The soloist Page 13

  His mother immediately started scolding him in Korean, saying only the phrase "wasting teacher's time" in English. Though I nearly agreed with her for once, I realized that if I questioned the boy's choice at all—if I made him at all conscious of having to please me with the choice—the effect would be utterly ruined. I mustered an expression of inno-

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  cence and said, "Mrs. Kim, there's nothing wrong with that suit. If he likes it, I think it would be fine."

  She looked at me in total confusion. Kyung-hee slipped away from us and wandered into the store. "That for Halloween!" Mrs. Kim said despairingly. "This for playing game! Why you always want him playing game, 'Jump like cat,' 'Wear funny suit'.>"

  "Mrs. Kim, music isn't like other jobs. You don't get good at it by making a serious face and pretending like you work in a big company. The only way he's going to become great and make money is if he enjoys music so much he can't do anything else. I'm trying to help your son, Mrs. Kim, I really am, and I know what I'm doing. I was just like your son, so I know what to do."

  Her hands were clenched into little fists and she looked as if she was fighting back tears. "We move here so Kyung-hee and K>aing-ja have good life, not like in Korea. Here we gotta make dn^ cleaner, no speak English, everybody think we stupid people! Mr. Kim, he no want Kyung-hee playing music, he say Kyung-hee no make money. He want Kyung-hee be engineer. I want Kyung-hee be happy too, so I fighting all the time, I say let him do music but he do it serious way. You, you American! You say, Tlay game, be happy, you make money.' OK for you, but what if Kyung-hee play game, be happy, but not work hard enough.^ Then he got nothing!"

  It was the longest speech I had ever heard her make, and I didn't know what to say. I understood her better now, but it wouldn't have done anyone any good for me to tailor Kvoing-hee's lessons to suit his parents' interests. You either teach honestly or you don't.

  She spared me from having to say anything by sighing

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  heavily and looking down at her purse. "Everybody say you good teacher, famous teacher. You nice to Kyung-hee, he like you." She shrugged. "You want to buy suit, you buy. Maybe Mr. Kim no have to see."

  We walked into the store together and found Kyung-hee standing next to the display model. I tried to forget everything I'd just heard and asked, "Is that the suit you want.> Don't worry about what I think. If it makes you happy, then you must have it."

  Kyung-hee seemed to be considering it. His mother had embarrassed him, but I hoped not too much. After a few seconds he glanced at me and nodded v^th his eyes. I think he was trying to answer without his mother seeing.

  I bought the suit. It was shockingly expensive, especially after the salesman, an aggressive kid with the letters XTC shaved into the back of his scalp, insisted that the costume wouldn't be complete unless it included the "utility belt," an accessory that aspiring Bat-persons simply cannot do without, as one heard him tell it. When we returned to the house I didn't ask if Kyung-hee would like to put it on for our lesson; I didn't see any need to put myself or Mrs. Kim through the sight of him practicing with that shiny cowl, with its permanentiy molded frown, perched on top of his head. I gave him my own version of the pep talk von Kempen had given me, amending it only in that he was to wear the suit for practice only, not lessons. He seemed genuinely excited, which delighted me.

  We picked up where we had left off with the drills and they went well. At the end I gave him a pat of encouragement on the shoulder, and smiled at Mrs. Kim. She only shrugged.

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  The killer's father appeared as the second witness for the defense. He had been sitting in the gallery since the beginning of the trial, but I hadn't guessed that he was the father; I had thought he was a member of the press.

  Mr. Weber told the court that he was the senior vice president of a multinational paper-goods company. From the moment he got on the stand you could see he was no stranger to confrontation. In spite of a considerable paunch, the loss of most of his hair and deep worry lines etched around his eyes, he looked like a powerfril man, with his huge shoulders and barrel chest. He maintained a stem, controlled expression for almost the whole time he was on the stand. His son, I noticed, only glanced at him furtively. His beatific expression had vanished for the time being, and was replaced by something more like embarrassment.

  Ms. Doppelt asked Mr. Weber to tell the court when his son's troubles at home and in school had started. The big man, who was sweating profiisely in the air-conditioned courtroom, dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief and

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  began by describing his wife's first hospitalization for mental illness.

  "When Philip was three, Nancy started getting obsessive about cleaning the house. She'd always been a damn good housekeeper, but this was obviously not about having a clean house. She'd spend hours folding the clothes in a single drawer, over and over. Then one day I came home from work and found her in the bathroom, curled up in the bathtub and crying. Philip was in the bedroom—he hadn't been fed all day, he was screaming. That's when I had to call the doctor. They took her to the hospital, and she stayed there for twelve weeks.

  "I had to get someone to take care of Philip. That's the way it was until he left for college. Nancy was always in and out of hospitals. When she was home, she was pretty much helpless, so she wasn't much of a mother. Because of my work, we moved around a lot, so we had to change nannies several times. I thought they were all adequate, but now ... I don't know . . ."

  Mr. Weber testified that his son had always been moody, but seemed to be managing just fine until college, when he dropped out suddenly after only one semester.

  "He came home—^we were living in Sacramento at that time—and, oh, I don't know, I think he said he wanted to write a novel, or screenplay, or something of that nature. I was skeptical. Some of his teachers said he was talented, but you don't know how to interpret that. It sounded to me like he was just looking for a way to avoid having to work. I said he could live at home for six months and give it a try, but at the end of the six months he'd be on his own."

  Mr. Weber wasn't at home for a lot of this period because his job took him back and forth to Europe frequently at the

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  time. But despite the absences, his relationship with his son got especially tense during these months. "As I say, he was always kind of. . . moody, quiet. But now it was more of a kind of. . . He sulked around the house all the time. He was going through one of those college-age attitudes where the father could do no right in his mind. He was very negative about me and my work."

  *'In what ways was he negative.^" Ms. Doppelt asked abruptly. As usual, she was not demonstrating a good bedside manner. With this witness, how^ever, it didn't bother me; Mr. Weber seemed like a fairly unpleasant fellow, so it was almost satisfying to see him grilled this way.

  "Oh, well, it's a paper company I run, right? So I cut down rain forests, I pollute rivers, I take owls' nests away— the whole nine yards."

  "So would you say that most of your talks with Philip were actually arguments.^"

  "When we talked at all, yes. We had nothing in common, so it always felt like there was nothing to talk about."

  I knew that situation well enough. By the time I was ten I could no longer hold meaningful conversation with my parents; neither of them knew enough about music to follow what I was saying, and I didn't know enough about life outside of music to talk about anything else. This didn't seem to bother my mother, who made enormous sacrifices to protect me from the outside world. Believing as she did that my talent came directly from God, she felt it was her solemn duty to watch over my gift, and to make sure I was always comfortable and safe from unpleasant distractions. Her role as guardian and manager kept her busy and appeared to compensate for the fact that instead of a friendship developing between us we formed a bond that was made up almost

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  entirely of a sense of mutual obligation. Instead of talking with me, she gen
erally issued reports on what she was doing for my benefit, and I reciprocated by allowing her to have her way in matters of policy, such as what I would eat and wear, where I would play and when, and whom I could meet.

  My father took a different approach. Once he felt he was no longer of use to me as an adviser or confidant, which was around my tenth or eleventh year, he abruptly retreated. Whenever people recognized him afi:er concerts or were told that he was my father, he would hunch up his shoulders, lower his head and answer their questions in short, tense phrases, and would usually excuse himself by saying to my mother, "I'll wait in the car." It was as if he didn't want to spoil things with his presence.

  When I was very young I was embarrassed by him, but as I grew older his social awkwardness particularly irritated me. He wasn't a stupid man, so I felt he had no reason to act ashamed of himself. If he hadn't had to flee Germany with my mother he would have been a lawyer there; because of his poor English he wasn't able to pass the entrance exams to any law schools here and finally had to take a job as a clerk in a large shipping firm. I could understand his disappointment, but it hardly made him a failure as a human being. It made me angry that at my concerts and at the parties our family was invited to he would make himself so conspicuously unobtrusive, because, I felt, this made people assume he must have had good reason to do so, and then I really did feel ashamed of him.

  The whole time I was growing up I never knew my father to have any friends. He never invited any co-workers over for dinner, and he never went out at night or on weekends with anyone. He came straight home fi-om work every night, and

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  stayed there even' weekend, finding usefijl but entirely unnecessary' things to do around the house. He would ask me how my studies were going, what music I planned to learn next and so on, but the few times I tried to talk to him about annhing else he always found something to do with his hands so that he wouldn't have to look directly at me. He would move his eyebrows up and down and nod occasionally so that I would know he was listening, but he kept his eyes on his hands, which would fold things, twist things, arrange things, prune things, polish things or whittle things, and this— intentionally or not—always seemed to drain the emotional content out of what I was sa'ing and turn it into polite, indirect chatter.

  My father rarely discussed his early life with me. I knew from my mother that his parents, who had chosen not to leave Germany, had died in the Holocaust, but I was in my twenties before I heard the rest of the stor' from a cousin. Our uncle, my father's oldest brother, had been held at the same camp as my grandparents but had managed to survive. In the years after the war ended, consumed with guilt over having lived without being able to save his own parents, he became addicted to morphine and died of an overdose in 1949. I never spoke about this with my father, even after I'd heard the story. The only truly weighty conversation I ever had with him occurred when I asked if he thought America could survive having a poorly educated, morally confiised former actor as its president.

  "It depends," he said.

  "On what?"

  "Whether you're an optimist or a pessimist."

  When I asked him to explain how he defined these two groups, he said, "Reinhart, when somebody gets born, it's

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  like he got pushed off the top of one of those ski-slope places. There's only one way to go, and that's down. Optimists are the people who face backwards; they're looking up, but trying real hard not to notice that up is getting farther away. Pessimists are facing the direction they're going."

  "So what are you, Dad.>"

  "I'm not looking."

  At the end of the six months Mr. Weber asked his son to show him the novel, and the boy admitted that he hadn't written a line.

  "I felt bad for Philip then, I really did. It broke my heart, because as a kid he was always slouching around the house, he had no friends, and the nanny said that all he did was watch TV all day and sleep on the couch."

  "Objection!" Mr. Graham interrupted. "That's hearsay, your Honor."

  "Sustained. Mr. Weber, just tell us what you know to be fact."

  The anguished father nodded and continued: "This was my own son. But I felt I had to be firm with him; otherwise he might never take responsibility for himself So I gave him five hundred dollars and told him he was on his own."

  "Was that the last time you saw him before he was arrested this year?" Ms. Doppelt asked.

  "No. He showed up about a year afi:er I'd kicked him out. I came home from work one night and there he was, sitting in the living room. He looked terrible. He was thin and pale, and obviously something was wrong with him. He talked kind of slurred and wasn't always making fiall sentences. He was rambling about living in Los Angeles and how he was writing for some big movie company. I could tell that he was

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  on drugs and I confronted him. He didn't deny it, just went pale and stormed out of the house. That was the last time I saw him. I assume he drove back to Los Angeles."

  **Mr. Weber, I realize this is a difficult question, but I think you understand why I have to ask it. Do you feel you did the right thing by sending him off on his own when you did.^"

  Mr. Weber mopped his forehead and cleared his throat. "With the information I had then, I think I did the best I could," he said tightly. ''But knowing what I do now, I would do it differently."

  "What makes you say that?"

  The man exhaled loudly. He seemed very uncomfortable about having to admit that he had made a mistake. "When Philip dropped out of college I thought he was just being difficult, that it was just a childish way of getting attention. He didn't act the way Nancy did during her bad spells, so I didn't think he had her mental problems. I guess I couldn't let myself think that was possible; it was too awful to think about. I thought that setting rules and being strict with him would make him grow up. I didn't want him to become one of those spoiled rich kids who become parasites as adults. Now I realize that he did have a problem, something of a mental nature. It wasn't his fault. I wish I had known that then. I would have sent him to doctors, and—"

  Mr. Graham objected, saying this was all speculation, and the judge agreed.

  Ms. Doppelt asked the father to read several passages aloud from a series of letters that Philip had addressed to his mother when he was living at the Zen Foundation. Mr. Weber had never passed them on to his wife because he felt they would only upset her. For the most part the letters

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  alternated between rambling, immature sentiments about life's impermanence and dramatic promises to exert himself to his fullest until he became enlightened and fulfilled his vow "to save all sentient beings from suffering." The overall impression you got was that Philip was a painfully insecure young man trying desperately to impress his absent mother, but in pathetically fantastical, overblown ways.

  A part of one letter, however, impressed and interested me. It read: "... sometimes when I'm sitting zazen in the main hall an intense thing happens, which happens to people who are on the brink of satori. I'll be listening to something, like the temple bell, or the garbage truck backing up every morning at around six, and if I hit a certain kind of state of mind, I can suddenly see the sound or taste it! Like the sound of the bell is dark green and shiny or it tastes like those slippery mushrooms that come in cans. The truck backing up has one of those beeping sounds when it goes backwards and the beep is bright yellow and has a metallic taste, but when he revs up the engine that's black, and for some reason it doesn't have a flavor. This could be a makyo, which means a kind of illusion that advanced Zen students get and I'll have to push through it, or it may be an early taste of enlightenment."

  This interested me because when I was very young one of the reasons I was able to hear a piece of music and then play it right back without having to look at a score was that for me each musical phrase had not so much a color or flavor as a texture, and if I could remember the sequence of textures, I could automatically reproduce the s
ounds. Philip's mention of "slippery mushrooms" suddenly brought a flood of memories for me. I could even recall a few of my textures, particularly the ones I associated with slow, haunting melodies.

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  There were phrases that felt like satin or feathers, and others that had the texture of coarse sand or polished marble. These memories were so pleasant that I fell into a grateful reverie for a while, where I remained until Judge Davis announced the morning break.

 

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  As the other jurors were standing up to file out, Maria-Teresa casually asked me if I would like to join her later for lunch. I was thrilled but nervous at the same time. Though there was nothing wrong with our eating together, there was the as yet unacknowledged fact that she was married. I knew, of course, that the only reason I'd gravitated toward her was the way she looked, but I certainly didn't intend to make a pass at her. I simply wanted to enjoy the fact that someone so physically attractive would pay attention to me.

  I wasn't completely without experience around women; I had nearly fallen in love once, in my late twenties. Naomi was a violist who played in a semiprofessional quartet with Martin, the well-read violin instructor. He thought she and I might hit it off, so he invited Naomi and me and a few other musicians over for dinner one night. I was attracted to her, and Martin strongly encouraged me to call her up, assuring me that she was interested. As usual I felt hesitant about doing so; instead of calling her right away I experienced a surge of renewed determination and practiced until I thought my arms would drop off, hoping to make progress toward

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  solving my problem so that I could at least tell her that I was preparing a concert. But when that effort brought no results, I ielded to Martin's exhortations and called her up.

  We dated for several months, but it was an awlcu'ardly platonic relationship. For most of our dates we went to concerts. When we didn't go to concerts, we talked about concerts or about music in general. She liked to talk about her quartet and solo work, but when she asked about my playing I could only discuss the past. Since we were both musicians, and had been nothing else since childhood, we had little else to share. We might have become great friends, but hanging over us was the expectation that we become something more than friends. Specifically, the expectation was that / should turn us into something more than just ftiends; she was a traditional-minded young lady and was clearly not going to initiate any of the activities I had in mind.