Night Music

by Jenn Marie Thorne

  I felt him sigh, a warm gust, and opened my eyes to see him staring at my face.

  He smiled slowly. “Sorry. Just a little . . .”

  “You don’t have to.” I laughed. “It was only an idea.”

  “No, this is great. If you really don’t mind.” He kept going, quickly now, all the way up to the curve of my biceps.

  When he finished, he kissed my palm lightly, a thank-you, and my whole body went fizzy.

  As we got out of the cab, Oscar held my arm gently upright, like he thought the notes might tumble onto the sidewalk.

  It was dark inside the basement apartment. Oscar fumbled for the light switch, and when the overheads came on, I let out a surprised laugh. The mess of composition pages had spread, carpeting the floor around the sofa, while some sparse neater pages taped to the wall flapped in the AC unit’s breeze. How did he live like this?

  Oscar wandered to his bed, pulling me with him. He smoothed a corner of his striped duvet for me to sit on, then joined me on the mattress. It felt like a line crossed to sit here, even though Oscar was working, carefully transcribing his music from my arm to his notation paper.

  “This okay?” he murmured, scooting closer.

  “Yeah.” I kept still, feeling the gentle heat of his exhalations— distracting myself by trying to make sense of what he’d written. That note was an E, maybe, if it lined up with the dots he’d drawn on the side? F sharp, after that?

  His finger slid up my arm. I refocused on the music. Were those eighth notes, sixteenths . . . would Dad know? Could Mom look at this and decipher it?

  “What do you think?” Oscar asked, tossing the pen onto the ground. “Oh. Sorry . . . here.”

  He handed me the sheet of paper where he’d transcribed the notes. In these few minutes, he’d added chords to it, a winding countermelody along the bass line. I could pick out the main theme now. I hummed it and it started to take form, an echo against stone, lilting but sad . . .

  A grin flitted across Oscar’s face. “You have a pretty voice.”

  “Oh. Thank you.” I cleared my throat—a harsh sound, ruining it. “My mom always had me sing the melody of a keyboard piece before I started working it. She said I sounded happier singing music than playing it, so I needed to . . .”

  I pressed my lips together, not liking the direction this memory was headed.

  “So . . .” Oscar nodded to the paper, a question in his eyes.

  “Yeah, it sounds . . .” I waited for the surge of memory to ebb. Then I drew a breath. “Why do you care what I think?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t have an eye for this. Or an ear. Maybe an arm.”

  He ran his thumb down my wrist again. “Thanks for that.”

  “I’m not an expert. It sounds . . . lovely to me? But I can’t hear all of it in my head the way other people seem to be able to.”

  “Hum it for me again.”

  I went warm, but picked up the paper and teased out the melody. When I stopped and looked up again, Oscar’s eyes were glowing.

  “You do get it.” He took the paper from me. “You get it in a different way.”

  I smiled through my puzzlement. This moment felt so tenuous, like the early-morning haze before the sun breaks over the skyline, everything insubstantial, from the duvet under me to the boy in front of me.

  Then he crumpled his composition into a ball.

  “What are you doing?” I rose onto my knees, reaching for it.

  He pulled it away. “It’s cool, this was an idea. You gave me a better one.”

  “How?”

  “Trust me, it’s fine!” He tossed it at what looked to be the discard pile beside the sofa. “This will get me there but . . . yeah. Not it.”

  “Oscar—”

  “Especially after the Mozart. Hearing that and then writing this? I don’t know. Maybe I need a quiet room for a few days to get Wolfgang out of my head.” He reached out, letting my curls pool in his palm. “Maybe I need your courtyard.”

  “Wolfgang might follow you. I’ve always heard music more clearly there. That was part of it, the way it could make the music in my head sound so . . . pure.”

  My ritual—sitting alone in the courtyard, eyes closed, visualizing myself on a stage, playing the most breathtaking piece the world had ever heard. It had felt real there. Possible.

  And now even the memory of imagining those things felt like a false one.

  “Music in your head?” Oscar looked weirdly excited. “Do you ever write it down?”

  “Not that kind of . . . no.” I shook my head. “I don’t compose. I don’t do anything but listen.”

  “Oh. Well, without listeners, there’s no reason to play music.”

  “Fair point. Count me in among the masses, then.”

  If there was a hint of venom in my voice, Oscar ignored it. He moved closer. “Did you like what you listened to tonight?”

  “Tonight was . . .” I stared at my lap, then back up at him, unable to be anything but honest. “It was like . . . a miracle.”

  I half expected him to jump up and do a victory leap, but he didn’t move a muscle. “Do you know what I was thinking about when I was conducting?”

  I watched him move closer.

  “Nachos?” I whispered.

  He closed his eyes and I closed mine and there were his lips, warm and parting, my arms sliding up around his neck to sink deeper into it. Relief surged over me like a warm bath. In the same moment, we both seemed to remember how polite we’d been all day, how very upbeat and chaste, and smiled against each other’s lips, then more kissing, more urgent, more greedy.

  He pulled back a few inches. “How did you know I was thinking about nachos?”

  I laughed.

  Oscar peered at me—a question.

  “So.” I shook my head. “Are we . . . ?”

  “I don’t think we have a choice.” He looked almost exultant.

  I beamed, catching the joy on his face. But then he frowned—and the litany of worries he’d recited earlier today ran through my head like a news-ticker.

  His mouth dipped to my neck, and I blurted, “Nora thinks it’s great. You and me.”

  He looked up. “Ms. Visser?”

  “Yeah!” Why why why would you bring her up right now? “In case you were worried about how, um, Amberley people would react.” Sweat prickled my armpits. “She guessed this morning and she gave me a big . . . thumbs-up?” I demonstrated, scrambling to wind this conversation back to the point before I’d derailed it. “I didn’t tell her anything. Obviously. I didn’t know if there was anything to tell.”

  “Wow.” He leaned away, thoughtful. “That’s good to hear, actually. I shouldn’t care, but . . . huh.”

  My face burned. Oscar lapsed into silence and I suspected if I tried to fill it, I might say something even more wrong-headed.

  There were dirty dishes piled up on the counter of his galley kitchen. I gave his shoulder a soft tap, and went to fill the sink.

  “You know, we switched the piece tonight. They were supposed to be rehearsing L’Apres-Midi with Reinhardt, but I mentioned Mozart in the interview, so everything got shifted. They’d done Night Music already, last Thursday.” He kicked his legs up with a cocky grin. “But not like that.”

  I looked back down at the soapy basin, the dishes I was scrubbing, my wet arm, all the purple notes running together.

  “Ah. Ruby.” Oscar jumped up, crossing the room in three long strides. “You don’t need to do that.”

  “I don’t mind.” I stacked clean plates to the side. “What did you say about Mozart? In the interview . . .”

  Oscar grabbed a dishrag and started to dry. “That he’s my north star, basically. That I admire everybody, but Mozart’s the one who nails what love sounds like.”

  “M
ozart.” The brazenness of that statement forced a laugh out of me. “Not, I don’t know . . . the Romantics?”

  “Okay,” Oscar said, hopping up on the counter. “How about, Mozart nails what I want falling in love to feel like.” He let his legs swing out, back in. “If I could choose, I’d much rather have that purity, that peace, that grace to come home to than any drama, however gorgeous and sweeping and complex and . . . you get it.”

  I peered up at him, elbow grazing his knee, feeling a lot of things, none of them pure. “Most people would disagree with you. Everybody seems to want to get destroyed.”

  “My brain is messy enough.” He slid back down. “I need a Mozart kind of love.”

  I felt him move behind me, warm and steady, his hands falling to rest on either side of me against the counter. I washed one more cup—his breath on the nape of my neck, his hips drawing closer to mine . . .

  But he reached for my wrists, stilling them. “You don’t need to take care of people so much, Ruby. You can take a break.”

  My hand closed around the drain plug, shoulders locked tight. “It’s the only thing—”

  He peered around me, intent. “What?”

  I pulled the plug and dried myself off. “I really don’t mind!”

  He watched me cross the room. “I noticed you the other day, going into Marty’s study. Like, sneaking. And then when we went in to work, it was immaculate—”

  “Dad can’t concentrate when it’s messy and he’s a naturally messy person, so . . . I don’t know.” I picked at my thumbnail, flustered. “I sort the mail, get his music in the right order. I vacuum. It’s not like I’m curing cancer.”

  Good lord, if Jules heard me say that . . .

  “You’re helpful,” Oscar said, stepping closer. “Kind.” Another step. “Beautiful.”

  I smiled, speechless.

  “So,” he said.

  “So . . .”

  He leaned against the wall. “There’s this Amberley thing I have to go to this weekend, while your dad’s away. This young donors’ cocktail reception something-something?”

  “Wing Club?”

  “Yes! You know about it?”

  “Nora mentioned it to me.” Practically your birthright.

  “Oh, of course.” His fingers nervously tapped the wall. “Well, are you going? Do you want to be my date? Sunday night. It would make it a lot more fun.”

  There was an edge to his cheerfulness, like he was daring himself to say all this. Was this his way of getting past all the things he was worried about?

  “I wasn’t actually planning to go,” I said. “But Wing Club is really nice. And you’re really nice to ask me.”

  Not an answer, but all I could conjure amid all the Alert, Alert, Alerts clanging in my brain. I pinched the buttonhole of his polo shirt to distract myself, my thumb grazing warm skin as his arm looped around me, pulling me closer.

  “Thank you for this morning,” he whispered. “And tonight. And everything.”

  Before I could say “You’re welcome,” he kissed me again, and I forgot what day it was, let alone what happened this morning.

  16.

  “you’ll think about it.” Jules paused from painting her toenails silver to gawk at me. “You seriously said that? It’s not like he was asking you to bear his children. Although that’s obviously next.”

  I pulled another pillow behind me at the top of her bed, craning my neck to avoid her nail polish fumes. “‘I’ll think about it.’ Yes. As in . . . what you say when you don’t want to do something.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jules said. “You don’t want to go to a party at Wing Club.”

  “No.”

  “With cocktails and champagne . . .”

  “I’m seventeen. They won’t let me—”

  “And tiny adorable food circulating and music playing . . .” She turned her attention back to her toenails. “Yeah, I don’t get it.”

  Then her head darted up.

  “This is a wardrobe issue! You have nothing to wear!”

  “What? No.” I sat straighter. “I’ve been going to Lincoln Center events my entire life.” If you don’t count the past two years. “Half my wardrobe is black-tie.” Well. Black. “And I bought a couple new things . . .” Workout clothes.

  “What would you wear, then? Hypothetically.”

  I pictured my bleak closet and made something up. “I have a silver dress, thank you very much, with a Peter Pan collar.”

  “Cap sleeves?” Jules sat up, smirking. “Hem to here?” She pointed to the bottom of her kneecap.

  I squinted. How dare she mock my imaginary dress. “And?”

  “And that’s what a twelve-year-old would wear, tagging along with her parents to a grown-up party. You said it yourself. You’re seventeen—”

  “I said it in the context of not being allowed to drink.”

  “I’m taking you shopping for something age appropriate. And you are going to this goddamned black-tie cocktail reception if it kills both of us.”

  “It’s not as simple as . . .” I clamped my lips shut.

  Jules hit me with a hard stare. “As?”

  How could I explain this to her? That if music was my recently broken-up-with ex, this was the equivalent of being a guest at its wedding? That people there would either know and pity me or, worse, not know and ask me when they could expect my big triumphant debut? That Oscar and I would be subjected to the glare of the classical music scene before there was even an us to glare at?

  That this whole thing felt weirdly like a trap?

  I chose the easiest complaint. “There will be photographers there who might see this as, like, my introduction to the . . . scene. Or whatever.”

  “The scene?”

  Wrong direction. She leaned forward.

  “Are we talking, like, high society here, or . . . ?” At my expression, she slapped the bed. “Oh my God, we are. And this would be . . . what? Your debut? Holy shit, this is so happening!”

  In fact, Jules was clearly so determined to ensure that this was happening that she skipped the second coat of paint on her left foot and immediately shimmied into gladiator sandals, dragging me behind her down the hall to her living room.

  “I haven’t decided about this!” I laughed, stumbling in my worn-out penny loafers. “I don’t want to buy a dress for no reason.”

  “The reason is so I can live vicariously through you, do not deny me, hi, Grams!”

  Jules’s grandmother stepped out of the kitchen, holding a pile of mail. Her face lifted at the sight of me.

  “Oh my God, is that Ruby Chertok? I’ve seen you go by, down on the street, but you’re so tall.”

  “Yeah, she’s an Amazon, minus battle skills,” Jules chirped. “We’re friends again! All is right with the world!”

  I snorted, but she wasn’t wrong. Nearly everything did feel right, including, improbably enough, the prospect of going dress shopping.

  Out on the sidewalk, I turned to her. “What did you mean by ‘living vicariously’? You’re the one who’s out every night—”

  “Not every night. Never anywhere nice.”

  She walked faster, avoiding the conversation. I took the hint.

  The truth was, pieces of Jules’s life that had felt to me like fun facts as a kid carried more weight now. Where my house was crammed with instruments, dusty books, and moldering antiques, Jules’s “trendy” mid-century furniture was chipped and faded from decades of actual use. She lived with her awesome bohemian grandma because her parents were addicts who couldn’t take care of her. Her mom had been born in that Central Park–adjacent house, grown up there, gone off the rails there, left her child behind there, and the rent had remained largely unchanged.

  Our street was the same. Our lives were different. I needed to stop whining about party invitation
s.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked, the hiss of a stopping bus rattling me back to the here and now.

  “Cravat.” She pointed up Columbus. “It’s a boutique on Seventy-fifth. Everything is, like, the tiny side of sample sizes, so . . . perfect for you.”

  When we stepped inside the cheery, spare shop, a girl in the back perked up. “Hey, girl! Love those shoes.”

  Jules kicked one foot behind her, posing like a pin-up. “You know where I got them.”

  “Do you shop here a lot?” I asked.

  Jules looked at me like I was crazy. “I work here.”

  “Oh! Wow.” I turned to a rack of all-black tops and started blindly sifting through. Everything seemed to be organized by color. “I didn’t realize you had a job.”

  “You wouldn’t, would you?”

  I tensed, but her voice was wistful.

  She nodded toward a curtained area in the back. “Dressing room. I’ll bring you stuff.”

  I hesitated, watching her pick a neon-green dress with no neckline beyond a bit of gauze.

  She glared. “I know what I’m doing.”

  I put up my hands in silent surrender.

  I’d just managed to close the curtain and shimmy my shirt off when three dresses rocketed over from the other side. Neon green, dark green, fire-engine red.

  “Um . . .” I held the red one with the tips of my fingers.

  “Put them on!”

  I did. All three. And Jules was right—she knew what she was doing.

  I tried the bright green dress last, examining my reflection in the mirror from every angle. A sleek, modern, put-together adult-type person peered back at me. Not quite me. But maybe that was a good thing.

  I couldn’t help but imagine the dress floor-length, unfussy, comfortable, my hair in an elegant up-do, heels just the right height for working the pedals. My imaginary concert dress. Even my face looked different than I’d always thought it would.

  Jules poked her head in. “That one. Definitely.”

  “Yeah, it’ll work.”