My alarm wakes me to a Saturday morning. It is 6am. I reach for my laptop and select Lang Lang’s ‘Rachmaninoff Concerto no 2’ on YouTube. There’s no better way to start my weekend than watching Lang Lang in bed and imagining myself on stage in Carnegie Hall. This is a dream I will not stop nursing until it happens. I don’t know why, but I still think that being a concert pianist is akin to being a magician. You, on stage, filling the hall with memorized notes birthed by ten fingers while your audience sits there, hypnotized, following your journey, awaiting the last note. I have been learning a Rachmaninoff Prelude for the past four days, hoping to add it to my repertoire for my next recital on campus. I glance at my upright piano for a while and resolve to start practising in the next one hour.
My doorbell rings and I turn to Brenda walking in with a black bag and a mischievous smile. I have learned to stop asking what she is up to. I like how she breezes in, like she owns my room. She drops the bag, jumps into my bed and makes to kiss me when she smells my breath, stops, and shakes her head slowly. I laugh.
‘It’s not funny, Del! It’s past 9,’ she says and snatches my laptop from me, and cuts off Lang Lang’s performance.
I walk to the bathroom, stretching and yawning and farting loudly.
‘Yuck! You are just so bizarre. Gosh!’
‘It’s a sign of love.’
‘What sort of stupid love is that?’
‘It means I’m not hiding anything from you.’ I spread my arms. ‘I am all yours; open to you like a cathedral’s doors.’
She doesn’t say anything as I enter the bathroom. Soon, a rap song seeps into the bathroom. I open the door to a dancing Brenda, her back turned to me. She twists her waist this way and that, sways her hands, and jerks her head left and right to the rhythm. Her ponytail swishes across her bum. I swallow hard and nod my head to the rhythm. Attempting a dance move for any reason is out of the question for me. Brenda is the most appropriate metaphor for a house party. I both like and loathe the fact that she doesn’t need anybody’s company or influence to start a party. She turns, dances into my arms and wets my lips with a kiss. She reaches for her bag and brings out a bottle of Vodka. I say goodbye to my Rachmaninoff piece waiting at the piano. There is no point battling booze, a heavy rap beat banging around my ears, and the need to practise at the piano. The last time, I had rejected a glass of wine from Brenda and sat down at the piano, determined to perfect the last page of a piece, she had turned up the volume of her own music to the loudest and come to sit in my laps. She made a jest about how shameful it was that, as a Nigerian, I didn’t know Jidenna. Eventually, I succumbed and took a sip from her glass, then a second sip, a third, a fourth, until she stood up and poured me a full glass. I closed my practice book and stood up. She had won.
We are in bed, naked and spent. This is the fourth time, yet, it feels like the first, like a doubt that has overturned in my favor. Before I left Nigeria for the US, it didn’t cross my mind that I would one day wake up in bed to a white girlfriend who will always be there. My friend and fellow pianist, Solomon, had joked that I would get all the girls once I had a successful recital. I argued and insisted on being celibate and focusing on my piano. He laughed and made a remark about how nice it will be to bring a biracial kid into the world. Solomon said I sometimes sounded like a catholic priest, and that I was letting myself be influenced by Father Dmitri, the Russian-trained pianist who had been visiting Nigeria on missionary work at the time.
‘Don’t you know that some of these priests don’t even keep their celibacy vows?’ Solomon asked me. ‘Who has celibacy helped in this life, eh? These priests are getting laid more than anybody else!’
I had lost interest in relationships after I broke up with Chinwe, my University classmate and first girlfriend. She had made me believe in love, until she didn’t. In our third year, she began spending long hours in the department and this made me suspicious. One evening, I feigned illness and was lying in bed when she took her bag and left for the department. At about 11p.m., I got to our department and met a cold and deserted place. Although the hallway door to the piano rooms was left open for students who wanted to practise all night—a departmental policy which saw students coming in their numbers until the enthusiasm died a slow death, I could have sworn there was nobody in the building. I walked down the hallway as silently as I could, until a soft moan stopped me at door 009 and I perceived Chinwe’s perfume. I opened the door and there they were—Dennis, a first year student of piano, pulling his dick out from Chinwe’s pussy. She was pressed against the piano, which had pages of printed music displayed as witnesses to their newfound obsession.
I jammed the door and left.
The day I told Solomon about Brenda over the phone, he was indifferent. I lamented about how my new relationship had managed to be both a blessing and a curse, about how I rarely could practise for long hours without being interrupted by Brenda, about how I partied and fucked more than I practised, about how Brenda wants me to meet her father, about how she calls me Del, as if I’m a laptop or some electronic gadget.
Solomon was quiet the whole time, a response that caught me off guard.
‘Delunebechukwu, a lot has been happening since you left,’ he said. ‘I managed to pass my final recital and it affected my GPA. I think about it sometimes and I blame myself for choosing to play Chopin’s ‘Impromptus’. I should have known that Chopin was a mad fellow. I regret that I didn’t choose Mozart. Professor Benson stopped talking to me, as if my poor performance would affect his salary. I’ve chosen to ignore him, too. My only joy is that I’ll be a graduate soon. And maybe, like you, I might be lucky to gain sponsorship and join you in America. You remember Adanna, right—that short fair soprano in diploma class? She’s pregnant for me. It still doesn’t make sense why she chose to keep the baby and not flush it out like the other girls did. I think she’s just being stubborn rather than naïve. Her mother called last weekend, threatening fire and brimstone. I don’t even want that to bother me. Nobody needs a prophet to know that I’m not ready to be a father. Not now. I have to go, man. I have to go. We’ll talk later’.
He dropped the call.
1 Comment
Four pages of interesting story.