The Audition(2)

I remember how outraged I’d been at that. I remember how attracted I’d been to the brooding man who hadn’t spoken a word of English when he landed.

I remember the tears rolling down my cheeks when I first heard him play, understanding why my mother had done what she’d done. Because when Nikolai Zhdanov plays the piano, angels stop and listen.

“You owe me,” I say boldly. A complete lie; he owes me nothing. I’m unscrupulous though. If he feels guilt at my mother’s death, I’m not above using it to rescue myself.

I need so desperately to claw out of the dark pit that my life has become.

He holds up his hands. I see the faded scars on them, the uneven skin that plastic surgery has not managed to smooth over. “I owe you nothing, Allie,” he says flatly. “Your mother was driving. When we rolled over, I tried my best to save her. My conscience is clean. I did everything I could.”

He doesn’t speak the next sentence. Had he walked away without trying to pull my mother out, his hands would have never been damaged. He had been the principal pianist at the New York Philharmonic. His career would have been written in stars. His attempt to save my mother had ended that dream.

“Please,” I say softly. “She saved you in Norilsk.”

“I would have done anything for your mother,” he clarifies. “You, on the other hand, are spoiled and self-indulgent and seem to be insistent on flushing your life down the toilet. I have no use for such destruction.”

His words wound me deeply and anger me just as much. “Did you not grieve your lost career, Nikolai? Did you not feel despair? I lost my only parent. Forgive me if I can’t be as stoic as you.”

“And this is how you honour your mother’s memory?” he sneers. There’s no kindness in his eyes. “Drugs? Alcohol? The losers you call friends?”

Again, I don’t ask how he knows about my life. But the damning facts are accurate enough.

“In January,” I say softly, “I hosted a New Year’s Eve party.” I remember that debauched spectacle, a hundred drunk people crammed into the apartment that my mother had left me in her will. “Some kids were banging out tunes on the piano.” I had felt a profound wrongness as a complete stranger sat at the piano that my mother had played on every day for as long as I remembered. “I pushed him out of the way and I played for the first time in six years.”

“What did you play?” he asks. For the first time since I’ve walked in, there’s a bit of a thaw.

“Ginastera,” I say. “The Danzas Argentinas.”

“Which piece?” he probes. Of course he knows Ginastera, and he knows the work intimately enough to ask the follow-up question. He was the principal pianist of the New York Philharmonic, after all.

“The third.”

“Danza del gaucho matrero,” he comments. He smiles for the first time. “I wouldn’t have thought of you as an arrogant cowboy. An ambitious choice.” His eyes run up and down my body.

“Please, Nikolai,” I plead. He has to help me. I need Juilliard; I need the structure of the hours of class and the endless practice to rescue myself from the void my life has become.

“You beg so well, Allie.” His eyes darken before they once again become emotionless. “I don’t take on students.”

I see the way his eyes rest on my cleavage, and I’m not afraid to use my body. “I’ll do anything,” I say. My voice takes on a suggestive tone, and my finger trails down the vee of the t-shirt I’m wearing.

He raises another dark eyebrow. “Come with me,” he says.

***

I follow him down a flight of stairs, and when we get to the bottom, he flicks the light on. My breath catches at the sight in front of me.

Nikolai’s basement is a dungeon. On the walls, I see whips and rope and paddles and canes and belts of leather. From the ceiling, metal chains dangle. Iron rings are embedded in the concrete floor. There’s a large metal cage in a corner. A massive wooden cross on one side. And, under a spotlight in the center of the room, the most incongruous sight of all. A piano.

“I’m not nice, Allie,” he says. “I’m not kind. This will be the hardest week of your life. I will hurt you. I will make you cry. I will make you beg me for mercy, and I will offer you none.”

“Will you make me pass my audition?” I ask.

He gestures to the piano. “Play the Ginastera piece,” he orders. “Let’s see what I have to work with.”

My hands are shaking as I walk to the piano. I haven’t eaten since the morning. I’m starving and my emotions are a confused jumble. But I make no excuses. Nine years ago, Nikolai Zhdanov moved from Norilsk to New York, where he didn’t know a single person apart from my mother. In three months, he learned to speak English and was hired by the New York Philharmonic. Two years later, he was appointed the principal pianist at the orchestra. I’ve heard him practise for hours upon end, focused completely on the goal in front of him.