My path doesn’t cross Marigold’s much the following day, despite our talk. I’m not sure if that’s because Marigold has better things to do than spend time with me and left, or because the apartment is simply so big that she’s gotten lost in it. The place feels empty now—her father left on his trip early that morning, and the rooms are extra echoey, furniture looming large like watchful giants.
So I spend most of the day in my room, my phone set on “do not disturb” and my body hunched over a small mountain of sheet music, poring over my and Celia’s notes until my head spins. Finally, when the notes have started to blur together, I give up. I open my laptop instead and tab over to my Dropbox folder that holds the videos of all my own past performances. Celia has me go through them periodically—A frank account of your own qualities and mistakes is the best way to improve,she’d said, and she’s probably right, but I hate listening to myself. It feels indulgent and vain, even if it is literally a school assignment.
I’m going through in reverse chronological order. No particular reason aside from it being the way the computer’s organized my files already. I click the next one without even checking the date stamp—but the second the video starts to play, I know that was a mistake.
I’m onstage, the audience is clapping, the camera shaking as the person holding it claps his hand against his thigh and hoots as loud as he can. It earns a couple disapproving backward glances—people don’t usually hoot at this kind of thing—but when he flips the camera around to show his own face, my brother clearly doesn’t care.
“You’re about to watch the greatest virtuoso piano performance of all time,” Adam declares to the lens. “My big brother, a rising star, future Parker student and future pianist for the New York Philharmonic—James Michael Larson!”
Adam hoots again, and he’s laughing as he flips the camera back around to fix on that image of me onstage, a stupid proud smile plastered on my stupid face.
I make myself watch.
Every movement, every measure. My hands dance over the keyboard. The expression I wear is that of a boy transformed, elated by the glorious music pouring from that instrument.
Here, in real life, my shoulders tremble. The first hot tear slides down my cheek, and I glance anxiously over my shoulder—but of course no one is there to witness it.
Fuck.Maybe it’s that I’m already so revved up, because that five seconds of Adam on tape has a choke hold on my heart. But I’ve never felt this way before, not while listening to my own music.
And god, it’s beautiful.
I rewind and play the beginning again, and again, and again, until I can’t process Adam’s face anymore, Adam’s voice. It’s all white noise.
Then I make myself listen to my performance again, wrangling my treacherous mind into submission and taking notes. I replay certain parts. I take more notes. I should have taken my Vyvanse today, I know that, but I woke up anxious, didn’t want to make things worse, and now I’m paying for it.
I slam my laptop shut and blow out a heavy breath.
I wish I could feel that way again about music.
I can’t, not after Adam.
But I wish I could.
More than that, I wish Adam were still fucking here.
I need a break.
I wander those wide halls of the Gensler apartment and eventually find myself in the library—yes, the Genslers have alibrary—and choose a book. It’s older, probably a classic, which I’d know if I ever paid attention in high school English class. I bring it into a small sitting room, where I settle on an emerald-green settee (that’s the word, right?) and try to read. It’s hard, only because I have a constant sense of how very fuckingaestheticit is to be sitting in this Victorian-style room reading a book that feels like it was printed in 1900, the soft afternoon light dipping through the tall windows to cast pale gold patterns across the floor.
It’s distracting enough that I keep needing to flip back andreread every few pages. But that might also be the way my brain has started turning to jelly the longer I’m at Parker. I had to take some compulsory liberal arts classes early on, but ever since, it’s just been piano, composition, theory, and more piano. My mind is atrophying. Like if they did an autopsy, all they’d find up there is a quivering pudding filled with drowning half notes.
Whatisleft of my brain is fully attuned to music, which is why the sound of someone playing piano immediately jolts me out of the book.
Someone—Marigold, of course. Not just because we’re the only people living here, but because I know her playing too well by now. I’ve learned her style like I first learned to read: note by note, and then, as if out of nowhere, it became second nature.
If I’m honest with myself, I was just waiting for a chance to toss the book aside. So I don’t fight it.
I follow the sound of Marigold’s playing into the main room. She sits at the grand piano, hands moving across the keys, playing one part of Schubert’sGrand Duo:the Sonata in C Major for piano four-hands. Schubert himself had once described the piece as a feminine take on a Beethoven symphony. I see that more than ever when Marigold plays it. Of course, with her musicality, she makes even the most aggressive Rachmaninoff sound incredible—but her performance of subtler pieces has always been one of her strongest suits. In my opinion, anyway. She brings a softness to the work that not many performers can. It’s like she’s cradling the music in the palms of both hands, wrapping it in cool silk and treasuring it near her heart.
With her head bent forward, a curtain of amber hair obscuring her face, she doesn’t see me. It’s only when I approach, and a floorboard creaks underfoot, that she stops playing, jerking upright like I’ve caught her doing something criminal.
“Don’t stop on my account,” I say.
“Sorry. Was I bothering you?”
The worst part is that she actually seemssincereabout the question, not like she’s trying to start shit.
“No. Of course not. It sounds fine.” From the look on her face, I can tell she doesn’t believe me. Complimenting each other, historically, is very much not our vibe. I rephrase: “Does seem kind of silly playing just one part, though.”
