Sight Reading

by Daphne Kalotay

  But Remy felt her heart brighten, said, “It’s true I tend toward romanticism. Or maybe what I mean is I tend toward the emotional!” She laughed. At the other end of the lounge, someone had turned on a radio, and some students were mock-fighting over which station to listen to. Seeing them, Remy felt as if she were in some other room altogether.

  “Strange,” Mr. Elko said, watching them. “Hearing that music on the stereo makes me recall something.” He shook his head, as if to dislodge the memory. “I couldn’t have been more than five years old. It was my first piano recital. My sister was there, too. We sat through these insipid renditions of, oh, you know, Chopin and Haydn and Bartók, brilliant pieces played poorly. The hall was on George Street—this was in Edinburgh—and when the concert was over and we could finally leave, we opened the door and there was a gypsy band on the pavement.”

  He smiled. “You know how it feels to finally leave some stuffy place and step out into fresh air? The music they were playing came flying in the second we opened the door. Some lively gypsy song. There was more life there on the pavement than in the whole of our piano recital. My sister even started dancing.”

  Remy smiled, as if she had been there, too.

  “I suppose it was the first time I really felt the difference a musician’s interpretation makes. That it’s the musician’s job to bring a composition to life. Though at the time, of course, I simply wanted to play the accordion!”

  Remy said, “That must be where your instinct to conduct comes from.”

  Mr. Elko’s eyes widened. “You know, you may be right. I’d never considered that.” He seemed surprised. “And what about you? What are your plans, now that you’re graduating?”

  “I’m getting ready to audition for a master class Conrad Lesser’s teaching this summer.”

  “Ah, yes, I heard about that. Quite an opportunity. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.”

  She told him that either way she would be here next year. She had gotten the tutorship she applied for, would be teaching in the school’s outreach program and playing in the honors orchestra. In what she hoped was a nonchalant voice, she asked, “Will you be here next year, too?”

  Mr. Elko paused. “I suppose that depends. On if the school wants to keep me, for one thing. But also if my wife wants to settle here. She’s barely been here since we moved.”

  He explained that her father had been ill. “Every time he’s in hospital, he catches some infection. Then he comes home and starts smoking again.” Mr. Elko shook his head. “She had to go back to North Carolina just yesterday, in fact. Help her poor mum out for a bit.”

  Remy nodded slowly, thinking about the beautiful woman with the blue eyes and perfectly smooth hair. Even her perfume had smelled just right. Finding Remy and Mr. Elko in the kitchen together, she had barely glanced at Remy, as if she could not be bothered.

  It hadn’t occurred to Remy that there might be a wife, though she supposed she ought to have known. But she wasn’t used to wondering about things like spouses; how was she to have guessed? Glancing at Mr. Elko’s hands, she said, “You don’t wear a ring.”

  Mr. Elko raised his eyebrows the way he did in the Mozart when it was time for the clarinet to sneak back in. “I didn’t know that was a requirement.”

  “A wedding ring.” Remy heard how demanding she sounded, when really she wasn’t even sure she believed in wedding rings.

  “We didn’t have the money for that. Not back when we married. My father-in-law was shocked. Right away he went out and bought her one. Gold thing with diamonds and sapphires—I think they’re sapphires. . . .” He made a face, as if wondering. “But back when she was your age she said she didn’t need a ring. She said love shouldn’t be about possession—”

  Just hearing him recite another woman’s phrasing made Remy feel sick. “You must miss her. You look sad.”

  “Oh, I always feel a bit gloomy after a final performance. A sort of postpartum depression.”

  “Me, too,” Remy said. Of course he loved that smooth-haired woman; she was beautiful, and she was his wife. Remy looked down into what was left of her pink wine. “I guess that’s the way it always is after a performance. For an hour or two we’re all working so well together, we create this sublimely beautiful thing, and then suddenly it’s over and we all go our separate ways.”

  Mr. Elko was looking at her appreciatively. “You know, you’re exactly right. It’s not postpartum. It’s postcoital, this letdown.” He laughed. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  He didn’t appear to think twice about having used the term “postcoital.” Remy thought for a moment. “It is physical, isn’t it? The whole thing. Not just the way my fingertips feel”—she showed him the tips of her left hand—“and not just the way my back sometimes hurts. It’s the way I feel during the performance. Like in the Sibelius, when we’re playing those swirls, and the trumpets sound like they’re off in the distance? My hair stands on end, every time, and I feel like someone’s just stripped my skin off—that sounds disgusting, I don’t mean it that way.”

  What she meant was that in those moments she was acutely aware of being a living being in a mysterious world, and at the same time a mere particle in the world—a world that would continue on without her, long after her heels ceased to scuff the earth. But it was easier to just describe the physical sensation. “It makes me feel exposed, like all my nerve endings are reaching into the air. I feel that way every time.”

  Mr. Elko looked at her. “It makes me feel that way, too.”

  The side of her that was next to him felt as if it were on fire. Yet it didn’t matter, because there was a woman—a beautiful woman with bright eyes and smooth hair—he already loved.

  Remy said, “I should get going,” hoping he would tell her to stay.

  He took a sip of wine and made a comical face. “Oh, yes, avoid this pink liquid at all costs.”

  Remy stood and gave as much of a smile as she could. “Well, good night,” she said, and went home.

  “SHE SAID SHE DIDN’T NEED A RING. SHE SAID LOVE SHOULDN’T BE about possession—”

  Heading home from the party, Nicholas heard himself saying the words, so stupidly. The cheap wine had left a cloying taste on his tongue, as if in retribution. Around him the air, too, was sweet, the flowering trees blooming hugely in the darkness. “. . . love shouldn’t be about possession . . .” With each echo Nicholas heard the self-effacement, the falseness of that statement, understood what Hazel had done, all those years ago, for his benefit. She had protected him, by pretending not to need or want an engagement ring. How had he not heard it before? He who had made a profession of listening.

  Many times he had recalled sitting across from her that fateful night, stunned by her beauty, blurting out, impromptu, “Won’t you marry me, Hazel? Won’t you be my wife?” Even then he had heard the dissimulation in his phrasing, the way the words, “Won’t you . . . ?” suggested doubt, when really he would have been shocked had she refused his proposal. And yet he had seen the slight disappointment flash across her face, watched her as she understood that this was it, this proposal of marriage that she had dreamed of, and that there was no little velvet box to peer into.

  And so he had blubbered something about how he hadn’t found a ring yet, how as soon as he scrounged together a bit of money he would buy one. That was when Hazel told him she didn’t need a ring, wasn’t even sure she quite believed in rings, since really they were about possession, and love shouldn’t be about possession. . . .

  He sighed as he turned down his street, past magnolia trees where preposterous blossoms hovered like plump birds. He had taken Hazel’s word without even considering who she was, a woman who understood the tactile beauty of objects, who found imagery and symbols in any objet d’art, whether museum paintings, graffiti murals, or the patterns in their Persian carpet.

  As he let himself into the darkened flat, he resolved to make it up to her. He flicked on the light and blinked at the bare walls.
Of course Hazel had left her mark, had doused the bathroom and kitchen counters with a purifying layer of bleach, had detonated disinfectant and soaked the stove’s coils in a tubful of suds—acts that to Nicholas had the aura of witchcraft. And indeed the apartment looked, felt, even smelled new, with Hazel’s apothecary jars lining the bathroom sink and her shoes tucked neat as bunnies into compartments on the closet door. Now Nicholas looked into Jessie’s room, saw her picture books on the little child’s desk they had purchased for her. How he wished he could lean over right now and pick her up, fill the room with her hiccupping giggles.

  Restless, he went to the piano, where he had been working out ideas for the Scottish piece.

  It was the first time he had looked to material from his own life. Perhaps that was why, ever since beginning the project, he found himself remembering things. Scraps of memories—sounds, images. Not always a comfortable sensation, these shimmers of moments long past.

  One happy discovery was that he still knew, by heart, much of the poetry he had memorized as a schoolboy—the Kipling and Yeats and Keats, and, later on, the Scottish poets he had discovered on his own.

  God gied man speech and speech created thocht,

  He gied man speech but to the Scots gied noght

  It had been a delight to discover in university that he could transfer his love for sound and rhythm and meter to a whole other vocabulary—one that needed no words at all. He took a seat at the piano and thought back to the seaside village in Moray. Even now it was poets’ phrasing he heard, “the rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum” and “the lacy edge of the swift sea” and “What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn?”

  And then came different words: “a stupid accident.”

  In his mind he saw the nubby finger and thumb. But it was his father’s voice, an angry grumble . . . A stupid accident. Nicholas didn’t fight the sensation that shimmied through him, some other truth lurking nearby, a shadow that when you turn around isn’t there anymore. It wasn’t the first time he had felt this shadow—yet he was relieved when the feeling evaporated. He waited to make sure the moment had passed, and told himself that memory was a tricky thing. Then he closed his eyes, to try to find again the village, the beach, the cry of gulls. He continued working into the wee hours.

  ALONE IN THE REHEARSAL ROOM, REMY LEANED CLOSER TO THE mirror, examining the swollen purple abscess that had emerged on the left side of her neck. It hurt to touch it. In the mirror she saw that it was close to rupturing. Though this wasn’t the first time she had suffered a minor affliction from intense practice, this particular grievance was new.

  “I hope you’re keeping that clean,” Julian said when he arrived.

  “It’s disgusting,” Remy said, still peering into the glass.

  “Stop touching it! Put a hot compress on it tonight. You can’t afford an infection right now.”

  “Tell me about it.” Both her senior recital and the audition with Conrad Lesser were only days away. Plus her parents would be here for graduation and to help her move. The boil on her neck seemed ominous.

  As she played the Brahms for Julian, the music sounded limp, not artful at all, her rubato mechanical, her marcato too heavy, as if she were mimicking rather than playing. When she could no longer stand it, she simply stopped and looked to Julian desperately.

  “You’ve practiced too much,” he said matter-of-factly. “Well, not too much, but in the wrong way. It’s become rote. That’s what’s happening.”

  Remy felt her panic rising. “What can I do?” She whispered, so as not to cry. “I need to play it next week. Should I just not play it until then?”

  “Taking a day off won’t hurt you. The work you’ve done will still be there inside of you.” He thought for a moment. “Here. Let me see that.” Julian took the score from the music stand and began going through it with a pencil, marking it here and there.

  “What are you doing?” Remy asked, even more panicked.

  “I’m changing some of the fingerings. To keep you on your toes.”

  “But I can’t change the fingerings now! It’s too late, I—”

  “Why not just try it, Remy? I’m trying to make it less familiar to you.”

  “But you already changed the fingerings in the Bach. I worked hard to figure out the most comfortable fingerings—”

  “And now you’re too comfortable,” Julian said.

  “Maybe I’m just tired. Anyway, I’m just in rehearsal mode. When it comes time to actually—”

  “Rehearsal mode! Remy, please. What have I told you for four years now?”

  “That each time we play a piece is an event.”

  Julian nodded. “Even a rehearsal is a performance, Remy.”

  “I know that. I—”

  “Don’t ever let yourself slouch, just because there’s no audience. The body remembers. The music remembers. Today I’m your audience—even this room is your audience. The rehearsal is the performance.”

  Remy felt suddenly exhausted. “Please don’t change the fingerings.” She began, silently, to cry.

  It wasn’t the first time she had cried, in frustration, in front of Julian. He wasn’t one of those teachers who forbade any show of mental weakness. Even now he just reached out and put his palm behind her head, gave her curls a brief rub. “I still remember the first time you played for us. You were this timid young thing with big brown doe-eyes. I could tell that it had been a challenge for you to get here, that you probably hadn’t had an easy ride of it. And then you started playing.” He nodded, smiling, and Remy found herself smiling, too.

  “Remy, wherever you end up—even at your audition next week, any time you have doubts about yourself, I want you to remember something. The music is in there.” He tapped Remy’s upper chest. “You’ve got soul, Remy. No technique can give a person that. No amount of practicing. A person either has emotional depth or doesn’t. You have it. That’s what makes your playing worth listening to.”

  Remy nodded, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “Don’t give up on yourself, Remy. You’ve made a commitment—to your talent. Don’t let anything get in the way of that commitment.”

  “Okay.” Remy took up her bow and lifted her violin, wincing when her chin rest pressed the boil on her neck. Just beyond her left hand she almost saw, for the briefest moment, the face of the little bearded man with the hat watching her.

  Chapter 4

  HAZEL STRAINED TO LISTEN TO THE ANNOUNCEMENT, BUT IT was for another flight. Hers had been rerouted. Now she and Jessie were stuck in New York rather than back in Boston, where they ought to have arrived by now.

  A family of silk-laden East Indians ferried a mountain of matching luggage past her while a cluster of brightly draped African women, their nearly bursting valises held shut by belts strapped around them, made chattering negotiations with a skycap. Hazel envied the grand togetherness of these families, so many sisters, cousins, brothers. Hazel had no siblings; there had been a baby brother before her, but he had died of crib death. And though she had friends from high school and college, that wasn’t the same as family—and so much moving around since then had caused her to lose touch with most of them.

  She looked back at Jessie, asleep in the collapsible stroller, and tried, as she did every so often, to sketch her. Already she had sketched various other people from the waiting area: two teens sitting cross-legged on the floor playing cards, and a man reading a newspaper, and the woman behind him whose small bag contained a furry white dog. With quick little strokes, Hazel drew the pattern of Jessie’s green jumper dress. She had explained to her why it was necessary to make a good impression when you traveled—which was why Hazel was wearing her favorite tunic dress and had fastened little plastic bow-shaped barrettes at the ends of Jessie’s pigtails.

  But the sketch didn’t look right. Truth was, she felt herself growing tired of her drawings. She wasn’t sure why. Until recently, she had felt an almost obsessive duty to try to capture all she
saw—had considered it a vocation, in fact, collecting these glimpses and fragments of daily life. A few years ago she had even come up with an idea for a project, a new sort of cartoon, not the usual comic strip but a more realistic expression of the world around her, its small quotidian moments. But basic questions such as how to exhibit or publish such drawings proved too daunting, and she hadn’t the gumption to seek out a mentor who might help her (or to even admit to others just what it was she spent her energies on).

  More than once in recent years, packing for a move, she had at the last minute decided to leave behind entire sketchbooks, having convinced herself there was nothing of real worth inside. Nicholas, discovering this once—shortly after the move to France—had been horrified. But to Hazel those drawings had become juvenilia, nothing she was proud of anymore. It had felt freeing, actually, to discard them. And now . . . it seemed enough to have seen and noted, mentally, these things around her. What had once compelled her to uncap her pen had lessened.

  “Attention, Pan Am Express passengers. Flight one-four-one to Baltimore is now boarding at Gate Nine.”

  She watched with envy as everyone at the next gate rustled to life. The man across from her, too, and the woman with the dog, went to join the rapidly forming line. A young woman dragging an overstuffed duffel followed them, tears running down her face. Airports were such receptacles for drama, Hazel thought to herself, watching the weeping girl join the others at the gate. Every one of these people had some story. There was a very old stooped man pulling a battered valise by its leather strap like a leashed dog. There was a young couple fussing over their baby in a way that didn’t bode well for their marriage or for the other passengers. There was an extremely attractive woman in a stylish tunic dress—

  Hazel’s heart gave a hard thud.

  It was she. Herself. She wore the same dress, had the same blond hair styled by a curling brush. Though Hazel saw just her profile, she knew, knew, it was her, and craned her neck to see more. The other Hazel continued toward the gate check, then turned her head for just the briefest moment. Yes, it was she, her own self—though prettier, somehow. Completely at ease, unburdened, no small child in tow. Smiling pleasantly—to herself, it seemed.