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My Guitar Music doesn't lie. You can race your fingers along the steel strings of a folk guitar until they swell and bleed. You can play major chords when you should insert a melancholy minor here and there, but the notes — they are only notes — and even majors can sound depressing when limp fingers play their best to deceive and to build falsely loving, tender memories. My guitar, never dusty, simply cannot lie. Mostly I play when she isn't home. I take that instrument — a beat-up 1968 Gibson LG-O that my teenage father carried around the country when he was dodging the Vietnam draft — and close my eyes while the music pours into the empty, echoing apartment. I play Dylan, Baez, and Joplin. I throw in a classical progression. Today, I learned to play Blackbird all the way through without a single mistake. That very moment is when she catches me. Sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, I'd barely just completed the last key, my fingers sore with intense concentration, when she turns the lock, an hour early — a deafening sound. There is no time to hide the Gibson, no time to pretend I'd been anticipating her return all evening as she expected and demanded. So I sit, unmoving, waiting for her reaction. As always, when she catches me, it begins with a tirade — "Katie, put that damned thing away and pay attention to me!" — followed by a deeply disappointed glare. Yes, how dare I sit on the floor, enjoying a talent that doesn't involve scrubbing floors, or cooking dinner, or worshiping the self-proclaimed goddess who just walked through the door. But I don't put the "damned thing" away. Not this time. Incensed that the command doesn't bring with it the desired action — me scrambling to please her, bursting with apologies — she begins to scream about how the guitar stands between us, a refuge to hide from her. She'll burn it, she says, or smash it, or hawk it off. A sad smile cuts across my face, and not knowing immediately why, an E-minor scale progression grows from tentative fingers She smashes a small figurine I'd given her for Christmas. It splits into a thousand porcelain shards to the melody an A-major, C-minor, racing, exhilarating piece I'd composed long before we met. It's stronger than she can handle. She turns on the television, the volume blasting the account of an airplane crash on CNN. My fingers strengthen and form power chords, sliding from fret to fret. My guitar is a statement, a solid, unyielding truth. In the right hands, it can tear down politicians, can sing for love, and peace, and justice. In my father's hands, it was decorated with beads, and flowers, and his power of choice. In my hands, it screams above the booming television, shatters that self-important, dominant, suffocating, cruel look that cuts my core every time she tells me, "No." "No," to anything that is mine, that is not hers, that she cannot control. She is more jealous of my guitar than any woman I look at. She is jealous because it represents a strength she has not yet smashed. It is the only one I have left. The power chords taper off. I uncross my legs and stand. My eyes follow her hands that take a painting off the wall — that silver moon took hours of tender brushstrokes to create — and watch her right fist protrude from the canvas' middle. My fingers do not tremble, but fly from string to string, an escalating chorus of sublime passion in D-major, G-major, and not a single minor. I say nothing. My guitar speaks for me. Her love is defined by a willingness to sacrifice, by the price one is willing to pay for her affection. But I have paid enough, and sacrificed enough. And besides, I define love differently. And though I've been weak, though I handed her the tools with which to squash me, I have not yet sunk so deep that her shadow looms over me completely. She cannot drown out the truth. Music doesn't lie. Just listen to it. I am playing the soundtrack of our lives, so long denied. My crescendo, our apex, will be defined by melancholy notes that trickle off into a softly revealed satisfaction that is mine. She must see it in my eyes, because she doesn't reach for the instrument, or wrap her fingers around its neck to kill the music. And then, blessedly, her anger dies. Feedback? E-mail me at kimberlylafontaine@yahoo.com. |