Musical Chairs Read online

  As if he were reading her mind, Walter said, “So you don’t need me stopping by? You’ll be around?”

  “With my boyfriend,” said Bridget. “He’s never been here before, and I think he’s going to fall in love with the place.”

  She didn’t mention that she was hoping to see if her relationship with Sterling might get bumped to the next level. Sterling had an eleven-year-old daughter who was heading off to sleepaway camp for eight weeks, and they were going to spend all that time together, a summer of romance, quiet, and privacy. So, no, she didn’t want anyone stopping by.

  “I hope your new guy’s handier than Bill—”

  “Will.”

  “—because you need to clean out your flues.”

  Bridget couldn’t quite picture Sterling as a chimney sweep. “I sort of doubt it.”

  “Well, enjoy the summer.” He walked back to his truck, saying, “They say we’ll be getting a lot of rain.”

  “Thanks for the eggs,” she called after him.

  She turned to go back in the house, standing in the doorway while the cats made up their minds whether they wanted to come in or stay out. Eliza Doolittle decided to come in, while Henry Higgins stayed out.

  Bridget walked under the leaky skylight in the entry, through the living room, and into the kitchen. She needed to shower and get dressed in decent clothes before she went to her lunch, but her laptop was sitting in the center of the table in the breakfast room, as if to say, Pssst, remember me? She sat down and opened her email; right at the top, above a message from her sister, Gwen, was a new email from Sterling, with the subject line Airflow? She started reading, something about allergens and his need for a fan that made a nice breeze but wasn’t too loud, but before she could get any further, the battery gave out and her computer went dead. She got up and found her power cord, leaned over, and reached for the outlet under the window. A flash of heat rushed up the length of her arm, all the way to her heart, and—just as the wind had shoved the tennis court fence onto the ground—an electric shock knocked her flat onto the floor.

  * * *

  After driving to the Sharon Hospital, Bridget found herself lying on a gurney, hooked up to an EKG, with a red streak running from her hand to her elbow.

  “We’ll get you out of here,” the nurse said. “Just taking precautions.”

  Bridget closed her eyes and pretended she was getting a facial.

  “What’s your name, hon,” the nurse said, verifying that the person in front of her matched the chart on her laptop. She was wearing eggplant-colored scrubs with bright pink Crocs, an outfit that clashed with itself and the peach-colored walls. She was a cheerful creature, making Bridget feel as though her electrocution had absolutely made her day.

  “Bridget Stratton.”

  “Date of birth?”

  “June third, 19—”

  A quick inhale. “I don’t suppose you’re related to Edward Stratton?” The nurse was looking down at her with excitement.

  “No.”

  “He’s from England, they say, but he’s got a house around here.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Our local celebrity.”

  Bridget pointed and flexed, pointed and flexed her feet.

  “Even at his age,” the nurse said, happily nodding her head, “they say he’s got that… appeal, you know. He’s still got it.”

  Staring at the ceiling, Bridget listened to the EKG machine as it beeped an A, at the same pulse of that Pachelbel piece she’d always hated.

  “Your blood pressure’s high,” the nurse said, sounding pleased.

  “Thanks,” said Bridget.

  “No, I mean you should keep an eye on it, watch your diet. Are you exercising?”

  The doctor came in past the pastel room divider, saving Bridget from having to answer. He studied her results, took off his glasses, and told Bridget she could go home. She sat up and turned so she was facing him, ready to get the stickers off her chest. The nurse began detaching the wires.

  “This happened at work?” the doctor asked.

  “She was at home,” said the nurse.

  The doctor looked at her like he felt sorry for her. “You should have an electrician check out your wiring.” Lifting her arm, he turned her wrist over and examined the streak. “A shock like that can kill you.”

  He got his prescription pad and scribbled on it as Bridget wondered what painkillers or relaxants he was giving her. She didn’t feel like she needed anything but had no intention of turning down meds.

  “Braxton & Sons,” he said, handing her the prescription with the name of a local electrician. “They did my outside lighting, and the whole entry is much more inviting.” He looked down at the e-chart again. “Stratton? Say, are you—”

  “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?

  “A ditty,” Will told him. “It’s garbage. Cover your ears.”

  He played through it again and found it was decidedly not the kind of song that grew on you through repetition. Finally, he checked his watch and got up to walk Hudson. At three, he had a lesson with Jisoo, a rising high school senior who was preparing her auditions for Peabody and the New England Conservatory. He’d been teaching her since she was in middle school. She was good, really good, much better than he was at that age. What, he wondered, would Jisoo think to see him on YouTube playing bad country music underwater with air bubbles coming out of his nose? What kind of example would that set? A good one—that musicians can and should seek innovative ways of supporting their careers? Or a bad one—that a sellout is a sellout, and no one should ever lower himself to such (watery) depths?

  * * *

  When it was time to go teach, Will locked his door behind him and turned in the dim, linoleum-tiled hallway to knock on Mitzy’s. She opened it and lit up when she saw him.

  “Hello, neighbor,” she said. “Look at you.”

  He smiled back. Like many New Yorkers, Will had assembled a faux family for himself. He had Bridget, he had her children, he had Hudson, and he had Mitzy, his Manhattan grandmother. She was cartoonishly short and wore big, round black glasses that didn’t seem to do much to help her failing vision. She reached out and gave the tips of his fingers a squeeze.

  “I heard you playing something very catchy on the piano,” she said. “You sounded marvelous.”

  “Country music,” he said. “I’m branching out. I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

  “Disturb me? I stood outside your door so I could hear you better. Are you heading out?”

  “I’m going to work, but I’ll stop by the grocery store on my way home.”

  She reached in her dress pocket and handed him a list and a ten-dollar bill. “Thank you, love. My left hip has gone wonky, and I’d like a grilled cheese.”

  “Do you need an Advil?”

  She waved him off. “How’s Bridget?”

  “She’s away for the summer with her boyfriend.”

  “Isn’t that nice,” said Mitzy.

  Will wasn’t so sure. He was having a hard time imagining Sterling happily ensconced at Bridget’s country house. Sterling was one of those New Yorkers who didn’t know how to drive a car. And he seemed pretty pleased with his life in Park Slope. He had a young kid, a job teaching in the MFA program at NYU, and bookstores all over New York that clamored to host him whenever he read from his latest novel. How exactly would Connecticut fit into all that?

  Not a fan of nature, small-town life, or unnerving quiet, Will himself was in no way enamored of Bridget’s large, cranky house. In spite of the fun they’d had there, he’d never understood her deep attachment to the place. Who could love something so needy and broken? He regularly stubbed his toes on the warped floorboards and got a wave of panic every time he flushed the toilet, and, as if to show it was capable of doing real harm, the house had now electrocuted Bridget in the breakfast room. What Bridget saw as charming, Will saw as burdensome and mean. He had always resented the house’s insistence on punishing Bridget for not paying enough attention to it. It reminded him of his ex-wife.

  “No concerts this summer?” Mitzy asked.

  “No, but I hope you’ll come hear us play in the fall.” He held up the shopping list. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Bring Hudson. I’ll have the gin out.”

  Will waved and went down the stairs, the song “About You and I” stuck firmly in his head.

  * * *

  Even though conservatory auditions were a few months away, Will decided to set up a mock audition, asking Jisoo to enter the practice room and introduce herself as though they didn’t know
each other.

  “Seriously?” she said. “That’s so embarrassing.”

  “Every second you’re in the room with the faculty is an opportunity to make a good impression. I don’t want you to waste any chance to connect. Look alert. And remember, they’ll likely stop you right before you get to the development section, so don’t let that throw you. They’re often short on time. Ready?”

  Jisoo walked out in the hallway, closed the door behind her, and then entered. “Hello,” she said.

  “Eye contact,” said Will. “Don’t be slouchy.”

  She went out and came in again. “Hello,” she said, looking at him this time.

  “Hello.”

  “I’m Jisoo, and I’ll be starting today with the first movement of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata.” She sat down and launched right in.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “Take a beat to focus. Let the room go quiet, just like you would for a concert.”

  Jisoo took a moment and began playing again. As he listened, he wished he could take credit for her performance. She played so accurately, with a lovely touch and a good deal of joy. Like any serious musician, she never went a day without practicing, and unlike a lot of students, she practiced efficiently and always had.

  Teaching Jisoo was the opposite of his experience trying to teach Bridget’s twins to play when they were young. They all gave up soon after he gave them Bach’s Minuet in G; Oscar never even opened it.

  “I don’t want to play piano.” He had dropped the thin score on the floor, an act of defiance. “I hate practicing.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Will. “What does that even mean?”

  “It’s boring.”

  This attitude was incomprehensible to Will, who had practiced every day since he was six. And to Bridget, who’d been handed a quarter-size cello at the age of seven and never put it down again except to go up a size every time she grew.