Wildalone (17 page)

“Why? Is this what I should do?”

“You should do only what you want, not what anyone else says. Including me.” Somehow, his smile continued to imply the opposite. “So the question is: Do you want to stay away from me or not?”

“I don't. But I also don't understand why you left Colonial as if we didn't know each other.”

“I hate public displays. Besides, it looked like you had a date.”

“You mean my friend Ben?”

“He seemed a bit too smitten for a friend. I hope you're not planning on going out with him again.”

“I wasn't ‘out with him.' He lives here in Forbes and we—”

“There is no ‘we,' Thea. I'm not going to share you.”

“Share me? Rhys, what are you even saying?”

“That I want you as my girl. And I absolutely mean it.” He kissed me, blocking any attempt to argue. “Now, if you still have energy left, I'd very much like to take you somewhere.”

His girl.
I tried to think clearly—about Rita's warning, and the better question of why I would leave with him, in the middle of the night, to go to one more party or whatever else he had in mind—but he leaned over my ear and whispered:

“I'll behave this time. Come with me.”

THE GOLF COURSE LOOKED AS
it always had—dark, vast, and solemn. I had already walked out there at night, when I went to play in Procter Hall. But it wasn't until we vanished deep into its hills that I sensed the difference: there was no moon this time. The grass rose and fell in invisible curves under our feet. The sounds of creatures had multiplied from all sides. And each tree appeared distant, then suddenly turned up next to us—a deformed giant, locked against the unending black of sky.

I had no idea where he was taking me, but I knew what would happen once we arrived there. Awkward scenarios ran through my mind, about whether—or how and when—to tell him that I hadn't had sex before. Turning it down in high school had been easy, especially after seeing a few of my girlfriends get their hearts broken when they wouldn't wait for the right guy. Now I wished I had just done it, with one of the nervous boys who swore their eternal love to me back then. It would have made things with Rhys much easier. No strained moments. No need for explanations.

Mercer Street was fully dark. There were no streetlamps, only houses whose dim light faded long before it reached the sidewalk. He led me in silence, absorbed in his own thoughts.

I was a mess. How did other girls do it? I had been to a few parties at Princeton, enough to know that in college sex wasn't a big deal—after a few beers, there was hardly anything people didn't do in front of everyone. It happened casually, with rehearsed nonchalance, as if a single glance and a quick
cheers!
was all it took to agree on the rest. And “the rest” was an even bigger mystery. Somehow, you were supposed to not care. To detach your body from any source of complications (the mind, the heart), and walk away afterward as if nothing had happened.

We reached a cluster of trees—the same trees under which he had left me the last time—and came out on the lawn. There was no light in the mansion. No trace of moon or stars; clouds had wiped out the entire sky. I could barely see his face but I felt his breath, the question in it.

“Will you come where I want to take you?”

The night had hushed around us, not a trace of wind left.

“Yes.”

He headed straight for the mansion. Several stairs separated the lawn from the French doors that looked out over it. Before we had even reached the top stair, before his hand had found the unlocked handle—perfectly sure of its location in the dark—and opened the glass frame to let me in, I already knew. I knew where he was taking me now, where he had wanted to take me before, and why my stubborn refusal to walk through the lawn had amused him earlier.

This was his house.

“YOU SAID YOU WANTED TO
know where I live. So here you are, in the den of your lynx.”

I had said it, yes. But now the “den” made me feel out of place—Cinderella at the ball, arrived way past midnight.

He flipped a switch. Several lights shimmered along the wall, creating an illusion that candles were being lit all around us. I heard a noise and instinctively squeezed his hand: a figure had appeared under the arched entryway. Dark, well-fitted jacket. The shirt strikingly white, as if a black light had been turned on somewhere.

“Ferry! Why are you up this late, my friend?” Rhys took a few steps in the man's direction, without letting go of my hand.

“I was under the impression that the master had returned to New York and would not be expected back in Pebbles for a while.”

“Well, I've decided not to leave—now or anytime soon.” He looked at me and smiled. “Thea, meet Ferguson, the man behind the scenes who runs this household. Ferry is practically family, but he insists on calling himself
our ‘butler.' Brings back Europe for him, I guess. So we indulge his fetish for old traditions.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir.” I had no idea how to address a butler, especially one in his seventies who looked and spoke as if he belonged in a Victorian novel.

“Likewise, miss.” His eyes lingered on my face—a subtle curiosity, or an attempt to assess how long the attention of a guy like Rhys could stay focused on someone like me. “Will the master be requiring anything?”

“No, not tonight. Thea?”

I looked at Rhys, unsure what he was asking. “I don't need anything, thank you.”

“We're all set then, Ferry. Go get some rest.”

When the man left, I finally looked around. There wasn't a hint of the heavy dark wood that filled such mansions in movies and magazines. A white marble floor made everything appear weightless, floating on air, all the way to a fireplace carved from the same stone (or maybe the floor had risen in a wave and splashed against the wall). In the corners facing it, lush palm leaves balanced their fans over Chinese ceramic pots, while in the middle an Oriental carpet burst its geometric patterns of red, green, black, blue. A sofa and two armchairs completed the setup, all in a leather whose white rivaled that of the walls. But by far the most striking objects in the room were two black grand pianos, placed opposite each other across from the windows.

“Who plays on the second one?”

“The devil himself. We often hold competitions.” He smiled, not realizing how believable that sounded. “Play something for me.”

“No, you play for me this time.” He had already heard me once, it was my turn to listen. “We'll consider it payback.”

“You mean
advance
?”

That wasn't at all what I meant, but maybe Alexander Hall mattered less to him than it did to me.

“All right, give me your favorite.” He walked over to the piano on the left and sat down, waiting for me to choose, as if he could play anything on the spot, without scores.

“I think you know my taste.”

“Your taste . . . the moody Pole? Come on, does it have to be him?”

“Why not?”

“He's too saccharine.” A few measures from a polonaise trickled from the keyboard. “So intent on melting you. It can get unbearable.”

I remembered him making a similar comment that night at Louisa's, and it unsettled me. Had I been wrong about him? My quick assumption that he understood Chopin's music (and, by extension, everything else) the same way I did now seemed just a trick of my homesick imagination.

“This one's better—” He started a mazurka, only to cut it off abruptly. “Except it gets so sugary, I just have to stop right there.” One look at my face, though, and he knew he had gone too far. “Fine, the moody Pole it is!”

This time he really began playing. Sounds filled the room—flawless, merciless in their beauty: the Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp Minor, one of Chopin's most virtuosic works. Incredibly fast at times. Heartbreakingly lyrical at others. Rhys had called this music saccharine, yet for a moment even he seemed swept by it. There was nothing sweet, or condescending, in the way he played. The piece poured out of him as if he was improvising on the spot, charging each note with as much intensity as it could possibly carry.

I do play. And your Chopin is stunning.
It had sounded so casual when he said it; as if, compared to me, he could barely hold a tune. Now he was turning out to be the far more accomplished pianist. We were a few years apart, granted. But age probably had nothing to do with it. He appeared to have a rare natural talent. An utter ease with the instrument that I had never heard, not even on recordings.

Once again, the questions raided my mind. Who was he? Old Princeton money, of the kind Americans considered aristocracy? A musical prodigy? Both? Or just a young, rich, eccentric genius who had decided to withdraw from the world, on the outskirts of this famously secluded campus?

Intimidated and shaken by all this, I absorbed each sound while he played. Yet in every single one, I also felt a sting from how, only moments earlier, he had dismissed this very music—the music that had brought me to him.

Finally, his fingers ended their self-indulgent stroll above the keys. The
last notes fell over the piano and dissipated, lost in the space between me and this guy whose presence, for the first time, felt irreversibly foreign. I still didn't know if he was a student at Princeton, had been in the past, or had found some other access to the only local party scene—the eating clubs. Either way, I was getting my first taste of the Ivy crowd: impudent, at times arrogant, too good even for its own privileged surroundings. It was a world I hadn't expected to ever be allowed into, let alone this quickly. And part of it already enticed me. The ease with which Rhys did everything. His confidence. Even the way he mocked Chopin, so different from the way people mocked things they didn't understand. He knew Chopin's music intimately and played it better than anyone, including me. What more could I possibly want?

I tried to smile. To thank him politely. But my voice came to me through the silence—distant, as if belonging to someone else—telling him that his Chopin was stunning, then asking him to take me home.

THE NEXT DAY I RECEIVED
both things the Dean's Office had promised me. First: a copy of Elza's transcript. Greek Art. A seminar on Pompeii. Advanced Composition. Methods of Modern Music. Not exactly a surprise, with her two passions being music and archaeology.

The second thing was a call from the counseling center, offering me an appointment that same afternoon.

“I am really glad you decided to come in, Thea.” A warm handshake, brief and professional. “Jane Pratt. Sorry, McCosh is a bit of a mess these days. Was it easy to find us?”

I figured she was referring to the elevators, temporarily shut down for maintenance. “The receptionist was very helpful, even gave me a map.”

“Right, right . . . Please, take a seat.” She pointed to an armchair in the middle of the room, choosing for herself the couch across from it. “This is your first time, I take it?”

“Luckily I haven't been sick at Princeton yet, so no reason for health center visits.”

“I didn't mean McCosh. I meant whether you've been in”—her eyes narrowed
in a sudden web of lines, adding at least a decade to a face whose delicate, densely freckled skin had made her look no more than thirty, barely out of medical school—“in therapy before.”

“Me? No, I haven't.”

We observed each other in silence. I wasn't trying to come across as hostile, but the calculated tact with which she had said the word
therapy
, and even the word itself, irritated me.

“Dr. Pratt, the Dean's Office asked me to see you for an informal handshake, whatever that means. So, to be honest, I didn't realize this would be a therapy session. Or that I needed one.”

“No one is saying you need therapy. Needing it and being able to benefit from it are very different things. We can all benefit from therapy, if it's done correctly.”

Sure, whatever. This was probably the usual spiel, to put my mind at ease while she “diagnosed” a long list of things I never knew were wrong with me.

“It won't take more than an hour. Just give it a try.”

“Try what exactly? Psychiatric tests?”

“No, no.” She shook her head, a notch too eagerly. “We'll talk about what happened in the past and how it might—or whether it even should—impact your life here.”

“I assume by ‘it' you mean my sister's death?”

Of course she did. Like my Greek Art professor (and probably many other people I would meet at school), she had a hard time perceiving me as a separate person, outside the Elza context. Somehow, my behavior was expected to bear the mark of a tragedy that had taken place while I was still an infant. And for the first time, I caught myself thinking that maybe my parents were right. Maybe coming to Princeton had been a mistake.

“Thea, we seem to have started off on the wrong foot. Why all this resistance?”

“Where I'm from, nobody goes to a therapist. People are offended by the idea of having to hire a stranger to listen to their problems. That's what family and friends are for.”

“Except there is a science to how we feel, a complex chain of cause and effect that your friends and family might be unaware of.”

“They know the most important thing: how my mind and heart work.”

“I wouldn't mind knowing that, too.” She smiled, sensing the first crack in the ice. “So, can I try? Just five minutes. And then if you still want to leave, I won't insist, I promise.”

She clasped her hands over her knees—bony hands, freckled, no rings. No other jewelry or makeup either. Gray pantsuit, a size too big. And sleek ash-blond hair, cut safely to just above shoulder length. It was as if she had wanted to be invisible. To merge with the room whose neutral, almost insultingly run-of-the-mill decor was probably a therapy device in itself.