Wildalone

  The preludes began—compelling and rich, gathering speed, spilling into the restless 8th and the mere thirty seconds of the flashy 10th. I tried to think only about the music, and not about measuring up to the sound that other hands before mine had drawn out of this same instrument, on this same stage. The trick was to not let your eyes escape into the rows of seats where hundreds of other eyes flashed back their judgment, at least not while you played. So I kept mine glued to the familiar black and white of stripes racing up and down the keyboard. Soon the hardest part was over. I had decided to close with three nocturnes and my favorite one—the open-wounded B-flat Minor—was saved for last, before the intermission. I could play it with eyes closed.

  It was in the moment of silence before this last nocturne that I first saw him. A tall boy, possibly my age, strikingly beautiful even from a distance, under the glimmer of the exit sign. He walked in through the door closest to the stage and remained there, arms folded over his chest, all of him sunk in darkness except the eyes—tiny pools of reflected light that refused to let go of me.

  My fingers fell on the keys and disappeared in the music, in its dark anguish. I had to concentrate on the piano and could no longer see him. But every nerve in my body felt his presence, felt watched by him—the only person in the hall still standing—as if he wanted me to notice him. To know he was there. And to play the last nocturne only for him.

  After the final notes I looked up, back toward that door—

  He was gone.

  The applause came to me distant, dulled, as if obscured by the layers of a dream. Who was this guy? Not only had he arrived late—he hadn’t bothered to hear me finish the piece, dropping by probably not so much for the music but because his ticket would have gone to waste. And why did I even care? The insolence of latecomers was nothing new to me. They felt entitled to rush in, fret, demand their seats, argue with ushers, and even prompt the dreaded “wave” (an entire row getting up to let them pass) just because they had paid money for those tickets. It inevitably ruined everything. The mood. The magic. The flow of music in the room. Yet this time there hadn’t been a single stir. He had walked in quietly and nobody had turned. Nothing had given him away except his eyes and a dark silhouette. Could this be the shift my piano teacher had once promised me, that abstract ear of the universe? A universe reduced to a single person. To a stranger who obliterated everything else . . .

  The intermission slipped by fast, with my two advisers rushing over, ecstatic, to wish me good luck with the rest. When I returned onstage, I saw the hall already waiting. But there was no one at that door. Nor in the aisle. Nor anyone who looked like him in the nearby seats.

  The second half had only études—mostly from Opus 10, the set Chopin dedicated to his main competitor, Franz Liszt. The dazzling 1st softened into the dreamy 3rd and the much darker, haunting 9th. Then came Opus 25—a deluge of sound, storm upon a storm. The audience went wild and it gave me a moment to run backstage for a sip of water. When I came back, the applause continued, but the door to my left stayed closed. Only seconds remained before the clapping would stop. Before it would be time for the last étude.

  I sat at the piano. Took a breath. Looked at the door. Lifted my fingers and placed them over the keys. Another breath. The shut door. Slowly, I lowered my right hand into the hesitant notes of the most stunning, most intimate of the études: the Nouvelle Étude in F Minor from 1839. Its first measures were still unfolding when I saw the dark figure walk in, as if he had waited outside for the music to begin. And again he stayed at the door, anonymous in its shadow, eyes locked on me in anticipation of the sounds.

  I had no idea who he was or why his presence had such an effect on me. But of one thing I was now absolutely certain: he wasn’t a latecomer. Twice already, his entrance had been timed purposefully, with precision. As if he had seen the program, recognized the piece that mattered most to me in each half of the recital, and decided to hear only that piece, nothing else.

  As I made my way through the étude, I imagined the crowds after the encore: everyone rushing to get home, the evening already reduced to a memory. What were the chances that I might run into him there? That a stranger who hadn’t even shown his face would decide to stay behind and try to meet me?

  Still, I kept wishing that he wouldn’t leave. Just before the last notes, when I lifted my eyes from the piano, I saw him reach toward the stage to drop in its corner a single white flower.

  Then he walked out through the exit door and disappeared.

  “THIS IS WEIRD. GUYS HERE don’t do things like that.”

  The girl who had decided to give me a crash course in American dating was just doing her job. Her name was Rita and she was my RCA (short for “residential college adviser,” the third-year student who lived in Forbes for free and was in charge of me and nine other freshmen down the hall). To cement the team spirit, she had brought everyone to my concert. Now, as the two of us headed back to the dorm, she dug into the only piece of gossip I had produced so far: a long-stemmed rose.

  “I mean, a guy might go out of his way to give you a flower if he’s already dating you or for your birthday. But to lurk by the door and stare at you like that—no way.”

  I glanced back as we walked. Far behind, the rose window of the concert hall bulged its lethargic blue stare, awake for a few minutes longer before the building would be shut down for the night. Two arched exits still beamed their light across the lawn. But there was nobody left; the doors were already closed.

  “And how come you didn’t see his face?”

  “Everything except the stage was dark. It always is.”

  “I don’t know, sounds kind of creepy. Maybe you have a stalker, Tesh!”

  It was her affectionate nickname for me; she had Hungarianized it. The family had moved from Budapest to New York when she was only five, which meant she had lived in the U.S. long enough to qualify for the RCA role that typically went to Americans. Only those who know how to fix everyone else’s problems was how she had put it. Now she seemed intent on fixing mine.

  “Look, let’s not overthink this. I don’t have a stalker. He was there to listen to Chopin, not because of me.”

  “And the flower was for Chopin, not you?” She smiled, having added one more to her collection of verbal victories. “Tesh, no offense to your dead composer, but from what I’ve seen, men nowadays don’t think with their ears. Nor with their brains, for that matter.”

  “Sure. Around you men probably lose the capacity to think at all.”

  She ignored the comment, but I was right—with her willowy figure, long black hair, and eyes the color of dark chocolate, Rita looked like she belonged on a catwalk. Next to her I was the washed-out twin: blond, pale, and watery-eyed.

  “So let me get this straight: I’m the one who turns heads, whereas you get noticed only because of the piano?” Her laughter echoed high above us, multiplied by the vault of Princeton’s most prominent arch, Blair, where I had once caught an a cappella group’s performance and, for half an hour, had forgotten everything else. “If I didn’t know you any better, I’d think you were the queen of hypocrites. When was the last time you looked in a mirror?”

  I had never worried much about my looks—until my first week at Princeton. You’re so dressed up, is it your birthday? I would hear this so often that I started changing outfits five times before I could leave my room in the morning. “Dressed up” seemed to capture anything outside the American fashion uniform of jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers. In my case it simply meant “all black”—a look that would have barely passed for casual in Bulgaria, where girls wore sky-high heels and miniskirts even to the supermarket.

  “Tesh, seriously. I know you have all this piano stuff going on, but try to break out of your shell every once in a while. Come to parties, drink, chill out, whatever. Everyone’s been asking about you.”

  “Who is everyone?”

  “The guys in our RCA group; don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. They blush
like schoolgirls as soon as you show up, all enigmatic with that foreign accent and those skinny black outfits of yours. It’s kind of funny, actually. They’ve nicknamed you ‘Triple B’—Badass Bulgarian Bombshell.”

  “Badass . . . is that a good thing?”

  “Are you kidding? It means you have the whole package: looks, attitude, sex appeal. There—” She stopped and turned me around, pointing at my reflection in one of Dillon Gym’s windows. “Gorgeous face, legs up to here, boobs any girl would kill for, and those full lips—I’d be dropping flowers onstage too, if I were a guy!”

  “Wow, thanks . . .” I smiled, trying not to sound self-conscious. “It’s nice to hear these things from a girl, for once. With guys you never know who has an agenda.”

  “They all do, I’m sure. But now with that new admirer of yours, none of them stand a chance. If I’m sensing correctly, the bar just got raised tonight?” She wasn’t giving up on the latest gossip, not so easily. “Let’s see . . . He needs to be erratic. Appropriately mysterious. Bonus points if he broods over nineteenth-century music. Oh, and God forbid he should show his face—that alone would disqualify him before he even speaks!”

  “Except I doubt I’ll ever see him again, Rita. I don’t even know his name.”

  “But he knows yours, and Princeton is smaller than you think.” She stole one last peek at the flower. “Never mind what I said before, the guy is probably perfectly normal. On the off chance he makes another weird appearance, though, I want to know about it.”

  “You sound just like my mother.”

  “I prefer chaperone, thank you.”

  Both of us laughed. The promise to report any stray flowers or weird appearances was on the tip of my tongue when someone called Rita’s name and a group of people surrounded us. We had finally reached Forbes.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Room of Breathing Clays

  WE HAD ONLY one weekend before classes would start, so the goal was to get the most out of it: rush from one meet and greet to the next, bond over food, party all night, then come home with a roster of new friendships. And not just any friendships. Upperclassmen, preferably athletes, who might single you out from the freshman pack and bring you into their coveted circle, which in turn meant you would be going to postgame parties, formals, and any other bash open only to the sufficiently popular.

  There was, of course, a science to all this. To maximize the return on everyone’s time, it was wise to move in groups, avoid one-on-ones and not linger. Names were thrown around like confetti. Introductions were brief. Conversations ended abruptly, having barely started.

  “Nice to meet you. I guess I’ll see you around?”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  “Cool.”

  “Bye.”

  I deviated from the rules only once, chatting up a Russian girl at a party with the hope that we might become friends since we had so much in common. But she quickly excused herself, saying that hanging out like this, just the two of us, wasn’t in our best interest.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ll get stuck in our Eastern European bubble. When instead we should be talking to Americans and learning how to become more like them. That’s why we’re here, right?”

  Right. Except I felt no need to become somebody else, and wanted to spend my time with whoever seemed most interesting to me—American or not.

  Unfortunately, the one person I was dying to meet didn’t happen to be around. He had entered my life briefly, leaving it without a word, and his flower was now the single piece of evidence (a quickly fading one) that he had been real. With more than seven thousand students at Princeton, the odds of running into him again were slim. Yet no matter where I went, part of me anticipated his presence.

  The concert had been a success, and Donnelly took me out to lunch on Sunday to celebrate the review about to appear in Monday’s issue of the Daily Princetonian. A trusted source, as it turned out, had given her a sneak preview.

  “Listen to this—” She opened a yellow folder before we had even headed over to the restaurant. “Foreign talent is always a breath of fresh air, but last Friday a student from Bulgaria served everyone an oxygen tank. It sounds like something Nate would say. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of his numerous fans wrote it.”

  “Professor Wylie has fans?”

  “He’s a bit of a rock star. You didn’t know?”

  I shook my head, ashamed that I hadn’t found the time to read more about my adviser online.

  “You should hear him on the electric guitar; it bends the limits of everything you’ve been taught about music. Naturally, students love him. And you lucked out when he decided to take you on.”

  I was sure I had; the concert had proven this. But it had also proven that Wylie viewed me as his newest pet, and I dreaded how far he would go in “finding me gigs.” Or what could happen if one day he overestimated me.

  I told Donnelly that I was grateful to both of them.

  “My pleasure. But this was just warm-up, honey. The real test will be New York. Nate is already pulling a few strings to get you there, although it’s far from a slam dunk.” My puzzled face made her laugh. “Meaning ‘a sure thing.’ Not much of a basketball fan, are you?”

  “I’m not really into sports.”

  “Well, this will have to change here. Everyone is into sports. Besides, you and our athletes share one thing in common: you don’t need to worry about grades. The piano comes first, and the school understands that.”

  “Understands . . . as in fewer classes?”

  “No, as in flexible curriculum. There are easier courses whose sole purpose is to give students like you a break: Physics for Poets, Rocks for Jocks. Those two should get you through the science requirement, unless you hate geology.”

  I wanted to ask what she meant by “students like me”—I was not a jock—but we had already reached the restaurant. The place turned out to be much pricier than I had expected. Its glass wall overlooked a sidewalk patio directly on Nassau Street—the main shopping and dining artery that divided the north end of campus from the town of Princeton. Once again, I regretted not having done a simple Internet search. When Donnelly’s e-mail had mentioned lunch at the Blue Point Grill, I had glossed over the name, unaware that in America the word grill signaled upscale ambience and thirty-dollar entrées. Now she, of course, fit right in with a brown pantsuit and coral brooch pinned to the lapel, while I sulked next to her, hoping that my black jeans and turtleneck could pass for edgy college chic.

  “Mrs. Donnelly! We were starting to worry that you had forgotten us this week.”

  The waiter showed us to our table and I tried to decipher the menu while the two of them exchanged pleasantries. It was a maze of seafood dishes, referring to at least a dozen kinds of fish I had never heard of before. When she ordered the sea bass, I asked to have the same.

  He grinned in my direction. “May I interest you in any of our delicious starters?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Donnelly sensed that I needed help. “Would you like a soup or a salad, dear?”

  “No, just the main course would be fine, thank you.”

  I was going to need quite a few restaurant trips in America before a meal would stop being an exercise in embarrassment. Luckily, Donnelly didn’t seem to mind. She loved the place, calling it her “weekly indulgence,” but I found it hard to believe she had the means to come here so often. Back at home, my family went to an upscale restaurant only on special occasions—two, maybe three times a year. Most other families could afford even less.

  “So where were we?” She unfolded the napkin and placed it in her lap—another American custom. I copied everything she did. “Ah, yes, classes and grades. The bottom line is to manage a decent GPA. It doesn’t have to be great, just decent.”

  “I need higher than decent to keep my financial aid.”

  “That’s the last thing you should worry about, especially with reviews like the one you just receive
d. Your campus job, on the other hand, is a bit of a problem. I heard they’ve assigned you to the dining hall two nights a week?”

  “I don’t mind working.”

  “It’s not a question of whether you mind. There are only so many hours in a day, and you can’t be washing dishes while you should be at the piano, practicing. Have you talked to anyone about it?”

  “My award letter said this was part of everyone’s package, no exceptions.”

  She frowned, taking off her jacket and pulling up the sleeves of her beige blouse, as if to prepare for a battle with the food that hadn’t been served yet. “First of all, it isn’t everyone—only those who can’t pay their own way. And second of all, there are always exceptions. The whole thing is absurd anyway.”

  “Why?” There was nothing absurd about earning pocket change when you needed it.

  “Because somebody took a great premise and flipped it on its head. With the ton of money they are giving you each year, do you think a thousand or two more would have made a difference?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Certainly not. Money isn’t the point here. The point is that a job teaches humility in a way books can’t, at least that’s what we trumpet all over the brochures. But I don’t see how we get there by having kids on financial aid serve food to their rich classmates. If anything, the lesson is more needed the other way around.”

  This was a new angle for me. I had always accepted as a given that there would be rich students at Princeton, and that I wouldn’t feel equal to them. At least not in terms of wealth.

  “Anyway, I’ll see what I can do. Unfortunately, the semester is starting and the Financial Aid Office will probably give me a hard time. But by spring at the latest we should have this fixed.” She sounded so confident that I wondered if there was anything she couldn’t fix, once she put her mind to it. “How do you like the sea bass?”

  The food had just arrived and I was taking my first bite. “Delicious, reminds me of my mother’s cooking. Except for a flavor I don’t recognize. Not exactly thyme.”