The Distance Between Us (14 page)

My only hope is that he’ll mangle it. Because otherwise I’m likely to come apart at the seams.

It’s not really Olga’s fault. It’s mine. We had a discussion a few years back about the repertoire we each favored in lessons, and I lied to her about why I no longer teach this
Nocturne
to my students. All she knows is that it used to be my signature encore piece in the old days, and that I had grown tired of it. She no doubt thought it would be a good, harmless prank for Viktor to spring it on me this way.

Well, that’s what I get for lying.

I open my eyes again and brace myself for what’s coming.

Unfortunately, the boy plays very well. His phrasing is limpid and thoughtful, and as the music gains in power and speed he displays an admirable restraint, avoiding the sentimental excess that so often mars the performances of young pianists. His hands are big and strong, but he isn’t afraid to use them lightly; he’s saving his energy for the finale. There’s an intensity to his expression that reminds me of Olga, an almost frightening loss of self in his concentration. It also reminds me of me, I suppose.

The melody begins its slow, relentless buildup, and I can’t block it out any longer.

This was Jeremy’s favorite piece.

Jeremy.

My sweet, stupid son.

When he was a child, he would come into the music room at home while I was practicing, and he would lie on the floor and listen patiently to whatever I was working on. My injury didn’t allow me to play for any length of time without causing enormous discomfort, so I’d eventually take a break and peer over the piano at him.

“Jeremy.” I’d make a face. “Not again, surely. Not today. My wrist hurts too much.”

He’d beg. “Please? Just once more, okay?”

I must have played it for him a hundred times over the course of his adolescence. The piece is only six minutes long, but it covers the emotional gamut, and as he grew older, I’d look up when I was done, and he would always have tears in his eyes.

I asked him once why he liked it so much if it made him sad, and he shrugged.

“I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his unruly blond hair. “It’s not just sadness, though. It’s everything. Everything all at once.” He grinned at me. “And you already know that, otherwise you wouldn’t play it the way you do.”

He couldn’t have been more than fourteen when he said those words.

Jeremy played the French horn. He started off on piano, as did all my children, but when he was seven years old we took him to a concert at the Conservatory. The orchestra was performing Beethoven’s Seventh, and he sat through the entire symphony without moving, his gaze glued to the horns and his face slack with wonder. All the way home in the car he whistled the theme to the finale, waving his arms around in the backseat like a mad conductor and annoying Paul with a barrage of rude remarks about the cello (Paul’s instrument). I don’t recall most of his comments, but when he made the proclamation that “the horn is the voice of God, but the cello is a farting walrus with strings attached to its head,” Paul seemed to believe he’d gone too far.

“Shut the fuck up, you little pisshead!” He reached around Caitlin and wrenched Jeremy’s arm with brutal intensity. “I’m going to fucking kill you!”

Paul never did develop much patience for his younger brother when they were children. They were only three years apart, and Jeremy’s mouth was merciless. He knew better than anyone else how to make Paul dissolve into a screaming lunatic, and the beatings he took because of it never seemed to discourage him from giving his tongue free rein.

I remember walking in the house one day after work and stumbling into a war zone. The table and chairs in the kitchen were overturned, and Paul had Jeremy cornered by the refrigerator and was ruthlessly punching him in the stomach, again and again, because Jeremy had been making fun of a slight lisp Paul had at the time. Both of them were bawling and Jeremy could barely talk, but every time he was struck, he’d croak, “Thtop it, Paul, pleath thtop it.”

“I can’t help thpeaking like that!” Paul wailed. “I hate you, I hate you!”

I separated them but just as Paul was beginning to calm down
again, Jeremy whispered from behind the safety of my back, “Thankth, Mom. He wath hurting me.”

Paul went berserk. He seized a steak knife from the silverware drawer and began chasing Jeremy through the house. I caught him before he could commit fratricide, but he nearly stabbed me in the leg as I wrestled him to the ground. Jeremy locked himself in a nearby bathroom and began to sing loudly, over and over, “Thith ith the dawning of the age of Aquariuth, the age of Aquariuth …”

That was a rather long day.

And yet most of the time they were quite close. They played music together frequently and watched television every night, and when they were older I would often find them sitting side by side on the front porch in the evening, listening to the radio and talking. Occasionally I’d hear them laughing like fools over something incomprehensible, a private joke made up of endless shared memories and intimately understood facial expressions, bewildering catchphrases, and crude sound effects.

In other words, everything that makes up the muddled and reason-defying language of brothers.

They weren’t just siblings, you see. They were also friends.

That’s why Paul is still so angry with me. He has few friends, and Jeremy was one of the only people in the world he actually loved, and so he blames me for everything that happened. It’s as if he thinks I could have changed the outcome, could have somehow prevented Jeremy from doing what he did.

It’s what my entire family believes.

Which is so grossly unfair, I want to scream. They have no idea what they’re talking about. None. I was the only one there with Jeremy at the end. The only one. I know what happened, and I know what I did was right. But they have never listened to my side of the story.

I yank my attention back to the present, trying to concentrate on Viktor’s few foibles as a player. I’m supposed to spend at least forty-five minutes of the class on him, and if I can just endure the initial run-through, I may be able to immerse myself in the nuts and bolts of his interpretation for the rest of the time, and avoid more of this senseless wallowing in the past.

Who am I kidding?

I’m not wallowing. I’m drowning.

Dear God, this hurts. The music feels as if it’s eating a hole in my flesh, one caustic note at a time. How can it possibly still hurt this much?

I’m not going to make it. I’m going to have to walk offstage any second now. Viktor’s almost arrived at the climax in the
Nocturne,
the place where all hell breaks loose, and I won’t survive it, not this time. It’s far too laden with memory, too rich with grief and longing and despair. If I were playing, I might be able to harness the notes and discharge some of the pain that way, letting it sluice out of me like sewage water from a pipe. But having to sit here and simply listen is torture.

His phrasing is exquisite. He connects one idea to the next in a seamless line, like a master storyteller, and his rests almost throb with tension. My only complaint so far is with his left hand; it has a slight tendency to overpower his right. It’s a minor problem, but I fixate on it with gratitude. Any flaw at all is a welcome distraction.

God damn him. If he’d only miss a note now and then, it would make this so much easier.

I turn my head away from the audience as my eyes fill with tears.

God damn Chopin, too, while we’re at it. And God damn Olga and our development director, and God damn Arthur and Caitlin, and God damn everyone in this room who expects me to hear this hateful piece right now without falling apart. All I want to do is go home, and sit with Alex again in the kitchen attic as we did yesterday, and lose myself in alcohol and undemanding conversation.

I blink to clear my vision and begin to rise slowly from my chair to leave the stage, but Viktor suddenly leans forward and sinks the weight of his forearms into the keyboard, and the music erupts into the air around me. I fall back in my seat and drop my head on my chest in defeat.

No qualified teacher would take Jeremy as a student until he was older, but the instant he turned ten we couldn’t put him off any longer. Arthur and I would have preferred for him to take up a string instrument or continue with the piano, but after Sandra Means at the Conservatory agreed to teach him, Jeremy insisted we
buy him a horn, and he began to practice with the single-minded devotion of an idiot savant. By the time he was twelve he could play almost anything in the repertoire. Orchestral excerpts from Mahler and Richard Strauss were standard fare, and he blared them out his bedroom window every day after school. It’s a wonder the neighbors never complained, because you could hear him from five blocks away.

When he was fifteen, he won a young artist’s competition with the Chicago Symphony, and almost every music school in the country that was worth a damn started trying to recruit him. Paul was already at Carson by then, but Jeremy—who was always far less afraid of the world than his brother—decided he wanted to go to Philadelphia to study at the Curtis Institute, and he somehow managed to convince Arthur and me that he didn’t need to finish high school first.

“What are you guys so worried about?” he demanded when we dared to argue with him. “Curtis doesn’t require a high school diploma.” He paced in a circle around the kitchen table. “And after I’ve been to a school like Curtis, no one will give a shit that I once dropped out of high school.”

Arthur looked at me and shrugged. “He has a point, Hester.”

I scowled back at him. “Yes, darling, he does. Unfortunately, it’s on top of his malformed little head.” I grunted. “And you have one, too, if you’re thinking this is a good idea.”

Jeremy’s eyes, gray and brilliant like his father’s, scanned my face for signs of weakening. He knew he’d won Arthur over (as usual) and had only me to contend with.

“Come on, Mom,” he nudged. “You know I’m right.”

“No, Jeremy, I don’t know that at all.” I rose to my feet to go get a drink. “I’d like for you to have something of a normal childhood, son.” I raised my eyebrows at Arthur. “Neither your father nor I ever did, and I think we owe you that opportunity.”

Arthur frowned. “Oh, for God’s sake. What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything, dear.” I made my way to the liquor cabinet and dragged out a full bottle of Glenlivet. “I’m simply trying to prevent our middle child from becoming a psychotherapist’s wet dream a decade from now.”

He waved his hand. “You’re being absurd. I’d say we turned out rather well, in spite of our unorthodox upbringings.”

“That’s debatable.” I held out the bottle of scotch for his inspection and he nodded his head. I took two glasses from the cabinet to pour us both a shot. “You, for instance, have an alarming number of personality disorders.”

“Name one,” he growled.

“Fine, I will,” I said, amused by his defensiveness. “You’re unable to go to sleep at night until you’ve plumped your pillow exactly eleven times.”

He stiffened. “That’s a harmless habit I’ve had since childhood. It doesn’t affect my sleep one way or the other.”

I laughed. “Yes, dear. Whatever you say.”

He ignored that. “Regardless, you know full well neither of us would have survived a so-called ‘normal’ childhood. The boredom alone would have killed us.”

I plunked the glasses down on the table before turning back to Jeremy. “All I’m saying is that something may happen in the next two years of high school that you might wish you hadn’t missed out on later in life.”

“Like what?” he demanded. “Another fascinating discussion about blackheads in health class? Another rousing shirts-versus-skins basketball game in gym?” He rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Mom. Don’t be obtuse.”

He won that argument, of course. He always won, no matter what. He always got what he wanted, in the end.

And with that thought, the image I’ve fought so hard to keep out of my mind comes back full force.

His face. His clean, smooth face turned up to the winter sky. His lovely gray eyes, empty and unblinking.

And so much blood in the snow. So very much blood.

I wrap my arms around my ribs and stifle a sob.

My face is still turned away from the audience, but by now everyone in the hall must know something is wrong. I can feel their eyes fixed on me. And there’s no time to recover before I have to speak again. Viktor is almost through with the piece, and when he’s done,
I’ll be expected to rise to my feet and launch into a scintillating dissection of his performance.

And I can’t. I simply can’t do it.

My son. My beautiful boy.

Oh, God. How am I going to live with the shame of this breakdown? I’m disintegrating in front of a roomful of people, and no one except Arthur and Caitlin has any idea why.

Viktor’s right hand spins out the last few melancholy notes, and then he sounds the final three chords, expertly milking the silence between them. There’s a long moment of profound stillness after the final one, and he doesn’t move a muscle. In spite of what I’m feeling, I can’t help but admire his artistry. He has the audience in the palm of his hand.

The applause starts, but before it can get going full tilt, he sneezes, then lifts the waist of his sweater to his face and loudly blows his nose on it. His thin, hairy stomach is exposed to the room. When he drops the gray sweater again, there are two wet patches near the hem in front, with a thin ribbon of yellowish mucus running between them like a tightrope. Viktor looks down at the mess he’s made, then he looks back up at me and shrugs apologetically.

The applause turns to raucous laughter.

Oh, praise the Lord.

As a rule, I do not believe in a “Higher Power.” As a child, I was raised in a semi-devout Methodist household, but by the time I was a teenager, God was no more real to me than Mr. Ed, the talking horse, and I have seen nothing in the nearly sixty years since to change my mind.

But today I may be forced to make an exception to that rule. Because nothing less than divine intervention could have been the cause of such a glorious and abrupt change of mood in my psyche and in the concert hall.