Sight Reading

by Daphne Kalotay

  Now Ginger was trying to look busy, as if she didn’t have time to chat with Maria. Hazel suspected that Ginger was in fact jealous, since Maria had such a successful business, money for all kinds of gaudy jewelry, and a loving husband and children and grandchildren. After all, here was Ginger, who made such an effort to keep fit, stay on top of things, was educated and polite and easy to get along with—whereas loud and at times uncouth Maria let everything hang out and had no curiosity about things that didn’t directly affect her, and still everything seemed to go her way.

  This was precisely what Hazel found so fascinating about Maria. Yet it did confuse her—about how to behave in the world. She herself was more like Ginger. And though she liked Ginger and was closer to her than most of her other friends, Hazel sometimes couldn’t stand her.

  For that reason she still hadn’t mentioned Hugh Greerson to Ginger. Since Ginger lived in Arlington and didn’t know the people from Jessie’s school, it was easy for Hazel to keep the whole thing with Hugh under wraps—though surely some of the other parents had noticed what was going on between them. Hazel herself had taken note when, a year ago, she glimpsed Hugh at First Night with Roberta Plotnik.

  Hugh. He had looked so thrilled when he finally kissed Hazel, the night they went to dinner and he dropped her off at home and then just leaned in so naturally, his lips soft, pleasant. Since then things had progressed beautifully. The socks had gone over very well. Yet even now Hazel knew to be wary. Experience had taught her that even the most charming man could surprise you. There had been Jerome Thau, for instance, whom she met back when she signed up with the matchmaking service, the one that advertised on the classical music station. Jerome Thau had been kind and polite, with a bashful laugh, and then, after three lovely dates, on a night when Jessie was at Remy and Nicholas’s, Hazel had gone to dine at his house and told herself that, if the occasion arose, she would spend the night with him. And just when the best part was beginning and Jerome Thau had removed most of Hazel’s clothing, and she most of his, and things were moving forward as she had hoped, Jerome Thau had donned a pair of weight-lifting gloves and asked Hazel to do something so odd and improbable, she still hadn’t brought herself to tell even Ginger about it.

  Next week Ginger would be leaving for another continent, trekking in Nepal, away for the entire month. Hazel was relieved at this; it allowed her a full four weeks to proceed with Hugh without the constant deception of withholding it from her. And if things continued to go well, Hazel would have a surprise for Ginger when she returned. It would be a miracle, perhaps—but why not? Why not a miracle, for once?

  Hazel felt her hope, tucked under her lungs, blooming again. There were times when she had thought it was gone for good, when she sat on the couch watching television, drinking her sauvignon blanc, certain that the very last of her hope had been killed off. But there it was, growing again, as unlikely as that might be. Even when she thought it had abandoned her forever, Hazel’s hope, hidden away, lived.

  THE WEATHER HAD TURNED FOR GOOD, NOTHING BUT COLD, THE trees naked and shivering. But the rehearsal room was warm. Remy was comforted by its familiar fuggy smell. This was one of the airtight Wenger rooms down in the basement of Symphony Hall, where, along with Christopher, a clarinetist, and Nora, the pianist, she had been rehearsing a piano trio for a fund-raiser for the Museum of Fine Arts.

  Now that they had finished, Remy placed her violin back in its case and carefully loosened her bow—well, not hers. She was trying it out on loan, not sure she would purchase it, though she longed to own something so beautiful.

  She had first tried it out two years ago. Just on a whim, while her luthier, Daniel, tallied up the fee for a violin repair. When she glimpsed the bow—silver and gold, the frog made of tortoiseshell, the adjuster bead of malachite—its beauty made her want to touch it. After discovering how good it felt in her fingers, and the gorgeous sounds it coaxed from her violin, she dared ask the price. Which made her hand it right back to Daniel.

  The bow was still there last week, when she entrusted Daniel with the latest bout of repairs. Her violin’s sound post had slipped, and then Daniel found two hairline cracks Remy hadn’t noticed. “It’s like a car,” Remy had said to him. “You think you just need a tune-up, and then it turns out the entire air-conditioning system has failed.”

  Daniel, a quiet, almost oddly serious man, had said nothing, and Remy worried she had insulted him. But then he said, so softly it was barely a suggestion, “That Melustrina you liked is still here.”

  The gorgeous bow—of course Remy had to try it again. She played a few of her favorite concert passages, and then an Irish jig, to test its responsiveness. She tried a bouncy spiccato, and then portamento. The bow was exquisite.

  Daniel had let her borrow it on loan.

  She told herself now, as she placed it in its slim slot in her case, that the bow would be more than a professional investment. It might even make a difference in her audition for associate concertmaster. Well, if indeed she were to audition . . .

  There was a sudden influx of air as the door to the rehearsal room opened. Nora said, “Oh, good, you’re here!”

  Remy looked up to see Yoni, his cheeks rosy, as if he had sprinted from the conservatory. “Hello!” he said in his confident way. He didn’t look surprised to find Remy there.

  “Hi, Yoni.” Remy had forgotten that he and Nora knew each other. She watched him introduce himself to Christopher, who sidelined in historical performance and even in his daily life looked like a character in a costume drama, with a long curling mustache and ankle-length cloak. Remy no longer recalled having found him odd. She watched Yoni shake his hand and, carefully buttoning the Melustrina into its slot, thought she might just go ahead and buy the bow, to hell with the price. It was a beautiful thing, and so little about her daily work was glamorous. For some reason she thought of the leopard-print thong.

  “We’re planning a little going-away party for a friend of ours,” Nora explained. To Yoni she said, “I’ll be right with you. Christopher and I just have to work out some scheduling.” She had taken out her datebook and was paging through it.

  “Oh, and I have to show you my latest discovery,” Christopher told Nora, who hadn’t yet seen the seventeenth-century flageolet he had apparently discovered in a bin at a garage sale in Concord.

  Remy shut her violin case. But instead of leaving, she found herself lingering by the piano, and played a few chords. Yoni stepped up beside her. “How are you, dear?” He played a little melody on the keys beside her.

  “Fine. How’s school?” Her hands pressed into the piano keys, another chord resounding.

  “The students are wonderful,” he said, “though sometimes, some of them, you know . . . they plop down a solo like they’re plunking a bag of groceries down on a table.” He laughed, while Christopher played Nora a little tune on the flageolet. To Remy it sounded like the call of some small, asthmatic bird. Yoni picked out the same tune on the piano.

  Remy moved her left hand down an octave and played the same chord in a lower register.

  “It needs a melody,” Yoni said, and then she felt his body almost behind her, an arm around one of her shoulders, his other hand alongside hers on the piano keys. Every hair on her body seemed suddenly to be standing on end. “Go ahead,” he said, “give me a chord.”

  She pressed into the keys, and Yoni improvised a little run, up and then down, right over her right hand, a loopy little melody, his playing not affected at all, it seemed, by the maimed finger and thumb. As his skin touched hers, something flashed inside her—but Yoni easily followed Remy’s lead when she switched keys altogether, and allowed himself to doodle around on the keyboard. His head was beside hers; it seemed that if she turned her head her mouth would be on his chin.

  Remy could hear Christopher telling Nora, “It’s an amazing find,” as Yoni lifted his hand and placed it directly over Remy’s, his fingers over hers. A flame coursed through her, straight down to her groin.
Remy bore down into the keys, a loud, rumbling chord.

  Yoni, his arms still encircling her, didn’t lift his hands. She could feel his pulse, and now his chin grazed the side of her head. His mouth came toward her ear. “I would fight for you.”

  The words were so soft, she might have dreamed them. She let the last groans of the piano strings reverberate into silence.

  Nora was blowing into the flageolet, trying to muster a tune. Remy took a deep breath, felt Yoni stepping back, his arms lifting away from her. Nora handed the flageolet back to Christopher.

  “I should have the Antiques Roadshow people appraise it,” Christopher said, and Remy laughed. But the laugh felt wrong.

  “I’d better get going, guys. Have a good afternoon.” She pulled on her jacket, feeling utterly confused.

  “See you at the museum,” Christopher said, and Nora gave a little wave.

  “See you.” Yoni, unsmiling, leaned in to kiss her good-bye. She kissed him quickly, still hearing his words in her ear—though by now they might have been a breeze, or her own thoughts.

  She took her violin case and left the room. Even as she stepped out of the building her pulse raced.

  THE NEXT MORNING, IN HER LONG WOOL CARDIGAN AND GRAY sweatpants and fuzzy slippers, Remy waited for Vivian.

  She was alone in the house, sipping black coffee in the kitchen. It was a small room, old and high ceilinged, with an ancient stove and a floor layered with linoleum; encountering it when they first viewed the house, six years ago, the realty agent had offered a panicked onslaught of suggestions for renovation. But it was a warm room, cozy despite the high ceilings, with a back door opening onto a patch of backyard.

  Remy sipped her coffee and thought. Another sort of woman would not be the least bit troubled by any of this. Another woman would not attach such significance to each small flurry of her heart.

  Whatever it was she was feeling was different, very different, from a few years ago, when she had gone through what her friend Vivian had informed her, with perfect math, was the seven-year itch. That was when Remy finally confided to Vivian, tearfully and with embarrassment, that she felt she was crawling out of her own skin. “I need something new so badly,” she had told Vivian. “Maybe I need to be away from Nicholas. I don’t know how people do it.” Vivian, who had never been married but seemed to possess an overall wisdom about the world, had assured her that this was a normal phenomenon and that the feeling would eventually dissolve. “Just make sure to never, ever, put yourself in a situation where you can follow through on your urges. It’s one thing to feel lust. It’s another to act on it.”

  The itch had indeed faded away. But this new feeling left her heavy, tumid with recollections—the murmured words in her ear, and the pulse of the piano beneath their mingling hands. She asked herself what in the world she could possibly want that she did not already have.

  The doorbell rang. “Hey, you.” Remy kissed her, Vivian in her tall fur hat and matching muff, a heavy embroidered coat that reached her ankles. “Let me in out of this weather,” Vivian said, the only person Remy knew who could dress this way and not look ridiculous.

  Just as Nicholas had his friend Gary, the one person completely outside his circle, Remy had Vivian, who lived off of a trust fund and owned an art gallery and sometimes called herself a photographer. Other times she called herself an art dealer. Now she lifted the fur hat off her head with two hands, up high, a champion displaying her trophy. Her hair rose with static. “It’s so cozy here.” She placed her hat on the table; it looked like a stuffed animal. “All right, what’s going on?”

  Remy spoke without pause, described what had occurred with Yoni in the rehearsal room. Vivian listened without question or comment, nodding like an expert.

  Finally Remy said, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Nothing, silly.” Vivian always made things sound so simple. “Feelings like that are normal. You’ve been through this before.”

  “No, this is different.”

  “Well, okay,” Vivian conceded, “I don’t mean to belittle it. But don’t you think it’s natural, too, when you’ve known someone so well, for so long? To have a sudden surge of affection? You two are very close. And let’s face it—he’s a very handsome man.”

  “It’s more than physical,” Remy told her. “Sometimes I think he understands me better than Nicholas.”

  “Well, come on, so do I.”

  Remy laughed.

  Vivian asked, “Have you thought about seeing a therapist?”

  Remy gave a loud sigh. Music was her meditation, her daily practice; she did not covet Vivian’s $100-per-hour psychoanalyst, just as she did not covet her fur hat and muff, her artist lovers in their East Boston lofts, or the rich clients who sent top-quality champagne at the holidays and tried to match the paintings they purchased with the fabric of their sofas.

  She said, “I take everything too seriously. It’s from being a musician. I’m used to trying to get every little thing just right. I can’t just let something be, and not examine it, or ponder it. I can’t not think that this really matters. It does matter.”

  Vivian’s eyes opened wider. “Remy. Are you falling in love?”

  Remy felt her own eyes widen. “Oh.” She thought for a moment. “I don’t know.” Pulling at a few of the woolly pills on her sweater, she asked, “Why can’t I be one of those women who don’t obsess about these things? Who don’t feel bad about it? You know, the ones who don’t read into every little thing?” She was recalling the time when she had wanted to live like Oscar Wilde—insouciant, decadent, her candle burning at both ends. “I wish I were one of those carefree, witty women. The ones who don’t take love so seriously. Who don’t let these things overtake them.”

  Vivian looked puzzled. “Who are those women?”

  Chapter 5

  THEY WERE AT HUGH’S HOUSE, SITTING BEFORE THE FIREPLACE, watching flames wrap themselves around logs. Hazel had kicked off her shoes and folded her legs to her side, propping herself up on one arm, aware of the curve of her body. Next to her, Hugh was leaning back on his arms, his legs stretched out ahead of him in corduroy pants, his feet in thick socks, one over the other. Caves of ashes glowed beneath the grill.

  Luke was at a sleepover. Jessie was at that Halloween party (and in Nicholas and Remy’s charge). Hazel watched the infinitesimal adjustments of each collapsing log, each dripping ember, and felt all around her the luxury of a night alone with Hugh. She was awash in ripeness, in possibility. Beyond the windows was an incredible blackness.

  “I can’t remember the last time I roasted chestnuts.”

  “I never have, actually,” Hugh admitted. “I saw them at Bread & Circus and thought it might be a nice treat.”

  Hazel smiled; she adored this man—how could she not adore him, with his honesty and goodness and spur-of-the-moment chestnuts? At last she had found someone right for her, just when it seemed there was no hope left. “Sometimes I think that’s the most wonderful part of life,” she told him. “Not the big, fancy things. It’s the little, hidden treats.”

  Hugh nodded, a bit gravely, Hazel thought. “It’s funny, isn’t it,” she continued, “how life gets tossed into baskets that way? I mean, there are the days that people assume are the most important ones, like your wedding day, or the day your child is born, the few defining events, the tragedies, too—that’s one basket. And there are the tiny wondrous moments that barely anyone else will ever know about, that’s another basket. And then there’s everything else.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Hugh said.

  “I don’t, usually.” She thought again and added, “Sometimes I feel like I’m passing through the days, and other times I feel like the days are mine.”

  Hugh reached over to run his fingers through her hair. “And which kind of a day is this?”

  “It’s mine, but I’m sharing it with you.”

  He gave her a very serious look and leaned over to kiss her, longer this time than t
he good night kiss last week. The fire was stronger now, bright scarves of flame whipping at each other. Hugh kissed her again, and this time he did not pause except to say something brief and meaningless, so sweet and surprising that Hazel at once forgot what it was. Nor was she sure of what she said back. They continued this way, saying things in little bursts, moving closer, Hugh’s fingers working open the top few buttons of Hazel’s blouse.

  He would see the white splotches, she knew. She felt herself shrinking back, told herself not to, told herself that in this light, the spots would not be noticed. But suddenly, just as she had feared, Hugh pulled away.

  The chestnuts had caught fire. There was the smell of scorching while with tongs Hugh rescued the blistered foil. Hazel was rebuttoning her blouse, her fingers fumbling. The logs leaked orange ash. Hugh turned to look at her just as she secured the top button, then looked down at the burned foil as if it meant something. His face changed, and he tugged open the wrinkled folds of foil. There they were, little chestnut brains, some of them brown, some of them blackened. Hugh said, “I think they’re okay.”

  Hazel gave a laugh to show that it didn’t matter. But it sounded wrong. Why did that always happen to her—even a genuine emotion, when it most mattered, sounding false?

  Hugh, too, looked disturbed. Hazel said, “We should probably wait for them to cool.”

  Hugh was looking into the steam that rose from the chestnuts as if it contained a private message. Hazel saw him swallow, saw the pensive movement of his throat. She decided it was better not to say anything more.

  After what felt like a very long minute, in a quiet voice, Hugh said, “I’ve been thinking. . . .”

  Hazel felt a wrenching inside of her. Whatever Hugh was about to say would have to do with her; it might be wonderful or it might be terrible. And as much as she supposed that it might be something good, what her heart felt was more like terror.

  “I’ve been having such a good time with you,” Hugh said, and swallowed again. “A really wonderful time.”