The saxophone teacher draws the belt of her leather jacket tighter around her waist. “I’ll see you Monday, then,” she says
to Julia. “And I’ll see you on Friday,” she says to Isolde. She looks lonely all of a sudden, standing stiffly on the gritty
Town Hall steps with the crowd pouring out on either side of her. She is backlit by the reddish velvet light of the foyer
behind her, and it strikes Isolde that she is rather pretty. She registers with something a little like triumph that the saxophone
teacher is now the outsider, looking down at the girls with a halting expression as if she wants to detain them further but
she is uncertain how.
“Sounds good,” Isolde says, and gives a little wave. Julia smiles, and then the two of them turn away from her and walk out
into the night.
Mrs. De Gregorio clutches her purse in the crook of her lap while she sips her tea. She sits with her knees together and her
thighs elevated a little because she is resting her heels against the crossbar of the chair and only her square toes touch
the ground. Her breasts almost reach her lap, and as she sits down she wedges her purse into the gap where her body hinges.
The saxophone teacher thinks how very strange it looks, Mrs. De Gregorio curving herself around her purse in this protective
way. From where the sax teacher is sitting, she can see only
the twin-balled golden clasp peeking out from beneath the soft
acrylic bulge of Mrs. De Gregorio’s breast.
She smiles. “What can I do for you, Mrs. De Gregorio?”
“I’ve come about my daughter,” Mrs. De Gregorio says, and as always the saxophone teacher marvels privately at this woman’s
performance, this single unitary woman who plays all the mothers so differently, each performance a tender and unique object
like the veined clouding on a subtle pearl. “This might seem like a bit of an odd errand,” the woman says, “me marching in
here like this to ask you such a personal question, but lately at home we’ve noticed a few changes, and—” Mrs. De Gregorio
looks down into her lap and sighs. “She’s just become
impossible
,” she says at last.
“Let’s start at the beginning, then,” the saxophone teacher says briskly, tugging down her shirttails and smoothing flat the
wool of her jersey as if she means business. “First of all—why the saxophone? Why did you choose this particular instrument?
The saxophone has connotations, as you know. A saxophone is not a piano or a flute. A very particular type of girl gravitates
toward the saxophone, and quite frankly it’s the type of girl who is not very likely to keep the peace. Why did you choose
the sax for your daughter?”
“Oh, it was
her
choice,” Mrs. De Gregorio says, but the saxophone teacher shakes her head and swiftly interrupts her—
“Let’s not play that game, Mrs. De Gregorio. Your daughter is your project, we both know that. The elements beyond your control
are really very few indeed. I can see you’re the type of mother who likes to hold the reins. The type of mother who regards
her children as free agents is a slapdash mother, a vague uncaring mother who simply doesn’t appreciate a job well done. You
are not that person.”
Mrs. De Gregorio nods, a little defeated.
“So you chose this fate for your daughter,” the saxophone teacher continues. “You pushed her toward the instrument of
her
undoing. You could have had a daughter who played the violin, long-haired and eccentric and quietly confident, but you chose
the saxophone. You made that choice.”
“I wanted to say,” Mrs. De Gregorio says, fumbling for the words, “I wanted to say that we’ve noticed a definite change, that’s
all. She won’t talk—well. You know what it can be like. And I just wanted to ask what she says to
you
each week. Whether you might have any clues. A boyfriend or something. Something we could work through, and understand.”
“Why do you think that your daughter would tell
me
the truth?” the saxophone teacher asks.
“About her studies,” says Mrs. De Gregorio weakly. “Or her life at school. Something like a boyfriend, a problem that we could
work through, and understand.”
The saxophone teacher doesn’t speak for a moment, just so Mrs. De Gregorio feels uncomfortable and wishes she hadn’t spoken
so freely. Then she says, “But how can you ever know?” She is more brooding now and less abrupt. “How can you ever get to
the kernel of truth behind it all? You could watch her. But you have to remember that there are two kinds of watching: either
she will know she is being watched, or she will not. If she knows she is being watched, her behavior will change under observation
until what you are seeing is so utterly transformed it becomes a thing
intended only
for observation, and all realities are lost. And if she doesn’t know she is being watched, what you are seeing is something
unprimed, something unfit for performance, something crude and unrefined that you will try and refine yourself: you will try
to give it a meaning that it does not inherently possess, and in doing this you will press your daughter into some mold that
misunderstands her. So, you see, neither picture is what you might call true. They are distortions.”
“
Has
she said anything?” Mrs. De Gregorio says. “I know it’s an odd question. It’s embarrassing to have to ask. But is there anything
we should know about?” Her hand disappears under
her breasts, checking that her purse is still tucked into the vast crux of
her lap. Her fingers find the wadded leather lump and touch it briefly.
“Oh, Mrs. De Gregorio. I’m her music teacher,” the sax teacher says. She returns her mug to the table and folds her hands.
“But then what do I do?” Mrs. De Gregorio asks with a kind of rising panic. “What options have I left?”
“You could ask your daughter,” the saxophone teacher says. “You could sit down and actually talk to her. But you always run
the risk that she might lie.”
“What did you imagine while you were watching?” the saxophone teacher asks when Julia arrives for her lesson on Monday afternoon.
“At the concert.”
“I liked the second half better than the first half,” Julia begins, but the saxophone teacher waves her arm impatiently and
says, “No, I meant what did you think about while you were watching? What sorts of things were you thinking about?”
Julia looks at her curiously, as if this might be a test. “Why?” she asks.
“It’s a game I used to play with an old friend of mine,” the saxophone teacher says. “We had a joke that the better the performance,
the more catalytic the effect. A poor performance might only make you think about what you had for dinner or what you were
going to wear when you woke up the next day. But a great performance would make you imagine things you would never have been
brave enough to imagine before.”
She is speaking eagerly, like a child. Julia unclips her saxophone case and says, “I was just thinking about the music.”
“Yes, but
around
that. When your mind drifted. What did you imagine?”
Julia slips her reed out of its gated plastic sheath and holds it for a second. “I imagined what was going to happen,” she
said, “when I dropped Isolde home.”
The lights change. The overhead lights and the bright overcast light from the window are doused; a template falls into place
in front of a solitary floodlight and the attachment begins to rotate, so that the yellow light is thinly striped and ever
changing, playing over the pair of them like passing streetlights striping the dashboard of a moving car. Julia sits down.
The streetlights come and go, streaking over her knees and curving away over her shoulder to disappear, and she is dark for
a moment before another streak of light rises up to replace the first, and then another, and another, all yellow and forward
bending.
“I imagined,” Julia says, “that on the way home we would talk about the concert a bit, and what we thought of it, and the
teachers that we had in common at school, and we’d keep coming back to
you
, to talk about you, because you are the only real thread of connection between us. We’d talk about you for a while back and
forth, only we wouldn’t be quite honest, because the most important thing would be to create an attractive impression of ourselves,
and what we truly thought didn’t really matter. We’d say whatever things would put us in the best light. We’d lie. All the
way home we’d lie to each other, back and forth.”
The saxophone teacher is unmoving. She looks Julia up and down with her eyes only. Her face is like a mask.
“And then I imagined,” Julia says, “that after I killed the engine we would sit there for a moment, not looking at each other,
just looking up through the darkness at Isolde’s unlit house. My key ring would still be swinging from the ignition, and we
would listen to the sound of the wind whipping the leaves. My mouth would be dry.”
The rotating template has stilled and Julia’s knees are in a square of light which falls through the car window and across
her lap. Her face is in shadow. She is sitting stiffly, one leg forward-stretched and cocked at an angle, as if on the brake
pedal. Her saxophone is lying on the couch beside her, and she is holding it casually with her left hand, lifting the upper
end slightly off the couch, so it looks like her hand is curled casually around the handbrake, her knuckles in the plastic
shallow beneath the handle and her wrist loosely arched. With her other hand she plucks at her sternum, testing the tension
of an invisible seat belt strap, lifting it carelessly and letting it slap back against her chest.
“And I’d go, You know what everybody says about me. At school and everything. It isn’t true.”
Julia wets her lips with her tongue. She isn’t looking at Isolde: she’s looking out the window, peering into the dark silver
of the wing-mirror, one hand still plucking at her strap.
“Isolde goes, I know. She says it really quickly and then she says it again. I know. She’s not looking at me, she’s looking
forward, up at the house, and her finger is at her throat, twisting her necklace around and around, cutting all the blood
from her fingertip. The end of it has gone gray.” Julia looks back at Isolde again, quickly, and tightens her grip around
the handbrake. “And then I go, I was just worried that you might think I was going to come on to you, or jump you when you
least expected it or something. I was worried you might think that.”
She reverts to gazing into the wing-mirror, turning her face away.
“Isolde goes, I don’t think that. And I go, Good. And then we sit for a moment, looking up at Isolde’s unlit house and listen
for each other’s breath, and then I go, That’s all. That’s all I wanted to say.”
The lights come up a little, just enough to include the saxophone teacher and bring her into the scene. She shifts and crosses
her legs. She looks uncomfortable.
“What is it that everyone says about you at school?” she asks
reluctantly. Sometimes Julia makes her feel cornered, and she
is feeling cornered now.
“Everyone thinks I like girls,” Julia says.
“I see,” the saxophone teacher says. The lights dip back down again, receding back to the single streetlamp casting its square
pool of light across Julia’s lap. The saxophone teacher disappears again into the dark.
“We parked the car,” Julia says, “and sat there for a while, and whatever we were talking about sort of trickled away like
water until there was nothing left and we just sat and waited for something to happen. My mouth was dry. And then Isolde goes,
Do you mind waiting here in the car for a while? My mum thinks Victoria came to the concert with me, and we have to walk in
at the same time in case she’s still up.
“And even while she was saying it a car pulled up and stopped a few houses in front of where we were, so both of us were lit
red for a moment in the glare of the taillights, and then the lights went off but nobody got out. We watched but the car just
sat there. And Isolde goes, She doesn’t know we’re here. She hasn’t seen us. Isolde’s watching the car with a hard tight sort
of expression and I don’t want to say anything in case it’s the wrong thing, and then she says, We had it all arranged. Mum
dropped both of us off at the concert, and I went in to meet you guys and Victoria went off to meet him. It’s the only way
she can still see him. She’s grounded most nights, and none of her friends will cover for her now. I don’t mind.”
The saxophone teacher leans forward in the dark. She is frowning.
“And then Isolde goes, I’d better go. If we sit here for much longer it’ll be weird. I have to go.”
Julia smoothes her knees and tugs again at her seat belt, nodding.
“But she doesn’t go. She stays in the car for a moment longer, and through the back window of the car in front we see Victoria
lean over and put her head on Mr. Saladin’s shoulder. It looks awkward, stretched across the gearshift with all this space
in between them, and he reaches his arm up and strokes her head. He’s saying something but we can only see their silhouettes.
It’s like a shadow-play, and all of a sudden my heart is hammering and I look at Isolde and she looks at me really quickly,
but then again, and she says, Please don’t tell anyone, and I say I won’t.”
Julia’s voice has become dry and choked, and her tongue keeps darting out to wet her lips. Spots of crimson have appeared
high on either cheek.
“And then she gets out,” Julia says, “and the silhouettes turn around and see her, and then Victoria kisses Mr. Saladin goodbye,
not on the mouth. He turns his face to the side so she can kiss his cheek, and then they both smile and maybe even laugh,
like it’s a joke. And then the red taillights come on again and Mr. Saladin’s car is gone, and Victoria and Isolde go into
the house together. Isolde is the one who unlocks the gate, and while she reaches for the latch Victoria steps into the light
and looks at me, really gets a long look at me, and then she says something under her breath to Isolde like she’s unhappy.
And then they disappear.”