Sight Reading (17 page)

Now the man with the bulldog face approached them. “I draw you,” he said, in another unplaceable accent, and held out a sketchbook into which he had scratched the image of a man and a woman who looked slightly like themselves. The man who was supposed to be Yoni was leaning toward the woman. Around them the artist had drawn the shape of a heart.

“Oh!” Remy said, and gave a little laugh—but Yoni was considering the drawing, not smiling. The bulldog man seemed suddenly nervous. “I leave you,” he said, taking the sketch away, and went back to his table and to the blond woman, looking dejected. Yoni's eyes followed him.

Immediately the man in the blue felt cap at the next table pulled his chair closer to Remy's. “People give him a little money, you know.” He nodded toward the man with the bulldog face. “For his art. People like to give him a little something.”

“No, thank you,” Remy said, trying to smile politely, and the man in the blue cap pulled his chair away again, back to the man in the black one. The air in the room felt suddenly sharper; Remy pulled the neck of her sweater higher. “I caught a chill, somehow.”

“Here.” From the back of his chair Yoni undraped his gray wool scarf with the short tassels and reached across the table, placing the scarf around Remy's shoulders. “How's that?”

“Thanks, Yoni.” Remy readjusted her shoulders under the scarf. Quickly she asked, “What do you think's happened to my husband?”

“Let's see,” Yoni said, repleating his napkin. “There are probably no parking spots, and the garages are full, and knowing Nicholas, he managed to get lost. Or something could have happened to the car. It broke down. No, let's see, Nicholas is driving, I would guess that he's had an accident.” He said it not cruelly but reasonably, as if having given all possibilities equal consideration.

“With his driving record,” Remy said, “it's probably all of the above. Should we order? Or should we call the police?”

Yoni raised his hand to call the gray-haired woman over.

“Yes?” she asked.

“We heard there was a fortune-teller.”

“She has strep throat,” she told him. “But that man over there will draw your picture for you.”

Yoni blinked, a look of recognition, but shook his head. “No, thank you.”

That was when Nicholas walked in. “Come here, you,” Remy called to him, and kissed his cheek, feeling almost duplicitous, somehow, as he settled into the chair next to her.

Yoni said, “I congratulate you, Nicholas. This is truly the most bizarre establishment I've ever come to eat in.”

Nicholas shook his head, looking exhausted, and said, “So many things have happened to me.”

AT FIRST HE SIMPLY COULDN'T
find a parking spot. He made a slow tour of each square block, gradually at a farther and farther remove from the restaurant, until, quite suddenly, he was lost. In the darkness, nothing looked familiar, and he drove for minutes more before he found that he had arrived, somehow, near Back Bay. It was at that point that he believed he had found a space, directly across from a brightly lit hotel. But when he tried to park, the car wouldn't fit. He tried for a good few minutes while the boldly costumed hotel valets passively watched. Then, after attempting to pull back out into the street, he struck the corner of a passing car.

The car stopped, flicked on its hazard lights. A woman stepped out and walked to the front, where Nicholas's bumper had tapped it. Nicholas, too, had emerged from his vehicle. “So sorry. I hope there's no damage.” Already he had noticed that her bumper was dented.

The woman didn't look furious, merely annoyed. “You'd better give me your insurance information.”

“Oh, yes, of course.” Nicholas went to find the papers in the glove box. To his delight, the papers were there. The woman took down the information, watched by the hotel valets in their long red cloaks.

The woman thanked him, returned to her car, and drove off. The street was suddenly quiet, lit by the shiny hotel and the bright shard of moon. As he opened the door to the Volvo, Nicholas saw a woman emerge from the hotel. Tall, with long limbs and a haughty, brisk stride. A name rose from the folds of memory: “Sylvane.”

She turned to look. “Yes?”

He crossed the street, watched her face broaden in recognition. They kissed each other's cheeks. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Leaving,” she said. “My flight is at eleven.”

“Back to Paris? But I didn't even know you were in town!”

“Just briefly. A dear friend of mine was married this weekend. Otherwise I would have loved to see you.”

His thoughts were adjusting now, readjusting—to Sylvane, the memory of who she was: a fellow composer whom he much admired. Physically, there was something elongated about her, the aquiline nose, the narrow gloved hands. Her neck and shoulders she held very straight, as if perpetually offended. She had always impressed him.

But she had not yet achieved the recognition she deserved. In the past five years or so this fact had become more and more pronounced, an element of her very being, of her Sylvane-ness, a certain fatigue behind her eyes, as if weighed down by disappointment. There was the visiting composer position that Nicholas had recommended her for, which, when the competition was finally narrowed down to just two, had gone to the other candidate. There was the post in New York that she had been selected for; at the last minute, due to a funding problem, the offer was rescinded. There was the annual composition prize for which she had been short-listed four years in a row.

With Remy, Nicholas had debated the reasons for this. He maintained it was just one of those things, some other composer always happening to win the judges' favor. But Remy pointed out that each one of those prizes had gone to a man (as had the visiting composer position). Well, of
course
they did, Nicholas nearly said in exasperation. Instead he simply explained, “You know how much it costs to maintain an orchestra. It all comes down to raising money. And men, dear Remy, as much as I hate to say it, are the ones with the money.”

“Right, right, and they're more comfortable handing their money over to other, fellow, men—is that it?”

Nicholas nodded. “They trust men with their investment.” But he did not think Sylvane a victim of the situation; she simply had not yet had her lucky break. Her music was lush, gorgeous. At times it reminded him of Rachmaninoff, something vast and sorrowful about it—yet too much sorrow could kill a living thing, and listening to Sylvane's work, Nicholas often felt the frustration of some heavy dark cloud always blocking one's view.

Even now, as they chatted on the cold sidewalk, the valets in their long cloaks half-listening with boredom, Nicholas heard the defeat in her voice.

“I hope you're having a good work year,” he told her, wanting to be encouraging. “I'm always waiting to hear what you'll come up with next.”

“You are very good at flattery,” she said.

“I say what I mean.” Sometimes when Nicholas heard her music he physically ached.

“Thank you for the compliment.”

Something about her reminded him, quite suddenly, of Hazel. It flustered him as he asked her how her husband was, and their children. Even as she in turn asked Nicholas about his work, his life in Boston, his wife and daughter, he found himself overcome by the sensation that he was somehow responsible for this woman's disappointment.

The feeling was increasingly familiar these days, ever since his daughter's teenage sullenness, ever since Hazel's annoyed message at his work number last week, about forgetting to take Jessie to her dental appointment, ever since the other night when Remy had come to bed in a new creamy silk nightgown that Nicholas had immediately wanted to peel off. “What's this?” he had said, pulling it up over her hips, and Remy had sighed in a way that sounded less like pleasure and more like resignation.

“I'd like to conduct one of your pieces,” Nicholas heard himself say to Sylvane. “At the conservatory next fall. I told them I'd conduct again while the director is on sabbatical.”

Sylvane gave an odd smile. “How nice. Please don't feel you have to do that.”

“I want to,” he said. “The concerto for viola. It's a favorite of mine. I know just the soloist for it.”

Sylvane's face had softened. “That's kind of you, Nicholas.”

“It would be a pleasure.” Really it was nothing much. But already he felt better. “Won't you let me take you to the airport?”

“Surely you have better things to do?”

“My car's right here.”

“I cannot let you do that. There is a subway station across the street and I can go for just eighty-five cents.”

Nicholas smiled. “Let me take you, please. That way we can continue our conversation.”

She was going to relent, he could see, the way that she reached for the handle of her valise. But then she narrowed her eyes. “Are you not on your way to somewhere else?”

“Oh!” Nicholas remembered. “I can use the hotel phone,” he told her, “to call the restaurant and tell them I'll be late.”

Sylvane laughed. “No! You go where you're supposed to be! You're too kind, my friend, I'm happy to see your face. You make me laugh. Here, I kiss you.” She kissed his cheeks. “And I hope to see you again soon.”

MUCH LATER THAT SAME NIGHT,
while Nicholas slept somewhat fitfully (the fault, he supposed, of that strange house wine), autumn sneaked in for good, the bone chill, wind like fangs. Nicholas woke with a mild headache, if not from the wine, then from the long, odd night. Service had been slow, the meal late, the conversation somehow awkward, not at all what he had envisioned—and then he had been unable to recall where he had parked the car. He felt disgruntled at the gods who usually protected him, that they had let his whimsy fail. As he peeled back the covers to begin his descent from the half-empty bed, his stomach made an unpleasant sound; that gypsy food hadn't sat well with him.

Remy had already left for rehearsal. Soon Nicholas, too, was on his way to work, feeling less than robust. All across campus, radiators were hissing with renewed effort, sputtering, clanking spastically, so that to Nicholas the entire place felt like an old car trying to start. He really would have preferred not to come to work today at all. But it was his job that afternoon to present an award to one of the students.

Now the award recipients were clustered with a small group of faculty and students eating rolled sandwiches and flat colorless cookies. Conservatory tradition had all award ceremonies followed by a buffet luncheon, to ensure a greater attendance.

“Bravo, Nicholas.” It was his colleague George Frank, using a pair of metal tongs to pick through an enormous basin of salad. George refused to eat any exposed fruits or vegetables. Not tomatoes or zucchini or anything that hung off a vine or a bush. He would eat peas in a pod, but not shelled peas. Even after ten years, Nicholas didn't quite understand.

“I liked the introduction you gave there,” George said. “Witty and brief, the way everyone likes them.”

“Yes, brevity is key.” Yoni had joined them, from out of nowhere, grinning as he always did, as if possessing a fabulous secret.

“Hello, Yoni,” George Frank said. “I didn't see you at the ceremony.”

“You know me: I only come for the buffet. How are you doing, George?”

“Very well,” George Frank said. “And I've been following your latest success,” he said, turning back to Nicholas. “What a wonderful article in the Sunday
Times
. I imagine you could paper a small bathroom with all the good clippings you're saving.”

“Or just use them as toilet paper,” Yoni said. Though he was clearly joking, George Frank raised his eyebrows. Only then did it occur to Nicholas that Yoni's tone might have been snide. He noted the feeling that, every once and again, pulsed between the two of them: a competition of some kind. Healthy competition, surely, since they had such different areas of expertise, yet sometimes there was an edge to it. Even last night, at the restaurant, he had felt some sort of tension.

He and Yoni had passed through such moments before. If only Yoni could understand that this was how things worked, the conservatory paying Nicholas for the simple privilege of having his name on the faculty roster. That Yoni shouldered more of a teaching obligation was only natural. Yet Nicholas understood that this fact might at times be a bother. Over the past few years his own professional life had grown more comfortable—less teaching and more time for composing—while Yoni's remained the same.

“Oh, there are only two sandwiches left,” Nicholas said, nodding toward the buffet. “I'd better snatch one before they're gone.” He moved toward the table, not at all hungry.

Like a fly Yoni followed him there. “Any chance you'll be up for another outing tonight, Nicholas?” His tone was hopeful; he must be wanting to make amends. “A pianist from Chile is playing at the club. He's supposed to be fantastic.”

Though his stomach was still uneasy, Nicholas said, “Sure, sounds good,” since he didn't want to sound sore. And anyway, Remy had the Symphony tonight.

“Good,” Yoni said. “I think it'll be worth it. Now I'd better get back to business.” He took his leave. Nicholas looked around the room, his eyes searching, though he couldn't think for whom.

ONLY A FEW OTHER PEOPLE
were at the club that night, couples and some men in business suits—taking prospective clients out for a night on the town, Nicholas supposed. In previous years there wouldn't have been a free seat, just smoke swimming overhead and regulars shouting out in friendly support as the musicians burrowed in and out of their solos. But the club had come under new management a year or so ago, and the current booking agent had shifted focus to international talent. As a result the clientele had changed. The wooden tables had been replaced with glass-topped ones, and an air-filtering system had been installed. Still Nicholas and Yoni continued to patronize their old haunting ground, if less frequently and always with a pang of disappointment, as if their stubbornness alone might return it to the way it used to be.