“No relation,” the nurse said, sounding disappointed.
“Too bad,” said the doctor. “What a guy; I’ll never forget hearing him conduct Gershwin in Central Park. Did you know the queen’s a big fan? They say he has a standing invitation to Buckingham Palace.”
* * *
Release papers in hand, Bridget walked out to her car and sent a quick text to Will:
Got electrocuted in the breakfast room :)
He answered immediately:
Jeeesh!! That house!!!!!! You okay????
His excessive use of punctuation amused her; for someone so reserved, his text messages were highly expressive.
She drove to the main intersection in the town of Sharon and sat at the light, admiring the old stone clock tower with its pointy red roof. She wished the clock said it was eight in the morning so she could start the day over again. She wished she’d at least taken a shower. The car behind her honked. She waved in apology, made a left turn, and drove to her father’s house.
2
If a pigeon were to perch on the rusty air-conditioning unit in the window of 66 Barrow Street and look into the fourth-story living room, it might be under the false impression that Will was taking a nap. It was ten in the morning, and he was lying on the couch with his feet up, planning out his summer schedule and estimating his potential earnings. He wouldn’t make as much as, say, people with normal jobs, but with the trio on hiatus, he’d found opportunities to make some extra money doing commercial work, like recording a jingle for a low-testosterone ad at a studio in New Jersey. He’d performed at a B-list celebrity wedding the night before with a terrific ensemble—a last-minute invitation after their pianist called in sick—and it was a windfall.
Gounod’s Faust was playing on his iPad, and he was cross-checking a series of emails with the lessons and gigs he kept track of in his calendar, an old-fashioned, spiral-bound throwback he carried in the pocket of his button-down shirts. When he was certain everything was entered (in pencil so adjustments could be made), he moved on to the next business: scheduling a three-way phone conference around the insanely busy schedule of their new violinist, Caroline Lee, so that he and Bridget could welcome her into the trio and discuss logistics. She was out of the country for most of June, but when Will requested a few dates in July, she had never gotten back to him. Will hoped this wasn’t an indication of her level of commitment. He tried calling her manager, Randall Bennett, but the call went first to Randall’s assistant and then to voicemail. Instead of leaving a message, he sent an email to Caroline, copying Bridget and Randall to keep them in the loop.
Randall was obsessed with what he called their “platform,” so Will picked up his iPad and took a look at their website. It hadn’t been updated in years. It didn’t list upcoming performances and certainly didn’t invite visitors to purchase downloads with a click; neither Bridget nor Will knew the first thing about how to manage it. There were good pictures of them on the home page, but it was the wrong trio; Jacques appeared beside them, posing with his violin, not Caroline with hers.
Will had been sorry to see Jacques go last month. He and Bridget had become good friends with him over the past decade, but after Jacques and his wife had a baby, they moved back to Europe. He and Bridget had tried to change Jacques’s mind, making the case that Bridget had managed to raise two children in New York City, and they had turned out quite well, thank you very much, but Jacques had already decided: “Everybody knows France is ze best place on earth to raise a child.” Will didn’t know if this was true or not, but he thought the trio should have meant more to Jacques than a random opinion.
* * *
Will lived in the West Village with his yellow Lab, Hudson, in a very small one-bedroom apartment with high ceilings and a playground out his bedroom window. For almost twenty years, he’d been living in the walk-up, a building owned by an invisible landlord who never bothered to make any improvements or repairs but, in exchange for his negligence, had only raised the rent a handful of times. The apartment was a bargain, possibly the last one in all of Manhattan.
Will’s style, if he were pressed to name it, was minimalist ’50s hip: he had an expensive tailored couch and a knockoff Eames lounge chair and ottoman, a Danish bar cart in one corner and a dumbbell set in the other, and his upright Baldwin in between, a piano he’d bought for fifty dollars from his friend Mitzy, who lived next door. He loved his home and everything in it.
Will taught piano lessons all over Manhattan but mostly on the Upper West Side, in the same neighborhood where he and Bridget had met and founded the Forsyth Trio. They’d replaced the violinist several times over the years, but he and Bridget had kept the ensemble together, carrying on the group’s name and identity. (They had called themselves Threesome their freshman year and changed it to Three Strikes as sophomores in an attempt to sound less risqué. After they graduated, they went with something more professional and dignified, borrowing the name of the Lower East Side street where they rented a rehearsal studio.) Pretty much every violinist they’d ever rotated in had assumed he and Bridget were together, or had been at one time, or would be eventually. They bickered like a couple and finished each other’s sentences. They irritated people with their inside jokes. “I wish my marriage was half as good as what you two have,” Bridget’s sister, Gwen, had once confessed before divorcing her rotten husband. “You look so good together,” Jacques always told them. Bridget had high cheekbones and long legs; he was broad-shouldered and square-jawed. Some went so far as to ask if he was Oscar and Isabelle’s father. “Can’t take credit for them,” Will would say.
Will got up off the couch and stretched, turning off the music in mid-aria and wiggling his fingers.
Hudson looked up to see if they were taking a walk. But when Will didn’t make a move for the leash and instead sat down at his Baldwin piano, Hudson wagged his tail and went back to sleep.
Most of the time, Will practiced on the pianos at the music schools where he taught, but there were days when he preferred to play at home, even though his piano was significantly worse in tone and action (as in it was tinny and sluggish) than those at Juilliard and Mannes, where he taught in their precollege programs. No amount of tuning could fix the flat sound of his Baldwin. He checked his posture and played through a Mozart Sonata in F Major and the first movement of Schumann’s Faschingsschwank aus Wien, focusing on his left hand for the latter. After an hour, he put his iPad on the stand and opened the music for one of his upcoming commercial gigs, and yes, it could be argued that playing this jingle was somewhat beneath him artistically, but Will took jobs like these all the time; this was how a professional pianist survived. He’d studied piano and tinkered in composition. He’d even entertained the idea of becoming a composer, but his strength, as it turned out, was in arranging, a skill that had become a hobby, not a profession.
Next Will opened the music for the country ballad he’d been hired to play in a video, a song called “About You and I,” and he gave it a whirl. It was terrible. Putting aside the corny and grammatically incorrect lyrics, the music was repetitive and stupid. According to the producer’s notes, the musicians would be filmed pretending to play first in a field and then, inexplicably, underwater while the female vocalist (who was apparently famous, though Will had never heard of her) sang in the background, riding a bucking seahorse. As he continued to play the song, Hudson looked up and cocked his head, as if to say, What is this shit?