Free Home from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart Mclean Page A

job playing at Radio City Music Hall. She did the Liza Minnelli show. She had to wear a sequined gown even though the orchestra was in the pit, because at every show, there was a moment when the pit was raised. The orchestra would play a number as they hovered in the air, and then they would drop out of sight again.
    Some of the people had been in the pit for over a decade. They hated what they were doing, but they didn’t leave, because it was a good job and steady. One night Annie watched the trombone player filling out his income-tax form during the show—putting down his pen and picking up his trombone without missing a cue.
    Stovman had an apartment on Riverside Drive, in the same building as Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman. Perlman lived on the top floor in the apartment where Babe Ruth used to live.
    Once, while Annie was warming up, she played a reel, and Stovman screamed at her. “Don’t play like that in here,” he said. The accompanist told Annie that Stovman was harder on her than any of his other pupils. That made her happy. She stayed two years.
    When she left, she was offered a job with the Boston Symphony. She got married six months later. She thought she had everything she ever wanted.
    But life with the orchestra didn’t suit Annie. She found the program repetitive, and when the conductor did choose new pieces to perform, they were seldom things Annie wanted to play. After rehearsals and performances, the younger members would sometimes gather at one another’s apartments for a glass of wine, but invariably, the talk would return to the same tired complaints—the lousy salaries, the long hours, the lack of opportunity. Annie had the job she’d always wanted, but she couldn’t find any joy in it.
    Then the first violinist left the orchestra, and the undercurrent of rivalry that Annie had always suspected was there burst into the open. The woman in the chair beside Annie suddenly stopped talking to her, and it didn’t take long for Annie to learn that the woman had tried to undercut her—had actually complained to the conductor that she was tired of carrying Annie, that Annie always played off tempo.
    When her marriage began to fall apart, Annie decided she’d had enough. She quit the orchestra and moved back to Nova Scotia with her daughter, Margot.
    Stovman was furious. He wrote her a blistering three-page letter. “What are you trying to do to me?” he wrote. To him?thought Annie. What am I doing to
him
? Oddly, the letter made her feel better about her decision. She took a contract with Symphony Nova Scotia. She also joined a Celtic group. Suddenly, music was fun again.

    Morley knew much of this, but she hadn’t heard all of it before, not all at once. They were eating dessert when she told Annie about Sam’s piano lessons and what his teacher, Mrs. Crouch, had said about him. She explained her plan to send Sam to music camp so he could study with Laurence Merriman.
    Annie said, “Laurence Merriman is a prissy snob. I thought Sam already had a music teacher. You said he was having fun with the guy.”

    On Thursday, when Morley took Sam to his piano lesson she asked if she could stay and watch. Ray Spinella, the one-armed teacher, looked surprised but delighted. “You could sit over there,” he said.
    Morley did her best to disappear. She needn’t have bothered. Ray and Sam were soon utterly absorbed by the music. Morley noticed that Ray obviously wasn’t following a method. And he wasn’t teaching the grade-one syllabus.
    At the end of the lesson, Ray had Sam make up a tune. Then Ray took a trumpet off the top of the piano, stood beside her son, and played along. Sam smiled at his teacher, Ray nodded, and they both kept going.

    On the way home, Morley said, “When you’re at camp, do you think they’ll give you your own horse, or do you have to share it?”
    Sam said, “I think you have to share. But I’m going to save up and buy my own horse. I’m going to call him Bach.