"Holding that warm, slim hand in mine, I sensed for the first time that I was someone other than who I’d been."
By Alexander C. Kafka
I’m sure that Independence Day has personal, metaphorical connotations for many people. Who can help but equate some private liberation with the patriotic kind, especially since the latter happens to fall—for kids, anyway—during summer vacation, when liberations flourish? For me, the day resonates with the splendidly helpless plummet into first serious love.
I was in the Young Artists Piano Program of the Tanglewood Institute, the famed summer music school in the Berkshires. There were less than a dozen of us studying with a clever and somewhat eccentric teacher, Gyorgi, and his considerably younger, soft-spoken, muscle-bound assistant Chris, a dancer-turned-pianist whom we all assumed was Gyorgi’s lover. (No, not their real names. None here are, except for Mike Udwin’s and Mayer Fishman’s, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) Gyorgi and Chris were wonderfully innovative—though at the time we were more likely to use the word “nuts.” They had us learn, among other assignments, pieces from an album called The Waltz Project, made up of new waltzes by contemporary composers like John Cage and Robert Moran and Joan Tower.
The YAPP pianists shared a campus—an old mansion and a bunch of teepee-shaped cabins—with some orchestral students, mostly wind and brass players, and miscellaneous other instrumentalists, like Lou, a college-age classical guitarist who bunked with me. Indian Hill, as it was called, was a short walk from Stockbridge and a bus ride away from the concert campus where the Boston Symphony, chamber groups, and other fabulous musicians—professional or would-be—rehearsed in the hot days and performed in the cool nights. The other instrumentalists were housed at another former school, near Lenox and the concert halls.
Truth to tell, I felt a bit over my head at YAPP. I was musical, had studied piano for some 11 years, had a knack for improvising and an above-average ear. But I was also somewhat lazy about practicing and, as a sight-reader, lousy to the point where, in retrospect, I suspect I had a kind of music-score dyslexia. I obscured that by memorizing fairly long and difficult works quite quickly, Chopin’s Ballade No. 3 in A-flat and Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque chief among them. Technically, I was decent, but a little behind my YAPP peers.
It was the summer before my senior year of high school, and it’s difficult to describe how free and sensuous and exhilarating and nerve-wracking Tanglewood was. Students were assumed to have adult self-discipline to match their advanced aesthetic sensibilities. To this day, I recall entering the campus driveway in the van from Pittsfield airport and seeing a gorgeous blonde girl in cutoffs and a bikini top, perched on a boulder and practicing the French horn. That appealed to the Wagnerian degenerate in me. But the summer, on the whole, was more redolent of Rousseau—especially because I’d spent the prior two summers at Interlochen, in Michigan, which you might call the West Point of arts programs.
Interlochen students wore uniforms (including absurd knicker-style pants with knee socks for the girls) and suffered such indignities as Date Gate and Shake Gate, where after concerts boys kissed their dates or shook their hands, under stallag-like supervision, before heading back en masse to a separate campus. Interlochen had lights-out and trumpet reveille and morning calisthenics.
At Tanglewood, for pianists anyway, there were lessons and master classes, but mostly there was solitary practice, in hot, small bug-ridden wooden sheds that the uninformed might easily have mistaken for outhouses. We were pretty much left to our own devices, and whatever rules may have been on the books, coed night visits to other bunks, or languorous walks to Stockbridge beneath tall, shady trees, were treated as casually as at a college campus.
II.
The majority of the YAPP students were Asian-American girls, and among them was Mia, a 16-year-old from Annandale, Virginia, just a short Beltway ride away from my home in Bethesda, Maryland. She was talented and serious about piano, but not in the mirthless tunnel-visioned way that some students were. She was slender and athletic, with long hair and preppy clothes. She had a quiet seriousness about her that, to me, represented both an exotic distance and a tidy wholesomeness, both of which I longed not only to be near, but to embody. I was, in fact, under something of an Asian spell that summer. My most heartfelt fantasy was to be transmogrified into Seiji Ozawa, wear white pajama suits while commanding a first-rate symphony with the sweep of my baton, and be surrounded at fund-raising soirees by tan, post-hippyish looking, monied babes with bell-like laughs. I wanted to sport Seiji’s humble, Cheshire-cat smile, the kind you can only get away with if you happen to be significantly better than everyone else on earth at what you do.
I was instead a modestly talented, insecure Jewish kid from a tight-knit, talkative, analytical family in the burbs. I had thickish aviator glasses, perpetually donned an over-stretched blue and white warm-up jacket I’d gotten as a bar-mitzvah gift several years before (the matching pants were too long and ungainly even for me), and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I did know, though, that I enjoyed the small circle of friendship and commonality with my YAPP friends, and that watching Mia, as I did none-too-subtly, I’m sure, I could at least take in some of what I couldn’t become.
The YAPP group became pretty close-knit in a short time, and Mia warmed to me, too. She laughed at my sophomoric riff on Mahler. We had read that he was superstitious about anyone being able to compose more than Beethoven’s nine symphonies. So I elaborated that he went on to write symphonies 9a, 9b, 9c, and 9d. Reading about Alma Mahler, as we munched on chocolate chip cookies on the lawn outside the amphitheater, we had a nice, puerile chortle over what it would be like to go out with a guy named Gropius. We walked by the sprinklers and through the lovely maze of hedges.
After dinner, the YAPPers would hang out on blankets at dusk on the Tanglewood lawn outside the huge Shed amphitheater drinking hot chocolate and listening to Mozart or Beethoven or Mahler. We couldn’t even see Ozawa and the symphony from where we were, but we’d look up at the dusk sky and see the musical cliffs and oceans and fire and plains that the orchestra created, then trekked through, in the brisk Berkshire ether.
On Independence Day, not too long into the YAPP season, Leonard Bernstein conducted a fun night of warhorses, culminating in the 1812 Overture and fireworks. It began to rain as we navigated through the exiting mob of tourists to the old school bus that served as our shuttle back to Indian Hill. The other students were in a rowdy, talkative mood after the celebrity and the cacophony and the crowds, but Mia and I, she in a tasteful pale green slicker, me in an awkward Super Surplus poncho, sat toward the rear of the bus, quiet, slouched, holding hands. I was happy beyond precedent. Holding that warm, slim hand in mine, I sensed for the first time that I was someone other than my heroes, other than what I coveted, other than who I’d been. I had not the faintest idea who this new guy was, but that didn’t matter as long as he was with Mia.
When we left the bus, Mia and I stood, paralyzed by lust and inexperience, in the rain on a corner of the lawn in front of the old school building, kissing long and deep. Every now and then, my mouth would make its way to her spicy, lean, wet neck and back to her mouth again, like a pony, restive and corralled. Occasionally, we’d stop and just catch our breath and murmur to each other. Our hands reached each other’s waists and backs, then bottoms through our jeans. The rain eased up, and we shivered in the leaf-sparkly damp, barely illuminated by a few dim security and street lights, stuck and thrilled. I tentatively reached a few fingers down her pants. She gently took my hand away and kissed me harder. Two things were clear. (1) We’d do nothing encroaching too near the domain called sex, and (2) I was her boyfriend.
Eventually, exhausted and frustrated and dazzled, we said goodnight. When I got back to my teepee, I fell onto my bed next to a shelf lined with music books along with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sons and Lovers, and the other novels on my summer English reading list. Lou was quietly strumming Villa-Lobos ballads as I drifted off.
III.
Mia and I didn’t overdo the couple stuff when we were with the other YAPPers, at concerts, or heading down to Stockbridge for Cokes and potato skins at Michael’s restaurant. But when we were alone—say, sweaty after tennis at some courts down the road from Indian Hill—we made out with the Olympic intensity that comes from knowing that this was the love sport we’d have that summer, that there would be no other. Well, almost no other. After a week or so, she’d allow me to grope around her panty line beneath the diminutive terry-cloth shorts she wore for tennis. And at night— when we returned from a vocal recital or chamber concert—I’d unbutton her blouse and she’d lie back on the steps of one of the practice sheds and let me undo her silk bra and kiss her small breasts. Once, her hand grazed the tip of me, but retreated in an instant.
I knew the names of her family members, that difficult subjects came easily to her in school, that she was dubious about our teacher’s obsession with contemporary waltzes. I knew that she took Catholicism seriously and I went to a pretty little church with her in Stockbridge and even played a Bach prelude and fugue on the organ toward the end of a service, though Mia dissuaded me, in my amative enthusiasm, from taking the Eucharist.
In other words, I knew her hardly at all, but I loved her—far beyond a crush, and with some inkling that what we had would not survive the shift to distance, small though it was, and the mundane of the school year. I knew boys—handsome, strong, accomplished, promising, confident boys—would surge around her. I knew girls—lovely, graceful, talented, sympathetic girls—would not even notice me, except perhaps in a hallway to give me a submission to the school literary magazine I co-edited. I knew lunches would not be spent in a quiet dining hall earnestly debating the best wrist action for playing Ravel’s Miroirs, but rather in a horrifyingly loud cafeteria trying to figure out, with Michael Udwin and Mayer Fishman, a calculus problem or what our back-up schools would be or what actually occurred at screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I saw Mia once more, for a date. I drove to Annandale, and we went to see An American Werewolf in London at a mall. The movie was scary and funny and sexy, but we were oddly somber, awkward. We kissed in the parking lot before I drove her home in my mom’s Granada, but something had changed. For Mia’s 17th birthday, I wrote her a poem, which five years later I foolishly threw away along with all my childhood poems. I remember only one line: “When you are near/love is not a complex thing.” But though I didn’t realize it then, the line was already nostalgia, and I never heard back from her. I sensed a rival whom I couldn’t rival. I was too hurt to pursue it. And I had other things to think about, most immediately the removal of four wisdom teeth, tryouts for The Music Man, and a dozen college application essays.
I went back to Tanglewood the next summer, as much out of habit as anything else. It was my sixth year of music camp. I was searching, I suppose, not for Mia—I’d heard she wouldn’t be there and was headed for Barnard in the fall—but for some equivalent intensity, warmth and bliss. Predictably, I found none. The YAPPers were on the Lenox campus this time around, and that was much less suited to pastoral daydreams and passion. One night, in the bland, slightly decrepit room I shared with two roommates, a window fell open on its chain above me, the glass shattering onto my blanket. I wasn’t hurt, but the incident seemed somehow telling.
The pianists were under the no-nonsense, traditional stewardship of another instructor. I practiced a great deal, not having the distractions I would have preferred, but my heart wasn’t in it. In my free time, I’d go to the Lenox library and read the Times and novels. From a friend, I borrowed a Walkman, the first I’d ever seen, and went on long strolls or jogs listening to Brahms, music that suited the lush, rolling hills and my melancholy mood.
At college that fall, I gleefully quit the piano to take up acting and ski team, which were considerably more social and fun. A year after that, I briefly dated a woman, Helen, who’d been in the YAPP program with me both those years at Tanglewood. A year younger than me, Helen had been the most musically and academically gifted of our YAPP cohort and she was the only one among us we could imagine successfully pursuing a concert career. She was very bright, in a sharp and brittle way, but also deeply sensitive. When she played piano, particularly Brahms, the interpretations were eerily wise and sad, as though there were a melancholy middle-aged virtuoso lurking inside her.
When we started seeing each other, she treated me badly—she was always late for dates, and around other people she’d practically ignore me, as if to show that couplehood would in no way dissuade her from being her own person. I think she was a little afraid of the intimacy, but also wished she were with someone who could confirm her sophistication (I didn’t fit that bill). And this was college, after all—she may have slighted me just to see if I’d put up with it. Surprisingly, I was sensible enough not to. I broke up with her after an evening of heavy petting and heavier sarcasm. I had a jar of pennies. She picked it up and hurled the pennies at me—though, fortunately, not the jar—and stormed out of my dorm room. In my underwear, picking up the coins, one by one, listening to the Goldberg Variations on my battered pawn shop turntable, I realized the obvious—that whatever Helen had been seeking, I’d been seeking Mia.
Twenty-five years later, I’m married to a woman whom I adore and who prefers Nanci Griffith to Hindemith. We have delightful eight-year-old boy-and-girl twins who enjoy soccer, reading Cam Jansen and Jigsaw Jones mysteries, and putting on shows in our family room. Life is fabulously full, and I am fully aware how lucky I am, even if I’m not Seiji Ozawa, who I suppose by now is reckoning with his own memories of Tanglewood.
But for an instant every Independence Day—especially if it’s a rainy, breezy one with restless trees—I think of 1981, and of Mia. For me, that day, that summer, was a taste of pleasures to come and a person to become rather than trying to be. And each Independence Day I hope Mia feels that same slight stir, wherever she is.
And if she doesn’t, I don’t want to know.
An excerpt from this essay ran in The Washington Post.
Modified photo. Original from stock.xchng.
