She is trying to be kind to Isolde, but Isolde finds that all she can do is blush and smile and mumble that she’s looking
forward to it. She is squeezing her toes together tight.
The gong sounds a gentle arpeggio to remind them to take their seats. The crowd at the Coke machine begins to disperse, and
the sax teacher smiles at them both in turn.
“I really hope you find this inspiring,” she says. “This is a special night for me as well—last time I heard this arrangement
live I was only a little bit older than you. It woke me up.”
The orchestra is plush and dazzling against the polished wood of the stage. In the first row of the balcony the sax teacher
sits
between her two students, calm and matriarchal and silent, the two girls sloping off on either side of her so the three
of them seem to form a kind of heraldic crest, a heroic grouping that might be placed above a shield to complete a coat of
arms. Julia sits with her hands in her lap, watching the flashing silver and gold with an intent glazed blindness, her eyes
unmoving as if she is concentrating on holding something very still in her mind. Isolde is more restless, deliberately leaning
away from the saxophone teacher lest their elbows touch, and watching the musicians in a detached, musing way, her gaze drifting
from the stage and over the dim unsmiling wraith-faces around her.
As Isolde peers vaguely at the pale faces in the audience she thinks about the different ways you can perform the act of listening.
Some in the audience have their eyes shut and their faces tilted slightly upward, enjoying the rain of the music on their
skin. Some are nodding in a slow, meaningful sort of way, perhaps every four or five bars, as if something is slowly and majestically
taking shape before them. Some, like the sax teacher next to her, are simply sitting still.
Isolde thinks how strange it is, that every person in the auditorium is locked in their own private experience of the music,
alone with their thoughts, alone in their enjoyment or distaste, and shivering at the vast feeling of intimacy that this solitude
affords, already impatient for the interval when they can compare their experience with their neighbor’s and discover with
relief that they are the same.
Am I hearing the same thing they are hearing?
Isolde wonders half-heartedly, but she is distracted from pursuing the thought any further, turning her attention instead
to watch an elderly woman in the stalls flounder noisily in her handbag for a tissue or a mint.
Julia is listening in a dreamy, sleepy way, the music drawing from her one slow, definite impression rather than a slideshow
series of impressions that she can cobble together later and divide to find the arithmetic mean. She is thinking about
Isolde.
She can’t quite see her past the stern unmoving profile of the saxophone teacher, just a flash of her knee every time Isolde
crosses her leg, but even so she finds her left-hand peripheral vision is sharpened with a tense hyperawareness whenever the
younger girl shifts in her seat. She thinks about the long look that she and Isolde shared in the counseling class, probing
the thought again and again like a bloody tooth and wondering, as she has wondered many times, where the look might have come
from, and where it might lead.
Sometimes when Julia’s thoughts circulate like this she becomes stricken by the irrational fear that she might open her mouth
and say exactly what she is thinking, just to spite herself. She thinks of what she would say, if she did say something, and
then she bites her lip and fights back a cold rush of fear at the thought of actually saying it.
The saxophone teacher is thinking about Patsy. She is thinking about Patsy in the smoky afterward bar, still with her concert
program tucked in her fist, ordering glasses of wine which they will later refill, in a secret giddy way, from a screw-top
bottle in Patsy’s handbag. She sees them both folding themselves into a corner, unwrapping scarves and coats and talking about
the crowd and the arrangement and the soloist, and then Patsy saying, “What did you imagine?” and already half-laughing in
her eagerness.
“I imagined the music was pouring out of the saxophone like water,” the saxophone teacher said, “pouring over the lip of the
bell and pooling on the floor at his feet, and the water level was getting higher and higher and the tide was churning stronger
and stronger and in the end he had to finish the piece just to save his life. And then we clapped and he started a new piece
and I imagined that the sax was sucking his breath out of him, instead of him blowing the air in, and that the mouthpiece
was pushing and pushing to get further and further in, that the sax was trying desperately to suffocate him, and he had to
keep playing to save his life.”
Patsy laughed and clapped and they touched glasses and drank, and the saxophone teacher said, “What did
you
imagine?”
“I imagined that noise had the power to seriously hurt you, even kill you,” Patsy said, “depending on the quality of the musicianship.
The more elegant the playing, the more total the death. The Town Hall would be like the arena where you were sent if you had
done something truly terrible. You’d be marched into the auditorium, strapped down and buckled on to the red velvet seats
so tight you couldn’t move. The soloist would be the executioner, playing faster and faster and watching you over the footlights
with wet greedy eyes.”
The saxophone teacher laughed and clapped and they touched glasses again and drank, and Patsy said, “That concert changed
me forever.”
On Saturday nights Bridget works at the local video store. She sits glumly on a high vinyl stool and watches the lonely people
drift from shelf to shelf, keeping one eye on the black-and-white security television that dimly shows the curtained nook
where the adult tapes are shelved. The clock says half-past nine. Bridget watches the inching revolutions of the minute hand
and listens for the padded thump of a late tape through the dewy drop-slot.
“Hello, Bridget,” somebody says.
Bridget shoves her chewing gum to the side of her mouth and turns her tired head to see Mr. Saladin standing by the door,
crisp in beige trousers and a woollen coat. He smiles at her in a boyish way.
“Hi, Mr. Saladin,” says Bridget, brightening and slithering forward off her stool. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
“My nephews live in the area,” says Mr. Saladin. “Two blocks over.”
“Oh,” says Bridget with genuine surprise, because she has never thought of Mr. Saladin as the type of man to have nephews.
She regards him a little shyly.
“How is it that you’re allowed to work here? You’re not eighteen,” Mr. Saladin says, folding his gloved hands across his chest.
“You must not be allowed to watch half the movies here.”
“I’m not watching them,” says Bridget, “I’m only selling them.”
Mr. Saladin chuckles. “And I suppose after I’ve gone you’re going to look up my record for porno,” he says.
“Probably,” says Bridget, with a rush of gratitude at being granted ownership of the joke. “And I’ll find out how old you
really are.”
“Now you’ve gone too far,” Mr. Saladin says, feigning gravity. “That is privileged information. Don’t you dare.”
Bridget giggles and then stifles the sound quickly, covering her mouth with her hand. Behind her, the row of mounted television
screens flashes its sequence of silent silver car-wrecks and swift untimely deaths.
“Working on a Saturday night,” Mr. Saladin says, shaking his head. “What happened to drinking and taking drugs and smoking
and playing loud music? I must be out of touch.”
Again Bridget’s hand flies to her mouth to smother her laughter. Mr. Saladin smiles, his gaze sliding upward for a second
as he is distracted by an image darting by.
The clock moves forward.
Until this precise moment in her life Bridget has understood flirting only as a self-promotional conversational tool, wielded
with the intention of winning a short-term companion or a grope. Now as she looks at Mr. Saladin, calm and smiling and unruffled
in his clean pressed clothes, his scarf knotted neatly around his throat, his elegant triple-veined leather gloves and
his
windswept hair, Bridget suffers a lusty rush of bewildered wanting that tightens like a fist in her groin. For the first time
in sixteen years she feels impelled to flirt for the sole purpose of ruining somebody else, driven to recklessness by the
dim and thrilling notion that
here
, at least, is a man who will see her in only sexual terms. She reaches out and pinches the laminate edge of the counter between
her thumb and her fingertips, rocking back on her heels in a flirty way, offering herself as bait just so she might have the
pleasure of watching him bite in vain.
“What are you doing now? Do you have a new job?” she asks. “We miss you at jazz band.”
“For now I’m painting houses,” Mr. Saladin says. “I’m in between things. So the new conductor is putting you through the paces?”
“Mrs. Jean Critchley,” Bridget says. “She’s okay.”
“I know the name,” Mr. Saladin says. “I’ve seen her play live. She’s good.”
“Yeah,” Bridget says casually. Mr. Saladin smiles and looks around him, as if he means to amble off, and so Bridget says all
in a hurry, “We had to go to counseling after you left, in case we were damaged. It was lame.”
Mr. Saladin raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t speak for a moment. Then he says calmly, “That doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“It was lame,” Bridget says again, and she almost feels inept, but then she remembers that
here
, at least, is a man who will understand and forgive her naïveté: to this man, her clumsy adolescence is not a handicap but
a prize. The fist in her groin stiffens again, clenching like a swiftly tightened screw.
“Victoria still hasn’t come back to school,” she blurts out before Mr. Saladin can speak again, trying in her gauche and rumpled
way to talk casually, like the beautiful girls at school talk casually, tossing their hair over their shoulder and turning
out their feet like show ponies. “Has she left for good?”
“No, I don’t think so,” says Mr. Saladin. “I imagine she’ll be back before exams.”
“That’s good,” says Bridget. She smiles in what she hopes is an encouraging way, wanting to show that she is on Mr. Saladin’s
side.
“Good to see you, Bridget. Keep on with your music,” says Mr. Saladin. He smiles at her and strolls off toward the neon wall
of new releases. “I’ll go and see what you’ve got on offer.”
“It’s two for ten,” Bridget calls out after him.
She stands there for a moment before retreating back to her stool. Out of habit she checks the security screen and sees a
couple furtively entering the adult nook, clutching each other and giggling as they trail their fingers along the spines.
She watches as the woman selects a title and they laugh at the various postures pictured in miniature on the back. The man
says something quietly, and the woman pretends to be furious and slaps at him with the end of her scarf. They laugh.
After Mr. Saladin leaves, Bridget looks up his rental history and is disappointed to find no porno. She learns that he is
thirty-one.
After the applause, the three of them sit for a moment in silence. The lights come up over the audience, restoring color to
the wraiths, and all around them the crowd begins to shift and laugh and chatter, reaching down for their scarves and their
programs and their clutch purses as if released from a spell. The saxophone teacher is lost in a memory and doesn’t stir,
her hands limp from the applause, her eyes large and vacant and turned toward the stage. Julia sits forward on her seat and
turns to Isolde suddenly, and says, “Do you want a lift home? I’ve got my car here. It’d be no problem.”
Isolde hasn’t yet learned to drive and Julia’s offer makes her feel young and inexperienced and graceless, as if she is being
forced to reveal that she can’t read or that she is still afraid of the dark. The older girl seems impossibly mature to Isolde,
like Victoria’s friends always seem impossibly mature, powdered and scented and full of secrets and private laughter, contemptuous
of little Issie for all that she does not yet know. “Thanks,” is what Isolde says to Julia now, smiling quickly and ducking
her head. “That would be great. I was going to have to taxi.”
“I won’t tell your mother,” the saxophone teacher says to Isolde, returning at last from her memory. “I know you’re going
to keep the taxi fare she’s given you.”
“How do you know
I
don’t charge a taxi fare?” Julia says.
The saxophone teacher laughs. “I’ve seen your car, for starters,” she says. She starts chatting about the music, speaking
mostly to Julia. Her big hands are spread open as she talks, turning her impression of the concert over and over like a potter
at a wheel.
Isolde nods and smiles. She darts a look at Julia, and wonders if Julia had been preparing the offer for some time, sitting
silent in the gray dusk of the stage-glow and all the while preparing how best to phrase the question. Do you want a lift
home? I’ve got my car here. It’d be no problem.
“It’s not a popular configuration,” the saxophone teacher is saying. Isolde keeps nodding wisely, trying to mask the shrinking
sensation in her pelvis, which registers as part exhilaration and part dread. What did the offer mean? Isolde almost imagines
the older girl leaning in across the gear shift and the handbrake and reaching out an ink-stained jeweled hand to tuck a wisp
of hair behind her ear. She almost imagines it, but in a fleeting shock of panic she snuffs out the thought.
“Pretty inspiring stuff,” the saxophone teacher says in conclusion, slapping the armrests in a jolly way and standing up to
join the inching exodus. “Pretty inspiring stuff.”
“Cheers for the concert,” Julia says to the saxophone teacher after they have shuffled their way out of the auditorium and
through the marble foyer into the cold. “It was incredible. I’ll be thinking about it all week.”