Wildalone (5 page)

“Understands . . . as in fewer classes?”

“No, as in flexible curriculum. There are easier courses whose sole purpose is to give students like you a break: Physics for Poets, Rocks for Jocks. Those two should get you through the science requirement, unless you hate geology.”

I wanted to ask what she meant by “students like me”—I was not a jock—but we had already reached the restaurant. The place turned out to be much pricier than I had expected. Its glass wall overlooked a sidewalk patio directly on Nassau Street—the main shopping and dining artery that divided the north end of campus from the town of Princeton. Once again, I regretted not having done a simple Internet search. When Donnelly's e-mail had mentioned lunch at the Blue Point Grill, I had glossed over the name, unaware that in America the word
grill
signaled upscale ambience and thirty-dollar entrées. Now she, of course, fit right in with a brown pantsuit and coral brooch pinned to the lapel, while I sulked next to her, hoping that my black jeans and turtleneck could pass for edgy college chic.

“Mrs. Donnelly! We were starting to worry that you had forgotten us this week.”

The waiter showed us to our table and I tried to decipher the menu while the two of them exchanged pleasantries. It was a maze of seafood dishes, referring to at least a dozen kinds of fish I had never heard of before. When she ordered the sea bass, I asked to have the same.

He grinned in my direction. “May I interest you in any of our delicious starters?”

“Excuse me?”

Donnelly sensed that I needed help. “Would you like a soup or a salad, dear?”

“No, just the main course would be fine, thank you.”

I was going to need quite a few restaurant trips in America before a meal would stop being an exercise in embarrassment. Luckily, Donnelly didn't seem to mind. She loved the place, calling it her “weekly indulgence,” but I found it hard to believe she had the means to come here so often. Back at home, my family went to an upscale restaurant only on special occasions—two, maybe three times a year. Most other families could afford even less.

“So where were we?” She unfolded the napkin and placed it in her lap—another American custom. I copied everything she did. “Ah, yes, classes and grades. The bottom line is to manage a decent GPA. It doesn't have to be great, just decent.”

“I need higher than decent to keep my financial aid.”

“That's the last thing you should worry about, especially with reviews like the one you just received. Your campus job, on the other hand, is a bit of a problem. I heard they've assigned you to the dining hall two nights a week?”

“I don't mind working.”

“It's not a question of whether you mind. There are only so many hours in a day, and you can't be washing dishes while you should be at the piano, practicing. Have you talked to anyone about it?”

“My award letter said this was part of everyone's package, no exceptions.”

She frowned, taking off her jacket and pulling up the sleeves of her beige blouse, as if to prepare for a battle with the food that hadn't been served yet. “First of all, it isn't
everyone
—only those who can't pay their own way. And second of all, there are always exceptions. The whole thing is absurd anyway.”

“Why?” There was nothing absurd about earning pocket change when you needed it.

“Because somebody took a great premise and flipped it on its head. With the ton of money they are giving you each year, do you think a thousand or two more would have made a difference?”

“Probably not.”

“Certainly not. Money isn't the point here. The point is that a job teaches
humility in a way books can't, at least that's what we trumpet all over the brochures. But I don't see how we get there by having kids on financial aid serve food to their rich classmates. If anything, the lesson is more needed the other way around.”

This was a new angle for me. I had always accepted as a given that there would be rich students at Princeton, and that I wouldn't feel equal to them. At least not in terms of wealth.

“Anyway, I'll see what I can do. Unfortunately, the semester is starting and the Financial Aid Office will probably give me a hard time. But by spring at the latest we should have this fixed.” She sounded so confident that I wondered if there was anything she couldn't fix, once she put her mind to it. “How do you like the sea bass?”

The food had just arrived and I was taking my first bite. “Delicious, reminds me of my mother's cooking. Except for a flavor I don't recognize. Not exactly thyme.”

“It's rosemary.” She savored the dish, eyes closing in approval. “I have a garden at my house, and the one herb I always want fresh is rosemary.”

Rosemary. Or thyme. We all had an herb that could take us home.

“Now, let's talk classes. We should reshuffle quite a bit.” She took a chart out of her purse and a red pen flew through the page, circling a few boxes. “You don't need this literature class. They read a book a week and it will eat up too much of your time.” A quick X in three of the boxes got rid of the excessive reading. “Definitely keep Composition, but one music class is not enough. I'd say two, even three—to beef up your résumé early on. Which means that either Greek Art or French 101 has to go.”

The tip of the pen froze over Monday's schedule, ready to strike either class as soon as I made my choice.

“Professor Donnelly, I'm not sure about the trade-off.”

She shrugged. “Everything is a trade-off. You'll get more use out of the language than the art history. But you already have Bulgarian and . . . what was your other language? Russian, right? So if you want to take art instead, go ahead.”

“I meant the trade-off between that and music.”

The pen dropped on the table. “Not sure I understand.”

“There are other things I'd like to explore.”

“Exploring is fine. But I can't let you jeopardize the piano.”

“How would this jeopardize it?”

“Easily. Music doesn't tolerate being pushed to the side—either you drop everything for it or it drops you. So, while endless sampling of the liberal arts may work for anybody else, for you things are different.”

Things had always been different for me, and I loved it that way. Yet it wasn't the kind of “different” Donnelly had in mind. Had I stayed in Bulgaria, my entire future would have been mapped out for me: competitions and concerts all through high school, then admission to the National Academy of Music, then more competitions and concerts, endlessly. It was a great future if you loved music (which I did). But I had come to America to choose my own future. And this time the piano wasn't enough; I wanted everything. Whatever I had been missing out on, all my life.

When I tried to explain, Donnelly wouldn't let me finish. “Thea, I get all that. I've been through it myself, believe me. What I don't get is how exactly you propose to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Fulfill the prerequisites for the major on time, qualify for the Performance Certificate, keep your stage appearances, while all along scattering yourself across the board like this. I don't think it can work.”

I felt short of breath just listening to her list. “Professor Donnelly, I thought I had more time.”

“More time for what?”

“To decide on my major at Princeton.”

The window was exactly two years, I was sure of it. In American colleges, you could try majors and switch them even halfway through the ride. Whereas in Bulgaria the decision had to be made by the end of high school. There was no such thing as applying to a college or university in general, only to a specific department. And if the department said yes, that was it.

“You aren't serious, are you?” The twist in our conversation had drained the smile off her cheeks. “Or are you actually telling me that you might major in something else?”

“I've thought about it.”

“And?”

“I need to take classes outside of music before I can make up my mind.”

She looked at me as if my face had become a snapshot of the apocalypse. “Fine, then, we will revisit this once the semester is over. But in the meantime I wouldn't put it on Nate's radar, if I were you.”

I promised her not to. She handed me the chart, French 101 and Greek Art still intact on it. Yet this was only the first of eight semesters at Princeton, and the fight was far from over. It was possible, of course, that I might major in music. But I was done sacrificing my entire world for it. I was eighteen years old. I wanted to live. And if this meant no longer being Wylie's protégée or having to endure Donnelly's grim silence, then so be it.

FINALLY, MONDAY CAME. MY LONG-AWAITED
, much imagined first day of school in America. Like my great-grandfather, who had worked so hard on resurrecting his piano that in the end he probably found those to be the most stunning sounds ever produced by a musical instrument, I had played the day up in my mind beyond proportion. Walking into a Princeton classroom had to be a rite of passage, an entry into something wonderfully new—or so I thought when I left Forbes in the morning.

Shame, then, that the moment was ruined almost instantly. My first class happened to be Greek Art, and within minutes of entering the lecture hall I was already mortified. Other students seemed to have read dozens of pages that I didn't even know had been assigned. They answered questions, recognized images on slides, and kept laughing at the professor's jokes about the origins of Greek mythology. Meanwhile, I was sinking in my seat. How was it possible to be so behind already?

The answer was simple: orientation week. I had been obsessing over preludes and nocturnes while everybody else had tracked down the syllabus for
each class and started reading. I could hear Donnelly's voice in my head:
Everyone except you and the athletes, dear
. . .

When the lecture ended, I hurried to leave, grateful not to have been called on to join the discussion.

“Miss Slavin, could you stay a minute, please?”

Professor Giles threw the words across the auditorium like a casual afterthought, without registering the question mark or even glancing in my direction. Austere in his tweed jacket, he had an unexpectedly deep, nuanced voice for a lean man in his sixties. It was because of this voice that, as I would soon find out, most girls in the class found him irresistibly charming.

“Glad to see you in Greek Art.” His eyes scanned the room, making sure the last student had left. “My family attended your concert last week. Everyone thought it was quite the triumph.”

I thanked him, relieved that the reason he wanted to talk to me had nothing to do with class participation. But the relief didn't last long.

“May I ask what made you decide to take my class? First-years typically start with Art 101.”

“I love art history. And Greek Art was the closest it got to home.”

“Home?”

“I meant my country, Bulgaria.”

“Ah, yes. Right at the heart of Eastern Europe, next to Greece.” He sounded disappointed. “It never ceases to amaze me, the musical talent in those Balkan lands of yours. Carries a certain . . . restless quality. A subtle unrest going so far back in time one could say it practically runs in the blood.”

Could.
Or was he actually saying it?

I forced my eyes to stay on his. “You've heard other Bulgarians play?”

“I have, I most certainly have.” He lifted a sheet of paper and stared at it, as if trying to reclaim his mind from a distant memory. “Miss Slavin, I hope you would indulge me with a slight departure from the syllabus.”

“A departure?”

“Of sorts, yes. Your first paper is due on Friday, and I always leave its topic open: choose a Greek vase and tell me which myth you think it depicts. Everyone has a favorite, so giving students a choice helps fire them up. In
your case, however, a certain vessel struck me with its particular . . . shall we say, resonance?”

The sheet landed on the desk, no longer upside-down from where I was standing. And two figures emerged on it, delicate like cutouts from an elaborate cartoon: a man holding a lyre and another man waiting for the sounds.

“The vase is on display downstairs. You won't have any difficulty finding it.”

Princeton's art museum, of course. In Bulgaria, it was unheard of for a university to have its own art collection, let alone an entire museum. But then again, with tuition at $33,000 a year, why would Giles have us write from photographs when the originals were only steps away?

I took the page from him. Maybe I should have been suspicious. Maybe it should have occurred to me that grading curves had rules (treat students equally) and that “departures” didn't happen lightly, on a whim. But for the moment, I convinced myself that everything made sense: class homework involving music was assigned to me by a professor who had heard me play. He had admired my technique. My inexplicably restless talent. And as for everything else that ran in my blood, he obviously had no clue at all.

THE OPEN PAPER TOPIC TURNED
out to be a mixed blessing: it fired everyone up, but mostly with stress. By midweek, the usual “What's up?” had given way to “Did you pick your vase yet?”—a question I answered briefly, skipping the fact that my vase had been chosen for me.

And not just the vase. One particular Greek myth stood out in my mind because, as Giles had said, the gift for music in the Balkan lands did go back in time. Way back, actually. Only hours from my home, in a region known as Thrace, the mountains had once echoed with the song of a man described in legends as the greatest musician who ever lived, the “father of all songs.” His lyre was believed to have charmed the anger out of beasts, coaxed trees and rocks into dance, and even diverted the course of rivers. More than two thousand years later, people in my country still knew the story of Orpheus by heart. His love for Eurydice. Her death from a snakebite. And his descent into
the Underworld, to claim her back. Touched by his music, the gods agreed to let his wife live again. On one condition: that he wouldn't turn around to look at her, on the way out into the world of the living.