the professor

Trigger warning: This piece contains depictions of predatory behaviour involving a power imbalance.

The first time I saw him, I was thirteen. I was performing at a masterclass at a university. He was sat in the front row, a bear of a man with a wild mane of grey hair, wearing a pair of grey sweatpants and a shirt from some basketball team. He looked utterly out of place among the other suited professors, but the moment a student began to play, the room belonged to him.

His methods was unlike anything I had ever seen. A boy would stumble through a Beethoven sonata, his fingers tensing on a difficult run. Then he would listen, his head cocked, and then rise from his seat. He would walk to the piano and gesture, a small, dismissive flick of the hand, and the student would scramble up, yielding the bench. Then he would sit and play the passage exactly as the boy had played it. Every missed note, every uneven rhythm, every ounce of hesitation copied with uncanny precision. The audience would shift uncomfortably, hearing the mistakes laid bare. Then, without missing a beat, he would play it again. But this time, it was perfect. This time, the sound that came from the piano was enormous. It was a huge, warm sound, a sound that seemed to wrap around you, to fill every corner of the hall and press gently against your chest. When he played forte, the piano didn’t just get louder, it projected, it soared, it sent waves of sound to the very back of the room without ever becoming harsh or sharp. Liquid gold poured from his hands, the phrasing singing, the difficult run sounding effortless. He didn’t just tell you what you were doing wrong; he showed you your own reflection, then showed you who you could become. And when he was done, he would gesture again, and you would slink back to the bench, chastened and inspired all at once.

And then there was his sightreading. A student came to him with a dense, modern étude he had never played before. But he just shrugged, placed the piece of music on the stand, adjusted the bench, and simply began to play. He didn’t know the piece, but his hands flew across the keys as if he had studied it for years, pulling music from thin air. It was magic, pure and undeniable. I turned to my mother, my heart hammering with a strange mix of awe and longing, and whispered, “I want him to teach me.”

After the masterclass, she approached him. I hung back, too shy to speak, but I saw them talking, his head bent toward hers. Later, in the car, she was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “He told me that boy who played Beethoven... he doesn’t have it. But he said you do. He said you have potential.” She glanced at me, her eyes bright. “He’s going to talk to the conservatory. He wants to teach you.”

And so he became my professor.

From the age of thirteen, every other weekend, my parents would drive me two hours to the conservatory. The lessons were intense, gruelling marathons of cycles of repetition and correction, but under his hands, the piano felt like a living, breathing thing. He was blunt. He would tell you the truth, always. No sugarcoating, no gentle encouragement meant to spare your feelings. If your phrasing was lazy, he said so. If your technique was sloppy, he said so. You left a lesson feeling eviscerated, but you also left knowing exactly what you had to do. He was very competent, the kind who could hear a wrong note buried in a flurry of notes from across the room, the kind who understood exactly what was wrong with your playing and what would make it better. And thus he pushed me, and I improved.

I started winning more things. First nationals, then international competitions. My name appeared in programs, my photo in newsletters. It felt like I was on a path, and he was my guide. He was someone in the music world, who toured constantly, who made recordings that sat in the collections of serious musicians. His students were successful, and one of them, a few years older than me, had done the unthinkable: she had won the International Chopin Piano Competition. The Olympics of the piano world. He himself had won similar competitions. But she was proof of his magic, the ultimate validation of his method. I was just another stone he was polishing, hoping I might one day catch a fraction of her light.

Slowly, the line between revered teacher and family friend began to blur. He would talk to my mother about his marital problems, complain about other parents, other students. Then suddenly, he was in town for a masterclass, having been invited as a guest by the university, and my parents, grateful for his years of dedication, invited him to stay in our guest room. It made sense. He was a lonely figure, a man utterly devoted to his art with little time for anything else.

Around that time, my family was planning a weekend trip to the city where he lived. When he heard, he offered, brightly, casually, that I should stay with him. Just me. He had just gotten a new apartment, he said. It overlooked the water, he said, knowing that I love water. I would have my own room, my own space. It would be fun. My mother thought it was generous. I said no. I didn’t know why yet. But somehow I just knew.

The first night he stayed with us, he knocked on my bedroom door. It was late, past eleven. “I was thinking of watching a movie, tomorrow maybe,” he said, his voice softer than I’d ever heard it in the studio. “Would you like to join me?”

A flicker of unease, small and nameless, passed through me. But my mother, passing by in the hallway, smiled. “He’s a bit lonely, he doesn’t have any friends. It would be a nice thing to do.” So I agreed.

He suggested the new film adaptation of the Colleen Hoover book playing in theaters. I was very much aware of the conversations happening online and in articles about the way those stories glamorized abuse, painted toxicity as romance, made controlling behaviour seem like love. I knew I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t want to sit next to him in the dark and watch that.

“ Oh, um, no thank you,” I said, looking at my feet. “I’m not interested in watching that movie.”

He chuckled, a low, rumbling sound. “Okay. We’ll watch something here then.” We ended up watching a classic film in the living room, my parents having gone to bed. It was fine. Normal. The unease from earlier seemed silly.

When the movie ended, it was very late. He was leaving very early the next morning, before I would be up, so we said goodbye then, in the living room, with the television still humming quietly.

“Come here,” he said, and pulled me into a hug. It was a little too long, a little too tight. Then, he tilted his head and tried to kiss me on the cheek. I flinched, turning my head so his lips barely grazed my ear. I laughed it off, a nervous, brittle sound, and retreated back upstairs to my room, the warmth of the evening instantly turning cold and clammy in my memory.

Then the texts started.

Hope you got home safe.
Hey. How are you? We should talk more
I’m playing a concert next week, I’ll give you tickets so you can come.

I didn’t reply. I was seventeen, and my world was a confusing mess of practice, homework, and teenage anxieties. His messages felt like a foreign object lodged in my chest, a constant, low-grade thrum of wrongness I couldn’t articulate. I told myself it was nothing. He was just being friendly. He was lonely. He was my professor.

After a few days of my silence, he texted my mother. Is everything okay with your daughter? She hasn’t replied to my texts. I’m worried about her.

My mother showed me the message, her brow furrowed in confusion. “He’s worried about you. Why haven’t you texted him back? He’s done so much for you.”

I couldn’t explain. The words felt too heavy, too dangerous. The great man, the teacher who had given me so much, was now a source of a shame I couldn’t name. The texts from him kept coming, a persistent drip-feed of attention I hadn’t asked for and didn’t want. Each one was a small violation, a reminder that a boundary I didn’t know how to draw had been crossed.

The texts continued for years. Not constantly, but persistently. A birthday message. A holiday greeting. A note about a piece he heard on the radio that reminded him of me. I never replied. Not once.

Just two months ago, another one arrived.

Comment ça va?

I stared at it for a long time. I am not just a musician anymore. I am a grown woman with a life far from the conservatory, far from that living room, far from the bench where I used to sit beneath his gaze. And still, his name on my screen made my chest tighten.

Last year, I had to return to that city for a funeral. I didn’t tell him. I went and I left the same day. A few weeks after, a mutual acquaintance mentioned in passing that he had heard I had been in town. And that he was upset. Upset that I didn’t visit him. That I didn’t reach out. That after everything, after all those years, all those lessons, all that he gave me, I couldn’t spare a few hours to meet him.

I did not reply to Comment ça va? I did not reply to his message. I will probably never reply.

He still teaches at the conservatory. He still tours, still makes recordings. His students still play wonderfully. The young woman who won the Chopin competition is now everywhere, signed to a major label, her face on the covers of music magazines, her concerts sold out months in advance. I sometimes imagine her in a lesson, him rising from his seat and waving her away from the bench, taking her place to show her the reflection before perfection. And I wonder if he ever knocked on her door late at night.

I didn’t end up pursuing a career as a concert pianist. I don’t know if that is because of what happened, or maybe for some other reason. Maybe the path he helped pave led to a place I no longer wanted to go. When I see his name, or hear a certain Chopin étude, I don’t think of liquid gold or the international competitions I won. I don’t think of the path he helped pave. I think of a man in grey sweatpants, who would flick his hand to move you from the bench. He was blunt, he would always tell you the truth. And the truth he left me with is this: the man who made stars, the man who shaped my hands and my ears, is the same man who made my phone buzz like a threat, and who makes me feel a lingering nervousness about going to the city he lives in. He gave me so much music, and then took the quiet peace of my own home. I don’t know if one cancels the other out. I only know that I carry them both.

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Geoff Watson, “Piano bench,” watercolour on paper, about 4” x 4,” 2019.