At The Grand
Laughter. Screams. Expletives. Anything and everything but patience the sound of a pin drop. Or maybe it was annoyance, second-hand embarrassment, anger. Edwin hunched over, shifting in his seat. Its nicked wooden legs sighed underneath his weight, echoing in the air. He wondered if they could feel the heat coming from him, see the wetness gathering at his temples, or hear his heart thumping so hard against the inside of his ribs that he swore it was rattling his chain. Had he really been holding his breath the whole time? Forty-seven seconds felt like years.
His nose itched, the trademark giveaway to his nerves, but he dared not scratch. He couldn’t risk moving his hands. Not until he figured out why the opening chord for the album that afforded him this custom Steiler grand piano and a sold out venue to play it in was gone from him. All he could do was stare down at the keys, waiting for the fire to ignite.
Holly, Jade and Mira stood still as statues at the side of the stage, careful not to touch the wires snaking along the floor, picture-perfect smiles frozen waiting for their cue. Their eyes darted from their mics to their boss — his hands shriveled into his sleeves instead of on the ivorites — to the faces in the audience dotted in technicolor lights, waiting, too.
If there was one thing Edwin knew how to do well, it was vividly imagine worst case scenarios, then prepare for them until he was almost disappointed when they didn’t happen. Like the thought of his seven-year-old ankles splintering beneath the skin if he launched from his bike down the steepest hill in Oakland. Or maybe how his throat could close up on junior prom night if he ate the sliver of apple pie Maddy tried to spoon feed him in the McDonalds parking lot. And even how his father would smack the black off his skin if he didn’t open the bathroom he accidentally locked himself out of before he came home. But the thing is, he was an expert rider. He’d suffered a mildly itchy tongue from eating a raw apple once, and only once. And when his father caught his sister and her high school boyfriend kissing in the guest bathroom, her only punishment was losing phone privileges for a week.
They were just a haze of hypotheticals that Edwin constructed play-by-plays in his mind for. Meticulously planning escapes and remedies and gritting his teeth for pain that likely would not come. But not being able to remember what came next once his hands touched the cool, polished plastic he’d always known wasn’t one of them. He’d never frozen before. Not like this. Not here.
He hadn’t needed sheet music past fourteen years old and could play along to songs he heard on the radio by ear. He knew “Für Elise” like the back of his hand — how to speed race through the first half until he hit the crescendo that everyone was excitedly waiting for, pause, then speed again.
Before he was old enough for his own lessons, Edwin used to curl his wiry frame under the baby grand in the living room while his mother played, dancing his fingers over the imaginary keys in his lap and singing words that didn’t exist. She’d smile down at him, as if this was the way it was supposed to be, as the balls of her bare feet pressed the pedals. It was the only place worry didn’t exist.
“You got it, Eddy.”
Her voice could cut through anywhere — a whisper with the weight of a bullhorn. Edwin looked over his shoulder into the wings, where his mother sat in a flimsy folded chair between the curtains. His manager, nervously clutching his clipboard, was merely a shadow behind her. There was that smile again. She always had a way of reaching him.
“You got it,” she mouthed again.
Edwin straightened up, spread his fingers across D, F-Sharp, A, and pressed. Wrong. But the pitter patter of claps in front of him still came. They don’t know. They don’t care. They just want to hear you. He could hear his mother in his head, and that same sing-songy way she said it before every piano recital, when he submitted his first solo record to the label, when he told her he was nervous about headlining his own tour because something could go wrong.
They don’t know. They don’t care. They just want to hear you.
With a deep breath, he started again. D. F-Sharp. A-Flat. More fervently this time. More convincing. And with the increasing sound of relieved applause, more convinced.
From the corner of his eye, he could see his trio of singers finally relax, sinking into their hips, hands seductively tracing their mic stands. The drummer tapped his sticks on the cymbals. The bassist propped up her instrument between her legs. The saxophonist lifted the reed to his lips. And his mother began tapping her feet as if it were her own night at the grand.
