Voss replied in the morning, which meant she had been up early, or that the email had found her between students.
I wondered when the silence would get expensive, she wrote. The Ballade is not ruined. Do not argue with me. Naomi Keller lives in Evanston and teaches in the city on Thursdays. She has no patience for myths and a great deal of patience for work. I have already written her, because I am old and allowed to interfere at the level of an introduction. If you do not write her yourself within two weeks, I will take it personally in a way that will not help you. Also: your bass. I cannot hear it from here. That is your job.
Claire wrote Keller that night, before she could become a person who waited out a deadline and called it dignity.
Naomi Keller's studio was a room over a violin shop on the North Side, reached by a staircase that smelled of resin and rain. Keller was sixty, black, with silver locs tied back and a cardigan that had seen better decades and did not apologize. The piano was a Yamaha grand, not a Steinway, voiced bright. She did not ask Claire for the restaurant story. She asked her to play scales. Then the Brahms. Then the opening of the Ballade, and she stopped Claire before the old wound could stage itself.
"You leave the body at the bar line," Keller said. "Every time you approach the place you're afraid of, you get polite. Polite is a kind of leaving. Play from four measures before, and stay."
"I stopped there once. In front of people."
"Congratulations. You are a pianist. Pianists stop. They also start. Again."
They worked for an hour. Claire sweated through the back of her shirt. Keller assigned a list that looked, on paper, like a demotion: scales in thirds, a Bach invention, the Brahms in full with the soft pedal forbidden, a sight-reading page that made Claire's pride wince. No Ballade for a month.
"Your technique is a house with the lights off, not a ruin," Keller said at the door. "We turn on one room at a time. If you came here to be discovered, the stairs are behind you. If you came here to practice, I'll see you Thursday."