Wildalone

  Guns were an odd topic for a welcome reception at the music department, and the man who brought them up (blue velvet jacket, unruly hair, the unshaven charm of a boy refusing to grow up even in his fifties) didn’t exactly fit my idea of faculty. Yet he knew about my piano background and had to have seen my file, so I ran with his metaphor:

  “Is Princeton really a battlefield?”

  “Yes, and not only Princeton. But don’t worry, you’re uncovering the rules of combat as we speak. My job is to make sure you strike with every shot. Your job”—he winked as if to soften the impact—“is to resist the urge to do the opposite of what I tell you.”

  I still couldn’t figure out who he was, but luckily he reached out for a handshake. “Nathan Wylie, your music adviser. Do we call you Theodora, or is there a shorter version?”

  “Just Thea. Pleased to meet you too. Although I believe I am assigned to Professor Donnelly.”

  “Correct. Sylvia is your go-to for all things academic; she can propel you at school better than anyone. But in terms of stage track record, we figured you’d need a villain more than a fairy godmother. By the way, here she is—”

  He waved a woman over just as she was stepping through the door. Even if the halo of short brunette curls and the red lipstick might have fooled you from a distance, everything else about Sylvia Donnelly—the composure of her heavy walk, the inquisitive eyes that scanned the crowd without hurry, the strain of authority in the air while she waited for one of us to speak first—made it clear that she had been teaching much longer than Wylie, possibly even longer than any other professor in the room.

  He introduced us and turned to her. “Perfect timing, by the way. I was just telling Thea that you and I have agreed to share custody.”

  “Then it bodes well for us that she isn’t running for the exit already. I can imagine what other things you must have told her.” After a thorough look at me, the scrutiny in her eyes softened up. “Tell me, dear, how has it been so far?”

  We started chatting about the trip from Bulgaria and my first impressions of life on campus. Wylie had excused himself to take a phone call.

  “Try not to be intimidated by Nate. His sense of humor is peculiar, but also quite refreshing once you get used to it.”

  “It doesn’t bother me.”

  “Good. That’s the one ally you can’t afford to lose.”

  “Because he is my adviser?”

  “That too. But he also happens to be department chair. Which means he can align things for you, so long as—”

  The rest was lost. Wylie had come back and his face promised nothing but bad news. “They’ve postponed the Paderewski concert; Moravec is ill. Francis needs to fill the gap right away and asked for the usual: a showcase of students across the department. I told him no way. I’m sick of potpourri.”

  “Of course you are; so is everyone else. But the concert is this week. We’ll never find a replacement.”

  “Then we need to come up with an alternative by tomorrow morning.” He fixed me with his eyes, as if remembering only now that I was still there. “Actually, I think I just did. What if we opened the season with a shocker? Say, by showing off one of our newest students?”

  I had no idea how to react. Could he possibly mean me? There had been a mention, in a handout somewhere, about Princeton’s Paderewski Memorial Concert—an annual affair honoring the Polish pianist and politician. That year’s concert, by the famous Czech pianist Moravec, was supposed to be on Friday and I had planned on going. Now Wylie seemed to think I should be the one onstage.

  Donnelly’s reaction took a few seconds: “You aren’t serious, right?”

  “Why not? We can afford a risk, for once.”

  “This isn’t risky, Nate. It’s reckless. Thea is only a freshman; we can’t put her through a solo recital yet.”

  “A freshman who looks better on paper than many of our seniors combined. And you’ve heard her demo; you know what she can do.”

  The “demo” was a recording I had submitted as part of my college application; it was never meant to outlive the admission process. Practicing for it had taken months, and now they expected the same performance on less than a week’s notice. There was no way. A solo recital at Princeton. It was an unbelievable opportunity, a chance I wouldn’t have dreamed of. But it could also turn into a grand fiasco. Who cared how I looked on paper? So far, everything in America was proving much harder than I had imagined. Even my English—impeccable on transcript—was already failing me miserably. For years, I had been cramming my brain with rules of grammar, idioms, and Latin word roots; I had read Shakespeare in the original and scored higher on the SAT than Princeton’s admission average. But a chat with native speakers had nothing to do with the intricacies of linguistics. It felt like watching champions play table tennis while you stood on the side, forced to swallow Ping-Pong balls.

  Wylie, however, wasn’t giving up. “Come on, Sylvia, think about it. Everyone loves young talent, so people are bound to be curious. In fact, the younger she is, the better. Plus, we get to keep the Slavic spin of the evening, which means fewer ticket returns.”

  She nodded, just barely. Now they were both looking at me.

  “I promised to be the guy finding you gigs, didn’t I?” And there he was, joking again. “We got down to business a lot sooner than usual, but what the hell. So are we on?”

  On? My mind was spinning with fear and I only managed to say how grateful I was to be considered for this.

  “You aren’t considered—Friday is yours if you want it. All I need is a yes or no. But you have to tell me now.”

  “I haven’t touched a piano since I left Bulgaria.”

  “You’ve got four days and classes haven’t even started yet. With your technique, snapping back into top form shouldn’t be a problem.”

  It was as if we were discussing a bike ride around the block.

  “Professor Wylie, I’ve never carried an entire concert at a place like this.”

  “Of course not, no one assumes you have. Is that all?”

  I stared at him. What else did he expect me to say?

  “Fantastic then, it’s done! You’ll have plenty of time to doubt yourself later.” He turned back to Donnelly, as if I had once again ceased to exist. “Revised announcements will go off to press tonight. We can give the ticket office a green light tomorrow.”

  “And the program?”

  “What about it?”

  “Given the timing, I think we should let Thea choose it herself.”

  He made up his mind instantly, the way he seemed to decide on everything else. “Fine, go ahead.”

  Still in shock, I asked to play all Chopin.

  Wylie wasn’t thrilled. “I get it, I do—‘the Chekhov of the keyboard’ and all that. But give us a tour de force, not a tear fest.”

  Donnelly came to my rescue: “Let her do it, Nate. I like the idea: the music of one Eastern European played by another, both voluntary exiles to a life in the West.”

  They argued briefly about the pros and cons of an entire evening dedicated to Chopin, then Wylie agreed to let me have it my way. And so it was settled. Whether I wanted it or not, Friday was mine and there was no turning back.

  BY NOON THE FLYERS WERE all over campus, crisp white against a collage of colors on bulletin boards. Only from up close could one detect the thin border in Princeton’s signature black and orange, framing the date—September 14, 2007—and the two names placed side by side, as if a magical typo had linked me to one of the most gifted men to ever touch a piano:

  THEODORA SLAVIN PLAYS CHOPIN

  I adored his music. Many great composers had come before him: the indulgent complexity of Bach, the unleashed ornamentation of Mozart, the thunderous genius of Beethoven who had all Europe on its knees. But only Chopin managed to bring out the piano’s full ability to create extraordinary sound. He considered grandiosity vulgar. Loud playing—offensive. A frail man with a velvet touch, he devoted his life to a single
instrument. And the result was phenomenal. “Everything I hear now seems so insignificant that I would rather not hear it at all,” wrote a well-known pianist after hearing Chopin play live. “That was beyond all words. My senses have left me.”

  Donnelly, of course, had guessed right away why I wanted to play Chopin, and how in his “voluntary exile to the West”—leaving his native Poland, barely twenty-one, to brave the music salons of Paris—I saw my own. Now the proverbial window of opportunity had opened for me. And a foreign world waited, eagerly. A world ready to be charmed but unforgiving if you failed.

  At Forbes, I became a celebrity overnight. People had seen the flyers, so suddenly everyone knew my name and that of the obscure European country I had come from.

  “You’ve put the Balkans on the map,” a guy said to me at breakfast, meaning it as a compliment and not realizing it could just as easily pass for an insult.

  “Thanks. Although my country has been on the map for thirteen hundred years.”

  “Yeah? Cool!” He grinned under his baseball cap. “What was there before, vampire castles?”

  “No, that’s Romania. Still the Balkans, but a bit farther north.”

  “Whatever you say. By the way, I’m a bit north of you too. Room 208.” My blank look elicited an even wider grin. “In case you ever get, you know, bloodthirsty and stuff. Give me a shout. Or just come over.”

  Normally, I would have shown him how Balkan vampires react to casual hookup invites. But that morning I didn’t care. I was exhausted, hadn’t slept at all. My mind was in overdrive, trying to predict each disaster waiting for me at the concert—as if anything could have warned me of what was actually going to happen, that the piano wouldn’t be my only worry Friday night.

  To “snap back into top form” on time, I went to one of the practice rooms in Woolworth, Princeton’s music building, and didn’t leave it except to sleep and eat. Playing for hours at a time was second nature to me—I had grown up doing it since I was five years old. My parents themselves were not musicians. They hadn’t even attempted an instrument. How come then? The question used to fascinate people, as if there were a secret formula they could apply to their own kids. How did she get hooked on it so young?

  Having heard the answer many times, I spiced it up by insisting that a certain childhood incident had stayed clear in my mind. The truth was, I only wished it had. As with every story repeated by one’s parents over and over, imagination had embellished the details until it was impossible to tell where fact ended and fiction began. But on one thing everyone agreed: there had been an old piano at our house. A piano that had remained silent for years.

  Supposedly, a great-grandfather had brought it in from the scrapyard. A dentist with a passion for “resurrecting things” (picking up discarded junk and adapting it to home use), he had seen the salvaged piano as the vertex of a quest, a chance to show off his carpentry skills—or so the story went—by proving to the world, and to himself, that even a broken soundboard couldn’t ruin a piano. It was the soundboard, the piano’s “heart,” that took the vibration of strings hit by hammers, amplified it, then carried it out into the room much like the diaphragm of a loudspeaker projects an electric signal to the ear. For weeks, our house had echoed with the sound of carpenter tools. When finally even the tiniest crack in the spruce wood had been fixed, a tuner had inspected the two-hundred-plus strings and confirmed that their tonality was, once again, pitch-perfect. Thus, Great-Grandpa had won: the piano had been resurrected. Unfortunately, nobody at home could play it. But he must have figured that someone, on a yet unsprouted branch of the family tree, was bound to pick it up sooner or later.

  And it happened. I found the piano shortly after my fifth birthday, in the locked room down the hall from my own. Late one night, I heard someone cry in there. Too scared to come out of bed, I waited for the crying to stop. Which it did—just before my mother walked in to fix my covers while I pretended to be asleep.

  The minutes ticked on. Who could possibly live in that room? I had often wondered what was inside. A passage to a secret garden? A hidden treasure? Or maybe the room was full of ghosts? I rolled between the sheets, eager to find out but also afraid of the dark, of everything that waited in it.

  “Fear has very short legs, it can’t get too far,” Dad had once said to me. “All you have to do is go after it, pull it by the elbow, and look it straight in the eye. That’s how you make it disappear.”

  So I took his advice. Jumped out of bed and walked into the hallway. A beam of light spilled out of the mystery room: somebody had left the door ajar. I pushed it open, peeked—there was no one; only the moon sneaked in through the windows. On the right, three identical wooden chests lined the walls, silenced by buckle-shaped locks. On the left waited a piano. I came closer and started pressing the keys—

  “What are you doing here, Thea?”

  My mother carried me out before I could tell her that I wasn’t done yet, that I wanted to play some more. Back in my room, she made me promise to never—never!—go through that door without permission.

  And this was where everyone’s memories began to diverge. I had ended up by the piano a second time—but how? Had the lock given after so many years? Dad was convinced I must have come in through one of the windows, but I had no recollection of either a window or a door. All I remembered was being already there and pressing the keys—the ones I liked best—until a tune emerged under my fingers. A tune that made me feel warm and safe, as if I were under the covers, falling asleep—

  “Fine, I give up. Since I don’t want you doing this behind my back, from now on you are allowed to play. But on one condition.” My mother always had conditions, for everything. “Once you start, quitting is not an option.”

  And so the door was locked once more, while the piano earned a place in the living room and never left it. The story, of course, had to be filtered for the ears of strangers. There was no mention of the crying I had heard that night, nor of a second condition my mother imposed on me: not to play that tune again. The rest was short and lovely. Our girl and the piano found each other. But how about the locked room? What was in it? Oh, you know, unsafe things. Whatever we had to put away when we childproofed the house. With that, curiosity was quenched. My parents were told how lucky they were to have me, and the conversation moved on, having exhausted its brief detour.

  Over the years, I kept my promise and didn’t quit. My lessons had started right away, and before I learned to read the alphabet I already knew how to read music. At first, playing for others terrified me; then I grew accustomed to the adrenaline and even began to enjoy it. But what I truly loved was playing for my parents. Making them proud. And seeing on their faces something that had rarely been there before: a smile. Once, I overheard a neighbor refer to them as “broken people.” I didn’t know what he meant, but it occurred to me that everyone else’s parents seemed younger, more energetic, happier. I never mentioned it or dared to ask questions. Instead, I hoped that whatever had done the breaking would be erased by my music as I became better. So I continued playing—stubbornly, every day, until my wrists would start to ache, then to throb, then to turn numb with pain from the long hours of practice.

  “This will open doors for you,” Dad would tell me, with a brief knock on the piano as if it were itself a door. Meanwhile, the only door I craved to see open was the one to our house, on the other side of which children my age played games instead of piano sonatas. I began to feel trapped, chained to the keyboard. And whenever my friends did something I couldn’t be a part of, playing became the equivalent of punishment.

  “You are restless, you want answers. But music is not something a child can fully understand,” my piano teacher warned me, being the only one to sense that something was wrong. “So don’t expect to fall in love with it quite yet. For now just master the technique. Tame the keys, teach instinct to your fingers. One day you’ll begin to hear the music. To really hear it. Then the universe, too, will begin to list
en.”

  Hear it? Every piece demanded to be heard hundreds of times, maybe thousands, until its sounds would haunt me even in my sleep. I didn’t argue with him back then, but now wished I had asked him questions—about that elusive age at which one stopped being a child and became worthy of the cosmic ear. Did eighteen cut it? It’d better. Because, with my first concert in America only days away, I dreaded finding out what might happen if the universe decided to listen before you were ready.

  I CLOSED THE LAST MUSIC score on Friday afternoon feeling strangely calm, as if an old friend had promised to be at the recital. “It’s just you and me, psycho,” I whispered to Chopin’s picture on the cover. Then I left to get ready.

  Alexander Hall was one of the most formidable buildings at Princeton. Reigning over an entire lawn by itself, the brown monolith rested undisturbed, surveying the campus with its cyclopean eye of a rose window. Inside, the concert hall was just as overwhelming. Massive stone arches loomed throughout the balcony, descending over the seats with the weight of a Roman cathedral.

  After so many concerts and competitions, I knew that stage fright was normal, part of what being a musician was all about. Even Chopin, the undisputed genius, had dreaded giving concerts, avoiding it whenever possible. “The crowd intimidates me, its breath suffocates me, I feel paralyzed by its curious look and the unknown faces make me dumb,” he had once written, and I knew exactly what he meant. All it took now was one glance at the enormous hall, streams of people rushing in, and the doubts began. What if I snap under the pressure? If Wylie has miscalculated the risk? Then there were also accidents. Tripping over the floor-length dress. A muscle spasm while you played. A sudden itch. Cough. Sneeze . . .

  The stage coordinator put an end to my self-torture: “It is time.”

  I stepped out into the applause. Across the stage—black, shiny, waiting—was the grand piano. Everything became quiet while I sat down and adjusted the bench. Over the next two hours, these people were going to receive my music in exchange for a brief acceptance. For an acknowledgment that, because of my one talent, I was welcome. I belonged.