"Wilfredo's Debussy"
A story from my collection, NEW YORK (available everywhere).... "Monk was thrilled to be able to come into the store and, watched always by the salesman Sergei, play one or two little things."
“May I ask you a question?” The man’s black skin had a sheen around the eyes. He wore black-rimmed spectacles, and Monk sensed reserved self-acceptance in him simply in the way he leaned toward the piano as though it were a lectern. His puffy double-breasted brown suit was too large even for his enormous frame. The necktie seemed to have been tied just once, then loosened, removed and put back on, over and over again for years. His black shoes had quite thick soles and heels, the kind of footwear worn by security guards, so that what they give to the wearer in comfort, they lose in style. He also carried a large Trader Joe’s paper bag that contained a number of sheet music scores, the covers of which, Monk could see, had faded badly or were scuffed along the edges.
Monk had been admiring an old Bechstein grand piano for the last few months, jealous that such a fine instrument, from 1900 or so, made of rosewood with carefully hand-tooled mounts and other fixtures, and perfectly tuned, could be sitting alone—music itself, as it were, waiting to be played—on the showroom floor.
His jealousy was restrained, though, because he was also very glad that the piano store, called Debussy, on West Fifty-Eighth Street, had had the good sense to display this instrument for all to see. It had been sold back to the store recently. The refined beauty of its finishing, its general appearance so dignified and perfectly varnished in warm tans and browns, were matched—overwhelmed actually—by its somber tone. This piano played intimately, yet with a heartfelt resonance that made the delicacy of feel in its keyboard seem a miracle to Monk. He was thrilled to be able to come into the store and, watched always by the salesman Sergei, play one or two things.
They had become friends. One of Sergei’s duties was to protect the pianos from amateurs, unless of course some amateur had just bought one of them and the bank had transferred the funds. He had learned though that Monk knew a good deal about what he was doing, even though he was not doing, say, Mozart. More often Monk did Bill Evans or Duke Ellington. That was fine with Sergei, since Monk seemed to understand those fellows quite well.
Monk himself knew that his own talent was only okay. He recalled how his father had supported his playing, even as Monk had struggled through his high school years, wishing eventually to go professional. He had never been able to get his fingers to work with the proper complicated authority, though, when it came to imitating solos he had heard on records by people like Teddy Wilson or Nat Cole. He was always just Monk, he felt. Good enough. Not bad. While those guys were celestials.
Monk looked up from the piano bench. “A question?”
He had seen this man in the store on several occasions. He too appeared to savor the pianos…particularly the Bechstein. He walked around studying it, always with the bag of sheet music hanging from one hand. Monk had never seen him play, and had even asked Sergei about him.
“I’ve asked him if he wanted to try any of the instruments.” Sergei’s Hungarian accent remained slightly noticeable in his otherwise American English. He had come to New York as an infant, after the 1956 uprising in Hungary. He had, he often said, difficulty selling an instrument to anyone who resembled Nikita Krushchev. Sergei played piano well enough, but his real talent lay in understanding the workings inside the instrument. He had perfect pitch, and could fix almost anything that had been broken for whatever reason. His angular frame was all bony and slow moving. He thrived on hearing and then repairing the least noticeable of problems in a piano. Indeed, he seemed to rage within himself in search of such things.
“But he’s only done it once,” Sergei had said. “I’d always figured he understands the music, the way he’s talked about the pianos. And all that sheet music he has. He finds it in second-hand shops. He even has a copy of a Mozart sonata signed by Rubinstein.” Sergei had placed a hand in the pocket of his suit coat and brought out a pipe, which he had tapped against the palm of his left hand. “But, play? Just once, and not for very long.”
“How good is he?”
“Very, if you can judge it from listening to him for just two minutes, part of an Eric Satie piece, and then only when we were alone in the store, after closing.”
“When was that?”
“Ten years ago. I almost had to force him to play.” Sergei had been fingering the keyboard of the Bechstein and had suddenly frowned, as though there were something wrong with it. Monk hadn’t thought there was. “I just wanted to know whether he could.”
“But he didn’t finish the Satie.”
“No. He stood up from the piano, thanked me and left. In a hurry.”
Now, the man dropped the shopping bag to the floor. “Yes. A small question.” He ran his right index finger along the surface of the Bechstein. “It’s just that I think you are not American.” His accent was Hispanic, Monk guessed.
“How so?”
A large grin appeared. “For one, you say things like ‘Good morning’ and ‘How are you?’”
Monk extended his hand. “Aren’t you talking more about someone who isn’t from New York?”
“Maybe that’s it.”
“Because I’m not from New York.” Monk took the man’s hand into his. “I’m Monk Samuels.”
“Thank you. And I am Rodney Echeverría.”
“Puerto Rico?”
Rodney’s left shoulder dropped, a bit of despondency. “No. Cuba.”
“I’m from California,” Monk said.
“Ah, that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Your seeming so foreign.”
Rodney invited Monk for coffee at the Europa Café, on Fifty-seventh, across the street from Carnegie Hall. It was there that Monk explained to him why he was named Monk.
“Thelonious.”
“The great one, who played so out of tune.”
“Yes. My father was a fan.”
“As is my wife Marta.” Thoughtful enjoyment flowed through a sigh from Rodney. “I never much approved.” The jab at Thelonius and Marta, offered with kindness, made Monk laugh. “But she has a right to her own taste.”
“She’s a musician?”
“No…a nurse…a therapist. Musculature. Movement, all that.” Rodney leaned forward. “He was a musician, your father?”
“No, he helped fund companies. Apple Computer and so on. Cisco Systems. He was very successful.”
“Unlike my father…” Rodney made a circle with his right index finger on the tabletop. “Who, as I do, taught piano for an hourly fee.”
“Mine loved Thelonious Monk because he played so many bad notes. He knew it was intentional on Thelonious’s part. He loved the comedy of it.”
“Just the comedy?”
“No. He also felt that Thelonious played with more…he called it ‘emotional courage’ than almost any of the other guys.” Monk paused a moment, reflecting on his father’s musical opinions and the thoughtfulness that went into them. “The sorrow in all that discord.” His eyes blinked as the memory of his father took him for a moment. Mel Samuels had been a far better venture capitalist than musician, but had known, somehow, who played well and who didn’t. “Thelonious Monk was a very great man.”
“He’s gone, your father.”
“A few years ago, yes.”
“And he enjoyed your playing.”
Monk swallowed, studying his coffee. He recalled his father sitting on the living room couch of their home in Woodside, listening to Monk essay a piece from Oscar Peterson or someone. A country community near Palo Alto, Woodside was where his parents, suddenly enjoying the benefits of Mel’s extraordinary venture capital decisions, had built their estate. The large two-story house had resided on several acres of a partially wooded slope, and had been surrounded by a very large English garden, a product of his mother’s expertise. As a teenager, Monk had felt that his parents’ conservative decorum didn’t fit very well with his own wishes for improvisation and fun. But his father especially had allowed that fun…even encouraged it. “I think he enjoyed my music. But he didn’t take it too seriously.”
Rodney extended his lower lip. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, he was right. When the time came for me to give up my professional…aspirations, I guess you’d call them, he still asked me to play for him.”
“That’s good.”
“By that time I’d decided to go to Berkeley.”
“What did you study?”
“Finance. A minor in music history.”
“Didn’t want to lose touch.”
“That’s right.” Monk shrugged. His coffee was too hot, and he stirred it with a small spoon, hoping that the infusion of air would allow him finally to enjoy it the way Rodney was so clearly enjoying his. “I was at least a better piano player than my father was.”
“And you’re as good an investor?”
Monk’s eyes brightened. “No. My father was an amazement when it came to money.” Finally, he brought the cup to his lips. The coffee was now full and warm, the compliment to the cinnamon toast and butter that rested on the plate before him. “But I do fine.”
“You’re looking at that Bechstein?”
“Yes.”
“Then I would say that you’re doing quite fine.” Rodney took up one of the three macaroons he had ordered.
Monk gestured toward the Trader Joe’s paper bag that was now resting on the floor next to their table. “But why do you go to Debussy?”
“It’s that Bechstein, Monk. My father brought it with us from Cuba. You know, Fidel and Che and so on. We had lost everything except for that piano. Imagine trying to get an instrument like that out of danger when danger is everywhere.” Rodney tightened his lips, the memory of the revolution still clearly a frightful unhappiness. “Our escape took all his money. But then he had to give up the piano itself because eventually we still had no money.”
“He sold it.”
“Yes. Here. To Debussy. I was just a little kid when it happened. Like Sergei when he came to this country.” Rodney hid a smile behind his right hand. “There are a few differences between us, of course. I’m a black caribeño, and he’s…he’s…” Rodney looked over his shoulder. “He’s an eastern European white boy. The Communists put down the rebels in his country.”
“And in yours, the rebels won.”
Rodney’s shoulders drooped. “Yes, sadly.”
“How long have you been coming to Debussy, Rodney?”
“Fifty years.”
“And the piano’s been there—”
“It’s been in the store, off and on, since that first time that my father brought me.” Rodney stirred some sugar into his coffee. “They would sell it and it would be gone for a while. But then it would come back. The most recent owner had died or bet wrong on the market or something. And then my father would come back. I played it once.”
“Why not more often?”
Rodney gave Monk a look of hurt and even, briefly, dismay. “You would ask me to betray my father?”
“No. Rodney, I—”
“The piano’s been in prison, don’t you see?”
Monk searched Rodney’s eyes, a petition for forgiveness. “What was your father’s name?”
“Wilfredo Echeverría Bourbón.”
“What did he do that first day he brought you to the store?”
Rodney remained silent a moment. “He too was heavy, like me. He breathed with difficulty, a raspy sound that he had to quell when he was playing. He often said to me that he was afraid the children he taught would think him a ghost, a fantasma, as we say.”
He spoke haltingly, as if a wound had seeped open.
“With chains running around his lungs. That day, he stared at the piano a long while.”
“That’s all?”
The wound flowed, and Rodney considered his reply. “No. He placed his right hand on the keyboard and played a few chords.”
“Do you remember which ones?”
“Schubert.”
“Anything else?”
“Brahms. And Beethoven, of course.” Rodney lowered his voice, almost to a whisper. “Before the revolution, my father had been considering a concert career. Even though he was black, he had been arranging for his first appearances in Europe, but…” Rodney took in a breath. “Fidel didn’t think much of that idea.” Rodney replaced the cup on the table, brought his fingers across a second macaroon…his favorite cookie, he had told Monk…as he considered what next to say. “A career extinguished before it could even get started.” He brought the cookie to his lips. “My father loved Brahms. But he often told me that he could barely speak of Brahms in the same breath with Beethoven.”
“And he couldn’t afford to buy the piano back.”
“Never.” Rodney lowered the macaroon to the tabletop. “He played on all kinds of other instruments. Friends’ pianos. Pianos in the public schools where he taught. Tinny, elderly pianos. Out of tune, exhausted pianos. His students’ pianos when their mothers would allow a black man like him to come into their apartments. But that Bechstein…he called it ‘my Debussy’. And finally, of course, he died.”
Rodney suffered a passage of silence.
“The loss of that piano broke my father, Monk, almost as much as the revolution did.” He exhaled, a bit of gravel in his own breathing. “I’ve been saving up for years, to try to buy it back. But every time it comes into the store again, it’s almost double the previous price.”
“I see. And of course the price now is—”
“A hundred thousand.” Rodney looked aside, out the window to Fifty-Seventh Street. “Losing that piano…it broke his heart.”
The next time Monk met Rodney in the store, the Bechstein was gone. He had told Sergei about Rodney’s caring for the piano’s welfare. Sergei had sensed it through the years, but had not understood the full story, as Monk had related it to him.
But now….
“Sergei, I—“
“He’s a cherished customer, Monk.” Sergei had come from the repair area at the back of the store, hurried from it by Monk’s clear upset. Rodney, holding his wife Marta’s hand, put his left hand to his chest. Marta, a small woman in a burgundy-colored dress, her very black hair detailed with a white gardenia, brought her two hands together, enfolding Rodney’s right and coddling it.
“Somebody we’ve been working with for years,” Sergei said.
“But—“
“I know you were looking at it, Monk.” He turned to Rodney. “I know. But Joe came in with a small suitcase that contained the…the—“
“Hundred thousand,” Rodney said.
“A hundred and five, actually.” Sergei scratched the back of his head. “He had asked us to hold the piano for two days while he cleared up a problem with the money, and he threw in the five thousand as a thank you gift.”
Monk surveyed the space on the show room floor in which the piano had resided.
“A service fee, I guess,” Sergei said.
Monk felt he could still make out the instrument, although the view was actually just a chimera, like an imagined drawing on a deteriorating, dust-ridden scrim.
“But you knew that I was—“
“Monk, he had the money in hand. I’m sorry. It was Joe Saxon.”
“The dry goods guy?”
Rodney leaned forward. “Who?”
Sergei also examined the empty space. “Born in New York. A retailer. Made millions.” The wooden floor revealed a few scuffs where the legs of the piano had met it. Small scars. “Not the first thing he’s ever bought from us.” Sergei offered a consoling smile. “A good man.”
Rodney groaned. “But—”
“Rodney, I’ve known him since I was a kid. Joe and his wife Delphine…”
Rodney and Marta glanced at each other. He swallowed. “Saxon?”
“That’s right.
“Delphine Saxon?”
“You’ve heard of her, of course,” Sergei said.
“Heard of her!” Rodney nodded toward Marta. “Oh, my love….”
Marta had remained silent through the conversation. But now she patted Rodney’s hand. “We saw her perform.”
Monk, at a loss, looked on.
“Carnegie Hall,” Marta said.
Sergei shrugged. “I’m sorry, Rodney.”
Monk went with Rodney and Marta to the Europa, where they sat down at a window table. Carnegie Hall rose up from the sidewalk like an arriving ocean liner across the way. Monk had ordered a cappuccino, but let it rest as he contemplated the hall. For a while, no one said anything. It was true; Monk had wished to buy the piano. Even though it would be overkill, he had realized, given his questionable talent as a pianist. But the thing was so beautiful.
“My father,” Rodney whispered.
Marta took up his right hand.
“Look, the piano isn’t dead,” Monk said.
She examined the hand, and then began massaging it, a combination of caresses.
“It might as well be.” Rodney closed his eyes, grateful for Marta’s attention.
“But you can—“
“I may never see it again, Monk.”
Marta laid her head against Rodney’s upper arm. She raised a hand to the back of his neck and massaged it.
“This is like death itself.” Rodney leaned back, closing his eyes, accepting once more Marta’s salving touch. “Again.”
At home in his apartment on Riverside Drive, Monk went online, to read about Joe Saxon. But indeed it was Delphine who interested him more. She had been a concert pianist, raised in Paris, who as a teenager had embarked upon her professional career. She had been thought of as a notable for the future, a pianist who would take the world. But Delphine had been afflicted at the age of thirty-two with multiple sclerosis, and had suddenly had to retire. Her husband Joe had been fifty-seven at the time. After a business career that had been played out on the pages of Women’s Wear Daily and Vogue, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, he had retired and given himself over to care for his wife. The years of silence that had followed had diminished the society pages’ memory of Joe and Delphine Saxon. He now was known as the elderly, plainspoken businessman and devoted escort to his wife, while she was the luckless genius.
Monk went back to Debussy a few times during the next weeks, and Sergei told him that Rodney had not come in. Mid-summer had been blazing, and Rodney suffered from the heat. He had been staying at home.
“It’s his weight, I think. I worry about him every year,” Sergei said.
Monk knew, though, that no matter the weather or Rodney’s heft, the absence of the Bechstein was what pulled at his heart. He remembered having asked Rodney at the Europa how many times the piano had been sold since his father had lost it.
“Nine.”
Having witnessed this latest disappearance of Wilfredo’s Debussy, Monk could well imagine how each of those had hurt Wilfredo and, to be sure, Wilfredo’s son.
A few days later, he entered the store again and heard a male voice from the repair room, wavering, hesitant as it voiced a complaint. “It’s the Bechstein’s C-Sharp/D-Flat key, Sergei.”
Monk was able to visualize the key, knowing the sound it should make.
“It’s off.”
Monk placed his shoulder bag on the counter outside the repair room. As he waited, he heard Sergei’s acknowledgment of the key, and his guesses about what had gone wrong with it.
“But can you fix it?” The voice was broken up here and there by the effects of age. “It’s such a disappointment. She’s in mid-passage, and then that happens.”
Monk looked to the side. She? He hurried a glance into the back room. Sergei sat at a desk, his shirt sleeves rolled up. His grey hair was mussed, and Monk could tell from his demeanor that his puzzlement over the sprung key was genuine, as though an unbelievable, disastrous truth suddenly had been revealed to him.
“I’ll look at it, Joe. Of course.” The sound of Sergei’s breathing intensified as responsibility for the Bechstein’s breakdown hounded him.
“When?”
“Tomorrow?”
Monk attempted a look at the other person in the back room. He knew who it was. Through the narrow slit between the edge of the curtain and the doorjamb, he could see only a pair of forearms encased in the sleeves of a linen suit coat, a pair of emerald French cuffs, and wrinkled, ivory-white hands that held a slip of paper. The hands reminded Monk of his father Mel’s when he had been lying in his bed in Woodside, the day he had died. Covered with dry, wrinkled skin and age-spots here and there, his father’s hands had maintained a kind of spirited gracefulness in their gestures even as recently as the month before. His mother had occasionally told Monk that his hands were like his father’s in this respect. Monk had sat by the bed waiting until, a few hours into the afternoon, Mel, seeking yet one more breath, had gone.
“What time?” Joe said.
Sergei checked his cellphone. “Two?”
“Fine.”
The hands folded the slip of paper and then disappeared from Monk’s view. Sergei stood and motioned toward the show room. Monk stepped away from the counter, not wanting to reveal that he had been spying on the conversation.
The curtain parted, and a small elderly man presented himself to Monk, surprised by him.
“Oh….”
Monk smiled. “Excuse me. I—”
Sergei emerged from the back room as well. “Ah, Monk. I’m glad you’re here.”
“I can wait.”
Sergei shook his head. “But I want you to meet Joe Saxon.”
Joe appeared scattered for a moment. Indeed he was very old. The whiteness of his hair was like fresh, though sparse, snow. Even his eyes appeared frail, helped to sight by the thick rimless lenses of his glasses. He stood nonetheless straight, and Monk noticed that his demeanor intensified right away after his moment of early surprise.
Sergei touched Joe’s elbow. “Joe. This is Monk Samuels. Another friend.”
Joe nodded, his eyebrows raised as he pondered Monk’s chest. “How do you do?” He did not offer his hand.
“Monk was looking at the Bechstein too,” Sergei said.
Surprised by Sergei’s admission and this wish for chumminess between the two competitors, Monk frowned with unease.
“Ah.” Joe extended his hand. “You understand pianos!”
They walked to the Europa. Joe’s footsteps were tentative with age, and Sergei had taken his arm. The heat had not subsided, and Sergei remained dressed in shirtsleeves and slacks. When they sat down at a table, awaiting the waiter, Joe leaned toward Sergei.
“Have you told Monk about Delphine?”
“No, I—“
“Sergei did mention her name to me.” Monk nodded. “And I did a little reading.”
Sergei sat back in his chair and remained quiet.
“Then you know about her career,” Joe said.
“I do.”
“And you know what happened to her.”
“Yes.”
Joe sat up straight. The curved wooden back of the chair framed him so well that Monk felt compelled to sit up himself, in order to offer precise answers to what Joe may ask of him.
“Can you imagine what that must have meant to her?”
Sergei slouched in his chair, suddenly looking away, his arms folded as he listened.
“A disaster,” Monk said.
Joe reached for his wallet. “Sergei’s coming over to fix the Bechstein tomorrow.” He took out a twenty and gestured to the waiter. “You love that piano, too, I gather.”
Monk nodded.
“Why don’t you come with him? He and Delphine are pals. I’d like you to meet her.”
When Monk arrived at the Saxons’ apartment, he heard piano music through the door. It was something by Mozart or Haydn, someone like that. But Monk couldn’t tell because the music was being played so badly. He knocked at the door. The piano stopped, a few notes scattered about.
The door opened and Joe greeted Monk. Beyond Joe, in a large living room that had a view of Central Park and The Ramble, a hunched-over, rigidly still, gray woman sat at the Bechstein. Dressed in an ankle-length black smock, she wore her hair up in a bun, a black silk cloth across her forehead and tied in back. She wore a pair of green jade earrings, carved as delicate swans. When she turned her head, with noticeable slowness, toward Monk and Joe, the right one swayed back and forth like a bell hung from a slim ray of gold.
“Delphine, this is Monk Samuels.”
“Hello.” Delphine’s voice was not constricted by her condition, as most of her body so obviously was. The single word glowed. “Sit down, Monk.” Her French accent accentuated its clarity.
Sergei arrived a moment later and, after a few moments’ conversation, he set about to repair the Bechstein. At first, Delphine seemed peeved with him. She pointed at the keyboard. “It’s this one.” But Monk discerned, as Sergei himself helped her stand up from the bench and assisted her to an armchair, that it was only the key with which she was miffed, not Sergei.
Sergei leaned over her in a moment of affection. “Don't worry. I’ll get it.” Returning to the piano, he lifted his tool case to the bench and pressed the offending key a moment. Delphine winced as the sound came from the instrument. “Yes, I see,” Sergei said, and he began inspecting the innards of the piano.
Delphine attempted a smile. “He’s darling.” It was an effort to do so. Monk sat down in another armchair. “Sergei has shepherded every practice instrument I’ve ever had. I referred him to all my colleagues.”
Joe poured tea for everyone. “But it’s a shame, isn’t it, that so few of them come to play for you any longer.”
“Well….” She had not wanted tea, and waited as the others sipped theirs. “It would be lovely to hear this instrument played by someone….” Delphine looked to the side. “Other than me.”
Sergei, seated on the bench, slowed his work on the piano as he listened to the conversation.
“Someone….” Delphine sighed. She leaned toward Monk. “I suppose you heard me out in the hallway.”
“I did.”
“That’s what it’s become.” Delphine sat so still, so rigidly, her hands folded on her lap, that movement seemed almost an impossibility. “I don’t much enjoy the people who come here to help me. The nurses and so on. They’re nice enough.” She lifted a hand to her cheek. The effort to caress the cheek caused her pain. “But they don’t…they lack….” The hand returned to her lap. “They don’t have the music.” She frowned. “They move me around, which is painful enough. But they don’t understand the music, which is worse.”
She made the complaint with such tenderness that her face actually softened. Until now it had seemed to Monk that even those muscles had grown rigid from her affliction. He now mused that the stoniness in her face was actually a sign of simple dismay.
Anger.
Rage.
Monk sought Rodney’s permission, and then asked Marta to meet him and Sergei at Debussy the next day. They sat alone in the repair room and talked the situation over. Marta defined her hands as “soft, Monk,” “loving,” and “a little sensuous, even. In the right way, of course.” When Monk had explained to her Delphine’s problems, she had raised her shoulders, unconcerned. “I can help her.”
Monk turned to Sergei.
“I’ll call them,” Sergei said.
A few days later, though, Marta called Monk. She had been interviewed by Joe and Delphine. “I massaged her hands while they were talking with me,” she explained to Monk. “That helped me get the job.” But Rodney had not wanted Marta to return to the Saxons’ apartment. Forming a relationship with them—as sought after as such a relationship would have been prior to Joe’s purchase of the Bechstein—was now too painful a prospect for Rodney.
“He so admires Miss Delphine, Monk. But….”
Monk was about to ask Marta if he could speak with Rodney, when Marta spoke once more.
“I told him I wanted to keep going with the massage, that maybe I could arrange for a visit for Rodney now and then.” She had pointed out to Rodney that it was not as if the piano were in solitary confinement. It seemed that it was in the hands of a kindly regime. “I mean, Miss Delphine asked me to ask him over.”
“But does she know—“
“I told her. Cuba. That idiot singao Fidel. The revolution. All of it. And you know, Monk, she…she sounded heartbroken.”
A week later, at Delphine’s request, Monk sat down at the piano to play a version of “I Got It Bad, And That Ain’t Good.” Joe sat on a folding chair next to Delphine’s armchair and held her hand. In their affectionate motionlessness, the couple resembled faded porcelain. The lilt and frivolity of the tune made everyone in the room smile, especially when Monk played part of it in the style of Thelonius Monk himself. Like Thelonious, Monk intentionally missed notes, came up short on the chords or played chords that were heavily discordant. He did not know whether Sergei or Delphine could imagine the fruitlessness of such a task, since Thelonius’s playful clumsiness had been so much more accomplished than Monk’s could ever be. As a kid, Monk had known that he had some talent as a pianist, but not talent like that.
Nonetheless, as the lowering sun cast shadows across Central Park, Monk also knew that this was Delphine and Wilfredo’s Debussy and, as such, could make any kind of playing sound better than it would have on some other instrument…even that of the immortal Thelonius Monk himself.
“Bravo.” Amused cheers broke from everyone as Monk came to the end of the tune.
Marta had insisted on making coffee, and when she brought it into the living room, Rodney sat forward in an armchair, watching her arrival. “My wife makes the very best coffee in the world.”
“Well, she is Cuban, after all,” Delphine said. She was able to smile. “So you would expect such excellence, wouldn’t you?”
Marta went back to the kitchen. She had found the paper bag with the dozen fresh coconut macaroons that Monk had bought earlier, and now brought them into the living room on a blue porcelain dish.
“Well, Rodney?” Monk had returned to his armchair. He had taken great care with his appearance on this afternoon, making sure that the double-breasted black suit he wore fit him well, was properly pressed and formed a formal, modest witness, with the deep blue silk tie and paisley green kerchief, to what it was about to hear.
Rodney stood and examined the Bechstein. “Thank you, Joe.” He walked toward the piano. “Monk. Sergei.” He ran a hand across the brown lacquer. “And especially Delphine. Thank you.” He strummed the strings inside the instrument. Monk listened to the buzz-like response that resulted, a sound that had always reminded him of some sort of laughing threnody. He loved the sound, the shimmering anguish of it.
Rodney sat on the bench and removed his glasses. He placed them in the chest pocket of his suit jacket. No sheet music lay on the music back. He leaned over the keyboard and, after a moment’s contemplation, turned to Delphine.
“Mozart. Köchel 397. Fantasia in D Minor.”
“Oh, Rodney.” Delphine took a handkerchief into her right hand. She turned to Joe and, with some labor, brought it to her eyes. After a moment’s quiet, she returned the handkerchief to her lap.
“She recorded this,” Joe said to Monk.
Rodney laid the fingers of both hands on the keyboard. He appeared to hesitate, as though worried he had stumbled into some lapse in taste. A breach of the Saxons’ hospitality, maybe.
“Rodney, please,” Delphine said. “Please continue.”
Marta stood silently in the doorway to the kitchen, her right hand resting against her right cheek, as she watched her husband. After another moment, he began playing. The music moved with unsettling slowness. His head hung over the keyboard, almost motionlessly, while tenderness riffled from the instrument. Rodney’s very large fingers made the lightest of impressions on the keys. For Monk, the music formed a stream of utterances and long silences, as though Mozart and Rodney—in writing the piece and performing it for Delphine, Joe, Sergei and, to be sure, Wilfredo—were seeking explanations in the silences, for why there was such disappointment in the wish for beauty, for why revolutions can sometimes further the gift of contemplation, why dawn fills with slowly warming light and dusk takes it away, and why dreams are so often destroyed. It was a sad, violent memory brightly recalled, played so lightly that the lightness itself became an elegiac expression of true mourning.
© Copyright 2017. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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Terence Clarke’s new novel, The Moment Before, was published on September 15. Available everywhere.
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