TO ESCAPE the packs of students clattering down the hall between classes, Suzanne turned around to face the bulletin board outside the secretary’s office. Maybe if she moved very close she might magically dissolve into the bulletin board, become two-dimensional, a paper cutout. Or even more miraculously, someone who’d seen her in a class would notice her and speak to her. There were times when her old childhood anguish about being real overcame her, times she wished she had never come here and gone instead to the local high school with Eva and Alison and the other girls from the neighborhood. But Richard and her piano teacher, Mr. Cartelli, even her parents, had said how wonderful it was that she’d passed the auditions and been accepted at the High School of Music and Art. She must take the opportunity, even though, her mother added, it meant that long subway ride from Brooklyn alone every day. Gerda had offered to come with her the first day, but Suzanne refused in horror.

Everything about the school was better than what she’d known before, more colorful, more intense, high on a hill overlooking miles of city streets—the very air felt charged. She’d learned more French in one week than she had in a year in junior high. Except that no one knew who she was. To be known: It was what she craved. It was her second week of high school, and still she was anonymous, invisible amid strangers. She was not used to anonymity; at home, on her street, she had come to take her reputation for granted. She was the lively, sweet-natured girl with the special gift that would someday bring her a special life that the others, the ordinary ones, couldn’t hope for. The reputation could be a burden, an embarrassment, yet now she missed it. Here, if she didn’t turn up her absence would barely be noticed.

And she had looked forward so much to the new school. The prospect of escape—in Brooklyn, Manhattan seemed like another country—and of finding new friends had helped through the long hot summer, a summer the kids on the block had inaugurated with a trip to Coney Island. Knowing she would very soon be in a new world had gotten Suzanne through that dreadful evening when she was crowded into a car in the Cyclone roller coaster with the fattest boy on the block, Arnie Perchusky.

It had been a humid June night, school would be over in two days, and the dreaded Regents Exams were finished. She had the whole summer to practice. Mr. Cartelli had set her to work on a Brahms early sonata, and Richard said she must start learning some twentieth-century music as well—Bartók, Stravinsky, Satie. . . . She dreamed daily of the future, of the miracle of being accepted at Juilliard when the time came, of someday playing on a grand stage—but she was superstitiously afraid to extend her fantasies that far. Meanwhile, she practiced fervently to make them come true.

She was lonely, but leaning against the parked cars on the street with the girls and boys from the neighborhood didn’t relieve her loneliness, merely screened it; still, the warm nights drew her outside with a hope shadowed by hopelessness. So when the group decided to borrow enough cars to drive to Coney Island—several of the local boys were old enough to have driver’s licenses—she went along. The Cyclone was nightmarish, the fat boy beside her an opaque stranger. Everything about the excursion made her swear to forget this part of her life, nearly over. When the awful ride was finished she and the boy slunk apart, he too perhaps dreaming of a future in which he would be thin, an athlete maybe. Suzanne was certain she would leave, one day for good.

And now here she was, again feeling alien. The worst moment of the day was lunch in the cafeteria, carrying her tray and heavy book bag, gazing straight ahead, trying to appear casual as she moved through the aisles, looking for an empty table. She could usually find one near the edge of the room, and once she was seated and peering around, her fingers unconsciously marking a Bach Invention on the tabletop, she noticed a few others like herself, alone and reading, or pretending to read, while they ate. Why couldn’t the solitary ones approach one another? You’re alone and I’m alone, so why not sit together? But that wasn’t the way things were done, not in high school, at any rate, perhaps not anywhere. No one wanted their humiliation exposed.

As the students jostled behind her in the hall, she made a show of studying the notices pinned to the bulletin board, then began reading them in earnest. One offered free tickets to a Sunday matinee concert at Carnegie Hall. Suzanne had never been to Carnegie Hall. Richard had taken her twice to recitals at Brooklyn College—her parents had let her go, provided he escorted her to her front door immediately afterward—but never to anything in Manhattan. Why not? She plucked up her courage and stepped into the office. Trying to keep her voice firm, she inquired about the tickets.

“Sure, and you can have two if you like,” the secretary said brightly. “Maybe you want to bring a friend.”

“No, one is fine. Are they really free?”

“Of course.” The secretary had two spots of rouge on her cheeks and gray ringlets, and on her smooth empty desk stood a cut-glass vase with a single flower. She reminded Suzanne of Mrs. Gardenia, and like Mrs. Gardenia, she smiled too much. “Are you a freshman?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re in luck. They don’t often give away something as good as this. Rudolf Serkin. I’d go myself, but I’ve got to take care of my grandchildren. Here you are.” She handed her the ticket. “Enjoy it. And keep checking the bulletin board. You never know what might turn up.”

Suzanne tucked the precious ticket in her wallet. She could tell her parents it was a required assignment. Her mother still fussed about the subway and warned her every morning to be careful. Careful of what, she didn’t say.

She arrived twenty minutes early on Sunday afternoon and ambled up and down Fifty-seventh Street, though it was hardly suitable for ambling. The rattling, incessant traffic made the manhole covers rumble; trucks and taxis blared; caravans of green buses slogged along. Next door to Carnegie Hall was the Russian Tea Room, with a gleaming gold samovar in the window, flanked by reproductions of ancient icons. Peering inside, she glimpsed velvet curtains and waiters dressed in embroidered tunics. Farther down the block was an enormous bookstore, and beyond that, a Bickford’s cafeteria where solitary people sat over cups of coffee, looking dejected and aimless, reading newspapers or staring into space.

Back inside the lobby a crowd had gathered, women with faces caked in makeup, moving gingerly in high heels, draped in furs though the weather was still mild in September, and gray-haired, clean-shaven men in dark suits. She felt shabby in her nondescript gray jacket and Cuban heels. No one else was alone.

She edged her way through the crowd toward a woman taking tickets, who directed her up a flight of dingy stairs with dingy, pale green walls. The staircase continued endlessly, round and round. After several flights she showed her ticket again and was told to keep climbing. As the stairs continued, the crowd thinned out and she stopped counting. At last, when there were no more steps, she was handed a program and directed to a seat in the center of a row, fortunately not yet filled, so she didn’t have to step over too many people.

The hall was immense, a fairy-tale palace, its luscious cream-colored walls and ceiling adorned with elaborate curlicued carvings. High up were suspended magnificent chandeliers with glittery crystals that stirred faintly in the air currents. Everywhere was red velvet and a heady scent of opulence. On the stage hung a heavy crimson curtain, and on each side were the box seats with their red plush chairs. She had never been in such a huge theater before. Years ago, when she was a tiny girl, her parents had taken her to see Peter Pan and, a few years later, The Sound of Music, but those theaters were not as large or glamorous, as richly garnished and decorated, as here, and her parents had flanked her like bodyguards. Here she was alone. Not lonely anymore in the crowd. Yet she was trembling at the newness of it all, as if something would be required of her. There was nothing she need do, she reminded herself. Only sit still and wait, look and listen.

In the orchestra below were rows and rows of heads, many of them gray-haired. If she squinted, the heads looked like marbles lined up on a Chinese checkerboard. Looking down made her dizzy, like the Cyclone in Coney Island a few short months ago, sitting with Arnie Perchusky. That had been dreadful, the sickening pitch downward and the tremulous ascent, but here the dizziness was almost pleasant, like the time last May when she got tipsy at her cousin Sandra’s wedding. Uncle Simon brought her a glass of champagne that she drank too quickly, as if it were soda; she felt a frothing deep inside that excited her, as if something uncontrollable, unpredictable, was about to happen. She giggled, and when Uncle Simon escorted her onto the dance floor, she moved as if she were floating, almost levitating. When the dance was over her mother knew right away something was different. “What did you give her?” she asked Simon accusingly. “She’s barely fifteen.” But Gerda’s voice was amused, too, almost flirtatious. She must have drunk some herself, Suzanne thought. “Time for her to have a little fun,” Simon said with a wink. “You make her work too hard.”

She studied the program. The pianist would be playing Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, the Bach C-minor Toccata, the first set of Schubert’s Impromptus, and, to close, Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. The Waldstein was a happy coincidence; she had just begun studying it with Mr. Cartelli. So far she had worked on only the first two movements. Mr. Cartelli had told her to get the first movement up to speed and in the second, to use the pedal more sparingly. He didn’t praise her often; he was sober and demanding and not given to conversation, a change from Mrs. Gardenia and her chatter, but they had grown to understand each other. He’d said at first that he rarely took students so young—Suzanne was ten when they began—but after hearing her play he relented, warning that if she was serious, she must follow his instructions to the letter and practice at least two hours a day.

 

A middle-aged couple sat down on her right and smiled. The woman had stiff sprayed blond hair and purple lipstick and wore a black tailored suit and a print blouse with a big bow at the neck. The man was bulky and had trouble squeezing himself into the seat. He kept squirming and adjusting his body; Suzanne was glad he wasn’t beside her.

“Are you by yourself?” the woman asked.

Suzanne nodded.

“Well, you must love music. Isn’t that nice?” she said to her husband. “A girl who loves music so much that she comes on a Sunday afternoon. It’s very high up, but don’t let that worry you. In Carnegie Hall you can hear everything perfectly, down to the last note, even up here. We have a subscription to the whole series.”

Suzanne nodded again. She didn’t know if you were supposed to talk to your neighbors at a concert, the way you would at a party or a wedding. Luckily the woman opened her program and so Suzanne could continue reading about the pianist, Rudolf Serkin. He was from Czechoslovakia and had been a child prodigy, had played all over the world and won prizes. She wondered how much he’d practiced in his youth. Probably hours and hours each day.

When all the seats were filled, the hall very gradually grew still, as if the audience understood it was time, that something momentous was about to happen. The curtain parted to show an enormous black grand piano in the center, on a gleaming wood floor. The piano and the floor caught the light from the chandeliers and shimmered. When the hall was utterly silent, a small gray-haired man in a black cutaway and shiny shoes appeared from the wings. Suzanne was too far away to see his face, but she noticed his deft movements and the way he inclined his head slightly, acknowledging the audience. He sat down and adjusted the stool by turning a knob below. Then he raised his hands over the keys.

The woman was right. She could hear every note; they emerged from his fingers like clear crystals. Yet she barely recognized the Waldstein Sonata: How could these be the same notes she struggled with? They had motion and coherence and shape, motion above all. The repeated triads of the opening, which she couldn’t manage to make sense of, became a hammering, insistent demand. The first movement climbed compulsively, as if the music were being pursued, chased by more music, each phrase impatient to assert itself and rush on. She tried to follow along with her fingers on her knee, but he went too fast. She needed all her concentration simply to listen.

The music was being made right this minute by his skimming hands, which looked, at so far a distance, like pale fleet fish glimpsed underwater. The notes had been written down centuries ago, and now they were rising from the instrument as if they were brand new. Mr. Cartelli had tried to tell her something like that. The composer hears something in his head, he said, and writes it down, but it lies there inert until someone rouses it, and then it’s as alive as the day it was written. Do you understand? The notes were more than a technical challenge to be mastered, a series of difficulties that should result in a beautiful sound. They were a dream of the ear, and playing them was giving that dream sound and texture, the dream of a dead man passed on to living listeners.

During the intermission, while the people around her made their way down the aisles, she stayed in her seat. Where could she go? There was no one to talk to. What if she didn’t get back to her seat in time and had to climb over the entire row of people? She studied the program, read about the lives of the composers and the music, but was too distracted to grasp any meaning. She couldn’t wait for the small man to appear again, to pass the dream along.

She listened to the rest of the program, especially the gorgeous Schubert Impromptus, in rapture and despair: I could never play like that. And then she thought, I will. She would practice even harder, longer hours, until she could do what this man, this Rudolf Serkin, was doing. He was not a B+. He was beyond all ordinary ratings.

When it was over, he rose slowly, as if exhausted, and came to the center of the stage to accept the clamor of applause. He looked diminished, shrunken into his black suit, the magic gone from his person yet still hovering in the air around him. He disappeared into the wings, but the audience kept clapping. He returned, a bit more briskly, as if in that one instant he had gathered his strength, and bowed again and again. They wouldn’t stop clapping. Even from so far away she could see him smile. The applause made him happy, happier than he could show. All at once everyone was standing up, clapping for the small man, and he, in the bright light below, seemed to grow larger. All those people were thinking of nothing but him, and their applause made him occupy more space in the world. There was no doubt that he was real, no chance that he would shrink away. The more they admired him, the larger he became, the more firmly rooted.

Suzanne’s eyes filled with tears. She realized, with shame, that the glory showered on him moved her even more than the music had moved her. It was the music that should matter. And yet it was as if his gift, his performance, were merely the preliminaries needed to achieve the praise. The glory. He was drenched in the brightness of the world’s love. Wrapped in glory.

She would show them. She had a gift, too. She would do nothing but practice for the rest of her life, for that reward. She would do the chromatic scales in reverse, the triads and fifths and sevenths, the arpeggios Mr. Cartelli believed in like an article of faith. She would harden her will; she would do whatever was necessary to have that.

Again and again he disappeared into the wings, but they wouldn’t stop calling him back, and now he appeared weary, even impatient. He had had enough, all that he needed. And still there was more.

The woman standing next to Suzanne turned to her excitedly. “Now, wasn’t that fantastic? Isn’t he just a genius? It’s like that every time!” All Suzanne could do was nod. If she tried to speak, she might burst into tears. This was too enormous to speak about. All the people in the hall would be thinking about him long after he left the stage; days later they would be remembering the music, remembering him. Every single person in the huge hall knew his name. How many people? Thousands, maybe. The woman next to her waved good-bye and turned away, and Suzanne rubbed her fists against her eyes so no one would see her tears. She would have that. She must. What else was there worth having?

 

 

It took longer to go down the stairs than up, the crowd was so dense. But Suzanne barely felt the press of bodies against her. The image of Rudolf Serkin, bathed in light, bowing again and again, remained with her, and she could still hear the closing bars of the Waldstein as if they were rising from the piano behind him. When someone tapped her on the shoulder, she almost tripped.

“Hi. Aren’t you in my French class?” It was a tall boy with longish straight hair, sandy brown shading into blond, and he was dressed for the occasion in a dark sports jacket. He was gazing down at her as if they were old friends.

“I don’t know. Am I?”

“Third period? Mr. DeLuca?”

“I guess so.” So she’d been noticed, though she’d never noticed him before.

“I always sit far back. But I’ve seen you up front. You’re a freshman, aren’t you?”

She laughed. “How could you tell? I don’t carry a sign.”

“I haven’t seen you around, and you have that look, kind of dazed, you know. Oh, I don’t mean it in any bad way, you just look like you’re finding your way around. It is confusing, so much going on, so many people. You must have had French before, to be in intermediate.”

“I had it in junior high. It seems like an eternity ago.”

“I know what you mean. Are you here by yourself?”

She nodded.

“Me too. I like to get away on weekends. I live with my aunt and uncle, and they’re a drag. And I love to listen to music, especially people who play the way I’ll never come near playing. Frankly, I don’t know how I got accepted in the first place. Anyway, so, what did you think of this?”

What did she think? How could she possibly say what it meant to her without telling her whole life story? “It was fantastic,” she said lamely. “He’s amazing.” She wanted to say that it was her first time in Carnegie Hall, but she held back—it would sound so naive, and this boy had such a knowing air.

“Yeah, well, Serkin is always amazing. I never heard him in person before, though, only on records. So, you play the piano?”

They had reached the lobby at last and stood awkwardly in the center, the crowds pushing past them toward the exit.

“Yes. But at school, as the second instrument, they assigned me the violin. I don’t know why. I’m still learning how to hold it. I can’t seem to get that right.” She smiled again. “What about you?”

“Piano, too. I got assigned to trumpet. But at the end of last year I did get into the second orchestra—they probably don’t have enough trumpet players. Do you want to stop somewhere for a coffee or something?”

Was he actually asking her out? He wanted to spend more time with her. “I don’t know. I mean, yes, I would, but I ought to call my mother and tell her I’ll be late. She always worries when I go to the city alone, like God knows what might befall me.”

“Befall you? Ha! I like that. There’s a phone booth on the corner. You can call from there. Where do you live?”

“Brooklyn.”

“Me too. We can ride home together on the subway. My name is Philip, by the way. What’s yours?”

 

Before she quite realized how it happened, they had become a couple. Despite her good looks—she had become unusually pretty, she could see for herself: the sleek long hair, the perfect skin, the long eyelashes and large eyes she had just learned to outline with a dark pencil (nasty Eva had some uses)—she had never had a boyfriend before. She hadn’t wanted a boyfriend before, at least not any of the boys she knew in school. The ones who approached her were not the ones she wanted, and she brushed them off as not worth her time.

She dreamed of older, sophisticated boys, closer to men, the kinds of boys she would never find in her neighborhood. Still, observing other girls, the flashy girls, she wondered how it came about, how the terms of the pairing were negotiated. Was it a tacit arrangement, something you drifted into, or were there open declarations, as in the movies and on TV? And now it was happening to her, practically overnight. At school she went from being the mysterious-looking pretty girl no one knew, the girl who walked alone from class to class, avoiding meeting people’s eyes, to a girl who was attached, and to someone clearly important. Phil knew everyone, it seemed. Even the teachers paused to greet him in the hallways. And he introduced her to everyone, forthrightly, like someone he was proud to be with. They sat together in French class; in the cafeteria, whichever of them arrived first would save an extra seat, and quickly their table would fill up with friends.

And because everyone recognized that they were a couple, she found herself, in between classes or after school, standing in the midst of a clump of kids, chattering, giggling, gossiping. It was a marvel to her, how simply being attached to a boy, a boy everyone knew, could give her this instant status.

What she wondered at, above all, was why he had chosen her when he could have anyone he wanted, any of the popular girls who waved to everyone who passed. It wasn’t only his lightweight, understated charm; he was good-looking, too, with his long thin face and regular features and odd gray-green eyes, intelligent eyes that always seemed to be assessing what was before them. With so many advantages, he still wanted her. She knew her own advantages: Besides being pretty, she had begun to dress carefully, in the style taken up by girls who wanted to be seen as arty or bohemian, a word they liked but whose meaning they were not entirely clear about, either geographically or culturally. Dark tights, turtlenecks, long flowery skirts, long hair, dangling earrings. She would often add something distinctive, colored tights or a looping scarf or oddly shaped beads she bought in Greenwich Village. But her looks alone couldn’t explain it. There were plenty of attractive girls. The only special thing about her was her talent, and she didn’t think that was something that would matter to a boy like Phil. Though she might be mistaken. At the very start, before they were firmly joined, he had begged her to play for him in one of the practice rooms and had seemed genuinely awed.

“Do you realize how good you are?” he said, and the gray-green eyes shone and seemed to penetrate her.

“I don’t know. There may be plenty of others like me.”

“Oh, no. You’re special. Believe me, I’ve heard a lot.” Special: the same word her father used, but in Phil’s voice it lost its grating edge. And then he kissed her with his tongue in her mouth and he wanted to go even further, but she wouldn’t. It was too sudden, and especially not in the small practice room where anyone might walk in. He didn’t pressure her. She asked him to play something and he refused. “No, not after that. Some other time.”

In the first few weeks she strained to be bright and entertaining, as if she might bore him. But very soon her pride put a stop to that. If he didn’t like her as she was, well, then, forget it. What was the value of having a boyfriend if you had to work to keep him? No, she would be only what she was, and that would have to do. Let it last as long as it could. She had never known this kind of pleasure, a true friend her own age, someone who cared about the same things and wanted the same things, someone to whom she was not peculiar or eccentric for wanting those things.

For he was a true friend. It was much more than kissing in the back rows of dark movie theaters, or holding hands on a bench in Washington Square Park, or going to parties—she’d never known there were so many parties on the weekends—where they could find secluded places to explore each other, up to the point where Suzanne said no. It was the talking, the exchange of confidences, that thrilled her.

Often they rode home together on the subway. It was a long ride and Phil lived three stops past hers, but if they were in the middle of a conversation he got off and walked her to her street. They talked about everything in their lives. She told him about her family, how her father pressured her relentlessly and—what made it worse—ignorantly about her music, how ever since her talent was discovered she had become a prized possession he could show off for his own gratification. She even told him about the mortifying fiasco years ago when she played so badly for Uncle Simon and Aunt Faye, a scene that even now brought her a shudder of disgust. Phil thought she took it too seriously; he was sympathetic, but clearly to him it was a minor family incident, almost comic. She didn’t tell him about the visit of the Woodsteins and the Newmans from Philadelphia, when she claimed the Rachmaninoff prelude as her own. Richard was the only person who would ever know about that.

She even told him about Richard and what he meant to her, how she would probably not be at Music and Art right now without his encouragement. It almost seemed a betrayal of something precious to talk about Richard to Phil, and yet it was so important a part of her life, she felt he couldn’t really know her without knowing about Richard. She described his house and his paintings, his friends and his music, how until now he had been the only person who truly understood her. And had given her her first cup of coffee, which she had been addicted to ever since. She caught a shadow of jealousy pass over Phil’s face, and that shadow gave her a surprising flicker of delight. Of course, there was no competing with Richard, he was in a class by himself, but she couldn’t explain that.

He told her about living with his aunt and uncle, the gloomy apartment, the heavy meals eaten in near silence, except when he attempted to break it with an account of some school antic, and afterward the silence took over again. Their gloom was like a spreading stain he was determined not to allow to reach him; he must outrun it whenever it threatened to catch up. He did this by going to all the free concerts and staying late at school, getting involved in anything that would keep him out of the house. His aunt and uncle didn’t even like him, he said. Perhaps they thought that having a boy of their own would cheer them up (with a chill, he remembered his aunt saying, “You’ll be our boy,” but he didn’t repeat that to Suzanne). Having a boy had not helped them. If anything, he had made them gloomier.

Suzanne found it incredible that they didn’t like him. At school everyone liked him; he could get along with anyone, never got angry or sullen or ruffled. Nonetheless, he said, his aunt and uncle thought he was worthless; he could do nothing to their satisfaction. But he would show them, and very soon.

He told her about the accident on the Long Island Expressway that had killed his parents and his younger brother, and that would have killed him, too, except he had been stubborn and refused to go. To this day he didn’t know if he had made the right decision. At this Suzanne gasped. Even in her lowest moments she would never have preferred to be dead. Thoughts like that were in a realm beyond her boundaries. He showed her a photograph of his real family, a black-and-white snapshot he carried in his wallet: the four of them on the lawn in front of their house in Great Neck. His parents looked young and happy; his mother was slim and girlish, with her hair in a ponytail, wearing shorts and a T-shirt (so different from chunky Gerda, who wore housedresses); his mother had her arm around Phil and his brother. His father was tall and lanky like Phil, with lots of thick dark hair, and he towered above the others. Phil and Billy were making funny faces for the camera. The photo was taken just a few months before the accident. He couldn’t remember who took it, probably a neighbor. He tucked it back in his wallet and she saw tears in his eyes, but he quickly blinked them away.

They talked about their aspirations. In those they were very much alike. Maybe that was what had drawn him to her, Suzanne thought. Maybe ambition could sense itself in another. They would both be very successful and show everyone, Suzanne because she must—ambition was by now too deeply rooted in her to dig out—and Phil because his aunt and uncle expected so little of him. It was essential to prove them wrong. He wasn’t yet sure what he would do. He had drive and determination in abundance but wasn’t enough of a musician to perform. He would do something in the field, though, maybe sound engineering, something that required skill and memory, a good ear and good hands. But he trusted that she would have a great career as a performer. He would help her get over her hesitations. He would love helping her. He liked helping people, he said, but didn’t add that he liked the powerful feeling it gave him. Nor did he tell her about the grades he altered in Mr. Sadler’s records. For now all he could do was get her into the classes she wanted, or get her tickets to concerts not yet posted on the bulletin board, but later on, he could do more.

It didn’t take Gerda long to catch on that there was a boyfriend, and when she did she insisted on meeting him. So one day when Phil walked her home from the subway, Suzanne invited him in. She had trepidations—he would find her house so dull—but it was better to do it on the spur of the moment than make a plan and suffer anxiety in advance. What she would have preferred was to bring Phil to Richard’s house. She would do that one day. Sitting in Richard’s living room with Richard being his nonchalant, wise, wry self—that was the setting in which she would like Phil to see her.

Gerda was taken by surprise in the kitchen, wearing her apron and rolling out dough for a piecrust. But she quickly removed the apron and assumed her most gracious manner, happily doing nothing to embarrass Suzanne, such as interrogating Phil about his family or fussing over him. She asked only where he lived (Brooklyn was reassuring), what instrument he played, and how he liked Music and Art. As for Phil, Suzanne, not long after, came to understand his behavior with her mother as a performance; he had so many roles at his command. He concocted a blend of deference, courtesy, and innocence—how had he known this would be the perfect approach? He must have a gift for sizing people up instantly, getting their number, as her father would say.

Gerda gave him seven-layer cake and milk, making a little joke about how thin he was, and Phil accepted a second slice with just the right degree of appreciation, admiring but not fulsome. Suzanne said little but watched each of them playing their role so well, awed by their natural adaptation, a talent she lacked. She could be only the one self, which vacillated unpredictably between talkative exuberance and shy reserve—the moods overtook her haphazardly, beyond her control.

When he finished his cake, Phil took his empty plate and glass to the sink, thanked Gerda, and said he wished he could stay longer but he had to get home—he had a history test in the morning.

“He seems like a really nice boy,” Gerda said the moment the door closed after him. “Very polite. But you might have given me some warning.”

“He walked me home and it just seemed like a good time. You kept saying you wanted to meet him.” She took a slice of cake. She’d been too nervous to eat while Phil was there.

“So, what about his parents? What does his father do?”

Here it was, inevitably, but at least Gerda had restrained herself until he left.

“His father had a business in Great Neck. Sporting equipment, I think. But both his parents were killed in a car crash when he was nine. So he came to Brooklyn to live with his aunt and uncle. The uncle is an accountant.”

“Oh, the poor boy. But does he have any brothers or sisters?”

“He had a younger brother, but he was in the accident, too. I’m going upstairs. I have homework.”

Once Phil was in her life, the trudge up the hill to the subway each morning, past the stationery store and the movie theater, the Chinese restaurant, the soda fountain, the butcher, and the cafeteria, was no longer a path heading to anomie, but a harmless route to the place where she belonged. By her junior year she was known less as Phil’s girlfriend than as one of the most gifted students in the class. It was taken for granted that she would apply to Juilliard and that she would be accepted, maybe even awarded a scholarship. Life was never easy for Suzanne—she was not built for ease—but for a while it was good.

 

 

Philip was a year ahead of Suzanne in school, and in the spring of her junior year, he was already preparing to go to Columbia, where he had a substantial scholarship. That March Elena arrived. From the Soviet Union, though it seemed from out of nowhere. One day she wasn’t there, the next day she was, so different from the others that everyone was immediately whispering about her, except for the few girls who actually tried talking to her. They reported that she spoke an odd form of English—fluent, more or less grammatical, but with so thick an accent that it was hard to understand her. She was tall and thin, her hair very long and blond, fairy-tale golden, and she wore it coiled and piled on top of her head like a much older woman.

In every way she was unlike the other girls. It wasn’t only the wary, canny expression on her face, but also her clothing. She wore skirts and jackets in drab colors, gray-green or black, too heavy for the season, and her skirts were too long—the others were already in miniskirts. Her shoes were brown, more like boots with laces. “Someone ought to set her straight,” murmured Jennifer, one of the more fashionable girls. “Take her down to the Village and get her put together. Or even an Army-Navy store. It’s amazing what you can find there.” She couldn’t be called out of style, exactly, because people were wearing all sorts of odd, patched-together getups. But Elena’s clothes were too ridiculous.

The way she asked directions was noticed, too, for she had little hesitation in seeking help. She wasn’t the least bit shy, they decided, just aloof. She asked as if she didn’t care what they thought of her and her strange accent, or as if she weren’t in a high school but in an office building or some government bureaucracy. “Can you advise me, please, where would be the gymnasium?” or “Where is located the office of the assistant principal, please?” As if she had learned the phrases from a book, but not the right way to string them together. And that extraordinary accent in that low, very adult voice.

Some found her a figure of comedy and snickered, not always behind her back. Other students were intrigued, found her exotic, and wanted to get to know her, as if it would be an honor. But they were put off by her manner: stuck-up, they called it, as Suzanne had occasionally been called as a child by the girls on her block. Meaning, Elena didn’t seem sufficiently grateful for their tentative approaches. They expected her to be humble, and she was not humble. She behaved as though school were a place where she turned up daily because it was required of her. She didn’t realize how privileged she was to be attending this special school to which the others had worked so hard to be admitted.

With all that, they were curious. There were few foreign students, and none from the Soviet Union. Who was she, and how come she had suddenly appeared among them in the middle of the term? It was Philip, with his sources of information and access to file drawers, who found out the facts. Having gotten what advantage he could from Mr. Sadler of the math department, who’d kept his promise about dropping a word to his friend in the Columbia admissions office, Philip now spent his free periods working in the principal’s office and was chummy with the principal’s secretary, who was bored and enjoyed a bit of gossip.

It was a romantic story. Elena’s mother, who was widowed young, was a Russian–English interpreter, often assigned to visiting dignitaries who came through Leningrad. (That might account for Elena’s odd English, Phil suggested; she’d probably learned it from a book, with her mother’s help, but hadn’t had much chance to speak. In the middle of the Cold War, English probably wasn’t a high priority in the schools.) The mother was assigned to translate for a famous American cellist on tour in the Soviet Union; fortunately, some cultural exchanges still survived, despite the icy political relations. The cellist, also a widower, fell in love with his interpreter, married her, and brought her and Elena back to the States. Elena hadn’t taken his name, Phil noted, which showed a sort of modesty—she wasn’t trying to profit from his renown. Her fellow students would have recognized it right away. Though no doubt the connection helped her get into Music and Art so quickly.

Not that she couldn’t have been admitted on merit alone. Back in the Soviet Union she’d been a child prodigy at the piano. Her mother was eager at the chance to leave—who wouldn’t want to get out of there? Phil said—and thought her daughter’s opportunities would be better in the United States. As the story spread through the school, Elena came to be regarded with awe, which made the others keep their distance. She walked through the halls alone and sometimes could be seen chatting with the teachers, especially with Mr. Shukov, the history teacher, who spoke Russian; they would make extravagant gestures while uttering their harsh, unintelligible phrases. An aura of untouchability was cast onto her, compounded of remoteness and vague resentment, a resentment she had done nothing to earn except own the facts of her life.

Phil and Suzanne were carrying their trays through the cafeteria, looking for a good seat, when he spied Elena alone at a table for four, eating a bowl of soup and reading, or pretending to read, a battered, hardcover book. They were too far away for Suzanne to see if the book was in English or Russian.

“Let’s go sit with her,” Phil said.

“You think so? She looks like she doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“Of course she does. I bet she wishes people would come over and talk to her. She’s new. We ought to help her out. Come on.” He led the way, and Suzanne had no choice but to follow.

“Is it okay if we join you?” he asked in his most winning manner, while Suzanne, slightly behind him, smiled tentatively and stole a glance at the book. It was in Russian.

“Yes, please, of course,” Elena said, and put the book away. As she smiled Suzanne noticed that her bottom teeth were crooked. Now that she was here with a rich stepfather, she would surely have them fixed.

After that opening moment they all relaxed. Elena was quite ready to talk, not stuck-up at all, though it was something of a struggle to understand her. Even she herself laughed at the mispronunciations Phil and Suzanne discreetly pointed out. But how she’d improved since she’d first arrived a month ago! They should have heard her then!

And so they became friends. Philip possessed the magic touch: Whoever he befriended was rescued from foundering in the chill waters of anonymity and attained the gilded shores of popularity. As it had happened with Suzanne, so it happened with Elena. The other girls, and, soon after, the boys, clustered around her. They didn’t call her aloof anymore; she was simply, well, different. She seemed older, as if she had endured more of life, or at least more of life that was notable. She was willing to answer their questions about the Soviet Union but didn’t play on their sympathies or exploit the exoticism of deprivation. Certainly life there was harder; things taken for granted here were not so easy to come by. But of course they knew all that, didn’t they? She smiled as she spoke. Of course they read the papers. The people, however, were not the monsters represented in the Western press.

Her new friends nodded knowingly, but few of them actually did read the papers. They knew about the Cold War, but it had been going on for so long—since before they were born—that it was accepted as an immutable global fact, nothing that touched their lives. Even the Cuban missile crisis of a few years ago had largely evaporated in the mists of adolescence.

They asked her about the famous cellist Paul Manning, now her stepfather, and life in his Park Avenue apartment. He was wonderfully kind, she said, and really not all that rich, at least by American standards. “At home we were required to share our apartment with another family, so this feels like . . .” She searched for a word. “Luxury,” Phil supplied. “Yes, that is right. Luxury.” The other family were boorish people who drank all the time and kept the TV on incessantly and left their dirty dishes in the sink.

Her stepfather was unpretentious and spent most of his time practicing, preparing for concerts. She was happy above all for her mother, who had worked so hard to make ends meet and now could finally rest. There was even a maid who cleaned the apartment, something they’d never dreamed of.

When they asked how she liked being here she smiled ruefully, though not with condescension. She was so self-absorbed, Suzanne would soon discover, that it would not occur to her to condescend: These Americans were not yet real enough to merit condescension, though they would become so soon enough. She hadn’t been unhappy, Elena said, despite the living conditions. She wasn’t at home that much; she had her friends. And she would have gone to the Moscow Conservatory, a peerless place, the pinnacle of achievement for music students. “Like the Bolshoi school for a dancer,” she said. But she was here and she would make the best of it—that was her way. “It is good here. It is excellent school and teachers are good to me. And not for long. Later I will hope to go to Juilliard, almost like Moscow Conservatory.” That was probably settled already, Suzanne thought; very likely she’d be spared the ordeal of applications and auditions.

It was Chekhov’s stories Elena had been reading, Suzanne found out when she asked, and she immediately took a collection out of the library and read the stories late at night in bed. They reminded her of Elena, wry yet accepting, with a kind of melancholy good cheer.

Things changed after that first day in the cafeteria. Philip wanted them to have lunch with Elena every day. He shifted into performance mode, Suzanne noted, as he had with her mother, only this was quite a different performance. He tried to impress Elena, amuse her, give her advice about school and about the city—a one-man tourist agency. Elena was a fine audience: She laughed at his anecdotes about the teachers; she listened to his advice about what to see and where to go.

“Have you been to the Metropolitan Museum yet? You must go. They have a great Impressionist collection.” Suzanne was surprised. He’d never mentioned the Metropolitan Museum to her; she didn’t know he had any interest in art. “And the Museum of Natural History is a lot of fun, too, if you like dinosaurs and whales and Indians.”

One day he suggested a ride on the Staten Island ferry. “It just costs a nickel, and it’s a great view of the skyline.”

“What do you do there on that island?” Elena asked.

“Nothing.” He laughed. “That’s part of it. There’s not much there. You just stay on the boat and ride back and look at the skyline. We’ll do it one of these Sundays. Maybe next week.” He turned to Suzanne—he was sitting between them. “Okay? We’ve never tried that.”

On Friday afternoons Suzanne went straight from school to Greenwich Village for her lesson with Cynthia Wells, a young pianist and Juilliard graduate Richard had recommended when Mr. Cartelli retired the year before. On the other days, if Phil wasn’t staying late to take care of the instruments or paste up the student paper (he’d arranged for an interview with Elena, “Russian Prodigy Lands at Music and Art”), he and Suzanne would take the subway to Brooklyn together. Now he began leaving her notes saying he had to stay in the principal’s office or work an extra hour in the practice room. On one of those days when she received a note, she saw him leaving school with Elena, his arm around her shoulder.

She grasped that it was ending as abruptly, though not as unaccountably, as it had begun. That he had many facets she knew, but he had never seemed duplicitous—in fact, she’d thought him too transparent in his eagerness to please, to help, to be appreciated. Probably Elena appreciated him more explicitly than she did, or he found her more deserving of his help.

Jennifer murmured advice in the girls’ locker room. “It hasn’t gone very far yet. You can still get him back. Keep him, I mean, if you play your cards right.”

“What ‘cards’?’” Suzanne said. “I’m not playing any card game. And I don’t want to keep him. Why should I, if that’s what he’s like?”

Jennifer looked at her, incredulous at the naive question. “That is very immature. Think about it before you do or say anything rash.”

There was nothing to think about. She scrawled a note saying good-bye in the briefest possible way and slipped it into the pocket of the jacket hanging from the back of Phil’s chair, wrapped around his keys so he’d be sure to find it. At the end of the day she left through a side exit in case he was waiting for her in front, trying to make it up. The term had only a few weeks left—already the trees were in lush bloom and the classroom windows were wide open, with the scent of honeysuckle wafting in—and during those few weeks she never spoke to Phil or Elena again. Each of them tried several times to stop her in the hall or in the cafeteria, but she walked past as if she didn’t recognize them. She found a sealed envelope slipped into her school bag and on the front, in capital letters, PLEASE LET ME EXPLAIN. She tore it up without opening it and tossed the pieces in a trash can in the subway station.

It wasn’t easy to maintain her pose of calm indifference, but she managed by force of will. By force of anger. Except for Fridays with Cynthia, she went straight home, her face stiff on the subway as she studied the textbooks she liked the least, trigonometry and chemistry, memorizing formulas for the coming Regents Exams. Once she got home she dashed upstairs to weep into her pillow, and she refused Gerda’s attempts at consolation.

It had been almost three years. She’d been so sure of him. He had told her he loved her. He had promised her things and had fulfilled his promises, gotten her free passes to concerts and rock clubs in the Village, where he had contacts. He’d even told her she kept him sane, that without her the miseries of home and his lost family would overwhelm him. She had never believed that; he’d been fine before they started. He would always be fine. That was his fate and his nature. She liked thinking in large terms like those.

When she thought of the things they had done together—once in the principal’s office after everyone had left for the day, and a few times in her own bedroom on a Sunday afternoon, when her parents had driven out to New Jersey to visit relatives—she blushed with shame. She hadn’t wanted to do it; it was so hugely forbidden. And what if she got pregnant? But Phil persuaded her. They were getting too old to be fooling around like kids; they’d been together so long. He’d use protection. She’d been afraid to face her parents after the first time, as if it were written on her face. Gerda surely would know—she had uncanny instincts. But facing them proved easier than she anticipated, and Gerda didn’t seem to notice any difference. At sixteen, nearly seventeen, Suzanne decided she could never be sure of anyone again. She would always be on her guard for hints of betrayal.

For a while Suzanne’s plight was the talk of the junior-class girls, most of them siding with her. Although Elena had her defenders, too: You’ve got to take what you can get, some of the girls declared. All’s fair in love and war. As for Phil: Boys do that, they’re fickle, they don’t know what they want. Fortunately for Suzanne, who shrank from notoriety, the affair was soon overshadowed by a plagiarism case. One of the girls in her circle of the popular, Helene, was discovered to have plagiarized a paper on Jean-Jacques Rousseau for a class in modern European cultural thought. That sort of cheating was almost unheard of at Music and Art, or at least almost never surfaced, and Helene was the new topic of conversation, also with her supporters and detractors. Rumors flew, of how she had been discovered—it happened that the teacher had recently read the book she’d cribbed from—how she had been sent to the principal and lectured. “And the worst part of it, Helene,” her teacher had allegedly said, “is that it was so unnecessary. You could have written an excellent paper on your own. You probably didn’t even save much time. What on earth possessed you, such a good student?”

In public Suzanne sympathized with Helene. She truly felt sorry for her, knowing how painful it was to be the topic of whispered conversation. Privately she was shocked, even offended, at what Helene had done. This wasn’t some childish prank with no consequences to speak of, as when she herself had passed off a Rachmaninoff prelude as her own work, and anyway, that was four years ago—she certainly wouldn’t repeat it today. No, this was serious; this was school. There was one’s permanent record to think of, and moreover it was shamefully dishonest. But Helene’s troubles, for Suzanne, were only a minor distraction. Always foremost in her mind was Philip and his betrayal.

Friday afternoons were a relief, because of her lesson with Cynthia. It was a busy time. Suzanne had to prepare for the end-of-term recital required of all juniors and seniors. She’d chosen a Haydn sonata that had looked simple at first glance but showed its subtleties the more she worked on it; she was also required to do a chamber piece, and together with a violinist and cellist was practicing the first of the two Mendelssohn piano trios. It would never do to break down in front of Cynthia, so exasperatingly serene, so sophisticated, so reasonable. Lessons with Cynthia meant only work and more work.

Cynthia was twenty-seven but seemed to Suzanne much older, with her own apartment, her grown-up clothes: She never wore jeans but dressed for lessons as if she were going to the theater. She was starting to play in recitals in small venues and was destined for success, Suzanne could tell. Certain people were, like Phil, and perhaps Elena. It had nothing to do with talent. Such people moved in the world as if it were theirs to manipulate, not hesitant or apprehensive. Cynthia was glamorous, though not beautiful. Striking, rather, with her prominent features, her dark hair cut short like a boy’s, and her heavy jewelry, necklaces and glinting earrings, but no bracelets or rings on her large hands, which could stretch two notes past an octave. She asked Suzanne nothing personal and told nothing about herself, except to explain once in a while how she had mastered a difficult passage. Suzanne had no idea whether she had a boyfriend or lover—she lived alone, that was clear—but if she did, she would never let herself be dropped. She would do the dropping. “You might find her cold,” Richard had said when he first suggested her, “but don’t be put off by that. She’s an excellent teacher and really a kind soul at heart, only she doesn’t like to show it.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, you know, some people are afraid of being hurt. Of getting attached.”

Something about the way he spoke—too self-consciously offhand—made her think they had been a couple. They’d make a good pair: Cynthia’s chill and Richard’s warmth, her sleekness and his nonchalance. Suzanne couldn’t imagine Cynthia hesitant about anything. Certainly she was no one Suzanne could confide in, except as her feelings emerged through her playing. When she pounded out Chopin’s twelfth étude or the passionate Brahms Intermezzo from Op. 118, she felt all her rage going into the music. Cynthia liked that. “I heard real passion there,” she said. “That’s fine. That’s how it should be. Only don’t get carried away. Remember, passion with control. You want to move your listeners to feel emotion, not to be overwhelmed by it yourself. Just because people call it the Revolutionary Étude doesn’t mean you should be in attack mode.”

At those moments, when they felt close purely through music, Suzanne would have liked to ask Cynthia how she recovered from love affairs—for surely she must have had many—but Cynthia, unlike Richard, did not encourage such liberties.

 

 

Suzanne found a job working as a music counselor in a summer camp far enough from home that she needn’t visit on weekends, and there, on neutral territory, she made friends easily. There was an older boy, also a counselor, pursuing her, whom she liked well enough, and with a nonchalance quite new to her, she didn’t need much persuasion to sleep with him, sneaking out to his bunk while his roommate was on kitchen duty after dinner. He seemed impressed by her experience and her responses, and she let him think it was his own appeal. In reality, and this surprised her, when the boy moved inside her, it wasn’t Phil she envisioned, but rather Richard. At first she tried guiltily to banish those fantasies, then after a while gave up and indulged them; they worked so well. This continued all summer, a colorful backdrop to the daily duties, yet she was relieved to know the boy was from Seattle so they wouldn’t be seeing each other again. Parting was not hard.

She felt as if she, too, had learned to play roles the way Phil did, and, for all she knew, everyone else as well. She had met people from all over the East Coast and unearthed a bolder Suzanne from a repertoire she hadn’t known she possessed. She returned for her senior year feeling grown-up. And Phil was gone, off to Columbia, she heard; now she was ready to see what else the world had to offer. This fall she would apply to Juilliard—the auditions would be dreadful, but she believed she’d get in—and then her true life would begin. What she had now only with Richard and Cynthia would spread and fill the rest of her days.

She found solace in visiting Richard and in playing for him. Aside from her family, he was the only listener who didn’t make her feel queasy with anxiety, the stage fright that dogged her more and more the older she grew. He was her one true friend, the one person with whom she could show her real self.

“You are the genuine article,” he said one evening. She’d hardly come in when he said, “Play something for me. Nothing fancy, just something to settle me. It’s been a long day.” Without a word, she sat down and played one of the intermezzi Brahms wrote for Clara Schumann.

“You are the genuine article.” He said it as if he hadn’t been totally sure before but now there was no doubt. She swiveled on the piano bench to look at him sprawled on the couch, his forgotten cigarette smoldering in an ashtray. He was smiling broadly, with satisfaction, and she smiled back. His hair was unruly and he needed a shave and he wore an old black sweatshirt she’d seen dozens of times, and yet he managed a casual elegance. He looked all at once beautiful to her. She felt something stirring in the air between them, and she longed to get up and touch him. She had turned seventeen over the summer and felt that her childhood—so prolonged—was at last over.

She didn’t go over to touch him. She sat on the bench staring for so long that he finally asked, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Or at least nothing I could talk about.”

“Try. Is it anything at school? The teachers?”

She shook her head.

“I know you broke up with your boyfriend last spring. Is it still that? Is he really worth months of pining?” He had just the hint of a smile, as if he were afraid to sound mocking.

She’d never gotten around to introducing Philip to Richard. Maybe she knew he wasn’t worth it, that he didn’t deserve Richard, he was a lower order of being. Her own thought startled her—exactly the kind of bigotry she scorned in others.

“No, it’s not him anymore. I’m over him.” She hoped that was true. Her feelings were such a tangle that she couldn’t tell whom or what she wanted. But she wanted something. And she had to speak, though she was shivering with embarrassment. Children were powerless, but adults could claim the world. Certain adults. Why shouldn’t she be one of them?

“It’s you,” she began, then paused while he waited, looking puzzled. “We’ve known each other such a long time. You’ve done so much for me. But you still think of me as a child, don’t you?”

He grinned as he would at a child. “No. You’re a woman of the world now. Especially after a summer of staging musical comedies. I wish I’d seen them. I bet you were a fantastic director. I think you have a touch of the martinet, beneath your charming good manners and appealing nature.”

“Oh, stop teasing. That is the worst. Don’t you think I have feelings?”

“I know very well you have feelings. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. But I really don’t get it. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

“How can you not get it? All right. It’s you. I mean, you and me.” She stared at him helplessly, willing him to read her mind.

It was a while before he spoke. He sat looking down at the patterned rug at his feet. “Oh. Oh, I see. I am so, so sorry. I never meant to give you the impression . . .” He spread his arms out as if to encompass the room, as if to indicate the obvious, then got up and paced to the window and back.

“It’s not simply that I’m so much older. I won’t even use that. But . . . you didn’t know, after all this time, after all the people you’ve met here?” He stopped and faced her squarely. “You are a very innocent girl indeed. Look, you’ve met Greg here so many times. You mean to say it never occurred to you . . . ?”

Something inside her, a vital organ, seemed to drop into free fall, leaving her weak. Whispers, rumors, nasty words she’d heard at school flickered through her mind. “A fruitcake, that’s what he is,” Philip had once said about Mr. Sadler. “I can tell by the way he looks at me.” She knew what he meant, but had never given a thought to Mr. Sadler.

How on earth could I have been so stupid? she thought. She had a flash of anger at her parents as well. Why hadn’t they told her? They must know. Everyone must know. That must be why they treated him with such distance, such suspicion. Of course. She flushed with shame. It was bad enough to have declared herself as she did, but to someone who didn’t even like women, in that way, at least. She’d been prepared for him to say he was too old, she must put away that sweet but impractical idea, they would forget all about it and go back to being good friends. She had almost hoped he would say that; it would forestall the complication and entanglement, yet leave her with a grief to harbor, sad but tender, grief like a secret, soothing companion. But this! There was nothing soothing about this.

She couldn’t account for what she said next. “I always thought there was something between you and Cynthia.”

“Well, yes, there was, briefly.” He looked away and his eyes closed for an instant, as if recalling a specific memory. “Can’t you understand? I’m not that . . . what shall I say? Exclusive. Sexual choices are complicated, Suzanne. Cynthia and I shared a lot. One thing leads to another. It just happened.”

“But not with me.”

“No, not with you. Use your head. I’m more than twice your age. I’m a teacher. You’re a student. It would be wrong. I’d be justifying your parents’ bad opinion, doing exactly what they always feared.”

“But don’t they know?”

“I don’t know who knows what. I try not to pay attention. It’s not easy. I’ve no wish to make it any harder.”

“I’ve got to go now.” She stood up and moved toward the door.

“Hold on. Don’t run away. That’s what you always do when there’s something you don’t want to face. Remember when you were a kid, with your parents? Or after your father made you perform? You’d dash out like a pianist rushing offstage and come here. You can’t always walk out of a room or a situation you don’t like. I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

She remembered the heavy yellow ceramic mugs from which she had drunk so many cups of coffee; they felt like a part of her childhood she must leave behind. “I’d rather have a glass of wine.” She thought he might object, but he opened a bottle of red and poured some for both of them. “What’s wrong with walking out on a situation you don’t like?” she asked. That was exactly what she had done with Philip, never spoken another word to him after she saw him walking with his arm around Elena. It hadn’t occurred to her that there was a better way.

“Everything is wrong with that. Look what’s happened here. You’ve learned something you didn’t know before. That’s always a good thing, at any age. When I met you, I was an adult, and I learned I could get really excited about the talent of a young child. That was something I hadn’t known before. I’d always worked with older students, but you had some kind of uncanny instinct about music I’d never seen in so young a kid. So I followed it. That’s all I meant. That we became friends meanwhile was a bonus. I never meant it to bring you any pain.”

She sat back down on the piano bench and hid her face in her hands. “I’m so embarrassed. I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been. How blind. How can I ever live in the world if I can’t see what’s right in front of me?”

“Just sit here awhile and calm down. Don’t flee—that’s the main thing. Now you’ll start looking at the world more closely. There is a world out there, you know. It’s not all in your head.” He drank half of his wine. “Talk to me.”

“What’s there to talk about now?”

“Plenty. Does this change how you feel about me? I mean, now that you know. Do you feel deceived?”

“No, I don’t think you ever tried to deceive me. And about the other, you know, what you are, your life, that doesn’t matter to me. Oh, I’m saying it all wrong. I don’t mean I don’t care about your life. I mean you’re the same to me as ever. But I’m not the same. And here I was thinking . . .”

“Suzanne, you’re not in love with me. You just want to be in love with someone. You suffered over the boyfriend, so naturally you look to someone you trust, who’s never betrayed you. And I never would. But that’s not being in love. It’s being grateful, and comfortable, and all sorts of good things.”

“How do you know who I’m in love with or not? You talk like you know everything. You’re the only person who . . .” She drank and wept.

“I’ve been the only one for some things. And I can still be. But you’ll have plenty of others. You’ll see. You’re just at the beginning—”

“Oh, stop. At least stop being so banal. That’s what I liked about you, that you weren’t as banal as everyone else.” She’d wanted to say “loved,” not “liked,” but the word wouldn’t come out.

“Okay.” He was silent for a while, smoking. “My parents didn’t speak to me for a long time. I’m an only child. I was their hope for more family, grandchildren, the real deal. But that was the lesser part of it. They couldn’t bear the idea of my . . . life. What I did. They found it disgusting. As many people do. It was hard. Terrible, in fact.”

“And now?” she asked.

“Now they need me. They’re old and not well. They need help, and I guess a queer son can do that as well as anyone else. If not for that, they might still not be speaking to me. Oh, unless some of my compositions get played or the opera I’m working on gets produced. That would make them happy. They’d think maybe it was all part of the artistic temperament.”

“How do you stand it?” It struck her how narrow her world was, how minuscule her conception of human behavior, human suffering. She’d felt the same jolt—this sense of enlargement, of enlightenment—when Philip told her about the death of his family. Once again she glimpsed how little she knew of the world outside her head, what people endured in that world. Would she ever know that breadth of pain? She both dreaded it and longed for it, curiosity vying with fear.