Thank you, Mrs. Z. (12.14.22)

My piano teacher, Iris Zahara, is gone. And I never told her what she’d meant to me.

It’s a common enough story. It is a trope of middle age (all right, late middle age) that one regrets not thanking the personally influential, and that regret proceeds from a mild ache to a kind of stabbing sensation when they depart. I’ve become wiser about this over the years, but somehow I never cast back as far as my twelve-year-old self, living a suburban and limited life, walking weekly into the anteroom of a larger world, in which lived a beauty, and beauty itself. And now, in the classic and inevitable sense, she cannot hear me.

I think first about her hair, a wild uncoiffed dash of brown, frequently roughed and rearranged by her restless hand. And the speed of her movements. My mother and her club friends seemed to flow through the air in a series of poses. Leaning against the Chrysler while reaching into a flowery handbag. Poised attentively over the bridge table, studying their cards. Pausing at the parish to listen to Father O’Mara, heads slightly tilted and smiling.

Iris appeared to roar. Lean, tanned, she rushed through the church down the side aisle, and arrived just in time at the organ seat, reaching out her feet for the flat slippers to play the pedals. She adjusted the stops. Flick. Flick. She twisted on the bench to look frankly, expectantly, unabashedly right at the altar; she lifted her long-fingered hands high above the keyboards and when they came down, the church was filled with music. She favored complexity, and ample use of the bass. Nothing timid. She liked long complicated runs on the keyboard or the foot pedals. She favored volume.

My former piano teacher was round Mrs. Salter, who called recitals piano parties and served cookies after. I’d started with her at a very young age, an earnest and biddable student. I liked to practice. The scales and repetitions didn’t bore me. Sitting at the piano, I had my back turned to my life. It was a mechanical task that pleased my mother. My fingers were entirely under my control, and sometimes they made pleasing sounds. I practiced every day, focused entirely on the page and never looking at my hands, elbows stiff, with no intonation at all, and absolutely no pedal. Plunk. Plunk. Plunk.

There were no more cookies when I switched to Mrs. Zahara for lessons, and no more plunk plunk plunk. And what kind of name was Zahara anyway? Nothing Irish started with a Z.

No. Mrs. Z was a performing concert pianist, with a long low studio overlooking her yard and creek. Two gleaming nine-foot Steinways. Plenty of couches of the exotic modern variety – low and leather. Paintings, each illuminated by its own picture light, on the wall between shelves and shelves of music. It caused me to love cloudy afternoons. She would rush into the room to sit beside me on the bench. The music she gave me was exotic, dissonant, passionate, percussive, from composers whose names I could not pronounce. It was not melodic. It became difficult to find practice time at home; my brother would groan and complain as I approached the piano.

And sometimes she would play for me to demonstrate something. Strong, strong attacks, plenty of dynamic control. Her hair would fly. Her arms were brown, her smile very white and very sudden. On the very best days, I would hear her playing through the open windows as I walked up the hill and glimpse her frowning in concentration over the keyboard. I would pause by the lilacs and look through the window at her, a woman working.

When my lesson was over, she would rush away. And I would pick up my music and walk home, abstracted, unsteady, my mind full of sound.

What did I learn in the studio, besides the Khatchaturian Toccata and how to attack the keyboard? I learned that there was a life, not flat and repetitive, but based on beauty and music, a life of high standards and regular work to achieve them. It was an uncoiffed life that included serious consideration of ideas and art, disagreement, discourse. There was a sense that life had the capacity for explosion. There were probably cocktail parties amid the Steinways, when interesting people might disagree. There might be wit. Repartee. It would happen by the picture lights, and candlelight, and the light and the conversation would spill out through the windows past the lilacs, over the yard and into the rushing creek.

Well, Mrs. Z. See what you did for that little girl who came and went from your studio? Thank you.