Wildalone

  “It’s rosemary.” She savored the dish, eyes closing in approval. “I have a garden at my house, and the one herb I always want fresh is rosemary.”

  Rosemary. Or thyme. We all had an herb that could take us home.

  “Now, let’s talk classes. We should reshuffle quite a bit.” She took a chart out of her purse and a red pen flew through the page, circling a few boxes. “You don’t need this literature class. They read a book a week and it will eat up too much of your time.” A quick X in three of the boxes got rid of the excessive reading. “Definitely keep Composition, but one music class is not enough. I’d say two, even three—to beef up your résumé early on. Which means that either Greek Art or French 101 has to go.”

  The tip of the pen froze over Monday’s schedule, ready to strike either class as soon as I made my choice.

  “Professor Donnelly, I’m not sure about the trade-off.”

  She shrugged. “Everything is a trade-off. You’ll get more use out of the language than the art history. But you already have Bulgarian and . . . what was your other language? Russian, right? So if you want to take art instead, go ahead.”

  “I meant the trade-off between that and music.”

  The pen dropped on the table. “Not sure I understand.”

  “There are other things I’d like to explore.”

  “Exploring is fine. But I can’t let you jeopardize the piano.”

  “How would this jeopardize it?”

  “Easily. Music doesn’t tolerate being pushed to the side—either you drop everything for it or it drops you. So, while endless sampling of the liberal arts may work for anybody else, for you things are different.”

  Things had always been different for me, and I loved it that way. Yet it wasn’t the kind of “different” Donnelly had in mind. Had I stayed in Bulgaria, my entire future would have been mapped out for me: competitions and concerts all through high school, then admission to the National Academy of Music, then more competitions and concerts, endlessly. It was a great future if you loved music (which I did). But I had come to America to choose my own future. And this time the piano wasn’t enough; I wanted everything. Whatever I had been missing out on, all my life.

  When I tried to explain, Donnelly wouldn’t let me finish. “Thea, I get all that. I’ve been through it myself, believe me. What I don’t get is how exactly you propose to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Fulfill the prerequisites for the major on time, qualify for the Performance Certificate, keep your stage appearances, while all along scattering yourself across the board like this. I don’t think it can work.”

  I felt short of breath just listening to her list. “Professor Donnelly, I thought I had more time.”

  “More time for what?”

  “To decide on my major at Princeton.”

  The window was exactly two years, I was sure of it. In American colleges, you could try majors and switch them even halfway through the ride. Whereas in Bulgaria the decision had to be made by the end of high school. There was no such thing as applying to a college or university in general, only to a specific department. And if the department said yes, that was it.

  “You aren’t serious, are you?” The twist in our conversation had drained the smile off her cheeks. “Or are you actually telling me that you might major in something else?”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “And?”

  “I need to take classes outside of music before I can make up my mind.”

  She looked at me as if my face had become a snapshot of the apocalypse. “Fine, then, we will revisit this once the semester is over. But in the meantime I wouldn’t put it on Nate’s radar, if I were you.”

  I promised her not to. She handed me the chart, French 101 and Greek Art still intact on it. Yet this was only the first of eight semesters at Princeton, and the fight was far from over. It was possible, of course, that I might major in music. But I was done sacrificing my entire world for it. I was eighteen years old. I wanted to live. And if this meant no longer being Wylie’s protégée or having to endure Donnelly’s grim silence, then so be it.

  FINALLY, MONDAY CAME. MY LONG-AWAITED, much imagined first day of school in America. Like my great-grandfather, who had worked so hard on resurrecting his piano that in the end he probably found those to be the most stunning sounds ever produced by a musical instrument, I had played the day up in my mind beyond proportion. Walking into a Princeton classroom had to be a rite of passage, an entry into something wonderfully new—or so I thought when I left Forbes in the morning.

  Shame, then, that the moment was ruined almost instantly. My first class happened to be Greek Art, and within minutes of entering the lecture hall I was already mortified. Other students seemed to have read dozens of pages that I didn’t even know had been assigned. They answered questions, recognized images on slides, and kept laughing at the professor’s jokes about the origins of Greek mythology. Meanwhile, I was sinking in my seat. How was it possible to be so behind already?

  The answer was simple: orientation week. I had been obsessing over preludes and nocturnes while everybody else had tracked down the syllabus for each class and started reading. I could hear Donnelly’s voice in my head: Everyone except you and the athletes, dear . . .

  When the lecture ended, I hurried to leave, grateful not to have been called on to join the discussion.

  “Miss Slavin, could you stay a minute, please?”

  Professor Giles threw the words across the auditorium like a casual afterthought, without registering the question mark or even glancing in my direction. Austere in his tweed jacket, he had an unexpectedly deep, nuanced voice for a lean man in his sixties. It was because of this voice that, as I would soon find out, most girls in the class found him irresistibly charming.

  “Glad to see you in Greek Art.” His eyes scanned the room, making sure the last student had left. “My family attended your concert last week. Everyone thought it was quite the triumph.”

  I thanked him, relieved that the reason he wanted to talk to me had nothing to do with class participation. But the relief didn’t last long.

  “May I ask what made you decide to take my class? First-years typically start with Art 101.”

  “I love art history. And Greek Art was the closest it got to home.”

  “Home?”

  “I meant my country, Bulgaria.”

  “Ah, yes. Right at the heart of Eastern Europe, next to Greece.” He sounded disappointed. “It never ceases to amaze me, the musical talent in those Balkan lands of yours. Carries a certain . . . restless quality. A subtle unrest going so far back in time one could say it practically runs in the blood.”

  Could. Or was he actually saying it?

  I forced my eyes to stay on his. “You’ve heard other Bulgarians play?”

  “I have, I most certainly have.” He lifted a sheet of paper and stared at it, as if trying to reclaim his mind from a distant memory. “Miss Slavin, I hope you would indulge me with a slight departure from the syllabus.”

  “A departure?”

  “Of sorts, yes. Your first paper is due on Friday, and I always leave its topic open: choose a Greek vase and tell me which myth you think it depicts. Everyone has a favorite, so giving students a choice helps fire them up. In your case, however, a certain vessel struck me with its particular . . . shall we say, resonance?”

  The sheet landed on the desk, no longer upside-down from where I was standing. And two figures emerged on it, delicate like cutouts from an elaborate cartoon: a man holding a lyre and another man waiting for the sounds.

  “The vase is on display downstairs. You won’t have any difficulty finding it.”

  Princeton’s art museum, of course. In Bulgaria, it was unheard of for a university to have its own art collection, let alone an entire museum. But then again, with tuition at $33,000 a year, why would Giles have us write from photographs when the originals were only steps away?

  I took the page f
rom him. Maybe I should have been suspicious. Maybe it should have occurred to me that grading curves had rules (treat students equally) and that “departures” didn’t happen lightly, on a whim. But for the moment, I convinced myself that everything made sense: class homework involving music was assigned to me by a professor who had heard me play. He had admired my technique. My inexplicably restless talent. And as for everything else that ran in my blood, he obviously had no clue at all.

  THE OPEN PAPER TOPIC TURNED out to be a mixed blessing: it fired everyone up, but mostly with stress. By midweek, the usual “What’s up?” had given way to “Did you pick your vase yet?”—a question I answered briefly, skipping the fact that my vase had been chosen for me.

  And not just the vase. One particular Greek myth stood out in my mind because, as Giles had said, the gift for music in the Balkan lands did go back in time. Way back, actually. Only hours from my home, in a region known as Thrace, the mountains had once echoed with the song of a man described in legends as the greatest musician who ever lived, the “father of all songs.” His lyre was believed to have charmed the anger out of beasts, coaxed trees and rocks into dance, and even diverted the course of rivers. More than two thousand years later, people in my country still knew the story of Orpheus by heart. His love for Eurydice. Her death from a snakebite. And his descent into the Underworld, to claim her back. Touched by his music, the gods agreed to let his wife live again. On one condition: that he wouldn’t turn around to look at her, on the way out into the world of the living.

  I could have filled the required pages easily, without treasure hunts in museum basements. But Giles had insisted, from the first slide he had flashed in our lecture hall, that no photograph stood a chance against the breathing clay.

  Princeton’s collection of “breathing clays” hadn’t made it to the main floor galleries, so I followed the map to the lower level. Thursday was the only night of the week when the museum stayed open late—at a quarter to ten, the place was deserted. I had wanted to be there alone and look for the vase undisturbed, but now wished I had come earlier, with the others. There was too much silence. It rose from the gray carpets and crawled up the walls, leaving its invisible imprint on everything.

  The first two display cabinets held mostly fragments. Clustered at random, the pieces peeked through the glass with the shy stare of creatures locked for centuries inside a tomb. I stopped in front of the third cabinet: its vessels were intact. There were warriors, gods, heroes, kings, each trapped in a pose of irreversible defeat or triumph. But the image I was trying to find had nothing to do with heroic battles. It had to do with music.

  Finally I saw it—at the end of a shelf, strikingly odd with its inverted shape that the Greeks had called a psykter (round belly, no handles, neck much shorter than the foot, as if the potter had sat at the wheel in the blur of a hangover). I leaned closer and the two figures played out their story. The musician’s head fell back in sadness. He dropped the lyre. Emptied, the air ached for sound. Still under the music’s spell, his companion bowed, while high above them a full moon—the glass reflection of a track light—pierced the black-clay night.

  “The time is now nine forty-five and the museum will be closing in fifteen minutes.”

  Everything startled me at once: the flash of a shadow across the glass, a rustle at the back of the room, the echo of speakers asking all visitors to proceed to the nearest exit. I looked around but there was no one. The security guard had probably decided to let me have those last remaining minutes to myself.

  I had brought a book—Ovid’s Metamorphoses—and opened it to the part on Orpheus and Eurydice. Giles had wanted a subtle unrest, but the story of the musician from Thrace, of how he led his wife away from death, had more unrest than anyone could have asked for. A living man, lost in the Underworld. Walking in darkness, among deaf rocks and dead shadows, knowing that even a single mistake will cost him the life of the woman he loves. Then the gods raise the stakes and the sound of Eurydice’s steps begins to fade, even though she is following closely, still within reach. Will he or will he not turn?

  Slowly, the words crept across the page, guiding my eyes in long-forgotten rhythms:

  They made their way in silence up a steep

  and gloomy path. With only steps

  to climb before their feet would touch

  earth’s surface, he panicked that he might again

  lose her and, anxious for another look,

  he turned. Instantly, she slipped away.

  He stretched his arms to her, despaired,

  eager to rescue her, to feel her body,

  but they held only air. Dying

  a second time, she didn’t blame him,

  didn’t complain—of what? of his great love?—

  just spoke a single word: farewell.

  He couldn’t hear. And with no other sound,

  she fell from him again, becoming shadow.

  The rest was his brief life without her, a life filled with nothing but sorrow. Consumed by grief, he swore never to love again. And not even the most seductive of women—the immortal maenads, possessed by the god Dionysus—could tempt him to break his vow. Enraged when Orpheus spurned them all, they ripped him to pieces.

  “The time is now nine fifty-five . . .”

  I closed the book just as the ceiling lights went out, leaving only the cabinets visible—illuminated from the inside, a deep amber of hidden bulbs that made the vases glow, stirred back to life after a long slumber. Suddenly, the entire place resembled a tomb. Dark, eerie, as if I had descended into a corner of the Underworld myself. My imagination ran wild. I couldn’t wait to go back to my room. Start writing. Attempt to capture on paper the uncapturable: the music and soul of Orpheus, whose tragic tale was now flashing through my mind like a film reel. If the musician on the front of the vase was indeed him, then another scene from his life might very well be on the back. His death, maybe? The cabinet was locked, so I tried to see past the glass, as far along the vessel as I could—

  “It must be a maenad, back there.”

  I turned around and froze. Someone was watching me from across the room, leaning against the wall between me and the only exit. It took a second to recognize the silhouette: my “stalker.”

  I did my best not to sound nervous:

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “That vase you were just looking at. Its other side must be a maenad, taking her revenge on the doomed musician.”

  Something about his voice got to me. I wanted to keep hearing its sound. Warm. Quiet. Disarming like the sound of a piano when your fingers are barely pressing on the keys.

  I turned back toward the glass; it was easier to talk to him this way. “Why do you think so?”

  “What else would it be? A sad lyre player on a Greek vase—your best bet is Orpheus, having just lost Eurydice. The only thing left for him now is to get torn to pieces. So that must be the back, no?”

  He had read my mind again—from a distance, just as he had done in Alexander Hall. The concert flyers did mention I was from Bulgaria, which explained why he would bring up Orpheus. Yet how had he found me here? It was too much of a coincidence for him to be at the museum this late, especially on a night when everyone went clubbing (Thursday and Saturday were the notorious party nights at Princeton). He had to have followed me into the galleries, only to watch me in secret until now.

  The thought made me uncomfortable and I kept looking at the vase, away from him. “You seem to know a lot about Greek mythology.”

  “Only parts of it. The myth of Orpheus holds a special . . . fascination in my family.”

  “A dismembered musician somewhere down the family tree?”

  “Yes and no. Long story.”

  I waited for him to explain, but he didn’t. The room was filling up with silence and I hurried to say something—anything—before the mad beating in my chest would have echoed all the way through to him:

  “Are you in Greek Art? I don’t remember s
eeing you there.”

  “No, that’s too epic for my taste.”

  “What is your taste?”

  He paused. Then his voice became even quieter: “I think you know.”

  I didn’t, not yet. But no one had ever talked to me like this—cryptic, soft, as if our intimacy was a given. It made me want to trust him, which scared me even more. “Actually, I don’t know anything about you.”

  There was a loud clicking sound, then the room became fully dark: the museum was already closed. I sensed a shift in the air, a cologne’s vague mix of moss or bark with crushed petals, and realized he had come up to me, so close his chest brushed mine every time he breathed. I heard my voice finally take a risk:

  “Thank you for the rose.”

  He said nothing; maybe he was nervous too.

  “Do you play the piano yourself or are you just a music fan?”

  “I do play. And your Chopin is stunning.” He said it slowly, as if each word was meant to sink through me and remain there. “Will you write about Orpheus?”

  “I think so.”

  “You should; that’s the most desolate myth of the Greeks. The man who lost his love because he was too weak.”

  “Or because he loved her too much?”

  “It’s the same thing, really.” He lowered his face to mine. “Security will be here any second.”

  My pulse went wild from the touch of his cheek, from its unfamiliar, intoxicating warmth—

  “Theodora . . . Comes from Greek, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, but no one calls me that. Just Thea.”

  “I will find you soon, Thea.”

  He let me slide past him, up the single flight of stairs leading back to the main gallery where the lights were still on. When I reached the top, I turned around. But the darkness was empty.

  THAT NIGHT, BEFORE I STARTED writing, I read the end of Ovid’s tale again—the most desolate myth of the Greeks. The death of Orpheus.

  It began with the poet of Thrace seated on a hill, matching tears and songs to the tune of his strings. As the wind scattered a woman’s hair, her voice rose through it: “Behold, sisters, behold the one who scorns us!” A spear was hurled, but it fell without wounding him. Next came a stone—charmed by the music, it dropped at his feet to beg forgiveness. As the fury raged closer, a clamor of drums drowned the soft voice of the lyre. Finally deaf, the stones grew red with blood.