When she came to the end of her song, the girl opened her eyes and smiled at Avery.
“Here for piano?” she asked.
Avery nodded.
“What are you playing?”
“Chopin’s Etude Opus 10, number 1, and William Bolcom’s Graceful Ghost Rag, plus the Bach and Beethoven.”
“I’m doing Stravinsky’s Four Studies and the Rondo in B Minor by Clara Schumann,” the girl offered.
Avery didn’t know those pieces, but they just sounded better than hers. The girl was wearing a flowing peasant blouse made of linen. It seemed more artsy than Avery’s generic poseur black turtleneck.
The soprano hit a high B with equal ease.
“She’s good, huh?” the girl said, nodding toward the end of the hall the sound originated from. “She was doing a little bit of Susanna from Figaro right before you came in. I think she was just kind of screwing around, but still, it sounded really nice.”
Avery vaguely recognized that this was a reference to The Marriage of Figaro, which was an opera. And that was where her knowledge of that subject ended.
“I heard the theory exam is really easy,” the girl went on. “Basic stuff, like how to convert a natural minor scale to a harmonic minor and a melodic minor. Scale degrees. The difference between the leading tone and the tonic. A few transpositions. Stuff like that.”
It all echoed in Avery’s head. This was stuff she knew. But it wasn’t the kind of stuff she poured out to total strangers in hallways. And why was this girl even here? It sounded like she already had her music degree. Maybe she did. Maybe she was a plant, sent here by the school to freak out the auditioners.
One of the doors opened, and a young woman emerged. She and Scarf Girl exchanged looks, and Scarf Girl jumped up from her seat. From their high-pitched greetings, Avery gathered that they knew each other.
“Avery Dekker?” Another student guide was peering from a doorway down the hall. Avery nodded and was waved back.
“Your turn,” Scarf Girl said, turning from her friend. “Good luck.”
“Right …” Avery quickly gathered her things. “Maybe I’ll see you”
Avery was ushered into a long, spare room with a hardwood floor and a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Pigeons sat along the sills outside, puffing themselves up to protect them from the cold and the snow.
At one side of the room was a grand piano. Not a baby grand—a grand, easily eight feet long and stark, shellacked black. There was a padded bench with a knob on the side to raise or lower it. On the other side three people, two men and one woman, breezily chatted with one another and sipped coffee. The two men were similar in appearance—clipped salt-and-pepper beards and V-necked sweaters. The woman had a great pile of wiry gray hair wound on top of her head and a black angora shawl wrapped dramatically around her shoulders. They didn’t seem to notice that Avery was there. After a moment one of the men turned and looked at Avery with a polite smile.
Avery had a strange impulse to ask if they were ready to order.
“Miss Dekker.” He spoke very softly.
Avery nodded.
He shuffled a pile of folders in front of him and drew one from the stack.
“We’re going to have you start with the Bach,” the man said, opening the folder. “What will you be playing?”
“Fugue number 19, from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier.”
“Fine.” He waved toward the piano and shuffled through her file. “Whenever you’re ready.”
After a moment, when the man gave her another little wave to encourage her, Avery walked over to the piano and sat down, taking a minute to adjust her bench. Whoever had played before her was tall. She had to raise the seat and move it closer to the piano. She set her fingertips lightly on the keys. There was a wobble building in her wrists that was trickling down to her fingers.
Just start, she told herself. Don’t think.
She hit the first notes of her piece. The Bach was mechanical and demanding but she knew it cold. She’d played it hundreds of times. This wasn’t going to be a problem. She ran through it automatically—a little hurriedly, and right around the fourth measure her fingers fumbled. Avery retracted her hands from the keys in horror.
In the deadly pause that followed, Avery almost wanted to laugh.
“Take a moment,” the man said, his voice unperturbed. Bored, even. It was as if he was just going through the motions now, saying what he needed to say to get Avery through her piece and out the door.
Avery pulled her hands from the keys and gave them a sharp, snapping shake. She tried to imagine the nervous energy flying from the tips of her fingers in bolts and settling harmlessly into the floorboards. It didn’t quite work. Her hands began to tense, freezing into stiff claws with nasty, short nails on the ends. She settled her fingers back on the keys. They felt cool and a little foreign. This wasn’t her piano. The old piano she had at home had keys that plunked down easily and issued a tinny, almost toy piano sound. This piano responded athletically—the keys sprang back. It would all be fine if she was at home, playing on the instrument she knew, with Bandit at her feet and her brothers running behind her.
One of her examiners loudly turned a page on his pad of paper. She started again, exactly at the spot where she had fumbled.
She didn’t play cleanly for the first minute. She was landing the notes, but her timing was off. Everything went a bit fuzzy, and she realized as she went on that she could barely remember how she had just played. Her brain could retain only about five seconds of performance, and then it was gone. She could only go forward, deeper into music that she could see now in her mind’s eye—but the notes would change on the score in her head, and she didn’t know if her fingers or brain knew best. She could only play and play and play. For all she knew, she was digging her own grave with every note, every mangled measure, every flattened crescendo.
And then she was done. She realized she’d come to the end of the last piece. She looked over at the three people at the table. They seemed deeply disinterested, and in fact seemed to notice that she was finished long after she did. They smiled three blank, polite smiles at her.
“Thank you, Miss Dekker,” the man said. “You can go wait downstairs.”
He gave Avery another small nod to let her know that she could go. The woman shoved more orange into her mouth and adjusted the arrangement of her great pile of hair.
Avery went back out into the hallway. She could hear the overhead lights humming. Scarf Girl and her friend were still there. She could hear the friend offering last-minute words of encouragement and advice. Scarf Girl hadn’t gone. Scarf Girl hadn’t messed up. Scarf Girl’s chances seemed pretty good at the moment.
She hated Scarf Girl.
“How’d it go?” Scarf Girl asked.
“Great,” Avery lied, lurching past her to get to the elevator.
Once downstairs, Avery sat numbly in the cold corner of the lobby. She had two hours to kill. Around her, other auditioners were waiting. Most were cramming for the theory exam. A few were analyzing their performances over the phone, citing specific technical achievements. Avery could barely remember the names of the pieces she’d played. Her mind had blotted out the entire episode, probably as a means of self-preservation.
She reached into her bag and pulled out the crib sheet she’d prepared for herself, but studying seemed useless. Instead, she watched the students coming in and out with their instrument cases, all looking purposeful and blasé. This place was their life. Physically, they didn’t fit any particular type. Some dressed a little more fabulously than most. A heavy knit white poncho wrap with long fringe. Skinny jeans and massive and furry wooly mammoth boots. Some were inconspicuous in their sweatshirts, wet hats, and scarves. Some obviously just rolled out of bed; some preened themselves carefully, cultivating the fabulousness they seemed to know they carried inside. Because that was the thing—all these people had it. It was the it that got them in, the it that made them able
to perceive and perform music far better than mere mortals. They were superior beings. The universe yielded her secrets to them and perfume ran through their veins. That was what it was like when you had it.
As she sat there, becoming dimly aware that she was resting in a small puddle of melted snow, Avery was pretty sure she didn’t have it. She wasn’t sure if she had anything. She couldn’t quite remember why she’d come.
44
The SUV made surprisingly little noise. The snow blanketed it, muffling the engine. Mel and Nina tried all the doors multiple times, in the hopes that something would suddenly give.
“I’m so sorry,” Mel said, close to tears. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Nina said, her expression dark as she tried to look down into the window well of her car. “I should have taken out the keys.”
“Don’t you have one of those remote locks?”
“It’s on the key chain.” Nina sighed.
Parker came over with a steaming cup in his hand and surveyed the scene.
“What are you guys doing?” he asked.
“We’re locked out,” Nina said.
“The engine’s on,” he said, stopping in his tracks.
“Noticed that. Thanks, though.”
Parker came over and peered into the window on the opposite side.
“Isn’t there a way of opening this?” Nina said, looking desperate. “Like with a clothes hanger?”
“I don’t think so. Not with this kind of lock. You need a slim-jim.”
Mel walked over, swept a spot clear on a bench, and sat down. The back of her jeans soaked through almost instantly. Her coat was still in the car, so she was shivering, but she didn’t really care.
“Triple A,” Nina said, digging into her purse for her wallet and phone. “I’ll call them and they’ll come out and open the door.”
It took Nina about ten minutes to get through. Parker sat next to Mel on the bench. He offered her his drink, but she waved it away.
“I’d say it’s going pretty well,” he said.
When Nina hung up the phone, she turned to find Parker sitting alone.
“Where’s Mel?”
“She went thataway.” He pointed to the building. “Really fast.”
Nina leaned up against her purring car.
“They said they have a lot of calls from people stuck on the road. It’ll take them anywhere from an hour to three hours to get here.”
“Well, it’s nice weather to sit around in and wait.”
“We’re going to miss her,” Nina said. “We’re going to get to New York too late, if we ever get there. We know what building she’s in, and that’s about it.”
“It’s only, New York. How hard will it be to find her?”
“I have to stay here to wait for the truck,” she said. “You can go inside if you want.”
Parker didn’t move. He just poured some of the hot liquid from his cup and watched it dissolve a hole in the snow.
“So, why are you here?” Nina asked.
“Why are any of us here?”
Nina just stared.
“Because Mel asked,” he said.
“Did you know I was coming?”
“Mel mentioned it. Why are you here? I thought you hated Avery.”
“I don’t hate her,” Nina said. She looked up into the falling snow. This always made her lose her perspective and gave her a sense of rising and falling at the same time.
“But you don’t like her.”
“I don’t like what she did,” Nina said. “It’s complicated. This whole thing is actually ridiculous.”
“So what did you end up doing with … ?”
Parker spoke with an ill-concealed anxiety. Nina didn’t feel like answering his question, but she was kind of stuck. Literally. Stuck in the snow, with her car, with him. It wasn’t like things could get much worse.
“I haven’t really figured all that out yet,” she said. “Why don’t you go wait with Mel? I think she’s a little upset about the thing with the door.”
“Right.” Parker hopped up. He was smiling, though it wasn’t a happy smile—more like the smile of someone who’s been proven right about something.
The truck arrived a half hour later, and the door was popped open in about ten seconds. This bothered Nina somewhat. She felt like it should have taken a little more time and effort. She’d spent more time opening jars.
The sky was now a feverish pink, and the snow showed no signs of stopping. Nina put the car into four-wheel drive and made her way along slowly. It took two more hours to get into the city. Traffic around New York was snarled and insane, and they spent almost an hour at a standstill waiting to get on the George Washington Bridge. It was too nerve-racking even to get excited about going to the city. Not that they could see the city, anyway. The sky was full of white drifts that obscured the view. It just felt like they were in a snow globe.
Once they made it over and got into the city proper, Mel became too agitated to follow the map, and Parker had to take over. He also had to crisis-counsel Nina as she experienced multiple panic attacks as yellow cabs skidded by her, coming within inches of her car. They managed to get onto the FDR Drive and basically slide down the side of Manhattan on packed snow, going way too fast in an attempt to keep up with the traffic.
“Are we in the nothing-left-to-live-for lane?” Parker asked.
They swung off somewhere in the twenties and managed to make their way down Second Avenue to an area that Mel vaguely recognized from studying the school’s Web site.
“Parking lot!” Mel cried. “Parking lot!”
Nina made a sharp left and turned into an underground garage. As they made their way out to the street, the snow was shooting down the narrow paths between the buildings and going right into their faces.
“So, where is this place?” Nina asked. She had only been to the city a handful of times with her parents, and she had never gotten much farther than Macy’s or the Empire State Building. This part of New York was completely strange to her. It was a tangle of stores, academic buildings, and delis. It was hard to look up and see how high any of the buildings were, but Nina could tell that they weren’t huge skyscrapers.
Parker was scanning the street.
“Turn right at the Starbucks, walk past the Starbucks, and keep going until you reach the third Starbucks on your left.” He shook his head. “Maybe they grow them here.”
“Eighth Street,” Mel said, brushing snow off her printout. The ink on the map smeared over the page. “Eighth and Greene. It’s near a park. Where are we?”
“Lafayette,” Nina said, squinting at a sign. “Which way do we go?”
“Um …” Mel rotated helplessly. “Maybe we ask someone?”
“Let’s walk until we see what number street we’re on,” Parker said. “We can at least get to Eighth.”
They walked along as people were out with shovels and salt, trying to do battle with the elements and losing.
“Great Jones Street,” Nina said as they reached the next corner. “That’s not a number. I’m going to ask someone.”
It took one or two tries, but Nina managed to flag down a woman who told her that the school was just a few blocks over.
“Okay,” she said, checking her watch. “We have ten minutes. Let’s go.”
45
Avery watched the snow beat into the glass doors of the lobby. Every time the doors would open, an artic gale would rush through the room. It would hit the security guard head-on and she would shiver dramatically and say, “Mm-mm-mm,” in a disapproving tone. To Avery, it seemed like a comment on her entire life. Mm-mm-mm, Dekker. You blew it. Game over. Thanks for playing.
She’d considered walking out before the theory exam, but she couldn’t pick herself up and get out the door. So when the exam room was opened, she shuffled along with the others. The test itself was nothing. She breezed through it. (It was easy to take a test when she felt like she had nothing to lose.) She’d p
lanted herself in the corner of the lobby again, stuck her earphones in her ears, and tried to blot the world out. But that stupid “Mm-mm-mm” had penetrated. She’d been listening to that “Mm-mm-mm” for over an hour.
Scarf Girl and Friend of Scarf Girl were there too—they’d been hip to hip the whole day. Avery had managed to gather that they’d gone to some music camp together for several years when they were kids. She vaguely wondered if they were dating, or if it had ever crossed their minds to just kiss, to hold on to each other in this cold lobby and just make out like maniacs to get through this agonizing wait.
But then, not everyone was like Avery. Not everyone gave in to their whims and destroyed their friendships in the process. Some people actually had a grip. Some people could keep their friends, and those people didn’t have to sit by themselves in a puddle in the freezing cold, waiting for the what was potentially the biggest piece of news (probably bad) they’d get in their lives.
Even the music Avery was listening to was depressing her. She connected songs to events and people and times and places, and every line drawn from every song seemed to connect to Mel or Nina. She yanked out the earphones and listened to the girl next to her jabbering into her phone. She was having a particularly soap-opera conversation—the kind of overly loud one that was clearly meant to be heard by everyone around her. Lots of I know!’s and Shut up!’s and even one For serious? For totally serious, serious?
When the girl said, “Oh … my … God!” nothing really registered until Avery noticed that almost everyone had jumped up and was rushing the hallway on the far left, forming a confused tangle.
This could only mean one thing.
Avery stood up slowly. She made no effort to get to the front of the throng. She hung on the edges until a spot was clear, which took some time. Finally, she saw a lonely list stuck to a door. It contained only one small column. Remarkably small.
Some people around her were gushing, and some were on the verge of tears.
Avery stepped a bit closer and ran her eyes down the page. She ran down again.
Her name was not there.
The Bermudez Triangle Page 25
