Cambridge

  “I want to have dinner with my family. I don’t want all these hangers-on …” My father realized this could be insulting and stopped. “I do not mean you, Frederika.”

  Frederika tried to smile.

  “I poached some pears,” my mother intervened. “Let’s have them.”

  Another thing Frederika was worrying about was the nature of the engagement that had made Vishwa unable to come the week before and unwilling to specify why.

  “He already has a girlfriend,” she said after dinner, when I was clearing the table and she and my mother were loading the dishwasher. “That’s why. That’s why he didn’t say.”

  “He might have had a private lesson. Or a doctor’s appointment,” my mother said.

  “At dinnertime?”

  “Maybe some Hindu thing?” I could tell my mother thought this was pretty feeble, because she backtracked right away. “I guess not,” she said. “They’re not religious. Whatever that means.”

  Frederika started up with Just Coming to Be Polite again. “And also, I’m sure that he has a girlfriend.”

  “But he was happy about dinner,” I said. “He was smiling a lot, Frederika. He was smiling very hard.” This was my first substantive contribution to the Vishwa effort, apart from boiling water for tea.

  My mother looked at me. “He was, was he?” She seemed impressed, I hoped with me, not just with the information. “If he has a girlfriend,” she told Frederika, “he won’t have her by the end of the week, I promise you.”

  Tuesday was breezy, dry, sunny, one of those days that exemplify the idea of spring in New England but which actually occur only two or three times a year. I was more distracted than usual at school. The windows were open, and I could smell the spent, oversweet lilacs, the honey-vanilla early peonies, the bright new grass dotted with clover puffs. It was impossible to pay attention to anything other than the drama of growth. Add in my music lesson and then dinner with Vishwa, and I was barely able to stay in my seat.

  The house was quiet when I got home. I’d been expecting bustle and worry. Instead the door was unlocked and there was a note on the kitchen table that read: NAPPING. Succinct and anonymous, it didn’t explain whether this applied only to my mother or if it included Frederika.

  I curled up with The Count of Monte Cristo in the living room window seat that looked onto the street to wait for Vishwa. After about half an hour I saw him coming down the block. He’d added a bulky tweed jacket to his usual ensemble of khakis and a white shirt. This was the full Cambridge uniform. Technically correct, it looked like a costume on him, probably because he was small and thin and dark and it had been invented by and for tall, well-fed fair people.

  “Do I look nice?” he asked the moment I opened the door. “I brought a tie too.” He pulled a fistful of magenta paisley out of his pocket. “I brought two ties,” he said, when I widened my eyes at the red swirls. The second one had blue-and-white stripes. “Which?” he asked, a tie draped on each hand.

  “Red,” I said. “The other one is boring.”

  “Jagdeesh insisted,” said Vishwa. “He made me take this horrible itchy coat and he made me take this stupid tie for a banker. I said, I have to have that red tie, it’s so cheerful and excited. He said I needed a backup calm tie.” He stuck the boring tie in the pocket of his itchy coat.

  “My father doesn’t wear a tie at dinner,” I said.

  “Then neither will I,” said Vishwa. He put the red tie in the other pocket.

  “He doesn’t wear a jacket either,” I said.

  “Thank god,” said Vishwa. He took it off and dropped it on the back of the sofa.

  I picked up the jacket and took it to the closet under the stairs. “He doesn’t like mess,” I explained.

  “What else doesn’t he like?”

  “Vegetables,” I said.

  “Hmm,” said Vishwa. He took his loafers off and lined them up at the end of the sofa. “Is this mess?”

  I hesitated. “When he gets home, it will be.”

  “I’ll put them back on later,” said Vishwa. “I’ll remember. Now let’s have your lesson.”

  “What are we going to listen to?” I asked.

  “Today, we’ll visit the piano.”

  This made me nervous. “I liked listening,” I said.

  “It’ll be fun,” Vishwa said. “You remember the part of the Brahms you liked so much? We’ll play that.” He sat down at the piano and patted the bench beside him. “Come and sit down.”

  I didn’t move.

  “You remember it,” he told me.

  “It’s too complicated,” I said.

  “The melody,” he said. He patted the bench again. “I’m just talking about the melody.”

  I sat down, but I didn’t put my hands on the keyboard. “I don’t know where to start it,” I said.

  “Anywhere,” said Vishwa. “That’s part of what I want to show you.”

  “Okay,” I said, but I didn’t lift my hands.

  “You’re afraid of the piano,” Vishwa said.

  “I hate the piano,” I whispered. “I hate it, I hate it.”

  Vishwa put his hands on the keys and played a big chord. Then he put his hands back in his lap.

  “You don’t hate it,” he said. “What you hate is that you can’t play it yet.”

  “Yet,” I said. “Yet!”

  “I can’t play it,” he said. “I’ll never really play it.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “I’m adequate,” Vishwa said. “I don’t sing through it, the way your mother does. That’s why I’m a conductor. I need a whole orchestra. I can’t do it alone.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever—” I stopped. “I don’t think I want to—” I stopped again.

  “Maybe it’s something else? You need something else to sing through?”

  I started crying, as usual.

  “Have you ever tried a violin?” Vishwa asked.

  I put my elbows on the keyboard with a dissonant clong and put my head down in my hands. A few tears fell onto the ivory.

  “Oh, dear,” said Vishwa. He didn’t sound alarmed, though.

  “Why is it always music?” I asked.

  “You’re good at it.”

  “Not good enough,” I said.

  “I’m not ready to give up on you yet,” said Vishwa. “It takes time and practice to be able to say what you want with music.”

  I raised my head and looked at him. “But it’s not what I want to say. It’s what they want to say.”

  “They?”

  “Brahms. Or Chopin. Or Bach. It’s not what I want to say.”

  “Whatever you want to say, someone has written it. They talk about everything. You can always find the music of what you feel.”

  “It’s not the same! It’s like somebody’s putting words in my mouth.”

  “Oh,” said Vishwa. “Well, I think I understand. But they aren’t words. That’s what’s wonderful about music.”

  He looked so happy that I didn’t dare say what I thought: That was precisely what was not wonderful about music. It wasn’t words. I sat on the piano bench, tense and slack at the same time, waiting for whatever was going to happen next.

  “Here,” he said. “This is something fun. Play the Brahms theme. You’ll be able to do it—it isn’t hard. Start at middle C.”

  It took me a while to figure it out, but he was right. It wasn’t as hard as I thought.

  “Perfect,” said Vishwa. “That’s perfect. Now, do it again, but start one note up, at D.”

  Immediately, I got confused.

  “It’s all different,” I said. “I can’t hear it. It’s like my ears got stuck the first way.”

  “Hum it,” he said. “Play the D and then hum from there.”

  Humming helped. But when I played it, every other note was a black key and it was harder to see the melody, somehow.

  “You’ve got it,” Vishwa said. “You see it now.”

  “Sort of,” I said.
I didn’t feel confident at all.

  “Now start at E.”

  It didn’t work again. I tried humming. “Why does humming help?”

  “I think you’re right when you say that your ears get stuck. It resets your ears. Try again.”

  E was even more confusing than D had been.

  “Vishwa, I can’t!”

  “Relax,” he said. “It’s always the same, no matter where you start it. I want you to understand the pattern of the melody.”

  “You mean three notes up and three notes down?”

  “Exactly.” He nodded. “And you can start those three notes anywhere you want. It’s the relationship that’s important.”

  I tried again. This time it worked better, at least for the first few phrases.

  “It’s like a translation,” I said. “It’s saying the same thing with different tones.”

  Vishwa smiled. “It’s called transposition, and you’re right. Translation and transposition are the same sort of thing.”

  Vishwa had said, “You’re right,” or, “That’s good,” at least three times since we’d sat down at the piano. He made me feel safe. I leaned against him, pushing my shoulder into his arm. He made an answering lean, so our bodies were propped together, like two playing cards starting to make a house.

  “Better?” he asked. “Not so scary?”

  “Yes,” I said. I started to relax, but relaxing let me feel how scared I was. Listening to music was wonderful; trying to play it—being forced to play it—made me nervous. It felt like a test, one I always failed.

  “I’m going to bring a violin to the lesson sometime,” he said. “A piano is too big. It’s at least ten times bigger than you are. I think that’s scary. A violin is nice. It’s light. It smells good. You’ll like it.”

  “But I can’t learn to play the piano on a violin,” I said.

  “It’s all the same.” Vishwa stretched out his arms to encompass every instrument in the world. “All one big thing.”

  I heard my mother walking around upstairs. She would not agree that it was all one big thing. There was the creak of her closet door opening and the rustle of her dresses. There was the thunk her bureau made because the drawer was swollen on one side. Some bracelets jingled. It was piano, piano, piano from her point of view. Once I’d heard her express some admiration for the cello, but fundamentally, the piano was music.

  “My mother says the piano contains the whole orchestra,” I told Vishwa.

  “That’s pretty much true,” he said.

  “So why isn’t she a conductor?”

  “Because she is such a very good pianist. If I could play the piano, or the oboe or the violin, like that …” He trailed off.

  “You said you sing through the orchestra.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Vishwa. “I feel it isn’t quite as direct. Not quite the same as having your hands on an instrument.”

  “Don’t underrate yourself,” my mother said from the doorway. “An orchestra without a conductor is dead. It isn’t anything. The conductor makes it alive.”

  “A symbiotic relationship, perhaps,” Vishwa said. He rose from the piano and made the little bow he always gave my mother. “After all, I need the orchestra as much as they need me.”

  “We sound like we’re in a French movie,” my mother said. “A bad one. Would you like a drink? Do you drink?”

  “And smoke too,” said Vishwa.

  “What a relief!” My mother pulled her Camels out of the pocket of her dress and offered him the pack. “I was worried that you would disapprove of these Western habits.”

  “Everyone in India smokes,” said Vishwa.

  But he had a funny way of smoking. He held the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, as if it were a pencil, and took rapid little puffs. He looked so awkward that I thought he might be smoking just to be polite. He had none of my mother’s debonair smoking tricks: breathing the smoke back up her nose so she looked like a dragon, blowing smoke rings, leaving the cigarette at the edge of her mouth with the smoke making clouds around her face while she talked.

  “Scotch?” my mother asked Vishwa.

  “Is that what you have?”

  “I have bourbon.”

  “This is an American specialty?”

  “Very,” said my mother. “It’s like Scotch, only more so. It’s Southern Scotch.”

  “I’ll try,” said Vishwa.

  “Go upstairs,” my mother told me, “and see what’s keeping Frederika.”

  Frederika was sitting on her bed beside a pile of clothes.

  “Mummy says time to come down,” I told her.

  “I’m not ready,” Frederika said. “I’m not dressed.”

  She was wearing my favorite Frederika thing, her red-and-white-striped shirtwaist with a full skirt that had rickrack around the hem. Unlike most of her clothes, it was store-bought, something she and my mother had found in Filene’s Basement, French, reduced from $80 to $10.99. They had cooed over the whopping reduction and the delicate workmanship: silk pockets tucked in at the sides, buttons hidden in a placket, hand-stitched collar.

  “I love that dress,” I said.

  “It’s not right,” Frederika intoned.

  “Vishwa doesn’t look special,” I said. “He came with all sorts of extra stuff, like a tie, but he isn’t wearing it.”

  “No?” Frederika looked up for a moment. “And your mother?”

  I couldn’t remember. “Something green?”

  Frederika grabbed me and tickled my neck. Though I hated to be tickled, I would let Frederika do it. “Which green thing?” she asked.

  “A green thing,” I said.

  “You are not the right age to care,” said Frederika.

  “I care!”

  “Pfui,” she said. “Look what you’re wearing.”

  I was wearing overall shorts and a purple T-shirt that was too small and had a hole in front but it didn’t show when I wore it with the overall shorts. That was what I wore every day (varying the T-shirt) from May to September.

  “Vishwa isn’t staying for dinner to see me,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what I wear.”

  “This is the problem,” said Frederika.

  “Frederika, you look nice. You look special-occasion nice.”

  “Yah?” Frederika sounded ready to be convinced.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Mummy will get mad soon.”

  Needless worry. My mother and Vishwa were lounging on the sofa chatting about Brahms while the ice in their bourbon settled with little chinks. Vishwa had forgotten to put his shoes back on (my father would get mad). One of my mother’s black sling-backs lay sideways, asleep on the floor, and the other dangled from her toes. The combination of the late, pale spring light and the drift of cigarette smoke made the air alive with dust that outlined sunbeams to create a Blakean atmosphere akin to the print that hung in my bedroom of Adam and Eve perpetually being exiled from Paradise, just like me.

  For the moment, though, I was in a kind of paradise. The insertion of the novel (Vishwa) into the routine (dinner) was the recipe for a heavenly evening. My mother had dressed up for it—odd I hadn’t noticed when I first saw her. She wasn’t wearing green at all but burnt-orange shantung with an amber necklace of her mother’s. Also, one of the dark perfumes she specialized in, which were bitter and smelled brown in the way a cello sounds brown.

  Vishwa stood up and made an obeisance to Frederika, putting his hands together and bending his head over them as if in prayer. My mother had never provoked such a gesture; for her, only a Westernized half-bow. Frederika, standing with her hand extended in a hearty, we’re-all-equals Swedish attitude, looked perplexed. My mother flipped her shoe back on her heel, dug the other one off the floor, and grabbed hold of my arm.

  “Let’s go check on dinner,” she said, and hustled me out.

  The coq au vin was simmering at the back of the stove. Someone had set the table (my usual job) already. A pot of water was at a low boil and the two-
cup measure full of rice stood waiting nearby. The salad was in its teak bowl, and the asparagus, washed and trimmed of its little horns the way my father liked it, lay in a green fan on the counter. There did not seem to be much to check on.

  My mother lifted the lid on the chicken. “Smells okay,” she said. She peeked into the oven, and a waft of cardamom came out. “That smells okay too,” she said. She stuck a fork on the edge of the oven rack and pulled. Then she percussed the top of the cake a few times. “Not quite,” she announced. “Olives?” she asked me.

  I didn’t like olives. “No,” I said.

  “Olives,” she decided.

  There was a black bowl especially for them, because, as my mother had said when she brought it home, the black of the bowl was nearly the same as the black of the olives, but not quite, and that made it nice. My father liked Kalamata olives only. There was a white bowl, half the size of the black bowl, for the pits. And then the pistachios. “Not the red ones!” my mother cautioned as I groped for the bag in the cabinet beside the refrigerator. “They dye your hands. I don’t know why he got them.” “He” (my father) went every other week to the Armenian stores two miles away in Watertown to get olives and pistachios and the huge flat bread we called Syrian bread, though the Armenians surely considered it Armenian, like the Greeks at the Acropolis restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue who bristled when you asked for Turkish coffee. I thought of how nobody had ever heard of English muffins in England.

  Waiting for my mother to set up the hors d’oeuvres tray, I began to compile a list of foreign foods that might be nonsensical in their native countries: French toast, Belgian waffles, Danish pastry. I could ask Frederika about that one. Maybe they called it Swedish pastry in Sweden. It was interesting that, aside from Turkish coffee, all these things were bread-based.

  “Do they have French toast in France?” I asked.

  My mother squinted at me. “What do you care?” she said.

  “They didn’t have English muffins in England, see, so I’m trying to figure it out. If they have French toast, do they call it French toast or do they just call it toast since they’re already French?”

  “I really don’t know,” said my mother. “Here. Take this in.” She put the tray in my hands.