Jasper lowers his wrists, flexing them according to the ergonomic exercises he’s followed religiously since that spot of trouble last year. He feels like a hunter closing in on his prey after a long and exhausting chase — don’t snap a branch now.
Fourteen
Toby slips into a seat at the back of the recital hall to catch the rest of the semifinalist performances. As each musician finishes his set, he disappears into the wings, then re-enters the auditorium through the rear door.
When a young Mexican plays with a strained expression on his face, Larry the Texan whispers, “Too much frijoles for breakfast. The kid’s holding back an epic fart.” Bumped from competition, Larry has been on a bender and reeks of the bourbon he carries in a Perrier bottle.
A Brazilian plays recklessly, and Armand leans over to titter, “He comes too fast, yes?” The German musician, who also struck out in round one, is making copious notes about each guitarist, convinced this will help him in future competitions.
When Salvatore, a diminutive Italian, performs an extravagant bow full of unnecessary flourishes, there is general merriment at the back of the hall. He plays with self-conscious beauty, lifting his hands to let the chords ring, extended rubatos that verge on corny, all of it a shameless romanticism that sets Toby’s teeth on edge. He even plays the modernist Krehm piece as if it were a late-nineteenth-century Fantasia.
Javier, the Argentine, slips in two seats down. He’s changed into a polo shirt and velvety chinos. Toby eyes him more than once and waits for a mirroring gaze. No dice — Javier is a straight arrow, despite the fussy cufflinks. “Italian guys play cantabile from cradle to grave,” he whispers during a pause between movements. This is true. Salvatore finishes each phrase with an arpeggiated chord, a mannerism that his fellow guitarists term “a Segovia” — a tip of the hat to the great pioneering guitarist who played in a different era. Such easy sentimentality won’t fool the judges.
Toby rests one sneakered foot up on the seat in front. Lucy waltzes onstage next, wearing a long black skirt and a gold blouse.
“The old babe,” Armand says, making no attempt to lower his voice.
Suddenly, Toby is rooting for her while Armand slumps in his seat, reminded that he has been humiliated by a woman. Lucy has piled her hair on top of her head in a weird way and fastened it with a clip. Toby watches as she aims her hundred-kilowatt smile at the judges, though there is no way she could see them in the blare of the spotlight, and her bow is a modified form of dead chicken with an odd jerk at the end, as if she’s lost her balance.
If Lucy heard Armand’s nasty comment, she isn’t letting on. She arranges the material of her skirt, then cranks up the piano stool and the footrest. Her guitar has a reddish soundboard, not the best instrument in the world but a decent copy of a fine luthier’s work. Lucy has promised that if she makes it to the finals, she’ll put a deposit on a Clifford Fairn concert model, though it takes seven years for delivery, given his backlog of orders. By then she’ll be — good Lord — fifty-three.
Her tune-up is discreet, apologetic pings that only the first rows can hear. She wipes her palms on her skirt, then steps into the opening bars of the Tárrega.
The piece unfolds in a version so opposite from the Italian’s overblown romance that at first Toby recoils. Decent tone, but it all sounds diligent to his ears, each phrase carefully articulated, each nodule of expression prearranged — nothing left to chance.
Toby glances at his colleagues down the row and notes the skeptical expressions, and let’s face it, obvious relief. Nothing here to fear. Yet by the time she’s halfway through, Toby is almost convinced. This Tárrega is brainy, perhaps brainier than the composer merits. He claps harder than he needs to when she’s done.
Next up is the Krehm marathon. Lucy skims her palms over her draped knees and gazes at some point at the back of the hall, then plunges in. Whispering ceases. Javier, about to beat an escape, stops in his tracks. The Tárrega has in no way set them up for the performance that is underway. She attacks the piece with her whole body, fingers snapping off the fretboard, head bobbing, shoulders pressed forward — the performance of a lifetime. Chords unroll with deadly accuracy, and she mutes vibrating strings with her wrist, her thumb, anything that moves. It could fall apart any second, but it doesn’t.
Toby slips his foot off the seat and leans forward, hardly daring to breathe.
The final notes die away and only then does Lucy release her shoulders. How fragile she looks, as if the air has gone out of her.
“Jesus,” Larry breathes, “she plays the rest of the program like this then the rest of you crew might as well pack it in.”
Javier stiffens. He won’t give up so easily.
“Where did this hausfrau come from?” Armand wonders aloud. “I have entered twenty competitions, and this is the first time I’ve seen her.”
Falling back into the seat, Toby begins to share the tango of panic: Lucy doesn’t need to win the way he does. She waltzes in with her disguise of middle age, pretending she’s some housewife, someone’s mother.
Next up is the suite.
Lucy squints blindly into the auditorium. Something inside her chest is doing handstands. Beyond the lights they note her bleached hair, a body that has borne children, and they are inventing a hundred stories to explain her presence here.
Delete Mark’s recent phone call.
“Just spoke to the Canadian consulate in Bangkok,” he said in the flat voice he uses when agitated. “Uncle Philip’s been busted. Turns out he’s a sex tourist.”
If I can get through the gavotte, she decides, the largo will be clear sailing. She can play the gavotte perfectly ten times in a row, then have it splinter during the eleventh. A slight drop in concentration causes havoc. If she stops for a moment to think, then she’ll capsize. Uncle Philip stashed in some third world jail, an old man in a hot country, so fastidious, flossing his teeth three times a day, those manicured nails. They will have confiscated his camera: Exhibit A.
Nothing lasts, least of all this heated stage and her pulsing nerves, nor the anticipatory stirrings of the audience. This is what the young ones don’t know; they have no perspective.
The guitar settles in her lap, a familiar weight.
Uncle Philip, she decides, smiles at a woman with a red purse and tells her, “I’ll look after your boys.” The woman nods, and without glancing at him, holds out her palm. He counts out a wad of baht, the national currency, and watches as the bills disappear into her purse.
The man will be kind, the woman thinks. He’ll give the boys treats, more than she can ever offer. Tonight she’ll cook fish and see her sister-in-law, who is pregnant again.
Her modest house is the site of a pleasure Uncle Philip has been imagining for months, a bouquet of anticipated tastes and smells, his papery skin yearning to be touched, as he touches now, pulling the boys into his chest, burying his face in their sleek hair.
Lucy lifts her hands to play. The tug of string against flesh and nail is welcome relief.
When she finishes the piece, she cradles her guitar tenderly as if it were a child she’s rescued from great danger.
In the back of the hall, Hiro caresses his new fingernail, giving it suspicious glances in the dark. He needn’t worry, for Toby is an honourable man and used plenty of glue.
Like the others, Lucy has mailed a short list of repertoire to the judges and awaits their selection, not knowing what piece she’ll be asked to play next.
Nerve is nothing new to her. Try fishing a toddler out of a swollen river or marching into a hospital room to demand they not resuscitate your own father. Nerve is what you get by living a life.
An older judge rises to her feet and peers through spectacles at a sheet of paper. Visnya Brocovic