Sight Reading (15 page)

“Runner-up” was the phrase she heard in her head. She nearly laughed aloud at her pun, picturing Yoni in his jogging outfit as she stood there with her handful of bras. Because Yoni never would come first at the conservatory, would he? Just as Remy would always be second violinist, second chair, second wife.

That was when she remembered: Jessie. She had completely forgotten her reason for coming here! How odd, how unlike her. Remy had to laugh at herself, and scanned the displays for the training bras.

Here they were. She selected the one she knew Jessie would like the best, beige cotton with a butterfly embroidered in white between the flat, flapping cups. Then she turned to join the line at the register.

But first she quickly went back to grab the leopard thong.

HUGH'S BIRTHDAY WAS NEXT WEEK,
and Hazel had been invited to celebrate with him: just the two of them, dinner reservations at Radicchio. She had thought hard about what to do for a gift, since this early on one couldn't risk anything too personal. She thought and thought, and then, during yet another slow afternoon at Maria's fabric store, came up with the perfect gift.

“What do you know about really good socks?” she asked Ginger, her coworker and best friend. Well, sometimes she thought of her as her best friend, and other times she thought of her as her divorced friend, since that was the main thing they had in common. Hazel had met her six years ago here at the fabric shop, where they each worked three and a half days a week, overlapping on Wednesdays. Sometimes Hazel wished Ginger didn't work here at all; then Hazel could do so full-time and become as expert as Maria, the Russian woman who owned the store.

“Fine quality ones,” Hazel continued. “Woolen.” When they went out this weekend Hugh had mentioned that he had just one pair of good wool socks, and that he always wished, during the cold winter months, that he would remember to buy some more.

“Do you mean for hiking?” Ginger asked, leaning against one of the enormous bolts of Spanish velvet, looking up from the magazine she was reading; since the store was high end, they had lots of gorgeous, overpriced materials and long stretches of inactivity in between clients. “You can get that sort of thing at REI,” Ginger said, and turned back to her magazine.

Hazel was about to explain that that was not quite what she meant, but it was too early to mention Hugh Greerson; she couldn't afford to jinx herself.

“Right,” she said, and busied herself with the fabric swatches. Socks would show him that she had listened, had heard what he had to say. Good, finely knit, high-quality ones.

As if holding such a specimen, Hazel ran her fingertips over the thickly embroidered rose pattern on her favorite fabric. She adored this shop, loved the way she felt here, surrounded by beautiful materials. She considered herself lucky to have a job that interested her and paid sufficiently. Between this, Nicholas's child support, and the money her father had left her, Hazel was able to live without financial worries.

She had even entertained the notion that she might open her own shop, one specializing in Oriental carpets. She had borrowed from the library every book she could find on the subject, had read about natural dyes versus synthetic ones, and the recurring symbolism of the various patterns, and the plight of the Afghani refugees who wove their initials into the edges. The careful craftwork and grand beauty, the combined elegance and domesticity of the carpets themselves, fascinated her. She drove around to various carpet stores and chatted with the men who ran them, thinking she might apprentice herself somewhere. But it was a male profession—heavy, dusty rugs lugged around huge warehouses, pure physical strength needed to roll them out and up again. In none of those shops had she felt quite welcome. And, of course, to become a buyer she would have had to voyage to all kinds of Middle and Far Eastern countries—and she had long ago lost her urge to travel.

She held the fabric up, to better examine the stitching. The embroidery of each rose petal was perfect. Such things really did make a difference. Even in a pair of socks, surely there was the equivalent of this gorgeous material. “Can you cover me for a coffee break?” she asked Ginger.

“Sure,” Ginger said, pleasantly bored. “Take your time.”

HEADING TOWARD THE DEPARTMENT STORE,
Hazel couldn't help thinking how wonderful it would be if things worked out with Hugh. That she might be part of a couple again, not just a lone divorcée in a sea of couples, was a thought she barely allowed herself to indulge in. It wasn't so much living one's life alone that was awful. It was that her aloneness felt like an element of her personality—as if her singledom were a character trait and not simply a situation beyond her control.

As much as Hazel abhorred this mentality, she herself sometimes thought this way. Take Ginger, for instance. Ginger was one of those busy single women who, because she had no children, was always participating in activities where she hoped to meet available men. Nothing ever came of it. To Hazel the repeated failures had become confirmation that there must be something wrong with Ginger—for being divorced, or simply for trying not to be. That was why Hazel joined Ginger in only one of her activities, the foreign film club (which consisted of five female coworkers from Ginger's previous job and two doughy-faced older men, one of whom still lived with his mother).

Surrounding her, all the time, like a cloud of gnats, was Hazel's awareness (everyone's awareness, she supposed) that there was something unseemly about being a divorced woman. Perhaps it was the mystery of what it was that was keeping an attractive woman all alone. Perhaps it was the unbecoming notion of a woman in her forties still going out on dates like a teenager. Perhaps it was the cliché of the desperate divorcée, bitter and on the hunt.

With a sigh, Hazel pushed through the front doors of Lord & Taylor—and there, just a few paces ahead of her, was Remy. Hazel could have caught up to her if she wanted to, could have said a friendly hello. Instead she slowed her steps, let Remy continue into the women's section. This city really was too small. Hazel was already in the men's section; there was no need to pretend to want to chat with Remy. Absently she picked up a packet of boxer underwear, but she couldn't help it: she looked ahead to where Remy was—and saw her fingering a big ruby-colored maternity blouse.

Hazel dropped the packet of underwear. She tried to retrieve it but her fingers wouldn't quite work. Again she looked over, to make certain she was correct. Yes, there it was, the sign overhead:
MATERNITY
. Now Remy was holding the blouse up against her front, admiring herself dreamily in the mirror.

So, it was possible, after all these years. Hazel had assumed that was one thing that would never work out for them; after all, it had taken long enough for Hazel herself to conceive. The doctors had said Nicholas had a low sperm count, that his sperm were “weak swimmers”—well, something like that, was how she had understood why it had taken four long years for him to finally fertilize one of her perfectly healthy eggs.

“May I help you, ma'am?” The store clerk, very young, bent down to retrieve the packet of underwear.

“Oh . . . yes. I'm looking for a good pair of men's wool socks. The best you have.” To Hazel's surprise, her hands were trembling. Ridiculous. Why should it matter to her if Remy was pregnant? Well, because her own daughter would now have a sibling. Hazel recalled the vision she used to have: the boy and girl in front of the steps to the beautiful house. Was this to be the boy, then?

Hazel followed the young man toward the socks.

“These are our most elegant ones,” he told her, displaying a pair of dark gray knee-highs. “Merino wool. Made in Italy.”

Ridiculous they looked. A skinny, droopy, overpriced pair of socks. She rubbed the long toe between her fingertips. What if Hugh thought a pair of socks like this piddly? On the other hand, what if he thought them extravagant, too much money spent on something unnecessary? The key to this thing with Hugh, she knew, was not to appear too invested, not to need him too much.

“The toe is double-knit,” the man told her.

“It feels thin,” Hazel said, concerned. Maybe this wasn't the perfect gift after all.

“If you'd like something thicker, we have these over here.” The young man was turning toward a tree of socks atop one of the glass cabinets. “Or if you want something in between, we have these.” He reached underneath, into the glass cabinet, where an array of socks were layered one over the other in a fan. “They come with a lifetime guarantee. When they wear out, you just send them in for a replacement pair.”

Hazel felt her brow furrowing, her heart racing as the man handed her a pair to admire.

“Is there a problem?” he asked.

How could she explain? The problem was that only the perfect gift would do. Because it was all so difficult, and the chances so slim. Whatever she gave Hugh had to be just right, because if it wasn't, and things didn't work out, she would blame herself—for buying the wrong gift, for doing the wrong thing.

“I . . . I'm sorry. I need to think this through a bit more.” It mattered now, somehow, so much more than she had thought it mattered.

“Yes, of course,” the young man said, “take your time.” But he took the pair of socks from her and put them back under the glass, as if to show her that she had missed her chance.

AT HOME, IN THE GOLDEN
light of afternoon, Nicholas sat at his desk in the music room.

It was his favorite room, a former screened-in porch the previous owners had winterized, which now housed the piano, an incongruous flowered settee, a long glass coffee table, and an enormous couch Remy called “the miracle sofa” because it was covered in some tweedy fabric that managed to mask whatever was spilled on it—a frequent enough occurrence. So many friends and guests had sat there, wine or coffee in hand, listening, laughing, or joining in with their own music-making. Three walls of windows looked onto the trees and shrubbery that bordered the majestic house next door, and during the day, when the sun was at just the right angle, the room became part of the landscape, the brownish carpet (under which, the realty agent had repeatedly assured them, was a beautiful parquet floor) soaking up the warm rays, with flickering light and shadows of tree branches passing across it like a benediction. A twist of a handle tilted open each tall window, admitting the twittering of birds, the chattering of squirrels, and breezes adorned by neighborhood sounds—the postman chatting with a dog walker, or from Beacon Street the occasional screech of brakes or bleat of a car horn. Now Nicholas could hear the T conductor's ineffectual ringing of a tinkly trolley bell; the house, an ivy-covered brick one in Brookline, was just a block from the C-line.

Trying not to submit to distraction, Nicholas again faced his work in progress.

It was the large-scale piece he had begun the year he met Remy, the year that everything became complicated. Sometimes he allowed himself to suppose that was the root of the problem (although he didn't really believe that kind of psychobabble). Yet it was true that the point when he had begun having trouble was soon after his return from Italy—that his realizations about his mother and about Remy had somehow stymied his progress. It was as though the complexities of life had crept into the work itself, not in a way that might add texture or depth, but in a confounding way.

And so Nicholas had put the piece aside and for years not looked back at it. All the while, though, he intended to return to it, and when last year he finally took it up again, he found it as promising as he remembered. For nearly a year now he had been working on it—yet still it wasn't right. Though individual sections were quite good, the structure was too broad, almost meandering. It needed to be reined in—but to do so seemed to compromise all he wanted to convey. At times he thought the piece Promethean, in other moments, simply a mess. What had begun as an excursion into his youth in Scotland had taken a darker turn in the second movement and from there grew increasingly unwieldy.

He blamed various factors. As his finished pieces won increasing praise, he was continually receiving commissions for other, smaller works—ten-minute pieces, usually, nothing overly daunting—yet fulfilling these requests meant setting this larger piece aside for long periods. And while time away from a work in progress usually allowed him to view it with a fresh eye, with this piece it had been a struggle to find, again, his original impulse.

Yet he was determined to finish it. There was too much good in it not to.

Today, though, Nicholas had barely lifted his mechanical pencil. Hearing the front door click open, and the thunk of a heavy book bag, he called, “That you, Jess?” eager for distraction.

“Hey, Dad.” There came the faint squeak of the refrigerator door, and Jessie pouring herself a glass of juice. Nicholas waited hopefully as she came to peer into the music room.

“There's a bunch of bands playing on Lansdowne Street Saturday night.” Her tone was suspiciously nonchalant. “It's an all-ages show. Some kids from school are going.”

The evasive “kids from school” made him wonder if that boy Kevin might be there.

Jessie took a swig of her cranberry juice. “So . . . can I go?”

Nicholas suspected he should say no. Hazel probably would have. If only Remy were home, she would know what to do. Shouldn't she be home now? Where was she, anyway? Suddenly everything felt precarious.

He tapped the mechanical pencil to his lip, weighing possible responses. “If there's a chaperone, then yes. I'll pick you up at ten.”

“Ten! Dad, come on!”

“Well, eleven, then. As long as you all stick together.”

“Dad! Some of the best bands won't even start playing until eleven!” Jessie stomped off in a way that let Nicholas understand he had been too lenient; clearly she was satisfied with the outcome, not to have wrangled for an extra hour.