“I like that you’re the one touching the art right now,” he said—and I realized I actually was. I’d been tracing AMATO without realizing.
I started to draw my hand back, but he laid his own on top of mine instead. Breath held, I lifted my fingers to let him slip his own in between. I felt every edge where our skin met, heat racing up my arm, along my spine.
That’s us, I marveled, staring at our hands as he leaned closer.
I looked up. “I like you t—”
“Excuse me,” a middle-aged security guard shouted from the far doorway.
Oscar and I shuffled apart, hands locked tight by our sides as we stepped out of the temple.
“This area’s off limits for tonight, folks.” The guard’s voice was carefully neutral, in case we were major donors.
“Sorry,” I mumbled as we made our way past him. The guard grunted.
“Couldn’t resist,” Oscar said—and that got a chuckle out of him.
We went as fast as we could without running through the Egyptian Wing, taking a wrong turn into Arms and Armor. Oscar eyed a Mongolian display curiously, but I tugged him away, whispering, “Let’s not press our luck.”
We clip-clopped through the empty Great Hall, burst into the humid dusk air, then trotted down the stone steps in synchronized rhythm. When we got to the bottom, our shadows preceded us, monumental, glowing at the edges, like we’d grown into gods while we were inside.
“We should get dinner.” The careful cadence of Oscar’s voice told me he was asking for something more.
“Sounds good.” I twisted a loose thread on my dress. “What are you in the—?”
“Oscar!”
It took me a few seconds to adjust to the incongruity of Dad’s voice coming from a parked Bentley at the curb. I turned to see him leaning out of the back window.
“I’ve got to steal your date, Rooster,” Dad said, winking before turning back to a stunned Oscar. “Johann Wittenstein. Conductor at the phil.”
Oscar nodded quickly. “I know, he’s one of my—”
“Wants you to shadow tonight.”
“Oh my God.” Oscar scrunched his hands in his hair.
“I’ve been trying to reach you.” Dad squinted between us.
I winced. “My phone’s on silent. I thought it was more . . . polite . . .”
“Mine too,” Oscar said, rubbing his face.
“Never mind, we’ll make it.” Dad opened the car door and stepped out. “Slide on in. Erich, make some room, would you?”
Oscar turned to me, mouthing, “Erich Fuller?”
My dad’s weird German friend. Most important minimalist composer in history.
I shrugged wildly and motioned him off. “This is awesome, go!”
“Aren’t you—?” Oscar glanced at the car.
I smiled softly, knowing better. “No room for me. I’ll catch you later.”
Oscar, flummoxed, disappeared into the car, hand extended to introduce himself.
Dad waved to me as he got in with them. “Thanks for being a good sport.”
“No worries,” I said to the empty sidewalk as they sped away.
Then I made my way back across the park, listening to every tree rustle, every bike click, every heartbeat along the way, wondering what it would sound like in a song.
* * *
• • •
The music woke me up—slower, sadder, sweeter, higher. It danced around the first one like a firefly.
I grabbed my phone. Two a.m.
“Oscar,” I groaned, half laughing as I buried my face in the pillow. “This is unacceptable.”
I went to shut my window, but found myself closing my eyes instead. He was playing with the tune—not finding it, trying a deceptive cadence, a more prosaic resolution in a minor key. Then starting over. Almost right . . . almost . . .
I threw a cardigan over my camisole and pajama bottoms, slipped into flip-flops, hurried downstairs.
It had started drizzling. I ducked my head and sprinted around the corner to knock on his door.
It opened immediately. Oscar turned back into the apartment like he’d been expecting me.
“Come in, you’re getting wet.” He laughed, seeing me hesitate. I ducked inside and he reached out to wipe beaded raindrops from my hair. “I want to play you something.”
It’s too late at night. Just tell him to turn it down.
But my mouth was too busy gaping at the scene in front of me—our studio, transformed. His dorm bed, jutting from one side of the room, was unmade and rumpled. He appeared to be using the desk to hold the entire stacked contents of his luggage, while the roller bags served as nightstands, glasses of water perched precariously on top of each. Against the other wall, a sofa looked like a composition book had exploded onto it. The pages were brimming with music, some markings pristine, others almost violently scribbled out.
“Sorry. Just . . .” Oscar walked to a bare spot on the far wall, near the galley kitchen, then slid sitting and patted the spot beside him on the floor. “I’d clean the couch, but I’ve got all the pages the way I want them . . .”
I peeked as I passed, too furtive to get any real impression. I sat beside him, half hoping it wasn’t as completely out of my league as I suspected it would be.
His AC unit was turned off, the window open above it, which explained both the noise and the fact that it was so insanely warm in here.
I watched as he futzed with his phone. He was wearing an undershirt and the nice gray dress pants he’d had on at the Met. His belt was on the floor. He must have slowly shed his outfit when he got home before getting distracted by the tune in his head.
“Okay, here,” he said, and music started to play from small speakers I hadn’t noticed, framing the far side of the room. “There’s an app for this too!” He grinned, then put a finger to his lips like I was the one who’d been talking.
I primed myself with a polite smile, but the music was . . . not his. It was Daphnis et Chloé.
I peered over at him again. He had his eyes closed. This was what he wanted me to listen to? A hundred-year-old ballet?
My shoulders relaxed. Worse ways to spend an evening than listening to some Ravel. Especially this, the best part, the “Lever du jour.”
It opened with woodwinds percolating—a sylvan glade, alive with birdsong. Strings slid along in the background, a breeze. I smiled in recognition as the bass line crept in, rumbling slowly higher as dawn started to break.
And then more than dawn. Heat, longing. The sense of a body . . . waking up. A tiny tremor rippled through me at the rising sound.
The gentle melody swelled and strained. Beside me, I could hear Oscar let out a slow sigh, his hands falling to rest beside mine on the cool floor. Not touching. An inch away.
Voices joined in, a wordless chorus, and the strings became sweet, pleading, everything swirling into absolute ecstasy. You didn’t need to have seen the ballet to recognize the moment of connection—Daphnis and Chloé discovering each other.
I closed my eyes. Oscar’s fingers slipped gently onto mine. The music dwindled into a burbling hush, the oboe’s refrain pierced by violin. And then it ended, that final note lingering, unresolved . . .
My head lolled on the wall, facing Oscar. He was looking at me. We both laughed, a little breathless.
“There’s something in this. Something I’m trying to get at. The way it gets into your bloodstream.”
“The park? Is that what you’re trying to put into sound? I . . .”
“Not the park.” He watched me, fingers still tangled in mine. “Something else.”
“Play it for me.” And I meant it. I couldn’t believe it, but I did. I had to hear his piece.
He swallowed, eyes flicking away, returning. “I hate this keyboard. I need a piano . . . I can play it for you in
the—”
I grabbed his hand tighter. “Now.”
He frowned. “Your dad . . .”
My mouth grazed his ear. “We can be quiet.”
He wasn’t breathing now and neither was I. Then, abruptly, he stood, pulling me up with him. We raced for the door, up into the cool rain, up to my stoop, where I fumbled for keys in my cardigan pocket.
He pulled me to the piano bench and physically sat me beside him, like he needed me that close. Then he raised the cover, pressed his fingers to the keyboard, and began to play.
It wasn’t quiet. But once it started, I didn’t want it to be. It was too gorgeous. The melody came in—I knew it by heart by now—solid as flesh, and then the countermelody, a firefly sweeping over it, inside it, below it . . . and then he stopped.
“That’s all I’ve got so far.”
Our knees were touching.
“What do you think?” he whispered, his expression almost pained.
I let one of my hands rise to his shoulder while the other found his fingers on the keyboard. “You know what I think.”
My eyelids shut, all systems down. I felt his slow drift, the heat of him—
The light came on.
Dad. Garden of Eden angry. He was going to smite us where we sat.
Oscar jumped up, smashing the keyboard with a clang. “Marty . . . sir, I—”
Dad raised his hand, silencing him. “What were you playing?”
“It . . .” Oscar glanced at me. I froze, just as thrown. “It was what I’ve been working on. The start of this piece. I’ve been trying to . . . Ruby’s been helping me . . .”
I slunk off the bench, arms crossed tight, wondering when Dad was going to look at me.
But his shock had already cleared. He was shaking his head. Clapping slowly. Crossing the room with his arm extended to draw Oscar in.
“This is remarkable. This is . . . This needs to be . . .” Dad ran a hand through his white hair, then his beard, waking himself up the way he did first thing in the morning. Then he snapped his fingers and pointed. “There’s a general meeting tomorrow. We’ll have donors there, alums, Nora, Bill. I want you to come. Play this for them.”
“It’s fifty bars . . .”
Dad was leading Oscar to the front door. “It’s the start. It’s more than a start, you’ve cracked it, kid. You get some sleep now.” He opened the door and eased Oscar out. “You’ll need to be your usual charming self tomorrow. Don’t worry about anything.”
Oscar looked over his shoulder at me, but I couldn’t read the expression in his eyes. The door shut behind him.
I waited for Dad to look at me, but he was staring at Mom’s piano like she was sitting there. When he turned to me, his eyes were so pained that I took a step back.
“You look like . . .” he started, but swallowed hard, like he was tasting poison.
I dropped my hands, watching.
“I remember when you first sat at that piano.” He motioned vaguely, the height of my shoulders. “You were so little. Just . . . tiny.”
He turned slowly, sleepwalking back upstairs, lost in his own thoughts again.
And I stayed below, staring at Mom’s Steinway, trapped in mine.
12.
sunshine blasted my eyes when I opened them.
Flat daylight.
I leaped from bed and into running gear.
Jules was sitting on her stoop texting when I got to her house, but her splotchy skin and mussed hair told me she’d already finished her run. She glanced up at me blankly, then snorted. “Two hours late? Really.”
“I slept in!”
“I gathered that.”
“I can’t believe it. I’ve never needed an alarm clock. I always wake up at six—”
“You don’t need to give me the rundown.” She stood, pocketing her phone. “Shit happens.”
“I was up in the middle of the night with Oscar and I think it threw everything off.”
“Oscar? The genius guy? The one you hate?”
“I don’t hate him. I . . .” I swallowed. “Really don’t hate him.”
“This is very intriguing,” Jules said. “I’m not being sarcastic, I am actually intrigued. But I need to take a shower before I ferment in my own sweat.”
I made a face. She curtsied, holding the edges of her running shorts, then skipped to her door.
“We’re going out tonight, though,” she muttered over her shoulder. “I’ll come get you so you don’t, like, take a nap and forget to meet me here for two freaking hours.”
She waved sweetly and disappeared into her house.
I was tempted to creep home in shame rather than venture out alone—but no. I was dressed as a runner. A runner I would be.
I maintained pace all the way to the boathouse this time. My chest felt like a giant had stomped on it, my legs were itchy, and my face felt like it had swollen, making me wonder if I was somehow allergic to exercise, but hey! Progress!
The cool-down was much better. Hypnotized by the light flickering off the pond’s surface, I felt my body buzzing. Damp hair curled against the back of my neck and the city’s sounds were muted, a song playing in another room.
As I walked, my mind kept snagging on Oscar. His fingers, his warmth, his I like you, his music, those freeze-frame moments last night when something delicious and dangerous was about to happen.
I glanced up and I was at the Alice in Wonderland statue, all the way across the park. I’d climbed it some blurry long-time-ago, a woman hovering on one of the toadstools, arms outstretched in case I fell—but had it been Mom or my nanny, Rosie? As much as my mind strained, I couldn’t picture her face.
As I walked home, a text came in from Alice. Where’s Dad??
I stopped to type. Amberley meeting with Oscar. Everything okay?
Just weirded out he wasn’t picking up his cell
Everything from Uber to pigeons weirded Alice out. So.
Anything I can help with?
Alice wrote back: Nope! :)
I appreciated the extra effort of the smiley face, even if I did wonder what was up with her most of the way home.
The Ultra-Super-Duper Awesome Composer Duo came back later than expected. As I walked downstairs, dressed to go out, I could hear their voices filling the house, the force field of their excitement simultaneously drawing me in and repelling me clear across the Hudson. Oscar and Dad, in Oscar and Dad’s world.
“So, what do you think?” Oscar danced onto the balls of his feet. “In-house? Workshop performance, or . . . ?”
“The performance!” Dad stood behind Oscar, shaking his shoulders. “Whatever you need, the school will provide. They’re getting plenty from this too, so never feel bad for asking.”
Oscar’s eyes clouded. Then he spotted me, blue skies restored. “They liked it!”
“What did you play?” I leaned on the table. “Those fifty bars, or . . . ?”
“He played the first movement,” Dad boomed. “You should have seen him.”
I hadn’t realized that was an option.
“He started out with that motif, described what it conveyed, the bridge, coming into the city, the Romantic theme—”
Dad meant it with a capital R. Romantic. As in the musical style.
But Oscar’s shoulders drew in like Dad had said too much. “Ah. I sort of improvised from there, but . . . you know, it wasn’t bad. It sketched out where I want to go with it. Minus the details, of course, and that’s where the music really . . . lives . . .”
His eyes rose to meet mine.
“We’re staying in to work, Rooster,” Dad said, walking into the kitchen. “What do you feel like for dinner?”
I knew Dad well enough to know what that meant: What do you feel like getting me for dinner? It had never annoyed me before, but it did now—so
the knock that sounded on the door, right on cue, felt extra satisfying.
“I’m heading out, actually.”
Oscar glanced at me, shoulders slumping.
Dad popped his head out of the kitchen, quizzical, like he’d heard me wrong.
“I’ve sort of reconnected with Jules—do you remember Jules?” He looked even blanker. “Julie Russo? Our neighbor?”
“The ten-year-old?”
I laughed. “She’s not ten anymore. Neither am I, by the way.”
Oscar fought a smile as he headed to the front door. The second he opened it, Jules strode through, holding a sequined top out to me.
“Try this,” she said, then glanced over her shoulder at Oscar. “I’m Jules, nice to meet you.”
“Oh,” he said, “I’m—”
“Hi, Mr. Chertok!” she shouted into the kitchen. “Long time no see.”
“You look the same,” Dad said, which made Jules and me exchange a delighted giggle, before she pulled me up the stairs like she was the one who lived here. She remembered exactly where my room was.
“Strip,” she said, as soon as I shut the door.
I raised my eyebrows. “Are you hitting on me?”
“Don’t you wish. We’re just in a hurry. Everybody’s already there and my phone is going to break from all the pissy texts I’m getting.”
I slipped the shirt on over the black dress shorts I was wearing.
“Do you have a vest or something?”
I winced a “huh now?” as she played with my messy braid.
“Never mind, this is fine, he’ll like it, let’s go.”
“He’ll . . . what?” I flushed, thinking of Joey. Logistically speaking, last time couldn’t have been a setup, but what about tonight?
Jules trotted down the steps ahead of me. “Aren’t you inviting him?”
I only had enough time to put “him” and “Oscar” together, a thrill shooting through me, before Jules waltzed past the study—its door still open—poked her head in and called out, “You coming tonight or what?”
“Oh. Um.” He was sitting at Dad’s piano, Dad nowhere in sight. The toilet flushed down the hall. Oscar looked at me. “I didn’t know there was a tonight to come to.”
Night Music Page 9