“ATTENTION, MISS Yuen!” A conductor’s wand rapped against Kiri Lee’s music stand.
“Pardonnez-moi, Madame LaMoine.” Kiri Lee’s attention snapped away from the open window. The fall day was much too beautiful to be stuck in the apartment practicing Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 5. She’d much rather spend it roaming around the palace in the Jardin du Luxembourg, smelling the flowers, and watching the ducks move across the grand pond.
“Alors, measure twenty-three,” Madame LaMoine continued in her heavy French accent. “And. . . .” She waved her baton.
Kiri Lee blew a long strand of straight, black hair out of her face and began to bow the notes before her, wishing for a moment that she were not a child prodigy. At times it felt liberating . . . exciting to have such skill, but now it had become a cage, one that she desperately wished she could escape. Hour upon hour of endless practicing, moving from professor to professor, concert to concert. It was never enough. She watched all the other kids playing in the grand square behind her family’s apartment. Just playing. She wanted to be like them. Carefree.
But it was not meant to be. Kiri was the adopted daughter of two aspiring musicians who pushed her relentlessly to reach some standard of expertise they never defined exactly. Kiri Lee knew it was somewhere between the clouds and perfection. She knew because her parents were never satisfied—not with her practice, not with her compositions, not with her performance. Never. She was bound for the great orchestras of the world whether she wanted it or not.
Kiri Lee’s music lesson stretched on into the afternoon, taking up most of the precious few hours of remaining sunlight until at last Madame LaMoine stuffed her baton into her leather satchel, rose, and went to the door. On her way out she turned and asked, “I will be seeing you tomorrow?”
“Oui, tomorrow at one,” Kiri Lee said, wincing as she did.
Madame LaMoine paused. “You know”—she said with a pensive tone—“there might come a day where you grow to love the music as your parents do.”
“The music,” Kiri Lee looked back out the window. “The music in my head is not the music here.” She blindly poked her bow at the pages on the wireframe stand.
“But first you must learn the music—”
“I know. I know. I must first learn the music on the page”— reciting Madame LaMoine’s too-often quoted verse—“so I can play what’s in my heart.”
Madame LaMoine sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “Miss Yuen, you are completely hopeless. Never have I met a child so gifted, and yet so . . .”
“Unhappy?” Kiri Lee finished her thought.
“Oui,” her teacher sighed. Silence hung between them. “Bonsoir,” Madame LaMoine said and left the apartment.
In a flash, Kiri Lee traded her cello for her violin, and her slippers for a pair of low-cut boots. She put on her jacket, quickly wrote a note to her mom to tell her where she would be, and counted to ten, giving her teacher enough time to walk out of the lobby . . . and if she timed it right, she’d miss her mom coming in. Then she rushed out the door.
Outside, the late-afternoon Paris traffic clambered down Rue Boissonade, each car trying to squeeze past the next on that skinny road. Kiri Lee never understood why people would struggle for one more car length only to be halted a moment later, no better off than the previous vehicle. She turned right down the sidewalk and headed north for the Jardin du Luxembourg.
The restaurants were reopening for the evening, their delicious smells filling the street around her. The aromas of coffee and warm bread wafted by, making her wish she had grabbed a baguette before leaving so hastily.
She continued up Avenue de l’Observatoire, passing the colonnades of trees and statues to her right, until the park entrance gates welcomed her onto the beautifully mowed terraces. Once on the grass, she slipped her boots off and allowed her bare feet to feel the cool grass slide between her toes. No one else would have taken their boots off on an October day, but Kiri Lee took every chance she could to enjoy the beauties of nature.
She turned left and ventured into one of the many manicured folds of trees, following a meandering pavement path to a playground. Among the many children playing on slides, swings, and jungle gyms, Kiri Lee spotted her friend Sophie. Younger than Kiri Lee, Sophie was born in Paris, spoke French, and was fluent in English. Like Kiri Lee, Sophie was a prodigy, but Sophie’s gift was in art. Sophie had taken to drawing with colored chalk as a toddler. After one of Sophie’s early chalk landscapes had fetched more than five hundred euros at auction, her parents enrolled her in the famed Académie des Beaux-Arts.
“Bonjour, Sophie!” said Kiri Lee.
The young artist with bouncy brown pigtails looked up from her latest sidewalk creation. “Bonjour, Kiri Lee!”
“The Notre Dame Cathedral?” Kiri Lee asked, looking at the drawing.
“Uh-huh,” she replied. “Like it?”
“Like it?” Kiri Lee beamed. “How could I not? C’est magnifique!”
Bright green eyes, rosy cheeks, dimples—Sophie’s whole face lit up with joy. Then she went back to her drawing.
Kiri Lee left the playground and followed a meandering path to her favorite spot . . . the mysterious Medici Fountain.
The long rectangular pool seemed as though it were cut off from the rest of the world, covered by arching trees and bordered by carved stone vases. Plants overflowed into the water, and lily pads speckled the surface like tiny islands peacefully ignorant of their neighbors. At the far end was the fountain itself, a massive stone edifice adorned with statues in smooth coves and intricately sculpted terraces. If they ever moved back to the United States, Kiri Lee would miss the fountain more than anything else in Paris.
She leaped to her favorite chair, amazed at how long she could stay airborne. Then she sat, thinking of how this place was almost four hundred years old, the rock green with algae and weathered with age. Four hundred years was a long time. It outlived kings, wars, revolutions, plagues, . . . even the modern age. The very fact that this work of art had endured so much gave Kiri Lee great comfort. Some things, she thought, don’t change.
She sat back in her chair and listened to the water trickle over the layers of rock and splash into the pool. Her eyes closed as the melody of the water mixed with that of the air and of the birds singing above her. It was in this place that she could escape the endless lessons and performances, demands, tests, and reviews. No more Beethoven, no more Haydn. It was here that the music of man died, and the music of life resumed.
She opened her eyes, laid the case across her lap, and unlatched the lid. With violin and bow withdrawn, she let the case slip onto the ground. She tucked the instrument under her chin, took a breath, closed her eyes, and began to play.
All at once she felt her spirit carried away on the wind, countless shapes and colors prompting her onward through a myriad of settings, each with its own mood, its own shades of light and feeling. No one could possibly write this on staff paper or record it in a studio, the way she saw it now. The Master Conductor was at work here, crafting the song of life without being seen . . . without any accolades . . . without any recognition. He was far greater than any conductor she had played under to date.
Here there was no one to critique her, no one to judge if she was living up to her potential. The music that poured from her violin soaked her soul and soothed the tension in her hands. Her arms relaxed. Here Kiri Lee was sure she could fly.
She allowed the melody to fly her far, far away. She slipped into a thunderous crescendo, imagining storm clouds around her. She could feel herself floating among them. But a sense of a lurking menace assaulted her. Brilliant flashes of light ripped through the sky and made the billowing cloud formations glow. Yet strangely, the ominous feeling in her chest did not seem to come from the storm; it was something below the storm . . . something that gave cause to the storm.
But what?
It was then that the melody of the rains came. The music of each droplet rose in harmony with the orchestration of the piece, as if the Master Conductor knew the placement for each one. Kiri Lee tried to drop below the storm, but the winds would not let her. She wanted to see . . . wanted to know what was down there. The music built in her head—swirling shapes and colors all poised on creation.
Then a flash of light.
Kiri Lee opened her eyes. There, only a few yards from her, was a strange-looking man leaning against a tree. He was wearing a trench coat, his wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes. She blinked to get a better look, and he was gone. The sun was dipping below the cityscape. She sat up abruptly, looking at her watch. It had been more than forty-five minutes since she had sat down by the fountain. Her mother and father would be waiting for her at the dinner table by the time she ran back to the apartment. Not good.
Sophie had heard the rumbles of thunder and stopped drawing. She glanced toward the sky and then looked around. She saw a tall man leaning against a tree on the opposite side of the sidewalk. Sophie didn’t think she had seen this man before, though the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat hid his face almost completely. Like the twin serpents carved into one of the nearby statues, the man’s eyes gleamed now and then—but he never turned his head.
Sophie wondered who he was watching. It might be any number of kids in the area. A blur of boys and girls sat cheering from the merry-go-round even as it made them too dizzy to walk, while others jumped rope, played on the monkey bars, and some preschoolers sat learning a song in English.
Eency weency spider went up the water spout,
Down came the rain and washed the spider out,
Up came the sun and dried out all the rain,
So the eency weency spider went up the spout again.
The man remained motionless, Sophie intently watching him. Something floated down from the tree limb a few feet above his left shoulder. It was a big spider—one of those orange and black ones that built the big webs in the eaves of the apartment! The spider dangled on its web, descended past the brim of his hat, and stopped very close to the man’s ear . . . as if it were talking to the man. The man nodded and tilted his head this way and that . . . almost as if he were answering back. Sophie giggled and quickly started sketching the man and the spider. Only minutes later the rain began to fall.
“Come along, Sophie,” her mother said. “Get your chalk. A storm is coming.”
“Mais Maman!” Sophie said. “That man, he talks with spiders!”
“What?” Sophie’s mother asked. “A man who speaks with spiders?”
“It is true, Maman! I saw him.”
Sophie’s mother nodded to her friends and was leading her imaginative daughter out of the playground, when a police officer approached.
“Pardonnez-moi, Madame.”
“Oui?” said Sophie’s mother.
The policeman explained that he had received a call about a strange man loitering around the playground and was investigating. Had they seen anything? No, her mother answered, they’d seen nothing unusual.
“Oui, Maman. That was the man I told you about. Come look!”
Sophie walked her mother and the policeman to her unfinished sketch of the man. It was all deep browns, blacks, and grays, a very dark image of a ghostly figure. “He is the one who speaks with spiders! I saw him there,” Sophie said pointing to where the man had been standing.
The policeman and her mother laughed. “A man who speaks with spiders? I’ll make note of that,” the policeman said as he walked away.