There was something about Aly, a charm that was often far from charming, a peculiarity that at once disqualified her from normal social intercourse and made possible her genius. "Unhuman" seems harsh, but she was proud to separate herself from most of the species. "Earth eaters" she called them. She praised me once as the most ecological person that she knew.
She was an astounding violinist. As a child she yearly won the statewide competition in Connecticut. At 14-years-old she started to attend a weekend program at Juilliard. On graduating high school she enrolled there full time.
When we were already a couple, a music theory teacher at Yale, who had gone to Juilliard with her, invited her down to New Haven to perform his music, with him on piano, at a composers' symposium at the prestigious university. In the audience was a Mr. Alfred, the head of Lincoln Center (whom Aly remembered from her days at Juilliard).
After their performance, Mr. Alfred approached the music theory teacher and insisted that Aly come down to New York to play for Yitzchak Perlman at one of the master's Saturday night soirees. Perlman, the greatest living violinist, reacted orgasmicly to Aly's playing, demanding to know what she was doing with her talent. She replied, "I would like to learn bowing technique from Mark O'Connor." (O'Connor, like Suzuki, has his own school of violin, a philosophy of how children should learn. Before devoting himself to the violin, he was a figure in Nashville, appearing on 200 records, on guitar, before he was 21-years-old.)
Three days after playing for Perlman, Aly's phone rang: "Is this Aly R.?" "Yes." "This is Mark O'Connor. Yitzchak Perlman tells me that I have to hear you play." In a testimony to how interesting the woman was (and is, although we have fallen out of touch), over the next two years Mark and she spent hours and hours on the telephone before she moved to California, travelled to San Diego, and made his wish come true. When I asked Aly what it was about her playing that had impressed Yitzchack Perlman so much, she replied, "My tone," all the sound she could get out of, or put into, a note.
What was this highly refined creature doing with me? Well, I do myself have a certain sensitivity, one that, like hers, sometimes makes it difficult for me to navigate social situations. Then, like her (although I don't like the designation, and she herself was never formally diagnosed) I am probably also on the autistic spectrum. And then, I got lucky.
My house on Farmington Avenue, in West Hartford, Connecticut was a tall, neo-Victorian covered on three sides by luxuriant vines; it really was excessive; think The Munsters. The day we met, I was in the front yard maintaining a lush garden planted by an earlier girlfriend:
Outside my house your garden grows
impossibly dense
like an equatorial jungle
flowers blooming
where you bled
purple, yellow, blue and red
drunkenly miscarrying.
Emmy, my gorgeous tourtoise-shell cat was stretched out in the sun on the brick walkway that led to the front door.
I just looked up and there she was, a very beautiful, young (16 years my junior) woman, standing admiring the scene. I said hello. She responded, telling me much later that the only reason she stopped, aside from the very beautiful cat and plants, was that, being Jewish herself, the yarmulke (skull cap) I was wearing made her feel that it was safe to speak with me.
She told me how much she liked the house, and, thanking her, I boldly offered, "It's very nice inside as well." Having had a violent episode with a man, she cautiously responded, "I'll come in, but if you touch me I'll never come back."
We went upstairs to my apartment, where by removing 80 feet of wall I had converted that third floor from a warren of former servants' quarters to a light-filled airee with a 12-foot window system revealing a magnificent vista. The remaining walls of the apartment were creatively and excessively sponge-painted with much detail and many colors by the same previous girlfriend who planted the garden.
Staying up all night she painted
seven wonders on the wall
and in the morning left to go and join the circus.
She's at home up on the highwire
'cause there's no place left to fall.
She has balance, but she's got no sense of purpose.
I didn't touch Aly that day. And she did come back, during which visits for several weeks we confined ourselves to heavy petting in my leafy, fenced-in backyard.
Aly was quirky, peculiar in her physical beauty as she was in her persona(s). She cut her own hair and wore whatever was lying around, but women who spent a lot of time and money trying to look good, would stop in the whole food market in disgust, at how this inattentive waif effortlessly beat them at it. A photographer stopped her on the streets of New York City and offered her $500 to come to his studio to be photographed... fully clothed. (She went accompanied by the Yale music theorist.) When I brought her to Vermont, despite the fact that she was shy and completely eschewed parties, the word quickly went around my circle of friends that Dr Dave's girlfriend was gorgeous.
We carried on for seven years, with her practicing violin ("communing with the spirit of Bach") 10-12 hours a day... getting together every or almost every afternoon and/or evening, sometimes while she finished practicing, to share our lives and bodies. It was lovely making love with the violinist, an exquisitely tuned performance.
Then, her mother died, and she moved to California. Then, my mother died, and I moved to San Miguel. And while in theory following her out to California was an option, and while in practice Mark O'Connor, knowing everyone in the music industry, would have more than cheerfully made her career there, Aly didn't want a career, not even if he and I could have managed it so that she only had to walk onto a stage or into a studio (even just put on headphones in an empty studio) and play along with the band.
My assessment at the time was that Aly could not move beyond the stunted love she got from her mother. But who knows, maybe she lived in a more perfect, ideal world where the spirit of Bach wanted her unadulterated devotion.
After we moved, we spoke everyday for a year and a half. On one of those calls she told me that she had been playing in a park (in Santa Barbara where she lives), and that someone had come up to her and asked her to play in the Monterey Pop Festival. She declined, explaining to me that it was just too hard to put a band together.
Fast forwarding thirteen years, when and where here in San Miguel, after a long, slow, intermittent courtship, I've recently started dating (slowly and intermittently) Caronte, another young, natural beauty, also highly intelligent and sensitively-strung, with her own history of trauma, and also troubled by the way the world reacts to her, the severe compromises required by, the wounds given and received in, relationships.
I've mentioned "my violinist" to her. And just last night, when Caronte messaged me feeling sad about some feedback she recently received from some friends, I mentioned Aly again, making the point that being so different, inevitably attracts negative attention:
Most people have inherited their way of being, usually thoughtlessly. You have constructed your life. And while it needs some adjustments, a little more tolerance between a few gears, it is a marvelous machine.
My violinist was similarly hurt by people's disapprobation. She was very strange. I am too, but I play with it, I make people laugh.
I used to say, "Controversy surrounds me," and "Very few people feel neutral about me."
Caronte wrote back:
I think I would have enjoyed knowing your violinist, to have shared war stories with her.
Me:
She didn't have relationships. Somehow I just got in.
I'm not saying that I understand, or that they do it on purpose, but both Aly and Caronte are provocative people. Aly's whole manner and form were different. Her scorn for the Earth Eaters destroying the planet, while not often publicly put into words, was very apparent in the looks that she gave. I almost always agreed with her critiques, but I was rarely so angry in mine.
My new friend, Caronte, I believe, needs a platform where she can express the personal power and philosophy that now sometimes comes out (or stays in) inappropriately. Hers is a force and conviction that needs proper exercise. If you and she will pardon the analogy, it is like a dog, who, when allowed to run free in the countryside, will stop chewing up shoes at home.
What kind of exercise I might need is a story for another day.
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Mark O'Connor believes that children should first learn to play popular melodies, such as he plays in the video below.
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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, public internet, building community, strengthening the local economy. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.
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