But what he did, to her shock, was turn each of the pegs just the slightest bit, so that the instrument was out of tune.
Then he handed it back and asked her to begin from where he had stopped her.
“But it’s not in tune—”
“Begin, please.”
As Remy began to play, she quickly heard which strings were sharp and which were flat, and automatically began to correct for the differences, grateful for her responsive fingertips. As confusing as it was to have to accommodate this way, it was also oddly exhilarating to instinctively make the infinitesimal changes necessary to stay in tune. Before she knew it, she had arrived at the end of the movement.
The other students applauded, as did Conrad Lesser, and Remy had to smile.
“My dear,” Lesser said, probably because he couldn’t recall Remy’s name, “may you never have to perform on an instrument as mistuned as that. But I hope you noted—that all of you noted”—he turned to the class—“the energy our young colleague generated just now. The electricity born of fright. Or rather, the electricity that results when we overcome fright.”
Remy laughed nervously.
“Your goal for this summer,” Lesser told her, “is a very basic one. I want you to play fearlessly. By that I mean with abandon. To move past your fear and free yourself—free up your playing. Do you follow? I want you, my dear, to feel limitless.”
“Okay,” Remy said meekly, and everyone laughed.
“Listen to that,” Lesser told them. “We limit ourselves every day without even knowing it, simply by doing what we always do, falling into patterns, not pushing ourselves further. But every one of you has expressive reserves you’ve not yet discovered. Your dear colleague here has just discovered some of her own, by facing a mistuned violin. I want to help each of you find those reserves, so that you can tap them and go further, and give more, than you ever have before.”
BY THE END OF THEIR FIRST LESSON, CONRAD LESSER HAD DETERMINED what each student’s goal would be. Just as Remy was to learn to feel “limitless,” the boy who played like Heifetz was to become “sincere.” For the twins, who tended to play with a terse, tight vibrato, it was to “soften your touch.” For the Russian boy it was to use more contrasting sounds in order to “expand your expressive vocabulary.” Today’s class had focused, so far, on Barb, the pretty girl who was also best in the class. With Barb, Conrad Lesser was focusing on the finest of fine-tuning, helping her work out fingering that better matched passages of the piano accompaniment, and that might bring out the ethnic and period qualities inherent in the music. Her goal for the summer was to become more “nuanced.”
Yet even she looked worn out from the past half hour of Lesser’s scrutiny. “Good, very good,” he said, dismissing her. “It’s difficult to sustain this level of effort, I know. That’s why after you’ve worked hard and long at this level of intensity . . . then what must you do?” He did not wait for an answer. “You must relax.”
He turned to address the class. “This goes for all of you. What we’re doing here takes incredible concentration. Physical stamina and psychological strength. When we learn how to focus, we must also learn how to release.”
“You mean like take a long bubble bath?” Barb asked.
“Take a bath if that helps. But I want you growing, increasing your skills and your strength. What each of you needs,” he said, “is a hobby.”
Remy grunted. A hobby! As if any one of them had the time.
“Preferably something aerobic or gymnastic,” Lesser continued. “As I said, our work requires that we be fit physically as well as mentally. Do any of you exercise?”
Everyone sort of stared down at their feet, except for one of the twins, who said, “I like jogging.”
“Jogging, excellent. How often do you do that?”
“Once a week at least. I want to do it more, but I don’t always have time.”
“For this class, you will go jogging three times a week. And what about you?” he asked her sister.
“I hate jogging.”
“Even better. The two of you need some time apart. What sort of sport do you like to do?”
“None. I hate sports.”
Conrad Lesser nodded, eyes squinting, big ears bobbing as he contemplated.
The Russian boy had raised his hand. He said, “I would like to roller-skate.”
“Skating, excellent! You will tell Lise your shoe size and we will buy you a pair of skates.” He nodded to his worried-looking assistant.
The Russian boy grinned. Remy was already dreading what athletic feats might be required of her.
“But back to Penelope.” Lesser squinted again. “I can see that you have a quick metabolism like your sister. As part of your imperative to soften your touch, I suggest you do yoga.”
Her sister giggled.
“There are books with accompanying videos,” Lesser said. “Lise will find you one.”
And so he doled out their new pastimes. By their next session, Barb was enrolled in an aerobics class, and the boy who played like Heifetz was learning tai chi. Mischa showed up in his new roller skates. Remy, to her horror, was handed a pair of swim goggles and told that she now had a membership at the YMCA.
“Swimming will help stretch you even more,” Lesser said. “Remember, I want you to feel limitless. Sleek and floating and free.”
SHE HAD NEVER WORKED SO HARD IN HER LIFE. EACH CLASS BROUGHT its own peculiar challenge, as well as some new hulking take-home assignment. When she played Vieuxtemps’s Concerto no. 5, Lesser made her transpose it, on the spot, into a different key—and then had her play the violin part on the piano, to make sure she had memorized it by sound and structure, not just muscle memory. Next she studied the entire orchestral score, “to be not just a violinist, but a musician,” Lesser said—and he had her hum the violin part while playing, on her violin, a figure from the accompaniment. It was all in the name of playing less “egocentrically,” to hear how harmony allowed everything to fall into place. “Only that way,” Lesser said, “can you comprehend the whole of the piece, of which you are just one component.”
In brief moments she really did feel she was achieving a kind of omniscience. It reminded her of when a dorm friend had taught her how to juggle. At first it had seemed impossible, so many things at once, but then, miraculously, in what seemed a single moment, it had all come together. Sometimes she even thought she could feel her brain expanding.
“All right, time for some sight-reading,” Lesser announced now, and Remy tensed. Who knew what he might throw at them.
“Let’s start with a duet. Remy and Mischa.”
Remy came forward to the music stand where Lesser had set down a score. Glancing through the pages, she saw that this was a suite of little dances: Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Minuet, Gavotte, and Gigue.
Lise was there to turn pages for Mischa, who would be playing the second violin part, while Lesser stood next to Remy. Already Mischa’s face was reddening; he always blushed when put on the spot. When Remy signaled that she was ready, they began to play.
It wasn’t at all bad. Remy found she was enjoying herself even as she concentrated on learning the notes, and as she approached the final measure of the first page, and saw Lesser’s hand reach out to turn it, was even able to relax a bit.
But Lesser did not turn the page.
“Turn, please!” Remy whispered as he held the page down with his finger—yet she continued, to her own surprise, to play. “Please turn!” she said again, with no notes before her, yet she was still playing her part, correctly it seemed, continuing the thematic precedent she must have already absorbed; the piece followed set patterns that she had already, she realized, internalized.
When Lesser at last turned the page, Remy searched hurriedly for the correct measure. Only when she found it did her pulse stop racing. But when, at the third page, she reached the bottom staves, and it was time to turn again, Lesser knocked the music off the stand.
Remy nearly stopped playing. She wanted to kick Lesser, to curse him—but she continued, to her surprise, to play. By now she understood the main themes well enough to briefly improvise. Meanwhile Lesser bent down slowly, picked up the sheet music, and returned it to the music stand.
For the rest of the piece, he did not meddle with the pages. When it was over, Remy glared at him, as the other students laughed and applauded with relief. Lesser gave a catlike smile and said, “Always be prepared for the unexpected.”
Remy wished he had made this point using Mischa instead.
“Anything might happen while you perform,” he told the class. “Your string might become loose, or the pianist makes a mistake, or”—he looked at Remy—“your music gets blown off by a breeze. Perhaps you forget, for a moment, what you’ve memorized. We never know, my friends, what life might toss at us.”
He nodded, and his ears seemed momentarily larger. “Not only must you be able to continue, but you must not be afraid of such things.” To Remy he said, “My dear, you are learning to play without fear.”
And when she headed home from class, exhausted, Remy wondered if it might somehow be possible that she could begin to lead her life, too, fearlessly.
Chapter 5
BESIDES THE MASTER CLASS AND HER JOB AT THE LIBRARY, REMY had joined a quartet that made good money at weddings (an opportunity that came by chance, when the second violinist moved to Connecticut). They often played two or three events in a weekend, and so the summer seemed to pass even more quickly.
She was working up her physical stamina, from the swimming, and had begun to look forward to those sessions in the water, the one point during her day where she could let her body fully release. She took one lesson each week and on other days swam laps. At first she had done so just three days per week, as Lesser had suggested, but very quickly she had begun to crave those sessions in the pool, where she could switch her mind off and just glide through the water. Her body felt both stronger and lighter, as if it had been stretched. There was also the fact that, as Lesser must have known would happen, the regime of hard work, physical exertion, and mental relaxation seemed to have created the intended effect: Remy was improving.
Her nights off were generally quiet. One evening in July, as she lay on the couch flipping through her roommate Sandy’s Cosmo, aware that the summer was already half over, Remy felt suddenly glum, that she was home alone (Sandy was attending a night course) perusing the thin, inconsequential pages of a magazine instead of doing something exciting.
The previous week’s heat wave had broken, and there was a light, cool breeze. A perfect evening to be out with friends, at a dance club or just out somewhere. But it was the middle of the week and there were no parties to attend. Remy decided to go to one of the concerts at Jordan Hall, where programs took place every week during the summer session, all of them free. She might find someone she knew there.
It was cool out, and Remy found herself dressing with attention: her favorite jeans and T-shirt, and her denim jacket, which had finally begun to fray at the hem in the acceptable way. Her hair had grown longer again, so she held it back in a thick elastic; Sandy said that when she showed off her cheekbones she looked sexy. The ponytail made a thick bouquet behind her, and Remy pulled a few strands forward from her temples, to lead the eye to her cheeks. Fully assembled, she stepped out into the bright, cool evening and headed for Jordan Hall.
She took a seat close to the stage, then cast her gaze around the room, searching for someone she might know. And then she saw him, striding into the hall as if aware that something wonderful awaited him there. Without thinking, Remy stood from her seat and waved.
Mr. Elko beamed back and came to her aisle, as if they met here all the time. “Hello, Remy. Fancy that.”
“Hello!” she said, unashamed of her delight. Just seeing him made her cheeks feel warm. And yet she wasn’t nervous or uncomfortable. When Mr. Elko sat down next to her, the warmth of the space and the golden lighting and the rustle of the audience settling into the old wooden seats made her feel at ease. It struck her that she had overcome her schoolgirl crush, that she was no longer the young, crazed undergraduate she had been just months earlier.
Mr. Elko was chatting lightheartedly, asking Remy about her summer. Yes, he told her, he would still be teaching here in the autumn.
“Then your wife likes Boston after all?”
He nodded but said she’d had to fly down to North Carolina; her father was having health troubles again.
“I’ll be here next year, too,” Remy told him, reminding him about her tutorship.
Mr. Elko congratulated her. “If we’re going to be colleagues, you should probably start calling me by my Christian name, hmm?” He said to call him Nicholas.
The lights dimmed and the soloist, a violist, stepped out onto the stage in a long dress. The first piece was Schumann’s Fairy-Tale Pictures, warm and wise and nostalgic. Remy closed her eyes and listened so intently, she almost—just almost—forgot that Mr. Elko was beside her. Not Mr. Elko: Nicholas.
“Your same old tweed jacket!” she noted when the lights went up for intermission and the summer students, having put in their required appearance, escaped to more entertaining activities. “Don’t you know it’s July? You need to dress accordingly.”
“This belonged to my grandfather,” Mr. Elko—no, Nicholas—said with mock pride. “That’s why it fits me so poorly. He was a stocky man. Probably not even a blood relation, actually. They say my grandmother had three admirers, and a child from every one of them.”
They didn’t stand up or walk around the way they usually would have, stretching their legs, yawning. Instead they sat side by side, and Remy told him about Conrad Lesser’s master class. “He’s been helping me play with a broader understanding of the music, just like you were trying in orchestra. To get us to see a piece from all sides. He says a great artist is someone whose interpretation of the world allows for new perspectives. And that there are endless possibilities, that our only limits are ourselves.” She realized she was nearly breathless. “He says his greatest goal, for all of us, is for us to ‘learn how to love music.’”
“A very worthy goal,” Mr. Elko—Nicholas—said.
She told him about the new piece she was learning, César Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, that the more she worked on it, the more she felt herself falling in love—with a piece of music! She told him about the swimming, that she understood, now, the link between mind and body.
All the while she felt a warmth emanating from him. And though she still felt the urge to bite his cheek, his neck, something had changed. At first she thought she might be imagining it, but the feeling continued throughout the second half of the performance, so that Remy’s heart began to pound, so certain she was that this warmth was real. Yes, she understood, finally, what was different. It was that her own warmth was being reciprocated.
When the concert was over and the lights had come up, Nicholas Elko asked, “How about a drink, then?”
They found a place on Mass. Ave. that was dark but not too crowded. Sitting across from each other at a small, sticky table, they drank Irish beer and talked about things that didn’t matter.
When they were onto their second beers, Remy reached across the table and put her hand on Nicholas’s. In Sandy’s Cosmo she had read that it was seductive for a woman to place the palm of her hand on the back of a man’s. (Placing the palm underneath his signified something else, though Remy couldn’t remember what.)
Looking down gravely, Nicholas said, “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
She said, “Yes, I do,” even though she didn’t, really.
The grave expression remained on his face a bit longer, but then he seemed to forget about it. “You have beautiful wrists,” he said. “I find myself noticing them.” His tone was one of observation more than flattery. It was the first time anyone had praised that particular part of her body. Remy felt both thrill and comfort, a strange comb
ination she had never experienced before.
“I suppose it’s time we went home,” Nicholas said quietly when they had finished their beers and the hour was late.
The “we” made it sound like “home” was something they shared. Only as she stood from the table did Remy allow that that probably wasn’t what he meant. But the thought of leaving without him was awful. How could they just say good night?
“I want to come with you.” She meant to be assertive and was surprised by how mumbly her voice sounded.
Nicholas frowned. And then, decisively, he gave a small nod.
Only when they arrived at the apartment where she had been once before did Remy allow the fact of the smooth-haired wife to find its way into her thoughts. But the wife was far away, and Remy had spent so many years being good. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
Here she was, so close to something she wanted so badly—as much, even, as she had wanted to be first chair. What would it feel like to refuse, this time, to step aside?
Nicholas was taking off his grandfather’s tweed jacket. His clavicle was smooth and beautiful. She reached out and touched it.
THE NEXT MORNING SHE WOKE UP SMILING. IT WAS THE FIRST TIME in her life that she had woken up that way. She knew she must look ridiculous, lying there grinning, with her curls all around her head. Next to her, caught in the tempest of sheets, Nicholas was still asleep.
Remy rolled to her other side and took in the room that she had barely noticed the night before. The window was open slightly, admitting a breeze. With the slight movement of the window blind, sunshine swung in like a wand. Scanning the tall bureau and the Paul Klee print and the books and laundry in haphazard piles, Remy turned to the little bedside table and saw a photograph.
At first she thought she would wait until he woke up, but she found she couldn’t contain herself. “Who’s that?” She knew that if she spoke loudly enough he would wake. “Nicholas? Who is that?”
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