The Lucy Variations (24 page)

When she started playing the Philip Glass –
Metamorphosis I
– a wave of rustling washed through the audience. People checking their programmes. Murmuring.

Philip Glass?
she heard them thinking. Twentieth-century composers were rarely performed at these things. The piece was not technically challenging in the show-offy way the audience had paid for.
This
was the big Lucy Beck-Moreau comeback? The theme was repetitive. But every time it came back around, Lucy tried to find something new to discover in it.

When she finished Part I, she was tempted, momentarily, to move into II. The series of pieces were meant to be heard together. But she couldn’t take up that much time, and anyway, she’d made her point.

She stood to bow and received uncertain applause. When she straightened up, she scanned the crowd, not for Will, or Carson and Reyna, but for her mother. There she was, stage right and down front, sitting with Lucy’s dad on one side and Grandpa Beck on the other, Martin next to him. Lucy smiled at her and held out a hand, the way you do when you’re acknowledging a pit orchestra. Her mother stretched out her arm in reply.

Like the old man before her, Lucy exited into the wings. She found him sitting on a metal folding chair in front of the curtain rigging. He looked up at her with watery eyes. “That was nice,” he said.

“I want to be like you,” she replied.

He laughed. “No. Keep being like you.”

She found another folding chair and sat next to him, so she could watch Gus from the wings.

The reception after the showcase was a crush of people. Lucy stayed near her family. Usually, Grandpa Beck would be working the crowd, taking Gus around, making him talk to people. Tonight Lucy’s dad was Gus’s chaperone, and her grandfather seemed abnormally subdued.

“Interesting choice, Lucy,” he said.

“Did you like it?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “But I didn’t hate it.”

It was the best she could expect from him, most likely. “What
do
you like, Grandpa? What do you love?”

He gave her a quizzical look. “I’m sorry?”

“What do you love?” she repeated.

“All of it. I love it all.”

Lucy laughed.

“You think I’m joking. I’ve given my life to this, Lucy. My money. My time. I could be sipping mai tais on the coast of New Zealand.” He gazed out on the room. She thought of him eight years before, weeping to see Leon Fleisher recover his second hand. “I know I’m an old crank. I can’t explain myself, especially with your grandmother gone. Don’t expect me to.”

“I …won’t.” Already she was thinking how she’d tell this story to Will before realizing she probably wouldn’t. It would take a while to break that habit, him being her audience.

Lucy’s mother came over with a glass of champagne. “This is the most people I’ve ever seen at this thing,” her mother said. They were clustered in a safe corner of the lobby, watching Gus and her dad circulate. “Diane Krasner will be happy. Lots of big donors.”

Grandpa Beck narrowed his eyes. “Who is Gustav talking to
now
? Good God. Will brought the entire establishment. Does he think we don’t know how to market Gus?”

Lucy held her tongue. Let him think what he wanted, that Will’s entourage of influencers were for Gus. Hopefully Gus thought that, too.

She’d been deciding whether or not to talk to Will; then she saw him near the bar with the record-company producer, and it was the producer who waved her over. “Be right back,” she said to her mom.

She wove through bodies, her heart in her throat, stopped a couple of times by people saying, “Great to see you up there, Lucy” or “I never would have recognized you!” When she reached Will, he introduced her to the producer, John Tommassini. She shook his hand. “I remember. How are you?”

“Very well, thanks. You’ve grown up.” He smiled at Will. “Of course, I would have loved to have heard the Brahms!”

Will laughed, uncomfortable.

Tommassini sipped his drink and said, “I’m loving the ideas Will’s been pitching us for collaborations with you two.”

Lucy looked at Will, but he avoided her eyes. John continued: “It’s such a great hook. Student and teacher, both former child stars, together. It doesn’t hurt that you’re both good-looking. Maybe a little airbrushing for you, Will!” He grinned. “Sad to say, but that’s the reality of marketing now.”

“Will isn’t…” Lucy started to say that he wasn’t her teacher. It wouldn’t exactly be true, though. “You can call my dad about it,” she told Tommassini. “I have to find my brother.”

Will followed her. “Hang on, Lucy.” She turned around. “I didn’t know you were into Glass.” He tried for the Will chuckle, but it fell flat. “Seriously, though. You…it was great. Kind of weird. But good-weird.” He took her arm gently. “I can’t hear in this crowd. But I want to talk. Here.” He pointed to the bottom of the sweeping staircase that went up to the next level’s lobby.

“I was going to do the Brahms,” Lucy said, when they got to the stairs, voice unsteady. “Until I saw you with all those people.”

“You pulled that out of your hat on the spot? Wow.”

She thought about the day before, at the coffee shop. How important it had been to her that he not be mad at her. Now it felt just as important to her to not be mad at him. She didn’t want that. She was tired of anger.

“Why’d you invite them?” she asked, finally meeting his eyes. And she saw in them that he was working out his explanation, switching gears, maybe to something rehearsed. “Be yourself with me,” she said. “Remember? Just tell me.”

He looked at her then and was real, not the charmer or the convincer. “This is myself.” He lowered his gaze. “I guess I saw an opportunity for my own…I don’t know. It didn’t start that way, though. That day, my first day at your house – not the party, but my first day with Gus – when I asked you if you ever wanted to play again, and you said you didn’t know. The look on your face.” He put his hand over his heart and lifted his head. “I could tell you did know, and you wanted to, but you were in a bind about it, inside yourself. When you came to me for help, it was like a dream.”

“I trusted you,” Lucy said. “I shouldn’t have. I mean…you tried to get me to play within just a couple of hours of meeting me when I said I didn’t any more. From that second, I shouldn’t have trusted you.”

He looked crushed, and even as she said it, she knew it had been sincere, him inviting her to the piano that night.

“I promise you it wasn’t until Diane came to my party that I got, you know, preoccupied. With this other idea. Ideas.”

She remembered Gus asking,
Why?
when she’d told him about Diane approaching Will. “Why was she even at your party? Does she always come? Did you invite her before or after I said I’d be there?”

He rubbed the back of his head. “You can probably guess.”

She nodded, going over all the moments since then that had meant so much. “What about everything else?” she asked, quiet. And for an anxious second, it seemed as if he didn’t know what she meant.

In an instant he figured it out. “Everything else. Everything else was…a surprise. And so lovely. And as real as you up on that stage tonight.” He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “And I swear to
God
, Lucy, I never had anything but the best intentions. Maybe with the career stuff, recently, I went off track. Okay, not maybe. But with the ‘everything else’, I really was, I tried to be, my best self with you.”

She couldn’t speak but thought,
Me too
.

He sighed. “Even that’s a rationalization, right? I’ll stop.”

“Okay,” she said softly.

“Is there anything…do you want to say anything to me? Ask me anything? I’ll be honest.”

Was it what I thought it was?
He’d be honest. She wasn’t sure she was ready to know. Then it struck her that they’d been talking in the past tense. And now they were exchanging final words. She snapped out of her hurt and confusion.

“No. We’re not saying goodbye. You know why?”

“Because you want to record a four-hands album with me for Tommassini?” he joked without a smile. “No? Okay. Why?”

“Because you’re going to keep teaching Gus,” she said, resolute. It would mean she couldn’t totally avoid him. He’d be part of their family’s life. She couldn’t just exit stage right and never look back. Or, she was choosing not to.

“Wait,” Will said, baffled, holding up his hands. “You’re not going to tell your mom what a…jackass I’ve been?”

“It’s for Gus. He still loves you. He still needs you.”

He dropped his arms.

“But,” Lucy said, “if I see you doing anything with his career that he’s not sure he wants, you’re going to have to deal with me.”

“Okay. And thank you. For giving me another chance. With Gus.”

They
were
saying goodbye, even if they were going to see each other again and again. Goodbye was happening. “Thank you, too,” she said, even though she wasn’t feeling it, in case she never got a chance to say it later.

“You’re strong, you know. A very strong person.” He smiled his crooked smile. “It’s one of the things I love you for.”

She shook her head, and now, after holding it together through the evening’s ordeal,
now
the tears threatened to spill. “Don’t…talk to me like that. I’m strong but not that strong.”

His smile disappeared. “I’m sorry, Lucy,” he said. And when she started to walk away, he touched her elbow gently. “Hey, the director of the Academy loved what you did. I don’t think you’ll have a problem, even with the whole mortal-enemies-with-your-grandpa thing.”

She let herself look at him one more time. “I’ll see you around.”

It was hard to get Gus away from his admirers. Lucy watched Will go to him and stay by his side the rest of the night. She found Martin and waited with him. “I don’t know if you saw me,” he said. “But I cried my eyes out to see you on stage. And you did so well.” Lucy huddled against him, and he put his arm around her. They stayed that way until the crowd thinned and eventually dispersed.

She watched Will say goodbye to her parents and grandfather.

Gus saw her waiting, and turned away.

“Gustav!” Martin called. “Get over here and talk to your sister.” He gave Lucy a last pat. “I’ll see you tomorrow, doll.”

Gus, obedient, approached Lucy. She desperately wanted to hug him, but she also respected his right to not want to be hugged. “You blew them away,” she said. “It was perfect. I’m super proud of you.”

“Thanks.”

“I have something for you.”

“I don’t want the bow tie.”

“I know.” She opened her palm, where she’d been warming Will’s nail clippers. “Here.”

He took them out of her hand. “Um. Okay.”

“They’re a good-luck charm. Trust me.”

Gus put the clippers in his pocket. And she could see it was hard for him to say it, but he straightened up his back and said, “I’m proud of you, too.”

She fought not to cry, which she knew would mortify him. “Gus,” she said, stooping a little to be closer to his face, “Will is all yours, okay? You can have him.”

“Are you guys still going to be friends?”

“Not like we were.”

On the car ride home, she felt the CD she’d made for Will in her coat pocket. She hadn’t given it to him, and never would.

Reyna had left her a voicemail earlier that day that she’d somehow missed.

“Hey. Carson told me about your thing, and I also saw it in the paper. I’m coming. You can’t stop me. And I wanted to say it was really cool to see your name like that, and I thought,
Hey, I know her, she’s my best friend
. And I wanted to say break a leg or whatever. I love you.”

The mid-January cold, for San Francisco, was brutal. Lucy walked the couple of miles, anyway, and let the wind slice through her, swearing under her breath with a kind of deranged glee. She wore a scarf that Felicia Pettis had given her when they’d met for coffee after Christmas. “It’s not a gift,” she’d said, when Lucy expressed chagrin that she didn’t have anything for Felicia. “Just something I saw that made me think of you.” She wound the purply fabric around Lucy’s neck and snapped a picture with her phone.

Lucy’s mom had offered and expected to give her a ride this morning, standing in the hall, ready. She’d looked a little hurt when Lucy had said no.

“It’s the first day,” Lucy had said. “I want to kind of…keep it personal. Make it mine.”

It wouldn’t be like before, when she’d go to cities but not see them, when she’d perform but be too stressed to think about the beauty of the music, when she’d trudge to the piano like it was a punishment.

This time, the second she felt herself not caring, she’d pay attention, she’d ask herself:
What do you love, Lucy?

And she’d remember. Ryan Adams and the first sip of coffee in the morning. Her mom singing along with the B-52s. Vivaldi, and Beethoven’s French horns. And people, even though they were complicated.

Not that she’d always know what she loved, or even what she wanted. She needed, actually, to feel uncertain. She held on to her doubt the way she used to hold on to the security of a good grade from Mr. Charles, or the assurance of best friendship for ever from Reyna, or Will’s adoration and attention.

Now, she didn’t want to know her future.

All she wanted was to be there, for every little minute.

She opened the wide double doors of the Academy, and made her entrance.