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The Piano Player and the Singer

Pam Munter

    She wasn’t the best piano player though at 85, she had worked at it most of her life. Even so, she loved the music and relished playing with the boys in the band. During the past dozen years or so, she couldn’t quite keep up reading those arrangements that seemed to chug by way too fast. But she would pick out the appropriate chords now and again, if inevitably coming in just a hair too early. Her fear of improvisation kept that demon at bay, however; she was in awe of anyone who could pull that off. She called the performance of any musician whose playing style moved off the page “in the ethers,” and “amazing.”
    We met when I auditioned to be the “girl singer” with a big band in Palm Desert, California. I had moved there a few years earlier from the Northwest after a hiatus from a singing career on the road. I was eager to get back into it and knew that singing with a big band was akin to riding the cowcatcher on a noisy, speeding freight train. It’s an exhilarating challenge with all that syncopated power.
    There had been other candidates, none of them suitable. The band’s bass player played in my Dixieland septet and had asked me to audition. “They need you,” he said. The leader left a cryptic message on my answering machine, setting the time for the audition and told me I’d sing “a couple of tunes.”
    Upon hearing that, I wasn’t surprised others had failed this vague, anxiety-provoking pressure test. To allay my concern and satisfy my usually compulsive preparation, I took advantage of my bass-playing friend’s insider status to find out the likely songs and the keys. Then I got the phone number for the big band’s piano player and asked her to meet with me beforehand to rehearse. She was the only woman in the band. I was hoping for kinship and support.
    Irene lived in a triple-wide manufactured home in a gated senior development. As soon as she opened the door, her diminutive body seemed to vibrate with tension. Yet she was welcoming as she led me through her teddy-bear-littered living room into the stuffy music room. She pulled out a vocal chart she thought likely to be called and started the intro to the uptempo Gershwin standard, “’S Wonderful.” Fortunately, it was in my key and one I had sung it many times before. When I finished, she said, “Oh, you’ll get the job. They’d be very lucky to have you.” We went over a few more possible charts and she declared I was “in the ethers.” The next afternoon, I killed the audition, joined the band, and we became instant friends.
    Perhaps it’s more accurate to say we became email buddies. Irene spent many hours a day exchanging messages with her friends and I became one of them for more than 15 years. In addition to band events, we met now and again for a celebratory meal or a quick visit but we did best at a distance.
    As the emails progressed, she gradually - and I sensed reluctantly - revealed herself, perhaps in ways she had not done with many. After a few years, she confided that a decade earlier, she had been diagnosed with stage four metastatic carcinoma and hadn’t been expected to live. No one we both knew had any knowledge of this, and she asked me more than once to keep it between us. She proudly described herself as being made of “concrete and nails” but that wasn’t my impression at all. She seemed a tightly wrapped bundle of nerves, barely glued in place, closed off to any possibilities but polite palaver. She never opened her front door unless she was fully made up - always with her habitual bright blue eye shadow and heavy Giorgio cologne. Her outfit was complete with big, clunky earrings.
    After her abusive, alcoholic husband died a year or two into our relationship, she seemed to become more joyful even while increasing her airtight denial. She started telling me funny stories about how she had enjoyed taunting her husband, who was often in an alcoholic stupor. He would drink while sitting on a bar stool in their kitchen which overlooked the piano room. His unwavering glare annoyed and unnerved her as she practiced, so she bought a portable folding screen and ceremoniously erected it between the piano and his line of sight. Dealing with conflict indirectly was her preferred m.o.
    Living constantly under the threat of a recurrence of her disease, she was protective, not only about disseminating information to others but about merely hearing about other people’s medical traumas. Negative thoughts and words were anathemas, feared as potentially powerful emotional antecedents to bad medical news down the line. To her, words could be causative. She would flippantly describe her own feelings using song titles or hyperbole, lacking both authenticity and genuine disclosure. “I’m just ‘Breezin’ Along With The Breeze’ today,” she would say on a good day. It was as though she couldn’t find words to describe her inner state. Cliches were so much safer. It kept real life and her own fears at bay. If she had a medical appointment, she would write, “I’m sure everything will be perfect.” She added a benediction. “May nothing happen to the contrary. Then I can come home to ‘Something Cool.’”
    In spite of her buttoned-down lifestyle, Irene had a quirk I discovered only when I invited her and her husband to dinner, along with a few mutual friends. She called that afternoon to casually drop a warning. She hoped I didn’t mind if she came as a witch.
    “Excuse me? A What?”
    “I just love dressing as Wendy the Witch.”
    “Uh. Sure. No problem. It’ll be fun. Thanks for the warning.”
    I hung up wondering who this person is. Certainly nothing about my prior experiences with her would put this behavior in the same universe. It seemed so out of character.
    And so she arrived in full witch regalia, complete with Margaret Hamilton-like makeup. She cackled at the door, got our attention and appreciation, then proceeded to remove the costume, dining in full makeup. There was never an explanation for this anomaly.
    She sometimes emailed about yearning for change – in her yard, her furniture, her friends or her doctors - but nothing ever came of it. Easily overwhelmed by the steps involved and the fear of making a mistake, she comfortably left things as they were. She preferred her own discomfort to the possibility of conflict.
    We were of different generations and backgrounds, revealing occasionally jarring contrasts. If either of us mentioned a project that needed doing, she would quickly quote the song title, “It’s So Nice to Have a Man Around the House,” a direct and ironic contradiction to her long and hellish life with her dead husband and a stark contrast to my well-known feminist views. Her best friend was a married man in her complex who would visit each week, performing minor handyman tasks while bringing her food and good cheer. But she was hungrier still for what she called acknowledgement, as if she didn’t really exist unless someone else infused her psychological fragility with praise. As a result, she maintained several lengthy relationships with unkind people who would feed her compliments just often enough.
    The dependence on clichés and the brittle Pollyanna demeanor were easy to sidestep in email, but not so much in person. When we’d meet, she would enthusiastically repeat favorite stories, mostly about musicians and singers we both knew, dominating the conversation with chirpy monologues about them.
    “Ted is just such a fine musician. You know he was with Benny Goodman’s band in the 40s. He has a lifetime contract at Willard’s club now. And he’s 93.”
    She loved to reminisce and romanticize her past, spinning stories about life as a “working girl in a man’s world.” She laughed about her boss “chasing me around the desk. He was so handsome but I never let him catch me. By then I was in love with Rodney. Boy, was I stupid or what? ‘Stupid Cupid!’” Neither truth nor accuracy was important here, and certainly not interactive conversations. She wanted to be entertained and distracted, if only by herself.
    Once I had somehow earned her trust, she told me her truths more often, always in email. If she wasn’t feeling well or having problems with family members, she shared some of the details, which I understood to be rare disclosures in her world. She knew she would get an honest and nonjudgmental response. Reciprocally, I found myself telling her things I had not shared with other friends. We had become a reassuring part of each other’s daily infrastructure, exchanging several emails a day.
    On occasion, when her frequent emails dwindled, I knew something was amiss. She often struggled with her computer, dependent on her nephew who lived out of state to unlock its mysteries and to repair what inadvertent damage she might have done with a misplaced keystroke. Technology was not her friend. For her birthday one year, I bought her Macs for Dummies, which she kept on her desk for reference. Each time there was a time lapse, I patiently waited until she resolved the silence.
    I began to think about her death. She lived alone so how would I know? Would it be the sudden disappearance of her emails? A telephone call from the nephew? I thought about how much I would miss those frequent emails, always full of chatter and trivial news, the kind of interaction I could never pull off for long in person. In spite of myself, she had become an affirmative force in my life and, as I considered it, sometimes the only one during the years we had known one another.

    Inevitably over time, Irene began to experience age-related physical problems she would not discuss in detail. After a gardener had found her lying on the patio and called 911, her family, who lived 75 miles away, helped her move out of her beloved triple-wide Eden, into a care home closer to them. Other than the times she was very ill, she kept up our daily email correspondence, now all in capital letters. She apologized because they weren’t longer, lamenting her lack of energy. I could sense she knew her life was winding down, though never directly addressed. She expressed little regret about putting down the beloved cat she had adopted a few years earlier, as if she were clearing out anything that might cause others any inconvenience.
    One morning following another medical crisis, she emailed that she had opted for palliative care. She was enjoying sleeping a lot, she said, seldom hungry, feeling no pain. Her family had bought her a comfortable recliner for her room, but she still struggled to slowly edge to the table to answer any emails that might be awaiting her. Though she was surrounded now by family and caregivers, she would not give up on her friends in cyberspace. The weeks passed and I waited.
    Her daughter-in-law emailed me to say she was sleeping nearly all the time now and that she was reading my emails to Irene aloud every day. She encouraged me to keep writing them, as Irene seemed to perk up when they came. With careful deliberation, I wrote about what I was enjoying, what I was planning to do, trips I might take—all consistent with the upbeat personality I had come to know. I knew continuing our connection even in this odd manner was her way of saying, “Goodbye.” Mine, too.
    Her memorial was held at the clubhouse in the complex where she had treasured her Eden. Her nephew, a professional piano player of whom she was very proud, entertained in the background with Great American songbook tunes while we all shared a buffet lunch. The room was full of friends, old and new, who reminisced about her piano playing, her unflinching support of other musicians, her loyalty no matter what. A niece recalled with glee that Irene loved Halloween so much that she seldom waited for that holiday to dress up. Of course, I had vivid memories of her appearance as Wendy the Witch at the dinner party. The niece reported that Wendy only came out at dinner parties when there was a predictably laudatory audience.
    Still, it was a bit jolting when the event full of warm reminiscences came to a close with her nephew playing – and animatedly singing – “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead” from “The Wizard of Oz.” We laughed in recognition. It was just the kind of send-off she would have loved.

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