Night Music

by Jenn Marie Thorne

  10.

  my stomach clenched as I reached the Amberley campus. I trod on, swinging the bag of pastries like a wrecking ball.

  Colossal gleaming walls, iconic fountain dancing in the middle of the dizzying plaza, banners waving for performances to come, tourists snapping pics—and just around the corner, Lilly Hall. This is okay, this is fine.

  I dared a look around the school’s side courtyard, playing Spot the Musician, which took me all of ten seconds. Two skinny white guys sat on the edge of a planter eating bagel sandwiches, talking animatedly while their feet idly tapped a steady rhythm. Percussionists. Two whispering girls passed me on their way to the dorms, cradling hot venti Starbucks cups. Vocal program. A gangly South Asian kid nearly ran smack into me, his expression fuzzy, fingers frantically tapping the straps of his enormous backpack.

  Keyboard program. He’s working on a piece in his head.

  I stopped walking for a second. Shoved it all down and kept going.

  Music surged as soon as I stepped from the lobby into the hall—“Mercury” from The Planets. The full orchestra was up on the stage, and the players were clearly my age. Summer program kids. Dad was conducting, talking to them . . . a real honor. He swished his baton, motioning for them to stop, which they did, messily. It was their first day together, everybody slightly out of synch, but Dad seemed pleased to bits. He shouted, “Yes!” then waved for someone else to fill his place.

  Oscar? I paused in my step to watch him, dizzy from the vertigo of spotting someone you’ve just met in a completely new context. He nodded, clearly nervous as he took the baton from Dad with a bow. Then, as Dad walked away, he straightened, gesturing grandly toward the wing Dad had disappeared into, and the orchestra burst into applause, as if Oscar had compelled them to do so.

  I blinked hard, trying to figure out what I’d seen.

  Something happened the instant Oscar touched that baton. His energy changed, becoming visible, palpable, even from here. His posture was perfect, arms primed and ready as he took to the podium. Then he lifted the baton—and began.

  They played. At his command. Yeah, this was what orchestras did, but he looked like an actual sorcerer. He shushed the woodwinds, drew them out louder, cracked a beat to ignite the strings, and kept the pulse of the piece pounding like his own heart. The entire hall was crackling with power, filling with sparks.

  And he was doing it.

  “He’s talented. No wonder Kat was talking about him.”

  I whipped around, my eyes adjusting slowly to the darkened hall. There were two girls in the back row in slouchy dresses, hair pinned up tight. Ballet students, from next door. Why were they taking their break here?

  “How old?” one murmured to the other.

  “Don’t know. Old enough. He’s hot.”

  “Kat was totally right.”

  Who the hell was Kat? Was she another dancer? Why did I hate her so much?

  I hurried to the side of the stage where Dad stood watching the podium like Oscar was juggling knives.

  “Dad.” I held out the bag of pastries. He kept bobbing his head with the music, eyebrows knotted as he made mental notes. “Dad.”

  He startled. “Oh! Thank you!”

  I waved, hoping for a quick good-bye, but he leaned in to kiss my cheek, which made me smile despite myself.

  Then he whispered, “See?” and motioned to the stage.

  I wasn’t even sure why Oscar was here. Was this a conducting clinic? Was he taking the helm of the school’s orchestra? Listening, I realized it amounted to the same thing. Day one, this assured. He knew the music like he was thinking it up, breathing it out. And the orchestra fell in line, totally in his thrall.

  When I closed my eyes and listened, I went sunburst bright. Watching Oscar, it intensified, but then I took in the full orchestra—ninety-seven of them, my age, impossibly brilliant—and the light sputtered.

  I needed to go.

  Quick lean-hug good-bye into Dad’s arm, then away. Mid-house, a flash of red hair made me turn—Nora, standing beside William Rustig, Amberley’s president.

  William—Bill, to Dad—was sleek, silver-blond, possibly an android. Win used to call him “Bill’s Rusting” when Dad wasn’t around, joking that everything he said was “Programmed. For. Minimal. Controversy.” Right now, Bill wasn’t saying anything, and neither was Nora, both loitering in the aisle, staring at Oscar like they were waiting for him to levitate the timpani with his baton.

  I half waved to Nora as I slipped past, but she didn’t notice—a relief. I’d see her at the museum event tonight. I wanted her to find me at my best, summer lit, not here, a shadow.

  I glanced back in the hope that Oscar had somehow noticed me come and go, but his entire world right now was “Mercury” and I was not even here, just passing through.

  Even with my eyes focused on the path out, the glimpses of Lincoln Center that crept in were enough to make my rib cage ache. Was this how people felt after they sold their house and watched other people move in?

  Don’t mope, silly girl. You were only ever visiting.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was rummaging through the kitchen, typing a grocery list on my phone, when Oscar and Dad came back.

  “We’ve got to home in,” Dad was saying. “You can do everything, that’s what got you here, but what do you need? What compels you?”

  “Need,” Oscar murmured—and that one word was enough to conjure images of him up at that podium. “So . . . does it have to be something that strong? Can it be—”

  “If you want the music to be strong, then yes, the impulse behind it has to be a cannon blast.”

  “Okay, yeah.”

  I forced myself to move. Added baby carrots and hummus to the list and shut the fridge, loud, so they’d know I was home.

  “Do you know why I wrote The Sleeping Variations?” Dad asked.

  “I’ve been wanting to ask.” Oscar poked his head into the kitchen with a quick wave hello.

  I jumped, startled. By the time I recovered, he’d already reversed around the corner.

  “It was the winter The House Guest closed,” Dad went on. “Nobody knew what to do with it, was it Broadway, was it an opera? I was a little lost . . .”

  Muesli, tangerines, bananas, pasta went on the list. I wrestled down a grin, Oscar’s face—so excited to say hi—lingering like a mirage. Basmati, almonds . . .

  “Then I met Anna.”

  The phone wobbled.

  “She was sitting at a café, annotating music. I fell in love with her before I even said a word to her.”

  I shut my eyes, breathing.

  “She wasn’t impressed with me. Not at first. Not even after I told her my name—she wasn’t such a fan of the New City Symphony.” Dad laughed, delighted, like it had just happened, like they weren’t divorced, like he’d seen her at all in the past year. “But I won her over. And I wrote in a fever. I burned . . .” There was a sound, he was thumping something—his heart? “And so I set fire to the orchestra. That’s how that piece came about.”

  “Ruby too.”

  Dad didn’t respond.

  “How Ruby came about,” Oscar went on. “And . . . Alice, Leo, Winston . . .”

  “Oh!” Dad let out a booming laugh. “Right, sure. Is she here, Ruby, you around?”

  He was shouting up the stairs.

  “Yep!” I walked out of the kitchen, eyes locked on my phone. “Anything you want from the store?”

  I peeked up to see Oscar stare at his shoes, at me, away again.

  “Coffee!” Dad dug in his tweed jacket. “I’ve got a coupon for Fairway. French . . . roast, Oscar, what do you need?”

  “Me?” Oscar startled alert, glancing between us. “No, I can handle getting my own groceries. Probably. If you show me where the supermarket is.”
r />   I grinned. “Supermarket. Ha. Suburbanite.”

  “You don’t have supermarkets?”

  “We say grocery store.”

  “It’s like another planet.” Oscar clutched his forehead. “How will I ever adapt?”

  Dad passed me a silky envelope. “Nearly forgot. Nora sends her apologies, etcetera, can’t make it to the museum tonight, says you should go in her place.”

  I turned the envelope over, panic rising. “Did she say why—?”

  But Dad was talking over me, one hand on Oscar’s shoulder. “You go.”

  Oscar’s face went slack. “Um. What are . . . ?”

  “I’m out of pocket tonight. Erich Fuller’s in town, I’ve got to ferry him to Jean Georges, and . . . what is it, an exhibit preview?”

  I frowned. “I think so. It’s at six . . .”

  Dad turned to Oscar, decision made. “You’ll enjoy that. And Ruby won’t mind having a plus one, will you, Rooster?”

  “I am very good at being a plus one,” Oscar put in, catching up to the conversation. “Always one person. Never two. Rarely a fraction.”

  “I’m wholly impressed.”

  “Wooooow.” And yet he was laughing.

  Dad stared at us in faint confusion.

  “Okay.” My pulse jumped again as soon as I said it.

  “Okay,” Oscar echoed. “It’s a plan.”

  His voice had stalled before the word plan—a teensy caesura. He’d meant to say date.

  We both watched my dad tromp past. We looked at each other. Then Oscar followed him upstairs, a smile blooming on his face.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Do you hear that?” Oscar stared at an oak branch.

  He’d suggested we walk to the museum through the park, which I’d seized on as an excuse not to bother with heels. I listened now, dubious, then heard the chuk-chuk of a squirrel, followed by angry scrabbling as it ran farther up the tree.

  Oscar started off again. “What instrument would that be?”

  “The tree? The squirrel?” I glanced behind us. “A trumpet. But really small so he can hold it.”

  “Not what I meant.” Oscar grinned.

  I fake-whispered, “I got that.”

  “I’m . . . writing this piece.” He looked uncharacteristically sheepish. “A symphony. I think it’ll be about coming here, experiencing this, whatever happens.”

  Oscar gazed out at the afternoon light bathing Central Park in orange, like this—walking to the Met—was the first movement of his autobiographical symphony.

  I stared with him. “So you’re taking that whole ‘what is your piece about’ thing pretty literally, then.”

  “Extremely, yeah. I’m playing with that idea of Richard Strauss’s, that you can capture experience through sound, each faucet drip, each clink of a fork . . .”

  “You’re putting forks in your symphony?”

  “Maybe!” Now he laughed. “If forks become important, they’ll go in there. Maybe I’ll be eating and somebody chokes at the next table—”

  “You’re hoping for this.”

  “Or I taste the most incredible dessert of my life, or I start falling in love . . .”

  “What does a fork sound like?”

  “Violins,” he said, like it was obvious. “Plucked—plink, plink, plinkplinkplink.”

  I could hear it. Oh my God, he was a terrible singer, but still.

  “Depends how fast you’re eating. And then the murmur of the restaurant underneath, a steady pulse, that city sound . . . woodwinds.”

  “You know the ‘city sound’?” I grinned. “You’ve been here less than a week.”

  “I got it right away. It’s different from DC, even.” Oscar’s eyes met mine drowsily. “Maybe it takes an outsider to hear it.”

  It didn’t. I knew it by heart. I listened with him all the way to Fifth Avenue.

  This music didn’t bother me. It was my autobiography too.

  11.

  in the cavernous calm of the Met’s Great Hall, closed to all tonight except elite donors and their guests, everyone’s well-shod footsteps echoed in a different key. I heard bits of chatter fragmenting, bouncing directionless.

  “Extremely intuitive therapist, probably psychic . . .”

  “Seven figures. Could have been low eight if they’d timed it better.”

  “Obviously water’s the next big commodity.”

  “Off the hook. All day. I need a dog as an excuse to leave . . .”

  I glanced at Oscar—his eyes were cast upward, staring at the marble multi-domed ceiling, but judging by his perplexed smile, he was eavesdropping too. His eyes dropped to mine and lit up, a shared joke. What were we doing here? I bit the corner of my lip to keep from laughing.

  An elderly docent motioned the herd around a corner to an exhibition gallery, where a man in blue-framed glasses was speaking into a microphone about the large black-and-white photograph of a Native American woman on the wall behind him.

  “Note the use of triangles, the light here and against the facial planes . . .” He pointed, but all I could see were squint lines, resigned shoulders, a woman who didn’t want to be stared at. I looked away.

  Oscar had drifted idly back into the Great Hall, peering up at the balcony bar above. A few Artemis Circle guests were up there holding cocktails, waiters circulating with canapés.

  A string trio was setting up in the near corner. Two violins and a cello.

  “Party or art?” I asked Oscar.

  “Ah, the eternal question.” He smiled. Didn’t answer it.

  I could start to see myself getting into the art side—lines, form, working to preserve history, culture. Passion wasn’t the right word, but I could make a philanthropic impact here without it rending my soul apart. Which was, you know, a plus.

  Actual mingling, though? Not without Nora.

  A noise from above made my head instinctively tilt to watch the string trio tune, plunk, nod, launch into song—Vivaldi . . . no, Corelli.

  The music fell around us, a shower, and Oscar and I turned to catch it like we were dying of thirst. The music sang of spring, renewal, young things growing and sparking and daring and flying. Brilliant things. Genius.

  Pain dug into my throat and spread roots. Love it all I wanted, it wasn’t mine.

  The people in the gallery were looking at me. Even if they weren’t, they were averting their eyes, and the music was still playing, and—

  “How ’bout neither.”

  I blinked. Oscar’s hands were in his pockets, casual, but there was something careful in his expression.

  “Neither?”

  He leaned closer. “Do you think we have the run of the place?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back, my shoulders loosening slightly as our conversation drowned out Corelli. “Nobody’s said we don’t.”

  Oscar’s eyes narrowed mischievously. They darted from me to the sign reading Egyptian Art.

  I grinned.

  He offered his arm and I took it, gliding with Oscar in a pas de deux away from the music, away from the party, my body finally releasing the moment we rounded a corner and the sound behind us dropped away.

  We broke slowly apart as we strolled the silent aisles of antiquities, stone sarcophagi, glass cases full of tiny ornate tools, textile fragments, reconstructed pottery. Oscar veered from one to the next in a looping dance, walking backward to grin at me, eyes crinkling.

  I grinned back. “Okay, rebel. Be careful.”

  “I’m not gonna break the art, Ruby.” He let his hand linger centimeters over a stone tablet, as if waiting to see if I’d squeal. “So. Serious.”

  “You have some impulse control issues, don’t you?”

  “Believe me.” He shot me a sidelong glance. “There are plenty of im
pulses I’m controlling.”

  That made me go warm. “You’re like some wild creature.”

  “Wild? Creature?” he scoffed, leading us idly into the great glass sunroom housing the Temple of Dendur. “I’m gonna choose to believe that isn’t an unconscious racial signifier . . .”

  I stopped walking. “Are we seriously talking semiotics right now? That’s something that’s happening?”

  “Oh, it’s happening.” He strolled backward along the reflecting pond, grinning shamelessly at me. “Nice pivot.”

  I shook my head, smiling back like a goon. “I solemnly swear it was not a comment on your—”

  “I mean, you live in New York, you’re way above that, right? You must know two or three black people already. Maybe four.”

  “I know a lot of black people!” And all the blood drained from my face at the sound of my voice echoing through the hall. I kept walking, straight into the temple itself, like I could entomb myself here to escape mortification.

  Oscar stepped in beside me. “You’re listing them, aren’t you? In your head. That’s how many black friends you have, you can list them in your head.”

  “Stop!” I fought not to laugh. “Okay, just so you’ll shut up—Walter, Bernice, Darian, Maya, Erika, Lenox, Jacie. Seven current black friends.”

  He considered, nodding. “Not bad. Better than I expected.”

  I put my face in my hands. “I feel dirty right now.”

  “As well you should.” His voice was soft.

  He reached up to gently unfold my hands from my eyes. When I blinked up at him, his face held a wholly new expression. Not teasing. Just open—so himself that it made everything in my body go perfectly quiet.

  “I like you, Ruby. More than I probably should.”

  I suddenly felt terrified to look at him. I let my eyes drift to neatly etched graffiti on the temple wall, AMATO, left by some continental tourist centuries before we were born . . .

  “I’ve known you for a weekend, but I like you,” he said. “I like how hard you try to be serious and how bad you are at it. I like that you know what semiotics means.”

  I let out a whispery laugh, daring myself to glance up at him. His eyes found mine and locked into place.