At nine on Sunday morning, Avery walked up the wide stone steps of the Albertson Music Building on Eighth Street. She hadn’t been sure what to wear, so she’d ended up putting on standard art student gear: black pants, black turtleneck. These were actually her P. J. Mortimer’s pants she was wearing. Though she’d washed them since then, they still retained the faintest odor of hamburger, ketchup, and industrial cleanser.
Once inside, she was given a folder of admissions information and brochures by a student guide and sent upstairs to wait for her audition. She sat on the floor with her coffee and reviewed her music, even though there was no point. It had to be in her head and in her hands by now. She’d played each song hundreds of times. Looking at the notation only confused the issue.
She put the music back in her bag and stared at the wall. There was a bulletin board there, overflowing with posters for chamber music recitals, summer institutes, choir performances, and music festivals. A soprano was doing her scales somewhere down the hall, and Avery listened in amazement as she nailed a high A with perfect clarity and roundness, then easily ran back down the scale.
Across from her, a girl in a long black skirt with a shock of blond hair wrapped in a red scarf was sitting with her eyes closed and smiling to herself. She swayed back and forth and beat out a complicated rhythm on the floor with a flat hand.
Some of us don’t need stereos, Avery thought. Truthfully, Avery could be like that too: Sometimes she could hear music that clearly in her own mind. But she disliked public displays that made it clear that she heard fully audible noises—and occasionally voices—inside her head.
When she came to the end of her song, the girl opened her eyes and smiled at Avery.
“Here for piano?” she asked.
Avery nodded.
“What are you playing?”
“Chopin’s Etude Opus 10, number 1, and William Bolcom’s Graceful Ghost Rag, plus the Bach and Beethoven.”
“I’m doing Stravinsky’s Four Studies and the Rondo in B Minor by Clara Schumann,” the girl offered.
Avery didn’t know those pieces, but they just sounded better than hers. The girl was wearing a flowing peasant blouse made of linen. It seemed more artsy than Avery’s generic poseur black turtleneck.
The soprano hit a high B with equal ease.
“She’s good, huh?” the girl said, nodding toward the end of the hall the sound originated from. “She was doing a little bit of Susanna from Figaro right before you came in. I think she was just kind of screwing around, but still, it sounded really nice.”
Avery vaguely recognized that this was a reference to The Marriage of Figaro, which was an opera. And that was where her knowledge of that subject ended.
“I heard the theory exam is really easy,” the girl went on. “Basic stuff, like how to convert a natural minor scale to a harmonic minor and a melodic minor. Scale degrees. The difference between the leading tone and the tonic. A few transpositions. Stuff like that.”
It all echoed in Avery’s head. This was stuff she knew. But it wasn’t the kind of stuff she poured out to total strangers in hallways. And why was this girl even here? It sounded like she already had her music degree. Maybe she did. Maybe she was a plant, sent here by the school to freak out the auditioners.
One of the doors opened, and a young woman emerged. She and Scarf Girl exchanged looks, and Scarf Girl jumped up from her seat. From their high-pitched greetings, Avery gathered that they knew each other.
“Avery Dekker?” Another student guide was peering from a doorway down the hall. Avery nodded and was waved back.
“Your turn,” Scarf Girl said, turning from her friend. “Good luck.”
“Right …” Avery quickly gathered her things. “Maybe I’ll see you”
Avery was ushered into a long, spare room with a hardwood floor and a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Pigeons sat along the sills outside, puffing themselves up to protect them from the cold and the snow.
At one side of the room was a grand piano. Not a baby grand—a grand, easily eight feet long and stark, shellacked black. There was a padded bench with a knob on the side to raise or lower it. On the other side three people, two men and one woman, breezily chatted with one another and sipped coffee. The two men were similar in appearance—clipped salt-and-pepper beards and V-necked sweaters. The woman had a great pile of wiry gray hair wound on top of her head and a black angora shawl wrapped dramatically around her shoulders. They didn’t seem to notice that Avery was there. After a moment one of the men turned and looked at Avery with a polite smile.
Avery had a strange impulse to ask if they were ready to order.
“Miss Dekker.” He spoke very softly.
Avery nodded.
He shuffled a pile of folders in front of him and drew one from the stack.
“We’re going to have you start with the Bach,” the man said, opening the folder. “What will you be playing?”
“Fugue number 19, from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier.”
“Fine.” He waved toward the piano and shuffled through her file. “Whenever you’re ready.”
After a moment, when the man gave her another little wave to encourage her, Avery walked over to the piano and sat down, taking a minute to adjust her bench. Whoever had played before her was tall. She had to raise the seat and move it closer to the piano. She set her fingertips lightly on the keys. There was a wobble building in her wrists that was trickling down to her fingers.
Just start, she told herself. Don’t think.
She hit the first notes of her piece. The Bach was mechanical and demanding but she knew it cold. She’d played it hundreds of times. This wasn’t going to be a problem. She ran through it automatically—a little hurriedly, and right around the fourth measure her fingers fumbled. Avery retracted her hands from the keys in horror.
In the deadly pause that followed, Avery almost wanted to laugh.
“Take a moment,” the man said, his voice unperturbed. Bored, even. It was as if he was just going through the motions now, saying what he needed to say to get Avery through her piece and out the door.
Avery pulled her hands from the keys and gave them a sharp, snapping shake. She tried to imagine the nervous energy flying from the tips of her fingers in bolts and settling harmlessly into the floorboards. It didn’t quite work. Her hands began to tense, freezing into stiff claws with nasty, short nails on the ends. She settled her fingers back on the keys. They felt cool and a little foreign. This wasn’t her piano. The old piano she had at home had keys that plunked down easily and issued a tinny, almost toy piano sound. This piano responded athletically—the keys sprang back. It would all be fine if she was at home, playing on the instrument she knew, with Bandit at her feet and her brothers running behind her.
One of her examiners loudly turned a page on his pad of paper. She started again, exactly at the spot where she had fumbled.
She didn’t play cleanly for the first minute. She was landing the notes, but her timing was off. Everything went a bit fuzzy, and she realized as she went on that she could barely remember how she had just played. Her brain could retain only about five seconds of performance, and then it was gone. She could only go forward, deeper into music that she could see now in her mind’s eye—but the notes would change on the score in her head, and she didn’t know if her fingers or brain knew best. She could only play and play and play. For all she knew, she was digging her own grave with every note, every mangled measure, every flattened crescendo.
And then she was done. She realized she’d come to the end of the last piece. She looked over at the three people at the table. They seemed deeply disinterested, and in fact seemed to notice that she was finished long after she did. They smiled three blank, polite smiles at her.
“Thank you, Miss Dekker,” the man said. “You can go wait downstairs.”
He gave Avery another small nod to let her know that she could go. The woman shoved more orange into her mouth and adjusted the arrangement of her great pile of hair.
Avery went back out into the hallway. She could hear the overhead lights humming. Scarf Girl and her friend were still there. She could hear the friend offering last-minute words of encouragement and advice. Scarf Girl hadn’t gone. Scarf Girl hadn’t messed up. Scarf Girl’s chances seemed pretty good at the moment.
She hated Scarf Girl.
“How’d it go?” Scarf Girl asked.
“Great,” Avery lied, lurching past her to get to the elevator.
Once downstairs, Avery sat numbly in the cold corner of the lobby. She had two hours to kill. Around her, other auditioners were waiting. Most were cramming for the theory exam. A few were analyzing their performances over the phone, citing specific technical achievements. Avery could barely remember the names of the pieces she’d played. Her mind had blotted out the entire episode, probably as a means of self-preservation.
She reached into her bag and pulled out the crib sheet she’d prepared for herself, but studying seemed useless. Instead, she watched the students coming in and out with their instrument cases, all looking purposeful and blasé. This place was their life. Physically, they didn’t fit any particular type. Some dressed a little more fabulously than most. A heavy knit white poncho wrap with long fringe. Skinny jeans and massive and furry wooly mammoth boots. Some were inconspicuous in their sweatshirts, wet hats, and scarves. Some obviously just rolled out of bed; some preened themselves carefully, cultivating the fabulousness they seemed to know they carried inside. Because that was the thing—all these people had it. It was the it that got them in, the it that made them able to perceive and perform music far better than mere mortals. They were superior beings. The universe yielded her secrets to them and perfume ran through their veins. That was what it was like when you had it.
As she sat there, becoming dimly aware that she was resting in a small puddle of melted snow, Avery was pretty sure she didn’t have it. She wasn’t sure if she had anything. She couldn’t quite remember why she’d come.