"There comes a point," she said, "where it's no longer worth it."

There was something mature in her tone of voice, but I chose to ignore it.

Still stuck in teacher mode, I said, "Don't you dare say that. Music is always worth it. It's worth everything and anything. I'll talk to Dorothy. I'll make it work."

She shook her head vigorously. "No, don't do that."

"You don't understand," I said, allowing some of my own desperation to creep through. "When you are good, when you have real talent, you also have a moral obligation to develop it, to see where it intends to take you."

She lifted her eyes to me, at the same time withdrawing her hand from mine. She chewed on a hangnail, her eyes trained on my face.

"I have a moral obligation?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Like G.o.d? He's going to punish me if I stop?"

Had I not been so desperate in that moment, I would have told the truth. I would have said, Oh, Hallie, who the h.e.l.l knows about G.o.d or his intentions? I only know that I would do almost anything to possess your talent, so I'm willing to do almost anything to make sure that, at least in you, it is realized. That is a teacher's obligation, is it not? A teacher shows her student how to do what she herself is not capable of, not courageous enough to pursue.

Instead, because I was on a roll, I said, "It's not the kind of punishment you're thinking of. If you give up, your punishment will be to walk around in this world, a true musician without an instrument. A player without a place to play."

She stared at the ground, maybe at her feet, maybe at something I could not see.

"You don't want to give up, do you?" I asked.

She shrugged. "It's part of my father, part of my mother. It's the only thing I love."

"Well, there you go," I said, feeling a tenuous victory.

She sighed a long sigh and lifted the instrument to her chin. She raised the bow shoulder-high and looked at me again.

"So anything is worth it?" she asked.

"Anything," I told her.

As if I knew. As if I had a f.u.c.king clue.

The money, somehow, did not give out. She kept coming in for lessons. Dorothy kept writing checks. The world kept turning; it didn't end. And Hallie kept making beautiful sounds.

I held on to my dreams, and to hers, locking them both away in a safe place. A place of isolation, devoid of conscience, devoid of regret. I pondered it in my heart.

ALL CRIMINALS HAVE a deep need to confess.

My father, the carpenter, confessed to me by taking me to see fires being put out.

He loved fire the way I love music, and he could not keep it to himself. He told me how fires started. He told me how they were extinguished.

All criminals confess to their crimes through their obsessions. s.e.x addicts pretend to be celibate. Thieves pretend to admire cops. Arsonists pretend to worship firefighters.

There was a tradition in my house, in my lonely house in Virginia, with my two angry parents, who mostly hated life and refused to partic.i.p.ate in it until the fire alarm went off. Then my father would wake me up, regardless of the hour, and load me into the car, and we would chase the fire.

My father loved wood, and he equally and curiously loved the thing that could destroy it.

It was up to him which ent.i.ty he preferred over the other. Creation or destruction is always the choice. He worried over both. I sat still and waited to learn.

I think, in some part of my brain, that I committed to birth rather than death. Which didn't make me weak. It just made me, as I see it, a woman.

Much later, when he saw me falling in love with an instrument, he wanted to say, Yes, I've known a love like that, quite apart from what you feel for another person. The love you feel for a force, for the evidence of G.o.d on earth. He loved fire, but he had no real place to worship it. He loved fire too much to kill it. Much as I ultimately loved music too much to kill it.

We are, of course, destroyed by what we love.

9.

WHO WAS THE GREATEST lyricist who ever lived?

Patrick says, "Paul Simon."

Ernest says, "Steve Earle."

Clive says, "Bruce Springsteen. No, John Lennon. No, Elvis Costello. No, Bruce."

I say, "Woody Guthrie."

Franklin says, "Who the h.e.l.l cares about lyrics?"

It is a Wednesday night. We are closing up shop, and we're all somewhat behind, since the holidays are closing in and the store has been very busy. I am cranky, mainly because it is December and I have no one to celebrate with, but also because, generally speaking, I need to get laid, and not getting laid really does make a woman cranky.

Music almost does the trick, but eventually it doesn't. Eventually the keeper of the music realizes that it isn't quite the same as s.e.x, and then the keeper of the music gets a little agitated, knowing that s.e.x would actually help her sleep. But she doesn't know where to get it. No, that's not entirely true. She could get it from the twenty-eight-year-old ba.s.s player, but she doesn't want to do that. She wants to get it from the store manager, the only real man in evidence, but he's so obsessed with music, which he thinks is better than getting laid, that he can't imagine the real thing anymore.

The bottom line is this: life is about people interacting with one another. When people resist doing that, they go a little crazy. They start demanding more than can reasonably be expected from things like musical instruments or pets or houseplants or hobbies. Or students.

The fact that none of us, the lost souls at McCoy's, have any real receptacle for our physical pa.s.sions explains why we hang around talking about who was the greatest lyricist. It's fine to talk about those things. It's really not fine to pretend that it matters in any kind of picture, let alone the big one.

It is because of this essential spiritual deficiency that I became overly involved with Hallie. It is fair to say that her talent attracted me. It is fair to say that I wanted her to realize her potential and that I, as her teacher, felt obligated to do my best to make that happen. It is fine and admirable to want to do your job well. When you want your job to define you, fill up all your holes, make up for what is missing, justify your existence, and serve as a stand-in for your own lost ambitions . . . well, this is when you get into trouble.

That is what happened when I made the decision to visit Hallie's home.

About a month after I saw the bruising on her wrists, a few weeks after she'd told me the money had run out, I noticed that she showed up at our lessons looking depressed and withdrawn. She practiced her scales without complaining. From a technical standpoint, she played all her exercises with perfect precision. But her heart was not in it. The music itself, which is connected to something much deeper than finger and wrist movements, had gone away. It was dying, if not dead. When you see that happen, you know that the student has reached the end of her journey. In most cases, you simply let the lack of interest run its course. The student starts showing up late, starts complaining, stops practicing, stops caring. I had always accepted that with my students. Maybe I would have a couple of concerned discussions with the frustrated parents, but I didn't have much to offer once the interest started bleeding out of the student. It was an exercise, telling everyone to stay the course. I really knew that the course was over, and I simply waited for it to become apparent to all concerned.

I refused to do that with Hallie. When I saw her going through the motions, I decided to do a thing that I never did. I called Dorothy and asked if I could come out for a visit. She didn't resist me. She was eager for it. It was clear to me that Hallie's proficiency in violin was the only thing that kept her interested in this sullen child.

The home was in a pleasant little pocket of Mar Vista, which literally means "view of the sea." The sea was close enough to be a rumor in that part of town, but the community was tucked away behind the airport, closer to large warehouse stores and fast-food chains and enormous prefabricated apartment buildings. The ugliness of the landscape had earned this part of town the nickname Marred Vista. I kind of respected that.

It was an ordinary weekday evening when I showed up at their house in my exhausted Honda. My backseat was full of sheet music and accoutrements for my violin, but I left the car unlocked, knowing that no one is in the business of stealing actual music. They only steal radios and CDs. They steal technology. I learned this when my car was broken into in front of my house. I had gotten lazy and left my violin in the backseat. The thieves left it and took, instead, forty dollars' worth of CDs. I suppose it's the good news that no one knows where music really comes from or how much it is really worth.

Dorothy let me into the house, which was small but clean and well kept in the way that poor people's houses are. Everything was cheap, but it gleamed. Just like the house I grew up in. I can remember my mother saying, "We don't have much, but you can eat off it." She thought that only rich people had the luxury of being dirty. She might have remembered that from when her family had money. The Millners' house had been messier than ours, but the mess seemed grand somehow. Books scattered, clothes left on the floor, jewelry tossed on countertops. As if there were more where that came from. In a certain kind of poor people's house, everything always matches. Those are the poor people with aspirations. Trying to step up and blend in with the cla.s.s hovering just above them. Matching sets of furniture, and rugs that match the upholstery, and gewgaws and color schemes that tie everything together. As if symmetry begets beauty.

The Edwardses' house greeted me with all that and a thousand smells. Carpet was everywhere, and it held the landscape of their existence. Pledge and smoke and air fresheners, food and pets and perfume. Dorothy yelled for her husband as she offered me a seat, and Earl appeared as if he'd been waiting offstage for his cue.

He was a tall man, well built, but with a cowering nature. He looked at me with watery blue eyes. He still had on his suit from work, even the jacket, and he was completely devoid of wrinkles. He sat on the edge of his La-Z-Boy recliner and interlaced his long fingers and waited.

"I am Pearl Swain, Hallie's music teacher-"

He clipped my sentence. "Is the girl giving you trouble?"

"No, not at all," I said.

"Can I get you some coffee?" Dorothy asked. "My boys are at sports practice. One plays basketball. The other one wrestles. It's never-ending around here."

"No, I don't need coffee. Where is Hallie?"

"In her room," Earl answered. "Doing her homework. I'm not usually home this early. Dorothy told me you were coming. What's the problem?"

"Earl is in insurance," Dorothy interjected.

Earl cast a glance at her.

"There's no problem," I said.

"I don't understand," he said.

I began to feel a queasiness building in my stomach, like the early stages of the flu or pregnancy, when it's possible to tell yourself it's not there. The tightness grew with my resistance to it. I couldn't tell where it was coming from- the smells from the carpet or the familiar surroundings or the unnatural stillness of Earl.

He squinted at me, and I said, "Well, there's a slight problem, in that Hallie is exceptionally talented but lately I see her losing heart."

"Is she talking back?"

"No, nothing like that."

"Because I don't tolerate back talk."

"We have discussions. I'm interested in her opinion."

"Because I tell her like I tell my boys. You can't help how smart or good looking you are, but you can sure help how you behave."

The queasiness leapt forward. My father might have said something just like that to me. I wondered if I looked as pale as I felt.

"So what is it, then?" he asked.

Dorothy seemed to check out, her loquacious nature disappearing in the presence of her husband. I saw how he ruled this house with his exact.i.tude. His quiet dominion. His inscrutable expression. I had seen my father do that when company came. When the preacher dropped by. When my mother threw a fit. He was proving to us that he would not be moved even as everything moved around him.

I said, "It's nothing I can put a finger on. It's more like a feeling. Hallie showed some real apt.i.tude in music, with the violin in particular. Which is a hard instrument to play. But now she just seems to be going through the motions."

Earl smiled at me. He had a large head. His hair was thick and carefully combed back. "Going through the motions, is that what you said?"

"Yes."

"Isn't that what she's supposed to do? Isn't that what a teacher asks a student to do?"

"Technically speaking. What I mean is, she doesn't care."

"If she doesn't care, she should stop."

"She used to care, though."

I couldn't believe the way my brain was breaking down. Something in his manner was scrambling my thoughts. His expression was neutral, but I could feel the sneer building inside him. I knew I could not say the words. They were as scorned here as in my father's house.

"She used to care and now she doesn't," he repeated.

"Going through the motions works in certain things, but not in music. You have to have a kind of . . . interest in it."

He knew I meant "pa.s.sion." He knew all the words I was talking around.

He smiled. "Well, I don't have my heart set on her being a musician. Do you, Dorothy?"

Dorothy's eyes grazed mine. Then she said, "It would be nice if she had a marketable skill."

"Typing. That's a marketable skill."

"Well, yes, but I don't see why she couldn't do both."

"Miss . . . Swain, is it? I know you have to get all wrapped up in your students because they pay you and whatnot. But Hallie came to us carrying that violin and talking about playing it. Now, if she's changed her mind, I'm going to have to let that be."

"I happen to know, Mr. Edwards, that Hallie only came to me because someone in school recognized her talent and suggested she apply for a grant. At which point Mrs. Edwards brought her in. Hallie herself was reluctant to take the lessons. After a few lessons, she began to come into her own. She showed a kind of talent that I have never seen in my years of teaching. And soon her devotion to the music developed. I saw it happen right before my eyes. I saw her grow into it. I didn't imagine it."

"No one's saying you did," he said evenly.

"And then I saw it disappear. Now, as a teacher, I am supposed to pay attention to my student's behavior. I have an obligation to let the parents know when I see some kind of abrupt change like that. Sometimes it's indicative of something-"

I cut myself off. They were staring at me. Dorothy sucked in a breath and put a manicured hand to her mouth.

"Drugs?" she asked. Hopefully, I thought.

I stared hard at her. "No. Not drugs."

"Something worse?" she asked.

I looked at Earl. His expression had not changed.

He said, "I don't think you're that kind of teacher. You're not a public school teacher. Those are the people who are supposed to let us know when something's wrong. Her math teacher. Her history teacher. Those folks. Not you. She pays to see you. Or should I say, we pay for her to see you."