Wildalone (16 page)

And now he, in turn, was passing that riddle on to me.

“What happens in the rest of the paper?”

“It flows beautifully. All the way to its tragic end.”

“The death of Orpheus?”

“Not just a death. A suicide. The daemon breaks his vow, so that the maenad will kill him. Because what is immortality without happiness?” He let the question sink in, as if expecting it to haunt me even after all his other questions were gone. “When we humans lose a love, we wait for time to dull out the pain. And time obliges—they don't call it ‘healer of all wounds' for nothing. But a daemon can never heal. In eternity, time simply doesn't exist.”

It was a while before there was another sound in the room—he was getting up and his chair screeched against the floor. I took this as a sign that we were done and hurried to get up too.

“Enjoy the journey back. Back home, and back through time.” He smiled and handed me the paper. “It is truly a mysterious part of the world, yours.”

I asked if I could photocopy the pages, but he had already done it.

“You can keep the original. I figured you might want it in case you . . . for its sentimental value.”

Before I could thank him, a phone rang on his desk and I saw all signs of emotion wash off his face as he reached to answer it.

I LEFT THE ART BUILDING
in a daze, with the paper tucked inside my bag like a secret heirloom. But as soon as I reached Forbes and started reading, I realized that this was not the kind of heirloom I wanted.

THE TWO DEATHS OF ORPHEUS

by Elza Slavin

I had known her name for several months now. She had typed it herself, probably the way we all type our names: by habit, without thinking. Yet seeing it felt unsettling, wrong, as if I had put my own name on a school paper and then someone had erased me from the page, replacing me with her:

Elza
.

Giles was right about her writing—powerful, and somehow dreamy. It engulfed you in a world of myths and visions and, before you noticed, it had carried you back into the bizarre darkness of its universe.

A universe permeated by death, intoxicated with it. I saw the madness of nocturnal rituals where people drank, danced, and copulated under a strangely detached moon. Among them was a young musician. Lost in sadness. Haunted by his doom. Ready to die—wanting to die—just like everybody else around him. In that world, death seemed to be the answer to everything. Death as a cure. As the ultimate ecstasy. A long-awaited end, then a rebirth. And above all, death as a sacrifice that would enable love to last forever.

From beginning to end, the paper was exactly as Giles had said. Except one thing: it didn't sound like a theory at all. Dreamy as her writing was, I knew—and this intuitive certainty frightened me—that what Elza had put down on those pages hadn't been a theory, at least not to her. She had written it with a chilling confidence, the way a surgeon dips the scalpel for an incision through the skin. And the suicide of Orpheus, each gory detail, was described as if she had been there and witnessed it.

All this, of course, had fascinated our art professor. To him it was just scholarship—brilliant, but still only an academic exercise creating fiction out of ancient pottery. To me, it was a glimpse into the madness of my sister. Whether that madness fit within strict medical definitions or not, Elza had died at Princeton. Maybe, by the time she wrote that paper, she had already
wanted
to die. Now I was no longer sure that these pages (an afflicted girl's fantasy, as Giles had called them) didn't have something to do with it.

And what if they did? A paper in itself proved nothing. It offered no leads I could follow, no insights into her life or who might have ended it.
None, except the vaguely disturbing hope that maybe the past wasn't buried as deeply as everyone said it was.

I opened the window. All the way—the room needed air. Then I slipped the paper among the Chopin scores at the bottom of my suitcase and turned off the light.

In darkness, places begin to feel alike. I remembered another dark room, not too long ago, where a guy had whispered to me before I even knew who he was, telling me that I should write about Orpheus. And something else, the first thing he had ever said to me:
It must be a maenad, back there.

The singular.

How had he known?

I sneaked under the covers, curled into a ball, and tried to summon sleep under my burning eyelids.

T
HE SCHUBERT RECITAL
with Ben would have been a magical evening (tiny church off campus; violin music by candlelight) if I had managed to stay focused on where I was and not think about Rhys.

Almost a week had passed since the incident on Mercer Street, and I never heard from him. It was better this way—I had nothing to say to someone who would drop me without a word simply because I refused to have sex in public. He probably had nothing to say to me either. The kind of girl who could keep up with him was not a shy freshman from Bulgaria, and he must have figured it out right there, under those trees.

Still, I couldn't let go. Blaming him was the easy part. Yet what if it was my fault too? I felt insecure—not only with him, but in America. Expecting disaster at every step. Threatened by anything unknown, unfamiliar, foreign. Rhys was the opposite: nothing seemed to intimidate him. He didn't look much older than the students at Princeton, but acted older. Late twenties, maybe. A man, not a boy. A man who knew what he wanted and went for it, confident that he would get his way.

“Hey, are you all right?” Ben was waving at me, looking worried.

I became aware of the noise, hands clapping from all sides. The concert had ended, even the last encore, and I hadn't noticed any of it.

We headed for the Street. By the time we arrived, it was close to eleven and the insanity had started. Hundreds of students, most of them already drunk, zigzagged in groups back and forth, from one club to the next. Rita texted me from Colonial and we found her in the crowd—everyone partying, shouting, spilling beer from disposable cups. Ben and I were too dressed up for the place, but nobody seemed to care what anyone else did or looked like, so we all danced for a while until Rita grabbed my hand.

“Oh my God, Tesh, he's gorgeous!”

“Who?” I thought she was trying to sell me on the advantages of dating Ben.

“There's a guy who has been staring at you for the last five minutes. I bet it's your stalker! Don't turn, though, he'll see it.”

I didn't need to turn—the stalker hadn't left my thoughts all night.

“He came in with the swimmers, but I doubt he's on the team. I've seen them compete a few times, and I definitely would have remembered him.” She kept looking over my shoulder, across the room. “I'm surprised this guy would go to a Chopin concert, actually. He looks more like the lead of some Euro rock band. And, Tesh, much as I do hope you get to meet him this time, I think it's too early for you to be mixing with the Ivy crowd.”

“Why Ivy?”

“The swimmers practically run that club. No one is allowed into their clique, and as far as dating goes—good luck counting on anything serious, no matter how sexy or cool you are. They commit only to the team.”

“If that's the case, then why are you worried about me mixing with them?”

“Because I know you like this guy. And from what I've heard, their entire gang is not to be trusted.”

“You never think anyone is to be trusted.”

“Exactly. Most of the time, unfortunately, I turn out to be right.”

“Wouldn't you rather trust people and turn out to be wrong?”

It was a reminder of how different Rita and I were. Although born in Hungary, she had grown up in America, where, from what I could tell, the smart thing to do was protect yourself against emotional impact from others. In my culture, we gave the benefit of the doubt until proven wrong.

“Tesh, I'm serious. There's nothing wrong with playing it safe.”

“Actually, there is. I've been forced to play it safe all my life. Shouldn't everyone be entitled to a mistake or two at some point?”

She shook her head. “Your mistake just left, by the way. Too bad.”

I turned around, only to see him walk out the door.
That was it? He wouldn't even come to say hi?

The next half hour drifted through me without an imprint—I smiled, talked, danced, all as if an external force prompted my body to keep moving. When I headed out long before anybody else, Rita and Ben looked worried; he even offered to take me back to Forbes. I said I'd catch the campus shuttle, even though I had no intention of doing so. What I needed was a long, solitary walk.

I also wanted to call my parents and tell them about Carnegie. I had been putting it off all week, waiting to be in a better mood so that nothing would sour the moment of giving them the news. Now I simply sat down on one of the many campus benches and made the call.

It was 7:00
A
.
M
. in Bulgaria. Dad had been up for a while, but my mother sounded sleepy.

“Huh? New York . . . what about it?”

“I'll be playing there in November, Mom. Carnegie Hall! Can you imagine?”

There was no answer—she probably thought she was still dreaming. I wished I could see her face, the change on it as the news sank in. But this was the curse of the telephone: I would never know.

Finally, Dad's voice came through from the second handset: “Thea, baby, that's terrific! Tell us everything! When? How?”

I gave them the details: Albéniz, Wylie, the crazy intensity of it all. On the other end there was silence again.

“Mom? Dad? Are you guys all right?”

Yes, of course they were. So excited. And proud of me. And happy. Then came the sentence that broke my heart:

“You must promise to take a lot of pictures.”

There was no need to explain to one another how we felt at that moment. How they would sit quietly at home on the night of my big piano triumph, or how, in the few seconds of applause, I would look from the Carnegie stage to see just an empty hall, a world in which I knew and loved no one.

In all the years of hard work, of me practicing endlessly and both my parents taking extra shifts to pay for piano lessons and music camps and recording studios and contest fees, none of us had seen this coming. That one day I would live in America. That the flight from home and a week's hotel stay in New York would cost more than their annual salary. More than I could earn in the dining hall the entire freshman year.

I hung up the phone feeling so sad I almost went back to Colonial. But that would have accomplished nothing (except maybe elicit more worried looks from my friends), so I headed to Forbes instead—down bleak alleys, through courtyards stirred only now and then by an insect crashing into a wall lantern or the blink of a window turning black. The campus had sunk into the languor of an early-October night, a crease between seasons when the dense heat of summer still smolders inside stone and bark, but less so with each day, weakened by shivers from the approaching fall.

Finally, Forbes glimmered in the distance. On a Thursday night, when everyone went partying, the dorm had the vibe of a sinking ship: abandoned yet still brightly lit, dragged down by its own silence. I walked along the empty corridors to my room, took my key out, and slipped it in the lock—

“I was worried you might not be coming back alone.” A hand reached and pushed the door open for me.

“Rhys? I don't appreciate the scare . . .” Only a second ago, I could have sworn the hallway was deserted. “Who told you where I live?”

“Serial killers have tricks. Blackmail. Bribery.” He saw that his old joke was creeping me out again. “Or, in this case, extortion of Forbes staff. Which was a challenge, given that I still don't know almost anything about you.”

“And so what if you don't? You said you didn't need to know me, right?”

“I didn't mean it that way.”

“What other way is there?”

“Just . . . wanting someone. Without the kind of background checks you ran on me earlier—who I am, what I do, where I live.”

“Well, yes, but I can't go out with a guy unless I know whether he—”

“Whether he'll admit he screwed up? I acted like an ass back there. But it won't happen again, I promise.”

“What, you needing to ‘have me'?”

“No. Me leaving you by yourself.”

Something about his promise scared me. I realized how quickly I was starting to rely on another promise, one he hadn't even implied: that he would continue to be in my life.

“By the way, speaking of background checks—what was that girl telling you about me?”

“Which girl?”

“Your girlfriend at the club tonight. She was checking me out and clearly giving you some savvy advice. To stay away from me, I'm guessing?”