“I think it’s still deciding.” Yoni picked up the menu, a brief, handwritten one, and squinted. “What time is it?”
“Time to call Cybil.”
“Right. I’ll go see if there’s a pay phone.” He stood and went to the back hallway.
When Yoni had disappeared, the man in the blue felt cap pulled his chair closer to Remy’s. “You speak good English?” he asked.
“I like to think so.”
“What you think of this?” He handed her a sheet of bright yellow paper with little tear-offs of a telephone number at the bottom. Remy skimmed the text—too long for a flyer—something about trading used cars for land in Costa Rica. There were numerous misspellings, but Remy didn’t feel like correcting them.
“I give you some!” the man said brightly, trying to hand her some more flyers.
“No, no, thank you.”
“Oh, okay,” the man said, sounding hurt. Taking the flyers back, he turned abruptly away.
Yoni had reappeared. “She’s not going to be able to join us,” he said, and then, nodding his head toward the next table, “What was that about?”
“A business proposition. Used cars and oceanfront property.” Yoni sat down across from her. “Too bad Cybil can’t make it,” she added as he unrolled his cutlery from the napkin. Really, though, she was content knowing it would be just the three of them, their little family.
Yoni didn’t respond; he seemed to be thinking to himself. “So, what’s new, how are things? How’s dear Jess?”
“Oh, you know, she always manages to have a good time.” Remy laughed. “I have to admit, sometimes I’m jealous of her. Or maybe just . . . envious.” Of Jessie’s ease, her endless summer, lying around reading those paperbacks, holding lengthy telephone conversations with that boy Kevin, and long sessions of giggling with Allison. “I mean, when I was her age, I was this anxious girl practicing my violin for hours. I watch Jessie at her swim meets and soccer practice, and there she is, always enjoying herself, scoring goals, winning. . . . Of course, she’s completely unmotivated about anything other than sports.”
The waitress, the same gray-haired woman, presented them with a basket of dark bread and a tray of olive oil and offered to bring a bottle of the house wine. Then she left them.
Yoni immediately began tearing at the bread though it had already been sliced. He always ate this way, Remy had noticed, zealously cracking things apart, so that when the dishes were cleared there was a ring of crumbs or seeds around where his plate had been. Sometimes Remy found herself watching his hands, entranced by the wounded one. It made her feel childish, the urge to stare at this deformity. Other times she didn’t even notice it.
“Do you and Nicholas want to have a child of your own?” Yoni asked, dipping the bread in oil.
Remy watched him chew, heard the familiar pop of his jaw. Tonight his face was unshaven, so that he looked Mediterranean, tougher, his cheekbones more defined. Remy reached over and wiped some crumbs from his cheek. “I guess that’s the one thing Nicholas and I can’t manage to do together.” She shrugged, to show that really it didn’t matter. She had made a decision to stop trying; it was simply too painful. It surprised her now to realize that Nicholas had never mentioned any of this to Yoni. “To be honest, I’ve always found something slightly greedy in people having kids all the time. There are already so many children without families and homes.”
“Oh, come on, cut the self-righteousness.”
“I’m not trying to be self-righteous,” Remy said. But she relented. “Look, I would love to have a baby. It’s something I’ve wanted for a long time. It would be nice. Yeah. Really nice.” It felt good to say it aloud. This was something she rarely spoke about anymore, though there had been a few years when she had spent tearful hours talking her friend Vivian’s ear off about it, until she realized that Vivian was tired of hearing Remy complain. Even now she felt the need to add, “At a certain point I realized that everyone has something like this.”
“What do you mean, ‘like this’?”
“Everyone has something they want but don’t get to have.”
Yoni seemed to consider this. “Do you really think that’s true?”
Remy nodded. “It’s what makes us human. Or maybe what keeps us . . . moral.” She thought for a moment. “What about you?”
“What’s my unfulfilled desire?” He seemed caught off guard.
“No, I mean do you think you’ll ever want to have children.”
“Oh,” he said briskly, relieved, “yes, I do. With the right person, yes, I would. Very much.”
That he responded so quickly, and in the affirmative, surprised her. “I must say, Yoni, I’d assumed you were a perpetual bachelor.”
“I believe in family,” he said.
Remy thought about this. “The truth is,” she told him, “Jessie really is more than enough for me. I don’t mean that as a complaint, by the way. I’m talking about love.”
Yoni smiled warmly. Feeling somehow embarrassed, Remy looked toward the door and said, “Nicholas appears to have vanished.” And then: “Should we be worried?”
“Knowing Nicholas, no.”
Remy smiled. “True.”
Then Yoni’s face changed. “Does everything really come so easily to him? I’ve often wondered that. It seems that way, but then I think it might just be the aura he gives off.”
“He works incredibly hard.” Remy heard how defensive she sounded.
“Well, of course, I know that, I just meant—”
“There’s no struggle,” Remy said flatly. “Believe me, I know exactly what you mean.”
Yoni nodded, almost imperceptibly. “It’s hard, isn’t it, when one of the people you love most in the world doesn’t quite understand what it feels like.” He paused, as if revisiting some painful moment. “I mean that he maybe doesn’t know what a certain kind of . . . frustration might feel like.”
Remy supposed Yoni must be talking about himself, about how Nicholas made him feel, and felt a sudden tenderness toward him. She reached out to take his hand in hers. “He doesn’t mean to do it. That’s what I have to remind myself. He can’t help it if he doesn’t understand.” Yoni’s hand felt warm in hers. She heard herself say, “I do sometimes wonder what my life would be like with him if it hadn’t been so easy. For him to win me, I mean. If he’d had to fight a bit more, to get me. If he’d had to fight for me.”
Immediately she felt that she had told on Nicholas. Ashamed, she looked down at her plate, and brought her hand back to her lap. Yoni, too, was quiet, just thinking, perhaps, until the waitress arrived with the wine—a bottle already uncorked, as if pilfered from some lunch table in Italy. The waitress filled their glasses and, without waiting for their approval, left the bottle on the table and walked away.
“It’s perfectly fine,” Yoni said, somewhat awkwardly, after a small sip. “Could be fun to get drunk on it.”
Now the man with the bulldog face approached them. “I draw you,” he said, in another unplaceable accent, and held out a sketchbook into which he had scratched the image of a man and a woman who looked slightly like themselves. The man who was supposed to be Yoni was leaning toward the woman. Around them the artist had drawn the shape of a heart.
“Oh!” Remy said, and gave a little laugh—but Yoni was considering the drawing, not smiling. The bulldog man seemed suddenly nervous. “I leave you,” he said, taking the sketch away, and went back to his table and to the blond woman, looking dejected. Yoni’s eyes followed him.
Immediately the man in the blue felt cap at the next table pulled his chair closer to Remy’s. “People give him a little money, you know.” He nodded toward the man with the bulldog face. “For his art. People like to give him a little something.”
“No, thank you,” Remy said, trying to smile politely, and the man in the blue cap pulled his chair away again, back to the man in the black one. The air in the room felt suddenly sharper; Remy pulled the neck of her sweater higher. “I c
aught a chill, somehow.”
“Here.” From the back of his chair Yoni undraped his gray wool scarf with the short tassels and reached across the table, placing the scarf around Remy’s shoulders. “How’s that?”
“Thanks, Yoni.” Remy readjusted her shoulders under the scarf. Quickly she asked, “What do you think’s happened to my husband?”
“Let’s see,” Yoni said, repleating his napkin. “There are probably no parking spots, and the garages are full, and knowing Nicholas, he managed to get lost. Or something could have happened to the car. It broke down. No, let’s see, Nicholas is driving, I would guess that he’s had an accident.” He said it not cruelly but reasonably, as if having given all possibilities equal consideration.
“With his driving record,” Remy said, “it’s probably all of the above. Should we order? Or should we call the police?”
Yoni raised his hand to call the gray-haired woman over.
“Yes?” she asked.
“We heard there was a fortune-teller.”
“She has strep throat,” she told him. “But that man over there will draw your picture for you.”
Yoni blinked, a look of recognition, but shook his head. “No, thank you.”
That was when Nicholas walked in. “Come here, you,” Remy called to him, and kissed his cheek, feeling almost duplicitous, somehow, as he settled into the chair next to her.
Yoni said, “I congratulate you, Nicholas. This is truly the most bizarre establishment I’ve ever come to eat in.”
Nicholas shook his head, looking exhausted, and said, “So many things have happened to me.”
AT FIRST HE SIMPLY COULDN’T FIND A PARKING SPOT. HE MADE A slow tour of each square block, gradually at a farther and farther remove from the restaurant, until, quite suddenly, he was lost. In the darkness, nothing looked familiar, and he drove for minutes more before he found that he had arrived, somehow, near Back Bay. It was at that point that he believed he had found a space, directly across from a brightly lit hotel. But when he tried to park, the car wouldn’t fit. He tried for a good few minutes while the boldly costumed hotel valets passively watched. Then, after attempting to pull back out into the street, he struck the corner of a passing car.
The car stopped, flicked on its hazard lights. A woman stepped out and walked to the front, where Nicholas’s bumper had tapped it. Nicholas, too, had emerged from his vehicle. “So sorry. I hope there’s no damage.” Already he had noticed that her bumper was dented.
The woman didn’t look furious, merely annoyed. “You’d better give me your insurance information.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Nicholas went to find the papers in the glove box. To his delight, the papers were there. The woman took down the information, watched by the hotel valets in their long red cloaks.
The woman thanked him, returned to her car, and drove off. The street was suddenly quiet, lit by the shiny hotel and the bright shard of moon. As he opened the door to the Volvo, Nicholas saw a woman emerge from the hotel. Tall, with long limbs and a haughty, brisk stride. A name rose from the folds of memory: “Sylvane.”
She turned to look. “Yes?”
He crossed the street, watched her face broaden in recognition. They kissed each other’s cheeks. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Leaving,” she said. “My flight is at eleven.”
“Back to Paris? But I didn’t even know you were in town!”
“Just briefly. A dear friend of mine was married this weekend. Otherwise I would have loved to see you.”
His thoughts were adjusting now, readjusting—to Sylvane, the memory of who she was: a fellow composer whom he much admired. Physically, there was something elongated about her, the aquiline nose, the narrow gloved hands. Her neck and shoulders she held very straight, as if perpetually offended. She had always impressed him.
But she had not yet achieved the recognition she deserved. In the past five years or so this fact had become more and more pronounced, an element of her very being, of her Sylvane-ness, a certain fatigue behind her eyes, as if weighed down by disappointment. There was the visiting composer position that Nicholas had recommended her for, which, when the competition was finally narrowed down to just two, had gone to the other candidate. There was the post in New York that she had been selected for; at the last minute, due to a funding problem, the offer was rescinded. There was the annual composition prize for which she had been short-listed four years in a row.
With Remy, Nicholas had debated the reasons for this. He maintained it was just one of those things, some other composer always happening to win the judges’ favor. But Remy pointed out that each one of those prizes had gone to a man (as had the visiting composer position). Well, of course they did, Nicholas nearly said in exasperation. Instead he simply explained, “You know how much it costs to maintain an orchestra. It all comes down to raising money. And men, dear Remy, as much as I hate to say it, are the ones with the money.”
“Right, right, and they’re more comfortable handing their money over to other, fellow, men—is that it?”
Nicholas nodded. “They trust men with their investment.” But he did not think Sylvane a victim of the situation; she simply had not yet had her lucky break. Her music was lush, gorgeous. At times it reminded him of Rachmaninoff, something vast and sorrowful about it—yet too much sorrow could kill a living thing, and listening to Sylvane’s work, Nicholas often felt the frustration of some heavy dark cloud always blocking one’s view.
Even now, as they chatted on the cold sidewalk, the valets in their long cloaks half-listening with boredom, Nicholas heard the defeat in her voice.
“I hope you’re having a good work year,” he told her, wanting to be encouraging. “I’m always waiting to hear what you’ll come up with next.”
“You are very good at flattery,” she said.
“I say what I mean.” Sometimes when Nicholas heard her music he physically ached.
“Thank you for the compliment.”
Something about her reminded him, quite suddenly, of Hazel. It flustered him as he asked her how her husband was, and their children. Even as she in turn asked Nicholas about his work, his life in Boston, his wife and daughter, he found himself overcome by the sensation that he was somehow responsible for this woman’s disappointment.
The feeling was increasingly familiar these days, ever since his daughter’s teenage sullenness, ever since Hazel’s annoyed message at his work number last week, about forgetting to take Jessie to her dental appointment, ever since the other night when Remy had come to bed in a new creamy silk nightgown that Nicholas had immediately wanted to peel off. “What’s this?” he had said, pulling it up over her hips, and Remy had sighed in a way that sounded less like pleasure and more like resignation.
“I’d like to conduct one of your pieces,” Nicholas heard himself say to Sylvane. “At the conservatory next fall. I told them I’d conduct again while the director is on sabbatical.”
Sylvane gave an odd smile. “How nice. Please don’t feel you have to do that.”
“I want to,” he said. “The concerto for viola. It’s a favorite of mine. I know just the soloist for it.”
Sylvane’s face had softened. “That’s kind of you, Nicholas.”
“It would be a pleasure.” Really it was nothing much. But already he felt better. “Won’t you let me take you to the airport?”
“Surely you have better things to do?”
“My car’s right here.”
“I cannot let you do that. There is a subway station across the street and I can go for just eighty-five cents.”
Nicholas smiled. “Let me take you, please. That way we can continue our conversation.”
She was going to relent, he could see, the way that she reached for the handle of her valise. But then she narrowed her eyes. “Are you not on your way to somewhere else?”
“Oh!” Nicholas remembered. “I can use the hotel phone,” he told her, “to call the restaurant and tell
them I’ll be late.”
Sylvane laughed. “No! You go where you’re supposed to be! You’re too kind, my friend, I’m happy to see your face. You make me laugh. Here, I kiss you.” She kissed his cheeks. “And I hope to see you again soon.”
MUCH LATER THAT SAME NIGHT, WHILE NICHOLAS SLEPT SOMEWHAT fitfully (the fault, he supposed, of that strange house wine), autumn sneaked in for good, the bone chill, wind like fangs. Nicholas woke with a mild headache, if not from the wine, then from the long, odd night. Service had been slow, the meal late, the conversation somehow awkward, not at all what he had envisioned—and then he had been unable to recall where he had parked the car. He felt disgruntled at the gods who usually protected him, that they had let his whimsy fail. As he peeled back the covers to begin his descent from the half-empty bed, his stomach made an unpleasant sound; that gypsy food hadn’t sat well with him.
Remy had already left for rehearsal. Soon Nicholas, too, was on his way to work, feeling less than robust. All across campus, radiators were hissing with renewed effort, sputtering, clanking spastically, so that to Nicholas the entire place felt like an old car trying to start. He really would have preferred not to come to work today at all. But it was his job that afternoon to present an award to one of the students.
Now the award recipients were clustered with a small group of faculty and students eating rolled sandwiches and flat colorless cookies. Conservatory tradition had all award ceremonies followed by a buffet luncheon, to ensure a greater attendance.
“Bravo, Nicholas.” It was his colleague George Frank, using a pair of metal tongs to pick through an enormous basin of salad. George refused to eat any exposed fruits or vegetables. Not tomatoes or zucchini or anything that hung off a vine or a bush. He would eat peas in a pod, but not shelled peas. Even after ten years, Nicholas didn’t quite understand.
“I liked the introduction you gave there,” George said. “Witty and brief, the way everyone likes them.”
Sight Reading Page 15
