“You don’t have to do everything together,” she said. “He can do music on his own, and you have your poetry, and then you can come together in the evening–“
“And, what, watch Netflix?” I interrupted her. “No, we can make this work, I know it. Because when it does work, it’s glorious.”
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction
Seeking the Third
My husband Lee has devised a new form of musical torture, I mean learning, for me: find the third. He sits at the piano and plays a simple C-chord, CEG. The top note, the G, rings in my ear: royal purple. Easy to find and sing. The root, the C, is deep blue ocean. I dive down to touch it.
The third, the E, is the hard one. Tucked inside the chord, it’s pale as a lettuce leaf in a cheese sandwich.
“Listen harder,” Lee instructs, adding his left hand to the mix. I try, but now there’s a confusion of notes blooming under his fingers. So I cheat by catching the top note and mentally singing “Three blind mice” inside my head. “Mice” denotes the elusive third. My strategy works for a while as Lee moves up and down the scale. Then he asks, “Can you just find it? Can you hear it?”
I glare into his green eyes. He returns my look, immovable. Stubborn as hell. I mark the silvery blond stubble of his three-day beard, the fine architecture of his face. We met on a blind date, and the first time I saw him in person I thought No, no, no, he’s much too skinny. Then a second thought Maybe I can fatten him up. That never did happen, but somehow, seventeen years later, here we are. I think fell in love with his nose first, and then the rest followed.
And about that third, the answer is no, I can’t just hear it. All I hear is a beautiful mélange of sound.
“Try,” he insists. “Without any tricks.” And we go again. This time I let myself guess and grope and fail. Until something shifts, and to my surprise, I land in the right place. I can’t say how I’m doing it, but the more we play this game the more quickly I arrive. I feel like a trapeze artist letting go of the bar and flying through thin air to catch the hands of her partner, trusting that he’ll be there to catch her. But of course, the stakes are different. The trapeze artist risks breaking every bone in her body. When I let my voice sail out into uncertain territory, I risk my heart.
*
In third grade I was asked by my music teacher not to sing with the rest of the class because I was loudly and lustily making everyone else go off-key.
I’ve told this story before. It was 1965, the dark ages. At the time that Mr. C put his cardigan-clad arm around my shoulders and suggested I just mouth the words at the holiday concert, I didn’t even know what a key was. I just knew something about me was wrong, shameful. And my wrongness could be catching.
My story is not unusual. Our numbers are legion. We’re the ones standing awkwardly at birthday parties as the lit cake is brought out, afraid of being exposed as the off-key clodhoppers who will ruin the song. We’re the ones who know every word to every lyric on the Broadway cast album and helpfully shout them out when the real singers are caroling forth at the party. We’re the mad fans at the concert, worshipfully watching the singer on stage weave her mysterious magic, cheering her on.
I think back to myself as a child, a little oddball who lived in storybooks and fantasy, and I’m struck by the fact that I drew the teacher’s attention because I was singing so loudly, and I was singing loudly because I loved it. I loved the song, Val-der-eee, val-der-ahhh, my knapsack on my baaaack! And I was belting it out with all my heart, truly believing in that moment that I was traversing the Alps, just like Heidi.
I was a clumsy lover, to be sure, a lover with more enthusiasm than skill, but it was real love and it has endured through the decades, through high school music classes when I relentlessly pestered the girl standing next to me to tell me if I were sharp or flat, through stints in several no-audition adult choruses, to writing a few musicals–book and lyrics only–with composer-collaborators who made songs out of my words, songs I was not able to sing myself, to this moment when I stand by the piano with the man I fight with and laugh with and sleep with and trust like no other, throat open, palate lifted, tongue anchored behind my bottom teeth, my whole body sweating with exertion, trying to find that damn third.
*
Even a couple of years ago, this little exercise would have been impossible. When Lee and I first started making music together before the pandemic, the melody was like a tightrope to me. I’d wobble along, teetering and flailing, often slipping off entirely.
“How’d I do?” I’d beg him at the end of every session. “Was I on-key fifty percent? Seventy?”
He’d sigh. “I don’t know. There were places where you were okay. Just–listen harder, alright? Listen to yourself, listen to the piano, listen for the chords.”
In the rest of my life as a writing teacher, listening was my super-power. I dove into other people’s stories, asked questions, probed for the vulnerable truth. I was good with words, extra-sensitive to nuance and little turns of phrase. I was highly attuned to other people and their emotions. But I didn’t know how to listen to music. Not from the inside. And I was not very good at listening to myself, to the still small voice that knew what I wanted, rather than what other people wanted from me.
What Lee wanted from me was a musical partner, an equal. I don’t know how we survived those early sessions. He had majored in music at college, and his former wife (and several former girlfriends) had been gifted musicians. I was coming from behind. He was dismayed at my lack of skill, and I was heartbroken at his criticism. We fought so much at the outset, full-on fights with insults, slammed doors and tears, that the counselor I was seeing on Zoom suggested we should stop trying to collaborate.
“You don’t have to do everything together,” she said. “He can do music on his own, and you have your poetry, and then you can come together in the evening–“
“And, what, watch Netflix?” I interrupted her. “No, we can make this work, I know it. Because when it does work, it’s glorious.”
And it was–those fleeting moments when the stars aligned and I managed to get out of my head and just sang instead of worrying about it, when his playing and my voice merged and we were listening and responding to each other, more deeply than we ever had before. Those moments were few and far between but they were a thin thread of hope in a time of general despair and anxiety and I clung to them like a life-line.
Marriage has not been an easy road for us. I have a lot of over-eager puppy energy while he is a cat, imbued with natural dignity and a genius for disappearing. Given how we’ve struggled in our marriage, being able to make music together at all, even once in a while, even if the experience was fraught with the danger of another painful fight–was a miracle. Even more miraculous: the fact that we actually sound good together.
The best is when we’re improvising. He might initiate with a gentle build, and I’ll feel around for an entry-point amid the chords materializing and dematerializing under his long precise fingers. At some point we’ll arrive in a groove where we’re actually making the thing together–where I can follow his notes with my voice, and we entwine, and then separate, and then back to unison again, and then harmonizing as a third being seems to emerge between us, an energy that is not him or me, but something born of the best parts of both of us. Those sessions also end in tears but of a very different kind.
I hadn’t realized when I set out to try and learn music theory that I was actually learning Lee’s mother tongue, the keys to the kingdom of his heart. Of course, it’s been an odyssey of two-steps-forward-three-steps-back. But somewhere in all those zillions of hours of practice and learning and trying and failing and being corrected and trying again, I got better. I don’t know when it happened. All I know is that if I could learn to sing, anyone can. Not perfectly. Perfection is for the gods and Ella Fitzgerald. But well enough so that in those moments when the music is flowing, I feel something bigger going on than “just” love–I mean, yes, love, of course, love, but more than love–attunement.
Alison Luterman’s four books of poems include The Largest Possible Life; See How We Almost Fly; Desire Zoo; and In the Time of Great Fires. She has published poems in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Rattle, The Atlanta Review, Main Street rag, and many other journals and anthologies. Two of her poems are included in Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 project at the Library of Congress. Five of her personal essays have been collected in the e-book Feral City, published at www.shebooks.net and available on audible.com. She has also written half a dozen plays, including several musicals. She has taught and/or been poet-in-residence at California Poets in the Schools, New College in San Francisco, Holy Names College in Oakland, The Writing Salon in Berkeley, at Esalen and Omega Institutes, at the Great Mother and New Father Conference, and at various writing retreats, workshops and conferences all over the country. She is currently studying singing and writing a musical. Check out her website www.alisonluterman.net for more information.