I reached up from the bed and assured her, “I’ll be gentle with you, I promise,” as the door opened and Gail’s mother walked in.

I don’t know if Martha Prentice heard this last utterance of mine. But given the presented tableau of a jazz musician in his late thirties lying upon a college coed’s bed within an hour of first being admitted into her mother’s home, his arm apparently tugging the coed down onto the bed with him, I thought it was more than tolerant that Gail’s mother merely said, “If you don’t mind, I’ll leave Gail’s bedroom door open, since I love hearing her play the piano.” She gave me a smile that would have turned a Gorgon to stone. “I’ll just be in the next room, listening with great interest.”

Chapter 18

18

Swing Around The Sun

Gail went to one of the orange crates against the far wall and took from the top of it a thick sheaf of music manuscript paper. The pages were hinged together and folded accordion style. She opened the first five pages and spread them out like a banner across the piano, contemplated them for a moment, then launched into Swing Around the Sun.

Having only heard her play the cumbersome carillon, I hadn’t been able to appraise her skill as a performer. I could tell immediately that she was an accomplished pianist, but then, I’d expected her to be.

What I’d not expected was as startlingly original a harmonic style as I’d heard in over a decade.

Describing music with words is somewhat the equivalent of making a painting of a novel. Here are some words one would not use in conjunction with Gail’s composition: pedestrian, bourgeois, mushy, dated, innocuous, clichéd, schmaltzy. Another word you wouldn’t apply to it is catchy. This was not easy music. It made demands on the listener. Some untrained ears might hear it and think that something was wrong. Not that it was overly discordant; it just had its own unique tonality. Her stance on harmony was akin to Grandma Moses’s position on perspective. I was impressed that the Pan-Pacific judges, whoever they might be, had picked the inventive audacity of Gail’s composition over more traditional submissions.

Of course, I had wanted Gail’s work to be good, or at least competent. She’d told me on our walk to the ferry that she wanted me to orchestrate it, not rewrite it. Since I’d agreed to respect the integrity of her composition, I was desperately hoping it actually had some. Thankfully, the piece was clean, harrowing yet sprightly. It just refused to stay put.