35

Professor Joseph Skizzen had learned the importance of the chalk tray. When he first took his instructorship he had been handed, like keys for a city, a claw made of chalk sticks held in place by wire that could draw the lines of the staff with a swift swipe across the board. This implement now sat flat on his desk like a symbol of his subject. It took a steady confident hand, though, lest the lines wiggle instead of the notes. In the chalk tray, along with small mounds of white powder, were scattered bits of chalk too small to be of use any longer and a box the size of a pack of cigarettes, full of fresh pieces, as if at leisure, resting in it. Two erasers that badly needed banging lay in the tray as well. Whenever the professor leaned back against the blackboard there was a strong chance that chalk dust would form a line on his bottom. This line, when he turned around to write something important, could provoke a good deal of mostly silent amusement in his students. It proved him a ridiculous old fool and a figure that deserved their snickers. But to be a ridiculous old fool was not entirely a bad thing. The students might not remember his lecture on the mental deficiencies of notable composers, but they were certain to recall the humorous white line he always left behind when he drew conclusions.

And always good for a chuckle were ole Skizz’s cloth cap and white dice. These were his most recent props, and a great success. The cap could have come from a Fitzgerald novel and looked most at home on the golf course. He kept it wadded like a hankie in a jacket pocket. On the dot of the hour, the professor would position the cap on his head so it shaded his goatee like an eave and enter the classroom with a look that said, I am listening to distant music. He would put down his books and perhaps a record album; then remove the cap, tossing it onto the desk with a negligent gesture. After a moment for a stare around, he would retrieve it, probe under the brim with his fingers, and extract, as smugly as a magician, one pair of bright white dice. These he would roll across the desktop as if shooting craps. Then he would bend forward to see what he had shot, pause to take in their dots and appreciate their significance, and finally begin the hour by saying: Today, it seems, we shall study the passacaglia from the first act of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. Instead Professor Skizzen would proceed with a lecture on Mendelssohn’s symphonies … as the students expected.

That was how Joseph Skizzen created his Herr Professor, and a beloved one to boot: by doing silly, often inexplicable, hence memorable things, and in that manner developing, he thought, like a blooming plant, into a charming character, the subject of many an amusing collegiate story. He was a sketch, students said of him at first, but his classes were difficult and music of this elitist kind was … oh … so out of it. He had grown a goatee, purchased a pair of funny trousers, and affected a slight accent. But none of these oddities was sufficient to sustain a semester’s interest.

Life, he had learned, was mostly made of themes and their variations. Skizzen would open by explaining how little we knew about the music of the Greeks. He usually dwelled on the different modes distinguished by Aristotle. He would play a few snatches of this and that. Could the students pick out the military from the dirge, the sad song from the energizing march? They could. The students and their professor also reexamined Albéniz, requested Bach, rethought Chopin, requeried Debussy, every semester. Joey rolled in at ten. Joseph rolled out at six. Joey immersed his face. Joseph packed his pipe. Joseph boiled an egg. Professor Skizzen read the news, saw an item to be scissored, searched for his equipment. Joey complained until he found it. Professor Skizzen walked to school. He put on his cap to enter class and then entered. The professor tossed his dice; he fingered his chin; he stared out the window; kids coughed or whispered, giggled or shuffled their feet; fell asleep. Repeat. They were never dumb in different ways. Well … almost never. They almost never were dumb in different ways. The important thing was: Joey never left the house.

Another great truth was that Skizzen’s sniggering pupils became alumni despite his low regard for them. They would be sure to remember the time Skizzen brought Saint-Saëns down a peg by quoting Berlioz about the precocious genius, namely that “he knows everything but lacks inexperience,” and it won’t matter much if they get it wrong or its point is lost during recollection. When the little game of reminiscence was played with alumni friends, they would still have a few high cards. Really? you don’t say? a white line like the equator around his rump? Sure, as big as the track of a sailing ship. Actually, for a music teacher, old Skizz wasn’t half bad. Yup … jeez … those were the days.

Even Skizzen thought the classroom seemed a strange choice to represent his professorial career, for he had never been comfortable in one, and certainly wasn’t now, even after many years of playing the part of an offbeat prof renowned for his sharp ear, his clever tongue, his demanding standards, and, with regard to practical everyday matters, habitually bumbling. He could remember in terrible detail how he had taken his first step in local collegiate history. That step had to do with chalk, too, and taught him an important lesson even if his students had learned nothing from it. He could clearly recall the scene and situation, but they were likely to remember only the cloudy outline of an image they now prized like one of those brooches with the faded picture of a parent, girl, or boyfriend closed up inside like a corpse in a casket. Such mementos were occasionally to be peekabooed, and then passed along from one generation to another in place of an honest heirloom.

It was taken—the first step—during Skizzen’s third year as an instructor. He had by this time learned academic routine as well as his ABC’s; that is, he could recite them but do little else but spell out a few elementary admonitions. One was, unfortunately, that his students should listen with their third ear. Among the lads this had somehow become an obscene joke Skizzen otherwise refused to understand. Moreover, he had advised his few piano pupils to “make love to their instrument” when he knew nothing about that either.

It was spring term, and he had eight students in his Introduction to Music class. This was the department’s bread-and-butter course, yet enrollments had declined from the thirty he had on his baptismal day, a number that had leaked like a rowboat until now, his sixth go-round. At the department’s last meeting, held at the Mullins Hall urinals during a break in the student recitals, Professor Carfagno had called it their bread-and-water course, and then did so. Skizzen had responded, last into action because he wore buttons, by describing it as one of bread and wine, but Morton Rinse had trumped that with tea and biscuit, just before releasing a stream that outlasted the others, at least in noise.

Skizzen’s career hung in the balance. He thought he had lost some students because of an obsessive use of clichés, common sayings that he adopted to hide what he knew was incompetence. And he stole opinions from any book that lay open. He really had to stop describing music as food for the gods or boasting, on Mozart’s behalf, that the little brat was penning symphonies at the age at which the rest of us were struggling to learn our sums. His point was: music is easy; see, a three-year-old can play, a five-year-old compose; but his pupils thought what the hell they had no chance. Then, instead of trying to encourage them to admire nobler things, Skizzen would scoff at genius. After all, what else could Bach do beside fugues?

The young professor never took the right tone with his material because he didn’t know the right tone to take. You have no tone, he scolded himself. You have no real beliefs. Of what, about your subject, could you say you were sure? if you were put to the lie-detect? if you had to swear before a court? Perhaps you could believe with some confidence that, although Saint-Saëns and Mendelssohn were both more prodigious talents than even Mozart or maybe John Stuart Mill, their careers were made of promises they didn’t wholly fulfill. But what sort of promises did the cliché require? that they would surpass Liszt. In what? In his sum of seductions? In the length of his trills? Skizzen’s native skepticism was no help either. His students simply were discouraged by it. They couldn’t handle opposing points of view or any war of wills. All the same, Skizzen did believe music was easy. He had learned to play the piano by ear, and that showed he had promise, didn’t it? but he could only play honky-tonk and pretend it was Chopin. Though he had skills, these tiddlywink abilities would never pay the bills.

If you are terrified of being a bore you probably are a bore and terror should be on its way. But Skizzen had become bored by himself, even alone in the urinal, so what must he be to others? Was terror transferable? He believed it was—contagious, like panic. There were books that argued for it. If you could not hear what you were about to play before you played it; if you could not measure the intervals to come, had no grasp of the constellations that notes and not-notes formed; then fear would fill your fingers as though they were sucking straws. When he faced his first class, he heard his words toddle from his mouth, their sense of conviction tied to a string for handy retraction. He would look in wonder at his notes, notes both musical and expository, that suddenly meant nothing to him. Now, of course, he could pronounce his judgments with the bully’s bluster—“Wagner has taught the tuba’s pomposity to the flute”—and he could formulate intimidating opinions—“Late Liszt is as atonal as autumn”—that meant nothing whatever; but it took Skizzen five years to get glib. He had to forget how he mucked about at the keyboard, didn’t have his material in hand, couldn’t teach the sea to roil or trees to leaf. He had to believe in his brilliance, he told himself with some sternness: Be proud of your knowledge, and confident about your mastery. Let superior assurance win the day. Ah, he immediately thought, there you go, winning the day. You must stop seizing or winning or greeting or wasting the day. You must be original even while sucking on an orange. But, when he tried to hear in his head the sound of a conch shell blown like Poseidon might toot it on a stony beach, the best he could do was imagine a whistle that signified to a grateful group that gym was over. Everybody got to shower.

He took hold of a stick of chalk, pulled it from the pack, and held it like a cigarette to steady his nerve. “I’ll smoke it later.” The chalk absorbed the sweat of his palms and then emitted a terrible squeak when rubbed across the slate. Did he remember how to spell “Tchaikovsky”? Tchaikovsky, he said, steadied his head with one hand when he conducted so it wouldn’t fly off. His head, not his hand. Skizzen knew how the conductor felt. The conductor felt his head was a hat. Maybe it was the composer who worried about brisk winds and the conductor who kept a tight hold on the brim. Skizzen heard some signs of amusement from the boys in the back. In fact Tchaikovsky gripped his chin and waited for wobble. Sometimes, when Horowitz played, members of the audience climbed up on their chairs to watch his fingers run an octave like a deer. Skizzen found he felt better if he turned his back to the students and spoke to the board. Well, what was he going to say about Tchaikovsky beyond that joke? That his symphonies were soap operas?

Dates. He posted Tchaikovsky’s dates. Oops. Wrong decade. He wiped the mistake away with the side of his left fist. Aware of what he’d done, Skizzen tried to rid his hand of chalk by rubbing it on a cuff of his coat. Then he dropped the piece he was holding in a trouser pocket. A bit of discreet riddance. Let’s try to get on. Think nothing of it. Say nothing about it. As he took a step, he felt something run down his pants leg onto the floor. And then, starting nervously, he stepped upon something that caused a sound of crushing to come from his heel that had to be admired by the toe. Miriam hadn’t repaired that hole in his pants pocket. Don’t look down, you’ll fall. Ignore it as you would a smart remark. Skizzen thought that by the time he strode to the other side of the room he might have an idea. Vengeful grains of chalk remained stuck to the sole of his shoe; they squealed when he walked; and, though he dare not look down, were probably leaving lines on the floor. All I need, he managed to say, is to write out the bass part.

Joey dared not look at those rows of grins. He pretended to be contemplating the lawn outside. He remembered nothing of what he was supposed to say. A man with a red kerchief wrapped around his head drove a mower closer and closer. Bless that man with the red kerchief. Bless that grass, all noisy mowers. He said: How can we be expected to speak of music with racket like that in our ears. It’s dis-tracting. Skizzen slowly wiped his chalk-covered fingers on the front of his shirt. Turning back to the class, he put a forefinger in his mouth and made a face. Then what did he hear?

Applause.