“No.” Oscar tried to smile. “I’d just like to date your daughter.”
“I see.” Dad sat again, like he was too tired to stand.
He seemed older today, his actual age catching up with him. I wondered how draining that UK trip had been, despite the extended stay. Or maybe it was this conversation making him look like a series of small objects was falling onto his head.
“I don’t think you’ll have much time for dating this summer, son.” He squinted up at Oscar. “Your premiere is in five weeks and you’ve got—”
“We didn’t plan for this to happen,” I interrupted, while Oscar blurted, “She’s helping me. She’s a huge help, kind of a muse—”
“All right!” Dad lifted a hand, not looking at either of us. “You don’t need to ask my blessing. Just don’t let it affect your work.”
Oscar spun toward me, exultant, and I smiled back. But as I drifted into the hall, I felt more spectral than ever.
He was relieved—of course he was—because my father gave the okay. I knew Dad would, in the end. I’d even known the words he would use. They didn’t mean Dad approved, they meant he didn’t care enough about the subject to argue.
“Show me what you’ve got so far.” Dad closed the door to the study.
Even with my own door shut, I could hear Oscar playing on Dad’s upright. I sat on the edge of my bed and listened, bracing for my heart to sink into the trench I’d dug between music and me—but it didn’t. It bloomed, slowly unfurling.
That music was Oscar’s. And Oscar was mine.
25.
“muse.” Jules held the door to the pizzeria with her foot. “He used that word.”
“It’s sort of corny, but . . .”
“It’s sort of insulting.”
“He was scrambling. My dad can be intimidating.”
“But not, ‘Your daughter is amazing, I love hanging out with her.’ He says he needs you as a prop to make his music happen, basically? It’s so pretentious.”
I watched her, comprehension dawning, as I walked to the counter. “You don’t like him.”
“I don’t know him! I just . . . worry for you.” Jules glared at the slices on display. “And I think you’re a hell of a lot more than some dude’s ‘muse.’”
“Thank you,” I mumbled. “That’s nice.”
“It’s true.”
“While we’re saying true things, I think you’re better than this ‘born to be a shop girl’ dramarama.” I kicked her ankle. “There’s nothing wrong with shop girls whatsoever. But you’ve got talent, Jules—”
She side-eyed me hard. “You are changing the subject.”
“I’m . . . talking about potential! Yours, mine.”
“Which brings us back to what I was saying.” Jules paid for her slice and followed me to a table in the back. “This purpose thing you have. I might not know what you’re going to devote your life to, but I know it’s going to be incredible and I hope like hell it’s not, like, facilitating some dude’s personal journey. Because . . .”
She made a barfing noise.
“It’s not like that,” I assured her. “We are facilitating each other.”
“Dirty!” She folded her slice. “Speaking of which . . . ?” She smirked.
“We haven’t. Not that.” I took a bite and chewed, smiling. “We’re getting to know each other first.”
“You are such a goner.”
“I know.” I rested my forehead on the table. “Ugh, I know.”
* * *
• • •
“Sorry for the muse thing,” Oscar said the instant I set foot in his apartment that evening. “So pretentious. I couldn’t think of a better word!”
“They were powerful creatures, right? I can’t remember my Greek mythology.”
“Goddesses.” He sat on the edge of his kitchen counter, legs dangling. “The living embodiment of each of their disciplines.”
“Oh, that.” I snorted. “Well, then I’m definitely not a muse! Dad should have seen right through it.”
Oscar cocked his head. “You totally embody classical music to me.”
“You heard me play.”
“And I’ve heard you sing. And hum. And I’ve seen you listen and analyze and walk and . . . you are music.”
Shame flash-flooded me. Had he seen my Lincoln Center poster? Was he teasing me? The bold print caption “I AM MUSIC” had been cropped out of the photo hanging in the hall.
Even then, they must have known how laughable it was.
But Oscar’s eyes were warm. Those words were a coincidence.
“Sometimes when I’m working and I need to concentrate, the instruments drop out, and I hear you humming the melody.”
“Really?”
He shrugged one shoulder, smiling. “Plus I am picturing you in a tiny toga right now, and I have to say, it’s working for you.”
I walked over and shoved him, mostly as an excuse to bridge the distance, to invite him to pull me between his dangling legs and “apologize,” kissing my earlobe, my neck as he slid down standing.
He pulled away before I wanted him to—but his whole body looked like it was smiling. “Wanna help me work?”
“Is that a euphemism?” I half hoped it was, but he laughed, striding into the morass of strewn papers to grab some blank sheets and his keyboard.
“I’ve got threads in my head for how to develop the second movement—it’s about dichotomies, the arts, the street, those hidden portals we talked about . . .”
I nodded as if I had any idea what he was talking about.
He sat on the edge of his bed with the keyboard seesawing on his lap.
I put it to the side. “Come play on my piano.”
“Is that a euphemism?”
“No!” I laughed, then forced myself serious, thinking about how Dad was out to dinner with Nora and Bill tonight, wouldn’t be back for hours and . . . no. Serious. “You cannot compose on that thing anymore. Pianos only from here on out.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
* * *
• • •
I dragged an armchair from the sitting area to avoid using Mom’s piano bench. Then I leaned against my knees and listened while Oscar worked through a new motif in fits and pauses and bursts. His mind was a remote satellite. I couldn’t begin to understand how these thoughts were forming, these notes coming to life. But as the piece took form, his gibberish about dichotomies started to make sense—and so did what I’d noticed up in Washington Heights.
This new section was a nod to the mass we’d heard sung at the Cloisters, pure and sacred, interlaced with a higher, more contemporary melody. It took me a second to identify the syncopation as a bachata swing—Dominican-flavored, that music I’d heard pumping out of an apartment building. I watched Oscar, wondering whether he’d wandered back without me during those lost days, listening for the sound of the neighborhood. He must have. And here it was, dancing with something ancient—before drowning it out with an almost triumphant cadence at the end.
Almost. My muscles felt antsy, like I was kicking rocks off the edge of a cliff.
“It peters out there, doesn’t it?” I heard myself murmuring. “You resolve it so quickly, it doesn’t feel like there’s anywhere for it to go and you’re . . . how many bars in?”
“Forty.” He scratched his hair. “I’m not sure where I want it to go.”
I tried to think like Dad. “What are you trying to say?”
He leaned against the piano, head slumped. “Something . . . about high art vs. quote-unquote low art, music, pop culture, culture in general. This life, real life. You have the Cloisters, this oasis, but is it an oasis? Is it better than everything surrounding it? Who decides that? So I start out . . .”
He played the contrapuntal section, an analog to early music.
> “And then it starts to get heckled . . .” The Latin melody came in. “But in the end, the bachata . . . it’s joyous, right? It’s now, it’s the pulse of that neighborhood, it should win.”
“What about other pop forms? To keep developing it. Hip-hop!”
His eyes went wide—and my own scrunched tightly shut.
When I opened them, he was shaking his head slowly with a disappointed smile. “Ruby Chertok . . .”
My cheeks were flaming. “I know you don’t listen to hip-hop. I don’t listen to it either. I don’t know why I—”
“You don’t know why.”
“I . . . am shutting up now.”
He grinned. “No, I’m gonna let you sit in this a minute longer.”
“EDM maybe? Klezmer? Polka? I am an idiot.”
He reached for me and I walked to stand by him, his arm looping around my waist. “Definitely polka. I’m a polka fiend.”
I leaned against his shoulder, still cringing inside. “Okay, so, back to the music at hand . . .”
The thing was, he identified with the bachata on some level—and with the plainsong. He wasn’t just writing about a trip to the Cloisters here. Multiple cultures—he lived in them and they lived in him, variations on the theme of Oscar, and he switched them up when he felt he needed to.
He’d joked that he was a perfect plus one, never two, but he was more than two. He was as many people as he needed to be. It had to wear on him.
“So think about how it relates to the first movement,” I said, smoothing a bent corner of his composition page. “Is this a layering, is it a debate . . . a dance-off? Is one going to win, or . . . do they need to find a way to . . . ?”
Oscar peered up at me. “Cohabit. The thing is, I don’t have an answer.”
“I continue to have no idea what I’m talking about.”
“No.” Oscar squinted at the keys. “No, this . . . it’s something. It’s a question and that’s . . . yeah. I think you might actually be a muse.”
As cheesy as the word muse might have been, it didn’t feel insulting. It was a job, a purpose, a definition. And I was enjoying it.
He played and I listened. I frowned when it wasn’t quite there and clapped when it was and somehow my thinking walked the same lines as his. He strung it together, went back to add, jot, cross out—a quick harmonic sketch, the full orchestrations would come later—and then he played the whole thing.
And we looked at each other.
“Second movement.”
“I think so.”
We high-fived over our heads.
It was dark outside. We’d been at this for hours.
“Hungry?” I asked.
He stood, closing the fallboard, then reached for me. “Ravenous.”
* * *
• • •
“Fast-food restaurant.”
“This one.” I nodded up at the Burger Barn menu. “Fried potato product?”
“Seasoned, curly. You?”
“Shoestring.” I smiled at the cashier. “Small shoestring fry, classic double, please.”
“Same for me, no pickles on the burger,” Oscar said.
I looked at him. “No pickles?”
“No pickles.”
“I’ll take his pickle.”
Oscar stifled a laugh. The cashier rolled her eyes.
As soon as we found a seat, Oscar’s shirt pocket started ringing Dvořák.
“‘Songs My Mother Taught Me’?”
“And I’ll give you one guess who’s calling . . .” But he silenced his phone and put it to the side.
“You can answer! It is your mom, right? Am I—?”
His hand froze like this was a life or death decision. Then he stood. “Moms! Hey! Yeah, sorry it’s been so . . .” And he strolled out to the sidewalk.
I wondered how many days it had been since their last call. Did they have shared jokes? Would she ask him if he needed anything? Make sure he was eating well? What did mothers do when they were away from their kids?
I unwrapped my burger, watching him through the plate glass windows—pacing, smiling, frowning . . . walking away. “Um.”
A minute passed before he came barreling through the Burger Barn door, clutching today’s copy of the Times instead of his phone.
When he reached the table, he set the paper down and started flipping page after page. I pulled his burger out from underneath.
“My mom says hi,” he mumbled, turning to the next section.
“She knows about me?”
“Last week she asked if I’d made any friends and I said I had a girlfriend.”
“I wasn’t your girlfriend last week.”
He glanced up. “To me, you were.”
My smile was no longer stifleable. “Well, hi back to your mom.” I sipped my soda. “Sounds like a dis, totally wasn’t.”
“My article came out. The . . . interview thing.”
“Oh my God, awesome!” I reached over to see how far he’d gotten. “It’s the weekend paper, so it’ll be in the Magazine or the Arts—”
“Mom said Arts section. She was . . .” His hands stilled, pressing the pages as he breathed. “Weird about it? Excited but . . . I don’t know, I need to see it. I told her not to worry . . .”
I scooted my chair around so I could sit closer, then pulled the paper gently from him and pointed. “Top right.”
He startled, seeing his name. “It’s short!”
“It’s good, though, Oscar. It’s In the Wings.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s all people they think are going to be important one day. Win was in there after he got his first conducting spot. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Virginia Cheng—”
“Who?”
“She’s a painter. This is across all arts. It’s really cool!” I scooted my seat back, swiping a fry.
“Ah, this is . . . exciting.” He kept scanning it, a frown etched into his forehead even as he kept grinning. “I can’t believe that interview took like two hours and there are only five questions on here. Oh. The intro. That must be . . . huh.”
I read it again, upside down.
Oscar Bell, 17
Hometown: DC
Discipline: Classical composition
I blinked at him. “Is it the composition thing? Do you not feel like you’ve—?”
“The DC. I’m from Bethesda.”
A smile wavered on my lips. “Isn’t that fairly close to DC?”
“It’s not the same place. But, yeah, I mean . . . that’s not a big deal, right?”
That gossip piece about the two of us sprang to mind. “Is it that ‘mean streets’ thing you’re worried about? I doubt Times readers overlap much with the Post.”
“I’m not worried.”
His finger landed later in the write-up.
“‘His mother played him Mozart as a child, hoping to foster a better future for him.’” He stared blankly at the page. “My mother runs the biggest private hospital system in DC. You can’t get much ‘better’ than that.”
I picked at my burger, appetite fading. “Do you think she was upset?”
“She’ll be fine.” Oscar sniffed. “She’s excited for me. This is cool! Either way, it’s . . . yeah.”
I glanced at the article one more time, the details he mentioned standing out like they were written in bold. “Why don’t you get in touch with the reporter? I’m sure my dad knows him. You can ask him to print a clarification—”
“No, I’m not gonna rock the boat here. I mean, there will be other interviews, right?”
“Shawna Wells.”
“Oh shit. Right. And that’s soon.” He was leaning so hard on the table his chair started to slide away. “See, it’s all good. This is amazing.”
Whe
n we got up to leave, he bussed the newspaper to the trash along with our wrappers.
“Hey,” I said, prying it away. “What are you—?”
“Oh, right!” He laughed, watching as I carefully folded it and put it in my bag. “Good catch.”
He held the door for me with an elaborate bow. I slid out, smiling through my worry.
I’d caught the newspaper. But how much else had I missed?
26.
the piped-out smell of deliciousness dissipated as we walked away from Burger Barn.
“Huge progress today.” I bumped Oscar with my hip, nearly sending both of us careening into a construction pylon. He grabbed me tighter, steadying us.
“It’s still missing something.” To my relief, his voice was the right kind of fuzzy—thinking hard instead of covering up. “It’s pretty, I think, and it’s starting to say something, but it’s missing that key piece, that God piece, you know what I’m saying?”
“You want it to sound like God wrote it? That’s lofty, even for you.”
“Not that he wrote it himself, I’m not even sure that would be something anybody would be ready to listen to. But maybe he left a fingerprint, here and there.”
“You’re serious!”
As if on cue, light spilled out of a dingy Irish pub, giving him a saintly glow. “Well, yeah. Maybe it’s a composer thing. The act of creation, the need for a higher source of inspiration, for humility. I’m sure your dad gets it.”
I winced. “Hate to break it to you, but Dad’s an atheist.”
Oscar leaned away. “Really?”
“Since he was ten. He went to a yeshiva in Brooklyn. One day, he woke up and announced he was never going back and he wouldn’t set foot inside their synagogue either. It was like a Biblical revelation, except, you know, the exact opposite.”
Oscar looked weirdly troubled. I squeezed him as we walked.
“That’s why he got into music. Have you not heard this? My grandparents were looking for some way to keep him engaged in the community, so he started working for a music shop owner down the street, a friend of the family from back in Belarus. You can’t play instruments during Shabbat, so Dad studied music instead, pretending it was for fun. Traditional music at first, then poof . . . everything.”
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