ragtime nightingale

One day in late January, L asked me to go to her house to be there when she received the delivery of the electric piano she had bought off Craigslist. We took a break at 9 p.m. from our document review to head over. I was wearing shorts and a thin shirt - I had wanted to run; it was only .8 miles; I had been sitting in front of a computer all day - but L was worried that the delivery would arrive soon, and so we climbed on our bikes and rode. I didn't have time to change back into pants before we left. Goosebumps rose along my arms and legs, and I alternated breathing on the fingers of my left and right hands to keep them warm.

Her house was a two-bedroom bungalow across the street from the graduate housing dorms at Stanford, with a duplex rented out to strangers behind it. Much later, she gave me a lemon from a tree growing out of the gravel in the yard. There were no lights on in or in front of her house, so she used a green keychain LED to find the keyhole. It cast a funny glow on her front porch. We left our bikes there, and I went to stand in front of her radiator.

There were almost no furnishings in her house, just a black upright piano ("utter garbage," I think she called it) and an old sofa in her living room; a spool-shaped wooden table with two white folding chairs in the dining room; a neglected fridge; and a simple desk with a laptop in the office. I didn't look in her bedroom.

That afternoon we had had a conversation about music. She mentioned that she was working on a recording project involving the works of Joseph Lamb. I said, "I love Joseph Lamb." She looked surprised that I recognized the name. I said, "Of course, he and Joplin are the two most famous ragtime composers." I felt that I sounded forced saying this, and drank hurriedly from a cup of hot water as soon as it was spoken.

I couldn't remember the name of the Joseph Lamb song I loved, my favorite rag, one I had tried to learn as a guitar duet in 1999 with M, who refused to participate. I looked it up in the afternoon: "Ragtime Nightingale."

In her house, L moved quickly from place to place. She turned a flame on under a pot of water and said, "All I have are these frozen Russian dumplings, but have as many as you'd like." Neither of us had had dinner yet. She moved to the piano and played the first few measures of Ragtime Nightingale.

The delivery of the electric piano interrupted her. She instructed me to watch the water while a man unloaded the instrument and its stand from his little hatchback. She murmured appreciations ("Oh, this is perfect" and "This is exactly what I wanted") as he bent over with the plug to the socket. I rolled ten dumplings into the boiling water, and burned my hand on the splash.

The man left, and L sat down to test her piano. She pushed a few chords down, then ran a chromatic scale over all eighty-eight keys. She tried the concert grand, electric piano, and organ voices, then started Ragtime Nightingale from the beginning.

L is slim, poised, and quiet, and she plays that way. There was very little movement in the house: her hands moved very lightly over the keys; I sat very still just to the right of the keyboard and watched them as she played through the rag; in the kitchen, the dumplings gurgled and overcooked. The music came very naturally from her memory. L played a fourth section that wasn't on the recording I owned. I mentioned this and she said, "But it is in the song."

After the performance, L went to the kitchen, fished the ten dumplings out of the water, and served us five each with sour cream. We talked about our immigrant parents and our plans for escape, but mostly I put my head into the food and made shoveling motions with my hand. After dinner, we biked back to the office. I was freezing on the way back, too.

L is a ragtime composer. This is my favorite of L's compositions: