The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

14.

A WEEK BEFORE THE recital Cynthia told me suddenly that she’d changed her mind –“Lee Ann is going to accompany me, after all. It just seemed easier.”

I was stunned by this information. It just seemed easier—what did that mean?

Obviously it must mean that I wasn’t playing well enough, after all our practicing. I was not a “real” musician like Cynthia and Lee Ann—I could not be trusted with Cynthia Heike’s violin solo.

Yet I stood mute staring at Cynthia as if I had not entirely heard. Or if, in another moment, there would be another phrase from her, that refuted the first. Seeing the look of shock in my face (which perhaps she had not anticipated) Cynthia murmured an apology of sorts, not very convincingly; for Cynthia could not lie convincingly. An individual of pride and dignity cannot lie.

“It just seemed easier,” Cynthia said, evasively. “Lee Ann knows the piece pretty well. She can play by ear, you know . . .”

I went away shaken. I did not hear Cynthia calling after me. We were at school, in the corridor outside our homeroom, a tunnel of slamming lockers, contorted faces. Yet soon, when I was alone, and calmer, I understood, and did not blame Cynthia. For one with my musical limitations, a “perfect” performance could only be a fluke. I could not play a composition identically each time; each time, I played differently; I could not “keep time”; I had not a sense of pitch; I could memorize notes, and repeat passages until I’d seemed to master them; essentially, I was untrainable and no amount of practice could remedy that. The fact that I’d had inferior piano teachers in Lockport (whose modest weekly fees my grandmother had paid, happily for years) could not be disguised, for fatally they had allowed me to play piano badly, as they had praised me irresponsibly, and a sharp-eared music student like Cynthia Heike or Lee Ann Krauser could detect such deficits, she had but to listen closely.

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