Rodney wasn’t famous. But the Hass clavichord was. In Munich, three separate newspaper photographers had shown up before the concert at the Rathaus to take a picture of the clavichord. Rodney stood behind it, a mere retainer.
That the audiences who came to see Rodney weren’t large, that the universally retired members of these audiences were permanently stone-faced from years and years of faithfully enduring high culture, that fifteen minutes into a piece by Scheidemann a third of the audience would be asleep, their mouths open as though singing along or sustaining one long complaint—none of that bothered Rodney. He was getting paid, which had never happened before. The halls that Lisa Turner optimistically rented were two-or three-hundred-seat places. With twenty-five or sixteen or (in Heidelberg) three people in attendance, Rodney had the feeling that he was alone, playing for himself. He tried to hear the notes the Master had played more than two hundred years earlier, to catch them on the wind of the moment and reproduce them. It was like bringing Bach back to life and going back in time simultaneously. This was what Rodney thought about as he played in those cavernous, echoing halls.
The Hass clavichord wasn’t as thrilled as Rodney. The clavichord complained a lot. It didn’t want to go back to 1761. It had done its work and wanted to rest, to retire, like the audience. The tangents broke and had to be repaired. A new key went dead every night.
Still, the early music rang out, prim and lurching and undeniably antique, and Rodney, its medium, like a man on a flying horse, maintained his balance on the stool. The keyboard rose and fell, thumped, and the music whirled on.
When he returned to Berlin in late May, Rodney found he had less enthusiasm for strict musicology. He wasn’t sure anymore if he even wanted to be an academic. Instead of getting a Ph.D., he toyed with the idea of enrolling at the Royal Academy of Music, in London, and pursuing a performing career.
West Berlin, meanwhile, had been undoing and remaking Rebecca. In that walled, subsidized half-city, no one seemed to have a job. The comrades in the Wohngemeinschaft spent their time nurturing the sad orange trees on their concrete balcony. Volunteering at the Schwarzfahrer Theater, Rebecca played electrified accompaniment, half Kraftwerk, half Kurt Weill, for the antic, antinuclear goings-on onstage. Up late at night, sleeping ever later in the morning, she made little progress on her examination of Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der sch?nen Künste as it related to theoretical concepts of music listening in eighteenth-century Germany. To be specific, while Rodney was away Rebecca had managed to write five pages.
They had a wonderful year in Berlin, Rodney and Rebecca. But their doctoral research led them to the inescapable conclusion that they didn’t want to be doctors of anything.
They moved back to Chicago and drifted. Rodney joined an early-keyboard group that gave intermittent concerts. Rebecca took up painting. They moved to Bucktown and, a year later, to Logan Square. They lived on next to nothing. They lived like Boho Mouse.
Rodney’s fortieth birthday found him with the flu. He got out of bed with a fever of 103, called the school to cancel his lessons, then got back into bed.
In the afternoon, Rebecca and the girls brought in a weird-looking birthday cake. Through gummed-up eyelids, Rodney saw the lemon sponge cake of the soundboard, the marzipan of the keys, and the chocolate slab of the lid supported by a peppermint stick.
Rebecca’s gift was a plane ticket to Edinburgh and a down payment made out to the Early Music Shop. “Do it,” she said. “Just do it. You need it. We’ll work it out. The mice are starting to sell.”
*
That was three years ago. Now they were gathered around the gimpy-legged secondhand kitchen table, and Rebecca warned Rodney, “Don’t answer the phone.”
The twins were eating their usual naked pasta. The grown-ups, those gourmands, pasta with sauce.
“They called six times today.”
“Who called?” asked Immy.
“Nobody,” said Rebecca.
“The woman?” Rodney asked. “Darlene?”
“No. Somebody new. A man.”
That didn’t sound good. Darlene was almost family at this point. Considering all the letters she had sent, in ever-bolder typefaces, and all the phone calls she’d made, politely asking for money, then demanding money, and finally making threats—considering the persistent entitlement, Darlene was like an alcoholic sister or a cousin with a gambling addiction. Except that in this case she held the moral high ground. Darlene wasn’t the one who owed $27,000 compounding at an interest rate of 18 percent.
Darlene, when she called, called from within the call-center honeycomb; in the background you could hear the buzz of numberless other worker bees. The job was to collect pollen. In that effort, they were beating their wings and, if need be, raising their stingers. Because he was a musician, Rodney heard all this acutely. Sometimes he drifted off and forgot all about the angry bee that was after him.
Darlene had ways of regaining his attention. Unlike a trolling telemarketer, she didn’t make mistakes. She didn’t mispronounce Rodney’s name or mess up his address: she knew these by heart. Since it was easier to resist a stranger, the first time Darlene had called she’d introduced herself. She’d stated her mission and made it clear that she wasn’t going away until she achieved it.
Now she had gone away.
“A man?” Rodney said.
Rebecca nodded. “A not very nice man.”
Immy brandished her fork. “You said nobody called. How can a man be nobody?”
“I meant nobody you know, honey. Nobody you have to worry about.”
Just then the cordless phone rang and Rebecca said, “Don’t answer it.”
Rodney took his napkin (which was in fact a paper towel) and folded it in his lap. In an elevated tone, he said for the girls’ benefit, “People shouldn’t call during dinner. It’s impolite.”
For the first two years, Rodney had kept up with the payments. But then he’d quit teaching at the Old Town School of Folk Music and had tried to go out on his own. Students came directly to his apartment, where he taught them on the clavichord (it was perfect preparation for the piano, he told their parents). For a while, Rodney made about twice as much as he’d been making before, but then the students began to drop out. No one liked the clavichord. It sounded weird, the kids said. Only a girl would play it, one boy said. In a panic, Rodney started renting a rehearsal room with a piano and holding lessons there, but soon he was making less than he’d made at Old Town. That was when he’d quit being a music teacher and taken his present job as a patients’ records associate at an HMO.
By then, however, he’d defaulted on his payments to the Early Music Shop. The interest rate rose and then (fine print in the loan agreement) skyrocketed. After that, he could never catch up.
Darlene had threatened him with repossession, but so far it hadn’t happened. And so Rodney continued to play the clavichord fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes at night.