As a boy, he spent afternoons at the Steinway, a concert grand, whose erect top bollixed the sunlight that broke through the clouds hovering over Puget Sound. By sixteen, he was sure of only two things: he loved Beethoven, and boys. When his fingertips pressed the ivory keys, and the music he made came back up into him through the soles of his feet, he felt the one satisfaction he was to know. In college, he pinned the first girl he dated, though he might have had a thousand girlfriends, for he was kind and polite and never overeager. The pin became a diamond, the diamond a band, and by 26, he was married, a father, and a doctoral student in psychology, for he had eschewed his musical studies at 18, declaring himself insufficiently gifted, a notion out of which every teacher tried but failed to persuade him. “I can’t go on; I don’t have what it takes” was his two-part refrain. In truth, Beethoven and boys had something to do with one another, and he feared their passionate linkage.
It was 1961. Robert’s menage relocated from Seattle to San Francisco, where he had his first job, resulting from his first application, as assistant professor at the University of San Francisco. Initially, Charlotte fulfilled her faculty wife duties, entertaining Robert’s colleagues, keeping their child, a girl they named Beatrice after Robert’s recently deceased mother, out of sight of the Friday gatherings, where the mostly male professors talked and drank for many hours while the wives listened, or murmured in the kitchen of their own concerns. Though exhausted by her maternal duties, Char began her own advanced study not long after they moved, attending classes in Special Education for the Handicapped, as they were called in that era.
Unlike every other man in his department, Robert cooked and cleaned. The first in the office, he prepared the coffee and wiped the counters, washing the mugs his colleagues had not, leaving them scattered in the lounge for the secretary. Robert despised clutter. Actually, he preferred his own housekeeping to that of his wife, and after two years of trying and failing to parcel out their roles as other couples did, they established the pattern that would last their entire married life, with Robert doing most of the “wifely” tasks, plus working full time, always available for his students, while Char studied and attended to Beatrice, whom Robert believed he adored, yet remained strangely distant toward, as if he could never quite believe he, too, had engendered their sturdy female child; she was a perfect miniature of her mother, down to the webbed third toe on her right foot.
His dissertation took five years to complete, for he ignored it completely until receiving a warning from his chairman to finish the project or else. Begun so long ago, it had more to do with his mentor’s interests than with his own, which were rapidly falling into a category he called “Existential Psychology,” though there was, at that date, no such topic listed in the card catalogue. So he hustled his way through “Early Indications of Paranoid Schizophrenic Sociopathology in Pre-Adolescent Males,” the research all out of date, and his elderly professor vetted all 405 pages of it, then passed him, with honors, on his defense, for which he’d flown alone back to Washington. He did not alert his father or sisters of his trip, for he did not want to visit the family home, its waiting, unplayed Steinway.
Knowing his “celebration” to be a farce, he refused invitations from his former teachers and roamed the city instead, stopping at various bars for a bourbon and water, the drink he’d come to appreciate at every department function. In his nocturnal rambling, he entered a bar occupied, he soon realized, exclusively by men. One bourbon, then another, allowed him to peruse his companions with relative security, as it was dark in the bar; he had only subconsciously remarked upon the lack of windows, the subterranean entrance to the place. Though he had permitted himself a glance, here and there, in high school and in college, at a basketball player’s body in the gym or a surreptitious stare at his chess opponent’s fair head of curls, bent assiduously over the board, this was his virgin adult moment of freedom in an all-male setting, aided of course, by the many drinks he had consumed that evening, though the walking had burned off some of the haze with which alcohol glazed his entire waking life.
To his left sat a man like himself, losing his hair, in jacket and tie, completely ordinary, eyes downcast. To his right, an older gentleman with a cravat, cane, and Maurice Chevalier-style hat, chatting with the bartender. He winked at Robert, then turned back to the young lifeguard type, who wore jeans, a tight white shirt, with a white towel draped rakishly over his left shoulder. Other men clustered in pairs in the dim booths, sometimes sitting nearly atop one another, as the young marrieds often did in the later hours of the Friday night psych soirees, after the bottles of bourbon and rum had emptied, and no one could summon the energy to go out for more. When the bartender offered a third drink, Robert shook his head, afraid and exhilarated by where he had found himself. “This gentleman will buy it,” said the bartender, and Robert turned to the smiling older man, whose elegant fingers, sporting a slim cigar, bespoke a life of leisure, a pianist’s fingers. Robert was reminded of a favorite piano teacher and nodded uneasily, accepting the drink.
“My name is Wallace O’Hanlon,” said the man, moving his stool closer. Robert’s other neighbor gulped his beer and fled. “And yours?”
“Eugene,” said Robert, using his middle name, “Beckett,” he added, borrowing his favorite writer’s. Sweating, he swallowed his bourbon, and the bartender provided another, which Robert Eugene promptly inhaled. When Wallace placed one delicate finger on Robert’s cheek, a sudden sweet nausea arose in his gut. As he rushed for the exit, he heard the old man and the young bartender laughing at him, or thought he did.
By 36, now tenured chair of the department, and father of two more girls, Robert had gone completely bald. A careful dresser, though not vain, he affected a habit for hats. Berets were his specialty, and he owned six of them in a full spectrum of red-based shades. After having read Camus and Sartre, in French, he found himself grievously wanting in stoical prowess and gave up on Existentialism. Though the city was in full generational turmoil, men and women indistinguishable in their long hair and bell-bottoms, he and Char, now a full-time teacher in the public schools, had remained aloof from the hippies and the protesters. Too old to run barefoot through Golden Gate Park, too young to join the disapproving chorus of their older friends, they watched from their house, high on Lone Mountain, as the world metamorphosed around them. Even at his Catholic university, Robert’s students showed up in psychedelic paisley fashion, and he learned to detect the woody smell of marijuana from his student conferences, during one of which a favorite sophomore, a blond boy listed as George on the roster, who had renamed himself Geodesic, offered to share a joint. Shaking his head, Robert, while admiring the boy’s disdain for decorum, reached instead for his bourbon in the lowest drawer of his filing cabinet. “This works for me,” he told Geodesic, who clucked his tongue in disapproval.
“That stuff’ll kill you,” the boy said, his mantle of curls bobbing righteously. Then he sat up straight, looking Robert in the eyes, as if to shake off his hippie persona. “Look, I know this isn’t safe, here in your office,” he said in a low, more mature voice. “Why don’t you meet me off-campus, tonight, after your class, at The Grand Piano on Haight. Okay?” Then Geodesic wrapped himself and whirled off in his purple cape before Robert could refuse.
Beatrice, Lois and Phyllis kissed him absently as he gathered his books and papers from the living room, heading off to class after an early dinner. From the kitchen, where Char was grading papers, came a tentative, “Honey? Remember we have to do our taxes? Tonight or tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, regulating his breath the way he’d learned as a child at the keyboard, for sometimes Beethoven would so overwhelm him that he would forget to breathe, and an early instructor, Monsieur Forché, (a dandy who insisted on the title despite the fact he was born and bred in White Salmon, Washington, but had studied for six months at the Conservatoire in Paris), had taught him the invaluable lesson of counting his breaths. Many years later, Robert would understand this same method to be key to Eastern meditation, a technique for which his oldest daughter would travel to India and live in an ashram for five years to master.
Night classes were new, both to the school and to Robert. Though Char had at first objected, saying they hardly saw him as it was, Robert had prevailed, for he received a small bonus for taking on the 7-10 pm offerings, and they needed the money for the girls’ orthodontia, since all three had inherited the overcrowded mouths of their mother’s family. Although together they netted a more than adequate salary, their expenses had a way of mounting beyond their means. Char had commandeered their credit card, using it rigorously at the city’s many bookstores, where she would go to lose herself after school in stacks of novels and plays. Always, Robert would get excited about a new author, incorporating quotes and anecdotes into his lectures (Heidegger’s “the forgetting of being” was current for several years), and Char would read all she could to keep up with him. But he never stayed focused for long, while Char’s interest intensified. In the early 70s she organized a reading group among her colleagues at Galileo High School, for which she was chief scheduler, reading hungrily into the nights to determine the texts for their calendar. She also enjoyed dressing their daughters well, for she had grown up in the frugality of Seattle’s Cannery Row, and consequently all three girls were treated to shopping tours on I. Magnin’s children’s floor.
Robert’s lecture that night centered on Dr. Karen Horney, whose radical work in the 1950s made her a favorite with the rising feminist movement, which found an ally and a promoter in Robert, alone among his colleagues. For his forward-thinking ways, he was attended by a coterie of female students, some of whom, he knew, took his kind attention for flirtation. Robert neither encouraged nor discouraged their interest.
Unfortunately, someone kept giggling every time he uttered the name of the analyst, though he pronounced it “horn-eye,” as his notes indicated. Two girls burst into spasms when he mentioned Horney’s accomplishments, Horney’s iconoclastic vision, and Horney’s infamy, all in one sentence.
“What’s the matter with you!” he shouted. The class hushed at once, for he had never raised his voice before. “I’m sorry.” He coughed fakely. “I’m a bit under the weather tonight.” The culprit students, red-cheeked as pomegranates, mumbled apologies. Though he hadn’t covered all his material, Robert dismissed them early.
Flustered, he rushed to his office before any of the usual hangers-on could stop him, and, with the lights out, swallowed a shot of bourbon. His pulse finally slowed to a reasonable rate, and he watched the phosphorescent hands of his clock as the minutes passed. Geodesic would now be seated at The Grand Piano, sipping a glass of red wine, Robert imagined, rehearsing his invitation to Professor Moore to walk with him in the park on this redolent April night.
After the building fell silent, and Robert’s anxiety had dissipated somewhat, he decided to go home. But when he turned on the lights and saw the armchair reserved for students, he pictured Geodesic still sitting there, his low voice rich with desire. For him? Robert gulped. For the bald professor whose gut was beginning to droop, whose palms sweated badly before the first drink of the day? Or was it a dare, or a proposition arrived at in stoned communion with his buddies? The latter seemed unlikely, as Geodesic was always alone, never a part or appendage to any of the various cliques that formed yearly in the department. He poured another drink, and, hearing footsteps, assuming it was a student with a question, composed himself. Someone knocked. “Dr. Moore?” said the low voice. “Can I come in?”
Frightened, Robert put away the bottle and glass, still full. “Enter!” His automatic pilot drive clicked on, habituated by years of morning classes, which he taught, hungover, always on time.
The young man peered around the edge of the door, as if someone might be hiding there. He wore a bleached white shirt, ironed, and brown sportscoat, no tie, with brown corduroys. Swallowing, Robert was moved by the boy’s transformation, his quiet simplicity. Blond curls spilled out of the ponytail down his back, and his entire body shook as he reached for the armchair and sat. “I had a feeling you wouldn’t show,” he whispered, “so I came to get you.”
For a moment, Robert considered calling Security. He could have the boy removed for inappropriate behavior, and that would be the end of that.
“I completely forgot!” said Robert, the lie straining the corners of his mouth. “I thought it was next week! But you know,” he said, pointing to the calendar, feeling the emptiness of his chatter balloon in the still room, “it’s tax day tomorrow, and, celebrated procrastinator that I am, I haven’t done a thing about it.” He almost added, “my wife is after me,” but restrained himself for no reason he could name.
“I didn’t mean to…make you uncomfortable today,” George said, touching his fingertips to his smoothly shaven cheek. Robert followed his gesture, mouth open. “I don’t ever want to make you uncomfortable,” he added, pressing the tip of his middle finger to the center of his lips, as if to keep some word or words from escaping. Robert closed his mouth. “I just thought it might be nice to know you better. To know you…” he looked around the large room, its walls burdened with books, “in a different context. Outside your office.”
Gripping the oak armrests of his chair, Robert remembered to count his breaths. “Surely you’ve heard of my seminar banquets,” he said, managing a laugh, “so, when you’re a senior….”
“But that’s still student-teacher.” George leaned toward him, his breath warm on Robert’s hand, which toyed with a fountain pen on a pile of files. “I meant something more personal. You don’t have a son, do you?”
Robert blanched. “No! But what does that have to do with anything? I am your teacher, am I not? And you, my student.”
George rose. “I had a very special teacher in high school. Without him, I wouldn’t be here.” George checked his pockets: first his coat, right, left; breast; then shirt; then pants, front and back, finding what he was looking for in the last one. Robert watched George pat himself down with his own lips pressed tightly together. “I wanted to give you something.”
“Do you need an advisor?” asked Robert, the only response he could summon.
“Don’t you?” said George, smiling for the first time since he’d entered the room. “Yes. I need one. I need you.”
“Who’s your advisor now?” Robert knew his question was absurd.
George handed him something small wrapped in a handkerchief. “Look at it after I’m gone,” he said, and left.
As soon as George shut the door, Robert pulled open his drawer and guzzled the shot he’d poured earlier. For a second he worried the boy would commit suicide, “after I’m gone” resonating in Robert’s ears. Yet, after some analysis, he concluded there was nothing at all depressed in George’s actions or words. He was strong; he’d come for what he wanted. He hadn’t taken no, which Robert’s absence from The Grand Piano would have signified. And he’d managed to get Robert to volunteer as his advisor, a task which would mean more conference time with George, alone, a prospect which elicited in Robert both anxiety and anticipation.
Promising it would be his last, Robert poured one more drink, then opened up the handkerchief. Under the dull halo of his desk lamp, an obsidian stone gleamed. It fit snugly in the center of his palm, worn smooth as if rubbed for years by warm hands or many waves. A talisman? He slipped the rock in his front pocket and was wondering what to do with the cloth when he saw something written on the white cotton, a phone number. First he threw it in the trash, then reconsidered and stuffed it in his pocket, glad that he and not Char did the laundry.
The following Tuesday, George did not attend his Introductory Abnormal Psych lecture. All weekend Robert had grazed the rock in his pocket while looking for change, or keys, or had simply felt his fingers straying there to touch it. The handkerchief he’d washed, hoping the number would vanish, but it remained perfectly legible, as if written in indelible ink. Without planning to, he had it memorized. After class and conferences and his daily shmooze with the secretary, Judy, he understood that he was disappointed George hadn’t shown. He’d paid extra attention while dressing that morning, matching a geometrically patterned crimson tie with a new beret, wearing his favorite chestnut-colored jacket, which was very like George’s.
A week later, Geodesic George returned to class wearing his cape, his odor of marijuana and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Robert had few rules about classroom fashion or behavior; he didn’t mind if students came without shoes or fell asleep (as long as they didn’t snore), but he would not speak to a student whose eyes were masked. In the past, he’d say “No sunglasses indoors, please,” to the general classroom, and the guilty party or parties would remove them, grateful, however, not to be singled out individually. But this time Robert remained silent. His quivering, inarticulated hopes had shriveled upon seeing Geodesic — for surely it was Geodesic who had returned, not George — slouch to the back of the room, ignoring him.
For an hour, Robert told stories of schizophrenia, a disease he knew so well he rarely referred to notes. He walked around the room, gesticulating, joking. He didn’t dare travel as far back as Geodesic’s desk, and when the students began their shuffling and book gathering, indicating class was about to end, Robert felt relieved. When Geodesic slithered out the back door, Robert touched the rock in his pocket, its smooth surface beside his keys and stubs of chalk, and was, for a moment, conscious of his cowardice.
On Thursday, he poured a fortifying bourbon before heading out to Introductory Abnormal Psych. But Geodesic never came back. When Robert inquired of the Registrar, he was told the student had withdrawn from the university for medical reasons, though no doctor’s note had been filed.
Drinking before class became a new ritual. He saw his students, his daughters and Char floating beneath a gauzy mesh, aware at all times of their presence, but never allowing them to take on distinct identities. Ever a workaholic, he discharged the duties of the chairman’s office with diligence, and, with Judy’s aid, maintained a busy working life for years and years. Char retreated into her books, his daughters into their burgeoning lives.
In the early 80s, gay men began to die in San Francisco, a subject to which the Chronicle, in the person of Randy Shilts, self-described as the only “out” reporter on a major daily, gave considerable attention. Every morning, as Robert drank his pot of coffee (he rose at 6 without fail) and skimmed the headlines, he pondered the word “bathhouse,” which regularly graced the front page in what were later known as the “bathhouse wars.” He knew that gay men went to the bathhouses for sex, not baths. Yet he could never quite imagine it: a giant room with one clawfoot bathtub? Many rooms with many bathtubs? Porcelain or PVC? Or was it a big steambath, communal, like the old Cliff House drawings, but these bathers were all naked men fornicating with one another, in front of one another? Certain health professionals argued the bathhouses should be shut down, but the gay community, galvanized after the 1978 murder of Supervisor Harvey Milk, rejected with indignation any attempt to restrict their hard-won freedom. Robert read Shilts before even scanning the headlines.
When Char joined him at 6:30, after rousing Lois and Phyllis (in 1980, after dropping out of Berkeley, Beatrice had left for India, where her guru had fled after his conviction for tax evasion), she read the headlines over his shoulder. “Those poor men,” she said. “It reminds me of TB.”
“You weren’t around for that,” he said irritably, turning the page.
“No,” she agreed, taking the buttered muffin Robert had prepared for her from the toaster oven, “but my parents used to talk about it all the time. They lost people at the cannery. Long before I came along. That’s all.” She sat down across from him. “What is it, hon?”
“This kid,” Robert said, blinking rapidly, pointing to a photograph of an intense young man with light curls. “I knew him. I mean, I know him. He was my student.”
Char pulled the paper closer. “George Murphy, proponent of bathhouse closure,” she read aloud. “Well, he’s not your first student to show up in the Chronicle. Nor mine.” Robert took the paper back. “Remember Ken Park? A quadriplegic who always got punished for racing down the hallways at Galileo? Anyway, he sued one of the bathhouses to make them install ramps. And he won.” She shrugged. “I hear he’s sick now. With this cancer, this GRID-lock business.”
“Gay-related immunodeficiency,” Robert said slowly.
“Gotta go, hon,” Char said, checking her watch. “Remind Phyllis of her ortho appointment, and Lois needs to pick up her prescription.” Lois was on The Pill, a decision arrived at mutually between her and her mother. Working in the public schools, Char claimed she saw absolutely everything, and her method of warding off disaster with her own children was preventative medicine, from birth control to specific drug alerts. The girls responded well, speaking frankly with their mother about their lives, though they remained shy around their father. This arrangement satisfied Robert, as he preferred the relatively manageable problems of his students and office to those of his family. Robert’s routine greased the wheels of his life until the heart attack, just before his fiftieth birthday.
“You don’t need me to tell you to stop drinking,” Dr. Finegood told him, post-op, after they’d accomplished the relatively experimental procedure of transplanting veins from the patient’s thigh for use in the heart. “But I will anyway.” He surveyed Robert’s skinny body. “Stop drinking, and start eating. Okay?”
Beatrice didn’t fly home from India, though her mother cabled her immediately after it happened, a Friday afternoon during Robert’s weekly round-up with Judy, a woman who, as the cliché would have it, spent more time with Robert than his wife did. Suddenly, pain pierced his body, a sharp, gouging dentist’s drill kind of pain shredding his very core, and for the first time, Robert forgot how to breathe. When he regained consciousness, Char, Dr. Finegood, Lois and Phyllis were hovering over him in the bright ward of cardiac intensive care at UC Med, where he had an extraordinary view of the ocean.
For a week he lay in his bed watching the clouds, which reminded him of the afternoon fog on Puget Sound. He remembered the gray light, and the rare sun that found its way to warm him at the piano, though he hadn’t needed warming as he worked his way through the sonatas. When he quit for good, he’d been struggling with Beethoven’s last work, his unfinished and most beautiful composition. In this way, Robert stopped drinking, not by design or will. Miraculously, he suffered no DTs or other major trauma of withdrawal.
When he came home from the hospital, he stopped eating. “You’re depressed,” Char told him. He denied it. “Of course you are. You’ve had your whole life exactly as you wanted it until now. Isn’t that true?”
Robert’s colleagues and Judy visited him often, telling him how much he was missed, how they couldn’t function without him. Nevertheless, a younger man was appointed temporary chair in his absence. Robert didn’t care. His head ached constantly, and the spot on his thigh, from where they’d removed the veins, emitted a noxious odor he couldn’t tolerate. Char swore she smelled nothing, but Robert, obsessed, spent several sessions daily swabbing the area with creams and unguents. He didn’t want the smell on his penis.
Finally, a letter came from Beatrice: […]
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Annie Dawid’s 6th book, Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown, comes out Nov. 18, 2023, the 45th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre, from Inkspot Publishing in the UK. It will be available on Amazon and other sites. Her fifth book, Put off my Sackcloth, was published last year by The Humble Essayist Press. It was a runner up in the Los Angeles Book Festival 2021 autobiography category and a finalist in the 2022 Memoir category from Book Excellence and in non-fiction, Rubery International Book Award 2022. Her short story, “Kenny, Winking,” won the ChipLitFest Short Story Contest (UK) 2022. Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown won the 2022 Screencraft Cinematic Book Contest. Her poetry chapbook, Anatomie of the World, was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press. Her three volumes of fiction are: York Ferry: A Novel, Cane Hill Press, 1993, second printing, winner of 2016 International Rubery Award in Fiction; Lily in the Desert: Stories, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2001; and And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family, Litchfield Review Press, 2009.
Sex and the Piano originally appeared in Clackamas Literary Review.