Sight Reading (3 page)

“No, not right now. A reporter for the
Globe
is coming in an hour.”

Yonatan raised his eyebrows. Nicholas explained that the newspaper was going to profile him in their Arts section.

“That's great,” Yonatan said, without quite looking like he meant it. Nicholas decided not to mention that this was his second press interview this week; since arriving in Boston he had been made to feel like something of a celebrity. He told Yonatan, who was already turning to go, that he would join him for a spell.

“Call me Yoni, by the way. Let's get out of here.”

Nicholas followed him out without grabbing his coat; Yoni's very tone suggested it would be wrong to need one. Like Nicholas, Yoni wore just a wool jacket and pale slacks, as if warm weather had already arrived, though he kept his hands tucked into his pockets. For days Nicholas had witnessed this stubborn urge for spring, the way people ignored the latest snowfall and instead of knit hats wore baseball caps. In a span of just two weeks, his female students had shed the short rubber-with-leather boots that appeared to be union issued and now wore equally ubiquitous white tennis shoes—though filthy snow still lined every curb and lay in black puddles at street corners. His colleagues, meanwhile, bicycled to work and sported spring parkas open at the collar.

Outside the air was cold, but the sun warmed their foreheads. “You all right after Bill's little dig there?” Yoni asked.

Nicholas laughed. When the chair of Composition asked for Nicholas's input at the meeting, the director of Wind Ensembles had made a loud comment about asking the opinion of “someone who has been here for all of two weeks and whose appointment wasn't even unanimously approved by the Faculty Committee.”

Nicholas had weathered petty jealousies before and told Yoni so—though really he never could help feeling mild shock at being anything but adored. As a child he had charmed at the piano. The only reason he had chosen to attend a university instead of a conservatory was for the continued pleasure of surprising people with his musical gift. Hard work came naturally to him, with effort but without sweat. At the university, he studied music history, writing his thesis in one intense, flurried week—an epic poem explaining the development of exoticism in the Western choral tradition. Other undergraduates pumped out long, dull papers of interchangeable style, but Nicholas's essay-in-verse was immediately sent on to a university press. By then he had begun conducting, one of the few who, perusing a score, could envision multiple interpretations even before the first run-through (foreseeing, too, the possible difficulties and how much rehearsal might be needed). The first time he stood in front of a full orchestra, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the enormous sound, he quickly discerned the various instruments' voices, and never once lost control of the players.

It was around that time that he discovered his gift for composition, little pieces for fun, a bagatelle here, a badinage there; it helped to think of them, like his thesis essay, as poems (though less difficult, since they needed no words). Then came the string quartets, woodwind quintets, preludes, fugues. Ideas presented themselves while he showered, while he dreamed, and he accepted them with gratitude, hearing melodies in the hiss of radiators and the dripping of faucets. Even in the fortnight since his move to Boston he had begun a new composition—a sort of tone poem about the Scottish seaside town where he had spent his early childhood. He worked on it every night (since without Hazel and Jessie here he had an abundance of free time), immersed in hurtling gray waves and cool-spittle air and gulls lifted by scrappy winds.

Nicholas asked about Yoni's work and his training, learned that he was something of a jazz buff and owned an apartment just a few blocks away. When they turned onto Newbury Street, a tall slim girl in jeans and a big slouchy leather jacket sidled up to them, and to Nicholas's surprise Yoni slung his arm around her waist.

“Fancy meeting you here.” He gave her a peck on the forehead, but then she leaned her face up to him and they performed a lingering kiss. “I thought you were going to the library,” Yoni said.

“I'm foraging for food.” She gave a flick of her long blond hair. “Your fridge is practically empty.”

“Nicholas, meet Samantha. A woman of discerning appetite.”

Samantha shook Nicholas's hand incuriously. She was his same height and lanky like a boy. “Shouldn't you be at work?” she asked.

Shouldn't you be at school? Nicholas wanted to reply. She looked about eighteen. It occurred to him that she might be one of the conservatory coeds.

“We're playing hooky,” Yoni told her. “Care to join us?”

“That's okay, I'll see you tonight. I'm going to get a sandwich.” Nicholas was impressed, somehow. As the girl turned to go, Yoni gave a lingering wave—and Nicholas saw that his hand seemed to be missing part of a finger. Something was wrong with the thumb, too.

“Be good,” Yoni called, and plunged his deformed hand back into its pocket.

For some reason Nicholas immediately felt ashamed of his own hands, and shoved them into his own pockets. “She's very young,” he said of the girl, not in judgment so much as observation.

Yoni seemed to understand this. He paused to formulate. “After their teens they just don't look as good.”

Nicholas laughed out loud. “I beg to differ.” He envisioned Hazel's shape, the elegant curve of her hip, the dip and rise of her breasts, her smooth buttocks, and the way her stomach had rounded ever so slightly after giving birth to Jessie. She was his Grace Kelly, his Catherine Deneuve. She was lovely, lovely—Nicholas's love for her was inextricable from her loveliness, her golden skin and lively smile and the thick-as-honey hair she wore in a bandeau. She nearly sparkled, as American as they come. When he met her in London in the student housing office, he literally tripped over his feet when he saw her; he caught himself by grabbing onto a chair, which knocked against a table so loudly, Hazel and the woman behind the counter turned to see what the commotion was. Hazel's eyes had laughed at him, though she seemed accustomed to this sort of spectacle, a man falling over himself because of her. Nicholas felt a flash: I want. I want that. That brightness, that laughter. Even now, Nicholas sometimes had to look to Jessie—whose looks were a precise mix of Hazel's perfectly shaped features with Nicholas's coloring—to fully understand that he and Hazel belonged to each other.

“Are you married?” Yoni was asking.

“Yes, but she can't join me here yet. Her father had a heart attack, and now there's some additional trouble with his lungs. So she's gone to North Carolina to help her mother. Our daughter's down there, too.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. Though her parents must be grateful to have her there. The longer I'm apart from mine, the more I realize how much they mean to me.”

Nicholas nodded, though it was nothing he himself felt. His mother had died in an accident before he was a year old, before he had any memory of her. In the last existing family photograph, she was a frail-looking woman with dark circles under her eyes, sitting next to her young daughter and holding the newborn Nicholas in her arms; her husband stood over them all, looking worried. After her death, Nicholas's father—already something of a misanthrope (or so Nicholas had been told)—had become even more withdrawn. Even now, living on a sparsely inhabited Scottish isle, the man had little to say to his two offspring. A series of aunts and great-aunts had taken care of Nicholas and Glenda until they were sent to boarding school, first in Edinburgh and then in London.

Nicholas mentioned none of this to Yoni. Whenever he did divulge some slice of his past, people reacted with pity—even after Nicholas explained that none of it had been a trial. It was simply the beginning of what had continued to be a peripatetic existence: so many places to explore, new people to discover. But according to Glenda (a social worker employed by the British military as a trauma therapist, who could supply a psychological explanation for basically anything), both she and Nicholas, denied the unwavering love of a true family, relied on their talents and charm rather than connecting genuinely with others. Deep down, she insisted, Nicholas harbored profound pain and fear of intimacy. It was the sort of thing she had to believe, since it kept people like her in business.

To Yoni, Nicholas said simply, “Well, yes, it can be difficult to be apart.”

Yoni sighed, and together they continued on their way.

HER TINY TRIUMPH CAME THE
following Sunday, when Lynn was absent from rehearsal. It was snowing—one of those demoralizing March snowfalls, big wet flakes that splattered as soon as they hit the ground—and as Remy made her way to the concert hall, stubbornly without a hat or scarf, the dusky streets glimmered, and even the complaints of car horns became a sort of music. When she took her seat in the first violin section, her hair and even her eyelashes were wet.

All day she had been humming melodies from the repertoire, envisioning the subtle alterations of expression that occurred in Mr. Elko's face. She liked the way the muscles in his jaw flexed, and the slight squint of his eyes when a passage wasn't quite there yet. A single eyebrow raised just so meant “and now the piccolo calls out ever so faintly,” while a downward tilt of his head, brow frowning beneath his sweep of dark hair, meant “here comes the rustle of the cellos, underfoot, menacing.” After he had been conducting for a quarter hour or so he would remove the tweed jacket and, after a few more minutes, roll up the sleeves of his button-down shirt. The way the muscles of his forearms seemed to pull him right up into the air made it seem all kinds of wonderful things were possible.

Like Oscar Wilde said:
Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

The stage lights warmed her, drying her curls. When it became clear that Lynn would not be coming to rehearsal, Remy fastened her hair into a thick ponytail and moved over to first chair. How good that simple movement felt, the easy taking of something she had wanted so badly.

Now it was Remy Mr. Elko nodded to, and she felt more alert, somehow—felt the spark of comprehending his sign language, his hands articulating his thoughts about the music. For
Scheherazade
, she played Lynn's solos as though they had been hers all along, experimenting with dynamics and rubato yet remaining attentive to the orchestra, to the way Mr. Elko coerced this united sound, sweeping them all together under the arc of his arm. The sensation of the other instruments converging around her was rapturous—the merging of so many voices into something greater than themselves.

“Excellent job tonight,” Mr. Elko said afterward. Remy was loosening her bow as slowly as possible, waiting for him to say just that. “Truly beautiful. Thank you for filling in.”

“My pleasure,” Remy told him, surprised at how suavely she said it, as if she were used to filling in, as if she were used to compliments.

Mr. Elko nodded with approval. Remy placed her bow back into its slot, then reached up to free her ponytail from the hair elastic. Released, her curls seemed to her no longer unruly but proudly untamed, in a natural, perhaps even beautiful way.

Mr. Elko's eyes seemed to rest on her for a beat longer than necessary, and when he looked away Remy understood that he had finally, truly, seen her.

Chapter 2

H
e began counting down the days until Hazel and Jessie would arrive.

Two nights before they were to fly in, he joined Yoni at a jazz club. Groups of friends sat around the horseshoe-shaped bar and at little tables off to the side, smoking and ordering drinks and nodding reverently at the performer—a blues singer who looked to be about eighty years old. Yoni and Nicholas sat at a table in the corner.

The singer had begun the second set when Samantha showed up, and with her another girl. She always had a sidekick of sorts, probably a remnant of some initial pretense (just a couple of students hanging out with a favorite teacher . . .). There had been a different friend last week, when Nicholas joined Yoni at a café in Cambridge. It took Nicholas a moment to realize that tonight's girl was one he knew. She looked different, her long brown curls hanging freely; in orchestra she had pulled them into a ponytail, a curly burst atop her head.

“This is Remy,” Yoni said when there was a moment of relative quiet.

“Yes, right, we've met.” Nicholas was pleased to have remembered. Remy, what kind of a name was that? Americans gave their children all manner of names. And yet “Remy” did seem to suit her. He told her, “Thank you again for filling in the other day.”

Remy's eyes lit up as she said something in return—but the blues singer launched into another song, and Nicholas couldn't hear her. He immersed himself in the music instead while Samantha leaned back in her chair, slung a leg over Yoni's lap, and managed to look supremely bored, smoking a series of cigarettes while Yoni ran his hand lightly up and down her shin. It was the damaged hand, missing the tip of the thumb—no fingernail at all—and the top two knuckles of the first finger. The skin of the thumb was a darker color than the rest. Nicholas marveled that it hadn't affected Yoni's agility on the trumpet. Or perhaps it
had
affected him. Maybe that was what had prevented him from achieving greater renown.

Nicholas had finally asked him about it, at Club Passim the other night. “Army injury,” Yoni had said, looking away. “Well, off duty, actually. Wish I could say it was an act of heroism. But it was just a stupid accident.” He gave a little shrug, as if to downplay the episode—but Nicholas saw a flash of something else in his eyes. He decided not to probe.

The odd thing was, ever since then, whenever Nicholas allowed himself to glimpse the damaged hand, a wave of something awful passed over him. It seemed a reminder, almost a recollection. Nicholas would find himself looking at his own hands, surprised to discover them intact. Only since asking Yoni about it had he felt this way.

Yoni and Samantha were kissing again. These professor-student romances always struck Nicholas as cliché. At the Budapest conservatory where he had been composer-in-residence, it seemed half the instructors had flaunted a precocious student girlfriend. Tonight, though, something like envy swept through Nicholas—of Yoni and Samantha's closeness, their easy connection. There was something nearly mocking about it, though he wasn't sure what he meant. He didn't need a Samantha; he had Hazel.

And with Hazel, well, theirs wasn't this lazy sort of affection. There had been pure excitement, the shock of attraction.
Tripped over my own feet
. . . He still recalled the surprise of it, finding her there in the musty-smelling housing office, where she was negotiating a residence problem and Nicholas was posting an advertisement for a room in the house where he lived—a dilapidated Victorian that his landlady was always threatening to bequeath to him. In Hazel's case there had been some confusion with the paperwork, and the room she had been allotted was still occupied. The university had put her up in a bed-and-breakfast for two nights, but on that fateful third day of her semester abroad they were hoping to assign her more permanent quarters.

“Well, now, that's serendipitous,” the housing woman had said, seeing the notice Nicholas asked to tack to the bulletin board.

Nicholas gave Hazel an apologetic look. “As much as I'd love for someone like you to grace our doorstep, I'm afraid you might find it . . . less than comfortable.” Saying so, he missed the corkboard and stuck the tack into his finger. The notice dropped to the floor.

Hazel laughed. “Is it worth looking at, though?”

“Absolutely. It'll make the next room you see look like the Ritz.” Though he knew that the place would never do for a bright, beaming girl like this, at least he would have the pleasure of accompanying her there.

On the way, he learned that she was an art history major, spending a term in London before finishing at her college in Virginia next spring. Nicholas told her about his own program, and the piano duet he was composing, and by the time they arrived at the house, had offered to take her to the Tate some afternoon.

His landlady, Mrs. Pitt, didn't realize that Hazel was with him. “I just got back myself,” she called from her usual spot by the fireplace (which was never lit, since there was a problem with the flue). “Had my annual checkup, and do you know what the doctor said? Said I've the body of a forty-year-old!”

Then she noticed Hazel, and narrowed her eyes. “See you've brought company.”

“She's looking for a room, actually.”

“I don't take female tenants.” It was a policy she had just then thought up.

“I'm afraid I didn't note that on the advertisement,” Nicholas said to her.

“That's all right, dear. Don't you worry, I'm still leaving the house to you.”

When he and Hazel were once again outside, and Nicholas was deciding to offer her lunch, Hazel said, “She's fond of you, isn't she?”

“Mrs. Pitt?” That she could suggest this about his landlady gave him hope for Hazel's own feelings. “I suppose it's because I help her out a bit.”

“She didn't seem too happy to meet
me
.”

“I suppose she's jealous,” Nicholas ventured to say, “because you're so pretty.”

Hazel gave a joking shrug. “But
she
has the body of a forty-year-old!”

She had been like that then, lighthearted, happy. She didn't need him, it was clear, just as she didn't need Mrs. Pitt's rented room. Instead she took a tiny single in one of the halls of residence, on a floor with twelve other women and only one bathroom. “It's amazing,” she told Nicholas on their first real date, the following week, as they walked leisurely circles in the park. “I was sure it would be a problem, all of us wanting to shower at the same time. But the others barely shower, ever!”

She seemed to find everything about life there delightful. On their wandering walks she exclaimed at the quaintness of door knockers and the curling hinges that pinned back shutters. Even the university's stodginess, the white-haired men staring from oil portraits in the halls, charmed her. She loved the tidy parks and the polite coldness of people on the Tube, the considerate way they avoided one another's eyes. “I mean, where I'm from we always smile and say hello, but this is civilized, too, isn't it?”

She found the curving roads and crooked alleys sweet, the cars comically small, the sound of their claxons adorable. And she adored Nicholas, too. It happened quickly, the way the best things do. In January she flew back to Virginia to finish up at her own college, but as soon as she graduated she returned to Nicholas. In six months they were married, and six months later began the long years of Hazel trying to become pregnant. But until then she had been content.

Well, Nicholas told himself, while the blues singer slowly shook his head at some irreversible mistake, circumstances can't be helped. It was hard on her, the constant moving, never knowing where they would be next. At first she had focused on her sketches, filled notebook after notebook with drawings she planned to turn into an exhibit of sorts. But each time it seemed the project might come to fruition, some small hurdle put a halt to things. Nicholas rarely dared ask about it. Hazel was quiet about her plans, shy, even, when it came to discussing her art and what she envisioned.

These thoughts wove in and out of the music. All the while Nicholas was aware of the girl, Remy, sitting there stubbornly in the corner of his eye. He decided to go home.

But a voice came from behind him. “I
thought
that was you!”

It was a woman he knew, a conductor with whom he had studied in Finland. He waited for her name to come to him while she said, “You weren't at the festival last year. I looked for you.” Anna, that was her name. Nicholas asked if she lived in Boston.

“Oxford,” she told him, looking disappointed at his not remembering. But how was he to keep track of such information? His acquaintances ranged the globe, from his student days in London and Helsinki to conferences and arts colonies and orchestras. He maintained friendships lightly, knowing that in relationships it was best not to be needy. His sister had been that way back when they first went off to boarding school—followed the other children around until they grew tired of her. Even as a small child, Nicholas had taken note. He viewed friendships as akin to plants; they flourished most healthily when not overly tended.

“I'm here just for tomorrow, then off to New York,” Anna was saying as Nicholas recalled something specific about her: She claimed to be able to translate any tempo she heard into specific counts on a metronome. “Perfect tempo,” she called it, the way others had perfect pitch; Nicholas thought he might mention it now, to prove to her that he remembered her. “I'm giving a lecture at the Athenaeum tomorrow morning,” she said, “if you're interested.” She gave a nod to the scene surrounding them. “I was told I absolutely had to see this place.”

“Here, have a seat,” Samantha said, moving onto Yoni's lap so that Anna could pull the empty chair over and plunk herself down between Nicholas's seat and Remy's.

As the music started again, Anna made a confidential-looking face at Nicholas. Yoni and Samantha were lightly nuzzling, and Remy was watching the singer. Anna made the secretive face again, and then again, until Nicholas made his own quizzical face back—but she just made the same face as before, a tiny pout and a raised eyebrow, so that Nicholas was thoroughly perplexed.

All he wanted was to go home and lie between his wrinkled sheets. That way he could wake early and get straight to his new composition, the one about the seaside at Hopeman; he suspected it might not be a tone poem after all but, rather, one movement of a larger piece. “Well, thank you all for a lovely evening. It's time for me to go snore loudly.”

Yoni said, “Early to bed, early to rise . . .”

“Nice seeing you,” Samantha said indifferently. Remy told him, “Good night,” but her eyes slid away from his. Anna said, “I should go now, too,” and followed him up the stairs into the chilly night. “Will you be at the festival this summer?” she asked.

“They've invited me, but I'm not sure I'll go. My wife wants us to spend more time together once she gets here. Getting settled, you know. She'll be arriving the day after tomorrow.”

Anna's face seemed to change briefly. “Well, maybe you'll come to my lecture tomorrow,” she said. Nicholas said he would try to make it, then flagged down a cab for Anna before heading for the T.

He slept late the next morning and, rather than attend Anna's talk, got right to the Scottish piece. This wasn't a decision about Anna or her lecture. He simply had work to do.

ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS
Hazel did her very first morning in Boston was lay out the Persian carpet. Nicholas had left it propped in a corner, still rolled up and covered in dusty plastic. Who knew how long ago it had arrived. As soon as Nicholas headed off to the conservatory with Jessie—as eagerly as a student to show-and-tell—Hazel pushed aside the coffee table and lugged the carpet across the wooden floor, past the piano, and over to the sofa. Only as she stepped carefully past the antique mirror (still leaning against the wall, waiting to be hung) did she think again of the woman at the hospital.

She fought the thought away—ridiculous, really—and tugged the thick plastic from the carpet, watched the carpet roll slowly open like a yawn. The winding vines of orange, blue, and pink, the bold stamp of what looked like golden butterfly wings, the deep red flowers filling the border . . . Hazel found it comforting, something familiar and lovely in yet another new place. She patted down the edges and made sure it was straight.

Ah, there. The carpet really was beautiful. Her parents had given it to them as a wedding present, and laying it out turned anyplace into home, no matter where in the world they had landed. Yet each time she unfurled it, desperate for it to work its magic, the same thought crept up: there was something petty in her lugging the carpet from here to there, something wrong with such emotional investment in a mere object.