Mystery Chord

The mystery chord of the composer Scriabin would bedevil audiences,
causing dizziness, flushing, the inability to speak
for several days, moonsickness, fainting, and questioning
of one’s path through life. Aware of its strange power,
Scriabin, the dark mystic-eccentric Russian, used it sparingly.

Conceived on a carriage driven through Moscow one snowy evening,
Scriabin hearing a new piano sonata in the air,
when his eyes fell on a young blond woman standing
on a street corner, her eyes, moist from the cold
or tears, meeting his. Scriabin, married with children,
felt a profound longing, wishing she were in his carriage
so that he may kiss her, without words, jumping
head first over a cliff. But the carriage moved on
and Scriabin lost sight of her in the crowd, left
with only a sound in his head, ten notes,
none of which making any sense together, but somehow
they did. Nine notes would have incomprehensible dissonance,
but with the tenth, came the new, mournful, unbearable
truth that matched his feelings. A small consolation,
perhaps, for what he desired and couldn’t have.

So he felt at the time. But the consolations
of music travel through time and space, enduring.
In 1967, my father, playing jazz piano in a lounge in Cleveland,
found the mystery chord under and in his hands.
Entrusted to him. Came without asking. He was backing
a singer who almost, on a good night, sounded like Peggy Lee.
My father taught her, like the others, how to sing jazz,
what key was right for them, how to believe in a lyric.
My father, married with six kids, may have had an affair
with her or one of the other singers. Perhaps unfair to speculate.
Perhaps beside the point. But in the middle of the song
by Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin, there it was. The sound,
the longing for something that’s not here on earth.
He hit the chord, improbably, ten fingers on ten notes
spread across the keys. He came down on the keys
with such intensity that his whole body, in reaction,
leaped backward, the back of his head hitting the bar,
knocking himself out, falling off his bench and onto the floor.

He woke up in a few moments, Peggy Lee and the bartender
leaning over him. He smiled, fulfilled. Snow started falling
lightly outside. He got to his feet and the audience applauded.
He felt rueful, but didn’t have to.
They heard it.
The mystery chord.

My father sat down to find it again, but it was lost,
like Coleridge’s dream of Kubla Khan, like Scriabin’s memory
of that girl in the Moscow winter night. The bruise was throbbing.
He felt the warm blood in his hair.
He played the opening notes of “There Will Never Be Another You.”