expected him to banter about her critiques? To refute her comments amusingly? He didn’t. He looked embarrassed that he’d disappointed her. I’m sorry, Antonio. I wish I would have told you back then to wait, keep going, no one can write decent fiction in less than two years. The other day the televisions at my gym were showing a special about astronauts, Antonio said. Did you know my neon gym is my one link to American pop culture? I was on the Treadmaster watching all those silent televisions, and in spite of their muteness I could easily tell what the shows and the commercials were all about because they had cued up all their moments for me. Here’s the moment of truth. Here’s the moment of cereal. Plus some of the televisions had subtitles. What does it mean, Masha? When all our narratives have been cued up for us? Here’s a moment for you: There was a radical old priest at my Jesuit high school and we were all in awe of him and for years I used to think of him as my mentor but I only spoke to him once, maybe twice. By the time I arrived at San Javier he had abdicated his role as a spiritual counselor because he thought my classmates and I were the problem. I wasn’t the exception, but for years I imagined he’d been my spiritual sensei, my Narcissus, my Mister Miyagi. But it doesn’t really matter, right? Our faux narratives affect us just the same. Here’s a narrative for you: one time I stayed on the Treadmaster for more than two hours because the music channel was showing a documentary about a former member of Menudo, a Latin American boy band that was popular when I was in middle school. This represents at least a hundred words I was not counting on. Come, Antonio said, pulling her to his bedroom, I want you to meet Alvin Lucier.
—
Not yet asleep on her living room sofa, as she listens to Tabula Rasa amid boxes she still needs to retape and ship to her new life at NYU’s film program, boxes where she may or may not toss in Antonio’s reddened manuscripts, she wonders if years from now she will only remember Antonio because of Tabula Rasa, the only piece out of all the contemporary pieces he’d included in his compendium that turned into a favorite (in a few days she will move away from San Francisco like everyone else, leaving behind friends who were really acquaintances who paired up with her simply to avoid going out at night by themselves and who will not remember her just as Antonio won’t remember them and she won’t remember him — every moment is an ending, Arvo Pärt said, every five minutes there’s an ending do you understand? — no, I don’t —), and perhaps all that will remain of San Francisco for her will be Tabula Rasa and the vague contours of Antonio at his farewell party (why hadn’t she interrupted his drunk ramblings with questions or asides or by shouting at him why are you leaving? — you didn’t want him to think you cared? — I did and didn’t, do you understand? — on the one hand everything will pass and on the other nothing will pass and I miss Antonio’s dumb sprint toward everything in the world —), and perhaps she will also remember that first night with Antonio at Bistro Stelline, and afterwards how surprised she’d been at how much he’d revealed about himself and how quickly she’d accepted his invitation to come to his apartment, although he didn’t phrase it as an invitation but simply slipped his hand on hers and said come, Masha, no, Antonio, she didn’t say, I just met you, no, Masha thinks as she listens to Tabula Rasa, she will toss Antonio’s ersatz fiction in her recycling bin along with her unused canvases and be done with a life in San Francisco she will not remember once she settles in New York.
—
I’d never listened to classical music before, Antonio wrote, at home in Guayaquil no one unwrapped the classical cassette collection compiled by the Encyclopedia Salvat because on the one hand my mother favored the melodrama of José José, not melodrama, no, let’s call it pickled fatalism, while on the other hand I favored the pickled nihilism of Guns N’ Roses: to me symphonic music as elemental as Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique sounded like sap from soundtracks, so to train my ear I started listening to easy Satie piano pieces, then I moved on to Mozart sonatas, a movement at a time, which Annie was glad to supply for me, sharing her recordings of the complete Beethoven sonatas by Richard Goode, of Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes by Alfred Brendel, everything by Sviatoslav Richter and nothing by Glenn Gould, and after I exhausted Annie’s music stash I ventured out on my own, driving to the shopping outlets in Sonoma or Saint Helena and listening to Scriabin’s sonatas or Prokofiev’s piano concertos or whatever I’d purchased at random from the classical music section at Tower Records that same afternoon, no, not at random, those listening / driving sessions were life projects to me so the recordings had to be of (a) longer piano pieces and of (b) composers I didn’t yet know, and perhaps because I didn’t yet know too many classical pieces besides the ones that Annie was introducing me to through analog recordings of Sviatoslav Richter and tapes of master classes she’d attended at Berkeley, which I was borrowing from her because I’d refused to play the little Bach pieces she’d assigned to me from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach and therefore needed to know what else was out there, purchasing a recording before setting out to Sonoma or Saint Helena still felt like a chance activity, and although Annie had cautioned me against listening to piano music while driving because the onrush of road underneath obfuscates the nuances that I should be listening for, especially when the markings of a phrase demanded pianissimo, I did it anyway, purchasing Prokofiev’s piano concertos because Annie frowned upon Prokofiev — if you would have lived in San Francisco with me I would have immediately shared with you that as a young student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory Prokofiev would sneak into the concert hall before a performance to pencil wrong notes into the scores, Leopoldo — and then one night at Annie’s house, after she examined the cover of my sheet music binder that read Antonio’s Piano Career, and after she laughed at it as one laughs at the silly refrains of children, I parked outside Gordo’s Taquería on Solano Street and cloistered myself inside my car, forcing myself to listen to the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique until it made sense to me, which must have been a long while because the burrito folk started eyeing me suspiciously: by the time I was done training my ear, I had to accept that it was too late; that there was more to playing the piano than pressing the right notes; that I would never achieve a competitive level of pianism and would never become a pianist: well, why not a writer?
—
I Am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier: I am sitting in a room, Alvin Lucier said, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room, again and again, until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves. Was this Antonio’s idea of a prank? Or was his insistence to have her listen to this piece just a pretext to seclude himself with her by his bed? Antonio wasn’t laughing, and the door to his bedroom wasn’t locked, but neither was sufficient evidence to refute her hypotheses. So that any semblance of my speech, Lucier said, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, if you ignore the reverb and the space sounds of the electronic dance music coming from his living room, where his farewell party wasn’t ebbing yet — can you believe it? Antonio’s going back to do the Peace Corps in his own country! — are the natural resonant frequencies of the room, articulated by speech. What you won’t hear is Antonio relaying his unspoken expectation of her to her: concentrate, Masha, music isn’t just counterpoint and variations. But I regard this activity, Lucier said, not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have. I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. After the seventh or eighth iteration she stopped listening in for surprises. Lucier was simply shearing his voice and what remained was metallic noise. His fingers surprised her by grazing her lips. She didn’t smile so he did it again, this time acting as if he was clearing bread crumbs, stepping back, drunk like the rest of them — all of my friends here are party friends, Mashinka — turning his left hand into a bird, fingers like antlers, as he had done the night they stormed out of the premiere of Messiaen’s San Francis de Assisi. Whatever he saw in her face saddened him but he was a quick one, raising his index finger in mockery, as if he had just remembered something important: aha, yes, he had to stop his double decker and tap the other portable player to check that it was still running. Are you recording this, Antonio? He nodded, motioning with his hand to please recite something for him. Sure, why not? She could recite something he wasn’t likely to know: here is my gift, she could recite, not roses on your grave, not sticks of
