Sight Reading (5 page)

Mrs. Sprat was fitting herself into a chair near her husband. “Yeah, so, it's all a big cover-up,” one of the younger men was saying—the heavyset, sloppy-looking one with the cracker crumbs at the corner of his mouth. “Nobody's talking, though.” He was leaning back in their one good armchair, going on about some local scandal involving a city councillor. He didn't work at the conservatory. His name was Gary, and he was a freelance journalist. A few weeks ago he had written a fawning article about Nicholas, with two misquotes that Nicholas maintained were much better than what he had actually said. This evening he had already managed to mention, as if in passing, having met President Reagan and Isabella Rossellini—but Hazel could tell that “met” might be an overstatement.

“Mollusks,” the other young man, Yoni, declared. “Spineless, the lot of them.” He was slim and dashing and had an Israeli accent. Two girls, both of them skinny and slim-hipped, sat on either side of him on the couch. Students from the conservatory—though Hazel detected a girlfriend-y air. Something about the way they reclined there, the alignment of their bodies with his: Could they
both
be his girlfriends? They looked absolutely comfortable, as though they sat on that couch all the time. Perhaps they
did
sit there all the time. Her pulse hastened with the thought. This wasn't at all what she had pictured for the party.

“But won't someone leak the truth?” Frank or George asked. He was pushing all of his tomatoes from the tomato-mozzarella salad over to the edge of his plate. Hazel's heart sank while Gary the newspaperman began talking about press leaks. “There's bound to be something about it in the
Herald
.”

A debate began about responsible journalism while Hazel served a bit of the mozzarella salad to herself, to see what was wrong with the tomatoes. “Do you think any of it will come back to haunt City Hall?” Nicholas asked, beside her on the love seat.

“Nah.” Gary took a dismissive gulp from his wine. “That's not the way it works.” Nicholas often collected people like this, loud, boastful ones from some field he didn't know enough about. He thought Gary brilliant simply because he wrote for a newspaper. Hazel hadn't dared point out that the article about Nicholas, overboard in its flattery, was full of lazy journalistic quirks. No, all the love and admiration she had for Nicholas would never be enough; he needed to hear it from some guy with a journalism degree.

“Your wife's a looker,” she had overheard Gary tell Nicholas after she had been introduced. And though it had pleased her to hear it, and to hear Nicholas say, “I think so myself,” she couldn't help recalling the way Nicholas had been early in their courtship: so bowled over, he could barely speak. Sometimes he had even fumbled his words, not nervous so much as overwhelmed—with happiness, it seemed, and a sense of his own luck. Back then, he had just begun to seriously pursue composing, and there was a sense of discovery about him. Weekly concerts, church choruses, friends' debuts, Nicholas's own premieres . . . All were a pleasure to Hazel, just as England itself suited her—the museums and high streets, the Bergamot tea and crumbling biscuits, the sound of church bells and the charming accents around her. The very fact that people weekended in Spain, in Paris, as casually as a Virginian might drive to the mountains . . .

Gary was still holding forth on political corruption in Boston. Mr. Sprat said jokingly, “See what kind of a place you're moving to, Hazel?”

“I should have been warned.” The tomatoes tasted fine. Relieved, Hazel put down her plate and smoothed her new skirt. In the end she had gone shopping at Filene's, since she wanted to wear something nice. She had even seen a canvas tote bag with the same print as the skirt—but it wasn't anything she truly needed, so she hadn't allowed herself to buy it.

Yoni, with an arm along the back of the sofa so that it was vaguely around the blond girl, gave a broad, handsome grin. “No trouble discerning the Boston accent?”

“Only yours,” Nicholas joked, while the blond girl lit a cigarette.

“No,” Hazel ventured to say, “but I do find the people a bit . . . cold.” There, she had admitted it.

What she meant was that everyone seemed to have a chip on their shoulder. Like the man in the Stop & Shop parking lot yesterday who had rolled down his window and yelled, “You're in my way!” when she was only trying to back into a space without hitting anything. But she didn't want to offend anyone, so she used the word “cold.”

“It's true, though, isn't it?” Nicholas put in, as if it had only now occurred to him. “It's not how I usually think of Americans. No one looks you in the eye when you walk down the street. No one says hello.”

It was more than that, actually. In her few days here, everyone she had come across—in the grocery, the bank, Filene's—seemed to be on the offensive. Even the birds at the feeder she had set up on the little balcony had this quality, the way they fought over the plastic perches and sparred midair, ugly brown city birds with none of the cuteness of goldfinches or the chickadees she'd hoped for. The guarded manner of people on the T, the surliness of the cashier at the liquor store. Something about this made Hazel think of . . . small, yappy dogs guarding unattractive houses. But probably things just looked this way because she was tired and hadn't yet found her footing.

Gary said, “This ain't California.”

Hazel said, “No, it isn't.” She didn't even feel like refilling the bird feeder. But you couldn't just cut them off like that. Once you started caring for something, it was cruel, simply cruel, to suddenly stop.

Now George or Frank was telling them about when he moved here fifteen years ago. Hazel couldn't help looking again at the little hill of tomatoes at the edge of his plate. Of course tomatoes were not yet in season, but she had made a point of finding the ripest ones possible.

At least everyone seemed to like the Triscuit recipe. And the dip in the bread bowl seemed a success. The cheese board was running low. Hazel stood, smoothed her skirt, and went to the kitchen to slice more Gouda. It was peaceful there—safer, somehow—and when Nicholas stepped in a moment later, Hazel was able to smile.

“Wonderful spread, Hazel. You're fantastic.” He rested his palm on her back.

“Who are those girls?” she whispered.

“Girls?”

“Next to Yoni.”

“Oh, right, a couple of favorite students.” He said it lightly—too lightly, Hazel thought. “Gifted musicians. Samantha and . . . ” His forehead wrinkled with recollection. “Remy, that's her name.”

Hazel tried not to frown.

“She used to have longer hair,” Nicholas said thoughtfully. “Sort of wild. Now it's shorter.”

Hazel felt an inner flinch—at hearing the man she loved note the details of another woman's looks. “It's still a bit wild, isn't it?” she said, trying to keep her voice light. The girl had corkscrew curls that came just to her chin, and every once in a while would tug on one, as if to drag it to its original length. When she let go, the curl would spring back up. Perhaps it was a nervous gesture. It didn't detract from the fact that the girl was, Hazel had to admit, attractive, with rosy cheeks, big brown eyes, and a heart-shaped mouth—features Hazel thought of as youthful and that made her feel, suddenly and for no good reason, old.

“Here, let me get that,” Nicholas said as Hazel lifted the tray of Gouda. Hazel handed him the tray and followed him back out to the living room.

Gary and Yoni were discussing Boston's new music scene, while the others looked on with what Hazel supposed was relief at not having to make conversation. The girl with the curly hair was the only one who bothered to join in, telling Gary first, and then Yoni, that both of them were wrong. “Just go into Newbury Comics and they'll let you know where the best new bands are playing. You just have to know where to find them.”

Yoni looked at the girl with an almost prideful smile. “Who knew our little conservatory student was a little bit rock 'n' roll?”

“It's called being well rounded,” the girl said, and pinched Yoni's arm in a way Hazel thought forward. Perhaps
she
was his girlfriend, and not the blonde?

Yoni gave the girl an avuncular pat on the head, and Hazel felt a new wave of confusion. His other arm just barely grazed the blond girl's shoulders. One of his hands, Hazel had noticed, was missing a finger and part of the thumb. The skin around the thumb seemed to have been patched on. She tried not to stare.

“What
is
the rock scene like here?” Nicholas asked. “I wonder how different it is from England.”

Hazel raised her eyebrows; did he know anything about the rock scene in England?

“I can only tell you about Boston,” the curly-haired girl said, Nicholas nodding along as she described the shows she had seen. Well, he was their host, after all. And he had always possessed a genuine curiosity about the world.

Hazel, too, had been like that. Each time she and Nicholas relocated, she made an effort to meet people and learn the local lore. Her sketchbooks had filled with images of church spires and bustling piazzas, and then, over time, with the very people around her, their expressions and gestures, the fleeting moments of connection. It seemed to her those small daily observations added up to something, and that she might even turn her work into a larger project. The idea had buoyed her, kept her focused no matter where or how often she and Nicholas moved.

That her love of all things European had in time—not long at all, really—become impatience (with the backward ways of Old World cities, their deteriorating buildings and finicky traditions, the inefficiency and chauvinism and general hassle of almost any daily transaction) was something she never would have expected. Things she had once thought curious or romantic became simply an inconvenience. Following Nicholas from England to Finland, Italy to Hungary, Belgium to France (with stints in Texas and Vancouver in between), something else had changed; Nicholas's love for her was no longer enough to cut through her loneliness, through the palpability of being so far away. Not to mention the growing fear and frustration of suspecting she might never have a baby. And so Hazel became less enamored of her own life.

“You have to hear this woman sing,” the curly-haired girl was saying now, about someone who apparently worked at a shoe store in Back Bay. “Even when she yells her voice is so . . . melancholic I guess is the word.”

Hazel turned to refill Mr. Sprat's wineglass, relieved to not have to look at the curly girl. Instead she sat down next to George or Frank, who had moved up to the love seat.

“I remember the first time a piece of music made me cry,” Nicholas said. “I was still a child, and my piano teacher had me playing Bach's two-part inventions. Perhaps you know the second one?” He hummed a little line in what sounded to Hazel like a minor key.

“Each hand creates its own melodic line,” he explained, for Hazel's benefit, probably, “and there are of course stretches where one hand or the other carries the melody. In invention number two there's a recurring moment where, while one hand plays the main phrase, the other does the most basic little progression.” He sang four notes of a rising scale,
Do re me fa,
followed by four notes of the next scale,
re me fa so,
and the next,
me fa so la.

“My eyes welled up the moment I heard it. It was the simplicity of that rising scale. Plodding yet hopeful, the way it keeps reaching up.”

“For me it was Bach, too,” the curly-haired girl said, her eyes wide. “I mean, Bach was my lightbulb moment.” Hazel could tell by her expression that she thought it meant something, when surely Bach-induced epiphanies were true for lots of musicians. Hazel was glad when Yoni, in his matter-of-fact way, said, “I think it has to do with going up four steps and then having to start again from three notes below where you've just arrived.” He hummed
Do re me fa, re me fa so.
“Having to climb back up all over again.”

“Like Sisyphus,” Hazel said, glad to have something to contribute.

“Yes, that's it exactly,” Nicholas said. “Having to try all over again after being knocked down. So basic and human. That must be why it made me cry.”

Hazel found herself nodding. Basic, human . . . It was the way critics often spoke of Nicholas's compositions, praising the way that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he had moved from the cerebral and atonal back to pure melody, toward the satisfaction of linear structure and chord progressions that resolved themselves. Some even called his work “deceptively simple.”

Now the girl and Nicholas were debating what made a performance “poetic,” cutting each other off with interjections of “But is all poetry necessarily beautiful?” and “Just because it's true doesn't make it art.” Hazel's pulse quickened, as if there were some sort of crime taking place in her apartment.
Her
apartment? She hadn't had any say in it. The living room curtains were atrocious.

This wasn't what she had pictured for the party. In her imagination there had been Nicholas with his arm around her, his new friends and colleagues asking what she had been up to without him. In her mind she had them laughing at her anecdotes, about Rascal up on Madame Duvalier's roof. . . . The vision had seemed so real. Which made this scene before her all the more disappointing.

The same thing had happened to another vision she used to have. One that had seized her repeatedly in her very first months with Nicholas, back when she was still a student: she and Nicholas walking hand in hand toward the door of a house, a beautiful house, and before them two children, a boy and a girl. The vision was blurry, like a dream, yet carried with it the certainty that this was
their
house, and
their
children.