I’m afraid of the piano. I would have to say. The combination of possible notes one can play simultaneously is exquisitely vast, and yet painfully limited.

When ordering lunch at a diner, or determining which television channel to watch, I can usually with ease cut my likely choices to three or four and transform a potential travesty into an easy game of chance. All the process takes is a standard quarter. I flip. I choose. That’s it.

Though sometimes, I flip. Then I decide if the flip is what I want or not. I go with my instincts, and before dangerously long, I’m eating onion rings or watching Comedy Central.

Not so with the piano. Eighty-eight pitches and ten fingers always sounded to me more like a word problem from a sadistic math book than something as pleasantly simple as selecting appetizers.

And while dealing with a small number of choices brings me tranquility and peace of mind, I also appreciate the benefits of the near infinite. Walking a path on the sidewalk, I often ponder the exact route I’m taking, down to the centimeter, and I reflect on the thousands of subtle decisions I’ve made every day of my last fifteen years – even if only in walking. In terms of my life as a whole, I find the choices ahead of me literally unbound by any number of which I can conceive. On an afternoon stroll I feel completely liberated from the clutches of probability.

Not so with the piano. Though there are many musical arrangements that can be played on it, there are many more that can’t. Chances are, I won’t be able to play what I want, anyway. Ten fingers is a lot, but not that many.

And just as one instant of decision-making comes and goes, and the ivories have revealed the judgment I have made, the entire practice of piano playing is complicated by the interloping passing of time. Every moment, I must prepare myself for commitment to the sounds I make in the immediate future.

In spite of all my reservations, whenever I approach the piano at my house, it succeeds in luring me into its game. There are so many combinations I have not tried, not to mention the many I have tried but far from mastered. And yet, I know that by playing its game, I will be suspended in place, isolated from the world, and trapped within the borders of my talent and its keys. I fear it, as I would anything whose mere presence confines me, even as it seduces me into exploring the unknown.

On one warm mid-July Wednesday, as I was in the middle of improvising over jazz chords, a knock erupted on my front door. It was syncopated, and it sounded purposely so. Slightly annoyed by the interruption of my playing, and party grateful that I now had an excuse to decide to stop playing -- and not continue to delay my decision on whether to stop – I stopped playing and walked over to the door. Through the peephole I found a giant eye staring at me. I opened the door and saw a man connected to the eye, probably in his late twenties, wearing a khaki dress shirt, light colored camouflage pants, a leather vest and a Panama hat. I couldn’t see the back of his head, but I immediately noticed that his light-brown beard was in dreadlocks.

"What could I do you for?" I do not conventionally ask this particular question of strangers at my door, but I thought his appearance warranted an exception to this policy.

"I heard you playing some wild stuff from outside. I used to play that jazzy stuff before."

"Oh, and what jazzy stuff do you play now?" I asked.

"Well. I, uh. I guess you could say I’ve become much more selective over the years."

"I’ve probably become less."

"If you want, I can show you the kind of music I’m into."
Somewhat creeped out by the prospect of this odd man entering my house to use my CD player, I panicked. I wanted to reply with something that I could follow up with anything. I failed somewhat with "do you carry your music with you all the time?"

"I have it in my brief case." This was the first time I noticed that he had one – no less one of alligator leather.

"What is it?" I could always tell him that I refuse to listen to the genre he liked, and politely close the door in his face, I thought. At that moment, he pulled out a page of sheet music and handed it to me, saying "here" under his breath.

I took a quick glance at it, and immediately showed him that I recognized it. "This is your favorite piece," I asked, "Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata?"

"Look more carefully."

It was then that I discovered the sharps and flats added in pencil to what looked like random notes throughout the page, some erased messily but most still clean and easily visible. Confused and somewhat annoyed, I asked, "What is the meaning of this?"

"For the longest time," he began to explain, "I have loved that song. I learned how to read music just so I could play it. It was so close to perfect; it was always right no matter what mood I was in. But over time I came to realize that there was something missing. There was always something missing, and I just didn’t realize it before. And I found out what. I made some changes, and nowadays once I’m playing it, I couldn’t possibly want even to listen to anything else.

This seemed absurd to me. Moonlight Sonata is a great piece, I thought, but how could it ever be someone’s favorite musical work? And how could one possibly improve on it? But then I realized that these two objections of mine might cancel each other out, and perhaps the stranger at my door had in fact found something worthy of my time. I was not prepared, however, to give it a listen without more convincing.

"How could there possibly be a piece of music perfect enough to be happy with it exclusively?"

"Do you think there could be such a woman?"

I thought about this. "If she liked the right kind of music. But I don’t think it’s possible to find one composition such that once I play it, I’m satisfied with only it."

"Once you play it, nothing else can satisfy you. I’ll play it for you and you can see how it sounds yourself."

Finally, I caved in and let the stranger play the disfigured sonata on my piano. It started out exactly as I knew it. Soon, I realized that although I recognized all the notes, this stranger had quite a particular feel for the composition that I could hear through his performance. It was a feel I’d never felt conveyed through Beethoven’s Moonlight, or any other piece I could think of at the moment. Was it just that he was an excellent pianist? Or did he simply understand the music in front of him more than anyone I had ever heard? Perhaps he was right about the singularity of this piece: his performance seemed to affect me in a way no other version of it -- and perhaps any other piece of music – ever had before.

But just as I became consumed by the music’s trance, he played his first ornamentation of the melody, which caught me off guard and shook me out of the spell under which I previously resided. I shook it off. But just as I came to ignore the abrogation, to continue listening as if nothing strange had occurred, another intruding note invaded the tune and took me one half step higher than I was prepared to go.

It was terrible; I couldn’t believe the torture I had to endure. When he was finished, he turned and complained, "I think this might be slightly out of tune."

"I hardly think it matters. It would have sounded bizarre either way."
"You didn’t like it," he asked defensively. Quickly, he changed to attack mode, "you didn’t understand it."

Circumventing his claim, I simply asked, "I can tell that you are a good player, where did you learn?

"My parents made me take lessons for twelve years. I practiced some in college."

"It shows. Can you play me something else?"

Clearly offended, he stood up and walked toward the door. Turning the knob, he spun his head around and whined, "You didn’t listen to a word I said!"

Ready for this encounter to end, but very curious, I watched as he exited, slamming his brief case in the door on his way out. I ran behind, opened the door and hollered at him, telling him that he left his sheet music behind. He muddled something about extra copies and pencils, got on a purple bicycle, and rode away.

Closing the door, determined to resume my improvisation, I returned to my piano. I looked at his sheet music, and eyed the name "Short Marve" and a phone number written at the bottom. I sat down to continue the chord progression that Marve interrupted, but had difficulty improvising this time. No matter how hard I tried to shake it out of my head, the name Short Marve appeared in my mind, clouding and dancing atop the notes I played. I closed my eyes. Finding the notes I wanted to hear on the piano, all I saw was half-erased sharps and flats, smudged alterations to the solo I was playing, following each other in a circle around my confused poor head. Dizzy from this lack of focus, I played with greater precision, careful that the notes I played were those I decided to hear, and not those that snuck into this private moment between me and the piano from somewhere mysterious and obnoxious and dressed in khaki.

The more I concentrated, the less sense my notes made. I increasingly couldn’t account for what I was playing, until all structure was gone and the relationship between one note and the next sounded arbitrary, and without human guidance. The order of sounds illuminating from the instrument across from me sounded entirely deficient of cohesion and continuity, and began to take on an aura of the naturally random. I began to like what I was playing, or what may have been playing me, even as I resented the fact that I liked it.

And then I felt a shock. I don’t know where it came from or how to describe it.

I glanced up and stared at the adulterated sheet music ahead of me. Abandoning my original plans, I folded up the music, closed the piano, and went upstairs to spend the rest of my waking hours on the phone with friends. You were one of them. We talked about movies.

The next morning I awoke, scratched my thigh, and looked at the alarm clock sitting on the dresser near my bed: 6:52. I went back to sleep and awoke again, looked at the clock and saw 8:52. Going back to sleep once more, I sprang out of bed but refused to look at the clock immediately lest I notice I’d slept exactly two hours since the last time I awoke. After refusing to peer at my timekeeper for several minutes, I finally turned to see it reveal 10:57.

So early in the day, these things happen. The day often becomes increasingly commonplace and conventional, at least if by my own experience. I walked to my television set and turned it on, wishing to hear some background news while I brushed my teeth. At eleven in the morning the next news program began as I squirted a defiantly large glob of Aquafresh on my toothbrush. It was within the first minute of brushing, walking around the TV room as I was, that I noticed the news anchor’s voice begin to enchant me. What hit me first was the beat. The pulses and pauses in the lady’s voice took me over, and I couldn’t for the life of me tell what I thought of it. And then, upon focusing on my own enchantment from the woman’s speech, I finally decided how I felt about it: I loved it.

The variations in her voice waltzed effortlessly between implied songs, sometimes echoing my last thoughts ahead of time through warm vibrations, other times forsaking its wicked repetition with a brief cadence. I had always avoided listening carefully and trying to find music in newscasters’ voices. I found most of them had a rather pretentious tone.

As my forgotten toothbrush began to irritate my gums, I hit the pinnacle of my summary romance with Broadcast television. And then, I realized how I really felt.

I hated it. I realized that the musical traps and puzzles in the voice were all part of some elaborate act. It was all an illusion. Insofar as what she was doing could be called music, she was simply faking it! Her choice of changing inflection was caught between a handful of false genres; motivated by false intentions. Every beat and rest in her voice was entirely predictable or painfully out of place. The appeal in it, on an artistic level, was too gaudy to be classic and too dull to be absurd. These last few minutes I had thought her pretentiousness was intimately rhythmic; in truth her rhythm was simply pretentious.

I shut the Television off and sat in the silence for an hour, holding my toothbrush over the armrest of my sofa, apathetic toward its occasional dripping on the floor.

After lunchtime, I began to wonder why I wasn’t hungry. Somewhat concerned, I put a frozen lasagna in my microwave and set the timer to the eleven and a half minutes I had found was most to my liking for such a dish. It was on medium. I went to the piano.

Sitting down, I began to improvise in E minor. I started off, with no more passion for jazz than I had hunger for Italian TV dinners. Working off some predictable chord progressions, I ended up in E Major. I closed my eyes. Hoping to find a steady and reliable pattern with my left hand, I searched with my right in the hope of going to a place I’d never been, and yet one familiar enough to appreciate easily.

And then I was in C# minor. I could not help but think about the Moonlight Sonata, in the same key. Fucking Marve! I want him to come play it for me, I thought, but only if he’d play it the right way. I decided I would give it a try, following the original sheet music and ignoring the pencil markings, of course. I looked at the wooden cover that separated me from the keys. Why did I conceal them from view? I never could fathom why people so closely followed the convention of hiding the keys after use. It made no less sense to me to just allow them exposed. That is when I remembered that I did not normally put down the cover after use. Upon this realization, I decided to put off playing the piano, go upstairs and talk on the phone until nightfall.

That night I snuck to the piano, fearing being caught by someone, though I never knew who. I turned on a lamp and opened the piano cover without even thinking. Sitting down, I noticed the page was still folded. It was not enough that I approached the damn instrument, now I had to actively unfold the page, exposing to myself my intentions as well as the sheet music itself. Did I doubt that I could still play it? Perhaps I was trying to prove something, I thought. In a fit of quiet rage I banged at the keys until I passed out.

When I awoke, the first thing I saw was the status of the sheet music that had caused me such psychological turmoil the last I remembered: unfolded. Nothing could stop me. I began to play immediately. And I was playing better than I ever had before.

And then it came

I played the wrong note! The pencil marking was dark, and all the focus I had on the task to avoid the markings must have backfired. I started from the beginning, but then the same thing happened. I tried playing small sections at a time, and each time I played the wrong part perfectly well. Frustrated and frightened, I played the entire piece all the way through, exactly as Marve had done two days previous on that very piano. Every wrong note was right on. Angered and terrified, I ripped up the sheet music in dozens of pieces and decided to take a walk.

Leaving my house, I thought for the first time about how awfully bizarre it was that such a strange man came to my house in the first place. I flashed back to seeing him on my porch to when he visited me for the first and only time. What was his deal? Whatever it was, he must have thought it was important enough to disturb me at home and interrupt my playing. Has he done this before to other people? Or perhaps I was the only one.

Caught up in these thoughts, it did not occur to me how fast I was walking. I was looking upward, and I saw trees passing me faster than usual, but I just didn’t think about it. My mind was spinning, trees were flying by and I was worried that my new obsession over Marve’s Moonlight was unhealthy. And then I felt a thump on my knees.

I looked down and realized that in my brisk and aimless walk I bumped into this little boy. Without thinking, I said, "Whoa are you okay, I’m sorry," and after a short silence continued with "where are your parents." The boy spoke bake with a blank expression, disgusted and confused. I walked away, quickly.

I went home. I stared at the piano angry and bewildered. The torn up sheet music was still in my garbage can. The next thing I remember, I woke up at three in the morning to take a leak. I tried to go back to sleep but I couldn’t. My body felt covered with insect bights, though I couldn’t find any insects. My stomach hurt in such a way that I knew vomiting wouldn’t be possible, and if it was it probably wouldn’t make me feel much better anyway. Eventually, I must have fallen a sleep, because I woke up the next morning, and went back to the piano. I remember it clearly; because I saw on it at least fifty pieces of sheet music taped back together. I sat down, and played for three hours. It was incredible. I never sounded so good, I thought. I thought I played it better than Marve himself. Then I thought I shouldn’t think that.

Oh. Hold on. There’s a call on the other line.

Hello? No one was there. Where was I? Oh yeah that’s right. The next few days, I played that piece an awful lot. One day that week, I played the piece for seven and a half hours. I wanted more copies, in case anything happened to my original. I called the phone number written on the bottom. It was disconnected, or temporarily out of service. I checked the number and called again, but it still didn’t work.

I got photocopies. I handed the copies to friends that lived close by. Remember when I told you on the phone that one day that I was going to send you something? It was going to be that.

Then I realized what I wanted to do. The happiness had to be shared.

Nighttime brings a whole different vibe to University Avenue. Walking down the street, I sang the altered melody I came to love, under my voice so as not to get hugely strange looks. After a while, I began to feel a certain discontent that I hadn’t had with the piece, or with life itself for that matter, in an entire week. One of Marve’s notes seemed odd for the first time. Everything else was perfect; all of his alterations hit the spot. But I felt there might be room for improvement. I decided not to mess with it. I was sure Marve’s version was well thought out, and that the sour note would grow on me as all his other changes did.

I had just cleared my mind when I ran into the man I was looking for. He wore an off-white sport coat, light brown Dockers, white wingtips and a light greenish pork pie hat. His face looked worn, but not tired. His name was Jim Feldway, and he was known around town as the man with the portable acoustic piano on wheels that plays ragtime on the streets on weekdays, or whenever and wherever anyone would be willing to pay him to.

He didn’t think five hundred dollars was nearly enough for his piano.

The next morning at eleven I awoke and left my house, thinking about that sour note the entire trip to the street corner where I was to meet Jim at noon. When I came upon him, I gave him five dollars, and asked him to play me some ragtime for a while. He did so. I knew it would be painful to hear him play such dull music when I could easily be hearing what I loved best. It paid off in the end. After a couple hours, he had to go to the bathroom. He did. When I saw that he was out of sight, I grabbed his piano, unlocked the wheels, and pushed it away as fast as I could. Most people didn’t even notice.

I figured I could get far enough away such that by the time he came out I would be somewhere hard to catch. I initially walked very quickly, then slowed down, and pulled one of his business cards from the box on the top of his piano. I took out my cell phone and called the number that was written on his card. He had a cell phone as well. I told him not to do anything stupid, or I would destroy his piano. He would have it back in a week. I hung up.

Settled in a different part of town, I sat down and played Marve’s Moonlight to the people walking by. Many didn’t notice the changes. Others certainly did, flinching.

And then I saw a little boy, probably about eight years old. He looked like the kid I bumped into, but I couldn’t be sure. I stopped playing and asked him up-front: "Did I bump into you the other day, kid?"

"Yes"

"I’m sorry about that. I should’ve been watching where I was going."

"So should have I."

After a short silence, I continued playing the piece. I usually kept my eyes on the piece, but by this time I had memorized it anyway. In my peripheral vision, I could see the little boy staring at me, seeming never to blink. At some arbitrary point through my sixth performance in row, I stopped suddenly and turned to the boy.

"What are you thinking of?" I asked.

"I was wondering if you meant to play the piece that way.

"Oh certainly. It’s no mistake. I play it this way on purpose. It’s better this way."

"I can tell that the notes you play are what you plan to play, but do you mean them?" asked the boy.

"I happen to love it this way. I don’t think you’d understand."

"Is there anything you’d want to change?"

I paused and stared into his eyes. They were beautiful.

"There’s one note." At this point, I was talking to myself more than to him. I like all of Marve’s notes. They’re perfect. But I don’t quite understand one of them. You probably don’t like any of them because you can’t understand any of them. But they’re necessary exactly where they are for the piece to be right. You can’t understand, because you simply want to hear the piece the way you’re used to hearing it."

"I’ve never heard it before," said the boy with the beautiful eyes. "It sounded perfectly normal to me."

"Then why did you complain about it?"

"I wasn’t complaining," said the boy. "I only asked if you meant it to sound like that. I liked the way it sounded. I like most music I hear. I most like to hear music the way the people making it want it to sound. I was only wondering if you meant it that way"

"Oh." I thought about this. I turned and played the piece again, exactly as Marve and Beethoven wrote it, except I replaced the one note I found sour with the one Beethoven originally wrote. I wondered if the little boy would notice the difference. I asked him, "Did that version sound different to you?"

"Not really," said the boy. "It sounded better, though."

That just blew me up. Had I really found something better than Beethoven or Marve had? I played it again. It really sounded better that way, I thought. I played it over and over, feeling guilty about changing Marve’s work so much, and yet feeling more free and beautiful than ever.

And then I saw Jim turn a corner. He noticed me. He was coming after me. I ran away fast.

Jogging fast through the streets I bumped into many strangers. I passed by several girls that turned me on, even as I kept running from my chaser. I saw a familiar face on one of those girl’s heads, blanketed in silky red hair and atop a slender body dressed in purple. Though I recognized her image, I had no name or distinct memory to connect it with in my mind. There were fifty like her. That drove me crazy, too.

What was really getting to me was the fact that I had changed Marve’s composition and liked it so much that way. Then I began to second-guess my whole faith in any of the alterations at all. Perhaps the original is best after all, and Marve was simply brainwashing me. No of course not, that would be crazy. No. Perhaps it’s just that the Moonlight Sonata is such a drab piece, and Marve’s perfect adaptation of it is superior by such magnitude that I can never appreciate it completely. Maybe each change he made was perfect, but I am one step from his perfection in my character and class so as I understand all his adjustments but one. Or maybe it’s so superior that I need to get used to it, over more time.

Maybe it was an error. A mistake.

A scam.

Every note was the way it should be. The way Marve wanted it to be.

But someone broke into my house.

The same guy who taped together the sheet music. And added one note. A sour note that Marve never meant to be heard.

I see a woman walking with three toy dogs. They look like triplets.

Where were those little boy’s parents? I thought. How dare he do that to me? Get me to play a distortion of Marve’s masterpiece. He should always be watched by his mom or dad or babysitter or someone. Someone needs to keep him away from sensitive art. Or maybe…

Maybe he knew the intruder who desecrated the sheet music when I slept. It was all I ploy to make me lose my loyalty to Marve. Maybe the boy was friends with Marve.

Or the intruder.

Or both. It could have been a conspiracy.

I run past a donut shop, which smells good.

Maybe Marve wants me to choose my own path with music, find my own perfect combination of notes, and he was showing me the way. Of course, I wasn’t ready for that yet. I needed more practice under his structure before I could try my own things. Did he want me to find my own way in the end? Am I only thinking about that because the little boy? If I follow my instincts, do I forsake Marve in a false goal pointed out by some kid not yet in fourth grade? Did I betray Marve simply through my interaction with the boy? Or vice versa?

No. Not vice versa. That must have been a mistake. My actions might derogate Marve, I thought. They may run counter to my own integrity. But I shouldn’t ever be concerned with betraying the boy. I only had to worry about following Marve’s piece.

And then I started feeling very confused. If Marve could improve on Beethoven, couldn’t I improve on Marve? Was it really the piece I was concerned with following jot for jot, or was it him? Or was it the mere act of following – the possibility that such a quintessential piece could exist – to which I was so attached? I felt trapped. Though I walked with the same streets that made me feel so free many times before, Marve’s mind games seemed to hold my spirit hostage; imprisoned by his sheet music, I felt my liberty drain away into a gutter of ratios and familiar melodies. My devotion to his music, my fascination with it, began to infiltrate the other areas of my thinking. A high pitch squeal pumped through my mind as I felt myself uncoil from around the possible ways of playing that piece right and of playing it wrong.

Wait a second. Didn’t he say something about my piano being out of tune? Maybe that’s the whole source of this confusion. There’s nothing wrong with Marve, or his piece, or with me, or even the boy. I just need more time with a perfectly tuned piano.

As my mind and feet sped up I ceased t o know where I was going. But I got there, nevertheless. I bumped into and knocked over a man walking his bicycle. I guess I must have been going much faster than when I crossed paths with the boy. I looked down and I saw the bearded man in khaki, awkwardly holding an open alligator-skin brief case. Papers were flying in the breeze. I swung at one of the pages with my hand, stepping forward on one foot, and catching it. It was sheet music. It was Mozart. It had penciled in notes and messy eraser marks. It didn’t even occur to me to help him up, or apologize for knocking him over.

"What are these?"

"It’s the only thing I listen to or play. The only thing worth listening to or playing."

"Whatever happened to Moonlight?

"Do I know you?" Marve’s question answered mine. I walked away slowly and he screamed back to me, "hey, you should look where you’re going."

"I’ll start doing that," I replied without turning, "and you should, as well."

I love playing the piano still.

I make mistakes, and miss some notes. And I sometimes get stuck inside the confining boundaries of the piano; other times the sheer vastness of choices overwhelms me. It’s a frightening instrument, and I love it. It scares me in how much it’s taught me, but it’s taught me nevertheless.

These days, I sometimes play jazz and am working at ragtime. I even play that Mozart piece Marve was carrying around that day, all the changes the way he wanted them, plus some of my own. And I also like to play the Moonlight Sonata, in its original form.

But why did you ask? What scares you about your home?

Short Stories

home