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  “I should have been warned.” The tomatoes tasted fine. Relieved, Hazel put down her plate and smoothed her new skirt. In the end she had gone shopping at Filene’s, since she wanted to wear something nice. She had even seen a canvas tote bag with the same print as the skirt—but it wasn’t anything she truly needed, so she hadn’t allowed herself to buy it.

  Yoni, with an arm along the back of the sofa so that it was vaguely around the blond girl, gave a broad, handsome grin. “No trouble discerning the Boston accent?”

  “Only yours,” Nicholas joked, while the blond girl lit a cigarette.

  “No,” Hazel ventured to say, “but I do find the people a bit . . . cold.” There, she had admitted it.

  What she meant was that everyone seemed to have a chip on their shoulder. Like the man in the Stop & Shop parking lot yesterday who had rolled down his window and yelled, “You’re in my way!” when she was only trying to back into a space without hitting anything. But she didn’t want to offend anyone, so she used the word “cold.”

  “It’s true, though, isn’t it?” Nicholas put in, as if it had only now occurred to him. “It’s not how I usually think of Americans. No one looks you in the eye when you walk down the street. No one says hello.”

  It was more than that, actually. In her few days here, everyone she had come across—in the grocery, the bank, Filene’s—seemed to be on the offensive. Even the birds at the feeder she had set up on the little balcony had this quality, the way they fought over the plastic perches and sparred midair, ugly brown city birds with none of the cuteness of goldfinches or the chickadees she’d hoped for. The guarded manner of people on the T, the surliness of the cashier at the liquor store. Something about this made Hazel think of . . . small, yappy dogs guarding unattractive houses. But probably things just looked this way because she was tired and hadn’t yet found her footing.

  Gary said, “This ain’t California.”

  Hazel said, “No, it isn’t.” She didn’t even feel like refilling the bird feeder. But you couldn’t just cut them off like that. Once you started caring for something, it was cruel, simply cruel, to suddenly stop.

  Now George or Frank was telling them about when he moved here fifteen years ago. Hazel couldn’t help looking again at the little hill of tomatoes at the edge of his plate. Of course tomatoes were not yet in season, but she had made a point of finding the ripest ones possible.

  At least everyone seemed to like the Triscuit recipe. And the dip in the bread bowl seemed a success. The cheese board was running low. Hazel stood, smoothed her skirt, and went to the kitchen to slice more Gouda. It was peaceful there—safer, somehow—and when Nicholas stepped in a moment later, Hazel was able to smile.

  “Wonderful spread, Hazel. You’re fantastic.” He rested his palm on her back.

  “Who are those girls?” she whispered.

  “Girls?”

  “Next to Yoni.”

  “Oh, right, a couple of favorite students.” He said it lightly—too lightly, Hazel thought. “Gifted musicians. Samantha and . . .” His forehead wrinkled with recollection. “Remy, that’s her name.”

  Hazel tried not to frown.

  “She used to have longer hair,” Nicholas said thoughtfully. “Sort of wild. Now it’s shorter.”

  Hazel felt an inner flinch—at hearing the man she loved note the details of another woman’s looks. “It’s still a bit wild, isn’t it?” she said, trying to keep her voice light. The girl had corkscrew curls that came just to her chin, and every once in a while would tug on one, as if to drag it to its original length. When she let go, the curl would spring back up. Perhaps it was a nervous gesture. It didn’t detract from the fact that the girl was, Hazel had to admit, attractive, with rosy cheeks, big brown eyes, and a heart-shaped mouth—features Hazel thought of as youthful and that made her feel, suddenly and for no good reason, old.

  “Here, let me get that,” Nicholas said as Hazel lifted the tray of Gouda. Hazel handed him the tray and followed him back out to the living room.

  Gary and Yoni were discussing Boston’s new music scene, while the others looked on with what Hazel supposed was relief at not having to make conversation. The girl with the curly hair was the only one who bothered to join in, telling Gary first, and then Yoni, that both of them were wrong. “Just go into Newbury Comics and they’ll let you know where the best new bands are playing. You just have to know where to find them.”

  Yoni looked at the girl with an almost prideful smile. “Who knew our little conservatory student was a little bit rock ’n’ roll?”

  “It’s called being well rounded,” the girl said, and pinched Yoni’s arm in a way Hazel thought forward. Perhaps she was his girlfriend, and not the blonde?

  Yoni gave the girl an avuncular pat on the head, and Hazel felt a new wave of confusion. His other arm just barely grazed the blond girl’s shoulders. One of his hands, Hazel had noticed, was missing a finger and part of the thumb. The skin around the thumb seemed to have been patched on. She tried not to stare.

  “What is the rock scene like here?” Nicholas asked. “I wonder how different it is from England.”

  Hazel raised her eyebrows; did he know anything about the rock scene in England?

  “I can only tell you about Boston,” the curly-haired girl said, Nicholas nodding along as she described the shows she had seen. Well, he was their host, after all. And he had always possessed a genuine curiosity about the world.

  Hazel, too, had been like that. Each time she and Nicholas relocated, she made an effort to meet people and learn the local lore. Her sketchbooks had filled with images of church spires and bustling piazzas, and then, over time, with the very people around her, their expressions and gestures, the fleeting moments of connection. It seemed to her those small daily observations added up to something, and that she might even turn her work into a larger project. The idea had buoyed her, kept her focused no matter where or how often she and Nicholas moved.

  That her love of all things European had in time—not long at all, really—become impatience (with the backward ways of Old World cities, their deteriorating buildings and finicky traditions, the inefficiency and chauvinism and general hassle of almost any daily transaction) was something she never would have expected. Things she had once thought curious or romantic became simply an inconvenience. Following Nicholas from England to Finland, Italy to Hungary, Belgium to France (with stints in Texas and Vancouver in between), something else had changed; Nicholas’s love for her was no longer enough to cut through her loneliness, through the palpability of being so far away. Not to mention the growing fear and frustration of suspecting she might never have a baby. And so Hazel became less enamored of her own life.

  “You have to hear this woman sing,” the curly-haired girl was saying now, about someone who apparently worked at a shoe store in Back Bay. “Even when she yells her voice is so . . . melancholic I guess is the word.”

  Hazel turned to refill Mr. Sprat’s wineglass, relieved to not have to look at the curly girl. Instead she sat down next to George or Frank, who had moved up to the love seat.

  “I remember the first time a piece of music made me cry,” Nicholas said. “I was still a child, and my piano teacher had me playing Bach’s two-part inventions. Perhaps you know the second one?” He hummed a little line in what sounded to Hazel like a minor key.

  “Each hand creates its own melodic line,” he explained, for Hazel’s benefit, probably, “and there are of course stretches where one hand or the other carries the melody. In invention number two there’s a recurring moment where, while one hand plays the main phrase, the other does the most basic little progression.” He sang four notes of a rising scale, Do re me fa, followed by four notes of the next scale, re me fa so, and the next, me fa so la.

  “My eyes welled up the moment I heard it. It was the simplicity of that rising scale. Plodding yet hopeful, the way it keeps reaching up.”

  “For me it was Bach, too,” the curly-haired girl said,
her eyes wide. “I mean, Bach was my lightbulb moment.” Hazel could tell by her expression that she thought it meant something, when surely Bach-induced epiphanies were true for lots of musicians. Hazel was glad when Yoni, in his matter-of-fact way, said, “I think it has to do with going up four steps and then having to start again from three notes below where you’ve just arrived.” He hummed Do re me fa, re me fa so. “Having to climb back up all over again.”

  “Like Sisyphus,” Hazel said, glad to have something to contribute.

  “Yes, that’s it exactly,” Nicholas said. “Having to try all over again after being knocked down. So basic and human. That must be why it made me cry.”

  Hazel found herself nodding. Basic, human . . . It was the way critics often spoke of Nicholas’s compositions, praising the way that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he had moved from the cerebral and atonal back to pure melody, toward the satisfaction of linear structure and chord progressions that resolved themselves. Some even called his work “deceptively simple.”

  Now the girl and Nicholas were debating what made a performance “poetic,” cutting each other off with interjections of “But is all poetry necessarily beautiful?” and “Just because it’s true doesn’t make it art.” Hazel’s pulse quickened, as if there were some sort of crime taking place in her apartment. Her apartment? She hadn’t had any say in it. The living room curtains were atrocious.

  This wasn’t what she had pictured for the party. In her imagination there had been Nicholas with his arm around her, his new friends and colleagues asking what she had been up to without him. In her mind she had them laughing at her anecdotes, about Rascal up on Madame Duvalier’s roof. . . . The vision had seemed so real. Which made this scene before her all the more disappointing.

  The same thing had happened to another vision she used to have. One that had seized her repeatedly in her very first months with Nicholas, back when she was still a student: she and Nicholas walking hand in hand toward the door of a house, a beautiful house, and before them two children, a boy and a girl. The vision was blurry, like a dream, yet carried with it the certainty that this was their house, and their children.

  But it hadn’t turned out that way.

  Now Yoni was calling someone Hazel didn’t know a tortoise. The blond girl laughed and flicked her cigarette ashes into the ashtray—but no, it wasn’t an ashtray at all. It was one of Jessie’s art projects, the little ceramic imprint of her hand they had fired in a kiln. Jessie had insisted it be displayed right here on the table between the window and the couch. And now it had become an ashtray. Hazel felt her mouth opening, to object.

  “Oh, sorry. Jeez. Ah, well.” Gary was leaning over, blotting at the Persian carpet. He had spilled his glass of wine.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Hazel said quickly, her heart in her throat. “I’ll mop it right up.”

  Nicholas made a motion as if to help her. “No, don’t you worry,” she told him. “I’ll get it.”

  She hurried to the kitchen for some seltzer, though probably it wouldn’t do any good. Mrs. Sprat had followed her there, her enormous cotton dress rustling around her. “First we’ll just lift it off with some paper towels,” she told Hazel calmly. “That way it won’t rub into the fibers.”

  Together they hurried back to the living room. Mrs. Sprat administered the paper towels to the swilling, sullied flowers, her dress shifting around her like a great tide while Hazel poured seltzer onto a sponge. Gary, moving his feet out of the way, asked some question about conservatory hiring policy, and each one of the men had a different answer.

  Hazel knelt on her new skirt and blotted at the carpet. The wine spread into the towel with uncanny speed, so dark and red it might have been blood. And then she felt them—tears, hot and ridiculous, about to come forth. That she was upset about a spill seemed all the more unpardonable.

  “All right, hand me that sponge,” Mrs. Sprat said while Hazel managed, as she always did, to blink the tears back.

  Chapter 3

  EARLY ON THE SATURDAY MORNING OF THE SPRING CONCERT, A hall-mate said sleepily that there was someone on the telephone for her.

  It was early May, buds finally opening on branches. Remy leaned against the wall outside of her room, the spiraled cord of the hall telephone stretched as far as it could go.

  “Sorry to bother you this early,” came Mr. Elko’s voice, “but there’s a possibility of what some might term an emergency.”

  It figured that innocent, orange-haired Lynn, still living at her parents’ duplex in Somerville, would only now contract the quick, violent flu that had swept through the dorms two months earlier. Lynn had been up with it all night, Mr. Elko said; she wasn’t certain she would be able to play this evening. “We’ll just have to see how she feels tonight.”

  All morning Remy practiced Scheherazade, trying out different accents and bowings, finding ways to avoid crossing strings where she didn’t want to break a phrase. She imagined herself saving the day—and how grateful Mr. Elko would be.

  She was still embarrassed about the way things had gone at the cocktail party. Late in the evening, when she went to the kitchen for a glass of water, she had somehow ended up in a debate with Mr. Elko. For some reason (well, because she knew it might prolong their conversation) Remy had put forth the notion that brilliant ideas were always inherently original—which Mr. Elko immediately pointed out to be incorrect. He laid out a number of innovations composers had brought forth over the years, how each had borrowed from the others and made each successive musical development possible. And though this of course made sense, and was expressed with a certain exasperation (“Why, even in the past fifty years . . . you can draw an arrow from Schoenberg to Webern to Cage . . . !”), Remy felt compelled to stand her ground—until Mr. Elko’s wife came in and asked what was taking so long with the lemon slices.

  She was gorgeous, of course, the wife: calm and blond and floral scented. Remy had felt, all over again, unkempt, unruly. It didn’t matter that she had cut her hair; it was still a curly mess.

  Well, maybe tonight would be different. She would be the modest, self-effacing stand-in, as calm and composed as the stars in the sky.

  But of course Lynn was there for the concert. Her parents delivered her right to the door, her mother pinning a corsage to Lynn’s gown in a way that wouldn’t interfere with her violin. Pale and thinner than ever, wearing enough makeup to hide the fact that she had been vomiting for twelve hours straight, Lynn gave a wan smile. In case she was still contagious, she stood apart from everyone until it came time to go onstage. She then played, Remy noted, as strongly as ever.

  At intermission she disappeared into the bathroom, and Remy told herself it was still possible; Lynn might not have the strength to make it through Scheherazade. But she did, of course, summoning her stored talents, translating emotions into crafted sound, knowing when to stretch the music or speed it up, where to increase tension or release it, and just how long to hold a fermata. . . . The audience gave a standing ovation, and even Mr. Elko was amazed, Remy could see. When the soloists took their bows, the rest of the orchestra tapped their feet more loudly than usual, aware that they had witnessed a feat of human endurance. When they stepped offstage, Lynn said a tired, “Thanks, Remy,” grinned that goofy silver grin, and went to find her parents in the hall.

  Only about half of the orchestra converged in the lounge, where a somewhat dull party was taking place. As always, the concert had been scheduled too close to final exams; everyone was tired and anxious and had something better to do than sit around drinking wine that came from a box. Remy’s friend Jennifer had already rushed off to telephone her boyfriend, who was in the army and lived on a military base somewhere. Samantha had sauntered off to a rendezvous with Yonatan Keitle. Peter suggested he and Remy head back to the dorm together, but Remy told him to go ahead without her. Having spent ten hours thinking she might be concertmistress for the night, she was as exhaustedly giddy as if it had actually happened, and quickly dow
ned a glass of pink wine. It was too sweet, yet she drew another glassful from the little plastic lever, and then slouched on a sofa with a bassoonist who lived on her hallway.

  When she looked up from her glass, Mr. Elko was approaching, holding a full plastic cup of wine. “Remy, I can’t thank you enough. You put my mind at ease enormously.”

  “My pleasure,” she told him, but it didn’t sound as suave as last time.

  The bassoonist was just leaving, and Mr. Elko took his place. The side of Remy’s body next to his felt as if it were glowing. And then she was engulfed—by the urge to touch his skin, to lick his lips, to stroke the floppy dark hair of his head.

  “This stuff drinkable, then?” Mr. Elko nodded at Remy’s glass.

  “It works for me. But I guess I don’t know much about wine.”

  Mr. Elko took a gulp from his plastic cup. “Ghastly. We’ll have to get rid of it. I say we drink it all.”

  She laughed. “Are you a big drinker?”

  Mr. Elko considered. “I do like a good Scotch, as you may have witnessed at our party. And I suppose I’m all for getting pissed every now and again. Though this wine might stop me.”

  Remy said, “I can never get really good and drunk, even when I try.”

  Nicholas nodded, smiling. “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said at the party. When we were discussing originality, where it comes from. I kept wondering what stopped you from seeing what I was saying—and you know what? I figured it out. You’re a Romantic.”

  Remy felt her ears redden as Mr. Elko explained, “The very idea of independent genius is a Romantic one. You know, the brilliant but misunderstood loner. What artist hasn’t felt that way at some point? So I see where you’re coming from.” He nodded. “I, too, am a Romantic at heart.”

  In his eyes Remy glimpsed the humble look she had noticed at moments in rehearsal, like in the Sibelius when the trumpets called out over the low, smooth undulations of the strings. “So that’s something we have in common, actually,” he said lightly, as if it were no great coincidence.