by Nathan Hill
They took their seats, studied the program. Bethany would not go on until the second half. The first half was all smaller works—minor chamber pieces and quick solos. It was clear Bethany’s piece was the showstopper. The big finale. Samuel’s feet bounced nervously on the soft, carpeted floor.
The lights dimmed and the musicians stopped their chaotic warm-ups and everyone took their seats and after a lengthy pause there came a sturdy note out of the woodwinds, then everyone else following it, tuning to that note, anchoring themselves to that spot, and something seemed to catch in his mother’s throat. She inhaled sharply, then put her hand on her chest.
“I used to do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“The tuning note. I was the oboe. That used to be me.”
“You played music? When?”
“Shh.”
And there it was, another secret his mother had kept. Her life was a fog to him; whatever happened before he came along was all mysterious, locked behind ambiguous shrugs and half answers and vague abstractions and aphorisms—“You’re too young,” she’d say. Or “You wouldn’t understand.” Or the particularly infuriating “I’ll tell you someday, when you’re older.” But occasionally some secret would crack free. So his mother was once a musician. He added it to the mental inventory: Things that Mom is. She’s a musician. What else? What other things didn’t he know about her? She had acres of secrets, it was obvious. He always felt there was something she wasn’t saying, something behind her bland partial attention. She often had that disassociated quality, like she was focusing on you with maybe one-third of herself, the rest devoted to whatever things she kept locked inside her head.
The biggest secret had slipped years earlier, when Samuel was young enough to be asking his parents ridiculous questions. (Have you ever been in a volcano? Have you ever seen an angel?) Or asking because he was still naïve enough to believe in stupendous things. (Can you breathe underwater? Can all reindeer fly?) Or asking because he was fishing for attention and praise. (How much do you love me? Am I the best child in the world?) Or asking because he wanted to be reassured of his place in the world. (Will you be my mom forever? Have you been married to anyone besides Dad?) Except when he asked this last question his mother straightened up and looked at him all tall and solemn and serious and said: “Actually…”
She never finished that sentence. He waited for her, but she stopped and thought about it and got that distant, bleak look on her face. “Actually what?” he said.
“Nothing,” she said. “Never mind.”
“You’ve been married before?”
“No.”
“Then what were you going to say?”
“Nothing.”
So Samuel asked his father: “Was Mom ever married to anyone else?”
“What?”
“I think she might have been married to someone else.”
“No, she wasn’t. Jesus. What are you talking about?”
Something had happened to her, Samuel was sure of it. Some profound thing that even now, years later, occupied her attention. It washed over her sometimes and she’d disengage from the world.
Meanwhile, there was a concert happening. High-school boys and girls playing important senior-year recitals, five- to ten-minute pieces that were right in the strike zone of each student’s ability. Loud clapping after every performance. Pleasant, easy, tonal music, mostly Mozart.
Then it was intermission. People stood and made their way elsewhere: outside, to smoke, or to a nearby buffet table, for cheese.
“How long did you play music?” Samuel asked.
His mother studied the program. She acted like she didn’t hear him. “This girl, your friend, how old is she?”
“My age,” he said. “She’s in my grade.”
“And she’s playing with these high schoolers?”
He nodded his head. “She’s really good.” And he felt this surge of pride just then, as if being in love with Bethany meant something important about him. As if he were rewarded for her accomplishments. He would never be a musical genius, but he could be a person a musical genius loved. Such were the spoils of love, he realized, that her success was also, by some odd refraction, his.
“Dad’s really good too,” Samuel added.
She looked at him, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. It’s just, you know, he’s really good. At his job.”
“That’s an odd thing to say.”
“It’s true. He’s very good.”
She stared at him a moment, mystified.
“Did you know,” she said, looking down at the program again, “that the composer of this piece never made any money from it?”
“Which piece?”
“The piece your friend is going to play. The guy who wrote it, Max Bruch, he never earned a penny.”
“Why not?”
“He was cheated. It was around World War I, and he was bankrupt, so he gave it to a couple of Americans who were supposed to send him the money, but they never did. The score disappeared for a long time, then ended up in the vault of J. P. Morgan.”
“Who’s that?”
“A banker. Industrialist. Financier.”
“A really rich guy.”
“Yes. From a long time ago.”
“He liked music?”
“He liked things,” she said. “It’s a classic story. The robber baron gets more stuff, the artist dies with nothing.”
“He didn’t die with nothing,” Samuel said.
“He was broke. He didn’t even have the score.”
“He had his memory of it.”
“His memory?”
“Yeah. He could still remember it. That’s something.”
“I’d rather have the money.”
“Why?”
“Because when all you have is the memory of a thing,” she said, “all you can think about is how the thing is gone.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“You’re young.”
The lights dimmed again, and people around them took their seats, and the buzz of small talk quieted, and everything went dark and silent and the whole cathedral seemed to distill itself into one small circle of light at the front of the altar—a spotlight illuminating an empty bit of floor.
“Here we go,” his mother whispered.
Everyone waited. It was agony. Five seconds, ten seconds. It was taking too long! Samuel wondered if someone had forgotten to tell Bethany she was on. Or if she’d left her violin at home. But then he heard the click of a door somewhere in front of him. Then footsteps, soft shoes on the hard floor. And finally there she was, Bethany, gliding into the light.
She wore a slim green dress and her hair had been done up and she looked, for the first time, tiny. Around all these adults and high schoolers, way up in front, it was as if Samuel’s normal scale was thrown off. Bethany now looked like a child. And he was worried for her. This was too much to ask, all this.
The audience politely clapped. Then Bethany put her violin under her chin. She stretched her neck and shoulders. And without a word, the orchestra began to play.
It started with a low thrum, like thunder very far away, a faint drumming from beyond the light. Samuel could feel it in his torso and fingertips. He was sweating. Bethany didn’t even have her music! She would do this from memory! What if she forgot? What if she blanked? He realized now how terrifying music is, how inevitable—the drums would keep driving forward, whether or not Bethany knew her part. And now, softly, the woodwinds came in—nothing dramatic, but three simple notes, each lower than the last, repeated. It wasn’t a melody; more like a preparation. Like they were readying the sanctuary for sound. Like these three notes performed the ritual necessary to be in the presence of music. It wasn’t the music yet but rather its leading edge.
Then Bethany straightened herself and placed her bow at the proper angle and it was clear something was about to happen. She was ready, the audience
was ready. The woodwinds held a single long hovering note that gradually faded away, that sounded like taffy stretched to nothingness. And just as that note disappeared, just as it was swallowed by the darkness, a new note leaped from Bethany. It grew stronger and louder and then she was the only one speaking in that huge hall.
There was nothing more lonely than that sound.
Like all the heartbreak in someone’s long life gathered and distilled. It began low and moaned higher, slowly, a couple of steps up, a few steps back, and so on, like a dancer, whirling its way to the top of the scale, more quickly now, to announce, at the very peak, a kind of forsakenness, a desolation. The way Bethany bent that last note as she climbed into it—it sounded like a cry, like somebody crying. An old familiar noise, and Samuel felt himself falling into the note, gradually folding himself around it. And just when he thought she’d reached the top, another note came, even higher, a wisp of music, the barest edge of the bow meeting the thinnest string, just the finest sound: clean, noble, soft, a slight quiver from Bethany’s rolling finger, like the note itself were alive and pulsing. Alive, but dying, it seemed now, as the note diminished and decayed. And it didn’t sound like Bethany’s playing softened but rather like she was moving quickly away from them. Like she was being stolen. And wherever she went, they could not follow. She was a ghost passing into another realm.
Then the orchestra answered back, a full and deep barrel of sound, like they needed all the numbers they could muster to match this one tiny girl in her little green dress.
The concert passed in a kind of blur after that. Occasionally Samuel would be newly amazed by one of Bethany’s maneuvers: how she could play on two strings at once and make them both sound good; how she could play so many hundreds of notes perfectly from memory; how fast her fingers moved. It was inhuman, what she could do. By the middle of the second movement, Samuel had concluded there was no way he deserved her.
The audience went mad. They stood and cheered and gave Bethany bouquets of roses so large they impeded her balance. She carried them in both arms and was barely visible behind them, waving and curtseying.
“Everyone loves a prodigy,” his mother said, herself also standing and clapping. “Prodigies get us off the hook for living ordinary lives. We can tell ourselves we’re not special because we weren’t born with it, which is a great excuse.”
“She’s been practicing nonstop for months.”
“My dad always told me I was nothing special,” she said. “I guess I proved him right.”
Samuel stopped clapping and looked at his mother.
She rolled her eyes and patted him on the head. “Never mind. Forget I said that. Do you want to say hi to your friend?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She’s busy.”
And indeed she was busy: surrounded by well-wishers, friends, family, her parents, various musicians congratulating her.
“You should at least tell her she did a good job,” Faye said. “Thank her for the invitation. It’s polite.”
“Plenty of people are telling her good job,” Samuel said. “Can we go?”
His mother shrugged. “Okay. If that’s what you want.”
And they were on their way out of the hall, and they were moving slowly with the surge of people also leaving, Samuel brushing against hips and sport coats, when from behind him he heard his name. Bethany was calling his name. He turned and found her wrestling through the crowd to catch up to him, and when she finally did she leaned into him, her cheek to his, and he thought he was supposed to give her one of those fake-kiss things he saw all the adult men doing, until she brought her lips all the way to his ear and whispered, “Come over tonight. Sneak out.”
“Okay,” he said. That warmth on his face. He would have agreed to do anything she asked.
“There’s something I have to show you.”
“What is it?”
“The cassette you gave me? It’s not just silence. There’s something else.”
She pulled away. She no longer looked, as she had onstage, small. She had regained her normal Bethany proportions: elegant, sophisticated, womanly. She held his stare and smiled.
“You have to hear it,” she said. Then she dashed away, back to her parents and her throng of giddy admirers.
His mother looked at him suspiciously, but he ignored her. He walked right past her, out of the church and into the night, limping slightly in his rock-hard shoes.
That night he lay in bed waiting for the sounds of the house to disappear—his mother rattling around in the kitchen, his father watching television downstairs, then eventually the whoosh of his parents’ door opening as his mother went to bed. Then the television turning off with an electric chunk. The sound of water running, a toilet flushing. Then nothing. Waiting another twenty minutes to be sure, then opening his door, twisting and untwisting the knob slowly and tightly to avoid unwanted metallic clicks, walking lightly down the hall, stepping over the squeaky part of the hallway floor that Samuel could avoid even in total darkness, then down the stairs, placing his feet as close to the wall as he could, where there was less creaking danger, then taking a full ten minutes to open the front door—a small pull, a small tic, then silence, then another: tic—the door opening in fractions of an inch until the gap was finally wide enough to pass through.
And finally, once liberated, running! In the clean air, running down the block, toward the creek, into the woods that separated Venetian Village from everything else. His foot clomps and breathing were the only sounds in the whole big world, and when he felt afraid—of getting caught, of dangerous forest animals, of mad ax murderers, kidnappers, trolls, ghosts—he steeled his mind with the memory of Bethany’s warm, wet breath on his ear.
Her bedroom was dark when he arrived, her window closed. Samuel sat outside for several long minutes panting and sweating and watching, reassuring himself that all relevant parents were asleep and that no neighbors would see him creep through the backyard, which, when he finally did, he did so quickly, running on the tips of his shoes to avoid all ground sounds, then crouching below Bethany’s window and lightly tapping it with the pad of his index finger until, from out of the darkness, she appeared.
He could see only bits of her in the murky nighttime light: the angle of her nose, a toss of hair, collarbone, eye socket. She was a collection of parts floating in ink. She opened the window and he climbed in, rolling over the frame and wincing where the metal bit into his chest.
“Be quiet,” said someone who was not Bethany, who was elsewhere in the darkness. It was Bishop, Samuel realized after a moment of disequilibrium. Bishop was here, in the room, and Samuel was both disheartened and grateful for this. Because he didn’t know what he would do if he were alone with Bethany, but also he knew he wanted to do it, whatever it was. To be alone with her—he wanted it very badly.
“Hi, Bish,” Samuel said.
“We’re playing a game,” Bishop said. “It’s called Listen to Silence Until You’re Bored out of Your Mind.”
“Shut up,” Bethany said.
“It’s called Be Put to Sleep by Cassette-Tape Static.”
“It’s not static.”
“It’s all static.”
“It’s not only static,” she said. “There’s something else.”
“Says you.”
Samuel could not see them—the darkness in here was total. They were more like impressions in space, lighter shapes against the blackness. He tried to place himself in the geography of her room, constructing a map from memory: the bed, the dresser, the flowers on the wall. There were glow-in-the-dark stars dotting the ceiling, Samuel noticed, suddenly, for the first time. Then the sounds of fabric and footsteps and the bed’s quick squeak as Bethany probably sat down on it, near where Bishop seemed to be, near the cassette player, which she often listened to at night, alone, playing and rewinding and playing again the same few moments from some symphony, which Samuel knew because of all his spying.
> “Come up here,” Bethany said. “You have to be close.” So he got up on the bed and moved slowly toward them and felt around clumsily and grabbed something cold and bony that was definitely a leg belonging to one of them, he didn’t know which.
“Listen,” she said. “Very closely.”
A click of the tape player, Bethany leaning back into the bed, the fabric folding around her, then static as that brief dead space at the beginning of the tape ended and the recording actually began.
“See?” Bishop said. “Nothing.”
“Wait for it.”
The sound was distant and muffled, like when a faucet is turned on somewhere in the house and there’s that rushing sound from hidden, far-off pipes.
“There,” Bethany said. “Do you hear it?”
Samuel shook his head, then realized she couldn’t see the gesture. “No,” he said.
“There it is,” she said. “Listen. It’s under the sound. You have to listen below it.”
“You are making no sense,” Bishop said.
“Ignore what you can hear and listen to the other stuff.”
“Listen to what?”
“To them,” she said. “The people, the audience, the room. You can hear them.”
Samuel strained to listen. He cocked his head toward the stereo and squinted—as if that would help—trying to pick out any kind of organized sound within the static: talking, coughing, breathing.
“I don’t hear anything,” Bishop said.
“You’re not concentrating.”
“Oh right. That’s the problem.”
“You have to focus.”
“Fine. I will now attempt to focus.”
They all listened to the hiss coming out of the speakers, Samuel feeling disappointed in himself that he also had not yet heard anything.
Bishop said, “This is me totally focused.”
“Will you shut up?”
“I have never been so focused as I am at this moment.”
“Please. Shut. Up.”
“Concentrate, you must,” he said. “Feel the force, you must.”
“You can go away, you know. Like, leave?”
“Happily,” Bishop said, scrambling away and leaping off the bed. “You two enjoy your nothing.”
