yourself up before the first note sounds.
Armand stomps in, wet hair with towel flung around his neck. “That’s not how you do it, esteemed colleague. You’ll fall on your face. Permit me. I have perfected the ultimate stage bow.” He reaches for Toby’s guitar. When Toby doesn’t deliver it immediately, Armand’s smile grows rigid. “I may not be such a genius as you who have achieved the semifinals, but I do know how to bow.”
Toby relents. “Show me.”
Armand seizes the instrument, lifts the sound hole to his nose, and peers inside to examine the maker’s name. “Who is this guy?” he asks.
“Luthier from Quebec,” Toby says.
This was his standby instrument, until he lost his main performance guitar. Yes — lost.
Armand clutches the guitar mid-neck to his side and bows evenly, the instrument following the tilt of his body, and hovers there for two beats before rising at the same leisurely pace.
“You see?” he says. “No rush. This is a very elegant gesture.”
“Work of art,” Toby agrees, taking the instrument back, then retreats to his room, feeling a tingle of irritation. It’s so easy to get lost in curtains of detail.
Across the hall, Hiro stumbles over the tremolo passage in the compulsory piece and swears loudly in Japanese. If you can’t manage a whirlwind tremolo in the privacy of your room, what hope do you have when nerves bite down? The technique relies on a form of fraught relaxation, achieved after years of practising slowly, then working up to hummingbird speed.
Toby shuts the door, then rolls a towel along the bottom to mute his playing noise and that of others. The single chair faces the porthole window overlooking the courtyard. He switches the chair around so it now faces the door, then kicks the footstool over to its new position: this rearrangement is a trick to keep him from getting comfortable in one spot. Toby has to be able to mount any stage and posses the new space within seconds.
He practises until midnight, then falls into bed, lying there visualizing the way his left hand slides up the fretboard, fingers planting. Toby knows this passage as if it were imprinted on his eyelids, but something is wrong. He jackknifes up in the bed, body licked with heat: it’s the wrong damn piece! All he can see is the music he played in the first round, but that’s over, finished. He strains to pull his mind to the next morning’s program, mere hours away, reciting the name of each work in sequence, what key it’s in, and how the first bars sound. Yet the moment he sinks back into the pillow it’s the freaking Fandanguillo and Sarabande that appear in photographic detail.
In that week of madness leading up to the Paris trip, he’d practised in his rented room ten hours without a break until day bled into night. Fingers grew numb, calluses shredded, and his wrists seized up, deep down the carpal tunnel. Red stop signs must have flashed, but he refused to see them. A spirit state is where it took him, lips cracked, dropping pounds by the day. He was pure mind and ringing tone, a lean mystic of the guitar, death a heartbeat away.
Well, it always is, isn’t it?
No time to shop for food and no desire to break the spell. That’s what no one understands: the so-called black hole was anything but. Nothing could interrupt him, no phone or doorbell, just brother Felix who found him lying on his cot with saliva caked to the corners of his mouth — dehydrated, for starters. It was Felix who lifted him onto the back of his Harley and roared downtown to Emergency. How long was he in the hospital? Four days? Discharge to the halfway house where a man called Jasper greeted him at the door. Lucky to get in such a place, everyone assured him. They’ll soon get you on your feet again.
“What would you do if I hadn’t entered your life?” Jasper likes to ask.
Toby answers the question with a mysterious smile, convinced that once Jasper is sure about him, sure that he’s healed, those sharp eyes will move on.
The first time they became lovers he felt Jazz pucker like a snowflake under his touch, and for more than a year the guitar stayed locked in its case, a pet they weren’t sure about.
It’s almost 3:00 a.m. and Toby’s mind is doing cartwheels. Frantic, he pops a sleeping pill, one of four he sneaked out of Jasper’s toilet bag before leaving home. Jasper will notice, of course. He will have counted the tablets.
At last Toby feels his limbs grow heavy on the mattress as the little blue pill folds him into its tent.
Poor Nina, the Mexican girl. Lucy finds her hiding in the dorm bathroom, one foot propped on the sink, painting her toenails. The cellphone lies next to her naked foot.
“You headed home soon?” Lucy asks in a carefully neutral voice, waiting before darting into a cubicle. Everyone knows how Nina wept through her performance.
The girl glances up, brown eyes pooling water. “I am so sad,” she says, sighing tragically. “My boyfriend is angry. He pays for my flight, for food, for everything.” She goes back to dabbing her nails with the tiny brush.
Lucy places her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I’m sure he’ll forgive you.” She hopes that’s true.
The girl finishes off one nail and proceeds to the next. “His mother and father are professors, very intellectual family,” she says. “I thought if I do well here, maybe —” she turns to look Lucy in the eye “— they will respect me.”
Lucy feels sorry for the girl, but this is quickly overtaken by a lick of euphoria, for what really stirs her is her own success. She enters the cubicle and dangles her purse from the hook, feeling her heart kick. It’s all she can manage to calm down enough to practise for the next round, fending off a crazy fantasy where she’s wearing a sparkly top and a long drapey skirt, peering out from behind the curtain as the concert hall fills with admirers. It’s the finals, and Goran has flown in to witness the historic occasion.
“Do you believe you will win?” the girl calls from the other side of the door.
“Of course not,” Lucy assures her.
Later Lucy perches naked on the rim of a steaming pool while women of all shapes and sizes tiptoe across the tiled floor. The spa smells hygienically clean. Nearby an ancient Korean woman crouches on a low bench and, using a pail, sluices water over her mottled shoulders.
Lucy starts to slip into the bath, but the old woman waves at her urgently.
“You help me,” she orders, thrusting the empty pail toward Lucy. This is followed by a crusty loofah sponge.
“What do I do?” Lucy asks, lifting her legs out of the skin-puckering water.
The woman points at the empty pail and the sponge, then makes scrubbing motions. On the other side of the pillar another much younger woman is scrubbing a girl’s back with a rough sponge. A film of steam covers flesh and hair, blurring the edges. Mimicking what she sees, Lucy scoops up a load of water and coasts the wiry loofah across the old woman’s back in small, tentative strokes. The crepey skin seems translucent, as if it might easily shred.
The woman cries, “No good! Harder!” and shakes her shoulders in obvious frustration. The loose flesh of her back sinks to broad hips and a soft flat bottom, pleating like drapery.
Lucy obeys as soapy water flows down the gutter into the drain.
A
