All the Time in the World (29 page)

“What do you feel like watching?” Scotty pulls up the channel menu on the screen. He came home just in time to say good night to the boys as they were getting into bed, as he does on most nights, and he and I have fallen into our routine of staring at the same things on the TV screen for the rest of the evening. There have been very few inconsistencies with how we've conducted ourselves as April turned into May. We've gotten along without many disruptions since Simon left, and the feeling that we're working together toward something stable is strange but welcome.

My phone rings, and the number on the caller ID makes my stomach drop: Everett. It feels like I'm getting a call from another lifetime.

I hang up after speaking briefly, trying to make sense of the date and time of the concert Jess invited us to, but I can't make the details work together in my head. Scotty is looking at me for an explanation. Neither of us answers our phones very often, preferring to behave like agoraphobes and text back the answers to voice mails, so I understand why he would succumb to the urge to pry once he's overheard my plans.

“What's at the Park Avenue Armory?” He turns the television volume down a few notches.

“Something I have to dress up for,” I say. “I'm not sure I can walk there in heels though, so maybe I just won't go.”

“You don't have to walk. Call a car.”

“It's not
that
far.” I sit down next to him, careful not to disturb the balance of his dinner plate.

“We have an account. That's what it's for.”

“Okay, but I was sort of kidding.”

“Charlotte.”

“I said okay. I'll call a car.”

“What's at the armory that requires heels?” he asks.

“Paintings of dudes with sashes. Ladies wearing stoles,” I say. “It's very fancy.” I know Scotty wants to pry further but won't, and I'm relieved that the manners he was brought up with are working to my advantage. There are other parts of my life, parts that don't involve action figures and green plastic utensils and creative wheedling, but telling Scotty something that doesn't pertain to this household feels like betrayal, and betrayal is not a suitable action item for the benign agenda we have worked so hard to craft for our evenings.

“It's … this thing,” I say. “This guy. I've known him for a while. We have a mutual friend in town, and she's performing at the armory.”

“Is this a guy you're, ah, seeing?”

“No,” I say. “It's not, no. Not, like, a guy. Well, a guy. An old friend. But the one who's playing, she's a girl.”

“An old friend? From your music program?”

“Yes.” I dig my hands down between the couch cushions and come up with three pennies and two puzzle pieces. George will be relieved to see those pieces; he hates incomplete puzzles.

“She plays?”

“Yes, she plays her own work. She's a composer.”

“I didn't even realize that was a job anymore,” Scotty says, and either my imagination is projecting, or there is scorn in his voice.

“Well. It is.”

“And that's what you do,” he says. I can't tell if it's a question or a fuzzy memory.

“Play?”

“Yes, play.” Scotty looks at me like I'm a witness for opposing council, trying to evade him. “And write music. I'm not sure what to call it because you never talk about it.”

“I went to school for composition,” I say. “So I play. Although I'd never dare to play that thing you have here. It looks like a museum piece.”

“No one uses it.” Scotty gets up and goes to the kitchen, returning with a glass of something that could be either bourbon or organic apple cider on ice. “My mother thought we should have it because civilized households have pianos.”

“Or some kind of harpsichord, at the very least.”

“You should use the piano,” he says. There's this strange sense of melancholy welling up in me as he speaks, almost like nostalgia, a wish that all I was waiting for before sitting down at that magnificent instrument was permission.

“I remember some of the songs you made up with the boys.” Scotty sets his drink down in front of him. I'm happy to see him pick his dinner plate back up and continue to eat. “She, she used to sing me some of the ones that I didn't get to hear firsthand. She thought they were so funny.” We're no longer talking about his mother.

“Mostly with my ukulele,” I say. “But yes, I play the piano. Not well. I can play some things. Just not, like, late Rachmaninoff.”

“I don't know what that is,” he says.

“Well, your mother would be appalled to hear that,” I say, with a strong urge to distract him, as I do with his sons, from the sense of Gretchen that has just snuck up on us. “Hey. Want to see what's on the DVR?”

“How about the next episode of
Walking Dead
?”

“Only if you skip through the biting parts,” I say.

Scotty clicks away from the channel menu and cues up the DVR. “The boys are making you soft,” he says. “Zombies are one of Matt's top five greatest fears.”

“It's the way they
move
,” I say. “So weird and erratic.” Scotty is scrolling through the recorded programs, and in the corner of the screen, the program on the current channel begins. Familiar music plays out over the sophisticated speaker system in the family room, and the sound of it is fierce, coming at me from all sides. My stomach twists with pride and regret and all the other emotions that bristle me when I encounter this particular forty-five seconds of sound. It's never come upon me in this place before, and my sense of insulation, of being able to block it out forever if I stay inside my fortress, dissolves into the suede couch.

I take the remote from him and turn the volume all the way down before he can find our next episode. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Maybe I should put on some pants first,” he says.

“Those pants are fine,” I say. He's wearing the Northwestern sweatpants that I first saw on Patrick.

“You prefaced the question with ‘can I ask you a question?' It seems like daytime pants might be required.”

“Stop it.
Daytime
pants. Ha.”

Scotty slides his finished plate off his lap and onto the coffee table. “Ask.”

“Did you ever study intellectual property? In law school?”

Scotty puts his elbows on his knees and steeples his fingers in front of his face. Even in sweatpants, he looks like he should be addressed as Counsel.

“This is a serious question,” he says.

“Mostly hypothetical, maybe.”

“Intellectual property as it pertains to artists? Composers, for example?”

I pull one of my legs up over the other in a half lotus and straighten my spine. “Yes. Was that part of your, ah, training, ever?”

“We protect intellectual property for a handful of companies at my firm,” he says. “I know a thing or two about that kind of law. I can probably be much more helpful if you give me the specifics of the situation though, and try not to generalize it too much.”

What I can't figure out, what I've never been able to figure out, is how to open. What is the right way to start this story?

“The nice thing,” says Scotty, like he can read my mind, “is that you can say anything to me, anything that you want. We've cleaned up vomit together, so pretty much any barrier between us is gone.”

I click the sound back on the television and hit rewind on the current program. I let him listen to the theme, the last thing I've composed up to this point, and then I tell him the story. And I'm surprised at my detachment, surprised that I feel so far removed, surprised by the steadiness of my voice. When I finish, Scotty is looking at me with interest, not sympathy, and I'm grateful that he's also able to maintain that emotional detachment. Too many of my emotions have already run down Jess's drain. I don't want her to have anything else of mine.

“I understand why it's been so gray for you,” says Scotty. “In my opinion, it's not a legal issue. It's a question of ethics. Someone in a position of authority, like a teacher, ought to be clear about the boundaries of the work you're doing. When doctors publish in medical journals, for example, they publish under their own names, even though they have research assistants and interns working with them. But the interns know the game going in. They have a certain amount of responsibility to opt in or opt out. I'm assuming it was never put forth in that seminar that any of the work you were doing might be used for outside entities?”

“I don't think so.” The circulation in my legs starts to cease, so I uncross them.

“As I thought. My guess is that she never considered that one of her students would come up with something worthy of being appropriated for her own purposes. But once she had it, instead of bothering with the proper ethical channels, she decided to bank on what she knew of you, of your inexperience, rather, and take what she needed.”

“So there isn't anything to be done, really. I thought so, but it's always been in the back of my mind that I should ask a lawyer about it.”

“I don't think you need a lawyer,” says Scotty. The ice in his drink has melted, turning the liquid a light yellow.

“It's really only curiosity at this point,” I say. “I haven't written anything since then. I don't need protecting. I'm not going to go after her.”

Scotty studies me. I have trouble withstanding his full attention. I look at the TV, my hands, the space between our knees. “You have no culpability here,” he says. “There were no parameters, no expectations set up. Nothing that could have prepared you. You were not naive. What she did was an abuse of power. A breach of ethics.”

“No parameters,” I say. “That's the terrible part. That lack of boundaries. If she could do it, it must be part of that whole world, you know?”

“I don't think you should let her have this one, Charlotte,” he says. “Don't let her decide that this project was your last move as a composer. She played you, but you're onto her now. If she needs to steal from you in order to keep her career moving forward, then it's only a matter of time before she's finished. But you don't need to be finished. This is not your shame. It's hers, and you should let that weigh her down. The further you go, the more it will pull on her. Don't you think?”

“I'm not doing it on purpose.” I feel shaky, and I don't want him to notice. A drink will help, so I reach for his, and he lets me finish it. “It's not like I have this spectacular symphony sitting in my head, waiting to explode out of me, and I'm too scared to let it. There just isn't anything in me to write.”

“You have been writing a little,” Scotty says. “With the boys and all.”

“I guess they're the only ones I can be sure won't steal my stuff.”

“George won't. You might have to watch out for Matt though.”

“He's a stinker, it's true.”

“Will you play me something?” Scotty says. “Something you play with them? You should sit down at that museum piece, before you lose your nerve, and play right now.”

“I don't know.”

“It's only me. I wouldn't know an E-sharp from a hole in the ground.”

“There's no such thing as E-sharp. E-sharp is just F.”

“See? You're safe.”

We make our way into the living room, and I sit down. Scotty sits in a chair to one side of me, visible from my periphery, and my mind jumps to his father. He's sitting in the master-of-the-house chair, the one George the Elder had assumed when he was here for the funeral—the one, I realize, Scotty usually sits in but had abdicated for those few days when his parents were here. I'm surprised he's sitting there now, with no one in the room but him and me.

There's very little space on this piano bench, on any piano bench. But it would be better for him to be this close than as far away as that chair puts him. I scoot to one side and pat the bench beside me.

“They sit next to you?”

“Actually, they usually sit
on
me in some way.”

He joins me at the piano. I put my hands on the keys, and the feeling in my chest makes me think of one of those toys, available at museums and in educational catalogues, the ones that take an impression of your hand or arm or face (if you dare) in a bed of pins. It's as though I'm pressing against one with my entire torso and then taking a step back and letting the pins slap into the front of me, hoping that if I move the right way, they'll stay lifted, suspended, instead of coming back down to knock the wind out of me.

“We wrote this song the first time I took them to the pediatrician's office. Mae was here, and we'd never really met before. Maybe we'd seen each other on video chat or something. But this was her first visit since you guys hired me, and I remember feeling terrible, thinking she would hate me forever because George wanted me to hold him, instead of her, while he got his shots that day.” I push the keys down into chords under my fingers, moving up and down chromatically until I find the right key. “I also remember thinking that a one-to-one ratio should have been easier with the kids, but instead, it seemed to add an element of, like, competition to the whole outing. Matt was being such a smart aleck, and Georgie had this terrible, short fuse. It was really hot, much hotter than I thought was appropriate for early June, and I didn't blame them for being listless and draggy, but you know how it is when you have a witness to your child-care skills, right? My rapport is not the same as when I have them on my own. I promised that we could stop for some kind of cold treat if we could make it through the appointment without incident, and then thought, great, Mae's probably thinking I'm the worst, resorting to bribing them with treats.”

“We bribe them with treats all the time,” says Scotty. I think back to the first time I heard that from Gretchen, but I don't mention it. “Mae is superwoman, but I'm also pretty sure she invented bribery via treat.”