Unwritten Laws 01(34)

Henry’s secret odyssey through Albert’s store had begun with piano lessons, first with the proprietor, but later with Albert’s daughter Swan, who’d been named after a black opera singer from Natchez. Born a slave in 1824, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield had traveled to London and sung for the queen in Buckingham Palace, where opera enthusiasts christened her the Black Swan. Albert Norris had known all about the Black Swan, of course. Swan’s mother had tried to call her Elizabeth, but the child had such beauty and grace that no one ever called her anything but Swan. Like her father, Swan was a musical prodigy, and by seventeen she was handling the majority of Albert’s lessons.

One of Swan’s pupils was a gangly white fourteen-year-old named Henry Sexton. Despite Albert’s strong improvisational style, as a teacher he was a stickler for theory. Henry sometimes felt more bullied by Albert in the teaching room than he did by the redneck coaches on the football field at Ferriday Junior High. But Swan was different. She might run him through a few scales at the beginning of each lesson, but this bored her, and she only did it to please her father. She delighted in teaching Henry to play the songs he really wanted to learn, hits he’d heard on the radio, mostly. Henry lived for the hour he spent with the older girl every Thursday afternoon, confined in the eight-by-ten room with a Baldwin upright and a scent so primally feminine that he could hardly think of anything else.

A narrow vertical window had been set in the door of the teaching room, and Henry had cursed it a thousand times. Albert used the window to keep an eye on Swan when she was teaching boys. Since the store was elevated off the ground, the floorboards always creaked, and Henry used those creaks as a Distant Early Warning System to keep track of Albert’s movements. The problem was, some customer was usually playing a piano in the main room, and this masked the sound of Albert’s walk. Bass guitars were even worse. To Henry’s everlasting gratitude, Albert sometimes taught piano in the display room at the same time Swan was teaching him. And it was one of these afternoons that Swan had given Henry the greatest shock, and the greatest gift, of his life.

He’d been trying to copy her technique on Bach, which was torture when 95 percent of his concentration was on the shapely thigh of the beautiful girl sitting hip to hip with him. He was also praying she wouldn’t notice the taut little tent in his lap, which had become a regular feature of the lessons, and which Henry simply could not control. As he struggled to keep his left hand in rhythm, Swan’s hand settled on that tent as softly as a butterfly. Then she began to rub it.

“Keep playing,” she whispered.

Henry stopped anyway, his heart and lungs expanding like balloons hooked to a high-pressure cylinder.

“Go on,” Swan urged, her big eyes flashing, “or I’ll have to quit.”

Sweat poured off Henry’s face. He banged his left hand down on the keyboard, and Swan rubbed harder beneath it. Less than a minute later Henry shivered and began to smack the keys like a man with stumps for fingers—but he kept playing. Swan kissed his cheek and said, “Maybe now you can concentrate, boy.”

After this lesson, Henry ran home and washed his pants in the Whirlpool before his mother could get home from her second job at the church. Then he’d prayed eighteen hours a day for his next lesson to arrive.

When the next Thursday came, Swan made him wait almost the whole hour before doing anything other than what Henry’s mother was paying her to do. But fifty minutes into the lesson, Elizabeth Swan Norris got up and moved to Henry’s right side, which was not her usual place, then took his right hand and guided it under her dress. Henry gulped when he felt what awaited his fingers. Her wetness confused and terrified him. Still, he let her move his fingers in circles over the hard little berry between her legs while she played piano with her left hand. When Swan finally shuddered against him, the music stopped. When her father looked into the window a few seconds later, he saw two kids on the piano bench and four hands on the keyboard. He did not see that two of the hands were wet.

“Don’t you go falling in love with me,” Swan warned Henry that day. “If you start talking foolishness, I’ll stop these lessons. You hear?”

“But … but …” Henry stuttered, knowing already that his heart was full of something that felt nothing like foolishness.

“But nothing,” Swan snapped. “I’m just giving you some special lessons, that’s all. Lessons you need.”

Five weeks of special lessons followed, each one ending with mutual ecstasy. Twice Swan freed Henry from his jeans and sucked until he almost screamed, and those times he felt what the preachers claimed being filled with the holy spirit was supposed to be like and what a heroin addict had told him it felt like when he’d shot up for the first time.