductor that she was tired of carrying Annie, that Annie always played off tempo.

When her marriage began to fall apart, Annie decided she’d had enough. She quit the orchestra and moved back to Nova Scotia with her daughter, Margot.

Stovman was furious. He wrote her a blistering three-page letter. “What are you trying to do to me?” he wrote. To him?
thought Annie. What am I doing to
him
? Oddly, the letter made her feel better about her decision. She took a contract with Symphony Nova Scotia. She also joined a Celtic group. Suddenly, music was fun again.

Morley knew much of this, but she hadn’t heard all of it before, not all at once. They were eating dessert when she told Annie about Sam’s piano lessons and what his teacher, Mrs. Crouch, had said about him. She explained her plan to send Sam to music camp so he could study with Laurence Merriman.

Annie said, “Laurence Merriman is a prissy snob. I thought Sam already had a music teacher. You said he was having fun with the guy.”

On Thursday, when Morley took Sam to his piano lesson she asked if she could stay and watch. Ray Spinella, the one-armed teacher, looked surprised but delighted. “You could sit over there,” he said.

Morley did her best to disappear. She needn’t have bothered. Ray and Sam were soon utterly absorbed by the music. Morley noticed that Ray obviously wasn’t following a method. And he wasn’t teaching the grade-one syllabus.

At the end of the lesson, Ray had Sam make up a tune. Then Ray took a trumpet off the top of the piano, stood beside her son, and played along. Sam smiled at his teacher, Ray nodded, and they both kept going.

On the way home, Morley said, “When you’re at camp, do you think they’ll give you your own horse, or do you have to share it?”

Sam said, “I think you have to share. But I’m going to save up and buy my own horse. I’m going to call him Bach. Ray is
going to teach me some of the cowboy songs that Bach wrote. Can I do piano next year?”

“We’ll see,” said Morley.

Sam had his face pressed to the car window. He was whistling the tune that he had just made up. The tune he and Ray had been playing together.

Morley smiled.

               
I
t was study break. And, as if on cue, spring was in the air. “Maybe a record high for this time of year,” said the weatherman. Dave wore his spring jacket and sneakers to work. Walking out the front door, he felt … light. The sun warm on his face for the first time in months.

Morley had taken the kids to Florida.

“It’s great,” she said on the phone. “I wish you could have come. God, I needed this.”

Dave was home alone.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m okay.”

But he wasn’t okay. Something strange was going on. It began after he drove his family to the airport. It began as a funny whirling feeling in his stomach. It wasn’t like he was sick. It was a pleasant sort of feeling. Like being excited. Or nervous. But Dave wasn’t feeling excited or nervous about anything. He was feeling … goofy.

At first he thought he was tired. He had stayed up late helping his wife pack. At midnight he had taken the car to the all-night gas station. His family was leaving at seven in the morning. They were at the airport at five-thirty. I must be tired, he thought.

He went to bed early on Wednesday and slept soundly,
but when he woke up in the morning, the feeling was still there. Except more so.

He felt … giddy.

It was another beautiful day.

“You wouldn’t believe the weather,” he said to Morley on the phone. “Everyone is outside. It’s like someone pulled a switch.”

On his way home, he bought a bottle of red wine and picked up a video. This is great, he thought. I never get to do this. He cooked pasta and mixed it with garlic and broccoli and drank half the bottle of wine. While he ate, he listened to Paganini’s
Violin Concerto, Number One
, occasionally directing the CD with his fork. After he finished, he put on coffee and did the dishes. He was looking forward to watching his movie, but as he was putting away the Paganini, he spotted an old Beatles album, and the whirling in his stomach intensified. It was the sound track from
A Hard Day’s Night
. He hadn’t listened to the record in years. The summer he was sixteen, he had gone to England with his parents and had brought the album back with him. It was possible that he had been the first person in the country to own it. He pulled the record out of its jacket and spun it between his palms.

That first dissonant chord filled the kitchen like an old friend. Aficionados still argue whether it is an F-major or G-major 7th. In his book
A Day in the Life
, Mark Hertsgaard writes that the swelling opening chord of the album sounds like a hijacked church bell announcing the party of the year.Dave smiled, turned up the volume, sat down at the table, and poured himself another glass of wine. After all these years. The music washed over and through him. He played the album twice and then got down on his hands and knees and pawed about and finally found
Abbey Road
.

He killed the bottle of wine, sitting on the floor, listening to
the second side of the album. The side with the incomplete song fragments. He had forgotten how much he loved the way the uncompleted songs had been mixed into one glorious movement. Woven together like that because McCartney and Lennon hadn’t had the stomach to work as a team anymore and couldn’t finish writing the individual numbers.

Dave staggered to bed after midnight. He never watched his movie.

On Friday, when he woke up, he didn’t want to listen to CBC radio. He reached over and sleepily changed the station to CHUM—hits of the fifties and sixties, the music of his life. He brushed his teeth to Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome.” When he was eating breakfast, they played the title song from the musical
Hair
. He ran his hand over his head.

He felt … buoyant.

All day at work, old pop tunes kept bouncing into his imagination. He didn’t know what the hell was going on, but he liked the way he was feeling. He usually played jazz in the store. On Friday he played rock and roll all day long.

Rock and roll had once been a big part of Dave’s life. But lately, his tastes had shifted. He had become more aligned with the likes of Gershwin and Billie Holiday. Louis Armstrong and Gene Ammons.

Slowly, he had left rock and roll behind him.