Harmony

As October progressed to November, Calvin found himself working harder and harder, spending almost all his free time trying to put together and finish the first three of the songs he had sketched out with Ginny. He barely saw anyone besides his students and her. He was also rehearsing with the twentieth-century chamber music ensemble, and trying to manage his own courses besides. He was busier than he'd ever been in his life.

The composition department at the university was small, and every one of the faculty and the dozen or so graduate students knew everything that was going on with everyone else. Calvin went to a mid-semester meeting with full expectations of being teased about something, and he was not surprised when Maia Park, an outspoken peer of his, came up to him and said "I gather you've been having an interesting semester."

He thought she was talking about a concert he'd done the week before that had been fiendishly difficult to put together. "Yes," he said, "I've never heard Pierre Boulez done so well."

Maia pulled face. "Pierre Boulez? You weren't making out with Pierre Boulez last week in front of the building last Wednesday. I'm talking about the punk rock girl I saw you with. I was going to stop and say hello, but you two seemed a little busy."

Calvin thought back; they'd had lunch at the cafe across the street, but Ginny had a class afterward. There had been, he recalled, a prolonged goodbye on the street. "That's Ginny," he said. "My girlfriend."

Faculty were shuffling in and people were making small talk, but at this, everyone in Calvin's vicinity turned their heads as if he'd made an official announcement.

"That girl with the crazy red hair?"

"Ginny. Yes. She's actually writing the text for my thesis."

"Is she in a band or something?"

"No," he said, uncomfortably aware of the attention. He was considered something of a maverick in the department; people thought he was bull-headed and wrote strange music. According to Assif, the only thing that kept him from being disliked was his cheerful willingness to take the eight-thirty a.m. remedial theory class for entering freshmen. "She's a live-in companion for an elderly woman."

And still they stared. "What?" he said. "She likes music."

"Does she like yours?" Maia asked.

It was irritating how many people laughed.

The mockery left him in a sour mood, not improved by an official reproach from Katzoulas for trying to put together a full orchestra for a run-through before Thanksgiving break. It was too much to ask of the musicians, he was told; the music would be too difficult. Why not wait until the spring semester? Why were the questions about orchestration so urgent that they must be answered immediately?

All he had to look forward to after the meeting was a pile of counterpoint homework in need of grading that was waiting for him in his office during his lunch break. The grading was interrupted by a squabble with Assif about the papers overflowing from Calvin's desk.

"I got rid of the books," Calvin argued.

"And yet." Assif pointed to the chaos on Calvin's side of the room. "God save you, Calvin, you appear to be hemorrhaging staff paper at every turn."

"I'm a little busy."

"You think I am not busy? Yet you never find my papers on your desk. I am on the verge of calling one of those companies that bring very large dumpsters to bear on these sorts of problems. I do not want my personal space to be a casualty of your so-called masterwork."

"Dammit, I'll take care of it, all right? Just not right now."

"That is a refrain I've heard before," Assif grumbled on his way out.

Calvin looked at his mess and sighed. He did not want to be dealing with any of this; all he wanted to do was lock himself in a room with a piano and compose.

Later that afternoon, he trudged through the cold November wind to his shift at the music library, which was unfortunately busier than usual; he had no time to take care of the grading he'd brought with him to finish. When Assif stopped by to borrow an LP, Calvin was still in a foul mood. He was hunting around in the stacks for it when he heard Assif chortle, "Oh, Calvin! Come out here!"

He emerged and saw Ginny standing at the desk with a slight blonde girl. "Your muse is here," Assif said.

"What do you need, Ginny?"

She looked a little hurt. "Is this a bad time?"

"Tell me," Assif said, "has he taken you out to that fancy Italian place in the North End yet? I bet not. He never does what I tell him."

"Assif, could you just shut up?" Calvin snapped. For a moment all three of them started at him, Assif and Ginny and the other girl--who the hell was she? "Do you need something?" he barked at her.

Ginny looked at him coolly. "This is Sarah. We're in German together and we need a recording."

"Do you have the call number?"

Sarah looked at him, wide-eyed. "Ginny said you'd know."

"I'm not a mind reader."

"Cal!" Ginny said hotly. "It's Die Schone Mullerin and I didn't bother to look it up because you always just get the recording you like best."

"Such a charming man you have here," Assif put in.

Walking back to the stacks again, he imagined that the shelves were towers of glass and stone, deserted corridors of a great city that he could be alone in. When he returned with the recording, he slid it across the desk and took Sarah's ID without another word. Ginny didn't say goodbye.

Not long after he arrived home that evening, his buzzer rang. He knew it would be Ginny and that she wouldn't be very happy with him. He almost didn't answer, but he knew that if he didn't, he would make it worse. He let her up, unlocked the door, and then returned to the sofa. A moment later Ginny walked briskly through the door, shutting it behind her without a glance.

"Why the hell were you so rude to me and Sarah?" she said, shedding her coat.

"Ginny, I am truly, deeply sorry for that, but if you had the day I'd had, you'd have been rude, too."

She sat on the arm of the sofa. "What kind of day?"

"I argued. All day long."

"That sounds right up your alley."

"No, you don't understand." He closed his eyes. "I just feel like nobody gets it. Why doesn't anybody get it? Why do people think it's a good thing to settle for less than what you want, less than what you're capable of?"

"What people?"

"My students, for one. They don't even bother to show up for class most of the time, and when they do, all they want to do is complain about how I'm a tough grader, I'm too demanding, I have unrealistic expectations. And my cohort. I'm too hard to work with, I'm too much of a workaholic, my music is weird. And the faculty. Why am I out of line for wanting to do something to my standards even if it's a little inconvenient? And the musicians--they act like it's a chore to play something new, God forbid if it's a little difficult to rehearse. Nobody wants to do anything great."

She rubbed his shoulders. "I can do something great for you."

"I'm serious! You don't get it either."

"Yes, I do."

"I don't think you do! You never seem to have any worries about what you're going to do with the rest of your life. How long do you want to help an old woman shuffle to the bathroom as your career?"

He regretted the words as soon as he said them; Ginny looked shocked and hurt. "What's so terrible about wanting to live in the present moment?"

"Look, I didn't mean that the way it sounded."

"Yes, you did, but I understand why it would look as if I don't care. It's just..."

She sighed. "Listen, Calvin, what would you do if you just started going deaf, like Beethoven?"

He hated far-fetched hypotheticals. "That's not going to happen."

"But if you knew that it would. That you'd lose the ability to hear music. Really, I want to know your answer to this. What would you do?"

He blanched. "If I couldn't hear anymore?" That was strange, foreign territory. "I really don't know."

"It would be awful, wouldn't it? And if you knew it was going to happen, if you were just counting down the days, wouldn't you wonder sometimes why you should bother?"

"No. I'd try to accomplish as much as I could before that happened." He leaned his head against her side. "Why are you asking me this?"

She seemed far away from him now. "It's complicated," she said softly.

Calvin closed his eyes; despite the bad day, he did feel better with her here.

"Maybe I could be great at something," she said, somewhere above him.

"You are great." He slid a little lower and put his head on her lap, his hands on her thighs. She was wearing another of her wool skirts, and he felt the prickly fabric on the tops of his hands contrasting with her smooth skin against his palms. The textural contrast roused him a little.

"How?"

"You're pretty great to me. And apparently that's a Herculean task."

"But that's not a gift."

"You're a writer, Ginny." He inched his hands further up her skirt. "You have a calling." He found the damp line of her panties and her breath hitched a little.

"I want," she continued, "to be as committed to something as you are to your music. But it seems...dangerous."

"Dangerous?" he echoed, only half-listening. He began to work her panties down her legs.

Her breathing increased. "What if you woke up one day and realize you spent your whole life on something that wasn't really worth anything at all?"

He was planting kisses on the insides of her thighs. "If you did it," he said, "it would be worth something. I know it would be."

"Calvin." She was trying to sound annoyed with him, but her voice was low and lovely. He loved her like this. He pushed her skirt up further,

Mea culpa, he thought. A delicious shudder passed through her body when he pressed his tongue to her. He kept going until she cried out his name, her fingers clenched in his hair. Only then did he feel like he'd been absolved.

***

Later she lay in the darkness of the late fall dusk with him in his bedroom. Normally she began to feel depressed at this time of year, when the light receded earlier and earlier with each passing day. But just at this moment she liked the darkness. She was running her hands over the outline of Calvin's body, feeling it as much as seeing it. It was cold outside but he was warm, warm, warm, and she did not want to get up and leave him to go back to Cynthia's apartment.

"You're serious about this boy," Cynthia had observed, and she did not quite know how to answer. What was it that made a relationship serious, exactly? Was it the amount of time spent with one another? The time spent making love? The time spent not making love? The topics of conversation?

"I want to tell you something," Calvin said, interrupting her thoughts. Her hand met his face, stroked the stubble on his chin.

"When I was a kid," he began, "I wasn't very adaptable. I, ah, had a lot of trouble socializing."

"I'm shocked," she said with affection.

"I didn't like being around other people. I used to get upset when teachers asked me to play with other kids or do silly games like Red Rover. And I was rude. I wouldn't answer when people talked to me if I was thinking about something important. If I thought they were boring I'd just walk away. It seemed like every time I talked, I got into trouble. I'd say the wrong thing. Eventually I got so frustrated that for a little while I refused to talk altogether, and that's when my parents took me to see a psychologist."

She could picture it: Calvin as an impetuous little boy, his brain too big for his body. Stubborn, headstrong, and lonely, with a brain far ahead of his age group.

"Nobody ever really understood it. I think they thought I had some kind of social anxiety, but that wasn't it. I wasn't afraid of people. I didn't worry about them disliking me. It was just that I had so much going on in my head that I needed to think about. I hated it when people interrupted that. I couldn't see why it was so important for me to play some stupid game and sometimes I got so angry that no one understood.

"This doctor, though, he was good. I think he figured out the problem pretty quickly. He explained things in a way that made sense--why it was important to answer when someone talked to me, very logical about it. Before, I didn't get it. You know, what does rude even really mean? I didn't do very well with abstract concepts back then. Dr. Simmons understood that. It was so nice to be understood."

"I can imagine."

"Anyway, he had me do these exercises in my head when I started feeling frustrated. One of them was counting to ten and imagining myself in my favorite place. He said I never had to tell anyone where it was, not even him. I never did, but I still--I still do it, sometimes, when I get frustrated. Because I still do get frustrated with people, all the time."

She slipped one of her legs between his and laid her hand on his chest.

"It's always the same place. It's always New York, but completely empty. No people at all." When she chuckled softly, he said, "I know it sounds like a horror movie."

"No," she said, "it sounds like you. No distractions, no annoyances."

He almost sat up. "Yes! Imagine all the buildings, the museums, and Central Park, and imagine the silence. I've never heard silence in New York. And in my head it's always lovely and interesting and uncomplicated."

Uncomplicated. She sighed. "Calvin, I know that's how you like things. I'm sorry I'm not that way. I'm sorry if I upset you."

"No, that's not why I'm telling you this."

"It's not?"

He took another breath. "I'm saying that for years and years it's always been the same place. New York with no one in it but me. But it's different now."

"How?"

"You. I picture you. Us." When she didn't respond, he said, "I'm saying I'm in love with you. I love you."

"Oh, Calvin," she said softly. She closed her eyes. You're serious about this boy. She wanted him all the time, in every way it was possible to want someone. She had been afraid of this, but now that it was here, she didn't feel scared. She felt euphoric. "Tu es ma joie de vivre," she said into his chest.

"What was that?"

"I love you, too."

***

Despite a great deal of opposition, just before Thanksgiving, Calvin bartered, bribed, and begged a few musicians and a soprano to run through the first songs for an audience of three: himself, Katzoulas, and Ginny.

He had worked like a fiend to the detriment of other things; Ginny had given him a haircut one night in his apartment because he refused to take the hour out of his day to go down to the university barbershop. This was the hardest thing he'd ever done. He had trouble believing so many other composers had done it with ease. The words threw an entirely new element into his usual workflow; he had to impose upon himself a certain fidelity to them. He found that he was changing his approach, his style, to meet Ginny's; perfection demanded it.

Everybody in the department thought he was nuts, but since they had nothing to offer in the way of help, he didn't much care. He knew, even if no one else did, that he was doing his best work to date. All he wanted to know was whether he was orchestrating it effectively, and the only way to know that for sure was to hear it.

He waited impatiently in the concert hall, watching the musicians file in, drop their coats, start tuning and rosining and blowing on reeds. Most of them were leaving for the break the next day and the energy wasn't as focused as Calvin would have liked. When Ginny came in her cheeks were red from the wind. Her hair peeked out beneath a gray wool hat and she turned her head left and right to take in the hall.

"The acoustics aren't the best," he said, approaching her for a distracted kiss on the cheek, "but I couldn't book the good hall."

"Hello to you, too," she said, but she was happy. "Where should I sit?"

"Somewhere in the middle." He eyed the door, where Katzoulas was trudging in, looking the very picture of resentment. Katzoulas hated leaving his house before noon and after five. It took twice as much work to secure his presence than it had for Calvin to get the soprano, and he was now sharing his apartment with her cat for the holiday free of charge.

"Are you going to sit with me?"

"I can't, I have to conduct." He patted her shoulder. "But whatever you think, write it down for me, okay?"

"All right, Calvin, let's get on with this," Katzoulas called from the back of the hall.

Calvin bounded up on the stage, skipping the steps; he only had half an hour.

He wished he could turn around and look at her during the read-through to see her reactions--in some ways hers were much more important than his mentor's--but there was too much to worry about, too much to do. He had to conduct and make notes, marking mistakes, changes, moments when something was off but he wasn't sure what. By the end of the run-through, he realized that it wasn't quite there yet, but he knew how to fix it. He was so busy covering his score with writing that he forgot to thank the musicians. When he next looked up, they were filing out, and the soprano was standing directly in front of him on the nearly empty stage, looking expectant.

"Thanks, Annemarie," he said, flustered. "You can bring Mr. Sushi over tomorrow morning."

She handed him back her part. "I think I like this, Calvin. Let me know if you want me to sing it in the spring."

"Really?"

"Just don't ask at the last minute."

As she left, Katzoulas strode down the aisle to meet him at the edge of the stage. "Well," he huffed, "you seem to know what you're doing with those. Let me see your notes."

He perused Calvin's score and made a few observations. Then he asked, "And remind me again how you found this miracle text?"

"I have my own librettist now," he said, gesturing for Ginny to join them.

Katzoulas regarded her with some mix of curiosity and disbelief. "Well, you've saved his merry ass, Miss--Abbott, is it? Yes, indeed."

"I wasn't that bad off," Calvin argued.

Katzoulas snorted and Ginny could not hide her amusement. "Make the changes. After the break we'll talk about the rest."

Calvin gathered his things and jumped back down from the stage. "So, what did you think?" he asked her.

"The short version? It was wonderful."

He sat down beside her in the front row, stretching out his arms and legs, allowing himself to feel how tired he was. "I'm glad you like it."

"It's so strange," she mused, pausing before she continued. "I fantasized sometimes about publishing them, but I never imaged them set to music. It almost seems as if they're not mine anymore. Like you've made them something even better than they are on the page. The music changes them."

"How?"

"Maybe change isn't quite the right word. I mean that it's like the music alters the experience of them. It's like you've molded the music to fit them. To make them less...elusive."

He took her hand and kissed it, satisfaction welling through him. She understood him, even if she didn't know that she did; she had just articulated exactly what he'd been trying to do. She reached over and rubbed the back of his neck; it felt glorious. He closed his eyes and sank lower in the seat.

"Are you all right? You look exhausted."

He was exhausted. Physically and mentally. The upcoming break wouldn't really be a vacation; he wasn't going home and he still had an enormous amount of work to do, not to mention a diva's cat to feed. But he was happy. He was happier than he could ever remember being.

"I'm great," he said, reaching for her hand. "Take me home."

***

The last days of November passed in a fugue of more work, and then it was December, almost time for the semester's final exams. One bitterly cold afternoon Calvin was in his office, working on a paper he had to write for his history of art song course, when Maia Park popped her head through the door. As usual, she was heedless to the fact that both he and Assif were neck-deep in work.