Sight Reading: A Novel Read online

  “Hazel.” Her mother always spoke in a flat, perfunctory way, but this time there was a waver in her voice. “Your father. He’s in the ICU.” Hazel felt her heart plummet as her mother said, “You can come home, can’t you?”

  Of course she could. I’ll be there, she said, just as soon as I can.

  HER PARENTS WERE NOT MUSICIANS. They seemed surprised, mystified, even, by how quickly Remy took to her violin, which at first was a little thing of ugly orange-colored wood, shiny and hardly larger than a toy. Her future was decided on a single day, in a few brief minutes, which in retrospect seemed to her a disturbingly abrupt way to make such an important decision. She and the rest of the third graders were led into the stuffy auditorium, where Mrs. Sylvester, the music teacher, awaited with an array of battered orchestral instruments. The students were to sample the ones that intrigued them and make a selection, and by the following week each would have his or her very own, on loan from the school.

  Remy had already made up her mind to play the flute. She had watched April Englensen onstage with the woodwinds in the Christmas concert tapping her foot jauntily along with Mrs. Sylvester’s baton, looking more poised and confident than all the other sixth graders. In April’s hands the flute looked light and sparkly, a glamorous accessory as much as an instrument. But when Remy tried to blow into the flute that day in third grade, no sound came out. She tried altering the shape of her mouth, but the flute barely yielded a whisper.

  Mrs. Sylvester put her plump arm around Remy and urged her over to the stringed instruments. Gently she placed a violin in Remy’s left hand, arranging its wooden body so that her chin nestled onto the little black chin rest. A bow was placed in the light grip of her right hand, and though there seemed, for a moment, to be altogether too many things to think about, when Remy pulled the bow across the strings a scratchy sound emerged. This was sufficient for Mrs. Sylvester to write Remy’s name next to the word violin and move on to the next student.

  “But I don’t want to play violin,” Remy started to say but stopped. She already knew that what she wanted didn’t necessarily matter. For years she had wanted a little sister or brother, but insisting to her parents hadn’t yielded any results. And she hadn’t at all wanted to move away from her grandparents, hadn’t wanted to go to this school, where the other children’s friendships allowed no room for a new girl with unruly hair. Even her teacher, a tall thin woman whose fingernails were as bright red as her lips, had said to Remy, in a voice of disapproval, while distributing twenty-one little thin black plastic combs before the photographer came to take the class picture, “I don’t know how this thing will ever get through your hair.” Remy was too ashamed to relay this to her parents. And yet this was the very reason she wanted to play the flute: to be, instead of a shy, relenting girl with a head of messy brown curls, that straight-backed one happily tapping her toes along with the music, holding a silver flute as sleek and sparkling as a magic wand.

  Instead, in a crooked row with twelve other pupils each Monday, Remy stood before a heavy black music stand and sawed away at “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Old Rosin the Beau.” She had neither perfect pitch nor a flair for improvisation, and had to work to learn to read the notes, just like all the other students standing before their own heavy black music stands. But unlike the others, Remy did not struggle to draw her bow across the strings at the correct angle, to coax the right pitch and timbre from beneath her fingertips. The awkward posture, with the left hand’s inward-twisted grip, quickly became second nature. Mrs. Sylvester had affixed three tiny strips of red adhesive paper, like skinny Band-Aids, at intervals across the fingerboard of each child’s instrument to indicate where to place their fingers as they scaled the instrument’s neck—but Remy had no need for a visual guide, easily heard what was in or out of tune, felt innately how to interpret the notes on the page, how to turn them into sound. She found the red fret lines unattractive, and scraped them off.

  Within weeks Mrs. Sylvester had pulled her aside, given her new exercises and a new lesson book. Remy loved playing her scales and arpeggios, stretching her fingers, retracting them; they were becoming quick and adept, just as her bowing arm was already stronger. Across her little amber cube of rosin, a slim rut grew deeper by the week. Remy practiced so often a small bruise formed beneath her jaw, and one of the violin’s strings popped; Mrs. Sylvester had to replace it, demonstrating how to thread the tip through the peg and twist it around securely.

  Soon she had moved on to the third lesson book, where the staves were no longer cartoonishly large, the notes no longer magnified as if for someone with poor eyesight. By the next year, something new had happened. At home one afternoon, practicing what she would later discover was a transcription of a Bach prelude, Remy found herself not simply playing the music but traveling inside it, among the notes themselves, from line to line among the staves, sculpting a path of sound. Not that she was consciously aware of having been transported—but when she arrived at the end, she was momentarily shocked to find herself in her same house in suburban Ohio, standing there reading from sheet music propped on a folding metal stand.

  She knew then, if without the words to express it, that what she was studying was not simply music but beauty, and that she wanted to inhabit, completely, that beauty—and that this was something quite different from the jaunty flutist tapping her foot to the music.

  THE NEW CONDUCTOR’S NAME WAS Nicholas Elko.

  At their next rehearsal, Lynn told Remy all sorts of things about him—that he was thirty-one years old, that he had been a guest conductor in Budapest and at the London Sinfonietta, that he composed as well as conducted. Since she was concertmistress, she had made a point of introducing herself and, she told Remy, found out about him from her mother (a music teacher who had a hand in all of her daughter’s professional affairs). Lynn, a prodigy, was the youngest student in the conservatory and still lived at home with her parents—which Remy supposed offset, somewhat, the honor of being first chair.

  Until this past autumn, first chair had gone to Albert Kim, one class ahead of Remy. Albert had perfectly even fingers and the composure of a sunset, and it had been a pleasure to witness up close the way he brought an instrument to life. Yet Remy had looked forward to the year that Albert would graduate, when she would take his place. And then, just when the time had finally come, Lynn Swenson arrived.

  Fifteen years old, with long, gawky limbs and a straight orange bob, Lynn probably weighed at most ninety pounds, but when she drew her bow across the strings her gangliness transformed into beauty and sound. It wasn’t just her impeccable technique; it was her daring, her nerve, an inventiveness that made even the most familiar moments sound new. Remy had tried to figure out exactly how the transformation occurred, but it was like trying to decipher the work of a magician whose sleight of hand is too quick for the naked eye.

  And so it was with understanding as well as awe that Remy had stepped aside, while Lynn justly claimed first chair. When Lynn played her Scheherazade solos, Remy watched her shifts and slides, and admired her strong vibrato (which started at her wrist rather than her fingers) and where she had come up with smoother fingerings. She felt real affection, of an almost protective sort, for Lynn—who after all was doomed to spend her conservatory years with a mouthful of metal and few friends her age. Sometimes, as they played in perfect synchrony, it was as if the two of them became a single unit, sharing not just a conductor and music stand and the same notes on the same manuscript page, but also the internal experience of those things. Remy supposed it was the closest she would ever come to reading someone’s mind.

  “Turns out he’s a rising star,” Lynn lisped through her braces, explaining that Nicholas Elko had been awarded all sorts of prizes and commissions. “My mom says he’s a winner.”

  It was a phrase Remy disliked. After all, there could be only so many winners, and the path Remy had chosen was the sort that gradually narrowed the further you traveled, room for fewer
and fewer along the way. At twenty-two Remy already knew this. Work in first-rate orchestras and chamber groups was a rare coup, and a solo career the exception, not the rule. Most students would end up pinch-hitting for this and that ensemble, supplementing their salaries by giving private lessons or playing quartets at weddings. Yet Remy had faith that if she worked hard enough she could make it to the top. She had applied for a postgraduate fellowship and was preparing to audition for a summer master class with Conrad Lesser. That was how these things went, step by reaching step, up a steep ladder.

  Mr. Elko had them start with the Sibelius again. Remy watched him not as she usually did, following a maestro’s cues, but as a physical being, the shapes his arms made before him, the vigorous way he pierced the air with his baton, rising on his toes, as if about to become airborne. She noted the way he shook his head, his shiny dark hair flapping across his forehead, and the way he caught the eyes of the section leaders, almost winking at them. She was just one chair away from being noticed by him.

  “Let’s have just the woodwinds,” he was saying. Remy looked at his boxy tweed jacket and button-down shirt and wondered if he had just the one set of clothes. The collar of his shirt framed his clavicle, where his skin looked pale and smooth. Remy realized, quite suddenly, that she wanted to touch it.

  She shifted her eyes in case the other first violins had witnessed her thoughts. Across her cheeks she could feel the spreading heat, a bright blush moving toward the top of her forehead.

  The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

  It was a line from Oscar Wilde. Remy had been reading him ever since seeing The Importance of Being Earnest at the Huntington last month. Oscar Wilde would never blush over something like this.

  Mr. Elko motioned for the woodwinds to stop. “You all know, of course, that there’s more than one side to any story.” As he turned to address the orchestra tutti, Remy felt her blush receding. “The same is true for any piece of music.”

  He came to the front of the podium. “I realize I’m asking you, perhaps, to do things differently than the way you’re used to. But think of it as another side of the story. What are the other angles we have yet to consider?”

  The girl who played the harp raised her hand, but Mr. Elko didn’t seem to notice. “Our job, together, is to uncover the composer’s hidden ideas. There is often more to a composition than we may first assume. My job is to discover the possible angles, and yours is to bring them to life.”

  Remy had never thought of music in terms of hidden ideas. Of course lots of composers liked to insert musical allusions into their work, and sometimes mathematical tricks or in-jokes, but she could tell that Mr. Elko meant something else.

  “I grew up in Scotland,” he said, “and we’ve quite a bit of rain. Sometimes it’s so fine, you feel it rather than see it. It’s that sort of attention we need to bring to a piece of music. That level of awareness.”

  He paused for a moment. “You know, sometimes, when the rain’s that fine, if you’re lucky you get a rainbow. Have you ever really looked at one? Not just the stripes of color and the places where it fades out at the end, but the gradations you can barely see. It’s those places, the barely visible ones, that we’re trying to get at. Those are the secrets.”

  Remy glanced at the sheet music on her stand, as if it might contain a secret code. “It’s a useful metaphor, actually,” Mr. Elko added. “Not bad, that. We’re trying to convey the entire spectrum of color. The sky as well as the earth. The celestial and terrestrial together. All points of view. The complete musical perspective.” He said this not as a grand pronouncement but with a lightness, as if chatting over coffee.

  For the rest of rehearsal, whenever the first violins weren’t playing, Remy observed the rest of the orchestra, to try to see what Mr. Elko saw. Did he, too, find the percussionists comically grave, all three of them with hair short in the front and long in the back, counting precisely, their brows furrowed, before lowering a mallet or striking a single, starry note on a triangle? What did he think of the sad-faced girl who played the harp, and the hefty boy underneath the tuba, cheeks puffed out like balloons? And what about the entire brass section dripping saliva onto the floor, and the clarinetists with their overbites? Then there was the third chair cellist, who always looked like he was in pain when he played, writhing and grimacing, so that it was a wonder his playing didn’t sound tormented. Did Mr. Elko think that, too? It was the first time Remy had felt the urge to see the world the way someone else might see it.

  “I DON’T SUPPOSE YOU, TOO, need some air after that?”

  Nicholas looked up to see Yonatan Keitel—a horn specialist and the one other faculty member his age—leaning into his office. They had just been released from a department meeting at which nothing had been accomplished. Yonatan was from Israel, trim and Mediterranean-looking, and grinned as though he and Nicholas were in cahoots about something. “You don’t have to stick around here, do you?”

  “No, not right now. A reporter for the Globe is coming in an hour.”

  Yonatan raised his eyebrows. Nicholas explained that the newspaper was going to profile him in their Arts section.

  “That’s great,” Yonatan said, without quite looking like he meant it. Nicholas decided not to mention that this was his second press interview this week; since arriving in Boston he had been made to feel like something of a celebrity. He told Yonatan, who was already turning to go, that he would join him for a spell.

  “Call me Yoni, by the way. Let’s get out of here.”

  Nicholas followed him out without grabbing his coat; Yoni’s very tone suggested it would be wrong to need one. Like Nicholas, Yoni wore just a wool jacket and pale slacks, as if warm weather had already arrived, though he kept his hands tucked into his pockets. For days Nicholas had witnessed this stubborn urge for spring, the way people ignored the latest snowfall and instead of knit hats wore baseball caps. In a span of just two weeks, his female students had shed the short rubber-with-leather boots that appeared to be union issued and now wore equally ubiquitous white tennis shoes—though filthy snow still lined every curb and lay in black puddles at street corners. His colleagues, meanwhile, bicycled to work and sported spring parkas open at the collar.

  Outside the air was cold, but the sun warmed their foreheads. “You all right after Bill’s little dig there?” Yoni asked.

  Nicholas laughed. When the chair of Composition asked for Nicholas’s input at the meeting, the director of Wind Ensembles had made a loud comment about asking the opinion of “someone who has been here for all of two weeks and whose appointment wasn’t even unanimously approved by the Faculty Committee.”

  Nicholas had weathered petty jealousies before and told Yoni so—though really he never could help feeling mild shock at being anything but adored. As a child he had charmed at the piano. The only reason he had chosen to attend a university instead of a conservatory was for the continued pleasure of surprising people with his musical gift. Hard work came naturally to him, with effort but without sweat. At the university, he studied music history, writing his thesis in one intense, flurried week—an epic poem explaining the development of exoticism in the Western choral tradition. Other undergraduates pumped out long, dull papers of interchangeable style, but Nicholas’s essay-in-verse was immediately sent on to a university press. By then he had begun conducting, one of the few who, perusing a score, could envision multiple interpretations even before the first run-through (foreseeing, too, the possible difficulties and how much rehearsal might be needed). The first time he stood in front of a full orchestra, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the enormous sound, he quickly discerned the various instruments’ voices, and never once lost control of the players.

  It was around that time that he discovered his gift for composition, little pieces for fun, a bagatelle here, a badinage there; it helped to think of them, like his thesis essay, as poems (though less difficult, since they needed no words). Then came the stri
ng quartets, woodwind quintets, preludes, fugues. Ideas presented themselves while he showered, while he dreamed, and he accepted them with gratitude, hearing melodies in the hiss of radiators and the dripping of faucets. Even in the fortnight since his move to Boston he had begun a new composition—a sort of tone poem about the Scottish seaside town where he had spent his early childhood. He worked on it every night (since without Hazel and Jessie here he had an abundance of free time), immersed in hurtling gray waves and cool-spittle air and gulls lifted by scrappy winds.

  Nicholas asked about Yoni’s work and his training, learned that he was something of a jazz buff and owned an apartment just a few blocks away. When they turned onto Newbury Street, a tall slim girl in jeans and a big slouchy leather jacket sidled up to them, and to Nicholas’s surprise Yoni slung his arm around her waist.

  “Fancy meeting you here.” He gave her a peck on the forehead, but then she leaned her face up to him and they performed a lingering kiss. “I thought you were going to the library,” Yoni said.

  “I’m foraging for food.” She gave a flick of her long blond hair. “Your fridge is practically empty.”

  “Nicholas, meet Samantha. A woman of discerning appetite.”

  Samantha shook Nicholas’s hand incuriously. She was his same height and lanky like a boy. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” she asked.

  Shouldn’t you be at school? Nicholas wanted to reply. She looked about eighteen. It occurred to him that she might be one of the conservatory coeds.

  “We’re playing hooky,” Yoni told her. “Care to join us?”