Wildalone (31 page)

“How do I decide if I should forget him, Silen?”

I was hoping for something simple, advice I could follow safely. But he gave me the most indefinite answer of all: “That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether the reason he keeps secrets is not him, but you.”

“Me? Why would it be me?”

The frown had now merged his eyebrows into one big, unruly mess. “You want the truth? Of course you do. And truth is always a beautiful thing, always. But before you demand the truth, you must be ready for it.”

The shears resumed work on the pine tree. Metal flashed through the branches; dead ends snapped and fell to the ground. It was clear he had nothing more to say to me. Or maybe he did, but like everyone else preferred the easy way out—because I wasn't, you know,
ready
.

All of a sudden, he stopped and turned around.

“Don't let my inopportune rant upset you; there are more important things to worry about. Carnegie, I hear?”

“Yes. The concert is in two weeks and I'm terrified. No matter how much I practice, it's never enough.”

“Music isn't an Olympic discipline, Theia. Inner peace matters more than practice.”

“I wish you could say this to my two advisers.”
And also to the guy who just destroyed whatever inner peace I had left.
Then it occurred to me that I
hadn't mentioned the reason for my fight with Rhys. “But how did you hear about Carnegie?”

“Through the proverbial grapevine, I guess. News of this kind certainly gets around. Now, if you want my advice—take the day off. Try to rest, and have a good time at the chapel this evening.”

“The chapel?”

“Yes, the one on campus. Nothing beats the story of a phantom on a moonless night. And the organ is spectacular.” Then a suspicion crossed his mind: “You are going, aren't you?”

“If it's an organ concert, I doubt I'll go. My friends aren't really into organ music.”

“Friends, acquaintances—one always needs a retinue. But tell me, if some day your heart must sink into its labyrinths, where would your friends be then? Would they descend with you or would you venture in alone?”

He said it with such pathos that I almost laughed. “I don't think my heart has many labyrinths, Silen.”

“Not yet. But wait until it has to make a choice. The safe promise of a man or the dark promise of a phantom.”

For the first time, something about the way he talked scared me. “I'm not sure what you mean.”

“Only that you should go tonight, that's all.” He smiled and the eyebrows floated back to their separate corners. “I wouldn't miss it for the underworld!”

Just as I was about to leave, he started frisking the many pockets of his overalls.

“First, I must give you this—” He finally found it: a small wooden tube, too thick and short to be a flute. “The key to the chapel's windows. They won't speak to you without it.”

“You are the keykeeper to the chapel also?”

“Possibly.” He gave me a mysterious wink. “Keykeeper to anything that has been locked away for too long.”

On my way to Forbes, I looked more closely at the tube. And, of
course, it wasn't a key at all. What I was holding in my hand happened to be just a tiny spyglass.

THE NIGHT HAD SUBSUMED THE
chapel in impenetrable darkness, transforming it into a fairy tale of stone and color. Deep, famished black had crept along the walls. It had gorged on them, swallowing their contours completely. And now the only things left were windows. Lace patches of red and blue. Suspended in solitude. Floating in a mute, merciless sky.

“Good evening, miss. Are you here for the screening? We will be starting soon.”

I passed by the usher. Climbed the few stairs. But it wasn't until I stepped inside that my eyes were swept by the raw magic of the place. By its absolute, unabashed splendor.

Earth and sky, man and god, life and death—everything was fused in a vast expanse of line, light, and air. Endless arches rose all around, shooting high through a distant vaulted ceiling like giant capillaries of stone. And the windows, their colors now maimed to the monochrome of night, balanced their fragile skeletons against this massive span of walls, held in place by an elusive geometrical enigma. In comparison, Procter Hall seemed a dollhouse. Intimate, a jewel in its own right, but trapped in the confines of sensible proportions. This chapel was oblivious to scale. It reached for the sky, knowing that even a dome of stars could not contain it.

I walked along the nave. Sat down. Everything around me was breathing and alive: frayed floors, expectant pews, flickers of chandeliers gone mad inside the iron cages. People scurried, choosing their seats. Far ahead, a crimson rope separated the wood-carved altar where an organ—spectacular, as Silen had called it—lined its pipes along the walls, solemn like guardian knights on both sides.

“Take a look at the wood surrounding us. It comes from Sherwood Forest.
The
Sherwood Forest. And some of it may even date back to the time of Robin Hood.”

A girl's voice had risen over a group of tourists who blocked the view
(probably the last tour of the day), and I half listened while she explained how the carvings had taken one hundred craftsmen an entire year to complete. Then I heard a mention of music: “. . . for there is a rhythm to these carvings, as to everything else in this chapel. You can see the figures: Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Orpheus . . .”

The name took a moment to sink in. Orpheus again. This time in an American college chapel, whose interior wasn't supposed to have any link to Bulgarian legends or Greek myths.

The tour group was already moving on to the next point of interest.

“. . . where you can see a quote from John:
And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
Truth is the theme of this entire transept. Now, if you could please follow me back to the exit . . .”

I caught up with them just in time. “Excuse me, I overheard you mentioning Orpheus.”

“Oh yes, he's right there.” She pointed to a few wooden figures carved on top of the altar benches. Orpheus was first, facing the entire chapel. “Beautiful, isn't he?”

Even from a distance, the tiny statuette projected the bleak silence of its despair: the wood had given shape to his lyre, but could never give it voice.

“How come they have Orpheus here?”

“Because of music. These benches—this is where the choir would sit.” The lights went out and a large white screen loomed next to us. “You must take your seat; they'll be starting any minute.”

The moonless night story that Silen had made me promise not to miss turned out to be
Phantom of the Opera
from 1925, screened to the accompaniment of the chapel's eight-thousand-pipe organ. Smudged credits popped on-screen. The long-dead high society of Paris ascended the grand staircase of the opera house, caught up in glamour, in worldly gossip, hungry for the prospect of being seen but deaf to the warnings of dread sent by a creature from the catacombs. A phantom. A music genius who fell in love with a young opera singer and became her teacher—her “spirit of music”—determined to make her a star by showing her that the heart, not the mind, was where music should come from.

The scenes flashed on. I began to feel suffocated, observed, as if a hidden stare was fixed on me under the glare of that screen.
You shall know the truth and it shall make you free.
The words were probably inscribed somewhere, in the maze of the transept's window. What truth exactly would I know? That Rhys was my phantom? My “spirit of music”? That in two weeks, when I would play on the Carnegie stage, those would be his sounds too—
his
mind,
his
heart,
his
music?

I grabbed my coat, sneaked out of the pew, and ran—down the transept of truth, all the way to the exit doors and the much-needed air on the other side of them.

LIKE EVERYONE ELSE WHO PLAYED
the piece, I galloped through
Asturias
, giving my two advisers what Rhys would have called a show-off. A loud torrent of sound. Flamenco played like a Bach fugue.

“Not bad, not bad at all.” Wylie grinned in his seat. “Hardly the disaster I was told to expect.”

Donnelly blushed, busted. “Well, I didn't go
that
far, Nate. But it's great to see Thea back on track. That was lovely, dear!”

“Thank you.” I smiled, politely. “Except this isn't how I'll play it at the concert.”

A shock wave went through the room. Wylie reacted first:

“Then what was all this? Warm-up?”

“No. Just a demo, so nobody would worry about my technique. For Friday, though, I want this music to sound the way I . . .”

“Yes?”

I remembered Rhys's hands on the keys, every note charged with passion. “I want to play
Asturias
the way it feels.”

“Ah, the sobfest again.” Wylie looked even more skeptical than he had been about Chopin. “Very well, then. Show us!”

After pulling all those strings for me, he expected a show. And not just an average show. A tour de force.

I began playing, but this time only for Rhys. Just the two of us, in his
cottage, kissing under the sounds of a guitar.
Nothing is ever safe in legends.
Or in music. Or any time you are about to fall in love . . . Then the two of us again—back at school, alone on a terrace. Crisp sky. Gold November morning. I must ask him a question.
Make it a threat. Rip it open.
So—I do. He hesitates—an absolute, breathtaking absence of sound. Until the sadness slams into me, like octave keys hit on both sides of the piano—

There was a handclap. Bracelets jangled from a woman's wrist.

A man chuckled.

Everyone was pleased.

THANKSGIVING TURNED OUT TO BE
a big deal: even people I barely knew had invited me to dinner.

“We are thrilled to have you over, dear!” Donnelly smiled, encouraging me to try the turkey she and her husband had been roasting all day. The two had a warm, unpretentious home with topiaries in the front and her beloved herb garden in the back. “Thea is from Bulgaria,” she announced to the other guests. “This is her first Thanksgiving.”

Fourteen pairs of eyes turned to me around the table, curious what I thought of Turkey Day and how it compared to celebrations in my country. I told stories of food and fetes and folk traditions. But the real comparison I kept to myself. My first holiday in America happened to also be the first I was spending away from my family. Every whiff of freshly cooked food, every burst of laughter or clink of glasses made me wish I were home instead. It was impossible to explain how one could feel so welcome, surrounded by so many wonderful people, yet so alone. And when a guest made a toast (“to all those whose love we will always give thanks for”), it made me miss my parents almost to the point of tears.

After the feast ended, I took a long walk back, but the empty campus only made it worse. The concert was in less than twenty-four hours. I dreaded it. Worst of all was my irrational need to practice—all evening, just in case—as if a few more hours could make a difference.

Don't bother sitting down at the piano unless you're ready to become a wound
,
Rhys had warned me.
The music, the song, the dance—everything bleeds, if it comes from Andalucía
.

I had spent the last two weeks trying not to think of him. But now, in a masochistic urge to “bleed” myself numb, I went back to my room and searched under a pile of books for the
Gypsy Ballads
. I wanted to feel the flamenco rhythms again. The rush from his kiss. His voice. His touch. And the sense of being with him, back in that cottage—my happiest days since coming to Princeton. Or possibly in my entire life.

The
Ballads
took up only half the book. The rest was an earlier collection,
Songs
, written shortly after Lorca gave up the piano. It started with a panoply of color, a mix between a schoolyard and a circus. There were merry-go-rounds, horseriders, harlequins, unicorns, and a group of children watching a yellow tree change into birds while the sunset shivered over the roofs and flushed like an apple. After them, in a suite of Andalucían songs, a girl from Seville chose the wind over a suitor who roamed the thyme-scented streets without a key to her heart.

Then I saw a wrinkled page, the only damaged leaf in the book, thickened by what looked like it had been water. Not tears, a larger splash. And all over it—a familiar handwriting. Minuscule rosaries of red ink, suspended on long, slanted loops:

Who else would love you like me

if you changed my heart?

The couplet was repeated obsessively, up and down and diagonally around the printed text, obliterating the entire margins.
Books go through many hands, people scribble
, Rhys had said on Martha's Vineyard, when I had seen the same handwriting in another book. Yet these were no ordinary scribbles. The frantic hand leaving them must have belonged to an Estlin. Not Rhys—his handwriting I had already seen—but someone else in that family. Someone who appeared to have been desperately, hauntingly, in love.

Even more unsettling was the poem itself. Named after Bacchus (the Roman equivalent of Dionysus), it had only six couplets—starkly bare,
thrown together like drunken fragments held in place by the whim of the moody god himself:

                     
Green intact whisper.

                     
The fig tree opens its arms to me.

                     
Like a panther, its darkness

                     
stalks my frail shadow.

                     
The moon counts its dogs
,