Wildalone (6 page)

I could have filled the required pages easily, without treasure hunts in museum basements. But Giles had insisted, from the first slide he had flashed in our lecture hall, that no photograph stood a chance against the breathing clay.

Princeton's collection of “breathing clays” hadn't made it to the main floor galleries, so I followed the map to the lower level. Thursday was the only night of the week when the museum stayed open late—at a quarter to ten, the place was deserted. I had wanted to be there alone and look for the vase undisturbed, but now wished I had come earlier, with the others. There was too much silence. It rose from the gray carpets and crawled up the walls, leaving its invisible imprint on everything.

The first two display cabinets held mostly fragments. Clustered at random, the pieces peeked through the glass with the shy stare of creatures locked for centuries inside a tomb. I stopped in front of the third cabinet: its vessels were intact. There were warriors, gods, heroes, kings, each trapped in a pose of irreversible defeat or triumph. But the image I was trying to find had nothing to do with heroic battles. It had to do with music.

Finally I saw it—at the end of a shelf, strikingly odd with its inverted shape that the Greeks had called a
psykter
(round belly, no handles, neck much shorter than the foot, as if the potter had sat at the wheel in the blur of a hangover). I leaned closer and the two figures played out their story. The musician's head fell back in sadness. He dropped the lyre. Emptied, the air ached for sound. Still under the music's spell, his companion bowed, while high above them a full moon—the glass reflection of a track light—pierced the black-clay night.

“The time is now nine forty-five and the museum will be closing in fifteen minutes.”

Everything startled me at once: the flash of a shadow across the glass, a rustle at the back of the room, the echo of speakers asking all visitors to proceed to the nearest exit. I looked around but there was no one. The security guard had probably decided to let me have those last remaining minutes to myself.

I had brought a book—Ovid's
Metamorphoses
—and opened it to the part
on Orpheus and Eurydice. Giles had wanted a subtle unrest, but the story of the musician from Thrace, of how he led his wife away from death, had more unrest than anyone could have asked for. A living man, lost in the Underworld. Walking in darkness, among deaf rocks and dead shadows, knowing that even a single mistake will cost him the life of the woman he loves. Then the gods raise the stakes and the sound of Eurydice's steps begins to fade, even though she is following closely, still within reach.
Will he or will he not turn?

Slowly, the words crept across the page, guiding my eyes in long-forgotten rhythms:

                     
They made their way in silence up a steep

                     
and gloomy path. With only steps

                     
to climb before their feet would touch

                     
earth's surface, he panicked that he might again

                     
lose her and, anxious for another look
,

                     
he turned. Instantly, she slipped away.

                     
He stretched his arms to her, despaired
,

                     
eager to rescue her, to feel her body
,

                     
but they held only air. Dying

                     
a second time, she didn't blame him
,

                     
didn't complain—of what? of his great love?—

                     
just spoke a single word: farewell.

                     
He couldn't hear. And with no other sound
,

                     
she fell from him again, becoming shadow.

The rest was his brief life without her, a life filled with nothing but sorrow. Consumed by grief, he swore never to love again. And not even the most seductive of women—the immortal maenads, possessed by the god Dionysus—could tempt him to break his vow. Enraged when Orpheus spurned them all, they ripped him to pieces.

“The time is now nine fifty-five . . .”

I closed the book just as the ceiling lights went out, leaving only the cabinets visible—illuminated from the inside, a deep amber of hidden bulbs that made
the vases glow, stirred back to life after a long slumber. Suddenly, the entire place resembled a tomb. Dark, eerie, as if I had descended into a corner of the Underworld myself. My imagination ran wild. I couldn't wait to go back to my room. Start writing. Attempt to capture on paper the uncapturable: the music and soul of Orpheus, whose tragic tale was now flashing through my mind like a film reel. If the musician on the front of the vase was indeed him, then another scene from his life might very well be on the back. His death, maybe? The cabinet was locked, so I tried to see past the glass, as far along the vessel as I could—

“It must be a maenad, back there.”

I turned around and froze. Someone was watching me from across the room, leaning against the wall between me and the only exit. It took a second to recognize the silhouette: my “stalker.”

I did my best not to sound nervous:

“Beg your pardon?”

“That vase you were just looking at. Its other side must be a maenad, taking her revenge on the doomed musician.”

Something about his voice got to me. I wanted to keep hearing its sound. Warm. Quiet. Disarming like the sound of a piano when your fingers are barely pressing on the keys.

I turned back toward the glass; it was easier to talk to him this way. “Why do you think so?”

“What else would it be? A sad lyre player on a Greek vase—your best bet is Orpheus, having just lost Eurydice. The only thing left for him now is to get torn to pieces. So that must be the back, no?”

He had read my mind again—from a distance, just as he had done in Alexander Hall. The concert flyers did mention I was from Bulgaria, which explained why he would bring up Orpheus. Yet how had he found me here? It was too much of a coincidence for him to be at the museum this late, especially on a night when everyone went clubbing (Thursday and Saturday were the notorious party nights at Princeton). He had to have followed me into the galleries, only to watch me in secret until now.

The thought made me uncomfortable and I kept looking at the vase, away from him. “You seem to know a lot about Greek mythology.”

“Only parts of it. The myth of Orpheus holds a special . . . fascination in my family.”

“A dismembered musician somewhere down the family tree?”

“Yes and no. Long story.”

I waited for him to explain, but he didn't. The room was filling up with silence and I hurried to say something—anything—before the mad beating in my chest would have echoed all the way through to him:

“Are you in Greek Art? I don't remember seeing you there.”

“No, that's too epic for my taste.”

“What is your taste?”

He paused. Then his voice became even quieter: “I think you know.”

I didn't, not yet. But no one had ever talked to me like this—cryptic, soft, as if our intimacy was a given. It made me want to trust him, which scared me even more. “Actually, I don't know anything about you.”

There was a loud clicking sound, then the room became fully dark: the museum was already closed. I sensed a shift in the air, a cologne's vague mix of moss or bark with crushed petals, and realized he had come up to me, so close his chest brushed mine every time he breathed. I heard my voice finally take a risk:

“Thank you for the rose.”

He said nothing; maybe he was nervous too.

“Do you play the piano yourself or are you just a music fan?”

“I do play. And your Chopin is stunning.” He said it slowly, as if each word was meant to sink through me and remain there. “Will you write about Orpheus?”

“I think so.”

“You should; that's the most desolate myth of the Greeks. The man who lost his love because he was too weak.”

“Or because he loved her too much?”

“It's the same thing, really.” He lowered his face to mine. “Security will be here any second.”

My pulse went wild from the touch of his cheek, from its unfamiliar, intoxicating warmth—

“Theodora . . . Comes from Greek, doesn't it?”

“Yes, but no one calls me that. Just Thea.”

“I will find you soon, Thea.”

He let me slide past him, up the single flight of stairs leading back to the main gallery where the lights were still on. When I reached the top, I turned around. But the darkness was empty.

THAT NIGHT, BEFORE I STARTED
writing, I read the end of Ovid's tale again—
the most desolate myth of the Greeks
. The death of Orpheus.

It began with the poet of Thrace seated on a hill, matching tears and songs to the tune of his strings. As the wind scattered a woman's hair, her voice rose through it: “Behold, sisters, behold the one who scorns us!” A spear was hurled, but it fell without wounding him. Next came a stone—charmed by the music, it dropped at his feet to beg forgiveness. As the fury raged closer, a clamor of drums drowned the soft voice of the lyre. Finally deaf, the stones grew red with blood.

The first to be torn apart were the birds, the beasts, the innumerable living things that followed the poet, enthralled by his song. Then the maenads gathered on Orpheus—like hounds circling a doomed stag in the amphitheater's arena. Mute for the first time, succumbing to his fate, he stretched out his arms to them, and the spirit breathed out through that mouth to which stones listened, whose voice the wild creatures understood—and vanished down the wind.

The birds, lamenting, wept for Orpheus; the beasts gathered in despair one last time for him; the trees, shedding their leaves, mourned him with bared crowns. They say the rivers wept too, swollen with their own tears; and the water nymphs—the naiads—with disheveled hair, put on somber clothes.

The poet's limbs were scattered through the land, his head and lyre thrown into the river Hebrus, bound for the Underworld—and (a miracle!) floating in midstream, the lyre whispered mournfully; mournfully the lifeless tongue murmured; mournfully the banks echoed in reply. The ghost of Orpheus sank under the earth, only to recognize all those places he had seen
before. Searching for the fields of the blessed, he found his wife and held her in his arms. There they walk together to this day, side by side—now she goes in front and he follows her; now he leads and looks back as he can do, safely, at his Eurydice . . .

FRIDAY PASSED WITHOUT A TRACE
of the mystery stranger. As did Saturday. But he had promised to find me, and this became my secret. It changed everything: the quiet alleys, the secluded courtyards, eerie buildings peeking out from behind pallid trees—every place on campus turned vibrant with color when I imagined it as the place where I might see him next. “Apparently I was right, you have a stalker,” Rita would have said, before launching her own investigation as to why anyone would follow me into a deserted museum and talk to me in the dark. Which was exactly why I decided not to tell her any of it. There was no need for him to be labeled “weird” again; I didn't want the word lodged in my mind. Whoever that guy was, he understood Chopin's music and loved the story of Orpheus, just as I did—if this meant he was weird, then so was I. And I didn't worry that he would keep stalking me. I worried that he wouldn't.

On Saturday night the RCA group voted down Rita's proposal for a trip to the movies and ended up party hopping through the dorms instead. “Guys, you should save your energy for the Street tomorrow,” she kept warning us, but nobody cared. We rushed from one spot of blasting music to the next, high on adrenaline from finally being out at night in college. By noon the following day, all of us were going to regret it.

The Street
, as the first few blocks of Prospect Avenue were known, was the liveliest (and often the only) hub of nightlife at school: a strip of land running parallel to Nassau Street in the northeast corner of campus, where Princeton's eating clubs opened their doors—and their free beer taps—twice a week, on Thursdays and Saturdays. Everything about the Street had a strict nomenclature. To give us a leg up in the game, Rita handed everyone an aspirin after brunch and prepped us on the basics.

“Eating club” was a fancy name for a cross between a dining hall and a
fraternity house. The clubs were not affiliated with the school, which washed Princeton's hands of the alleged wild parties, excessive drinking, and anything else that went on in them. The current count was ten clubs, and at the end of sophomore year you had to pick one, just as you had to pick a major. But there was a catch: picking a club didn't mean the club would pick you. Five out of the ten ran a lottery, and according to a wide consensus, Vegas paled in comparison to what you had at stake when your name was pulled out of a hat (or wasn't) at your club of choice. The other half were openly elitist. Priceless member spots were awarded in a process known as “bicker”—a fraternity rush spiced with the pinch of a job interview, a bacchanal, and a political campaign, all in one. “Bicker week is like the Dark Ages: things lose their shock or shame value,” Rita had summed up succinctly, leaving it up to us to imagine the rest.

And then there was Ivy. The oldest and most exclusive of the clubs, it reveled in its own legend: the unmatched aura of a name, the undisputed splendor of one-hundred-plus years of history, and a pervasive rumor (which was most likely true) that even a perfect human being, lavishly cloned in God's own image, would be turned down by Ivy absent a pedigree involving royalty, a head of state, or, at a minimum, a billionaire. Ivy was the fabled fortress of privilege. The magnificent outlier. The ultimate spoiled child who made up rules and refused to account to anyone for it. Ivy was the vein that had always pulsed at the very heart of Princeton.