You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe Read Free Book Online Page A

housemate’s wit. “Just a few minutes of close listening, with sarcasm, even, I’d certainly appreciate. How for example would you say I’m handling the rubato?”
    “What’s rubato?”
    “It’s short for tempo rubato , which in Italian literally means ‘robbed time,’ and it’s when you play some little bits of the song slower and others faster than the sheet music literally tells you to. Chopin encouraged this to give a piece of music that romantic feel.”
    “Well so I’m guessing rubato doesn’t mean you play each note as if it was from a different song than all the other notes are from.”
    “Now you see? That’s exactly the kind of useful criticism—again, sarcasm notwithstanding—”
    “I gotta go.”
    “Humor an old man.”
    “Which one?”
    “The one who may well be out of your hair in a matter of months.”
    “Why, are you going somewhere?”
    “Maybe. And this place you’re going with such urgency is?”
    He didn’t like Jones’s slightly opened mouth. It, like his raised eyebrow, acknowledged something, who knew what? He may really only have wanted piano help on this occasion, he was nothing if not sentimental and self-involved, and often appeared not to know he’d practically raped Karl a thousand times with his unhappy wit, but it also needed to be taken into account that he hadn’t yet remarked on Karl’s face, and that he’d been known to keep a comment to himself and use the silence that replaced it as a filament to tether Karl to him. But Karl felt filament-proof, inoculated if you will that very afternoon against being duped or bested for at least the rest of the day, and, mistaking pain for wisdom, chose to abandon the exit and enter the rec room.
    “Now if this rec room were somehow the foyer of the famous Steinway Hall in New York City, which was the biggest music venue in town till they built Carnegie Hall, what you’d see here would be one of each of every piano they made, including an example or two of their custom models for elite clients, because while the backbone of their branding scheme was the ubiquity of the piano—you had a piano because you had one and you didn’t question having one because you didn’t question having a table and plates to eat off of—the, uh, donut hole if I may now switch metaphors of the brand was the whiff of rarity, the whiff of difficulty, of aspiration, it’s got to hurt you a little to have a piano or you wouldn’t really want it. Was it the black American author James Baldwin who said that the failure of the American labor movement could be attributed to the symbolic desire of every worker for the boss’s daughter’s hand in marriage? Am I making sense here or am I just rambling?” Jones said as he played a few inaugural chords that were not all that different to Karl from getting punched. “The Steinways were Germans, by the way. Still are, they’ve got a plant in Frankfurt I believe or Hamburg, cities that sound alike to us but probably have little to do with each other if you’re actually German. They’ve got to this day a bold business plan that bespeaks genius.”
    Karl had never been comforted by the power of boldness or genius. He really did hope in spite of everything he knew about life that the meek would inherit the earth, though he didn’t see how they could all share it and be any better off than they were now.
    Jones played the first theme once through and Karl paced more rapidly than he felt Chopin would have wanted him to on the far side of the pool table, keeping it at all times between the music and himself.
    “All right so what should I do here?”
    “Take some piano lessons.”
    “It’s a fair point. I get so busy during the week—someone’s got to slay the dragons—so I’m lucky if I get an hour here and there to practice, and then too I’m restless, easily distracted. I’d do better if there weren’t a pool table also in this room. If each one had its own room I’d be good at both, but