The First of Them
The first of the études always reminds her of a day when she was thirteen, though there’s no reason to remember this one day over so many others like it, while things were still good and summer meant beautiful blue skies with her parents lazing on chaise longues near the docks, her mother sipping Coca-Cola and her father a ginger ale whiskey. Her mother was reading Under the Sign of Saturn that month. Occasionally her father would use a copy of a magazine to block the sun from his face, but usually he just turned his head to the side, ambiguously dozing while he baked himself golden. She would have been in the ocher-yellow fiberglass kayak, and her brother, who had the lung capacity, would have been swimming out to the island. This was not the only perfect day, but like any piece of music, she thinks, you can only hear one moment of it at a time.
The first of them does not sound impossible. It sounds, simply, like two distinct pieces of music being played simultaneously, perhaps in adjoining rooms. On the top is a lilting, Mozarty pastoral. She plays it and thinks of the gentle wind rolling on the water and the green coast in the distance, freckled with white cottages. Underneath is a gentle thumping march, someone rapping quietly on an old door. That’s the tune of her brother’s breaststrokes, powerful enough to cradle-rock the kayak when he passes close by. Here’s the difficulty: It’s not two pieces for two hands; it’s not two separate staves. Some notes for the upper melody come from the left hand, and some from the right. Sometimes it’s the right hand knocking, and sometimes it’s the left. Playing the pastoral and the march together requires a forced schizophrenia, and at the same time a unity. The impossibility of this first one isn’t in the hands. It’s in the mind.
How can opposite things exist at once, even in memory? The perfection of that day, then everything after. It took her a long time to be able to play this piece without crying. She plays it and she sees the eleven o’clock sun hanging at a hawk’s angle of descent, and her brother’s arms crashing through the small swells the breeze made. He was such a strong swimmer.
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