The Music Teacher by Barbara Hall

Author:Barbara Hall [Hall, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781565126725
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2009-11-16T08:00:00+00:00

10

YOU MIGHT BE WONDERING how a woman gets to be forty in a city as big as Los Angeles without having any female friends. Well, I did have them. Or I had one. Her name was Leah.

We used to meet at John O’Groats, an Irish breakfast joint on Pico, every other Saturday morning to catch up. Leah was a lawyer-turned-artist. She worked in family law. She dropped out and took up mixed media, which, as far as I could tell, was about putting unlikely stuff together until it looked good. She said that’s what families were about, too. But with art, nobody gets hurt.

Leah made a name for herself by collecting bottle caps, flattening them with an iron, painting them, and then arranging them into abstract forms on a piece of plywood. There was a real rush for her work a few years back. Celebrities bought it. (That’s how you know you’ve made it in L.A.) Leah would call me at all hours, saying, “Oh, my God, Tom Cruise was just here!” Or George Clooney or Jennifer Lopez or Susan Sarandon. Like most art waves in Los Angeles, it didn’t last long.

We met at church, when I first moved here. A laid-back Episcopal church, which never bothered with follow-up. My faith started dwindling around the breakup of my marriage, and the church was so laid back they never sent anyone to check on me. This just didn’t seem right to me. Though at the time, Leah said, “Pearl, be honest. If they sent someone, you’d throw a bucket of piss in their face.”

I would never have done that, but it sounded appealing.

I said, “Well, I’d like the option.”

Leah laughed her raspy smoker’s laugh and said, “That’s why preachers stopped making house calls. Who wants to get pissed on without a soul to show for it?”

Leah still went to church, even though she had been flailing as an artist. Or maybe because of it. She liked her faith. Whenever we talked, she’d say, “Don’t you miss the wafer, Pearl? Don’t you want to take Communion?”

“What for?”

“For protection,” she said.

“Protection against what?”

“Well, I don’t know. Life.”

“I don’t think it works that way. That’s more like superstition.”

“It’s not a superstition. It’s an image. An archetype. Jesus is your lawyer. Communion is your retainer.”

“Please.” I kind of believed it. But at the same time, as a musician, I thought I was way more up in God’s grill than Leah. Although flattening out bottle caps might have had a spiritual component I hadn’t yet understood. I have always believed in art, have devoted myself to it from an early age, because I decided it was important to make the world a more beautiful place. But the bottle caps sometimes looked to me like a nervous preoccupation, an attempt to ward something off. It scared me when I thought that music might have become that for me, too.

Leah and I had our bimonthly breakfast at John O’Groats shortly after my visit to the Edwardses’. I usually filled her in on all the happenings at my job.

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