Solo (Symphony Hall)

by Lauren E. Rico

  He takes my glass and gives me half a pour. “I wasn’t kidding before,” he says, catching my eye when he hands it back to me. “This stuff goes down easy, but it’ll hit you like a freight train later.”

  I nod my understanding and take the glass from him as he pours some more for himself, too.

  “I don’t—” I begin and then stop. He waits. I continue. “I don’t know what I ever did to give anyone a bad impression of me.”

  He doesn’t miss my hesitation over which pronoun to use. I don’t want to point the finger at him. Or at his friend Tessa, Town Crier and President of the Shepherd University Gossip Coalition.

  I watch him take a deep sigh and he turns back to lock his eyes on mine over the rim of his wineglass. I can see the licking flames of the fire reflected in them, giving him a little hint of the satanic. A chill runs down my spine.

  “Katherine, from my end, it’s you being late all the time and coming in with bloodshot eyes. Some days you reek of smoke, like you’ve been in a bar all night and just stumbled into class. It feels disrespectful to me and it’s that kind of thing that makes people think the worst of you.”

  Despite my best efforts, I blink hard at his honesty. It’s not exactly mean, but it’s certainly not kind. I pick up my glass of wine and drain it. I can see he wants to say something about it, but he’s holding his tongue. Yeah, well, I’m not going to hold mine.

  “So, those things made you think what? That I’m some party girl? Or lazy, entitled, rich kid, or…or worse?” I demand.

  He shrugs and considers the fire again.

  “Well, they don’t exactly make me think you’re an honors student,” he mumbles.

  “And yet, I am.”

  He looks at me with confusion. “You’re what?”

  “I’m an honors student. President’s Honor Roll every semester since I was a freshman,” I inform him in what should be a strong, proud voice. But it’s not. It’s a small, weak voice that sounds as if I might burst into tears.

  No. I’m done crying.

  “You know what, let’s not talk about this now,” he suggests.

  But I’m not finished with this conversation—not by a long shot. It’s unlikely I’ll ever have the opportunity, or the courage, to speak to him this candidly again.

  “You know why I don’t tell anybody anything? Because when I do, I find personal details of my life in the newspaper.”

  He starts to reply but I hold up a finger to silence him. He nods and takes a sip of his wine instead.

  “I’m tired all the time,” I continue, “because I’m a grad student with a heavy class load. And I also happen to work two jobs.”

  His brows go up in clear surprise.

  “I have classes all day, go home, and grab a quick bite to eat. Then I clean offices in a professional building in town. I get off at ten, then I sit up and study till about one. My alarm goes off at five in the morning and I head over to the North Dining Hall on campus, where I work the breakfast shift until seven thirty. I try to change my clothes, which always smell like the smoke from the grill, but there isn’t always time. If there’s a spill that needs to be cleaned up before my shift ends, or if I get stuck hauling out the trash, I might be running fifteen or twenty minutes late. Which doesn’t give me a lot of time to get all the way across campus, find a parking spot, and hike the stairs to your class before the stroke of eight a.m. And, Dr. Drew, if I argue with you in front of the class, it’s because you won’t give me a chance to speak. To explain myself or answer a question…or anything.”

  His stunned expression is so intense that I look away, into the fire. But I can see in my peripheral vision that he’s still staring at me.

  “So there it is,” I continue. “Tired, bloodshot eyes, late all the time, smelling of smoke, grumpy. I think that pretty much covers it all, doesn’t it? Sometimes, when people don’t know the truth, they just make shit up,” I conclude, thinking about my misinformation about his fiancée.

  “I’m sorry, Katherine. I really am. I’ve been jumping to conclusions. But you just get on my nerves sometimes. I feel like you’re always judging me.”

  “What?” I yelp, my voice suddenly too loud for this conversation. I sit up and glare at him incredulously. “You think that I judge you?”

  “Well, don’t you?” he asks, genuinely interested in what my answer will be. “I feel like you’re always trying to show me that you’re smarter than I am; that you don’t need to learn anything from me.”

  The room feels chillier all of a sudden.

  “What? Are you insane?” I argue, my pitch rising to match my volume. “I mean, really, you’re the one who’s constantly trying to trip me up!”

  “Trip you up? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he counters indignantly. A little too indignantly, in fact. He knows I’m right, I can see he does. And it’s pissing him off. Yeah, well it’s pissing me off, too.

  “You ask me harder questions than everyone else. You deliberately try to embarrass me. You offer the rest of the class an open invitation to your office for help, but me… God, it’s like you want me to fail your tests and your assignments.”

  “But you never do,” he says, jumping onto my wave of accusations. And then he stops, cold, as the realization of what he’s just said—what he’s just done—sinks in. He’s just admitted his guilt.

  “No. No, I don’t,” I spit back at him as I shake my head, a triumphant smile spreading across my face. “I can’t fail, you self-serving jackass! I can’t afford to make a single mistake because you’re just waiting; watching every little thing I do and say. Everyone gets a pass except for Katherine Brenner, the senator’s daughter, right?”

  He starts to answer, but I won’t let him get a word in. I’m getting worked up now and my cheeks have gone from pale to flaming.

  “I don’t have the luxury of not passing your class. Not if I want to graduate. So I stay up all night studying and doing your assignments. I read ahead. I study in and around and beyond the composers we’re studying because you have never once asked me a question that involved the material we were currently covering.”

  “Oh Christ,” he grumbles, rolling his eyes. “That is not true.”

  “It is!”

  “Please, Katherine. Paranoid much?” he scoffs.

  “Copland.”

  “What?”

  “Copland. We were talking about the correlation between Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth when you asked me a question about Aaron Fucking Copland. And then the discussion on the baroque concerto grosso style. The entire class is knee-deep in the eighteenth century with Bach and Vivaldi and you ask me about Béla Bartók. A twentieth century composer. Dude, don’t even get me started on that assignment last semester when you asked us to write a—”

  “Okay, enough, already!”

  His volume startles me and I feel my heart pick up pace under my shirt. His shirt.

  “You’re right,” he mumbles after a long, awkward silence.

  “I’m what?”

  “You heard me. You’re right. I’m harder on you than everyone else. But let me ask you something. Has it made you think on your feet? Study more, study deeper? Has it made you a better student?”

  Holy fucking shit. My fingers twitch with my desire to throw this wine in his strong-jawed, dark-eyed, sexy-stubbled face. Bastard. No fair looking sexy when I’m so pissed off.

  “Fine.” I huff petulantly. “Yes. You’ve made me a better student and you’ve made me a better conductor, and it makes me absofuckinglutely furious!” I roar with irritation.

  I register just the hint of a slur in my words. And the profanity. Slurry profanity. Must be a hallmark of my tipsiness. I nod to confirm my own statement and promptly drain the glass of riesling I’m holding before reaching over to pour myself another glass, draining the bottle before he can.

  “Good,” he says in an obnoxiously calm tone. “I’m glad you’re a better conductor because of me.”

  I tr
y to eviscerate him with my steely stare. It doesn’t work. He just looks at me, unfazed and amused.

  “Oh no, no, no!” I yell, wagging my finger at him. “Don’t you dare say that like it’s a good thing!”

  “Well, isn’t it?” he challenges.

  “Yes!” I shout. “Wait, I mean no! Christ—I mean, don’t pretend you do it for my benefit when all you want to do is fucking torment me!” I’m shaking with rage. “God! You are such. An. Ass!”

  Uh-oh.

  Even in my woozy state I realize I might have just gone a step too far. I cringe a little, as if bracing myself for the ugliness that’s about to spew forth from my professor. But ugliness isn’t what spews. It’s riesling. A mouthful of it when he snorts with laughter.

  “Oh! Oh, Jesus.” He howls, much to my confusion. And dismay. “You’re right, Katherine, I am an ass!”

  I can’t resist. I abandon my pissiness in favor of laughing, too. “I know! Right? You are such an ass!”

  He nods, tears starting to stream down his face, wine soaking into his sweatshirt. “But to be fair,” he says, holding up his index finger, “you bring out the ass in me.”

  I consider this for a second as our laughter subsides.

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll give you that,” I say, considerably more reasonable than I was just a bit earlier. “Hey, did you say there was more wine somewhere?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Drew

  We’re halfway through the third bottle. It’s chardonnay and she doesn’t seem to like it as much as the riesling, but I only had two bottles of that in the house. That’s okay, though, because it makes her slow down a little. I, on the other hand, pick up her slack.

  “So, your project,” I begin.

  “The one that’s outside, encased in ice and snow?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “What about it?”

  “When it thaws, is it going to be as good as what you turned in the other day?”

  “Better,” she informs me.

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Is this you not being difficult?” I tease.

  “Okay,” she concedes with a giggle. “Maybe just a little.” She uses her thumb and index finger to indicate “a little.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” I roll my eyes. “What I want to know is how you do that? How do you know exactly what the orchestration calls for? I swear to God, you seem to know every performance practice incorporated by every composer in every period. What keys they worked in. The tempos they liked to use, the instrumentation. You don’t miss a single detail,” I declare, the wine making me a wee bit dramatic. And loud. “It’s as if you’ve memorized every characteristic ever used.”

  Her brows pull together as she seems to consider this. I’m guessing her brain is even foggier than mine is right now. And mine is pretty fucking fogged-in.

  “Oh,” she says, finally grasping what I’m talking about. “You mean when you ask us to arrange something in the style of Mozart or Bach?”

  “Yes, exactly,” I nod enthusiastically.

  “Evan!” she suddenly shrieks with peals of laughter. “My God, could he be anymore clueless? I mean, he’s a kick-ass bassoon player but Jesus Christ—crack open a book once in a while!”

  I snort and she points at me.

  “Aha! You think so, too,” she accuses.

  “I’m not really supposed to say…” I leave the sentence hanging, but it’s clear I agree with her assessment of poor, dim Evan who doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing my class this semester. Good thing he’s got another year to sort it out before he graduates.

  We’re both laughing for no good reason now, other than the fact that we are well on our way to hammered. I reach for the wine bottle, put it to my lips, and take a long swig before passing it to her. She looks at me like I have three heads.

  “Seriously? Did you not just nurse me back to health? Dude, you do not want my cooties all over your wine bottle.”

  “Oh shit, you’re right.” I grab a half bottle of zinfandel sitting in front of us on the coffee table. I hand it to her and she pulls a swig. “There—your own personal bottle. Now, back to the subject at hand, Miss Brenner,” I say, trying to sound serious with limited success. “You always know the answer. How do you do that?”

  “Ah, well,” she begins, lowering her voice and leaning in closer to me, as if she’s about to share one of the best-kept secrets of the ages. “That’s easy. I cheat.”

  I frown. That makes no sense.

  “You cheat? How the hell can you cheat? You have no idea what question I’m going to ask. Not unless you’re a mind reader. Wait, are you a mind reader?” I turn on her with the faux accusation. “That’s it, isn’t it?” I declare triumphantly.

  She grins and giggles, shaking her head at me. “No, it’s cheating because I know all the answers.”

  “Huh?” is the best I can muster in my increasingly inebriated state.

  “I read all the books. Cover. To. Cover.”

  “What? The textbooks?”

  She nods.

  “Yuh-huh. And other books on music history. Sometimes I read t-t-thesissis that other students have done. I’ve read both of yours, you know,” she says proudly.

  “No fucking way!” I say with a half grin.

  She purses her lips and raises her chin in an attempt to look scholarly and aloof.

  “‘At the heart of post-World War II American society was the drive to get the men back into the workforce and the women back into the home. As a result, there is considerably less compositional output from the women of this period which roughly mirrors the Abstract Expressionist movement.’”

  My jaw drops to the floor. “How the hell did you…?”

  “Holy shit!” She points at me and giggles. “I wish I had a camera so you could see your face. Where’s my phone?” she mutters to herself and goes digging into the couch cushions. “Huh. Hmm,” she mutters when she comes up empty.

  Okay. Something totally insane is going on here, and it has nothing to do with the drinking. I reach out a hand and put it on her wrist.

  “Really, Katherine, you read the whole thing?”

  She smiles. “Yeah, I did. And it was pretty perfect, you know. Just the one wrong date on page fifty-six, down in the fourth paragraph—” She slaps a hand over her mouth, as if to stop anything else from slipping out.

  I feel my eyes narrow as I go from impressed to suspicious in two seconds flat.

  “How could you possibly know that?” It comes out as more of an accusation than a question.

  “Okay, fine. I’ll tell you,” she says, rolling her eyes with exasperation. “I have a synthetic memory.”

  “A what?”

  She concentrates and tries again. “A pornographic memory. No, that’s not right either.” She giggles at her inability to spit the word out. Whatever word it is she’s trying to say. “I have an eidetic memory. There. That’s right.”

  “A what?”

  “You know, phonographic. I have a phonographic memory,” she explains, the tiniest hiccup escaping her lips at the end of the sentence. It makes her giggle again.

  My eyebrows go up in sudden understanding and supreme surprise.

  “D–do you mean you have a photographic memory?”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  “Hold on a sec,” I say, waving one hand at her while putting the other to my forehead, which feels as if it’s stuffed with cotton candy. “Are you telling me you’ve memorized my master’s thesis?”

  “Yup. And your doctoral one, too. And every textbook you’ve ever assigned, and all the scores I read. I can’t help it, I pretty much remember everything I see.”

  “What? No fucking way! You’re shitting me, Miss Brenner,” I accuse with a light elbow to the ribs.

  “Hey,” she complains, elbowing back. “I shit you not, Dr. Drew.”

  “Prove it,” I say with a firm nod, as if it’s
been decided.

  “Huh?”

  “Show me how you do it,” I command, twisting my head to look around us. When I spot the novel she was reading earlier in the day, I snatch it up and flip to a random page. “Okay,” I say as I look down at the page, then back up at her again. “Page two hundred and sixteen. Paragraph two.”

  “Oh, come on,” she whines. “I’m not a trained seal, you know.”

  “Oh-ho! Did you want to maybe retract your previous statement about having a—a what was it again? A synthetic memory.”

  “Ei-d-d-ethic,” she stammers and slurs at the same time, and it’s fucking adorable.

  “Exactly.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she hisses. “You are such a pain in the ass! Fine, fine, fine. Get ready to have your socks knocked off, Dr. Drew…”

  Katherine closes her eyes and puts her fingers to her temples, as if she’s channeling some long-dead spirit. But she’s only channeling the spirit of a third-rate romance writer named Whitney Larabee Lovelace.

  “Ahem. Okay, here we go.” She takes a deep breath and squishes her face together in a dramatic facsimile of melodramatic lust.

  “‘He leans down, his fingers playing gently along the line of my jaw. I can’t help but lean in to his touch. It burns a fiery trail everywhere that his skin connects with mine.’”

  She’s recited the paragraph verbatim. Suddenly her eyes pop open. “And the word ‘connects’ is missing an n by the way.”

  I’m staring at her now, mouth agape, eyes wide, book dangling precariously from my fingertips.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I murmur in stunned appreciation.

  “I know. Right?” She cackles with a grin, reaching for her wine bottle. When she does, my hand somehow lands atop of hers.

  At first, she thinks I’m trying to stop her from drinking anymore, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. And, although I am removing her hand from the bottle, that’s not why. I take her hand in mine and use it to pull her forward, off her couch cushion and onto mine. She doesn’t fight me.

  My head is spinning with conflicting emotions. I want her. I want this. But there’s that nagging part of me that’s screaming “What the hell are you doing?”