Check out Part I first (if you haven't already done so)! Hope you like it!
The hall was empty as I entered the conservatory but for four people standing by the notice board, a string quartet, judged by the size of their cases. Then I realized one of the violinists was Zak Andrews.
“Hey Zak,” I called and approached him. For some reason my heart started hammering.
“Peter,” he said. “What’s up?”
We chewed the fat for a while.
“Listen,” I said. “That girl Katie – she still taking lessons with you?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
“Well, could you give me her phone number? I still have this, er, book, the book she lent me at the workshop in August. I need to give it back to her.”
“You could give it to me, and I’ll pass it on,” he offered.
“Er, well, I don’t have it here,” I said.
“Alright,” he said. “I guess it makes more sense if you do that directly, just a sec.”
He pulled out his cell phone from the pocket of his jeans and pressed some buttons.
“Home or cell?”
“Cell,” I said, my heart beating furiously.
It took me until the following evening to decide if to call or to text her, when to do it, what to say, and whether to do it at all. Finally, I made up my mind to call her around half past seven this Wednesday evening.
I had developed an aversion to texting after the hell that I’d been through with Cori. I had dumped her the day I got back from the workshop. I had done it kindly and politely, in an eye-to-eye talk. She’d cried her eyes out, telling me I was the love of her life, and left me with a nagging guilty conscience. Only a few days later she took to harassing me with some rather nasty messages. It had only stopped some two weeks ago.
Now I was sitting on my bed, staring at the phone in my hand, about to call the fifteen-year-old girl whom I believed to be the love of my life. Crazy.
She answered after the second ring. “Hello?”
“Hi.” I had to clear my throat. “It’s me, Peter.”
Silence.
“Er – are you there?”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “Sorry. How – how are you?”
“Pretty good,” I said. “Listen, I’d like to…ask you out.”
“Me?”
“Well, yes, actually.”
“Oh.”
She fell silent. This is one hell of a verbal exchange, I thought. Bound to make the top ten list of real-life dialogues.
“If you don’t want to…”
“I do,” she said, and something inside me did a strange kind of leap. “When?”
“Choose a day,” I said.
We settled on Friday evening and arranged for me to pick her up at the main station at seven. I was floored. It had been so easy!
“Peter?” she said. “Will you – will you take me to the jazz club?”
“Jazz club? You mean the Box?”
“Whatever…”
Things could scarcely get any better.
I arrived in front of the florist’s inside the station hall at seven on the dot. Only a minute later I spotted her between a tall man with a turban and an old woman on crutches. She smiled when she saw me. I started walking towards her. It felt so good to see her…
She wasn’t extraordinarily pretty – my pals wouldn’t understand what I saw in her – but she had a certain outward intelligence. And her movements had a something to them, a kind of elegance…it was nothing striking, if you didn’t look closely you wouldn’t see a difference between her and any other ordinary person. Her feet were turned somewhat inward when she walked, not something you would normally describe as attractive – but underneath it all, there was such grace, such harmony about her movements…
And just like that, it hit me. I had a moment of insight into the nature of true beauty.
We met beside McDonald’s. For a brief moment we just stood facing each other – I was savoring this moment with all my senses – then she hugged me. Quickly and superficially, but she hugged me.
“It’s good to see you,” she said.
I found my tongue again. “Same here,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”
The embarrassed laugh – how I’d missed it!
And off we went, heading for the Box, which was just a few streets away.
“Do you know what’s on tonight?” she asked.
“I think it’s a bassist with his band. I don’t know him.”
“Well, never mind,” she said. “My dad tells me they’ve always got good people at the Box.”
“Your dad, how is he?”
“My dad’s fine,” she said, “but you’re talking about Carl, aren’t you?”
“He isn’t your dad?”
“No. My parents have been divorced for some years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to be,” she laughed. “They’re easy. And I get on perfectly well with each of their new partners. It’s not a bad thing to have four parents instead of two.”
We crossed the main street in front of the station.
“So you like to listen to jazz,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I got that from my daddy – Carl hates jazz. I guess I’ll be the youngest once again this evening. I’m always the youngest at concerts.”
That reminded me of something.
“Shit,” I said. “What if they won’t let you in? At fifteen, I mean?”
She chuckled. “It’s alright. No one under sixteen is admitted, but I’ve just turned seventeen.”
“What?!”
“Sullivan got that wrong. I was really sixteen then.”
I joined in her laughter. “Well, at first I thought you were nineteen or twenty. I thought you were a student at the conservatory, too.”
“Oh, I don’t think the standard has dropped that far among the violin students.”
“Stop panning yourself,” I said.
“That reminds me!” she said. “The internet does serve some purpose after all. I’ve listened to your music.”
“You have?”
I was surprised to see she was taking that much interest in me.
“It’s marvellous,” she said. “Honestly. You know something about arranging. And –” She raised her eyevrows. “I know this sounds funny, but it makes me glad when I hear someone under thirty doing stuff like that. It makes me think, like, all is not lost. Gah!” She snorted. “I am sounding like I was seventy and not seventeen. Don’t listen to me! But to come back to your music – I was wondering, do I hear the influence of John Mayer there?”
She smiled and winked at me. Man, this girl knew her way around in music!
“I confess,” I said. “You’ve caught me!”
“Ah, but you didn’t steal anything, as far as I got it,” she said. “Drawing inspiration is OK, if you do something good with it. And that you surely did.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “This is heading in the wrong direction. It’s not the part of the woman to make the compliments.”
She laughed. “Oh, well.”
We arrived at the Box.
“Is this the first time you’re here?” I asked as we entered the smoky, dimly lit room. She nodded.
We chose a table close to the small stage where the band was just setting up their equipment. It was a trio, drums, piano, and bass. We sat down to face each other.
“Where do you usually hang out then?” I wanted to know.
“Nowhere,” she said with a smile. “To tell you the truth, I hardly ever go out. I hate discos. Can’t stand the music, you see.”
“I see. It’s true, those dance beats can be a pain in the ass.”
“But you go there anyway.”
“Well, yes.” I grinned. “Sometimes I do. But what do you do when you see your friends?”
“I don’t see my friends.” Her laugh came a little late. “Not that I don’t have any – I’ve got beautiful friends; they accept me into their circle when I need them and leave me alone when I don’t need them. I love them all, I just don’t have a lot in common with them.” She traced the carvings of the wooden table with her finger. “I guess I’m just waiting for my soul mate to show up somewhere.”
“I’d like to be your soul mate,” I said quietly, “but I don’t know if I can.”
She raised her head and looked at me strange, blinking as if she was having trouble seeing me clearly.
A waiter appeared at our table. “Can I bring you anything to drink or to eat?”
She cast a quick glance at the menue and ordered a cheese sandwich and coke. I decided on chicken sandwich and tap water.
The evening went on smoothly. We mostly talked about music. The band began to play at half past eight. They were pretty good, yet there were only very few people in the audience. The drummer was a woman.
“I’ve never seen that before,” I said, “a female drummer.”
“Not me neither,” she said. “But this one rocks.”
“Do you like it?”
“Well –“ She raised an eyebrow. “These are some bad-ass musicians, but I keep waiting for the bass player to get his fingers into a knot.”
The young bassist was playing as if he’d signed up for a contest in playing as many notes as possible in a second.
“Well, he knows his scales,” I said.
She nodded in agreement. “And the pianist is cool.”
The guy at the piano, who was also the singer for those songs that required it, was the exact opposite of the bassist, playing no more than what was needed to fill in the gaps.
“And anyway,” she said, “this is my favorite combination of instruments. You don’t need anything else, you know.”
“No horns?”
“Not necessarily. Well, a guitar might be nice. Like Oscar Moore.”
“Who’s that?”
“Nat King Cole’s guitarist.”
“I see.”
The song ended, we applaused, and the band launched into a very jazzy version of Michelle.
“Ah!” she said. “You played that when you were jamming that one evening, you and Carl and Oliver. You could go up there and be Oscar Moore.”
I laughed, but suddenly somebody tapped me on the shoulder. The guy at the next table was leaning towards me.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I just happened to overhear your conversation, and I understand that you play the guitar. The band is planning to have a jam session afterwards. I’m sure they would be happy to see you join in, seeing that there are, well –“ He gave a quick glance over the audience. “Not too many people here.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” I said. “I don’t have a guitar with me anyway.”
“That’s not the problem,” said the man. “They’ve got a guitar here, of course!”
“Well, we’ll see,” I said.
The guy laughed and saluted and turned away again.
“Please play with them!” she said.
I pouted. “Naw…”
She grinned. “I’ll get you to do it, just you wait and see!”
We watched the band again. The bassist was giving a virtuoso solo.
“Remember the talk we were having,” she said, “when we were walking back from the restaurant?”
My head jerked around. “Er – which?”
“The, er, first part.” She was looking abashed. “That one about being aware of what you’re playing.” Her face straightened. “Anyway, that’s one thing that fascinates me about jazz. Those guys –“ She nodded towards the band. “They have to be aware of what they’re doing, or else they’d be lost.”
She watched the guy on the bass for a while. “Well…maybe that doesn’t go for everyone.”
I laughed.
“Do you think he knows what he’s doing?” she asked.
“I doubt that he even cares!”
Shortly past eleven, the band was finished.
“Thank you,” the bassist said into the microphone. “Now we’re gonna have a jam session, so any musician among you who’d like to have a little fun is most welcome to join us here on stage.”
She turned to me and smiled expectantly.
“Come on, guys,” said the bass player. “I am sure there are musicians among you!”
Now the guy from the next table turned and looked at me as well.
“Come on!” he said. “I need you. I don’t wanna go up there alone.”
I saw that he was holding a saxophone now.
She looked at me, head tilted to one side, eyes like blue-green seas.
I sighed. “Oh, alright.”
“Ha!” she burst out laughing, almost hysterically. “Gotcha!”
The owner of the club brought me an acoustic guitar, not a good one of course, but quite playable. So me and the sax player joined the trio. I admit, I was pretty nervous. It turned out OK, though. We played some standards, Over The Rainbow and Manhattan and A Foggy Day, and some Beatles and Marvin Gaye. The sax player wasn’t very good, so I didn’t feel too much out of place.
But after half an hour I quit and gave the guitar back to the barkeeper.
“Good job, man,” said the bassist. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-one,” I said.
“Not bad,” he said, “not bad. Sounds very promising.”
“Thank you.” I gave him a few compliments about the gig, which he obviously needed desperately, and said good bye to the drummer girl and the pianist, who was a jovial fellow.
And as I approached the table, she beamed at me in a way that made the hair stand up on my arms.
I must have made a dumb show, because when I sat down on my chair, she started to laugh.
“You were good,” she said. “I’m really proud of you.”
She winked at me when she said it and made it sound somewhat ironic. But her eyes…
During the ten months that our relationship lasted, Cori had never looked at me like this.
Suddenly she said, “Oh, damn it!” She pulled out her cell phone. “Yes, mom…I’m alright…Sure. An hour. Bye.”
She sighed. “They want me to come home. They’re not happy with me wandering around at stations at night and stuff, you know.”
“Well, that is out of the question,” I said. “I’m taking you home, of course. I’ve got the car parked behind the station.”
“Oh great!” she said. “That means we can stay another thirty minutes.”
We each had a cocktail. When the waiter came with the bill, she tried to pay it. But I told her that this was not the way to do things. The man made compliments, the man paid the bills, and the man drove the woman home. We were doing things proper.
But it made me think. Wasn’t it in the natural course of dates that the couple kissed at the end? I watched her as we got up and went for the coatrack. She clearly wasn’t expecting anything of me.
I picked her jacket from the hanger and helped her into it. I had always had a faible for tradition; those things always gave me a good feeling for some reason.
We went outside and walked in silence for a while.
Then I said, “Katie.”
“Hmm?”
“You know…you know I love you?”
She made a strange noise. It sounded like a choked breath.
“Does that trouble you in any way?”
She took a long time to answer. Was I imagining it, or was she breathing faster?
“I – I can’t say.”
“Why?” I said. “I mean, is it like, you like me and would like to be my friend but nothing else? Is that what you feel like?”
“No,” she said.
“Well, what is it, then?”
Those long pauses between my questions and her answers began to worry me.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Can we find out?” I said. “Would it help you if I, say, took your hand? So you could decide if you liked that or not.”
I held out my hand, and she laid hers in mine. Her fingers were trembling. I hoped that my palm wouldn’t get sweaty.
We walked like this for a few minutes, and when it seemed safe to ask without appearing impatient, I said, “How does it feel?”
But that was a mistake. She pulled back her hand and shook her head. A soft, miserable-sounding moan escaped her.
“Why are you afraid?” I asked, finally losing the grip on my voice, which started shaking uncontrolledly. “What can I –“ I broke off, realizing I was sounding just as agonized as I felt.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I want to…”
Want to what? Why didn’t she continue, for god’s sake?
We didn’t talk during the drive, except for her telling me where to turn. When I finally pulled up in front of her house, I took a deep breath.
“Look,” I said. “I need to know what I’m in for. Do you hate me?”
She looked at me aghast. “Of course not!”
“You like me, then?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“You don’t…”
My voice failed me. I had asked this same question before, and gotten no answer.
“You don’t love me?”
When she answered, her voice was barely audible. “I love you like mad.”
My jaw dropped. It felt like she had punched me in the stomach.
“Then what –“ I jumped at the unexpected loudness of my own voice. “Then what is the problem?”
She looked at me, eyes wide, and shook her head. Then, before I could stop her, she opened the door.
“Good night,” she said. Was she crying? “And thanks for everything. And…I’m sorry!”
She closed the door and headed for the house.
