With his right hand, Rodney played an E-flat scale. “I’m practicing,” he said. He stared at his hand, as though he were a student learning to play scales for the first time, and he didn’t stop staring until Rebecca had withdrawn her head from the doorway. Then Rodney got up and shut the door semi-violently. He came back to the clavichord and started the piece from the beginning.
Müthel hadn’t written much. He composed only when the spirit moved him. That was like Rodney. Rodney played only when the spirit moved him.
It moved him now, tonight. For the next two hours, Rodney played the Müthel piece over and over.
He was playing well, with a lot of feeling. But he was also making mistakes. He soldiered on. Then, to make himself feel better, he finished off with Bach’s French Suite in D minor, a piece he’d been playing for years and knew by heart.
Before long he was flushed and sweating. It felt good to play with such concentration and vigor again, and when he finally stopped, with the bell-like notes still ringing in his ears and off the low ceiling of the room, Rodney lowered his head and closed his eyes. He was remembering that month and a half, at twenty-six, when he’d played ecstatically and invisibly in empty West German concert halls. Behind him on the desk the phone rang, and Rodney swiveled and picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Good evening, am I speaking with Rodney Webber?”
Rodney realized his mistake. But he said, “This is he.”
“My name is James Norris and I’m with Reeves Collection. I know you’re familiar with our organization.”
If you hung up, they called again. If you changed your phone number, they got the new one. The only hope was to make a deal, to stall, to make promises and buy some time.
“I’m afraid I’m well acquainted with your organization.” Rodney was trying for the right tone, light but not insouciant or disrespectful.
“Formerly I believe you’ve been dealing with Ms. Darlene Jackson. She’s been the person assigned to your case. Up until now. Now I’m in charge and I hope we can work something out.”
“I hope so, too,” said Rodney.
“Mr. Webber, I come in when things get complicated and I try to make them simple. Ms. Jackson offered you various payment plans, I see.”
“I sent a thousand dollars in December.”
“Yes, you did. And that was a start. But, according to our records, you had agreed to send two thousand.”
“I couldn’t get that much. It was Christmas.”
“Mr. Webber, let’s keep things simple. You stopped meeting your payments to our client, the Early Music Shop, over a year ago. So Christmas doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with it, does it?”
Rodney hadn’t enjoyed his conversations with Darlene. But now he saw that Darlene had been reasonable, pliable, in a way that this guy James wasn’t. There was a quality in James’s voice that wasn’t so much menacing as obdurate: a stone wall of a voice.
“Your account is in arrears over payments for a musical instrument, is that right? What kind of instrument is it?”
“A clavichord.”
“I’m not familiar with that instrument.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to be.”
The man chuckled, taking no offense.
“Lucky for me, that’s not my job, knowing about ancient instruments.”
“A clavichord is a precursor to the piano,” Rodney said. “Except it’s played by tangents instead of hammers. My clavichord—”
“You see that right there, Mr. Webber? That’s incorrect. It’s not yours. The instrument still belongs to the Early Music Shop out of Edinburgh. You only have it on loan from them. Until you pay off that loan.”
“I thought you might like to know the provenance,” said Rodney. How had his diction got way up here, to these heights? Nothing complex: he just wanted to put James Norris of Reeves Collection in his place. Next Rodney heard himself say, “It’s a copy, by Verwolf, of a style of clavichord made by a man named Bodechtel in 1790.”
James said, “Let me get to my point.”
But Rodney didn’t let him. “This is what I do,” Rodney said, and his voice sounded tight and strained, overtuned. “This is what I do. I’m a clavichordist. I need the instrument to make my living. If you take it back, I’ll never be able to pay you back. Or pay the Early Music Shop.”
“You can keep your clavichord. I’d be happy to let you keep it. All you have to do is pay for it, in full, by five p.m. tomorrow, with a certified check or wire transfer from your bank, and you can go on playing your clavichord for as long as you like.”
Rodney’s laugh was bitter. “Obviously I can’t do that.”
“Then by five p.m. tomorrow we’re going to unfortunately have to come out and repossess the instrument.”
“I can’t get that much by tomorrow.”
“This is the end of the line, Rodney.”
“There’s got to be some way—”
“Only one way, Rodney. Payment in full.”
Clumsily, furiously, his hand like a brick trying to throw a brick, Rodney slammed down the phone.
For a moment he didn’t move. Then he swiveled back around and placed his hands on the clavichord.
He might have been feeling for a heartbeat. He ran his fingers over the gold ornamentation and the tops of the frigid keys. It wasn’t the most beautiful or distinguished clavichord he’d ever played. It couldn’t compare to the Hass, but it was his, or it had been, and it was lovely and rapturous-sounding enough. Rodney would never have got it if Rebecca hadn’t sent him to Edinburgh. He would never have known how deeply depressed he’d been or how happy the clavichord, for a time, would make him.
His right hand was playing the Müthel again.
Rodney knew he’d never been a first-rate musicologist. At best, he was a mediocre, if sincere, performer. With fifteen minutes’ practice in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening, he wasn’t going to get any better.
There’d always been something a little pathetic about being a clavichordist. Rodney knew that. The Müthel he was playing, however, mistakes and all, still seemed beautiful, maybe more so for its obsolescence. He played for another minute. Then he placed his hands on the warm wood of the clavichord and, leaning forward, stared at the painted garden inside the lid.
It was after ten when he came out of the music room. The apartment was quiet and dark. Entering the bedroom, Rodney didn’t turn on the light, so as not to wake Rebecca. He undressed in the dark, feeling in the closet for a hanger.
In his underwear he shuffled to his side of the bed and crawled in. On one elbow he leaned over to see if Rebecca was awake. But then he realized that her side of the bed was empty. She was still in her office, working.