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marlowe1-blog · 1 year

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"The Music Teacher" (The Stories of John Cheever)

Demeter, Are you teaching piano?

I finally agree with the critics who see witchcraft in the stories of John Cheever. I am not certain that it's obvious that Ms. Deming the music teacher is Demeter who is leading the people to Hades (or the mother of Our Lady of the Underworld) but there's certainly something going on with her.

And Seton, the main character (not the same one as in The Golden Age), is in a downward spiral with his wife and whatever he could have done to make it better is well past. Shoot. I just read about this the other day, but it's the point where things become obviously FUBAR after years of losing trust and losing respect without any noticeable change ot the bottom line (currently the example is Netflix raising its prices every year and thinking that everything is fine because no one is canceling, not realizing that they are telling every single subscriber that they can't trust them NOT to keep pulling this shit. But there's also Justin Roiland abusing women, abusing co-workers and underlings while grooming teenage girls. He had many years of being able to get away with it, but then the floodgates opened.)

Seton is in a bad place. But he doesn't realize it because his entire life revolves around working and expecting to come home to a wife who has done everything like a happy 1950s housewife. Only none of them were happy (not naturally. There were a lot of tranquilizers prescribed in the 1950s). Last Shabbos, I tried talking to friends who decided to ignore me and have their own conversation about great food in New York and Italy and France yada yada. Now I was bored and feeling my poverty but then a note of urgency ended up in the conversations as they both noted that they got free food at the office because they worked until 2 in the morning and then their wives agreed that they hadn't really gone out for years because work and kids took all the time. So vacation in Italy was it.

Then I was sad for these people. And happy I ncever went into law or finance since as much as I'd like to afford their apartments and their vacations and their families, i just don't see those marriages lasting. Oh what the hell do I know. I'm single and going on dating apps and getting hung up on friends because of mutual childhood trauama.

So that's Seton's marriage. He comes home. The place is a mess. The kids are wild. The dinner is burnt. He tries to make things better but he's completely inept. He tries to order her to go to the restaurant where they used to go when they were actually in love. She brings the kids. The dinners remain burnt.

And then the story gets weird. He's told to take music lessons and his first thought is that it's an affair. Only John Cheever is not a Mad Men writer (as much as people find the similarities) and Ms. Deming (Demeter?) is an old music teacher.

She has him doing the basic scales. He goes home. He plays them. His wife doesn't like it. He goes to lessons. He goes home. He continues to practice the same scales. Everything is standard. His wife asks him to ask for another lesson. Seriously, you can't be playing scales week after week. But that's all he does.

That's the only thing that the men in the neighborhood do. He walks past houses. They are playing the same scales. His wife starts cooking well. He's working a kind of magic with the repeatitive music.

Then one day he goes and sees Ms. Deming happy. She's with bikers who seem like rough company but she's letting her mask slip. Only Seton sees her and she returns to the stern teacher. And she still won't let him change the lesson to the same scales.

And that's it. He stops playing. His wife is now better behaved. The marriage isn't exactly healthy but he doesn't have to deal with it. And then Ms. Deming is dead. She was murdered. We don't know who did it. We assume it was the bikers. It could have been any of her students or it could have been Seton. For all we know it could have been a wife sick of hearing the same tune repeatedly and sick of being hypnotized.

This is a story of mysteries. Who is the music teacher? Why does the music hypnotize the wives? Who killed the music teacher? Why does she only make her students play the same thing?

But these mysteries are at the heart of other mysteries that are more mundane, like when did love die? Why did the marriage fail? Are we just trapped in our lives? Does music save us or kill us? How do we get love back once it seems to have died? Once your marriage dies, when do you admit it?

This is a brilliant story that goes to the heart of a society that was unsustainable.

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