“What’re you saying? I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Those grab knobs don’t cut it when I use a hand. Can’t get the right performance that way. What’s it look like when I use my teeth?”
“What does it look like? What do you mean?”
“Suddenly you don’t understand English?”
“It looks okay,” he said. “It looks fine. It’s interesting.”
“As interesting as a monkey juggling?”
He glowered at me. “What the hell kind of thing is that to say?”
“I don’t want to be a novelty pianist. ‘Playing tonight, Jonah the Crippled Prodigy Bravely Soldiering Forward.’ ”
He hissed through his teeth. “Man, I really don’t like you when you put yourself down.”
“Well, you know, somebody’s got to do it. If I’m not hard on myself, Malcolm, who will be? It isn’t a good thing to be soft on yourself.”
“Who told you that?”
“Somebody smarter than both of us.”
“That could be almost anybody.”
“Exactly.”
In silence, we drank what remained of our Cokes, and then I said, “It’s not a bad thing, Malcolm.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
“I’ve been thinking about Vermeer.”
“What about Vermeer?”
“How he was totally forgotten for two hundred years, and now everybody thinks he’s the greatest ever.”
“So you’re ditching the piano for a paintbrush?”
“If Vermeer had been a piano man, a performer, he’d never have been rediscovered two centuries after he died.”
“Man, you’re losing me.”
“He was rediscovered because he created something. You see? They didn’t dig him up two hundred years after they buried him, and he’s been walking around ever since. His paintings were rediscovered.”
“Believe it or not, I realized that.”
“If I can’t be a performer, on a stage in front of people, maybe that’s good, because maybe what I can do is write music. Create.”
“You mean write songs?”
“At least the melodies. I don’t know about the words.”
“You’re ten.”
“I’m going on eleven. And I don’t expect to have a hit tomorrow. It’ll take years and years to learn.”
“What kind of songs?”
“Rock ’n’ roll, I guess.”
“That’s what sells. No market for new swing.”
“Rock ’n’ roll is a place to start.”
“Maybe ballads, love songs,” he suggested. “Maybe blues.”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Country and western?”
I shrugged. “I don’t have anything against it.”
“Broadway show tunes?”
“Could be interesting.”
“Symphonies?”
“Well, maybe not symphonies.”
“Not until you’re twelve, anyway.”
“I’m no Mozart,” I said.
“I wondered when you’d start being hard on yourself.”
“Maybe I’m not anyone, not Mozart, not Cole Porter or Doc Pomus or anyone who can write good music. But I’ve got to try, don’t I?”
“You’ve got to try,” he agreed. “And you are someone.”
We went on like that for a while, and as he was about to go home, I said, “You have a penlight?”
“What do you want with a penlight?”
“I’ll tell you sometime. I just need one.”
“I can get you one.”
“That would be swell. Maybe tomorrow?”
“Yeah. I’ll get you one tomorrow.”
91
The following day, having the sutures taken out of my back hurt, though not as much as getting blown off my feet by a bomb. The doctor declared himself pleased with my progress, and I said that I was happy with it, too, though in fact I didn’t think I’d made any progress and didn’t expect that I ever would, at least not as far as walking was concerned.
With my father loose in the world, Grandpa didn’t want my mother taking the bus to work or walking alone any distance, and he didn’t trust the reliability of taxicabs. That same day, he fronted her the down payment for a used car, a 1961 Buick station wagon the precise soft brown of a chocolate Necco wafer. For a wagon, that car had cool body styling; and because my wheelchair was collapsible, Mom would be able to stow it in the back of the wagon and take me places with her.
Having been invited the week before, Mr. Yoshioka came to dinner that evening, bearing an immense bouquet of roses that must have been difficult to manage on the bus. He admired the Buick, which was in tip-top condition even though it had sixty thousand miles on it. Over dinner, when I suggested that he should buy a car for himself, he replied that he’d never had the time to take driving lessons.
“Besides,” he said, “I would miss walking to work. I have taken the same route for so many years that every building and every crack in the sidewalk and each of the many details along the way is like an old friend.”