Nellie.” She grabs his forearm. He was about to keel over.
A crunching sound signals the arrival of the bus as it steers off the highway onto the gravel shoulder.
Armand jumps to his feet, waving wildly.
Sixteen
Lucy’s twin boys, Charlie and Mike, are planning to get their own place as soon as possible, the only setback being that neither has a job or savings. Mike says that students can apply for welfare. The boys can tell you exactly what their basement apartment will look like: a stack of vinyl records, old-school turntable, handful of clothes stuffed into cardboard boxes, mattresses on the floor — life reduced to its essentials. Maybe a high-def television. A decent set of speakers. Mike wants a dog, a Rottweiler or Doberman. Shame that pit bulls have been banned.
Lucy was in the kitchen preparing lunch for Mothers of Gifted Children when Mark wandered in, eyes bleary from a long shift guarding art. She was in the midst, recipe book cranked open, julienned vegetables everywhere.
“Pass the cumin seeds?” she said. “Top shelf.”
“Hmm?” Mark never heard what she said the first time.
“Cumin!” she snapped. Then she added, “Please.” She must make an effort.
Mark obeyed, or tried to, scrutinizing the row of spice jars, twisting them around so he could read the labels. Finally, he handed his wife the jar marked cumin.
“Uncle Philip will have touched ground by now,” he said, leaning against the fridge door so that she had to ask him to move. “Bunking into some seedy hotel to save money.”
This conversation took place a week ago.
“Probably,” agreed Lucy, mixing chili oil into the spices.
“Not such a bad life,” Mark continued. “Taking off for months at a time. We could do that.”
Lucy looked up. “How?”
Mark made a dismissive gesture toward the sprawl of dirty bowls and spatulas. “Just walk away. Take the boys with us, or leave them with my sister.”
“With Rosemary?” Lucy snorted.
“Why not?”
Wild Rosemary, whose own daughter waltzes in and out of rehab? The same Rosemary whose current boyfriend sports a three-inch knife scar on his cheek after a skirmish “inside”?
She knew that look on Mark’s face: wistful. He was missing who she used to be when they were younger. Well name that tune! She missed herself. She didn’t want to take off for months at a time like a pair of retirees. Her life was just beginning to get interesting. Last night her teacher, Goran, set his hand on her wrist and said in that smoky voice, “You are surprising me, Lucy. You are surprising yourself.”
She’d just played her entire program in the conservatory studio. When she was done, he stared at her, those almond eyes filled with actual tears.
Three hours of practising, wearing a visor in the dorm room because the overhead light hurts his eyes. Toby is still shivering, but he won’t give in to it, no whisky for this boy. They are all waiting to hear who’s made the cut, who will enter the finals. The pod is oddly sombre, the now-famous river catastrophe a sobering reminder that life holds surprises. Toby’s mind wants to go back to the crisis, as minds do, into the dark cold water. Brain scrambles even as his fingers plant firmly on strings and fretboard.
At 8:00 p.m. Toby drops his competition badge into his pocket, noting that the others don’t. They’re proud of their status. Montreal’s Gazette ran a feature on the congress, calling this gang the cream of the classical guitar world, the upcoming generation. The musicians step into downtown Montreal, aching to be together again. The waiting is a kind of torture: when will the judges make up their bloody minds? A tour bus rambles past, headed toward historic Old Town, its loudspeaker noting features in both official languages.
Hiro points to a sign over a café door: les copains.
Toby nods. Sure, he’ll go anywhere. The musicians enter the bistro and hover in the vestibule, waiting to be noticed. Everyone in the joint is earnestly talking while dance music blasts out of a cut-rate sound system.
“We better scram, Junior,” Larry says, digging him in the ribs.
“Why?” Toby asks. The place looks perfect, very Left Bank, elegant young men propped up against the bar, soft lighting, pressed tin ceiling — this is why people travel.
“Fag bar, you dumb Canuck.”
This is how they end up in a faux-Irish dive called Brasserie Molly Bloom, full of French-speaking students perfectly at home with posters of early-twentieth-century Dublin, cobblestone streets greased with rain and soot. They find a pair of empty tables at the rear of the cavernous bar and push them together.
“I’m not drinking tonight,” Toby announces when Larry and Armand try to ply him with beer.
“Come on, man, you’re celebrating a near-death experience.”
If he starts drinking, he won’t want to stop. Coldness sucks at his entrails, a thirsty creature.
“I saw his hand,” Lucy says, settling in across the table. “It was poking out of the water, very creepy, then it disappeared. So I snatched what turned out to be hair and pulled like crazy.”
Toby reaches up to touch his scalp, which is still tender.
“Such an episode underlines how meaningless this competition is,” she says, her voice seeking to be heard over The Chieftains soundtrack. “Who bloody cares about music when tragedy beckons?”
Toby stares at his fingertips, still crinkly from river water. This isn’t what any of them want to hear. The competition must matter more than anything. Once they stop believing that, their performances will wilt.
He wants a drink. Now.
It’s Armand who makes a point of switching topic. He’s tired of Toby grabbing the attention, and he leans into the rim of the table, forearms planted on its sticky surface. “The man is amazing.”
“Who?” someone asks.
“Williams.”
He’s referring to John Williams, the British guitar god.
“And I don’t mean just technically,” Armand adds.
“Too amazing by half,” Larry says, pouring himself a pint from the pitcher. “I swear he never plays at more than sixty percent. He doesn’t have to.”
Growing more animated, Armand says, “In master class in Frankfurt he remarks that my playing reminds him of Fisk.”
Eliot Fisk, that is, American guitar whiz, said to be a carrier of the Segovia torch. This boasting is routine, especially for a man who didn’t make it past the preliminary round.
“Give me the wild guys, like Käppel or Barrueco,” Larry says, hoisting his beer in salute to those
