The Apartment A Novel(37)

I got there early and was told I’d have to wait. I was given a cheaply made black-and-white flyer with pictures of two young Japanese girls and a list of composers below them. I walked outside and smoked two cigarettes, and when I realized that had killed less than ten minutes, I walked around the block to look for a place to get out of the cold. I found an empty basement bar called New York New York. Inside, it was pretty dismal. A lot of purple light could not disguise the fact that in daylight it probably resembled an office cafeteria. A woman in her fifties, wearing a conspicuously conservative black skirt suit, sat at the bar by herself. I smiled and sat beside her, but left an empty stool between us. She spoke to me, and I stopped her immediately – I only spoke English, I told her, and I was very sorry about that. I ordered a glass of water and lit a cigarette. The bartender, an American, said, Hey, buddy, could you not spend a few bucks on a drink? He was maybe thirty, and wore a black bowling shirt with a pink collar. His hair was short at the sides and back and sort of spiked on top. He had the kind of American accent you have if you are born in New Jersey but leave when you’re young, and live all over America. I said, Sure, I’ll have a beer. Small or large? Small, I said. The woman fished a baby onion out of her cocktail. She threw her head back and held the onion above her open mouth as though it were a tiny little man and she were a giant lizard. She put it in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed, then turned to me and said, What do you tell an old hippy? I said, I don’t know; what do you tell an old hippy? She delivered the punchline, which I didn’t understand, either because she had slurred it or because she had momentarily departed from English, but I laughed anyway.

The bartender seemed to be happy I was there to deflect some of the woman’s attention; he left the bar to wipe some perfectly clean tables, and he turned some music on. The first song was ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’, and the woman got up off her seat and did a very slow and sexy dance against her chair. I watched her, because there wasn’t anything else to do, nor anyone else for whom she could dance. When the song was over, she picked her chair up and moved it close to mine, and said, I used to be a jazz singer. Then she sang two words of a Louis Armstrong tune, gutturally: I … see … – I started coughing, loudly, the loudest cough I ever coughed, before she could sing anything else. The bartender returned. The woman held her empty martini glass up and said, Give me a whiskey or fuck me! Nobody said anything to that, and it disappeared into the pathetic darkness of the bar. She asked what I was doing here. Going to a recital around the corner, I said. I mean, what are you doing in the city? I began to say the usual thing I said, which was that I had no real reason, but that it seemed like a nice place, etcetera, when she interrupted me: What recital? I said, Just a free violin recital around the corner. Students. She looked me up and down. What are they playing? she asked. I said I didn’t know. Someone had recommended it to me, and I knew nothing more than where it was. You’re going to a concert, but you don’t know what is playing? she asked. I remembered the flyer, and showed it to her. She pointed to the first girl and said, Kreisler, Glazunov. She looked under the second picture and said, Ah, Ciaccona. She said it as though she had suddenly become Italian. How much does it cost? It’s free, I repeated. She said, Okay, I will go with you. The bartender, who had been polishing some perfectly polished glasses, stopped to see what would come of that. I didn’t know how to respond, so I stuttered something out, just words like maybe and um and well. She turned angrily away and said, as though she were Poirot, casting accusations, Perhaps you only like teenage girls. I said, Well, it was nice talking to you. I’d finished only half my beer, but it was pretty tasteless. I walked out. It felt a whole lot colder, because I had not wasted enough time, and I had to go back to the recital hall thirty minutes early and hang around the front door like a creep.

The street was empty, but over a period of about fifteen or twenty minutes it began to fill with cars parking. Japanese people stepped out of them. The women carried large umbrellas – it was intermittently sleeting – and the men carried bouquets of flowers. There were young children everywhere. This was the crowd that developed around me while I waited. First there were five, then ten, and soon there were at least two hundred Japanese people standing outside the museum and recital hall. When they finally opened the doors, I was one of the first to go inside. The recital hall was a large white room with multiple thick white pillars and a vaulted sky-blue ceiling. There was a raised stage with a single chair on it, and a music stand. I took a seat in the front row. This seemed to annoy a lot of the people who subsequently filed in and wondered, I presume, who the hell I was and what I was doing there. I nearly stood up and went to the back row, except a man came out – a Professor Schmetterling – who obviously managed the recitals and taught at the school, and addressed us. For a while, nobody understood a word he was saying. He said, Would it be better if I spoke English? The Japanese crowd nodded and one man at the back shouted, Yes, please! So he introduced us to the evening in English. Tonight, he said, it is my privilege to present two of our most promising students. The girls were Umiko Chigama, age thirteen, and Shino Moroto, age fourteen. Chigama went first. She was very good, for thirteen. She was probably very good for thirty, but I would not really have known. There didn’t seem to be any mistakes, though she played without much feeling. Moroto was better. She played the Ciaccona, or Chaconne, the fifth and concluding movement of Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2. I believe I sat next to Moroto’s father, since she looked at him while she was playing, and winked at him during applause. And since he wept when she played, and nobody else wept. Chigama had been very expressive – her shoulders dived from time to time, and her eyes rolled back. Moroto played with no expression at all, and seemed, at times, to mumble numbers to herself, but the music was somehow more powerful, louder.