Sometimes Jasper regrets confiding details of the current mess: the girl believes it gives her privileges.
“I need a copy of this document.” He releases Moxie’s chart.
Rachel hesitates before lowering her feet, as if the mundane task were beneath her.
When Rachel disappears into the copy room, Moxie says, “She doesn’t like you much, does she?”
“What makes you say that?” Jasper doesn’t conceal his surprise.
“That weird look on her face.”
For a moment Jasper is rattled. He recalls Rachel’s expression while talking on the phone before she spotted Jasper. You can’t say it was gleeful. That would be an overstatement.
Pens squeak as the judges scribble notes and scores on their clipboards.
“Thank you, Mr. Hausner!” a voice booms from the wilderness. No hint in its tone as to how he has played. Toby beats an escape to the wings, breathing hard.
“Outstanding!” Lucy says, touching his back.
His heart is an ungated pony. “I was okay?”
“More than.”
“I stampeded through the last movement of the Krehm.”
“But you pulled it off.” Lucy clings to his elbow in a proprietorial way as they move down the corridor toward the green room. “Dazzling!”
“Really?”
“Where have you been hiding all these years?” she asks.
“Hiding?” he repeats like a half-wit. He’s running through the program in his mind, focusing on bits where he’d inexplicably strayed from decisions worked out hundreds of times in practice. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“You could, but you haven’t.”
The Argentine sits on the chair in the green room, hands breezing through the opening bars to the Tárrega. The man is dressed like a movie star — steel-grey jacket with black shirt and turquoise tie. He glances up as Toby enters, nods once, but keeps playing. Feeling his impatience, Toby packs quickly and darts out of the room, not noticing that Lucy has disappeared. He’s ravenous, a tight muscle of hunger, and fixes his mind on a platter of steak frites, the sort of thing Jasper never serves at home.
Lucy waits outside the recital hall in her summery dress, hand planted on one hip as Toby steps into the daylight. “They tell me,” she says gaily, “that if you play well here, you might get laid.”
“Good incentive,” Toby says.
“I go on in forty minutes.”
“Then you should be busy prepping, not hanging around here.”
The smile leaves her face, and he can see the lined skin, the brave red lips. He guesses she has allowed thoughts of home to invade her mind, a substitute anxiety that is more familiar than performance.
They move toward the dorm, which is a long block through the campus. A slick modern building housing the medical school blocks light in one direction while a dour Victorian edifice crowds the western side. An outdoor art exhibit is underway, and the courtyard is packed with booths displaying watercolours of Old Montreal and marine life, the vendors parked on camp chairs. Lucy threads her way between them.
“I never practise just before going onstage,” she says, brushing past a booth selling handmade puppets. “What if I blow a passage, or forget it entirely?”
This is where Toby should reassure her, but he doesn’t, his mind still wrapped around his own performance. As they near the dorm building, Hiro bursts through its double doors and cries, “Absolute disaster!” He waves his hand in front of their faces. The nail of the ring finger is torn, leaving a jagged edge. “I hit on fucking shower tap.”
Toby lifts the wounded hand and inspects the damage. “Got a Nittaku back in your room?”
Hiro nods. Nittaku is the Japanese ping-pong ball favoured for cutting into crescents to serve as emergency nails.
“But I absent special glue,” he says.
“Fetch the ball and I’ll enact my magic,” Toby instructs. “But first I must eat.”
As Hiro disappears into the elevator, Lucy says, “Don’t do too good a job.”
Toby is genuinely shocked. Not enough glue, and the nail will go flying, like a hockey player losing a blade mid-stride.
Lucy is stricken. “Scratch that last comment,” she says, hurrying toward the elevator leading to the women’s wing.
The Krehm piece went off the rails with that weird slur he added out of nowhere; it threw off his fingering until the end of the phrase. Can’t let each tiny flaw chisel into his confidence, for something else, almost magnificent, stole in when he was onstage: he knew he belonged up there.
After lunch, after demolishing a platter of steak and fries, Toby bends over the nail repair job, manicure scissors in hand, Hiro’s elegant finger waiting to be saved. He remembers his mother clipping his nails when he was little, tenderly pushing each soft cuticle out of the way. When he was very small, she chewed off his nails with her teeth. Hiro sits quietly during the task, as if afraid he might distract Toby. It’s an intimate procedure, and Toby inhales the kid’s aftershave and minted breath as he slides the tiny slice of celluloid over the nail and presses it flat. The two men eye each other, and it’s Toby who breaks the silence, saying, “Don’t drink hot fluids or eat for an hour.”
Hiro looks anxious; he doesn’t get the joke.
“You’ll be fine, my man,” Toby reassures him. “This is your lucky nail.”
Luck is a word Hiro does understand, and he grins with relief.
Something’s taken hold of Lucy’s body and colonized her mind, an unstoppable force. She’s leaped from being ecstatic at not making a fool of herself in the opening round to actually thinking she might win.
When she first met Mark, he was a compact man wearing khakis and one of those Picasso striped shirts, and she decided they would create a bohemian life together. Each month they would host a salon where poets could read their latest masterpieces, musicians would play difficult experimental music, and Mark’s big, expressive paintings would hang from the walls to be viewed and discussed by all. Lucy would play a sonata or two, when she wasn’t refilling the cauldron of chili. Something like this event did happen once or twice. Then one day Mark came home announcing that he’d landed a job at the Art Gallery of Ontario as a security guard and was about to be fitted for his uniform. He took to the job and claimed he was in no way restless or unhappy, although weeks went by where he didn’t set foot in his studio. In the evenings he’d fool around with his collection of vintage lunch boxes and Big Little Books. She never dreamed she’d end up living with a man who enjoyed hobbies.
“Draft Agenda.” Jasper types these words under the subject heading, then taps send. Luke likes the word draft because it’s an invitation to muck about and change things. Jasper fully intends to edit the sequence himself before tomorrow’s meeting, and he’ll do this without alerting Luke. The fiendishly expensive dinner party Luke arranged for potential donors, without consulting the executive, will be brought up under “other business.” Jasper has arranged for Ruth Baxter, treasurer, to raise the issue: she’s livid. Luke took his cronies to Flood, the fancy oyster bar, and put it on the institute’s tab. They can ill afford such reckless extravagance. Luke will squirm in his seat and bluster on about how they were discussing “key elements of our fund-raising mission,” but no one will buy it. When the issue is raised, he’ll act startled, then say with a grandiose wave, “If I’ve lost the confidence of this board, then I offer my resignation …”
Not for the first time.
Except