Читать книгу The Ann Ireland Library - Ann Ireland - Страница 23

Toby’s semi-drunk when a knock on the door rouses him. Peek at the clock: just midnight, but it feels as if he’s been awake for hours, cursing the greasy pub food and beer. Since everyone else in the dorm is dead to the world, he rises groggily, wraps a sheet around his midsection, and heads out of his room to investigate.

Lucy looks as if she hasn’t slept, either. She’s wearing the same clothes she wore at the bar and waves him into the foyer with an urgent gesture.

“What?” Toby rubs his mouth. His breath must be Middle Earth.

“They posted names.”

He feels a shudder of anticipation. “The finalists?”

She nods. “I don’t dare look on my own.”

Toby tugs at his hastily assembled toga. “Let me change.”

“You’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

They ride the creaky elevator to the ground floor, then step into the deserted foyer, Toby clutching the improvised garment to his chest.

Lucy points to the daily board where someone has pinned a sheet of white paper containing a daunting short list. “I don’t know if I’m more scared to be left off or to make the cut,” she says in a pinched voice.

Toby approaches the board, chin high. With each step the print grows larger until he can read the eighteen-point caps at the top: finalists.

Rise of sour puke to the throat — blame nachos and the second round of Guinness.

“Seems like you’re one of the chosen few,” Lucy says. She’s crept up beside him.

He stares at his name. Cascading euphoria, a wild sensation that roars through his body, and he has to close his eyes for a moment, then just as suddenly, joy’s boxcar arrives — doubt.

There’s been a mistake. He’s some lunatic who thinks he’s the pope or Napoleon.

“Congratulations,” Lucy says. “Well deserved. I thought you played beautifully.”

“Thank you.” His voice echoes inside his head.

“Might as well head back to my room and sleep,” she says, and he hears footsteps disappear behind him, the elevator door swing shut.

Four names appear in clear type.

His own.

Trace.

Javier the Argentine.

And Hiro.

Salvatore, Mr. Bel Canto, has been dropped.

No sign of Lucy. He looks around, but she’s gone.

She may sleep, but he will work.

Toby soaked his battered fingers in a bowl of salt water. This took place in the room he’d rented, first home away from the childhood home. Eighteen years old, practically a genius, people were saying. Yes, the word was used. He was training full-time for the Paris competition. He’d been playing so long without a break that his calluses cracked, hence the blood and stinging saltwater bath. In the early hours of a marathon session, he was on edge, too much energy; his nervous system was his enemy. He’d discovered the solution: subdue the animal via repeated exercises while watching himself in the mirror. As time crept by, he seemed to enter a state of bliss where the rest of the world fell away. He’d been reading documents by certain Christian and Eastern mystics, so the sensation was not unexpected.

What did it feel like and how exactly did it come upon him? This is what he’s been trying to remember all these years. Was he playing better back then, more poetically — not a word he would normally use — or did it just seem like that?

How could he ever know for sure, since nothing was recorded and all he knew then was that he wanted to stay divine, so he removed his bloodied hands from the water and went back to work.

Brief pauses to sip cold tea and eat biscuits until both ran out. Did he sleep? He had no memory of it.

The next stage slunk in like a troll, bringing a drenching fatigue. His mind seized up and was unable to look upon itself, to reflect. Sleep was death; food was death; water was liquid kryptonite.

This lasted how long? He wasn’t sure, because he continued to play, hardly knowing what he was doing, until one evening the fatigue lifted and he found himself performing the most difficult piece of the looming Paris competition flawlessly, not a hint of tension in his body.

If this was ecstasy, then he wanted more of it.

Rapture and genius were twinned, though this was no place to linger, more like a hot stove touched and escaped from.

Jasper’s opinion was that he’d been deceiving himself in a hypoglycemic trance.

Brother Felix found him slumped over a chair, passed out, and hauled him down to Emergency. The object was to re-hydrate, re-salinate, orchestrate potassium, electrolytes, and urine production. He’d lost his way, everyone seemed to agree, because he’d forgotten the basics: eat, drink, sleep. It came from being a young man living alone.

Ten days later Toby clambered aboard the airplane to Paris — wild horses couldn’t stop him. The so-called breakdown, he figured, was a minor setback. He barely glanced at the City of Light as he set to work, and very soon the judges were scared and excited by him.

On that June evening of the final recital, he crossed the stage in front of six hundred people, sat down on the quilted stool, lowered his right wrist, still scarred from the IV, and began the variations.

Then the horror started. A composition that he could, and did, play in his sleep unravelled, then vanished without a trace. He improvised in a quasi-classical mode until a voice called out, “Thank you, Mr. Hausner. That will be plenty for tonight.”

Valium injected in the left buttock brought him back to the recognizable world, while Klaus flew over the Atlantic to fetch him home.

“Was that you I saw sneaking into the university this morning?” Portia fixes Manuel with her eyes. She wears a military cap today along with some sort of sailor getup, complete with bell-bottom trousers.

They stand holding takeout coffees on the sidewalk below the entrance to Jean-Paul’s brownstone. The judges and a select group of federation members have been invited for a breakfast meeting.

“Excuse me?” Manuel says.

“With our youngest competitor in tow, both of you looking worse for the wear?”

“Excuse me?” Manuel crafts an indignant tone, but he is hoarse, his throat not yet lubricated by coffee.

“You should know better,” she adds before edging past him and mounting the iron staircase.

The front door is already open, and Jean-Paul greets her with a kiss, then waits for Manuel, who ducks the kiss but receives a comradely embrace.

“I hope that you have slept well,” Jean-Paul says.

“I can only speak for myself.” Portia raises her crescent eyebrows, then sails past both men into the high-ceilinged room where she pirouettes, taking it all in. She strokes the dining table that is set up as a buffet, then runs her hand over an accompanying chair and notes, “Hans Wegner wishbone chair, very nice.” Without a trace of self-consciousness, she lifts one of the asymmetrical plates. “Vintage Russell Wright. Jean-Paul, you suffer from impeccable taste.”

“Blame my wife.” Jean-Paul stands in his collared shirt and pressed black pants, looking embarrassed.

“And where is this celestial being?”

Before Jean-Paul can answer, the doorbell rings and he hastens to greet the newcomers — the judges Visnya Brocovic and Jon Smyth, both looking achingly chipper.

As greetings are exchanged, Manuel rubs his eyes with his fists, grinding the optical orbits until he sees flashes of light. The front door continues to swing open and shut as federation members arrive. His head throbs — nothing to do with last night’s romantic fiasco.

“Do not come home,” Lucia ordered during his morning phone call to the weary homeland. “There is nothing here — zero.” Then she pleaded, “Stay, Manuel, and send money.”

“Pastry?” Jean-Paul offers a tray of delicacies.

Portia makes a little gasp of pleasure and coasts her hand above each item on the platter until her fingers seize a miniature brioche.

The guests draw file folders from a stack and sit on folding chairs that have been set up around the perimeter of the spacious room. The walls, Manuel notes, are decorated by abstract paintings, the artist’s palette knife yielding layers of colour and unusual dumpling shapes.

Seeing his interest, Jean-Paul says, “My wife is the artist.”

He looks proud, so Manuel quickly mutters words of praise.

“I hiked up Mount Royal as the sun was rising,” Portia announces to the gathering as she brushes pastry crumbs off the flap of her nautical shirt. “From which vantage point I watched the city spring to life.”

Visnya appears cross. She finds Portia’s athletic feats undignified in a woman of her age.

“Time to call the meeting to order,” Jean-Paul says, clinking a spoon against his water glass.

Twenty-two musicians and teachers have gathered this morning to attend to the important question: who will succeed old Gregorio as president?

Portia teeters at the edge of her chair, face bright and expectant, folder set on her lap. Gregorio himself is not present. A reoccurrence of an unpleasant disease keeps him home in Milan under the devoted care of his wife and widowed daughter.

“Who’s running for election besides Portia?” Jon Smyth asks.

“I see three names on our list,” Jean-Paul says, directing him to the material they are supposed to have read and carefully considered.

“I’d just like to add,” Portia says, clearing her throat, “that I feel confident that any one of the nominees would do a fine job, and I will happily bow to whomever gains your favour.”

Still, she can’t restrain herself. “As we are well aware,” she continues after a tiny pause, “the organization has become an old boys’ club and technologically backward. I aim to change this.”

There are mutters of agreement and even a trickle of applause. Then Jean-Paul taps his glass again. “May I remind you that elections are the final item on our agenda. I draw your attention to the first point of business — how shall we thank Gregorio for his decade and a half of careful stewardship?”

There is a short, troubled silence. Everyone has a Gregorio story, often involving some small humiliation or misunderstanding.

“Lifetime honorary membership,” someone suggests.

“Scholarship in his name?”

“We commission a guitar-shaped pin.”

“Cufflinks.”

Someone snickers, then cufflinks versus tie pin occupies ten minutes of heated discussion before Jean-Paul cracks the tabletop. “How many in favour of a scholarship?”

A few hands shoot up.

Meanwhile, Portia is mouthing something in Manuel’s direction; an instruction is being issued. An ominous feeling creeps into Manuel’s already churning gut, for Portia remembers things with hideous clarity. She will have recalled, for instance, that episode in Mexico City, not his finest hour, and now this new slanderous accusation caws into his morning brain: Was that you I saw sneaking back this morning with our youngest competitor in tow?

What right has she to monitor his actions?

He nods back, very curt, inviting no further communication. The voting continues, and Portia slips out of her chair to perch on the arm of Manuel’s modernist settee. She whispers in his ear, “Can I count on you?” and places an icy hand on his shoulder.

He stares straight ahead, pretending to be intent on the business of the meeting. Cufflinks are surely more useful than a tie pin. Gold is too expensive and would deplete the coffers of the federation.

“For the proposed virtual conservatory?” The hand sinks farther into his flesh.

Jean-Paul glares at the pair of them as he tots up numbers of raised hands.

“I need you,” she breathes.

“Why?” Manuel can’t bear women who drag him into their personal dramas.

“No private cabals during the meeting,” Jean-Paul says, staring at them with a fixed smile.

Portia glances up. “Carry on, love. We’ll be done in a flash.” She presses her magenta lips to Manuel’s ear again and confides, “Without you onboard the idea will be DOA.”

After this pronouncement, she pulls away and returns to her chair, bowing apologetically to Jean-Paul. Everyone notes the way she dangles one long leg over the other, sailor on shore leave.

Manuel steams: why should he lend his name to her enterprise? He won’t agree to be her hand-picked director of the Internet conservatory, an unpaid position. Yet if he doesn’t, he understands, last night’s girl will be brought into the picture. A disaster for Trace, as his vote would be cast off as tainted. There could be a nasty scandal, one he can ill afford. So unfair. After all, he tried to persuade the girl to go back to her dormitorio.

Perhaps not hard enough.

The front door of the apartment kicks open, and Jean-Paul glances up. His face changes. He looks startled, then wary.

A stout young woman appears in the doorway. She is a mess, hair uncombed, jeans slung low on full hips. Jean-Paul speaks in rapid French, which the girl ignores. Instead she examines the scene in the room and demands in unaccented English, “What are these assholes doing here?”

Jean-Paul’s expression freezes, then he speaks quietly to the assembled group. “I apologize for the manners of my stepdaughter.”

“Don’t apologize for me.”

Jean-Paul’s face blanches. Or rather it loses its colour and white is what remains.

“Come.” Portia seizes Manuel’s hand. “Now’s our chance.”

They retreat to the room behind the kitchen where coats hang next to a stack of neatly tied newspapers. Daisies wilt in a pair of window boxes, the petals brown so late in the season. Beyond the window is the fire escape decorated with a compost bucket.

“Tell me why you’re not supporting my initiative,” Portia demands, pressing her hip against the ledge. “It’s not my nature to twist arms, yet I’m fully prepared to do so, for the sake of the organization.”

“I understand,” Manuel says.

“And yet you claim not to be in favour of the virtual conservatory.”

“It is so.”

She can’t bear his bland tone. “It’s the only way we can grow into a global organization.”

He thinks of Guillermo and Mónica back home, content to live their lives staring at a computer monitor, never setting foot outside the country, hardly moving beyond the confines of the decaying capital city, lulled into a hypnotic trance they mistake for life.

More stormy words issue from the front room, followed by Jean-Paul’s measured tones. The man is a paragon of self-control. After this exchange, they hear a stomping noise as the girl makes her way upstairs, then the bone-rattling slam of a door and the rumble of a bass beat — the universal language of adolescence. Even his beloved Gabi exhibited such behaviour once or twice.

“I will return to the meeting now,” Manuel says, not about to be bullied by this woman who sweeps her hair behind her ear, a woman who thinks she is still beautiful.

She ignores his small threat. “Do you really think Aaron Whatshisface from Tel Aviv is a possible leader? The man can’t be bothered to show up for meetings. And Harry from the Florida Panhandle? Nicest guy on earth but —” She raises her palms. Words fail her. “I’ve led Berkeley Integrative Strings to its present stature, sat on every committee in the federation.” She stops. “Why am I working so hard to sell myself?”

“I don’t know,” Manuel says.

Her expression shifts, all trace of pleading gone. “If you don’t sign on, your indiscretion of last night will become public knowledge. How many more competitions do you think you’ll be invited to judge?”

The woman is a warrior, and Manuel likes warriors. He is one himself.

“Perhaps I will support this plan,” he muses aloud, “but first I have one favour to ask.”

“What?” she asks, already suspicious.

“Can you create an artist’s position for me in California?”

As soon as he speaks, he feels a surge of excitement. Lucia will whoop for joy at the news. He’ll send home envelopes, via Western Union, full of crisp money orders that she’ll dangle in front of her family. Morning fog rolls into Berkeley, California, the city where Nobel Prize winners meet over coffee to discuss the birth of the universe or urban ecology, and where he, Manuel, might finally cease the daily struggle.