Death and Transfiguration Read online

  Sitting on the kitchen counter next to his empty mug, the twenty-four-ounce one with the Caffiends logo that Yumi had given him, was a single-burner electric hot plate. He turned the dial, listening for the click to know it was on, until he could feel the little pointer positioned at two o’clock. If he turned it to three o’clock it would boil the water faster, but it would short out his antediluvian fuse in the basement, and that was a pain in the ass to replace. Next he turned on the faucet and filled the mug, sticking his finger in it to know when the water had reached the top. Then he poured the water into a teakettle that he had owned longer than he could remember, and set it on the hot plate. He opened the cupboard above the counter, and using the point of his cane, felt for the two-pound can of Folger’s instant coffee among the other cans, all of which he could identify by their shape and/or size. He would have preferred to keep the cans on the counter so he wouldn’t have to reach for them, but they attracted mice, even with their lids on. The mice scared his gargantuan bulldog, Trotsky, which Jacobus couldn’t care less about, but he did care that they would shit all over his kitchen. He used to keep peanut butter–baited traps on the floor, but the dog had found the treat irresistible, and with a brain capacity inversely proportional to his stomach’s, was unable to make the cause-and-effect connection between licking the peanut butter and the intense pain on his tongue that inevitably followed immediately thereafter. So now Jacobus kept the cans in the cupboards.

  He maneuvered the can with his cane, and when it was an inch over the edge of the shelf, deftly flicked it off and caught it in his left hand. He did the same exercise with a plastic jar of sugar. By the time he had emptied three teaspoons of coffee and one of sugar in his mug with the spoon he kept in the can, the water was boiling, which he could tell from the foghornlike moan the kettle gave off. He touched the spout of the kettle to the lip of the mug so it wouldn’t spill, and poured.

  While the coffee cooled enough so he wouldn’t burn his tongue off, he yanked open the recalcitrant door of the refrigerator—perhaps the last of its species, which needed defrosting, though he never bothered—and inhaled deeply. The sound of the door opening was followed by the predictable clattering of Trotsky’s claws as he skidded around the corner into the kitchen.

  Slim pickings. Jacobus fondled a half-empty bag of Lit’l Smokies smoked sausages and put that back. He felt an onion whose soft spot had grown alarmingly since yesterday, and backed away from an open can of sardines. He took one sniff of a prehistoric chunk of liverwurst and with heavy ambivalence let it drop from his hand, assured that before it hit the ground Trotsky would catch it in his gaping maw, swallow it, and beg for more. All that remained were condiments of an undefined nature and an open bottle of Rolling Rock. Unbidden came Jacobus’s recollection of the few days he had spent at the home of Yumi’s grandmother, Cato Hashimoto, aka Kate Padgett, in her mountain home in Japan, and of the profusion of delicacies that had been assembled before him, one after another, for his alimentary consideration.

  Jacobus brusquely banished that thought from his mind, and, supplanting it with serious consideration of the Rolling Rock, calculated whether it was the appropriate time of day for a beer.

  The phone rang again. He pulled his handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped the sweat off his head. After the fifteenth ring he decided that his sanity was worth more than his privacy.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mister Jacobus?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Sherry O’Brien.”

  “So?”

  “I’m the acting concertmaster of Harmonium.”

  “As opposed to the juggling concertmaster?”

  “I was wondering if I could come play for you.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m auditioning for the permanent concertmaster position in a few days, and you’ve come highly recommended. The orchestra’s here at Tanglewood for the week and since you’re nearby I thought, well, I thought I’d give you a try. I’m happy to pay whatever your fee is.”

  Jacobus considered his schedule. In the afternoon, his former student and surrogate daughter, Yumi Shinagawa, was going to play for him in preparation for the same audition. When was the last time he had seen Yumi? He couldn’t remember. Almost a year? Tomorrow he had nothing. The day after that he had nothing. The day after that … Actually, his calendar was clear for the rest of his life, however long or short that would last.

  “I’m very busy,” he said.

  “I’m sure you are,” she pursued, “but I was really hoping…”

  He didn’t hang up but let the silence linger.

  “Maybe tomorrow afternoon?” she continued, picking up her own thread.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Today and tomorrow we have morning rehearsals at ten. Would one o’clock be okay?”

  “You know how to get here?”

  “I’ve got GPS.”

  “Then maybe you should have that treated first.”

  “And your fee?”

  “Incalculable.”

  Jacobus hung up.

  From what O’Brien said, Jacobus figured it must now be about 9:30 A.M. He removed the Rolling Rock from the fridge, chugged it, and took his coffee to the rusty iron lawn chair that had once been painted green that sat in front of his house, wondering along the way why the acting concertmaster of the world’s most famous orchestra would ask for a lesson from a total stranger three days before an audition. And why Thursday suddenly felt like G minor.

  TWO

  He met Yumi in front of his house.

  “I brought you a care package from the city,” she announced, emerging from her car. “Carnegie Deli pastrami, corned beef, chopped liver—”

  “Beware of grease-bearing gifts,” he said, unable to quell his sense of foreboding from O’Brien’s call.

  “Jake, I think you’re getting overly suspicious in your old age,” Yumi said, pretending to sound hurt. “Maybe you’ve been involved in one too many murders.”

  “Then what gives, may I ask?”

  “It’s been almost a year since I saw you in New York, and I figured you might be getting a little tired of the local organic kale you love so much here in the Berkshires. I also brought some tongue, Swiss cheese, and mustard, and rye bread, and half-sour and sour pickles, and pickled tomatoes.”

  “Have I ever told you you were the best student I ever had?”

  “No.”

  “Good. You shouldn’t have a swelled head.”

  “I’ll just put it all in the fridge. Is it still running?”

  “Hobbling is more like it. Ol’ Bessie is a designated Superfund site.” Jacobus hollered in the direction of Yumi’s footsteps. “And don’t let Trotsky eat any of it!”

  “Worry not. I brought him a doggy treat from Bone Appétit.”

  It struck Jacobus that Yumi’s Japanese accent and manner of speaking, tinged with her English grandmother’s inflection and grammar, had over the years become almost thoroughly Americanized. A reflection of her responsive ear, no doubt. But he also observed that whatever she might be losing of her childhood speech patterns was being replenished with Granny’s maturity, becoming more like her by the day. Her talent, her perceptiveness, kindness, tenacity. Her sense of humor. Her general brilliance. Yet Jacobus had shunned Kate when the promise of a happy future presented itself. Why had he done that? he asked himself, and though he knew the answer, he denied knowing it. He would prefer living and dying miserable and unloved than admit the source of his pain.

  Jacobus followed Yumi back into the house. He jerked at the door a few times to try closing it behind him, its hinges bent askew by Trotsky’s joyfully misguided efforts to greet visitors by running through the screen. A few miles down the road, the Condos at Elk Meadow had been built for summer hordes of New Yorkers. That it was neither a meadow nor had there been an elk spotted in the area since before Cotton Mather preached to the Puritans hadn’t diminished the demand for the homes, which had resulted in a pr
operty tax increase on Jacobus’s humble cottage, magically now worth substantially more than the sum of its mildewed parts. The town tax assessor had summarily dismissed his reasoned argument that naming his house the Hovel at Slug Haven should result in a tax reduction. By lifting the handle and leaning against the screen door, Jacobus closed it as well as he could, hoping to keep the flies and mosquitoes out. While Yumi was in the kitchen, voicing expressions of revulsion in both English and Japanese as she exhumed the malodorous contents of his shuddering refrigerator, he took his seat in the dilapidated Naugahyde swivel chair in the living room that also served as his teaching studio. The room had changed little in aspect over the years, except that the dust, which had settled over a surreal landscape of music, books, and recordings strewn in disheveled piles on the floor and every other horizontal surface, had grown into uniform three-dimensional fuzz.

  “So you’re sure you want to play in an orchestra?” Jacobus asked Yumi after she had finished unpacking the food and then her violin. “You know, you won’t have any artistic autonomy. You play a lot of crap by de-composers that would have been better unwritten, and have no choice in the matter. You’ve got a bunch of bored colleagues sitting behind you waiting to stab you in the back. It’s an endless grind that never pays as much as it’s worth. Everyone ends up with aches and pains, if not chronic injuries, from overplaying. You have to deal with managements that are usually trying to screw the musicians out of this or that in their contract. And last but not least, you’ve got guys like Vaclav Herza who can be bastards even if they’re geniuses, which they’re usually not.”

  “Thanks for painting such a sunny picture, Jake,” said Yumi, tuning her violin. “You’ve really given me motivation.”

  “Hey, look before you leap, honey. Buyer beware. Say you win the job and then hate it. I don’t want you to come crying that I hadn’t told you so.”

  “Well, I have to admit that if I still had a steady job I wouldn’t be doing this, but since the nightmare with my quartet last year it’s been tough trying to cobble together enough freelancing and teaching and also afford my apartment, so the idea of a guaranteed paycheck, with paid vacation, pension, and health care, sounds pretty appealing at the moment—even though the rest of it might not be so alluring. I’ve never played in an orchestra—at least not since I was in public school in Japan—so this is kind of challenging. And exciting.”

  “What’s on the repertoire list for the audition?” Jacobus asked. He pulled a pack of Camels out of his flannel shirt pocket, congratulating himself that he had refrained from smoking until noon—well, almost noon.

  “They want one Romantic concerto and one Mozart, so I’m doing Brahms and Mozart Five. Then there’re Mozart symphonies Thirty-nine and Forty-one, Schubert Two, Beethoven Three and Nine, Brahms Four, the Mendelssohn Scherzo from Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Scherzo from Schumann Two, Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, Prokofiev Five, and the solos from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Brahms One, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, Mahler Four, and Shostakovich Five. I think that’s it. I might have left out a couple things.”

  “How long’s the audition? A week?” Jacobus asked, lighting up.

  “Ten to fifteen minutes for the semifinals is my guess. They’re letting me skip the preliminaries—my performing experience with the Magini Quartet must have looked good on the résumé. The finals—if I make it that far—I guess will be longer.”

  “How many in the preliminaries?”

  “About eighty applied is what I heard.”

  “Eighty,” mulled Jacobus, blowing what he hoped would look like smoke rings. “Why so few?”

  “I think because it’s a concertmaster audition they tried to separate the wheat from the chaff and discouraged a lot of less experienced people from attending. Still, the audition committee will be listening to preliminaries at least all day Monday.”

  “Will Herza be there for all of that?”

  “Just for the finals is what I was told.”

  “That’s par for the course. In the old days the conductor could hire anyone he wanted, especially concertmaster, because he’s his right-hand man. Now you’re lucky they show up at all, but Herza’s reputation is that he wants the best, and over the years he’s gotten what he wants.”

  “I’m getting nervous just talking about it. Maybe I should do some playing before I get cold feet.”

  For the next three hours, Jacobus drilled Yumi on the repertoire, admonishing her again and again that the artistic license that made for a great string quartet player was not the stuff of winning an orchestra audition. She had to learn to perform more like a tutti player, a musical term originating from the eighteenth century for a musician within the string section, as opposed to a principal player. In recent history, being called a tutti player had taken on the disparaging, almost insulting connotation of lacking musical personality, but in Jacobus’s eyes, being a good tutti player was the height of professionalism because it combined the highest level of skill and artistry within the strict confines of being one among up to sixty string players in the orchestra.

  “What I’m trying to say, Yumi,” Jacobus concluded with the extinguishing of the last Camel of the pack, “is that this isn’t the kind of audition where you have to play double harmonics and fart the ‘Carnival of Venice’ at the same time in order to make an impression.”

  The fact that Yumi had never played professionally in an orchestra was undoubtedly a deficit. There are certain unwritten traditions in every significant piece of the symphonic repertoire regarding particular changes in tempo, certain bow strokes, and even which string to play on, that orchestral veterans know but for which Jacobus had been compelled to give Yumi a crash course. Even if Yumi were to play an otherwise perfect audition, if she slipped up in this regard, the committee would disqualify her without hesitation because they would know she was not ready to be the leader of the world’s greatest orchestra.

  “I’m schvitzin’ and exhausted,” Yumi said after they had tackled the last movement of Brahms Four.

  “Yeah. Me too,” Jacobus lied. He found that the marathon lesson had invigorated him as he relived his own all-too-brief career as an orchestral player. It had come crashing down on the day of the concertmaster audition for the Boston Symphony so many years ago—the audition that he won even though he had been stricken with the sudden blindness that forced him to relinquish the position and that changed his life.

  “I think I’ve got the hang of it,” Yumi said, packing her violin away. “Just one question. What happens if I make a mistake at the audition? It probably means I’ve lost, right?”

  “That’s two questions, Yumi.”

  “Okay, just two questions, then.”

  “I’ll answer the second one first. If you make one mistake it might well mean you lost because it’s always possible someone will play as well as you and make no mistakes.”

  “So I give up?”

  “Hell, no. Did it sound like I was suggesting that? You never give up. Here’s the answer to the first question. If you make a mistake, forget about it. By the time you’ve played a note out of tune or made a clumsy shift it’s already in the past and there’s nothing you can do to retrieve it and make it better. Music’s not like a painting, where you can dabble at it until you’ve reshaped the boob to your satisfaction. With music, especially an audition, you have to stay focused entirely on the present, so if you make an error, put it out of your mind and just play as beautifully as you know how. Don’t go out of your way to impress them to make up for a mistake, either, because that’s when people really fuck up.

  “You know,” Jacobus continued, “I used to be an admirer of Turner.”

  “Ted Turner, the media mogul?”

  “No, he’s a stomach turner. I mean J.M.W. Turner, the nineteenth-century English romantic artist. Mentioning painting reminded me there’s an exhibit of his stuff up at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown.”

  “Yes, I rea
d about it in a Berkshire tourist guide. Turner and Gainsborough. Why do you mention it?”

  “You should go. Then you tell me why.”

  “If I have time, then.”

  “It’ll help with your audition.”

  “Okay, if you say so. I’ll try to.” Yumi gathered her violin case.

  Jacobus shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He reached for another cigarette but finding the pack empty, tossed it on the floor.

  “O’Brien’s playing for me tomorrow,” he said. It sounded almost like a confession. As soon as he said the words, he was aware that Yumi’s actions came to a halt.

  To compensate for the lack of visual stimuli, Jacobus had developed an acute sensitivity to subtle nuances, shades of inflection, of the human voice, but even a deaf person could have heard the frost in Yumi’s one-word response.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Yeah. She called me this morning, out of the blue, and asked,” said Jacobus, hoping that the explanation would make it acceptable.

  “You usually say no to last-minute requests for lessons,” said Yumi.

  “It’s not really a lesson.”

  “Coming from you, Jake, that’s pretty lame. Might there be some reason you’d rather I not win?”

  “Of course not.” Then why, he asked himself, had he agreed to hear O’Brien? “It’s just,” he improvised, “so I can gauge the competition for you.”

  “Keep working on it,” said Yumi. “But thank you for the lesson. Really.”

  THREE

  FRIDAY

  O’Brien’s lesson was a different story altogether. When she arrived, he beckoned to her from his living room chair.

  “Is this where you teach?” O’Brien asked upon entering.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “It’s just that you’ve got all this … paraphernalia.”

  “Paraphernalia? You mean like a dope addict?”