Catching Genius

by Kristy Kiernan

  I pressed my face to the railing, my cheeks puffing around the edges of the bars, only able to see out of my left eye. At the right angle we could almost get a whole view of the dining room by the reflection in a large mirror hanging in the living room. But it was painful and left us with red creases on our faces, and there was rarely a situation intriguing enough to warrant it.

  Graciela was seated with her back to the mirror, and her hair was loose, spilling over the chair back in a long black wave. My father was in profile at the head of the table where he always sat, and aside from the two of them the room was empty. I was just about to whisper a complaint to Estella when Graciela pushed back her chair, tucked her hair behind her ears, and crawled beneath the table.

  I thought she must have dropped a piece of food, or maybe her napkin. I was forever losing my napkin—my lap seemed maddeningly slanted—and had ducked under that table many times to retrieve it.

  Estella’s fingers ratcheted painfully around my wrist with each moment that Graciela did not come out. My father leaned back in his chair, apparently unconcerned about Graciela and her errant napkin, but then his hands disappeared under the edge of the table, and I realized that our nanny was doing something in my father’s lap.

  I stared only a second longer before Estella jerked backward, taking me with her, and we thudded onto the Oriental runner. There was a sudden noise from the dining room, and we stared at each other in terror. Our father took the stairs two at a time, but by the time he reached the top I was in my room.

  I trembled beneath my covers, clutching a stuffed dog, less concerned now with Graciela and her interest in my father’s lap than I was with my role of sleeping innocent. He stood over my bed, breathing heavily, but he said nothing, and I finally felt his hand light upon my head. I both longed for the comfort of that touch and was repulsed by it.

  He left, quietly closing my door behind him, and I heard him walk down the hall to Estella’s room. Were numbers racing through her mind even then? Zero comforting her the way my stuffed animals comforted me?

  The next night I crept to the music room, staying well away from the railing. Estella was not there yet, and I clambered onto the sofa and wrapped the shawl around my shoulders, already having forgotten the revulsion I’d felt when my father touched my head with the same hand he’d touched Graciela’s head with. At first, all I took with me from that night was that nannies were definitely not in my future and that I needed to figure out how to pick my fallen napkins up without ducking under the table.

  Estella finally stole in the door, allowing her eyes to get used to the dark before she shut it. She climbed onto the sofa with me, tugging for a bit of the shawl, and we huddled together.

  “Connie?” Estella said. “You can’t tell Mother what we saw last night.”

  This put a new slant on things. “Why not?”

  “Because what we saw didn’t really happen,” she said. “We were dreaming, okay?”

  “Oh,” I said. “But—”

  “It’s our secret dream, okay?”

  I thought about it for a moment. I had many secrets with Estella. I knew all about secrets, but I knew nothing about nannies in laps. I went with what I knew. “Okay.”

  I don’t know to this day if our father found Estella before she reached her bed and what he said if he did. I learned how to keep a napkin on my lap. I had Gib young, married and pregnant before I graduated from college. I never got a nanny. I never told my mother. And Estella and I never spoke of it again.

  But it remained fresh in my mind, like an acid etching. I kept trying to forget, but the sight of Graciela tucking her hair behind her ears and my father moving his hands down to his lap never went away, and this was what I thought of when I cried in the Cadillac.

  I did not tell Luke about the beach house. I did not ask Gib about his report card. And nearly a week later I still had not called my mother with an answer. When the phone rang I considered not answering, certain it was Mother, ready to start nagging, but when I glanced at the caller ID, I smiled and picked up, always happy to talk to Alexander.

  “So can we practice at seven instead of six?” he asked without preamble.

  “Sure. I’m not the one you need to ask. Have you called Hannah yet?”

  Hannah was our flutist, a tiny, harried woman with less free time than anyone I knew. Alexander had moved to Verona after a disastrous break-up with a high-strung conductor, and he’d initially harbored grand ideas of taking South Florida by storm. Unfortunately he wound up with me and Hannah. The mother of five kids, Hannah had to fight for her time with the trio by necessity. I had to fight for my time to play too, but my fight was against my own tendency to disappear into my family, whether they needed me or not.

  Alexander, childless but for his students, wound up being our default manager. The baroque period was rich in pieces for our trio, but it took skill and time to arrange concerts, so Alexander shouldered the responsibility for organizing everything.

  “Of course. She can do it. How’s the Escalade?” he asked quietly. He was the only one who knew about the gifts and what they meant. This one had nearly sent him over the edge, and I’d found myself consoling him rather than the other way around.

  “It’s . . . large,” I said, forcing a smile into my voice, but he was silent. “Everything okay, Alex?” I prodded.

  “I’m not sure. Is everything okay with you?”

  “Ah, did my mother talk to you? I was going to talk to you about it at practice. You did say you were ready for a vacation.”

  “What? No, I haven’t talked to June, I just—listen, can we talk after practice?”

  I was mystified. “What’s going on?”

  “I really want to talk to you in person,” he pleaded.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll talk about vacation then too. I have to go close the house on Big Dune after Carson leaves for camp. I’ll be gone for a few weeks.”

  “We’ll look at the schedule,” he said. “David can probably sub for you.”

  “Great. Maybe you could use the time to schedule some auditions?” I was constantly pushing him to find a position with the Verona Symphony, or at least get on the sub list.

  “Don’t start,” he warned. “I’m very fragile right now.”

  I grinned as we said good-bye; he was always fragile right now. I wondered what the big mystery was. Maybe he had a new love interest. Or maybe he was looking to change the trio, find a pianist and make it a quartet. It was Hannah’s main fear for some reason, though Alexander reassured her constantly.

  In the beginning, I encouraged him to replace me as soon as he could. I wasn’t the most dedicated violin player. My father’s gift of the child’s violin might not have been prompted by a desire to see me actually play, but after Estella’s genius commanded all of his attention I naturally turned to something I thought might please him, might swing his beautiful language and Sykes eyes back my way.

  And so I practiced. And practiced some more. And got a callus on my chin from the chin rest, one to match on my neck, a hickey on my collarbone from the shoulder rest, and an unconscious uplift of my left shoulder even when no violin was in sight. All to achieve little but a broken heart when my practice turned me into a merely competent player by the time I was twelve, not a prodigy, not a genius, nothing to rival Estella.

  My gift was beauty. A fact constantly pointed out to me by my teachers, who, after discovering I was merely average in intellect, seemed to feel slighted that they didn’t get their chance with Estella. Aside from the Sykes eyes, I was my mother’s child through and through, and the light brown eyes combined with the blond hair and my mother’s delicate features seemed to strike a chord in men, especially men like Luke. Luke didn’t like the calluses, or my short nails, and so I gradually stopped practicing regularly after college. I occasionally played something soft and dreamy when Gib wouldn’t go down for a nap—until it became obvious that it just agitated him.

  When Carson was born I put th
e Stainer away and forgot it, until a friend from college came for a visit. We drank too much wine one night, and somehow she convinced me to pull the violin out. The case, stuffed behind discarded Easter baskets and outdated coats in the hall closet, was clogged with dust, and I felt a pang of guilt, as if I’d neglected an old friend for so long that I might never be forgiven, and rightly so.

  After I’d tightened and rosined the bow I drew it across the strings, and from the discordant wail that drifted forth it seemed that perhaps I was indeed not to be forgiven. I worked on it for almost forty minutes, but it slipped out of tune almost immediately. My long nails made me clumsy on both the strings and the bow, and I grew frustrated as I hunted for the nail clippers I’d always kept in my case but that seemed to have disappeared.

  My wedding rings kept my fingers from moving the way they should; my hoop earrings clanged against the violin; my necklace ground into my collarbone; I couldn’t find a comfortable position for my left foot; I was distracted by the smell drifting from the long-shut case; my hair fell across my forehead and into my eyes. In short, it was a disaster.

  My friend, bewildered by my growing irritation, poured me another glass of wine. But even after divesting myself of all jewelry, pulling my hair back, and cramping my hands awkwardly to play around my nails, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to my own out-of-tune playing. I finally put the violin away in the corner and spent the rest of the night in an oddly satisfying snit.

  After my friend left the next week, I clipped my nails off and worked on tuning nonstop. Once the A-string finally stayed where it was supposed to, I pulled my stack of music out, alternately sucking my sore, naked fingertips and flipping the sheets. Like lines from favorite childhood books, snippets of music ran through my mind as I shuffled through them, and I found myself excited in a way I hadn’t been since I was a child at the thought of coaxing music out of the air.

  When Alexander moved to town, I’d needed some prodding, but there was no denying the joy the trio brought me. Everything about my life was shared. The very food on my plate was open to the jab of a fork from Luke or one of the boys, and I could hardly remember the last time I’d had five minutes alone. Not only was the playing my own, but somehow the music seemed my own too, coursing up like blood through my heart as the bow rose, running down through my veins as the bow fell.

  I worried that if I played with other musicians it would force me to share what I firmly believed to be mine, but as soon as those first notes from the three instruments met and threaded together, I knew that it was all more concretely mine than I ever would have thought. I was giving them the music, because it was mine to give.

  Alexander’s phone call was mysterious, but he had a flair for drama; I quashed the dread that he might want to break the trio up and accepted that his news would come when it came. I put it out of my mind and was later grateful for the last few days of peace that act brought me.

  Estella

  Connie will not set a date, and I am tempted to call the whole thing off. I don’t want her here. I don’t want my mother here. I don’t want them to ask me why Paul and I aren’t married, why we leave our doors unlocked, why we rent the upstairs, why we don’t have a car, why I don’t shop more, why I’m so thin, quiet.

  We don’t need to rent the rooms. We want to. We love the college students. Paul is social, and he somehow found the social animal in me and patiently coaxed it out, and now I cannot imagine life without these young people. And they have been astounding this year. They refused to allow me to notify the schools that I could no longer take students. Instead, they set up a two-sided desk next to my bed and took turns tutoring, looking to me for confirmation, teaching at the same time they were learning themselves.

  The doors remain unlocked because many of the younger students I—we—tutor need somewhere they can go that will always be available. They are the scholarship kids at private schools, and few come from happy homes. Some are talented in math and come to me for more advanced skills, some need help in math in order to keep their scholarships.

  The schools send them to me because they know I’m no longer at the college and have the time. And because I do it for free now.

  I don’t want to explain any of this.

  I tell Paul I’ve been tired. He looks at me sternly and tells me I’m going before he takes me to bed and holds me gently, as though I might crack at the seams. I tell him I have too much to do to bother with old memories, or old books. He shows me the bookcases he’s making for me, makes me run my hands over them. They’re beautiful, and I don’t have the heart to tell him that I wish he would abandon them to work on his own projects.

  The things he makes are permanent. He turns imperfections into bowls, split wood into sculpture, lightning strikes into art. He believes the imperfect can become perfect if he can only find the correct form, and then fit it to function. I cannot explain that there is no perfect form or function to this family.

  There is nothing beautiful to be made from our lightning strikes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Haydn went better than we expected, and Alexander was pleased beyond measure. He played a quick jazz riff and twirled his cello, laughing, and Hannah and I grinned at each other as we put our instruments away. Alexander’s approval was always worth the practice time.

  I pulled my wedding rings out of my front pocket and slid them back on my finger as I watched Alexander wipe down his cello. I’d never gotten the knack of playing with the rings on. It was too distracting for me, too invasive, and I rather liked the ritual of it, the trade of one life for another. Without the rings I played unencumbered by earthly possessions and responsibilities, but they were always there when I finished, to remind me that my life was anchored by things more permanent than the notes that died away in the air despite my attempts at sustaining them.

  Once I’d laid my case by the door, I broached my trip, showing them the dates in Alexander’s date book. It was unfairly short notice, and I almost hoped they would protest so I could have a reason to cancel.

  “I’ll see if I can take my two weeks here,” Alexander said, tapping his pen against the calendar. “And David can easily sub for this performance,” he continued, circling the date we’d planned for the library.

  He poked his pen at the performance scheduled for the week after my return, the night we were to play the Haydn Trios for the conservancy. “But you’ve got to be back for this, Connie. I’m comfortable with the Beethoven, God knows we’ve done it enough, and the Telemann is in good shape. Can you guys practice the Haydn during those two weeks? And, Hannah, you’re still lagging on the Tartini.”

  It would mean taking my violin to the beach house, but it was too important to him for me to turn him down, so I agreed. Hannah, who hadn’t taken a vacation since her fourth child, didn’t even bother looking at the dates as she closed the case on her flute.

  “Whatever you want. I’ll try not to screw up too badly, darling,” she said with a smile, blowing an air kiss at him.

  “Can we fit a practice in . . . here?” he asked, circling the Saturday after I came back. I agreed to that too, though I knew Luke wouldn’t be happy about me having practice on his first day off after I’d returned.

  Hannah shrugged. “Long as you don’t mind me bringing Jan and Natalie,” she said. “The other kids will sell them on eBay if I leave them alone long enough.”

  “No problem,” Alexander said, and we stood there awkwardly. Hannah and I usually walked out together, talking about kids, husbands, houses, anything but music. A trio was a careful mix. There was always eventually someone left out of something. It might be social plans, or the decision to try a new piece, or just gossip. It was like having two best friends; each covert conversation and private joke had the power to instill paranoia, altering the delicate balance.

  Alexander cleared his throat. “Connie, I’m still having problems with my server bumping me off. Could you have another look at my computer?” he asked, his eyes pleadi
ng with me to go along.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll see you when I get back, Hannah. Enjoy the break if the kids will let you.”

  Hannah’s eyes flitted between us uncertainly, but she finally smiled and turned away. “Okay. Have a good time at the beach, Connie.”

  Alexander wrinkled his nose at me when the door shut. “Sorry,” he said. He suddenly looked very serious, even nervous. I followed him to the kitchen, where he poured us each a glass of wine before perching on the stool next to mine.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” he said and took a slug of wine.

  My heart took a double beat and I licked the wine, too dry for my taste, from my lips. “Just say it,” I said softly.

  “I’ve lost lesser friends than you, Connie.”

  I stared at him, taking my fingers off the stem of the wineglass and twining them in my lap. “Say it, Alexander.”

  “I saw Luke. I saw him with someone. It was obviously not just a friend.”

  Time slowed and slowed and slowed. Another one? So soon. I wasn’t ready for it so soon. Had it truly become this easy for him? Apparently, yes. I continued to stare at Alex, my eyes growing dry and then watering, finally forcing me to blink, to move, to breathe again, though I did so in slow motion. Those rubber bands snapped, snapped, snapped, and yet I still couldn’t speak. If I didn’t speak then perhaps I would not have to listen.

  But my tongue betrayed me and I blurted, “When? What did you see? Oh, shit—what did she look like?”

  Alexander had tears in his eyes, and I could have cried for him if I hadn’t been so intent on not crying for myself. “I’m so sorry, Connie. I really debated whether to tell you at all—”

  I held my hand out. “It’s fine,” I said forcefully, almost aggressively, and then quickly dropped my hand when I saw him lean back away from me, wide-eyed, as though afraid I might strike him. “Just tell me . . . please.”