The Santa Anas blew fiercely that day, floating that scent of dried jasmine and foreboding ash. The sky was electric, a bruised violet waiting to spark. Even in autumn, the freeways glistened metallic in the heat, but inside Claudia’s modernist glass box home along Benedict Canyon, the air was stale.

In the corner of the otherwise barren living room sat the Bösendorfer. It was pristine, boasting white, high-gloss spruce, red felt, and gold detailing. A yellowing piano score reduction of Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles lay flat on the desk.

To play the piano, there isn’t much to do. Hands on white bars, one key per finger, allow for the weight of the finger to ever so slightly tap down on the ivory. Notes. Two keys together for a harmony, a pulse for a rhythm. Inside at its heart, high-tensile steel strings under incessant hammers are beaten. Incessantly. The most beautiful melody; just the sound of the abuse.

Pianists abandon their bodies like wide-receivers taking a hit with a dark spot spreading across their brain scans. The pianist succumbs to gravity, just as the keys that produce melodies fall under the weight of the finger and the string rattles under the provocation of the hammer. 

In wicked pain, the pianist loses her back, her shoulders, her arms, her hands, her fingers. The coils of the piano hug her tendons in a radiant embrace. Parasites. They bite with each note, drinking her body dry. Under her heart is hollow. Unmovable, lost in some forgotten melody in the chest of her instrument. Her piano left silent.

The girl rested her right hand on the keys without pressing down. It sat there like some five-legged crab, clawing its way from the receding tide, dying on the keys before her. Her finger twitched. Fucking pathetic. 

***

The girl arrived at golden hour, the skyline of Los Angeles bleeding mimosa and embers. Her mother’s voice chilled and smooth, like a dry martini, rinsed and riddled of Vermouth.

“I value my time,” Claudia’s voice in a slow drawl, not looking up from her magazine. “Why weren’t you here ten minutes ago?” Claudia wore a pearl silk robe with a hint of rose. She perched on the velvet couch, a long, thin herbal cigarette held between two skeletal fingers. The scent of clove and cinnamon left a mist between the girl and the Georgia O’Keefe on the wall.

The girl looked at her mother, silent. Her ring finger twitched to some off-kilter rhythm, the motion small, unconscious, and terrifying—more than the threat of her city on fire outside. Her joints seared. 

She remembered Tchaikovsky’s last symphony, the one with the 5/4 waltz. Tchaikovsky, a Russian homosexual, couldn’t waltz in time with his lover, hence the uneven waltz and the symphony being dubbed Tchaikovsky’s suicide note. When he was caught, he killed himself by drinking shit water to get cholera. How romantic. He had it easy: Tchaikovsky didn’t have to live with Claudia. She was bony, like a lizard. Probably bulimic, but would never brag of needing such schemes to maintain her figure. Expensive face lifts, surgeries, creams, treatments. All to fight gravity. 

“The Dior gown is back from the cleaners. Fall Winter 1949 haute.” The girl had already prepared a custom-tailored white suit for the gala concert, one with arms designed for full range of motion and that would cover the metal brace protecting her hand. Her mother’s dress prepared to trap her, built for a woman not fighting her body.

The dress was a heavy cream, an ombre of black petals falling like soot to the floor with a sleeveless bodice. The corset lifted her breasts, but severed the blood flow to her arms. When the girl tried to reach for her brace, Claudia slapped her hand down… 

The girl looked into the mirror. Her hand drained of color—an acid-washed gargoyle.

“Shoulders back. See. Now, you look like you’re not falling apart.” Claudia patted the girl’s raised shoulders. Outside, the Santa Anas whistled through the canyon, humming a haunting, false harmonic.

***

Claudia was born in Fresno, the ass crack of California, amidst almond trees and the stench of slaughtered cows. She spent forty years scrubbing that smell from her skin since moving to Hollywood. A career in modeling failed upwards into being the most sought after casting director for MGM and a marriage and non-prenup divorce to a top Warner Brothers’ producer. Casting 101: women need to want to be you, and men need to want to fuck you. 

Claudia had some natural beauty but was best showcased after renovation. Fill, lift, tuck. Beauty takes pain and sacrifice, but the end allows for a life of luxurious comfort, far from the agricultural pit and above everyone who never invested in their future, high in the hills. 

Pianists aren’t often known for their physical beauty; men with rolled shoulders and sunken faces. Her daughter, an exhibit of beauty but born at eight pounds and too thick-boned for ballet, would never have a chance at SAB. Still, the piano is feminine, intense, and seductive: an instrument to breed a star. 

Through wise parenting, homeschooling, and the finest of Russian music teachers, her daughter began her training. Two hours of scales and technical ètudes and ten hours of repertoire (14 on Sundays) daily. A day of rest on the 31st of a month. 

Claudia was successful. Her girl, the winner of the International Chopin competition at twelve. Piano was a ballet. Each arpeggio, a pirouette. Yet, as time moved on, her fingers were no longer slender but thick, with strength and hard callouses. Her shoulders began to raise and tighten in a forward roll. But just as with aging, Claudia refused to accept her girl’s carpal tunnel and dystonia. A tighter dress, an adjusted light, and some headshots in haute couture. Smile and wave until the muscles and gravity forget they were ever meant to break.

*** 

A mosaic of up-cycled plywood and silver sheets created the structure of the concert hall. When the hall was first constructed the sunbeams refracting off the silver exterior lit cars on fire, so the hall was painted over a dulled grey. Everywhere but the performance spaces are obstructed by some curved red-grained wood, no view clear except for the guidance onwards—the music radiating from the amphitheater. The elites of industry would gather here for the opening Gala of the new season for the LA Opera. The agency representatives looking to book her on a multi-year international solo tour through the Philharmonics of Europe stood at the wine bar in the corner. Claudia leaned against a column of a staircase behind the bartenders, perched above the scene.

The girl began with the Tristesse Chopin Ètude No. 3. Simple melodies in thirds, clean and eloquent. The music glided from her fingertips, pulling like golden threads tangled around her heart, glowing as they blossomed from her chest through her veins. Page three—she knew it by heart. Tritone melodies pulling taut in opposite directions. Her fingers understood the intricacy of the placement. She knew how to execute, to twist half her hand above the rest. Her eyes closed, allowing the music to flow over her. But then, her ear too trained, she fixated, fluttering her left eye, on that D sharp: out of tune. How could it be? Hadn’t they gone through piano selection processes and multiple technician crews? 

Her ring finger locked. Focused on the tuning, she hadn’t paid attention to her hands. She looked down. Her hand’s position was clawed, monstrous. Her knuckles were swollen, displaced, pushing out of their natural sockets like tectonic plates. Her skin lacked all color and blood. The performance continued, skeletal and broken. Her hand a hissing radio signal. Numb.

The girl was trained on how to work through the cruel, punishing pain. To stop recognizing it. To no longer know what hurt her body.  She refused to even take an ibuprofen. This was different, though. This was pain from a knife. A rusted nail stabbing through her palm, a knife slicing through each artery up through her elbow. This was pain from an electric wire, sudden shocks shooting from her wrist through her thumb. This was pain from a boulder crushing her hand, flattening it. Her palm was burning from the fire as her fingers suffered a cold dysesthesia. The girl tried to flick her palm, attempting to restore blood to the tips of her fingers to no avail. She felt the ghost of every hour of practice, millions of repetitions, collapsing into a knot in her forearm until her elbow popped. It was the sound of her career, snapped in half. Decades of staying home, never playing a sport, scared of hurting a finger. She had never even gone bowling, not to suggest she ever had any friend to bowl with. Her hand, once an instrument of precision, was now just heavy, a useless lump of bone and screaming tendons, her nerves shredded. Perhaps for the first time since she touched a piano, she shed a tear, salt burning her eyes and mascara dripping down her stinging cheek.

She looked up from the bench towards her mother. There, Claudia reached into her Hermes clutch and pulled out her lighter. She slowly lit her fake cigarette, eyes locked intensely on her failure of a daughter. As Claudia exhaled her first drag of smoke, the girl ran away, the dress trailing behind. The agencies, the opera, the piano, all remained—silent.

***

The girl stood on the beach at the shoreline, the bottom of her dress beaten by the waves up to her knees. Around her lay a graveyard of kelp and honeybees who drowned trying to escape the heat, all caked in sand. The girl slowly knelt down, clutching her dead hand, and wept into the water. The girl looked up at the horizon, the sun hemorrhaging a deep red. Her dress soaked in salt, clinging to her skin. 

“Darling.” She heard that demented voice behind her from the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway. Her mother always knew how to raise her voice without it turning into a scream. “Please, that gown is quite expensive. It cost more than the car.”
“I don’t care.” The girl started to laugh under her breath. It was a dry, rattling sound. It was, for the first time she could remember, honest. 

“It’s disrespectful to run,” Claudia continued, gesturing with her cigarette, the embers shaking into the dry sagebrush along the cliff below her. The brush threatened the air with a faint glow. “Get in my car, we’re going back. I’ll call your publicist. This can all be fixed.” 

“I can’t anymore,” the girl sighed to herself, defiant and true. The girl fell forward and writhed into the ocean, drowning her mother’s cries into the background. Her dead hand dragged through the foam like a weighted anchor. Behind her, the casual flick of her mother’s cigarette transformed the sky with a copper flame and dark smoke. A fire bloomed, engulfing the cliffside, a sudden towering tsunami of flame mirroring the sunset. 

The girl continued to crawl, pulling herself towards the grey water, her hair unpinning itself and floating like the kelp washed ashore. Her dress began to shed away as the tide rose above her. She laughed manically with bliss. For the first time in twenty-nine years, she had nothing left to perform.

---

Marvel Jem Roth knows the pain of the piano.