To the Boy who Played Me Chopin: Or, Why I'm Glad as Heck My Life is Not a Sandra Bullock Movie

Recently, I’ve had two odd experiences involving total strangers and a piano.

The first happened at work, in a crusty practice room littered with stale Reese’s wrappers. My job is wholly cerebral, and so on my break I run to the practice rooms and I play, trying to shut off my throbbing brain for a minute. The pianos are tuned only once at the beginning of each school year, and by the time February rolls around they sound pretty awful. My piano today sounded remarkably honky-tonk.

As a musician, I’ve always had this secret fantasy that one day, I’ll be sitting there, playing and minding my own business, and someone will enter the room and he’ll say (yes, it’s always a he), “My God! What were you playing? That’s beautiful!”

“Oh,” I’ll say with a flip of my hand, “it was just something I wrote.”

How casual I shall be! How nonchalant! I'll gaze at him steadily and finger my platinum-blonde hair. (In my fantasy world, I resemble Gwyneth Paltrow. Early '00s Gwyneth Paltrow. Think Margot Tenenbaum.)

Then—oh, joy!—he’ll turn out to be a musician too, and then we’ll be fast friends, and we’ll ride off into the sunset. Or the cafeteria. Or something.

Well, the other day I was sitting there, minding my own business, and I finished playing something my friend Cusack and I have been working on for months—an epic, eight-minute blend of Muse, Chopin, and Debussy. And then this person I had never seen before entered the room and closed the door behind him. He looked like a young, shabby Jason Schwartzman, of all people. “What was that piece you were playing?” he asked.

I reddened. “It was something I wrote,” I said. “I mean, that my band wrote.”

“How did you do that?” he said.

I showed him. Naturally, now that I had an audience, I sucked.

Not-Jason didn’t seem to mind. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “I love it.” He smiled, and then he bent over and unzipped his backpack, pulling out sheet music, Chopin and Debussy. He asked me if I’d ever heard of Muse.

I told him I plagiarized Muse on a regular basis. Not-Jason didn’t seem to mind this either. He was a pretty easy-going guy. He started going on and on about all these songs by Muse. I hadn’t heard any of them, but I wanted to look like I knew what I was talking about, so I nodded and said, “Yeah. Uh-huh. Oh, that’s a good one.” Not-Jason sat down and started playing Chopin. He wasn’t bad.

After that, we stood around and looked at each other for a minute, and then we talked about nothing, and then I told him I had to get back to work. And that was it.

If this had been a movie, things would have ended differently. If my life was a crappy rom-com directed by Garry Marshall that will make $50 million on its opening weekend just because of Sandra Bullock and her not-quirk, it might have ended like this:

Not-Jason finishes his Chopin. Elyse giggles uncontrollably. She snorts.

ELYSE [covering her nose]: Oh my God! I’m so sorry!

NOT-JASON: Did you just snort?

E. [still giggling]: No! [She snorts again.] Yes! Oh my God!

[She starts to run out of the room, but trips and falls. He catches her.]

N.-J.: I think it’s cute.

[They stare at each other. Cue “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol.]


Dear God.

Truth be told, I like the real ending better, in which I ran off and phoned my friend Cusack—the one who wrote the song with me—and told him our music was so good that it moved total strangers to interrupt private practice sessions and declare their adoration. Thing is, I was so excited that my phone skills (which are pretty shoddy to begin with—I hate talking on the phone) deteriorated and I found myself shouting, “Boy! Piano! Muse! Plagiarism!” Needless to say, Cusack was thoroughly confused.

The second Weird Thing happened in the chapel at school. (As a side note, I’m surprised we’re still allowed to call it “the chapel.” Chapel services themselves, which have been secular for decades, were recently redubbed “Community Reflections.” This reached a new level of absurdity last quarter when we held a Community Reflection about Intimate Partner Violence. I wouldn’t be surprised if soon we have Community Reflections in the Center for Spiritual, Humanistic and Tree-Huggery Thought. Anyway. )

Nomenclature aside, the chapel is an ethereal place to play. It’s one of those places I run to when I’m either glowingly happy or blackly depressed, like last winter, when I got turned down from study abroad. I ran up the hill to the chapel and played for two solid hours. I played until my arms hurt, and then I kept playing anyway. Outside, the snow fell slowly.

A year later, on the afternoon of this Strange Occurrence, the sun was out. I took my shoes off. (I always take my shoes off when I play in the chapel. That way I can actually feel the smooth metal of the pedals.) Then I stepped on the stage and sat down at the Baldwin grand, which is ancient and immaculately tuned.

Half an hour later, I had to go to class, and so I descended from realms ethereal and started getting ready to go. Then I heard a voice from the balcony.

“You took me to the woods,” it said.

I looked up, startled. “I what?” I said.

“You took me to the woods,” the lady said. She was a cleaning lady, and she was staring down at me. She had long gray hair and had probably been a hippie in a past life.

These are not the sorts of conversations one usually has with strangers. “What did you see in the woods?” I asked. (The nice thing about conversations with strangers, though, is that if something becomes awkward, you never have to see them again. Thus, it's appropriate to take a little more risk than usual.)

“I saw a lot of things,” she said, arms slung over the railing. “I saw a lot of things, and you took me there.” She paused contemplatively, and then she said, “How does it feel to be enormously talented? Does it feel good?”

I shouldered my backpack of Important Books to Read and pondered how to answer this question. These aren’t the sorts of things one usually asks of strangers unless they’re irritated--i.e., "How ya feelin', punk? Ya feelin' good?" But the cleaning lady didn’t sound malicious. She wasn’t making fun of me. It occurred to me suddenly that this maintenance person was in possession of sensibilities just like mine. She could feel things too, even though I carried a bag full of Important Books and she scrubbed walls dirtied by the soles of selfish liberal arts kids.

It’s a very strange thing when something you do moves somebody enough for them to tell you about it. It's strange because making art is an often solitary and sometimes very lonely affair. I wrote one of the songs I played for the cleaning lady after the death of a friend a couple years back. I never thought I would share it with anybody: it was just my attempt at reckoning with something that didn't make sense. But apparently it made sense to her.

I was watching an interview with Chris Martin of Coldplay the other day, and he said that most of his songs, now consumed by millions, were written in moments of extreme loneliness, dark hours when no one can hear you and all the world’s asleep. And yet here were these songs, songs borne out of sorrow, being sung by stadiums full of people. Turns out Chris wasn’t the only one who was “lost and hurt and lonely too.”

I stood in the chapel, stood beneath the balcony with the cleaning lady. She thought I was enormously talented. Did it feel good? She wanted to know.

“Yes,” I said. “But only if I get to take people to the woods.”