Wildalone (4 page)

It was in the moment of silence before this last nocturne that I first saw him. A tall boy, possibly my age, strikingly beautiful even from a distance, under the glimmer of the exit sign. He walked in through the door closest to the stage and remained there, arms folded over his chest, all of him sunk in
darkness except the eyes—tiny pools of reflected light that refused to let go of me.

My fingers fell on the keys and disappeared in the music, in its dark anguish. I had to concentrate on the piano and could no longer see him. But every nerve in my body felt his presence, felt watched by him—the only person in the hall still standing—as if he wanted me to notice him. To know he was there. And to play the last nocturne only for him.

After the final notes I looked up, back toward that door—

He was gone.

The applause came to me distant, dulled, as if obscured by the layers of a dream. Who was this guy? Not only had he arrived late—he hadn't bothered to hear me finish the piece, dropping by probably not so much for the music but because his ticket would have gone to waste. And why did I even care? The insolence of latecomers was nothing new to me. They felt entitled to rush in, fret, demand their seats, argue with ushers, and even prompt the dreaded “wave” (an entire row getting up to let them pass) just because they had paid money for those tickets. It inevitably ruined everything. The mood. The magic. The flow of music in the room. Yet this time there hadn't been a single stir. He had walked in quietly and nobody had turned. Nothing had given him away except his eyes and a dark silhouette. Could this be the shift my piano teacher had once promised me, that abstract ear of the universe? A universe reduced to a single person. To a stranger who obliterated everything else . . .

The intermission slipped by fast, with my two advisers rushing over, ecstatic, to wish me good luck with the rest. When I returned onstage, I saw the hall already waiting. But there was no one at that door. Nor in the aisle. Nor anyone who looked like him in the nearby seats.

The second half had only études—mostly from Opus 10, the set Chopin dedicated to his main competitor, Franz Liszt. The dazzling 1st softened into the dreamy 3rd and the much darker, haunting 9th. Then came Opus 25—a deluge of sound, storm upon a storm. The audience went wild and it gave me a moment to run backstage for a sip of water. When I came back, the applause continued, but the door to my left stayed closed. Only seconds remained
before the clapping would stop. Before it would be time for the last étude.

I sat at the piano. Took a breath. Looked at the door. Lifted my fingers and placed them over the keys. Another breath. The shut door. Slowly, I lowered my right hand into the hesitant notes of the most stunning, most intimate of the études: the Nouvelle Étude in F Minor from 1839. Its first measures were still unfolding when I saw the dark figure walk in, as if he had waited outside for the music to begin. And again he stayed at the door, anonymous in its shadow, eyes locked on me in anticipation of the sounds.

I had no idea who he was or why his presence had such an effect on me. But of one thing I was now absolutely certain: he wasn't a latecomer. Twice already, his entrance had been timed purposefully, with precision. As if he had seen the program, recognized the piece that mattered most to me in each half of the recital, and decided to hear only that piece, nothing else.

As I made my way through the étude, I imagined the crowds after the encore: everyone rushing to get home, the evening already reduced to a memory. What were the chances that I might run into him there? That a stranger who hadn't even shown his face would decide to stay behind and try to meet me?

Still, I kept wishing that he wouldn't leave. Just before the last notes, when I lifted my eyes from the piano, I saw him reach toward the stage to drop in its corner a single white flower.

Then he walked out through the exit door and disappeared.

“THIS IS WEIRD. GUYS HERE
don't do things like that.”

The girl who had decided to give me a crash course in American dating was just doing her job. Her name was Rita and she was my RCA (short for “residential college adviser,” the third-year student who lived in Forbes for free and was in charge of me and nine other freshmen down the hall). To cement the team spirit, she had brought everyone to my concert. Now, as the two of us headed back to the dorm, she dug into the only piece of gossip I had produced so far: a long-stemmed rose.

“I mean, a guy might go out of his way to give you a flower if he's already
dating you or for your birthday. But to lurk by the door and stare at you like that—no way.”

I glanced back as we walked. Far behind, the rose window of the concert hall bulged its lethargic blue stare, awake for a few minutes longer before the building would be shut down for the night. Two arched exits still beamed their light across the lawn. But there was nobody left; the doors were already closed.

“And how come you didn't see his face?”

“Everything except the stage was dark. It always is.”

“I don't know, sounds kind of creepy. Maybe you have a stalker, Tesh!”

It was her affectionate nickname for me; she had Hungarianized it. The family had moved from Budapest to New York when she was only five, which meant she had lived in the U.S. long enough to qualify for the RCA role that typically went to Americans.
Only those who know how to fix everyone else's problems
was how she had put it. Now she seemed intent on fixing mine.

“Look, let's not overthink this. I don't have a stalker. He was there to listen to Chopin, not because of me.”

“And the flower was for Chopin, not you?” She smiled, having added one more to her collection of verbal victories. “Tesh, no offense to your dead composer, but from what I've seen, men nowadays don't think with their ears. Nor with their brains, for that matter.”

“Sure. Around you men probably lose the capacity to think at all.”

She ignored the comment, but I was right—with her willowy figure, long black hair, and eyes the color of dark chocolate, Rita looked like she belonged on a catwalk. Next to her I was the washed-out twin: blond, pale, and watery-eyed.

“So let me get this straight: I'm the one who turns heads, whereas you get noticed only because of the piano?” Her laughter echoed high above us, multiplied by the vault of Princeton's most prominent arch, Blair, where I had once caught an a cappella group's performance and, for half an hour, had forgotten everything else. “If I didn't know you any better, I'd think you were the queen of hypocrites. When was the last time you looked in a mirror?”

I had never worried much about my looks—until my first week at
Princeton.
You're so dressed up, is it your birthday?
I would hear this so often that I started changing outfits five times before I could leave my room in the morning. “Dressed up” seemed to capture anything outside the American fashion uniform of jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers. In my case it simply meant “all black”—a look that would have barely passed for casual in Bulgaria, where girls wore sky-high heels and miniskirts even to the supermarket.

“Tesh, seriously. I know you have all this piano stuff going on, but try to break out of your shell every once in a while. Come to parties, drink, chill out, whatever. Everyone's been asking about you.”

“Who is everyone?”

“The guys in our RCA group; don't tell me you haven't noticed. They blush like schoolgirls as soon as you show up, all enigmatic with that foreign accent and those skinny black outfits of yours. It's kind of funny, actually. They've nicknamed you ‘Triple B'—Badass Bulgarian Bombshell.”

“
Badass
. . . is that a good thing?”

“Are you kidding? It means you have the whole package: looks, attitude, sex appeal. There—” She stopped and turned me around, pointing at my reflection in one of Dillon Gym's windows. “Gorgeous face, legs up to here, boobs any girl would kill for, and those full lips—I'd be dropping flowers onstage too, if I were a guy!”

“Wow, thanks . . .” I smiled, trying not to sound self-conscious. “It's nice to hear these things from a girl, for once. With guys you never know who has an agenda.”

“They all do, I'm sure. But now with that new admirer of yours, none of them stand a chance. If I'm sensing correctly, the bar just got raised tonight?” She wasn't giving up on the latest gossip, not so easily. “Let's see . . . He needs to be erratic. Appropriately mysterious. Bonus points if he broods over nineteenth-century music. Oh, and God forbid he should show his face—that alone would disqualify him before he even speaks!”

“Except I doubt I'll ever see him again, Rita. I don't even know his name.”

“But he knows yours, and Princeton is smaller than you think.” She stole one last peek at the flower. “Never mind what I said before, the guy is probably
perfectly normal. On the off chance he makes another weird appearance, though, I want to know about it.”

“You sound just like my mother.”

“I prefer
chaperone
, thank you.”

Both of us laughed. The promise to report any stray flowers or weird appearances was on the tip of my tongue when someone called Rita's name and a group of people surrounded us. We had finally reached Forbes.

W
E HAD ONLY
one weekend before classes would start, so the goal was to get the most out of it: rush from one meet and greet to the next, bond over food, party all night, then come home with a roster of new friendships. And not just any friendships. Upperclassmen, preferably athletes, who might single you out from the freshman pack and bring you into their coveted circle, which in turn meant you would be going to postgame parties, formals, and any other bash open only to the sufficiently popular.

There was, of course, a science to all this. To maximize the return on everyone's time, it was wise to move in groups, avoid one-on-ones and not linger. Names were thrown around like confetti. Introductions were brief. Conversations ended abruptly, having barely started.

“Nice to meet you. I guess I'll see you around?”

“Yeah, you too.”

“Cool.”

“Bye.”

I deviated from the rules only once, chatting up a Russian girl at a party with the hope that we might become friends since we had so much in common.
But she quickly excused herself, saying that hanging out like this, just the two of us, wasn't in our best interest.

“What do you mean?”

“We'll get stuck in our Eastern European bubble. When instead we should be talking to Americans and learning how to become more like them. That's why we're here, right?”

Right. Except I felt no need to become somebody else, and wanted to spend my time with whoever seemed most interesting to me—American or not.

Unfortunately, the one person I was dying to meet didn't happen to be around. He had entered my life briefly, leaving it without a word, and his flower was now the single piece of evidence (a quickly fading one) that he had been real. With more than seven thousand students at Princeton, the odds of running into him again were slim. Yet no matter where I went, part of me anticipated his presence.

The concert had been a success, and Donnelly took me out to lunch on Sunday to celebrate the review about to appear in Monday's issue of the
Daily Princetonian
. A trusted source, as it turned out, had given her a sneak preview.

“Listen to this—” She opened a yellow folder before we had even headed over to the restaurant. “
Foreign talent is always a breath of fresh air, but last Friday a student from Bulgaria served everyone an oxygen tank
. It sounds like something Nate would say. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if one of his numerous fans wrote it.”

“Professor Wylie has fans?”

“He's a bit of a rock star. You didn't know?”

I shook my head, ashamed that I hadn't found the time to read more about my adviser online.

“You should hear him on the electric guitar; it bends the limits of everything you've been taught about music. Naturally, students love him. And you lucked out when he decided to take you on.”

I was sure I had; the concert had proven this. But it had also proven that Wylie viewed me as his newest pet, and I dreaded how far he would go in “finding me gigs.” Or what could happen if one day he overestimated me.

I told Donnelly that I was grateful to both of them.

“My pleasure. But this was just warm-up, honey. The real test will be New York. Nate is already pulling a few strings to get you there, although it's far from a slam dunk.” My puzzled face made her laugh. “Meaning ‘a sure thing.' Not much of a basketball fan, are you?”

“I'm not really into sports.”

“Well, this will have to change here. Everyone is into sports. Besides, you and our athletes share one thing in common: you don't need to worry about grades. The piano comes first, and the school understands that.”