Nocturne(12)

“Gregory, then.”

I shifted in my seat and licked my lips before speaking again. “Term papers?”

“This? No. I’m actually reviewing a list of instructors who might be willing to take on a disabled student. Blind.” He struggled with his words, which I found unsettling.

“Differently abled.” I chuckled.

“What?” He scrunched his eyebrows together, genuinely baffled by my statement.

I shook my head. “Never mind. How old is …”

“Oh, twelve. Him. He’s twelve.” Gregory sank down a little in his seat and rubbed the back of his neck.

“What instrument does he play?”

Gregory’s eyes shifted away from me and toward the window. “Cello.”

“Why aren’t you doing it? You teach.” I shrugged and rested my elbow on the table, facing him as I propped my cheek up on my hand.

Gregory took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a minute. When he opened them, he finally faced me. “I’m not … I just don’t think I’m qualified to handle such a task.”

“Certainly not, if you are referring to the student as a task. Seriously though,” I continued when it looked like he was going to cut in, “you could totally teach him. Marcia Taylor is my roommate and she says you’re a genius.”

He chuckled a little. “As much as I appreciate the observation—”

“I’m serious,” I cut in again, sitting straight in my chair. “I was nine when I grew tired of racing up and down the rows of chairs in an empty opera house during line rehearsals. I wanted to do something. I wanted to play something. The woodwind coordinator for the orchestra was a flute teacher, and my mother paid her to start teaching me. She resisted at first because she’d never taught a child.”

“I can relate.” Gregory nodded and crossed his arms in front of him, leaning back until he was resting against the window.

I did an unattractive half-laugh, half-moan at the memory. “She was awful. Seriously. She would teach me notes and would start out by doing the standard circle diagram of the flute keys, filling in the ones where my fingers needed to go. But, then,” I reached forward and took hold of Gregory’s hand, ignoring the shocked look on his face, “she’d take my fingers and manipulate them to solidify her point. I’d be holding the damn flute with her bossy hands all over me, as if it were appropriate for a nine-year-old to be playing an open-hole flute to begin with.”

Gregory’s eyebrows shot up. “You learned to play on an open-hole flute?”

I smiled a little at his reaction to my starting with a flute many don’t use until they’ve played for several years. “She may have had no finesse whatsoever in dealing with me, but she got the job done. I’ve never played anything but open-hole, and I have her to thank for drilling me and training my hand muscles to reach far enough to cover the keys. My point? You can teach this kid, if you want to.”

Gregory nodded slowly, looking at the table just past our hands.

Our hands.

I’d gotten so swept up in the story of Giada Barone that I’d left my hands on his … demonstrating a middle E-flat. Shifting slightly to try to pull my hands away without creating an awkward moment, my fingers slid in between his and from a distance it would have looked like we were holding hands.

All the sound in the room disappeared as I felt the fingers on his left hand tighten around mine. They were as strong as I’d imagined, but softer than I’d expected. His thumb skimmed over one of my knuckles, and I yanked my hand away. I shot my eyes to his face as my lips parted, my lungs begging me to take the breath they’d been waiting ten seconds to receive. Gregory’s eyes came back from his contemplative stare into nowhere as I cleared my throat and wrapped both hands around my latte mug.

“Oh, Savannah …” He sounded rather panicked as he dug for something to say.

It was just an accident. A reaction. He wasn’t thinking. This isn’t about you.

I smiled as wide as I could in order to hide my surely flushed cheeks.

“You should give that kid a chance, Gregory. You could change his life.” I shrugged, speaking too quickly. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Giada. I know that for a fact. Enjoy the rest of your spring break.”

I left my seat before he could tell me he hadn’t meant what had just happened.

“You too, Miss Marshall.” He ran his hand down his face and left it over his mouth as he continued scanning the papers in front of him.

I scrambled over to my cozy booth and regained control of my senses, looking around to see if any of my classmates may have witnessed that. As much as it could have screwed things up had someone seen it, I felt like I needed some sort of confirmation that it had happened at all.

I got all the confirmation I needed when I looked up, and Gregory’s eyes met mine across the coffee shop. For the next twenty-two seconds, we were the only people in the coffee shop. Then he broke the spell, looking away, leaving me devoid of reason and racing for the door.





Gregory


It was the afternoon of the first day of classes after spring break, and technically my office hours, which I was required by the conservatory to keep, though few students ever dared to interrupt me in here. I was sipping a cup of tea, leaning back in my chair, with my feet upon the desk. Rachmaninoff was playing, not quietly. It was a new recording by the London Symphony. Such music is never meant to be played softly, as if it were background music. It demands attention. Several nagging papers from the conservatory administration lay ignored on my desk. I wasn’t prepared to deal with them, especially while wrapped in the sounds Rachmaninoff.

My eyes were closed, so I was completely unprepared for the disturbance when my office door flew open and banged into the doorframe with a loud thump. I dropped my feet to the floor, eyes darting to the door.

It was Savannah Marshall. She had bright spots of color in her cheeks, and her right fist was clenched at her side, her left gripping a paper that was now slightly crumpled. An angry line ran down the center of her forehead where her eyebrows pushed together.

I cleared my throat, unwilling to show her just how ruffled I was by her entrance. Or her appearance, which was shockingly fetching with that dark rose color highlighting her cheeks, a tight blue sweater over faded jeans that emphasized every single curve of her body.

“Miss Marshall. Perhaps you forgot to knock?”

She held up the paper. “I came here to discuss this.”

I raised my eyebrows. This wasn’t likely to go well, given her inclination to argue everything to death, so I took a sip of my tea in an effort to maintain my equilibrium. Then I mustered the coldest voice I could manage. “There’s not really anything to discuss.”

“An F? This paper did not warrant an F.” Her cheeks were still flushed as she spoke, and I found it difficult to take my eyes off of them.

“Miss Marshall, your paper most certainly did. I took a considerable amount of time justifying your grade before putting it on the paper. I don’t intend to justify it further. You are capable of much better work than this.”

She smacked the paper on the desk—the large “F” scrawled across the top half.

“Mr. Fitzgerald.” She took a deep breath. I suppose to calm herself, which seemed to be necessary. “Number one. You gave exactly no feedback. There is not a single mark in this paper. Nothing to indicate what is right or wrong. Simply a grade. Number two,” she took another breath and her voice was much more even, “I very carefully met every single requirement of the assignment. You required a comparison of Debussy’s compositions from early in his career and late. You required an analysis of the technical aspects of at least two of those compositions. You required that I address the differences in tempo, meter, pitch, harmony. I addressed each of those.”

I frowned. Her tone rang with unattractive self-importance. She’d done the things I’d asked, true. But she’d also included nearly five pages of completely irrelevant material. “Hardly. Miss Marshall, the assignment was a comparison of the music and its elements. Not a biography. You have more than three pages in this paper about his wife. What possible relevance does she have to the assignment?”

Savannah shouted, her brown eyes nearly popping out of their sockets. “She shot herself in the chest days after he announced he was divorcing her! How could that not be relevant? How could that not affect his music?” The color in her cheeks deepened the louder her voice got.

I sat forward in my chair and against my better judgment, found myself arguing back, “It’s completely irrelevant! The assignment was to compare the musical composition, not delve into the composer’s personal life!”

She flipped the pages of the report and stabbed it with her index finger, leaning over my desk as she did so. “I did do that, if you’d actually bothered to read the paper. Yes, the music was changed, and I illustrated that in the paper. But his music was changed by his life. His music was changed by his experiences. But, this isn’t about me at all, is it? This is about my mother! Are you simply punishing me because of her?”

At that, I stood. Her chain of logic made no sense at all. What did her mother have to do with anything? Of course, Savannah came from good musical stock, and that had to be respected on some level. But punishing her? No, I was pushing her. Pushing her to do better than the paper she’d turned in.