Nocturne (9 page)

All the sound in the room disappeared as I felt the fingers on his left hand tighten around mine. They were as strong as I’d imagined, but softer than I’d expected. His thumb skimmed over one of my knuckles, and I yanked my hand away. I shot my eyes to his face as my lips parted, my lungs begging me to take the breath they’d been waiting ten seconds to receive. Gregory’s eyes came back from his contemplative stare into nowhere as I cleared my throat and wrapped both hands around my latte mug.

“Oh, Savannah …” He sounded rather panicked as he dug for something to say.

It was just an accident. A reaction. He wasn’t thinking. This isn’t about you.

I smiled as wide as I could in order to hide my surely flushed cheeks.

“You should give that kid a chance, Gregory. You could change his life.” I shrugged, speaking too quickly. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Giada. I know that for a fact. Enjoy the rest of your spring break.”

I left my seat before he could tell me he hadn’t meant what had just happened.

“You too, Miss Marshall.” He ran his hand down his face and left it over his mouth as he continued scanning the papers in front of him.

I scrambled over to my cozy booth and regained control of my senses, looking around to see if any of my classmates may have witnessed that. As much as it could have screwed things up had someone seen it, I felt like I needed some sort of confirmation that it had happened at all.

I got all the confirmation I needed when I looked up, and Gregory’s eyes met mine across the coffee shop. For the next twenty-two seconds, we were the only people in the coffee shop. Then he broke the spell, looking away, leaving me devoid of reason and racing for the door.

Gregory

I
t was the afternoon
of the first day of classes after spring break, and technically my office hours, which I was required by the conservatory to keep, though few students ever dared to interrupt me in here. I was sipping a cup of tea, leaning back in my chair, with my feet upon the desk. Rachmaninoff was playing, not quietly. It was a new recording by the London Symphony. Such music is never meant to be played softly, as if it were background music. It demands attention. Several nagging papers from the conservatory administration lay ignored on my desk. I wasn’t prepared to deal with them, especially while wrapped in the sounds Rachmaninoff.

My eyes were closed, so I was completely unprepared for the disturbance when my office door flew open and banged into the doorframe with a loud thump. I dropped my feet to the floor, eyes darting to the door.

It was Savannah Marshall. She had bright spots of color in her cheeks, and her right fist was clenched at her side, her left gripping a paper that was now slightly crumpled. An angry line ran down the center of her forehead where her eyebrows pushed together.

I cleared my throat, unwilling to show her just how ruffled I was by her entrance. Or her appearance, which was shockingly fetching with that dark rose color highlighting her cheeks, a tight blue sweater over faded jeans that emphasized every single curve of her body.

“Miss Marshall. Perhaps you forgot to knock?”

She held up the paper. “I came here to discuss
this.
”

I raised my eyebrows. This wasn’t likely to go well, given her inclination to argue everything to death, so I took a sip of my tea in an effort to maintain my equilibrium. Then I mustered the coldest voice I could manage. “There’s not really anything to discuss.”

“An F?  This paper did not warrant an F.” Her cheeks were still flushed as she spoke, and I found it difficult to take my eyes off of them.

“Miss Marshall, your paper most certainly did. I took a considerable amount of time justifying your grade before putting it on the paper. I don’t intend to justify it further. You are capable of much better work than this.”

She smacked the paper on the desk—the large “F” scrawled across the top half.

“Mr. Fitzgerald.” She took a deep breath. I suppose to calm herself, which seemed to be necessary. “Number one. You gave exactly no feedback. There is not a single mark in this paper. Nothing to indicate what is right or wrong. Simply a grade. Number two,” she took another breath and her voice was much more even, “I very carefully met every single requirement of the assignment. You required a comparison of Debussy’s compositions from early in his career and late. You required an analysis of the technical aspects of at least two of those compositions. You required that I address the differences in tempo, meter, pitch, harmony. I addressed each of those.”

I frowned. Her tone rang with unattractive self-importance. She’d done the things I’d asked, true. But she’d also included nearly five pages of completely irrelevant material. “Hardly. Miss Marshall, the assignment was a comparison of the music and its elements. Not a biography. You have more than three pages in this paper about
his wife.
What possible relevance does she have to the assignment?”

Savannah shouted, her brown eyes nearly popping out of their sockets. “She shot herself in the chest days after he announced he was divorcing her! How could that not be relevant? How could that not affect his music?” The color in her cheeks deepened the louder her voice got.

I sat forward in my chair and against my better judgment, found myself arguing back, “It’s completely irrelevant! The assignment was to compare the musical composition, not delve into the composer’s personal life!”

She flipped the pages of the report and stabbed it with her index finger, leaning over my desk as she did so. “I
did
do that, if you’d actually bothered to read the paper. Yes, the music was changed, and I illustrated that in the paper. But his music was changed by his
life.
His music was changed by his experiences. But, this isn’t about me at all, is it? This is about my mother! Are you simply punishing me because of her?”

At that, I stood. Her chain of logic made no sense at all. What did her mother have to do with anything? Of course, Savannah came from good musical stock, and that had to be respected on some level. But punishing her? No, I was pushing her. Pushing her to do better than the paper she’d turned in.

I did something I have never done in my entire career as an instructor. I shouted at a student, leaning forward over my desk, which had the effect of bringing us nearly face to face. “Miss Marshall, I don’t care if your mother is a harlot selling herself in the street! This isn’t about that. It’s about you and your talent. You are too
good
for this!”

Her face went slack, reflecting shock at my words. I continued, inching closer to her face until we were almost nose-to-nose. “You have the ability to be one of the premier musicians this school has ever graduated. And yet you
waste
it. You waste it on your pointless musical experiments. You waste it on your weekends spent …
dancing
... and
drinking
... when you should be perfecting your craft. You waste it on the time you spend with that
boyfriend
of yours.”

Her face scrunched up, a mixture of confusion and amusement on her face, and an oddly formed laugh forced itself out. “Who are you talking about? Nathan? Not that it’s any of your business,
Mr. Fitzgerald,
but Nathan is
not
my boyfriend.”

We maintained our stance inches from each other’s faces. Inches from each other’s lips. With only my desk separating us.

Not her boyfriend.
What was he then? This boy who constantly had his hands on her, this boy who leaned over and whispered in her ear in class, who touched her intimately while dancing, who repeatedly made a fool of himself in my class. I’m not a sociologist, but if he wasn’t her boyfriend, he certainly wished he was. I started to reply, but then clammed up. This wasn’t about that anyway. I took a breath, attempting to calm myself.

Pulling back slightly, I spoke in calm, measured words that belied the tension roiling inside of me. “Miss Marshall, it matters to me not one bit whether or not the boy is your boyfriend. What matters to me is that you accomplish your best possible work.”

“No.” Her voice was low and bitter, if not a bit baiting. “This grade isn’t because the work isn’t good. This is because I disagree with you. You think music is this heartless engineering construct made of nothing but notes and rhythms pasted together by architects. It is not. Music is communication. It’s emotion. It’s passion and love and hate and expression.”

As she continued she leaned even closer to me, anchoring her hands on my desk as her hot breath invaded the space between us.

“Mr. Fitzgerald, music was around long before there were theorists to talk about rules. Music is what makes us alive, and I feel sorry for you for not understanding that. If all you care about is mechanics and theory, then you’re in the wrong field, no matter how talented you may be.”

I recoiled. Since I was sixteen years old, when I won my early admission to the New England Conservatory and a full scholarship, not a single person had ever suggested that I might be choosing the wrong field. That this appallingly arrogant twenty-one-year-old thought she could do such a thing was infuriating.

She stuck out her red polished index finger and poked it on my chest. The same finger I’d instinctively traced with my thumb just last week. “I’m formally appealing this grade. Please reconsider it on its merits, and not your knee jerk emotional reaction to the idea that musicians might
feel
something. And if you don’t change it, I intend to take it to the Dean.”

With that, she backed up and walked out of my office, leaving a gaping hole of fury in her wake.

Savannah

I tore out of Fitzgerald’s office door in a flurry, breezing past Nathan, who I’d honestly forgotten was waiting for me.

“That … sounded intense.” Nathan followed quickly behind me, stuffing his hands in his coat pockets as we neared the exit.

“You think?” I was still breathless from my face-to-face showdown. “Damn, he’s a prick. Did you hear what he said? He had the audacity to say that his treatment of me has
nothing
to do with my mother.”

Nathan shrugged and placed his hand on the exit door. “Maybe it doesn’t, Savannah. You know how Fitzgerald is. And, he didn’t even know who she was until a few weeks ago. He was on your case long before that.” His tone fell flat as he spoke.

“Whatever.” I pushed past him and out into the unseasonably warm late-March air. I was still worked up from my first-ever shouting match with a teacher, and I didn’t bother to put on my coat. Looking back, I saw Nathan lagging a few steps behind, looking at the ground. “What?” I stopped, waiting for him to catch up.

“He thought I was your boyfriend?” Nathan gave a slight nervous chuckle and brought his eyes to mine.

I laughed and rolled my eyes. “No kidding, right?”

He shrugged, looking just past my shoulder for a second. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh come on!” I rolled my eyes. “Gregory Fitzgerald is so damn out of touch with reality that he can’t even decipher your sexual orientation? You don’t find that the least bit humorous?”

Nathan’s face paled for a split second before his nostrils flared and he pointed his eyes damn near through me. “ Wait, you think 
I’m gay
? I’m not gay, Savannah.” 

I jumped as he shouted the end of his sentence.

Looking around the vacant sidewalk, I was knocked dizzy by his words. “Wait. Wait. What? Nathan. Wait.” I was out of breath, my cheeks heating and feeling dizzier still. “Aren’t you?”

“No!” He took a step back, running both hands through his hair before turning to the right and storming off.

What the hell?

“Nathan, wait!” I ran, nearly falling on the still-slick sidewalk before I caught up to him. I grabbed the fabric of his coat and pulled as hard as I could until he was forced to stop and turn to face me. I almost wish he hadn’t. There were actual tears in his eyes. “What do you mean
no
?”

“Are you fucking kidding me, Savannah? We’ve been friends for ten years!” He couldn’t even look me in the eye.

“Yes, I know!” I shouted, matching his volume. “And in ten years I never saw you date anyone—”

“We only saw each other during the summers at camp!”

“Stop yelling!” I took a breath and felt tears rising in my own eyes. In a much softer voice, I continued, my mind racing a thousand miles a minute. “You never once talked about any girls, not even when we talked during the school year.”

“I never mentioned any
other
girls, Savannah.”

“And that time at camp when I was fifteen, when you punched Jared Reese after he grabbed my boobs?” I felt anger at the slimy little saxophonist all over again.

“What’d you think that was?” he asked condescendingly.

My eyes bugged out. “Uh, sticking the fuck
up for me
, not you being pissed that someone else copped a feel!”

I felt bile rising through my chest and my face flushed.