At Ease

by Jeff Ross

  After an hour of practice, everything had become a little too “tricky.”

  Dani did fine with the second-violin part. I could sense her watching me. And though the cello is the driving force in the Adagio, it felt as though the rest of the group was looking to me for guidance. Waiting for my next move before committing to an action.

  It was amazing playing the lead. I felt in control. The other parts swam around mine, and if I happened to play too loudly or with more energy than necessary, it was because I was enjoying it more than I thought I would.

  “I need a break,” Olivia said, setting her viola down in its case.

  “Me too,” Jon said, and even though Olivia went straight to her phone, he followed her out of the room, talking at her. I could tell he had some kind of plan for the day. A few points of interest he wanted to bring up. He’d probably researched some of the things he’d discovered Olivia liked and was waiting to innocently drop them into conversation. Hoping to catch her interest enough for her to put the phone down for a moment and talk to him.

  “He totally likes her,” Dani said.

  “Yeah,” I replied, feeling that I wasn’t giving away any of his secrets because I hadn’t brought it up.

  “You think so too?” Dani said.

  “Now that you mention it, yeah,” I said.

  “I miss my boyfriend,” she said, either because it was true or because she didn’t want to give me the wrong idea.

  “Where is he?”

  “Montreal. Well, outside of Montreal, but still close. We’ve been together for eight months.”

  “Does he play anything?”

  “Music? No. Soccer, yes. It’s all he does. In fact, with the start of the summer season I doubt he’s even noticed I’m gone.”

  “I’m sure he’s noticed.”

  She’d stood and was looking out the window. “I’m just kidding,” she said. “We Skype every night.”

  “It must suck to be away from him.”

  “It’s only a couple of weeks, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “And anyway, I’m going to university in the fall, and he still doesn’t know what he wants to do. He says he’s going to follow me to Western, but I kind of don’t want that.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Why?”

  “Because it’s university, you know? I don’t exactly want to go out and be crazy or anything. But I need to experience everything I can.” She turned to me and scrunched her face. “We talked about getting an apartment together, but I just signed up for a room in the residence. So he can come visit and stuff, but the rooms are all for two people, so he won’t be able to stay the night.”

  I decided not to say anything. It felt like she was mostly talking to herself anyway. Getting all the thoughts out to see how they looked in the light.

  “I think being together eight months is too short a time anyway. Don’t you?”

  “Too short for what?” I said.

  “For us to move in together, I guess. For him to even come and stay the night and…for us.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She smiled at me. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  I almost laughed. “No.”

  “You want one?”

  “I haven’t really thought about it.” Which sounded crazy but was totally the truth. It wasn’t like I didn’t think about girls. It was just that I hadn’t ever noticed a specific girl and thought I would like to date her. Just like I had never thought about performing in front of people.

  “Okay,” Dani said. “That’s kind of weird.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t mean that you’re weird. Just that guys your age are normally girl crazy. Like we’re this new thing in the world that they never noticed before and then they suddenly do and it’s all they talk or think about.” She crossed the room and sat next to me.

  “I like girls,” I said. “Just no one specific.”

  Danielle put her hands on my knees. “Would you like to go on a pretend date with me?”

  “What?” I said.

  She sighed and looked at her feet. “I’ve only ever dated my boyfriend. His name’s Pierre, by the way, so I can stop calling him just ‘my boyfriend.’ Anyway, I’ve only ever dated him. And we’ve never really dated. Like, we go to the movies and stuff, but it’s always with a group, and then when we’re alone, well…I mean…” She blushed, shook her head quickly and waved a hand in front of her. “Anyway, it’d be fun for you to show me the city. Just the two of us, though, and we could pretend we were on a kind of date.” She nudged me with her elbow. “Does that sound totally weird?”

  “No,” I lied. “I get it.”

  “So, you want to do that? We can go Wednesday, before this is all over. You can show me the cool things in the city, and I’ll buy you dinner.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  Olivia and Jon came back into the room. Jon was talking while Olivia tapped away on her phone.

  “I asked you out,” Dani whispered. “So I pay for dinner. That’s how it works. Even if it is just pretend.”

  I leaned into her. She smelled like tangerines. “Okay,” I said. “Sounds fun.”

  Eleven

  “Why aren’t the Juilliard people going to be here?” Olivia whined.

  It was Wednesday, the third to last day of the workshop. I had spent the morning working on solo pieces. We’d all had lunch together, but otherwise it was a time to perfect our pieces alone.

  Mr. Powell held his hands out. “They’re caught up with something else,” he said. “I am sorry.”

  Olivia seemed on the verge of tears. “Is there no way we can perform later? Maybe they’ll show up eventually.”

  “The representatives have said they can’t be here at all today,” he said. “Which is why we’ll be doing the solo performances tomorrow. But there simply isn’t enough time to do both the group and solo concerts at the same time.”

  After Mr. Powell left, Olivia turned to the rest of us. “Why should we even bother?”

  “He said we can just do the Fugue if we want,” Jon said. “That’s good.”

  “For those people?” Olivia said, pointing at the other students. “I mean, honestly, who cares?”

  “It’s a performance,” Jon said. “It shouldn’t matter who is listening. Let’s just go out and kill it.”

  “We’ve practiced really hard,” Dani said.

  It seemed to me Olivia did care but was completely deflated.

  “I can’t come back here next year,” she said. “I’ll be nineteen.”

  “Are you going to university for music?”

  “Yeah, but just…” She sighed. “I really wanted to go to Juilliard. Not for undergrad, but once I graduate. I want to be in New York. I need out of here.”

  “Mr. Powell said they’d record all the performances,” Jon said. “So that should work. You can still get your performance to the Juilliard people.”

  “It’s not the same,” Olivia said.

  I understood what she meant. It isn’t the same. As Mr. Powell said, a recording lacks poise and presence. At first, I was happy to not even think about going out onstage. I was almost ready to go along with Olivia and say forget it. But we had worked hard, and I could tell Dani really wanted to do the performance. It meant something to her, though I didn’t know what.

  “Let’s do this,” I said.

  “Really? Hulk-Aid, are you sure?”

  “That has not caught on,” Dani said.

  “Yes, I mean it,” I said.

  “No freak-outs?”

  “None.” I didn’t feel nervous. Well, not passing-out, falling-down, it’s-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it nervous. I felt my nerves. The anxiety there. But I was with these other three people. We were going to perform together.

  “Fine,” Olivia said. “But I’m not going to like it.”

  * * *

  There was no great spectacle getting on the stage. We walked out, our instruments r
eady, sat in the chairs, turned to the first page of the Fugue and waited for everyone to be quiet.

  It took a while.

  I waited for the voice of doubt to creep in. But as I did, I watched Danielle. She inhaled deeply, then let the air out in a slow, steady stream. Almost two whole weeks of practices and lectures, workshops and group classes, for this.

  I was doing it for her.

  No one cared that we were on the stage. Well, maybe some of them did, but not enough to stop chatting.

  Mr. Powell clapped his hands, and everyone came to attention.

  “Hey, everyone, we’re DJ OW!” Jon said. “Check out this crazy tune.”

  “Oh my god, what a loser.”

  It was Cathy, standing directly in front of us. She brought her phone out and held it up in front of her. “Put on a good show, Will.”

  “What are you doing?” Olivia whispered at Jon.

  “Softening up the crowd,” Jon said. “Ready?”

  I looked away from Cathy. Then I heard a little beep as she began recording on her phone.

  We readied our instruments and played.

  My head did not explode.

  My insides did not fall out.

  I didn’t pass out, drop my bow or in any way mess up. I just played. The whole time, I kept an eye on Danielle. Watching her as she enjoyed every second of it. How she lived in the moment.

  Once, while I had a quick break in the piece, I looked at Mr. Powell, who was standing with Alisha. He had his eyes closed, his lips closed tight. Alisha was smiling as though she was pulling the music into her.

  I glanced at Cathy; she scowled back. I considered giving her a wink, but I wasn’t that brave. And soon enough it was over.

  “That kicked ass,” Jon said as we were putting our instruments away. The next group had already taken to the stage.

  “It really worked,” Danielle said.

  Jon punched me on the shoulder.

  “And no Hulk-Aid,” he said. “How’d you do it?”

  I didn’t tell him how I’d thought of Mr. Jorgensen being nervous every time he stepped on the stage. Or how I’d pretended we were in our practice room alone. I didn’t even tell him how I’d practiced the piece so many times that I likely could have been half comatose and still pulled it off.

  And I didn’t tell him it was because I was playing for Danielle.

  “It’s fun playing with you guys,” I said. “I guess that’s all.”

  “Fun.” Jon shrugged. “Okay, whatever floats your boat.”

  When we had our instruments put away, Danielle leaned over and whispered in my ear. “It’s time for our date.”

  “What about the other performances?”

  “I don’t think we’ll be missed. Come on, I need to get out of here.”

  I looked to the stage. Cathy was there, glaring at one of her group members.

  “Okay,” I said, as Cathy began to berate the cellist. “Let’s go.”

  Twelve

  At first I thought the sound of the violin was in my head. Then I noticed a girl standing on the corner of York and William Streets. I’d seen buskers in the ByWard Market before, but usually a guy with a beat-up guitar or one of those people who dress all in silver and only move, like, once an hour.

  The girl with the violin was maybe eighteen or nineteen. She was good. The market was filled with music that night, yet people stopped to listen to her, dropping coins into her open case before going on their way. Beside us, through an open window in the Château Lafayette, we saw a TV showing a baseball game, men with fingers wrapped around bottles staring intensely at the screen. Someone bumped me as they passed, and Dani pulled me to the wall of a parking garage.

  “She’s good,” Dani said.

  “Yeah,” I replied. I was nodding my head to the music.

  Occasionally the girl dipped her head toward the ground and added a little flourish to her bowing.

  At first I thought she was showing off. But soon I saw that she was completely entranced by the music. She’d fallen into what she was playing. Coaxing each note out of her instrument. There were mistakes, of course, and the sound was a bit flat—though that could have been the violin itself. But for this crowd, these people wandering through the market on a hazy summer evening, she was playing something completely beautiful.

  When she finished the piece, the small crowd that had gathered around her clapped. More money dropped into her case. Children ran up and thanked her.

  Danielle and I walked through the market. I pointed out the places I knew. The statues and buskers. The restaurants I’d eaten in. I showed her where a great bookstore once stood. Most of the market area was now full of pubs and expensive restaurants.

  “That was awesome,” Dani said out of nowhere. She grabbed my hand. We were standing in front of a store that seemed to sell only soap.

  “What?” I said.

  “Our performance. It was awesome. We totally nailed it.”

  “It was great,” I said.

  She squeezed my hand. “Thank you,” she said. Then she let go and pointed at a nearby store. “We need to go in there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we totally rocked that concert and I want to celebrate with new shoes.”

  I had never been in Top of the World—or in any of the trendy stores—and was amazed by all the shirts and skateboards and the sheer number of different decks and wheels available. It was like a different world. When Mr. Jorgensen and I came into the market, we always went to the same independent coffee shop. Sometimes he stopped in at the bike shop where his nephew worked, and other times we wandered up to the National Gallery.

  Dani bought a pair of deep-blue etnies and a fat leather bracelet. As we were leaving the store, she wrapped the bracelet around my wrist.

  It seemed strange there—I’d never worn any jewelry. “What’s this for?” I asked.

  “For remembering me,” she said.

  I wanted to tell her I wouldn’t forget her, but the words didn’t come out.

  “Is this place good?” Dani asked. We’d worked our way back around to William Street, and ended up outside a restaurant named Vittoria Trattoria, where the violinist was busking.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Let’s try it.”

  We went inside and were given a window seat.

  Before taking our order, the waiter brought out a little basket of bread. We were both starved and grabbed pieces—but there was one hard little bun we both avoided.

  Eventually, Dani picked it up. “What’s with this guy?” she said, knocking it on the table.

  I took it and knocked it on the window, then set it in the middle of the table. “Is it supposed to be like this?”

  Dani grabbed it from me. “Maybe.”

  “Who would eat that?”

  She looked at me, tilting her head to one side. “Truth or eat the bun,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Truth or eat the bun,” she said again. “We’ll ask each other a question and whoever doesn’t answer their question has to eat this bun. And you have to be totally honest. If you’re not totally honest and the other person calls you out, you have to eat the bun.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Like, the whole bun?”

  “Yes, all of it. Who knows though—it could be really good.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Same here,” she said. “You start.”

  “How?” I said.

  “Ask me a question. Anything. I’ll answer it honestly.”

  “Do you love your boyfriend?”

  She sat back in her seat, thinking. I didn’t even know why I’d asked that. It just seemed to be something she was struggling with. Something I could force her to be honest about, for better or worse.

  “Right out of the gates, eh?” She took a sip of water and opened her eyes wide. “I don’t know.”

  “Eat the bun.”

  “No. That’s the honest truth. I’ve told him I love him. He said
it back. So that was all taken care of. But right after I said it, I wasn’t sure if I believed it. I’m still not.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You don’t have to eat the bun.”

  She banged it on the table. “That makes me ridiculously happy.”

  “Your go.”

  “If you could be anything, what would you be?”

  “Like, now? Or when I grow up?” I asked.

  She laughed.

  “What?”

  “When you ‘grow up.’ That just sounds dumb.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s just that I’m about to go to university, and we’re supposed to feel all grown up and act differently and everything. But yeah, you’re fifteen. So…when you grow up.”

  “A violinist,” I said.

  “Honestly?”

  “Absolutely. A soloist as well. Like James Ehnes.” As I said this, I realized it was true. But at the same time, the idea felt fresh and new.

  Our dinners came. I’d ordered a plain-sounding pizza. Danielle had seafood lasagna. The table immediately smelled like the ocean.

  “Your go,” Danielle said.

  “Why did you come to the workshop?”

  She scrunched up her nose. “Honestly?”

  I pointed at the bun.

  “Okay. Because I had to prove to myself that I was good enough. Getting in was hard. Okay, actually—so I don’t have to eat that bun—I’m here because I had to prove to everyone else that I was good enough. And by everyone else I mean my friends and Pierre. Mostly just so they’ll leave me alone. You should have seen people when I told them I was coming. They were all, like, amazed that I had made it in. As though what I’m doing is some stupid hobby. So who cares? Because it’s classical music.”

  She paused and took another drink of water. “That’s why I’m here, I guess. For them. Because when I told them about this program and how hard it was to get in, there was this little bit of recognition that maybe, just maybe, all the practice I did and everything else actually mattered. That it was as important as when Pierre scored a goal. Only when I get a piece down, there’s no applause. Right? But no one has any idea about these things. I mean, what is success in classical music?”