Sight Reading

by Daphne Kalotay

  “Oh, love,” Nicholas said when he turned to see her. He came close and leaned in—carefully, as if to breathe the scent of a rosebush. The first thing he kissed was her wrist, one and then the other.

  Chapter 6

  THIS SATURDAY’S LECTURE BY VISITING CONDUCTOR NICHOLAS Elko has been canceled due to a death in the family. Our thoughts are with him in this time of sadness.”

  Nicholas dropped his travel bag, felt his skin grow cold. The flyers were posted all around the little train station, and though they were written in Italian, he didn’t need his years of study in order to translate; his love of opera meant he was used to words like “death” and “sadness” being hurled back and forth. His heart began a frenzied pounding. Who had died, and why hadn’t he been informed?

  A wreath of sweat broke from his scalp. Jessie, in an accident at day camp? Hazel, run over by a Boston driver? Awful possibilities raced before him: his sister at her military outpost, attacked by a traumatized patient . . . His demented father lost in the Paps of Jura . . . Now he was fully sweating. He ran to the ticket window, where a man with a curling mustache smoked a cigarette as if the world were the same place it had always been. That’s me, Nicholas explained, his voice shaking as he pointed at one of the flyers and tried to discern the source of this news.

  Only hours later, when from a clunky pay phone at the post office he had called all possible relatives across three continents and two islands and found everyone to be living, did Nicholas understand that there had been a mistake. An official at the music festival slowly uncovered the mix-up: it was another composer—the one from Barcelona—whose relative had died. Sorry for the confusion. Mi dispiace.

  Nicholas looked past the boxy telephone out to the peaceful green hills and accepted the apology. He retrieved his bag and suit jacket and made his way down the town’s one road, past bobbing poppies and tall, scrappy weeds. Only as he approached the little hotel where the festival had booked him a room did it strike him as odd that the notices would have been posted at the station. Shouldn’t they have been at the lecture hall instead? Typical Italian inefficiency . . . Well, it wasn’t worth blaming anyone, he told himself as he followed the innkeeper, a gray-haired woman with two pairs of glasses dangling around her neck, down the hallway to his room.

  The woman spoke in a rapid, rote way that Nicholas didn’t quite follow—something about the outside door locking at eleven p.m.—and handed Nicholas a metal ring with four small keys. It lay in his palm like an awkward insect while the woman indicated which key would let Nicholas into the building should he be out past that respectable hour. The other three keys she dismissed, explaining, as far as Nicholas could make out, that any key at all could open the door to his room.

  With that she left him. Nicholas removed his travel clothes—acrid with dried sweat—and lay naked on the thick, coarse sheets. Taking deep breaths, he listened to his heartbeats and tried not to think about the train station.

  He had nearly confessed to Hazel, right there on the telephone, so relieved was he to hear her voice. But the awkward half-second delay would have made such a conversation even more painful. What mattered was what they had been spared. Everyone was all right.

  Yet even now, as the evening sun began its descent, Nicholas felt the echo of something dark: the heartache of a widower, the mourning of a father, the suffering of a brother, of a son. No matter that the misunderstanding had been cleared up. It was as if every one of those possible tragedies had occurred.

  Nicholas told himself that it was over now, everyone was fine. He had been swallowed by an abyss, tossed back up, and survived. Everything would be all right.

  It was what he had been telling himself ever since quitting Remy. He’d had no choice but to end it, now that Hazel was back. That he had allowed himself to become that most unexceptional of creatures, a cheating husband . . . The very banality of it bothered him as much as his own wretchedness.

  When his pulse had finally slowed, Nicholas rose and bathed and dressed for dinner. He was to dine with the festival’s director, a man named Lothar—a German businessman who had lived in Italy for decades and fancied himself a musician. Nicholas had dined with him in this tiny town twice before. A village, really, known only for its music festival and for an old castle that, in an effort to win a Michelin star, had years earlier been restored to its original decrepitude. Walking to the restaurant, Nicholas even noted the same village idiot from his last visit, an old man who greeted pedestrians by waving menacingly and saying nasty things about their mothers. The man was as much a fixture of the festival as the fading purple banners that lined the narrow street; as the string quartets popping up all over and at all hours; as the Polish opera company that performed the complete repertoire of Mozart’s operettas; as Lothar, who attended nearly every concert and made sure that at the week’s end each performer received a souvenir—always some useless, unattractive object that looked to have been mass-manufactured at a German factory.

  The restaurant was filled with festival-goers, and the waiters were making the most of the extra business, flirting with everyone, showing off. A week from now the festival would be over, and the town would again be sleepy and quiet, with nothing to do but wait for next summer. “I’m so glad we were able to convince you to join us again,” Lothar said in his practiced English as he and Nicholas tucked themselves into their little table and joined the din of the low-ceilinged room. “The festival missed you last year.”

  There wasn’t much chance for detailed conversation; with so many festival members in evidence, Lothar had to keep getting up and shaking hands and winking at people. Aspiring composers pulled cassettes from their pockets and handed them off swiftly, like drug dealers. Nicholas gnawed happily at the tiny grilled birds he had ordered.

  “Fancy running into you again!”

  Nicholas looked up to see his old classmate Anna. “How’s Boston?” she asked.

  “Oh, hello. What a nice surprise.” Really he felt annoyed, recalling the night at the club in Boston, and, more recently, what Yoni had said about her. It was as if he weren’t being permitted even this brief break from that other life. Anna seemed to sense this and looked somehow offended.

  “Ah, my two favorite people!” Lothar called everyone his favorite. “How are you, Anna?”

  “Late for dessert, I see.” She glanced back at her table. “But I’ll make sure to catch up with you later.”

  Nicholas was relieved when she walked away. Lothar sat down and took up his abandoned food. “You’ve grown up,” he announced as he dislodged a bird from a skewer. “There are lines at the sides of your mouth. Yes, it’s no longer a boy’s face. Even you have been aged by life, then?”

  The image that came to Nicholas was of her wrists, and her curls, and her wide brown eyes. His jaw had trembled when he explained to her that they had to end things.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” Remy had said flatly. “I still love you.” And though Nicholas had nothing but contempt for the way Americans said “I love you” all the time, hearing Remy say it, he felt an urge to speak, though he didn’t know what to say. There was a horrible stretchy feeling in his chest.

  “I love you,” she had repeated, defiant. But Nicholas managed to keep his mouth shut, and walked away.

  Nicholas described to Lothar his move to Boston and his busy summer schedule. He slid from his wallet photos of Jessie and of Hazel, and launched into a detailed description of his job at the conservatory, and the various commissions that had been coming his way. Talking soothed his nerves. He drank more red wine than usual and found himself telling Lothar about the posters at the station.

  Lothar listened carefully, then said, “To me it sounds suspiciously like a dream. You’re sure you didn’t dream it?”

  “More like a nightmare,” Nicholas grumbled.

  Lothar nodded. “It has all the elements, doesn’t it? A foreign location. Panicked phone calls. A symbolic death. And, most interestingly, that momentous question
, now that you’ve lost someone important, perhaps the most important person in your life: Who is that person?”

  Nicholas frowned. Psychoanalytic rubbish. As bad as his sister. “I don’t go in for dream analysis,” he said. But a bad taste had risen in his throat. The afternoon’s scare was still very real and nothing he was prepared to analyze.

  “Well,” Lothar said briskly, “I’ll see to it that by tomorrow the last of those flyers will have disappeared. You’ll forget you ever saw them. And your lecture will be well attended, don’t worry.”

  Nicholas wasn’t worried at all, though he hadn’t yet prepared his lecture; he would do it tonight before he went to bed. But the thought of the flyers still troubled him, somehow.

  At the end of the evening, he wished Lothar and Anna good night and walked back toward the hotel. There was some sort of discotheque up at the castle, and from over the high stone wall, like a shower of noisy stars, came the tinny sound of pumping dance music.

  Those posters at the station, of all places.

  And his poor mother at the railway crossing . . .

  Ah, right, yes. Nicholas felt almost a dolt for not having thought of it sooner. After all, the association must have been there all along, in his mind. Trains, death. How odd that they should come together this way again—though really Nicholas had never consciously made the connection. He loved trains, loved travel. And rarely thought about his mother at all. Her death wasn’t anything to dwell on (though as a child he had sometimes found himself imagining it, in slow motion, as in an action film).

  At the hotel, the front door hadn’t been locked. Filled with the reassurance of imminent sleep, Nicholas made his way down the dark hall and let himself into his room. Only after he closed the door did he notice that, by mistake, he had used his house key from home.

  THE DAY THAT NICHOLAS LEFT FOR ITALY, THE WEATHER GREW SUDDENLY very hot. Remy’s room became close, stale air caught in the eaves. Worse than that was the ache that had started in her wrists—a dull pain that increased during the night and woke her from sleep.

  The next day the pain was even worse. Remy felt tightening around her a chain of fears she had never before considered: that she had some awful disease, that she would become a cripple, that she would have to give up the violin altogether. She recalled her old teacher, Mrs. Lepik, forced to end her concert career when physical therapy and cortisone shots failed to relieve the tendonitis in her elbow. In class with Conrad Lesser, Remy had to make an effort not to let the pain show on her face.

  Somehow the pain seemed shameful, a sign of something worse than mere tendonitis. Something horrible was happening. Even as she worked her hours at the music library, and swam at the Y, and performed with her quartet (not daring to mention the pain, fearful they might think she couldn’t work anymore), and managed through it all to chat and laugh as usual, behind the chatter lurked this new, frightening pain.

  She allowed herself to wonder if Nicholas’s kisses had somehow been cursed. Surely she was being punished—for trying to claim something that wasn’t hers. For trying to live freely and fearlessly, like Oscar Wilde.

  In this world there are only two tragedies; one is not getting what one wants, the other is getting it.

  She thought of her old conservatory flings, and Peter from her dormitory saying, “Now you’ve been deflowered,” and supposed that she would never again have such carefree relationships. She recalled the joy she had felt that first night with Nicholas and in the morning waking up smiling. Seeing him again, that day on Boylston Street, she hadn’t even cared, anymore, what Lesser said about her career. Standing naked before Nicholas, all she had wanted from life was him.

  With Nicholas she had felt lit from within.

  To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

  To break up with her last week he said, “Don’t you see? It wouldn’t be good between us.”

  They were in her apartment when he said it, standing at the door, and Remy had begun pummeling him. “Why? Because you decided it wouldn’t be?”

  “Look,” he had said, when she grew exhausted with hitting him. “I’m going away. I leave next week, and I’ll be far away. By the time I get back you’ll have forgotten all about me.”

  “Don’t give me that garbage! How dare you use a line like that on me!”

  “I just mean . . .” But she could tell that he didn’t have the slightest idea what he meant.

  And now Remy was being punished.

  She had told herself a music career didn’t matter, that there was this other, better happiness—but that too had been snatched away.

  Her wrists throbbed fitfully.

  Well, what if she did give up the violin? She could grow her nails long, paint them magenta like Sandy’s. Lose the scar on her neck. She thought of Samantha, off in New York getting a degree in music therapy. There was another musician she knew, a boy, who had quit the cello and instead was training to be an audiologist.

  But could Remy really do such a thing?

  No—no! She could not. Music was her life, the violin was her life, especially now, without Nicholas. If she couldn’t have him. If she wasn’t allowed to have him.

  Lying across her bed as the little fan anemically stirred the air around her, Remy decided: I don’t care what Lesser thinks. Music is all I have.

  THE WEEK PASSED PLEASANTLY ENOUGH, AND NICHOLAS SOON FELT restored. His lecture was well attended. Lothar sat in the back, taking impassioned notes, and only one person, the man who had written a history of La Scala, asked an obnoxious question at the end. In response, Nicholas told a joke he had stored up for just such occasions. Afterward he couldn’t help feeling confident—that he would return home to his old self, free of that spell that had gripped him. Life would return to what it had always been.

  Since this was the final day of the conference, there was a picnic luncheon up at the castle. Nicholas shook hands with people he had met and wouldn’t see until the next festival of this sort. A contralto from Sweden said, “I was so sorry to hear your news.”

  “What news?”

  “There was an accident?”

  “An accident . . .”

  “Someone passed away? And yet you stayed.”

  “Oh, the posters.” Amazing, Nicholas thought, how quickly rumors grow. “There was no accident. It was all a mistake.”

  “Some mistake!”

  Again Nicholas found himself recounting how it had felt to see those flyers at the station, how his heart had nearly stopped. The episode had become a mere anecdote, he realized, when really he had never in his thirty-one years been so worried.

  “Ah, you’re here, good!” It was Anna, who appeared to have taken up with a fellow conductor. Nicholas had noticed the two of them walking arm in arm.

  Now the closing ceremony was taking place. Some paid vague attention, while others continued to chat. Nicholas turned toward the platform where the town’s mayor was thanking the participants. A young man lugged a bass fiddle over cobblestones, while next to Nicholas a baritone went on about a polyp that had grown on his throat. All across the grounds were musicians and singers exchanging telephone numbers and performance schedules. Anna wrote her contact information on the back of a Corelli program for Nicholas and said, “I’m going to go find Hans.”

  Nicholas stuffed the Corelli program into his jacket pocket and watched Lothar distributing the souvenirs. Everyone—men and women—received the same ugly brown and white silk scarf. Nicholas heard the Swedish contralto say, practically, “I will wrap my necklaces in it.”

  He helped himself to a glass of wine and wandered away from the ceremony, toward the north side of the castle, where the view was finest. The hills piled up against the horizon as if the world really was this peaceful. To the left, past the fields and sunflowers, the little train station awaited him.

  Just glimpsing it, Nicholas felt his pulse quicken. Those posters tacked all over the place . . . Only now did they seem to him embarrassing
, a public display of subconscious fears. In that way, it was as though he had dreamed it. Lothar was right, Nicholas nearly laughed to himself, though he couldn’t, quite. He still felt the frustration of that unanswered question. Who is that person? He shook his head at himself—Freudian nonsense. Yet he could not dispel the residue of those panicked telephone calls, and the contralto asking about the “accident,” so stupid . . .

  The glass of wine fell from his hand, shattering at his feet. For a moment Nicholas just stood there, mouth agape, while the thought pulsed through him. Then he rushed back down the narrow street, to the café where there was a call box. An operator helped him complete the call, to the military station in Nairobi.

  Once again his sister’s voice came across a slightly crackling line.

  He told her, “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “Are you all right, Nicholas?”

  “When Mother drove onto the tracks. She knew the train was coming, don’t you see? She meant to do it.”

  Silence on the other end, that other continent.

  Nicholas was nearly tripping over his words. “Did anyone believe that piffle about the ‘new electrical signals’? We just accepted what they told us.”

  Softly Glenda said, “We were children, that’s why. You were a tot when you first asked what happened.”

  His father grumbling, “A stupid accident,” and nothing more. Only years later had an aunt explained to Nicholas about the railway signals.

  Glenda said, “You can’t tell me you’ve never wondered before.”

  Nicholas found he was leaning against the wall of the call box. “You mean you knew?”

  “Just look at her eyes in that photograph.” Glenda’s tone was annoyingly matter-of-fact. “It’s clear she was deeply depressed.”

  “Postpartum depression,” Nicholas heard himself say, to show Glenda he understood the implication. “Isn’t that it?”