Part 19 (1/2)

”Well, then you should go find another teacher,” I said.

She nodded and started packing up her instrument.

”I don't know where you're going to find someone,” I said.

”Lots of people teach violin.”

”Not for these prices,” I told her. ”McCoy's is as cheap as you'll find. I'm the best you can get for this money.”

She shrugged. ”So I'll pay more.”

”You will?”

”Yeah.”

”Your father doesn't even want to pay my fee.”

She said nothing.

”You had to fight to keep coming here. Do you really think they are going to go to the trouble of finding another teacher, and pay more?”

”I'll get him to pay,” she said.

”How?” I asked, feeling mean.

”I just will.”

She grabbed her violin case and walked out. I should have left it at that. I should have stayed in the musty little room and waited for my next student. But I couldn't. I followed her.

She had stormed out of McCoy's without warning her mother. Dorothy had remained behind, no doubt engaging Ernest or Franklin in some discussion of guitars or money. Hallie was hurrying down the sidewalk, the hot wind whipping through her short black hair. Trash was gusting around in the gutters. There was an eerie sort of moan on the street. It felt like the end of the world.

”Hallie, be reasonable,” I said. ”You won't get him to pay. If you leave me, music will be over for you.”

”I'll get him to pay,” she said, not looking back at me.

”How?”

”I know how.”

”What will you do? Say please? He doesn't like music.”

It was a cheap shot, but I felt desperate. She stopped and turned to me, clutching her violin case next to her chest.

”Yeah, but he likes me,” she said.

The world around us suddenly turned silent. Or maybe it just turned silent for me. I couldn't hear the cars on Pico. I couldn't hear the wind. My ears just quit working, which is what happens, I'm told, when you hear something you don't want to hear.

She said, ”We have a deal, him and me.”

”Hallie,” I said quietly. Or I thought I said it. I could no longer hear my own voice. All I could hear was the relentless devil wind, like a thousand wailing souls in purgatory.

”You're the one who said it was worth anything,” she reminded me.

And she left me with that to think about for a while. Days, months, or the rest of my life.

It was easy, really, what came next. I wondered why I had made it so hard.

From Franklin's office I called Leah at work and asked for that name. The name of the social worker. She said, ”Are you sure?” and I was sure.

I called the social worker. She listened. She asked questions. She said they would look into it.

I hung up the phone and I felt it rise up, terrible and real, that feeling I'd had when I saw the violin burning on the leaves and I knew something deep inside me had changed and it would take a long time to know what.

14.

AMERICA IS A HARD COUNTRY, full of hard people.

It is amusing that anyone anywhere thinks of us as being soft and spoiled, privileged, lazy, unchallenged, or indifferent, pickled with happiness.

My father used to say that kind of thing to me, and I let his rants drift by my ears, preoccupied, as I was, with my own inalienable rights. I thought he was talking about himself, his own experience with extreme poverty, forced service in the Korean War, and a disappointing adult life full of things he did not ask for and did not understand. But as I grew older, I realized he was referring to something much bigger than I could ever grasp. Something bigger than his own personal history, bigger than the Depression, World War II, and polio. Bigger than his angry marriage and his obsession with fire, his need to conform and his wild desire to break the same rules he constructed and held dear.

I went through a phase in my life, my freshman year in college, when I became obsessed with reading biographies. I was hungry for the stories of other people's lives. I was comparing them, I suppose, to my own, with a frantic desire to determine whether I had fared better or worse, whether I could learn from their failures and emulate their successes. I wasn't sure what I was looking for. I just wanted to know.

I started with the biographies of musicians- Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline, Robert Johnson, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Cooke. I enjoyed the early years especially, the chapters that described their humble beginnings, during which time there was no reason to suspect that these people would amount to anything at all. In most cases it seemed these people were destined either for obscurity or for a life of crime. They were as surprised as anyone when things took a turn for the better. I skimmed the successful years, then got interested again in the long decline. One could argue that I was interested only in the bad news. But it was more serious than that. I was interested in the demons that haunted, it seemed to me, every living person. Certainly every person who had ever ventured into music.

It was clear how G.o.d felt about musicians. He kept killing them off, mostly in small planes.

My curiosity grew, and I started reading biographies of writers, politicians, dancers, generals, scientists. After a while it didn't matter what the person had done to distinguish himself. I had discovered that every person had a story, and I wanted to know them all.

I read about Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Jefferson, Cole Porter, Daphne du Maurier, Diane Arbus, John Fante, Albert Einstein, Grace Kelly, Martin Luther, Meister Eckehart, Gelsey Kirkland, Isaac Newton, Edgar Cayce, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, John Brown, Robert E. Lee, Pica.s.so, Jung, William Faulkner, and William Shakespeare. I didn't have to be interested in the person's work at all. In fact, I didn't care if the person had done anything of importance. I could have read the biography of my next-door neighbor, if it had been written in a true and dramatic style.

I loved stories of people. They were born to such and such parents, in such and such a place. They dealt with this hards.h.i.+p and the other. They had a childhood illness. They rescued someone from death. They turned to crime, away from crime. They nearly died, came back to life, wors.h.i.+pped G.o.d or the devil. They were happy, unhappy, successful, unsuccessful. Fell in love, out of love, were loyal, betrayed people, betrayed themselves, longed for something, got it or didn't get it, and in the end, they died.

I was interested, I suppose, in the jagged nature of any person's life. I was looking, I also suppose, for that time line, that linear path resulting in logic and satisfaction. However, I am fairly certain that if I had found it, I would have been disappointed. What intrigued me, even thrilled me in some dark way, was that none of these lives made any kind of sense. Every life seemed incomplete. Every life seemed random in its trajectory, contradictory in its purpose.

I liked that.

Any mediocre psychologist would say that I was filled with schadenfreude, or the desire to see others fail. That I was looking for something to justify my own emptiness, my own suspicion that my life had no real design, no clear purpose. But I don't think so. That is too easy. I was looking, I think, for some evidence that a life is not supposed to have such obvious boundaries, such a clear narrative. Therefore it is really all right to feel completely lost inside your own circ.u.mstances. That we all arrive here disconnected and disconcerted and we just do the best we can, hitting and missing. Hitting more than missing, if we are lucky. And then, because G.o.d is merciful, it eventually stops.

It was through reading these biographies that I was eventually able to forgive my parents, then to forgive myself. Because we are all just feeling our way through the dark, I told myself in my biography days. There are just as many fascinating stories that are never told, because the person never got anything published, produced, recorded, awarded, or photographed. But these biographies were the proof I needed that no life really falls into place.

When I first moved to California, I forgot about the biographies, and my biography phase, because it seemed to me that life in Los Angeles defied that logic. I felt I was surrounded by people who knew exactly what they were doing. They knew where they had been and where they were heading, and anyone without a similar knowledge was left out in the cold. I didn't mind being in the cold so much. But it was a paradigm s.h.i.+ft for me. I went from believing that no one has the answers, to thinking that everyone has the answers but me.

After Hallie left, I started reading biographies again. I had to be reminded. I needed to know my part in her story. In any given biography, I show up around chapter twelve. I am the person who could have made a difference but didn't. I am the person who met her at the crossroads of her life, gave her a little bit of helpful information, then let her down. I am the person who, when you get to this particular chapter in her biography, makes the reader shake his head and say, ”Oh, well, that's the one who let her get away. That is the turning point right there.”

But the thing that strikes me about these biographies, then and now, are the pictures. I loved the pictures most of all. In most good biographies, hidden like little treasures, like golden Easter eggs in the middle of the book, are the pictures. The pictures begin at the beginning. The mother and father with their child, staring at the camera in homemade clothes, all stoic and satisfied, determined and ready to face the future. They don't realize, when the picture is taken, that they are holding some national treasure on their knee. The treasure himself (or herself) always appears detached, distanced, unrelated, ready to escape. You look at the pictures and you think, Well, no wonder. But it isn't fair. Any family photograph would reveal the rebellious child who has other things in mind. Very few of them go on to distinguish themselves. Yet in every photo, there is the one who wants to get away.