Nocturne

Twenty years ago I found a recording of my father playing the piano. I burned it onto a blank CD, sketched my father’s silhouette across the reflective acrylic in permanent marker, and gave it to him as a retirement gift, the music he once played lasered under a drawing of his head. 

For decades my father taught general music at a junior high in the Bronx, an hour’s drive from home. We had moved from an apartment across from the Bronx Zoo to an actual house, in a rural upstate town now considered a New York City suburb. My father once came home with a bite mark from breaking up a fight. Another time he found a bullet hole in his classroom window. A student correctly deduced the bullet’s location: lodged in the wall behind his desk, head height. 

Dodging bullets while my mom taught kindergarten funded their eventual retirement to a big house in Connecticut. I recently suggested, offhand, that they downsize: sell it, buy a smaller house back in New York, but also a condo in this Midwest college town. Now my parents spend five months a year here. When they first arrive they marvel at the size of my children since last time, but this eventually becomes unremarkable. Undetectable, even. My parents see their grandchildren every day from midsummer until Thanksgiving and you cannot watch a child transform if you are always looking. We often eat lunch together, after which my mother and I will clear the table while my father makes espresso. 

Today he faces me, instead of the espresso machine, as I transfer rejected food into the top of a stack of bowls. 

“Guess what I found today?” 

I do not guess “bullet.” 

“That CD you made me. I listened again.” Twenty years after I gave it to him, fifty years after his performance. 

I expect my father will say his performance was OK. Fine. Anyway, thanks for that thoughtful gift, all those years ago. 

Instead he whispers “It was really very good,” like a confession. 

I wait for him to move on, to “Who wants espresso?” and then take orders. Single or double? Tall or short? He might even offer to froth some milk, as he does from time to time. Instead he goes on about the piano. 

“Bob taught me for free.” 

Another disclosure. I knew his mentor’s name was Bob but didn’t know their whole arrangement was pro bono. 

“He brought me to concerts, too. Once even to this giant apartment. Penthouse! Full view of the park.” 

His piano stories, which I have not heard in decades, typically end with career advice. Do as I say, not as I did. Cautionary tales. Today’s story is different, his sense of what it means to have lived his own life versus what his particular life might mean for other lives yet to be lived. 

Bob introduced my father to the owners of the giant apartment, childless aristocrats, patrons of the arts. At first my father sat tentatively at their piano. Then he tore through Chopin and Liszt. The couple, dazzled, offered to sponsor him on the spot. 

“Like an adoption but for grown-ups,” he smirks. 

I imagine my father watched his whole life unfold in that moment, into stage lights and standing ovations, enthusiastic but circumscribed shouts. Not in his parents’ Neapolitan but in Dante’s Italian, the convention of those halls, at once so far from my grandfather’s restaurant but also the same. Places where Toscanini might leave a baton. 

My father rushed to Selective Services from the apartment, his sponsorship-adoption secured, and applied to extend his student deferment. The clerk reached back to my father’s file. It was right on top of the pile. 

“I never won anything else in my life,” my father laughs, tears in his eyes. 

His draw number—his birthday, that was how they did it—was 21 out of 365. A real winner if you wanted to go to Vietnam. Imagine wishing against your own birthday. His deferment was ineligible for extension. A friend recommended he take the test for the Howitzer company. 

My father puts down the fruit he is slicing for my son and pantomimes loading shells and plugging his ears. 

“Can you imagine me doing that?” 

He laughs again, tearless, as I load the dishwasher. I am not typically encouraged, or permitted, to load the dishwasher.

My father failed the Howitzer test because he bombed the questions that required him to rotate complex objects in space. He could read anything off a score at the keyboard, but those complex objects generally stayed where they were. Instead of going to Canada he drove out to an office on Long island and joined the Air National Guard. His number was 21, his deferment had ended, and neither his sponsorship nor any other spectacular thing he had seen in a florid vision, in a penthouse apartment with a view of the park, had even begun. 

I only ever listened to this story’s untold counterpoint: the alternate history in which he refused to join, refused to sign, rolled the dice and played the piano relentlessly in spite of America, until America changed its mind and left Vietnam. Bravissimo. Like that untold version was the whole point, that the thing he didn’t actually do drove the things he did instead. As though that the shadow story, unrelenting, moved the real one forward. 

Today, as my father reveals a new plot point, I learn that I was wrong. There was never any other path. While he signed on the dotted line in the office on Long Island, convincing some recruiter that he could play trombone in the Air National Guard Band, someone in a different office folded a subway token into his draft letter, folded his draft letter into an envelope, and sent the envelope to his parents’ house. The day it arrived in the mail my father’s signature, somewhere on Long Island, was dry. 

“I sent the token back.” 

He didn’t need it. He was going a different way. 

“Jesus Christ.” I don’t know how else to put it. 

I do not mention that I try to play the piano for fifteen minutes a day but can’t get a streak going.

In college I played a lot. As soon as I left my parents’ house, almost to the day, I decided I wanted to become a concert pianist. I had only ever played in episodes before then, vain and ultimately failed attempts at the hard Billy Joel songs, “Angry Young Man” and “Root Beer Rag.” But Sviatoslav Richter was nineteen when he gave his first recital, and Michael Jordan was cut from the varsity team when he was a sophomore in high school, and Claude Debussy failed music theory. When I wasn’t at the piano I collected humble and unlikely beginnings, tracked them like weird statistics. I watched the movie Shine and missed the message: Practicing like that makes you so insane you shit in the bath. 

At nineteen I gave my first recital, at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. I played on the Elton John Piano, so nicknamed because it was encrusted in precious stones and every wooden rail and panel seemed to have been melted into impossible swerves and histrionic flourishes. More Louis XIV than Elton John in retrospect. I was to play a tiny piece, from Bartok’s Mikrokosmos, befitting a beginner. A warm-up. Then the Mozart Sonata, theoretically in F, difficult to hear as such in my version. 

The printed programs swapped the order. I went with the typo, no problem, hard piece first. But before long I didn’t know where I was. I made it to the end but it was a bloodbath. An old person in front huffed at me. I played Bartok after whatever happened during the Mozart and fucked that up, too. When I returned to my seat one of the good pianists on the program looked over at me, down the row, and laughed. I was not happy about this at the time but now when I call her face to mind I can see kindness in it. It was a spontaneous and disquieted laugh. It said “Right? It is like that sometimes!” and “I am so, so sorry.” 

After the recital and back at the music building I unlocked the room where I had been practicing, a rehearsal hall with a window versus a tiny cube in the basement. Students playing on this particular recital were upgraded to the grand. I played the sonata again. And again, and again. I could not make it through. My parents looked like ghosts, enduring it, over and over. I just wanted to get it right, one time. My father said I could stop, that it sounded good, that clearly I had been working on it. That I was used to playing Bartok before Mozart. That I must have practiced enough to have written even the order of pieces, indelibly, into my body. One little typo and the whole thing fell like cards. I was just stuck in some neurological cross-wiring. I could let it go. 

They took me out to dinner, then drove the three hours back home. I went to the health center because I was gulping for air. Asthma, I thought. Allergies, my mom said. Dysregulation, the doctor was certain. The mind’s outward gaze spun back on itself, seeing only itself. The process can go algorithmic, fractal. A feedback loop. Had I ever worked with my breath before? Had I ever talked to someone? 

It got worse going forward, cresting a few years later, in the run-up to my first trip to Italy, barely funded by my restaurant tips and maxing out my credit cards. I could not get out of bed but the airport is not in my room so I had to push through, even though forcing it, I was starting to learn, can make you crazy. You stop knowing what is OK to feel. 

The arbitrary focal point for this season of worry was my Italian. Not good enough to survive in the actual country, I was certain. On the plane I started writing in a journal, in Italian, to practice. 

I watched a college friend get married at a castle in Siena. I did not weigh in on the arguments unfolding among the groomsmen. Some concerned the quotidian: Was Thailand really the best place to buy seersucker suits? Some were bona fide philosophical riddles: Learn to cook yourself, or earn so much you can hire a chef to live with you? And how might solving that particular mindbender inform your choices more broadly? 

After the wedding I went south, to meet my grandparents’ siblings and other, more distant relations. My mother’s uncle came to meet me at the station and cried, as though simply standing there together on the platform were some psychic victory, the closing of a circle I could not see. My aunt packed me two sandwiches when I left. I kept thanking her for the provolone and she kept insisting it was something called provola. Everyone cried again, except me. My crying was reserved for hostels, when the giant rooms were empty. A casually-scheduled train took me to Rome, my last stop, and the Vatican, my last site of obligatory tourism. I didn’t want to go, my Catholicism lapsing violently since high school, the job pretty much done by that summer. But I also didn’t want to lie on a cot all day. Just the museum, I promised myself. Not a religious thing. I noted a long, makeshift tunnel snaking away from St. Peter’s Basilica. 

In the museum I saw Van Gogh’s Pietà, after which I chased down Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s, where I did not burst into flame, exiting through the strange tunnel. Photographs floated on its black-curtained walls. The Pietà, again. Michelangelo’s sculpture, not Van Gogh’s painting. I had to look for the projectors, really look, in order to figure out how the contours of limbs, abstracted, and curves of marble, shot close, could appear to float in space in the dark. Crisp, as though they were starched, the process from laundry sciences analogously applied to photography. I learned from the didactic that the photographer, Robert Hupka, also documented Toscanini. 

My grandfather’s restaurant was called Michelangelo. He once served Toscanini a superlative meal, after which Toscanini gave him a baton. I like to imagine it was actually a trade, that my grandfather gave Toscanini tongs or a slotted spoon in exchange, something he could actually use at home, to turn prawns or lift agnolotti out of a gentle simmer in salted water. My grandfather did not use Toscanini’s baton at home. He hid it in back of a framed picture in the front room of his house that sat above a Knabe grand piano. By some miracle of financial discipline my grandparents had managed to buy this piano for my father. 

My father emigrated when he was four. He learned English through immersion, at school, and learned the restaurant business from his father, on the job. He also learned to play old Italian songs on the accordion. When he first played for his parents they looked at each other as if to say How did this happen? How does he already know how to do this? My grandmother wrung her hands and my grandfather yelled at her to stop wringing her hands. Nonetheless they said yes when my father asked if they might replace the accordion with a piano. Years later my aunt used the Knabe grand as an ironing board. My grandmother thought to repair it in secret. She hired the cabinetmaker, who ruined the lid forever. I like to think that even the cabinetmaker came to Alice Tully Hall when my father gave his last recital, the one I found on cassette, the one he listened to this morning. 

After the Pietà, on the return flight, I wrote again in my Italian journal, about the work of human hands. How would you actually say that? Le mani umani? Feminine article, masculine adjective? I also read the whole DaVinci Code, between Fiumicino and JFK, but when I landed I would be a composer. It was a good reason to move to Queens. Better than the real reason, the office job writing fake SATs in Times Square in exchange for the American dollar equivalent of one seersucker suit, custom-cut in Thailand, per quarter. 

When I got to the city, after the Vatican and the Pietà, I blew through museums as though my eyes were on fire. I bought a MoMA membership with what little money I could still charge. I went constantly, even during my lunch hour. A membership meant I could move through exhibits like a comet and wouldn’t see this astronomical speed as failure to optimize, a waste of a single-day ticket. 

Years later a chamber group brought me to a different museum to see a particular artwork. They would pay me thousands of dollars to compose music in response. The day I first saw it is the day I stopped cutting orbital paths across galleries at speed. I asked the front desk if they had a chair I might sit on, to look at this work, The Battle of Carnival and Lent. They gave me a folding stool from a collection of many identical folding stools, leading me to deduce that yes, one could behave this way in a museum. 

This particular battle, like the Pietà, is a set piece around which the artist makes an announcement. With the subject-variable removed, the artist’s singular approach emerges as true subject. I did not mean to invoke the lineage of this scene when I started calling my composition Of and Between. What actually happened was that I was at a bar on my phone, searching for the image of The Battle of Carnival and Lent, but the internet fed me a different artwork, hundreds of years older: The Battle Between Carnival and Lent. I decided to memorialize my confusion in my working title, remembering “things a rabbit can do to a log,” using it to test whether “of” and “between” were prepositions. I believed that they were, despite a rabbit’s inability to do anything “of” or “between” a log without bringing other rabbits, or logs, into the picture. 

I wanted to compose in the same way I imagined this artwork must have been made. To build a robust frame, overlay the richest details of subject, like a neurotically ornamented piano at the Clark Art Institute, then to see that interim subject as itself a new robust frame, onto which I would overlay a smaller subject, another neurotic ornamentation, but in miniature. Over and over until saturation, until you cannot get any closer, regardless of where you situate yourself on, say, a folding stool.

I made the frame. Dots on paper, only the white notes. Pillars to hold up the real work. Placeholders. Then I ran out of time and that was that, the bare pillars subsequently offered to the ensemble as the real work, Of and Between still across the top of the front page. Commission more or less fulfilled, promise more or less kept, I cashed the check. 

Contrast that with the story my father tells me in the gap between the end of lunch and the beginning of espresso. He bores into subject, relentless, uncovers another detail, bores further in. His story, today, is what my work, then, was supposed to have been. 

The Battle of Carnival and Lent is made of glass. Stained glass, the sort you might find in a cathedral, refracting sunlight onto the Pietà, captured by a photographer, projected into black. In a sense we see light through glass as much as we see two bodies in stone, one mourning, one dead. But the dead one will soon enough be resurrected and the one mourning will soon enough be dead. A turn of phrase, then a turn between phrases. Imagine saying that in Italian. Imagine saying that at the piano. 

In my hands the piano would not speak. Nonetheless I kept trying. Most recently I would show up every day and play for fifteen minutes into a field recorder. Improvisations in a strange style, the product of wandering around the keyboard over the years, here and there, off-the-cuff and untutored. Just my hands firing, more about how it felt than how it sounded. 

Before I began I pattered into the mic in ways my father would have appreciated. “My hands are cold but that is to be expected,” I recorded on day one, January in Minnesota. 

“Good morning, the future,” on day two. He would puzzle that out for a moment but then it would hit him. He would silently laugh, his entire body shaking.

On day three I said “I doubt I have the levels right” but proceeded to play anyway, on the beautiful Steinway in the recital hall next to my office. No one wanted to be there so early in the morning, still dark, so it was mine. 

I made plans to do this forever. To add fifteen more minutes of sound to the archive, every day. Sometimes I would even open the doors. My father could come listen. I could chart the course of the whole rest of my life this way, a life in which playing a little every day was bedrock practice. How my father had wanted to live. How it was until it wasn’t. In his hands, having lived his life, what the piano told him was unbearable. It said too much, so he walked away. 

My childhood surrounded this change, from my father playing to my father no longer playing. At the end I would pester him to read through Respighi’s “Notturno” or the Chopin “Aeolian Harp” étude. He never called it that, it was just the Ab-major étude. The C-minor, though, he always called “Revolutionary,” the one I made him play for a friend and his parents, who had come to pick him up from our house. My father resisted at first. He said he didn’t have it in his fingers anymore. We all went on until it became easier to play than to politely decline again. He unleashed it, with the fury of hands that had been coerced. 

As my father hands me my espresso, short, he asks “How has your playing been going?” The fruit has all but disappeared. My son can eat it in massive, irrational quantities. My father always holds a mango in reserve. 

He cuts into it as I think about what I might say. That it was a joy until it wasn’t. That he knows my history, how I sometimes cower at the instrument. Like the soccer games in high school. I should have been able to do more, given how long I could juggle the ball and how many times I kicked one into the half-wall in the backyard, and yet. Same with the piano in winter. On my best days I was expansive, looking out. I played with abandon, my limitations beside the point. I juggled the ball. On other days it was different. The feeling was “not yet.” Not every day, but on enough days to kill the momentum. In the end it just stopped occurring to me as something to do. 

“Pretty good. He’s going to destroy that mango, fair warning.” 

“That’s why I buy so many!” 

Maybe this is my way in. My chance to say that something else has begun, in the shadow of that failed practice. My extra mango, in case of emergency. I could tell him about the novel, could say that I have been writing, furiously, for two years. That I cannot seem to stop. 

“I want to play something for you,” he speaks into the long silence. 

My mother has been whispering to me over the phone for months, preparing me. Mysteriously, and without explanation, my father has begun again. We agreed not to bring it up, to let him be, to see if he mentions it. 

I do not hear in colors, but when my father plays “Notturno” the room glows electric purple and gold. 

The piece imitates a guitar. At first. The fingers strum—that is the word for it—over and around each other. Wild hand positions, shimmering chords ringing out. It teaches the listener that the piano has strings. 

But there is something else the piano can do. After the strumming—mere introduction, it turns out—the right hand announces itself. A long, suspended melody, decorative turns closing each phrase. 

This music is only possible on the piano. It sings the piano out, celebrates it. Try “Notturno” on a guitar. I dare you. I see your guitar and I raise you this line of discrete anchors across which a trained right hand can dance. My father’s cascades, hangs, stops. Before he lifts the pedal I applaud. I had not planned to. 

You get to this point on this instrument the same way my son learned to draw. Before he was pounding mango slices at the table he was obsessing over rockets. Drawing them, specifically. For his first he made a big upside-down V, the body, then two smaller upside-down Vs on either side, presumably boosters or some other rocket parts he imagined ought to be there. We cheered his effort, but not too much. The parenting books say motivation should be intrinsic. He drew another one, hopefully not because we cheered. Then another, and another. At some point we stopped saying anything at all and just kept the markers and printer-paper coming, somewhat tentatively given the overflow situation on the kitchen table. 

We never said to keep at it, or to work on it in this or that way, or that if he really stuck with this daily rocket-drawing practice, someday he would draw a rocket that did not look like any other rocket but was still, uncontestably, a very good rocket. We knew enough just to let him draw. He needed to, so he drew, and in scratching the itch, over and over, he converged on his platonic kid rocket ideal. Then it was in his body. Hardwired. Trivial. 

This is how my father plays “Notturno,” his hundredth rocket, or thousandth, or billionth, an emergent property of having done a thing he couldn’t not do. He would play and every next time he would sound a little more like himself. Then he stopped for decades. Then he blew out the cobwebs and returned to where he always was. 

In my novel the decoy father’s name is Dario. I named him after the playwright Dario Fo, who also seemed to have found something he couldn’t not do. In early drafts the veneer was thin, but when the story took flight I let Dario become someone else. My eventual guiding principle became to write to anyone but my father, as anyone but myself. 

In my novel Dario plays the piano, but in its place the reader might just as well see roofing tile or a wrench. The piano is a bridge to a more generally legible situation: This was to be my work but it is not. In my case it is true, but it doesn’t matter that it is true. What matters is that it might be true for any reader who has ever said “No, your work will not be mine.” Or: “I cannot help but do the thing you forbade.” Or, and especially: “I could not help but do the thing you forbade, which you finally accepted, which I know was almost impossible for you, and at that precise moment I lost the thread and walked away.” 

After naming my decoy father Dario, I learned that it means “possessing goodness.” I want his goodness to radiate from the story more than his virtuosity on the instrument. His goodness feels more real. The piano was only ever its proxy, a way for my father to say that I can play well enough to survive. 

I hear it in his voice: “No one is going to mail you a subway token, no one is going to take away what you have built. From your restaurant work, your fake SATs and your graduate degrees, your tenure-track job. It’s not like you are driving an hour to teach general music at a junior high in the Bronx.” 

That is all true. 

It is also true that I am quietly walking away. No grand gesture, no signature on any dotted line. A movement of the soul, a therapist once told me, cannot be willed and cannot be stopped. 

For my father the piano said too much. Music said too much. For me, in my untrained, dabbler’s hands, they do not say enough. Stories travel in sound but I cannot get sound alone to tell them. I could never have practiced enough. I couldn’t even play for fifteen minutes. 

Knowing that, I would walk away even with nowhere else to go, even without anything else to do. But I have discovered an ending that is also a beginning. A way to set music down. A story announces itself in the piano’s decay, as its strings come to rest under the pedal. Something I can do with my hands that does not also break my heart.