Don't Disappoint (Ch. 6)
by Martin van Cooper
Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next nine-ish weeks, we’ll be serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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Having run the experiment once and obtained quantifiable results, there was no need to repeat it, she heard her father deadpan to some of his physician cronies at a dinner party when she was 8 or 9. Just old enough to understand that she herself was the product of the experiment but too young to understand that her father’s dry humor concealed no displeasure in the results of getting her mother pregnant. That, quite simply, he had already done this and thus saw no reason to do it again. It remained, even after she was old enough to recognize all these things, one of those seeds of her personality, a single event to which she would attribute innumerable shortcomings over her two decades of education and relationships, romantic or otherwise. At four she had begun piano lessons. Her father had played the trumpet in high school and could bang out a few showtune ditties and her mother had come to love Mozart in college, she would report, Jessica’s mother would, to anyone who asked, although she didn’t play an instrument. Her mother would sit in the kitchen when the piano instructor would come to the house to teach Jessica, from age 4, on the baby grand Steinway the old man purchased before Jessica was born. But the child didn’t take to Mozart after she started learning individual movements and then whole pieces. I don’t understand, her mother would say to her, of her Chopin nocturnes and Debussy symphonies, circa age 10, why you choose to play such dreary, morose music. It’s such a tone of depression. Mozart and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, they wrote music that celebrated the virtuosity of life. The brilliance of living. Her father heard her perform for an audience precisely one time, in April 1990 when she was 12 years old, in front of ~500 people at the California Theater in San Bernardino: she gave a solo performance of the Moonlight Sonata—a compromise with her mother, who upon hearing the second movement only was indignant that her daughter was just being obstinate, but then acquiesced when she heard the third. She had won a competition the previous Fall amongst performing arts schools throughout San Bernardino county and the surrounding areas of 17 and under pianists. Most of the kids in the competition had painting or photography or sculpture or writing or performance portfolios that reached back from when they could barely tie their own shoes and many of the older ones she beat out were already on the radar of the best music schools in Boston or Berkeley or across town at USC. Jessica went to a public middle school and was admitted to the competition after her mother petitioned in person both the principal and the music director of the high school she would enter the following year. She had no portfolio and although she nor her parents knew it at the time, in less than two years she would give up piano and not touch one again for almost 20 years. She rode her bike to the auditorium 4 days a week plus Saturday for a month prior to the performance, which her teacher insisted on recording for Jessica to start building the aforementioned missing portfolio to spread more widely what everyone who heard her play that night agreed was preternatural brilliance and which was clear evidence of either divine intervention (there are pockets of the faithful in the Inland Empire) or a severe genetic mutation or mental instability but which regardless heralded a virtually limitless future career in professional performance. Her mother drove her to the theater the day of the performance, helped Jessica dress and apply some clownish makeup to counteract the stage lighting and gave her a flower for her dress and was in general just uncharacteristically sunny and agreeable and supportive and present. Remember, her mother told her as they pulled into the parking lot, you belong here. You earned this. And then in the way parents do when they don’t know when the hell to shut up, she continued, Just don’t forget to smile and I’m sure you will perform perfectly, no mistakes. As she walked on stage to welcoming applause from the full auditorium, she saw her father’s silhouette at that moment entering the back of the auditorium, his trench coat over his suit and hat in hand, having come straight from his medical office no doubt.
Athletes and artists will relate that when they perform at a certain level—with such concentration and intensity and apparent abandon—the experience does not even register in their consciousness. It’s an out of body experience that you hear about from others afterwards, a total loss of time, the performer’s conscious control rendered moot and having to essentially wake themselves up at the end of the exercise and to be convinced by others that it actually happened. Until watching a video of the performance or hearing about it from someone in the audience, the performer is not really confident that she didn’t get up there and hammer out Mary Had a Little Lamb over and over for 30 minutes. The comedian is so convinced that he stood up in front of the crowd and screamed or recited the Pledge of Allegiance and somehow hallucinated the applause and laughter. The golfer is not completely sure he didn’t take all his clothes off and run around the green making simian noises and gestures. So it was with this performance. Jessica received a 5 minute standing ovation, during which she embarrassedly took two dozen bows and was showered with praise in the hallway after the event and at the reception, for a 12 year old an even stranger concept, which was held in her honor where she fielded questions and accepted praise from adults many times her age that looked at her like some majestic tropical bird or space age humanoid robot while assaulting her with words like transcendent and brilliant and remarkable and virtuosic, all of which she knew the meaning of in the abstract but could scarcely connect them to what had just transpired. That’s what you’ve been working towards all these years, her mother told the 12-year-old girl, who had only recently had her first period and whose growth spurt had but one superficially redeeming quality of making Rachmaninoff easier to play, in a momentary interlude as they walked to the reception. All that practicing. I told you, see I told you, her ebullient instructor chimed in when she found them backstage. It really paid off. It finally paid off. Her father did not attend the reception and they got home before he did and she finished her homework and showered, still trying to process and organize the packets of memories that were appearing in her mind. She went downstairs to find him sitting in his study, her mother having retired early to some other part of the house, with his two fingers of neat Glen Morangie and whatever biography he was devouring at the time and he looked up at her when she walked in and smiled so effortlessly, exuded such warmth and ease and self-assurance and he put his book down and placed his hand on her shoulder and said, Jelly bean, that was really special today, and she decided that night to never play the piano again.
