Chapter Seventeen
KNOX
THE AFTERGLOW of a job well done still hasn’t let up as I shake the hands of the members of the headliner band Dark City’s Children.
It’s been a long time since a performance felt important enough, where the music between the four of us on stage was in sync enough for my synesthesia to hit notes past sour and bitter.
Tonight I began tasting the hints of sweetness along the outside ridges of my tongue as Via, Zeke, Cash, and I played our way through our set list and the crowd responded enthusiastically.
“Make sure to stay in touch, Knox,” Helen, one of the backup singers, says to me as the last of their instruments is placed in the trailer.
“I will,” I promise.
“And give our manager Mandy a call by the end of the week. I’ll make sure to mention the Nightshades in our conference call with him tomorrow.”
“I will,” I repeat.
I’m more than happy to have connected with such an amazing rock band. They are absolutely the kind of people I would want to work with again.
I feel strangely wired. My mind is thinking through a solid exercise plan that might wear me out as the rest of us part ways for the night. That’s when I notice that Raven’s car still sits in the parking lot, the only one left from the staff. Typical. She is always working.
I turn back into the building, wondering if I’ll catch her in the office pouring over spreadsheets like usual.
Instead, I almost immediately hear music, a piano playing deep inside the space.
I follow it, intrigued by the expressive sound.
Raven’s posture is straight-backed and calm, almost reverent.
Yet, there is an unmistakable electricity in the way her hands hover before striking the next note of the piece, like she was listening for something only she could hear.
I ease myself silently into one of the chairs.
It’s mostly a standing venue, but a handful of seating options are alongside the wall, keeping me in shadow and out of her line of sight.
The opening passage she is playing is delicate, each note placed with care.
The piano does not merely release a series of notes.
With Raven at the bench, it speaks in a voice that feels beautifully human.
I’ve heard a dozen people play that piano over the last few weeks, but it has never sounded like this before.
She seems to know the instrument’s full emotional range, teasing out soft phrases that shimmer and dance across my taste buds.
As the piece develops, so does the intensity, Ven’s body becoming more lively.
She leans into the keyboard, drawing out thunderous chords that resonate through the floor and into my chest. Her hands move with breathtaking precision, gliding effortlessly across octaves.
Arpeggios cascade out of the piano like water over a precipice, crashing into each other, foaming up and out like spray.
What makes this clandestine performance truly extraordinary to me, however, is the emotional honesty woven into every moment.
For someone seemingly afraid of vulnerability, she nevertheless lays out every emotion, exposing it to the stage lights.
Pauses linger just long enough to ache, resolving only when the phrase has earned the release.
There are moments of playful joy, bright and dancing, fully alive, followed by passages of somber reflection, approaching funereal.
Time bends the longer she plays. Seconds stretch and contract.
The music guides me through an emotional landscape I’ve never heard, and I never want to leave.
The bursts of flavor I keep experiencing as I listen drag me into the depths of summer.
Limes, raspberries, rich soils, and Kansas breezes. Oranges, hops, and coconut.
Raven sways with the phrasing, breath aligning with the tempo, as if the piano were an extension of her, as familiar to her as any other part of her body.
I sense deep listening happening in real time on her part, which seems to respond to the resonance of this room, the decay of each note, the silence between sounds.
The final notes fade, lingering in the air like dust, leaving an imprint of ginger on my tongue long after the last sound has vanished.
I feel like I’ve been holding my breath since I sat down, and now I exhale.
I’m standing and clapping before I can think it through, and I watch as the loud, sudden action startles Raven out of her reverent moment.
“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry,” I say honestly. “But that absolutely deserved a standing ovation.”
“Thanks.” She smiles softly, closing the fallboard of the upright piano.
“Please don’t stop on my account.”
“No, I’m done.” She stands, the bench scraping the floor as she does.
“I knew you could play, but you never told me you could play like that.”
She shrugs. “It’s nothing.”
“Really? Because that sounded very much like the opposite of nothing. Raven, that was incredible.”
“Thanks.”
I take the side steps up to the stage, joining her in the spotlight.
“Where did you learn to play like that?”
“Oh, I’ve been playing since I was five. I’ve had plenty of music teachers, not just for piano. But playing like that? I worked on that piece in undergrad. It’s called Okosum’s Piano Sonata No. 5.”
“It was beautiful. You must have gotten a standing ovation when you played it in college.”
Her expression darkens noticeably.
“No, not that one. I wasn’t able to perfect it in time for my senior recital. I played another one of hers, her Sonata No. 1. It’s another lovely piece, but less technical.”
“I would love to hear that one too.”
“I don’t really play for audiences anymore.”
“That’s an actual shame, Ven.”
Her expression twitches, but she doesn’t comment on the nickname this time. She looks away from me.
“Have you been talking to my parents, because they say the same thing during just about every conversation these days?”
I sense I’m wading knee-deep into a loaded conversation. But I press forward.
“After listening to you play like that, I hear their point.”
“It’s not that simple, Knox.”
“I mean, maybe I’m an idiot, but it doesn’t seem that hard. You are one of the best piano players I’ve ever heard. No, scratch that, you are the best I’ve ever heard.”
Raven rolls her eyes, pushing her smile down into a line. “Trying to kiss your boss’s ass?”
Yes. Among other things.
“No, just wondering why someone with your talent is basically working backstage.”
“The pressure is totally different backstage and as a manager. My self-worth can’t take a hit every time I miss a note if I’m not playing.”
A long silence stretches between us, but I’m not going to break it. Ven sits back down on the bench. Her posture shows she’s ready to play once more, but her eyes are distant in memory.
“I had this professor in college. He’s a brilliant pianist and composer.
He only takes on one new student a year, and I could not believe I was chosen my freshman year.
He was the most exacting piano teacher I had ever had up to that point.
You think I’m intense, but I have nothing on this man.
I can’t tell you how much my piano playing improved over that first semester alone.
But he was also a good listener, asking questions about my personal life, my family, my freshman romances, my classes, anything and everything.
It all seemed pretty innocent, just a professor getting to know his student. ”
I already feel uncomfortable, sensing where this story is going.
“The too-long-didn’t-read version is he is a selfish, controlling asshole.
But I was distracted by all the things he gave me.
By all the things he promised to give me.
In hindsight, I should have seen him for the cliché that he is.
An aging married professor always sniffing around co-eds.
I mean, there is an entire genre of books about men like that.
Those all seem to end happily, but not so much for me. ”
I want to say I’m sorry. I want to hold her in comfort. But I feel like saying or doing anything will break this talkative spell she seems to be under. So I nod.
“Instead of a happily ever after, I got a stress ulcer at 20 and nearly failed out of college. I completely crashed out just a few days before an important recital. It was more like an audition, actually. It was the final hurdle to enter my senior year. I just couldn’t take it anymore.
The insane practice and rehearsal schedules, the endless criticisms, the pressure to perform at a certain level across different styles.
“It was like this beautiful world I had dreamed of and worked for was suddenly a cage.
A little prison I happily built for myself without realizing it.
There was no getting out. Not with all the pressure I felt at the time.
There was only sitting and enduring. So I did.
Years of relentless verbal abuse from a man I trusted, all culminating in the worse performance of my lifetime.
“God above, the railing I took from that four-person committee…” shaking her head, she says, “it almost made me quit. I absolutely did cry the moment I got off the stage. I made it through my senior year, just barely, but after graduation, I stopped performing.” She sighs.
“I know I disappointed a lot of people with that decision, but I needed a break from playing music for a while. And like I told my parents, it’s not like I gave up on music entirely.
It’s still my passion. It’s still how I feed myself.
I’m just not the object of ridicule anymore. ”
Everything she is saying is making me seriously pissed at a list of people whose names I don’t even know.
Her shit professor. The school administrators who likely knew the stress that man was putting her under but did nothing to support her.
That committee is filled with four assholes and no brain cells.
Anyone who has ever made her feel like she wasn’t the most incredible musician on Earth.
Fuck. Them. All.
“Sorry, you don’t care about any of this.”
“I do,” I insist. “I really do want to know why the most talented piano player I have ever heard isn’t playing international concert halls.”
She presses her lips together once more, and I know she is suppressing a smile.
“Because no one is looking for a pianist slash percussionist with late-developing but nonetheless crippling stage fright.”
“I’d hire you.”
That smile she was suppressing comes out in full force.
Damn. It hits me like a sudden illness. I feel lightheaded, giddy, and unsettled all at once.
I think that’s the first time she has smiled at me specifically like that since she hired us.
I’m immediately consumed with ideas on how to get her to do it again.
“How sweet of you. But I know what you’d pay and you, sir, cannot afford me.”