NOW: BIG SUR Before any of this, she thinks, there was the kind of promise a girl just couldn't keep. Before the bad decisions, before the night sky right now so big, so big it's big enough to swallow the both of them, before her hands shaking stop shaking stop shaking stop shaking. She is standing at the precipice of a cliff, the edges of her vision sparking out into static, the heaving sea below her moving against the rocky shore with a roar. The wind is wild in her ears, singing her down. Not even the work of a jump. Just let yourself tip backward, let it go. Before any of this, was there ever a chance for something else? The lowering moon swollen huge. Her hands ache, longing and more than longing.
If there were chords that said this. Out there beyond the farthest reach of the world, out at the edge of everything, he is waiting for her. White face and long black coat and the knife-thin beckon of his mouth. His eyes darker than all the dark around her. The promise of him: honey flowing from the cracked earth, a crown of stars at her brow. The wildness of her despair at last made quiet. In her nostrils the heady tang of blood. A dog howls in the dark, three times.
She can see the black palace on the white plain, its hundreds of doors open to welcome the night in. She takes a step forward. You can play again, he says. Play for us. You can play for all the years of the long night in my kingdom. "Hey, princess," says the familiar voice behind her. "Come on. Come back from there.
" A hand takes hers, pulling her away from the brink. "What are you doing? You're going to fall." Cass's touch is insistent, bringing her back to her own skin, the solid earth under her bare feet. The madness leaches slowly out of the night. A car door slams somewhere behind her in the campground; a child shouts. "Maia. Come on. Girl.
Come away from the edge." She shudders, thinks of leaping free like a deer, plunging into the abyss, and then the spell of Cass's gentle hands on her bare skin brings her back to herself and her twitching limbs still. What did I almost just do, she thinks. Oh god, no, I don't want to fall, even as she stumbles backward, her clumsy feet carrying her away from the precipice. Back to the campfire's kind glow, their tent, Cass's arms around her, Cass's soft voice in her ear, murmuring, "Come on, princess, one foot after the other, come on. Nice and slow." I will wait for you, child, he says, his voice deep as stone in the heart of her. I will wait.
You will play for us. No, she says. But even in the circle of Cass's arms she can see his smile. THEN Oscar is wearing his white suit today and he's unhappy with her. "Again," he says. "This passage. We will play only this passage, until it is correct." He doesn't mean "we.
" He means her. His disappointment is like a rain cloud filling the room, drizzling resignation across his neat features and tiny frame. In the white suit he looks even more like a child: his ageless face unlined, though Maia knows he's at least fifty, his snowy hair still thick and unruly, his eyes bright and alert as an owl's. And as dispassionate. "Do you see," he says, pointing to the page, in a tone that clearly indicates she does not. "Here is the song, here in the left hand. You bury it. We listen and we ask ourselves, 'Where is the story? Where is the beauty in this piece?' It is like listening to something that is, how do you say.
Muddy. You play this and it is a wall of mud, Maia." Oscar's English is perfect; he's lived in the States for decades. But he likes hamming it up when he's displeased. "No mud," she repeats dutifully. "The mud is agonizing to me, Maia." She nods. Sets her hands at the keys.
Plays the arpeggios for him again, and again, and again, each time faster, each time more precise, as though by mastering the passage with near-inhuman speed she can somehow open up whatever it is that's closed in her. When she plays it for a tenth time Oscar gestures to her to keep going and she surges forward, borne away by her own momentum, the notes rolling off her fingers, the music pounding through her and tumbling across the keys. When she's played through the étude, Oscar straightens the lapels of his white suit and leans back in his chair. "You are very good," he says after a long silence. "You know this. You are the most gifted student I have taught in many years. You work. You practice.
You are serious. You have the ability to make a career. Even now, if we were not here"-he makes a sweeping gesture that encompasses the entirety of his house, the city, the backward corner of the world in which they have found each other-"if we were not here, and lived in a real place, a place of culture, who knows what would happen for you already. But you know what I am about to tell you. I say this to you always." "No emotion." "No emotion. Tell me, what is it you are so afraid of?" She is silent.
"You will not tell me. This is unfortunate." His French accent thickens. " Chérie. You mustn't think as much as you think. You must breathe it. You must trust it with your own hands. This is why we practice and practice and practice, so that the notes become our own, so that we inhabit them until it is as though we wrote them ourselves.
Until we see through to the other side. We are not draft oxen. It is not enough to work. Anyone can work. If you were only to work it would be better for you to shovel a ditch, do you see? For to only work, it is never to be great, and if you are never to be great there is no point in trying. You pick a profession that is sensible and have little babies and a house." He says "babies" with a tone of utter disgust. "This is all clear to you?" "I want to be great," Maia says.
"I know this, I know you do. I see it in you. You look at me, here, all alone, I play for children. I do not mean you. For these wretched children with their runny noses, every day they come to me, their parents say, 'Oscar, you make my child a musician,' and I say in my heart, 'I cannot make a peasant into the queen of France.' You must not end up like me. Broken and old. I could also have been great.
I will never be great now. I am a sad man with a sad life, which I have ruined for myself, as you know. But you, child, your life is ahead of you." "I'll try." He purses his lips. "It is not a matter of try. Come, let us end on a pleasant note, if you will forgive me a little pun. Play for me Chopin's Sonata in B-flat Minor.
Just a little of the funeral march, if you please, to soothe my sad old heart. Do you know Schumann said that this piece had something repulsive about it? It only goes to show you that there are Philistines in even the most unexpected places. But of course, now we remember Schumann as a man who could have been one of the greatest composers of the nineteenth century if only he had been coherent, which is not a criticism we apply to Chopin, is it." "No, I guess we don't," Maia says. Oscar is placated by the Chopin and releases her at last. She gathers her things and he escorts her to the door, as he always does, though she's spent countless hours of her life in this house, knows the worn path from the piano to the front door so well she could mark it out with her eyes closed. Oscar's creaking old Victorian is nothing like her own beige-carpeted house with its white walls and spotless floors. Even now, the cleaning lady is probably bleaching counters, scrubbing toilets, washing already-clean white sheets.
Oscar's house is an oasis of shabby majesty, littered with books and papers and dirty coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays teetering precariously atop stacks of newspapers and notebooks and sheet music. When she was little, he'd let her linger after her lessons in his enormous library-an entire room full of nothing but books, crammed shelves stretching from the floor to the ceiling, books spilling over into piles on the floor. Books in French and English and Spanish and Italian, books about music and history and gardening and cooking. A disintegrating leather-bound set of the complete works of Balzac, translated into English, that she'd devoured in the drowsy afternoons until he sent her home to practice. Biographies of Ravel and Debussy and Chopin and Fauré, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, Oscar's own teacher Nadia Boulanger. (She has seen him mimic her countless × when someone asks him what he thinks of something Maia knows he finds distasteful, he says, vaguely, "Oh! You know what I think about that. ") A battered paperback of Les trois mousquetaires that she'd struggled through in the original French. If Oscar was happy with her he would read passages aloud in a hilarious, affected baritone.
The rooms in Oscar's house are papered with ancient, hand-painted wallpaper, once grand but now peeling in long strips from the walls. His dusty wooden floors are scattered with threadbare Oriental carpets, piled three or four deep; the windows are hung with velvet drapes, in some places so worn that light drifts through them to stain the dark floors gold. The disorder of Oscar's house is like a sanctuary. No one here to foll.