The School for Musical Education

Publisher: Solstice Literary Magazine | Author: Nadia Ghent | Genre: Non-Fiction | Publication Date: December 15, 2024 | Publication Type: Online Journal | Content Type: Essay

Nelson was there to teach me about the world.

I’d wandered into the music department freshman week in college, looking for a challenging course to take. Nelson taught Music 13, which was advanced music theory with lots of sight singing and dictation, and word was he was a tough grader, so you had to show up for every class and pay attention. I already knew the difference between a major third and a tritone, a diminished chord from a dominant seventh. I could take four-part dictation and knew my way around Bach Chorales. I’d analyzed Schuman’s Dicterliebe during my senior year of high school, felt comfortable with the dense thickets of harmonies that for Schuman were an expression of love and betrayal and the inner life of the artist. I knew about Schuman’s many breakdowns, that he’d died in an asylum after throwing himself into the Rhine, but I didn’t want to think about the specifics since my mother had been locked up in a psych ward that summer. I’d studied the violin since I was seven, and I intended to keep up my practicing. Those first few weeks of college, I was fired up with ambition, liberation, and youth.

One day in early October, Nelson asked me to stay after class, and when everybody else had left and the classroom was empty, he told me he couldn’t keep his eyes off my face. That when he looked out into the classroom from where he stood at the lectern or at the piano demonstrating chord progressions, all he could see were my eyes, my long hair shining among all the other students. The vapid many he said, that he was doomed to teach year after year. That I seemed special, gifted, old for my years. I took everything in, believed everything he said. We went out for coffee, then dinner. I wasn’t on a meal plan, and I appreciated not having to pay for my own food.

After dinner that first time, he took me to his house, an angular grey contemporary on a suburban dead-end street close to Providence. He was a widower and lived alone; his grown-up children, a son and daughter, were already off to their own colleges. Nelson lit a fire in the fireplace and pulled me onto a white rug by the fire’s edge. In the firelight he looked young, confident, strong. He had chosen me. I was the one. Afterward, we had ice cream in Japanese bowls with coffee liqueur on top.

I was sure he was the only man I’d encountered who would take me seriously. I was convinced he was the antidote to all my problems. I was too naïve to understand the situation I was in, too proud to think that I might have made a terrible mistake. He chose me, I kept reminding myself. Seduction wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary. I must have known he was attracted to the perpetual youth of his students, thinking that time would stand still the younger his lovers become. Seeking out the troubled girls, the ones struggling with their own issues, he culled the weak ones, like me. He was tall and distinguished, older by how many years I didn’t want to think about, but of course he was as old as my father.

One day, he took a photograph of my face. I was wearing an orange velvet blazer and gold hoop earrings, my hair was wild and windy, and I was smiling. Let’s go for a walk around the pond, he’d said, a prelude to drinks, dinner, his bed. He was trying out his new Polaroid camera, and my face appeared out of the grey chemical fog, resolving into some kind of momentary happiness. Or was it that early on, things were still playful, not too serious yet, just filling a need? Not yet towing along the dead weight of secrets, my secret life. He gave me the photo, and I tossed it in my backpack. He wasn’t that interested in my face.

He took many more photographs of other parts of my body.

“I want to have a piece of you,” he said later that night, the camera between my legs. Farther up, each of my breasts became a single snapshot and then a shot together, twinned. I willed myself to feel nothing, not the humiliation of the camera nor the cold of his house. His hands pulled me over onto my stomach, steadying his hand on my back, the photos rolling out of the Polaroid slit that bloomed into images of somebody else’s body. That couldn’t have been me. This became our Friday night ritual in the cul-de-sac suburb where his big house was, the empty bedrooms of his grown-up and moved-away children with the doors shut tight to keep the heat circulating in seventies oil embargo New England, and I was never warm enough on the bed until it was over and I could get dressed and forget who I’d become.

I did not yet understand the maneuvers of this kind of man, or that in my life, in other women’s lives, there would always be these kinds of men. It felt exciting to go off with Nelson in his silver sports car slung low to the ground, racing away from campus. Soon, he started picking me up a couple blocks away from my dorm, a dark corner where there weren’t any streetlamps and nobody would see. I’d bring my textbooks in a knapsack, but there never was enough time to get much studying done.

By Thanksgiving, I knew that Nelson wanted to show me off to his friends. I was younger even than his daughter, an alluring find he couldn’t keep secret. He was into showmanship, a way of making his life seem charmed, above the usual level of discretion. I was happy to skip going home for the holiday, and I phoned in some weak excuse that I had a big paper to write and didn’t have time to make the trip to New York. My mother hadn’t moved out yet in those last few months before the divorce. She’d recovered from her breakdown, but there was nothing left to celebrate. On the phone she sounded slurred, indistinct, as if she were still on Haldol or back to drinking.

Once we left Providence, Nelson didn’t seem to care who saw us together. “You don’t owe anybody anything,” he said, “least of all your parents.” I didn’t care that much either, as long as we stopped for lunch somewhere. In those years, I wore my hunger like a Girl Scout badge. Macaroni and cheese, tuna fish on toast—I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d eat, the salty richness of mayonnaise, butter in my mouth, how I wouldn’t have to talk while chewing, how he would pay the bill.

We were driving to Maine for the holiday to visit his old friend Eric and his wife Hilde. They lived on a small island that you had to take a ferry to get to, a half hour trip away from the tourists and the rocky coast across the empty Atlantic. Mostly lobstermen lived there, trawling for catch year-round. Eric and Hilde were Nelson’s age, and they didn’t have children. Eric was an orchestra conductor and traveled to guest conduct symphonies all over the world. Nelson said he liked to travel, needed to get away from the solitude on the island. There was something about the quiet in the pine forests surrounded by the ocean that could only be appreciated for short stretches, or maybe it was Hilde’s silence, Nelson explained, her aversion to conversation, but Eric was in demand everywhere. Hilde didn’t mind being left alone among the lobstermen. Eric made a lot of money, and they were comfortable.

Nelson picked me up early the morning of the trip. I’d been up late the night before trying to get work done, not succeeding. The sun was barely cresting over the State building, the dome still dark, a sudden chill in the air. Dry leaves gathered in drifts over the sidewalks and heaped against the curb. There were beer cans and pizza crusts everywhere, grease-stained cardboard boxes tossed onto the grass in front of my dorm, reminders of the night before and the college debaucheries that I wasn’t a part of now that I was with Nelson. Everybody was leaving to go home except me. Squirrels gathered bits of discarded pizza against the approaching winter.

Soon, I saw Nelson’s silver car turn the corner and drive down the street. He stopped half a block from where I had been waiting. I picked up my knapsack, walked over and got in. The heat was on, and the seat was warm. Bach was playing on the car stereo, the Brandenburg Concertos, music my mother, a violinist, used to perform live on the radio with her chamber group every New Year’s Day. Nelson handed me a bran muffin, a Thermos of coffee.

“Are you excited for our little trip?” he asked. He reached over and squeezed my shoulder. His hand lingered, hovering over my breasts.

I nodded, pulled the seat belt over my lap. What else could I say? I was glad I wasn’t going home. For the briefest moment, I thought about the cup of café au lait my mother made for me after she came back from the hospital, sweet and creamy and full of contrition. That first sip, the hot porcelain against my lips, steam rising into the air. Then I made myself forget it.

“Long trip. We’ll have to stop for lunch somewhere quick if we want to make it before the last ferry leaves,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. There wasn’t much else to say. I’d long ago stopped saying yes or no. My will was no longer my own. But I was glad he’d brought some food. I ate a bite of the muffin, left the coffee. Better to remain in a state of sleepy delirium, better to let my exit from the comprehensible world wash over me without understanding what I was doing.

I was a teenager in a sports car with a man old enough to be her father. Perhaps I wanted him to be my father. But I didn’t want to look too closely at the Freudian angle. I was lonely. He said he loved me. What more did I want other than the suspension of the rational world, this warm place nestled among the leather seats of an expensive car next to this tall man driving me away from all my problems?

“It should be a pretty drive,” he said. Nelson had the map laid out on the console; the route northward drawn in a thick purple line. I’d often think back to my analog days with fondness, the endless paper maps unfurling over my lap, how you could see the totality of the trip at one glance. But even then, especially then, I couldn’t see where I was going.

My job would be to relay the directions once we started driving on the back roads after leaving the highway. And then I could sleep or daydream or watch the landscape go by. I’d been to Maine only once, camping with my family, and it had been a weekend of black flies and burned food and hurt feelings. My parents fought nonstop, and when my mother couldn’t stop crying, my stepfather drove her into town and bought her a bus ticket home.

“You’ll have to be careful with Hilde,” Nelson said. “She can seem a little intimidating. She has high standards. She puts up with a lot when Eric is away. We’re lucky he’s around this weekend. He wants to meet you.” Nelson smiled at me. His teeth were white, symmetrical.

I wasn’t listening. Soon, I drifted off as the sun began to climb higher in the sky. Nelson kept talking. I heard his voice weaving in and out of the Bach, moving in between the lines of counterpoint, the warmth of the car, the warm leather seat containing me like my mother’s arms bearing me out into the world.

I was startled awake by Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto on the tape deck, big piano chords booming against scuttling winds and brass. The landscape was piney and forested with a few bright yellow leaves left on the black branches of bare deciduous trees. I was famished. Soon, a Howard Johnson’s came into view, its orange roof a beacon on the empty road.

I remembered when my father would take me to the Howard Johnson’s on Sixth Avenue before returning me to my mother and stepfather. He’d order me a scoop of orange sherbet nestled into a silver cup, and I would eat it slowly one tiny bite at a time, because I never wanted our visit to end. I would twirl on the counter stool, around and around as the sherbet melted into a sticky orange puddle.

Nelson pulled off the highway, parked in the lot. We got out and walked stiff-legged to the door. The restaurant was crowded. We were seated next to a group of elderly women drinking coffee and eating pumpkin pie. I thought they might have been a church group or a foursome of bridge partners out for a day-before-Thanksgiving lunch. They looked up as we approached, their blue-tinged heads bobbing slightly as they turned in our direction. Dismay clouded their faces at the sight of a well-dressed older man, a professor-type in a tweed jacket and trim corduroy pants, and me, the young, barely post-adolescent girl, with limp hair and an Army surplus knapsack hanging off one shoulder. The dissonance was jarring. We were clearly not father and daughter.

Maybe it mattered to me what they thought, or maybe it didn’t. I was already adept at practicing the art of ambivalence, because I wasn’t even there. I as myself, the daughter of X and X, stepdaughter of X, sister to X and X, college student, violinist, young woman in the world, no longer existed. A screen had descended with the image of someone who looked just like me, but was somebody else, a nonentity who didn’t need to react to strange looks. I didn’t need to feel anything except that I was hungry, the stab of hunger reminding me of my body’s pitiable weakness. Nelson looked at me across the table, took my hand, drew it to his lips.

“What stories they’ll tell to their biddies back at the retirement home,” he whispered, and I smiled. There was Creamy Clam Chowder on the menu, and that was what I wanted.

We drove the rest of the afternoon in dimming light, the sky clouding up against the moving horizon of the highway and the miles of ribboned concrete spooling out in front of us.  Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite, the Fifth Symphony, and all of the Piano Sonatas played on as we drove, Nelson carefully pulling out each tape as it ejected at the end, and giving it to me to return to the alphabetized tape box. Soon, forests gave way to big formations of granite outcroppings, and a saline smell began to come through the vents of the car.

By late afternoon, we reached the ferry dock. Headlights shone against the line of waiting cars. I didn’t know where I was, and yet I was there. I had made a choice, but it didn’t occur to me that the choice I’d made wasn’t a choice at all. I wondered about my little sisters, who would read to them, who would see that they had something to eat after my mother’s inedible turkey meant that everybody was still hungry after the dishes were cleared away. I almost wished I’d gone home instead of sitting in the dark car with a man I barely knew. A man who was my professor, but I could not think of that now.

“We’re the last ones in,” Nelson said. Taillight in front of us blinked on, and all the cars started to move forward onto the ferry, then stopped. A dock worker put wooden blocks against the wheels, and we got out of the car. The deck swayed as the ferry made for open water. Nelson drew me close in the darkness. I saw other passengers getting out of their cars too, stretching their legs, the shadowy outline of a barking dog, the glowing red tips of cigarettes. The smell of the sea was deep and redolent. We stood by the railing, watching the coast recede, the lights of the houses growing fainter like fireflies in the distance. The wind blew my hair into my face, and even with Nelson’s body against mine, I was cold.

Here we were, a couple in the dark of the night at sea. I had never taken a trip with a man who wasn’t my father, but I pushed the thought out of my mind. I remembered that first night, the word yes remaining unsaid, the two of us lying together on the white rug by the side of the fireplace in his empty house. That night, Nelson had been quiet for a long time, then turned to me and grasped my face in his hands.

I thought about telling him my story first, but the words disappeared before I could speak. All my parents’ drama seemed so pale compared to that moment. I wanted him to care about the way my mother stood motionless by the elevator the day I left for college, medicated, inert. That I’d begun to lose the contours of the pressure sore which used to bleed whenever I practiced, and now was only a small patch of roughened skin because I had so little time for the violin. But I could say none of this. I felt a wave of loneliness wash over me, even though I was in somebody’s arms.

“Love is a kind of possession, you know,” he’d said. “You can’t be responsible for anybody’s happiness except your own.” The fire was warm, the flames dying down to embers. This seemed profound in some important way, like knowledge about the world handed down from on high. I could not yet feel the barbs, the possession he had already taken of me. I did not yet know this wasn’t going to be about love.

Soon, the ferry reached shore and banged against the island’s dock. Taillights came back on. Nelson steered off the deck and onto the village streets. Before long, we were the only ones on the road. The turn-off for Eric and Hilde’s house was in a section of the island that was only forest. It was hard to see in the darkness, but at the turn-off, a Coleman lantern dangled from a mailbox, a warm yellow glow in the moonless night.

We drove down the long driveway, tires kicking up gravel. I saw candles flickering in all the windows. Floodlights mounted on the eaves filled the parking area with brilliance. Eric and Hilde stood in the doorway waiting for us as moths circled around their heads. Eric waved. He was tall, ramrod straight, grinning like a schoolboy greeting a long-lost friend. Hilde looked austere, unsmiling. Out of the car, I was stiff and suddenly cold again in the night air.

“Welcome, travelers! You must be weary after such a long trip,” Eric said, his voice booming into the distance. “And Nelson, look at this, what a little lady, where did you find such a thing?”

Eric looked me over, took in my thin clothes, my knapsack. Then he grabbed Nelson’s hand, shook it, and pulled him into a bear hug. They had been friends for a long time.

“Hilde, say hello! You remember Nelson, he was here last summer with—” Eric stopped, turned to Hilde, “doesn’t matter, here he is again with, what’s your name? Nelson, you never told me her name!”

Eric turned to me, and I told him my name, pronouncing it carefully so Hilde would know how to say it too, but she stood in silence, moths flying around in the glare of the floodlights. I still had not learned the protocol of greetings and handshakes, the adult semiotics of social encounters that deliberately overlook the obvious, and it took me a long time before I did, but I understood the awkward silence Hilde appropriated for her greetings to me that night. It wasn’t that women don’t shake hands. It was that I was much, much younger that she was, than all of them were.

Eric led us into the living room, and I perched next to Nelson on the sofa. I hadn’t yet relinquished my knapsack with all the books weighting me down with the expectation that I would finally catch up with the coursework I’d neglected since the beginning of the semester. Quietly, I heaved the knapsack at my feet. I leaned into the pillows, a little wary, watching the proceedings of the grownups.

Hilde came in from the kitchen with a bowl of crab dip, and Eric started to make some drinks. I thought about the big paper I really did have to write over the vacation, The Uses of Imagery in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers for English 112, but imagery was the last thing I felt like concentrating on. All that academic life, late nights in the library, walking back to my dorm at two in the morning, the stars like brilliant points of light above my head, thinking I belonged to some grand intellectual tradition of wonderment and study. That life seemed so useless, so feeble now.

But I was very cold. Within the upper reaches of the vaulted ceiling, blasts of air circulated downward in frigid drafts that made me move closer to Nelson, so relaxed and comfortable in his turtleneck and corduroy pants. I wished I’d brought warmer clothing, a sweater, something I could disappear into, a blanket I could pull over my face while still being able to hear everything, like the times I was a child and disappeared behind the sofa in the living room when my parents had company, back when they were still pretending to be happy. I’d peer over the sofa, watching the grownups drinking and laughing, the air blue with their cigarette smoke, fascinated with the way they seemed to inhabit their adulthood with authority, their elegant clothes, the clinking of ice in their drinks, the ease of their talk. Then I would fall asleep behind the sofa until I woke briefly in my stepfather’s arms as he carried me back to bed.

From the kitchen the smell of roasting goose came wafting in, a rich fatty sheen hanging in the chilly air. A small fire was going in the fireplace, warming the edges of the sofa, but not nearly enough to warm the enormous room. On the stereo, Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances played, the sound turned low. I recognized it from Week 8 of Nelson’s class. I was glad to be at rest after all those hours in motion, but I felt awkward, exposed. I wasn’t sure what was expected of me, how I was supposed to act. I wanted to seem carefree, but I was very hungry.

“Gin and tonic, old friend?” Eric asked Nelson. “You haven’t changed your drink, have you?”

“Of course not, same as always,” Nelson said. He grinned at Eric, as if there were some significance to the gin and tonic that I could not grasp. Hilde set the crab dip down on the coffee table, smeared some on crackers and passed them around.

“And for you—” Eric looked at me. He’d already forgotten my name. “What can I get you?”

I asked for a gin and tonic too, even though I didn’t like the bitter taste underneath the sweetness of the tonic. But I wanted to be the same, to show I belonged. I was Nelson’s. My voice sounded surprising, as if it had been a long time since I’d heard myself speak. The words “gin and tonic” felt thrilling to say. Hilde offered me the plate of crackers with crab dip, and I took one, bit off an edge. The dip was salty, creamy in my mouth. I had another.

Nelson sipped his gin and tonic. “Strong! You remember how I like it, Eric.” He took a cracker from the plate, ate it in one bite.

I sipped my drink, the bubbles from the tonic rising to my nose, the gin sharp against my tongue. I’d already decided this night would better than the Saturday nights in frat houses on campus, the warm watery beer, the boys with their leering eyes. Hilde put the tray down on the coffee table and sat in an armchair across from me. Eric brought over two glasses of scotch and gave one to Hilde.

I watched her as I took another sip of my drink. She was elegant, soigné in the way I had imagined well-bred women from small mountainous European countries would be, someone who hiked in alpine meadows instead of riding on the New York City subways. She must have been the kind of person who loved animals and edelweiss and her grandfather, like in the children’s book, Heidi, that once sat on my bookshelf at home, its cover scribbled over thanks to my sister.

But Hilde was not at all like my mother, whose excesses made her uncontainable, with her loud voice, her cheap gauzy peasant dresses that barely covered her ever-expanding waistline. Hilde was tiny, quiet, prim. Her hair was pulled back in a French twist, and she wore linen slacks and a shimmery white shirt under a black sweater. Her clothes looked expensive, as if they came from the kind of store my mother would never take me, where there were no price tags, and the question “how much?” was never asked. I wanted to touch the fabric, feel the softness under my fingers. I wondered how Hilde could have ended up so neat and pulled-together after being in the kitchen all day. Thanksgiving was when my mother would be too psychotic to bring the over-cooked turkey to the table, or she’d already be back in the hospital.  A day that had always been about our family drama, not the meal. Maybe the holiday meant nothing to Hilde and was only a civility that came from good manners.

Still, Hilde looked at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. I knew I had not made a good impression. Even as the gin and tonic started to make me feel light-headed, a dizzy feeling that made me think I shouldn’t care that much, I still wanted Hilde to like me.

Eric and Nelson ate all the crab dip and crackers, and then they had more drinks. They laughed over old stories, lost in their masculine worlds of authority and importance. I hadn’t even finished half my drink, and already I knew I had had too much. But I liked the way I felt, a little fuzzy, open to possibilities.

“Come help me,” Hilde said suddenly, as she rose from the armchair. I looked down to see her black leather flats, how her insteps rose from the elegant insoles like snowy Alpine mountains. She set down her scotch. She’d barely had any of her drink either. “Dinner needs tending to.”

I wasn’t sure what Hilde expected I’d be able to do, but I didn’t want to keep sitting in the chilly living room while Eric and Nelson gabbed on. I followed Hilde into the kitchen. At least it would be warmer there.

The goose rested on a wooden carving board surrounded with roasted vegetables gleaming with oil. There were copper pots and pans hanging from a rack above the kitchen island. On the stove, two covered saucepans with steam rising above the lids cooked over a low flame. There weren’t any dirty dishes in the sink or on the counters. Everything was in its place. The kitchen was orderly, efficient, with a military row of identical wooden spoons standing straight in a ceramic crock by the stove. Nothing at all like my mother’s kitchen, where nothing was where it should be, disorder and complications littering the countertops, where every dinner was a battlefield.

Hilde handed me a porcelain serving bowl. “Here, this is for the spaetzle. Put some butter on it. I will carve the goose.”

I could feel the emptiness in my stomach as the smell of roast goose swirled around me. “As a conductor, Eric must think of his hands,” she said. “I will not trust him with a knife.”

I dumped the spaetzle into the dish, went to the refrigerator for butter. Hilde sharpened a carving knife, the rhythmic back and forth of the blade rasping and metallic. With quick, decisive strokes, she sliced off the drumsticks, then carved into the breast. The meat was white and tender, with juice dripping down the carcass onto the carving board. The knife was very sharp.

“Call the boys,” Hilde said. “Dinner is ready to eat,”

I carried the spaetzle down a long hallway toward the dining room. There were many photographs of Eric lining the walls, Eric at the podium, arms outstretched, baton in the air, Eric shaking hands with important men in tuxedos, Eric looking pensive while holding the score of Mahler’s Fifth, Eric, head bowed, receiving an honorary knighthood from the Queen of England. An entire gallery of Eric and his accomplished life, his accolades, his authority.

But it was the photograph with Hilde standing next to Eric that stopped me. I stood in front of it, drawn into the image of the two of them in a sailboat by the rocks of a cove, Hilde with the sun in her hair, smiling, and Eric with his arms around her, looking toward the open water. Maybe they’d had a picnic on the shore and were sailing home before the wind died, or maybe they were headed toward an island off the coast, the two of them together, traveling somewhere special. There was something about the picture I couldn’t fathom, the motion of it frozen at that moment of possibility: the ripples on the water, the expression on Hilde’s face, the way she looked directly into the camera. She was so beautiful, so sure of herself, as if only she knew which direction to point the bow. I wondered if I would ever be so confident. But the bowl was hot, and I needed to set it down.

Just then, Eric and Nelson ambled into the dining room, empty glasses in their hands. I put the spaetzle on a trivet next to the goose, and Hilde brought in the gravy. Then she lit the candles, and wispy smoke rose in the air. With an exaggerated flourish, Nelson pulled out my chair, and I sat down, the white tablecloth stiff against my knees.

“Hilde, that goose is magnificent. You’ve outdone yourself,” Eric said. His eyes gleamed as he admired the roast, so skillfully reassembled, after Hilde had carved it, to look as if it were whole again, decorated with a circlet of lady apples and herb branches, the skin brown and taut.

“Hilde knows how to impress us,” Eric said, “And she knows how to impress me in so many ways.” Hilde nodded her head to acknowledge his praise. She positioned serving forks and a ladle for the gravy by the platter of goose, then brought over a stack of four bone china plates with golden rims.

“I’ll never forget the pig you roasted last summer,” Nelson said. I could tell he was hungry too, but not drunk, not yet. Hilde served the goose and the spaetzle, passing a full plate to Nelson first.

“We need wine,” Eric said. He filled our glasses, walking unsteadily around each of our chairs, spilling some as he poured. I watched the droplets spread out into little red blotches on the white tablecloth. I could feel Eric’s breath on my neck as he poured wine into my glass. He filled mine last. Eric heaved himself back into his chair as Hilde passed me my plate. It was heavy and warm with the goose and the spaetzle, the gravy.

“We won’t say ‘grace,’ so don’t be disappointed. Dig in.” Eric said. I lifted a forkful of goose to my mouth, feeling its texture against my tongue, rich and moist. Meat wasn’t something I ate much of in my sanctimonious vegetarian youth, but all that was gone now. I was somebody else.

After a few sips of wine, I started to feel as if I were receding from the table, isolated by invisible glass from the banter around me. I was a rare fern or some kind of exotic moss, inert but lovely, something to put behind glass and admire. Eric kept looking at me, while Hilde slowly ate, the tines of her fork pushing against her knife in the European manner, deft and controlled. Eric opened another bottle of wine. I liked being away from the conversation, and I was a little drunk too, my head wooly and throbbing. Their voices sounded distant, echoing as if from within a cavern. Words and phrases and whole stories I couldn’t catch hold of went by. I drank more wine in between mouthfuls of goose, the taste of cherries mixing with slippery meat. Each mouthful was rich and surprising. Eric filled my glass again even though it was still half full. Under the table, Nelson’s foot stroked my leg, the hard leather of his sole rough against my shins. The evening was expanding, and I didn’t want to think or speak. I wanted to be apart from the world, the glass wall keeping me separate. I wanted to be fed delicious food, cosseted, and ignored.

Eric had already finished eating, and I could see his head thrown back, laughing at a joke Nelson just told. He pushed away from his empty plate and sat back in his chair, loosened his belt. Hilde placed her silverware across the rim of her plate. She had barely touched her food. Nelson searched for my hand, but I drew it away. I wanted to keep eating, but my stomach was too full. And then Hilde turned toward me, watching as I pushed the last bits of goose on my fork and left it on my plate. She looked as if she needed something urgent from me.

“Nelson tells me you want to be a poet,” she said. I looked at her, bewildered. Was she confusing me with someone else? I’d never told Nelson what I wanted to do with my life, and he hadn’t ever asked. I’d been his student. He knew I played the violin. But wanting to be a poet was something I never would have admitted to. It sounded so suspect, so flimsy, like being someone who didn’t know anything about the way things were supposed to work. I liked poetry because the lines were short, but it was music I loved.

“You have the hair of a poet, so long and free, and that look, of always searching for the way the world reveals itself,” Hilde said. She swirled wine around in her glass.

“Yes, well, maybe, I don’t know.” I felt my face burning. I didn’t want to be a poet at all, shut away in a room all my life writing poetry nobody would ever read. I wanted to be like that photo of Hilde in the sailboat with Eric, with everything already figured out, on my way somewhere, knowing what was ahead and sailing in the right direction. Nelson’s hand was creeping up my thigh.

“A life in poetry, how nice,” Eric said. He poured himself some more wine, unsteady, at first missing his glass, then filling it to the brim. I could feel Nelson’s hand between my legs now, the slick thrust of his fingers. I made myself not gasp.

“It is a hard life,” Hilde said, “the life of the poet. “Always to live in another place that is not yours, not the world we live in. But it is so lovely, to feel these things.”

“She’s got many hidden talents,” Nelson said. “A poetic vision, a good ear.” I tried to keep still. His hand withdrew, caressed my thigh.

“My favorite poet is Rilke. Surely you’ve heard of him?” Hilde asked, looking at me intently. I think she knew what was going on under the table. I had no favorite poet.

“How can I keep my soul in me, so that / It doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise /

It high enough, past you, to other things?” Hilde recited, her eyes closed. “So beautiful,” she murmured, “but more so in the German, of course.

“Yes, it is,” I said. I wasn’t going to be a poet. I would never be able to write. What did I know about my soul?

“It is about loneliness, how we are only able to know what is ourselves and nothing more,” Hilde said, still murmuring. Then she recited the lines in German.

“Hilde, you amaze me,” Eric said. Hilde opened her eyes, glanced at Eric and then turned again toward me. She was smiling now, her face lit in the candlelight.

“What you don’t know about your own wife!” Nelson said. “Hilde’s got hidden talents, too Eric. You’re a lucky man.” He toyed with his napkin, hit me playfully with it. “And this one’s got talents too. She’ll be famous one day, won’t she?  A famous poet, a woman version of Rilke. We’ll all have her book of poems on our bookshelves someday.”

Eric laughed. I wanted to hide under the table, mortified, like a child again. I felt my face enflamed, Nelson’s words ringing in my ears, and Hilde’s too, but there was something deeper about what she’d said, the look she gave me that I had no context for. I wished that I hadn’t had so much to drink. I looked down at my plate. Hilde smiled again briefly as she went into the kitchen to get dessert. A chocolate mousse cake with strawberries, carried in on the morning ferry, she said, as she scooped the cake from its plate. I could eat only a few bites before I was too full to eat more. Nelson reached over with his fork, ate what was left.

That night, in bed, he pinned me to the mattress in the cold room, and I could taste blood in my mouth. The hurt of it made me remember his words and the look on Hilde’s face. It wasn’t pity but something else I didn’t have a name for. Earlier, when we’d climbed the stairs to the bedroom, I listened to the clatter of plates and silverware and glasses in the kitchen. Maybe this was a kind of solace, the way my mother cleaned up no matter how out of it she was, or maybe it was relief knowing the night was coming to an end, I wasn’t sure, but there was comfort in the ordinary sounds of water running, cabinets opening and closing, the groan and hiss of the refrigerator door, Hilde by herself cleaning up downstairs as Nelson cleaved into me and I clung to him, until little by little, there was silence and only the stars shining in through the window.

In the morning, there was snow on the ground. I left Nelson sleeping in bed, dressed quickly in the cold, and went downstairs. I could smell coffee brewing and something with cinnamon baking in the oven. Bright morning light filled the kitchen windows, the snow reflecting sunshine under a clear blue sky. There was frost on the windowpanes.

“Good morning,” Hilde said.  She pronounced my name carefully, with equal attention to each syllable. X-X-X. “Did you sleep soundly?” she asked. She was ironing white shirts at an ironing board next to the kitchen table.

“Yes, thank you, very soundly.  It’s so quiet here.” I hadn’t slept well at all.

“There is coffee there, and kuchen coming. Please, help yourself.”

I poured coffee into a heavy stoneware mug, sat down at the table, took a sip. The mug was warm in my hands, the coffee strong. Hilde was ironing Eric’s tailcoat shirts, the white starched fronts with dozens of frilly pintucks. One by one, she pressed the tip of the iron down along the pleating. A pile of shirts was heaped onto the back of a kitchen chair.

“That’s a lot of shirts,” I said.  I was embarrassed by how obvious that sounded. I had no idea how elaborate each shirt was, the number of them she had to iron.

“Yes, Eric must take at least twenty on his trip. One can ask the hotel to do such a thing, but it is never done well. He leaves for South America tomorrow.”

She worked quickly, the iron in her hands evening out the wrinkles, as if it were her hands themselves caressing the fabric, making the shirts look like new. I sat sipping coffee, watching as the shirts took on the shape of a body, the fabric emerging from shapelessness into stiff perfection. As she finished, she placed each one onto a hanger and hooked it around a portable rack that hung from a doorknob. I had no idea how to iron; it had always seemed such a waste of time.

“My mother taught me how to do this,” Hilde said. “An important skill, she would often say to me, in the cultivation of a marriage. It is the way things must look when your husband is a man in the world.”

The way things must look, I thought. I could never be that kind of woman. What did my mother teach me? I remembered the last time I heard her play the Bach Chaconne, all those notes spilling over, the useless beauty of it. “You have such a lovely home. Thank you for having me,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

Hilde didn’t answer. We remained in silence until all the shirts were done, and the rack sagged under the weight of the hangers. She unplugged the iron and folded up the ironing board.

“Come with me upstairs. You can help me carry the shirts,” Hilde said. “I want you to see something.”

I followed her up the stairs, her hair swaying, the sound of her shoes tapping lightly against the wooden steps. From behind, I could see how small she really was, her backbone visible under her shirt like a mountain ridge, the faint imprint of ribs showing through the thin fabric. Wasn’t she cold in that cold house? She led me into her bedroom, and turned to me, index finger pressed against her lips. Eric was still sleeping, buried under a white duvet that rose and fell with his noisy breathing. Hilde took my hand, led me into a walk-in closet, and shut the door. The closet was lined with cedar and smelled of pine trees, the knots in the wood panels rising to the ceiling. A leather Vuitton suitcase sat open on a luggage rack, partially filled with men’s clothes, neat stacks of socks, underwear, undershirts. I closed my eyes and thought of being lost in a forest, and there, in the distance, a tiny house with smoke coming out of the chimney, and I was walking over pine needles and fallen branches in bare feet toward the house, and as I got closer, I could see that the house was made of spun sugar and candy, and there was a boy in the house, waiting for me. I opened my eyes.

Now I knew. This would be the end of my musical education.

“Look at this,” Hilde said. “Look at all this,” and she pointed to the racks and racks of shirts and suit jackets and sports coats and tuxedos and tailcoats, each one spaced evenly apart, each one perfectly straight, each one the perfect shape of a man. She had done all this. This was her work. There were so many of them to see.