other with new eyes, as if the juxtaposition of the two of them together is making her see elements of each girl that she has never seen before.
“Sort of,” Julia says quickly. “I’ve seen you around anyway.”
“Yeah,” says Isolde. “But I didn’t know you played sax.” For some reason the thought of Julia as the saxophone teacher’s comfortable old-time student is strange to her. She startles herself with the realization that the private confidences and successes and failures that she has shared in her lessons each Friday were, for the saxophone teacher, only one recurring episode in weeks and months and years of shared confidences and successes and failures—that she herself is only one among many. Isolde wonders what Julia tells the saxophone teacher when they are alone.
“Why aren’t you in jazz band?” Isolde asks quickly. Her shyness makes the question sound accusatory. She is aware of the saxophone teacher’s eyes flicking from her to Julia and back again, as if Isolde is the final piece of a puzzle that will enable her to understand Julia, and Julia is the final piece of a puzzle that will enable her to understand Isolde. It makes Isolde hot and uncomfortable, and inside her shoes she squeezes her toes together in frustration.
“I don’t really have school spirit,” Julia says. “I’m not that kind of person, I guess. If there was something smaller and more underground I might give it a go. I’ve thought about starting a band.”
“Oh,” Isolde says, wondering at this new concept that you might be good at something but not have to prove it by playing for the school.
“I played in a band in my first year of university,” the saxophone teacher says. “We had some dreadful name. I can’t even remember what we called ourselves now.”
“Was it the Sax Kittens?” Julia asks. “Was it Sax, Drums and Rock ’n’ Roll?”
“We weren’t nearly that clever,” the saxophone teacher says. “God, we were awful. We used to do this thing at the end of each gig that was really easy but it always got the crowd going. I’d stand next to the guy who played tenor and at the end of the song he’d flip his sax around so I’d blow into it while he was still fingering the notes, so we were both playing the one instrument. I suppose it must have looked quite difficult—people always screamed like we were doing something amazing.”
Julia is grinning now. “You’ve got a dark jazz past,” she says. “You’ve played
“I’ve done some things in my time,” the saxophone teacher says, pretending to be haughty.
They both turn to Isolde to let her share in their joke, and Isolde smiles quickly.
“Oh, I remember,” the saxophone teacher says. “We were called the Travesty Players.”
“What does the Travesty Players mean?” says Isolde.
“It’s a term from the theater,” the sax teacher says. “A travesty role is a part which is meant to be played by a person of the opposite sex. So if you were going to play Hamlet, the program would say, ‘Isolde in the travesty role of Hamlet.’ ”
“Oh,” says Isolde.
“Why did you choose it for your band name?” says Julia.
“We were all into gender back then,” the saxophone teacher says cheerfully. “Ask your mother.”
She is lively tonight, but Isolde finds herself shrinking back, finding the intimacy too forceful and defiant, as if the saxophone teacher is a prisoner released for this night only, drawing the girls close to her in a hard and glittering pincer-grip and demanding they share a part in her slender lonely joy. Julia seems at ease, smiling and pressing the saxophone teacher for more details about her dark jazz past, and Isolde regards her jealously.
Her cardigan is buttoned with gold dome buttons and is unraveling slightly at the hem, giving her a careless scholarly look that makes Isolde feel young and clumsy and naive. She is wearing a silver turquoise ring on her ink-stained nail-bitten fingers, and tight-knit fishnet stockings underneath her skirt. Isolde drinks it all in and then feels oddly disappointed, looking at this newer, more complete version of Julia who is a whole person and not just an idea of a person. She feels jealous and excluded and even betrayed, as if Julia has no right to exist beyond Isolde’s experience of her.
Isolde turns her attention back to the program. The soloist is a foreigner, photographed in black and white with his chin on his fist and his saxophone gleaming against his cheek. He looks moody and implacable and gifted. He is playing in front of the symphony orchestra tonight, and pictured opposite is the conductor, a plump jolly man with his baton loose in his hand like an idle dagger.
“A great soloist,” the saxophone teacher is saying, “is never some perfect airtight freeze-dried package who has studied and studied and studied. A great soloist is always born out of a partnership or a group. A great soloist is always someone who has had something to feed on.”
Julia is listening politely but frowning all the same. Isolde notices that her nibbled skepticism, which at school seemed an index of aggression and dissatisfaction and gloom, now seems an index of something different, a carefulness or guardedness maybe, something more instinctive and less hostile.
“This is the first concert you’ve come to this year, isn’t it, Isolde?” the saxophone teacher says suddenly, and Isolde nods.
“This guy is awesome,” Julia says, flapping the program. “I’ve got all his recordings. Hey, do classical players have groupies? That’s something I definitely need to look into.”
She is trying to be kind to Isolde, but Isolde finds that all she can do is blush and smile and mumble that she’s looking forward to it. She is squeezing her toes together tight.
The gong sounds a gentle arpeggio to remind them to take their seats. The crowd at the Coke machine begins to disperse, and the sax teacher smiles at them both in turn.
“I really hope you find this inspiring,” she says. “This is a special night for me as well—last time I heard this arrangement live I was only a little bit older than you. It woke me up.”
The orchestra is plush and dazzling against the polished wood of the stage. In the first row of the balcony the sax teacher sits between her two students, calm and matriarchal and silent, the two girls sloping off on either side of her so the three of them seem to form a kind of heraldic crest, a heroic grouping that might be placed above a shield to complete a coat of arms. Julia sits with her hands in her lap, watching the flashing silver and gold with an intent glazed blindness, her eyes unmoving as if she is concentrating on holding something very still in her mind. Isolde is more restless, deliberately leaning away from the saxophone teacher lest their elbows touch, and watching the musicians in a detached, musing way, her gaze drifting from the stage and over the dim unsmiling wraith-faces around her.
As Isolde peers vaguely at the pale faces in the audience she thinks about the different ways you can perform the act of listening. Some in the audience have their eyes shut and their faces tilted slightly upward, enjoying the rain of the music on their skin. Some are nodding in a slow, meaningful sort of way, perhaps every four or five bars, as if something is slowly and majestically taking shape before them. Some, like the sax teacher next to her, are simply sitting still.
Isolde thinks how strange it is, that every person in the auditorium is locked in their own private experience of the music, alone with their thoughts, alone in their enjoyment or distaste, and shivering at the vast feeling of intimacy that this solitude affords, already impatient for the interval when they can compare their experience with their neighbor’s and discover with relief that they are the same.
Julia is listening in a dreamy, sleepy way, the music drawing from her one slow, definite impression rather than a slideshow series of impressions that she can cobble together later and divide to find the arithmetic mean. She is thinking about Isolde. She can’t quite see her past the stern unmoving profile of the saxophone teacher, just a flash of her knee every time Isolde crosses her leg, but even so she finds her left-hand peripheral vision is sharpened with a tense hyperawareness whenever the younger girl shifts in her seat. She thinks about the long look that she and Isolde shared in the counseling class, probing the thought again and again like a bloody tooth and wondering, as she has wondered many times, where the look might have come from, and where it might lead.
Sometimes when Julia’s thoughts circulate like this she becomes stricken by the irrational fear that she might open her mouth and say exactly what she is thinking, just to spite herself. She thinks of what she would say,
