In Harmony (40 page)

He looked at me, and then looked at the poster.

Extra credit.

“Connor, they just run that for snob value. It’s for the
super-elite
. No one actually enters it. Certainly no one manages to do well in it!”

“Technically,” he said slowly, “we don’t have to do well in it. We just have to enter.”

I blinked. The improv challenge was held
after
the recitals. If Connor and I entered it,
theoretically
he still had a shot—however unlikely—at getting the grades he needed to graduate. And therefore they’d have to let him do the recital. And if we aced the recital, I could still graduate. Connor had come up with a sneaky, backdoor way to give me my dream back.

“We don’t even have to show up for the challenge,” he told me excitedly. “Entering just gets us back into the recital.”

I thought about it. We’d have to rehearse like hell for the recital, with Connor knowing that however well we did in it, he still wouldn’t graduate. It melted my heart that he was willing to go through all that just to give me a chance, but it would break my heart to do it.

I shook my head. “No,” I said firmly. “It’s not enough.”

“You could graduate!”

“I’m not putting you through all that if you don’t have a chance too. If we do this, we do it for real. We get you back into Fenbrook, we ace the recital and
I
graduate, then we ace the improv and
you
graduate, too.”

Connor gaped at me. “You just said it was for the ‘super-elite’. You said before it was
hardcore,
remember?”

I squared my shoulders. “Then we’ll just have to be hardcore. We’re in this together, or not at all.”

He stared at me for a long time. “You can be a stubborn bloody mare at times, you know.” He pulled me into a hug, my head against his chest. “Thank you.”

We went to see Harman.

***

“No,” said Harman. “Definitely not. You shouldn’t even be on Fenbrook property, Connor.”

“If he enters the improvisation challenge, he could still get the grades he needs to graduate,” I told Harman.

“
Barely!”
said Harman. “And he can’t enter. He’s already been kicked out.”

“
Technically,”
I told him, a warning note in my voice, “you shouldn’t have kicked him out. It was still possible for him to graduate—how did you know he wasn’t going to enter?”

That threw him, and he gave me a long look before finally sighing in defeat. I’d trapped him in his own rules again. “Okay,” he admitted. “We missed that one.”

“So if we sign up for the improv challenge, Connor’s back in?” I asked. “He can do the recital with me? He could still graduate?”

“
If
you were to ace the recital,
you
could still graduate,” Harman said tiredly. “I suppose in theory,
if
you scored top marks on the improvisation…yes, Connor could too. But—no offense—that’s a big ‘if’. No-one’s ever scored
that
highly in the improvisation. Certainly not with your…unusual choice of instruments. With all due respect, Karen, I admire your determination, but I’d advise you—”

I leaned over his desk, all five foot four inches of me. “With all due respect, Professor Harman…I think it’s time I started making my own decisions.”

***

We had one week to not only nail the recital, but learn how to improvise together. We needed more than just rehearsals; we were going to war.

We chose Connor’s apartment as our bunker. Ruth had packed her bags and left, destination unknown. With Jasmine crashing at my place, it made more sense to work at Connor’s—besides, his neighbors were more forgiving than mine and we weren’t going to have time to be considerate about when we practiced.

When we arrived, I eyed the space. I’d forgotten just how small it was. Rehearsing there as we had in the past was one thing, but with two of us living there we were going to be crawling over each other. And yet somehow, because it was Connor…that didn’t sound so bad.

I drew up a planner. I couldn’t find a piece of paper big enough, so I drew straight on the wall, constructing a massive grid eight feet wide and as tall as I could reach, and then filling it in. “Rehearsals are light green through dark green,” I told him. “Lightest green for the first piece, darkest green for the final piece. Improv practice is yellow.”

“You think this’ll get us there in time?” he asked.

I gave him a look. “This is what I
do.”

“What’s red?”

“Mealtimes.”

“What’s blue?”

“Showers.”

“What’s pink—Oh.
Really?!
You even scheduled
—”

“I could take it off the grid if you want,” I deadpanned. “More time for rehearsing.”

He put his hands together in prayer. “Please don’t.”

***

In the improvisation challenge, we’d be given a basic melody and would have to compose around it—in thirty minutes—and then perform what we’d composed. There’d be no time for back-and-forth and second-guessing each other. We had to function as one, despite our very different instruments.

The first time we tried it, we’d barely strung together ten bars when we ran out of time and the cello and guitar never blended. Connor was better at it than I was—he’d had years of jamming in bars. I’d spent my entire life with organization and structure.

“I can’t do it,” I told him. “I can’t not know in advance what I’m going to do. I can’t walk in there without any idea of what the music’s going to be.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and made me look at him. “If there’s one thing you’ve taught me, it’s that we can change,” he said.

And so we practiced. We found an old kitchen timer and set it at random, behind our backs. When it went off, we had to stop whatever we were doing, turn on an old, thrift-store radio and listen to the music that was playing—whether it was rap or classical or a commercial for toothpaste. And then we had thirty minutes to come up with something based on that melody that didn’t suck.

We clashed at first, wasting time by arguing. Even after all our time rehearsing together, it was difficult to get past that, to stop thinking on our own and start trusting each other to do our parts. But we ran the exercise five or six times a day and, gradually, we got slicker. After a few days, we could use every second of the thirty minutes productively, him focusing on the flowing parts that could be winged and me focusing on the ones with heavy structure that needed precision. I was the tent poles; he was the canvas.

Meanwhile, we had to get the recital nailed. Playing through it again and again was like reliving the course of our relationship: the first pair of sections, written when we hardly knew each other, both of us separate and aloof. The second pair, when I’d written him into the music and he’d written me. And then the final pair, the ones written after we’d had sex. Mine a delicate blending of our two styles, intimate but romantic; his urgent and powerful, the guitar parts hard and almost brutal as the cello wrapped itself around them—

We were usually tearing each other’s clothes off within seconds of finishing that part.

We rehearsed on the roof whenever the weather allowed it, the music floating out across the neighborhood. We’d refuel on coffee and work late into the night, and then be too wired to sleep, talking or fucking until the early hours.

Fucking. I remembered the days when I would have thought of it as
him taking me.
A lot of things about me had changed.

***

Midway through the week, Clarissa and Neil stopped by. I didn’t even have to ask how it was going—I could see by the way Neil stood next to her in the corridor. There was a new ease about them, a new level of intimacy beyond the sexual.

“We figured you could use these,” said Clarissa, handing me a stack of Tupperware containers. “Home cooked food. No doubt you’ve been living on pizza while you’ve been hunkered down in there.”

“Of course not,” I told her, pushing the stack of pizza boxes behind the door with my foot. I opened the top box and the lemon chicken inside didn’t just look edible—it looked amazing. “I didn’t know you cooked.”

Clarissa glanced over her shoulder at Neil. “I don’t,” she said. She leaned in and hugged me. “I don’t know what you did,” she whispered, “But thank you.”

“Are you two…okay?” I asked.

She smiled. “Early days. But I think we’re going to be.”

***

Lying in bed one night, we got to talking about our dreams. A million miles from the money of Boston and the lofty academia of Fenbrook, I finally had room to ask myself what I wanted.

The answer, when I figured it out, surprised me. What I wanted was to join the New York Phil. Not for my father. Not because it was what was expected of me. Because they were the best, and I wanted to be the best, too. That chubby-fingered six year-old who’d first fallen in love with the cello was still inside me, and it had taken losing my dream to remember what had started it. I’d come full circle, wanting the same thing I’d wanted that day I’d nearly fallen down the steps of Fenbrook, but for completely different reasons. I wasn’t driven by fear any more—fear that if I failed to get into the orchestra, I’d be nothing. I knew now what it was like to lose the dream, and it didn’t scare me anymore because I’d discovered something better. I’d found that as long as you have someone who loves you, who’d do anything in the world to save you…well, the rest of the world can go hang.

I called my father the next morning and told him when the recital was, that I’d be performing with Connor and that he could come if he wanted to. But that, no matter what, I was living my own life from now on.

Connor listened in. When I hung up, he hugged me. “I’m proud of you,” he told me. “That took guts.”

I looked at the floor. “That was his voicemail,” I said. “That’s still sort of brave, right?”

He hugged me again.

***

Between rehearsals and practicing improv, the days passed in a blur. If we weren’t showering or grabbing a bite to eat, we were working…and when we couldn’t work any more, we slept. We didn’t leave the apartment, except to go up onto the roof, the entire week, sending out for groceries when Clarissa’s food ran out. We were holed up in a room not much bigger than a prison cell, and yet the proximity didn’t grate…it made us closer.

And hornier.

After months of lusting after each other and not being able to do anything about it, having the freedom to just lunge for each other was intoxicating. The apartment was tiny, but we got creative. On the roof, under the stars, an old blanket thrown down on the concrete. In what we laughably called the kitchen, the hard back of a wooden kitchen chair pressed against my thighs as he bent me over it. And in his bed, my arms stretched out over my head and clutching at the pillows as I moaned and kicked and gasped, his head between my thighs.

***

The night before the recital, the nerves started to hit me. We were as ready as we could be—the recital was slick and polished and when we improvised we were doing the musical equivalent of finishing each other’s sentences. But I was still scared as hell. When Connor was asleep, I slid out of bed and stood by the window with a sheet wrapped around me, gazing out at the city.

A few months before, my biggest worry had been whether I’d make it into the New York Phil. Now, even after all our efforts, my entire college career hung on one ten minute performance and one half hour test. If we messed up tomorrow—or if the panel decided our crazy mash-up between classical and rock was garbage—

Just as I felt my shoulders start to tense up, large warm hands stroked down them. His body pressed up against me from behind, the heat of him soaking through the thin sheet to soothe me.

“You’re scared.” Not a question.

“How can it be fair that everything comes down to one morning.
Less
than a morning. Less than an hour! Four years at Fenbrook and if we’re ill tomorrow or we have an off day or we just mess up or—”

He kissed the back of my neck. “Or if you don’t get enough sleep….”

“You’re not helping.”

He kissed me again, right in my secret spot just behind my collarbone, and I went weak.

“Come to bed,” he told me.

“You go. I’ll just toss and turn and keep you awake.”

“Karen Montfort, get that sweet arse of yours in my bed this instant!”

I felt a sudden rush of heat push away my nerves…and just a hint of what Clarissa must feel, when Neil spoke to her like that.

“I don’t think I can sleep,” I told him.

His lips twisted into one of those filthy smiles. “I know a way to tire you out.”